“I’ve been angling to get you to myself for a long time, my love” he revealed. “I’ve been crazy about you since I saw you eating the five course special in the Corner Café, weeks ago. My dream woman, that’s what you are, Sylvia. Big as they come, and beautiful with it. But I could tell you didn’t think much of me. I smiled at you more than once in the Café, when you looked my way, but you didn’t even see me. You were too busy eating. Fair enough, I told myself. When you left I decided to follow you, and of course, before long, I got to know all about you.”
“You spied on me,” Sylvia said, contemptuously.
“You bet. Every day, from dawn to dusk. Watching your house was much more interesting than watching this one. I’d got Mr. so-called O’Cooler’s number by then anyway. I had no doubts about who and what he was: all I lacked was some way to turn that knowledge to my advantage.”
O’Cooler seemed about to speak, but in the end decided to keep his own counsel. His owlish eyes watched Strope keenly however, as the little man continued his monologue.
“I almost went up and spoke to you a number of times, but you stared through me, or gave me a haughty look, so I didn’t dare. I’m a bashful man, by nature. Anyway, when I realized you did unpaid work for the Volunteers, I saw my chance to get close to you, so I offered my services too. They soon had me on trial, answering the phone in their office. That’s when I put two and two together and I saw an opportunity to get you where I want you.
“It was me that brought the plight of the ‘poor old gentleman’ to the attention of the Volunteer Service. I pretended a call came in requesting help just when I knew you were due to take the next case. It was me that hinted to the Coordinator that you ought not go alone. There was nobody else around who could have gone with you, I made sure of that.”
“And here we are,” Sylvia said. “I see.” She looked again to O’Cooler for assistance, but he had still not taken his eyes off the little man. “What’s this bargain the two of you struck?” she asked.
Strope gave her a blissful smile. “Simple. As you so rightly guessed, our friend here has ‘special dietary needs.’ Requirements that are not being met, because he can’t get about to satisfy them. I can and will provide him with what he requires. In return, he allows me the uninterrupted use of part of his premises for my own purposes. I must have somewhere away from my flat, where I can satisfy my needs occasionally. Somewhere my activities won’t be overheard.”
“Where do I fit in to this agreement?” Sylvia asked, glancing desperately back and forth from what she could see of the inexpressive features of the resident of the house to the gloating, triumphant face of the little man. “I don’t understand. What am I going to get out of it?”
Strope moved closer to her. “My undivided attention,” he said.
Sylvia snatched up her bag and attempted to leave the room. She was slow on her feet, however, and Strope was as agile as a lizard. He slipped out of the door ahead of her and slammed it in her face. She heard the lock turn.
She turned to O’Cooler. “Are you going to let him keep me here?” she demanded.
O’Cooler’s eyes were heavy-lidded—almost closed. He looked tired out. Obviously he wasn’t used to such excitement. Not during the hours of daylight, anyway.
“That was one of the terms of our pact,” he acknowledged wearily.
Sylvia folded her arms across her breasts in an angrily protective gesture, as though she was preparing to repel boarders. “What’s he up to now? Where’s he gone?”
“Checking the security arrangements, I imagine. He asked about them earlier. I had them installed some years ago, to stop the more predatory local youths getting in, and other, more welcome people getting out, during occasions when I was forced to absent myself for one reason or another. There are steel bars up at all the ground-floor windows, which are made of bulletproof glass. The outer doors are similarly protected. The whole ground floor can be sealed off from the upper regions at the press of a button.”
“So I’m trapped. You’re going to let him do what he likes with me?”
“He led me to believe you are not the first, and probably won’t be the last, of his victims.”
“Well, that’s a consoling thought, to be sure,” Sylvia snapped.
O’Cooler raised one furry eyebrow at her sharp tone and unexpected irony, then fatigue got the better of him. He held back his head, opened his mouth, and yawned widely.
Sylvia noticed the yawn, and the glint of O’Cooler’s fangs.
