By Horror Haunted

by Celia Fremlin

  But the smell had grown stronger over the weeks; she could smell it now as soon as she came in from school, as soon as she opened the front door. At this very moment, as she leaned against the creature, posing for yet another picture, she could smell it more strongly than ever before, and her heart was beating with a dreadful and ever more familiar rhythm. She was posing, as always, with her arm around Leo’s neck; but lately she had taken to making sure that it was her right arm that encircled him. This way, she hoped, he would not be able to feel the tell-tale thudding beneath her left ribs. For there was no danger—so Daddy kept telling the reporters—so long as there was no fear. Lions are gentle creatures, he kept explaining to the Daily This and the Evening That, so long as they are handled fearlessly. It is only the scent of fear, he declared, that stirs their dormant savagery.

  “Well, in that case, I’d better keep to windward of him,” grinned the photographer, “just in case my best friend doesn’t tell me! Just a little more to one side, dear,” he continued, focusing on Rosalie. “And your chin up a bit—no, not too much! There—that’s it! That’s grand! Hold it!”

  Rosalie flashed on the artless grin, the wide-eyed innocent look of a child who has never known fear, and in a moment it was over; the three men were putting away their cameras, folding up their tripods, while a fourth was writing down, at lightning speed, Mr Turner’s buoyant, oft-repeated opinions:

  “Of course I shan’t send him to a zoo when he’s full-grown!” he declared truculently. “D’you think I’m the sort of chap who’d turn chicken? Besides, it’d break Rosalie’s heart if I got rid of him, wouldn’t it, pet?”

  “Yes, Daddy.” Rosalie knew her cues, and she was rewarded by a renewed flutter of admiration from the assembled young men.

  “Plucky little kid …!” “Chip off the old block …!”—and her father’s handsome, sunburnt face beamed proudly down on her. She pushed back the wisps of straight blonde hair from her face, summoned up her innocent, fearless blue gaze, and repeated in the childish treble loved by the Press: “Of course we’re going to keep Leo! I love him! We’re going to keep him for ever!”

  The four men looked at her admiringly, and it was good.

  *

  What was not so good, though, was coming home from school in the afternoons, and finding Leo shut up alone in the dining-room, waiting for her. She still, in her secret heart, thought of this room as “the dining-room”, which was what it had been when Mummy was alive, though aloud she always referred to it now as “Leo’s room”, just as her father did. How eagerly Leo always bounded out as she opened the door—she had promised her father that always, before she did anything else, she would let Leo out after his long dull afternoon in captivity. And how he loved it! How he gambolled and purred around her, rubbing his great rumbling head against her … sometimes he half knocked her down, rubbing, quivering, thrusting his weight against her body with great throaty purrs (“Just like a great big kitten?” one of the reporters had suggested, pencil poised; and Rosalie had thought carefully about her answer. “No,” she had said at last, “Not quite like a kitten.”).

  And after she had got herself her tea, and had given Leo his dish of warmed milk—then, as the shadows of the spring evening gathered outside the windows—Oh, what a game of romps began for Leo! How he would crouch, and spring, and make feints at her feet as she moved about the room! How he would purr, and pounce, and then, sometimes, stop purring and fix her with his great yellow eyes into moments of tense, incredible stillness.

  He was company for her, her father was always explaining to the reporters; so much nicer than coming home to an empty house as other little girls had to who had lost their mothers. And the reporters were tactful. They didn’t ask how long it was since Mummy had died, or how it had happened, or anything, so Rosalie did not have to re-live for them that terrible afternoon, nearly a year ago now, when Mummy had gone out shopping with the car, and had never come back. “Head-on collision …” “Instantaneous …” “Couldn’t have felt a thing….”—Rosalie still remembered with awful clarity the phrases with which the unhappy policeman had tried to soften the terrible news; and she remembered, too, the look on her father’s face as he listened. A blank, uncomprehending look, as if he was somewhere else, far beyond the reach of comfort. Even now, after all these months, Rosalie still caught him sometimes with that same look on his face—times when he thought he was alone, with no one watching. Always it made her feel sad all over again, and somehow a little scared. If Mummy had still been alive, Rosalie sensed dimly, Daddy would never have started on this craze for keeping a lion….

