Shudders in the Dark & Carnival Of Terror

by Ruskin Bond

  At the last, when the candles were guttering, the bottles empty, and the last log’s ashes on the hearth, Mr Shute asked who was the creature Paley he had found hanging over the carp pond.

  Mr Tregaskis told him, but the next morning Mr Shute could not recollect what he had said; the whole evening had, in his recollection, an atmosphere of phantasmagoria; but he thought that the agent had said that Paley was a deserted sailor who had wandered up from Plymouth and taken the work without pay, a peculiar individual who lived in a wattled hut that he had made himself, and on food he caught with his own hands.

  His sole explanation of himself was that he had waited for something a long time and was still waiting for it; useful he was, Mr Tregaskis had said, and it was better to leave him alone.

  All this Mr Shute remembered vaguely, lying in the great bed staring at the pale sun glittering on the name ‘Florence Flannery’ scratched on the window with the two dates.

  It was late in the autumnal morning, but his wife still lay beside him, heavily asleep, with her thick heavy chestnut hair tossed over the pillow and her full bosom panting, the carnation of her rounded face flushed and stained, the coarse diamonds glowing on her plump hands, the false pearls slipping round her curved throat.

  Daniel Shute sat up in bed and looked down at her prone sleep.

  ‘Who is she? And where does she come from?’ he wondered. He had never cared to find out, but now his ignorance of all appertaining to his wife annoyed him.

  He shook her bare shoulder till she yawned out of her heavy sleep.

  ‘Who are you, Flo?’ he asked. ‘You must know something about yourself.’

  The woman blinked up at him, drawing her satin bedgown round her breast.

  ‘I was in the opera, wasn’t I?’ she answered lazily. ‘I never knew my people.’

  ‘Came out of an orphanage or the gutter, I suppose?’ he returned bitterly.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But your name?’ he insisted. ‘That is never your name, “Florence Flannery”?’

  ‘I’ve never known another,’ she responded indifferently.

  ‘You’re not Irish.’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Shute. I’ve been in many countries and seen many strange things.’

  He laughed; he had heard some of her experiences.

  ‘You’ve seen so much and been in so many places I don’t know how you’ve ever got it all into one life.’

  ‘I don’t know myself. It’s all rather like a dream and the most dreamlike of all is to be lying here looking at my own name written three hundred years ago.’

  She moved restlessly and slipped from the bed, a handsome woman with troubled eyes.

  ‘’Tis the drink brings the dreams, m’dear,’ said Mr Shute. ‘I had some dreams last night of a fellow named Paley I met by the carp pond.’

  ‘You were drinking in the parlour,’ she retorted scornfully.

  ‘And you in the kitchen, m’dear.’

  Mrs Shute flung a fringed silk shawl, the gift of an Indian nabob, round her warm body and dropped, shivering and yawning, into one of the warm tapestry chairs.

  ‘Who was this Florence Flannery?’ she asked idly.

  ‘I told you no one knows. An Irish girl born in Florence, they said, when I was a child and listened to beldam’s gossip. Her mother a Medici, m’dear, and he a groom! And she came here, the trollop, with some young Shute who had been travelling in Italy—picked her up and brought her home, like I’ve brought you!’

  ‘He didn’t marry her?’ asked Mrs Shute indifferently.

  ‘More sense,’ said her husband coarsely. ‘I’m the first fool of me family. She was a proper vixen. John Shute took her on his voyages; he’d a ship and went discovering. They talk yet at Plymouth of how she would sit among the parrots and the spices and the silks when the ship came into Plymouth Hoe.’

  ‘Ah, the good times!’ sighed Mrs Shute, ‘when men were men and paid a good price for their pleasures!’

  ‘You’ve fetched your full market value, Mrs Shute,’ he answered, yawning in the big bed.

  ‘I’d rather be John Shute’s woman than your wife,’ she returned.

  ‘What do you know of him?’

  ‘I saw his portrait on the back stairs last night. Goody Chase showed me. A noble man with a clear eye and great arms to fight and love with.’

  ‘He used ’em to push Florence Flannery out with,’ grinned Mr Shute, ‘if half the tales are true. On one of their voyages they picked up a young Portuguese who took the lady’s fancy and she brought him back to Shute Court.’

  ‘And what was the end of it?’