She was a well-meaning, good-hearted person who tried always to see the best in people. She was the sort who made an effort to keep up a cheerful front, and tried not to dwell too much on the dark side of life. She had to, the kind of work she did, to get through her days. True, she was a bit slow on the uptake, but she wasn’t stupid. She was a supremely practical girl, who didn’t try to ignore the evidence of her own eyes. And she could think fast, when she had to.
“There’s something you should know,” she said to the increasingly dormant creature in the wheelchair.
“Mmm.” He hardly stirred.
“I was voted ‘Most Valued Volunteer’ by my fellow workers recently. I got a certificate.”
O’Cooler twitched slightly, perhaps with impatience. “Oh: good.”
“Most Valued Volunteer,” she repeated. “I’m an important part of the set-up back there. Very experienced. They need my expertise.”
O’Cooler stifled another yawn. “How very gratifying for you.”
“They’ll miss me soon, if I don’t get back. They have your address. Strope slipped up there, in his hurry to get his hands on me, and wrote it down on a piece of paper for my Coordinator. They’ll certainly come looking for me. Maybe with the police. I should have thought you were the last person in the world to want them snooping around, under the circumstances, especially if Strope was right about what you’ve got buried in your back garden.”
Her words aroused the sleepyhead quicker than an alarm clock could have done. “Are you sure about that?” he spluttered.
“Absolutely. I’ve been gone a long time already. And, let’s face it, you’re as much a prisoner here as I am—in your condition, in the middle of the day. There’s nobody to help you make your escape in that thing.” She pointed to the long, lidded wooden case she had earlier mistaken for a blanket-box.
O’Cooler’s composure had vanished: he was wide awake. Sylvia could almost hear the alarm bells ringing in his head. “But if I stay here, and let you go . . .! That man said if I let him have you, he would bring me food regularly, until I recovered.”
“If he promised to lure people here for you to feed on, forget it. He couldn’t deliver. And he’d dump me and run, when he’d finished doing what he wanted to me. You’d just have another corpse on your hands for the police to find when they get here.”
“I had no option but to believe him or starve.”
“But I told you I could put an aid-package together for you myself. Individually tailored to your needs, now I understand exactly what those needs are. We’ll work something out.”
“Can you give me some details?”
“Okay.” Sylvia explained that the Health, Social and other Services were being manned more and more by otherwise unemployed and untrained volunteers who, if they were considered at all suitable, were told to put in plenty of time for nothing, if they wanted to continue to receive benefits. Millions of people were desperate to comply with this scheme, as it offered the nearest thing most of them would ever get to security.
“There’s a vetting process they all have to go through, and most of them are worse than useless, as you can imagine. Those, we have to reject. It’s part of my job to interview these people. I have access to the names and address of thousands of the rejects, who mostly have no income at all. Consequently, they will do anything, anything at all, for a little cash.”
O’Cooler fiddled thoughtfully with his walking stick. Out of touch with social and economic conditi
ons in the world outside, he hung on to her every word.
“See what I’m getting at?” Sylvia said, as her bleak revelations sank into the invalid’s brain. “I am in a position to hand-pick any number of reliable—let’s call them donors—of either sex, who will provide you with a discreet personal and anonymous service, brought to you in your own home, for a few pounds a week. I know you made some unwise investments, but you can afford that surely?”
She could see O’Cooler (she still preferred to think of him under that name) was tempted by her scheme. “I can even screen them for your favorite blood group, if you have a preference,” she added temptingly.
“What guarantee do I have you will do as you say?” O’Cooler said. Mr. Strope could be heard returning, his boots knocking on the uncarpeted parquet floor in the corridor outside.
“You have my word. As ‘Most . . .’”
