The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror

by Campbell, Ramsey

  When she’d gone, Sutcliffe said: ‘I’m sorry. What was that you were saying?’

  But the inclination to tell him had gone. Instead, Lamson talked about the Rovers’ chances this afternoon in their match against Rochdale. As they spoke, though, his mind was not wholly on what they were talking about. He was troubled, though he did not know properly why, by the dreams he had been about to tell Sutcliffe about, but which, on reconsideration, he had decided to keep to himself.

  He was glad that he had a full day ahead of him, what with the football match this afternoon and a date with Joan at the Tavern tonight. Sutcliffe was taking his fiancé with them, and it promised to be an enjoyable evening for them all. He only wished that his relationship with Joan, who he had been going out with now for three months, wasn’t so peculiarly Platonic. Whether this was his fault or hers, he did not know. A bit of both, he supposed, when he thought about it. Yet, if things did not improve very soon, he knew that their relationship, whatever his own inner feelings might be, would start to cool. Was this the cause of the dreams? he wondered, as he tried to concentrate on what Sutcliffe was saying. There did not seem to be any other reason he could think of at the moment that could account for them, and he decided that this must be it.

  As Lamson walked home through the vaporous gloom beneath the old street lamps along Beechwood Avenue, after leaving Joan at her parents’ home, his mind was deep in thought. It had been, as he had expected, an enjoyable evening, but only because of the new folk group they had been able to listen to at the Tavern. Joan had been no different than before: friendly and feminine in every way that he could wish, talkative—but not too much so—intelligent, amusing, and yet… and yet what was missing? Or was it him? What was it, he wondered, that made him feel so fatherly towards her, instead of the way in which at all other times he wished, even yearned, to be?

  If not for the unexpected sound of someone slipping on the pavement some distance behind him, he would not have been brought out of his reverie until he reached Station Road and the last, short stretch to his flat. As it was, he half intentionally, half instinctively turned round to see if someone had fallen.

  But all he glimpsed on the otherwise deserted avenue was the vague impression of someone merging hurriedly with the shadowy privet bushes midway between the feeble light of the lamp posts further back. So fleeting was the impression, though, that he would have taken it for the blurred motion of a cat that had raced across the avenue, but for the distinct recollection of something having slipped on the footpath.

  For a moment or two he waited and watched in vain, certain that whoever or whatever hid in the gloom of the privet had not moved since he turned, and was only waiting for him to turn back again to emerge. It was disturbing, and he tried to play down his nervousness with the thought that it was probably only some kids playing an idiotic game of hide-and-seek in the dark. Unconvinced though he was by this explanation, it was substantial enough for him as an excuse to turn round with at least the pretense of indifference and continue on his way home. Even so, it was with a definite feeling of relief, however, when he reached Station Road, where the bright shop windows, neon signs and the passing cars and buses brought him back into reality. With more speed than he usually employed he strode along to the door leading into his flat and raced up the two flights of stairs to his rooms.

  As he closed the door behind him he noticed the small black head he had bought from the tramp perched where he had left it on the dresser, its outline gleaming in the reflection of the streetlights outside.

  It was looking towards him, crooked at an obtuse angle on its broken neck. He threw his overcoat onto the bed and stepped to the window to draw the curtains together before switching on the light. He felt at the radiator opposite his bed by the bookcase. It was just lukewarm.

  As he stared morosely about the room, he wondered what had made him buy the head. What perverse attraction had struck him about it before had gone, and all he could see in it now was ugliness and decay. He picked it up. It wasn’t as if he could legitimately claim he’d bought it out of some kind of archaeological interest. It was years since he’d last pottered in that subject at school, and what enthusiasm he may have once had for it had been lost to him long ago. For a moment he rubbed the small lumps on its brows, but he felt too tired suddenly to study it tonight. There was a nagging ache in his back and his arms felt stiff, while the rash-like irritation had returned to tingle on the back of his hands.

  Lamson dropped the stone head back on the dresser and began to change into his pajamas. He felt too tired now to think or even place his clothes folded up, as he normally did, on the table beside his bed.

