The Grotesque

by Patrick Mcgrath

  ♦

  There was a brief bewildered silence. Then Harriet rose and followed Cleo, and then Hilary. I did not try to stop them. Then Mrs. Giblet spoke. “Poor child,” she said, with a sigh. “I will tell her that we all feel it as she does. But young people do like to see feelings displayed; they can’t understand that with the years one learns to preserve one’s energies; one has to. Is that not so, Sir Hugo?”

  I had listened to Cleo’s outburst with my elbows on the table, my forearms forming an arch, and my mouth and chin pressed to the interlocked fingers at its cusp. I glanced sideways at the old woman, but, knowing what I knew, I did not shift my head from my hands to respond. Instead, Victor spoke. “Daddy,” he said, “I think that’s hysteria, but I’m not sure what sort.”

  “Victor,” said his father, “shut up.”

  The Horns went back to London at the beginning of January. They had not had a terribly festive time of it at Crook, I’m afraid. Sidney’s specter had hovered over all of us, particularly Cleo of course, and what with the pipes bursting, the atmosphere in the house had been not only cheerless but uncomfortably cold and drafty as well. Hilary told Harriet that she was reluctant to go, with Cleo so unhappy, but Victor had to be back at school. Harriet assured her that she could cope perfectly well here. It was all very distressing. Henry actually drew me aside, just before they were to leave, and told me he was quite concerned about Cleo. He thought he detected a morbid element in her grief; this disturbed him. He suggested that if she was still depressed in a week or so we should telephone him; he would arrange for her to “see someone” in Harley Street. I told him I appreciated his concern. But I was sure, I said, there was no cause for alarm. Didn’t he know, I said, that all the Coals were mad? He ought to know, having married one of them! I grinned at him around my cigar and clapped him on the back. I asked him where his next voyage would take him, what far-flung corner of the globe—Singapore? The Caribbean? Or maybe the pine-girt shores of British Columbia, for a cargo of good pulping timber!

  “Seriously, Hugo,” he said.

  “Seriously, Henry,” I said, “don’t worry about Cleo; she’ll be fine with us.”

  I was sorry to see Victor go, I was fond of that little chap. I gave him a ten-shilling note when his parents weren’t looking and told him to forget Freud, read Darwin instead. “Read The Origin of the Species, my boy,” I said. “Find out where you came from.” His hair falling over his eyes in a thick fringe, he grinned at me in mock outrage, those good Coal teeth of his protruding far beyond the bottom lip, and ran a plump finger across his throat. “Never!” he said. I cuffed him once or twice, shook his hand, and stamped off to the barn.

  Mrs. Giblet was as good as her word. She resumed her tenure at the Hodge and Purlet, and early in the new year I began to hear reports from the village about her. She would apparently leave the inn after breakfast and be driven down the Ceck’s Bottom road as far as the cart track that gives onto the marsh. She would then make her way out onto the marsh and spend the day, in her huge fur coat, picking slowly across the frozen ground until, at around five, when the light began to thicken, she returned to the road, where the car would pick her up. Several people saw her out there, including Bill Cudlip and old John Crowthorne, and they mentioned it to me with quiet expressions of scorn. I found it oddly touching, though, the picture of the old woman, out on the marsh alone beneath the cold gray sky, searching for traces of her lost son. I presumed she did not follow Cleo’s advice and go out there after dark, when the “evil creeping thing” was abroad; the Ceck Marsh, after dark, is an uncanny sort of place, even without evil creeping things. I was out there one night myself.

  As for Cleo, she went into semi-seclusion over in the east wing, where she has her bedroom, and only rarely came downstairs. When she did appear, she was either angry or depressed or both. “Where,”

  I chided, “has my laughing girl gone?”

  She rounded on me, eyes blazing. “Why should I laugh, Daddy? What do I have to laugh about?”

  “Steady, darling,” murmured Harriet. “Not so fierce, darling.”

