The Serpent

by Neil M. Gunn

  * * *

  He came to with a not unfamiliar feeling, though the first gropings into consciousness never lost their freshness of terror. He was not in his bed, however. He fought back the panic. Where was he? cried his silent fear as he cunningly lay still. The pain in his head became real. He sucked in a deep breath and choked on the paraffin fumes. He moved and, his face coming away from the shield of the upturned table, saw the smouldering glow of the peat fire.

  Memory now returned but still in an unreal way. He scrabbled at the table and heaved it round. On his knees – he saw Janet.

  Janet! On hands and knees he approached her. Janet! ‘Janet!’ he cried.

  In the dim glow from the flameless fire, her face was still and ghastly white. He saw the dark blood-streak on her temple.

  For a little while he lost his head. ‘Janet, speak to me!’ he cried, like a frightened child. ‘Janet, my own love! Janet!’ He touched her cheeks, caught her face in his hands, and turned it to him to make her speak. He kept calling her name, moving and fondling her, stretching her out, so that it would be easier for her to answer him. There was a cry behind. He started back, a wary enraged beast, and saw Tina.

  He must have continued to glare at her, even when she had stepped past him and was on her knees beside Janet.

  Presently Tina turned wildly, and looked up at him.

  He nodded. ‘I’ll get my mother,’ he said. ‘Stay here.’

  He fell many times before he rattled in at the door and came on his mother in the kitchen.

  ‘Mother!’ he cried. ‘Run to Janet’s! Quick! She’s hurt!’

  His mother’s mouth, her whole face, opened as she stared at him, at the shaking body, the bruised cheek, dark with dried blood.

  ‘Run, I tell you!’ he shouted.

  She did not speak, but let out a cry and in a moment was gone.

  He drank some well water out of the pail that was always kept in the passage, slapped more of it against his face, and hurried away to the shop. He had to come back to the house for the key, but soon he was on his bicycle, heading for Muirton and the doctor.

  It was a wild ride, but he was never once thrown. This was even to him at the time extraordinary, because there was a long spell when he had hardly any bodily feeling or, rather, when his body felt light as cotton wool and it was a marvel how the bicycle kept upright. He suffered, too, what was to him at the time an incredibly vivid hallucination. Some three miles from the village the road turns sharply from the moor to a bridge over the stream. Stunted Scots firs grow about this spot; there is an old quarry on the right by the entrance to the bridge; and here the stream narrows and is noisy over a bed of broken rock. The bridge itself has a three-foot stone wall on either side and a drop to the water of about thirty feet.

  Of all spots in the district – and there were a few – it had the worst reputation for being haunted. Varied were the apparitions, but pride of place was held by the woman of the tragic love story. She could be seen walking from the quarry to the keystone of the bridge, where she disappeared, sometimes silently, sometimes with a cry. Tom himself had explained the legend away by reference to witchcraft, running water, and the probability that there had been a bridge here from ancient times.

  So far he had been helped by the wind, which was funnelled by the Glen, but its true direction was such that when he turned sharply towards the bridge, a back eddy, from the steeply banking ground on his right, hit him strongly in the face. Head down, straining on the pedals, he was all but stopped, and as the machine wobbled on some loose gravel he let out a cry of rage, of desperation, at being kept back when every second had a fatal value. As he tugged at the handlebars his head jerked up and there in front of him, perfectly distinct in the bright moonlight, was the figure of a woman, dressed in black, just entering between the walls of the bridge. He saw her ghost-like face turned over her shoulder, and her whole action was that of watching him and at the same time escaping from him. This suggestion in the figure not of haunting the spot but of itself being hunted, was somehow so unexpected, so ominous, that an icy cold drenched his skin. His legs kept the pedals going round automatically, for now he had cleared the high ground on his right and the wind was once more being funnelled downstream. As the figure gained the keystone of the bridge, he heard its unearthly screech above the roar of the narrowed tumbling water and the howl of the wind in the trees. For a moment it hesitated on the wall of the bridge and then went clean over.

