Seven Strange Stories

by Rebecca Lloyd

  ‘But earlier you were so adamant that I was not to go back there, Richard.’

  I felt shivery with irritation and nerves and I knew that if she questioned me further, I’d snap. ‘The situation is now entirely different,’ I said. ‘I suspect the others are still waiting in the drawing room for my terrified return. I don’t suppose they imagined that I might be ingenious enough to lure their ghost away to the garden, do you?’ I turned sharply as I spoke and headed towards the house along the other path past the nasturtiums. She followed me and if she spoke to me again, I didn’t hear her as there was a savage roaring in my ears. I’d estimated that I might have spent somewhere in the region of fifty pounds for the spread Celia and I had laid on for her funeral. ‘Just follow quietly behind me,’ I said, as we reached the back door, ‘no talking.’

  ***

  I hesitated before opening the spare room door, and turned to look into Diane’s face as the thought came to me again that she might be innocent of the prank. ‘You do know what is in this room, don’t you, Diane?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course I do, I’ve stayed in there before as you very well know. Bed, wicker chair table and bookcase.’

  I opened the door and ushered her firmly in by her elbow. ‘And your coffin,’ I declared.

  And there it was; a light beech wood coffin sitting on the floor in the centre of the room with discreet silver handles and hinges. ‘Climb back into it,’ I said, and I think she could tell by the tone of my voice that I wasn’t going to tolerate any shilly-shallying on her part.

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Richard! How dare you! Are you quite mad?’

  I took a moment or two to work out what to say to her next. I began slowly and in a half whisper. ‘At eleven o’clock this morning, along with those who are drinking my whiskey in my drawing room right now, I gazed at you as you lay in that coffin. Celia and I had agreed that your coffin be kept with us overnight, and you were brought into the house in the evening whilst I was still travelling back from London. Then Celia and I spent the night in the room across the landing and she was weeping desperately about your death for a good part of the night I should tell you.’

  ‘I’m dead?’

  ‘Well, I was supposed to think so, yes. But you’re not are you?’ I reached over and poked her sharply on her fleshy arm a couple of times.

  ‘Ow! Richard, please stop it,’ she said, ‘you’re frightening me. What is the matter with you? I’m going to find Celia.’ She began to back away from me towards the door.

  ‘I’m going to find Celia,’ I mimicked and advanced.

  She put her hands up to her throat as I came towards her and stared wildly at me as if she was a rabbit startled suddenly by the lights of a passing automobile. I did grab her roughly, I admit that, but there was nothing frail about Diane Clarke, nothing at all. After that the events are a little confused so you’re simply going to have to imagine them.

  ***

  I stayed in the spare room until it began to get dark, and then when I did go downstairs, I stood outside the drawing room door for a while listening to my friends and my wife chortling and gabbling away to each other.

  ‘Where on earth did you get to Richard?’ Celia asked as I walked in, ‘you’ve been gone a whole hour, did you go to the North Pole for the ice?’

  ‘Good of you to think of it,’ Dickie added, ‘but ice from the kitchen would have been just as suitable.’

  Several of the women had that silly look they get when drink is involved. The room was a complete fug with all the cigarette smoke. Patricia William’s rope-coloured hair was springing out from beneath her absurd hat, and the Robinson woman who I still maintain looks like a gargoyle, had a streak of puce coloured lipstick trailing from the corner of her thin mouth. The men were a disgrace as well; jackets flung off, ties askew, faces bright red and eyes darting and piggy. ‘Ah, the ice!’ I said, hoping my voice sounded much as it always did. ‘So sorry; I went out for some fresh air you know, and it looks as if all of you would benefit from the same; it’s awfully smoky in here. On my way back, I went upstairs to look once more at our dear little dead friend. She’s still there, you know.’

  ‘Oh, how kind of you Richard,’ my wife said, ‘it would’ve been nice if you’d shown the same consideration towards her when she was alive.’