  For a moment he struggled to keep awake, but he could not resist. He did not want to resist. All he wanted to do was to surrender himself, his body and soul, to the dull black nothingness of sleep.

  Sleep quickly overcame him as he lay on his bed and closed his eyes.

  And in his sleep he dreamed.

  There was a wood in his dream, a great, deep, darkly mysterious wood that filled him with unease as he listened to its decrepit oaks groaning in the wind.

  He stood before it alone. But he did not feel alone. He could sense something watching him malevolently from the gloomy depths of the wood.

  The twilight passed into the darkness of night. Shadows glided silently through the trees, gathering as if to stare out at him with small, round, rubicund eyes. Or was it his own eyes playing tricks with the dark?

  Then he saw something emerge from the waist high ferns, crawling on all fours across the ground. It was almost black, its naked flesh dry and coarse, strung tight about its jutting bones. Its legs, though hairless, were as the legs of a goat, whilst shrunken breasts, some twelve in number, hung limply from its chest. They swayed as it moved, its jaundiced eyes gleaming from the deep black depths of their sockets with a foul anticipation. There was a convulsive twitching in its long, thin, bony hands.

  Unable to move, Lamson watched it crawl towards him. Its penis was hard with lust, the dark nipples of its breasts enlarged and tight. Its lips were wet with overflowing saliva as it drew towards him.

  Though partially human, it was hideously inhuman, a foul, unearthly, cacodaemoniacal Pan. Stiff black horns curved upwards from its brows; a scaled and rat-like tail flicked from its spine. He could see the mounting tension of its poised phallus.

  He tried to scream.

  With all his strength he tried to scream, to cry out and tear himself away from the hideous creature creeping towards him, but there was nothing he could do. He was paralyzed and defenseless.

  A murmured chanting sibilantly issued encircling trees, flitting with the wind.

  ‘Ma dheantar aon scriosadh, athru, gearradh, lot no milleadh ar an ordu feadfar diultu d’e a ioc.’

  The rhythmic chanting began to mimic the frenzied beating of a heart, faster and deeper, as the satyr, swaying its lean torso to the rhythms of the chants, came upon Lamson. Its left hand grasped him about the thigh, pulling him down till he knelt on the ground. Its foetid breath blew hot into his face like the searing gusts of a newly opened furnace. He could see the wrinkles in its clammy flesh and the sores suppurating on its lips.

  With renewed urgency he wrenched himself free and tried to roll out of its way across the grass. But before he even saw it move he felt its hands grasping him once more. He kicked out at it, whimpering. Its talons tore a deep gash in his trousers and its palm slid searchingly down his leg.

  Once more he kicked.

  With a slow deliberation it reached out for the buckle of his belt and ripped it free.

  It was crouched over him, its softly repulsive underbelly almost touching his legs. In the feeble light its body seemed huge.

  With a sudden exertion Lamson managed at last to emit a scream.

  As its hand reached for him between his legs darkness sprang up about him like a monstrous whirlpool.

  He felt dizzy and sick, shuddering with horror as he awoke, his b
ody drenched with perspiration in the tangled blankets of his bed. At the same time he felt the final climax of an orgasm clasp hold of him.

  He lay back and gasped, weak with the intensity of his ejaculation. He felt suddenly fouled, as if he’d been dragged through demoniacal cesspools of sin.

  Nauseated, he looked across from his bed at the carving. Its coarse features seemed even more hideous to him now than before, and he did not doubt but that in some repulsively Freudian way its lecherous features—mirrored, as he now realized, on the demon creature of his nightmare—had influenced his sleeping mind. As he looked at it he found it difficult to understand how he had failed to notice the unclean lust rampant about its face before, like some infernal incubus roused by the harlots of Hell. As he washed himself clean a few minutes later he wondered if it would not be better to get rid of the head, to throw it away and forget it, and in doing so, hopefully, rid himself of the dreams.

