The Old English Peep Show

by Peter Dickinson

  He found that he’d gone farther than he need along the path toward the folly; he stood and hesitated whether it was worth going to see how carefully the bone-meal machine had been cleaned, but decided that he hadn’t the time. Down the slope, the sun already lay behind the minarets of the pit, making their stilted silhouettes black against the orange bars of fine-weather cloud. Somebody would realize he was missing soon and come and look for him. Miss Finnick might ring Singleton up—she wasn’t exactly predictable, even to herself. Pibble realized that his unnecessary walk up the path, his hesitation, even the way he’d allowed the conversation in the cottage to trail down useless byways, all stemmed from dislike of what he was intending to do. He sighed and started to walk toward the pit, lifting his feet in exaggerated arcs to wade through the dew-dank grass.

  There was a door in the northeast minaret, but it was padlocked with a very good self-locking Chubb and the key was in none of the possible hiding places. He went to the wall and leaned over; the lion was invisible under one of the arches, but the stone tracery down the inside of the tower was as he’d remembered it, almost as climbable as a ladder. He tied the shovel to the handle of the bucket and let the whole contraption down over the edge by the string, until it was just above the level of the lower balustrade; there he started it swinging, out and in, helping each swing with a twitch of his forearm until the pendulum effect carried it well into the archway beneath him and he could pay the string out with a rush. There was a clatter as the shovel clanged onto flagstones, but no movement in the pit.

  Climbing down turned out nothing like as easy as it had looked. After about four feet he came to a bare-seeming place where he could neither see nor feel a foothold. He craned over his shoulder to study the neighboring tower, hoping that its symmetry would give him a guide about which way to reach, but the corner of his eye was attracted by a brownness at the bottom which hadn’t been there before.

  The lion had come silently out and was staring at him, the end of its tail flicking jerkily from side to side. Otherwise it was totally still.

  It watched him with brooding passion while he clutched at a stone lotus as fiercely as if the tower had been a reeling mast; it was a minute before he could return to his study of the other tower and see that by working to his left he would reach a more ornamented section, and another two minutes before he could persuade his hands to let go of the lotus. Only when he was safely over the balustrade and hidden in the darkness of the upper cloister did the lion give a sign—that harsh, breathy, painful bellow which spoke its mad cravings so plainly.

  Pibble had the shakes again, and his back was hurting—probably­ he’d just wrenched Miss Finnick’s plasters out of position in his descent. He stood and gazed dimly at the inside wall, waiting for the shakes to go away and for his eyes to become used to the darkness: the lion must be a fairly recent importation, but the narrowness of the path to the upper door showed that visitors had not come down into the pit even when it had been untenanted. That probably meant the floors were unsafe, and he wanted to be sure of seeing any weakness which might hurtle him down to those yellow fangs and that sandpaper tongue.

  But as his vision seeped back to him he saw that there was a different reason for keeping strangers out. A stone face grinned at him out of the wall; it wore a Johnsonian wig, but otherwise the figure was naked, and so was the stone beldame with whom he was coupling; and both were part of a jungle of writhing limbs, stretched bodies, faces strained into greedy masks or softened into peachy fulfillment. The obscene riot stretched all down this wall and around both corners, out of sight; it must be the longest pornographic frieze in Europe. No doubt old Josiah Clavering, during his nabob years, had seen some temple carvings like those at Ellora and translated the idea to his Tiger Pit; but these were not the perfect circular breasts, the double-jointed hips, the ingeniously varied attitudes of ecstasy of those hundred milkmaids whose eagerness Krishna satisfied simultaneously; still less was any face that rounded, Madonnalike softness in which the Indian sculptors had expressed the sanctities of lust. Here the coarse, vigorous chiselings into the soft stone had limned European bodies busy in the few basic postures of the unsophisticated imagination. And the faces were individual portraits. The carving was not good; it was peasant art of the kind that a few generations earlier had modeled the gargoyles; nowadays the nearest equivalent would be the dingy drawing found in horror comics. But it was a great oddity, scandalously publicizable, far more crowd-compelling than any hero-eating lion, stuffed, could ever be. Pibble was astonished that Mr. Singleton had made nothing of it.

