Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

by Barbara Comyns

  When Old Toby had been working at the bakery for about ten days, Eunice came in to order a large seed cake for the Willoweeds. It was a sultry afternoon, and the smell of baking and then the sight of poor Old Toby’s red eyes and scarred face suddenly sickened her. She felt her upper lip become damp and a great noise of rushing, like a thousand pigeons’ wings, came in her ears. She sat on a sack of flour and buried her face in her hands, and Toby hurried to fetch her water, his poor face all puckered up with worry. Eunice felt better when she had drank a little; and was just managing to get to her feet when a boy came rushing into the bakery and shouted, “Hi! The miller has gone mad and drowned himself. They are just fishing his body out of the river now!” Before they could question him he was gone. The baker came running out of the bakehouse calling, “What was that? What has happened?” and his wife who had been drinking suddenly appeared and said, “What’s th’matter?” and stood there swaying.

  Eunice left without ordering the seed cake, she felt strangely sick and longed to lie down in the cool and quiet of her bedroom. But, when she reached the Willoweed house, all was confusion. Grandmother Willoweed had heard the news and wanted Emma to row her down the river to see the miller’s body dragged out of the water. She shouted at her and shook her; but poor Eunice only cried, “No! No!” in a pitiful voice. The noise reached Ebin’s attic, and he crept down the stairs, holding the banister so that he could retreat quickly before he became involved in anything unpleasant. When he heard what all the commotion was about, he was not at all averse to seeing the drowned miller himself, and offered to take his mother. The words were hardly out of his mouth before the old woman seized his arm and almost dragged him down to the water.

  “Hurry, hurry, or we will be too late,” she cried as she took a flying leap into the boat, which shivered under the sudden weight.

  In spite of the heat Ebin rowed swiftly while his mother urged him on, and they soon came to a small group of empty boats. On the bank of the river there were about a dozen people gazing at Doctor Hatt, assisted by the miller’s son, giving the drowned miller artificial respiration—with no results. The miller was very dead and his eyes were horribly wide open.

  “I’m sorry; but it’s no use,” said the doctor, “he has been dead about an hour. We must get him back to the mill.”

  They decided to lay the corpse on a blanket in the bottom of a boat, which the son could tow to the mill. Doctor Hatt shut the dreadful open eyes; but they were soon open again with their glassy stare. One of the villagers stepped forward and placed pennies on the eyes to weigh the lids down; but, when they carried him to the boat, the pennies fell out and there were the dreadful glassy eyes again. No one liked to follow the dead miller and his living son. Even Grandmother Willoweed felt rather tired, although she recovered on the return journey because she remembered it must be almost tea time. Heavy clouds, some with hard, curdled edges, had gathered in the sky, and the peacock’s harsh cry greeted them as they climbed out of the boat.

  That night it became stiflingly hot and not a leaf moved on the trees. It seemed as if a storm were coming; but nothing happened, and the leaves stayed still. Emma was disturbed by Dennis crying and shouting in his sleep; and, although she took him into her own bed and tried to comfort him, he kept starting up and crying that a great fish with the miller’s head was trying to devour him. And so the night passed.

  - CHAPTER VIII -

  EBIN WALKED under a sticky yellow sky. It seemed as if there was no air, and the villagers talked together in tired little groups. He stopped when he reached the bridge, and gazed down at the water; but that looked yellow and tired too. He had slept little during the night because the heat in his attic under the leads had been unbearable, and, when at last he had managed to doze off, he had been disturbed by Dennis’s cries.

