Spider

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Later I hear the wireless playing dance music in the dayroom, and later still the plumbing groans and thumps and clanks to life as dead souls shuffle into bathroom and lavatory to scrub their crumbling teeth and empty their shriveled bladders. Dead souls! I am the deadest of dead souls now, see me lying on the bed smoking a thin one to keep the lung-worm down, regard the weary zombie!

  Later still the house grows quiet, and in the early part of the night, before they start the chanting, I often prowl from floor to floor, for I like the shadows. I specially like the way the light from the streetlamp sifts in through the frosted glass panels of the front door and spreads a dim glow across the hallway, I often sit in the darkness at the top of the first flight of stairs and watch the glow, for I find it makes me tranquil. What makes me even more tranquil is being in the kitchen late at night, when everything is quiet. One night I discovered the cupboard under the sink, and by means of my lighter was able to examine its contents carefully: there was a U-shaped pipe descending from the sink above; there was a toolbox; there were bottles of bleach and ammonia; rags; detergents; a stack of yellowing newspaper; a tin bucket with a scrubbing brush and a bar of carbolic soap in it; I even found my rope in there. I spent half an hour sitting cross-legged gazing into the cupboard, the lighter burning fitfully on the floor in front of me. Then I took everything out, set it all neatly on the kitchen floor, and climbed in myself—not an easy task, I am not small! But with my head on my chest, and the U-shaped pipe in my lap, and my arms round my knees, I was able to squeeze in and pull the door shut. For ten minutes I sat there squashed up in the darkness, and felt great peace. Then I climbed out and turned the taps on; with the sound of running water in the pipe the little cupboard was heavenly, and now I am spending thirty or forty minutes in there every night.

  But if I stay too long they make me suffer for it, so you’ll see me suddenly emerge from under the sink and go scuttling back up to my room in a fine state of guilty panic! Ah, the creatures. Often now they work on the ceiling, they use the ceiling as a screen, and upon it they project images and even entire scenes that are distortions, or elaborate parodies, of pieces of my past. They have learned, too, the insidious technique of taking the content of my day’s thoughts and rendering it filthy or absurd or grotesque, and sometimes even as I’m writing, and can’t stop myself looking up, I see a skewed imitation of the very matter on the page in front of me—see now! See them do it now! See how huge my hands are, disproportionately huge, and my face long and yellow with the skin flaking off in a shower like the scales of a cod under the fishmonger’s knife! Oh see him fumbling there, the poor monster, fumbling with his pencil with those great misshapen paws—the pencil so tiny and delicate now as he tries to grasp and manipulate it—and I tear my eyes away, force myself back to the book and as I do so up comes a shriek of laughter, and it’s impossible not to hear Hilda’s voice in it, the touch of hoarseness and the fierce hiss of threat in the tone.

  Breakfast is a trial, for their eyes possess the means to destroy me; more hazardous still is crossing the hallway to the front door, and my nightmare is to become uncoupled halfway over. Fearing it makes it occur, so I find myself at the end of breakfast attempting not to think about becoming uncoupled; I rarely succeed. Then she comes out of her office and I am gripped with terror. “Mister Cleg!” she’ll cry. “Where is your overcoat?” Or, “Where is your cap?” One day she said: “We really must get those fingernails clipped.” Her face has started to break up the way it did in Kitchener Street, eyes and chin and hair and nose separated one from another and all afloat so I must bring them together with my mind in order to make a face. She doesn’t try to conceal her deadness and animality now, it’s evident in her fingers, which clench and unclench with barely suppressed rage and hunger. She wears the same cardigan she did the night she took my father down the gasworks canal, and I sometimes think she will open it and push her breasts at me, as she did that other night, and there’s movement in my lung at this thought. She is biding her time though; every encounter breaks off abruptly and uncertainly, leaving me bewildered. Once she said to me: “Mr. Cleg, what do you know about the bread knife?” That day she was up in my room again, I could smell her when I got back. It was as though a pack of wild animals had been living up there, not even tobacco and an open window could rid the room of the odor.