  But the reporters mercifully asked her nothing of all this. They contented themselves with asking her how she felt about coming home to a lion after school, and with telling her what a lucky little girl she was, and weren’t her school friends madly envious? And Rosalie agreed, resolutely, that they were.

  *

  The only thing was, the way Leo seemed to have swollen a little bit each day by the time she came in from school. The whole house vibrated, now, at the impact of his wild scrabbling at the dining-room door when he heard her come in, and his baby mews had now and then a throaty sound, deep in the heart of them. He bounded and gambolled as playfully as ever, but sometimes, as he rubbed against her, begging for food perhaps, a strange, greenish, infinitely alien light would come into his eyes, flash for a moment, and be gone; and Rosalie would stand very still, repeating to herself, as if it was the litany of some religious sect: “Don’t let him smell fear! Lions are gentle creatures so long as you are not afraid!”

  Sometimes, guilty and furtive in the empty house, Rosalie would not let him out at all; she would leave him in the dining-room, scratching and scrabbling more and more wildly, until the very moment when her father’s key sounded in the door. There were other times, though, when she was more afraid to leave him shut in than to let him out, so wild became the scratching, so fierce the weight of his strengthening, growing body, straining against the timbers of the door; and the husky, broken mewing would begin to sound like a warning, like a taste of things to come.

  *

  One evening when Rosalie, once more secretly disobeying her father, had left the animal imprisoned in the dining-room, and was sitting over her homework, trying to ignore the wild, hoarse mewing, the vibrations and the shudderings which now filled every timber of the house—on this particular evening her father came home unexpectedly early. Rosalie heard him hurry to the rescue of his pet; she heard his deep voice greeting, consoling. Then she heard his step on the stairs … saw the white, shuttered look on his face as he stood in the doorway. He looked for all the world exactly as he had looked that day a year ago, when the police had come….

  “I forgot, Daddy! I’m sorry, I forgot!” lied Rosalie, over and over again; and gradually his features relaxed, though he still seemed puzzled and distressed.

  “But, Rosalie, how could you forget? Didn’t you hear him? Why, I could hear him from half way down the road, poor little chap! Oh, don’t cry, pet; no harm’s been done, and I know you’re sorry! But you won’t let it happen again, will you? I—” he glanced away, uneasily—“I did wonder, just for a moment—I don’t like to say this, Rosalie—but I did wonder, for just a second, if perhaps you were afraid to let him out?”

  The dread, the forbidden word had been pronounced. It seemed almost to choke them both, and Rosalie hurled herself to the rescue. Of course she hadn’t been afraid! Never, never! Afraid of Leo? Father and daughter laughed in unutterable relief at the absurdity of the idea; and that evening they had such a game of romps with Leo as threw the creature into ecstasies of excitement. He hurled himself backwards and forwards across the room, up and down the stairs, bounding from his master to Rosalie and back again, crouching and springing in pretended savagery. Springing … crouching … and now, suddenly, Rosalie knew that this time the savagery was not quite pretence. The green, alien glitter had come into his eyes; the delicate skin just below the muzzle was twi
tching strangely; and a new sound, unlike anything she had ever heard before, was reverberating for the very first time deep in his lungs. At some moment, between the beginning of the romp and this sudden stillness, the cub had crossed the invisible frontier of babyhood, and was a cub no more. He was a lion.

  But Rosalie’s father seemed to have noticed nothing.

  “Come on, Rosalie!” he urged. “He wants you to run away again! Come on—don’t spoil the game!”

  Still Rosalie stood, motionless. Still the green eyes glittered, unblinking. Leo knew, Rosalie knew, that the time for romping was over. Only Mr Turner did not know.

  “Come on!” he kept saying. “Come on, Rosalie—!”—and at that moment, mercifully, the telephone shrilled through the house. The tension was broken, and even Leo knew it. He relaxed; his eyes grew golden and gentle again, and he began to lick his paws.

