By Horror Haunted

by Celia Fremlin

  “Sorry I’ve been so long,” he was opening his mouth to say—or something of the sort, some typical male excuse, complicated, and involving the vagaries of a car—but Jenny silenced him, her finger on his lips.

  “Up there!” she whispered, soft and urgent in the darkness. “Up the stairs! There’s someone moving! I heard them! Oh, Kev., I’ve been so frightened …!”

  *

  A blinding flash…. A brilliance as from a thousand suns seemed to envelop them as the hall light snapped on; and a voice bawled down the stairs, “Who’s there?”—followed by a thunderous clatter of feet.

  In a second, Kevin and Jenny were away, across the dark garden, and dodging the great beam of light spreading from the open front door across the lawns. Hand in hand they fled through the summer darkness, across lawns, and paths, and flower-beds, until at last the grass was long and wet around their flying legs, and the scent of the wild bracken was all about them. Their breath was coming in great gasps now, but in the glory of shared danger they did not notice it; it was like the glory of the stars up there in the infinite dark; and the more poignant, because it was for the last time.

  For they would never go burgling again. Both knew it, for tomorrow they were leaving school, and Kevin was going to his first job, far away up in the North. Never again would Jenny slide her slim, lithe body through other people’s larder windows for him, nor open doors to him from the inside of other people’s houses. Never again would they know this glory of shared danger, the indescribable joy and fulfilment of facing hairbreadth risks together.

  Or would they? What did life hold, beyond the familiar school gates, and the safe harbour of home? Were there adventures still in store, risks yet to be taken, that would one day make this burglary-for-kicks lark look like a silly, childish game?

  They did not know. They could not ask each other, for by now their breath was almost gone. All they could do was to tighten the grasp of their interlacing fingers, and go on running, on and on, through the scented summer darkness, out of childhood into the unknown.

  BARRY FINDLATER

  TO BE JUST fifteen, and to lie awake in the darkness knowing that your mother—your loved and loving mother—is sending you to your death. Sending you with a happy smile on her face, congratulating you on your good fortune, and longing to hear all about it afterwards.

  But she won’t hear about it. You won’t be there to tell her.

  Oh, Mummy, Mummy!

  Penny stirred, pushed the stifling blankets further off her face. To think it had all started with an ordinary, typical mother-daughter misunderstanding, the sort that happens in every family, everywhere, and which is normally resolved by a bit of an argument, a few tears, and a long heart-to-heart at the kitchen table over cups of tea. That was how this one, too, would have been resolved if only they’d caught it early enough: if only Penny had had the courage to talk, and if only Mummy had had the perceptiveness to listen. The old, old story … but with what a twist to it!

  Penny shivered, raised her head from the pillow for a moment, fancying she heard a sound in the darkness; then let it sink back again.

  It wasn’t fair, really, to call Mummy imperceptive. She noticed things all right—it was her interpretations that were all wrong, culled as they were from articles in newspapers and magazines, which she believed in as if they were the Voice of God, instead of merely the voice of some weary editor trying to drum up some sort of reaction in his readers.

  Certainly, Mummy had noticed that something was the matter. She had fluttered round Penny like an anxious hen, plying her with vitamins, protein, hot milk; taking her to the doctor and talking to him about “the difficult age”, and “stress”, and “these wretched exams”.

  Exams! How remote they seemed, how trivial! Thinking about the forthcoming O-Level exams was like looking back on the cosy world of childhood, now gone for ever!

  The doctor had hummed, and tutted, and listened to her chest, and looked at the insides of her eyelids, and then he had prescribed an iron tonic, and a short course of tranquillisers to help her to sleep. It was against one of these said tranquillisers, administered with such assiduity by her mother each night, that Penny was right now fighting, struggling to ward off unconsciousness. Because, of course, what the doctor didn’t understand was that she had to stay awake. It wasn’t that she couldn’t sleep, but that she dared not. Not, at least, until dawn was at hand; only then, when the last light of the setting moon was fading in the grey square of the window, and the first faint sounds of morning were beginning in the black street—a car starting up: the scrape of a coal-shed door—only then did Penny begin to feel safe, and dared allow herself to sleep.

