Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  It was then that Helen felt something enter into her, as once, on a picnic high up in the hills, she saw a shimmering, speckled snake, startled by the approach of riders, walkers and coolies laden with the elaborate impedimenta of food, drink, cutlery, crockery and even folding tables and chairs, deftly insinuate itself into the hollow trunk of the tree along one branch of which it had previously been stretched in drowsy satiety. What entered into her was not resource or courage or cruelty or even a total insensibility. It was something both stronger and more mysterious than any of these things.

  ‘Wait!’ Without thinking, she had known – how had she known? It was a question she was often to put to Ilse – precisely what she must do and how she must do it. She had first gone down into the hall, taking the steps with extreme caution, one by one, a hand gripping the banisters, and had felt along the shelf where her rubber boots stood among other boots and shoes, and had then gone into the drawing room, opened one of the French windows softly, softly, softly, and left the boots beside it. She had then gone up the stairs again, as quietly as she had come down them, past the half-open door behind which Clare lay out, shivering, her lips drawn back from her teeth in what was almost a rictus of death, on that same bed on which she had waited, naked and smiling, for the descent of her lover. Helen tiptoed down the corridor – pray God, her grandmother would think merely that she was going to the bathroom – and opened the door of her bedroom and crossed over to the rickety chest-of-drawers. The drawer creaked, the chest-of-drawers rocked. She extracted the knife in its sheath, then drew out the knife with a sudden ferocity, as though to rip the sheath apart. She descended. Strangely, she felt no fear, no doubt that she would succeed in doing what the Thing which had insinuated itself within her was telling her to do.

  ‘Help me!’

  But Clare only cowered, her red-nailed fingertips pressed to her mouth and her knees drawn up, as though she wished for nothing but to revert to being a foetus in the amniotic fluid of the womb.

  ‘Clare!’ That Thing within her now seemed to reach out, a tangible presence, to yank the girl to her feet. ‘You must help me. I can’t do this alone. He’s too heavy for me.’

  Helen put an arm under the chest of the child. What a weight he was! It was as though she were dragging up his corpse, bloated with water and entangled with weeds, out of the bed of a river in which it had been drowned. Again she said: ‘You must help me!’ Clare, whimpering, approached and took first one leg in a hand and then the other. ‘And stop that noise!’ Helen hissed. ‘You’ll wake everyone up.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Never mind. Come! Come on!’

  One arm round the slumped body, she put a hand to the door-handle and gently turned it. Clare, one of the boy’s legs in each of her hands and her face screwed up like a runner’s making a last, superhuman effort, passed through. Then Helen followed. The two women, the child dangling between them, stood perfectly still, perfectly silent on the landing. They listened for some sound. There was nothing. They began their descent.

  In the drawing room, the pair of them panting effortfully, the child still between them, Helen remembered that Clare’s feet were bare. ‘Go and get some boots from the cupboard.’ ‘What boots?’ ‘Some rubber boots. Any boots. Provided they fit you.’ Helen took the full weight of the child in her arms. His skin against her skin, as he lay over her shoulder, was so warm that he might have been living. She waited. The Thing continued to tell her what she must do. She derived an extraordinary sense of power, such as she had never known before, from this clarity both of purpose and of the means to achieve it.

  Clare returned in a pair of galoshes. ‘ They don’t fit. They’re too big,’ she half whispered, half whimpered. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Never mind. Come with me. Take his legs again.’

  The galoshes were Isabel’s. She wore them when she was gardening.

  There was a large moon above the tennis court, which stretched, silver streaked with verdigris, before the dark house. A single lamp flickered from the servants’ quarters. But no one would see them; Helen or that Thing inside her had decided that.

  They toiled up the path to the privy, under trees juddering and rustling in the wind off the lake. At one moment, Clare, who was panting heavily, cried out: ‘It’s come off! It’s come off!’ She felt around with a foot, head bowed as she peered past the child’s legs, and eventually retrieved the lost galosh. The moonlight glistened on the sweat on her upper lip, her forehead and bare arms.

  Long before they reached the privy, Helen could smell its ammoniac stench. That stench revived her, as though someone had passed the dark green bottle of Yardley’s smelling-salts, used long ago by her mother when she felt faint, back and forth beneath her nose.

