Nightmare

by Lynn Brock

  ‘Outside? What do you mean?’

  ‘I think he must have met with an accident, sir. There’s a policeman with him wanting to know if he lives here.’

  At the hall-door Mr Knayle found a fresh-faced young constable who saluted him with cheerful smartness and then glanced towards the silent figure which stood at the foot of the steps, facing towards the road.

  ‘Good evening, sir. This is a man named Whalley who was found lying under a car on the Hog’s Back at seven-thirty this morning. I come from Guildford, sir. I’ve been detailed to bring him back. Your servant tells me that he lives in the flat above yours, but that there’s no one up there to take charge of him. It’s a bit awkward. Might I ask if you’re a friend of his?’

  Take charge of him—?

  ‘Oh, well,’ replied Mr Knayle, ‘I know him, of course. He lives above me. Is he injured?’

  ‘Not exactly injured, sir. There’s something the matter with one of his eyes, but the police doctor in Guildford said that it wasn’t due to the accident. He’s had a bad shock, though, seemingly. He hasn’t opened his lips since he was taken out from under the car. I suppose he has friends living in this neighbourhood?’

  ‘Well—no. I—I don’t think he has any friends living here.’

  The policeman laughed placidly. ‘Is that so, sir? That makes it a bit awkward, doesn’t it?’

  Mr Knayle hesitated. The situation had presented itself to him with such suddenness that he had not yet had time to grasp its chief significance securely. ‘Take charge of him—’ He took off his glasses to weigh that. The hatless figure at the foot of the steps had not moved and now that his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, he saw that its head was bandaged with a handkerchief. Its immobility and its averted face made it dubious and apart. Why did it turn its face away? Why didn’t it move and speak? Why didn’t it go up to its own flat? Why should he take it in and accept responsibility for it?

  ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘A collision?’

  ‘No, sir. The car ran into the ditch and turned over. The fog was very bad up Guildford way this morning.’

  The Hog’s Back—Guildford. What on earth had taken him all the way up to Guildford in a fog like yesterday’s?

  ‘Do I understand that he’s—that he’s not able to look after himself?’

  ‘Well, that’s about it, sir. The doctor didn’t know what to make of him. There’s no mark on his head or his body, but he’s dazed-like. He won’t talk and he hasn’t eaten anything all day. I don’t know what to do with him now. The way it is, sir, I’ve got to get back to Guildford; but my instructions are to find whoever belongs to him and hand him over to them. And now you say there’s no one here belonging to him.’

  ‘So far as I know, no one.’

  So the matter hung for some moments while Mr Knayle’s good nature struggled with his doubts. Finally he went down the steps and, taking Whalley’s arm, led him into the sitting-room. In the light his face was ghastly white and set in a desperate apathy. The bandage covered one eye and left the other in shadow—an enigma—the eye of a private-theatricals pirate. His clothes were torn and, though some effort had been made to clean them, caked with half-dried mudstains. Mr Knayle looked at him in distaste for a little while, pushed him down into an armchair and went back to the hall-door. But there was nothing more to learn concerning the accident. The policeman went away, disappointed that it hadn’t worked out at a drink, and, after a little reflection, Mr Knayle sent Hopgood down to ask if Mr Ridgeway would kindly come up for a few minutes.

  While he waited he returned to the sitting-room and rearranged Whalley more comfortably in his chair.

  ‘Well, old chap. Don’t you know me? Knayle? What about a cigarette? No? Something to eat? Eat?’ His jaws and teeth performed the motions of eating, exaggerating them. His voice diminished itself to wheedling cajolement. ‘Come, now, now—you must be hungry. You haven’t eaten anything all day, you know. What’s the matter with your eye?’

  But there was no reply, no movement. It might have been some figure from a waxworks that sat in his armchair, neither seeing him nor hearing him. He stood staring at it, a little contemptuous of its helplessness, a little interested in its deadness, more than a little resentful of its intrusion. When Mr Ridgeway shambled in with his gurgling pipe, he waved his hand silently towards it as something which had no business in his sitting-room.

  ‘Chidgey wants to know if you could see him for a moment, sir,’ said Hopgood from the door.