  Then the girl started to cry, and Harriet had to comfort her. Harriet later came to me, worried, and asked me didn’t I think we should call Henry and have someone “see” Cleo, as he’d suggested? Nonsense, I said, she’ll pull through. Perfectly normal thing, no cause for alarm. Coals don’t go to shrinks, I said. Very well, said Harriet, but I could see she wasn’t altogether convinced.

  But what had been uppermost in my mind, ever since Sidney’s bicycle came up on Christmas Day, was the Fledge question. I was now certain that he must have ambushed the boy on his way into Ceck that night, murdered him, and then abandoned the body out on the marsh. But where was the body? You see my predicament? Even though I was certain in my own mind what had happened, I was hardly in a position to go to the police. I needed facts, I needed evidence—I needed a body, above all! I would just have to wait a little longer, and keep in the forefront of consciousness the knowledge that I was harboring under my roof a desperate and violent man—a cold-blooded killer, in fact.

  January was, on the surface, a period of calm, and though I was maintaining a discreet surveillance of Fledge I spent most of my time out in the barn, where I was putting the finishing touches to the lecture. I’ve told you how conducive to clear thinking I found the Ceck Marsh, particularly when I was in the throes of composition. I drove out there one Saturday afternoon toward the end of the month and parked the Morris, as was my habit, on the cart track that gave off the Ceck’s Bottom road.

  The ground was muddy, for we had had some rain, and the sky was gray and overcast. I squelched down the track in my Wei-lington boots and then, emerging from the trees, I experienced something of a shock—for the wide expanse of marsh that I had expected to find desolate and empty was, instead, peopled—there were figures in the landscape, tiny figures spread out in a long line against the horizon. I had at first no inkling of what this could mean. I knew that the police had gone over the marsh in late December, after finding the bicycle, but they had uncovered nothing more and so discontinued their search. But I soon recognized a familiar humped and shuffling form that, distant and indistinct though it was, could only be Mrs. Giblet. And the little figures abreast of her, moving slowly through the gloom of the afternoon —these were surely children!

  I did not go further. The marsh was no use to me unless I found solitude there. I returned to the car and as I started it up a gentle, drizzling rain began to fall. I backed out into the road and turned in the direction of Ceck’s Bottom. The light was perceptibly fading when I reached the farm. I found George in his slaughterhouse, a dimly lit shed that reeked of offal beneath an old roof of corrugated tin on which the rain came softly pattering down. It was a dark and primal place, George’s slaughterhouse, and old John Crowthorne was in there with him, the pair of them in long, filthy aprons caked with blood; they were butchering the carcass of a freshly killed pig. It was a huge animal, and it was hanging upside down from its trotters from a hook in the beam overhead, sliced down the belly. Two buckets of faintly steaming blood stood on the floor nearby. George saw me in the doorway. He promptly whacked his chopper into a block of scarred wood and, wiping his hands on his apron, followed me out into the damp murk of the yard. His eyebrows meshed in an angry frown when I told him what I’d seen on the marsh, but it caused him no surprise. It seemed that the old woman was employing the children of Ceck in her search for the remains of Sidney; she gave them each sixpence for a day’s work. Apparently she had a theory that when the earth thawed it tended to shift about, and in its shifting about to disgorge its contents, unless they were deeply buried. There was some thawing that January; Mrs. Giblet hoped it would cause to rise that which had remained buried during the police search.

  We had a smoke, and then George tramped back across his dung-running farmyard to the shed. The rain came drizzling down upon him, and a sudden gust of wind molded his shirt to the ridges and hollows of his
long, knobbled back. He reached the door of the shed, turned, and through the scrim of rain I watched him lift a hand and bare his big teeth at me. I touched the horn of the Morris and pulled out onto the Ceck’s Bottom road, just as it began to rain in earnest. I mention this meeting only to demonstrate that George gave me no inkling, none at all, that he did, in fact, know what had happened to Sidney’s body. Hardly surprising that he gave no sign of it; he was a dour and cryptic man at the best of times, and certainly knew how to keep a thing to himself.

