The Third Grave

by David Case

  He leaned back against the rail, pensively puffing on his pipe.

  “Probably lots more monsters lurking about than people give credit for.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said.

  “ ’Course, they never do let on, do they? What I mean is, they got vice squads and homicide squads and suchlike, for all we know they got a monster squad, too. Only it’s hushed up. They wouldn’t want people to know about that. Might cause panic. Like when they don’t tell you about epidemics and things that immigrants bring in. All them alien diseases and infestations. It’s all kept secret. Politics.” He shook his head gravely. “Do you believe in monsters, then, sir?”

  “Well, truth is stranger than fiction,” I conceded, choosing my words carefully.

  “Nothing stranger than a monster, though.”

  I nodded solemnly.

  We exchanged a few pleasantries, oddly inappropriate after his previous tale, and he told me it was a pleasure to discuss things with an open-­minded man. Then I continued on toward the village. After I’d walked for fifty yards or so, I glanced back. Coots was still standing on the bridge, a slight dark shape. His pipe glowed with a pulsing rhythm, and he gave the impression of a man deep in thought, contemplating life as he knew it. I walked on into Farriers Bar.

  I passed several cottages with thatched roofs and quite suddenly found myself in the center of the village. It seemed a proto­type of its kind. The street was cobbled, the footpath narrow, and although lanes issued off the high street, the village gave the impression of being linear, without depth. All the shops were closed, and there was a splendid little church. There were no automobiles to be seen. A policeman was walking slowly down the opposite side of the street, his high helmeted shadow on the walls. I assumed this was Coots’s nemesis, Constable Chive. As he drew opposite, he glanced across the narrow road, and I saw an indistinct pale face. His steps slowed, and I half expected him to cross over and interrogate me. Having already, within half an hour, been mistaken for a newspaperman and a monster, I was mildly paranoid and, for all I knew, could be taken for a poacher as well. But he walked on, and so did I. A moment later I came to the Red Lion.

  It was an agreeable surprise.

  In times past, Farriers Bar must have been a stopping point on a route from somewhere to another, for the Red Lion was a fine old coaching inn built around an open archway through which a coach could be driven and the horses stabled in the interior courtyard. It had been only slightly modernized. The hotel entrance was on one side of the arch, the public house on the other. Antique lanterns were set on either side of the doors, and although they used electricity now, the incandescence was mellowed by golden glass.

  I entered through the hotel doorway and stopped at the desk. There was a bell which I pressed, and a few minutes later a buxom blonde woman, not yet old, appeared from a side door. She wore an old-­fashioned lace collar and rather more cosmetics than seemed suitable for a venerable inn. She was friendly and smiled as she moved behind the desk.

  “Do you have a room?” I asked.

  “Got twelve of ’em, matter of fact.”

  “One should do me.”

  “Single?”

  She looked as if she were inquiring about my marital status, but I assumed she meant the room and nodded. Then she said, “Bath?” as if she wondered whether I did. I agreed. She pushed the register across, an antient tome with a leather cover, opened toward the final page.

  “Mabel Sinclair,” she said. “I own this place. Been behind the bar, sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “Quite all right.”

  I signed the register. She turned the book around and studied my signature.

  “Will you be staying long, Mr. Ashley?”

  “Just overnight. Possibly tomorrow.”

  “You can park your car in the courtyard.”

  “I haven’t a car.”

  “That so?”

  “I came on the train.”

  “Well, isn’t that something?”

  I agreed it was something.

  She had removed a key from the board and placed it on the desk but kept her hand over it.

  “Don’t get many folks on the train these days. Don’t get many folks coming to Farriers Bar by any means, matter of fact.” She had a brassy, but pleasant laugh. “Will you be requiring dinner?”

  “I think not. A sandwich, perhaps.”

