Where Human Pathways End

by Shamus Frazer

  ‘What had he done—before?’ asked Helen with a shiver.

  ‘Robbed a bank that morning and killed one of the cashiers. His girl tipped the police he’d be coming here to wait for her. Got her picture spread all over the front page next morning: she was something to look at too—photogenic . . .’

  ‘She never came back. You never saw her again?’

  ‘Never . . . That swine Dave’s waiting for her still, you know. About a year he’s been waiting—and I expect he’ll be waiting till doomsday. But I can tell you I’ve had enough of him. I’m selling up. Got my hooks on a little place in Kent, out beyond Swanley on the Maidstone Road: lorries mostly. The new bloke will have Dave with the fittings—and good luck to him, I say.’

  It was twenty to one. We did not wait for the end of the performance. Dan seemed to be in a hurry too to clear our table and get back to his basement. As we let ourselves out into the street I glanced back: Dan was hustling with his tray down to the bar: I thought I made out a restless shadow moving in the alcove but this may have been imagination. As the door swung to behind me, it sounded as if the jukebox had started wailing again: I did not stay to make sure. Helen was waiting for me on the corner.

  ‘Oh Charles,’ she said, ‘I pity that girl if ever she comes back,’ and as she took my arm she added, ‘men don’t like being kept waiting. Even you if you had to wait till doomsday might be rather sore . . .’ Her arm trembled against mine, and the joke faltered. ‘If Dave was the end—without end—what is she? Does she carry a broken gramophone record in her head? What thoughts are swarming under that beeskep of dark hair?’

  ‘About some man or other,’ I said. ‘Some other man.’

  The Fifth Mask

  REMEMBER, REMEMBER—the Fifth of November? I only wish it were possible to forget it. But every year at this time one is reminded of what has been, and—of what is to come. The squibs crackle in the fog-shrouded alleys even before October is out; there is the tang of gunpowder in the sharpening air; the frontier incidents of memory, these—the skirmishing before the campaign opens in evil earnest.

  I keep to the highways at this season. But even in the Strand, among the neon lights, one runs into those little grim cortèges out of their rat-holes in the river fog: the cork-blackened faces, the trundled soapbox trolley, with its stiff, bloated guy bulging the tattered suit, the desperado hat pulled down over the eyeless, unwholesome mask; and no matter how quickly one tries to get by, one doesn’t escape that rat squealing chorus, ‘Spare a penny for the old guy, mister . . .’ Like a finger of ice drawn down between the shoulder-blades—that’s how it takes me.

  I hurry past, till the ribaldries flung at my back fall off, and I can pull in my stride and plan how to stop myself thinking.

  Oh, I’ve tried the cinemas—but they’re too dark and there’s muttering and breathing at your back; and even when the lights are turned on, the faces of the strangers banked around you are like . . . like masks . . . waiting for the dark, if you see what I mean. So it’s usually a pub. Luckily I found this one. I was whacked. All the way along, that chant: ‘Remember, remember . . . spare a penny for the old guy.’ Then at the corner here . . . just beyond the frosted window there with the goat and the pair of stilts on it—there was a kid standing in a mask; he didn’t say anything . . . but when I came by he made as if to take it off—his mask I mean. So I turned in here . . . to be out of the way.

  Tumbled in, you say? Well, I tripped over the mat certainly, if that’s what you mean. Daft sort of place to put a mat.

  Nerves? Well, there’s something in that, too—but there’s nothing without a reason. That’s what’s so frightening—just why it should have happened to me; and if there’s a reason there, mind you, I don’t want to know it.

  Why should I have been picked on—a mere child? Robin Truby and I couldn’t have been more than ten if we were that much when . . . this incident I’d hoped to get out of my mind long since . . . took place.

  No, let me stand this one. Two double whiskies, miss. The gentleman’s paid, eh? It’s kind, very kind—but no cause; the fall shook me up a bit, but I’m all right now. The whisky helps and someone with patience to understand.

  Robin? Robin’s dead now. At Normandy it was: one of those phosphorus bombs he was carrying, touched off by a bullet —burning with the phosphorous in his guts. You couldn’t put it out: like one of those guys they stuff with fireworks, they couldn’t get near him. There’s only me left: for the time being, that is. . . .

