Amy had retreated a little way, then stopped and turned, and between her and the pounding bulk of the creature stood Victor in a posture of defiance, his back arched and tail swollen. A kick from a wooden foot smashed into him, with a snapping of twigs or bones, and he went skidding, a lifeless bundle, across the road and into the ditch. Then Amy turned again and ran, ran in earnest, in long-legged strides, but even when she reached her best speed, she was not gaining on the green man. By now I was aware of what I still held in my hand, and saw what it was I must do, and pushed myself to my feet and ran in my turn down the road towards the graveyard. Ahead of me, the pursuit continued; from where I was I could not judge the distance between the one and the other, and did not try, but drew back my arm and hurled the silver figure over the graveyard wall. I heard it touch ground, and immediately that misshapen being came lurching to a halt, did more than halt, was bowed down, was borne backwards by some immense force, step by step, shaking and flailing, while portions of it detached themselves and came whirling towards me, around me and over my head, leaf, twig, bough, stump, so that I crouched down and crossed my arms over my face, ducking instinctively as a stout length of wood swished past, and again when a thorny tendril scored my wrist, eyes screwed up and ears filled with a drawn-out, diminishing howl of inhuman pain and rage.
Silence fell, broken only by some heavy vehicle speeding towards London on the A595. I got up slowly, walked a few paces, then ran on towards the village calling Amy’s name. She was stretched out at the edge of the road with blood on her forehead, one knee and one hand. I carried her back to the house, laid her on her bed and telephoned Jack Maybury.
5: A Movement in the Grass
‘Physically, there’s nothing to worry about,’ said Jack just after midday. ‘That’s a perfectly healthy sleep she’s in now. No evidence of concussion. No fever. And those cuts and bruises are quite minor. Psychologically, well, I doubt if there’s much grounds for anxiety there either, not immediately anyway, though I must admit I’m a bit out of my depth with sleepwalking. Are you sure it was sleepwalking?’
I turned from the window of Amy’s bedroom. ‘I don’t know. I just assumed it was.’ I had decided it was, as the most flexible rough version of what had really happened. ‘The front door woke me up, I saw her passing the window, so I went and—’
‘So you said. What exactly happened when you got to her?’
‘I called out to her, which was probably a mistake, only I didn’t think, and she gave this great start and half turned round, and tripped.’
‘And hit her head on the road hard enough to knock her out, but … I just wouldn’t have thought a bang that caused such a comparatively minor contusion would be enough to knock a healthy person out. Still. Why were you in the public dining-room instead of your own place up here?’
‘I go there sometimes. Less chance of being interrupted.’
‘Yeah. Just as well you did, this time. Right, well I’ll look in again this evening. Keep her in bed meanwhile. Light lunch. We’ll see how it goes. There’s a very good kids’ headshrinker bloke at the hospital I can get hold of tomorrow. Personally, I doubt whether she was sleepwalking at all.’
‘What do you think she was doing?’
‘Pretending to sleepwalk. She’d read about it.’
‘What would be the point of that?’
‘Oh, to get herself a bit of attention from someone,’ said Jack, with a full dose of his censorious look. ‘Anyway, I’ll be off now. How are you?’ he added grudgingly.
‘Fine. A bit tired.’
‘Get some rest this afternoon. No more little birds?’
‘No. Would you like a drink?’
‘No thanks.’
As he started to leave, I asked without premeditation, ‘How’s Diana?’
Jack stopped leaving. ‘How is she? She’s all right. Why?’
‘No reason.’
‘I’ll just say this much, Maurice. I like things the way they are. I don’t like turmoil or upsets or letting one part of your life interfere with the other. I’m not against people enjoying themselves in any way they happen to fancy, provided they don’t start behaving like bloody kids. Okay?’
‘I’m for that too,’ I said, wondering what Diana could have said to him, but, as a mere ex-lover of hers since yesterday, not wondering very hard.
‘Good. See you tonight.’
Then he did go. Very soon afterwards. Amy opened her eyes in the manner of someone waking up with tremendous reluctance after a tremendously deep sleep. She smiled at me, then felt the taped bandage on her forehead and traced its outline. We hugged each other.
