The other nasty little consideration was this. Unlike some novelists I could name, I invent all my characters, except for a few minor ones here and there. What I mean is, I don’t go in for just renaming people I know and bunging them into a book. But of course, you can’t help putting something of yourself into all your characters, even if it’s only, well, a surly bus-conductor who only comes in for half a page.
Right, obviously, this comes up most of all with your heroes. Now none of my heroes, not even old Lucky Jim, are me, but they can’t help having pretty fair chunks of me in them, some more than others. And Allington in that book was one of the some. I’m more like him than I’m like most of the others; in particular, I’m more like my Maurice Allington in my book than the real Allington, who by the way turned out to be called John, seemed (from what I’d heard) to be like my Maurice Allington. Sorry to be long-winded, but I want to get that quite clear.
So: if, by some fantastic chance, the Green Man, the monster, was going to turn up here, he, or it, seemed more likely to turn up tonight than most nights. And, furthermore, I seemed sort of better cast for the part of the young girl’s father, who manages in the book to save her from the monster, than this young girl’s father did. You see that.
I tried to explain all this to Jane. Evidently I got it across all right, because she said straight away, We’d better stay here tonight, then. If we can, I said, meaning if there was a room. Well, there was, and at the front of the house too, which was important, because in the book that’s the side the monster appears on.
While one of the blokes was taking our stuff out of the car and upstairs, I said to Jane, I’m not going to be like a bloody fool in a ghost story who insists on seeing things through alone, not if I can help it – I’m going to give Bob Conquest a ring. Bob’s an old chum of mine, and about the only one I felt I could ask to come belting up all this way (he lives in Battersea) for such a ridiculous reason. It was just after ten by this time, and the Green Man wasn’t scheduled to put in an appearance till after one a.m., so Bob could make it all right if he started straight away. Fine, except his phone didn’t answer; I tried twice.
Jane said, Get hold of Monkey; I’ll speak to him. Monkey, otherwise known as Colin, is her brother; he lives with us in Barnet. Our number answered all right, but I got my son Philip, who was staying the weekend there. He said Monkey was out at a party, he didn’t know where. So all I could do was the necessary but not at all helpful job of saying we wouldn’t be home till the next morning. So that was that. I mean, I just couldn’t start getting hold of George Palmer and asking him to sit up with us into the small hours in case a ghost came along. Could any of you? I should have said that Philip hasn’t got a car.
Well, we stayed in the bar until it closed. I said to Jane at one point, You don’t think I’m mad, do you? Or silly or anything? She said, On the contrary, I think you’re being extremely practical and sensible. Well, thank God for that. Jane believes in ghosts, you see. My own position on that is exactly that of the man who said, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.
Which brings me to one of the oddest things about this whole business. I’m a nervous type by nature, I never go in an aeroplane, I won’t drive a car (Jane does the driving), I don’t even much care for being alone in the house. But, ever since we’d decided to stay the night at this place, all the uneasiness and, let’s face it, the considerable fear I’d started to feel as soon as these coincidences started coming up, it all just fell away. I felt quite confident, I felt I knew I’d be able to do whatever might be required of me.
There was one other thing to get settled. I said to Jane, we were in the bedroom by this time, I said, If he turns up, what am I going to use against him? You see, in the book, Maurice Allington has dug up a sort of magic object that sort of controls the Green Man. I hadn’t. Jane saw what I was driving at. She said she’d thought of that, and took off and gave me the plain gold cross she wears round her neck, not for religious reasons, it was her grandmother’s. That’ll fix him, I thought, and as before I felt quite confident about it.
Well, after that we more or less sat and waited. At one point a car drove up and stopped in the car park. A man got out and went in the front door. It must have been Allington. I couldn’t see much about him except he had the wrong colour hair, but when I looked at my watch it was eight minutes to midnight, the exact time when the Allington in the book got back after his evening out the night he coped with the creature. One more bit of . . . call it confirmation.
