By Horror Haunted

by Celia Fremlin

  That would silence them! Now, surely, they would lose interest. An unknown girl meeting an unknown boy…. She waited for Charley and the girl to resume their work; for the clatter and hiss behind the counter to bury her once more in blessed anonymity.

  But it wasn’t like that at all. The girl was gaping, incredulously.

  “Barry Findlater!” she squeaked, in a high, astonished voice that carried right across the room. “Barry Findlater? But—I mean! Are you kidding? I mean—how can you be meeting him?”

  Penny was aware that by now the whole room was listening: the voices and laughter had blurred into silence, and here she was, alone on a floodlit stage, and the audience waiting.

  Humiliation, total and insupportable, gave her, in this final extremity, a sort of dignity. She did not burst into tears, or faint. Instead, she gathered up her handbag and gloves, and climbed quite slowly off her stool.

  “Thank you,” she said to the girl politely. “I think perhaps I’d better be going now,” and head held high, looking neither to the right nor to the left, she marched right through the hushed auditorium and out through the glass doors—remembering, even at a time like this, to clutch at the opening of her coat so that not even a glimpse should be visible of the dreadful suède garment below.

  Once outside, the pent-up agony could be controlled no longer. Hot with shame, the tears streaming down her face, she ran and ran. Not to anywhere, only away. And thank goodness, it was already night! The brief winter afternoon was over, and somehow, somewhere, beyond these lights, and shops, and crowds, there would be darkness. Real darkness, and peace, and solitude, where a girl could hide, face covered, huddled up in her winter coat, for ever and ever!

  On and on she ran, dodging among the late shoppers and the dawdling Saturday crowds; on and on, oblivious of the startled faces turned towards her, and the occasional cries of “Are you all right, Miss?”—from a solicitous passer-by; on and on until at last she came to the canal bank on the outskirts of the town. With the still, steely gleam of black water on one side and a dilapidated wooden fence looming on the other, she still kept on, pounding and gasping along the tow-path, until finally, panting and exhausted, she sank down on a wooden bench where, in summer, lovers were wont to sit, arms entwined.

  But now, in January, the tow-path was as deserted as a landscape on the moon. Lights from little houses somewhere beyond the wooden fence broke the totality of darkness, and gave an oily sheen to the still water in front of her. Somewhere, a wind was rising: it licked along under the fence; it caught at her ankles and shins; and even while her body was still hot with shame and with running, she could feel her feet growing cold, colder, almost numb.

  What was the time? How soon could she decently go home and tell her mother—Oh, God, never had she felt less like inventing a lively, cheerful account of an imaginary outing!—tell her mother some sort of a story about her date with Barry Findlater?

  She huddled deeper into her coat, pushing each hand as far as it would go up the opposite sleeve for warmth; and just then she became aware of footsteps approaching along the tow-path. Not loud, not hurried; it might have been a summer stroller were it not for the darkness, and the cold, and the wind moaning along the slats of the fence, stirring faint ripples, gleaming and gone, along the surface of the canal.

  And now Penny was aware of a tiny glow of light. Yes, it must be a cigarette, wobbling, dancing, quivering, performing little loops in the darkness as the steps came nearer.

  “Smoke?”

  The steps had stopped right in front of her—as, somehow, she had known they would. She wasn’t frightened. Tears, despair, humiliation—this melancholy trio can be counted upon to drive out fear. And anyway, the voice was young, a boy’s voice. The figure looming up in the darkness was slight and slender; he couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen.

  “Smoke?” the voice repeated, and Penny was aware of a packet of ten something-or-others being proffered out of the darkness.

  “Er … No. No, thank you.” She hesitated, warily. “I don’t smoke, thank you.”

  “Uh.” Pause. “Mind if I sit here?”—and without waiting for an answer the stranger lowered himself on to the bench beside her. For fully a minute, he sat there, silent, drawing on his cigarette and puffing the smoke out into the damp January darkness. Penny sat silent too. She couldn’t think of anything to say, and yet it seemed rude just to get up and go away.

  “So you know Barry Findlater, uh?”

