By Horror Haunted

by Celia Fremlin

  He wasn’t ready … had no idea … would have to buy a whole lot of papers and mug it all up before he could possibly face her….

  For several minutes he stood, the receiver growing ever hotter and moister beneath his hand, and watched the great golden light mounting and brightening beyond the glass panes of the phone-booth. The sense of time passing, of his family awakening and stirring in the sun-filled house, drove him to a sort of panic.

  There was only one thing to do: phone one of the neighbours, give him the message for Pamela, and then ring off quickly before he could start asking questions….

  It was sheer bad luck, of course, that it was Myrtle Hodges who answered the phone, and not George. George, in his stolid way, would simply have taken down the message and delivered it; whereas Myrtle, insufficiently occupied and hungry for scandal, made herself almost as difficult as Pamela herself would have been.

  Who? … Where? … Which…? How come he wasn’t phoning Pamela himself …? How could the number be out of order, it was all right yesterday…? And what was his number at the hospital, so that Pamela could come right over and phone him back …?

  In the end, he could only avoid being downright rude by pretending that the line was very bad … that he couldn’t hear properly … and at last, mercifully, the pips sounded his release.

  “Just tell her I’m all right,” he yelled, for the fifth time, and flung the receiver down; then stood there, for a full minute, panting with relief, leaning his head against the cold bars of the windows, and waiting for the surge of guilt and panic to subside, and for triumph to take their place.

  Hell, he was only playing truant for one day! By this evening he’d be home again, a dutiful husband once more, and with a well-rehearsed, thoroughly plausible story on the tip of his tongue. Pamela wouldn’t have suffered one moment’s distress from beginning to end of the adventure.

  James was whistling as he stepped out of the booth into the sunshine. He could feel the warmth of it now, new-minted, on his skin. His difficulties were all behind him, and ahead lay his golden, incomparable day.

  *

  It wasn’t a field, exactly: more a sort of building-site, but during the long months of waiting for planning-permission, or a bridging-loan, or whatever, the poppies and the yarrow had been quietly taking over, with no permission from anyone. In one corner elders had grown, and long lush grass, and cow-parsley. There a man could lie and dream, and feel the light and shadow on his face, all through the long June day. Here he could open his eyes and see nothing but blue sky and tall grasses above him; here he could forget that he was a married man, a father, a motorist, and only a quarter of a mile from his home.

  Home. It was a pity, of course, that he couldn’t lie like this in his own garden, among the roses and the lupins, on his own velvety turf over which he had laboured so hard over the years. But this was the common lot, he knew; husbands everywhere have been driven from their gardens by the fact that it is now possible to be somewhere else, and why should James expect to be different? He wasn’t really complaining.

  And indeed, lying here, his eyes half-closed against the glory of midsummer, there seemed little enough to complain of. A day, a whole summer’s day, had been handed to him for his very own. It was his. It belonged to him. Nothing could ever take it away.

  In the cow-parsley the bees hummed, just as they would be humming in the lupins at home. Instead of the scent of roses, there was the sharper, sweeter scent of elder-flowers; huge as dinner-plates against the infinite blue….

  *

  When he woke, it was already far on in the afternoon. The sun had moved round while he slept, and he lay now deep in shadow. He felt himself bathed in coolness, and a great peace. Welling up in him he felt, with a little stir of wonder, a sort of tenderness towards Pamela that he had almost forgotten. All the irritations, all the incompatibilities seemed mysteriously to have been ironed-out by this one day of stolen solitude. While he’d been lying here, deep in the dappled shade, summer had sunk into his soul, and there it would stay.

  He no longer felt the smallest guilt or fear. He had been doing good, nothing but good. For the first time in years, he became aware of a need to share his experience with Pamela. To tell her how he felt. Tell her the truth….

  Yes, the truth. No need, now, for a lot of destructive lying about train-accidents and hospitals. He would explain to her everything, including the way he felt about those Sunday outings. Explain it to her not bitterly and angrily, as had been his wont of late, but lovingly, the way he used once to explain things. And she, the way she used once to understand things, would understand.