  We were friends as kids, our parents living next door, see. At Failing this was, in Darkshire. I’m from the North, though you perhaps wouldn’t guess it: what with the war and living down here since, I’ve changed. A citizen of no abiding city, that’s me—and all of us, if it comes to that. But there’s something real about the place you’ve lived in as a child.

  You’ve never visited Failing, I take it? Well, there’s not much to see: it’s not as if it were London or anything. Industrial, you know: smoke-blackened chapels, and row upon row of yellow-brick houses under blue slate roofs. My folk and Robin Truby’s lived cheek by jowl, as the saying has it, in one of these rows—and we were always in and out of each other’s houses, or scrambling over the wall that shut off the backyards. Robin was a one for mischief: red hair he had, and a way with it. Robin Hood we called him, and I was Friar Tuck, because I was a well-built lad and on account of my glasses.

  Yes, I know: you’ll be asking yourself what this has got to do with what I’ve to talk about—guy, Fifth of November and all? I’m coming to it in my own time, sir—if time is ever our own, that is, and not lent to us, all cut to different lengths as it were. I worked in a draper’s once, and . . . but that’s not what I’ve got to make up my mind to tell.

  We used to save for the Fifth—Robin and I: save up the pennies and lay in a store of Burmese lights, and bangers, star rockets, Roman candles, Catherine wheels and such, but mostly it was bangers. And for weeks we’d be pestering our dads for an old hat, a pair of trousers with the patch on the seat worn through, a coat with the elbows out—anything that would do for the old guy. We’d get togged up, too, the last few nights . . . in masks . . . and go cadging coppers if we hadn’t enough by then: but in a distant part of the town, where we wouldn’t be run into by folks we knew. If it had got home what we were doing, we’d have been given a hiding we’d have remembered all our lives. It was respectable the district Robin and I lived in, and the worst crime we could commit was behaving like common boys might be expected to behave. That’s why we put on those masks . . . so we shouldn’t be recognised if a neighbour was to pass.

  We bought them at a little newsagent’s called Horrobin, where sometimes we’d get a penn’orth of aniseed balls or liquorice sweets when out for a walk this way, to or from the Town Fields. Robin chose a death’s-head, greeny white; and mine was a nigger’s the time I’m speaking of, liquorice black with red eyeballs; a nigger demon’s you might describe it. We put them on outside, and mark this—I had to take my specs off to fit it to the face, and then put them on again over the mask and all so as I could see my way, being short-sighted. Robin did look a sight, grisly, with his red hair sitting up like flames atop that green hollow skull-face.

  ‘Here, stick your hat on,’ I said; and we pulled on the old felt hats with the feather in the band that we’d brought with us. They held the masks more firm to our heads: soft cardboard or a kind of paper-mash they were, with a funny smell to them, sickly.

  We had settled to cross the Town Fields to a part where there was a new housing estate—working-class with shops, a cinema and everything—raised on the old war-time 1914–18 aerodrome. There was no one to know us that side, and we reckoned it would be dark before we came to it.

  The Town Fields in Failing have been turned into recreation space now—tennis-courts, cricket pavilion, that kind of thing; but at the time I’m speaking of they were under the plough. Often Robin and me would play stalking Indians in the corn there—till one day the
farmer caught us at it. But by November of course the corn was gone; I can’t recollect what was growing there unless some yellowing stalks and stumps of mangel-wurzel.

  It was foggy—not thick but moving in swirls. We kept to the top of the fields. There’s a wide path there, with seats set out and gas-lamps; set on a ridge, with big villas behind stone walls and tarred-wood fencing one side of it, and their gardens gloomy with tall trees and shrubberies, and the fields dipping below it the other side in a slow wide curve like they were the sea; a real treasure trail for conkers that path in the early autumn—though after . . . after what happened I never cared to visit it again.

  It was late afternoon but not dark when Robin and I took our way along this path. We passed the lamplighter with his long pole; but he was early that afternoon, and in the pale dusk the chain of lighted gas-lamps he’d left behind him gave more of noise than light, a hissing and plopping as if they were trying to tell you something.

  We’d almost got to the stile that led to a footpath cutting down half a mile or more to the bottom of the fields—we weren’t in a hurry, mind you—we’d been along there in the dark before, and we’d got our battery flashlights in our pockets; but, speaking for myself, when that voice called to us my first impulse was to scramble over the stile and run and run until I dropped. It was a thin voice and high, and somehow cold, very cold. I’d got my leg over the stile, but in my fright I slipped and fell off. Robin pulled me to my feet again.

