MASQUES OF SATAN (40 page)

Suddenly Roxanne stiffens, and looks away from me towards the half-opened door. My eyes follow hers. We see a face leering at us from the passage outside, red, bloated, and pustular, like a great wart. It is Joey King.

‘Hallo, Hallo! What have we here? Love’s young dream? You want to watch young Romeo here, Roxy. He knows a thing or two, don’t you, boy? Eh? He’ll have your knicks off before you can say knife. Eh? Eh?’

Roxanne screams at him: ‘Piss off, you dirty old shitbag!’

‘Oooh! Wash your mouth out, young lady. Wash your mouth out!’ says Joey, withdrawing his ruined face from the gap between the door and the door frame. We hear him wheezing and spluttering with laughter down the passage. The moment is broken. I get up to leave, but before I do Roxanne takes hold of my arm. ‘Come and see me any time you want,’ she said.

That night I had my first flying dream. I don’t mean that this is the first flying dream that I have had. I think I have always flown in dreams, but this was the first I remember clearly. A couple of years before, when my father was still alive, we had flown in an aeroplane from Blackbushe to Dinard. It was the first time I had flown, and the only time I now remember. Nothing prepared me for the joy which awaited me when we rose above the grey overhanging skies of England into the bright cloud fields where the eye of the sun is never shut. It was that moment where my dream begins but I am not in an aeroplane. I am alone and free in the air. I can see a gap in the clouds and I fly down through it. All power is invested in me to go where I want.

Below me is the sea and ahead of me a flat green coastline. There is a wide estuary debouching into the sea with shining, silty mud banks. I swoop down lower. The landscape is deserted except for some children, about my age, perhaps younger, who are playing on the sand banks at the mouth of the estuary. I come down further so that I am only fifty or so feet above them. I see now that there are seven of them, three boys and four girls, playing naked in the sunlight. I see my shadow pass across their backs, and it looks like the shadow of a great bird, like an eagle.

One of the children looks up, and to my dismay I see a look of terror strike his face. He shouts something to the others. They too look up, and are afraid too. They begin to run inland. I am coming closer to them, swooping nearer and nearer to the ground. One of the children, the youngest, I think, stumbles. His face is in the sand and he seems trapped there, his arms sinking further in. He begins to turn his face to me as I come down on him closer and closer. I am almost on him when I awake.

IV

The next day Rex takes us out again. Sarson sits in the front with him and they seem to be in a conspiracy together. Rex takes terrible risks with the car. We nearly run over an old lady. He drinks too much at lunch, and his driving becomes even more reckless. The sky is cloudless, the sun hot. We stop in Norgate, that savagely respectable little seaside town only three miles from where Sarson and I go to school.

There is a walk along a cliff which looks down to a concrete promenade, and below that there is a beach, a rather dreary pebble beach. There is a family on this promenade, a mother and father, a son of about seven, and a baby in a pram. We watch them go about their business. Rex and Sarson make sniggering little comments about them and I laugh too, though I feel I shouldn’t. They are a very ordinary looking couple, in their early thirties, I suppose: he craggy and emaciated with horn-rimmed spectacles, she a little blowsy from childbirth, with mousy hair and a disappearing chin. The South London whine of their accents drifts up to us and gives us more amusement. First Rex, then Sarson, then I start to imitate them. And I may as well admit that the shame I feel is not because I am sneering at people for their accent, but because I am simply imitating Rex and Sarson. Even then I know that I have to be different.

They are encamped on a bench in front of some steps which go down to the beach. We watch them struggling into bathing costumes while trying to remain decent. They have obviously chosen this spot imagining it to be secluded, which it is, because all the other holidaymakers are at the sandier end of the beach. But they are not unobserved. We watch and mock them without being seen.

Presently, after some discussion about the safety of this course of action, mother, father, and seven year old son descend the steps, hobble across the shingle and enter the sea. The baby in its pram is left on the promenade. Rex peers over at the baby from out vantage point some twenty feet above. He looks smooth and smiling, oddly like his publicity photographs. He turns to us and says,
‘A special mystery prize to the first one of you to hit the baby.’

Even Sarson is stunned. ‘Hit?’ He says. ‘What with?’

‘Anything you like. Stone, coin, whatever.’

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘Why not?’ There is a hesitation. ‘Go on, then.’

Suddenly we feel that the tension can only be broken by action. Sarson and I scrabble for stones on the cliff top. I looked for small ones; Sarson didn’t care what size they were. Rex looks on, puffing his Montecristo, serenely pleasured by our activity. Then we are ready, and we have to go on our stomachs and put our heads over the cliff edge to get a good view.

There is the baby in its pram, fumbling with a white crocheted blanket like an old man on his death bed. The bland blue eyes look up at us without curiosity.

I drop my stone, but I make sure it misses; then Sarson drops his. It is a heavy pebble which hits the baby full in the face, and before we run off and get into the Rolls, I see a great flower of blood blossom from the child’s head. We drive off. All three of us, Rex, Sarson, and I are laughing hysterically. Well, they are laughing and I am pretending to. We go inland into the country and stop the car at the top of a ridge looking down over a field. Sarson and I get out of the car and go to the top of the field, where a tractor is ploughing. I remember the faint snore of the tractor and the shouts of a great wheeling flight of white gulls as they follow the furrow. My head is empty. What we have done — what Sarson did — has taken away everything and left only this moment. I take in the field, the ploughing tractor, the flash and fall of gulls and the bright, bright sky. I am alive.

I don’t know how long it lasts but after a bit we get back into the car and Rex gives us a swig of whisky from his little silver flask. Then he gives us a puff on his Montecristo which made me giddy and anyway, I don’t like it because the slime of his saliva is all over the end.

