Devils' Spawn

by Charles Birkin

  “John, please. I’d rather not say.”

  “You must.”

  “Then I’m afraid that she doesn’t. She’s terribly fond of you for all the memories you have together, for what you were before . . . before . . .”

  “I went blind. Yes, of course. I understand.”

  “You won’t say anything to Jill, will you?”

  “How could I? There’s someone else, I suppose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “Jill has such a wide acquaintance.”

  “But anyone in particular?” he insisted.

  “I’m afraid so. Guy Challoner. He’s married—but separated from his wife, and of course he’s very rich.”

  “What? I don’t believe you. Shut up, do you hear me! You’re lying . . . lying . . . I believe that you hate Jill . . . why do you hate her so? . . . Yes, I can hear it in your voice. I’m going now . . . you’re a filthy liar. . . .” He groped towards the door. At that moment he heard the sound of Jill’s latch-key.

  Angela tried hard to convince herself that the last few minutes had never happened. She felt herself to be in a vacuum of unreasoning fury and fear.

  “Very well. Don’t believe it. Perhaps that would be best. You’re a fool, John; you’re blind in more senses than one.”

  She found herself in her bedroom behind a locked door. She hated herself. Why, oh, why had she done it? Other people had such simple happy lives. The tears came, salt and painful.

  “Hello, John, I’m earlier than I planned to be. We didn’t go to a play after all. I came back because I thought that you might be here.”

  Jill had seen at once that something had occurred, but thought it best to let him take his time. “What have you been doing?” She slipped off her coat and smoothed her hair in the looking-glass.

  “I . . . I dined here with Angela.”

  “How very sweet of you.” She picked up a cigarette.

  “Jill, be careful, Angela hates you.”

  The match she was holding flamed until it burned her fingers.

  “John—what do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’m tired, Jill. I’m going. Good night, my dear.”

  “I’ll send you back.”

  “Don’t bother, I’ll get a taxi.”

  “Nonsense. Beckwith’s still here.”

  On his way to Travers Square, John’s brain was in turmoil. There could be nothing in Angela’s horrible accusation, he knew, but supposing Jill still kept up a pretence of loving him . . . far better to break it up . . . finish it all. . . .

  Jill knocked at Angela’s door, tried the knob. No answer. With a sigh of exasperation she went to her own bedroom.

  She was conscious during the weeks that followed of a sense of strain when she was alone with John. He appeared to be listening more acutely, followed her with his seeking sightless face when she left his side, rang her up at all hours during her work. He seemed, too, to rely upon her more exactingly, to hold her arm even when in familiar surroundings, demanded continually to have his eyes bathed, his cigarettes lighted.

  One afternoon on her return from luncheon she found Angela waiting for her in the studio.

  “You’re busy, dear, I know. But I realised this morning that I had never really understood your elaborate job and I just thought I’d like you to take me round.”

  Jill wasted a precious hour showing her the complicated apparatus of the modern photographer. The elaborate lights, screens, developing and touching-up that the print requires. Several times during the tour of inspection she was called away to urgent telephone conversations. On such times she found her sister engaged in chatting to the assistants, taking an interest in the various processes in which they were engaged.

  August came with the oppressive heat that permeates from metalled road surfaces in big cities. Her work was slackening off and Jill was looking forward to the brief holiday in Biarritz that she was taking at the end of the month.

  John was waiting for her when she arrived at the flat. She was glad to see him. Lately they had seemed closer than they had been during the spring and early summer. He kissed her, and her eyes closed, and, as he held her tightly in his arms, her mind went back to the man of three years before. Laughing, on the tennis court, the winner of a close set 10–8 with Danios the Spanish champion; shooting in disgracefully shabby tweeds in Scotland; driving her Packhard far too quickly round the dangerous curves of the roads in North Wales.

  His hold tightened. “Darling, you were right, we can’t do without each other, can we?” He spoke gruffly. “We’ll be married right away and go to Biarritz for our honeymoon.”

  She stroked his thick fair hair, her mouth answering his. At last he drew away.

  “My Lord, we’ve been fools, Jill. The time, the precious time, we’ve wasted.”

  She noticed his forehead puckered, as it always was when he was suffering. Even at this time of the day heat was insufferable. “Darling—your eyes are hurting. I’ll get your lotion.”