  He did not look at the spot as he passed, but kept his trembling legs to their task and, when he had got round the off bend, with the wind once more in his back, he began pedalling down the valley in a blind fury of speed, sick with weakness, shaken by soft humps, jolted by round stones, swaying into and out of the middle track loosed by horses’ hooves, on the solid rubber tyres of his heavy machine.

  As he dismounted before Dr. Manson’s door, he staggered badly feeling gone from his knees, but the bicycle supported him.

  No physician cares to be called out on a Sunday night, and certainly not one with a country practice as wide as Dr. Manson’s. The doctor, who answered the door in person, had plainly been on the point of following the rest of his household to bed, and as he listened to the stammered request, ‘You’re wanted in Achuain at once,’ he frowned, and peered at the shadowed face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Tom could not speak.

  ‘Come in,’ said the doctor, and when he had shut the door behind Tom and led him into the sitting-room, he turned to face the country lad and his eyes at once narrowed on the wound in his head. ‘What have you been up to?’

  The reaction from his abnormal physical effort together with the warmth of the room and the strong smell of tobacco smoke so weakened Tom that he was glad of the chair the doctor offered.

  ‘There’s been an accident,’ said Tom. ‘It’s a girl – she’s very bad.’

  The doctor, sitting down opposite him, looked into his face. ‘Take your time,’ he said, ‘and tell me about it.’

  ‘You’ll have to hurry,’ said Tom, anxiety getting the better of him. ‘It may be too late.’

  ‘I see. What happened?’

  ‘You’ll have to hurry.’

  ‘Keep steady now. If I’m going to do good to anyone I’ll have to know what’s wrong, what to take with me.’

  ‘She was hit. She’s unconscious. She may be dead.’

  ‘Hit? How?’

  ‘Her mother – they had a row.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The girl – is going to have a child –’

  ‘Hold on!’ said the doctor sharply. He went to a wall cupboard and poured some whisky into a glass. Tom gritted his teeth against the hellish fainting sensation that had gradually been overcoming him. He did his utmost, but could not quite reach the proffered tumbler, and all in a moment passed out.

  When the doctor had got him round, Tom’s anger at his weakness, and shame, became mixed with his increasing anxiety to have the doctor on the road. But the doctor took him into the surgery, wiped and dabbed at the wound until it stung, and insisted on tying a bandage round it. This delay maddened Tom. ‘You were lucky,’ said the doctor.

  He heard the doctor talking to someone upstairs – probably his wife. Would he never come? At last his footsteps and his parting words: ‘No, I’ll drive myself.’

  Tom was eager now to be on his bicycle again. The whisky had revived him and he wanted to tear back through the night in front of the doctor.

  ‘You’ll help me to yoke the mare. Sandy, my man, will put your bicycle home on the bus to you tomorrow,’ said the doctor coolly. He was a man of about fifty and had a son, who would one day succeed him, in medicine at the university. He took Tom’s acquiescence for granted and moved round to the stable. Tom soon realized that in his present condition he could not have stood up to the force of the wind.

  ‘How did you get that blow?’ asked the doctor as the mare settled to a steady trot on the country road.

/>   Tom did not answer.

  ‘Are you any relation of the girl?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘As a doctor, you know, I have to ask questions. Are you the father of the child?’

  ‘No.’

  He felt the doctor studying him keenly. ‘I’m afraid I thought you were. Is the father known?’

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ Tom replied.

  ‘Has the blow on your head any connection with the girl’s accident?’

  Tom hesitated. ‘I was passing and heard the noise. I went in. I thought I might help.’

  The doctor asked more questions. Tom replied with reluctance. About the mother’s condition of mind he hinted in such a vague way that clearly the doctor did not trust him. Before relapsing into a long silence, the doctor said, ‘When it comes to answering the police, I’d advise you to be more direct.’

  Anxiety at mention of the police hardly touched Tom, so fathomless in a moment became his misery.