  *

  “What’s that? Television cameras …? Of course!”—Mr Turner’s voice was full of suppressed excitement. “Yes, yes, of course she will, they’ve just been having a fine game of romps this moment! The day after tomorrow? Of course … Yes. Yes!”

  He put the receiver down and turned to Rosalie, his face alight.

  “We’ve made it! You’re going to be famous, Rosie, my pet! Three million viewers will be watching your next romp with Leo! Oh, Rosalie, I feel so proud of you! This is what I’ve dreamed of all these weeks …!”

  “But—Daddy—” Rosalie did not know how to go on. How could she tell him, now, in his moment of triumph, of her long-hidden fears? Of how, this very evening, those fears had come to some silent, irreversible climax? How could she tell him that tonight she had known—she and Leo had both known—that their days of romping safely together were over?

  “But Daddy, I’m—” Again she stopped. How could she, with one devastating word, drive that look of love and pride from his face, perhaps for ever? Love-and-pride. For the first time she realised, dimly, that sometimes the two went together. With Mummy, love alone had been enough….

  She stared at her father, lips trembling.

  “Rosalie! What’s the matter? Why are you looking like that? I thought you’d be so pleased …!”

  “I am pleased, Daddy!” Desperately Rosalie managed to force the lie past her lips. “I am pleased … of course I am … but … Oh, I want Mummy back! I want Mummy! I want Mummy!…” Mummy, who used to take care of everything; who used to laugh at Daddy’s crazes, and enjoy them, and yet somehow managed always to restrain him a little, to save him from crossing some awful border, which Rosalie was aware of, though she could give it no name.

  “I want Mummy!” she sobbed, as she had not sobbed since the first days of her mother’s death; and for a moment father and daughter stared at each other, in sudden, helpless misery, unable to speak a word. And then Rosalie was in her father’s arms, sobbing out the full measure of her love and loyalty towards him:

  “Of course I want me and Leo to be on television!” she sobbed. “Of course I do, Daddy! I’m terribly pleased! I’m looking forward to it ever so much!”

  Never can so big a lie have brought so big a reward:

  “That’s my girl!” he said.

  *

  But that night, as she lay in bed, the high, sacrificial courage ebbed away. How had Joan of Arc kept to her decision through the long night, as well as during the bright, brave day? Leo slept in the dining-room now he had grown so large, but it was as if his lithe, steely weight was still there, on the bed, pressing down on her through the softness of blankets and eiderdown. Beneath her closed lids she seemed to see the greenish, alien light coming into his eyes; all around she could smell that strange, pervasive smell of his, that seemed to breathe out of a more ancient world than ours, the world of the immemorial jungle, where death comes swift and casual, even to little girls of nine.

  And as her courage ebbed away and became cowardice, so, in the end, did the cowardice, too, melt away, and become cunning; and Rosalie lay planning. Planning how to cheat, to lie, to manoeuvre for herself some sort of ignominious escape. As the hours of the night sounded one by one from the distant church clock, so did the crazy schemes come one after another into her head, only to be rejected. Should she run away? But she would only be brought back; and by then everyone would guess what she had been running from. Daddy would guess. His disappointment in her would be such as she dared not even think of.

  Feign illness, then? Wake up in the morning with a stomach-ache, a headache, a sore throat? But that would only put off the day a little longer. Next week, or the week after, the cameras would still come, and the smiling photographers … and by then Leo would have grown yet bigger; his teeth would be sharper, his great weight and his dark, jungle smell more overwhelming….

  Suddenly, the idea came to her! She would pretend that Leo had already attacked her! She would come down to breakfast with her arm bleeding! She would be taken to the doctor, and the doctor would bind it up for her, tut-tutting as he did so. “That lion cub must be sent away,” he would say; and Daddy would have to listen to him. Well, surely he would? You had to do what the doctor told you! Even grown-ups had to.

  *

  How cold the linoleum was to her bare feet, and how cold the moonlight streaming into the silent, tiny kitchen! Trembling, yet fearless in the intensity of her purpose, Rosalie softly opened the dresser drawer, and groped about in its shadowy depths for the carving knife.