  His voice, cutting into the silence, startled her. Her brain seemed chilled and dull from sitting so long in the icy darkness.

  “Why—yes,” she began vaguely; and then, like a kick in the stomach, the implications of his question hit her. Was there such a person as Barry Findlater, then? How could there be?

  “Wha—what do you mean?” she stammered. “You don’t know him too, do you?”

  “Cut it out!” The boy’s voice came sharp and tense through the darkness. “C’mon, don’t muck about! Where’d you see him? When? Who’s he with?”

  Penny’s brain was spinning. What hideous coincidence was this? How could there be a real Barry Findlater …?

  “I—I haven’t seen him for ages,” she temporised, utterly mystified; and then, realising that this was in flat contradiction to what her interlocutor must have heard her saying in the coffee bar, she added wildly, “It must be another Barry Findlater! A different one! Not the same as the one I know….” Even as she spoke, she realised the absurdity of her assertion. What on earth would this boy think she was playing at? Because, of course, he didn’t know—how could he?—that the two Barry Findlaters couldn’t be the same, for the simple reason that one of them didn’t exist and the other did.

  “I mean—that is—I only knew him slightly …”

  She floundered to a stop. Suddenly, the boy leaned forward, flicked into life the sharp little flame of a cigarette lighter, then turned and studied her face attentively by the tiny light.

  “Cripes!”

  At this succinct and all-too-revealing comment, Penny, in the darkness, blushed to the roots of her hair. She knew well enough what it meant. It meant that never, ever, would the famous Barry Findlater choose anything like this for a girl friend! Dowdy, mousy, ignorant, posh—Barry would run a mile!

  “I tell you it’s a different Barry Findlater!” she cried, stung by humiliation out of all vestige of common sense. “My Barry comes from Australia, he’s a sailor….”

  A stinging slap across the mouth made her gasp, from sheer surprise as well as pain.

  “Lay off it! Lay off it, see?” The hand was raised again, threateningly. “No one’s taking the Mickey outer me, see?” And then, almost without opening his mouth, the boy emitted a long, low whistle.

  “And don’t you move, see?” he continued, standing over her now, and mustering all the threat that his slight figure and rather high, nasal noice would allow. “If you try any funny business, I’ll push yer face through the back of yer neck, see?”

  Penny saw. She sat very still, and in a few moments other footsteps sounded on the tow-path, hurrying this time, running. Hoarse, half-lowered voices came nearer.

  And now she was surrounded by dark shapes. Questions were fired at her out of the obscurity…. Someone was leaning on a bicycle. Her original companion, whose name appeared to be “Crab”, was keeping up a barrage of muttered threats, the general tenor of which was to urge her, on pain of all kinds of unintelligible penalties, to reveal the whereabouts of Barry Findlater.

  “I don’t know! Honestly I don’t!”—Penny was aware of the growing hostility of her questioners; she was provoking them, she knew, not only by the negative nature of her replies, but by the language in which she couched them. “I’m terribly sorry—I truly haven’t any idea!”… Any minute now, and they were going to decide she was “Taking the Mickey”, and then the muttered, incomprehensible threats would become reality. Yet what could she do? Their questions were mostly gibberish to her—syllables s
he had never heard of came rapping out of the darkness. She was accused of having “conned the pad”, of having “slicked the dicksie”, of possessing some sort of secret information about the “tea trolley”.

  The dark forms crowded closer. “Touch ’er up, Stan!” someone suggested; and there was an uneasy guffaw. “Give ’er a taste of the Tapper!” someone else advised. Hostility, like a hot breath, was all about her. They were going to rape her? Cut her throat? Drown her in the canal? Were these the correct translations of the husky syllables bandied to and fro in the darkness?

  A hand like a trap fastened on her shoulder. She felt her arms pinioned. Hot, horrible breath was in her face; spurts of malevolent laughter, like machine-gun fire, spattered ever closer; and suddenly Penny made her choice. Made it as a mouse makes it, or a deer, or any other jungle creature faced with an extremity of danger. There are three choices—fight, and flight, and cunning; and from these primeval three each creature will select according to its kind.

