The Tomb and Other Stories

by Stanley Salmons

  If I lived in a street I could open the window and shout for a neighbour or wait for someone to pass by. But I don’t live in a street. If I open my window all I see is my weed-infested drive and, beyond that, total blackness. A little moonlight differentiates the trees from the fields but there are no other houses in view. Electricity arrives here along cables that swoop from pole to pole across more than a mile of open countryside before disappearing mysteriously into the house. There’s no telephone and I don’t go in for those mobile things the youngsters all have. They say there’s no reception around here anyway.

  It would have to wait until morning. I’d think of something in the morning.

  *

  And I did think of something in the morning, while I was having my breakfast. I needed an extra power point in the kitchen. I mentioned it only last week to the newsagent in the village and he recommended a “good man”. The “good man” would have to go into the cellar to turn off the electricity. He would know how to deal with it. I could nip down to the village today; there was a phone box outside the post office.

  *

  They say you can never get a workman when you want one but this gentleman arrived very promptly. I showed him where I wanted the point and he nodded.

  “No problem. Where’s the main fuse box?”

  “I think it’s down in the cellar. And a fuse may have blown; the lights went out last night.”

  I led the way downstairs. I’d found the old oaken door with the flagstone steps behind it about a year ago when I first moved into this house and went on an exploratory tour. It was a cool, creepy, cobwebby place and I didn’t give it more than a quick look. But even someone as technically inept as me couldn’t fail to notice the jumble of dust-laden cables, wonderful old white ceramic insulators and cast-iron circuit breakers that occupied the wall opposite the foot of the steps.

  At the door I backed off and let him lift the latch and go on down. I was feeling a trifle guilty.

  “Er, do be careful, won’t you?”

  “Careful of what?”

  “Ah, er, the steps are quite steep.”

  I loitered around the kitchen, listening out for screams. I thought I heard some laughter, but it must have been my imagination. Then heavy footsteps pounded on the staircase and my heart jumped.

  “Oh, it’s you. Yes?”

  “Take a look at this.”

  He was holding a length of cable and shaking his head from side to side. When they do that you know something’s amiss.

  He brushed the dust off the finely crazed rubber sheath and cracked it away to reveal the red and black conductors inside. To my mind that’s what a cable should look like. It was a friendly old cable that looked like it could do the job.

  He rubbed the red insulation between his fingers and it crumbled to dust, exposing cheery pink copper wire. Then he did the same with the black one.

  “This bit was lying on the floor, but it’ll be the same everywhere,” he said. “It’s shot. The whole house needs rewiring. Proper cables. PVC.”

  I looked at the offending item dubiously. Those cables must have been around for eighty years or more. I wasn’t going around rubbing them between my fingers and so long as no one else was, I didn’t see why they couldn’t go on for another eighty. I’ve heard about these modern PVC cables. People say they last for ever. But people don’t know about the population of mice and rats, squirrels and bats which – to judge from the noises at night – this house supports. Mice love PVC. In all probability rats and squirrels and bats are fairly partial to it too. I could imagine them all sitting down, knives and forks at the ready, impatient for the installation to finish so they could get stuck in.

  Out of pure politeness I enquired how much it would cost to rewire a house like this. Just approximately, say to the nearest ten pounds? He couldn’t say. He could, however, venture an estimate to the nearest thousand pounds.

  My jaw fell so low I had to rearticulate it before I could speak again. It would, I suggested, be cheaper to knock the house down and start again. He agreed. Only he meant it and I didn’t.

  I began to think there was a lot to be said for candles. For one thing you didn’t need to run PVC cables from room to room. Candles were portable and they gave you light where you needed it and nowhere else. Above all you could buy them without remortgaging the property. At one time, of course, there was no alternative: if you needed light you lit a candle. But for the most part you simply didn’t do much after dark. Night was the time to sleep and day was the time to work. The days were shorter in the winter, but then there was less work to do. It all seemed rather well regulated.

