The Dark Corners

by Robert J. Tilley

  Hull put the poker on the table, moved across the room, and gently took the knife from the boy’s hand.

  The boy’s eyes were open now, staring blankly down at Pardoe. He offered no resistance as Hull took him by the arm and steered him around the body to a chair in the far corner of the room.

  “Don’t look at him,” Hull said. He went to the sink, and filled a glass that was upturned on the draining-board. He took it back to the boy and handed it to him, then went back and knelt by the still figure on the floor.

  Pardoe was still alive, but his eyes were gradually filming and his pulse was barely detectable. His eyes moved, very slightly, touched on Hull’s face, then fell away again. Seconds later, he was dead.

  As Hull rose to his feet, Chapman appeared in the doorway, gripping his injured arm. There was blood between his fingers, and his face was wet and sick. He stared at Pardoe’s body, then at the boy, his mouth slackly open.

  “Oh, Christ,” he said, faintly. He leaned against the door frame, his head back and his eyes closed.

  “We’d better get a tourniquet on that arm,” Hull said. “Here, let’s have your jacket off.” He eased off Chapman’s coat, and tied his handkerchief above the elbow of the bleeding arm. “How’s the dog, by the way?”

  “Dead,” Chapman said. His eyes went past Hull to Pardoe’s huddled body, then he gasped, winced, and closed them again.

  Hull seated him in a chair opposite the boy, then went back into the corridor, peering into rooms until he found a telephone. He called the hospital first, then his office.

  “You’d better send out a spare driver, too. Chapman can’t drive, and I don’t really feel up to it.”

  He put the phone down, looked briefly out of the window, swore, then went to look for a blanket. He took one from the first bed that he found, carried it down to the kitchen, and spread it across the body. Chapman and the boy were still seated where he had left them, the boy hunched and staring sightlessly at the floor, his hands locked on the tumbler. Chapman watched him with exhausted eyes.

  Hull took a second glass from a cupboard, filled it, and preferred it to Chapman. Chapman declined it with a faint shake of the head. Hull leaned against the kitchen table, sipping gently at the water and watching the boy.

  After a while, the boy said without looking up, “He tried to kill—” His voice thickened, and he stopped.

  “It’s all right,” Chapman said, brusquely. “It’s all right.” He turned his head towards Hull, his drawn face white and angry. “You couldn’t help it, we know that. Don’t we,” he said to Hull.

  Hull nodded, shortly, took another sip of water, and looked back at the boy again. His face was quite empty, devoid of expression and movement, faint colour showing again around his rather prominent cheekbones.

  God Almighty, Hull thought with sudden irritation. You’d think he’d at least have cried by now.

  Perhaps a quarter of a minute passed. Then, as he watched, a tear showed on the boy’s face, leaking jaggedly down one cheek. His face crumpled, and he began to sob.

  “Here,” Chapman said. He pushed himself awkwardly forward in his chair, fumbling his good hand into his trouser pocket. He cursed, still searching, and twisted his head towards Hull. “Give the kid a handkerchief, can’t you? Mine must be in my other pocket.” His voice was angry.

  Hull put down his glass, took the folded handkerchief from his breast pocket, and walked across to the boy. He held it out to him.

  As he took it, the boy looked up, and for a brief moment Hull saw his eyes, watching him from behind the film of water that covered them. Then the tears welled again, and the eyes were gone, masked behind the handkerchief that the boy pressed against them.

  “That’s right, son, have a good cry,” Chapman said, hoarsely. His voice was at once conciliatory and furious. “Let it all out, it’ll make you feel better.” He sat back in his chair, breathing heavily. After a moment, he turned his attention to Hull, still standing looking fixedly down at the boy’s bowed head and shoulders. He shifted irritably in his chair, seeking a point of focus for his restless anger. “You’d expect him to cry, all things considered, wouldn’t you?” he said. His voice was rebelliously querulous. “It’s only natural, isn’t it?”