  The frieze continued all down the next side, where stood the mechanism which opened and shut the cage. A big handle drove a cast-iron cog whose teeth engaged with those of a thick vertical bar; this was fastened to the center of the gate, so that by turning the handle you could slide the whole frame upward; or you could disengage the cog from the bar with a crude clutch lever and let the gate fall. There was a circular hole in the middle of the paving through which you could inspect the inside of the cage. He turned the handle a couple of times, locked it into a cast-iron dog which was set in the framework of the mechanism for that purpose, and pulled the lever. The gate seemed to be counter-weighted, but it slid quickly and easily down.

  Pibble unlocked the handle and began to turn steadily; the machine moved in complete silence, except for a solid knock each time the handle passed the locking-dog; it took him about thirty seconds to raise the gate high enough for a lion to pass underneath, and another minute to raise it to its full height, but it wasn’t hard work. He locked the handle and went to the balustrade to see where the lion was.

  He gazed straight down into the stretched jaws and yawning gullet, about six feet below him. It was standing on its hind legs beside the gate, scrabbling at the wall with great hooked pads; the claws were as long as a woman’s fingers, and the brick and stone were already scored with deep gouges, as though the beast had reached up toward the unattainable meat many times before. Pibble picked the chicken out of his bucket and tore a leg off, and then broke the limb in two. He tied the string to the body of the chicken and let it down through the hole into the cage, swinging it to and fro until he could settle it well over toward the back wall; he fastened the top end of the string to the machine, picked up the bits of leg, and went to the balustrade again. The lion was still reaching up.

  “Here, boy,” said Pibble, his voice squeaky with fright. The lion stopped scratching and looked at him with melancholy scorn. Pibble held the drumstick up so that the lion could see it, then threw it down toward the entrance of the cage. With an incredibly quick scything movement of the huge head, the lion caught it in midair and swallowed it with the gulp of a man swallowing a bolus. Pibble held the thigh up, feinted to throw it the other way, then tossed it down to the entrance. The lion almost beat him again, but its jaws snicked shut a fraction late and it had to drop onto four feet to pick the morsel up. Gingerly Pibble jiggled his end of the string, so that the chicken twitched at the back of the cage. The lion stiffened, paused, swished its tail, looked up toward Pibble’s tempting living flesh, roared its great grumbling sigh, and stalked into its lair. Pibble pulled the lever and the gate slid down.

  When he went, shivering, to look through the hole, the lion was already staring up at him, the chicken in its jaws. Pibble jerked the string, and the wing to which he had fastened it gave. The lion gnawed once, gulped once, and the bird was gone. Then it turned away and lay down, staring out through the bars of the gate. Pibble looped up the string and carried the bucket and shovel around to the farthest corner, where the feces were. He let the bucket over the edge and tied the other end of the string to the balustrade.

  The fretted stone really was like a ladder here, a frill of oval openings just big enough for a toecap running down each side of the pillar. He picked up bucket and shovel and started to hunt for his nasty trove among the tussocks; there was more of it than he had realized, and i
t was difficult in the half light to pick out the freshest specimens. When the bucket was at the end of its tether, he put it down and searched farther afield, but there didn’t seem to be anything there—the lion must be a creature of habit. On his way back he saw a specimen he had missed, with something shiny amid its involutions; wrinkling his nose, he bent closer and saw that it was the metal clip from a pair of braces. He did not feel at all triumphant as he scooped it up and put it in the top of the bucket.

  He was looking around the scrubby floor, wondering whether there were carvings worth inspecting at this level, when he heard the noise. A solid, metallic tock. The handle going past the locking-­dog.

  The stone fretwork seemed less like a ladder on the way up, his climbing palsied, useless. Tock, tock, tock went the handle. He missed one of the oval holes with his right foot, got it in too high, couldn’t exert any leverage with his leg bent like that, hauled himself up with his arms alone, reached the balustrade, and flung himself sideways over the edge as the lion hurtled into the stonework below. It had come as silent as frost, but now it roared its misery again and again. When Pibble hauled the bucket tremblingly up, it batted at it so that it swung wildly to and fro and the shovel clanged down. Pibble hauled the obscene cargo to safety.

  “Visitors are requested not to tease the animals,” said a voice at his elbow. It was the General.

