Cries of Terror

by Anthony Masters

  From the first he produced a section of a bread board, four pegs, and six half-burned birthday candles screwed into nibbled-looking pink candy rosettes. The bread board he placed on top of the pegs, the candles he arranged in a semi-circle. He surveyed the results with squint-eyed approval.

  From the second box he removed a grotesque object composed of coal tar. It perched shakily on pipe-stem legs, two strips of cellophane were pasted to its flanks and a black rubber band dangled downwards from its head in which was embedded – one on each side – a red cinnamon drop.

  The casual observer would have seen in this sculpture a child’s crude efforts to emulate the characteristics of the common housefly. The casual observer – if he had been inclined to go on with his observing – also would have seen that Pruitt was in a ‘mood’. He might even have observed aloud, ‘That child looks positively feverish and he shouldn’t be allowed to play with matches.’

  But at the moment there was no casual observer. Only Pruitt absorbed in lighting the birthday candles. The image of the fly he deposited squarely in the middle of the bread board.

  Cross-legged he sat, chin down, arms folded. He rocked himself back and forth. He began to chant. Sing-song. Through his nose. Once in a while he rolled his eyes around in their sockets, but merely once in a while. He had found, if he did that too often, it made him dizzy.

  ‘O Idol of the Flies,’ intoned Pruitt, ‘hahneemahneemo.’ He scratched his ankle ruminatively. ‘Hahneeweemahneemo,’ he improved, ‘make the lemonade dry in the crack on the back porch, and make Miss Bittner find the scrooched up fly after she’s already drunk some, and make cook go down in the cellar for some marmalade and make her not turn on the light and make her fall over the string I’ve got tied between the posts, and make aunt get a piece of nutshell in her bread and cough like hell,’ Pruitt thought this over. ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘hell, hell, hell, hell, HELL.’

  He meditated in silence. ‘I guess that’s all,’ he said finally, ‘except maybe you’d better fill up my flycatcher in case we have currant cookies for tea. Hahneewee-mahneemo, O Idol of the Flies, you are free to GO!’

  Pruitt fixed his gaze in the middle distance and riveted it there. Motionless, scarcely breathing, his lips parted, he huddled on the bare boards – a small sphinx in khaki shorts.

  This was what Pruitt called ‘not-thinking-time’. Pretty soon, entirely without volition on his part, queer, half-formed dream things would float through his mind. Like dark golliwogs, propelling themselves along with their tails, hinting at secrets that nobody knew, not even grownups. Some day he would be able to catch one, quickly, before it wriggled off into the inner hidden chamber where They had a nest and, then, he would know. He would catch it in a net of thought, like Harry’s net caught fishes, and no matter how it squirmed and threshed about he would pin it flat against his skull until he knew. Once, he had almost caught one. He had been on the very rim of knowing and Miss Bittner had come down to bring him some peanut butter sandwiches and it had escaped back into that deep, strange place in his mind where They lived. He had had it only for a split second but he remembered it had blind, weepy eyes and was smooth.

  If Miss Bittner hadn’t come – he had vomited on her stocking. Here came one of Them now – fast, it was coming fast, too fast to catch. It was gone, leaving behind it a heady exhilaration. Here came another, revolving, writhing like a sea snake, indistinct, shadowy. Let it go, the next one might be lured into the net. Here it came, two of them, rolling in the sleep hollows. Easily now, easily, easily, close in, easily, so there wouldn’t be any warning ripples, closer, they weren’t watching, murmuring to each other – there! He had them!

  ‘Pruitt! Oh, Pru-itt!’

  The things veered away, their tails whipping his intellect into a spinning mass of chaotic frenzy.

  ‘Pru-itt! Where are you? Pru-itt!’

  The boy blinked.

  ‘Pru-itt! Oh, Pru-itt!’

  His mouth distorted like that of an enraged animal. He stuck out his tongue and hissed at the locked door. The handle turned.

  ‘Pruitt, are you there?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’ The words were thick and meaty in his mouth. If he bit down, Pruitt thought, he could bite one in two and chew it up and it would squish out between his teeth like an éclair.

  ‘Unlock the door.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’

  Pruitt blew out the candles and swept his treasures under the cot. He reconsidered this action, shoved his hand under the chintz skirt, snaffled the coal tar fly and stuffed it in his shirt.

  ‘Do you hear me, Pruitt? Unlock this door.’ The knob rattled.

