Completely Unexpected Tales

by Roald Dahl

  ‘Shall we draw the sheet back quick and brush it off before it has time to strike?’

  ‘Never! We are not entitled to take a risk.’ He spoke sharply and his voice was pitched a little higher than usual.

  ‘We can’t very well leave him lying there,’ I said. ‘He’s getting nervous.’

  ‘Please! Please!’ he said, turning round, holding both hands up in the air. ‘Not so fast, please. This is not a matter to rush into baldheaded.’ He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and stood there, frowning, nibbling his lip.

  ‘You see,’ he said at last. ‘There is a way to do this. You know what we must do – we must administer an anaesthetic to the creature where it lies.’

  It was a splendid idea.

  ‘It is not safe,’ he continued, ‘because a snake is cold-blooded and anaesthetic does not work so well or so quick with such animals, but it is better than any other thing to do. We could use ether… chloroform…’ He was speaking slowly and trying to think the thing out while he talked.

  ‘Which shall we use?’

  ‘Chloroform,’ he said suddenly. ‘Ordinary chloroform. That is best. Now quick!’ He took my arm and pulled me towards the balcony. ‘Drive to my house! By the time you get there I will have waked up my boy on the telephone and he will show you my poisons cupboard. Here is the key of the cupboard. Take a bottle of chloroform. It has an orange label and the name is printed on it. I stay here in case anything happens. Be quick now, hurry! No, no, you don’t need your shoes!’

  I drove fast and in about fifteen minutes I was back with the bottle of chloroform. Ganderbai came out of Harry’s room and met me in the hall. ‘You got it?’ he said. ‘Good, good. I just been telling him what we are going to do. But now we must hurry. It is not easy for him in there like that all this time. I am afraid he might move.’

  He went back to the bedroom and I followed, carrying the bottle carefully with both hands. Harry was lying on the bed in precisely the same position as before with the sweat pouring down his cheeks. His face was white and wet. He turned his eyes towards me and I smiled at him and nodded confidently. He continued to look at me. I raised my thumb, giving him the okay signal. He closed his eyes. Ganderbai was squatting down by the bed, and on the floor beside him was the hollow rubber tube that he had previously used as a tourniquet, and he’d got a small paper funnel fitted into one end of the tube.

  He began to pull a little piece of the sheet out from under the mattress. He was working directly in line with Harry’s stomach, about eighteen inches from it, and I watched his ringers as they tugged gently at the edge of the sheet. He worked so slowly it was almost impossible to discern any movement either in his fingers or in the sheet that was being pulled.

  Finally he succeeded in making an opening under the sheet and he took the rubber tube and inserted one end of it in the opening so that it would slide under the sheet along the mattress towards Harry’s body. I do not know how long it took him to slide that tube in a few inches. It may have been twenty minutes, it may have been forty. I never once saw the tube move. I knew it was going in because the visible part of it grew gradually shorter, but I doubted that the krait could have felt even the faintest vibration. Ganderbai himself was sweating now, large pearls of sweat standing out all over his forehead and along his upper lip. But his hands were steady and I noticed that his eyes were watching, not the tube in his hands, but the area of crumpled sheet above Harry’s stomach.

  Without looking up, he held out a hand to me for the chloroform. I twisted out the ground-glass stopper and put the bottle right into his hand, not letting go till I was sure he had a good hold on it. Then he jerked his head for me to come closer and he whispered, ‘Tell him I’m going to soak the mattress and that it will be very cold under his body. He must be ready for that and he must not move. Tell him now.’

  I bent over Harry and passed on the message.

  ‘Why doesn’t he get on with it?’ Harry said.

  ‘He’s going to now, Harry. But it’ll feel very cold, so be ready for it.’

  ‘Oh, God Almighty, get on, get on!’ For the first time he raised his voice, and Ganderbai glanced up sharply, watched him for a few seconds, then went back to his business.

