The Festering

by Guy N Smith

  One arm lay crumpled beneath the body, the other was outstretched, forefinger pointing towards the mouth of the well.

  There was no doubt in Mike’s mind that it was Frank Bennion lying there, even though the features were virtually unrecognizable – muddied, the nostrils blocked as if with stinking mucus, mouth agape as though death had struck even as the warning was being shouted and it was now mutely screaming, ‘It came up out of there!’

  14

  Doctor Williamson’s surgery was situated in a brick-built extension to his country mansion on the outskirts of Canon Pine, a village about two miles from Garth. The GP had a wide area to cover. His furthest patients were ten or twelve miles away, and he had become a kind of legend during the twenty or so years since he had taken over the practice after Doctor Andrews’ death.

  A man who commanded respect, he often advised on matters other than medical ones, and among the farming community his wisdom was held in awe; it would be a devastating blow to the community when eventually he decided to retire. There were rumours that he was on the verge of seeking a more relaxed way of life during his declining years, but he refuted them. A year ago he had taken on a younger partner, Doctor Bell, and there was talk that the older man was about to hand over the reins. But, in reality, Williamson just needed somebody to share the increasing workload, the difficult journeys to an emergency in the Range Rover during bad weather. Sadly, during surgeries, the majority of patients stubbornly demanded to see only Williamson, whilst Bell waited in vain in his empty consulting room. Only recently had they, rather reluctantly, accepted the junior partner. That was country life – nothing must change.

  Mike parked in the road outside the doctor’s house. It was hot, probably ninety in the shade, he reckoned. He walked around to the other side of the car, opened the door and helped Holly to ease herself painfully out of the passenger seat, wincing at her gasp of pain beneath her breath. His own ulcer was just as sore, but fortunately he was not compelled to sit upon it. The two of them stood there, holding on to each other, scared to go in through the wrought-iron gates, afraid of the diagnosis. Not talking, they inwardly wished they had not come, that they had given their ailments another day in the hope that they might heal themselves. In hope and fear they eased their way down the gravel drive with dense laurels on either side, an untidy sprinkling of dead brown leaves crackling beneath their shuffling feet. Today was what Doctor Williamson termed ‘country surgery’, an additional consultation session held from half-past twelve to four, primarily to encourage outlying patients to make the journey in rather than ringing for a visit. It saved time and petrol, and conserved an ageing man’s energy; the patients saw it as yet another demonstration of their revered doctor’s unselfishness.

  The reception area was deserted. There was an empty window with some pigeonholes behind it containing prescriptions to be collected and a hand bell on the sill to summon attention.

  ‘Ah, good afternoon.’ A small rotund woman appeared from an adjoining doorway and gave a welcoming smile, her grey hair neatly fastened up on the top of her head in a bun. Mike presumed she was the doctor’s wife acting as receptionist. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Thanks.’ God I wish you could. ‘Mannion’s the name, Mike and Holly, Garth Cottage. We’d like to see Doctor Williamson.’

  ‘I’m sorry’ – they got the impression that her apology was sincere – ‘but Doctor Williamson’s not here this afternoon, he’s been called away urgently. Would you like to see Doctor Bell?’

  Mike hesitated, then glanced at Holly. It was Williamson they wanted; he might just understand. They could come back this evening. Or tomorrow morning. Or tomorrow evening. In the meantime, the ulcers might have burst, healed. No, they wouldn’t; he knew they would just grow bigger and … ‘All right, we’ll see Doctor Bell.’ His tone was reluctant.

  ‘Go through to the waiting room, please. He won’t keep you many minutes.’

  There was no one in the large waiting room, just a table piled with well-thumbed magazines in the middle and chairs lining the walls. Neither Holly nor Mike picked up a glossy publication, and they were grateful that there was nobody else to witness their anguish.

  ‘This is the third time I’ve had this blind boil. Or is it the fourth?’ She told her husband what her own ears wanted to hear, forcing herself to believe it and wanting him to, also. ‘I suppose I’m stuck with it, and it’ll happen every few years.’

