Jules stepped forward quickly and touched the muscular stooping back. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘That’s no statue. . . . It’s a man, Pierre—a petrified man!’
I was beside him, and could see now clearly the tatters of shirt and breeches which still clung to the marble limbs. A knotted silk scarf with the knot at the back was tied about the lower part of the head, as if it had once been employed to gag or blindfold this man of stone: for marble he was, cold marble as I found when, shuddering, I put out a hand to touch among the dusty rags that half concealed it the left shoulder.
‘Here, bring up those lanterns,’ cried Jules in Arabic; and he added, ‘we shall need light indeed to clarify this mystery. What is it, Pierre, that can turn a man to stone, as if he’d been steeped for months in one of those petrifying wells you find in the Bas-Pyrenées, and yet does not petrify his clothes?’
‘Perhaps they dressed him up again after . . . after petrifaction,’ I said.
‘Stand here and hold your lanterns so,’ said Jules to the Arabs. ‘I want to get round to the front, and I want to avoid barking my shin on these tumbled stones. Give me a hand, Pierre.’
I leant across the tumble of masonry and steadied Jules while he balanced himself on it beneath the narrow doorway and tore the wisps of silk from the marble face. I had guessed already whose face we should see, but it was the expression it wore that drew from us the same instant the shocked cry: ‘Great God! It can’t be . . . Edward Monsell!’
They were the bearded English features with which we had been long familiar, the face that in the pompous nineteenth century photograph looks out from the frontispiece of Monsell’s last book; but here in stone it was contorted in an expression of obscene—of positively drooling—infatuation: the eyes stared muzzily, a leer wrinkled the pale beard-scored cheeks, and the marble lips parted it seemed in a snarl of lust disclosed the tongue curled on the utterance of its last word. In an Italian museum somewhere I have seen a sculptured Pan or Silenus with just such an expression of avid eroticism as now we looked on.
‘He was mad, Pierre!’ Jules began. ‘They drove him mad before . . .’
‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘he was diabolically in love. As an amorist, Jules, surely you recognise that look?’
Something flashed among the stones at Jules’s feet, a sudden dull wink of fire: I shone my torch between the barrier and Monsell’s pathetic boots, and it flashed again and I saw what the object was.
‘Careful, Jules!’ I said. ‘Don’t step forward, a moment.’ I stooped down between Monsell’s knees and the barricade and picked up the glass. It was an oval Victorian shaving-glass, ivory-framed and mounted on a short brass stand. In that instant as I wiped the dust from the glass I knew horrifyingly the shape of the Enemy: I knew just why Monsell had blindfolded himself, just why he had carried with him this shaving-glass, and just what he had been about when the accident happened and he became stone.
There was movement and a clanking in the darkness beyond the doorway, and I shrieked ‘Don’t look round, Jules. For Christ’s sake, don’t look round!’ and in Arabic to the others, ‘Run for your lives!’
But Jules had heard the movement behind him, and turned. ‘Aren’t we becoming . . .’ he began, flashing his torch into the gloom over the barricade. I shut my eyes as he gave one dreadful stony scream, ‘Pierre!’; and I knew that it was not my name he shrieked, and that too late he also had understood.
I had Monsell’s shaving-glass in my hand, and when I looked in it I saw Jules, frozen and motionless in the pylon doorway. The lighted torch still clutched in his stone fingers illuminated the chamber beyond; and in the glass I could make out dimly what that cell contained. Something, someone was chained up in there: I saw the huddled shape and the glare of the smoky yellow eyes. It was trying to hide its face under a veil of heaving black stuff; feathers or tentacles, I couldn’t at first make out what it was that stirred and tumbled over the dreadful eyes. Then the creature lifted its head, and I saw the dead-white lovely face and the snakes coiling and hissing above the desolate brows.
I cried again in Arabic: ‘Abdullah, get your men away quickly, and do not look round. Remember Lot’s wife, and don’t look back, any of you.’
I heard Abdullah’s voice, calling from a distance: ‘We do not turn our heads, effendi. Are you trapped there in the mouth of Hell?’
