Seven
Rose came up out of sleep in a sweating panic, to the sound of the yowling. It filled the house. She desperately told herself that it was just that damned cat . . .
But the yowling was so drear, so full of doom that it asked the question what was a cat? A cat was a wild animal that pretended to be a tame pussy for purposes of its own. A cat was a creature without mercy, that killed live rabbits and tore them to pieces. A cat was a thing that she had once seen swallow a mouse whole, like a Smartie, head-first, while it was still alive and its back legs wriggling. A cat was eyes that knew and would not tell. Claws and jaws that would rip without . . .
She leapt out of bed, and ran to the door, stubbing her toe against the bed-leg in the dark and nearly going full-length.
Timothy opened her door, as she recovered her balance. He looked calm and collected as usual; she had the absurd idea he had actually combed his hair. All this she saw by the light of his large torch.
‘Your damned cat!’ she shouted at him, most unfairly.
‘Let’s see what it’s up to,’ he said with a cheerful consoling grin. He could be so sweet . . .
They blundered down the stairs, he guiding her feet with the flicking beam of the torch, and giving her instructions to be careful in a voice that was the echo of Philip’s. Their flurry was made greater by the sound of a great clawing and rending.
‘What is it doing?’ she screeched.
The beam of the torch showed them. Quite impervious to the bright light, the cat was throwing itself at the closed door of the sitting-room. Like a mad thing. The thumps it was making were horrendous. It didn’t seem to care if it was hurting itself or not. And the faded brown paintwork of the door showed the white weals of massive claw-damage.
‘Get the thing out of the house. It’s mad. It must have rabies or something.’ She went to the front door and flung it open on the dark cool night. Then she rushed at the cat making shooing noises.
The cat took no notice at all. It might as well have been stone deaf. Only when she grabbed it did it notice her.
She wished it hadn’t. She had a brief feel of tight-strung muscles under the dark fur, of enormous cruel strength and diabolical ferocity, and then there was a spat and a flash of teeth and she reeled back clutching a hand that was agony. All feelings of pity for animals left her. This was an enemy, a demon, a devil. In a blind rage, she looked round for a weapon. And in the hall-stand, absurdly, she saw an old 1930s tennis-racket. She grabbed it and swung back and flailed at the cat. And hit it.
There was a scatter of claws on the lino, and suddenly it wasn’t around any more.
‘Where did it go?’ she said, feeling blood running down her hand and hearing it drip on to the linoleum, somewhere in the darkness.
‘Dunno,’ said Tim thoughtfully. ‘You shouldn’t have hit it, Mum. It wasn’t doing you any harm.’
‘That’s what you think. Shine your torch here. I’m frightened of getting blood on this nightdress.’
By the light of the torch, she held her bleeding hand over the sink. Thinking with a dreary bleakness that if the cat did have rabies, she was a goner. How would Philip manage without her? What would happen to the children? They said rabies was a hideous painful death . . .
Tim worked the water-pump, and she held her hand under its pulsing jet. The blood dwindled to two small puncture-marks; but it if was rabies, that wouldn’t be any consolation.
‘Keep pumping,’ said Timothy, managing to light an oil-lamp one-handed, while he held the torch with the other. ‘I’ll check where it’s gone. I think it went out but . . .’
Jane came trailing downstairs, half asleep, demanding to know what the hell was going on, and didn’t they know what time it was? But she brightened up when she saw Rose’s wounds. Went all practical and motherly, and put on TCP from the first aid kit they always carried on holiday, and slapped on two Elastoplasts. Rose felt a little calmer; she might have rabies, but at least there was no blood on her nightdress . . .
‘Think it’s gone, Mum,’ said Timothy thundering back downstairs. ‘I checked under all the beds.’
‘Let’s get back to bed then, for goodness’ sake,’ said Jane, suddenly sleepy again, now the blood had departed, and all the thrills were over.
But I’ve got rabies, thought Rose. I ought to summon the doctor. But that would mean getting dressed and walking up to the car, and phoning, and getting the car started . . . it seemed less bother to go back to bed and die of rabies quietly. She shut the front door and went back to bed, starting to plan the making of her will, so as not to cause needless bother to Philip after she was gone. Jane would have her jewellery, but not till she was twenty-one. She didn’t want her own grandmother’s pearls to end up round Jane’s neck at some Acid House rave-up . . .
