Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (35 page)

    Within a little amphitheatre of box and yew, both rampant and un-pruned, was a hard floor of grassless grit in which was built out of smooth, dressed stones a low circular wall that I took to be the mouth of a well. On the wall sat a pale, fair-haired boy of about my age. He wore grey flannel shorts and a white flannel shirt, of the kind I was made to wear out of doors in the summer at my school. We stared at each other for a long while. To me he was horribly unexpected.

    One reason why I spent so long looking at him was that I could not quite make out what I was seeing. He was a perfectly proportioned flesh-and-blood boy in all respects but one. He seemed smaller than he should be, not by much, but by enough to make him seem deformed in some subtle way. As he sat on the wall, his feet dangled a foot or so above the ground when they should have touched it, but he was not dwarfish. His legs were not bowed or stunted; his head was not too big for his body. Apart from the extreme pallor of his skin and hair, he was, I suppose, rather a handsome boy. I could have gone closer to him to confirm my suspicions about his size, but I did not want to.

    "Hello," I said, then recollecting that the boy, his appearance notwithstanding, was almost certainly Portuguese, I said:
"Bom Dir."

    "You're not
Portugoose,
are you?" said the boy. "You're English."

    "Yes," I said. He had a voice like mine. He belonged to the middle classes. He asked me my name. I told him and he said his name was Hal.

    "Hal what?" I asked.

    "Just Hal."

    "What are you doing here?"

    "What are
you
doing here?"

    I told him and then I said it was his turn to tell.

    "I come here sometimes," he said.

    "Do Mr and Mrs de Walter know?"

    
"Of course,
they do, you ass," said Hal. "Anyway, what's it got to do with you? Mind your own beeswax!"
Mind your own beeswax.
It was a piece of slang I had heard once or twice at my school, but even there it had seemed dated, culled perhaps from a reading of
Billy Bunter
or
Stalky Co.

    Hal asked me about my school, in particular about games. I boasted as much as I could about my distinctly average abilities and my exploits in the third eleven at cricket. He kept his eyes fixed on me, but I wondered how much he was taking in.

    He said: "When I grow up I'm going to be a cricketer, like Wally Hammond."

    "Who's Wally Hammond?" I asked.

    "Crikey, don't you know who Wally Hammond is? You are of blockheads the most crassly ignoramus."

    "Is he a cricketer?"

    "Is he a cricketer? Of course he's a cricketer, you utterly
frabjous
oaf! Don't you know anything?"

    As I was one of those boys who had learned by heart the names of the entire England cricket team, together with their bowling and batting averages, I took great offence at this. Later in our conversation I slipped in a reference to Geoffrey Boycott.

    Hal said: "Boycott what?" I did not reply, but I felt vindicated.

    It was not long after this that I began to feel that my company was no longer a pleasure to Hal. Something about his eyes was not quite right. They seemed to be darker than when I had first seen them - not only the irises and pupils, but the whites had turned a greyish colour. Perhaps it was a trick of the fading light that may also account for the fact that he was beginning to look even smaller.

    Suddenly he said: "Who are you anyway?"

    "Who are you for that matter, and what are you doing here?" I said, taking a step towards him.

    "Go away!" he shouted. "Private Property!"

    The sound of his cry rang in my ears. I turned from him and ran up the path to the top of the slope. When I had reached it, I turned again and looked back. Hal was still sitting there on the lip of the old well, his heels banging against the stones. He was facing in my direction but I could not tell whether he was looking at me or not. The light, which was not quite right in that strange garden, had turned his eye sockets into empty black holes. I turned again and ran. This time I did not look back.

    For some time I found that I was lost. In that dense foliage I could not tell which way was the sea and which way the Villa Monte Rosa. I remember some agonizing minutes during which I could not stop myself from going round in a circle. I kept coming back to the same small stone statue of a cat crouching on a plinth. It was perhaps the tomb of a pet, but there was no inscription. I began to panic. The cat looked as if it were about to spring. I decided that the only way of escape was to ignore the paths and move resolutely in one direction.

