‘Do come along, Emma darling,’ said her mother, pausing for a moment to give her daughter a look of undisguised disappointment and pity. ‘And please do not stare at the ground when you walk. You know how much it vexes me. Upright back, upright soul. That’s what Mr Cartwright says. Come along.’
Emma didn’t reply. Mr Cartwright was the minister and Emma’s mother was fond of quoting him. Emma had a sneaking suspicion that her mother was a tiny bit in love with Mr Cartwright, and she smiled guiltily at the thought.
They reached the summit of the hill and a rather red-faced Emma let out a long gasp, which produced yet another disparaging look from her mother.
‘You really must begin to think of yourself as a young lady, Emma,’ she said. ‘And start to behave like one.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ said Emma in weary response.
They made their way through the town, Mrs Reynolds saying good morning to everyone they met, much to Emma’s embarrassment, and eventually ended up at the marketplace. The stalls glowed with colour between ranks of people dressed as dourly as the grey buildings that enclosed the square and the drab sky that hung above them.
Emma noticed that there was a cluster of children at one corner of the market, outside the Corn Exchange. There were so many children, and so many adults with them, that it was impossible to see what it was that they were looking at, save for a glimpse of red and yellow awning.
Emma’s mother fell into conversation with Mr Gilbertson from the library, concerning the scandalous behaviour of someone Emma did not know. She found her mother’s gossiping tedious in the extreme and pleaded to be allowed to join the other children.
Permission gained, within moments Emma had squeezed her way among the crowd standing at the edge of the marketplace beside the low, spiked iron railings of the Corn Exchange. She watched, spellbound.
Everything around her – the incessant chatter and prattle of the town square – seemed to recede, to fall away, to drift from her consciousness. It was a puppet show and oh, how Emma loved a puppet show.
She pushed herself forward through the crowd, ignoring the grumbles of other children and admonishing tuts from their parents. Emma only had eyes and ears for the puppet show dazzling and shining before her like some kind of jewel in that dull, grey northern town.
A cold gust of wind blew in occasionally from the moors, but Emma did not feel it. She warmed herself in front of the brightly coloured little theatre stall as surely as if it had been a brazier full of burning coals.
The show exceeded her expectations, the puppets moving with a grace that Emma admired all the more for knowing that she would never share it.
The costumes were exquisite, making the dainty puppets look like the most delicate of tropical birds or brilliantly coloured insects. It was like a dream, a lovely, lovely dream.
Emma’s mother tried several times to tug her away, but it would have taken a carthorse to pull her, and Mrs Reynolds was a petite and rather spindly woman. So she gave up and said she would return for Emma in ten minutes and that she was to come then, no matter what was happening in the silly show.
But Emma was not even listening to her. Why would she listen to her mother when there was the beautiful harlequin puppet dancing and prancing before her, pirouetting and leaping, bowing and twirling? Mrs Reynolds sighed and left, determined to get on while her daughter was preoccupied.
Emma gave herself up to the puppet show entirely. The music had stopped now and the puppets were talking, but Emma wasn’t interested in the story and she wished that the puppet master wouldn’t keep putting on those silly voices. It was all so ugly, and yet the children around her seemed so intent on laughter. She didn’t find the puppets funny in the least and resented the attempts of the puppet master to garner laughs and coarse guffaws, when all she wanted was to see the beautiful puppets dance and twirl.
Mrs Reynolds did eventually come back and by chance her return coincided with the end of the show. She was relieved to forego the scene that would no doubt have taken place had she insisted that Emma leave before it was finished. She wondered how she had produced such a wilful daughter.
Emma put up no resistance to leaving. She felt a terrible sadness when the curtain fell, and the greyness of the town seemed to seep back into the world around her. But this feeling would only have been intensified had she stayed to see the puppet master pack away the puppets. Emma wanted to remember them as they were in the show.