  Homo Sapiens, of course, will nearly always choose cunning. Penny jerked her face clear of her captors, and gave a long, low whistle, rather like the one Crab had given earlier.

  In a moment, the tow-path was empty. Over the fence with wildly waving legs … headlong on bicycles … by one means or another, the whole lot had vanished, and Penny was left alone with the silence and the black, gleaming water. It was as sudden as waking from a dream.

  *

  “But darling, it’s only seven o’clock! What happened?”

  Penny stood, dazed and stupid, in the doorway, blinking in the unfamiliar light of home. It was like coming back from the dead. Seven o’clock?

  “… And where’s Barry?” Mrs Haddon peered past Penny’s shoulder into the darkness. “Didn’t he see you home …?” Her glance roved up and down the empty street, wistfully, as if she hoped that somewhere out there in the darkness an errant youth might yet be lurking, who might be hauled in for drinks … for coffee … for a meal … and then immured alone with Penny in the sitting-room for long enough for permissive maternal honour to be satisfied.

  But, “No!” said Penny brusquely; and pushed past her mother into the house. She knew she was being rude and ungracious, but she couldn’t—couldn’t—face a whole long drama of confession tonight. The talk … the tears … the embarrassment … and her knees not yet stopped shaking!

  “I’m tired. I’m going to bed,” she declared: and Mrs Haddon, by now a shuddering jelly of conflicting permissive principles, did nothing to detain her.

  And there, had she but known it, went Penny’s last chance of confiding in her mother. Tonight, confession had seemed merely too painful and embarrassing. By tomorrow, it would be too dangerous.

  She had spoken truly when she said she was tired. Exhausted would have been nearer the mark—with shock and fright. But before she could get into bed, she must move off it the stuff she had left there this morning. The page of newspaper with which she had hidden “Kitty of the Lower Fourth” still lay there outspread, and she bent tiredly to pick it up.

  This time, the bold, black letters hit her between the eyes.

  So that was why the name “Barry Findlater” had slipped into her mind with such uncanny ease! She must have been staring unseeingly at the words all the time she and her mother had been talking.

  “DRUGS RINGLEADER SENTENCED”, ran the headline. Last week—no, the week before, for this was last week’s paper—a certain Barry Findlater, leader of a local teenage gang, had been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on charges of drug-peddling.

  But it was not until the next day, Sunday, that the nightmare really began.

  It began in a small way, as nightmares so often do. It began when Penny’s mother asked her to run out, in the early winter dusk, to catch the post with some letters; and Penny had realised, quite suddenly, that she did not dare. In the dark? And alone? All the way to the pillar-box?

  “I—I’ve got this essay to write,” she lied; “I’m terribly behind …”—and it was with a mixture of relief, and irritation, and terrible guilt, that she watched her mother notching up the hasty fib as one more example of “examination stress”—against which the more trendy of the parents had recently been inveighing.

  That was the beginning. By morning she was better—her attack of nerves—panic—whatever you liked to call it—seemed to be over, and she set off to school almost gaily. Already, the terrifying evening was beginning to be in the past. The facts were over: from now on the thing was under the jurisdiction of her memory and imagination.

  Already she was beginning to feel quite proud of the part she had played. Single-handed, she had scattered the lot of them! Just like an Angela Brazil heroine, when you came to think of it! Courage winning-out against the bullies and the cowards! Pleased with her self-assumed role of heroine, the girl who last night had not dared to post her mother’s letters, now marched into school with head held high, hoping that everyone would notice her air of confidence and courage.

  What a story it was going to make! Leaving out the humiliating bit about the suède tunic, of course. And about what a fool she’d made of herself in the coffee-bar … and about the lies she’d told her mother….

  Leaving out almost all of it, in fact.

  She had thought this morning that her attack of nerves was over; but it wasn’t over. She was forced to this realisation quite early in the afternoon, as through the form-room window she watched the bright winter sky fading, first to white, and then to a deepening, luminous mauve. By the time school was over, it would be nearly dark, and already she knew that she would not—could not—walk home alone through the evening streets.