  “They are rather sore, Jill, darling. That’s what I came here to-day to tell you. I saw Elwes last night, and he told me there was a possibility that my sight might come back. He says my eyes are responding to the treatment he’s giving me. It will take some time naturally, but in a year or eighteen months if the improvement continues I shall be able to see with the help of spectacles. I’ll be able to see again, darling. Think of it . . . to see you and the sky and the green grass. . . .”

  “John—how perfectly wonderful! I’m certain you’ll be cured. I’ve always thought so. Doctors never give false encouragement.” Jill flung her arms round his neck. “Now, darling, you wait there.”

  She noticed that the green bottle was almost empty, but there was another full one placed slightly in front of it. She blessed Mrs. Walters for her efficiency. She took it down and soaked a wad of lint in its contents.

  John was sitting on a low stool facing the window. She had forgotten to remove her gloves, but she remembered that witchhazel did not stain. Carefully she bathed his eyes, pressed the healing swab firmly on to the inflamed lids. The muscles round John’s mouth tightened, quivered as if he were enduring great pain. Then, against his control, dreadful choking moans filled the room. Horrified, Jill dropped the bottle on the white carpet.

  “Jill—what have you done? Christ—it hurts . . . it hurts. . . .” His hands clawed at his face, tearing at his eye-sockets.

  “Darling . . . John, what is it?”

  She looked at the bottle on the floor. The contents had spilled on to the carpet, eroding the fabric. Her gloves, too, were turning black. She tore them off.

  “God help me!”

  John was by the window, his knees against the low sill, arms upflung to protect his face. Jill ran towards him. Unthinkingly, with the instinct of a hurt animal, he stepped back, staggered and crashed down to the street below. Jill stood quite still, momentarily paralysed with horror. Then she screamed.

  “Angela . . . Mrs. Walters . . . Mrs. Walters . . . Mrs. Walters. . . .”

  Footsteps ran towards the drawing-room. In their hurry the two women hustled each other in the doorway.

  “Look at the carpet . . . look. . . .”

  The acid had burned through to the wood.

  “Never mind, miss, don’t take on so,” Mrs. Walters comforted. “We can have a new piece let in.”

  “But the bottle . . . John’s eye-lotion.”

  “I think you must have taken the wrong bottle, Jill,” Angela broke in. “That was a bottle of acid one of your men gave me. He said it would take the stains off the wash-basin in my bedroom. Stupid of me to have left it in your cupboard when I had put it in one of John’s empty bottles of eye lotion. But I don’t see there’s any need to make such a fuss. I’m sorry, I’m sure.”

  She looked at Jill with an expression very near to tranquillity. . . . “Really, it wasn’t my fault. Accidents will happen as everybody knows.”

  Wide-eyed, Jill looked at
her. Roughly she pushed past them and ran out of the flat, and the lift doors clanged behind her.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charles Lloyd Birkin was born in England in 1907 and was educated at Eton College from 1921-1926. His contributions to British horror began in 1932 when publisher Philip Allan employed him to edit the Creeps series of short story collections, which included volumes with titles like Creeps, Shudders, Shivers, Nightmares, Tales of Death, and Tales of Fear. The books, with their sensational dust jacket art and stories by an impressive list of writers that included H.R. Wake­field, Lord Dunsany, Russell Thorndike, and Birkin himself (under the name Charles Lloyd), are highly collectible today and were the precursors of later popular British horror anthologies, such as the Pan Books of Horror Stories. Birkin’s contributions to the Creeps volumes were collected in his first book, Devils’ Spawn (1936), the only book published by Birkin before a long hiatus. In 1942, he succeeded his uncle as the 5th Baronet Birkin, and he served in the Second World War in the Sherwood Foresters.

  Following a long break, Birkin resumed writing after his return to London in 1960 and, perhaps at the instigation of Dennis Wheatley, began publishing new collections of short stories with The Kiss of Death (1964), for which Wheatley provided an introduction. Several more volumes of tales appeared between 1965 and 1970, including The Smell of Evil (1965), also introduced by Wheatley. From 1970 to 1974 Birkin lived in Cyprus, which he fled in the wake of the Turkish invasion. He and his wife Janet spent their later years in the Isle of Man, where Birkin died in 1985.