“Yes, I know: ‘Most Valued Volunteer,’” O’Cooler snapped, but he had made up his mind. He surprised Sylvia by holding out his big long hands and grasping hers. “It sounds like a bloody good bargain, to me,” he said, not really swearing, she guessed. “As you see, I put myself in your hands.” He raised her hands to his thin, hard lips, and kissed her fingers. “Here’s to our future,” he said.
She wondered if he was suggesting they could become friends. More than that, perhaps. The idea was not unpleasant. He had something other men she’d met certainly didn’t have. She could do worse. After all, in his way, he was very distinguished. A Count, even. Strope was having trouble with the awkward key.
“What shall we do about him?” O’Cooler muttered, a co-conspirator now.
“Is that stick of yours as strong and heavy as it looks?”
O’Cooler nodded. “And weighted with lead at the top.” He handed it over. “When you’ve finished, I’ll dispose of him in that.” He pointed toward the oven. “I should be able to manage if I take it slowly.”
“I’ll try not to kill him outright. There’s not much to him, but he should provide you with a snack before he goes.”
The aristocratic invalid nodded his approval and gratitude. “Very considerate of you.”
Beyond the door, Strope dropped the key and cursed.
Sylvia took the opportunity of this delay to lean down close to O’Cooler’s ear and quickly explain the nature of her own eating disorder: in particular, about the other things she had developed an appetite for recently. It was time, she felt, to exchange confidences: to form a bond.
At first, O’Cooler looked a little taken aback.
“Well,” he said at last, “who’d have thought it? But, if that’s the way things stand with you, I’ll save the heart and lights, and the, er, other bits.”
“If it’s not too much trouble,” Sylvia whispered. “I’ll have to get back to report to my Coordinator soon. I’ll tell her you don’t require our assistance after all, and that Strope has decided he doesn’t want to continue with this sort of work; but I’ll try and call round for them later, while they’re fresh.”
The key clicked and turned at last.
Moving surprisingly quietly for someone her size, Sylvia took up position behind the door.
She winked at her new friend, and raised the bronze-tipped stick high above her shoulder.
JOHN GORDON was born in Jarrow-on-Tyne and now lives in Norwich. As a child he moved with his family to Wisbech in the Fens of Cambridgeshire, where he went to school. After serving in the Royal Navy on minesweepers and destroyers during World War II, he became a journalist on various local newspapers.
His first book for young adults, The Giant Under the Snow, was published by Hutchinson in 1968 and gained praise from Alan Garner, among others, and was reissued in 2006 by Orion with editions in Italy and Lithuania and as a talking book.
Gordon has published a number of fantasy and horror novels including The House on the Brink, The Ghost on the Hill, The Quelling Eye, The Grasshopper, Ride the Wind, Blood Brothers, Gilray’s Ghost, The Flesh Eater, The Midwinter Watch, Skinners, The Ghosts of Blacklode, and Fen Runners.
The author’s short stories are collected in The Spitfire Grave and Other Stories, Catch Your Death and Other Stories, The Burning Baby and Other Stories, and the retrospective Left in the Dark. He was one of five authors who contributed to the Oxrun Station “mosaic novel” Horror at Halloween, edited by Jo Fletcher, and his autobiography Ordinary Seaman: Teenage Memoirs appeared from Walker Books in 1992.
Black Beads
John Gordon
The darkness can hide so many secrets . . .
Richard Appian was reclining full-length in the swing seat when he raised the question of the break-in. “It’s hardly serious,” he said. “Just enough risk to be entertaining.”
Angela watched him drink. He was really very handsome. Coppery hair cut short, a strong neck and broad shoulders. He was aware of his size and he used it; that was part of his attraction. He faced down anyone he met, his small blue eyes glinting with what at first appeared to be friendliness until suddenly his smile would broaden and his victim would realize, too late, that Richard Appian had marked him down. It thrilled her.
“Ricky,” she asked, and her voice was languid, “does the old lady have anything you particularly want?”
“Her place is a treasure-house,” he said. “Nothing has been touched for fifty years. You’ll love it.”
