by Otto Penzler
Mr. Holt gazes at Tom, and I’m more afraid than makes any sense that he’ll invite him to stay even if I leave. “I’ll need to take him with me,” I say too fast, too loud.
“Very well, I’ll convey your apologies. A pity, though. Jack was just making friends.”
A hint of ominousness suggests that my decision may affect my record. I’m trailing after the headmaster, though I’ve no idea what I could say to regain his approval, when he says, “We’ll see you on Monday, I trust. Go out the front. After all, you’re staff.”
It feels more like being directed to a tradesman’s entrance. Tom shoves one fire door with his fist and holds it open for me. It thuds shut behind us like a lid, then stirs with a semblance of life. Perhaps Mr. Holt has sent a draught along the corridor. “Let’s get out of his passage,” I say, but the joke is stale. I unlatch the door opposite his office and step into the sunlight, and don’t release my grip on the door until I hear it lock.
My Fiat is the smallest of the cars parked outside. I watch the door of the school in the driving mirror until Tom has fastened his seat belt, and then I accelerate with a gnash of gravel. We’re nearly at the gates when Tom says, “Hadn’t I better go back?”
I halt the car just short of the dual carriageway that leads home. I’m hesitating mostly because of the traffic. “Not unless you want to,” I tell him.
“I don’t much.”
“Then we’re agreed,” I say and send the car into a gap in the traffic.
A grassy strip planted with trees divides the road, two lanes on each side. The carriageway curves back and forth for three miles to our home. Tom doesn’t wait for me to pick up speed before he speaks again. “Wouldn’t it help if I did?”
I’m distracted by the sight of a Volkswagen several hundred yards back in the outer lane. It’s surely too small to contain so many children; it looks positively dangerous, especially at that speed. “Help what?”
“You to stay friends with the headmaster.”
This may sound naïve, but it’s wise enough, and makes me doubly uncomfortable. As the Volkswagen overtakes me I observe that it contains fewer boys than I imagined. “I don’t need to use you to do that, Tom. I shouldn’t have used you at all.”
“I don’t mind if it helps now mother hasn’t got such a good job.”
The next car—an Allegro—to race along the outer lane has just one boy inside. He’s in the back, but not strapped in, if he’s even seated. As he leans forward between the young couple in front I have the disconcerting impression that he’s watching me. I don’t know how I can, since I’m unable to distinguish a single detail within the dark blotch of his face. I force my attention away from the mirror and strive to concentrate on the road ahead. Until I brake I’m too close to a bus. “Look, Tom,” I hear myself say, “I know you mean well, but just now you’re not helping, all right? I’ve got enough on my mind. Too much.”
With scant warning the bus halts at a stop. The Allegro flashes its lights to encourage me to pull out. Its young passenger is unquestionably watching me; he has leaned further forward between the seats, though his face still hasn’t emerged into the light. The trouble is that the man and woman in front of him are middle-aged or older. It isn’t the same car. This confuses me so badly that as I make to steer around the bus I stall the engine. The Allegro hurtles past with a blare of its horn, and I have a clear view of the occupants. Unless the boy has crouched out of view, the adults are the only people in the car.
The starter motor screams as I twist the key an unnecessary second time. I’m tailing the bus at more than a safe distance while cars pass us when Tom says, “Are you sure you’re all right to drive, dad? We could park somewhere and come back for it later.”
“I’ll be fine if you just shut up.” I would be more ashamed of my curtness if I weren’t so aware of a Mini that’s creeping up behind us in the inner lane. The old man who’s driving it is on his own, or is he? No, a silhouette about Tom’s size but considerably thinner and with holes in it has reared up behind him. It leans over his shoulder, and I’m afraid of what may happen if he notices it, unless I’m the only person who can see it. I tramp on the accelerator to send the Fiat past the bus, only just outdistancing an impatient Jaguar. “I mean,” I say to try and recapture Tom’s companionship, “let’s save talking till we’re home.”