  I looked straight at her face and at Dickie’s who was standing behind her, and I laughed. But for the third time that day something was desperately odd, because not one of them laughed with me. Since our group had been together, all manner of practical jokes had been played, I told you about the one with the basket of puppies earlier—and the wasps’ nest in the picnic hamper two summers ago, and the time when we got those women’s knickers, but this one was dragging on for an inordinately long time.

  Margery Hancock’s pencilled-in eyebrows were raised higher than I’d ever seen them even during a tense game of Bridge. She came towards me and pressed her hand down firmly on my arm. ‘Richard, grief has all manner of expressions and none of them are wrong. Laughing is as valid as crying. We all know how fond you and Celia were of the little mite, and we’re dreadfully sorry about it. It was such a shock. But we knew hardly anything abouther, did we? And Agnew and I were just saying that perhaps there was a disease in the family that can account for their . . . absence, and perhaps she finally succumbed to it herself. When the cause of death is not known as in her case, it just means someone medical missed something.’

  ‘Did you rehearse that speech, Margery?’ I asked, shaking her hand off me.

  The room became very silent. ‘Perhaps we should all go upstairs again for one last look at her,’ I suggested. ‘What do you say?’ I laughed again. ‘You told me the funeral chaps were coming here at six to collect the coffin, Dickie, so look slippy; time is getting on.’

  Once more I was taken aback at their attitude; for surely it was now that they should confess. Instead, they put down their glasses, stubbed out their cigarettes and came forward with sombre expressions.

  I led the way upstairs.

  ***

  'Look, Richard, you have nothing to feel guilty about. If anything, it should be me who feels guilty for neglecting you like I did when Diane was alive.’

  ‘I must say you did spend rather a lot of time with her, Celia. And I believe her interest in you was unnatural.’

  ‘I’m well aware that you were having those kind of rather unpleasant thoughts at the time, but even so, isn’t it a bit extreme to claim you killed Diane Clarke yourself?’

  We were in the local tea shop and so we were having to talk very quietly indeed. I glanced down at my hands, as I had a wont to do since that day in the spare room with Diane. I’d seized her and thrown her onto the bed and held her arms down with my knees.

  ‘I can only say this one more time, Celia. I spent the best part of half an hour outside with Diane Clarke while you were all drinking to drown your sorrows or whatever the expression is.’

  Celia laughed and then leaned forward and whispered, ‘and then you enticed her back upstairs and killed her anyway?’

  ‘More or less. It didn’t take long. Suffocated her then burnt the spare room pillow a few days later as I couldn’t stand the idea of what it had been party to.’

  ‘That at least I’m willing to believe because I saw you burning something at the bottom of the garden. So you’re not going to see Doctor Worsted you say?’ she asked once more.

  At the time I was quite adamant that I would not come to see you, Doctor Worsted, although Celia would already have told you that. I informed her as I had done many times before that there was nothing wrong with my mind, and I still maintain it.

  Then she said, ‘Well that’s what you jolly well say, but everyone else thinks your nerves are completely shot and that’s why we haven’t seen any of our crowd for the last month. We haven’t even had a Bridge invitation lately, or hadn’t you noticed?’

  ‘I hadn’t as it happens,’ I told her.

  ‘No—too busy with your ne
w hobby.’

  ‘It’s not a hobby. Crosswords and jigsaws and Morris dancing are hobbies,’ I said. ‘I am simply interested in certain medical conditions.’

  ‘Catawauly,’ Celia hissed, and put her teacup down rather sharply onto its saucer.

  ‘Catalepsy. How many times do I have to tell you?’

  I sometimes think it would’ve been better if Diane had been a ghost, because as unpleasant as the idea is, that she could rise from her coffin alive is so terribly peculiar in my opinion. I don’t know what you think about that yourself.

