The Sandman

by Miles Gibson

  Jumbo smiled, stood up and began to search for his clothes, scattered on the carpet around the bed. He thought he was going home.

  “Sit down,” I shouted at him, “Sit down or I’ll cut your ears off.”

  He jumped back to the safety of the bed and pressed his hands between his legs as if his fingers were scalded.

  “Now tie him up,” I told Patsy and shook the knife in my fist.

  “I told you already I don’t do any of that stuff,” she shouted back defiantly.

  “Use your imagination,” pleaded Jumbo, who was afraid for his ears.

  Patsy glared at him and plucked some towels from the back of a chair. She began to tie the Buddha by his hands and feet.

  “Yes, that’s very good,” I said as I watched her working the knots.

  “What do you want me to do now?” she hissed at me when she was finished.

  “Smile,” I said cheerfully, “Sit on his lap and smile.”

  She perched herself carefully on Jumbo’s broad knees and watched nervously while I fiddled with the Polaroid. When I raised the camera to my eye they both began to smile as if their lives depended on it. They peeled back their faces and bared their teeth. Patsy pulled back the shower curtain to display her legs and wrapped her arms around Jumbo’s neck. I took a couple of pictures and laid them on the table to develop and dry.

  It was while I was putting the camera back in my bag that Patsy slipped off Jumbo and crept towards me. I turned to confront her with the knife but she dropped to her knees and tried to lift the hem of my raincoat.

  “Let’s play another game,” she crooned as she fumbled with the buttons of my trousers. She was hoping to escape the hard edge of the knife and cheat death by accepting the thrusts of my soft and porky dagger.

  “No,” I cried in alarm and pushed her away. I was shocked. “I haven’t finished.”

  Patsy stood up and began to walk backwards across the room. She must have smelt the violence in me. She said nothing.

  “What are you going to do with that knife?” whimpered Jumbo as I moved towards him.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” I said gently.

  “I have important friends,” he threatened as he struggled to shake loose the towels.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Please, please don’t hurt me,” he begged as I stroked his ear with the tip of the blade.

  “Oh, it shouldn’t hurt,” I reassured him. The knife was already deep in his neck. I gave it a twist and turned it towards his brains. He seemed to rise from the bed, float for a moment in mid-air and then somersault gracefully across the carpet where he settled in an ugly heap.

  “Oh, my God, you’ve killed me!” he gasped, “You’ve gone and fucking killed me.”

  I turned to Patsy. She was standing with her hands pressed hard against the wall, staring down at the corpse in horror. Her face was green. She took several steps towards the fallen Jumbo and fainted. She fell in a flurry of feathers with her arms thrown over her face. I was grateful for her assistance. I am not a squeamish man but there was something about Patsy that made me hesitate with the knife. I could not risk letting her stay alive but, at the same time, I did not relish helping her into the land of the dead. Her faint would serve as an anaesthetic. While she was still insensible I found a fruit knife and tucked it quickly behind her ear.

  I have no regrets. A dozen or more people pushed in or out of the world makes no difference in the grand balance of the universe. They are grains of sand. Every day a hundred children die in Africa from starvation, a hundred more choke to death on their milkshakes in the USA, a thousand more are born in China. It’s not a question of justice. No one selects them, one from another. Death, in all his wonderful variety, is deaf to prayers and blind to blessings.

  You may call me a butcher but electric toasters kill more people in a year than I could manage to touch in a lifetime. There are men who are actually paid to deal in death. Men with good educations and respectable families. Point your finger in their direction. They walk into the office each morning and get paid to dream of new, exciting ways to destroy the world. They make careers from it. Listen, I’ve got a good idea; why don’t we seed the clouds and make it rain acid over the cities? No that’s too expensive. But if we poison the water we could make the women barren and turn their bones to chalk. Yes, that’s better and we could probably do it within the budget. But it’s too slow. What we want is wind, fire and a damned big bang. Let’s have some lunch and think about radiation sickness.

  I frighten you because I work on a human scale, bring you death as a personal gift, an intimate melodrama for your parlour. But there are nightmares in the world so grand that your head could not contain them.

  What was I talking about? Ah, yes, I had just plugged Patsy’s ear with a knife. There is an extraordinary silence that descends upon the dead. One moment they had been struggling to stay alive, their blood rippling beneath their skins, hair erect, eyes wild, their mouths spurting nonsense. The next moment they were as motionless as furniture. They might have been torn mattresses, tightly rolled and thrown on the floor. I considered taking a final Polaroid but decided against it. I packed up my equipment and left the premises.

  As soon as I had reached the safety of my little lair I unpacked my bag and scrubbed down the raincoat and gloves in the bath. There was less blood than I had imagined but it is important to remain clean. I placed the precious photographs on the bedside table, ready for inspection at my leisure, and then settled in front of the TV to dry and dust my faithful rubber gloves. A delicious fatigue settled over me and I was almost asleep when there was a tapping on the door.

  When I answered it I found Johnson Johnson standing there in his carpet slippers, grinning and forking his fingers through the remains of his hair.

  “What’s the trouble?” I asked nervously.