  Only once, while he dressed, did a discordant thought make him wonder if, perhaps, the dream wasn’t connected in some way with his unsatisfactory relationship with Joan. But the two things were at such extremes in his mind that he could not connect them with anything other than shame. As he looked at the stone this shame transferred itself to this object, intensifying into a firm resolve to get rid of the thing. How could he possibly make any kind of headway with Joan, he told himself, with such a foul obscenity as that thing troubling him?

  When Lamson left his flat a short time later, carrying the head in his raincoat pocket, it was with steps so unsteady that he wondered if he was coming down with something. The irritation on his hands had, if anything, become even worse, while aches and pains announced their presence from all over his body while he walked. He wondered if he had overstrained himself when he was helping his brother redecorate his farm, though he’d felt fit enough the day before. The Sunday morning streets were agreeably deserted as he walked along them. The only cars in sight were parked by the kerb. In a way he was glad that the dream had woken him as early as it had. Just past eight thirty now, it would be a while yet, he knew, before the city would start stirring into life today.

  ‘Dirt-y o-o1d ma-an, dirty o-old ma-an!’ He looked across to where the singsong voices came from. Two small boys of about ten or eleven years in age, perhaps less, were stood at the corner of the street in a shop doorway. Cheeky little brats, Lamson thought to himself as he noticed the shuffling figure their jeers were directed against, a stooped old man slowly making his way down a street leading off from the main road past a line of overfilled dustbins.

  Although Lamson could not see his face he could tell that the old man knew the boys were calling out at him. Slow though his pace was, it was also unmistakably hurried, as if he was trying to get out of their way as quickly as he could on his old, decrepit legs.

  ‘Clear off!’ Lamson shouted angrily, feeling sorry for the old man.

  The kids yelped and ran off down an alley, laughing.

  If he had not felt so weary himself he would have run after them. How could they act so callously? He watched the old man as he continued up the street. There was something about the painful stoop of his back and the way his legs were bent, that struck a chord of remembrance somewhere. He could almost have been the tramp he met on the moors, except that he hadn’t been anything like as decrepit as this man obviously was, not unless his health had failed disastrously over the last couple of days.

  Lamson crossed the road and headed up past St. James church, putting the old man out of his mind. The pleasant singing of the birds in the elms that filled the churchyard helped to ease his spirits, and he breathed in the scent of the grass with a genuine feeling of pleasure. He only wished that his legs didn’t feel so stiff and tired. He wondered again if he was coming down with a bug of some kind.

  He paused suddenly by the wall and felt in his pocket, his fingers moving speculatively about the small stone head. Though he did not know properly why, he decided that the churchyard was too near his flat for him to get rid of the stone here. It would be better if he made his way to the canal where he could lose it properly without trace.

  As he turned round to leave, he noticed a slight movement out of the corner of his eye. With a feeling of trepidation he paused, turned round and anxiously scanned the solemn rows of headstones.

  Nothing moved, except for a light film of drizzle that began to filter down through the overhanging boughs of the trees. Yet, even though he could not see anything to account for what he seemed to have glimpsed, like a blurred shadow moving on the edge of his sight, he was sure that he was not mistaken. He stepped up the street to where a narrow gate led into the churchyard. He looked across it once again, and wished that he could make himself leave this suddenly disturbing place, but he could not. With slow, but far from resolute steps, he walked down the asphalt path between the headstones, his senses attuned to the least disturbance about him: the cold moisture of the drizzle on his hands and face, the hissing of the leaves as the rain passed through them, the singing of the birds that echoed and re-echoed about him, and the distant murmur of a car along Station Road as the clock tolled a quarter to nine. The air seemed strangely still. Or was it his own overwrought imagination, keyed up by the horrendous nightmare, scenes from which still flickered uncomfortably in front of him? He felt a fluttering sensation in his stomach as he looked along the roughhewn stones of the church with its incised windows of stained glass.

  Quickening his pace, as the drizzle began to fall with more weight, he passed round the church. As he walked by the trees on the far side of the building, where they screened it off from the bleak back walls of a derelict mill, he again noticed something move. Was it a dog? he wondered, though it had seemed a little large. He whistled, though there was no response other than a thin, frail echo.