  Hull continued to stare, shadows of recent memory flitting greyly through his mind. He thought about Pardoe, a solitary man who believed that he had found a terrifying evil, a belief that had eventually created its own tormented sense of purpose. Was this what he had really found? Were his conviction and speculations grounded in wildly improbable fact, forecasting the inexorable growth of something dark and cancerous that would one day insinuate its malignancy into places of power, or were they the fantasies of loneliness, paranoid dreams that had been woven around the tawdry but easily rationalised trickery of a child?

  And if he had been right, Hull reluctantly went on to question his sense of reasoning, what then? Did others like the boy really exist in the shadowed places of the world, their strange talent somehow prematurely spawned by their emotionally barren circumstances and already warped beyond repair? Were they even then engaged in the petty stratagems of adolescence, the measure of their activities as yet confined by the boundaries of imagination and experience, but slowly, like the opening of some dark and deadly flower, awakening to awareness of the power that they could some day hold?

  Dimly aware of Chapman’s pugnaciously repeated question, he listened to the keening sobs that came from the boy, his ears straining with unwilling urgency to the texture of their sound, inescapably conscious of the choking pressure of the fear that was clamped coldly and tightly to his throat and stomach.

  “Yes,” he said slowly, after a long moment. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  FIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS

  “And,” said my wife, concluding the day’s domestic news, “we have some new neighbours.”

  I was, I must admit, a trifle surprised. The previous tenant of the house next door had disappeared some months previously under circumstances that the police had chosen to term mysterious, since which time a trickle of rather obviously dubious clients had spasmodically appeared in the company of an overly-enthusiastic but in each case unsuccessful estate-agent. We are, it is true, a little isolated and rather far from the main road, but the town is rapidly growing and only four miles away and a pretty regular country bus service is available.

  Personally, I prefer to be cut off from the eternal bustle of people—once the daily grind is completed, it’s a good feeling to relax in the company of one’s own family secure in the knowledge that we’re really too far to be bothered with socially. And in any case, when you’re in charge of the local mortuary, as I am, people find plenty of excuses for not wanting to mix with you in your spare time—family memories, and a generally queasy feeling about spending their time with someone who handles cadavers as part of his job, no doubt. Anyway, my wife, since I was fortunate enough to marry the right sort of partner, shares my views on the social side of things and our son David likes the rural life well enough, so we don’t miss what would very probably be a rather irritating series of relationships.

  The business of our previous neighbour, a rather odd old chap called Broom, had received a certain amount of publicity in the local press, but not too much fuss had been made about it. There was absolutely no evidence of foul play, and after a couple of weeks it died a natural death. After all, people disappear all the time in very much the same way, and while I think the local police would have liked to carry the matter further than they did, they had very little to work on. Still, you know how it is in a largely rural area. People talk, because they have precious little else to occupy their spare time, and some pretty wild conclusions are reached in the process. There was even a short period when my wife and I were subjected to some rather overly obvious close scrutiny from our fellow travellers on our journeys to town, but, thank God, that didn’t last very long.

  However, as I say, it was rather a surprise. I think the estate
agent had more or less written the place off as a white elephant, and we had rather got used to having no immediate neighbours.

  “A family?” I asked.

  My wife shook her head.

  “Two men,” she said. “One tall, pale and silent, the other short, sandy and also silent. They’re both rather grim looking, and the tall one has very piercing eyes.”

  I laughed. My wife has a slight tendency to dramatize about people. I think she’d even rather enjoyed the fuss that had been made about old Broom.

  “How do you know they’re silent?”

  “They came round to borrow some milk.”

  “They?” I looked at her, puzzled. “Did it take two of them to carry a bottle of milk? Provided you gave them one, of course.”

  She shrugged.

  “Perhaps they’re shy. Anyway, the tall one did the talking, what there was of it. He said they hadn’t had time to make arrangements with the local tradesmen, but they’d take care of it in the morning. He said they didn’t expect to be there for long. Probably only a week or two, depending on circumstances.”

