Hmm. I must confess it does sound a bit thin. The police were very polite about it all, but my wife and boy have reported that they are being subjected to considerable scrutiny every time they go anywhere near the town. People who previously greeted me and seemed willing to indulge in a certain amount of conversation now find sudden and urgent business waiting for them on the other side of the street whenever I approach.
Perhaps it would be best if we were to consider a change of address in the near future. Jobs, of course, are a difficulty, particularly those offering the amenities of my present one—I wonder, under the circumstances, if a family member who might possibly be reading this could help me in the matter.
It would be greatly appreciated.
THE DEVIL AND MR. WOOLLER
“I wonder,” asked Mr. Wooller, “if I might trouble you for a match.”
The Devil murmured politely, fumbled in the pockets of his light topcoat, produced a box of Swan Vestas, and proffered them. His eyes were completely devoid of curiosity.
Mr. Woolier’s hands shook as he held them cupped over the tip of his cigarette, but he felt that he could be excused this slight outlet to his excitement. Most people, on finding the Devil standing next to them at Waterloo station, would doubtless have screamed, fainted, taken to their heels, or possibly even expired. None of these occurred to Mr. Wooller, to whom the Devil was now a regrettably familiar figure.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.
The Devil raised his eyebrows.
“Smoking,” explained Mr. Wooller, and coughed gently a couple of times, without removing the cigarette from his mouth. “Had my tonsils out a few weeks ago, and you know what that’s like at my age. Took it out of me, in more ways than one, I don’t mind saying.”
The Devil nodded, sympathetically.
“Been staying with my sister down at Brighton for the week,” said Mr. Wooller. “Could’ve stayed longer but she’s got enough to do without pampering an invalid like me.” He scratched the back of his neck, and felt the gun sag a little lower in his raincoat pocket. “Besides, I’ll have to be getting back on the job sooner or later.”
Mr. Wooller puffed jerkily, and then removed the cigarette from his mouth.
“Commercial travelling’s a bigger hustle these days than it used to be. Do you,” asked Mr. Woolier, greatly daring, and fixedly eyeing a slot machine on the opposite platform, “do much travelling yourself?”
The Devil smiled.
“A great deal,” he said. His voice was deep and not unpleasant. “My vocation requires me to be in a great many places in the course of a year. But travel is, after all, very conducive”—he eyed Mr. Wooller in a friendly way—“to a broadening of the mind.”
Mr. Wooller shuddered. He was suddenly recalling his own initial encounter with this long, lean and frighteningly bland world traveller.
The printing trade of the small Midland town had been booming, and correspondingly the demand for printing inks and paper had been large. Mr. Wooller, his order book comfortably full, had been standing on the pavement edge only a few yards away from her, when the little girl in the scarlet coat was lifted as though by strings and bowled beneath the rampaging wheels of a lorry that lurched suddenly round the corner.
He heard the screech of metal on metal as the green street corner lamp suffered a warping blow, and the death rattle of the small corner house as its bricks cascaded at absurd angles; he saw the flames that leaped thunderously skywards, and all his half-born heroism died as he flung himself flat in the dusty garden of the house in front of which he was standing, cursing the absurdly low wall that separated the property from the street.
After the explosion, numbed, deafened, and blinded by dust, Mr. Wooller rose stumblingly to his feet and ran around the fantastically blazing piles of bricks and masonry towards the dead and dying people. He tried to help when panic-stricken householders clutched at his sleeve and begged his assistance in removing belongings to a place of safety; but something was troubling him, and it had nothing to do with his prudent leap behind the wall when instinctive common sense had told him plainly that it was the one sane move he could have made.
Suddenly Mr. Wooller felt evil around him, and its dark and pungent presence was very frightening. Between the oily columns of smoke the sky showed blue and clear, yet to him the street was dark with more than merely smoke and sinless death. It was while he was helping to carry a cumbersome, marble-topped washstand towards the growing collection of settees, bedsteads, and gilt-framed pictures that he first saw him.