She was just dozing off, having left Philip her Swift Audubon binoculars, with the sincere hope that he would derive peace and consolation from them, when the uproar broke out downstairs anew.
Again, she flung herself out of bed and stubbed her toe on the bed-leg, and nearly went flying.
Her bedroom door opened more quickly this time. A torch-lit Timothy said, ‘Leave it to me this time, Mum!’ Obediently, she followed him downstairs. He stood watching the frenzy of the cat, his head on one side. Then he said, judiciously, ‘I don’t think it’s got rabies, Mum. It just wants to get into the sitting-room.’ And he walked across and opened the sitting-room door.
Immediately the cat calmed down, and slipped through the dark slit. And then, in the darkness, the terrible clawing started again. Timothy pushed the door wider, and shone the torch.
The beam caught the cat on its hind legs.
It was clawing at the tall locked cupboard beside the fireplace. Its whole body quivering with alertness, ears pricked for the slightest sound.
As if there was somebody hiding behind the cupboard door.
Rose’s world rocked anew; with all thought of rabies forgotten. The cupboard was as tall as a man. The wall it was set in, the outside wall of the cottage, could be three feet thick. There could be a man standing in there. A big old man, come back to claim his own.
The cat mewed, as if in dreadful greeting; its tail lashed wildly from side to side. Rose thought of secret passages underground, of tunnels and crypts. Oh, what rubbish you could think at two o’clock in the morning!
‘There’s something in that cupboard,’ said Jane behind her. ‘Something the cat wants.’
Rose wished Jane had not said ‘thing.’ ‘Thing’ was dead. Rose had a terrible vision of the seven-year-old corpse of Sepp Yaxley, propped upright behind that well-clawed door, waiting to fall out upon the first person to open it. Somehow, Sepp Yaxley dead was worse than Sepp Yaxley living. Or returned from the grave . . .
The cat mewed dreadfully, yearningly again. Who can know the minds of dumb beasts? And then Rose summoned common sense to her aid. The police would have searched the cottage, surely, when Sepp Yaxley first disappeared? Or would they, if they thought he’d been drowned on the marshes? Suppose he had stepped inside the cupboard and the heavy door slammed shut on him, like that girl in the old poem of her youth who hid in the clothes-chest on her wedding-night, and was found a skeleton years later?
‘I think we’d better open that cupboard, Mum!’ said Timothy judiciously. ‘At least it will settle the cat’s mind, and we can get back to bed.’ But there was a wild flick of excitement in his voice that disturbed her.
‘How can we open it?’ she snapped. ‘It’s locked and we haven’t got a key!’
‘I can pick the lock, easy,’ said Timothy. ‘Jonathan Stephens showed me how, last holidays. We practised picking the locks on his father’s car. I’ll just get my Swiss knife.’
Rose sat down weakly, and wondered what the world was coming to. Her terror of the cupboard was suddenly and irrationally displaced by a fear for her son’s criminal future . . .
His feet thundered downstairs again. They
all waited now, in silence. Even the cat, which seemed to have realised that aid was at hand; though it still mewed urgently, every few seconds, with one paw pitifully uplifted in expectation.
Timothy selected a long thin blade from the hundreds on the Swiss knife. ‘Come and hold the torch, Mum,’ he said. ‘No, steadier than that. Use both your hands!’
‘Oh, come on, I’ll do it,’ said Jane, taking the torch from her. ‘You’re a proper wet lettuce, Mum.’
Rose sat down again. She would never understand the rising generation. They seemed so utterly heartless. Without feeling. Only concerned with how much is it? Or, is there a quick kick in it? Debunking, cynical, on to the next cheap thrill.
Nor could she understand her own cowardice. Sitting at a safe distance while her two children were about to be fallen on by a long-dead corpse, a member of the living dead, or even a vampire . . .
The knife scrawped; the lock clicked. The tall door swung open, sending a great shadow as of death sweeping across the torchlit room.
And there was a smell, a dusty smell, a sweet smell, a sour smell, an infinitely evil smell.
‘Oh,’ said Jane, her voice sagging in disappointment. ‘Just jars. Books and jars. All that fuss over a few books and jars . . .’
‘This one’s got frogs in,’ said Timothy hopefully. ‘Dead frogs.’
‘We’ve got those in the bio lab at school,’ said Jane dismissively. ‘Anyway, they’re toads.’
‘And there’s newts,’ said Timothy. ‘And I think those are animals’ eyes . . .’ Hope of horrors still lingered in his voice.
‘I don’t like biology, it’s yuk,’ said Jane. ‘We had to dissect a frog at school and mine was a female full of eggs. I spent a whole morning scraping out the eggs, and then we had tapioca for school dinner . . . I’m off to bed. Have a nice supper! It’s lovely having a kinky brother . . .’
‘Who says I’m kinky?’
‘Half the girls in my class. I’ve had fights with girls who called you kinky. I needn’t have bothered. They’re right.’ She blundered away into the dark, tripping on one of the middle stairs in the process, and saying something that in happier circumstances Rose would have found quite unforgivable.
‘Ey, Mum,’ said Tim, grasping for a new ally. ‘There’s some jolly odd stuff in here. I think there’s a baby in one of these jars . . .’
‘Oh, what rubbish,’ said Rose, starting forward. ‘Really, Tim, you’re quite impossible.’
‘No, look!’
Reluctantly, she went forward. In the light of his torch, the dead frogs, frozen in the act of leaping, in their prison bath of dirty formalin, looked at her appealingly, still yearning for freedom and life outside the jar. The newts looked more reconciled to their fate, grim and nearly asleep. But the creature in the black jar, with its bulging forehead and never-opened eyes, its tiny budlike arms and legs . . .
‘It must be a chimpanzee foetus or something,’ said Rose desperately.
‘Go on,’ said her son heartlessly. ‘It’s human. The Sunday supplements are full of them. I wonder where he got it?’
‘I think we ought to go to bed,’ said Rose. It was the only sensible thought she could pluck from her churning mind.
Her son eyed her acutely. In the upward light of the torch, he looked . . . unearthly. Like a . . . not a devil, but a rather scary angel. Beautiful, and yet . . . unknowable, with his high forehead and large observant eyes. It had never occurred to her before that angels like Michael and Gabriel could be a bit scary. But after all, they had to put down devils, trample them under their feet . . .
‘He was a funny old bloke, Mum, wasn’t he? Sepp Yaxley, I mean. I wonder what really happened to him . . .’
‘Bed,’ said Rose firmly. It took some courage, after what she’d been through, to say ‘bed’ firmly to an avenging angel. So they went to bed; and that other avenging angel, the cat, was nowhere to be seen.
Eight
Contrary to her expectations of nightmares about frogs and embryos, Rose slept the dreamless sleep of a log, and stumbled downstairs next morning, feeling half-dead. She found the kids, perversely, in excellent spirits, sitting by the window in the sunshine, Jane with the cat in her lap. The devil of the night before gave her a wary look. It obviously had not forgotten the tennis-racket. But Jane went on stroking it, and said, rather meaningfully, ‘It’s all right, puss. Mum didn’t mean it. She’s quite nice really.’
Timothy said to the cat, ‘It’s the first time she’s hit anything with a tennis-racket for ages. You’re quite safe.’
‘My hand’s throbbing. Where it bit me,’ said Rose, hurt at all the sympathy going one way.
‘You’d better get to the doctor’s straight away,’ said Jane briskly. ‘And have injections.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ said Rose. ‘I don’t want to bother the doctor. He’ll be busy.’
‘If it was one of us,’ said Timothy darkly, ‘you’d have taken us already. What if you have got rabies? Or tetanus? How could we look after you? Who would drive us home?’
Cursing them for a hard-faced lot, Rose went reluctantly, after breakfast. She inspected the car carefully for further graffiti, on the pretext of checking the doors and tyres. There did not appear to be anything new; though she thought one or two curtains twitched, in the nearer houses.
The doctor turned out to be an elderly woman, who was not at all sympathetic.
‘How on earth did you manage to let yourself be bitten by a cat?’ She made Rose feel like a shambolic fifth-former, as she listened in stony silence while Rose stammered through an explanation.