  As the shadows lengthened on the summer grass, he scrambled to his feet and set off for home.

  *

  At first, he could not understand what it was that Myrtle Hodges was trying to tell him. He could only stare, bemused by shock, at the blood-stained table-cloth on his kitchen table, and at the drips of blood across the floor. Somewhere above all this, Myrtle Hodges’s scandalised face floated, the mouth yapping, the protuberant eyes positively bulging.

  It was some little time before he realised that it was she who was asking him the questions.

  “I don’t know,” he kept answering, parrot-like; “I wasn’t here”—and all the time he could feel a great blackness of terror, as yet unacknowledged, worming its way upwards through the blankets of shock, towards his consciousness. “I don’t know, Myrtle, I don’t know! I told you, I wasn’t here….”

  “I know you told me!”—at last the syllables flip-flapping from the dancing lips began to make sense—“You told me on the phone, didn’t you, that you’d been ‘detained in hospital’ after ‘the train crash’! Funny, wasn’t it, that you were seen last night walking home! At two in the morning …!”

  A Mrs Furnival at the Pryors … toothache … couldn’t sleep … happened to be looking out of her window…. “Funny”, too, had been the fact that when Myrtle Hodges had gone over to give Pamela the message, she’d got no answer to her knocks and rings; “funnier” still that there was no response from Pamela to the note dropped through her door; Mrs Hodges had been waiting all morning for her to come over, and half the afternoon.

  “Funniest” of all, of course, was the sight that had met their eyes, hers and George’s, when they finally decided it was their duty to break-in and see if anything was wrong.

  Blood. All this blood. What had James got to say?

  “George is over the road phoning the police right now,” Myrtle prompted, a little uneasily, as James continued to say nothing, and just stood there, staring. “They’ll be here any minute!” she added, in a last, puzzled attempt to sting him into some sort of reaction.

  James did not know, either, why he just stood there. It was all too sudden, too stupefying. Even the arrival of the police scarcely roused him. The police, and with them George Hodges, white-faced, and until this moment James’ friend.

  Questions. More questions: and, on James’ side, bewilderment, prevarication, evasion. He even tried the truth, but they stared at him, uncomprehending, and he watched the suspicion deepen under their puckered brows.

  Telephone calls. Rapped-out orders. An expert of some sort arriving, and confirming that the blood had been there since yesterday.

  Had already been there, then, when James came home last night. All the time he’d been tiptoeing about so carefully … so guiltily … with such precautions against waking anyone … all that time there had been no one in the house at all! No wife. No children. Nothing. He had escaped, with such guilt and glee, from absolutely nothing.

  And now, at last, the reality of it all surged up in him like sickness. Where were they? Whose was all that blood? What had happened? With a little moan, he staggered back into a chair, and covered his face with his hands.

  None too gently, they pulled his hands away; warned him that it would be best for him if he told the truth.

  He’d have told it, thankfully, if he’d only known it. Or even guessed i
t. That was the stupid thing, he realised afterwards; that he hadn’t guessed right away.

  *

  Guessed that of course Robin would start one of his nose-bleeds on being hauled out of bed at what must have seemed to him the middle of the night to go to Grandma’s. To go there immediately, in a taxi, so that Mummy could spend the night racing from hospital to hospital looking for Daddy. Because, of course (what a fool he’d been not to think of this!) Pamela would have heard all about the crash on the nine o’clock news, long before the morning papers were displaying their headlines. By ten o’clock, with James still not home, she would have leapt into panic action; such panic that she hadn’t even paused to wipe the blood that poured so predictably from Robin’s resentful nose while she phoned, and packed, and worried….

  So obvious, really. He ought to have guessed it immediately, right down to the last drop of blood by the cupboard where the sweets were kept. He would have guessed, too, if only he hadn’t been too terrified to think.

  Had Pamela, too, he suddenly wondered, been too terrified to think? Or had she, trekking fruitlessly from hospital to hospital, begun in the end to guess the truth? And having guessed it, would she suddenly understand it? The way she used once to understand things?