  “You can get a sandwich in the bar. Just the other side of the arch. Don’t have to worry about closin’ time, long as you come in the side door. That shows you’re registered as a guest; what’s called a bona fide traveler. Handy law, that. Open to abuse, though. We get the odd gentleman who registers and pays for a room just so he can drink after time. Sometimes they don’t even make use of the room. That’s why I have to insist they pay in advance—”

  She smiled apologetically with lipstick on her teeth.

  “Quite understandable,” I said.

  I offered money. She took it with the same hand that had concealed the key, thereby relinquishing it without emphasizing the exchange. The key was attached to a large brass ball so that a guest wouldn’t forget it was in his pocket.

  “Up the stairs, second on the right.” She motioned toward the staircase. “Or should I show you up?”

  “I’ll find it, thank you.”

  “Sorry there isn’t a porter. ’Fraid we don’t do much business here. I’ll be in the pub, you need anything.”

  I thanked her once more, she retreated through the side door, and I carried my bag up the wide staircase and down the hall. My room was labeled with brass numbers, and several attempts were required before I correctly fitted the key into the lock. The door creaked. The room was large with a high paneled ceiling and a tall window overlooking the high street. The bed was huge and soft, covered with a rose-­colored quilt. On the wall beside the door, slightly askew, was an oil painting of indifferent quality and ingenious geography, depicting the monoliths of Stonehenge rising above a stormy sea. I thought it likely this original work of art had been commissioned in payment for room and board at some past time when payment was not required in advance.

  I felt a touch of sympathy for the unknown artist and straightened the painting so that it squared with the walls, which were none too symmetrical themselves. It still didn’t look right. I decided that the painting, whatever its aesthetic qualities, was at least obedient to physical laws and acted as a plumb line, dutiful to gravity rather than to architecture. I pushed it back where it had been, then opened my valise and hung my suit in the closet. The suit depended at precisely the same angle as the painting, which seemed to prove my plumb-line theory. This was gratifying; I realized how the unknown ancient builder must have felt when he created the first plumb rule and determined the perpendicular in the construction of the pyramids. The builders of Stonehenge, too, must have known this physical law, and it pleased me to think that the painting, because of its subject, manifested the same principle. The variance between wall and painting, however, was almost alarming, and it was evident that this building would fall long before the great slabs of Stonehenge or the monstrous wedges of the desert. This was a fact which, I reflected wryly, Lucian Mallory could work nicely into his concept of the past: the lost skills and sciences of the ancients; the notion of time as a fluid constant in which events were congealed like lumps of fruit in aspic. I felt a sense of eternity fall over me with these thoughts, and outside the window Constable Chive passed once more, in the other direction, his hollow footfalls resounding as punctuation in the passage of time.

  In this philosophic mood, I went back down the stairs and through the side door. This placed me under the arch, and I paused there, fancifully listening for a clatter of hooves and a rattle of wheels. For a moment I could have sworn I heard those anachronistic sounds. Once, deep within the Great Pyramid, I had perceived the labored groans of ten
thousand slaves and the tormented cries of the grave robbers as the ancient traps worked, burying them under tons of sand. I had heard them distinctly, those echoes of eternity that had existed thousands of years before, as if the vibrations had been trapped in the very stones and, from time to time, had seeped out. It had excited me. It had frightened me. Could the sounds of great stress and unspeakable torment be congealed in the walls? Could a place be haunted by lithic possession? Could emotion be so powerful that the very molecules of the naked rock were altered? If time were truly constant, could not the dimensions of our existence overlap? I had been alone in the pyramid, the sounds had subsided and faded into silence, but I have never doubted that I heard them, not within my imagination, but as physical waves.

  And for a moment as I stood under the arch, the same phenomenon occurred. The rumble of a horse-­drawn carriage echoed up the articulation of my spine. I turned toward the entrance, startled. There was nothing there. No steed appeared with wide white eyes and foaming teeth; no elegant brougham with liveried attendants encroached upon my consciousness. The sound had receded in an instant. I looked back at the courtyard. Only a bicycle was stabled there, chained to the watering trough. I smiled at myself, but my backbone still tingled. I went through the opposite door and into the bar.