  ‘I know no more, save that she was flung out, as I’d like to fling you out, my beauty!’ foamed Mr Shute with gusty violence.

  His wife laughed loud and discordantly.

  ‘I’ll tell the rest of the tale. She got tired of her new love, and he wasn’t a Portuguese, but an Indian, or partly, and his name was D’Ailey, Daly the people called it here. On one voyage she told John Shute about him and he marooned him on a lonely island in the South Seas—tied up to a great, great stone image of a god, burning hot in the tropic sun. He must have been a god of fishes for there was nothing else near that island but monstrous fish.’

  ‘Who told you this?’ demanded Mr Shute. ‘Old Dame Chase, with her lies? I never heard of this before.’

  ‘’Tis the story,’ resumed his wife. ‘The last she saw of him was his bound figure tied tight, tight, to the gaping, grinning idol while she sat on the poop as the ship—the Phoenix—sailed away. He cursed her and called on the idol to let her live till he was avenged on her—he was of the breed, or partly of the breed, that these gods love, and Florence Flannery was afraid, afraid, as she sailed away—’

  ‘Goody Chase in her cups!’ sneered Mr Shute. ‘And what’s the end of your story?’

  ‘There’s no end,’ said the woman sullenly. ‘John Shute cast her off, for the bad luck that clogged him, and what became of her I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s an ugly tale and a stupid tale,’ grumbled Daniel Shute with a groan as he surveyed the bleak chill weather beyond the lattice panes. ‘Get down and see what’s to eat in the house and what’s to drink in the cellar, and if that rogue Tregaskis is there send him up to me.’

  Mrs Shute rose and pulled fiercely at the long wool-embroidered bell-rope so that the rusty bell jangled violently.

  ‘What’ll you do when the wine is all drunk and the boon companions have cleared out your pockets?’ she asked wildly. ‘Do your own errands, Mr Shute.’

  He flung out of bed with’ a pretty London oath, and she remained huddled in the chair while he dressed and after he had left her, wringing her hands now and then and wailing under her breath, till Dame Chase came up with a posset and helped her to dress. The sight of her dishevelled trunks restored some of Mrs Shute’s spirits; she pulled out with relish her furbelows and flounces, displaying to Goody Chase’s amazed admiration the last fashions of Paris and London, mingling her display with fond reminiscences of gilded triumphs.

  ‘Maybe you’d be surprised to learn that Mr Shute isn’t my first husband,’ she said, tossing her head.

  The fat old woman winked.

  ‘I’d be more surprised, m’lady, to learn he was your last.’

  Mrs Shute laughed grossly, but her spirits soon fell; kneeling on the floor with her tumbled finery in her lap, she stared out through the window on which her name was written at the tossing bare boughs, the chill sky, the dry flutter of the last leaves.

  ‘I’ll never get away,’ she said mournfully, ‘the place bodes me no good. I’ve had the malaria in me time, Mrs Chase, in one of those cursed Italian swamps and it affected me memory; there’s much I can’t place together and much I recall brokenly—dreams and fevers, Mrs Chase.’

  ‘The drink, m’lady.’

  ‘No,’ returned the kneeling woman fiercely. ‘Wasn’t the drink taken to drown those dreams and fevers? I wish I could tell you half I know—there’s many a
fine tale in me head, but when I begin to speak it goes!’

  She began to rock to and fro, lamenting.

  ‘To think of the fine times I’ve had with likely young men drinking me health in me slipper and the little cabriolet in Paris and the walks in the Prater outside Vienna. So pleasant you would hardly believe!’

  ‘You’ll settle down, m’lady, like women do.’

  Indeed, Mrs Shute seemed to make some attempt at ‘settling down’; there was something piteous in the despairing energy with which she set to work to make her life tolerable; there was a suite of rooms lined with faded watered green silk that she took for her own and had cleaned and furnished with what she could gather from the rest of the house—old gilt commodes and rococo chairs and threadbare panels of tapestries and chipped vases of Saxe or Luneville, one or two pastel portraits that the damp had stained, together with some tawdry trifles she had brought in her own baggage.

  She employed Mr Tregaskis to sell her big diamond in Plymouth and bought pale blue satin hangings for her bedroom and spotted muslin for her bed, a carpet wreathed with roses, a gaudy dressing-table and phials of perfume, opopanax, frangipane, musk, potent, searing, to dissipate, she said, the odours of must and mildew.

