Mandrake

by Susan Cooper

  Beyond the low hedge on either side, fields stretched where cabbages had been left to go to seed, in rows of long ungainly stalks. The road curved ahead, and they could see nothing. Then as they walked, and the curve opened, they both saw the man lying beside the hedge.

  ‘O no,’ Beth said, and stood still. ‘Not another of them. David, I can’t.’

  ‘Stay where you are, love.’ He crossed the road. As he came towards the body he thought he saw it move. But that was absurd. Then he came closer, and he could hear the breathing: heavy, husky and slow.

  ‘He’s alive!’

  He swung his bundle to the ground and knelt beside the man on the damp, gritty road. The breath was gasping in almost visibly through the open mouth; it was a well-worn face, beneath white hair cropped short and bristling. He judged the man to be about sixty. A goodish sports jacket and trousers, a raincoat lined incongruously with brilliant emerald silk.

  Beth came up behind him. ‘Is he badly hurt? ’ She gazed down nervously.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Queston was looking for obvious wounds, running his fingers along the bones of the arms and legs. ‘He’s certainly ill. Very ill. Look at the colour of him.’

  ‘That noise, when he breathes—’

  ‘Sounds like pneumonia. If it isn’t, it soon will be. We’ll have to get him into the warm somewhere, and quick.’

  ‘But darling, where? How can we? ’ She knelt down, looking at the man compassionately, and lifted his head gently to lie cupped in the palms of her hands.

  ‘God knows. Perhaps there’s somewhere—’ Queston peered vaguely up and down the road.

  ‘The caravan.’

  ‘No,’ he said at once.

  ‘But where else is there?’

  ‘We can’t go back. Not there. It’s not the same as it was before, you must know that. It’s—unprotected.’

  Beth said: ‘So is he.’

  ‘I’m more concerned with you. You don’t know the size of the danger—I do. Darling, you don’t know.’

  She only looked at him, and touched his cheek, and smiled.

  It took longer to go back; Beth stumbling under the weight of both bundles; Queston moving slowly with the man slung over his back. Darkness was nearer, and the mist hanging low over the road.

  In the caravan, Beth lit the hissing lamp, and Queston thought wryly of the way they had forced themselves to leave, half an hour before. To come back was both an anti-climax and a kind of warm, surrendering collapse.

  They took off the man’s coat, and wrapped him in blankets on one of the beds, propping him half upright. The tearing, difficult breaths had eased a little; there seemed to be nothing else wrong, though his forehead was dry and hot. Beth boiled water and poured it over a mixture of every aromatic herb she could find in the kitchen, from the neat row of small jars that they had left as useless, and they turned the man’s head so that he breathed the steam. In a little while he stirred, was caught in a paroxysm of deep, rumbling coughing, and lay back and opened his eyes.

  Beth put her hand on his forehead, and smiled at him. The man looked at her blankly for a moment. Then his face twisted into terror, and he drew away towards the wall, staring wide-eyed.

  ‘It’s all right’, she said soothingly as if to a child. ‘How do you feel?’

  She leaned forward. He whispered: ‘No. No.’ Then suddenly he was half upright, shouting.

  ‘I won’t. You can’t make me! I won’t see them again!’

  Beth recoiled into Queston’s arms. He held her, then put her gently aside and sat on the edge of the bed, easing the man back. The terror seemed to grow less; the man clutched at his arm conspiratorially: ‘Have they got you too?’

  ‘No one’s got me. Or you either.’

  ‘Keep her away. I won’t see them. You tell them, I won’t see them. Not again, not ever again.’ He struggled to get up.

  ‘They’re not here. Nobody’s here. This is our caravan, we found you in the road. You were ill. Lie down, you must rest. Come on now, it’s all right.’ Queston talked on, reassuringly, and the man lay back, his gaze flicking watchfully over to Beth.

  She whispered: ‘What’s he afraid of?’

  ‘Thinks you’re someone else. Or were you looking at him lustfully? Not that he’s a very attractive morsel. Can you get at the whisky?’

  She smiled faintly. ‘Mightn’t it be bad for him? I can make some tea. No milk, but there’s sugar.’