  Ah, here it was! How the moonlight glinted on the blade! It looked like a scimitar from the Arabian Nights. Cautiously—and as silently as if it was noise rather than blood that might flow from the prospective wound—Rosalie pressed the blade against the skin of her forearm.

  Nothing happened. She pressed harder … harder…. It began to hurt a little. Full of hope, Rosalie snatched the knife away, expecting to see the blood spurting. But no. There was no blood—not even a mark on the smooth skin, so far as she could see by this bland, silvery light.

  How hard it was! Again and again she tried, but still no blood would come, no trace of injury.

  And then, suddenly, she heard a low growl.

  The knife clattered to the floor in the moonlight; the blood slowly welled from the long, razor-thin weal across her palm; and only then did she realise that the sound had not been a growl at all, but merely the far-off rumble of a distant plane. Even as she gasped with relief, she realised that her purpose had meantime been fulfilled: she had cut herself! All was well! Tomorrow she would show the wound to her father, to the doctor, and Leo would be sent away! She would even bring herself to cry a little, and show proper regret, when the zoo people came for him!

  Joyously, she wrapped her hand in a handkerchief, and round that a towel, and scurried back to bed. She lay breathing great sighs of relief as drowsiness stole over; and the smarting of her hand was like a benediction. By morning the handkerchief and towel would be all soaked in blood … the end of her long, secret terror was in sight.

  But in the morning, to her horror, the cut was no longer bleeding! Indeed, it seemed to be almost healing already! Her father looked at it, and was disposed to laugh.

  “It’s only a scratch,” he said. “Poor old Leo, he’s a bit careless sometimes; he’s only a baby, after all, and he hasn’t learnt yet. Don’t worry, love, it’s nothing, it’ll be gone by tomorrow.”

  “But it hurts, Daddy,” Rosalie insisted; and at last, a little impatiently, Mr Turner agreed on the trip to the doctor’s surgery.

  “Just to make sure there’s no infection, or anything,” he explained—as though he needed to find some excuse for his capitulation. “Though actually a properly-kept lion is a very clean animal….”

  *

  The wait in the surgery was a long one. People with coughs, and slings, and bad backs lined the walls, and by the time Rosalie was called into the doctor’s sanctum, her father was beginning to look irritably at his watch.

  She went in by herself, as became a big girl of nine years, and the doctor listened gravely
as she described the nature of her accident. Then, gently, he unwrapped the handkerchief with its traces of blood, and examined the fast-healing cut. He stared at it in silence for what seemed an unnecessarily long time, and then he spoke:

  “Rosalie,” he said, “Why are you pretending that this was done by a lion?”

  He spoke kindly, and the hand on her shoulder was gentle; but if he had boxed her ears and stormed at her, Rosalie could not have burst into a wilder fit of sobbing.

  “Don’t tell Daddy! Don’t tell Daddy!” was all she could gasp out; and the kindly old doctor could get nothing more out of her. Bewilderment began to break through his professional calm, and even a certain alarm.

  “But, my dear, I must speak to your father,” he said anxiously. “You must see that I can’t leave matters like this—” and with that he walked quickly out of the surgery towards the waiting-room, leaving Rosalie sobbing with a shame so total, so overwhelming, that she could only pray that she would die, right there in the surgery, before she had to see the look that would be on her father’s face when he heard the truth.

  *

  For she could not guess, then, that before they left the surgery it would be her father who would be sobbing with shame, and with long-pent-up grief; and that it would be she, Rosalie, who would be forgiving him, and trying to offer comfort.

  PLACE IN THE SUN

  HOW WARM THE water still was, after nearly thirty-years! Through the shallow pools left by the falling tide her feet slid, white and mysterious in the starlight, like some strange new species of fish. Quiet, too, just the way fish are quiet; scarcely a ripple stirred the stillness of the summer night as she waded softly on, across the dark sands which had once been golden in the noonday heat as her children scampered across them all those years ago.

  “Mummy!” they had shrieked, “Mummy, look! Look at my starfish!… Look at my castle, it’s much bigger than Janie’s castle, isn’t it?… Mummy, look, is this a hermit crab? Look at my shell, Mummy, it’s all pink inside, look! Look, Mummy, look! … Look … Look!”