  LILAC TIME

  THE TOP-SOIL HAD been easy. He remembered how lightly the spade had tossed the loose earth this way and that in the moonlight. For those first minutes, it had all been effortless as a dream: the strange euphoria of the previous evening had still been flowing strongly in his veins, giving his thin young arms the strength, almost, of a grown man.

  But two feet down, he came to the clay. The sullen, sodden, implacable London clay; and it was only then that the dream-like omnipotence began to drain out of him. Now, the sweat of terror began to glisten on his forehead, his skinny adolescent arms began to quiver with exhaustion.

  The length was all right. The uprooted dahlias and the shaggy, seeding willow-herb lay blanched in the moonlight along half the length of the devastated autumn flower-bed. But only two feet deep! It would have to be deeper than that—much, much deeper. Four feet? Six? Years of wide but desultory reading of lurid paper-backed stories under the desks at school had not provided him with this sort of solid, factual information; but any fool could see that two feet wouldn’t be enough.

  He was crying now, in a sort of weak fury at the obstinate, devilish clay. He would have stamped and stormed at it, throwing a tantrum like a toddler, if it had not been for all those silent, curtained windows overlooking, like lightly-closed eyes, the whole row of little back-gardens. Any moment now, one of those sleeping eyes might open, with a streak of yellow light between the curtains, and a sly, sleepy voice would call out: “What’s going on, then?”—or maybe, more raucously: “Shut that bleedin’ row!”

  This soft squelch of spade on clay—was it a bleedin’ row? Of course it was!—it seemed to him as if it must be heard for miles! And so then there would be more voices, more cracks of light, eyes everywhere, queries called across the cloying darkness. Would it be best, when all this began happening, to make a clean breast of it? To tell them, straightaway, in a ringing shout, before they came flitting out of the doors and alleyways, over the fences, like ghosts attracted by the smell of blood, to find out for themselves?

  I have killed my love, he would yell to them across the gardens, across the closed, listening night, swept silent by the moon. I have killed my love, my only love. She was with Cyril, Cyril from the Gas Board offices, with his posh voice and natty suiting. She was standing by the front door, I could see her face in the moonlight, and when she saw me coming she laughed. She pointed, and she whispered to him, and then he laughed too. That was their last laugh, though, the last laugh they’ll ever have: he ran away like I’ve never seen a man run, nor even a rat; and her, she’s lying there in the passage where I dragged her. I hope—yes, the thing I hope most of all—is that she was still alive just long enough to see him run like that; see him run away like a rat, and never lifted a finger to protect her! That’s what I hope she was alive just long enough to see; to see it, and to know it, before she died.

  The clay! The damnable, accursed clay! Tears of fury and of terror streaked the boy’s thin, moon-blanched face; his breath came in feeble sobs, like the sob of the wet clay under the onslaughts of the jabbing spade.

  But he did not give up. He could not give up, for soon it would be dawn, and then bright morning, and the cover of darkness would be gone. So he struggled on, and gradually, inch by inch, as if dragging at the very intestines of the earth, he got the clay to move; and presently, into his trance of exhaustion, there came, dully, the knowledge that the hole was deep enough at last. As deep as it would ever be. Deep enough, anyway, for his love, his sweet, treacherous love.

  Oh, but the dangers still ahead! With morning, came the neighbours. Getting busy in the garden, eh? Them dahlias—you didn’t oughter ’a’ pulled up them dahlias, not while they’re still flowering! What a shame! Just look at them, all them colours! A shame!

  To plant a new lilac? But you didn’t need to’ve cleared the whole bloomin’ bed, a whole six foot of it, just to plant a lilac! Besides, what does a young lad like you want with a lilac? It’s only a rented room you got in there, innit? You’ll be gone off, lad, somewhere else, that’s for sure, long before that lilac can bloom!

  But as the days went by, the questioning had died down. Gradually, the horticultural experts of the little street lost interest in the boy’s folly, and turned their attention back to their own gardens; and at last the boy himself began to sleep again at night, instead of lying tense as whipcord through the black hours, waiting for the police to come for him.

