The Collected Short Fiction

by Robert Aickman

  She stretched out a small damp hand. "Poor Hilary. Mary was your friend. I'm sorry for you, Hilary."

  "Did she go to bed with a temperature?" asked Hilary. He was less unaccustomed than most children to the idea of death because he was perfectly well aware that of late he himself was said to have escaped death but narrowly.

  This time Valerie shook her head, though with equal solemnity. "No," she said. "At least, I don't think so. It's all a mystery. We haven't been told she's dead. We thought she was ill, like you. Then Sandy saw something in the paper." Sandy Stainer was a podgy sprawling boy with, as one might suppose, vaguely reddish hair.

  "What did he see?"

  "Something nasty," said Valerie with confidence. "I don't know what it was. We're not supposed to know."

  "Sandy knows."

  "Yes," said Valerie.

  "Hasn't he told?"

  "He's been told not to. Miss Milland had him in her room."

  "But don't you want to know yourself?"

  "No, I don't," said Valerie, with extreme firmness. "My mummy says it's enough for us to know that poor Mary's dead. She says that's what really matters."

  It was certainly what really mattered to Hilary. He passed his first day back at school looking very pallid and speaking no further word except when directly addressed by Miss Milland or Mrs Everson; both of whom agreed, after school hours, that Hilary Brigstock had been sent back before he should have been. It was something to which they were entirely accustomed: the children often seemed to divide into those perpetually truant and those perpetually in seeming need of more care and attention than they were receiving at home. That it should be so was odd in such a professional and directorial area; though Mrs Cartier, who looked in every now and then to teach elementary French, and was a Maoist, said it was just what one always found.

  Hilary had never spoken to Sandy Stainer, nor ever wanted to. The present matter was not one which he would care to enquire about in such a quarter. Moreover, he knew perfectly well that he would be told nothing, but merely tormented. Sandy Stainer's lips had somehow been sealed in some remarkably effective way; and he would be likely to find, in such a situation, clear conscience and positive social sanction for quiet arm-twisting and general vexing of enquirers, especially of enquirers known to be as vulnerable as Hilary. And Mary had been so much to Hilary that he had no other close friend in the school—probably no other friend there at all. Perhaps Hilary was one of those men who are designed for one woman only.

  Certainly he had no little friends outside the school; nor had ever been offered any. Nor, as usual, was the death of Mary a matter that could be laid before his father. In any case, what could his father permit himself to tell him; when all was so obscure, and so properly so?

  Within a day or two, Hilary was back in bed once more, and again missing from school.

  Doctor Morgan-Vaughan could not but suspect this time that the trouble contained a marked element of "the psychological"; but it was an aspect of medicine that had always struck him as almost entirely unreal, and certainly as a therapeutic dead end, except for those resolved to mine it financially. He preferred to treat visibly physiological disturbances with acceptably physiological nostra. In the present case, he seriously thought of again calling in Doctor Oughtred, who had undoubtedly made a very real contribution in the earlier manifestation of the child's illness.

  "Do you read the local paper, Mrs Parker?" asked Hilary, whiter than the sheets between which he lay.

  "I don't get round to it," replied Mrs Parker, in her carefully uncommitted way. "We take it in. Mr Parker feels we should."

  "Why does he feel that?"

  "Well, you want to know what's going on around you, don't you?"

  "Yes," said Hilary.

  "Not that Mr Parker reads anything very much. Why should he, when he's got the wireless? The Advertiser just piles up in heaps till the waste people come for it from the hospital."

  "What do they do with it at the hospital?"

  "Pulp it, I believe. You've got to do what you can for charity, haven't you?"

  "Bring me all the local papers in the heap, Mrs Parker. I'm ill too. It's just like the hospital."

  "You couldn't read them," said Mrs Parker, as before; carefully not conceding.

  "I could," said Hilary.

  "How's that? You can't read."

  "I can," said Hilary. "I can read anything. Well, almost anything. Bring me the papers, Mrs Parker."