She trailed behind her mother, who was just explaining that they should hurry across the road to Madame Claudette’s Hat and Ribbon Shop – for they both needed new hats for their cousin’s wedding – when Emma took one last look back towards the puppet show and walked straight into somebody.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
She had bumped into a boy of about her own age, but he made no reply. He was staring at her in the most peculiar manner and at first Emma thought she might have stunned him in some way.
There was something about the boy’s vacant expression that made Emma shudder. His pale grey, red-rimmed eyes stared out without any hint of life or soul at work behind them. It took Emma a few moments to realise that she knew him.
His name was Gerald, though it was only with considerable difficulty that she could match this sad creature to the boy who had shown her such interest at the church fete. Gerald, like Emma, was quite portly, but he was handsome in spite of this. Somehow this made his present state all the more troubling. He stretched out his arms towards her, opened his mouth and moaned loudly. Emma backed away with a shriek that caused her mother to stop in her tracks and turn round.
‘You should pay attention to where you are going, young lady,’ said a voice to Emma’s right.
Emma turned and saw a formidable-looking woman in a large and rather macabre hat with curving feathers that reminded her of a huge spider.
‘You might have knocked poor Gerald over, you silly girl.’
‘I’ll thank you not to adopt that tone with my daughter,’ said Emma’s mother, stepping into the fray.
She may have been slight, but Emma’s mother was not at all shy in expressing her views, though they were often spoken in a voice that might kindly be described as shrill.
‘Your daughter should be more careful,’ said Gerald’s mother.
‘If the boy is going to stand about in the street like a great sack of potatoes, then he is bound to be walked into!’ said Mrs Reynolds.
The boy’s mother flared her nostrils and, grabbing her son’s hand, led him away.
‘Well, really!’ Emma’s mother exclaimed.
‘Some people!’ said Mrs Timpson-Green, the florist, who had come out of her shop to observe the confrontation. ‘But, as a Christian, you have to have some sympathy for the lad.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Emma’s mother, who held Mrs Timpson-Green in very high regard. ‘As a Christian.’
She moved closer and tilted her head conspiratorially.
‘Apparently it happened all of a sudden,’ she said in a whisper.
‘I know,’ said Mrs Timpson-Green. ‘The doctors are mystified. They say there was a case just like it in Harrogate last month.’
Emma’s mother leaned a little closer still and dropped her voice even further, so that Emma could no longer hear. She watched as Gerald and his mother disappeared into the crowd and out of view. But before they did, Gerald turned to stare at her one last time.
Oh, how that gaze unsettled her. To be looked at so intently and yet at the same time so lifelessly, so witlessly – it was as if a shop window mannequin had turned its sculpted, empty head to follow her. She hoped fervently that she might never see that awful face again.
g
Emma and her mother were in Madame Claudette’s for some time, and each passing minute surrounded by the comforting loveliness of Emma’s favourite shop acted as a much-needed salve to the upset caused by the encounter with Gerald.
After the ribbon shop, they bought some writing paper and then spent
an exceedingly dull half-hour in the post office, queuing to send a letter to Emma’s aunt who lived in Canada.
On their way home they walked past the market. The puppet theatre was closed and getting ready to leave. Some of the stallholders were starting to pack up too, shouting out the prices of bargains and behaving in an altogether too forward way, which provoked the sourest of expressions from Emma’s mother.
Then, just as they were turning the corner into Pond Street to walk down the hill and back home, Gerald appeared once more, grunting and waving from the kerbside, tugging at his mother’s arm.
There was something deeply disturbing about the way he fixed Emma with his dull gaze and waved his arms around, as if he wanted nothing more than to be able to lurch across the road and attack her.
She quickened her pace and tried to avoid his gaze by looking back towards the market, but this seemed to incense him further. He broke free of his mother’s grip and came lumbering towards her.
Emma, in her panic, slipped and fell. When she tried to get up, Gerald was already beside her, grabbing her hair with one hand and waving and pointing with the other.