  The streets give me no comfort: everything is losing color, becoming bleached and dry. The weather is part of it: a string of these cold, clear days when the light is so strong and bright that my eye has no warm pockets of color or shadow or dampness into which it can slip for safety. There is always this glare now, the streets and walls and windows all look hard, like metal, the way they push white light back at me and make my poor eyes dart this way and that to escape it, and I can no longer sit by the canal or the river so I go down Kitchener Street and while away the hours in the Dog and Beggar. One visit I remember vividly: I was crossing the bridge over the canal when I became aware of a thought pattern not my own: Everything I touch dies. If you love me you die. If I touch you you die. Everything I love dies.

  This stopped me. Whose thought pattern was this? My father’s. It was my father for the first time coming out in me. More strangeness followed. When I reached the Dog I didn’t shuffle over to my usual table at the back. Instead I leaned on the counter with my foot on the rail, just as he had always done. Again it was him coming out in me, and I had no power to control it. Ernie Ratcliff was hostile, his face too breaks apart when he gets close to me, and it occurs to me that he is dead and either a ghost or a zombie like me. I bought my half of mild and stood there for more than an hour. Out with the tobacco and papers, and again it was him, it was Horace at the bar rolling a thin one, and I the helpless victim or vessel of his imposture. I had been appropriated, I felt, dragooned, impressed, and I watched in futile rage as he behaved in his old ways, leaned on his elbows, let the cigarette dangle from between his lips, turned whenever the door opened, kept himself to himself. What he didn’t do was drink his mild—the lung-worm has forbidden this, so he stood in the Dog without drinking, stood there in a world of wet, dying of thirst, so it seemed! As in a way was I.

  My father began taking over my thoughts and movements more and more frequently after that, and the Spider was helpless to prevent it. It was my father who began slipping into Hilda’s room at night, and during the day, whenever he was in the house, he watched her hungrily from shifty, furtive eyes that always slid away when she became aware of him. He began to take note of when she went to the bathroom and the lavatory, and he tried to catch glimpses of her through the keyhole, but I don’t believe he succeeded more than twice. Then, to my horror, in the Dog one afternoon, he attempted a conversation with Ernie Ratcliff Oh dear God the humiliation! He had no aptitude for it, no ease, it had been years since he’d practised casual conversation with a stranger. He stood at the bar in the way I’ve described and just blurted it out. Ernie Ratcliff was down the end of the counter murmuring in low tones to an old man with no teeth and a white stubble on his chin. “Remember Horace?” my father said, and it came out in a load croak that immediately silenced Ratcliff and the old man. “What’s that, mate?” one of them said. Their eyes bored into him; he tried again.

  “Remember Horace?”

  “Now which Horace would that be?” said Ratcliff “Cleg,” said my father. “Horace Cleg.”

  Ernie Ratcliff exchanged a glance with the old man, and then began polishing a beer glass with his dishcloth. “Friend of yours, was he?” he murmured.

  My father tried to laugh but it didn’t work; he was close to panic. “Died in the war, did Horace Cleg,” said the old man. “Died in the Blitz.”

  Ernie Ratcliff produced a bitter snort. “Took out the whole bloody street, that one did. Still, he was beyond caring by that point.”

  The old man shook his head. “Beyond caring,” he said. “I never seen a man lose his interest in life like Horace Cleg did. Destroyed him, what happened.”


  “Destroy anyone,” remarked Ernie Ratcliff, “lose your missus like that.”

  “Gassed, she was,” said the old man, turning toward my father. “Gassed in her own kitchen. Nice woman, too. Hilda, her name was, Hilda Cleg, her boy turned the gas on.” The old man paused, lifted his glass with a trembling hand. He fixed my father with a watery eye and whispered: “She were dead by the time Horace got to her!”