  She expressed no surprise that he should want to read something so boring even to her; nor did it seem to strike her that there might be anything significant in his demand. In fact, she could think of nothing to say; and as, in any case, she was always wary about what she let fall in the ambience of her employment, she left Hilary's room without one word more.

  But, as much as three days later, Eileen had something to say when she brought him his midday meal (not a very imaginative one) and an assembly of pills.

  "You are old-fashioned," remarked Eileen. "At least that's what Mrs Parker thinks."

  "What d'you mean?" asked Hilary in a sulky tone, because he disliked Eileen.

  "Asking for the Advertiser, when you can't even read it."

  "I can read it," said Hilary.

  "I know more than Mrs Parker knows," said Eileen. "It's that little girl, isn't it? Mary Rossiter, your little sweetheart."

  Hilary said nothing.

  "I've seen you together. I know. Not that I've told Mrs Parker."

  "You haven't?"

  "Not likely. Why should I tell her?"

  Hilary considered that.

  "She's a silly cow," said Eileen casually.

  Hilary was clutching with both hands at the sheet. "Do you know what happened to Mary?" he asked, looking as far away from Eileen as he could look.

  "Not exactly. She was interfered with, and mauled about. Bitten all over, they say, poor little thing. But it's been hushed up proper, and you'd better hurry and forget all about her. That's all you can do, isn't it?"

  In the end, having passed at Briarside and at Gorselands through the more difficult years of the Second World War, Hilary went to Wellington also. His father thought it a tidier arrangement: better adapted to more restricted times. By then, of course, Hilary's brothers, Roger and Gilbert, had left the school, though in neither case for the university. There seemed no point, they both decided; and their father had had no difficulty in agreeing. He had been to a university himself, and it had seemed to him more of a joke than anything else, and a not particularly useful one.

  Despite the intermittent connection with Wellington, theirs had not been a particularly army family, and it was with surprise that Mr Brigstock learned of his youngest son's decision to make the army his career, especially as the war was not so long concluded. Hilary, as we have said, was no milksop, and no doubt the Wellington ethos had its influence; but, in any case, it is a mistake to think that an officers' mess is manned solely by good-class rowdies. There are as many (and, naturally, as few) sensitive people in the army as in most other places; and some of them find their way there precisely because they are so.

  A further complexity is that the sensitive are sometimes most at their ease with the less sensitive. Among Hilary's friends at the depot, was a youth named Callcutt, undisguisedly extrovert, very dependable. On one occasion, Hilary Brigstock took Callcutt home for a few days of their common leave.

  It was not a thing he did often, even now. The atmosphere of his home still brought out many reserves in him. It would hardly be too much to say that he himself went there as little as possible. But by now both Roger and Gilbert were married, and had homes of their own, as they frequently mentioned; so that Hilary was beginning to expect qualms within him on the subject of his father's isolation, and, surely, loneliness. Late middle-aged people living by themselves were always nowadays said to be lonely. Unlike most sons, Hilary at times positively wished that his father would marry again, as people in his situation were expected to do; that his
father's views on the subject of women had somehow become less definite.

  And really the place was dull. Stranded there with Callcutt, Hilary perceived luminously, as in a minutely detailed picture, how entirely dull, in every single aspect, his home was.

  More secrets are improperly disclosed from boredom than from any other motive; and more intimacies imparted, with relief resulting, or otherwise.

  "I love it here," said Callcutt, one day after lunch, when Mr Brigstock had gone upstairs for the afternoon, as he normally did.

  "That's fine," replied Hilary. "What do you love in particular about it?"

  "The quiet," said Callcutt immediately. "I think one's home should be a place where one can go for some quiet. You're a lucky chap."

  "Yes," agreed Hilary. "Quiet it certainly is. Nowadays, at least. When my two elder brothers were here, it wasn't quiet at all."

  "Remind me where they are now?"

  "Married. Both of them. With homes of their own."

  "Nice girls?"

  "So-so."

  "Kids?"

  "Two each."

  "Boys?"