  And so the autumn passed, and a long, sodden December; and while it was still winter, before even the crocuses had begun to show their first leaves, tiny green things had already begun to sprout in the flat, untidy soil above his own true love. Weeds, presumably, but he never found out for certain; nor did he ever know whether the lilac bloomed: for, just as the neighbours had predicted, before this could possibly have happened, he was gone.

  *

  “Now, come along, Mr Parsons! Drink up! Just look at Mrs Carruthers, she’s on her second cup already, you’re getting left all behind! Come on, Mr Parsons, wakey wakey! What’s the good of bringing you out into the garden for your tea when you just … Oh dear! Shall I hold the saucer for you …? There, is that better …? Can you manage now …?”

  The young woman’s voice went on and on, bright and bracing, but he had been at the Old People’s Home a long time now, and he no longer listened. Nor was he bothered any longer by the sweet, tepid tea which his throat was obediently gulping from the expertly-tipped cup. He was aware only of the lilac in full bloom, above and all around him, and the sweet May breeze stirring the mauve blossom, heavy with bees. Now that he was more than ninety years old, he was finding it hard to distinguish the sweet, summer days, one from another, over the long years. He was a little confused, too, about the lilacs: so many of them there had been, in gardens here and gardens there, blooming and fading, through ninety spring-times. By now, they were all the same lilac, and beneath it lay his love, his first and only love, with her bright hair and her green, enchanting eyes.

  They had never caught him, he remembered; had never even suspected anything. He recalled how, over the weeks and months, the guilt and terror had gradually faded, to be buried at last, for ever, under the turmoil of the rushing adult years. Marriage—children—work; success and failure; and more work; they had come and gone, and now at last he was close to her again, close to his love, lovely still as on the day when he had killed her.

  Killed her. How thankful he was, now, that he had done it! That he had killed her, then, on that moonlit autumn night, in the full flower of her loveliness, more than seventy years ago! A murderer in shining armour, he had saved her from this Old People’s Home as surely as St George had saved his princess from the dragon.

  They would never get her
now! Not for her the shameful, lobbering gulps of tea from a cup that her trembling hands could no longer manage; not for her the wheelchair, nor the bright, professional voices impatiently jollying her through the dim, dead days. Not for her the crutches, the pointless tottering round and around the smooth, terrible lawns. Not for her the ill-fitting teeth, the mislaid spectacles, nor the endless, feeble bickering of the old, thin as the mewing of seagulls left stranded by a tide that has gone out too far ever to turn again.

  “Thank God I murdered you, my darling,” he murmured into the lilac-scented air; and the nurse, noticing that old Mr Parsons was mumbling to himself again, and slobbering over his cup, decided it was time to wheel him indoors.

  THE BLOOD ON THE INNOCENTS

  FOR ONCE, IT was Sally’s baby who was screaming, not hers. Tina raised her head from the pillow, the better to savour the delicious sounds. She wished that Colin, in the adjoining bed, would wake up too, and listen to the hideous racket, and be forced to admit, at last, how unfair he’d been, how unkind!

  “Other mothers manage to keep their kids quiet,” he’d complained, angry and hollow-eyed, only a couple of nights ago. “Other mothers cope…. Look at Sally …!”

  *

  Tina had looked at Sally a lot, naturally, ever since the night—nearly six months ago now—when the wretched girl had arrived, at past midnight, husband-less, her fair hair a-glitter with rain, and with her baby in her arms, to beg a night’s lodging from Colin and Tina’s landlady. The night’s lodging had extended to two … to three … to months and months, so that by now Sally and her 20-month-old Julie were accepted members of the household.

  Accepted, that is, by the landlady, and by Colin, and by the silly old crone in the basement, and by the neat, bustling couple on the first floor. Not by Tina. No one had consulted Tina about any of it, right from the beginning. No one had asked her whether she minded another baby cluttering up the place, filling the clothes-line with nappies so that there was no space left for Edward’s … endlessly occupying the bathroom just at Edward’s bedtime—adding insult to injury by the leisurely sounds of splashing and laughter that came through the door: