The door of the summerhouse was ajar. I looked inside. The roll of netting and the Thing I had hidden in it were gone. The dusty little room seemed very empty, yawning with the vacancy of moonlight; and I stood a moment puzzling at this emptiness, before I recalled that when I had last been here the two great painted heads had gazed gorily on me from the now naked corners of bleached panelling the moonlight and my torch beam played on.
I moved into the shrubberies, flashing my torch into the glooms. There was no one about. I plunged down the bank into the sunken walk under the tunnel of beech trees. Moonlight gleamed fitfully here, filtering in long trickles through gaps in the foliage and lying in pools along the path and the bare-earth banks.
The Beech Walk led into the park and eventually thickened out into ‘the Woods’, a copse or windshield along the northern edge of the park. As I approached the woods I saw the glow of a fire through the trees, and I began to set my features into the mould of sternness and severity which the circumstances seemed to demand even of a tyro schoolmaster.
I flicked off my torch, and moving away from the path, made a detour round that lurid point of fire so that I should come in from a side where the trees were thickest. The chanting of treble voices and the thudding of makeshift drums covered the sounds of my approach. Even when I emerged into the clearing where the fire blazed no one appeared to hear or to notice me.
There were about twenty of them, naked ash-daubed little boys squatting in a semi-circle about a bonfire. I was within ten yards of the fire, and I leant against a tree and pondered whether I should now blow a loud blast on my whistle and shout with terrible jocularity ‘Half Time!’
Most of those who squatted, swaying to their chant, had their backs to me; but facing me, withdrawn some way on higher ground the further side of the fire, were three vast still figures. ‘They have made a third head,’ I told myself uneasily, ‘and they have repainted the faces of the other two.’ The drummers knelt either side of the Cyclops figures and were pounding away on a rusted oil drum and what appeared to be biscuit tins. On the rising ground between the fire and the three painted figures lay a long black object which at first I could not identify.
Very suddenly the chanting and the beating of drums stopped. There was a kind of sigh, like an echo of that obscene sighing in my dream only softer, and one of the painted cyclops swayed forward until it stood above that black thing on the ground. The black thing wriggled and gave a muffled cry. The cyclops raised a long stick whittled at one end to a point, sharp as a spearhead; and I yelled at the top of my voice ‘Drop it!’ and ran out into the firelight. There was a long harsh shriek which broke into demoniac gobbling: the spear had jabbed wide of its mark and stuck quivering in the earth. The three cyclops figures turned and made off clumsily among the trees.
I had run through the semi-circle, skirted the fire, and was moving over to that object on the ground when the utter silence of those children behind me made me turn to look on their faces.
They were asleep: asleep or perhaps in a trance. Most had their eyes closed, and those whose eyes were open stared straight before them with a dreadful sightless fixity. The firelight made the ointment on their sores glisten oddly.
I turned again to the upright spear and the thing that lay stretched beside it. For a nauseating instant I thought I was looking on a charred body: the next moment with infinite relief I had realised it was the old tennis net from the summerhouse pegged out over a stirring body. Through the blackness of the netting I made out two scared eyes, a tousle of fair hair, and the torn strips of pillow linen with which the boy was bound and gagged.
‘It’s all right, Dickie,’ I cried, as I tore at the netting. ‘I’ll have you out of this in a minute.’
It was a long minute, and I was still tugging at the knots that held him when a second wooden spear fell short of us on the edge of the fire, sending up a flurry of sparks. I stood up and faced again the half-ring of sleepwalkers: they seemed frozen in the position in which I had last seen them, some with eyes closed, some staring straight ahead without a blink. Yet when I was stooping over the net a moment ago I had a strange feeling that many eyes were watching me. It was a situation I could not deal with alone. I blew on my whistle again and again, and was glad to hear a not too distant echo. A few of the boys round the fire woke up and began whimpering:
‘What’s happening? . . . Is that Mr Herrick? . . . Where are we? . . . Has there been an air-raid, sir?’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Squat down by the fire and keep warm, and try and keep awake. It’s important, you understand. Don’t let yourselves fall asleep again. Shake the others awake too.’
But even as I shouted to guide Roger to the spot they had taken their places in the semi-circle and fallen asleep again. Little Zuppinger had gone off in a faint and I stood guard over him until Roger came up.