I opened our bedroom door and listened. Soon I heard footsteps coming upstairs and going off towards the back of the house and then a door shutting, and then straight away the house seemed totally still. It can’t have been much later that I said to Jane, Look, there’s no point in me hanging round up here. He might be early, you never know. It’s a warm night, I might as well go down there now. She said, Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you? Absolutely sure, I said, I’ll be fine. But I do want you to watch from the window here. Okay, she said. She wished me luck and we clung to each other for a bit, and then off I went.
I was glad I’d left plenty of time, because getting out of the place turned out to be far from straightforward. Everything seemed to be locked and the key taken away. Eventually I found a scullery door with the key still in the lock.
Outside it was quite bright, with a full moon or not far off, and a couple of fairly powerful lights at the corners of the house. It was a pretty lonely spot, with only two or three other houses in sight. I remember a car went by soon after I got out there, but it was the only one. There wasn’t a breath of wind. I saw Jane at our window and waved, and she waved back.
The question was, where to wait. If what was going to happen – assuming something was – if it went like the book, then the young girl, the daughter, was going to come out of the house because she’d thought she’d heard her father calling her (another bit of magic), and then this Green Man creature was going to, from one direction or the other he was going to come running at her. I couldn’t decide which was the more likely direction.
A bit of luck, near the front door there was one of those heavy wooden benches. I sat down on that and started keeping watch first one way, then the other, half a minute at a time. Normally, ten minutes of this would have driven me off my head with boredom, but that night somehow it was all right. Then, after some quite long time, I turned my head from right to left on schedule and there was a girl, standing a few yards away; she must have come round that side of the house. She was wearing light green pyjamas – wrong colour again. I was going to speak to her, but there was something about the way she was standing . . .
She wasn’t looking at me, in fact I soon saw she wasn’t looking at anything much. I waved my hand in front of her eyes, you know, the way they do in films when they think someone’s been hypnotized or something. I felt a perfect idiot, but her eyes didn’t move. Sleep-walking, presumably; not in the book. Do people walk in their sleep? Apparently not, they only pretend to, according to what a psychiatrist chum told me afterwards, but I hadn’t heard that then. All I knew, or thought I knew, was this thing everybody’s heard somewhere about it being dangerous to wake a sleepwalker.
So I just stayed close to the girl and went on keeping watch, and a bit more time went by, and then, sure enough, I heard, faintly but clearly, the sound I’d written about, the rustling, creaking sound of the movement of something made of tree-branches, twigs, and clusters of leaves. And there it was, about a hundred yards away, not really much like a man, coming up at a clumsy, jolting sort of jog-trot on the grass verge, and accelerating.
I knew what I had to do. I started walking to meet it, with the cross ready in my hand. (The girl hadn’t moved at all.) When the thing was about twenty yards away I saw its face, which had fungus on it, and I heard another sound I’d written about coming from what I suppose you’d have to call its mouth, like the howling of wind through trees.
I stopped and stea
died myself and threw the cross at it and it immediately vanished – immediately. That wasn’t like the book, but I didn’t stop to think about it. I didn’t stop to look for the cross, either. When I turned back, the girl had gone. So much the better. I rushed back into the inn and up to the bedroom and knocked on the door – I’d told Jane to lock it after me.
There was a delay before she came and opened it. I could see she looked confused or something, but I didn’t bother with that, because I could feel all the calm and confidence I’d had earlier, it was all just draining away from me. I sat her down on the bed and sat down myself on a chair and just rattled off what had happened as fast as I could. I must have forgotten she’d been meant to be watching.
By the time I’d finished I was shaking. So was Jane. She said, What made you change your mind? Change my mind? – what about? Going out there, she said; getting up again and going out. But, I said, I’ve been out there all the time. Oh no you haven’t, she said, you came back up here after about twenty minutes, she said, and you told me the whole thing was silly and you were going to bed, which we both did. She seemed quite positive.