  "All boys. We only breed boys."

  "Only?"

  "There hasn't been a girl in the Brigstock family within living memory."

  "Saves a lot of trouble," said Callcutt.

  "Loses a lot of fun," said Hilary.

  "Not at that age."

  "Particularly, perhaps, at that age."

  "How's that? You're not one of these Lolita types, like old whatnot?"

  "When I was a child I knew a girl who meant more to me than any girl has meant to me since. More, indeed, than anyone at all. Remember that I never knew my mother."

  "Lucky chap again," said Callcutt. "Well, in some ways. No, I shouldn't have said that. I apologize. Forget it."

  "That's all right."

  "Tell me about your girl friend. I'm quite serious. As a matter of fact, I know perfectly well what you meant about her."

  Hilary hesitated. Almost certainly, if it had not been for the absence of other topics, other possible activities, other interests, he would never have mentioned Mary Rossiter at all. He had never spoken of her to a soul for the twenty years since she had vanished, and for at least half that time he had thought of her but infrequently.

  "Well, if you like, I will tell you. For what it's worth, which isn't much, especially to a third party. But we've nothing else to do."

  "Thank the Lord!" commented Callcutt.

  "I feel the Brigstocks should do more to provide entertainment"

  "Good God!" rejoined Callcutt.

  So, for the first time, Hilary imparted much of the story to another. He told how sweet Mary Rossiter had been, how they used to go for surprisingly long walks together, how they found the crumbling wall, and heard, and later saw, the shapeless, slithery dog, which seemed the colour of the wall, and saw also the collapsing mansion or near-mansion, which Mary, just like a kid, had immediately said must be a haunted house. Hilary even told Callcutt about the maps that the two children had drawn together, and that they had been maps not only of Surrey, but of Fairyland, and Giantland, and the Land of Shades also.

  "Good preparation for the army," observed Callcutt.

  But Hilary did not tell Callcutt about the lean, possibly naked, man he had so positively seen at the extremest angle of the wall. He had been about to tell him, simply without thinking, at the point where the incident came in the narrative; but he passed over the matter.

  "Bloody savage dogs!" said Callcutt. "I'm against them. Especially in towns. Straining at the leash, and defecating all over the pavements. Something wrong with the owner's virility, I always think."

  "This was the worst dog you ever saw," Hilary responded. "I'm quite confident of that."

  "I hate them all," said Callcutt sweepingly. "They carry disease."

  "That was the least in the case of the dog I was talking about," observed Hilary. And he told Callcutt of what had happened next—as far as he could tell it.

  "Oh, God!" exclaimed Callcutt.

  "I suppose it was what people used to call a mad dog."

  "But that was well before your time, even if you were a kid. There aren't so many mad dogs these days. Anyway, what happened to the dog? Shot, I take it?"

  "I have no idea."

  "But surely it must have been shot? Things couldn't just have been left at that."

  "Well, probably it was shot. I just don't know. I wasn't supposed to know anything at all about what had happened."

  "Good God, it should have been shot. After doing a thing like that."

  "I daresay it was."

  There was a pause while Callcutt wrestled with his thoughts and Hilary with his memories; memories of which he had remembered little for some longish time past.

  "It was the most frightful thing," Callcutt summed up at last. "I say: could we pay a visit to the scene of the crime? Or would that be too much?"

  "Not too much if I can find the place." This was indeed how one thing led to another. "I haven't been there since."

  "I suppose not," said Callcutt, who hadn't thought of that. Then had added: "What, never?"

  "Never," said Hilary. "After all, I'm not here very often."

  "Whose car shall we take?"

  "As far as I can recall the lie of the land, we had better walk. I daresay it's all caravans and bungalows by now."

  And so, substantially, it proved. It would no doubt be wrong to suggest that the municipal authority or statutory body or honorary trustees responsible for the conservation of an open space had in any major degree permitted the public heritage to diminish in area or beauty, but whereas formerly the conserved terrain had merged off into pastures and semi-wild woodland, now it seemed to be encircled almost up to the last inch with houses. They were big, expensive houses, but they had converted the wilderness of Hilary's childhood into something more like a public park, very beaten down, and with the usual close network of amateur footpaths, going nowhere in particular, because serving no function. Round the edge of this slightly sad area Hilary and Callcutt prowled and prospected.

