“Of course, they do, you ass,” said Hal. “Anyway, what’s it got to do with you? Mind your own beeswax!” Mind your own beeswax. It was a piece of slang I had heard once or twice at my school, but even there it had seemed dated, culled perhaps from a reading of Billy Bunter or Stalky & Co.
Hal asked me about my school, in particular about games. I boasted as much as I could about my distinctly average abilities and my exploits in the third eleven at cricket. He kept his eyes fixed on me, but I wondered how much he was taking in.
He said: “When I grow up I’m going to be a cricketer, like Wally Hammond.”
“Who’s Wally Hammond?” I asked.
“Crikey, don’t you know who Wally Hammond is? You are of blockheads the most crassly ignoramus.”
“Is he a cricketer?”
“Is he a cricketer? Of course he’s a cricketer, you utterly frabjous oaf! Don’t you know anything?”
As I was one of those boys who had learned by heart the names of the entire England cricket team, together with their bowling and batting averages, I took great offence at this. Later in our conversation I slipped in a reference to Geoffrey Boycott.
Hal said: “Boycott what?” I did not reply, but I felt vindicated.
It was not long after this that I began to feel that my company was no longer a pleasure to Hal. Something about his eyes was not quite right. They seemed to be darker than when I had first seen them – not only the irises and pupils, but the whites had turned a greyish colour. Perhaps it was a trick of the fading light that may also account for the fact that he was beginning to look even smaller.
Suddenly he said: “Who are you anyway?”
“Who are you for that matter, and what are you doing here?” I said, taking a step towards him.
“Go away!” he shouted. “Private Property!”
The sound of his cry rang in my ears. I turned from him and ran up the path to the top of the slope. When I had reached it, I turned again and looked back. Hal was still sitting there on the lip of the old well, his heels banging against the stones. He was facing in my direction but I could not tell whether he was looking at me or not. The light, which was not quite right in that strange garden, had turned his eye sockets into empty black holes. I turned again and ran. This time I did not look back.
For some time I found that I was lost. In that dense foliage I could not tell which way was the sea and which way the Villa Monte Rosa. I remember some agonizing minutes during which I could not stop myself from going round in a circle. I kept coming back to the same small stone statue of a cat crouching on a plinth. It was perhaps the tomb of a pet, but there was no inscription. I began to panic. The cat looked as if it were about to spring. I decided that the only way of escape was to ignore the paths and move resolutely in one direction.
Surprisingly enough this worked, and in a matter of minutes I found I was walking across the little lawn towards the terrace where my parents were. I was about to set foot on the steps to the terrace when I saw Mrs de Walter at the top of them, scrutinizing me intently. She came down to meet me.
“So you’ve found your way back,” she said. “We were beginning to wonder if you were lost.
I shook my head. She laid her thin hand lightly on my shoulder.
“Did you meet anyone on your travels?” she asked. It was a curious way of expressing herself and I was wary. “You did, didn’t you?”
I nodded. It seemed the course of least resistance.
“A little boy?”
I nodded again.
“An English little boy?”
I gave her the same response. The pressure of her hand on my shoulder became so great that I imagined I could feel the bones in her fingers through my thin shirt, or was it the cords of her strange crocheted mittens? She said: “We won’t mention the little English boy to anyone else, shall we? Not even our parents. This shall be our personal secret, shan’t it?”
I was quite happy to agree with this suggestion, because I had a feeling that my parents would not believe me if I did tell them about Hal.
“Come!” said Mrs de Walter. “I want to show you some things which will amuse you. This way!” Her hand now pressed firmly against my left shoulder blade, she guided me anticlockwise around the villa to a part of it which I had not seen – a long low structure with tall windows abutting onto the main building.
“We call this the orangery,” she said. “But it’s many years since anyone grew oranges here.” She took out a key and turned it in the lock of a door made from grey and wrinkled wood to which a few flakes and blisters of green paint still adhered.
“Who is Hal?” I asked Mrs De Walter.