‘Not yet. Wait for me in the great temple. I shall be with you, soon. The Professor is lost.’ I pushed past Monsell, and regained the passage. Horror made me look again in the glass, at Jules’s marble profile agape in the pylon doorway, at what lay beyond in the light of his torch. She had sunk her head again and the ghastly yellow eyes were closed. She was chained with many chains to the floor and walls of her cell. But something else was stirring out of the glooms in that chamber, and into the light of the fixed torch-ray there moved another figure: it was slight and slender, and blind eyes of palest blue gleamed under the hissing tangle of its hair. The captive had a child, a whole brood perhaps, a colony of gorgons who unchained might wander the labyrinth of passages and the ruined city outside.
I did not stay longer, but stumbled away along the tunnel. Where the petrified bats hung from the ceiling one of the Arabs waited patiently for me with his lantern. When I came up to him I realised he waited there for all time, his lantern burning out in the cold locked hand. I heard an indescribable moaning chuckle behind me, and lifting Monsell’s glass again to my eyes I thought I saw two white thin arms thrown about Jules’s neck and a darkness coiling and rippling on his shoulder.
I threw the mirror down into the dust and Monsell’s briar after it, and with my fingers to my ears I ran yelling down the passage, yelling at the top of my lungs so that I might hear no longer that hellish love-call at my back.
We dynamited the entrance of the rock-temple and sealed the gap effectively. I did not stay to dig out the ‘statues’ in the Acropolis.
What king of Khorassim, I wondered, had brought the creature here—and why? Of course it would have been as a secret weapon: one glare from those immortal yellow eyes to petrify his enemies. Had she been brought out with hooded head and led by blindfolded guards on days of judgement in the Acropolis? But like so many secret weapons, I reflected, this one must have gone hideously wrong. One day she escaped and there was panic in Khorassim as she wandered moaning through its streets. Later she was recaptured and chained. But how much later? What was the fate of the rest of Monsell’s party, and had he perhaps conspired with her against them? All these questions and half-answers ran in my head as we moved in the glow of the sunset over the sand mounds of the dead city.
I did not think of Jules. I could not think of him with regret or pity. He was luckier than I. When I looked into Monsell’s glass I think it was my heart that became stone. I have told you I can never again feel love for any woman. I shall die a bachelor. I also have nightmares. I am walking again those passages cut in the red sandstone, and I am filled with a pitiful—curiosity. It is something more than an archaeologist’s curiosity: I am excited and terribly afraid.
It was night-time before we reached the head of the defile. The ruins of Khorassim lay below us in the moonlight like the bones of a monstrous animal that had crawled across the desert, and into this valley, to die.
Obituary
IT WAS THE QUIET ambition of Simon Chataway-Bliss to be thought tough.
Simon was one of those young men who drift from Oxford into journalism—adventurous tiddlers who have exchanged the pond for the mill race. Everything around him seemed accelerated, but his own progress seemed to Simon not fast enough. He longed to ape the journalists of the screen, muscular yeggs with chins, who could gate-crash any place from a millionaire’s love nest to the condemned cell. Just now he was caught up in a backwater while the rush and swirl of Fleet Street passed by him. But the day was not distant, Simon told himself, when his own name would be coupled with that most aptly named of London Streets—the street of tough yeggs who were always putting
one over on time. ‘Chataway-Bliss of Fleet Street’—the words pattered well—‘Fleet Street’s Chataway-Bliss’, star reporter of the Daily Extreme, ‘whose scoops include . . .’; thus Simon, dreamy-eyed over a maltshake in his favourite milk-bar.
Unfortunately his news-editor did not see eye to eye with Simon as to his potentialities as a yegg. He sent him to flower shows and funerals because Bliss was knowledgeable about horticulture (at least he had known how to spell bougainvillaea for a crossword once) and because he had a nice discreet style for obituaries. Simon’s editor called him Bliss—plain Bliss—but with a depth of intonation that no elaboration of invective could improve.
It was a perfect pre-war August and nobody was in London. Simon’s editor, who was in London, was tired of seeing his news columns turned into a sort of ‘Who’s where’ for more fortunate fellow beings. Murderers, cat-burglars, and the naughty nieces of peers seemed all on holiday; there was no news in England at all. The Continent too was sunk in siesta: even the dictators appeared to have relaxed. The picture pages of the Daily Extreme were full of bathing beauties, and exhausted polar bears. It was that sort of summer, and the current of Fleet Street had dried to a trickle.