  There was a silence then, and the clock could be heard ticking somewhere off behind the bar. “Whatever happened to that boy?” said Ernie Ratcliff after a while, but my father didn’t hear the answer, for he’d already fled the pub, never to return.

  ♦

  The days that followed grew increasingly strange for the Spider. The oppressive sense that everyone and everything around him was dead rarely left him now, and for this he knew himself to be responsible. He became aware too that a terrible catastrophe was about to occur, but he had no clear idea what it was or from which direction it would come. It was at around this time that he decided to be buried at sea.

  Then one night as he sat in the cupboard under the kitchen sink a fresh memory erupted into consciousness. He was in his room in Kitchener Street, and he was dreaming. He was standing on a dusty road that stretched in a straight line to the distant flat horizon, and there was nothing in the landscape at all except for a low wicket fence of white posts that ran beside the road at ankle height. He was walking toward the horizon when he fell into the carcass of a chicken and was trapped in its bones. Then the night-hag came out of the wall and stuck her fingers through the bones, trying to get at him, hissing, “Spider! Spider!” Then he noticed that he was naked and covered with a soft black fungus. He stroked himself, which made him piss, and when this happened it immediately started to rain, and the rain hammered so hard at his window that he woke up to the smell of gas in the room. All perspective was distorted, none of the lines of the floor or the ceiling seemed to join up, and the door was a vast distance from the bed, though the walls on either side of him were so close together it was like being in an alley. On the floor were the fly boxes he had been working on before he fell asleep, so he climbed off the bed and sat on the floor, picking the flies off the ends of the pins and putting them in his mouth. All the time the smell of the gas was growing stronger and making him laugh, though the odd thing was that while he laughed he felt nothing. Then after some minutes he felt sick, and with that came a sudden overwhelming sensation of guilt and desolation. He went to the window and opened it and hung over the sill in the driving rain, limp as a rag doll until it passed, and then he began laughing once more, though again there was only a dead feeling inside. He had earlier stuffed a blanket under the door; he heard the door being pushed open and then, still limp, he was half dragged, half carried down the stairs and out the front door into the rain. He noticed then that he’d wet his pants. He stared at the open door of number twenty-seven and saw his father lurching out backwards dragging Hilda behind him, and this made him laugh more, though it puzzled him in a vague sort of way. Later he noticed the neighbors standing on the pavement in small groups in the rain and he could see at once that none of them was alive, that they were ghosts. After that he remembered a black car with its headlights on, and he remembered the way the rain was caught slanting across its beams, and there was also an ambulance with a red cross on the side. He remembered Hilda being loaded onto a stretcher and covered with a sheet, and this started him laughing all over again, but even so he was puzzled, and dimly sensed that some sort of mistake had occurred.

  Late one night before the chanting started Spider lay on his back by the fireplace and groped for his book. Out it came, the filthy thing, and he took it to his table and opened it to the last entry. He picked up his pencil and began to write.

  The presence in my body of the worm and the spiders (he wrote) has borne home to me that I am a dead man. This is what I shall do. When this entry is complete I shall put on my overcoat and leave the house. It is a clear night and the moon is close to the full. I shall quietly leave the house and make my way down to the river, down between the warehouses to the slimy steps. On my way I shall pause frequently to pick up stones, the heavier the better, and with these I shall fill the many pockets of the various garments I am wearing. Doubtless my progress will grow slower as my clothing grows heavier, but on I shall go, on through the empty moonlit streets, and by the time I reach the slimy steps I shall be very heavy indeed. A curious figure I shall cut then, your old Spider—empty within but for the worm and the spiders, wrapped without in cardboard and newspaper and layers of garments all weighted down with stones—and dead! Strange zombie, no? I will stand at the top of the slimy steps and watch the moonlight on the river, and I will think of the North Sea. I will think of that empty sea heaving beneath the moon, as I begin gingerly to descend, and I will picture in my mind’s eye the pale light gleaming on its swells, and even as the river churns about these large flat asylum shoes of mine, even as it catches and tugs at the turn-ups of my flapping flannels, even as my leg wrappings turn soggy and my sock gets wet—I will think of the silence of the moonlit sea. And when I’m up to my chest in it I’ll still be thinking of the North Sea, and I’ll be exulting inwardly, oh yes I will, I’ll be exulting at the prospect of silence and darkness and dampness and sleep. But by that time the river will have its arms around me and down I’ll go, and there’ll be nothing left of your old Spider then but a dirty book stuffed up a chimney.