  ♦

  I presume it was because I’d been out to the marsh in the afternoon that I dreamed of a Mesozoic swamp that night. It was very early in the morning, in the dream, and a sort of bluish gloom suffused the scene. Through a low fog that clung to the surface of the swamp darted small, shadowy, flying creatures that jinked and glided on delicate leathery webbed wings as they swept back and forth in search of prey. The tropical forest fringing the swamp was already steaming in the damp heat of dawn, and but for the steady buzzing and grating and chirping of the insects in the stands of giant pine and redwood nearby, a thick, heavy silence lay upon the place. Vast fallen tree trunks, indistinct in the gloom, their jagged stumps clawing high in the air like great drowning fingers, and trailing clumps and sheets of moss, lay moldering on the edge of the swamp, sinking back into the primeval slime from which they had originally risen. From out of one of these huge dead trunks there suddenly darts a tiny mammalian creature, covered with hair. It stops, one paw raised and its little snout twitching, then thirstily drinks from a pool of brackish black water puddled in the mud. Up comes that timid, twitching, hairy little head once more, and then the animal slips quickly back into its tree, back to its lair. A moment later a sort of muted rumbling sound can be heard from the forest, the crashing of huge bodies advancing through the undergrowth.

  The light is growing stronger. All is quiet as death, out there on the swamp, as from the forest the din of approaching huge beasts grows thunderous. And then they appear through the trees, plodding along in single file, their little heads nodding from side to side from long swaying necks and vast, barrel-shaped bodies: a herd of gentle Brontosauri, small-brained herbivores, a dozen of them, coming to the swamp to drink. Their gray, leathery hides are blotched and stippled with faint, rust-red markings, and their long, tapering tails are held out stiffly behind them, the whiplike tips flicking back and forth as they come. They move with dogged and stately grace toward a pool of water in the center of the swamp, and their footpads make great gloopy sucking noises in the mud. A low mist still clings in wisps and streaks to the surface of the swamp, lending the creatures a vaguely phantasmal aspect. But the sky is growing lighter by the moment, the great blocks of shadow framing the swamp are fading, and the trees come dimly into view. On they plod, beneath a sky in which the undersides of a few fleecy clouds are touched now with the rich pinks and reds of the dawn.

  They reach the pool and stand at the edge to drink. Their long tails still flick from side to side, and at every moment a head comes up, tiny on its serpentine neck, to sniff the air. The first rays of the morning sun come shafting through the forest and, catching the great back of one of these monsters, brings out the richly mottled russet redness of its hide; and still the heads go up and down, up and down, as from the forest comes the shrill scream of some awakening creature, followed by a long-drawn-out burst of manic chatter. A flying lizard drifts over the trees then wheels sharply and flaps off toward the rising sun. It is then that three events occur in rapid succession. The first is the springing up of a brisk breeze, blowing from the south; from that direction then comes the sound of some big animal moving through the trees; and a moment later the largest of the brontosaurs, a massive bull dinosaur of at least thirty tons, sniffs the air with intense concentration, then utters a sort of distressed whinny.

  All drinking ceases. The brontosaurs stand rigid, their heads lifted as they catch the first faint traces of putrid meat drifting on the breeze. There is some shuffling, and more whinnying, as they recognize the unmistakable fetor of a predatory carnosaur—such creatures invariably stink of the carcass of their last meal, for they lie upon the rotting corpse for weeks, in a deep digestive torpor. And then the predator shows himself at the edge of the swamp: a full-grown, mature adult male Phlegmosaurus carbonensis.

  At the sight of him panic catches hold of the timid brontosaurs. The dawn is shattered by great trumpetings of terror as they flounder in the mud, desperate to get off the swamp and back into the shelter of the trees. But in their hysteria they seem only to mire themselves deeper in the ooze.