  ‘Who was it?’ I gasped. ‘Who was it spoke just now?’

  ‘Don’t be a mutt, Fred Tucker. It’s only a lady. She doesn’t know us,’ he whispered. ‘She may be good for a tanner if we try it on—winsome like.’

  ‘A Death, a little Death—and are there two?’ the thin voice continued. ‘Is Death that small boy’s mate? . . . No, I see—a little negro, a Nubian, Death’s Ethiopian slave. . . . ’

  She was sitting in the middle of one of those seats I’ve spoken of; fussy iron painted a dark crimson, that must have been put there the same time as the gas-lamps were set up when the Widow Queen sat at Windsor in crinolines. She was thin as her voice, dressed all in black, a kind of black straw bonnet with a purple velvet ribbon nodding on her head; there was a stucco wall behind her, patched and discoloured as a gravestone, and the ghosts of winter trees rising above and losing themselves in the twilight. I got as big a fright to see her as when I’d first heard her voice—and I’d have bolted but for Robin’s grip on my arm. ‘Come on!’ he said, and pinching me as if he’d have me join in with him, called out in a kind of wheedling sing-song: ‘Spare a penny, lady, for the old guy?’ ‘Which old guy?’ she said with a chuckle that set your teeth on edge. ‘I only see two young ones, but my eyes are not as good as they were . . . in the dark!’ She beckoned us with a long hooked forefinger, white as a leper’s: ‘Come closer . . . closer . . . until I can see the whites of your eyes. . . . Then we can fire away at one another more effectively. . . .’

  I would have hung back, but Robin had hold of my wrist and pushed me along ahead of him until we stood a couple of paces in front of her—near enough for her to catch hold of me if she’d have leant forward suddenly.

  Robin took the collecting tin from under his coat and jangled it: we’d put a few ha-pence in before we set out so it would make a good noise: ‘Spare a penny for the old guy, lady.’

  ‘So I’m to stand and deliver, am I? My money or my life? Perhaps both, Master Death, eh?’ She took up a horrible black net bag from her lap—like the nets they peg out in a rabbit warren when they’re ferreting, only darker and more of it—and her fingers worked at the mouth of it in a kind of weaving way, like long white worms, a kind of maggoty movement in the blackness. ‘But you must unmask first—or you’ll be getting money under false pretences. Now which shall I choose to unmask first?’ She pointed a wriggling white finger at us, ‘Eenie, meenie, mina mo! Catch a nigger by his toe. . . .’ The finger jabbed stiff, pointed at my heart. ‘Take it off,’ she ordered. ‘Remove that mask, child, and——’

  I fumbled with my spectacles: it was as if I were hypnotised into it. I took them off. I took off my hat, and at the last I pulled off the nigger mask.

  ‘And it’s just as I fancied,’ she added. ‘A whey-faced boy. His mask is black, but oh, his soul is white. A pudding face and a lily liver.’ Her finger crooked back like a snake, and struck out at Robin’s chest. ‘Next boy!’ she said.

  I could hear Robin’s troubled breathing as he pulled off his hat and eased the mask elastic over his head. ‘It’s worth a copper, missus,’ he said, and I’d never heard his tone so uneasy.

  ‘Copper?’ she said. ‘And it’s a bright, new-minted copper, boy, too! Master Death is pink as Cupid, and his head is a torch brazier to warm the hands at; even my hands might thaw with that head for a muff. . . .’ It was as if she were speaking to herself; but suddenly she leant forward and stretched out her hands. ‘Give me the masks,’ she said, ‘and I’ll show you a trick, shall I? . . . An optical illusion, if you like long words.’

  She’d snatched them from us before we knew what she would be at, and was sitting back with the masks caught like moths in a spider’s web among that black stuff she was wearing. Her fingers worked again at the bag in her lap, and she took out a couple of pennies. They were black Victorian pennies, and she handed us over one apiece. Mine was ice cold, and the ‘tails’ side was green with a kind of mould like verdigris.

  ‘Now place them on my eyes,’ she said. ‘Press them in hard. You needn’t be afraid of hurting me.’ Neither of us moved.

