Cries of Terror

by Anthony Masters

  I paused for a moment, looking through the red pane at the clammy mist creeping and twisting round the summit of the old mountain. Then I continued:

  ‘They never returned. They stayed out longer than they had intended, and in the evening one of those sudden and terrible mountain mists came down. Simon sent out search parties – he rang the old bell in the belfry for as long as the mist lasted – three whole days – as some sort of signal to them. But they never came. They must have wandered for miles – you know how it is when you are lost in a fog – and then slipped and fallen into a gully, perhaps. Their bodies were never found …’

  ‘Horrible,’ said Miss Logan with a shudder. ‘And that was it, then … It must have been appalling for Sir Simon – appalling!’

  I nodded.

  ‘It was. He had set such store on this second marriage – the last of the line, you know. Particularly after the tragic disappointment his first wife had been to him …’

  We were silent. There came a slight commotion from downstairs and, looking over the banister into the hall, I saw that Gregory had arrived. He was divesting himself of his coat – a large, red-faced man, benevolent in appearance: singularly out of place in that over-crowded room with his big, bucolic personality. He was joking with some of the buyers.

  Miss Logan and I went downstairs. The buyers were collecting round the dais that had been set up for Gregory. We joined the solemn, whispering group.

  2

  I stop my narrative here for a moment. It is not easy for me to write – I am no literary man. The sheer manual labour of setting things down is enormous, to say nothing of the wearing effort of coordinating one’s facts and arranging them in reasonable coherence for the reader. The pen moves over the paper, the ink flows, the page fills up. Words and more words, yet somehow all the things one had hoped to say remain unsaid. I sit here at my desk in my sequestered room in London, five hundred miles away from Pitvrackie, struggling to set down something about the beastly things that happened in that hideous house. Why? It is, with those pothooks on paper, to exorcise the ghosts that have been haunting me since ever I learned the truth about Simon Erskine? I don’t know. I only know that for five years I have wanted to do this, I have looked forward to doing this. It may never be read – secretly, I hardly want it to be read. If it is, it can harm no one now. They are all dead – old Samuel Menasseh is dead: even Miss Logan, I learned about six months ago in a letter from my mother, died suddenly of heart-failure in her shop.

  And there it all is – all those miles away and all those years away. Above my desk now is the van Hoogstraaten landscape I saw and coveted that day of the sale at Vrackie Hall. I bite the end of my pen as I contemplate it. It stands as a symbol for all the horror I have felt through the years – it is impossible for me to look at the peaceful hillside scene without thinking of old Ben Vrackie as I saw him that day through the stained glass with the blood-red mists all about him. And I seem to hear, in my heart, a throbbing echo of the forlorn music thumped out in the empty, soulless rooms of Vrackie Hall by the grief-torn man who was, so tragically against his will, the last of the Black Erskines … Well, it is all an old tale now – older with the writing of it, whether that writing is good or ill. How should I know how best to set the story down? How should I know how to arrange events in a sequence that will give the utmost dramatic value to them? I may emphasize unimportant things. I may hold back on things that should be thrown into relief. I am not a professional. I write for one reason and for one reason only – because I must.

  So. I light a cigarette. I return to Vrackie Hall on that day of the auction.

  We stood round Gregory, the auctioneer, in a small depressed group. Bidding was good, though the scene was so curiously lifeless in the grey light that came in from the hills through the big windows. Gregory made some valiant effort to exercise his famous wit, but we were unresponsive – his voice rolled away into the recesses of the hall and the stairway. In the end he gave up. He became mechanical. He lowered his voice, he took to nodding and signalling, the tap of his gavel was almost inaudible. I lost interest after I had bought the van Hoogstraaten and the Mortlake tapestry I had had my eye on. I wandered away from the group of bidders and began to glance through the books. I was turning over the leaves of an early copy of Vathek when my eye was distracted by the figure of the strange old man, Menasseh.