I was absolutely shattered. But it all really happened, I said, just the way I told you. It couldn’t have, she said; you must have dreamed it. You certainly didn’t throw the cross at anything, she said, because it’s here, you gave it back to me when you came back the first time. And there it was, on the chain round her neck.
I broke down then. I’m not quite clear what I said or did. Jane got some sleeping pills down me and I went off in the end. I remember thinking rather wildly that somebody or other with a funny sense of humour had got me into exactly the same predicament, the same mess, as the hero of my book had been: seeing something that must have been supernatural and just not being believed. Because I knew I’d seen the whole thing; I knew it then and I still know it.
I woke up late, feeling terrible. Jane was sitting reading by the bed. She said, I’ve seen young Miss Allington. Your description of her fits and, she said, she used to walk in her sleep. I asked her how she’d found out and she said she just had; she’s good at that kind of thing.
Anyway, I felt better straight away. I said it looked as if we’d neither of us been dreaming even if what I’d seen couldn’t be reconciled with what she’d seen, and she agreed. After that we rather dropped the subject in a funny sort of way. We decided not to look for the cross I’d thrown at the Green Man. I said we wouldn’t be able to find it. I didn’t ask Jane whether she was thinking what I was thinking, that looking would be a waste of time because she was wearing it at that very moment. I’ll come back to that point in a minute.
We packed up, made a couple of phone calls rearranging our appointments, paid the bill and drove off. We still didn’t talk about the main issue. But then, as we were coming off the Mill Hill roundabout, that’s only about ten minutes from home, Jane said, What do you think happened? – happened to sort of make it all happen?
I said, I think someone was needed there to destroy that monster. Which means I was guided there at that time, or perhaps the time could be adjusted, I said; I must have been, well, sent all that stuff about the Green Man and about Allington and the others.
To make sure you recognized the place when you got there and knew what to do, she said. Who did all the guiding and the sending and so on? she said. The same, the same chap who appeared in my book to tell Allington what he wanted done. Why couldn’t he have fixed the monster himself? she said. There are limitations to his power. There can’t be many, she said, if he can make the same object be in two places at the same time.
Yes, you see, she’d thought of that too. It’s supposed to be a physical impossibility, isn’t it? Anyway, I said probably the way he’d chosen had been more fun. More fun, Jane repeated. She looked very thoughtful.
As you’ll have seen, there was one loose end, of a sort. Who or what was it that had taken on my shape to enter that bedroom, talk to Jane with my voice, and share her bed for at any rate a few minutes? She and I didn’t discuss it for several days. Then one morning she asked me the question more or less as I’ve just put it.
Interesting point, I said; I don’t know. It’s more interesting than you think, she said; because when . . . whoever it was got into bed with me, he didn’t just go to sleep.
I suppose I just looked at her. That’s right, she said; I thought I’d better go and see John before I told you. (That’s John Allison, our GP.)
It was negative, then, I said. Yes, Jane said.
Well, that’s it. A relief, of course. But in one way, rather disappointing.
THE DARKWATER HALL MYSTERY
On consulting my notes, their paper grown yellow and their ink brown with the passage of almost forty years, I find it to have been in the closing days of July, 1885, that my friend Sherlock Holmes fell victim, more completely perhaps than at any other time, to the innate melancholy of his temperament. The circumstances were not propitious. London was stiflingly hot, without a drop of rain to lay the dust which, at intervals, a damp wind swept up Baker Street. The exertions caused Holmes by the affair of the Wallace-Bardwell portfolio, and the subsequent entrapment of the elusive Count Varga, had taken their toll of him. His grey eyes, always sharp and piercing, acquired a positively hectic brightness, and the thinness of his hawk-like nose seemed accentuated. He smoked incessantly, getting through an ounce or more of heavy shag tobacco in a single day.