  The valley lay under the moon, glittering here and there in a barrenness of water and rock, swept by the black wind, the scarified earth of a planet dead before time began. The mare lifted her head and ears and snorted as she crossed the bridge. The doctor caught the reins in a firm hold and, checking her wayward fancy, urged her on with a ‘Klk! Klk!’ She broke into a gallop, round the corner of the bridge, out of the whining trees, and on to the moor.

  ‘She got a fright there once,’ remarked the doctor calmly.

  Presently he asked Tom who he was and where he lived. Tom answered with the minimum of words and once more was aware of a scrutinising look. The doctor knew who he was now, flicked the reins against the mare’s back, and settled down to the last lap of the journey. The circumstances attending Tom’s father’s death would naturally be known to the doctor who had been called in too late. After Alec Wilson’s bicycle smash, Peter Grant had gone to the extreme length of sending a telegram for the doctor. Indeed so widespread and distorted became the news of the death that the Procurator-Fiscal in Muirton called on Dr. Manson to see if there was a case for investigation by the Crown. But the doctor had shaken his head: ‘Pure heart failure.’ He had known the history of the case.

  As they dismounted opposite Janet’s house, the doctor said, ‘Watch the mare, will you?’ And walked away without waiting for an answer.

  Tom caught a rein lightly near the horse’s mouth and stood still in the night, waiting. There was a numbness in his brain, in his feelings. The village looked dead, and life itself, under this burden of anxiety, was only half real, already partook of the nature of death. Time, drawn out endlessly, added its weight to this burden. When thought or feeling started in him, he moved his feet or his head to defeat it. Once the mare grew restless, and by the time he had quietened her he felt exposed, and hot thrusts of emotion pierced him.

  With the noise of the opening door, such a weakness came over him that he gripped the shaft and leaned against the beast. The doctor’s footsteps were approaching sounds so portentous that for a moment he felt he was going to faint and could not meet them.

  The doctor put his bag in the gig and stood buttoning his coat. Tom could not trust his voice.

  The doctor looked at him. ‘She’s very low,’ he said. Then he brought the flats of his hands together as if about to say something further. The hands parted and the gig lurched as he put his weight on the round iron step. ‘Good-night,’ he called in his cool voice.

  Tom listened for a time to the crisp beat of the iron-shod hoofs as they passed away from this house.

  Afraid of the front door, he walked round to the back and stood for a little against the henhouse wall. The light was in the kitchen blind; the same pale yellow light. He leaned against the wall, his forehead on his wrists. ‘O God!’ he groaned and began to weep. He was very weak. He had no strength to do anything. There was no fight in him. There was nothing he could do. Feeling he wanted to lie on the ground, he made an effort to draw himself together. As his right hand went up to push the hair back from his forehead it encountered the bandage. By the time he had taken the bandage off, he felt steadier and approached the door.

  His mother, hearing his fumbling feet in the porch, opened the inside door. Catching a glimpse of old Bell the midwife on a chair by the fire, he backed away. His mother followed him and closed the inside door behind her.

  ‘She’s asleep just now,’ she said. He waited for her to go on. ‘She’s very weak,’ she added in a fatally quiet voice. ‘The doctor thinks she may not see the morning. She bled a terrible lot.’

  He thought of her condition, of an internal bleeding, of complications beyond his knowledge, and realised there was no hope. Her sleep had been induced like a pale mask over the physical disorders of death. Death came out of the doctor’s words and his mother’s quiet manner.

  ‘I’ll make Bell lie down and I’ll keep watch myself until the early morning. The doctor will be back with the daylight. You go home now and take a sleep. There’s nothing any of us any more can do.’

  As he turned his head away, he heard a voice calling distantly among the hills on the way to Altdhu.

  ‘Some of the men are out looking for Janet’s mother. But go you home,’ she urged him.

  He had forgotten Janet’s mother entirely. Nor did thought of her, or desire to search for her, trouble him now, as he went slowly up the field and along towards his own home.