  Although it was so stifling, it was only nine o’clock. From the bridge Ebin watched the little shops opening and their blinds being drawn up, and the groups of women parting as they went into various shops. While he was standing there, the butcher came to the bridge. He was wearing his straw hat on the back of his head, and had apparently come to sharpen his knives on the stone wall. When he had laid the knives across the wall he stood looking down at them in a vacant way. Ebin noticed that his swollen fingers were absent-mindedly plucking at his striped apron. He also noticed how red and hot the man looked, and remembered he had been seriously ill with some internal trouble recently. As he watched, the butcher’s actions became more and more strange. He moved in an odd jerky manner, and appeared to be talking to himself. Then he seemed to have convulsions in his legs, almost as if he was about to do some odd dance, and there was something horribly pathetic about it. His head lolled and rolled on his thick neck, and his eyes stared out from that red moon of a face in a sad bewildered way. Then he picked up a knife with a trembling, bloated hand and suddenly started to sharpen it as if he was in a frenzy, muttering to himself all the time. Ebin thought, “He is going to have a fit. What can I do? I know his hat will fall off.” Somehow the idea of the butcher’s hat falling off seemed a terrible thing. Then the shouting started, that appalling shouting started, and all the time the shining knife was dashing backward and forward over the stone. Dreadful tormented words came pouring out, and Ebin longed to escape from them but dared not move, he couldn’t move a step his terror was so great. Mingled with the shouting there were women’s screams. Some of them ran into the nearest shop, and he heard them bolt the door and felt he was alone with his terror.

  The shouting and sharpening stopped suddenly, and there was only the sound of water rushing through the weir. The butcher was looking at his knife with a look of amazement, as if he had never seen it before and had no idea how it had come into his hand. Then suddenly he began to bellow like some poor bewildered bull, waved his knife as if attacking an invisible enemy, and staggered about the bridge. Somehow Ebin managed to crawl away on all fours along the side of the wall. His mouth wouldn’t close and his saliva dribbled on to the dust, and he imagined he could smell blood. The bellows abruptly ceased and turned to strange gurgles. Ebin looked back over his shoulder and saw the butcher standing swaying gently on his feet. Suddenly with a swift movement he sliced his throat right across like a great smile. Ebin closed his eyes and heard the sound of the huge body falling. When he looked again the butcher was lying in his own blood, which had already congealed in places and resembled raw liver.

  Ebin managed to get to his feet, and he stood trembling with one arm over his eyes. Then he heard men’s voices, and someone led him away to the White Lion, which stood at the foot of the bridge. They took him into the billiard room, and laid him on one of the long, red plush seats.

  “No, there is blood on it, take me away,” he managed to whisper. They poured whisky down his throat, and someone tried to fan him with a calendar they tore from the wall. Flies buzzed against the windows. The whisky revived him and he struggled to his feet; but he was gently pushed back on to the sofa.

  “You had better stay here a bit, sir, until the Doctor has seen you,” said the sympathetic landlady.

  “Good God! I’m not cut, am I?” and Ebin hurriedly examined himself for signs of wounds.

  “No but you’ve had a nasty shock, sir,” she reassured him in her soothing voice. “That poor butcher, whatever possessed him to do a thing like that?”

  “It must be the sultry weather,” said the man who had helped him to the White Lion, “it’s making us all balmy, that’s what it’s doing. I had terrible dreams myself last night,” and the man’s lips quivered with the memory of the horror of the night, “and the pains in my stomach have been cruel!”

  Ebin looked at him with dismay. Surely he wasn’t going mad too. Then he heard Doctor Hatt’s voice and felt safe. The doctor entered the billiard room, looking even graver than usual. He gave Ebin a brief examination, pronounced him none the worse for his experience, and offered to drive him home in his new yellow motor car, which was standing outside the public
house; but Ebin did not want to be taken home. He did not feel up to the devastating questions his mother would fire at him when he returned.

  “Well, then, you had better come home with me,” the doctor said; and they climbed into the high, open car.

  At any other time Ebin would have been delighted to drive through the village in the snorting yellow monster; but now he felt too shaken to care. He glanced at the spot on the bridge where he had seen the butcher lying. There was no butcher, no blood, just some yellow sand.

  “I suppose the poor chap’s dead?” he whispered.

  “Yes, as dead as a door nail. I can’t understand it; but I hope to God there won’t be any more cases. It may be the heat, or it may be some kind of poison has got into the water. I’d better go straight on to the Medical Officer of Health and arrange to have the water analysed.”