“Come inside,” she said. “There are some things here which I’m sure will amuse you.”
We entered a long, dingy space feebly lit by the tall dirty windows that faced onto the garden. At the far end of the orangery was a curtain of faded green damask drawn across a dark space, and along the wall which faced the windows was ranged a series of rectangular glass cases set on legs at a height convenient to the spectator.
“These are bound to amuse you,” said Mrs de Walter. “All boys like you are amused by these.” Her insistence on my reaction was beginning to make me nervous.
At first I thought that the glass cases simply contained stuffed animals of the kind I had seen in museums, but when I was placed firmly in front of one I saw that this was not quite so. There were stuffed animals certainly, but they were all mice, rats and other rodents, and they had been put into human postures and settings.
The first tableau depicted the oak-panelled parlour of an old-fashioned inn. A red squirrel in an apron was halfway through a door bearing a tray of bottles, glasses and foaming tankards of ale. At a table sat four or five rats and a white mouse. Playing cards were scattered over the table and on the floor. The white mouse was looking disconsolately away towards the viewer while the rats seemed to be gloating over the piles of coin that had accumulated on their side of the table. The white mouse wore an elegant embroidered sash of primrose-coloured silk, while perching on one of the finials of his chair-back was an extravagantly plumed hat. The setting and costume accessories suggested the Carolean period. Two moles wearing spectacles and Puritan steeple hats were watching the proceedings with disapproval from a corner table. It was clear that the rats had gulled the wealthy but innocent young mouse out of his cash at cards.
The tableau looked as if it had been made in the Victorian era and had, I am sure, been designed to amuse, as Mrs de Walter kept reminding me, but there was something dusty and oppressive about the atmosphere it evoked. Perhaps it was the implied moralism of the display, a sort of rodent “Rake’s Progress” that disheartened me.
In the second case the scene was set outside the inn. The two moles were now observing the action from an open first floor casement window to the right of the inn sign that bore the image of a skull and a trumpet. On the road in front of the inn, a brawl was taking place between the white mouse and one of the rats. Both were being urged on by groups of their fellow rodents, the mice being smaller obviously, but more elegantly equipped with plumed hats and rapiers swinging from their tasselled baldrics. The rats had a proletarian look about them and had leather rather than silk accoutrements.
The third tableau was set in a forest clearing where the mouse and his comrades had just ambushed the rat with whom he had been brawling in the previous scene. The mouse was plunging a rapier into the belly of the rat, which was now in its death throes. I was slightly surprised by the graphic way in which the creator of these scenes had shown the blood. It surrounded the gaping wound, which the mouse had created. There was a dark, viscous pool of the stuff on the yellow soil beneath its body, and great splashes of it on the mouse’s white fur. One could just see the faces of the two moles peeping out from a dense belt of undergrowth to one side.
The final glass case depicted a courtroom, presided over by an owl judge. Other participants were all rodents of one kind or another. T
he white mouse, his coat still faintly stained with blood, stood in the spike-hedged dock between two burly ferret policemen. A rat in a wig was interrogating one of the moles, whose head was just visible above the wooden sides of the witness box. The entire jury was composed of rats and, as if to confirm the inevitable outcome of the trial, I noticed that a small square of black cloth already reposed upon the owl’s flat head.
“I thought these would amuse you,” said Mrs de Walter who was standing behind me. I started. In my absorption I had quite forgotten her presence. Amused was not the word, but I was held by a morbid fascination. These scenes with their lurid subject matter and their dusty gallows humour were redolent of long-forgotten illustrated books and savage Victorian childhoods.
“Ah! But you haven’t seen behind the curtain, have you?” said Mrs de Walter with a dreadful attempt at a roguish smile. It was then that I became very much afraid. I can only account for the suddenness of my panic by the fact that uneasiness had built it up inside me over the course of the afternoon, that it had reached a critical mass and was now in danger of erupting into sheer terror. One thought dominated: I must not see behind the curtain, and yet, at the same time, I knew I could not look away.