  "It was somewhere about here," said Hilary. "Certainly on this side."

  "I should have said it had all changed so much that we were unlikely to get far without comparative maps. None of these houses can be more than ten or twelve years old."

  They varied greatly in style: from Cotswold to Moroccan, from Ernest George to Frank Lloyd Wright. Some seemed still to value seclusion, but more went in for neighbourliness and open plan. Despite all the desperation of discrepancy, there was a uniformity of tone which was even more depressing.

  "I agree that my place has disappeared," said Hilary. "Been built over. Of course it was pretty far gone even then."

  The houses were served by a rough road, almost certainly "unadopted". It assured them a precarious degree of freedom from casual motor traffic.

  One of the biggest houses was in the Hollywood style: a garish structure with brightly coloured faience roof, much Spanish ironwork, mass-produced but costly, and a flight of outside steps in bright red tiles. The property was surrounded by a scumbled white wall. Hilary and Callcutt stared in through the elaborate, garden-of-remembrance gates.

  "It's like a caricature of the old place," said Hilary. "Much smaller, and much louder—but still . . ."

  The windows were all shut and there was no one in sight. Even the other houses seemed all to lie silent, and on the rough road nothing and no one passed. The two men continued to peer through the bars of the gate, ornate but trivial.

  From round the back of the house to their left emerged, in like silence, a large, moulting, yellow dog. They could hardly even hear the patter of its large feet on the composition flagstones.

  Hilary said nothing until the dog, which originally they saw head on, had turned and, with apparent indifference to them, displayed the full length of its right flank. Then he spoke: "Bogey," he said, "that's the same dog." Callcutt was known to his intimates as Bogey, follo
wing some early incident in his military life.

  Callcutt thought before speaking. Then he said: "Rubbish, Hilary. Dogs don't live twenty years." But he wasn't quite sure of that.

  "That one has."

  But now the dog began to bark, growling and baying most frighteningly, though, as on the previous occasion, not coming right up to the gate, or attempting to charge at them. If the fact that, a moment before, it seemed not to have seen them, might have been attributed to extreme senility, there was nothing remotely senile about its furious, almost rabid aggression now; and even less, perhaps, about the calculating way it placed itself, whatever might have been the reason. It stood a shapeless, sulphurous mass on its precisely chosen ground, almost like a Chinese demon.

  "That is just what it did before," Hilary shouted above the uproar. "Stood like that and came no nearer."

  "If you can call it standing," Callcutt shouted back.

  He was appalled by the dog, and did not fail to notice that Hilary had turned white, and was clinging to the decorative gatebars. But in the end Callcutt looked upwards for a second. He spoke again, or rather shouted. "There's a wench at one of the upstairs windows. We'd better clear out."

  Before Hilary had managed any reply, which the barking of the dog in any case made difficult, there was a further development. The glass-panelled front door of the house opened, and a woman walked out.

  Perhaps she had emerged to quiet the dog and apologize, perhaps, on the contrary, to reinforce the dog's antagonism to strangers: to Hilary it was a matter of indifference. The woman was of about his own age, but he knew perfectly well who she was. She was the grown-up Mary Rossiter, who twenty years before had been killed by a dog, probably a mad dog, possibly a dog that had been shot, certainly a most unusual dog, this very present dog, in fact.

  Whatever he felt like, Hilary did not pass out. "Do you mind if we go?"

  He withdrew his gaze and, without really waiting for Callcutt, began to walk away sharply. Again, it was somewhat as on the previous occasion: veritably, he was behaving exactly as a small boy might behave.

  He did not pace out along the rough road, past the houses. Instead, he walked straight into the dilapidated public forest. Callcutt had almost to run after him, in a rather absurd way.