‘It’s a kind of mass hypnosis,’ I told Roger. ‘Get them awake and keep them awake. There’s a pile of pyjamas and dressing-gowns by the trees over there. If you can get them dressed I’ll round up the others. A few have wandered off into the woods.’
They were not far off—three immense figures like giant toadstools under the trees. One jabbed at me with a pointed stick, but I caught at the thin wrist and shook him: the painted head tumbled off his shoulders, and disclosed Felton, blinking, coming to life.
‘What’s wrong, sir? . . . What’s up? What are we doing here, sir?’
The other two cyclops were shambling off among the trees. I caught the nearest by the arm as he made off after his fellow, pulled off the false head, and Bradbury began to wail.
‘What on earth, sir? . . . Hi, Felton you’ve nothing on! What are we doing in the woods?’
I pulled them both out into the firelight, and handed them over to Roger, who was marshalling his group into dressing-gowns.
‘Ah, Felton and Bradbury!’ he said. ‘Well that’s the lot, James.’
‘There’s another in the woods,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring him in.’
‘But all the missing boys are now here. I’ve taken a roll-call. You must help me get them back to school. Zuppinger will have to be carried.’
It was nearing dawn by the time we had got them back to school and to their dormitories. The doctor was sent for, and Roger and Roger’s wife Pamela and Molly Sabine watched by their beds.
I had told Roger what I guessed at, and I added, ‘I’m certain one of them got away into the woods.’
‘But we’ve checked them all in, James. There’s no one missing. . . . Oh I do wish the doctor would hurry. I suppose it was kind of auto-suggestion; as you say, a sort of mass hysteria or hysterically induced hypnosis,’ and he added wearily, ‘I think I must have been caught up in it too. Do you know that as we were bringing them back I . . . I actually thought that the swelling on Winterborn’s neck was an eye. He was stumbling along with his eyes closed, and for an instant I fancied he was looking at me out of his throat. Absurd. But it’s been an exhausting night.’
‘Do you want me to stay on guard here?’
‘No. There are enough of us here. It won’t be long, I expect, before Dr Halliday arrives. You go along and get some sleep.’
‘I’m going out into the park,’ I said, ‘to see if anything has been left behind. And I’ll borrow your gun if I may.’
The air was very close as I walked over the park. The storm that had held off for weeks was approaching at last. Thunder rumbled over the woods, and lightning seemed to make the trees leap forward to meet me. But in the east the sky was growing paler.
My excursion with the gun, like Roger’s earlier one, was a failure. Once I seemed to hear a harsh scream in a clump of trees in the centre of the park, but when I approached it there was nothing to be seen. And then after a long barrage of thunder and a fantastic scrawl of lightning in the north I thought I heard the cyclops scream out of the woods. By the time I had reached the clearing in the woods the darkness had lifted and there was no longer need of my torch. I
beat the woods in a widening circle round the bonfire clearing, and after twenty minutes I had come upon the Cyclops juju.
He was shrunk to his familiar size, fallen among brambles on the boundary of the woods. I picked him up and carried him to the still blazing fire. He tried to cling to my hand with his teeth but I shook him off and flung him into the glowing heart of the bonfire. There was a wild flurry of sparks, and a grating shriek. He writhed an instant among the white hot timber, and I took up one of the wooden spears to poke him back should he manage to wriggle clear of the fire. It was soon over. I watched him burn until he was an incandescent cinder, and I thrust at this cinder with the spear until it broke up into ash.
I got back to the school building just before the rain began in earnest. A few giant drops spattered me as I ran across the paddock; and as I let myself in at the side door the deluge set in with a roar.
In the hall I met Dr Halliday coming downstairs with Roger Edlington.
‘Wonderful!’ the doctor was saying. ‘They’ve all cleared up quite miraculously. Not a mark to be seen except for the little fellow who hurt his tongue, and I don’t believe he had any swelling, did he? . . . It’s wonderful what modern remedies will do.’