  3

  The bar was medieval, an oblong room with a low ceiling crossed by heavy blackened beams and several stout tables of aged oak. A polished brass rail extended the length of the bar just above the floor, and a sequence of pewter mugs hung down over it. A most agreeable room. Unfortunately, an American-style jukebox squatted in the corner, bubbling with gay purple lights. It was not playing at the moment, but there it lurked, threatening a cacophonous onslaught at any instant. I eyed it dubiously. There are few things as minatory as a jukebox in a public house, in the scheme of mechanical menace. I rated it just behind a telephone in a secluded cottage and just ahead of an empty typewriter on a desk when one’s work is being neglected. I approached the bar and positioned myself so that the damned thing could not attack me from the rear. Mabel Sinclair moved to serve me, preceded by her lipsticked smile. I asked for a sandwich and a pint of bitter. The beer was excellent, the sandwich unidentifiable. Mabel noticed the way I regarded her jukebox.

  “Pretty modern, eh?” she said.

  “It is that, yes.”

  “Only jukebox in the whole village.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Fella from the vending machine company kept after me for a whole year to put it in, you know. I wasn’t sure how it would fit in with the what you call decor. What do you think?”

  “Well, as you say, it’s modern.”

  “That’s so. Some of the old-­time customers weren’t too keen on havin’ it here. On the other hand, lots of the young folks in the village like it. Trouble is, most of them as likes it are too young to come into the bar. I ain’t too sure about it, myself. Got some good records, though. Got some Tom Jones records.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Oh, yes. Three or four of them. You like Tom Jones?”

  “He was a fine miner.”

  Mabel squinted.

  “He’s bloody awful,” said one of the sterling chaps at the dart board.

  Mabel scowled at him.

  “Old-­fashioned,” she told me.

  He grunted and threw for double tops. He missed.

  Mabel said, “I like to keep up with the times, myself. I figure a girl has to keep herself abreast of the times, don’t you? I mean, this ain’t the Victorian Age. People are broad-­minded now. Mind you, I’ve always been a broad-­minded old sort. You can ask any of the locals, they’ll tell you I don’t give tuppence for what anyone does. Long as they don’t cause trouble here in the pub, that is. Otherwise I’d have Chive on my neck. Chive’s the village constable. He’s a right stickler for the law, is Chive. ’Course, that’s his job. But I figure he’s just envious ’cause he can’t drink while he’s on duty.”

  “I’ve heard about Constable Chive.”

  “That so?”

  “Mr. Coots mentioned him.”

  “Coots? You a friend of old Coots?”

  “Not really. I just met him as I was walking from the station.”

  “Hah. Out poachin’, I’ll wager. He’s a right old rogue, is Coots. Listen, I’ll tell you something about Coots. Ah—where you from?”

  “London.”

  She nodded, verifying my statement.

  “Yes, well, seein’ as you’re from London, you’ll not be shocked to hear this, so I don’t mind tellin’ you. Old Coots has propositioned me. Fancy that! Me! Don’t know whatever possessed the old boy—”

  “He must be daft,” said the old-­fashioned dart player.

  Mabel shot him a wicked glance.

  I was trying to think of a way to change the subject, but Mabel continued, “ ’Course there are those that consider me attractive. Not just old Coots. Lots of men. You’d be surprised if I told you. Married men, even. Not that I’d reveal their names. That wouldn’t be right, you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

  “I certainly do.”