  “Good evening, Mr Burton,” he smiled, staring over my shoulder and stretching his neck to peer into my room. “We heard you come home.”

  “I went for a walk,” I blurted and then felt annoyed with myself for feeling that I had to explain anything to the wretched Johnson Johnson.

  “You should be careful,” he said, “The streets are dangerous at night.”

  “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

  “No one is safe,” he said with a wag of his head.

  “Is there anything else?” I demanded impatiently.

  “I wonder if you would care to turn down your television? My mother, you understand, has a crippling headache and she can’t sleep through the noise. I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  I was taken by surprise. I mumbled some apology and began to close the door. But Johnson Johnson had not finished.

  “I hope,” he continued slowly and with a fading smile, “I hope you won’t be doing any housework at this time of night.”

  “Housework?” I whispered, perplexed by his concern. Was this some kind of old maid’s joke? “What housework?”

  He noddeed at the rubber gloves that I clutched in my fist. I was so shocked I could find no reply and he smirked as if he had caught me trying to stuff an inflatable woman down the front of my pants. I began screwing the gloves into a ball but they wriggled loose and sprang into the air. Johnson Johnson bent down and picked the gloves from the floor. As he returned them he looked at me sharply with his bright, cunning eyes.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said again, and there was something in his tone of voice that made my blood run cold.

  *

  I never went walking again. I bought a little Volkswagen. It was old, scratched and a muddy shade of red but I did not want anything ostentatious. The engine was reliable and strong – that was important. I paid particular attention to the details of tax, insurance and parking permits: in my kind of work you cannot afford to be careless. And, when everything was in order, I took to the road. It made sweet changes in my life. Sometimes, when I felt restless, I cruised through the city and watched the crowds. At nig
ht I could park in the quiet streets of Swiss Cottage and Camden Town and sit in the darkness, watching the lights of the surrounding houses. Sitting so snug with the rain lashing at the windscreen I fancied, as I stared into brightly-lit kitchens and parlours, that I was contained in a bathysphere and peering at life on the ocean floor. The Volkswagen was a sealed chamber from which I could make my observations in safety and comfort. No one seemed to notice me sitting motionless behind the wheel and, as a precaution, I liked to keep a map on my knees so that, if I were ever challenged by the police, I could claim to be lost and ask directions.

  I took delight in the knowledge that this most innocuous machine with its battered bonnet and faded paintwork was destined to become the transport of death. It was such an unlikely disguise. When, in your dreams, has death sprung upon you from a secondhand Volkswagen?

  It was November and I had no plans to kill again that year. I remained intoxicated by the memory of Patsy and the wretched Jumbo. In the smallness of the night, I referred to my precious Polaroids and, staring at them, found I could recollect everything in the most vivid and intimate detail. Those two photographs unlocked a macabre peepshow which kept me hot and excited through many wintry nights.

  It was during the worst of the weather that I made a friend of my neighbour, Frank Plimsoll, the American who lived beneath Johnson Johnson. He owned a set of rooms cluttered with books and bric-a-brac and had spent most of his life trying to force the rudiments of world history into the stubborn skulls of schoolboys. He had lived in London for several years and had connections with a school in Chelsea. I cannot remember our first conversation but we would nod and smile at each other when we passed on the stairs and eventually grew familiar enough to spend evenings together exchanging books and opinions on the world.

  I could not guess at his age but he was certainly twenty years or more my senior. He had soft brown hair and a big, crinkled face. He liked to wear corduroy suits and heavy brogues which gave the impression of a gamekeeper dressed for church. He was slow and affable and generally in search of a woman.

  You must understand, he was not a man in search of a wife. Indeed, Frank seemed to live in dread of being trapped into any kind of emotional dependence upon a woman. No, he enjoyed fucking strangers. It was a sport. He liked to rent women for the night and had travelled around the world in search of novelties and bargains. He seemed to have a good, general knowledge of most of the brothels in the world. He had used brothels and bawdy houses like other people used hotels, moving from one to another as he travelled around. He said there were brothels in Bombay where the women were kept in bamboo cages overlooking the streets. He said there were bars in West Africa where a woman could be bought for a bottle of Guinness and a few cigarettes. He was an education. He spoke of his experiences in foreign parts as if he were describing nothing more remarkable than the local food and wine. There was never anything cheap or sensational about his stories. His adventures somehow managed to sound like something from National Geographic.

  Everything he told me about the world was fascinating. He was the first man who had spoken to me about the carnal pursuits and I was very impressed. Naturally these conversations would have been impossible with my mother or my aunt, Figg or even Dorothy and I did not yet trust Archie enough to approach him on such delicate aspects of human nature. Frank was like an older, more experienced brother and I was flattered, I suppose, that he took it for granted that I should be made fully acquainted with the sensual pleasures of the world.

  We spent several evenings in the month before Christmas drinking and talking together. He asked me very few questions about myself but when he asked me how I earned my living I told him I was writing a book on conjurers, a history of conjurers and their illusions. I don’t know why. It was the first idea that came into my head. But he seemed perfectly happy with the explanation and encouraged me to furnish the invention with such detail that I almost believed I was writing it. He wanted to see the chapters I had written and I had to make excuses. But I promised that he should be the first to read the finished work.