‘Never heard anything so ridiculous in my life,’ she said, when Rose finally stumbled to a stop. ‘Encouraging stray cats into your house . . .’
‘It’s not my house,’ said Rose feebly. ‘It’s a holiday cottage. The cat might have lived there . . .’
‘Surely you were told whether the cat lived there or not? And whoever heard of a cat living in a holiday cottage? You city folk are innocents abroad. What holiday cottage is this? I think I’ll ring up the RSPCA. That cat is a menace.’
‘No, no,’ said Rose, terrified that the cat was about to be condemned to death by her own foolish mouth. ‘I’m sure Miss Yaxley knows about it . . .’
‘Nora Yaxley? Nora Yaxley can’t stand cats. Never had a cat in her life.’
‘It’s not at Miss Yaxley’s. It’s at her brother’s old cottage.’
‘Sepp Yaxley’s cottage?’ The doctor’s tone had changed subtly, in a way that made Rose forget her humiliation and prick up her ears.
‘Did you know Sepp Yaxley?’
The doctor stared down at her desk, as if some errant Biro had wandered out of its rightful place, and was about to be hammered to fragments for its impudence. ‘I knew Sepp Yaxley,’ she said in a cold stony voice. ‘I was gathering evidence that would have sent him to prison. Only the evidence was difficult to get, and he . . . died, before I was ready to go to the police.’
‘What for?’ gasped Rose, aghast. ‘What had he done?’
‘Young girls,’ said the doctor, and then clamped her mouth shut like a rat-trap. Then she got up and said, ‘It’s water under the bridge now, anyway. And it’s best not to speak ill of the dead, though I’m half inclined to make an exception in the case of Sepp Yaxley. Well, no doubt he’s gone to his reward. Meanwhile, I think we’ll give you a couple of jabs. All cats have filthy mouths, and we don’t want you going down with something nasty in your charming country cottage.’
She turned away to a shelf of medicines and syringes, and added to herself, under her breath, something that sounded to Rose like, ‘Nora Yaxley must be out of her senses. Senile decay setting in, I wouldn’t wonder.’
Rose suffered two exceptionally painful jabs, as if she was being punished for her sins.
Driving out of Cley, she saw her little minister raising his hat to two lady parishioners as he came out of the newspaper shop, a copy of the Independent under his arm. She
was so glad to see a friendly face that she drew into the curb and waited till he overtook her. She wound down the passenger window.
‘Can you spare a minute, vicar?’
‘Certainly, my dear!’ He got in alongside her. ‘How are you, this lovely morning? Still enjoying your holiday?’
She took one look at his smiling face, and a dam seemed to burst inside her. She poured out her whole tale of woe, feeling terribly guilty to be wiping the smile off his face, and blighting his morning.
When she’d finally ground to a halt, he bit his lip and said, ‘I wish you’d told me before. That it was Sepp Yaxley’s cottage she was renting to you. It never occurred to me she’d rent out that place. But she’s a hard woman, Nora Yaxley. She’ll have her rights if it kills her. I suppose she thought you were too good a chance to miss, being a stranger who hadn’t a clue. And I suppose she took a chance on your being honest . . . well, she got what she wanted. Sepp’s valuables, without having to bribe somebody to clear Sepp’s house.’
‘But she could have walked down any time and collected Sepp’s things . . .’
The minister sighed, and was silent a long lime, watching the house martins feeding their young under the eaves of the nearby house, back and forth, back and forth.
At last he said reluctantly, ‘You’ll find this difficult to believe; but people have been terrified of that house. Any Cunning Man’s house. It used to be the same all over East Anglia. There’s a bit in a book by Richard Deacon, about a man who lived on the Suffolk border – Cunning Murrell was his name. There were all sorts of tales told about Cunning Murrell – he’s supposed to have lived to be well over a hundred. They say he could charm wild hares in the field – that they’d come and eat out of his hand. But the real point is that when he died, they could find no one who would clear out his house, for any amount of money. They had to wait months until they could persuade his son, Buck Murrell, to come and clear the house, and he came halfway across the country to do it. I suppose he must have been another Cunning Man . . .’
‘But what did they do, these Cunning Men, to make people so scared of them?’
Spectral Shadows Page 28