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Tell him to come in.’

  Chidgey’s eyes became uneasy when he discovered that the guv’nor was not alone. But Mr Knayle’s ‘Well, what is it now?’ was peremptory.

  ‘It was just to tell you, sir, that that police-inspector has been round to the garage again—him and another—an inspector from Guildford.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Mr Knayle with tightened lips. ‘I’ll write to the Chief Constable about it. What did they want to see you about?’

  ‘About a hammer, sir. They showed me a hammer and asked me if I knew anything about it. They didn’t say what hammer it was, but, of course, I guessed.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, they kept at me, sir, the two of them, asking me the same thing over again. Of course, all I could say was that I knew nothing about it.’

  Mr Knayle’s tone sharpened.

  ‘Keep still, can’t you. You don’t know anything about it, do you?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know whether I do or not, sir—now. I told them I didn’t, and they went away in the end. But it’s a funny thing, sir, there’s a hammer missing from our garage.’

  ‘Missing?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It was an old hammer the man you had before me used to use. It was too heavy for me, so I never used it. I kept it in a box with some other old tools and things, and when I looked in the box after they’d gone away, it wasn’t there, sir—and it isn’t anywhere about the garage, either.’

  ‘What made you look? Was it like the hammer they showed you?’

  ‘It was, sir, I think. That’s what made me look in the box afterwards, when I thought about it. It was very much the same class of hammer.’

  ‘When you say, like, what do you mean? Do you mean that the hammer they showed you might have been the hammer you kept in the box?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, sir. But it was very much like it.’

  ‘When did you see this hammer that’s missing?’

  ‘About a fortnight ago, sir, when I was tidying the box.’ Chidgey’s restless eyes flitted across the room. ‘I was wondering if Mr Whalley could have borrowed it, sir.’

  ‘Most unlikely,’ said Mr Knayle, after a moment.

  ‘Well, he took a pair of old gloves from the box, sir. I found them in his car. You were in the garage yesterday morning when I spoke to him about them.’

  ‘Yes. I remember. But Mr Whalley said he hadn’t put them into his car.’

  ‘He did say that, sir. But I think he must have done, and forgotten about it.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Mr Knayle, after another pause. ‘It comes to this, Chidgey—Do you believe that the hammer that was shown you is the hammer that is missing?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Chidgey replied with convulsive loudness.

  ‘Then, why the devil do you come to me with all this rigmarole?’

  Mr Ridgeway asked for some hot water and some salt just then and Chidgey made his escape. ‘Salt?’ repeated Mr Knayle, when the door had closed behind him.

  ‘I thought of bathing Whalley’s eyes,’ Mr Ridgeway explained. ‘However, I suppose we had better get him into bed first. By the way, the bed ought to be well warmed before he gets into it. You’ve got some hot-water bottles, I suppose?’

  This was a little too much for Mr Knayle. He walked slowly to the hearthrug and took up a definite position on it.

  ‘You propose, apparently, that Whalley should
remain in my flat and that I should take care of him?’

  Mr Ridgeway shrugged, after a quick glance. ‘Someone will have to look after him. Unfortunately I’ve only one bed.’

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘Oh—quite a number of things. It’s rather an interesting case. You don’t want him here, then?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Mr Knayle, ‘that’s rather an unreasonable way to put it. This may be a very serious business, you know, Ridgeway. He appears to me to be—well, to put it plainly, his mind seems to me to be affected. I—I really can’t accept such a responsibility. I think we had better take him up to his own flat. Or if you’ll do that, I’ll ring up and get a nurse.’

  ‘Cost you twopence,’ smiled Mr Ridgeway. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after him.’

  The dingy arms of his dressing-gown encircled Whalley and raised him to his feet. Their movements seemed ostentatiously gentle and protective, and Mr Knayle turned his back on them. When at length the hall-door shut he called in Hopgood and made him brush some crumbs of mud from the seat of one of the armchairs.

  ‘Would you like me to go up and give Mr Ridgeway a hand, sir?’ Hopgood asked before he withdrew.

  ‘I don’t think it’s at all necessary,’ Mr Knayle replied frigidly. ‘Get me some tea, now, will you.’

