The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  ‘Go on about seeing him in Benares.’

  ‘I saw him in quite a number of places after that. No need to go into it. I found out quite a lot about him before he knew we were interested in him. Do you know Dakhta Lal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s a temple there, among the tulsi-trees. A particularly un­pleasant Kali among other things, and paintings on the walls – call ’em ritualistic. And that time he beat me. Somehow he’d got away even with that height of his. I hadn’t a notion it was him till he spoke. Did I say that I happened to be disguised that day too?’

  ‘Thank God I’ve nothing worse than a bit of safe soldiering to do,’ Andy muttered.

  ‘I didn’t like his speaking first,’ Mickie continued. ‘And in English, especially after . . . anyway. It showed he’d scented us, and me in particular. “I don’t often come across a native who speaks English like you,” was one of his sneers. Then he got on to the wall paintings. Those that we’ll call ritualistic. It was all there, he said – whatever it was. Seemed to be taking in the Hindu Gods on his way to the Hindu Devils. I’ve no doubt it’s an immensely complicated study. Quite as difficult as getting yourself into the Calendar of Saints. Prayer and fasting, only the wrong way round . . . ’

  ‘Don’t leave quite so much out!’ said Davy, but Mickie’s narrative became even more fragmentary.

  ‘And he couldn’t resist showing off a bit either. Wanted to put the fear into me straight away. Listen. There’s a bathing-ghat just below the temple. We went there. He slipped out of his clothes. He went in. He went under. I timed him. He was under two hours and a half by my watch. Then he came out again. He put his face close to mine. He stank of mud. He spoke for all the world as if we’d been continuing a conversation. “And even if you do get me away to England you won’t be able to keep me there,” he said. “I may be only a novice, but I know enough for that!” That’s the fellow we’ve got under this roof. And now’ – Mickie seemed to be putting a world of recollections aside – ‘I want you to tell me something. Is it usual for a man to bring his dog into the dining-room the first time he’s asked to dinner?’

  Eve was lying on the sofa with closed eyes. She spoke without opening them.

  ‘He seemed to think he’d mentioned that in his letter.’

  ‘But there was nothing about it in his letter.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then tell me something else. We all four saw Mr Laban and his dog tonight. And we’ve all four seen Binian and the dog.’

  ‘No. I haven’t set eyes on the gentleman yet,’ Davy interposed.

  ‘Well, Eve and I have. So have the maids. Has anybody seen them all three together?’

  ‘Here, I say!’ said Davy, startled.

  ‘Has anybody?’

  Not one of them had seen the master of the house, his manservant and the Alsatian dog all at the same time.

  Suddenly Davy broke into a laugh, if a sound so violent could be called a laugh. Then he sat up, serious-faced and apologetic.

  ‘Sorry everybody. I don’t know what made me do that.’

  ‘I doubt if we shall see them all three,’ said Mickie quietly. ‘It’s my private belief that there are only two of them, and they were both here tonight.’

  Whereupon he invited them to run over the events of the evening.

  ‘Let’s assume for the moment there are only two. Which of them was master of the other tonight?’

  ‘Oh Lord!’

  ‘The dog’s being here at all? All that rigmarole about the virtues of Binian? The way the brute jumped up and licked him? The way it glared at me when I asked if Binian was going back to India? What happened then?’

  This time it was Davy whose mind rushed to embrace the incred­ible thing.

  ‘Good God! It barked! I can hear it now! And he turned faint and said he must go!’

  ‘And could we keep him? Would he let us send for a doctor? Would he let us see him home?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘And before he’d been gone a quarter of an hour, that howl that brought the maids in?’

  ‘What was that?’ Davy asked breathlessly.

  ‘I don’t know. I only know what I think.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘The wrench when they change places again,’ Mickie replied.

  Davy made one last clutch to save his foundering mind. – ‘Come,’ he expostulated weakly, ‘you’ll be saying next they can raise the dead!’

  ‘They say,’ Mickie answered slowly, ‘they can raise the unborn. If metamorphosis at all, what’s the odds?’

  And – if metamorphosis at all – why not? Since the birth of Time has not man’s mind veered and fluctuated among these very beliefs? Are we of today so much wiser? Life is a fluid. It may coagulate in a rock, creep sluggishly in a tree, but muscle and vein, hidden root and the beating heart, are no more than its apparatus. Is every species immutably established? How came it to be so? By the power of a Holy Word? Is there no Unholy Negation? What is a dog? How big is a dog? What is its weight, what its colour? How come the lap-dog and the mastiff to be equally dogs? And granted that which was not able to stabilise itself went into Creation’s limbo long ago, is there no ab­horrent art that can call it back, the simulacrum of an hour? And granted such an art, where would it find the weak link but in a creature that has lately ceased to be feral while attaining only a precarious domesticity? Browne speaks of ‘the public soul of all things’. The mind turns away from the thought of a public body, lent and borrowed and kept in circulation. Yet there can be no choosing among miracles. Accept one accept all. It might indeed be as Mickie said.