  ‘Give them to me then.’ We surrendered the pennies in silence, and she pressed them into her eyes. In that pale thin face they looked like sockets from which the eyes had fallen in dust. ‘And now the masks. . . .’

  She covered her face first with my nigger mask, and it was as though her face had fallen off leaving only darkness and nothing; or like the black cloth they cover a murderer’s face with on the trapdoor—I’d nightmares after seeing that once in a slot machine in Blackpool. It made me shiver to see her—though I couldn’t see her well, my glasses being still in my fingers since I’d taken off the mask.

  She picked up Robin’s mask next and put it on over mine—and the blackness in the sockets where the pennies were was like . . . well, though the words came to me years later, it was them I was groping for . . . like eternal night, sir.

  ‘And now, children,’ her voice sounded muffled and thinner than ever under the masks, ‘find the pennies.’

  ‘Go on, Friar Tuck,’ said Robin. ‘Don’t be a fraidy custard. Don’t stand there like a dumb loony. The lady wants you to take off the mask.’

  Very gingerly I reached out my hand to the mask: it seemed to fall off of its own accord into my fingers. I stood and stared fuzzily while Robin, encouraged by my success, reached out for the second mask.

  Two masks came away in his hands—and dropped on to the lady’s knees. I heard Robin whimpering, and felt my throat go withered at what I looked at. One of the masks that lay upwards on her lap was the lady’s face . . . the thin high-cheekboned face with the red line of the mouth now looked up at me vacantly from her knees.

  I thought it was something to do with my eyesight being weak; and automatically as it were I fumbled on the mask I was holding and the glasses on top of it.

  Then I began whimpering, too. The lady had a different face—a dreadful scarred sunken thing with the flesh of the nose eaten with decay.

  ‘Stop blubbering!’ Her voice was sharp and cold as ever. ‘Why shouldn’t I wear masks, too—on the Fifth of November? Did I blubber and cry when two little monsters came up to me out of the fog? You’d think if this was my face I had had some terrible accident, wouldn’t you? Or perhaps I was marked with a fearful disease, eh? But you can stop whimpering: it’s only a mask. And if it wasn’t—well, accidents on this dark earth are all part of a Design, you know—and that disease, well it’s an epidemic as common as the cold, isn’t it, Master Death?’


  We heard the words, but the meaning didn’t come till later, years later: I’m not sure I’ve caught it, the meaning that is, even now. But the sound of her voice seemed to lull us into a kind of trance. We’d stopped wailing—but I heard somebody’s teeth chattering, and couldn’t be sure they weren’t my own.

  ‘You’ve not found the pennies yet. Now, who’s going to take this mask off? . . . Eenie, meenie, mina, mo. Catch a . . .’ She stopped, and though the black empty eyes showed no sign of life, one knew that she was looking at someone else, someone standing a little behind us. It may have been the lift of that hideous mask—something, a new alertness in the thin body perhaps—that made me glance over my shoulder. ‘Another boy?’ she said. ‘Another dear little child to watch my trick with the pennies. Well, I’ve quite an audience now: a flock, a congregation. Come nearer, child.’

  At first I thought he was wearing a mask, too, this newcomer —his face was so white and his eyes stared so. He was a boy a year or two younger than Robin and me; fair hair he had and neatly brushed, and a neat grey overcoat and grey stockings. He had in one hand a linen bag which held his dancing-pumps, for you could see a patent-leather toe stuck out at the top. He had been coming back from a dancing class or some kid’s party across the Town Fields. Perhaps he lived in one of the big villas whose lights we’d seen winking back there beyond the foggy garden trees.

  He was not the kind of boy Robin or I cared for at ordinary times; if we’d met him alone we’d have teased him, thrown his shiny shoes among the mangel-wurzels and told him to get his hands dirty looking for them. ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy?’ we’d have mocked at him (there wasn’t ‘cissy’ in the dictionary in those days), and pushed him about, rubbed mud in his hair, had our bit of fun out of him. But now . . . I can’t speak for Robin, but for myself I was glad of his coming, and pitiful, too. I wanted to warn him; I wanted to say: ‘Run, lad, run as fast as you can before she pins you here as she’s pinned me and my friend. Run and bring help!’ But all I could get out was a croaking ‘Hallo, kid.’ I tried to sound friendly out of gratitude that we were no longer alone.