  ‘Not in there! No, I can’t go in there! I can’t!’ Clare suddenly began to wail, uncaring whether she aroused anyone or not. It was as though she knew already what had to be done.

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘All right. Wait here then. Wait here!’

  Clare retreated to the shadow of some bushes, huddled up, her arms crossed over her breasts, hands over shoulders, and her hair falling across her face. Her eyes were closed tightly, as though in the conviction that, if she could not see these terrible things, then they would not be happening.

  Helen went into the privy with the child over her shoulder, one hand clutching the back of his pyjama jacket to keep him in position, and the other the knife. Once, soon after her arrival, she had wandered in here, hoping that no one would see her, out of an ashamed curiosity, just as she had also passed and repassed the servants’ quarters, in an attempt to discover the banal, pitiful secrets of their lives. The two nationalities, masters and servants, lived so close to each other, they even excreted so close to each other; and yet she knew nothing about them, nothing at all. On that previous occasion, she had stood, her heart beating rapidly, in the centre of the square, gloomy shed, with huge, lazy flies settling on her lips, eyelids and bare arms and buzzing all around her, and had breathed in that ammoniac stench as though it were some hallucinatory vapour which would, if endured long enough, grant some kind of vision. Then suddenly, there had been a swift patter of feet outside the door and Peter’s head had appeared. ‘What are you doing in there?’ he demanded. ‘Nothing,’ she replied. Then she added: ‘Looking.’ ‘You’re not supposed to go in there. If Mummy knew, she’d be furious.’ ‘I can do what I like. Go away! Go away, you beastly little brat!’

  The moonlight, filtering down through the cobwebs covering the oblong aperture high up on the wall, showed her the wooden slat with the hole in it. Countless servants must have perched themselves there, like famished birds, countless of times. Their naked feet, she had noticed on that previous visit, had worn the slat, a mat brown elsewhere, to a glossy tan. She rested the child’s body on the slat, head tilted backwards through the circular hole above the noisome pit. She raised the knife, at the same time drawing back her body as far as she was able, so that the blood, which she imagined would spurt out, should not drench her. She cut violently and deeply, the muscles of hand, arm, shoulder rigid and straining. But the blood did not gush. The head, all but severed, fell back yet further, to reveal, black in the moonlight, the gash from ear to ear. Why was there so little blood? She was puzzled, as though by some scientific mystery for which her previous experience could provide no explanation. She took one of the small, perfectly formed hands and drew the blade of the knife across it twice. A few beads of blood oozed from the wounds. Then, jerking the body up by the front of the pyjama jacket, the blue-and-white-striped flannel taut beneath her hand, she drove the knife home beneath the ribs. No need. Isabel. I promise.

  … There was a thunderstorm and Isabel cowered, white faced, her hands to her ears. ‘Oh, oh, oh no!’ she cried out, as lightning serpentined over the ridge of hills beyond the window. Toby went over to her, stood behind her chair, put a hand on either of her shoulders. Helen
and her mother watched him. ‘There’s no need to be frightened. No need at all. Isabel, I promise you.’

  She tried to push the body down through the hole, thrusting with both her hands, but it became grotesquely stuck, head and one arm dangling, the other arm pushed upwards, as though to ward off yet another blow. She threw the knife to the ground and put both arms round the waist of the child and dragged his body out again. Then, holding him under one arm, she raised the slat. The moonlight shone down on a silvery film over the liquid below her in the pit. She exerted all her force and flung the body downwards. There was a splash and she felt something moist flick across her cheek. Putting up a hand, she wiped it away.

  She went out. ‘Clare! Clare!’ she hissed.

  Clare appeared from the bushes, first two hesitant steps, then one. She halted. ‘What have you done with him?’

  Helen gripped her by both her arms, she put her face close to hers. ‘An intruder killed him. An Indian. Or it may have been a gang. It doesn’t matter. You slept through it all. Heard nothing. You’d taken those pills, remember? You woke – late. He was gone. Gone. A mystery. That’s all. That’s all you have to remember.’