He deserves more of an apology, but I’m too preoccupied by realising that it wasn’t such a good idea to overtake the bus. The only person on board who’s visible to me is the driver. At least I can see that he’s alone in the cabin, but who may be behind him out of sight? Suppose he’s distracted while he’s driving? A woman at a bus stop extends a hand as if she’s attempting to warn me, and to my relief, the bus coasts to a halt. The Mini wavers into view around it and trundles after my car. I put on as much speed as I dare and risk a glance in the mirror to see whether there was anything I needed to leave behind. The old man is on his own. Tom and I aren’t, however.
My entire body stiffens to maintain my grip on the wheel and control of the steering. I struggle not to look over my shoulder or in the mirror, and tell myself that the glimpse resembled a damaged old photograph, yellowed and blotchy and tattered, hardly identifiable as a face. It’s still in the mirror at the edge of my determinedly lowered vision, and I wonder what it may do to regain my attention—and then I have a worse thought. If Tom sees it, will it transfer its revenge to him? Was this its intention ever since it saw us? “Watch the road,” I snarl.
At first Tom isn’t sure I mean him. “What?” he says without much enthusiasm.
“Do it for me. Tell me if I get too close to anything.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to talk.”
“I do now. Grown-ups can change their minds, you know. This is your first driving lesson. Never get too close.”
I hardly know what I’m saying, but it doesn’t matter so long as he’s kept unaware of our passenger. I tread on the accelerator and come up fast behind a second bus. I can’t avoid noticing that the object in the mirror has begun to grin so widely that the remnants of its lips are tearing, exposing too many teeth. The car is within yards of the bus when Tom says nervously “Too close?”
“Much too. Don’t wait so long next time or you won’t like what happens.”
My tone is even more unreasonable than that, but I can’t think what else to do. I brake and swerve around the bus, which involves glancing in the mirror. I’m barely able to grasp that the Fiat is slower than the oncoming traffic, because the intruder has leaned forward to show me the withered blackened lumps it has for eyes. I fight to steady my grip on the wheel as my shivering leg presses the accelerator to the floor. “Keep it up,” I urge and retreat into the inner lane ahead of the bus. “I’m talking to you, Tom.”
I will him not to wonder who else I could have been addressing. “Too close,” he cries soon enough. I scarcely know whether I’m driving like this to hold his attention or out of utter panic. “Too close,” I make him shout several times, and at last, “Slow down, dad. Here’s our road.”
What may I be taking home? I’m tempted to drive past the junction and abandon the car, but I’ve no idea what that would achieve beyond leaving Tom even warier of me. I brake and grapple with the wheel, swinging far too widely into the side road, almost mounting the opposite kerb. Perhaps the lumps too small for eyes are spiders, because they appear to be inching out of the sockets above the collapsed shrivelled nose and protruding grin. I try to tell myself it’s a childish trick as the car speeds between the ranks of mutually supportive red-brick semis to our house, the farther half of the sixth pair on the right. As I swing the car into the driveway, barely missing one concrete gatepost, Tom protests, “You don’t park like this, dad. You always back in.”
“Don’t tell me how to drive,” I blurt and feel shamefully irrational.
As soon as we halt alongside Wendy’s Honda he springs his belt and runs to the house, losing momentum when his mother opens the front
door. She’s wiping her hands on a cloth multicoloured with ink from drawing work cards for the nursery. “You’re early,” she says. “Wasn’t it much of a party?”
“I wish I hadn’t gone,” Tom declares and runs past her into the house.
“Oh dear,” says Wendy, which is directed at least partly at me, but I’m busy. Reversing into the driveway would have entailed looking in the mirror or turning in my seat, and now I do both. I have to release my seat belt and crane over the handbrake to convince myself that the back seat and the floor behind me are empty. “Done your worst, have you?” I mutter as I drag myself out of the car.
This isn’t meant for Wendy to hear, but she does. “What are you saying about Tom?” she says with a frown and a pout that seem to reduce her already small and suddenly less pretty face.
“Not him. It was—” Of course I can’t continue, except with a frustrated sigh. “I was talking to myself.”
The sigh has let her smell my breath. “Have you been drinking? How much have you drunk?”