And she would. The past was a deep well of mystery to which she was drawn. Even her clothes showed it with a tendency to be slightly out of date. But he liked a woman to look feminine, by which she knew he meant helpless and compliant, and he always maintained that it was the simplicity of her dress, the fitted waist and flared skirt that had at first attracted him. That, and the strange circumstances of their initial meeting.
“Black beads,” he said. “She’s bound to have ebony beads somewhere.”
She chided him at that. “Black beads are Victorian,” she said. “Far too old.” And yet he had struck a chord; she could see herself with a double string of heavy black beads reaching to her waist. It was a childish thought from far back. “You have read my mind once more,” she said.
His smile, which would come and go like a shutter opening and closing, remained open to show the whiteness of his teeth. He was so superbly at ease, stretched out in the shade of the swing’s awning, that her heart gave the strange little skip she had recently learned to live with and then ran away in palpitations that left her gasping. Which made her prettily defenseless, he thought.
“But you don’t actually need anything, Ricky,” she murmured, turning her head away to look across the wide lawn where the trees made tents of restful shadow.
“What I need,” he said, “is what I want. And what I want is to have you with me when I go there.”
“But why?” They sat in the shade of a cypress behind the house, but even there the glare of the sun had made him put on his dark glasses and she could not see the expression in his eyes. “Why, Ricky?”
“Because it would please me.” Beneath his invisible gaze his lips wore a smile. “Because you never let me take you home.”
“But I do.” Enormous weariness made her close her eyes. She did not wish to make yet more excuses for not allowing him to take her further than the entrance to the apartment building. “It’s such a small place,” she said, “you wouldn’t like it.” It was so dark and narrow it had taken her a long time to get accustomed to it. He wanted to know too much, too many of her secrets.
He watched her. She sat upright, except for the gentle curve of her spine, and her hand drooped over the arm of her chair holding her glass by its rim as if it was almost too heavy for her slim fingers. Her pale lethargy emphasized the dark beauty of the eyes which slid away from him to look toward the house. He had never lived anywhere else; there was space for him, and to spare, and it was easier for him to take part in the family’s business if he lived at home—in the style which suited him. He sought to impress her even more. “Mrs. Grayson’s house is m
uch larger even than this,” he said, “and we shall have it all to ourselves.”
“But it will be dark.” She did not look at him. She knew what was in his mind. Taking her to a strange empty house in darkness excited him, but he was reluctant to admit it to her. A faint contempt stirred in her that he should hide his desires by pretending to be a thief.
“All you will have to do is hold the torch,” he said.
“But what if we should be surprised?”
“That’s impossible. Mrs. Grayson is in a nursing home and won’t be coming back. Ever.”
“I shall be a liability,” she protested. “I can’t climb, I can’t run.” By tormenting him she put an edge to his determination, but she herself tingled with pleasure at the danger and it diminished the dragging tiredness that besieged her.
“There is no need to climb through windows. I can get a key at any time I want. We have known her for years, and she’ll never know what’s missing.”
“I’ll be useless—I get so breathless.” She frowned; it had not always been so.
“You won’t even have to climb the stairs.” The dark lenses looked on her and she knew the expression concealed there. She had seen it before on another face, in another place. She lowered her eyes and allowed him to betray what was in his mind. “A big house all to ourselves,” he said. “I shall carry you up the stairs in the dark.” He hesitated. “If you would like that.”
When she said nothing he sought to justify himself. “You mustn’t forget I have carried you before.” He saw her eyelids flicker as if she did not remember. It was a game they played. “My old dog Wolf found you,” he said. “In the woods lying among the dead leaves. He thought you were dead, too. We both did.”
“I was merely comfortable.” She dipped her eyes. “I was asleep.”
“How was I to know? I lifted you up, and you were as light as air.”
“Not everyone would find me as light as that; you don’t know how strong you are.” She was never sure she should remind him of his strength; she had seen others afraid of it. “Then you woke me.”
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