  As I opened the spare room door that afternoon and ushered the crowd in, I was expecting at least some of the women to become hysterical at the sight of Diane’s body in the coffin and I imagined Dickie Ingrams taking charge and kneeling down to inspect her closely. He’d snap his fingers in the way he does and ask for one of the women’s powder compacts—for the mirror—then he’d check Diane’s breath and find her actually dead. But instead they stood around the coffin sombrely and respectfully, glancing at me surreptitiously from time to time until one of the men spoke out. ‘Look here, isn’t this a little grizzly? We’ve already paid our respects to the deceased. I say we should wait downstairs for the funeral company, they’ll be arriving before long.’

  Celia claims I blacked out quite suddenly and fell down next to the coffin. I don’t remember that in the slightest. I don’t know if it’s possible for the brain to cease to function for a while, is it? Because that’s how I felt when it dawned on me that no joke had been played on me at all; Diane Clarke had been put in the coffin alive and then I’d gone straight ahead and killed her anyway. The hearse pulled up outside the house at a few minutes past six and four funeral men slid out and came to the front door. I was watching through the bathroom window; I’d gone up there and locked myself in to be away from our crowd. Celia and Dickie dealt with the business.

  Soon after I killed that woman, I began to lose interest in quite a number of activities I’d been attached to previously. Motoring ceased to fascinate me as did tandem rides with Celia in the summer. Sea bathing seemed futile—besides I always have found jellyfish to be singularly repulsive—and I discovered that I couldn’t concentrate while visiting theatres or art galleries. My wife began to attend Bridge parties without me and our house was seldom graced with visitors any longer. Much of the time I was laid up with nervous prostration and so by mutual agreement Celia and I began living in different parts of the house. When I was able to get out and about, I spent my time taking long walks down those same lanes that Diane and Celia were so fond of.

  The dream that I have described to you in parts, if indeed it is a dream, didn’t begin immediately after the frightful day of Diane’s real death, but a few months later. I am loitering by my glasshouses. It is evening and the garden is rolling in mist. I’m aware that Celia is inside the house and will soon be wondering where I am. I’m waiting for someone, excited and repulsed at the same time, it appears that I’m involved in an assignation. Before long, she drifts around the side of the smaller glasshouse and seems to more or less ooze onto the path. There is a shapelessness about her that alarms me, she glistens in parts and her advance towards me is slow, but determined. I can see her face eventually; a flattened oval disc that I recognise as the very same metal drinks tray my father gave me. There are no words or sounds in the dream, but a remorseless kind of terror builds up in me as she approaches. The white garment she’s wearing is becoming longer and changing shape, amoeba-like. Parts of it seem to be crawling up the side of the glasshouse as she advances, other bits waver about; seeking me in the way a leech might do. Then, as if there was not enough whiteness, it begins to snow, but it is feathers that float from the sky. That at least is what happens in the dream originally, but it has begun to change horribly, and if anything, it’s the change which has brought me to you, although I don’t suppose there is any realistic prospect of you being able to help me in the slightest.

  LITTLE BLACK EYES AND TINY HANDS

  Ernesto suspected that when his grandfather called his older brother, Sergio, a true Cavallero, it had something to do with the branch of the Cavallero family living in Palermo and who were—he told them, although neither believed it—bankers and merchants.

  Yet, when the boys asked questions about them, the old man would not be drawn. He could be as funny as anything when he was not in a bad temper, and they didn’t think he was secretive by nature, but on two subjects, that of the Cavalleros of Palermo, and of what happened in Cefalù when he was a young man, he couldn’t be made to speak more than a few tantalising sentences at a time. It had occurred to Ernesto more than once that Grandfather did it deliberately to provoke or control them, just as he did when he reminded them that it was his house they were living in . . . meaning they’d better behave themselves properly, or else.

  The house was half-way up the steep hill that rises behind Cefalù, not directly under La Rocca, but on one of the curves of land that lead towards the great rock. When a group of the Cavalleros moved out of the city of Palermo some generations back, they settled to farming oranges and goats in small holdings below the great rock. It was in one of these small holdings, close to the local school, that Sergio and Ernesto lived with their mother and grandfather. In fact, Ernesto and his brother were allowed to attend school for free because Grandfather supplied the thirty-five pupils and the nuns who taught them with goat’s milk and white cheese.