  ‘But I can’t! Can’t! Can’t!’ Clare was sobbing.

  ‘You’ve got to. Now do what I say. Sleep or pretend to sleep till morning. Then look for him. Then say he’s vanished. You had a migraine. Those pills. You slept heavily. You heard nothing, know nothing. Got it?’ Clare only whimpered. Helen shook her even more violently, her nails digging into her quailing flesh. Clare nodded, her body still racked with gulping sobs which sounded like an endless retching.

  ‘All right. Now let’s get back to the house. Come on. Move!’ She gave Clare a shove. Clare went down the zigzag path ahead of her, silent now, a hand over the mouth. Once, her silk wrap caught on a bush and she gave it a sharp tug, so that there was a sound of ripping silk. ‘ Oh, oh!’ she wailed; but she went on.

  ‘Take off those galoshes.’ Outside the French window, Clare stooped and removed first one and then the other. Her teeth were chattering. Helen had already kicked off her boots. Holding them in one hand, she pushed Clare ahead of her, one arm holding the galoshes against her breast, into the moonlit drawing room. Clare pointed: ‘Blood!’

  Helen looked down. There was a darkening stain at her crotch. Strange. She had felt neither its dampness nor its warmth. She gave herself a shake. ‘It’ll wash out. And I’ll have to wash these boots.’ There was no blood on them but they were caked with soil from the floor of the privy. ‘All right. Let me see the galoshes.’ Clare handed them to her. ‘They seem no different.’ Helen thrust them back. ‘Put them back in the cupboard exactly where you found them and then get upstairs. Upstairs!’

  They went out into the hall. Clare crossed to the cupboard and thrust the galoshes far back to the rear.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’ Shoulders hunched, a hand to her mouth, Clare stood there, unmoving.

  ‘No, you’re not. Upstairs. Hurry.’

  Clare, stooped like an old woman, her shadow humped and huge beside her, clutched the banister rail and began to haul herself upwards, as though her strength were ebbing with each step. Boots in one hand and knife in the other, Helen followed her, erect and calm. They reached the landing. Helen indicated the door to Clare’s and the child’s bedroom with an inclination of the head. Clare turned the handle, went in, let out a choking gasp.

  Toby stood there.

  Again rockets fizz, this time in extravagant profusion, one after another, up in the sky. The show has reached its climax. ‘Ah!’ It is like the sigh of some universal orgasm. Then someone begins to clap and in a second everyone is clapping, as the rockets crackle and splutter all over the indigo sky.

  … Toby stared at Clare, not at Helen. Helen might not have been there. ‘ Clare. What’s happened to him? Where is he?’ He was in his pyjamas and slippers, his face freshly shaved and still stinging from the eau de cologne which he had just rubbed into it.

  Clare sank on to the child’s bed. Helen closed the door.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Helen said with flinty calmness.

  Toby merely stared at her.

  ‘It was a mistake, it wasn’t intended to happen. We were together, he woke up. He was going to scream, we tried to stop him. He suffocated.’

  No shock, horror or grief appeared on Toby’s face. It was impassive in its rigidity, the muscles of the neck and uptilted jaw stretched taut.

  Then: ‘But where is he now? Where?’

  Clare began to rock herself back and forth on the bed, her hands to her stomach, as though in some attack of excruciating colic.

  ‘Clare.’ He went and sat on the edge of the bed beside her. ‘Who did this? Did she do it? Did you do it?’ He put an arm around her shoulder but she at once pulled away.

  Helen replied with the same flinty calmness: ‘We both did it. We didn’t mean to do it. An accident. But no one will believe that. Now listen, Daddy. Listen.’

  She stood over the two of them and told him, in a voice which never faltered or trembled, of all the events of the night – except for the reasons for her presence in Clare’s room at such an hour and for a reaction so violent to the crying out of a child from his sleep. Toby never looked up at her throughout her account. His gaze was fixed on Clare, who was now absolutely motionless, as though unconscious or in a deep sleep, her legs drawn up and a hand over her eyes, on the bed beside him.