The Devil was standing at the back of a rapidly filling gap in the crowd of onlookers and appeared, oddly enough, to be causing no stir among those nearest to him. His hat was dark, adorned with a small red feather in the band, and his topcoat was light and of an excellent cut. No horns or spiked tail were in evidence before the crowd surged across Mr, Wooller’s point of vision, but the spear-point moustache and Vandyke beard were as near to his wildest nightmares and twitching with a sardonic impudence that could only be described as devilish.
Mr. Wooller stumbled, and his end of the washstand scraped along the pavement.
“What the…” said the man in front.
“There,” choked Mr. Wooller. He was sweating violently, and his pointing hand trembled. “There, at the back of the crowd. I just saw…”
“Look, mate,” said the man ahead of him. His home was burning to a cinder, and he felt no inclination to stop and argue with Mr. Wooller. “If there’s somebody over there you want to ’ave a yarn with, don’t let me ’old yer back. But somebody’s got to ’elp me shift this stuff, and we’re not gettin’ far at this rate. Charlie!” He ignored Mr. Wooller. “Come and give us a lift with this thing. Seems our friend-in-need ’ere…”
But Mr. Wooller had gone, edging his way desperately through the tight ranks of people. He was breathing hard and shaking dreadfully with the appalling absurdity of it all, but he never for one moment doubted either his sanity or the efficiency of his eyesight. He had seen Mephistopheles, gazing with dark and triumphant eyes at a deed of his doing that would hereafter be spoken of as an accident—a sad and terrible freak affair, brought about by the carelessness of a little girl who had started to cross the road without first looking both ways.
Mr. Wooller arrived, panting, at the back of the crowd, with the picture of the child hurtling through the air, propelled by no earthly force, still hauntingly clear in his mind. The Devil had gone. In his place stood a short, stocky man in a cloth cap and muffler, a racing paper beneath his arm, and an empty pipe between his teeth. He answered Mr. Wooller’s stare with an openly hostile look.
The street was free of devils. Even as he stared dumbly about him, the oppressing darkness that only he seemed to see suddenly lifted. No trace of the Devil remained, and Mr. Wooller, seating himself on the nearest kerbstone, allowed himself to be suddenly and violently sick.
The second occasion had been a little different.
A mild political discussion between two navvies in the bar of a public house in Hackney, where Mr. Wooller chanced to be lunching, had suddenly, and for no apparent reason, developed into a blasphemous row the like of which he had never witnessed before, even in his army days. Steadily, and with an awful deliberateness that seemed beyond their power to control, the two big men had whipped themselves into mutual states of homicidal unreasonableness.
Mr. Wooller, a little frightened, decided to get out before any blows were actually struck. He was fumbling stealthily beneath his chair for his brief case when he saw the figure in the window seat and paused, as though suddenly and miraculously carved out of stone.
There was no mistaking that dark hat, and light and expensive topcoat. The trim moustache was even neater than before, but it was the Devil as he had first seen him, only now he was fastidiously consuming bread and cheese, a beer tankard at his elbow. As Mr. Wooller heard the first jarring blow from the direction of the bar, the Devil nicked a crumb from the corner of his
mouth with an inappropriately white handkerchief, rose to his feet, and passed quietly from the building.
One of the navvies died. The other was so badly cut about—they had quickly resorted to the use of shattered beer mugs—that it was a wonder he survived to go for trial. Mr. Wooller was a witness for the prosecution, but what could he say? Could he state, under oath, that he had seen a murder promoted by the Devil actually committed under the eyes of its instigator?
Mr. Wooller had no wish to go to a lunatic asylum. He committed perjury, and passed from the courtroom a respected and truthful witness to all those present, and a miserable and tortured being with a freak trick of observance to himself.
