‘Are you saying chickens attacked the boy?’
Virginia poked her long finger into Eric’s ribs. ‘Tell her what you told me,’ she said.
‘You do know what those marks are, Mrs Pantun, don’t you?’
‘Yes, only Eric says it isn’t the others doing it.’
‘Others—children, you mean?’ I turned to Eric, but he ducked his head and wouldn’t look at me. ‘Eric, please tell me what’s been going on.’
‘You’ll only say I’m a liar.’
‘I promise I won’t. Show me those marks again.’
He looked at his mother. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Miss Barker isn’t from Lower Seeping. She’s not like other people here. She’s more like a doctor.’
Eric took his jacket off and handed it to Virginia. Underneath he had a tee-shirt on, and I could see that his arm was covered in bites all the way from his wrist to his shoulder. I was sickened by the sight of it.
‘Maybe you need some time off work,’ I suggested, for something to say.
‘I can work,’ he answered loudly. ‘I want to stay at the farm, but I’m scared. I like going to Bilesworth on the bus and taking the eggs to the wholefood shop. They’re nice to me in there and it smells goodly.’
‘So, will you come with us?’ Virginia asked. ‘If we’re careful, the Chicken Man won’t see us because of what his windows are covered in and never been washed, but Eric says he comes outside sometimes and stands about watching him work, so we’ll still have to be careful.’
I turned to the boy. ‘You want this to stop, don’t you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I would be stupid if I didn’t.’
‘Then give me a name, Eric,’ I said, ‘and we’ll find the mother and talk to her.’
‘Those chickens don’t have names, and I don’t know about what is a mother to them.’
‘I’m talking about the kid who’s doing this, Eric.’
‘If it was a kid, I’d have squashed him, Miss Barker,’ he answered, ‘flat. Probably killed him outright.’
I had work to do and I’d set myself a deadline for the day, and now I knew I wasn’t going to meet it.
Virginia leant forward across the table. ‘I want to see the chicken responsible,’ she said, clenching her fist.
A sharp sensation passed through me, half disquiet and half terrible sadness for these two. They were a reminder that there were still pockets of primitive isolation and ignorance in the country. ‘Eric, go and sit outside for a while so I can talk to your mum by myself.’
I watched him shuffle out, and when I turned back to Virginia, she was weeping silently, and the tears on her cheeks were large and rapidly falling. ‘He’s a good boy, he can’t help what he knows,’ she whispered.
‘Those are human bite marks, Mrs Pantun, and Eric mentioned something about the post office earlier on,’ I said. ‘Tell me about that.’
Virginia wiped her cheeks on her sleeves and sat up straighter. ‘At first he thought it really was Mavis Clore because the chicken looks like her when it bites him.’
Quite suddenly, and from nowhere I recognised, I found myself struggling not to laugh. I stood up and went to the French windows so that I could get my face under control, and as I stared out at her son, who stood kicking at something on the lawn, Virginia said, ‘If I go alone, the Chicken Man might see me and drive me away. He wouldn’t do that if you were there, Miss Barker, because people around here are afraid of you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re educated, is one thing.’
‘Why else?’
‘Because they’ve seen you in the back meadow when the light fades, standing doing nothing, and they think it’s peculiar.’
‘Okay,’ I replied, turning around to face her. ‘Let’s go to the chicken farm this very minute.
The plan was not to disturb the Chicken Man in his bungalow, but to walk quietly past into the wretched dusty enclosure behind the property. To my way of thinking, if we did what Eric wanted in the first instance, later on he might be persuaded to tell us which child had bitten him.
The Chicken Man’s bungalow was down the bottom of a badly rutted and overgrown lane that nobody else used. Towards its end, the lane curved to the left, and as you rounded the bend you came face to face with the fawn-coloured bungalow perched like a cardboard box on a patch of land slightly higher than the lane itself.
The Pantuns were walking behind me in single file, Eric at the back. They’d been whistling in unison all the way there and I could tell they were very nervous.
As we drew close, Virginia said, ‘He can still see through the front windows, and he might be looking out. We have to go through the farm into the nettles at the back by the apple tree and up to that hanging off gate.’