  ‘And what do you say it’s called?’ Davy asked with an exhausted sigh.

  ‘Lycanthropy.’

  ‘And the other trick?’

  ‘Tantric.’

  ‘But what – what do they want to do a silly thing like that for?’

  ‘From Binian’s point of view? I told you what he said to me. Said if we got him to England we shouldn’t be able to keep him. Well, we couldn’t bring home the charge we wanted, but we deported him on something else. And in England he’s got to live. Somebody’s got to pay his wages. So what would suit him better than to get hold of some harmless old semi-invalid who lived alone, get himself fixed up as his servant, and – continue his interrupted studies? He can produce Mr Laban when necessary. After all there’s got to be a Mr Laban. He must have a certain amount of business to transact. There had to be a Mr Laban to let us this house.’

  ‘That was rather taking a chance, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Probably wanted the money. Another thing. That letter. All hurried and frazzled. Said he wanted to come. Said he hoped to come. Used exactly the same words again just as he was leaving. The rest was all testimonials to Binian. But that sounded like a message for us.’

  ‘Slipped another note in! Then by the time he really passes his Higher Proficiency – ?’

  ‘An old man will be on his way back to India, travelling with an Alsatian dog,’ Mickie replied.

  6

  A thoughtful Eve walked the next morning on the common. She had dozed and waked again all night in the drawing-room, with Davy to keep her company, yet she was not in the least tired. Instead, some­thing seemed to have happened to time. Long ex­periences, protracted processes of thought, passed over her while the second-hand of her watch crept round once. Similarly with her perceptions. She seemed to take in a hundred things at once, the sulphur butter­flies that played about her, the smell of bruised thyme that rose to her nostrils. The wide vale below lay thankful in the sun, as if its very farms and copses praised the sweet orderliness of created things. In those cottages women were at work, in the schools children were being taught in the fear of God. Men swung their horses at the turn of the field, the tradesmen’s vans delivered the g
roceries. Everybody was aware of the friendly presence of his neighbour, and dogs were dogs and nothing else.

  She was standing still, with the breeze rippling her cropped head; she turned to look back at the house. But the pines hid it, seemed to whisper ‘Hush!’ about it. How foolish it had been to suppose even for a moment that one could be under the same roof with a person and not be aware of that person’s presence! The very announce­ment should have been its own warning. It was like having a dead person in the house; the dead make no noise, but it is useless to pretend they aren’t there. Was she afraid? Of course she was afraid. But it was of something vaster than the house she was afraid. She would have been no less afraid, perhaps more afraid, anywhere else. Therefore having said she was afraid she must forget it. If she were even to change her room her fear might become a panic. And that would be dangerous.

  Mickie and Andy had again gone to London. Davy, who had driven them, ought to be back by now. Moreover, it would be as well for her to occupy herself, like those women in the farms down there. Perhaps the hands of her watch would move a little more quickly then. Suddenly she turned her back on the sheep-dotted slope where the clumsy baby-lambs called, and sought the shady lane. Conscious that she was walking slowly towards the house, she walked more quickly. She reached the pine-sheltered drive. Half way down it she stopped dead. Violent and uncouth noises were coming from the direction of the yard.

  She reached the turn. In the middle of the yard Rose and Laura stood. Davy had returned, and was in the act of taking a run at the closed door in the wall. It was from behind the door that the noises came. Half a dozen dogs seemed to be tearing one another to pieces.

  Davy played polo twice a week, squash the same, tennis all the time, with an occasional bout of fives. When he set his twelve-and-a-half-stone of toughness to the charge something had to give way. There was a crash, and an iron staple was heard to go clinking along the ground. Instantly the noises ceased, and a door banged.

  Eve had run forward. Davy was trying the door that had banged. He turned, saw her, and rejoined her.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked breathlessly.

  ‘Dog had a convulsion or something. I was only just back.’

  Eve sought her maids. She had it in breathless half sentences.

  ‘I said to Laura first time I saw him – “He thrashes that dog, he does,” I said –’

  ‘If you’d heard it, miss –’

  ‘Like shouting it was –’

  ‘I’ll swear there was two voices –’

  ‘Thump-thump, raging and tearing –’

  ‘It was Laura’s morning upstairs, and I ran up to her all of a shake –’

  ‘And I bumped into her as I was running down –’

  ‘And even in the garden we could hear it over the roof –’

  ‘And then Mr David drove up in the car –’

  ‘That howl last night too –’

  ‘And we were going to ask if we could have that spare room next to yours, miss –’

  ‘Because we won’t be able to stay if there’s going to be these goings-on –’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the distracted Eve.

  But it was two o’clock before lunch was served that day.

  In the afternoon Rose and Laura took down their beds, and Davy helped them to carry mattresses and what-not past the orchard end to the main portion of the house. He made use of the opportunity to examine the room they were leaving. It was a pleasant sort of loft, such as is found over garages, and its window looked past the close hedge that, with the wall at the other side, shut off Mr Laban’s wing. Over this hedge Davy saw the upper portion of his private door, with a pointed window above it that seemed to be obscured with some sort of décalco­manie. Possibly one large room, possibly two smaller ones, lay behind it. If there was a chamber below it apparently had no light at all.