  *

  The little group of first-formers were surprised, and a little embarrassed, that a great girl from the Fifth Form should suddenly choose to walk with them; but they were too awed to complain. Penny was aware of their discomfiture, but what could she do? Her own friends all lived in other directions; these eleven-year-olds were the only girls who went her way—her only protection against the terror of the streets.

  It couldn’t go on, of course. The first-formers became first cool, then openly hostile, at having their merry, scuffling journey, full of giggles and horseplay, spoiled by the inhibiting presence of a senior whom they hardly knew. So after a few days, Penny gave it up, and began instead to invent excuses for phoning her mother from the secretary’s office and asking to be fetched by car. A fictitious sprained ankle; an unconscionable load of books; a coat to be collected from the cleaners….

  But after a while, first her mother and then the school secretary began to be curious. How had she sprained her ankle … why hadn’t she told the gym mistress at the time, instead of going on with the vaulting as if nothing had happened? Why, suddenly, did she have to carry so many books around—it had never been like this before …?

  And so this, too, had to stop. She took to inviting friends home to tea—three, four days in succession; but this, likewise, couldn’t be kept up for ever. The day came when her resources were at an end. She would have to walk home alone.

  Penny was not a stupid girl. She realised that part of her terror was irrational, the result of shock; but how much of it could be thus explained, and how much was she actually, genuinely in danger?

  Drugs. While the last lesson of the afternoon—geography it was—droned on, Penny set herself to assembling in her mind everything she had heard or read about drug gangs.

  That they would stop at nothing was common knowledge. If Crab and his friends thought Penny was a danger to them, they would not hesitate to silence her. But did they think she was a danger? After all, she hadn’t reported them to the police, or even to her mother. Especially not to her mother, for Mummy would surely have gone straight to the authorities—well, any parent would—and then, when the gang realised who it was who had informed on them …! “You wanna be carved, or summun?”—Penny seemed to hear Crab’s high, nasal voice muttering at her across the rows of desks, and she shivered.r />
  No. The police must never be told. On this, she was sure, her life depended. But wait: suppose it wasn’t the police they were worrying about at all? Suppose it was Barry Findlater himself that they were scared of? Had he double-crossed them, and gone off to prison taking some vital secret with him? A secret of which she, as his presumed girl-friend, would be assumed to be in possession? A secret about a contact …? a cache of drugs …?

  Outside, the short winter day was fading. Soon, it would be dark. Miss Carter was already handing out xeroxed maps of somewhere or other, and reminding them to be sure and mark the something-somethings with red ink, and then to check the something against the diagrams on pages something-and-something.

  Fog, as well. She could see the pale, creamy swirls already licking at the lower panes of the window. Down there, at pavement level, it would be quite thick. A perfect night for a murder.

  Only a mile. Less, if you didn’t count this bright, lighted stretch of High Street, bustling with shoppers, prams, and safety. It was after the turning into Raymond’s Road that the danger would begin—the turning that took you away from the noise and the crowds, and launched you into an area of wide, affluent suburban roads, lonely and desolate as the moon. Roads where the people were too rich to walk, and the sleek cars flashed by blind and uncaring as the stars. And on your other side, the silent houses crouched behind black shrubs, blinds drawn, curtains closed, unhelpful as the dead.

  *

  Have you forgotten, Penny, that Bullies are always Cowards? This is Kitty of the Lower Fourth speaking. Those boys were bullies, Penny, you don’t have to be scared of them, because obviously they must be cowards.

  Listen, then, Penny, for the wary, plimsoled footstep of the Coward. Behind you he will be, not in front, for that is the way of cowards. He will be somewhere in the shadows, lurking deep under those black bushes, afraid to move into the light. Look, Penny, into the dark places, to the left and to the right, in all directions at once, for cowards dare not hunt alone. They hunt in bands, slinking in single-file under the lee of the walls. They won’t spring out and confront you face to face, they will wait till you have passed by, and then, from the shadows and from the black doorways they will come gliding out … first one, and then another … and another … and another … to join the hunt. Right now they are creeping after you! After you! After you! AFTER YOU …!