  Ganderbai poured a few drops of chloroform into the paper funnel and waited while it ran down the tube. Then he poured some more. Then he waited again, and the heavy sickening smell of chloroform spread out over the room bringing with it faint unpleasant memories of white-coated nurses and white surgeons standing in a white room around a long white table. Ganderbai was pouring steadily now and I could see the heavy vapour of the chloroform swirling slowly like smoke above the paper funnel. He paused, held the bottle up to the light, poured one more funnelful and handed the bottle back to me. Slowly he drew out the rubber tube from under the sheet; then he stood up.

  The strain of inserting the tube and pouring the chloroform must have been great, and I recollect that when Ganderbai turned and whispered to me, his voice was small and tired, ‘We’ll give it fifteen minutes. Just to be safe.’

  I leaned over to tell Harry. ‘We’re going to give it fifteen minutes, just to be safe. But it’s probably done for already.’

  ‘Then why for God’s sake don’t you look and see!’ Again he spoke loudly and Ganderbai sprang round, his small brown face suddenly very angry. He had almost pure black eyes and he stared at Harry and Harry’s smiling-muscle started to twitch. I took my handkerchief and wiped his wet face, trying to stroke his forehead a little for comfort as I did so.

  Then we stood and waited beside the bed, Ganderbai watching Harry’s face all the time in a curious intense manner. The little Indian was concentrating all his will power on keeping Harry quiet. He never once took his eyes from the patient and although he made no sound, he seemed somehow to be shouting at him all the time, saying: Now listen, you’ve got to listen, you’re not going to go spoiling this now, d’you hear me, and Harry lay there twitching his mouth, sweating, closing his eyes, opening them, looking at me, at the sheet, at the ceiling, at me again, but never at Ganderbai. Yet somehow Ganderbai was holding him. The smell of chloroform was oppressive and it made me feel sick, but I couldn’t leave the room now. I had the feeling someone was blowing up a huge balloon and I could see it was going to burst, but I couldn’t look away.

  At length Ganderbai turned and nodded and I knew he was ready to proceed. ‘You go over to the other side of the bed,’ he said. ‘We will each take one side of the sheet and draw it back together, but very slowly, please, and very quietly.’

  ‘Keep still now, Harry,’ I said and I went around to the other side of the bed and took hold of the sheet. Ganderbai stood opposite me, and together we began to draw back the sheet, lifting it up clear of Harry’s body, taking it back very slowly, both of us standing well away but at the same time bending forward, trying to peer underneath it. The smell of chloroform was awful. I remember trying to hold my breath and when I couldn’t do that any longer I tried to breathe shallow so the stuff wouldn’t get into my lungs.

  The whole of Harry’s chest was visible now, or rather the striped pyjama top which covered it, and then I saw the white cord of his pyjama trousers, neatly tied in a bow. A little farther and I saw a button, a mother-of-pearl button, and that was something I had never had on my pyjamas, a fly button, let alone a mother-of-pearl one. This Harry, I thought, he is very refined. It is odd how one sometimes has frivolous thoughts at exciting moments, and I distinctly remember thinking about Harry being very refined when I saw that button.

  Apart from the button there was nothing on his stomach.

  We pulled the sheet back faster then, and when we had uncovered his legs and feet we let the sheet drop over the end of the bed on to the floor.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Ganderbai said, ‘don’t move, Mr Pope’, and he began to peer around along the side of Harry’s body and under his legs.

  ‘We must be careful,’ he said. ‘It may be anywhere. It could be up the leg
of his pyjamas.’

  When Ganderbai said this, Harry quickly raised his head from the pillow and looked down at his legs. It was the first time he had moved. Then suddenly he jumped up, stood on his bed and shook his legs one after the other violently in the air. At that moment we both thought he had been bitten and Ganderbai was already reaching down into his bag for a scalpel and a tourniquet when Harry ceased his caperings and stood still and looked at the mattress he was standing on and shouted, ‘It’s not there!’

  Ganderbai straightened up and for a moment he too looked at the mattress; then he looked up at Harry. Harry was all right. He hadn’t been bitten and now he wasn’t going to get bitten and he wasn’t going to be killed and everything was fine. But that didn’t seem to make anyone feel any better.