One of Eric’s jobs was to feed the chickens, as there wasn’t a scrap of vegetation or anything they could eat as they free-ranged on the hard red clay of the godforsaken farm. As we stepped into the enclosure, it seemed as if from nowhere a huge and terrifying swarm of skinny white chickens appeared and made their way towards us, a few of the intrepid and healthier-looking ones attempting to take to the air to reach us first. The noise they made was close to indescribable—a terrible overwrought screeching with a ferocious breathless wheezing and clucking beneath. I stepped quickly behind Eric and pulled his mother close to me. Within seconds we were surrounded by the creatures, and when I looked down into their thousands of faces and their expectant beady eyes, blue and watery for the most part, I began to feel suffocated and nauseous. I thought of scales, and lice, and claws, and warmth, and foetid things, and air choked with feathers that you couldn’t breathe in.
‘I’ve got to get pellets from that falling-over shed,’ Eric shouted over the noise. ‘You and Ma can stay over by the fence.’
As Eric shuffled through the chickens towards the shed, Virginia and I re-positioned ourselves against the fence posts. I realised I’d been holding my breath as the white bobbing mass of hysterical creatures moved further away in pursuit of the boy.
We watched Eric disappear into the shed and come out again pushing what looked to me like a child’s pram from the 1950s, full of chicken feed. When he reached somewhere near the centre of the enclosure, he threw scoopfuls of pellets first in one direction and then in another, and the chicken mass split into factions and began feeding frantically, stopping only briefly to scratch and peck at rivals.
I glanced at Virginia who was squinting hard at the scene before us, and in that instant, while my attention was diverted, Eric shouted loudly and his mother raised her hand and pointed. ‘I saw it!’ she called out. ‘I saw the thing; it rose up and bit him before he could do anything.’
Without thinking further, I followed as Eric’s mother began moving towards him through the chickens whose terrible noise had abated slightly. When we reached the boy, he held up his arm in triumph and there was a fresh bite-mark, the skin around it red and hurt-looking.
‘So which animal are you saying did that?’ I asked.
Eric looked hard at the chickens closest to us, peering into one face and then another and shaking his head as he did so. ‘It’s made itself hidden, he said. ‘I wish he wouldn’t think about her all the time.’
‘Who think about who Eric?’
‘The Chicken Man, I mean.’
I looked towards the bungalow. The back windows were covered in a white smeary substance, so it would’ve been difficult for the Chicken Man to spot us, as Virginia had said. ‘Who is he thinking about, Eric?’ I asked.
‘His wife who is dead.’
I turned to Virginia. ‘Mavis Clore’s twin sister,’ she explained.
I turned to Virginia. "Mavis Clore's twin sister," she explained.
Of course, although I hadn’t been looking at the moment Eric was attacked, it was obvious that he must have done it to himself. I’d hoped his mother and I could work this out together, but now it appeared she was colluding with her son, and I didn’t know quite where that left me. At any rate, we didn�
�t have to search for a little villain in Lower Seeping as the cause of it any longer.
Virginia and I walked back into the village, leaving Eric to finish his job. I could hardly bring myself to speak to the woman, but the silence became so weighty that I had to say something. ‘Didn’t the Chicken Man’s wife have curtains in that bungalow while she was alive?’ I asked.
‘There are curtains still, she said, ‘but since Gloria died, he doesn’t use them; the chicken shit all over the windows is good enough for him.’
‘Yes, but that stuff was on the inside of the windows, wasn’t it?’
‘The rest of the chickens, his favourites, live inside with him. That’s why he’s called the Chicken Man. The postman says there’s not a scrap of room left in there, the whole bungalow is all chicken now.’
I’d seen the Chicken Man from time to time in Lower Seeping. He was one of those lumbering men who appear in the countryside more often than in the city, the kind who seem fully grown except that their wrists and hands have an undeveloped, child-like look to them. ‘When did Gloria die?’ I asked.
‘About two years ago. Everyone in Lower Seeping went to the funeral, even us.’
‘Your son knew Gloria when she was alive, then?’