‘So what’s my special mystery prize?’ asks Sarson.

Rex reaches into the pocket of his blazer, takes out a silver-coloured  pistol, and points it straight at Sarson’s head. I see his finger squeeze the trigger. There is a click and from the muzzle comes a little flame. It is a cigarette lighter. He hands it to Sarson who is delighted. There is a fresh wave of hysterical laughter, an atmosphere of light, airy emptiness everywhere.

I can’t remember what we did for the rest of that day, but I know my mind kept going back to the baby and the peony of blood unfolding its petals from the white head.

That night I am dreaming again. It begins almost where the last left off, but it is not quite the same. The sky is clear; I am flying higher and I can see far up the river as it winds through green, flat lands. I know, of course, that I am dreaming: it is one of those dreams, and I am capable of rational thought. It occurs to me that the thing that I see is in my head: it is the creature of my mind. At the same time I do not consciously create what I see; nor can I alter it. I try to put trees and hills into the landscape, but it remains stubbornly flat and wide. Yet this does not prevent me from being the God of this world, the mightiest and most powerful being in it, one who, if he chose to wake, could destroy the land and sky with a single movement. And I can fly; I can move as I wish.

I see the children down below, and they are running across the sands towards the mouth of the river. Once or twice they turn their heads towards me, and on their faces I see fear. Their fear does not trouble me as it has done; it gives me joy. I see that there are six running from me. One lies face down in the sand, its white skin bruised and purpled by the savagery of my world. I do not mind, because I know that in my world I can command the purple corpse to stand up and live again if I want it to. As it happens I do not. Instead I fly upwards into the blue dungeon of the sky. Darkness is rushing up out of the sea, richly black, unpierced by stars. I plunge into it, and the next moment I am fighting for breath in our dark hotel bedroom. Sarson sleeps serenely, shallow breaths just audible, like the ebb and flow of sea on a distant shore.

The next day, as if by common consent, Sarson, Rex, and I went our separate ways. Rex drove off to the station to meet someone; he would not say who. I was in a state of horrible expectation that, at any moment, the police would arrive and begin to question me about a dead baby in Norgate. I feel as if my insides have been excavated, and instead of my organs there was a large dark cavern. I have nothing to turn to but the external sensations of people passing, gulls crying, and the breeze from the sea. I go down to the pier to look at the sea, hoping to lose my anxiety in it, and, as I watch the waves, I do feel the episode of the baby diminishing. It becomes one of many incidents. After all, God kills far more babies than I do — if it was killed — and I didn’t kill it; I only did not prevent it from being killed; but then neither did God. These thoughts turn and turn inside me, and though I try to make the sea wash them away I cannot.

‘Hello, lad. Penny for ’em,’ says a voice. I start violently.

‘What you been up to. Eh? Eh?’ says another. I turn to face my accusers. It is Billy Wilshire and Joey King, out for a walk on the pier. They go into a sort of cross-talk routine which sounds as if it had been meticulously rehearsed.

‘That was a guilty start,’ says Billy.

‘Been up to naughties,’ says Joey.

‘He’s gone all white. Looks like a condemned man, don’t he, Joe?’

‘Guilty as charged, your honour.’

‘Where’s your partner in crime, then?’

‘He’s not grassing.’

‘We’ll have to take him in,’ says Joey.

‘We’ll have to. Get the truth out of him.’

‘By force if necessary. Fancy a cup of rosie and a fairy cake at the pier caff?’

‘He’ll come along quietly. Won’t you, boy? Eh? Eh?’

I come with them and we sit down in the little café at the end of the pier. They have tea; I have lemonade. Some of my fear of being found out has evaporated out of sheer curiosity. I had never thought of Billy and Joey sharing any common ground except the theatre, yet here they are, out for a walk. Joey has on a suit, rather too tight for him and a pork pie hat. Billy wears a white shorty mackintosh buttoned up to the chin, and a woolly hat which shows that he has removed his toupée. These are odd clothes for a fine summer’s day. I watch them and wait for their interrogation to begin, but it is not what I expect.

‘Well, Billy, now that we’ve got him here, what shall we do with him? Give him the third degree?’

‘Give him a fairy cake, Joey.’

‘You and your fairy cakes, Bill! So what do we want to know?’

‘We want to know everything, don’t we, Joey?’

‘You mean what’s going to win the 2.30 at Arundown?’

‘No, Joey. We want to know about Rexy.’

‘What? Sexy Rexy?’

‘We want to know all the low-down.’

‘Do you think he knows the low-down, Bill?’

‘He knows the low-down, Joey. I’ve seen him when he didn’t know I was looking. This lad’s a dark horse.’

As if on cue they both turn to me as I am sucking the last of my lemonade out of the bottle.

‘Never mind the burp-water now,’ says Joey. ‘Give us the low-down. What’s Rex up to? We know he’s up to something. Why’s he seeing his agent today?’

‘Is it true, the, he’s getting back together with Roxanne?’

‘What d’you know, boy? Eh?’

It is a moment of revelation. I see their faces, the one red and bloated, the other pale and wizened, not attached to people, but as images, symbols of the wickedness that has possessed them. They are not men: they are icons of envy and prurience, ready to be stuck up on a cathedral buttress. I know no more than they do about Rex and his agent or Roxanne, but they do not know this, and so I have power. In their greed they will devour anything I throw to them, because they have ceased to be anything but mouths to feed. I will give them what they want, which is an illusion, and in turn I will have what I want. As yet I have not decided what this is.