  “He still doesn’t sound very silent to me,” I said.

  “Oh, that was all he said, apart from good-morning. The rest of the time he just stood there, giving me the benefit of his piercing glance. I told him how long it was since we’d had anybody next door, and how the estate agents have had such a hard time finding anyone willing to occupy a house with such a mysterious past. He didn’t say anything at all—just nodded every so often and fixed me with those penetrating eyes.”

  “Well, let’s hope they weren’t capable of penetrating too far,” I said. “And what did Lou Costello do all this time?”

  She laughed.

  “Oh, he just stood there holding the milk bottle. I didn’t tell you about his eyes, did I? Rather pale and fishy, and he never blinks. He stared at me, too, but it wasn’t half as effective as the other one.” She frowned a little. “They’re an odd couple. I wouldn’t say they were exactly creepy, but they both had a sort of—well—slightly fanatical look about them.”

  “There are different types of fanatics,” I said. “They might be musicians or painters or something. Anyway, as long as they don’t pester us for milk all the time they can be as fanatical as they like.”

  I yawned and stretched. I hadn’t had a particularly hard day—the local mortality rate is pretty low—but there are times when it’s an extra good feeling to be away from the people, live and dead, who surround me all day, and back with those I can really relax with.

  I pushed my chair back.

  “I think I’ll wander round the garden for a bit. I want to have a look at those cauliflowers, and there’s always the chance I might get a look at these odd neighbours of ours.” I smiled. “Shan’t be long.”

  “All right,” said my wife. She started clearing dishes off the table. “Don’t forget to look at the chickens while you’re out there. They’ve got into the habit of laying an extra egg or two when we’re not looking, and then tucking them away in an odd corner where we aren’t likely to find them. And I could do with some potatoes for the morning.”

  “Chickens and potatoes,” I said, dutifully.

  It was fresh in the garden, cool but very pleasant. It was getting dark, so I checked on the chickens while I could see what I was doing. Apparently this was one of their lazy days. They gave a few hostile clucks at being disturbed, but no eggs were forthcoming. I made sure the padlock on the door was firmly locked—you never know what might try creeping in there at night—and fetched the spade from the tool-shed.

  It was quite dark when I started digging. I’d sneaked a look over the fence on my way to the potato patch, but nothing was visible in the gloom of the next garden and there were no lights on in the house. I presumed our neighbours were either out or liked to retire early. As a result, it gave me more than just a slight jolt when I suddenly found myself bathed in a pool of white light as I was bent down, feeling for potatoes in the freshly turned ground.

  I straightened up and turned slowly, shading my eyes and blinking a little in the glare. The light was directed from the top of the fence that divided the two gardens. It seemed to be coining from a torch or bicycle lamp, and a pretty powerful one at that. I stuck my head forward, squinting at the source, still blinking and wondering who the devil was trying to be funny.

  “Yes?” I said. It sounded damned silly at the time, but the whole thing was so unexpected that I couldn’t think of anything else to say that wouldn’t have involved a certain amount of exasperated blasphemy.

  I finally made out a head, silhouetted against the remains of the fading sunset. The torch seemed to be resting on top of the fence, and as far as I could make out he was giving me a thorough once-over.

  “Yes?” I said again, and it didn’t sound any more intelligent than the first time. I moved forward, still holding the spade, and tried to get a better look at him.

  “Digging I see,” he said, and there was some consolation to the fact that his opening remark sounded as asinine as my own. It was a deep voice, with pretty sombre overtones, and for some reason I was immediately reminded of an undertaker that I’d once known. It had very much the same sort of foreboding note about it.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s right. Digging. For potatoes.” I said it pretty shortly, because the confounded man had nearly made me jump out of my skin. “I take it you’re one of the chaps my wife was telling me about. Our new neigh…”

  “Potatoes,” he said, and it sounded like bodies. I don’t know if he thought that grave-digging was included among my duties. “Do you often dig for potatoes at this time of night, Mr.—ah—Brown?”