  Francis Hatt stopped the car outside his own house, and told Ebin to go inside and wait for him. He didn’t know how long he would be.

  “Ask my old housekeeper to give you some coffee—and the dispenser’s there—she’ll look after you.”

  Ebin drank coffee with the dispenser. She was a nice girl, but dull and heavy, like underdone pork. He did not tell her about the butcher’s dreadful end, although he could think of nothing else. The words would not come into his mouth; he could almost feel them locked in his chest like a great lump. When the girl had gone back to her duties, he restlessly walked up and down the drawing-room, and suddenly noticed a typewriter and a stack of papers laid out on a table inlaid with marquetry. It looked so unsuitable—a typewriter on that elaborate table—and was a sure sign that Mrs. Hatt was no longer there. The neatly arranged magazines had gone from their usual table; the large bowls of flowers were there no more; even the books on the shelves had changed. It was the first time Ebin realized that Mrs. Hatt was gone for ever and that kind and bustling figure would not appear in her chintzy drawing-room any more.

  He tried to concentrate on thoughts of Mrs. Hatt; but it was always the butcher he was really thinking about. He sat down at the table and started experimenting with the typewriter. It was a more modern machine than his own, and moved easily to his touch. He looked at the words he had typed: “The butcher’s throat looked like a smile when he had finished with it.”

  He swore and pulled the paper out of the machine and was about to throw it in the wastepaper-basket; but suddenly he stopped, and started staring at it as if he had never seen a piece of paper before.

  Then he slowly ripped it into small pieces, placed a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter and started to type again as if in a frenzy.

  The dispenser came in to see who could be clattering away like that on the doctor’s machine; but Ebin never noticed her, so she went away again. The old housekeeper came to ask if he was staying to lunch, but received no reply. He just continued his furious typing, and the small bell of the machine clanged away like a miniature fire engine.

  In less than an hour he had finished his typing. He pinned the sheets together without reading them, folded them across, and put them in his breast-pocket. Then he went into Doctor Hatt’s dining room and helped himself to two glasses of sherry. Fortified by the sherry, he returned to the drawing-room and made a telephone call to London. It was a long call, and he had only just replaced the receiver when Doctor Hatt returned. The doctor thought his friend seemed rather exhilarated, but put it down to the sherry he had obviously been drinking.

  - CHAPTER IX -

  THE FOLLOWING day the people in the village who subscribed to The Daily Courier were surprised to see a leading article headed “Mad Village,” giving a lurid description of the last few minutes of the butcher’s life and a not quite so lurid description of the miller’s end. The article ended with the words, “The inhabitants of this remote village are asking each other ‘Who will be smitten by this fatal madness next?’”

  This article caused a panic in the village. Already there was another case of violent madness. The victim this time was the man who had helped Ebin Willoweed on the bridge—the man who had complained of nightmares. He lay screaming in his bed and his two brothers had to hold him down. They had tried drugs; they only acted for a short period and then he would start up in bed again yelling that monsters were trying to devour him and that he was a wicked sinner. People gathered outside his cottage on the Broom Road. The cries made their blood run cold, they said, and they did not ask each other “Who’s next?” because they had already decided it would be Ebin Willoweed. It must be catching, they said, as they moved a little further from the cottage. Notices appeared in prominent places saying, “Do not Drink Water Unless It has Been Boiled,”—“Trying to pretend it’s the water when we know it’s the microbes,” they muttered. That evening reporters from two newspapers appeared in the village, asking questions and generally prying. They stayed at the White Lion.

  Francis Hatt and the Medical Officer of Health were furious when they read the article in The Daily Courier. Francis suspected Ebin Willoweed the moment he read it. It could have only been written by an eye-witness; also he remembered The Daily Courier was the newspaper from which Ebin had been dismissed when he first returned to his mother’s house years ago. At lunch the previous day Ebin had muttered something about a phone call and had reluctantly offered him half-a-crown, which he had refused at the time and now regretted. He was not free now to attack Ebin with his disgraceful behaviour, as the poor demented man on the Broom Road was taking a considerable amount of his time and there were several other patients, mostly suffering from internal trouble, to be attended to, besides frequent discussions with the Medical Officer of Health. They decided to engage a temporary assistant, and a young man from London who had been specialising in brain diseases was on his way to the village. “But I expect the whole thing will be over by the time he arrives,” the Medical Officer observed.