Mrs Reynolds stepped in and slapped Gerald hard around the side of the face. He didn’t cry or even look at Emma’s mother. He merely stood staring at Emma in silence for a moment, before suddenly emitting a horrible cry.
‘How dare you strike my boy?’ said Gerald’s mother, rushing over. ‘I have a good mind to fetch a policeman.’
‘Please do,’ said Mrs Reynolds, ‘and I shall tell him how your lunatic child tried to murder my daughter.’
Gerald’s mother glared at her with a look of bitter resignation, as if she had only just realised with whom she was dealing. Emma sobbed mournfully, begging to be taken home.
‘Really!’ said Mrs Reynolds. ‘I wonder at that creature being allowed out, I really do.’
‘How can you be so cruel?’ said Gerald’s mother. ‘He means no harm. Your daughter has upset him in some way. I have never seen him like this before.’
‘My daughter has done nothing at all to the boy,’ said Emma’s mother, raising her long nose to the clouded sky. ‘Come along, Emma, before that wild thing breaks free and attacks the both of us.’
g
The meeting with the horrid, lumpen creature Gerald had become had upset Emma so much that, try as she might, she could no longer visualise the loveliness of the puppet show, and she had hoped to replay its beauty for weeks to lighten the monotony of her life. That beast had spoiled it for her and, though she knew it was terribly wrong to blame the blameless, still she hated him for it.
Emma was forced to endure her mother reliving the whole episode over supper, when she recounted the incident with added theatrical flourishes for Emma’s father, who, as usual, did little to disguise his lack of interest in anything other than the price of cotton.
Emma was sent to bed early with a cup of warm milk, because her mother was certain she must have been horribly traumatised by the shock of being preyed upon by ‘that awful creature’.
Ordinarily Emma would have resisted her mother’s attentions, but on this occasion she felt that there was a grain of truth in the idea that she had been deeply affected. She was happy to seek the comfort of her bed and the oblivion of sleep.
But Emma’s sleep was not a peaceful one: her thoughts were invaded by the unwanted memories of Gerald – of the strange, empty shell of the boy she had once briefly known and, though it pained her to recall it now, liked more than a little.
As in the worst nightmares, there was a ghastly confluence of the real and unreal worlds: she dreamed that she was in the room in which she now slept, except that in her dream she had been woken by a strange sound somewhere in the house.
Far off in the hallway downstairs, she heard the front door swing open and then close. She heard the sound of shuffling footsteps. With the horrible certainty of dreams, Emma knew it was Gerald.
She ran to the landing and leaned over the banister. She saw him standing in the hall, his back to the door, staring up at her with his awful, lifeless, dull grey eyes.
Emma opened her mouth to scream but no sound emerged. She screamed silently until her lungs hurt. Then, with a suddenness made all the more startling by his previous stillness, the boy began to shuffle towards the stairs.
Emma was momentarily frozen, and stared in trembling horror as the boy climbed the staircase with an awkward speed.
It was not until he had reached the top of the stairs and was shuffling towards her down the hall that she finally managed to prise her feet from the floor and run back to her room, slamming the door behind her.
She knew it was a dream. She told herself over and over it was a dream, as the footsteps came closer and closer, closer and closer. Then the door handle gave a terrifying rattle.
Emma woke with a start, still reeling from the nightmare. The real and imagined worlds were so confusingly intermingled that she wondered if she had woken from one dream into another. She could feel beads of sweat on her forehead.
Then she heard the sound of footsteps. They were small and hurried and quiet and so at first they appeared as though they were a long way away. But no. They were in the room. They were in the room; she was certain of it.
Her mind was still escaping the tangle of thoughts that remained from her nightmare, and she struggled to make sense of what she was hearing. Her eyes were gradually adjusting to the gloom of the bedroom. The footsteps had fallen silent.