“Not a great deal under the circumstances.”
“Which are those?” Before I can answer, however incompletely, she says, “You know I don’t like you drinking and driving, especially with Tom in the car.”
“I wasn’t planning to drive so soon.”
“Was it really that awful? Should I have come to support you?”
“Maybe.” It occurs to me that her presence might have kept the unwelcome passenger out of my car, but I don’t want her to think I’m blaming her. “I wasn’t going to make an issue of it,” I say. “You didn’t seem very eager.”
“I’m not completely terrified of school, you know.”
Despite the sunlight and the solidity of our house, I abruptly wonder if my tormentor is listening. “Me neither,” I say louder than I should.
“I hope not, otherwise we’ll never survive. Come inside, Paul. No need for anyone to hear our troubles.”
“All I was trying to say was I’ve already made one person feel they had to tag along with me that shouldn’t have.”
“I expect one of you will get around to telling me about it eventually.” Wendy gazes harder at me without relinquishing her frown. “Taking him with you didn’t put him at risk, did it? But driving like that did. He’s the best thing we’ve made together, the only one that really counts. Don’t endanger him again or I’ll have to think what needs to be done to protect him.”
“What’s that, a threat? Believe me, you’ve no idea what you’re talking about.” The sense that I’m not rid of Jasper is letting my nerves take control of my speech. “Look, I’m sorry. You’re right, we shouldn’t be discussing this now. Leave it till we’ve both calmed down,” I suggest and dodge past her into the hall.
I need to work out what to say to Tom. I hurry upstairs and take refuge in Wendy’s and my room. As I stare at the double bed while Tom and Wendy murmur in the kitchen, I have the notion that my fate is somehow in the balance. Now there’s silence, which tells me nothing. No, there’s a faint noise—the slow stealthy creak of a stair, and then of a higher one. An intruder is doing its best not to be heard.
I sit on the bed and face the dressing-table mirror. It frames the door, which I didn’t quite shut. I’ll confront whatever has to be confronted now that I’m on my own. I’ll keep it away from my family however I have to. The creaks come to an end, and I wonder if they were faint only because so little was climbing the stairs. How much am I about to see? After a pause during which my breath seems to solidify into a painful lump in my chest, the door in the mirror begins to edge inwards. I manage to watch it advance several inches before I twist around, crumpling the summer quilt. “Get away from us,” I say with a loathing that’s designed to overcome my panic. “Won’t you be happy till you’ve destroyed us, you putrid little—”
The door opens all the way, revealing Tom. His mouth strives not to waver as he flees into his room. I stumble after him as far as the landing and see Wendy gazing up from the hall. “He wanted to say he was sorry if he put you off your driving,” she says in a low flat voice. “I don’t know why. I wouldn’t have.” Before I can speak she shuts herself in the front room, and I seem to hear a muffled snigger that involves the clacking of rotten teeth. Perhaps it’s fading into the distance. Perhaps Jasper has gone, but I’m afraid far more has gone than him.
ADAM AND EVE AND PINCH ME
A. E. Coppard
COMBINING REALISM WITH THE supernatural does not come easily to most authors of horror and fantastic fiction, as they are, by definition, diametrically opposed to one another. Nonetheless, the British poet and short story writer A(lfred) E(dgar) Coppard (1878–1957) managed this as well, or better, than most of his more famous contemporaries, smoothly slipping back and forth in his narrative between the mundane world and the ethereal one. In how many tales of terror and suspense do the characters need to worry about earning a living or think about filling their bellies? This foothold in reality is commonplace for many of the characters in Coppard’s stories, even while they are enmeshed in occult happenings.
Having to work in a tailor shop at the age of nine, Coppard was totally self-educated, learning to be an accountant for an ironworks firm in Oxford until he became a full-time writer in his forties. He went on to write more than a hundred short stories, which he preferred to call modern folk tales, as well as poetry and children’s stories. He was proud of his stories, going so far as to write a descriptive bibliography of his own work, and often inserted his own “fictive self,” as he described it, into it.