  2

  The next three days were wet and Mr Knayle spent the greater part of them before his fire. The occupation of his mind was not so much thought of any definition as the repeated asking of a few questions to which the fire supplied no answers. They were always the same; he could find no means to vary them or expand them. One long wet day had made him weary of their abortive monotony; three had robbed them of almost all relation to realities. But they refused to be shut out, and they had taken such complete possession of him that he could think of nothing else.

  He shook his head to dislodge them, leaned forward to poke the fire, picked up a novel, and recrossed his legs. But the novel dropped to his lap and his eyes returned to the fire. Had Chidgey really lost a hammer? If he had, was it really like the hammer which had been shown to him? Was it the hammer which had been shown to him? Supposing that it was, had Whalley taken it from the box, with the gloves? Had Whalley taken the gloves from the box, or had Chidgey taken them and left them in Whalley’s car and forgotten that he had done so? Had Chidgey made up a story about losing a hammer, or had he really done so? If he had … Mr Knayle’s questions slid past ceaselessly on an endless chain, always detached, yet always linked in the same order. He frowned, picked up his book again, and saw Chidgey slide up over the edge of the page, bent over a box, looking for a missing hammer.

  Sometimes he made an effort to stop the chain. Chidgey … Why not question Chidgey more closely? If his story was a made-up one he would stick to it, of course. But if it wasn’t—Chidgey was a careful chap—very careful about his tools—very unlikely to mislay a hammer—especially a hammer which he didn’t use. Suppose it, then. Suppose that a hammer was really missing from a box in the garage. How like had it been to the hammer which had been shown to Chidgey? Who could tell? Not Chidgey himself.

  From that uncertainty on everything was uncertainty. Mr Knayle grew sick of his questions. They slid across the hearthrug, the fire, the mantelpiece, the wallpaper, the ceiling. They followed him when he got up, and slid across the carpet and the windows. They slid across his plate while he ate, across his mirror while he shaved, slid down the water of the geyser while his bath filled, slid up the flex of the light over his bed while he tried to read himself asleep. There was no escape from them anywhere in the flat. He desired to escape from them, yet found a perverse pleasure in surrendering to their obsession. When Hopgood came into the room he watched him with a raised eyebrow, impatient to be left with them again. Hopgood grew a little nervous under this silent scrutiny and one day upset the contents of an ashtray over the hearthrug. ‘Leave it,’ said Mr Knayle, pettishly. ‘Clean it up afterwards.’

  The weather improved, but he could find no interest out of doors. Only with the greatest difficulty could he persuade himself to morning and afternoon constitutionals upon the deserted Downs. He didn’t want to go to the Club—he didn’t want to shoot—he didn’t want to play bridge—he didn’t want to talk to people—he didn’t want to do anything. It was altogether unlike him and a little disquieting, but there it was. He didn’t want to do anything, and there was nothing to make him do anything. It didn’t matter in the least whether he did anything or not, and he didn’t care whether it mattered or not. In his sitting-room he was his own and sufficient for himself, shut in from criticism, secure from slight and wounding indifference. It was always easier to go back to the armchair and think about Whalley.

  Lack of fresh air staled his appetite quickly and made his sleep broken and irregular. He sat up late, got up late, changed the hours of his meals, smoked incessantly, and developed a slight but persistent dyspepsia. His temper became so irritable that Hopgood grew to dread the sitting-room door. But the fire had to be kept up. If it wasn’t Mr Knayle sat looking at it and let it go out.

  Curiously, although his thoughts concentrated themselves incessantly upon Whalley, they never directly faced the possibility that Whalley had committed murder. They were always sliding towards that possibility, skirting round it, and then retreating to make a fresh approach. The word murder and the idea murder had always repelled Mr Knayle. For him murder had always been an alien, abnormal thing which happened in the part of his newspaper which he never read. He had never had anything to do with murder, never conceived that he could ever have anything to do with it. His mind baulked at the thought that anyone whom he had known could commit a murder. It could suppose it possible that Whalley had taken the hammer from the garage—possible, even, that the hammer had actually been the hammer which had killed Miss Prossip. But it refused to suppose that Whalley had used it to kill her. There the chain always slid out of sight.