Mrs de Walter appeared to take all this in, but she showed neither concern nor indifference to my state of mind, only a kind of intense curiosity. She bent down and looked directly into my eyes.
“I wonder if you should see this one. It might shock you.” She approached the curtain and put one hand on it so that in an instant she could pull it aside. There was a pause before she asked me a question. “Are you by any chance a pious sort of a boy?”
For several seconds I simply could not grasp what she meant. Of course I understood the word “pious”. It was the name of a recent Pope; monks in the Middle Ages were pious; but I had never heard it applied to a living human being, let alone myself. I said I didn’t know. She smiled.
“All right,” she said, “the tiniest peep, then,” and she flicked aside the curtain. It was only a few seconds before she released the curtain and all was hidden again, but my impressions, though fragmentary, were all the more vivid for that.
It was a glass case like the others, but the scene within it was very different. I remember the painted background of a lurid and stormy sky, torn apart by zigzags of lightning. Against them the three crosses on a grey mound stood out strongly. I cannot say too much, but it was my impression that the three toads had still been alive when they were nailed to the wood.
I can remember nothing after that until Mrs de Walter and I found ourselves on the terrace again. I saw a table strewn with little glasses and open bottles full of strange-coloured liquids. Mr de Walter and my parents appeared to be having a lively discussion about race.
“I’ve knocked about the world a bit in my time,” de Walter was saying, “and I’ve met all sorts, I can tell you. And of all the peoples I have met, the best, for all their faults, are the English. ‘Fraid so. Modesty forbids and all that, but facts is facts. Next best are the Germans. Now, I know what you’re going to say, and I’d agree, your bad German is a Hun of the first water – dammit, I should know! – but your good German is a gentleman. Your Frenchie is an arrogant swine; your Arab is a rogue, but at least he’s an honest rogue, unlike your Turk. Don’t waste your time with the Swiss: they all have the mentalities of small town stationmasters. Nobody understands the Japs, not even the Japs. But your absolute shit of hell in my experience is the Bulgarian. Scum of the earth; sodomites to a man; rape a woman soon as look at her, but not in the natural way of things if you understand me.”
“Hugh!” said Mrs de Walter reproachfully, indicating my presence.
“What about the Portuguese?” said my mother quickly, in an attempt to smother any further revelations about the Bulgarians. “You must like the Portuguese. We’ve found them to be absolutely charming.”
“Your Portugoose is not a bad fellow, I grant you,” said de Walter rather more thoughtfully than before, “but he’s a primitive. You’ve seen the folk around here – dark, squat little beggars, stunted by our standards. Well, there’s a reason for that in my opinion. It’s because they’re the direct descendants of the original Iberian natives. There’s been no intermingling with Aryan races, not even the Romans when they invaded, or the Moors for that matter. They’re like another species. I call them the Children of the Earth.”
My parents did not know how to respond to this without either compromising themselves or causing offence, so there was a silence. It was broken by de Walter’s suggestion that he take us on a tour of the house.
The rooms were luxuriously furnished in an opulent Edwardian style with heavy brocades and potted palms. On side-tables of dark polished wood were ranged treasures of the kind that used to be called “curios” – ostrich eggs mounted in silver, meerschaum pipes whose bowls were shaped like mermaids or wicked bearded heads, little wild animals carved in green nephrite by Faberge. On a side-table was a gold cigarette case of exquisite workmanship with the letter “E” emblazoned in diamonds upon it. De Walter opened the case for us. Resting in its glittering interior was a charred and withered tube of white paper that might once have been a cigarette.
“I’d blush to tell you how I got hold of this little item, or what I paid for it,” he said. “This case once belonged to a very beautiful and tragic lady, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria. And that little scrap of paper was the last cigarette she ever smoked. I have the documents to prove it. She was assassinated, you know. Stabbed by an Italian anarchist in Switzerland of all places. Ghastly people, the Italians: blub over a bambino while holding a knife to your guts under the table.”