None of the boys involved remembered anything of that night. I might have fancied, like Roger, that I had been caught up in a mass hypnosis—if later events had not supplied a postscript to the tale. In the war my troopship was torpedoed in mid-Atlantic, and survivors were put ashore in a foetid harbour town on the West African coast to await the arrival of another convoy. I spent several days there, and in the course of these I found my way into the local museum. In a corner of the Tussaud-styled ‘Hall of Ethnology’ there towered grim and immense the original of Winterborn’s juju. At its feet a printed card explained that this figurehead of a wrecked sailing ship had been for over a hundred years the tribal god of the Walupa people. The Walupas, so I was told by a bar-stool acquaintance, were once notorious cannibals: and ‘Probably’ he added, ‘still are. A friend of mine, a policeman, got on to a case a few years before the war. There was a Walupa witchdoctor . . .’ So I heard again of the raid in which Winterborn’s juju was discovered. The details of that raid and of the things discovered in the hut were enough to give authenticity to my story; but I didn’t tell it just then. It was hardly a bar-room tale.
The Deepest Lady in Singapore
I ONLY MET HER the other night but I can’t get her out of my mind. I’ve got to tell you about her. God knows what’ll happen if I don’t. And if I let her down as Mr Summerskill Morgan did, she has warned me just what to expect. A whole series of men had let her down—even a parson in the end; but they were none of them authors like Summerskill Morgan. I don’t know why it should be worse to be misunderstood by a literary man than by anyone else; but to her it was the culminating tragedy.
As a writer, of course, I can’t hold a candle to Summerskill Morgan, but just because I’ve appeared in print and over the air, she’s chosen me to explain how woefully misunderstood she has been by her husband, her young man, and especially by Mr Morgan.
Our meeting was unconventional even for Singapore. I had been to a party and was driving home in the small hours along Cavanagh Road. There’s a cluster of magnificent raintrees on the corner where it meets the Bukit Timah Road and my headlights picked them out some way off and something white below them. At first I thought it might have been a headstone in the cemetery beyond; but it moved. A few great raindrops splashed on my windscreen and I set my wipers to work. Then I saw her. She was standing on the verge of long grass under the raintrees wearing, it seemed, a long white evening gown.
I slowed up. It is unusual to find a young woman unescorted at two in the morning, thumbing a lift. She was at the window in a moment.
‘I wonder if you’d mind . . .’ she begged—but her words were lost in a great snarl of thunder. I opened the door of the car and she got in.
‘What did you say?’ I shouted above the fury of the rain.
‘Please drive on,’ she answered quickly. ‘I’ll tell you where to turn. It’s rather a long way.’
Her voice was pleasant in a tinkling sort of way, but cold, and somehow frightening. Oh, she was beautiful enough, dark and very pale. Her hair was cut short in the fashion of thirty-five years ago. We used to call it a shingle, I believe. There was something rather odd about her dress too. It was, I noticed, stained with mud at the hem.
The car turned slowly the circumference of Newton Circus and splashed off at her word into a black river of road.
I grew slightly facetious. I do when I’m not at ease.
‘A strange species of hitch-hiking yours,’ I said. ‘Why should you play orphan of the storm at two o’clock in the morning under the raintrees?’
‘A man once let me down, you see,’ she said. ‘So I waited.’
‘And that’s where I came into the picture?’ I asked.
‘Oh, you’ve been there quite a long time. In the picture.’
‘You mean you hung around for someone to turn up?’
‘No. I was waiting for you. I knew you’d come.’
There was even something ominous in her tone. This was ghastly. Perhaps she was a mental case escaped from a hospital ward. Her gown was suspiciously like a nightdress.
‘But this is absurd,’ I said. ‘You don’t even know me.’
‘I do. You’re a writer. And only a writer will do.’
A new hook of fear was fastened in my heart. Not a lunatic, this.
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to do with me. I . . . I’ve never met you before in my life, have I?’
We splashed past a derelict trishaw up to the gunwales in floodwater, as unexpected as a gondola on that sodden deserted road. She let fall a few tinkling drops of laughter.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘But aren’t you just the teeniest bit thrilled to be waylaid by a . . . by a . . .’
‘I’m married,’ I said, shortly.
‘So am I. Or rather, so was I. It doesn’t matter, does it?’