  Impossible to believe that barely a fortnight ago she hadn’t had a care in the world! Not true:—she had had cares, of course she had—who hasn’t, at fifteen? But how trivial they looked now, how childish! If only she had seen then how unimportant they were … how temporary … how easily remedied! If only she could go back now, with all her extra two weeks’ wisdom, to that grey winter Saturday when she took the first, idiotic step that never need have been taken at all! If only she had told Mummy, then and there, when it was all hardly more than a joke, really! Only, of course, it hadn’t seemed like a joke at the time. It had seemed desperate … unendurable … an insupportable exercise in humiliation…. Lying here, trapped, now, by sheer physical terror, in fear for her life, Penny mused incredulously on that absurd, two-week-younger self, who had made such a drama out of a small social embarrassment. Already, she found herself no more able to understand the stupid kid than her baffled, well-intentioned mother had been.

  It had been a Saturday when it all began—well, of course it had. Saturday, that hazardous day when the protective routine of school fell away, and you were left naked and exposed to whatever life might toss at you. And Mummy, instead of protecting her daughter from it all, the way mothers were supposed to, seemed to go out of her way to make it worse.

  Certainly, on this particular occasion, it was Mummy who had caused the first tremors. Well, sort of. Penny recalled the little jolt it had given her when she heard the front door slam, and knew that her mother was back already with the weekend shopping … humping it into the kitchen … opening and shutting cupboards … putting it all away. Penny remembered how she had stiffened at the familiar sounds; and how, when she finally heard her mother’s step on the stair, she had been gripped by an idiotic degree of guilt and panic; had grabbed at a nearby sheet of newspaper and whisked it over the book she had been reading. By the time the footsteps came level with the door, she had her pose perfected: the blasé, languid teenager slumped on the divan, skimming idly through the local news. Her mother would knock, of course, before entering: she was always very scrupulous about that sort of thing. All the same, it was essential to be prepared, for there is no guilty secret known to man that can possibly be pushed out of sight in the sort of time you get between hearing a knock and having to say, “Come in!”

  But there was no “tap-tap” on the door; no “Penny, are you there, darling?”—and a moment later the steps had passed on. The door of her mother’s room had opened, and then closed. The danger was over.

  Penny let out her breath. She flicked away the newspaper, and thankfully exchanged the relaxed teenage slump for her more normal reading position—not relaxed at all, but crouched over the book like a panther about to spring—and resumed her perusal of “Kitty of the Lower Fourth”.

  Whatever would Mummy say, she wondered, if she ever discovered that her daughter Penny, fifteen last week, was still reading Angela Brazil school stories! For a year now, ever since her fourteenth birthday, Penny had been miserably aware of her mother’s growing anxiety and disappointment—her sense of betrayal, almost—at having a daughter on whom her permissive and liberal principles were so signally wasted. When, Mrs Haddon’s reproachful eyes seemed to ask, was Penny going to start going out with boys? To demand the latest teenage gear? To wear exaggerated eye-make-up, so
that her mother could at last get in on those trendy disputes with the Headmistress about individuality and self-expression?

  Not that Mummy ever actually reproached Penny with any of this: she was far too tactful. But as the terrible fifteenth birthday approached, and still no boy had asked Penny out anywhere; and as weekend followed weekend, and Penny still just stayed around reading, and doing her homework, and feeding the guinea-pigs—then it was that Penny began to feel her mother’s anxiety like a coiled spring at the centre of the home. Every time the telephone went, and it wasn’t for Penny … every time the sun shone on a Saturday afternoon and there Penny still was, not getting dressed to go out anywhere … and what made it worse (Penny had known this dimly for years, but had only lately began to frame the thought clearly)—what made it worse was that Penny was the child of a “broken marriage”; and this made it incumbent on her to be terribly, terribly normal—more normal than other girls ever have to bother to be—in order to assuage her mother’s feelings of guilt at having deprived her daughter of a father. Penny didn’t feel deprived—it was all so long ago, and she could remember little of her father, apart from an atmosphere of rows, of black silences, of tears and slamming doors, than which the present was immeasurably pleasanter and more peaceful.