  He was standing a little to my left, before the table displaying Sir Simon’s big game trophies. His attitude was one of extreme horror – yet the horror was grotesque: his small wizened body was rigid, so that the musty black cloth of his coat was stretched tight across his shoulder-blades, his pale eyes seemed to protrude, his toupee had slipped a little awry, giving him an irrelevantly rakish aspect. I went on observing him for some time, then moved over beside him.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ I said. ‘You seem, like myself, to have lost interest in the proceedings over there.’

  He started, then, adjusting his old wire-frame spectacles with, I noticed, a trembling hand, he said:

  ‘Yes … I – I’m afraid I have. I …’

  His voice trailed away. He glanced back at the table and I followed his gaze – to the drums that were among the African trophies. He coughed. Then he suddenly took off his glasses altogether and started to polish them with an old silk handkerchief.

  ‘I know you sir,’ he said quaveringly. ‘I’ve seen you before – several times.’

  ‘I’m often in Scotland,’ I replied. ‘And when I’m in Scotland I’m often at the sales. My name is Ferguson. I know that your name is Menasseh – I’ve seen you frequently too. I take it you’re a dealer? – or are you only an amateur, as I am?’

  ‘Eh?’ he stammered (it was as if his mind were not focusing properly – he was thinking all the time of something else). ‘No – not a dealer. Only an amateur, Mr Ferguson.’

  He put on his spectacles again and stared back at the drums on the table. His gaze was particularly drawn to the two small drums with the silver mountings. He passed his hand over his brow – his toupee fell even further askew.

  ‘Horrible – horrible,’ he muttered. ‘God of Abraham, it’s horrible …’

  He seemed to go into a trance for a moment or two. Then he put out his finger and traced, with the trembling point of it, the singular design of the coiled serpent on the parchment of the small drums. I watched him, fascinated.

  ‘Hideously attractive things,’ I said, by way of an opening. ‘Typical of Sir Simon to have had them – a man of curious tastes. You know how he is said to have beaten on them frantically for hours on end after the disappearance of his second wife?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Menasseh, in a whisper. ‘Yes, I know …’

  ‘A strange sign of grief.’ (I was still searching to bring him out – he was, there was no doubt, affected to the very roots by something.)

  ‘A strange sign of grief indeed,’ he muttered. Then once more he fell distrait. It was a long time before he added, in an almost inaudible undertone: ‘A terrible sign of grief – terrible and horrible …’

  I looked at him, drawing my brows together. He was white. He kept moistening his thin lips with the point of a colourless tongue. I wanted extremely to ask him what it was that was upsetting him, yet after all I hardly knew him. I found myself, in the long silence that ensued after his last remark, wondering who he was and what he did (I had forgotten, when I asked him if he was a dealer, how, in the old days, we had speculated on his occupation.) Printing, was it – or drawing? Something of that nature, I recalled. Perhaps it was a little publishing business? Yet it was more than likely I would know of it if it were publishing: that was my own line of business – I knew most of the trade in Scotland. Whatever it was it was lucrative – I remembered having heard that he was a wealthy old fellow.

  Suddenly we became aware – simultaneously – that two of Gregory’s assistants were moving towards us. Apparently the African trophies were the next item on the catalogue. I glanced quickly at Menass
eh.

  ‘Now’s the time,’ I said smiling. ‘You seem interested in those drums of Erskine’s. They’re going up, I fancy. Are you buying?’

  He gazed at me, his eyes large behind the thick glass of his spectacles.

  ‘Oh no,’ he whispered. ‘Oh no. God forbid it …’

  The two men in green baize aprons were lifting some of the larger drums, preparatory to carrying them over to Gregory’s dais. Menasseh, I saw by this time, was looking quickly backwards and forwards in an access of nervous apprehension of some sort. He suddenly leaned close up to me.

  ‘Ferguson,’ he said, ‘I can’t keep it, I can’t. I must tell someone. I want to see you – I must see you.’

  ‘We could go outside,’ I said, a little disturbed, I had to confess, by his urgency. ‘I shall not be bidding again. Will you?’