Suddenly there was a crash that sent Emma scrabbling back on her bed, pulling the covers to her face as she pressed herself up against the wall.
Something unseen had knocked over the vase that stood on her dressing table, and was now behind the curtain. The heavy fabric bulged and twitched as the thing moved about behind it.
Then, all at once, the curtains jerked wildly and shook as whatever it was appeared to climb them; a dark shape scampered across the windowsill and disappeared out through the open window.
Once absolutely sure it had gone, Emma quickly went across to the window and shut it, lest it should try to re-enter. The night was overcast and moonless, but it was midsummer and the sky still bore a dull glow from the day’s reluctant departure. By this pale insipid light, she caught a glimpse of something fleeing across the garden. It was a glimpse only, but she had a strange feeling of recognition.
As she went to pull the curtain across, Emma’s toe stubbed against something sharp, and she bent down to see that there was a pair of scissors lying on the floor. And not just scissors.
On the floor and on the sill were strands of hair: strands she took at first to be the fur of whatever creature had entered the room, until she realised that the hair was her own. A great hank of hair had been cut from her head.
In a blinding flash she remembered the groaning Gerald, the hand reaching out and grasping her hair, the awful blank intensity of that soulless face.
Emma opened her mouth and screamed, and this time there was most definitely a sound, and within seconds her father came running into the room, Emma oblivious, her eyes closed tight. She continued to scream and scream until he slapped her with some force across the side of the face.
g
It was many hours before her parents were able to settle Emma, and she had only fallen asleep through utter exhaustion. The following day it took all of her father’s powers of reason and persuasion to explain to her that a boy like Gerald – a boy so painfully slow and clumsy – could never have climbed into her room, even if he had the wit to escape from his own house and walk the half-mile to the Reynolds’.
Besides which, the window to Emma’s room was a small casement window. A boy of Gerald’s build could never have squeezed through it.
Emma had clearly had a nightmare and gone sleepwalking under its influence. She must somehow have picked up the scissors and cut her own hair. Her parents could only be thankful that she had not injured herself.
Emma took a while to accept the truth of these facts
– but in the end she could see no other explanation. Even so, she made sure that the window was thoroughly shut before she went to sleep the following night, and her mother, just to be on the safe side, removed her scissors from the room.
It was some days before Mrs Reynolds felt her daughter had recovered enough to be taken into town. There was always the danger that they might bump into that dreadful boy and his mother, but that was a risk they would have to take. If they stayed away from town for too long, it would look as though they had done something wrong. Mrs Reynolds knew how people gossiped. She knew only too well.
Emma had been dreading this expedition and had feigned a stomach ache to avoid it. But she knew that she couldn’t stay in her house for ever. Only the lure of a trip to the ribbon shop and the hope that the puppet show might be back in the market square persuaded her to swallow her fears.
But Madame Claudette’s was so crowded that Emma’s mother ended up flouncing out, pulling Emma away before she even had time to look at a beautiful pink ribbon that would have been perfect for her new bonnet.
On top of that, the marketplace was full of all kinds of stalls and barrows, but quite devoid of the one thing Emma so longed to see – the puppet theatre.
Then, to make Emma’s misery complete, they walked out of the pharmacist’s to find Gerald standing on the pavement across the road.
Emma stepped back, bumping into Mr Cartwright, the minister, who paused only to tip his hat and apologise for getting in her way. Emma’s mother tried to engage him in conversation, but he seemed to be in a hurry to get on. Meanwhile, Gerald had begun to walk towards Emma.
Mr Reynolds had had a long talk with his daughter about this meeting and what Emma should do if and when it occurred. She was not to confuse the boy of her nightmare with this poor creature who was not responsible for his actions. If she remained calm, Gerald would lose interest in her.
But now, with Gerald standing in front of her, reaching out towards her hair again, Emma found it harder than she had imagined to stay calm. And it had been fairly difficult even in her imagination.
Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth Page 10