  Arranging these crude splendours was her sole occupation. There were no neighbours in the lonely valley and Mr Shute fell into melancholy and solitary drinking; he hung on to this existence as just more tolerable than a debtor’s prison, but the fury with which he met his fate expressed itself in curses awful to hear. Such part of the estate as still belonged to him he treated with complex contempt; Mr Tregaskis continued to supervise some rough farming and the man Paley worked in the garden; taciturn, solitary and sullen, he made an ill impression on Mr Shute, yet he cost nothing and did some labour, as carrying up the firewood to the house and clearing away some of the thickets and dying weeds and vast clumps of nettles and docks.

  Mrs Shute met him for the first time by the carp pond; she was tricked out in a white satin pelisse edged with fur and a big bonnet, and wandered forlornly in the neglected paths. Paley was sitting on the edge of the carp pond, looking intently into the murky depths.

  ‘I’m the new mistress,’ said Mrs Shute, ‘and I’ll thank you to keep better order in the place.’

  Paley looked up at her with his pale eyes.

  ‘Shute Court isn’t what it was,’ he said, ‘there is a lot of work to do.’

  ‘You seem to spend a power of time by the pond,’ she replied. ‘What are you here for?’

  ‘I’m waiting for something,’ he said. ‘I’m putting in time, Mrs Shute.’

  ‘A sailor, I hear?’ she said curiously, for the draggled nondescript man in his greenish-black clothes was difficult to place; he had a peculiar look of being boneless, without shoulders or hips, one slope slipping into another as if there was no framework under his flabby flesh.

  ‘I’ve been at sea,’ he answered, ‘like yourself, Mrs Shute.’

  She laughed coarsely.

  ‘I would I were at sea again,’ she replied; ‘this is horror to me.’

  ‘Why do you stay?’

  ‘I’m wondering. It seems that I can’t get away, the same as I couldn’t help coming,’ a wail came into her voice. ‘Must I wait till Mr Shute has drunk himself to death?’

  The wind blew sharp across the pond, cutting little waver, in the placid surface, and she who had been Florence Flannery shuddered in the bite of it and turned away and went muttering up the path to the desolate house.

  Her husband was in the dirty parlour playing at bezique with Mr Tregaskis and she flared in upon them.

  ‘Why don’t you get rid of that man Paley? I hate him. He does no work—Mrs Chase told me that he always sits by the carp pond and today I saw him—ugh!’

  ‘Paley’s all right, Mrs Shute,’ replied Tregaskis, ‘he does more work than you think.’

  ‘Why does he stay?’

  ‘He’s waiting for a ship that’s soon due in Plymouth.’

  ‘Send him off,’ insisted Mrs Shute. ‘Isn’t the place melancholic enough without you having that sitting about?’

  Her distaste and disgust of the man seemed to amount to a panic, and her husband, whose courage was snapped by the drink, was infected by her fear.

  ‘When did this fellow come?’ he demanded.

  ‘About a week before you did. He’d tramped up from Plymouth.’

  ‘We’ve only his word for that,’ replied Mr Shute with drunken cunning; ‘maybe he’s a Bow Street runner sent by one of those damned creditors! You’re right, Flo, I don’t like the wretch—he’s watching me, split him! I’ll send him off.’

  Mr Tregaskis shrugged as Daniel Shute staggered from his chair.

  ‘The man’s harmless, sir; half-witted if you like, but useful.’

  Still Mr Shute dragged on his greatcoat with the capes and followed his wife out into the grey garden.

  The carp pond was not near the house, and by the time that they had reached it a dull twilight had fallen in the cold heavy air.

  The great trees were quite bare now and flung a black tracing of forlorn branches against the bleak evening sky; patches and clumps of dead weeds obstructed every path and alley; by the carp pond showed the faint outline of a blind statue crumbling beneath the weight of dead mosses.

  Paley was not there.

  ‘He’ll be in his hut,’ said Mr Shute, ‘sleeping or spying—the ugly old devil. I’ll send him off.’

  The dead oyster white of Mrs Shute’s pelisse gleamed oddly as she followed her husband through the crackling undergrowth.

  There, in the thickening twilight, they found the hut, a queer arrangement of wattles cunningly interwoven in which there was no furniture whatever, nothing but a bare protection from the wind and weather.