‘Have I been sleepwalking, Dad?’
‘Well … you might have been. All sorts of people do.’
‘I had a funny dream, Dad,’ she went on immediately. ‘You were in it.’
This was the first time that day she had spoken more than a couple of words. ‘What happened?’
‘Well, I dreamt I was lying in bed here, and you were calling to me. You told me to get up and come downstairs, so I did. I took Victor with me, because he was here. You didn’t tell me to, but I thought you wouldn’t mind. Then when I got downstairs, you said I was to go outside into the road. I still couldn’t see you, but that was what you said. So I went outside, but you weren’t there, so I started looking for you.’
‘Go on.’
‘I’m trying to, but it gets harder to remember after that. You gave me a fright, but you didn’t mean to. You came up and told me I was to put Victor down and run into the village, so I did. I started to, anyway. Then I really forget what happened. But I do sort of remember that you were being very brave, Dad. Was there a man chasing me?’
‘I don’t know. You were dreaming.’
‘I don’t think I was. I wasn’t, was I?’
She was looking hard at me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was real.’
‘Well done, Dad,’ she said, and took my hand.
‘What for?’
‘Not pretending. And being brave. What happened to the man?’
‘He ran away. He won’t be back.’
‘What happened to Victor? The man killed him, didn’t he?’
‘Yes. But it was over in a moment.’
‘He was brave too. It wasn’t really you telling me to get up and come downstairs, was it? Then what was it really?’
‘I think that part of it must have been a sort of dream. You imagined it. No, not quite that. There was a spell on the house, so that people saw things and heard things when there wasn’t anybody there.’
‘You mean like that screaming the other day?’
‘That was part of it. But it’s all over now, I promise you.’
‘Okay, Dad. I mean I believe you. I’m all right. Where’s Victor? He’s not just still lying there, is he?’
‘No. I’ve got him safe. I’m going off to bury him in a minute.’
‘Good idea. Come and see me again when you’ve got time.’
‘Would you like me to get Joyce or Magdalena to sit with you?’
‘No, I’ll be all right. Could you pass me that magazine about Jonathan Swift there on my dressing-table?’
‘Jonathan Swift? Oh, I see.’
The front page of the publication carried a colour photograph of a young man (or so I assumed him to be) who had yet to undergo his first haircut or shave; it had been deliberately worsened in quality by a no doubt advanced fuzzing process, and had evidently been taken from some sunken chamber or hole in the ground at its subject’s feet. I handed the thing to Amy, who immediately opened it and started reading.
‘What would you like for lunch?’
‘Hamburger and baked beans and chips and tomato sauce and tinned cherries and cream and a Coke … uh, please, Dad.’
‘Won’t that be too much for you? Dr Maybury said you were to just have something light.’
‘Oh, Dad. I’m so hungry. I’ll eat it slowly.’
‘All right, then, I’ll fix it.’
&nb
sp; I went downstairs in search of David and found him in the front bar, an all-too-popular rendezvous on Sunday mornings. It was full of middle-aged men in Caribbean shirts drinking pints of bitter, and less straightforwardly middle-aged women in floral trouser-suits drinking Pimm’s. They were all talking as if from one side of a busy street to the other, but quietened down and stared into their drinks when they saw me, out of respect for the bereaved, or the insane. David was in the middle of taking an order from a party of six that included a pair of identically dressed identical twin queers, and looked as though he had had trouble getting that far. He greeted me apprehensively, no doubt hoping, with some justification, that I was not about to ask him to do anything along the lines of preparing a room for Count and Countess Dracula, and cheered up a good deal when I did no more than tell him Amy’s wishes and say I would be resuming charge at 6 p.m. (I had determined to finish everything by then.)
With this out of the way, Nick and Lucy not yet emerged and Joyce nowhere to be seen, I picked up the hammer and chisel I had used on my dining-room floor and dropped them in the passenger’s seat of the trade truck. Then I fetched Victor from the gardening hut, where he had lain wrapped in sacking since I stowed him there before breakfast. I also took a shovel and a scythe. The least unsatisfactory plan I could think of was to drive up as close as possible to the graveyard gate, unload and then re-park the truck at an inconspicuous distance. In the event, nobody saw me; at this time everyone was in the pub or the kitchen.