  One of the few brotherly occupations Sergio and Ernesto shared together, as they were so different from each other in many respects, was trying to guess what Grandfather meant when he mentioned certain things.

  ‘Why is it that you’re a true Cavallero and I am not?’ Ernesto asked one evening when they’d gone down to the orange grove to get out of the house.

  ‘I think Nonno just means I stand my ground, Ernesto.’

  ‘Which means he thinks I don’t,’ Ernesto stated, ‘because he never says I’m a true Cavallero.’

  Sergio shrugged. ‘That’s because you’re not.’

  ‘I suppose it must be because I’m only eight.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t, silly.’

  ‘Then do you think it’s because I don’t fight people?’

  ‘Yes, maybe, and other stuff.’

  ‘What other stuff?’

  ‘How you talk about things no one else around here is interested in, and because you do those drawings.’

  ‘Mamma says there’s nothing wrong with drawing buildings.’

  ‘Yes, but you know Nonno doesn’t like anything he thinks is weird.’

  ‘I think it’s weird how you keep fighting Antonio Puglisi just because his family doesn’t like our family,’ Ernesto said.

  ‘You’re too young to understand it, Ernesto. It’s about history and honour.’

  Antonio Puglisi was Sergio’s sworn enemy, but luckily for Ernesto, while his brother was at school the enemy boy never glanced in his direction, yet Ernesto knew everything about him there was to know from the stories Sergio told. He knew what Antonio said to his teacher each day, the number of children he had frightened or hurt, the things he had destroyed, and even what his mother had given him for lunch sometimes.

  While Sergio described the clever ways in which he’d outdone the Puglisi kid over the supper table, Grandfather would watch him with his eyes shining and twinkly. ‘Learn from your brother, for Sergio is a true Cavallero,’ he told Ernesto so many times that it became sickening to him. And the more the old man said it, the more Ernesto hoped that one day he’d be able to move far away from the Cavallero family and the boring neighbourhood in which they lived outside Cefalù.

  In the year Ernesto turned nine, there came a particular Sunday when he was left alone with his grandfather, as Sergio had gone with their mother to wait for the fishermen to come back. Ernesto was in such a foul mood that even the sound of the church bells could not comfort him. He was tired of his low status in Grandfather’s eyes and he shouted out his frustrations at
him: ‘Why should I care if those kids call me Stone Boy, Nonno?’

  Grandfather stared at him. ‘Because it’s a very strange thing to be called,’ he answered.

  ‘It doesn’t bother me. When I grow up, I want to make enormous buildings, bigger than anyone has ever seen, so perhaps Stone Boy is a good name to have.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you even know what to call a man who does that work, do you?’

  ‘No, but I don’t care.’

  ‘Do you want to be a builder, like Pietro Lanza?’

  ‘No, Nonno, I want to get builders to make what I draw.’

  ‘You want to be an architect, Ernesto.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes. An architect designs buildings and does drawings like you do on paper. But you’d lose all the drawings and plans, wouldn’t you? You’d lose your pencil and your paper and everything else. Besides, that’s just a silly dream, boy. Sergio will need you here on the farm when I’m dead.

  Ernesto stood up, shivering with frustration, and watched while his grandfather fumbled for his tobacco. ‘When I’m grown up I won’t stay in this boring place a second longer than I have to!’ he shouted.

  ‘It wasn’t always boring here. It was once thought of as dangerous,’ Grandfather whispered.

  Ernesto had been about to run from the room and take his seething anger with him down to the bottom of the orange grove, and with it his shame, for he did admire his grandfather and he hated it when the old man saw him charged up. But the thought of his town being a dangerous place, stopped him, and that had been Grandfather’s intention, of course. He’d hinted at the idea of the neighbourhood being dangerous before, but now the boy sensed that if he was clever about it, he might be able to trick him into giving some detail. ‘I don’t believe you; dangerous when?’ he asked.

  ‘Around 1920.’