When he arrived back at his lodgings on the final day of the trial, with the knowledge that Clement Fisher, the navvy, would shortly be hanged by the neck until he was dead, Mr. Wooller sank into the basket-chair by the window of his bedroom and stared unseeingly at the neat, peacefully secure rows of rooftops that covered the neighbouring estate.
He was not a clever man. He shared the scepticism and doubts of the majority of his fellow-men as far as a God in Heaven and a Devil in Hell were concerned, and was filled with a hopeful belief that the solution was as black and white as that; but he was nagged consistently by the boomingly confident voice of scientific reasoning. When his wife had been alive, he had attended Sunday services apathetically, because she wished it, bored by the preachers, whose quotations and denunciations seemed unnecessarily riddled with italicised phrases, and subdued during the hymns, helped little by a singing voice that had maintained a constant tunelessness since childhood. Since her death, his half-hearted attendance had ceased altogether. Now, shatteringly, his doubts had been dispelled for him. A Devil existed.
Slowly, Mr. Wooller sat upright in his chair. He recalled the tankard of beer, the plate of bread and cheese. An internal system was needed to accommodate such earthly fare—a throat, a stomach, kidneys, liver, a heart to pump the black and evil blood. When on earth, the Devil obviously assumed the bodily characteristics of man, and should surely be vulnerable to man’s catastrophes. So reasoned Mr. Wooller, and as each thought was planted and took root in his mind, so the reasons for his extraordinary powers of observation were revealed to him.
He rose, crossed to the bureau, and opened the middle drawer.
He took out the small brown box with the brass fastening that lay at the back beneath his whiter shirts, unlocked it with the miniature brass key on his key-chain, and took out the gun.
It was a relic of the First World War, contained three bullets, and was in perfect working order. Once a year, on the anniversary of his demobilisation, Mr. Wooller removed it from its coverings, oiled it, worked the breech a few times, pointed, it playfully at himself in the mirror, and replaced it in the box. For Mr. Wooller had always been an adventurer at heart, and although the only action he had witnessed had been at his desk behind the lines, no second-lieutenant had been better prepared for conflict.
Now he weighed the gun lightly and thoughtfully in his hand, and placed it in his brief case.
From that day he carried it, sometimes in the brief case, and sometimes in the pocket of his raincoat. He had no licence, but he reasoned that such a formality was superfluous under the circumstances. If a man carried a revolver solely for the purpose of eliminating the Devil when next he encountered him, a legal triviality could surely be overlooked.
It was some months later that he had his tonsils removed. They had been slowly poisoning his system for some time past and his work was suffering, and although his doctor had pointed out that it was a little late in life for the operation, he had decided to undergo the indignity of the knife; then taking advantage of an open invitation, he had gone to stay with his sister at Brighton during his convalescent period. And it was while travelling back to London that he once again found himself in the Devil’s presence.
Entering the restaurant car, his eye fastened on a hat and folded coat, resting on the rack above an aisle seat at the far end of the carriage. There was no mistaking them. Mr. Wooller’s tongue clave to the roof of his mouth, and perspiration beaded his forehead. He wondered if he should dispense with all formalities and there and then walk down the aisle and blow the Satanic brains all over the restaurant car; but then he remembered that the revolver was in his raincoat pocket in the compartment he had just left.
So he sank quietly into the nearest seat, and just as quietly ordered a double brandy. The Devil, clad in respectable light tweeds, finished his meal unmolested, flicked a crumb from the corner of his mouth with what looked like the same milk-white handkerchief he had used before, and retired, presumably to his own compartment.
At Waterloo, easily spotted by a dry-mouthed and shakily determined Mr. Wooller, the Devil seemed in no hurry to leave the station. He strolled unhurriedly to another platform, halfway down which he paused, and retired to an elegantly lounging position against the nearest railings. Mr. Wooller, from his position behind a pile of luggage, noticed his quarry’s steady interest in a group of men, soberly clad, standing rather formally a few yards away.
His hand taut on the butt of the lethal weapon in his pocket, Mr. Wooller hailed a passing porter.