‘I liked your article on the hippopotamuses in Regent’s Park, Bliss. A very bright little article.’
‘Thank you, Mr Tonks.’
‘But it won’t do, see. There was Sutcliffe’s sea lion story and Hiscock’s polar bears last Friday. This is a newspaper, Bliss, not a menagerie bill.’
‘Quite. But you did say the Zoo.’
‘Yes? . . . Now see here, Bliss, if a story won’t break it’s up to us to make one. Something’s got to be resurrected. . . . Let’s see, it’s about this time fifteen years back the big Horrobin scandal broke.’
‘Horrobin?’
‘Before your time. A financial shark: he got ten years. Look up the files, Bliss.’
‘Aitch?’
‘Yes, aitch, Bliss, aitch for Horrobin.’
When the files were brought Mr Tonks said, ‘Looks promising. . . . Horrobin released from Scrubs, September ’31. Now living in strict retirement with Mrs Horrobin at Chawcote. Crusoe stuff. Visitors discouraged. There may be a story there, Bliss. Look up trains to Chawcote.’
Simon turned over the pages of Bradshawe with fingers clumsy with excitement. Visitors discouraged: surely a happier opportunity for a display of his talents than flower shows or funerals or hippopotami.
Chawcote was a dreary little village encircled by forest. There had been no vehicle at the station and Simon had to walk. It was very hot, and his city shoes were soon leprous with dust. There were few people about. The Man and Bundle Inn seemed to have been locked up for all time. The village was dozing frowsily in the heat, and over its cluster of red pantiles the prickeared tower of an early Gothic church kept sultry watch like a slumberous grey cat on a checkered hearthrug. At a corner of the square opposite the Inn there was a shop window displaying a sad clutter of scrubbing brushes, tin kettles, and jars of boiled sweets. A board above the window proclaimed in outmoded lettering of faded gilt ‘MATTHEW PINBODY—GENERAL STORES’. Simon decided to pursue enquiries here.
A startlingly loud bell clanged above his head as Simon entered the shop; and Mr Pinbody, in a monstrous celluloid collar, came clicking through the bead curtains the next instant, and with palms resting on the counter was asking Simon in a voice muffled by moustache what he could do for him, sir. Simon mentioned the Daily Extreme and the Horrobins. Mr Pinbody was very ready to be of assistance to a gentleman of the Press, but there wasn’t much known about the Horrobins hereabouts. They kept themselves to themselves, said Mr Pinbody. Did they live in the big house which Simon had noticed from the train? No, the big house had been closed these fifteen years: they lived in the woods behind the house. Could Mr Pinbody be more explicit? Mr Pinbody couldn’t say exactly where they lived; a mile on in the woods, maybe, but he had orders to deliver a case of goods—tea, salt, and such—twice a year at the gate leading to the woods. If the gentleman were to follow the lane that led up behind the house he’d find the gate. The gentleman might find the Horrobins peculiar. They’d had a lot of trouble to bear, said Mr Pinbody.
The bell jangled frenziedly overhead as Simon went out.
Simon pushed his way through breast-high bracken. It was close and stifling and very still in the woods. Once a pheasant rising at his feet with its clockwork cry made his heart race unpleasantly. But save for this and the persistent buzzing of the flies—a lilliputian army screaming in puny indignation at the intrusion of this strange Gulliver—there had been no sound of life. Simon took out his pocket handkerchief and flapped at the flies, but his exertions served only to raise further insects from the bracken—ugly green things the size of bluebottles whose deeper buzzing added to the general shindy. He began to wish himself in Fleet Street again or at a funeral even—anywhere away from these desolate woodlands and the persecution of insects. But he pressed on, stumbling over roots and hidden rabbit holes and flapping vigorously with handkerchief and felt hat at his dark halo of fly.