  ‘I’m coming fast as I can,’ he said. He rose, stalked over to the door, shot back the bolt and stood, squinting, in the brilliant daylight before Miss Bittner.

  ‘What on earth are you doing in there?’

  ‘I guess I must’ve fallen asleep.’

  Miss Bittner peered into the murky confines of the bathhouse. She sniffed inquisitively.

  ‘Pruitt,’ she said, ‘have you been smoking?’

  ‘No, Miss Bittner.’

  ‘We mustn’t tell a falsehood, Pruitt. It is far better to tell the truth and accept the consequences.’

  ‘I haven’t been smoking.’ Pruitt could feel his stomach moving inside him. He was going to be sick again. Like he was the last time. Miss Bittner was wavering in front of him. Her outside edges were all blurry. His stomach gave a violent lurch. Pruitt looked at Miss Bittner’s stockings. They were messy. Awfully messy. Miss Bittner looked at them too.

  ‘Run along up to the house, Pruitt,’ she said kindly. ‘I’ll be up presently.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’

  ‘And we won’t say anything about smoking to your auntie. I think you’ve been sufficiently punished.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Bittner.’

  Pruitt went languidly up the path, conscious of Miss Bittner’s eyes boring into him. When he turned the bend, he stopped and crept slyly into the bushes. He made his way back towards the bathhouse, pressing the branches away from him and easing them cautiously to prevent them from snapping.

  Miss Bittner sat on the steps taking off her stockings. She rinsed her legs in the water and dried them with her handkerchief. Pruitt could see an oval corn plaster on her little toe. She put her bony feet into her patent-leather Health shoes, got up, brushed her dress and disappeared into the bathhouse.

  Pruitt inched nearer.

  Miss Bittner came to the doorway and examined something she held in her hands. She looked puzzled. From his vantage point, Pruitt glimpsed the pink of the candy rosettes, the stubby candle wicks.

  ‘I hate you,’ whispered Pruitt venomously, ‘I hate you, I hate you.’ Tenderly, he withdrew the coal tar image from his shirt. He cuddled it against his cheek. ‘Break her ear thing,’ he muttered. ‘Break it all to pieces so’s she’ll have to act deaf. Break it, break it, hahneeweemahneemo, break it good.’ Warily he crawled backwards until he regained the path.

  He trudged onward, pausing only twice. Once at a break in the hedge he reached into the aperture and drew out a cone-shaped contraption smeared with syrup. Five flies clung to this, their wings sticky, their legs gluey. These he disengaged, ignoring the lesser fry of gnats and midges that had met a similar fate, and returned the flycatcher to its lair. The second interruption along his line of march was a sort of interlude during which he cracked the two-inch spine of a garden lizard and hung it on a bramble where it performed incredibly tortuous convulsions with the lower half of its body.

  Mona Eagleston came out of her bedroom and closed the door gently behind her. Everything about Mona was gentle from the top of her wren brown hair threaded with grey to the slippers on her ridiculously tiny feet. She was rather like a fawn. An ageing fawn with liquid eyes that, despite the encroaching years, had failed to lose their tiptoe look of expectancy.

  One knew instinctively that Mona Eagleston was that rare phenomenon – a lady to the manner born. If, occa
sionally, when in close proximity to her nephew, a perplexed look overshadowed that delicate face, it was no more than a passing cloud. Children were inherently good. If they appeared otherwise, it was simply because their actions were misunderstood. They – he – Pruitt didn’t mean to do things. He couldn’t know – well, that slamming the screen door, for instance, could send a sickening stab of pain through a head racked with migraine. He couldn’t be expected to know, the poor orphan lamb. The poor, dear, orphan lamb.

  If only she didn’t have to pour at teatime. If only she could lie quiet and still with a cold compress on her head and the shutters pulled to. How selfish she was. Teatimes to a child were lovely, restful periods. Moments to be forever cherished in the pattern of memory. Like colourful loops of embroidery floss embellishing the whole. A skein of golden, shining teatimes with the sunset straining the windows and high-lighting the fat-sided Delft milk-jug. The taste of jam, the brown crumbles left on the cookie plate, the tea cups – egg-shell frail – with handles like wedding rings. All of these were precious to a child. Deep down inside, without quite knowing why, they absorbed such things as sponges absorbed water – and, like sponges, they could wring these memories out when they were growing old. As she did, sometimes. What a wretched person she was to begrudge a teatime to Pruitt, dear, little Pruitt, her own dead brother’s child.