  ‘I must have caught mine from you. Not that I’m blaming you.’ Finding reasons, excuses – anything as long as it wasn’t to do with the borehole, he thought.

  A buzzer sounded. Mike and Holly looked at each other. Who was going first, or should they go in together? A few moments of hesitation and then they began another shuffle across the slippery polished linoleum.

  Doctor Bell was in his early forties, with wavy dark hair and a boyish smile. He was still struggling to win the confidence of the locals; he liked it when the ‘old man’ was out because they didn’t have a choice, which gave him the chance to win them over. With his tweed jacket and grey flannels, he hoped he gave a rural impression; it wasn’t easy when you had moved from London. ‘Now, what’s the problem?’ He pressed the tips of his fingers together, sensing an embarrassment which embarrassed him, too.

  ‘We’ve … er, we’ve both got … boils,’ Mike stammered, pulling up his shirt and watching for a reaction on the doctor’s face, but there was none, just a leaning forward. ‘My wife’s is in … a rather … more tender place.’

  ‘I see.’ Bell came round the desk, scrutinized the infected navel, touched it gently and heard his patient grunt and stiffen. ‘Nasty, but common enough. I think I’ll have to lance it, but first I’m going to give you a course of antibiotics to see if that will do the trick. Looks to me as if you’ve been rubbing on something.’

  Mike closed his eyes to hide the guilt in them. That bloody whore, that was where it had come from. And he’d passed it on to Holly. A kind of VD of the navel, but it spread where it touched.

  Bell was back at his desk scribbling something on an index file, then writing out a prescription. ‘I’d better have a look at yours just to see that it’s the same as your husband’s, Mrs Mannion.’

  Mike did not want to look and wished that Doctor Bell had asked him to step outside. But it was impossible not to peer past the doctor when he leaned over Holly as she lay on the examination couch with her denim shorts around her ankles. Mike heard her bite back a cry of pain and saw the ugly swelling, the head threatening to burst, full of vile matter.

  ‘Hmm.’ The doctor straightened up and Mike jerked back, trying to create the impression that he was more interested in a hunting scene on the wall. ‘Same goes for you, Mrs Mannion. Antibiotics and then, if it doesn’t burst by the day after tomorrow, I’ll fix it.’ He was writing again, ripping another sheet off his pad. ‘The chemist in town, Blurton’s in the High Street, is open till six. The sooner you start the course, the better.’

  ‘Doctor …’ Mike’s mouth was dry, his words did not want to come. He felt like a child trying to pluck up the courage to ask an awe-inspiring parent a delicate question. ‘Tell me … it isn’t … I mean, it’s not one of … them, is it?’

  ‘Whatever are you talking about, Mr Mannion?’ It might just have been genuine bewilderment on Bell’s features. He had put his glasses on, seemed suddenly sombre, and was doodling on his jotter.

  ‘The … the disease,’ Mike’s head was thrust forward and he felt a sudden desire to scream his worst fears aloud. ‘What those two men died of, Bennion’s workmen – and now Bennion himself.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what they died of.’ Bell dropped his gaze, then looked up again. ‘All I know is that three men died and there is an autopsy taking place. They weren’t my patients or Doctor Williamson’s. Whatever you’re worrying about, forget it. You’ve both got nasty boils, the common or garden sort. One of you started with one, and in all probability infected the other. Now, does that answer your quest
ion, put your mind at rest?’

  Mike nodded, not trusting himself to speak immediately. All too pat, he thought, stalling them with drugs and hope to God it clears up. He wanted to believe the doctor. If it wasn’t the well then it was that prostitute, and maybe antibiotics would do the trick. ‘Thanks, we’ll go and get the pills.’

  ‘Fine. If the boils aren’t gone in forty-eight hours, come back. If they are … give me a ring, will you, please?’ Mike tautened as the room seemed to spin. We’re guinea pigs, he thought, the first live ones. The others had died. The doctor was trying drugs, hoping, because he couldn’t think of anything else. He was just playing a game, deceiving the patient, because there wasn’t anything else to do. The centuries-old plague was beyond the dawn of modern medicine.