  Paley was not there.

  ‘I’ll find him,’ muttered Mr Shute, ‘if I have to stay out all night.’

  For his half-intoxicated mind had fixed on this stranger as the symbol of all his misfortunes and perhaps the avenger of all his vices.

  His wife turned back, for her pelisse was being caught on the undergrowth; she went moodily towards the carp pond.

  A moment later a sharp shriek from her brought Mr Shute plunging back to her side. She was standing in a queer bent attitude, pointing with a shaking plump hand to the murky depths of the pond.

  ‘The wretch! He’s drowned himself!’ she screamed.

  Mr Shute’s worn-out nerves reacted to her ignoble panic; he clutched her arm as he gazed in the direction of her finger; there was something dark in the shallower side of the pond, something large and dark, with pale flat eyes that glittered malevolently.

  ‘Paley!’ gasped Mr Shute.

  He bent closer in amazed horror, then broke into tremulous laughter.

  ‘’Tis a fish,’ he declared; ‘one of the old carp.’

  Mrs Shute indeed now perceived that the monstrous creature in the water was a fish; she could make out the wide gaping jaw, tall spines shadowing in the murk, and a mottled skin of deadly yellow and dingy white.

  ‘It’s looking at me,’ she gasped. ‘Kill it, kill it, the loathsome wretch!’

  ‘It’s—it’s—too big,’ stammered Mr Shute, but he picked up a stone to hurl; the huge fish, as if aware of his intentions, slipped away into the murky depths of the pond, leaving a sluggish ripple on the surface.

  Daniel Shute now found his courage.

  ‘Nothing but an old carp,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll have the thing caught.’

  Mrs Shute began to weep and wring her hands. Her husband dragged her roughly towards the house, left her there, took a lantern, and accompanied now by Mr Tregaskis returned in search of Paley.

  This time they found him sitting in his usual place by the side of the pond. Mr Shute had now changed his mind about sending him away; he had a muddled idea that he would like the pond watched, and who was to do this if not Paley?

  ‘Look here, my man,’ he said, ‘there’s a great carp in thi
s pond—a very big, black old carp.’

  ‘They live for hundreds of years,’ said Paley. ‘But this isn’t a carp.’

  ‘You know about it, then?’ demanded Mr Shute.

  ‘I know about it.’

  ‘Well, I want you to catch it—kill it. Watch till you do. I loathe it—ugh!’

  ‘Watch the pond?’ protested MrTregaskis, who held the lantern and was chilled and irritable. ‘Damme, esquire, what can the thing do? It can’t leave the water.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ muttered Mr Shute, ‘promise you that.’

  ‘You’re drunk,’ said the other coarsely.

  But Mr Shute insisted on his point.

  ‘Watch the pond, Paley, watch it day and night till you get that fish.’

  ‘I’ll watch,’ answered Paley, never moving from his huddled position.

  The two men went back to the desolate house. When Mr Shute at last staggered upstairs he found his wife with half a dozen candles lit, crouching under the tawdry muslin curtains with which she had disfigured the big bed.

  She clutched a rosary that she was constantly raising to her lips as she muttered ejaculations.

  Mr Shute lurched to the bedside.

  ‘I didn’t know that you were a Papist, Flo,’ he sneered.

  She looked up at him.

  ‘That story’s got me,’ she whispered, ‘the man tied up to the fish god—the curse—and he following her—tracking her down—for three hundred years, till she was hounded back to the old place where they’d loved.’

  Daniel Shute perceived that she had been drinking, and sank into a chair.

  ‘Goody Chase’s gossip,’ he answered, yawning, ‘and that damned ugly fish. I’ve set Paley to catch him—to watch the pond till he does.’

  She looked at him sharply, and appeared relieved.

  ‘Anyhow, what’s it to do with you?’ he continued. ‘You ain’t the jade who left the man on the island!’ He laughed crudely.

  Mrs Shute sank down on her pillows.

  ‘As long as the pond is watched,’ she murmured, ‘I don’t mind.’

  But during the night she tossed and panted in a delirium, talking of great ships with strange merchandise, of lonely islands amid blazing seas, of mighty stone gods rearing up to the heavens, of a man in torture and a curse following a woman who sailed away, till her husband shook her and left her alone, sleeping on a couch in the dreary parlour.