  The mud churns and flies as the trumpeting brontosaurs begin to lumber clumsily back across the swamp. And then Phlegmosaurus moves. He darts over the swamp on his strong back legs, the forelegs held in close to the muscle-bound trunk, and the great tail jutting stiffly behind, a sort of rudder, or stabilizer, to his crouched and fast-moving body. His head seems all jaw, champing and roaring as he comes. He has selected his prey, a plump young calf, slower than the rest, which now whinnies pitifully for the protection of the herd, a protection that is, in this extremity, forgone. Phlegmosaurus is quickly upon the creature. Nimbly avoiding the lashings and thrashings of the brontosaur’s great tail, he closes with it and in one bound clamps himself to its shoulder. Up comes a hind leg, and that terrible curved claw glints for an instant in the sunlight— and then in a blur of flying mud and flailing flesh the claw goes slicing again and again at the throat of the brontosaur, and the huge creature sinks with a dreadful wheezing sound into the ooze, and great gouts of blood come pumping from its torn throat. Then, still roaring with fury, Phlegmosaurus begins tearing at the dying animal, pulling at the flank until a huge piece of steaming flesh comes away; and for some minutes this frenzy continues, as the brontosaur lies kicking and dying in a muddy pool of its own blood. The rest of the herd has disappeared into the forest, and from the trees there has now arisen a cacophony of shrieks and cries and wild chatterings, and already, at the edge of the swamp, scavengers are beginning to assemble. At last the young herbivore lies still, and the frenzy of ripping and tearing subsides. For some time Phlegmosaurus eats methodically, clutching the meat with its forelegs, cutting and slicing with its great claws. Every few moments the head is lifted, and turned this way and that, the jaws dripping gore. Then, when the sun is high overhead, and flooding the swamp with heat and light, the beast slumps onto the ripped corpse and dozes there in the warm dead flesh. Over on the edge of the swamp, from out of its tree trunk, the hairy little mammal once more emerges. Sitting up pertly on its hind legs, it wipes its whiskery snout with both paws, gazing with bright keen eyes at the now-slumbering dinosaur.

  Suddenly a ragged scream shatters the stillness of the swamp —and I awoke. I had a moment of confusion, thinking I was still out there, and then with a shock I realized that the scream had come from Cleo’s bedroom—she sleeps in the east wing too. Pausing only for my dressing gown and slippers I made my way to her bedside. The poor child was extremely distressed. I found her sitting hunched in bed with her face in her palms. Her curtains were slightly open, and the moonlight that came sifting through the gap spread a pool of illumination on her bed, and in the center of this pool she sat in a white nightgown, weeping. I went to her and she immediately buried her face in my shoulder and clutched me tightly. Huge sobs contorted her thin, trembling frame, and she was quite unable to speak. I held her for several minutes until the sobs slowly subsided and she regained control of herself. At last she lifted her head from my shoulder and I gave her a handkerchief. “Thank you Daddy,” she sniffed. “Oh dear,” she said. “Oh how horrible. Oh how ghastly.”

  “What, darling?” I murmured, stroking her hair.

  “Oh Daddy,” she said—and gazed at me for a long moment from bleary, tear-damp eyes—“oh Daddy, he came to see me again —and it was horrible, much worse than last time.”

  “Who came to see you, darling?” I said, still softly stroking her hair.

&nbs
p; “Sidney did, Daddy.”

  “Sidney! That’s impossible, darling! Do you mean Sidney is in this house?” I looked over my shoulder, as if Sidney might be lurking in Cleo’s closet, or crouching out of sight at the end of her bed.

  “No, he’s not here, Daddy, you won’t see him.” She dropped her eyes and sniffed loudly several times. Then up came her face, stark with horror and grief. “He’s dead, you see.” This provoked a fresh flood of tears.

  Slowly, then, the story came out. It seems that this was the second time that Sidney had come to Cleo in the night. These “visits,” she insisted, were not dreams: she distinctly remembered awakening. The first time he had been standing beside her bed, and his skin, she said, was chalk-white, translucent, and tinged with a faintly greenish hue. He smelled unpleasantly sweet, said Cleo. He was wearing the suit he’d been in the night he disappeared, a beige tweed affair, jacket and plus fours, with a faint check pattern in yellow and sky-blue. What had riveted her attention, however, was the great ragged angry gash beneath his chin: Sidney had had his throat cut.