No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (14 page)

And it was summoned by the bells, Harden’s old church bells, pealing out their slow, doleful toll for Muriel Anderson.

But those bells changed everything. I can hear them even now, see and
feel
the changes that occurred. Before, there had been couples out walking: just odd pairs here and there, on the old dene lane, in the fields and on the paths. And yet by the time those bells were only half-way done the people had gone, disappeared, don’t ask me where. Down in the graveyard, John and Billy had been putting the finishing touches to their handiwork, preparing the place, as it were, for this latest increase in the Great Majority; but now they speeded up, ran to the tiled lean-to in one tree-shaded corner of the graveyard and changed into clothes a little more fitting, before hurrying to the gate and waiting there for Mr Forster’s hearse. For the bells had told everyone that the ceremony at Harden church was over, and that the smallest possible cortège was now on its way. One and a half miles at fifteen miles per hour, which meant a journey of just six minutes.

Who else had been advised by the bells, I wondered?

I aimed my binoculars at Slater’s Copse, and…they were there, all four, pale figures in the trees, their shaded faces turned toward the near-distant spire across the valley, half-hidden by the low hill. And as they left the cover of the trees and headed for the field adjacent to the cemetery, I saw that indeed they had their picnic baskets with them: a large one which the man and woman carried between them, and a smaller one shared by their children. As usual.

The hearse arrived, containing only the coffin and its occupant, a great many wreaths and garlands, and of course the Reverend Fawcett and Mr Forster, who with John and Billy formed the team of pallbearers. Precise and practised, they carried Muriel Anderson to her grave where the only additional mourner was Jack Boulter, who had gone down from the house to join them. He got down into the flower-decked hole (to assist in the lowering of the coffin, of course) and after the casket had gone down in its loops of silken rope finally climbed out again, assisted by John and Billy. There followed the final service, and the first handful of soil went into the grave.

Through all of this activity my attention had been riveted in the graveyard; now that things were proceeding towards an end, however, I once again turned my glasses on the picnickers. And there they sat cross-legged on their blanket in the long grass outside the cemetery wall, with their picnic baskets between them. But
motionless
as always, with their heads bowed in a sort of grace. They sat there—as they had sat for Joe Anderson, and Mrs Jones the greengrocer-lady, and old George Carter the retired miner, whose soot-clogged lungs had finally collapsed on him—offering up their silent prayers or doing whatever they did.

Meanwhile, in the graveyard:

At last the ceremony was over, and John and Billy set to with their spades while the Reverend Fawcett, Jack Boulter and Mr Forster climbed the knoll to the house, where my uncle met them at the door. I heard him greet them, and the Vicar’s high-pitched, measured answer:

“Zach, Sam here tells me you have a certain book with pictures? I should like to see it, if you don’t mind. And then of course there’s the matter of a roster. For now that we’ve initiated this thing I suppose we must see it through, and certainly I can see a good many long, lonely nights stretching ahead.”

“Come in, come in,” my uncle answered. “The book? It’s in my study. By all means come through.”

I
heard
this conversation, as I say, but nothing registered—not for a minute or two, anyway. Until—

There came a gasping and a frantic clattering as my uncle, with the Reverend Fawcett hot on his heels, came flying up the stairs to the landing, then up the short stairs to my room. They burst in, quite literally hurling the door wide, and my uncle was upon me in three great strides.

“Sandy,” he gasped then, “what’s all this about gypsies?” I put my glasses aside and looked at him, and saw that he was holding the sheet of notepaper with my scribbled query. He gripped my shoulder. “Why do you ask if the man in these pictures is a gypsy?”

Finally I knew what he was talking about. “Why, because of their eyes!” I answered. “Their three-cornered eyes.” And as I picked up my binoculars and again trained them on the picnickers, I added: “But you can’t see their faces from up here, because of their great hats…”

My uncle glanced out of the window and his jaw dropped. “Good Lord!” he whispered, eyes bulging in his suddenly white face. He almost snatched the glasses from me, and his huge hands shook as he put them to his eyes. After a moment he said, “My God, my God!” Simply that; and then he thrust the glasses at the Reverend Fawcett.