‘No. She never ever came out of the chicken farm. Eric never did meet her.’
We were approaching the Pantuns’ Nissen hut, and as we got there, Virginia stopped. ‘You could come in, maybe—or maybe not?’
I hesitated, but I was now intrigued by the pair of them, and by what they hoped to gain by their story. I wondered if the whole thing was the beginning of some kind of scam to hustle money out of me.
There were vigorous nettles growing up the curving corrugated iron walls of the hut and as the day had been hot, the warmth in the walls caused the nettle leaves to relinquish their soporific smell.
‘Excuse the mess,’ Virginia said as she led the way inside. ‘I’ve got some elderflower wine, Miss Barker. Will you sit over there and I’ll get it.’
I headed for the lime green sofa and watched my feet as I went; the whole of the floor was covered in overlapping black plastic garbage bags. There were two old sheets, one brown and one white, hanging on a couple of strips of washing line, and as I inspected the arrangement more closely, while Virginia rooted around in an old cupboard, I realised that the Pantuns had screened off two separate areas with the sheets. As she returned with glasses of pale liquid, Virginia caught me examining the arrangement. ‘His is the brown room and mine is the white one,’ she offered, handing me a glass.
‘We didn’t achieve much this morning, did we? Because you say you saw the chicken bite Eric, but it was just at the moment I happened not to be looking,’ I said. ‘So, can you describe that chicken to me, Mrs Pantun?’
She opened her arms wide and flapped her hands up and down as if imitating a bird trying to rise from the ground. ‘I only saw the back of it and its wings out, and the way it latched onto Eric’s arm in a kind of huddle before it fell back into the whiteness below.’
‘Did you see its head?’
Virginia sat down opposite me on an ancient-looking chair covered in black varnish, and crossed her ankles. ‘No, and now I feel bad that I asked you to help us. But we thought you might have powers.’
I stared at her. ‘What?’
‘I mean you being still as a stone in the back meadow at night, people here wonder about that a lot. Eric and I thought you’d be able to make the chicken stop doing it.’
I felt the same strong need to laugh as I had earlier that day. Instead I grinned, and I could see she mistook it for friendliness. ‘You mean you wanted me to talk to the chicken?’
‘Yes,’ Virginia said, tilting her head and squinting at me, as if puzzled by my question.
‘Does nobody in Lower Seeping know what I do in the meadow at night?’ She shook her head, and looked a little frightened. ‘I’ve told enough people here. I research fireflies. They’re rare these days, that meadow is one of the last places you can find them. I’m recording their numbers.’
‘Oh, the little Lamp Men! I love them. In the old days there used to be thousands along the verges of the back road. You could almost see your way home by their light if you’d been out late.’
‘So you see, I’m not a witch, Mrs Pantun, and I can’t talk to chickens. What do you suggest we do now about your son and what he’s up to?’
Virginia thought for a moment. ‘The thing I told him yesterday, except I can’t afford it.’ Now we were getting to it; she wanted money. ‘I said I’d buy him a padded jacket from Bilesworth. I saw one in the market there. With a jacket like that his arm would be protected.’
‘Even if I could speak to chickens, it wouldn’t make any difference, because Eric, as you know, is biting his own arm,’ I announced, more loudly than I should have.
Virginia had been in the process of reaching across to fill my glass, but stopped, and gently lowered the plastic bottle to the floor beside her chair as her terrible eyes widened, and a strange greenish flush crept up her neck and into her cheeks. ‘You think we’re liars?’ She stood up, and the bottle flopped over and spilt its contents. She ignored it. I began to be afraid, but I wasn’t going to back off now. ‘Why would my boy hurt his own self? He’s burdened enough as it is by what he has to lay his eyes upon. You should leave now, Miss Barker. If he comes home and you accuse him, it won’t turn out well.’
I didn’t imagine the Pantuns would come near me again after I’d called Virginia’s bluff, but barely two weeks later they were staring over the beech hedge again as I was working on my stats in the dining room. Eric was wearing a hoodie thing. A big storm was brewing on that day, and the whole sky had turned purple and flecky-yellow and roiling, and the wind had become ferocious and in all directions at once, and booming, too. They were getting drenched out there; I opened the French windows and waved at them.