  The assistant—Philip Andrew—arrived the next day, and by that time there were two more cases of the madness, two unrelated children. Their illness had started with stomach trouble; but, when they had almost recovered, their brains became affected. They moaned and shouted, and screamed that terrible monsters were pursuing them, and they clung to their parents in terror. Their poor little legs were drawn up to their stomachs by violent pains, and they frequently vomited. The man who lived on the Broom Road appeared to be recovering, although he was very weak and could take little nourishment and still suffered from hallucinations and insomnia.

  There was a joint inquest on the miller and the butcher. It was held at the Assembly Rooms and Ebin was one of the chief witnesses. It was noticed that when he was not giving evidence he was scribbling away on a small pad on his knees. The other journalists were scribbling too. The doctors frowned on them for bringing unwelcome publicity and causing alarm in the village. When the inquest was over, Francis Hatt asked his old friend why he was doing this and pointed out the harm he had done and ended with “Can’t you see the village is almost on the verge of mass hysteria?”—and then he regretted the words in case they were scribbled down too. Ebin looked bewildered and hurt and said he had to do it: he couldn’t have stopped himself writing the first article; it just came pouring out as if it was writing itself and then, when it was finished, it seemed a pity to waste it. And the Courier had been really pleased with it, and wanted anything he could write about the epidemic.

  “Francis, you can’t think what it is like to be earning money after all these years. To be working again. Do you know I keep touching wood—and it has to be real wood, not painted. The end of the pencil does quite well. I haven’t told my mother yet because I know somehow she would put a stop to it; you see, she likes to have me under her thumb. Francis, I’m sorry about it causing panic in the village, but it would have leaked out eventually; this inquest would have drawn attention to it, for one thing!” And the doctor had to agree that this was true, and suddenly gave Ebin one of his dazzling smiles, and they left the assembly rooms together.

  Grandmother Wi
lloweed sat in the morning-room eating a honeycomb out of a bowl on her lap. As she licked the wooden frame with her tongue, she bitterly regretted the day she had announced that she would not cross ground that was not her property. At the time she had wondered if she was making a mistake; but it had appeared such a grand gesture and it had seemed unlikely then that she would ever particularly wish to enter the village again. She had a very good view of the main street from the boot-room window with its coloured windowpanes of glass. She spent many an amusing half-hour in there with the galoshes and old black boots for company.

  But now she felt unhappy. For one thing the honey had become mixed up in her chins and she felt miserably sticky; and she was disturbed by Ebin’s behaviour since the catastrophe of the butcher. He had told her so little about it, in fact he had hardly spoken to her for days and had become strangely independent, sitting up in his room typing away; now he had been asked to attend the inquest, and when he returned would he tell his mother anything about it? she wondered. He was undoubtedly becoming conceited and out of hand. The old lady picked some beeswax out of her teeth as she pondered on ways of putting her son in his place and brightened up a little when she decided to put the maids on to spring cleaning his room. He couldn’t sit up there in haughty isolation under those conditions. She chuckled to herself and felt happier. But if only she had been free to wander in the village and hear the screams coming out of cottage windows and perhaps even help nurse one of the unfortunate afflicted. She would dearly love to see someone who believed they were being pursued by monsters. So far there had only been five cases, but there would be more; she was confident there would be more. One of the maids might become a victim, or even Old Ives. The thought of Old Ives being devoured by imaginary monsters cheered her up considerably, and she trotted off to the potting-shed to see if he looked at all queer; but she found him looking very well, sorting out some seeds he had been drying. She wasn’t very pleased with the way he looked at her and asked how she was feeling.