  “I don’t think I could run to that,” I managed.

  “Might be cheaper in the long run,” he said, his voice laden with doom. “If you think of the fire risk.”

  Fire risk?

  We discussed it further. At the very least, he said, I should have an effective fuse box. He carried on about the fuses, muttering imprecations about barbed wire and marvelling at the miracle that I hadn’t been reduced to a heap of smoking ashes long before now.

  He went to his van and came back with a circuit breaker box. He opened the lid and showed me the row of things inside, MCBs or RCDs, maybe both, I’m not sure. If the tabs were up, they were on; if one was down it had tripped, and all I had to do was lift it back. No fuse wire to replace. This was the modern way, he said. I nodded reluctantly. He fitted the new box and then he installed the new power point, and then I wrote him a cheque that made my hand shake and bid him goodbye.

  I went back to the kitchen and tried to derive a little satisfaction from filling a kettle and plugging it into the new power point. I would have loved to know whether he’d seen anything else in the cellar but I couldn’t very well ask. He’d had the light on down there so presumably it had gone, although Lord only knew how. Well, that was one problem solved.

  I felt out of sorts, just the same. It wasn’t only the size of that cheque; it was the new circuit breaker. I could picture it down there, sitting on a wooden board on the wall, a self-satisfied, clean, shiny plastic box among all the dusty rubber-and-ceramic paraphernalia of the distant last century.

  I knew it was a mistake. This isn’t a mass-produced, loft-insulated, double-glazed, centrally-heated, UPVC-window-framed dwelling of the sort that springs up overnight on new estates. This house has been lived in. Her floors have been brushed by the skirts of ladies wearing frilly, high-necked blouses and stern expressions, and rose-cheeked, mob-capped maids, leaning sideways against the weight of buckets of coal being carried to open fireplaces in every room. Her floors have creaked under the hand-made leather boots of men of substance, men who wore waistcoats all the year round, disappeared during the week to occupy themselves in some obscure fashion in the city, and returned to their country seat at the weekends to entertain and spend evenings in the library smoking cigars and drinking brandy. In this house, the walls flickered with soft shadows cast by candles and warm fires, while beyond the heavy curtains the windows twinkled under a generous frosting of ice. In a later era, gas mantles would hiss out their lime-hard light and the achingly bright walls would disappear into impenetrably black corners. But another generation or two would pass before those walls were ravaged, and polished oaken floorboards prised up, to make way for the new electric light.

  You don’t take an elderly lady and fit her with three-inch high heels. She won’t look right, she won’t feel right, and she’ll fall over. Sure enough, my house now started to fall over with monotonous regularity and the culprit was that circuit breaker. The first time it happened I found my torch, went down the steps quickly, pushed up the tab, and retreated. Then it happened again. And again.

  It wasn’t just electrical surges it was sensitive to. All it took was a momentary draught of air, or even a careless thought, and it would snap over like a mouse trap. I turned the radio down and crept about on tiptoe, but nothing seemed to help.

  By now I was keeping my torch within r
each at all times. When the lights went out for the umpteenth time I put down my book, groped around on the side table, picked up the torch with a sigh and went down the stone steps yet again, the thin beam piercing the darkness ahead of me. Of course I flicked on the light switch from pure habit and of course nothing happened. The torch shone on the plastic box and then I started to breath more quickly. The air was heavy with the presence of something, something with me here in the cellar. I swung the beam round and caught my breath.

  There they were again, glowing back at me: two eyes, close together, like a tractor’s headlamps, but red.

  It was back.

  I couldn’t see the outline of it at all – the glow from the eyes was too bright. Resisting the urge to run, I gripped the lens end of the torch with a trembling hand and twisted it to widen the beam. Two more eyes came into view, greeny-yellow, close together under the first two.

  I tried to swallow, but something the size of a grapefruit had formed in my chest and was migrating upward into my throat. I continued to twist the torch and two more eyes came into view, out to the sides. Then two more, and two more. That was it. Eight eyes, four pairs. And by now my rudimentary biological knowledge was screaming into both ears. The only land-based creature I knew that had eight eyes was a spider. And this one was the size of a wolf.