As they stepped inside, Virginia reached up and pulled Eric’s hood off his head. On his cheek was a deep bite mark that stood out dramatically on his narrow pale face. ‘It got his face this time,’ she whispered. ‘He wasn’t quick enough.’
‘I have some of those biscuits you like,’ I said, keeping my voice steady-sounding. The Pantuns had been behind me as we’d walked to the chicken farm that day; at some point, Virginia would’ve been able to make the fresh bite mark Eric had shown us at the time on his arm, just as she would have been able to bite the boy’s cheek before they turned up at my cottage just now. I couldn’t look at them as we went through to the kitchen, and it was only when they were eating biscuits and drinking tea that I let myself look at Virginia’s teeth. ‘I saw those padded jackets in Bilesworth,’ I said, after a while. ‘I’m happy to give you the money to buy one, Mrs Pantun, since you think that will stop the attacks.’
Eric shook his head. ‘It’s too hot to wear a jacket like that,’ he said. ‘If you don’t know how to stop her biting me, then—’ he shrugged, ‘—I’ll have to leave the farm.’
‘I wish I did know how to stop her biting you,’ I said, looking straight at Virginia’s slightly whiskery chin; and, as quickly as you can imagine, she caught my drift, and again a flush of green appeared on her neck and spread along one side of her face.
She stood up and the chair scraped on the flagstones. ‘Give me your arm, boy,’ she said, and reaching down, took her son’s forearm and bit into it hard enough to make him scream. I found my heart had started to bang fast against my ribs as she thrust his arm towards me. The indentations she’d made were different from the ones on his face; that’s what she meant me to know.
‘You bugger, Ma!’ Eric said, as tears of pain formed in his eyes. ‘Why d’you do that?’
‘Because of what Miss Barker was thinking,’ she said, staring down at me. ‘Eric was talking about Gloria biting him, not about me. Tell Miss Barker about the Pantun burden, son.’
The boy looked startled and panicky. ‘We’re not supposed to say about that, Ma. Grand-da said the Pan
tun burden was just for family.’
‘This is different. You’ve never been attacked before. We need your egg money, Eric; we can’t do without it.’ Virginia sat down again and began to weep quietly, but I didn’t dare put my hand out to comfort her.
Eric reached for another biscuit, and then changed his mind and frowned at me. ‘Ma says the chicken that looks like the post office woman will be Gloria Clore, because that was the name of the Chicken Man’s wife who died. When people around here die, I can make them . . . happen again. We don’t tell anybody, though.’
‘But people here know something anyway,’ Virginia said. ‘Eric doesn’t mean to be like a bridge for them, but some of the Pantuns have always been cursed that way. I had an aunty who was the same, and the boy with stumpy legs who Granddad killed was like that too.’
‘We dare-dent speak to the Chicken Man about what his wife is doing, cause he might get riled up and fire me for upsetting her.’
‘It’s Gloria’s job he’s taken, you see,’ Virginia said. ‘She used to feed the chickens and collect the eggs herself, and that’s why she’s biting my boy.’
‘Eric,’ I said in my softest voice. ‘A chicken’s beak couldn’t make those marks.’
‘Gloria has lips and teeth,’ he whispered back, pulling his hood up over his head and trying to hide his face.
I felt shaky and nauseous. ‘It’s a chicken with a human head, then,’ I stated.
‘Yes,’ the Pantuns said together.
‘A bit smaller than a person’s head, she’s got,’ Eric added.
I felt a sudden and peculiar sensation, as if I was beginning to develop a fever and yet at the same time I felt very cold. As I could no longer look at either of the Pantuns directly, I turned my head to stare out of the window at the terrible sky and the heavy clouds, criss-crossed with telegraph wires from which all the starlings had long gone.
‘When Eric first told me about her coming at him like that, I made him stand at the back of the post office and watch Mavis working,’ Virginia was saying, ‘and when he came out again, he said the face was much the same. That’s how I knewed it must be Gloria that bites him.’
Seven Strange Stories Page 14