  He strode between a row of ornate monuments of polished marble. Was that someone there, crouched in the bushes?

  ‘Excuse me!’ he called enquiringly. Then stopped. Calling out to a dog, indeed! he thought as he glimpsed what he took to be a large black hound—perhaps an Irish wolfhound—scutter off out of sight between the trees.

  As he walked back to the street, he decided that it was about time he got on his way to the canal before the rain got any worse.

  The rain did worsen. By the time he reached the towpath of the canal, he was beginning to regret having come out on a morning like this on such a pointless exercise. The rain covered the fields on either side of the canal in a dull grey veil. What colours there were had been reduced to such a washed-out monochrome that the scene reminded him of that in an old and faded photograph. Facing him across the dingy waters of the canal were rows of little sheds and barbed wire fences. Crates of neglected rubbish had been abandoned in the sparsely grassed fields, together with the tyreless carcasses of deserted cars. The fields rose up to the back of a grim row of tenements whose haphazard rooftops formed a jagged black line against the sky. Only the moldering wood of the derelict mills and their soot-grimed bricks on his side of the canal stood out with any clarity.

  A dead cat floated in a ring of scum in the stagnant water at his feet, its jellied eyes sightlessly staring at the sky with a dank luminescence.

  As he took the stone head from his pocket, Lamson heard someone move behind him. Having thought that he was safely alone, he spun round in surprise. Crouched deep in the shadows between the walls of the mill, where a gate had once stood, was a man. A long, unbuttoned overcoat hung from about his hunched body. It was a coat that Lamson recognized instantly.

  ‘So it was you those kids were shouting at,’ Lamson accused, as the tramp tottered out into the light. ‘Have you been following me?’ he asked. But there was no response, other than a slight twitching of the old man’s blistered lips into what he took to be a smile, though one that was distinctively malignant and sly. ‘You were following me last night, weren’t you?’ Lamson went on. ‘I heard you when you slipped, so there’s no point denying it. And I saw you this morning whe
n those kids were having a go at you. I thought they were being cruel when they shouted out at you, but I don’ t know now. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps you are a dirty old man, a dirty, insidious and evil old man.’ Even now there was no more response from the tramp than that same repugnant smile. ‘Haven’t you got a tongue?’ Lamson snapped. ‘Grinning there like a Gargoyle. Well? You were talkative enough when we met on the moors. Have you taken vows of silence since then? Come on! Speak up, damn you!’ He clenched his fists, fighting back the impulse to hit him in the face, even though it was almost too strong to resist. What an ugly old creature he was, what with his pockmarked face all rubbery and grey and wet, and those bloated, repulsive lips. Was he some kind of half-breed? he wondered, though of what mixture he could not imagine. A thin, grey trickle of saliva hung down from a corner of his mouth. There was a streak of blood in it. As he stared at him he realized that he looked far worse, far, far worse than before, as if whatever disease had already swollen and eroded his features had suddenly accelerated its effect.

  The tramp stared down at the stone in Lamson’ s hand.

  ‘Were you after gettin’ rid of it? Is that why you’ve come to this place?’ he asked finally.

  ‘Since it’s mine, I have every right to, if that’s what I want to do,’ Lamson said, taken aback at the accusation.

  ‘An’ why should you choose to do such a thing, I wonder? You liked it enough when I first showed it to you on the bus. Couldn’t ’ardly wait to buy it off o’ me then, could you? ’Ere’s the money, give us the stone, quick as a flash! Couldn’t ’ardly wait, you couldn’t. An’ ere you are, all ’et up an’ nervous, can’t ’ardly wait to get rid o’ the thing. What’s the poor sod been doin’ to you? Givin’ you nightmares, ’as it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What should I mean? Just a joke. That’s all. Can’t you tell? Ha, ha, ha!’ He spat a string of phlegm on the ground. ‘Only a joke,’ he went on, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.