    Surprisingly enough this worked, and in a matter of minutes I found I was walking across the little lawn towards the terrace where my parents were. I was about to set foot on the steps to the terrace when I saw Mrs de Walter at the top of them, scrutinizing me intently. She came down to meet me.

    "So you've found your way back," she said. "We were beginning to wonder if you were lost.

    I shook my head. She laid her thin hand lightly on my shoulder.

    "Did you meet anyone on your travels?" she asked. It was a curious way of expressing herself and I was wary. "You did, didn't you?"

    I nodded. It seemed the course of least resistance.

    "A little boy?"

    I nodded again.

    "An English little boy?"

    I gave her the same response. The pressure of her hand on my shoulder became so great that I imagined I could feel the bones in her fingers through my thin shirt, or was it the cords of her strange crocheted mittens? She said: "We won't mention the little English boy to anyone else, shall we? Not even our parents. This shall be our personal secret, shan't it?"

    I was quite happy to agree with this suggestion, because I had a feeling that my parents would not believe me if I did tell them about Hal.

    "Come!" said Mrs de Walter. "I want to show you some things which will amuse you. This way!" Her hand now pressed firmly against my left shoulder blade, she guided me anticlockwise around the villa to a part of it which I had not seen - a long low structure with tall windows abutting onto the main building.

    "We call this the orangery," she said. "But it's many years since anyone grew oranges here." She took out a key and turned it in the lock of a door made from grey and wrinkled wood to which a few flakes and blisters of green paint still adhered.

    "Who is Hal?" I asked Mrs De Walter.

    "Come inside," she said. "There are some things here which I'm sure will amuse you."

    We entered a long, dingy space feebly lit by the tall dirty windows that faced onto the garden. At the far end of the orangery was a curtain of faded green damask drawn across a dark space, and along the wall which faced the windows was ranged a series of rectangular glass cases set on legs at a height convenient to the spectator.

    "These are bound to amuse you," said Mrs de Walter. "All boys like you are amused by these." Her insistence on my reaction was beginning to make me nervous.

    At first I thought that the glass cases simply contained stuffed animals of the kind I had seen in museums, but when I was placed firmly in front of one I saw that this was not quite so. There were stuffed animals certainly, but they were all mice, rats and other rodents, and they had been put into human postures and settings.

    The first tableau depicted the oak-panelled parlour of an old-fashioned inn. A red squirrel in an apron was halfway through a door bearing a tray of bottles, glasses and foaming tankards of ale. At a table sat four or five rats and a white mouse. Playing cards were scattered over the table and on the floor. The white mouse was looking disconsolately away towards the viewer while the rats seemed to be gloating over the piles of coin that had accumulated on their side of the table. The white mouse wore an elegant embroidered sash of primrose-coloured silk, while perching on one of the finials of his chair-back was an extravagantly plumed hat. The setting and costume accessories suggested the Carolean period. Two moles wearing spectacles and Puritan steeple hats were watching the proceedings with disapproval from a corner table. It was clear that the rats had gulled the wealthy but innocent young mouse out of his cash at cards.

    The tableau looked as if it had been made in the Victorian era and had, I am sure, been designed to amuse, as Mrs de Walter kept reminding me, but there was something dusty and oppressive about the atmosphere it evoked. Perhaps it was the implied moralism of the display, a sort of rodent "Rake's Progress" that disheartened me.

    In the second case the scene was set outside the inn. The two moles were now observing the action from an open first floor casement window to the right of the inn sign that bore the image of a skull and a trumpet. On the road in front of the inn, a brawl was taking place between the white mouse and one of the rats. Both were being urged on by groups of their fellow rodents, the mice being smaller obviously, but more elegantly equipped with plumed hats and rapiers swinging from their tasselled baldrics. The rats had a proletarian look about them and had leather rather than silk accoutrements.