  “I once saw a man in New York who cut a woman into six parts. He locked her in a coffin and attacked it with a chain saw. It was incredible. One of the best tricks I think I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said with considerable enthusiasm.

  “How did he do it?” I asked.

  “Well, you should know better than to ask such questions. A good magician never betrays his secrets – it would spoil the fun,” he chuckled.

  “Did you like New York?” I enquired. He rarely spoke about his home.

  “I loved it,” he sighed.

  “Why did you leave?”

  “It’s too damned violent. Do you know the most common fatal disease among the young men in New York?”

  “No,” I said and shook my head.

  “Murder.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said with a shudder.

  “Murder. In New York you stand a better chance of being murdered than having a heart attack.”

  “That’s very hard to believe,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I read it in the Sunday Times,” he said. He paused then to empty his ashtray. He chain smoked Camels, lit one from the stump of another, hour after hour, so that his rooms were constantly filled by a grey and poisonous fog that stung my eyes and made me cough. His carpets were filled with the soft white ash. His fingers were orange.

  “London can be dangerous,” I said when he was settled again with the ashtray balanced on his knees.

  “Yes,” he agreed, “It’s not safe any more.”

  “People are robbed in broad daylight. Old ladies smacked on the head and their handbags snatched …”

  “It’s one of the hazards of life in the city,” shrugged Frank. “You learn to live with it.”

  “Yes, it’s like those murders a few weeks ago in Soho,” I ventured carelessly. “Fifteen years ago they would have created a sensation – the newspapers would have been boiling for weeks. Now they’re accepted as just another bad night.”

  “Ah, yes, but those murders are different,” smiled Frank and paused dramatically to suck on his Camel.

  “Different?” I demanded.

  “Yes, there’s something peculiar about those killings. I think there’ll be a few more of them before he’s caught.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s dangerous,” explained Frank. “He’s a man who kills purely for pleasure.”

  “He probably killed for money,” I suggested. But Frank shook his head. “According to the papers nothing was stolen. He’s a man who murders for sport. And that kind of sport becomes an addiction.”

  I nodded sagely, “Blood sport,” I said.

  “Blood sport,” he replied.

  The rest of our conversation that night is lost to me. He continued to talk and smoke and dream of distant brothels but I remember none of it. He had called me an addict I couldn’t believe it.

  But Frank’s observations had startled me and I resolved not to make another kill for at least six months or perhaps a year. I was an artist and not driven by the mad desires of an addict. I wanted to prove Frank wrong. And yet, despite myself, I obliged him a few days later by killing again. I could not help myself.

  It was a mild night, black as the grave but warm and smelling of rain. I was driving towards Swiss Cottage with my equipment in a bag beside me on the seat. I had not planned a killing but knowing I had the knives with me gave my journey an added touch of excitement. It was thrilling to glance across at the big green Harrods bag and to know that it contained everything I needed to extract the life from whoever I might encounter in the dark.

  When I grew tired of driving I parked the car in a quiet street and settled down to watch the lights in the surrounding houses. I had planned nothing. I was happy enough to sit and dream. But around the corner trotted a short fat man in a brown coat. He was followed by a short and very angry woman who was puffing and blowing and clutching at his sleeve. Every few yar
ds he stopped walking and tried to tear his sleeve free from her grasp by slapping her face but she held tight and tried to bite him. Gradually they fought their way to one of the neighbouring houses. There was no light in any of the windows. The man stopped at the front door and fumbled for keys in his pocket. The woman beside him wiped the hair from her face. She raised one knee and used it to balance her handbag while she poked around inside it and produced her own key. Then the man tried to snatch the key from her hand but she pushed him away with her elbow and searched for the lock.

  I pulled on my gloves, picked up my knives and glided from the car. When they opened the door I was standing behind them. I followed them into the empty house and the woman had switched on the light before they saw me standing between them.

  The man was very drunk and his eyes were as cloudy as poisoned oysters. There were fine red scratches across one cheek, from the ear to the chin, and his mouth looked swollen. He stared and wagged a finger at me as he tried to find the strength to speak. He threatened me with his finger. The woman was almost as drunk as the man. Her lipstick was smudged and bled from the corners of her mouth. Her hair was tangled and her knuckles were bruised. She was wearing a cheap red frock and a small fur jacket. The jacket might have been sewn from cats.

  “Who are you, shit-face?” the man finally blurted at me. He sounded as if he had been approached by strange men all evening and I was only one of a crowd who needed introductions. “Is he another of your friends?” he shouted at his companion.

  The woman said nothing. She was scowling and stroking her cats.

  “Get out and take her with you!” he shouted and stumbled towards the door. He made a grab at the woman as he moved but missed by several inches and lost his balance. He spun on his heel and hit the floor. He sat up painfully and rubbed his head.

  I knelt down beside him and studied the side of his skull, searching for the place to insert the knife.

  “The fucker’s got a knife,” he burbled gleefully to the woman, as if his worst suspicions about her friends had just been confirmed.

  “Look at that, the fucker’s got a knife,” He pointed at me again with a crooked finger.