  “You see, I’m a widow. A gay widow, ha ha. My husband passed on a few years ago. Retired naval type, lots older than me. Don’t know why I married him. This was his inn. Say, ha ha, maybe that’s why I married him.” She shook her head. “No, I shouldn’t speak that way about the dead. Anyhow, he was a stuffy old sod, didn’t like a bit of fun. Didn’t even care to have what you call marital relations more than once a month or so. Mind you, I treated him right. I was a good wife to him. The way I figure it, if you’re going to wed a bloke, you’re entitled to treat him right. I didn’t play around on him. Leastways, not much. Not what you’d call blatant. But then he passed on, rest his soul, and left this inn to me.” Mabel paused a moment, as though in observance of silent obsequies for her departed husband, but then abruptly resumed her recital. “Well, I looked at myself after the funeral—looked right in the looking glass, you know—just as if I was looking at someone else, takin’ stock of the situation. And I said, Mabel, old gel, you’re still young and you’ve still got your looks and you’re a woman of property now, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have some fun now you’re unattached. That’s just what I said, right out loud. Now, some folks might think that was the wrong sentiment to have, with the old boy hardly cold in the grave, but the way I see it, once he was dead and gone, why, what the hell! I’ll be cold in my own grave soon enough. So I don’t see how it was much of a sin.”

  She looked at me with raised eyebrows.

  “You’ re quite right.”

  She smiled and leaned closer. She was truly buxom and blossomed across the bar, threatening to envelop my pint. I withdrew it hastily. The dart player exclaimed cheerfully as he finally doubled out. The jukebox bubbled. We’ll all be cold in our graves soon enough, I thought, just like eighty billion of our evolutionary ancestors, and I couldn’t castigate this lively woman for whatever method she chose to impress some significance upon her passing years.

  “Let’s have another pint,” I said.

  “Fancy you meeting Coots,” Mabel muttered, as she pulled it.

  This was an opportune moment to change the subject, and I said, “He tells me he discovered a murder victim recently.”

  “He certainly did.”

  She placed the mug before me, the barm overflowing onto the quercine counter.

  “Old Coots is right chuffed with himself, makin’ a discovery like that. Why, if it weren’t for him, the body might never have been found. Just goes to show, there’s somethin’ to be said for poachin’. Most excitement we’ve ever had in the village, I reckon, what with policemen and newspaper fellas and the like. ’Course, it wasn’t a local gentleman, so the village can enjoy the excitement without havin’ to mourn. Not that we wish harm to any strangers.”

 
“They’ve not identified the body?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Yes, I can see how it would cause excitement in a peaceful little village like this.”

  “Only murder we’ve ever had here.”

  The dart players had come to the bar for refills. The old-­fashioned one said, “No, there was a murder here in 1897. You ain’t forgettin’ that, Mabel?”

  “Well, that might have been an accident—”

  “Accident? You just don’t want to give the Red Lion a bad reputation. It was murder right enough.”

  “Double murder, it was,” the second player added. “Right here at the inn.”

  Mabel turned to me.

  “Never was proved as murder,” she explained.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Well, it was like this. The wife of the squire was having an affair with a local lad—”

  “Blacksmith’s son,” the dart player said.

  “That’s right. Very sordid. She’d been meeting him for almost a year. About once a week. I read a book about it once. Well, sometimes they went to the blacksmith’s shop and sometimes they took a room here at the Red Lion. I guess the innkeeper in those days was sort of broad-­minded. Well, one fine day the squire came to hear of it. According to this book I read, the squire was a short-­tempered bloke, and when he found out his lady was unfaithful he flew into a proper rage. Can’t say as he can be blamed. He had his carriage hitched up to a fine pair of horses, jet black they were with fiery eyes. The stable lad explained about that at the inquest. Said that the master’s eyes were burnin’ just like the horses’, blazin’ away like to frighten the devil. So off to town he comes, fixin’ to catch his lady in the act.

  “Well, sir, the lady and her lover were taking drink in the bar—right here at this very same bar, you see—and gettin’ themselves ready to repair to the room they had already arranged for. As chance would have it—according to this book—they were just coming out of the public house, arm in arm and in their cups, as the squire turned his horses into the archway. He saw them at the same instant they saw him. His wife screamed and her lover threw up his hands and the squire started to rein in his horses with a terrible clatter, howling like a fiend. And then, quick as a flash, a terrible look came over his face. He let the reins go and whipped the horses savagely. They leaped forward onto the cobblestones and thundered directly over the lady and her lover.