  ‘Well, that’s that.’ Holly was sitting in an uncomfortable kind of twisted position in the passenger seat, two smoky plastic bottles clutched in her sweating hand. ‘We don’t have any choice, Mike.’

  ‘Bell says they’re common boils.’ He made yet another attempt to console himself and his wife. ‘For the moment we’ve got to go along with that.’

  ‘All right,’ she whispered. It was an effort to talk. ‘Let’s treat them as boils, then. Until we find out otherwise.’

  On the familiar stretch of road, Holly found herself tensing, glancing almost furtively along the opposite verge, knowing that there would be a gateway a few yards round the next bend, a view of the renovated cottage which stood at the bottom of the steep drive. It would have a deserted look about it, an emptiness that hurt. She hoped Mike wasn’t watching her, that he would not notice her intensity. She was sweating, trembling.

  The sudden shock hit her as hard as if she had carelessly changed position and put her weight on that boil. Searing, hurting, she felt a desire to leap from the moving car and rush heedlessly down the drive. Because the cottage wasn’t deserted; an Escort van with ladders and drain rods strapped to the roof was parked outside the door. Nick Paton was at home!

  She closed her eyes and felt her brain reeling. What the hell was Nick doing at home? He was never home before late evening, often not before the early hours. The urge was almost overpowering. She had to see him, talk to him. Before it was too late.

  Back home, it was another slow trip from the car to the cottage, Holly wanted to shake off Mike’s supporting arm. Her burning desire almost transcended physical pain. She was trying to walk normally. God it was agony!

  They swallowed their pills, drinking orange juice to wash them down because neither of them could face the water out of that hellhole outside. She leaned up against the fridge and found a comfortable position.

  ‘Will you be all right for a while?’ That meant he was going through to the studio to paint. In all probability he would be gone for hours once he got started. She hoped so.

  ‘I feel much better,’ she lied, wondering what excuse she could find for going out, and if she was physically capable of taking the car.

  ‘Call me if you need me.’ He clinked his glass in the sink, ‘I’ll have to press on with the work, regardless.’

  ‘You do that.’ She managed a smile. The bottom of her spine felt as though it was smouldering like a length of damp kindling which would burst into flames when it dried out. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Good.’ He was on his way to the door when suddenly he turned to the window and peered out. ‘There’s a vehicle coming in through the gate. A van. That CID man again, I suppose.’ His groan that turned to mild surprise. ‘No, it isn’t the police. It’s the plumber!’

  Holly thought for one second that she was going to faint, as from the depths of despair euphoria rose like a phoenix out of the fire. Holding on to the fridge until the feeling passed, she waited until she could trust herself to speak. Then she said, ‘You carry on, Mike. I know you’ve an awful lot of work to catch up on. I’ll see to the plumber. Mostly he knows what has to be done, so he’ll probably just get on with it and won’t need either of us.’

  ‘Good.’ Mike smiled and went out. ‘See you later.’

  Holly was sweating, weak with relief. It was as though Nick had been made aware of her craving for him and had come in answer to a telepathic summons. Her whole body seemed to be on fire, the flames of lust consuming everything within her, even the pain.

  She heard the van stop, the engine die and a door slam. She made her way across to the sofa and was oblivious of any discomfort as she stretched herself out on it. Damn you, Mike Mannion, she thought. Why the hell didn’t you stop in London out of the way!

  Doctor Williamson had not hurried on the steep, twisting journey up through the hills above Garth village. It was hot in the Range Rover, and at one point he pulled in to a wide stony lay-by to look down on the cluster of houses below. It was like a toy farmyard untidily strewn by a careless child, a magical haphazardness about it which was absent in modern-day planning, where everything had to be symmetric. Garth had grown up like the gorse and bracken on the slopes above it, a process that had taken centuries; a dwelling was needed so it was built, out of stone from the quarry and timber beams from the forest, hewn by hand. It was an ancient habitation, populated by peasants who lived a simple life and left no written records. He could only guess at their life style. They grew their simple food, reared their animals for meat, hunted deer in the hills. And now … he was as guilty as any of these so-called outsiders; even from here he could make out his own house back at Canon Pine, its new extension standing out stark and ugly against the old brickwork. He needed a place in which to treat the sick, but it could have been built of stone and timber, not unsightly glaring red mass-manufactured brickwork that would crumble to dust long before the local stone of the big house which it adulterated.