The Reverend was no less affected; he said, “Dear Jesus! Oh my dear sweet Jesus! In broad daylight! Good heavens, Zach—
in broad daylight!
”

Then my uncle straightened up, towered huge, and his voice was steady again as he said: “Their shirts—look at their shirts!”

The vicar looked, and grimly nodded. “Their shirts, yes.”

From the foot of the stairs came Jack Boulter’s sudden query: “Zach, Reverend, are you up there? Zach, why man ar’m sorry, but there must be a fault. Damn the thing, but ar’m getna red light!”

“Fault?” cried my uncle, charging for the door and the stairs, with the vicar right behind him. “There’s no fault, Jack! Press the button, man—
press the button!
”

Left alone again and not a little astonished, I looked at the gypsies in the field. Their shirts? But they had simply pulled them out of their trousers, so that they fell like small, personal tents to the grass where they sat. Which I imagined must keep them quite cool in the heat of the afternoon. And anyway, they always wore their shirts like that, when they picnicked.

But what was this? To complement the sudden uproar in the house, now there came this additional confusion outside! What could have startled the gypsies like this? What on earth was wrong with them? I threw open the window and leaned out, and without knowing why found my tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth as once more, for the last time, I trained my glasses on the picnickers. And how to explain what I saw then? I saw it, but only briefly, in the moments before my uncle was there behind me, clapping his hand over my eyes, snatching the window and curtains shut, prising the glasses from my half-frozen fingers. Saw
and
heard it!

The gypsies straining to their feet and trying to run, overturning their picnic baskets in their sudden frenzy, seeming anchored to the ground by fat white ropes which lengthened behind them as they stumbled outward from their blanket. The agony of their dance there in the long grass, and the way they dragged on their ropes to haul them out of the ground, like strangely hopping blackbirds teasing worms; their terrified faces and shrieking mouths as their hats went flying; their shirts and dresses billowing, and their unbelievable screams. All four of them, screaming as one, but shrill as a keening wind, hissing like steam from a nest of kettles, or lobsters dropped live into boiling water, and yet cold and alien as the sweat on a dead fish!

And then the man’s rope, incredibly long and taut as a bowstring, suddenly coming free of the ground—and likewise, one after another, the ropes of his family—and all of them
living things
that writhed like snakes and sprayed crimson from their raw red ends!

But all glimpsed so briefly, before my uncle intervened, and so little of it registering upon a mind which really couldn’t accept it—not then. I had been aware, though, of the villagers where they advanced inexorably across the field, armed with the picks and shovels of their trade (what? Ask John and Billy to keep mum about such as this? Even for a guinea?). And of the gypsies spinning like dervishes, coiling up those awful appendages about their waists, then wheeling more slowly and gradually crumpling exhausted to the earth; and of their picnic baskets scattered on the grass, all tumbled and…empty.

I’ve since discovered that in certain foreign parts ‘Obour’ means ‘night demon’, or ‘ghost’, or ‘vampire’. While in others it means simply ‘ghoul’. As for the gypsies: I know their caravan was burned out that same night, and that their bones were discovered in the ashes. It hardly worried me then and it doesn’t now, and I’m glad that you don’t see nearly so many of them around these days; but of course I’m prejudiced.

As they say in the north-east, a burden shared is a burden halved. But really, my dreams have been a terrible burden, and I can’t see why I should continue to bear it alone.

This then has been my rite of exorcism. At least I hope so…

Horror can come in many different shapes, sizes, and colours and often, like death, which is sometimes its companion, unexpectedly. Some years ago horror came to two boys in the coalmining area of England’s north-east coast.

Pals since they first started school seven years earlier, their names were John and David. John was a big lad and thought himself very brave; David was six months younger, smaller, and he wished he could be more like John.

It was a Saturday in the late spring, warm but not oppressive, and since there was no school the boys were out adventuring on the beach. They had spent most of the morning playing at being starving castaways, turning over rocks in the life-or-death search for crabs and eels—and jumping back startled, hearts racing, whenever their probing revealed too frantic a wriggling in the swirling water, or perhaps a great crab carefully sidling away, one pincer lifted in silent warning—and now they were heading home again for lunch.