  6:10 P.M.

  Damn sorry, my dear fellow. Didn’t spot you down there. I thought that moron Rastus had shut Bonzo in without water.”

  “General Clavering,” said Pibble, “I have reason to suspect that your brother has been killed and that you have some knowledge of how this happened.”

  “I told Harvey it was bloody silly to get a real pro down,” said the General. He put his hand into an inner pocket and Pibble stiffened to jump for a gun, but what the General drew forth was a small torch which he shone into the bucket, bending down to peer at its contents.

  “Didn’t think of that,” he said as he straightened up. “What are you going to do?”

  “Have it analyzed for hair. And there’s something that looks like a braces clip. Meanwhile I’ll apply for a search warrant. There’s going to be a fuss, but you could save some of it by telling me what happened.”

  The General shone his torch on the back wall, where a tall English beauty with the popeyes so admired by the eighteenth century was entwined with an ecstatically grinning hunchback.

  “Extraordinary fellow, Josiah,” said the General. “That’s Lady Feverfew, you know. He put all the neighbors in, but kept it for his own amusement. Didn’t even let his brother down at the Abbey see it. Harvey wants us—I suppose I can say ‘me’ now—to open it to the visitors, but I don’t see how we can. Not honorably. Silly word. That old chap”—he shone his torch farther down the wall—“was the Rector in Josiah’s day, used to drink port with him after hunting, ancestor of Maureen Finnick’s, as a matter of fact. Isn’t the slightest evidence he was a pederast, and I don’t see why a lot of salivating Yanks should be allowed to think so now, eh?”

  “General Clavering,” said Pibble, “will you please tell me how your brother died?”

  “I am telling you, damn it,” said the General sharply. “If you won’t let me tell you my own way, you won’t get a squeak out of me. You must be feeling bloody pleased with yourself, but you aren’t home yet. Come here and listen. Going to take a long time, so we might as well be comfortable.”

  He leaned his hands on the balustrade, like a tripper admiring the view from Weymouth Pier. Pibble walked forward and settled warily beside him: there was something wrong, another oubliette being prepared in that subtle old mind—perhaps he’d brought Singleton with him and left him lurking in the shadows, ready to tiptoe in when Pibble was all set up and pitch him down to the disposal unit below. The disposal unit was in theatrical form, ravening to and fro with the stilted walk of a destroyer captain pacing his five-foot bridge; the long tail lashed against either flank; the mad eyes never stopped looking up to where there now stood, just out of reach, a double helping of Man.

  “Going to be a cracking night,” said the General. “Full moon, almost. We’ll be having a frost in a week or two—I must remember to warn Rastus. That one might be Mars—we’d never see Venus from down here. You interested in astronomy?”

  “Interested but ignorant,” said Pibble, still tense for the Hush Puppy step on the flagstones behind him. The old man was keen to talk, to whatever end, and the sensible thing was to let him run on. They always tell you more than they mean to, the clever ones.

  “Dick knew ’em all,” said the General. “Show him a fiddling little patch of sky through cloud and he’d tell you the names of the stars in it. He had that sort of mind, which was why we brought the Raid off. I’ll tell you something I haven’t told anybody—funny what you’re prepared to let them mumble over and then spit out again—writers, I mean. We decided early on that we’d always keep a bit back, so that the next chap could be offered a new crumb—you’d see if you read the books in order. The first ones had whole chapters about Dotty Prosser, most dangerous bloody bonehead I ever knew, wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if he’d been wiped out in the landing. We let them run on, though, because he was part of our investment. The Raid was our capital. Where was I?”

  “Why you brought the Raid off,” said Pibble, unrelaxed.

  “Course. Funny thing was what we chose to keep back, what seemed personal and private. Dick didn’t mind about this, but to me it seemed so particularly him, so right for his nature … Well … shan’t try to put it into words. Tried last night as a matter of fact, talking to Anty about him. She’s very cut up about this business, much more than you’d think to talk to her. Never mind. You ever looked at a chart of the St. Quentin estuary?”

  “Not closely.”