Suddenly he came upon a small clearing. There was a tumbledown log shack here, and squatting outside it two tattered and cadaverous figures: a woman, grey-haired and filthy, skinning a rabbit before the smouldering greenwood fire, and a lean, tangle-bearded old man, sharpening an axe with a whetstone.
Simon stepped into the clearing and remarked brightly: ‘Mr and Mrs Horrobin, I presume?’
‘Yes, we’re the Horrobins. What do you want with us?’
Her voice was cultured, but she spoke very slowly with a peculiar hesitation, picking at her words: it was as though, Simon reflected, she had not spoken with anyone for many years.
The old man said nothing: he had lowered his axe and was staring now at Simon, now at the woman—not moving his head, but his eyes only. The eyes beneath their shaggy brows were a very pale blue.
Simon introduced himself as Chataway-Bliss of the Daily Extreme, Chataway-Bliss of Fleet Street: he added that Fleet Street seemed a very long way away.
The woman smiled, showing broken yellow teeth.
‘It is,’ she said, ‘a very long way indeed.’
The man picked up his axe again, and went on sharpening it.
Simon said: ‘I suppose you don’t get many visitors here?’
‘One or two. We had a very nice clergyman once . . . three years ago, perhaps five: one loses count of time here. He came to ask about our souls, you know.’ She slipped her tongue over her cracked lips. ‘But he was very nice, wasn’t he dear?’
The man nodded: the stone continued to sing along the bright edge of steel.
‘Our readers aren’t very interested in souls, I’m afraid,’ said Simon. ‘They want facts, the more incredible the better. If you don’t mind my saying so they’ll lap up a story like yours. Back to nature and all that. . . . It must be rather jolly.’
‘It would be all right I suppose but for rabbit.’ She motioned towards the half-skinned carcase on the ground. ‘Always rabbit. Our cats bring them in. We’ve four lovely cats. We’ve trained them to hunt for us, but they will bring in rabbit. It gets monotonous.’
‘I suppose it does,’ said Simon lamely, ‘but there are compensations. No income tax worries, what? No rates or lighting bills? A lot of people, if they had the courage, would be glad to escape like you from our spoon-fed civilisation.’
‘Oh, it can be amusing.’ Suddenly she tittered. ‘Do you know I played at the Gaiety once?’
Simon fumbled for his notebook. ‘Gaiety Girl yields all for love,’ he scribbled. ‘Ex-convict Recluse’s Rabbit Dietary.’
‘Yes, Flossie Kane of the Gaiety. That was me. Some people may remember the name.’ The momentary spark of vivacity had died. She spoke dully.
‘This is most interesting,’ said Simon. ‘This will make a grand story, if I may say so. You don’t mind if I ask you certain questions of . . . of human interest? Our readers would be very grateful.’
‘They asked him the questions the other time.’ She indicated the man with a gesture of her head. ‘He doesn’t care for questions.’
‘No . . . then if you don’t mind . . . ’
‘Later, when we’ve had supper. Of course you’ll stay and grace our humble board? And now perhaps you would like to see over our little house?’ She spoke slyly, not looking at Simon but at the man.
‘I should be charmed,’ said Simon, ‘if you’re sure it’s no bother.’
‘No bother. . . . No bother at all, is it dear?’ She led the way to the hut, then stood aside to let Simon enter first.
Simon hesitated on the threshold. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ The reek from the hut was not reassuring.
‘Smoke? But of course. It’s quite usual, I believe.’
Simon lit a cigarette and groped with the lighted match in the dark interior. The floor seemed littered with the remains of meals. A cat hissed at him from the shadows.
There was a dark object hanging from a nail on the wall: in the last spurt of the match Simon identified it as a black shovel hat, mouldy with age. He turned for the fresh air, stooping under the low lintel.
It was as he was straightening himself that Simon saw a flash of steel in the sunlight: he heard the woman’s laughter in that slow moment, and a sound of splintering bone, and nothing after.
‘He’s not as nice as the clergyman, is he dear?’
‘No. The curate was exceptional. This reporter fellow’s tough.’
‘Still, he’s better than rabbit?’
‘Yes, he’s better than rabbit.’
Simon Chataway-Bliss could not have composed for himself a neater obituary.
Where Human Pathways End Page 13