  Helen finished. That Thing within her told her that she had the power to make him do what she wanted. He would go back to his dressing room, he would say nothing, it would all have happened as she willed it to have happened. There had been an intruder or intruders. An act of terrorism. An act of revenge. Hideous.

  Horrendous. But what could you expect of such people in such a country?

  ‘Yes,’ Toby said at the end. ‘Yes. We’ll say first that someone must have stolen him. Then someone – someone will find the body. We must make ourselves believe that someone has stolen him. We must forget all the rest. We must believe it, behave as if we believed it. Stolen him.’ He rose from the bed but he still looked down, as though in thrall to some unbreakable spell, at the motionless body outstretched on the bed. Then he raised his eyes to Helen, gave a dazed, squinting frown, pointed. ‘ Nightdress. Blood.’ Again he pointed.

  She nodded, herself peering down at her crotch. ‘ I’ll wash it.’

  ‘Give me.’ He held out a hand.

  She looked around her, pulled the bedspread off the child’s bed. She dropped the bedspread to the floor, turned her back to him, raised her arms, clumsily pulled off the nightdress. She threw it to him, not now caring if he saw her naked, and then picked up the bedspread and wrapped it round herself.

  ‘Knife.’ The knife lay on the chair across which the brassière had been thrown. Then he himself stooped, as though aching in every bone, and picked it up.

  ‘What are you going to do with them?’ she asked.

  ‘Destroy them.’ He hesitated. It was almost an interrogative, as though he were seeking her advice. Then he said more firmly: ‘Throw them into the lake.’

  Knife in hand, he moved back close to Clare’s bed. Again he looked down. ‘ Oh, Clare, Clare, Clare.’ He spoke with terrible anguish. He also spoke with terrible remorse, as though it had been he and not the two girls who had been responsible for the death of the child. Though he must have noticed the omissions in Helen’s story, he had not once asked why Helen and Clare had been together so late in the night, what they had been doing to wake the child and cause him so much terror or why, in panic, they had silenced him in so horrific a fashion. He knew. Helen knew that he knew, just as she knew why he had come to Clare’s room.

  Toby left the room and Helen, the boots in one hand while the other hand held the bedspread around her, also left it. He did not look back at her as she crept up the stairs. She went along to the bathroom, washed her hands, washed them over and over, scrubbing them so violently with a nailbrush under the cold tap �
� there was no running hot water in the house – that at the end they were red and raw. She wet a flannel and rubbed vigorously at her cheek, where the sludge of the privy had splashed it, as though to remove an indelible mark. She ran the same flannel over her belly, where the child’s blood was smeared, and then used it to scrape and dab at the boots. She rinsed the flannel, rinsed it again and yet again, before she wrung it out and placed it beside her towels on the towel-stand. She returned to her room, unwound the bedspread which she had again wound about her naked body, and slipped into a clean nightdress taken from the same drawer from which she had taken the knife. The sheath! The sheath was still in the drawer.

  The house was completely silent as she crept down the stairs again, the bedspread bundled under an arm and a hand clutching the sheath. Would she be able to slip into the dressing room and give Toby the sheath without waking Isabel? She dropped the bedspread to the floor of the landing, gently turned the handle of his door and pushed it open. She heard him give a startled gasp. He was by the open window, leaning against its frame, a hand holding up the net curtain as he looked out and down to the lake. Without a word, she held out the sheath to him. He hesitated, then took it from her. Not for a moment did he look at her. Turning back from the window, he muttered: ‘Tomorrow morning. In the lake. I’ll ride there. From The Bluff.’

  She slipped out, leaving the door ajar. If Isabel woke when he shut it, then he could tell her that he had been along to the bathroom. She opened the door to Clare’s room with the same stealth. The Eurasian girl still lay motionless on her bed, her knees drawn up and her face, eyes staring in shock, turned to the wall. Helen spread the bedspread over the child’s bed, smoothed it with both her hands, patted a pillow. Then she went over to Clare.

  ‘Remember what you have to say tomorrow.’

  A little whimper bubbled up from between Clare’s lips.

  ‘Nothing ever happened, none of this. We know nothing about it. Nothing. Remember?’ She leant over and shook Clare roughly by a shoulder. ‘Make yourself believe that. Nothing.’