    The third tableau was set in a forest clearing where the mouse and his comrades had just ambushed the rat with whom he had been brawling in the previous scene. The mouse was plunging a rapier into the belly of the rat, which was now in its death throes. I was slightly surprised by the graphic way in which the creator of these scenes had shown the blood. It surrounded the gaping wound, which the mouse had created. There was a dark, viscous pool of the stuff on the yellow soil beneath its body, and great splashes of it on the mouse's white fur. One could just see the faces of the two moles peeping out from a dense belt of undergrowth to one side.

    The final glass case depicted a courtroom, presided over by an owl judge. Other participants were all rodents of one kind or another. The white mouse, his coat still faintly stained with blood, stood in the spike-hedged dock between two burly ferret policemen. A rat in a wig was interrogating one of the moles, whose head was just visible above the wooden sides of the witness box. The entire jury was composed of rats and, as if to confirm the inevitable outcome of the trial, I noticed that a small square of black cloth already reposed upon the owl's flat head.

    "I thought these would amuse you," said Mrs de Walter who was standing behind me. I started. In my absorption I had quite forgotten her presence. Amused was not the word, but I was held by a morbid fascination. These scenes with their lurid subject matter and their dusty gallows humour were redolent of long-forgotten illustrated books and savage Victorian childhoods.

    "Ah! But you haven't seen behind the curtain, have you?" said Mrs de Walter with a dreadful attempt at a roguish smile. It was then that I became very much afraid. I can only account for the suddenness of my panic by the fact that uneasiness had built it up inside me over the course of the afternoon, that it had reached a critical mass and was now in danger of erupting into sheer terror. One thought dominated: I must not see behind the curtain, and yet, at the same time, I knew I could not look away.

    Mrs de Walter appeared to take all this in, but she showed neither concern nor indifference to my state of mind, only a kind of intense curiosity. She bent down and looked directly into my eyes.

    "I wonder if you should see this one. It might shock you." She approached the curtain and put one hand on it so that in an instant she could pull it aside. There was a pause before she asked me a question. "Are you by any chance a pious sort of a boy?"

    For several seconds I simply could not grasp what she meant. Of course I understood the word "pious". It was the name of a recent Pope; monks in the Middle Ages were pious; but I had never heard it applied to a living human being, let alone myself. I said I didn't know. She smiled.

    "All right," she said, "the tiniest peep, then," and she flicked aside the curtain. It was only a few seconds before she released the curtain and all was hidden again, but my impressions, though fragmentary, were all the more vivid for that.

    It was a glass case like the others, but the scene within it was very different. I remember the painted background of a lurid and stormy sky, torn apart by zigzags of lightning. Against them the three crosses on a grey mound stood out strongly. I cannot say too much, but it was my impression that the three toads had still been alive when they were nailed to the wood.

    I can remember nothing after that until Mrs de Walter and I found ourselves on the terrace again. I saw a table strewn with little glasses and open bottles full of strange-coloured liquids. Mr de Walter and my parents appeared to be having a lively discussion about race.

    "I've knocked about the world a bit in my time," de Walter was saying, "and I've met all sorts, I can tell you. And of all the peoples I have met, the best, for all their faults, are the English. 'Fraid so. Modesty forbids and all that, but facts is facts. Next best are the Germans. Now, I know what you're going to say, and I'd agree, your bad German is a Hun of the first water - dammit, I should know! - but your good German is a gentleman. Your Frenchie is an arrogant swine; your Arab is a rogue, but at least he's an honest rogue, unlike your Turk. Don't waste your time with the Swiss: they all have the mentalities of small town stationmasters. Nobody understands the Japs, not even the Japs. But your absolute shit of hell in my experience is the Bulgarian. Scum of the earth; sodomites to a man; rape a woman soon as look at her, but not in the natural way of things if you understand me."