  ‘No. No. Not here,’ he muttered. ‘Not here – I can’t stay here. It has upset me too much – I must go away from here, quickly.’

  He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and thrust a card into my hand.

  ‘If you are in Dundee,’ he said, ‘if you should be in Dundee –’

  ‘I have to be there at the end of this week, as it happens,’ I answered. ‘I have a little business which I am mixing with my holiday. Thursday, I should say – or possibly Friday.’

  ‘Good. Good. Then could you call on me? For God’s sake could you call on me?’

  I nodded: and he, in his nervousness, set his old head nodding up and down too. I fingered his card, looking at the address on it:

  SAMUEL MENASSEH

  39, THE PORTWAY

  DUNDEE

  ‘My business address,’ he said, reading my thoughts. ‘But come anytime, anytime this week. I shall be there. I have a little room behind the shop where I live – I only go to my house outside the city at week-ends and so on.’ Then, reading my thoughts still more deeply, he added: ‘My business is strange – very strange. Don’t be surprised. It’s a little – unpleasant. I don’t tell people about it – I won’t mention it here … But come, sir – oh for God’s sake I beg you to come! It will haunt me, this – I’ll have no peace!’

  He said these last words quickly, in a hoarse, strained whisper. Then he turned and was gone. I was left holding his card, staring after him as he hastened over to the massive door. He had left me with an intolerable curiosity – a sense of dismay over his hurried and half-finished sentences.

  I was brought back to my senses by the deep, healthy tones of Miss Logan’s voice. She was standing, a sane, coherent figure in her brogues and tweed costume, watching the man as they carried the little skull-drums to Gregory’s dais.

  ‘Ferguson,’ she called. ‘Come quickly. Look at these – they’re lovely. I’m having these – by Jove, I’m certainly having these.’

  I slipped the old man’s card into my pocket and went over to join her. She was by this time holding the smaller drum up to the light and examining the silver base.

  ‘Look here,’ she said excitedly. ‘What an odd thing. Someone’s scratched some verse on the silver – look at it, Shelley, of all strange things!’

  She read out solemnly:

  Music, when soft voices die,

  Vibrates in the memory …’

  And she laughed.

  ‘Odd thing to find on the mounting of an African drum, I must say. Your old Sir Simon was a devilish queer fish, if ever there was one …’

  I had to agree. Above all I have to agree to that …

  3

  Almost midnight. Incredible how quickly the time has gone. I started writing shortly before seven, and since then have interrupted myself only for long enough to brew some tea at about ten. My pen hand is cramped and painful and my eyes ache terribly from staring at the white paper. Yet I cannot stop – I must go on now.

  I look back at what I have written. I feel a sinking in the stomach. How imperfectly I have set things down! A rambling introduction, too much description, a conversation which, on paper, seems disjointed and insane. Yet I have tried faithfully enough to keep a clear head over this nightmare. I have tried to set things in their order, to conjure up some sense of atmosphere. The old house, the death of Bridgid and David Strange in the terrible hill mist, the tragic last months of that haunted, lost man … You see, I know it all now, I know every shade of it. And this informs every word I write, every thought I have in this quiet room. My pen moves over the paper slowly and carefully – I stop to think before every word. I know all of it – all of it …

  My remembrances go, irrelevantly, to Miss Logan. By her very inconsequence in this nightmare she is the most grotesque figure of them all. Tweeds, brogues, untinted lip-salve. The more select journals, the Scottish Nationalist movement, long walks on the moors with one of those sticks with spikes on the end and handles that fold open to form a little seat. And her shop with the Chelsea china, the old spinning wheels, the pictures on wood, the churchwarden pipes in bundles, the little ornamental shepherd crooks of green Nailsea glass. And somewhere among all these things, tucked away in a corner, perhaps, when her first enthusiasm for them had waned, the little drums. I do not suppose she even knew of those insane weeping fits of Sir Simon’s, when he sent the sound of those drums across the valley …

  She had met him once, I remember she said. He had made her uncomfortable. She had been at school with his first wife. A quiet girl. She had never been able to understand –

  What? How could she understand? Miss Logan in her little shop, dying of heart failure. Yet had her heart ever started? A man to her was a companion for a walk on the moors. Of course she had never been able to understand, with her babbling of Shelley. How could she?