  He screwed up his eyes against the glare of the afternoon sun, ignoring the black flies which swarmed and settled on him. The smell of the hills was sweet, heady; unchanged since time immemorial. Yet there was something here, something even he could not understand. He sensed it in the atmosphere and felt a fear of the unknown. It emanated from the village, spread out like an invisible cloud and ate into him. The tension would not go away, and his mounting uneasiness meant that he did not sleep easily, and woke up and stared into the darkness, sensing a presence. But when he switched the light on there was nothing there. Childish fears, he tried to convince himself unsuccessfully. Those deaths – the workman, Fitzpatrick, was the only one he had seen for himself. Williamson had found himself shying away from the corpse, and he had seen death in many terrible forms throughout his life: cancers that had rendered their victims virtually skeletal, road accidents where the dead were unrecognizable mulches. But that one … he could see it even now, sores that pulsed even after life had deserted the wretched body, spreading and feeding on the dead flesh with revolting rapidity and cancerous lust.

  Today he was on his way to witness a death, but this time it would be natural, peaceful, a termination of a long and healthy life. Old Josh Owen was ninety-four, or was it ninety-five? Anyway, a quarter of a century bonus on his allotted lifespan. He might have made the century – his father had, just. But that was before the doctor came to Canon Pine.

  Owen was a typical hill man, a smallholder who had farmed his fifty acres the way his father and grandfather and the rest of his line had before him, resisting change; no machinery, no running water or electricity. Water came from the brook in the dingle, warmth from the kindling in the forest. He ate simple food: milk from the house cow to drink and make cheese, rabbits snared in the heather. He went abroad in all weathers, drying off in front of the fire, going to bed when it was dark and getting up at first light. A natural way of life, Williamson thought, which was why he had outlived his neighbours who had succumbed to the march of civilization. But now Owen’s time was nigh, and the doctor would be with him at the end; there was no point in trying to fight the inevitable, the old man would not thank him for it. Maybe Owen was already dead. Williamson hoped so, which was why he was not hurrying, idling here and
trying to admire the view, watching the graceful glide of a buzzard above the valley as it floated on its ragged, moth-like wings, hunting its prey. Like himself, it was waiting for death.

  Josh Owen was still alive. Williamson forced the warped door open, squeezed through into the small, sparsely furnished room and saw the old farmer sitting up on the couch which had served him for a bed since boyhood. Grimed sheets matched his weather-beaten countenance and he was still wearing a ragged cap because he refused to concede that he was bald. Toothless, pouting his hardened gums, blowing out his cheeks as he breathed with difficulty, he smiled in his own inimitable shrunken way, knowing that he was going to die and welcoming the end because there was nothing left to live for now that he was confined indoors.

  The doctor did not enquire after his health. Both of them were only too well aware of the situation, and up in the hills you did not waste time with trivialities. Nod and answering nod, then Williamson pulled up a stool and lowered his bulk on to it. The farmer was breathing heavily; the end would not be long and the doctor would sit it out with his patient. The old eyes closed, the head sank a little. Not long now. Outside that buzzard was mewing its plaintive hunting cry directly over the tumbledown dwelling as though even it scented death.

  Then Josh Owen opened his eyes, and Williamson saw that they were bright and clear, alert and understanding. Another puff of the hollowed cheeks and the toothless lips began to move. When Owen finally spoke there was no slurring of his voice, just a matter-of-fact tone. His body was tense, upright, fighting off death because he had something to say and his Maker would not mind waiting another few minutes.

  ‘Listen, doc, there’s bad things happenin’ down Garth, ain’t there?’

  ‘Yes.’ Williamson felt that this gloomy abode had suddenly gone chilly. There was no point in denying what Owen said; maybe he sensed it, too, even up here, a thousand feet or more above Garth. The evil, whatever it was, knew no boundaries.