First, Victor. I soon found him a pleasant, secluded spot near the wall, out of sight from where Underhill lay, and in that soil it was not difficult to open a trench eighteen inches deep or so. In he went, and I shovelled the earth back into place, thinking how much I would miss his total lack of dignity and of ill nature. A couple of days earlier, I should probably have considered taking his body to the vet, in the hope of establishing something about the force that had killed him, something objectively factual that would support my story. But by now I had given up all such notions: I had seen what I had seen, and there would never be a way of convincing anyone else that I had. I smoothed the earth flat with my hands.
The second task was a far more formidable affair. I had some idea of direction, but very little of distance, and I spent over an hour and a half, and had cleared something like twenty square yards of ground, before I found the silver figure in a tuft of couch-grass; I suppose even then I was lucky. Laying it on a triangular piece of somebody’s headstone, I went at it with the hammer and chisel and, aided by the softness of the metal, quickly had it in half a dozen not easily recognizable pieces, which I buried in different parts of the graveyard. Having done this I felt a lot safer, but by no means safe. More effort was going to be necessary before that state could be attained.
I was just about to move on to the next job when a thought struck me. I went over to where Underhill was buried, dropped the tools and pissed on his grave.
‘You bastard,’ I said. ‘You tried to pretend you hadn’t chosen me, out of all the people who’ve lived in that house since you. You just waited until Amy was the age you liked, and then you set to work to arouse my curiosity. And in your present form you couldn’t do to her what you did to those other poor kids, so you tried to kill her instead. For fun. Very scientific. Some purpose.’
Again without being seen, I returned to the truck and drove through the village, which under the bright sunshine had a look of spurious significance, as if its inhabitants were known to be the wisest and happiest in England. I drew up outside the rectory, a small but beautiful Queen Anne house across the road from the church. Its garden was overgrown and littered with rubbish, including a number of framed pictures, mostly of country scenes, which had presumably come with the house. Music was rampaging away inside it. I tugged at the rusty iron bell-pull and an electronic chime sounded from within. After about a minute, a rather better-kempt version of Jonathan Swift opened the door. He looked at me while he chewed something.
‘Is the rector at home?’ I asked.
‘Who are you?’
‘One of his parishioners.’
‘His what?’
‘Parishioners. People who live in his parish. Round here. Is he at home?’
‘I’ll see.’
He turned away, but the advancing shape of the Reverend Tom Rodney, clad in a turquoise tee-shirt and skin-tight black denim trousers, was now to be seen over his shoulder.
‘What is it, Cliff? Oh … Mr Allington. Do you want to see me?’
‘Well yes, I was hoping to. If you’ve got a minute.’
‘Uh … of course. Do come in. I’m afraid everything’s in a bit of a mess. Oh, Mr Allington, this is Lord Cliff Oswestry.’
‘Ch-do,’ said Lord Cliff.
‘Hi there, man,’ I said, not sure whether he had adopted the title for some trade reason, or had acquired it willy-nilly.
Judging by his manner so far, I favoured the second of these.
‘I haven’t had a chance to clear up all the crap,’ said the rector. ‘We got back about three this morning, and I just made morning service with a big low on. Oh, Cliff dear, could you turn it down a bit? I’m afraid Cliff and I are sort of hooked on Benjie again. He does get to one, doesn’t he?’
By now we were in a sort of drawing-room with black wallpaper on three walls and gold on the fourth, a squat bamboo screen enclosing nothing in particular and a lot of suède-topped stools. I could not see much crap, apart from some broken crockery that looked as if it had been hurled rather than dropped, and an object resembling an aerial sculpture that had made a forced landing. An invisible singer with a bad head-cold was doing his best to reach some unreasonably high notes among a lot of orchestral fuss. Very soon this faded to a murmur, presumably by the agency of Lord Cliff, of whom I saw no more.
‘Well, what’s the trouble?’ asked the rector, almost like a real rector. This kind of thing must be an example of the dead weight of tradition he was constantly on guard against, sometimes, as now, with inadequate vigilance.