  I backed towards the mains panel, breathing fast, keeping the torch trained on the creature. Mercifully it didn’t move. I was so used to resetting the circuit breaker that I could do it by feel alone. My fumbling fingers raised the cover, found the plastic tab – in the down position, just as I expected – and lifted it. I heard the satisfying click and simultaneously the room was flooded with light.

  The spider had gone. In its place there was a neat stack of bottles, the highly reflective bases turned to me. Eight of them in all.

  *

  A few days later the electrician dropped by.

  “Just checking to see if things are all right with that new circuit breaker,” he said.

  “Actually, no, it’s always going off for some reason. I spend half my time going up and down to the cellar.”

  “Yeah, I thought that might be a problem. It’s the old wiring, you see. Too much leakage. Tell you what I’ll do: I’ll fit a less sensitive trip. It’ll still be safe, but it’ll fix the problem.”

  He did install it, and it has fixed the problem – so far.

  I didn’t tell him about the spider. I didn’t tell him about the wine bottles, either. They must have been left down there by the previous owner. I understand he lived in the house for years, right up to the time he passed away. He must have died from happiness. There were two bottles of 1978 Château Margaux and six bottles of 1947 Château d’Yquem.

  I invited my friends round for a dinner party. It was a jolly occasion. We had the Médoc with the main course and consumed two bottles of the Château d’Yquem with dessert.

  Oh, and dinner was by candlelight.

  Just to be on the safe side.

  [Short fiction winner, writersbillboard.net September 2008]

  The Pill

  Dr. James Gilphead ran a single-handed General Practice in Yorkshire. Upper Piddle was a pretty village. Pretty small, and pretty depressing. The young women looked old and the old women looked older. They carried heavy shopping bags and gathered in knots outside shops and at the bus shelter to complain about the price of groceries and the men, roughly in that order. The men were mostly farmers. They gravitated to the “King’s Arms” in the evenings to complain about the price of beer, fuel, agrochemicals, and the women, roughly in that order. There were too few children to support a school so they had to attend one in another village. The older ones left as quickly as they could.

  Dr. Gilphead saw little of the local men in his practice; his surgery was taken up mostly with the women, who presented a litany of trivial complaints that sometimes made him wonder what the other ninety-five per cent of his medical training had been for. He did, however, pride himself on knowing all the patients by name. And so it was that when, towards the end of this particular morning clinic, he put his head around the door of the gloomy, wood-panelled waiting-room, he recognised the dour little man who stood up.

  “Ah, Mr. Stebbins. Come through, would you?”

  Mr. Stebbins removed his flat cap as he entered the office, a gesture of respect he normally reserved for the graveside. Dr. Gilphead picked the patient’s file out of a cabinet and indicated the seat on the other side of his desk.

  “Do sit down,” he said, as he scanned the summary card, swiftly interpreting his own shorthand:

  Farm hand/tractor driver. Seen 12 Feb. Headaches. Mildly elevated b.p. Prescribed 2.5 mg bendroflumethiazide. To return if no improvement and in any case for another check in 6/12. Pharmacy to request repeat prescriptions as usual.

  It’s mid-August, so this must be the six monthly check. Good.

  He looked up at the patient. “Now then, how are we today?”

  Everything about this man was droopy. His eyes drooped, his cheeks drooped, his mouth drooped. The effect was not dissimilar to an ageing bloodhound.

  He shrugged, and then his shoulders drooped. “All right, I suppose. I only came back ’cos you said I should.”

  “Yes, well I think we’ll start by taking your blood pressure, shall we?” Gilphead said briskly.

  As the patient stood to take off his jacket Dr. Gilphead observed a curious bulge in the crotch of the man’s trousers and made a mental note that not quite everything about Mr. Stebbins was droopy.