  ‘Not from her,’ the man said loudly. ‘I won’t touch anything from her.’ He lost his breath for a moment, and coughed, gasping. He looked pleadingly at Queston. ‘Only what you give me. Not from her.’

  ‘Put the kettle back on, if there’s enough water,’ Queston said to Beth. ‘I’ll make the tea.’

  She went into the little kitchen. He watched the droop of her shoulders; she had badly wanted to help the man. He himself hadn’t cared; a poor sort of balance that the help had to come from him. He looked back at the bed. The man was resting back on his elbows, breathing more easily. His stubble-cut hair looked oddly youthful over the haggard grey face. He tried to smile. ‘Asthma. Always had it. Must have got a touch of bronchitis now too, I think.’

  ‘Does it often knock you right out? You were in a bad way.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘How did you get there? In the road, I mean. Where were you going?’

  ‘Away,’ the man said. He stiffened, remembering, and his face creased into cunning. ‘I got away, without them knowing. They won’t catch me now. You won’t let them catch me, will you?’

  ‘Who d’you mean, they? ’ Queston said. ‘The Ministry?’

  ‘Ministry? ’ the man said vaguely. ‘No.’ He looked round to see that Beth had not come back, and clutched Queston’s arm confidingly. ‘The women,’ he said, and was silent.

  Beth, in the doorway, frowned inquiringly; Queston motioned at her to keep out of sight.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Gloucester.’

  ‘Are you from Gloucester?’

  ‘No,’ the man said at once. ‘I’m Neville Warren.’ He looked up expectantly, deprecating and self-satisfied, like one accustomed to recognition.

  ‘O. I’m David Queston. And my—that’s Miss Beth Summers.’

  Beth came tentatively towards them; the man’s chagrin was more than his fear. ‘You haven’t heard of me?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘I have,’ Beth said unexpectedly. ‘At least, there was a Neville Warren—I remember reading—’

  ‘Go on,’ the man prompted her eagerly.

  ‘You’re a medium.’

  The pleasure held a faint flicker of distress. ‘I prefer the word “sensitive”.’ He glanced at her, and drew away towards Queston. ‘She knows,’ he whispered. ‘She would, of course. She belongs to them. You can’t pretend. Don’t leave me with her.’ He clutched, pleading, and Queston looked with distaste at the eager eyes; the man’s face was flabby, old, the skin flushed with purple-red veins and darkened by a grey haze of beard. Was it fear that made him repellent, or something more?

  He said sharply: ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Nowhere. I moved around. I have a consulting-room in London, of course, but I use it only irregularly. Only for special clients. I visit exclusive groups in many places—none of those vulgar so-called churches, you understand, but private circles. Some very distinguished people. One can give comfort, it’s a great privilege… Once or twice I did offer my services for psychical research as well. I believe in trying to further scientific knowledge. But those people, really—so childish and undignified. Asking me to play games with cards, and stupid drawings. I gave it up, I really did. I told them, I should be insulting my gift.’

  He spoke with an eager gentility that tried to be impressive but was only absurd. He said suddenly to Queston: ‘You have a very good aura, did you know that? Very strong, very powerful indeed. You are an intellectual man, I think, but spiritual as well. Perhaps you have a little of the gift yourself.
’

  Queston looked at him in faint disgust. ‘You claim to get in touch with the dead, you people.’

  Warren smiled reprovingly. ‘They pass over, but they are not far away. It is meaningless, the word “dead”. They are all around us, waiting for us to communicate. Alas, so few these days can—’

  At the end of the caravan, Beth stiffened suddenly. ‘David!’

  ‘What is it?’

  She stood motionless, with the kettle in one hand. ‘Listen!’

  Queston sat upright, straining to hear beyond the flimsy, stuffy little room; but there was only the wind, peevishly whining through the telephone wires. Then he thought he heard, for an instant, the rasp of feet on the road. Glancing at the fear in Beth’s face, he stood up and turned towards the door. Before he could put out his hand, a new sound came outside and the door burst open. Warren, twisting to push himself against the wall as if it could shelter him, squealed like an animal. The gaping doorway was black, empty and cold, shadowed from the lamplight by the open door. It was a moment before Queston could see the faces.