‘No trouble,’ I said, squirming about on my stool in search of some tolerable position. ‘There are two things I’d like to bring up. The first is that the seventh centenary of the founding of my house, the Green Man, comes round next month, as you probably know.’
‘Oh yes, somebody was telling me about it the other day.’
The somebody must have been the Father of Lies himself, since I had just made up the centenary idea. In the same improvisatory vein, I went on, ‘Anyway, I was thinking of throwing a rather special party to mark the occasion. It’s been a very good summer for me, financially that is, and if this weather keeps up I could put on quite a show in the garden there. I get quite a lot of, well, prominent people at my house from time to time, show business, television, fashion, even the odd politician, and I thought I’d just invite the lot. You never know who might turn up. Anyway, I was wondering if you’d like to come along. Plus any chums you might care to invite, of course.’
People’s eyes do not actually glisten unless they are weeping, but the rector put up a convincing simulacrum of it without recourse to tears. ‘Could I bring my bishop? The old sweetie would adore it so.’
‘You can bring the Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland if you like.’
‘Oh, how super.’ His eyes stopped glistening. ‘What was the other thing?’
‘Oh yes. I expect you’ve heard that my house is haunted. Well, it’s been getting quite troublesome recently. I’d like you to perform a service of exorcism to get rid of the spirits, or whatever they are.’
‘You’ve got to be joking.’
‘I’m perfectly serious.’
‘Oh, come on. You mean you’ve actually been seeing ghosts? Really.’
‘Yes, really. Otherwise I shouldn’t have bothered you.’
‘You don’t suppose a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo could have the slightest effect, do you? On anything?’
‘I don’t know. I’d like to give it a trial. It
would be a great favour to me if you’d just run through the service, Rector.’
I was fully prepared to go on and tell him in the plainest terms that no exorcism meant no invitation to the party, but he was ahead of me. No doubt the course of his career had trained him to recognize a quid pro quo as soon as he set eyes on one, or rather overtrained him, because he would never get any kind of quo from me. With the irritation which his face was so well constructed to express, he asked, ‘When?’
‘Now. I can drive you there in three minutes.’
‘Oh, honestly,’ he said, but without heat, and was busy in calculation for a moment. My bet is that he had spotted the annoyance-potential to Lord Cliff of going off with me on such an eccentric errand. ‘Oh, very well, but I think it’s shaking to find a person of your education falling prey to gross superstition like this.’ But he got off his stool nimbly enough.
‘You’d better put on your regalia for this do, I think.’
‘Oh, for …‘ Lord Cliff (on my reading) entered his thoughts again, and he cheered up a little. ‘Might as well do the thing properly while one’s about it, I suppose. Amuse yourself. Have some fruit. Back in a trice.’
There was a bunch of bananas on a table-top of an untrimmed chunk of slate, I ate a couple and told myself I was having lunch. But, in my experience, even a lunch as light as that needs washing down. I went to a likely-looking (also very nasty-looking) cupboard I had spotted on first entering the room. Apart from what might have been sticks of incense and what almost certainly were marijuana cigarettes, it contained gin, vermouth, Campari, white port, a variety of horrible drinks from the eastern Mediterranean, a siphon of soda and no glasses. I rejected the idea of mixing myself a dry Martini in a near-by ash-tray, and took a swig from the gin-bottle. Warm neat gin is nobody’s nectar, but I managed to get some down without coughing much. I chased it with soda-water, taking this perforce from the nozzle of the siphon, a different kind of feat, then swallowed a pill. As I did so, it crossed my mind that, if Underhill had been able to manufacture a hundred scarlet-and-green birds, he could certainly have manufactured one. It was true that he had produced something like my hypnagogic visions, which I had had for years, since long before moving into his house, but his version of these had been a passable copy, a counterfeit, whereas (I realized for the first time) the birds had been exact replicas of the original one I had seen in the bathroom—how like him to have tested a weapon before using it in earnest. Well, when I had had time to forget just how much the solitary bird had frightened me, there was going to be a case for going back on the bottle: the half-bottle, at least.