  That’s a pretty picture, eh? That’s a pretty death. But it’s not for me. I shan’t do it that way, attractive as it all sounds, the silence, the dampness, the moonlit swells. No, there’s only one way out for me, and it’s not the river. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now, ever since I came across that nice bit of rope—which Hilda thought she could take away from me! Well I found it. I found it in the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and now I’m going to use it. Where? Up in the attic of course, where those bloody creatures of hers can see what they’ve brought me to! They can cackle, they can drone, they can chant and stamp their filthy feet, they can get the dust dancing in the moonlight and paint pictures in the roof, but will it stop your old Spider climbing onto a broken chair, with the loose end slipped through the ring end to form a noose? Will it stop him lashing the rope to a rafter? And putting his head in the noose? Will it stop him kicking the chair away? It will not, no it will not!

  Oh enough. Listen, the house is so quiet you can hear the dead souls coughing and mumbling in their sleep. But here’s a question: why do I keep thinking about John Giles’ teeth? His false teeth, I mean, the ones he got after they pulled out the originals? They lived in a glass of water on a shelf in the attendants’ room, and before every meal he’d go up and get them, and return them after he’d eaten. Well, there was one summer when John had been very quiet for some months, and it was decided for the first (and only) time to try him on a downstairs ward; and it was also decided that if he was well enough to go downstairs then he was well enough to wear his teeth. I was working in the vegetable gardens at the time, and one of the great joys of summer for me was the cricket, for from the old tea garden I had a clear view of the field below. So one afternoon Ganderhill was hosting a team from a nearby village, and the men from the downstairs wards went down to watch, John included. Perhaps it was the sun, but right in the middle of the game he became agitated. I’d been aware from where I was working of the crack of leather on willow, the ripples of applause, the sudden cries to the umpire, all these sounds carried clear up the hill—when suddenly I heard a voice roaring: “Austin Marshall, where are my brains? Where are my brains, you bastard!” I looked down, and in among the cricketers was John. He was staring up at the buildings at the top and waving his fist. “You bastard/” he yelled. “Where are my brains?” (John believed that while he was asleep the superintendent had stolen his brains.) Three or four attendants were cautiously moving toward him across the grass when Dr. Austin Marshall himself appeared on the top terrace and
called down: “What’s the matter, John?” I turned toward him, shielding my eyes from the sun. But the sight of the superintendent only enraged poor John the more, and he made a run for the steps. The attendants soon overpowered him, and struggling wildly, and still shouting, he was manhandled up the steps to the top terrace, then straight up to hard bench. It was discovered only when they got him there that somehow in the fracas he had lost his teeth.

  Well, for a day or two this gave us something to talk about, and then we forgot about it. But two weeks later I was picking lettuce from the beds close by the path. They were lovely lettuce, the ones I grew that summer, Augustas, a crisp, green, loose-headed variety. It was a cool summer, and this is good for lettuce, for hot weather turns the leaves bitter and triggers bolting. I’ve grown all types, but it’s the Augustas I like best, they’re the sweetest and most buttery. I was picking my Augustas then, when close to the path I came upon a particularly glorious specimen. I pushed back the thick green outer leaves, and there, dead in the heart of the thing, were John’s teeth! Grinning at me! And then I thought I heard the lettuce say: “Where are my brains, you bastard!”

  Odd thing, no? Quiet wheeze of laughter from your old Spider as he gropes for his tobacco. One last thin one, one for the road, then it’s out with the sock, out with the keys, and off up the attic for me!