  No matter, though. She had her shop, with its green Nailsea glass. And over the door of it, in gilt, old-style lettering, one word: Antiques.

  And now, as I near the end of the story, I think of another shop, a stranger shop. I found it, in the twilight, in a side-street near the docks in Dundee. It was low-fronted, ill-lit by a flickering gas standard at the kerb of the pavement. The window had nothing in it, above the door was no sign to announce the trade or occupation of its tenant. The name, no more, in faded block capitals:

  SAMUEL MENASSEH

  I knocked, and heard the echo of my knock go rolling into the dust and darkness inside. I waited, impatient. A sailor stumbled in the dusk further along the street, singing in the drawn-out, lugubrious tones of a drunken man. I knocked again, and from inside this time there came the sound of shuffling feet and the undoing of a chain.

  He seemed smaller now, the old man, as I looked down on him from the pavement. He wore a loose, grey-wool cardigan and, on his head, instead of the toupee, was a skullcap of black velvet – a little biretta of the sort the cantors wear in the synagogues. I greeted him and he nodded. Then he motioned me to follow him and I went inside.

  It would be a mockery to say that I was not, in all desperation, impatient and curious. I remembered too acutely the old man’s broken conversation in the hall at Vrackie, the whole sense of dismay and nervous horror that had come from him. In the intervening days since that interview I had seen too often, in my mind’s eye, that white wizened face, those long trembling fingers of parchment tracing the design of the snake on the other parchment of the drums. I was consumed by impatience. As I followed him through the dim corridor to the sitting-room at the back of the shop, I searched feverishly about me for some sign, some illumination of the mystery of him. But there was nothing. Half-way along the corridor we passed an open door that led into the shop proper. I peered anxiously through it. Dimly glimpsed in the light from the gas standard outside as it flickered through the window, was a counter, exceptionally low. Suspended above it from the ceiling was a long, flexible, snake-like thing – a piece of gas tubing I thought at first, and then had the curious fancy that it was a drill – the cable lead of a pedal drill, such as old-fashioned dentists use. But fantastic to suppose that the man was a dentist. Besides, I had no more than glimpsed the appliance
in the gloom …

  We reached the small sitting-room. I stood for a moment opening and shutting my eyes, accustoming them to the light that came from the gas-bracket above the mantelshelf. The room was poorly furnished – a table, a basket-chair by the fireplace, an old dresser, a wardrobe. In the corner a divan bed. Some books in a hanging shelf, a fretwork pipe-rack. And for pictures –

  I, so accustomed to the beautiful in pictures, so used to the shaded tones, the colours in harmony, the designs so subtle, so balanced – all the magic of the Masters: I, with my fastidious passion for tapestries and delicate needle-worked panels – what could I make of the monstrous things on the walls of that room of Menasseh’s? Unframed, stuck to the plaster with rusted drawing pins, glazed with layers of size varnish – those rioting tortured dragons in wild reds and blues, those posies of purple flowers, those bleeding hearts transfixed with arrows, those fleshy nudes in violent pink, with bellies sagged and scarlet-nippled breasts – what could I make of them? And yet, I knew that I knew them – they were, in their style, unmistakable. I searched my memory and then, in a moment, could have laughed aloud. For I had, by a wild coincidence, been thinking just outside, while I had listened to the drunken sailor go stumbling along the street – as it goes, you will understand, when one’s mind wanders inconsequently in its own secret places and among old associations – I had been thinking then of a fascination of my childhood: whether that sailor were, as had been the only sailor I had known as a child – tattooed! And I understood the meaning of the drill that hung from the ceiling of Menasseh’s shop – I had an image of the dye-charged needle at the end of it stabbing again and again into white, tight flesh …