  Davy stood in thought. His was a mind that liked to get things over and done with, and here you had a fellow who in some way or other had provided himself with a sort of dog, that he sometimes took a night’s lodging in himself, but more often used in order to lock up his master. If that was so the thing was fairly simple. All that need be done was to come upon Mr Laban plus dog, put a bullet through the brute, and – well Davy didn’t quite know what would happen after that, but something would be bound to happen. At least if that wasn’t the idea he didn’t know what was.

  But he hesitated. He hesitated because he was a little nervous of the glimpse he had had that morning. For supposing the thing didn’t always work cleanly and completely? Suppose one wasn’t always completely master, nor the other utterly helpless? He no longer sang his song about the two men and the dog. He didn’t want to kill the wrong one, nor yet to blow a hole through a sort of amalgam of the two. And how the old fellow had tucked his supper away last night! Just as if he had been getting his strength up for something! Getting his strength up to shut up Binian in the dog! How had the struggle ended? Either might be master at that very moment.

  Davy left the loft. He walked round the house and entered the yard by the broken door. He strode to the private door and knocked loudly with his knuckles. He waited for a couple of minutes, and then knocked more loudly still. He thought he heard a faint voice within.

  ‘It’s Captain Peckover. Will you please come down?’

  After all, what more natural than that they should call to enquire after the health of an old man who had been ill?

  Several more minutes passed. Then feet were heard on wooden stairs within. The door opened. Binian stood there.

  So this piece of emaciation was the famous Binian! It was much that such a mummy should bear a name at all. Two hours in a river? He might have been there two months, and just hauled out; and the fishes had had his eyes, for Davy couldn’t see any. He clung to the lintel with his fingers, like something that hung on to the bar of a pit-cage, going up or down. And he had almost completely lost his voice.

  ‘Yes, sir?’ he whispered.

  ‘Can I see Mr Laban?’

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Laban isn’t very well, sir.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I want to see him.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s not to be seen, sir.’

  ‘I’ve come to apologise for a broken door. I heard such an infernal hubbub in here this morning that I thought something was wrong, and burst open the door.’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything, sir.’

  ‘Something was the matter with your dog.’

  For a moment Davy saw the eyes at the bottom of the puckers. – ‘Mr Laban will be sorry you were disturbed, sir.’

  ‘I not only heard it. I saw it.’

  The extremity of his exhaustion notwithstanding, something in the abominable cadaver seemed to stiffen. – ‘Mr Laban’s very partic­ular about who enters these parts of the premises, sir.’

  And the door began to close, as if a corpse drew to the lid of his coffin. But Satan himself could not have bettered the look Davy had through the last inch of it.

  The yard door remained unrepaired during the whole of the next day. The inmates of that portion of the house must have slept the clock several times round. But on the morning after it was found to be set up again, and Rose and Laura, descending to light the fires, saw through the kitchen window the tall black-coated figure, with the dog once more at his heels. A small shed had been reserved for the storage of the master’s outside belongings, and it was from this shed that Binian was returning, carrying several pieces of iron. During that morning muffled knockings were heard, and Davy, interested in these knockings, sought his observation-post in the loft. The door under the decalcomanied window stood open, and Binian could be seen behind it, with a large screwdriver in his hand. The door closed for a moment, but opened again, as if he was ascertaining some fit or dimension, and at one of his movements something fell,
with a clang of iron. It was an hour before the door finally closed and did not open again. Apparently he had to secure the door that he himself could get out. But it might be a matter of difficulty for anybody outside to get in.

  7

  People who live through vast experiences what time it takes the hand of a watch to travel one minute cannot long remain at that point of tension. There are silences that make us long to shriek in order to break them, and the Thing that Grows had got hold of Eve. It sprouted a fresh tentacle at every denial of its existence. Andy suggested, for example, that if she would not go to the Trevelyans she might ask Rachel Trevelyan to come and stay with them. To have told him, as she wanted to tell him, that she would not dream of asking Rachel or anybody else to such a house, would have been the truth. But she couldn’t admit that. She sat down and wrote to Rachel – a pointless letter, all about nothing, with never a word of invitation in it. Again, it got on her nerves that Davy went about cheerfully whistling. She knew that it was all for her benefit, and that his eyes and ears were sharpened all the time. None the less it drove her to the piano herself, to play a few bars and stop, her fingers on the keys, as if waiting for something. And she herself had either to pretend to her maids or else lose them. Yet day followed day, night night, without anything happening. Worst of all, Davy’s song ran fantastically in her head. A man and a dog; two men and a dog, always two, never three; and always the other one. She began to feel that her thoughts were not her own. They were being manipulated, palpated, read. It is after this fashion that the Thing that Grows works. You yourself do its work for it. Neither Laban nor Binian was Master of that House. The Devil was Master of that House in which Eve had thought to spend her English summer.