  “Well, I tell you it’s absolutely bloody terrifying, a complete bloody pot-mess of shoals and channels, all different at different tides. Dick sat up with those charts night after night, and when he’d finished you could name a tide and wind direction and he could draw the whole estuary, bang, every depth right to six inches. He took us in and got us out along ways which even the fishermen hadn’t thought of. War Office expected us to lose two-fifths of our boats before we’d even landed. Dick lost eight boats.”

  “Two-fifths!” said Pibble. “That’s forty per cent! They didn’t do worse than that at Dieppe!”

  “Ha!” said the General. “You’re going to learn a bit of history tonight, young man. You know why they mounted the Raid in the first place? They wanted to prove that it couldn’t be done. Winston was roaring for action because Uncle Joe kept getting at him, but the others were a lot of yellowbellies who expected the Yanks and the R.A.F. to win the war for them. Winnie bellowed and prodded till they realized they’d have to arrange something; then they thought they might as well take the chance to get rid of a lot of nits and nuisances—bods like Dotty Prosser and me. Christ, they must have rubbed their hands when they thought of that one!”

  “Did you realize this at the time?” said Pibble.

  “Not in so many words; pal of mine told me, long after the war, when he’d had a couple of ports too many at some bloody function. But we smelt something at the time, Dick and me. Obvious, really. Why put me in charge if they wanted the Raid to be a wow? Daresay you’ve heard how some of them used to go on about Monty—that was nothing to what they said about me. Trouble was I had a brother in the Navy, very close to him all my life, so I knew what an absolute dog’s dinner the Army was—even the clever chaps were saddled with a structure and a tradition so bloody inefficient that they were damned lucky if they got a quarter of their force into the right place at the right time. I used to say so, and I was too good at my job for them to sack me, so they must absolutely have pissed themselves silly with giggles when they thought of putting me in charge of the Raid. And it wasn’t only me. Prosser was just abou
t typical of the sort of officer they landed me with.”

  “And Mr. Singleton, and Dr. Kirtle?” said Pibble.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, you couldn’t expect them to pick out individually tiresome M.O.s—Fred just got detailed. Same with other ranks; they were mostly just stray units who happened to be messing up some desk wallah’s paper work, and St. Quentin was a heaven-sent opportunity to tidy them away, a great big bloody W.P.B. But Harvey was in the same sort of mess as I was, only lower down the ladder; he’d made himself unpopular with his regiment, one of those toffee-nosed lots—the Halberdiers, as a matter of fact. He’d got just as riled at the damned stupid inefficiency of the Army as I had, though more in a profit-and-loss way, seeing he’s Harvey. Luckily there were quite a lot like him, to balance the Prossers, and between us we brought the thing off. Couldn’t have done it without Dick, though. He was in Western Approaches, but he wangled himself off, just to come with me. That mean anything to you?”

  “I think so,” said Pibble.

  “They were a bloody good crowd—they wouldn’t have changed jobs until they were dead, given the option. But Dick pulled strings, and there we were.”

  “I see,” said Pibble, watching the lion pause in its pacing and stretch up the fretted stonework toward them, remeasuring its height against the unshrinkable distance. He heard a rustling in the gallery behind him and swung suddenly around, but though it was almost pitch dark now under the vaulted ceiling, he could see that no enemy stood there; it must have been a mouse, or even a leaf.

  “Nervy?” said the General. “Not surprised—nasty great brute and he bloody nearly got you. To be fair, Dick was always a small-boat man at heart, lost in those damn great ships; all seemed to be run by pursers, he told me. So we sat down together and decided to trust no one. Had to do everyone’s homework for them: Army’s perfectly capable of sending two shiploads of boots somewhere, left boots all in one boat, right boots all in the other; then they can’t understand why the whole bloody lot’s useless when one of the ships gets sunk. Harvey was bloody good at sorting that sort of pot-mess out, and I had my pals. After all, Winnie had set his heart on the Raid, so we always had one bloody great string to pull when all our anti-tank guns were sent to lie rusting at Arbroath Station. Same with Intelligence—talk about wish fulfillment! Anything they want to be true is true. Journalists are the worst, archaeologists the best—I got journalists. So we just said, ‘Yes, yes, how bloody clever you are,’ and went off and asked elsewhere. I got more usable gen in the bar of the Travellers’ than I did out of the whole of my I Section.