  “Well, Mr, Stebbins,” he said, as the last of the air hissed out of the inflated cuff. “That all seems fine. Any recurrence of the headaches?”

  “Not really.”

  “Good. Well, I think we should take you off that medication now.”

  “Oh no, doctor. You can’t do that!”

  Dr. Gilphead gave a short laugh.

  “Mr. Stebbins,” he said gently. “Your blood pressure’s within normal limits now – if anything it’s a little on the low side. You have an active, outdoor life. You’re not overweight, you drink moderately and you’ve given up smoking. And you have no family history. You’re in a very low risk category for heart problems. Why would you want to stay on the medication?”

  “It’s not me. It’s the wife. She’s very keen on me takin’ treatment. Says it’s made a new man of me. Me – I’d soon as not take the bloody great things.”

  “It’s only 5 mg bendroflumethiazide, Mr. Stebbins. It’s a very small tablet.”

  “Oh no, it’s not. Not these ’uns. Bigger’n a bloody mothball, they are.”

  He made a circle of thumb and forefinger to illustrate the point.

  “I tried crushin’ them up, but they’re right bitter. So I ’ave to swallow damn things. Very ’ard to go down, they are.”

  A nasty thought insinuated itself into the back of Dr Gilphead’s mind and wriggled there, like a worm. He made a show of looking at his watch.

  “My, is that the time? Look, Mr. Stebbins, I have to make a telephone call right now. Would you mind waiting outside for a moment? Don’t go back to the waiting room – I won’t keep you a moment.”

  The Village Pharmacy served both the General Practice and the Veterinary Practice. Dr. Gilphead waited patiently while they checked their records. A voice came back on the line. Gilphead blanched.

  “What do you mean, mix-up? Who with, for Pete’s sake? Stalleybrass. You’re talking about Stalleybrass, the Stud Farm? What’s the matter with you, couldn’t you read the name on the prescription? There’s a horse called Mr. Stebbins? What were you treating it for? Oh my God. Didn’t you check the address?”

  He glanced at the address on his patient’s filing card. It began: Mr. Harvey Stebbins, The Stables…

  “Never mind. Look he’s been taking it for about six months. Has this ever been tried on human patients? No, I don’t know either. Well, what are the side effects in horses? Mmm. I doubt there’s an equivalent of shivering withers in a
man. What the hell am I going to do? He, or rather his wife, wants him to stay on the medication. I can’t do that with an untested drug. Not ethically. But if I tell them why, there’ll be hell to pay. You’re in trouble too, dispensing a vet treatment to a patient. Look, stay there. I’ll be round in five minutes.”

  He opened the door to Stebbins and indicated the seat again.

  “Sorry about that. Now, where were we? Blood pressure’s normal. You don’t have the headaches any more. What about bowel movements?”

  “No problem with that, doc.”

  “What about the waterworks?”

  “The what?”

  “Are you peeing normally, Mr. Stebbins?”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “And are you sleeping all right?”

  “Well I am when the wife will let me.”

  Dr. Gilphead’s mind worked rapidly. There didn’t seem to be any obvious side effects. In fact now he came to think of it, he hadn’t seen Mrs. Stebbins for several months now. She used to be in on one pretext or another every week. Perhaps the medication had advantages, at that…

  •

  Two months later, the frown that normally darkened Dr. James Gilphead’s brow had lifted. The solution that he’d arrived at with the local Pharmacist seemed to be working admirably. The man had been quick to see the point. He’d made up the preparation in a more convenient size, called it Priapuzid, and Dr. Gilphead had prescribed it for the husbands of all his troublesome women patients, as a tonic for the male menopause. The effect had been magical. His practice had been transformed. The women who had once crowded his waiting room were now seen walking through the village with dreamy expressions on their faces.

  The phone call came from Dr. George Braithwaite, G.P. for Lower Piddle.

  “Gilphead, what’s all this I hear about a male menopause tonic? Some of my patients have been asking for it. For their husbands,” he added.