  She went on down the stairs, one white hand trailing the banister. The fern, she noticed, was dying. This was the third fern. She’d always had so much luck with ferns, until lately. Her goldfish, too. They had died. It was almost an omen. And Pruitt’s turtles. She had bought them at the village. So cunning they were with enamelled pictures on their hard, tree-barky shells. They had died. She mustn’t think about dying. The doctor had said it was bad for her.

  She crossed the great hall and entered the drawing-room.

  ‘Dear Pruitt,’ she said to the boy swinging his legs from the edge of the brocaded chair. She kissed him. She had intended to kiss his sunwarm cheek but he had moved, suddenly, and the kiss had met an unresponsive ear. Children were jumpy little things.

  ‘Did you have a nice day?’

  ‘Yes, aunt.’

  ‘And you, Miss Bittner? Did you have a nice day? And how did the conjugations go this morning? Did our young man … why, my dear, whatever is the matter?’

  ‘She broke her ear thing,’ Pruitt said. He turned towards his tutor and enunciated in an exaggerated fashion, ‘didn’t you, Miss Bittner?’

  Miss Bittner reddened. She spoke in an unnaturally loud toneless voice of the deaf, ‘I dropped my hearing-aid,’ she explained. ‘On the bathroom floor. I’m afraid, until I get it fixed, that you’ll have to bear with me.’ She smiled a tight strained smile to show that it was really quite a joke on her.

  ‘What a shame,’ said Mona Eagleston, ‘but I daresay it can be repaired in the village. Harry can take it in tomorrow.’

  Miss Bittner followed the movement of Mona Eagleston’s lips almost desperately.

  ‘No,’ she said hesitantly, ‘Harry didn’t do it. I did it. The bathroom tile, you know. It was frightfully clumsy of me.’

  ‘And she drank some lemonade that had a fly in it. Didn’t you, Miss Bittner? I said you drank some lemonade that had a fly in it, didn’t you?’

  Miss Bittner nodded politely. Her eyes focused on Pruitt’s mouth.

  ‘Cry?’ She ventured. ‘No, I didn’t cry.’

  Mona Eagleston seated herself behind the teapot and prepared to pour. She must warn cook, hereafter, to put an oiled cover over the lemonade. One couldn’t be too particular where children were concerned. They were susceptible to all sorts of diseases and flies were notorious carriers. If Pruitt were taken ill because of her lack of forethought she would never forgive herself.

  ‘Could I have some marmalade?’ Pruitt asked.

  ‘We have currant cookies, dear, and nut bread. Do you think we need marmalade?’

  ‘I do so love marmalade, aunt. Miss Bittner does too. Don’t you, Miss Bittner?’

  Miss Bittner smiled stoically on and accepted her cup with a pleasant non-committal murmur that she devoutly hoped would serve as an appropriate answer to whatever Pruitt was asking.

  ‘Very well, dear.’ Mona tinkled a bell.

  ‘I’ll pass the cookies, aunt.’

  ‘Thank you, Pruitt. You are very thoughtful.’

  The boy took the plate and carried it over to Miss Bittner and an expression of acute suffering swam across the Bittner countenance as the boy trod heavily on her foot.

  ‘Have some cookies.’ Pruitt thrust the plate at her.

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ Miss Bittner said, thinking he had apologized and congratulating herself on the fact that she hadn’t moaned aloud. If he had known she had a corn, he couldn’t have selected the location with more exactitude. She looked at the cookies. After that lemonade episode, she had felt she couldn’t eat again – but they were tempting. Gracious, how that corn ached.

  ‘Here’s a nice curranty one.’ Pruitt popped a cookie on her plate.

  ‘Thank you, Pruitt.’

  Cook waddled into the room. ‘Did you ring, Miss Mona?’

  ‘Yes, Bertha. Would you get Pruitt some marmalade, please?’

  Bertha shot a poisonous glance at Pruitt. ‘There’s none up, ma’am. Will the jam do?’

  Pruitt managed a sorrowful sigh. ‘I do so love marmalade, aunt,’ and then happily, as if it were an afterthought, ‘isn’t there some basement cubby?’

  Mona Eagleston made a helpless look at cook. ‘Would you mind terribly, Bertha? You know how children are.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, I know how children are,’ cook said in a flat voice.