  “When they’re needed,” I said. Now that the initial shock had abated a little, I was beginning to feel more than a little resentful. Also, I have always considered the name Brown to be a perfectly presentable one, and his exaggerated pause in the middle of producing it had smacked more than a little of disdain.

  “While I appreciate this early attempt at a neighbourly introduction, Mr.—ah—”; he let that one slide; “I must confess to a slight allergy to being spotlighted in such an abrupt manner.” I smiled, and made it pretty sour. “You’ll have to excuse what might seem to you my unreasonableness in this matter, but it’s just that I’m not used…”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Your allergy. I quite understand.” He seemed to be playing his torch a little closer to my feet than my face, and his head was tipped a little as though studying the ground. I looked down. A potato gleamed whitely where the spade had neatly sliced it in half. I bent down, picked it up, and waved it gently in the beam of the torch.

  “Potatoes,” I said.

  He said nothing, and I could feel his eyes probing at me from behind the beam. Then, as abruptly as it had been switched on, the light went out. There was the faintest rustle of grass behind the fence, and then he was gone.

  I stood for several seconds, just staring foolishly at the spot above the fence that he had vacated. It was very quiet, and I heard his feet as he reached the gravel path. Then another pair joined in. Together, they crunched off into silence. A door slammed.

  Suddenly, the night seemed a lot colder.

  Annoyed, puzzled, and with the faintest flicker of fear worming its way down my spine, I finished digging the potatoes. It was pretty dark, particularly after peering for so long into the beam of light, and I must have split quite a few more before I finally got as many as we’d need for the next day. I took the spade back to the shed, and carried them indoors, frowning.

  My wife was reading in the one easy chair that we keep in the kitchen, and she looked up as I came in.

  “You’ve been a long time,” she said. She saw my frown, raised her eyebrows, and put down her book. “Something wrong?”

  I told her what had happened, including the bit about the second pair of footsteps. Before I finished, she was frowning, too.

  “Did you get a look at him?”

  “With hi
m shining that confounded light at me, I couldn’t see a thing. I must admit, though, more than once I got the impression that you must be right about his piercing eyes. I felt the damned things digging into me at unpleasantly regular intervals. Or maybe it was the little one, peeping through a convenient knot-hole.” I took my pipe from the mantel, and started packing it with tobacco. “I’m certainly going to take a look at them the first chance I get. What the devil does he mean by creeping up on me like that? I nearly jumped ten feet in the air when he switched his torch on. I didn’t hear a sound, and before I knew it there I was, spotlighted like a ruddy crooner at the Palladium.”

  I started lighting my pipe, feeling thoroughly annoyed.

  She looked at me silently while I exhausted two matches.

  “Do you think they’re—alright?” she said. She looked a little upset. “I mean…”

  I shook my head, firmly, and used up a third match, but I wasn’t feeling too happy. The small worm of unease that had made itself felt in the garden was still persisting, and I couldn’t shake off the impression that his—or somebody’s—eyes had made on me.

  The pipe refused to behave itself and my wife was obviously a bit upset about the whole affair, so we listened to the radio for a bit and went to bed early.

  It took me quite a while to get off to sleep, an unusual state of affairs, and she was still stirring restlessly when I dozed off. Also, I had a bit of a nightmare, another unusual event, a frighteningly pointless affair in which I was completely surrounded by gigantic searchlights that poured a glaringly concentrated pool of searing white light that nearly blinded me. And even as I clapped my hands over my eyes, I caught a vague impression of something lancing at me from the surrounding blackness, travelling with frightening velocity and ready to pin me in the circle of light like a butterfly on a collector’s pad…

  I woke, sweating profusely, just before it hit.

  I was more than a little relieved when the alarm clattered and we had an excuse to get up.