  He saw them in a group out in the night, upturned featureless pale blobs, and as he saw them a figure rose there, growing as it climbed the steps to fill the doorway. It was a woman; a big, square-built woman in a shapeless dark huddle of clothes, with fierce dark eyes under heavy brows, and a low thick fringe of hair. She was monstrous, he thought in horror as he stared at her: like some awful goddess of the night, materialized from long-dead fears that stirred out of the centuries at the sight of her.

  She stood there, filling the night; her voice was deep.

  ‘Come.’

  Queston found words, and they squeaked in his throat. ‘Who are you?’

  The woman said again: ‘Come. Come with us. ’Tisn’t safe to stay here.’ She had a marked Gloucestershire accent, and the sound made her instantly less terrible. Queston could hear Warren gulping, in shallow hysterical gasps of breath, and he furiously willed him to stop. Behind his back, Beth moved, and he felt her take his hand.

  ‘We live here.’ Her voice came cool and clear over his shoulder. ‘Why shouldn’t we be safe?’

  The woman’s gaze shifted, and he thought a swift gleam crossed the square, mountainous face as she looked at Beth. But she spoke to him.

  ‘We know you have Warren here. I am sorry. You must come. We need him.’

  She moved forward. Automatically Queston stepped out of her way, unwilling to touch her; there was a crude animal smell about her, not so much unpleasant as alarming. She brushed past him, so that he and Beth were crushed backwards into the little kitchen, and then suddenly the whole caravan was full of them, strange silent pushing women in the same dark clothes, with their hair cut in the same rough clumsy way. Some with hair long and loose over their shoulders, some with bright ribbons or scarves in curious strong colours, yellows and reds; some massive as the first, some pretty-petite or thin and vulpine; but all inexorably feminine. Even the leader, Lesbian if ever he saw one, gave him an un-nerving sense of impending rape; and the feeling was far from erotic.

  Perhaps it was the way they crowded round Warren, changed now into a whimpering, shrinking old man. Pie cringed down on the bed, making inarticulate throaty noises that were not words. Then they closed in on him, and the next instant he was on his feet, and hustled quickly past by three or four of them; Queston had a momentary glimpse of his face, turned beseechingly as the same gibbering protest came from its mouth; and then they had him down the steps and outside. And the heavy unsmiling faces inside the caravan were turned on Beth and himself. He could see the big woman’s head over the rest.

  ‘You’d better come with us,’ she said. It was an opinion now, not a threat; the tone was amiable. He could hear Warren’s cries growing fainter out in the dark. The women looked at him without expression; Beth was still clutching his hand.

  He said, as he moved forward: ‘Who are you?’

  ‘We’re Gloucester,’ the woman said.

  The moon had broken suddenly from a bank of cloud; a half-moon, cold-glowing white. The city looked smaller than he remembered. And he knew he did not remember the wall, looming high and black all round. There was a gate, and an indistinct murmur of voices in the dark, voices of men as well as women; and then with the pressing of those round them they were inside. He held Beth close to him, his arm round her shoulders. He knew that she was terrified, but still he knew that it would have been worse to stay in the open. Whatever might happen here, that would have been worse. The conviction seemed neurotic, ridiculous, when he tried to analyse it, but it had been too many years growing to be ignored now.

  The streets were empty; every shop dark, and every lamp-post. Looking in from the crowd round the gate, he saw that a light shone dimly on every corner, but nowhere else. He commented on it facetiously to a young woman at their side, and she stared in the gloom.

  ‘Power’s been rationed for months now. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘We haven’t been in a town.’

  ‘O yes, the electricity went ages ago. They have what they call a skeleton national grid for London and the big places in the north. The small towns generate their own. They say it can’t be done much longer.’

  The crowd was moving away down a side street. Their leader came across to Queston.

  ‘You’re hungry, I expect.’

  ‘Well—’ He stared at her, trying to make out more than the heavy brows and jutting chin in the half-lit dark. Friendly or hostile? Were they guests or prisoners?