  ‘Thank you, Bertha. The pineapple will do.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Bertha plodded away.

  ‘She was walking around in her bare feet again today,’ Pruitt said.

  His aunt shook her head sadly. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said to Miss Bittner. ‘I dislike being cross, but ever since she stepped on that nail’ – Mona Eagleston smiled quickly at her nephew – ‘not that you meant to leave it there, darling, but … well … will you have a slice of nut bread, Miss Bittner?’

  Pruitt licked back a grin. ‘Aunt said would you like a piece of nut bread, Miss Bittner,’ he repeated grinningly.

  Miss Bittner paid no heed. She seemed to be in a frozen trance sitting as she did rigidly upright staring at her plate with horror. She arose.

  ‘I … I don’t feel well,’ she said, ‘I think … I think I’d better go lie down.’

  Pruitt hopped off his chair and took her plate. Mona Eagleston made a distressed tching sound. ‘Is there anything I can do –’ she half rose but Miss Bittner waved her back.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Miss Bittner said hoarsely. ‘I … I think it’s just something I … I ate. Don’t let me disturb your t-t-teatime.’ She put her napkin over her mouth and hastily hobbled from the room.

  ‘I should see that she –’ began Mona Eagleston worriedly.

  ‘Oh, don’t let’s ruin teatime,’ Pruitt interposed hurriedly. ‘Here, have some nut bread. It looks dreadfully good.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Please, Aunt Mona. Not teatime.’

  ‘Very well, Pruitt.’ Mona chose a slice of bread. ‘Does teatime mean a great deal to you? It did to me when I was a little girl.’

  ‘Yes, aunt.’ He watched her break a morsel of bread, butter it and put it in her mouth.

  ‘I used to live for teatime. It was such a cosy …’ Mona Eagleston lifted a pale hand to her throat. She began to cough. Her eyes filled with tears. She looked wildly around for water. She tried to say ‘water’ but couldn’t get the word past the choking in her lungs. If Pruitt would only – but he was just a child. He couldn’t be expected to know what to do for a coughing spell. Poor, dear, Pruitt, he looked so … so – perturbed. Handing her the tea like that, his face all puckery. She gulped down a great draught of the scalding liquid. Her slight frame was seize
d with a paroxysm of coughing. Mercy! She must have mistakenly put salt in it, instead of sugar.

  She wiped her brimming eyes. ‘Nutshell,’ she wheezed, gaining her feet. ‘Back … presently …’ Coughing violently, she, too, quitted the room.

  From somewhere beneath Pruitt’s feet, deep in the bowels of the house, came a faint far-away thud.

  Pruitt picked the flies off of Miss Bittner’s cookie. Where there had been five, there were now four and a half. He put the remains in his pocket. They might come in handy.

  Dimly he heard cook calling for help. It was a smothered hysterical calling. If Aunt Mona didn’t return, it could go on quite a while before it was heeded. Cook could yell herself blue around the gills by then. ‘Hahneeweemahneemo,’ he crooned. ‘O Idol of the Flies, you have served me true, yea, yea, double yea, forty-five, thirty-two.’

  Pruitt helped himself to a heaping spoonful of sugar.

  The pinkish sky was filled with cawing rooks. They pivoted and wheeled, they planed their wings into black fans and settled in the great old beeches to shout gossip at one another.

  Pruitt scuffed his shoe on the stone steps and wished he had an air rifle. He would ask for one on his birthday. He would ask for a lot of impossible things first and then – pitifully – say, ‘Well, then, could I just have a little old air rifle?’ Aunt would fall for that. She was as dumb as his mother had been. Dumber. His mother had been ‘simple’ dumb, which was pretty bad – going in, as she had, for treacly bedtime stories and lap sitting. Aunt was ‘sick’ dumb, which was very dumb indeed. ‘Sick’ dumb people always looked at the ‘bright side’. They were the dumbest of all. They were push-overs, ‘sick’ dumb people were. Easy, little old push-overs.

  Pruitt shifted his position as there came to his ears the scrape of footsteps in the hall.

  That dragging sound would be cook. He wondered if she really had pulled the muscles loose in her back. Here came Harry with the car. They must be going to the doctor. Harry’s hunch made him look like he had a pillow behind him.

  ‘We mustn’t let Pruitt know about the string,’ he heard his aunt say. ‘It would make him feel badly to learn that he had been the cause.’