“That bunch down there,” he said, nodding sideways and slipping a half crown into the man’s hand. “Do you know who they are?”
Mr. Wooller was tingling with excitement. His own gaze, forever flickering between the Devil and the group of men, failed to see the dawning of suspicion in the porter’s eyes.
“Reception committee,” said the man. He seemed suddenly anxious to be about his business. “From one of the embassies. ’Scuse me, guv’nor, but I’ve got a load of luggage to shift.”
He was off, before Mr. Wooller could question him further. So that was it, thought Mr. Wooller, and wriggled his shoulders a little, as he felt the trickle of sweat down his spine. A full-blooded assassination. Somewhere in this crowd lurked a fanatic, armed with gun, bomb, or knife, ready to dispense death the moment the incoming diplomat stepped from the train.
It was no time for discreet questioning and the warning of officials. That was when Mr. Wooller, making the most momentous decision of his life, had stuck an unlighted cigarette in the corner of his mouth, stepped from his hiding place, and strolling to where the Devil stood, politely asked him for a match…
Conversation, such as it had been, died, but Mr. Wooller had established his bridgehead. He stood there at the peak of his adventure, a middle-aged commercial traveller for a printing-ink manufacturer, rather shabby and more than a little afraid, clutching an old Luger in his raincoat pocket and determined at all costs to forestall the deviltry that was scheduled for that day and place.
Sudden activity on the platform announced the approach of the train. A loudspeaker boomed. A fraction of a second before the stirring of the passengers on the platform commenced, the Devil started to move.
Slowly and majestically, he stepped forward—a true Prince of Darkness—towards the isolated group that had now stiffened into a semblance of attention.
Mr. Wooller, sweating profusely, followed a bare six feet behind.
The train slid grindingly to a halt.
There was a craning of necks among the group as a myriad doors disgorged people on to the platform, then a sudden sharp voice in a foreign tongue. The reception committee quickly and efficiently grouped itself into a flying wedge that brushed aside all opposition, then flowed smoothly into a half circle in front of a first-class carriage door.
The Devil walked straight towards them.
Mr. Wooller, horribly rattled, faltered for a split second, then he too plunged on. Surely the Devil himself would not…? Mr. Wooller’s eyes, stinging with the salt of his perspiration, frantically sought any movement in the crowd that would announce the assassin’s position. He saw none.
The half circle of figures split suddenly into two facing lines, forming a short, narrow corridor. As the grey-bearded passenger with the dark features and the
puckered brow strode forward between the ranks, the Devil halted and faced him, his hands sliding slowly from the pockets of his coat.
Mr. Wooller panicked.
In a fenzy of fear, he lurched forward, tearing his own gun from his pocket, his free hand fumbling wildly at the safety catch. He thrust the gun forward, jamming the barrel hard against the Satanic spinal column—and fired three times.
Voices rose in deafening tumult around him. Dazed, Mr. Wooller gazed upon the body of the man he had killed. He lay sprawled at the feet of his fellow-countrymen, a small, grey-bearded man from whose dark features all puckers had been miraculously erased, and whose overcoat now showed dark red stains.
Angry, brutal hands seized Mr. Wooller, and he was hurried without ceremony into a nearby office.
They were unkind enough to bring the body of the diplomat into the same room and rest it gently on the floor, directly opposite the corner where Mr. Wooller was savagely being bundled into a pair of handcuffs. When the police, after listening to the testimony of the porter and, other less important witnesses, came to take him away, Mr. Wooller was still staring at the body with wild and reddened eyes, and sobbing brokenly to the grim-faced men around him, “But didn’t any of you see him, not any of you?”
They assured him, not unkindly, that they had not, and it was only as he was being led away that Mr. Wooller suddenly began to appreciate the amount of patient preparation and the really devilish cunning that had gone into it all.
THE OTHER MAN
With his back to the window he had broken, he stood listening to the faintly dusty silence in the cottage.
The Dark Corners Page 5