  But to not feel deprived, was not enough. She had to be seen to be not deprived, too; be seen to be as normal as—nay, more normal than—the next girl. And this was the reason it was so specially terrible that, at the ripe age of fifteen, she still hadn’t managed to get herself a boy friend—“to form a stable relationship with a member of the opposite sex,” as her well-read mother would have put it, in those interminable conversations over the garden wall. Right now, through the closed window, Penny could hear just such a conversation starting. She couldn’t hear the words, but from the lowered, confidential tones she could guess well enough what it was about. “Adolescent negativism” … “Identity crisis” … “Maturity-avoidance mechanisms” … Like a fish slithering back thankfully into its own cool and tranquil element, Penny slipped back now into the world of Kitty of the Lower Fourth.

  *

  Oh, those mellow, turreted school buildings! Those smooth, enchanted lawns, and the ping and twang of tennis-balls on summer afternoons! Oh, the glory of getting into the swimming team … being top in the geometry exam! How marvellous to have lived in a world where such simple, straight-forward things actually mattered; where bells rang clear and imperative across the summer grass, summoning you to prep, to gym, to piano lessons! How confident and impregnable one must have felt, in that sunny, ordered world, where you could be fifteen, sixteen, or even seventeen, and still nobody expect you to have a boy-friend! A world where approval could be won in such simple, clear-cut ways—by practising hard at your overarm serve; by learning chunks of Paradise Lost by heart; by not cheating in the Latin exam. A world where you could succeed simply by trying hard enough. Not this complex, fevered real world, where trying hard only seemed to make things a hundred times worse.

  Because Penny had tried, over and over again, to be a proper teenager. She had listened to all the right records. She had forced herself to go to party after ghastly party where, in darkness, to the beat of sullen music, other people swayed and kissed in a heaving, with-it mass, into which Penny seemed to have no more access than she had to the other side of the Milky Way. She tried with her clothes, too. Hounded by a relentless flow of cash from her mother, she had bought all the proper teenage things, and had even—at great self-sacrifice, because what she really wanted was a proper play-run for her guinea-pigs—she had even asked for an up-to-the-minute suède tunic for her birthday. Delighted, her mother had bought one for her, and there the horrible thing was, hanging in full view through the open wardrobe door. There was nothing wrong with it really, Penny knew very well. It was what they were selling in all the boutiques; plenty of girls would have been in raptures over it. It fitted her, too. But none of this seemed in the least to modify its monstrous wrongness once she had actually got it on. Never, never, could she actually go out in the thing. One more disappointment for Mummy. And it must have cost pounds and pounds.

  “Penny? Penny, are you there, darling?” The ritual tap-tap, and as Penny whipped the newspaper over “Kitty of the Lower Fourth” once more, the door began to open, inch by tactful inch, to reveal first a wisp of faded chestnut hair, and then a pair of fly-away spectacles, peering cautiously to left and right, as if some sacred teenage secret might yet spring out, claws bared, from some unaccustomed corner.

  “Busy, darling?” Mrs Haddon sidled carefully into the room. “It’s a lovely day,” she added, guardedly.

  Here it came, the gentle, intangible prying. Sunshine always made it worse; Mrs Haddon seemed to feel that the winter sun should bring out boy-friends as if they were daffodils.

  “Yes,” said Penny, non-committally; and was aware of her mother’s tiny spark of hope fading. Just as it always did. She was aware, too, of her mother’s defeated glance falling for just a second on the terrible suède tunic, bought with such hope, and pride, and love, only a week ago.

  Penny felt quite sick with pity. She could bear it no longer.

  “Mummy!” she cried, sharp and urgent, “Did I tell you I’m going out this afternoon? I—I’m meeting someone at the coffee bar! And I’m going to wear my tunic! My suède tunic!”

  The incredulous joy on Mrs Haddon’s face was almost frightening. “Is—is it a boy?” she managed to gasp out; and Penny nodded dumbly. What had she done? What on earth was going to happen next?