  ‘You’ll take them, Mary,’ the woman said to the girl beside them. ‘We are going on, with the man Warren. Follow us when you can.’

  Watching her, the angle of the shadowed head as it leant slightly to one side, Queston realized what it had been, all along, that made most of them seem familiar. The listening, the air of other-attentiveness.

  He said suddenly: ‘It won’t speak to you, you know. It isn’t a voice for the ears.’

  The big woman looked at him. In the cold darkness, with the stars pricking frostily overhead, he caught a gleam from her teeth as she smiled. ‘O, but it will speak,’ she said softly.

  ‘And now I think I know you. O yes, Mr Queston, it will speak. And you shall hear it.’

  He realized, when the one called Mary led them into the light of the little house, that she was not much more than a girl. She had said nothing as she walked them swiftly through the empty streets, past chinks of light glinting from tight-curtained windows, but inside her own home she relaxed, and became real. She smiled, took off the dark, enveloping coat to show herself thin, muscular, high-breasted, in a close-fitting dark dress. Queston knew that without a sign, she was beckoning him. He sat down, faintly shocked, close to Beth, beside the small wood fire spluttering in the grate. Opposite, the girl Mary’s parents nodded and watched.

  They were old, sunk into the wisdom of defeat, though Mary herself seemed only about twenty. The old woman, tugging a shapeless knitted shawl closer round her shoulders, said petulantly: ‘When are we going down? It’s nearly time. It’ll be warm there. Mary, we ought to be going down.’

  ‘In a moment, Mum. We’ve got visitors, they’re hungry. I’m just going to the kitchen. We’ll be going down soon.’ She touched her mother’s shoulder, and disappeared. The old man sat with a muffler round his neck, mumbling at an empty pipe. He said, looking at Queston from watery eyes: ‘Cold out.’

  ‘It is indeed.’

  ‘Very cold. Never used to be so cold.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Lots of things have changed.’

  ‘Gloucester has changed,’ Queston said, experimentally. ‘You have a wall round the city now. That used not to be there.’

  ‘Ah, but it did. In the beginning. You not a Gloucester man? ’ The old man peered at him suspiciously.

  ‘We’re visiting. Passing through… it’s a lovely city.’

  ‘Certainly is.’ He relaxed again. ‘Quiet as it was in my grandfather’s day, now. They’ve got the righ
t idea for once, the politicians. I never voted for this government, I’ll tell you that, but they’ve done well. Could have pranged everything, but they’ve given us peace and quiet. Keep ourselves to ourselves, that’s all we ever wanted. All that Common Market nonsense—England’s an island, isn’t it?’

  Queston said, half to himself: ‘No man is an island—’

  ‘That’s John Donne,’ the old man said unexpectedly. ‘Knew a chap in the R.A.F. used to spout him by the yard. Some good poems, too.’ He grinned a lascivious old grin.

  ‘Anything you can mention, Dad knew someone who could do it in the R.A.F.’ The girl had come back. ‘Isn’t that right? ’ She said it without malice, smiling at him.

  ‘Good lot of chaps, say what you like,’ the old man said mildly. ‘An intelligent service, the Air Force. D’you know,’ he said to Queston, ‘we had two university lecturers and a barrister in my squadron.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Queston said politely.

  ‘Bombers, I was in. Rear-gunner. Nasty job that, you copped all the odd flak that was going. I remember once—’

  ‘Not now, Dad,’ the girl Mary said. She put two plates on the table. More gently, she added: ‘There’s no talk of war now. You know that. It’s all forgotten. The Minister said, if you want to go back, go back by centuries, to the good things. Not dropping bombs on people.’

  ‘True enough. True enough.’ The old man nodded. Fie pulled out his pipe again and sucked at it. ‘You haven’t got a smoke, I suppose? ’ he said hopefully to Queston.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I haven’t had a pipe since—well, never mind.’

  The plates held a grey, glutinous mess with pools of sugar melting into a watery liquid on its surface. ‘Porridge, I’m afraid,’ the girl said apologetically. ‘It’s all we’re down to at the end of the week. Ration day tomorrow. But it’s hot, it’ll fill you. O, and there’s some milk. Here.’