The books that lined the whole of one wall of what he called his “saloon” were nearly all leather-bound and had curious titles which I did not recognize. They were not like the miscellaneous collection of classics and popular novels to be found in our house.
“Here’s something that might amuse you, old man,” said de Walter to my father, pulling out a gilt-tooled volume in red leather. “Crebillon Fils. The engravings are contemporary.”
I saw my father open the book at random. The right-hand page was an engraved illustration of some sort, but he shut it too rapidly for me to see what it was.
My eye was attracted to a group of silver-framed photographs on a bureau. Several of them featured younger versions of the de Walters, which showed that they must once have been elegant if not exactly handsome. Others were of strangers, presumably relatives or friends, usually formal portraits, and of these one stood out. It was an old photograph, pre-war at a guess, of a bald man with a short nose, determined mouth and a fierce stare. He looked straight out menacingly at the camera and, it would seem, at us. It was like no photograph I had ever seen before.
“Know who that is, young feller-me-lad?” De Walter asked me.
“I do,” said my mother with evident distaste.
“Yes,” said de Walter, sensitive to her reaction but unruffled. “He had a certain reputation. The Great Beast, and all that. Queer chap, but he knew a thing or two. Know what he said? Remember this, young ’un. ‘Resolute imagination is the key to all successful magical working.’ That’s what he said. Well, Crowley had the imagination all right. Trouble was, he lacked the resolve. Drugs and other beastliness got in the way. I’m afraid he wasn’t quite a gentleman, you see.
“I visited him once or twice during his last days in Hastings. He was in a bad way because the drugs had caught up with him, as they always do. Ghastly, but useful. Got some handy stuff out of him, about the homunculus. Ever heard of that, little man?” he said with a wink. I said I hadn’t.
“It means ‘little man’, little man. Except he doesn’t come out of a mother’s tummy, he comes out of an egg. But it’s a special alchemical egg.” I was baffled, but I took comfort from the fact that my parents seemed to be equally puzzled. De Walter went on: “Making the egg. That’s the hard part. Now, here’s another. Have you heard of a puerculus, my boy?
” And he winked again. I shook my head. “Well now, use your nous. Puer in Latin means—?”
“Boy.”
“Good. Right ho, then. So if homunculus means little man, then puerculus means—”
“Hugh, dear, hadn’t we better be getting on?” said Mrs de Walter.
“Ha! Yes! Call to order from the lady wife!” De Walter led us out of the room and down a whitewashed corridor towards a stout ironbound oak door with a Gothic arch to it quite unlike the others in the house.
“Now then,” said de Walter, putting his hand on a great black key that protruded from the door’s lock, “my grand finale. The wine cellars! This way, boys and girls!”
My mother, who had become increasingly nervous throughout the trip, suddenly burst into a stream of agitated speech: “No really, that’s awfully kind of you, but we must be on our way. Do forgive us. It’s been really delightful, but there’s a bus from the village in ten minutes – I consulted the man, you see – which we will just be able to catch. Thank you so much, but—”
“Enough, dear lady, enough!” said de Walter. He seemed more amused than offended, though even then I recognized the amusement of the bully who has successfully humiliated his victim.
When we were safely on the bus, among a troupe of uniformed schoolchildren and three black-clad old women who were carrying cages of hens into Estoril, my mother said: “Never again!”
My father, whose courteous soul, I thought, might have been offended by our hastily-contrived departure, said nothing. I think he even nodded slightly.
One Sunday morning, a year or so after our holiday in Portugal, my parents and I were sitting over breakfast in the kitchen. Sunday papers were, as usual, spread everywhere.
One of my father’s indulgences, excused on the grounds of professional interest, was to take a large number of the Sunday papers, including the less “quality” ones, like The People and the News of the World. I noticed that my father always picked up the latter first and often read it with such avid attention that my mother had to address him several times before he would comply with a simple request, like passing the butter. I had no interest in newspapers at that time and frequently, with my mother’s permission, took a book to the breakfast table.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 Page 38