  “Yes. I—I forgot to tell you,” she plunged on, recklessly. “He—I—I met him the other day….” She stopped, and stared down, suddenly panic-stricken, to where dear, safe Kitty of the Lower Fourth lay hidden. There was no going back now: Mummy looked so happy, so excited, so young! “His name’s Barry Findlater,” she finished wildly, thankful that a name had leapt to her mind so readily—far more convincing than the kind of name—John Smith, Tom Robinson—that one conjures up by a deliberate effort.

  Not that Mrs Haddon was in any mood for suspicions. Under the intoxicating stimulus of her delighted credulity, Penny found herself improvising freely. He was tall, handsome, with long dark hair; he was a rebel, a guitar-player; the lot. And if, now and then, her voice faltered a little under the strain of invention, Mrs Haddon did not notice it. She was in Heaven.

  *

  Laughter—music—the clatter of crockery. Saturday afternoon at the coffee-bar was in full swing. Perched on her high stool, her elbows on the counter, both hands caressing her near-empty beaker of coffee, Penny waited for death. Because, really, that seemed to be the only way out of her present predicament. She could neither go nor stay; both were equally impossible. She couldn’t go, because how could she possibly face Mummy with the news that her date with the non-existent Barry Findlater had lasted less than an hour? And she couldn’t stay, because how could she go on facing the inquisitive glances which—it seemed to her—came at her like poisoned darts from every corner of the room? To her fevered sensibilities, it seemed that every single person in the coffee bar was looking at her. All those scornful boys; all those girls with knowing, sultry eyes peering from behind curtains of straight, fashionably waist-length hair; they were all looking at her, noticing that she had no friends. They were pitying her, seeing with X-ray eyes through the thick winter coat to the impossible suède tunic beneath. They were timing her, glancing with surreptitious mockery at the clock on the wall, whispering to one another about that queer girl who had been sitting there all by herself for hours. Well, for fifteen minutes, anyway; soon it would be twenty….

  “Anything else, love?”

  The girl behind the bar spoke with casual amiability as she swept Penny’s empty coffee mug off the counter and wiped the marble surface beneath it, but Penny started as if the pistol held to her head had gone off at last. For the girl’s innocent question, translated by Penny’s overwrought imagination, went something like this: “What do y
ou think you’re doing, sitting here hour after hour toying with a single cup of coffee? What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you go? Why aren’t you talking and laughing like everybody else? Why aren’t you with friends?”

  No wonder Penny hesitated over her answer. Questions like these, at point-blank range, would disconcert most of us.

  “Er!” was all she could manage, in a queer, croaky voice; and now the girl really did look at her. She paused in her brisk wiping of the counter.

  “You waiting for someone?” she said curiously. “Or something?”

  Only now, when she really had succeeded in making herself conspicuous, did Penny realise how imaginary her former terrors had been. Until this moment, no one had been paying the slightest attention to her.

  So. She had let cowardice make a fool of her. All that was left was courage.

  “I was to meet a friend here,” she declared boldly. “But I got here awfully late. He may have thought I wasn’t coming.”

  There! Now it wouldn’t be too humiliating when he didn’t come, and she had finally to slink out of the place by herself.

  “Not Dud Lee, was it?” said the girl helpfully. “Dud’s been in a coupla times since dinner, hasn’t he, Charley?”

  “Eh, what’s that? Someone looking for Dud?” Charley, red-haired and freckled, had to shout through the scream and hiss of the coffee machine, and several nearby customers glanced up with vague interest.

  Penny could feel a monstrous tell-tale blush bearing up on her. Dare she settle for this Dud, and thus quench all this kindly, horrible curiosity? But—Oh God!—suppose Dud actually did come in! If he had come in twice, he could come back a third time, couldn’t he?

  “No! No!” she exclaimed—and at the urgency of her repudiation several more people looked up, mildly curious. “It’s not Dud! It’s—you wouldn’t know him—he doesn’t come here much! His name’s Barry Findlater!”