  Reaction had hit him heavily; he had all he could do to drag his legs. For the first time a pain began to throb in his wound. When he got into the house, he took the bandage from his pocket and started winding it round his head. It was something to do. Then he pressed in fresh peat about the red heart of the fire and stretched himself full length before it and closed his eyes.

  His eyes opened on a red point in a mass of grey ash. As he lifted his head, pain stabbed him in the right temple. The lamp was burning low in a deathly silence. He glanced at the bed where his father had lain so long, and in an effort to scramble swiftly to his feet was all but defeated by the cramps in his body. The clock on the mantelshelf said eight minutes past two. He gripped his head and discovered the bandage but forgot himself in a moment when he thought he heard his mother’s footsteps outside. Ο God, that awful sound of human footsteps!

  Soon he realised the footsteps could not have been in the night but only in his mind. At a distance he caught a dim reflection of a bandaged head in the small mirror that hung on the wall by the window. The first glimpse of this ghastly visitant shook him; then he approached the mirror and took the bandage off. An urge came over him to clean up his face, hastily, like one in a fevered hurry for an important meeting. With the clotted wound he could do nothing, but drops and trickles of dried blood over his right eyebrow and about his ear he rubbed away with the wetted end of the towel that always hung on its nail by the water bucket. With the comb that was stuck in the brush on the window shelf, he combed back his hair. This final act for some reason slowed up all his movements and he turned round and began to stare and hearken.

  Suddenly he started to shiver from the cold and, taking his overcoat from the back of his bedroom door, put it on.

  He was now all dressed to meet Janet.

  As he went along the hillside the pain from his wound spread through his head in a dull ache and this helped to steady him. But all the time the overcoat was flapping against his knees, and as he came by the henhouse wall he looked down at the dark cloth hanging so still now and strangely upon him. Memory in an instant introduced the headless stranger of his vision. That stranger was not himself, yet never had it stood so near him, so perilously near. Shedding the coat, he dropped it on the ground.

  In anger he hissed at this stealthy approach upon him, and with the uprise of his fighting spirit his limbs began to tremble. Panic forces, waiting their chance in their moving wolf-circle, can slash in very quickly.

  And all this as by-play around the awful act of going to the door.

  His mother opened t
he inner door and pulled it nearly shut after her. ‘She’s wakened now, but very weak,’ she whispered. Then after a profound silence: ‘Would you like to see her?’

  He looked up at his mother’s face in mortal agony, unable to distinguish her features in the dark porch. ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

  ‘Wait till I see’; and, going from him, she closed the door behind her. He tried to listen but could only hear the blood in great threshing beats in his ears.

  The door opened and, with a composed smile, his mother invited him in.

  He entered, turning from the fireplace to the back wall where the large bed stood with its wooden sides and top. The curtains were drawn completely back, and Janet’s great dark eyes were looking at him from her pale face, from the white pillow, from the tumble of her black hair.

  They were full of light, of a shy half-startled light, centred upon him in an expectancy so sensitive, so ready for withdrawal, that Tom stood bewildered and immensely awkward. It was Janet – Janet’s face – removed from him into a white beauty, living in the glimmer of spirit, of wonder, from the dark eyes, a troubled wonder, alive with the knowledge of what had been between them and had brought them to this strange and final moment. She was holding her defences even now, holding the hidden question in expectancy of what he would say or do.

  It could not be borne. His eyes dropped to the white counterpane. His body shifted on its feet. ‘I’m sorry you are ill,’ he muttered. His defences began to crash internally. Desperately he choked down the flood of released emotion. He had meant to be quiet and sensible, to tell her that he understood what had happened, that he still thought of her as his old friend. He had meant to make her mind easy on his account, if that would help her.

  Her hand came wavering over the counterpane. He drew in a great gulp of breath that made him shudder. He took her hand in his own. Then he buried his face in the counterpane and pressed her hand against his cheek.

  While he struggled there to control himself, he felt the light movement of her hand like a spoken word, a delicate tenderness. He turned his mouth on it and kissed it. Before getting up, he crushed it against his forehead.