  ‘Mr Pope, you are of course quite sure you saw it in the first place?’ There was a note of sarcasm in Ganderbai’s voice that he would never have employed in ordinary circumstances. ‘You don’t think you might possibly have been dreaming, do you, Mr Pope?’ The way Ganderbai was looking at Harry, I realized that the sarcasm was not seriously intended. He was only easing up a bit after the strain.

  Harry stood on his bed in his striped pyjamas, glaring at Ganderbai, and the colour began to spread out over his cheeks.

  ‘Are you telling me I’m a liar?’ he shouted.

  Ganderbai remained absolutely still, watching Harry. Harry took a pace forward on the bed and there was a shining look in his eyes.

  ‘Why, you dirty little Hindu sewer rat!’

  ‘Shut up, Harry!’ I said.

  ‘You dirty black –’

  ‘Harry!’ I called. ‘Shut up, Harry!’ It was terrible, the things he was saying.

  Ganderbai went out of the room as though neither of us was there and I followed him and put my arm around his shoulder as he walked across the hall and out on to the balcony.

  ‘Don’t you listen to Harry,’ I said. ‘This thing’s made him so he doesn’t know what he’s saying.’

  We went down the steps from the balcony to the drive and across the drive in the darkness to where his old Morris car was parked. He opened the door and got in.

  ‘You did a wonderful job,’ I said. ‘Thank you so very much for coming.’

  ‘All he needs is a good holiday,’ he said quietly, without looking at me, then he started the engine and drove off.

  The Sound Machine

  It was a warm summer evening and Klausner walked quickly through the front gate and around the side of the house and into the garden at the back. He went on down the garden until he came to a wooden shed and he unlocked the door, went inside and closed the door behind him.

  The interior of the shed was an unpainted room. Against one wall, on the left, there was a long wooden workbench, and on it, among a littering of wires and batteries and small sharp tools, there stood a black box about three feet long, the shape of a child’s coffin.

  Klausner moved across the room to the box. The top of the box was open, and he bent down and began to poke and peer inside it among a mass of different-coloured wires and silver tubes. He picked up a piece of paper that lay beside the box, studied it carefully, put it down, peered inside the box and started running his fingers along the wires, tugging gently at them to test the connections, glancing back at the paper, then into the box, then at the paper again, checking each wire. He did this for perhaps an hour.

  Then he put a hand around to the front of the box where there were three dials, and he began to twiddle them, watching at the same time the movement of the mechanism inside the box. All the while he kept speaking softly to himself, nodding his head, smiling sometimes, his hands always moving, the fingers moving swiftly, deftly, inside the box, his mouth twisting into curious shapes when a thing was delicate or difficult to do, saying, ‘Yes… Yes… And now this one… Yes… Yes. But is this right? Is it – where’s my diagram?… Ah, yes… Of course… Yes, yes… That’s right… And now… Good… Good… Yes… Yes, yes, yes.’ His concentration was intense; his movements were quick; there was an air of urgency about the way he worked, of breathlessness, of strong suppressed excitement.

  Suddenly he heard footsteps on the gravel path outside and he straightened and turned swiftly as the door opened and a tall man came in. It was Scott. It was only Scott, the doctor.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ the Doctor said. ‘So this is where you hide yourself in the evenings.’

  ‘Hullo, Scott,’ Klausner said.

  ‘I happened to be passing,’ the Doctor told him, ‘so I dropped in to see how you were. There was no one in the house, so I came on down here. How’s that throat of yours been behaving?’

  ‘It’s all right. It’s fine.’

  ‘Now I’m here I might as well have a look at it.’

  ‘Please don’t trouble. I’m quite cured. I’m fine.’

  The Doctor began to feel the tension in the room. He looked at the black box on the bench; then he looked at the man. ‘You’ve got your hat on,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, have I?’ Klausner reached up, removed the hat, and put it on the bench.

  The Doctor came up closer and bent down to look into the box. ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘Making a radio?’

  ‘No, just fooling around.’

  ‘It’s got rather complicated-looking innards.’