For some minutes after this I sulked, but the steaming of the rain dissolved the mood, and the hypnotic tick and whirr of the windscreen-wiper cleared up the last trickles of my petulance. Curiosity was edging caution out of me.
‘I don’t even know your name,’ I said.
‘Men didn’t worry about that sort of thing in my day,’ she said. ‘Still, if it’s any help, it’s Isobel Gardenrose. The “Isobel” was always mine; the Gardenrose I got from the dentist I inadvertently married. Is that what you want? I was going to tell you all about it in my own good time anyway.’
‘There is no time like the present, dear Mrs Gardenrose.’
‘Call me Isobel, darling. Gardenrose is such a mouthful. You should have seen Alfred’s patients trying to get it out with their faces swollen up like melons.’
‘Alfred’s your husband I take it?’
‘Well, he was my boss to begin with. I was his receptionist. But he proposed, and though he wasn’t much to look at I said “Yes” and we were married in the cathedral by the bishop and a lady’s choir singing away like billy-oh; and then we went off for a honeymoon in Java. Alfred was a good dentist and owned six racehorses, a Mercedes Benz, and a big house near the Botanical Gardens. I took Alfred along not so much as a husband but as a sort of genie of the lamp.’
‘Or Goose that laid the golden eggs?’ I said.
‘Not eggs, darling. Fillings. At first I had only to ask for anything I wanted and Alfred wrote a cheque. But later he began to show quite another side to his character. You can’t think what an old meanie he could be. Things went from bad to worse, so I got to know other men.’
She put out a hand to mine. It was startlingly cold. I shuddered and jerked at the steering wheel. The car skidded slightly and threw up great sprays of water. Isobel sat unconcerned, deep in her thoughts.
‘No. Not here, darling. The turning after next. I’ll tell you when. My first was really quite a sweet boy. Something
in oil, I think.’
‘Like a sardine?’ I said.
‘We fell in a big way. But I had to be careful. If Alfred had suspected there’d have been an end to racehorses, and the Mercedes Benz. Poor Robert didn’t run to that sort of thing. He’d only just joined his firm from England. Well, things couldn’t go on as they had been. So guess what I decided to do?’
‘Murder Alfred?’
‘Exactly. I thought if Alfred could be removed painlessly—the way he removed teeth—the world would be one big Garden of Eden for Robert and me. Swing right here.’
I turned the car into a steep little road vaulted with dark trees.
‘Why are you telling me all this?’ I asked. ‘If it’s true . . .’
‘Oh, it’s true all right. I thought up all sorts of schemes, and at last I found one that seemed quite foolproof. Alfred’s surgery was full of lethal drugs, and I knew where he kept his keys. There was a hypodermic syringe in his cupboard too; and the corks of Alfred’s brandy bottles were rather less thick than many peoples’ skins. Alfred was very fond of brandy. . . . Of course, I decided not to let Robert know until Alfred was successfully out of the way. Men have silly scruples about things like that sometimes.’
‘Women certainly have a greater sense of tidiness,’ I said.
‘Well, I doctored the brandy. I thought it might be as well not to be present at Alfred’s last meal—so I took mine at the club and went to the pictures afterwards. I had in my bag Alfred’s suicide note which I’d got him to write quite ingeniously in a game of “Consequences”: “and the World said: ‘Of unsound mind’.” But when I got home that night Alfred was still alive. I heard him laughing in the rather shrill way he had. I tiptoed to the screen doors and peeped. There was Robert looking rather ill and Alfred plying him with brandy. “Drink that up and you’ll feel better,” he was saying. Robert drank it up and began snoring in a frothy sort of way. Alfred was drinking grapefruit juice himself. When he saw me he said “Hullo, Isobel, my dear. Robert just dropped in tonight and I asked him to share my meal. We were playing ‘Consequences’ when he suddenly went all queer.” We sent for a doctor but Robert, poor sweet, died the same night. At the inquest Robert’s last note was read out in Court: “and he said: ‘It’s a far, far better thing.’ We never spoke about it afterwards. Alfred was just the same old meanie. And I got to know more men. But all the time my heart was bleeding, bleeding for poor Robert. It’s a tragic story, isn’t it? You could make a novel out of it, couldn’t you?’ she asked eagerly.
Where Human Pathways End Page 10