  Suppose that Whalley’s mind was affected—either by his wife’s death or by the state of his health—or by money troubles and literary failures. But all that was too vague for Mr Knayle. Until this mysterious accident, Whalley had always appeared to him perfectly normal—a quiet, self-controlled figure going up or coming down his steps. He shied away from obscure aberrations, seeking for a deliberate, reasoned purpose. But what had Whalley ever had to do with the Prossip girl? There had been that ridiculous row over the gramophone, and apparently she had been chiefly responsible for its annoyance. But who could take that seriously? The fiddle? The flooding of the Whalley’s flat? The complaints about that little dog—what was his name? Mr Knayle couldn’t remember his name and couldn’t imagine anyone killing a young woman because she had played a gramophone over his head six months before. He shook his head and lighted another cigarette.

  Sometimes he raised his eyes to the ceiling, but they always returned to the fire quickly. The ceiling had become a reminder of a fatuousness of which he was now a little ashamed and which, he suspected, had been largely physiological—some late, feeble explosion of sex—no rose-scented rapture, but a whiff of musty decay. He didn’t want to think about that sort of thing. His romance had become suspect—an elderly infatuation, of now uncertain ambitions, for another man’s wife. He wanted to cancel all that and leave her in her original state—the wife of Whalley with whom he was now determined to have nothing to do.

  Sometimes, too, he rose quickly from his armchair to peer through the window-curtains. But it was only to watch Ridgeway pass between his little flight of steps and the staircase leading to the upper flats. Ridgeway spent most of his time now in the first-floor flat, descending at intervals for meals, sometimes remaining up there all night. Mr Knayle kept watch upon his comings and goings and was always tempted to hurry out and ask him how Whalley was getting on, and whether his mind was right again, and whether it was likely that he had heard Chidgey’s story about a missing hammer, and what Ridgeway himself thought about Chidgey’s story. But, though hi
s interest in Whalley had become an obsession, he was determined to have nothing to do with him, or with Ridgeway, who had taken charge of him. Ridgeway’s remark about the telephone had been most offensive. When the sound of the slippered footsteps had died away Mr Knayle went back to the fire, remembering sometimes that he had peered through the curtains at Whalley’s wife, and feeling a little furtive.

  The grey days before Christmas passed. He was always sitting in his armchair before the fire, raising a cigarette slowly to his lips and taking it away again.

  After lunch on Christmas Day his attention was attracted to the sound of footsteps pacing to and fro slowly above his head. They paced slowly and faintly, and when he had listened to them for some moments, expecting them to stop, his attention strayed from them. In a little while, however, it returned to them. They had not stopped, and they had grown louder.

  For an hour and a half they paced, almost directly above his armchair. He got up to listen to them—listened to them from different positions about the room. Their sound grew louder and more distinct. When they ceased at length, he yawned with weariness of them.

  Ten minutes later they began to pace again. They went on pacing all the afternoon, all the evening, stopping sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for half an hour. They were audible everywhere in the flat—there was no way not to hear them. They were pacing when he fell asleep towards two o’clock, pacing when he woke at half-past three.

  Next day they began towards midday. Mr Knayle swore at them and went for a walk. When he returned to lunch they were still pacing. They paced all the afternoon and all the evening. He got no sleep whatsoever that night.

  When they began next day at half-past one he sprang up from the table and upset his coffee.

  ‘Talk about the gramophone, sir—’ said Hopgood, when they had stood for a little space looking upwards in silence.

  It seemed impossible that they could continue and never grow weary. But they went on pacing all day long, all through the night. Actually their sound was scarcely louder than Mr Knayle’s angry breathing, but his fretted nerves heard it as the trampling of a regiment. Its torture hammered on his smoothly-brushed head and beat it slowly into seething fury; it made his palms sweat and dug his finger-nails into them, made him writhe in his chair and batter the fire savagely. He tried various devices to deaden the sound—packed his ears with cotton-wool, wrapped a muffler round his head, turned on the wireless. Nothing was of any avail, however. In the end it was more satisfying to hear it clearly and hate it without interference.