As his depression became blacker, he would sit in his purple dressing-gown with his fiddle across his knee and draw from it strange harmonies, sometimes sonorous, sometimes puzzling, more often harsh and disagreeable. Strange too, and quite as disagreeable, were the odours given off by his chemical experiments; I did not inquire their purpose. When he brought out his hair-trigger pistol and proceeded to add elaborate serifs to the patriotic VR done in bullet-pocks in the wall opposite his armchair, my impatience and my concern together dictated action. Nothing short of a complete rest, in conditions of comfort and ease such as I could not possibly provide, would restore my friend to health. I moved swiftly; telegrams were exchanged; within little more than twelve hours Sherlock Holmes was on his way to Hurlstone in Sussex, the seat of that Reginald Musgrave whose family treasures he had so brilliantly rediscovered some five years earlier. Thus it was that events conspired to embroil me in what I must describe as a truly singular adventure.
It came about in the following fashion. That same afternoon, I had just returned from visiting a patient when the housekeeper announced the arrival of a Lady Fairfax. The name at once stirred something in my memory, but I had had no time to apprehend it before my visitor had crossed the threshold of the sitting-room. There entered a blonde young woman of the most unusual beauty and distinction of feature. I was at once aware in her of a discomposure obviously not at all derived from the sweltering weather, to which indeed her bearing proclaimed utter indifference. I encouraged this lovely but troubled creature to be seated and to divulge her purpose.
‘It was Mr Sherlock Holmes whom I came to see, but I understand he has gone away and is not expected back for a fortnight,’ she began.
‘That is so.’
‘Can he not be recalled?’
I shook my head. ‘Quite out of the question.’
‘But I come on a matter of the utmost urgency. A life is in danger.’
‘Lady Fairfax,’ said I, ‘Holmes has been overworking and must have rest and a change of air. I speak not only as his friend but as his physician. I fear I cannot be influenced by any other consideration.’
The lady sighed and lowered her gaze into her lap. ‘May I at least acquaint you with the main facts of the matter?’
‘Do so by all means, if you feel it will be of service to you.’
‘Very well. My husband is Sir Harry Fairfax, the sixth baronet, of Darkwater Hall in Wiltshire. In his capacity as a magistrate, he had brought before him last year a man known locally as Black Ralph. The charge was poaching. There was no doubt of his guilt; he
had erred before in this way and in others, and my husband’s sentence of twelve months in gaol was lenient to a degree. Now, Black Ralph is at liberty again, and word has reached our servants that he means to revenge himself on my husband – to kill him.’
‘Kill him?’ I ejaculated.
‘Nothing less, Dr Watson,’ said Lady Fairfax, clasping and unclasping her white-gloved hands as she spoke. ‘My husband scouts these threats, calling Black Ralph a harmless rascal with a taste for rhetoric. But the fellow is no mere drunken reprobate such as one finds in every village; I have seen him and studied him, and I tell you he is malignant, and in all likelihood mentally deranged as well.’
I was at a loss. My visitor was by now extremely agitated, her vivid lips atremble and her fine blue eyes flashing fire. ‘He sounds most menacing,’ said I, ‘and I understand your desire for assistance. I chance to know a certain Inspector Lestrade at Scotland Yard who would be happy to lend you all the aid he could.’
‘Thank you, but my husband refuses to go to the police and has forbidden me to do so.’
‘I see.’
‘There must, however, be other consulting detectives in London whom I might approach. Perhaps you know of some of them?’
‘Well,’ said I after a short space, ‘it’s true that in the last year or so a number of – what shall I call them? – rivals of Sherlock Holmes have sprung up. But they’re very slight and unsatisfactory fellows. I could not in honesty recommend a single one.’
There was a silence. The lady sighed once more and at last turned to me. ‘Dr Watson, will you help me?’
I had half expected this preposterous suggestion, but was none the better armed against it when it came. ‘I? I am quite unfit. I’m a simple medical man, Lady Fairfax, not a detective.’
‘But you have worked with Mr Holmes on his previous cases. You are his close friend and associate. You must have learned a great deal from him.’
Dear Illusion Page 28