  ‘Yes,’ Klausner seemed tense and distracted.

  ‘What is it?’ the Doctor asked. ‘It’s rather a frightening-looking thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’sjustanidea.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It has to do with sound, that’s all.’

  ‘Good heavens, man! Don’t you get enough of that sort of thing all day in your work?’

  ‘I like sound.’

  ‘So it seems.’ The Doctor went to the door, turned, and said, ‘Well, I won’t disturb you. Glad your throat’s not worrying you any more.’ But he kept standing there looking at the box, intrigued by the remarkable complexity of its inside, curious to know what this strange patient of his was up to. ‘What’s it really for?’ he asked. ‘You’ve made me inquisitive.’

  Klausner looked down at the box, then at the Doctor, and he reached up and began to scratch the lobe of his right ear. There was a pause. The Doctor stood by the door, waiting, smiling.

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you, if you’re interested.’ There was another pause, and the Doctor could see that Klausner was having trouble about how to begin.

  He was shifting from one foot to the other, tugging at the lobe of his ear, looking at his feet, and then at last, slowly, he said, ‘Well, it’s like this… the theory is very simple really. The human ear… you know that it can’t hear everything. There are sounds that are so low-pitched or so high-pitched that it can’t hear them.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Doctor said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, speaking very roughly, any note so high that it has more than fifteen thousand vibrations a second – we can’t hear it. Dogs have better ears than us. You know that you can buy a whistle whose note is so high-pitched that you can’t hear it at all. But a dog can hear it.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen one,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Of course you have. And up the scale, higher than the note of that whistle, there is another note – a vibration if you like, but I prefer to think of it as a note. You can’t hear that one either. And above that there is another and another rising right up the scale for ever and ever and ever, an endless succession of notes… an infinity of notes… there is a note – if only our ears could hear it – so high that it vibrates a million times a second… and another a million times as high as that… and on and on, higher and higher, as far as numbers go, which is… infinity… eternity… beyond the stars.’

  Klausner was becoming more animated every moment. He was a small frail man, nervous and twitchy, with always moving hands. His large head inclined towards his left shoulder as though his neck were not quite strong enough to support it rigidly. His face was smooth and pale, almost white, and the pale
-grey eyes that blinked and peered from behind a pair of steel spectacles were bewildered, unfocused, remote. He was a frail, nervous, twitchy little man, a moth of a man, dreamy and distracted; suddenly fluttering and animated; and now the Doctor, looking at that strange pale face and those pale-grey eyes, felt that somehow there was about this control and his right hand on the knob that moved a needle across a large central dial, like the wavelength dial of a radio. The dial was marked with many numbers, in a series of bands, starting at 15,000 and going on up to 1,000,000.

  And now he was bending forward over the machine. His head was cocked to one side in a tense, listening attitude. His right hand was beginning to turn the knob. The needle was travelling slowly across the dial, so slowly he could hardly see it move, and in the earphones he could hear a faint, spasmodic crackling.

  Behind this crackling sound he could hear a distant humming tone which was the noise of the machine itself, but that was all. As he listened, he became conscious of a curious sensation, a feeling that his ears were stretching out away from his head, that each ear was connected to his head by a thin stiff wire, like a tentacle, and that the wires were lengthening, that the ears were going up and up towards a secret and forbidden territory, a dangerous ultrasonic region where ears had never been before and had no right to be.

  The little needle crept slowly across the dial, and suddenly he heard a shriek, a frightful piercing shriek, and he jumped and dropped his hands, catching hold of the edge of the table. He stared around him as if expecting to see the person who had shrieked. There was no one in sight except the woman in the garden next door, and it was certainly not she. She was bending down, cutting yellow roses and putting them in her basket.

  Again it came – a throatless, inhuman shriek, sharp and short, very clear and cold. The note itself possessed a minor, metallic quality that he had never heard before. Klausner looked around him, searching instinctively for the source of the noise. The woman next door was the only living thing in sight. He saw her reach down, take a rose stem in the fingers of one hand and snip the stem with a pair of scissors. Again he heard the scream.