In 1967, the British television series Omnibus filmed The World of Coppard, which adapted three of his stories: “The Field of Mustard,” “Dusky Ruth,” and “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me,” which was produced and directed by Jack Gold and adapted by Kit Coppard.
“Adam and Eve and Pinch Me” was first published in Adam and Eve and Pinch Me Tales (Waltham Saint Lawrence, Berskshire, U.K., Golden Cockerel Press, 1921).
Adam and Eve
and Pinch Me
A. E. COPPARD
AND IN THE WHOLE of his days, vividly at the end of the afternoon—he repeated it again and again to himself—the kind country spaces had never absorbed quite so rich a glamour of light, so miraculous a bloom of clarity. He could feel streaming in his own mind, in his bones, the same crystalline brightness that lay upon the land. Thoughts and images went flowing through him as easily and amiably as fish swim in their pools; and as idly, too, for one of his speculations took up the theme of his family name. There was such an agreeable oddness about it, just as there was about all the luminous sky today, that it touched him as just a little remarkable. What did such a name connote, signify, or symbolize? It was a rann of a name, but it had euphony! Then again, like the fish, his ambulating fancy flashed into other shallows, and he giggled as he paused, peering at the buds in the brake. Turning back towards his house again he could see, beyond its roofs, the spire of the Church tinctured richly as the vane: all round him was a new grandeur upon the grass of the fields, and the spare trees had shadows below that seemed to support them in the manner of a plinth, more real than themselves, and the dykes and any chance heave of the level fields were underlined, as if for special emphasis, with long shades of mysterious blackness.
With a little drift of emotion that had at other times assailed him in the wonder and ecstasy of pure light, Jaffa Codling pushed through the slit in the back hedge and stood within his own garden. The gardener was at work. He could hear the voices of the children about the lawn at the other side of the house. He was very happy, and the place was beautiful, a fine white many-windowed house rising from a lawn bowered with plots of mould, turretted with shrubs, and overset with a vast walnut tree. This house had deep clean eaves, a roof of faint coloured slates that, after rain, glowed dully, like onyx or jade, under the red chimneys, and half-way up at one end was a balcony set with black balusters. He went to a French window that stood open and stepped into the dining room. There was no-one with
in, and, on that lonely instant, a strange feeling of emptiness dropped upon him. The clock ticked almost as if it had been caught in some indecent act; the air was dim and troubled after that glory outside. Well, now, he would go up at once to the study and write down for his new book the ideas and images he had accumulated—beautiful rich thoughts they were—during that wonderful afternoon. He went to mount the stairs and he was passed by one of the maids; humming a silly song she brushed past him rudely, but he was an easy-going man—maids were unteachably tiresome—and reaching the landing he sauntered towards his room. The door stood slightly open and he could hear voices within. He put his hand upon the door … it would not open any further. What the devil … he pushed—like the bear in the tale—and he pushed, and he pushed—was there something against it on the other side? He put his shoulder to it … some wedge must be there, and that was extraordinary. Then his whole apprehension was swept up and whirled as by an avalanche—Mildred, his wife, was in there; he could hear her speaking to a man in fair soft tones and the rich phrases that could be used only by a woman yielding a deep affection for him. Codling kept still. Her words burned on his mind and thrilled him as if spoken to himself. There was a movement in the room, then utter silence. He again thrust savagely at the partly open door, but he could not stir it. The silence within continued. He beat upon the door with his fists, crying: “Mildred, Mildred!” There was no response, but he could hear the rocking arm chair commence to swing to and fro. Pushing his hand round the edge of the door he tried to thrust his head between the opening. There was not space for this, but he could just peer into the corner of a mirror hung near, and this is what he saw: the chair at one end of its swing, a man sitting in it, and upon one arm of it Mildred, the beloved woman, with her lips upon the man’s face, caressing him with her hands. Codling made another effort to get into the room—as vain as it was violent. “Do you hear me, Mildred?” he shouted. Apparently neither of them heard him; they rocked to and fro while he gazed stupefied. What, in the name of God,… What this … was she bewitched … were there such things after all as magic, devilry!