But lunch was still almost two hours away, and it would take them less than an hour to get home. In that simple fact were sown the seeds of horror, in that and in one other fact—that between the beach and their respective homes there stood the viaduct…

Almost as a reflex action, when the boys left the beach they headed in the direction of the viaduct. To do this they turned inland, through the trees and bushes of the narrow dene that came right down to the sand, and followed the path of the river. The river was still fairly deep from the spring thaw and the rains of April, and as they walked, ran and hopped they threw stones into the water, seeing who could make the biggest splash.

In no time at all, it seemed, they came to the place where the massive, ominous shadow of the viaduct fell across the dene and the river flowing through it, and there they stared up in awe at the giant arched structure of brick and concrete that bore upon its back one hundred yards of the twin tracks that formed the coastal railway. Shuddering mightily whenever a train roared overhead, the man-made bridge was a never-ending source of amazement and wonder to them…And a challenge, too.

It was as they were standing on the bank of the slow-moving river, perhaps fifty feet wide at this point, that they spotted on the opposite bank the local village idiot, ‘Wiley Smiley’. Now of course, that was not this unfortunate youth’s real name: he was Miles Bellamy, victim of cruel genetic fates since the ill-omened day of his birth some nineteen years earlier. But everyone called him Wiley Smiley.

He was fishing, in a river that had supported nothing bigger than a minnow for many years, with a length of string and a bent pin. He looked up and grinned vacuously as John threw a stone into the water to attract his attention. The stone went quite close to the mark, splashing water over the unkempt youth where he stood a little way out from the far bank, balanced none too securely on slippery rocks. His vacant grin immediately slipped from his face; he became angry, gesturing awkwardly and mouthing incoherently.

“He’ll come after us,” said David to his brash companion, his voice just a trifle alarmed.

“No he won’t, stupid,” John casually answered, picking up a second, larger stone. “He can’t get across, can he.” It was a statement, not a question, and it was a fact. Here the river was deeper, overflowing from a large pool directly beneath the viaduct in which, in the months ahead, children and adults alike would swim during the hot weekends of summer.

John threw his second missile, deliberately aiming it at the water as close to the enraged idiot as he could without actually hitting him, shouting: “Yah! Wiley Smiley! Trying to catch a whale, are you?”

Wiley Smiley began to shriek hysterically as the stone splashed down immediately in front of him and a fountain of water geysered over his trousers. Threatening though they now were, his angry caperings upon the rocks looked very funny to the boys (particularly since his rage was impotent), and John began to laugh loud and jeeringly. David, not a cruel boy by nature, found his friend’s laughter so infectious that in a few seconds he joined in, adding his own voice to the hilarity.

Then John stooped yet again, straightening up this time with two stones, one of which he offered to his slightly younger companion. Carried completely away now, David accepted the stone and together they hurled their missiles, dancing and laughing until tears rolled down their cheeks as Wiley Smiley received a further dousing. By that time the rocks upon which their victim stood were thoroughly wet and slippery, so that suddenly he lost his balance and sat down backwards into the shallow water.

Climbing clumsily, soggily to his feet, he was greeted by howls of laughter from across the river, which drove him to further excesses of rage. His was a passion which might only find outlet in direct retaliation, revenge. He took a few paces forward, until the water swirled about his knees, then stooped and plunged his arms into the river. There were stones galore beneath the water, and the face of the tormented youth was twisted with hate and fury now as he straightened up and brandished two which were large and jagged.

Where his understanding was painfully slow, Wiley Smiley’s strength was prodigious. Had his first stone hit John on the head it might easily have killed him. As it was, the boy ducked at the last moment and the missile flew harmlessly above him. David, too, had to jump to avoid being hurt by a flying rock, and no sooner had the idiot loosed both his stones than he stooped down again to grope in the water for more.

Wiley Smiley’s aim was too good for the boys, and his continuing rage was beginning to make them feel uncomfortable, so they beat a hasty retreat up the steeply wooded slope of the dene and made for the walkway that was fastened and ran parallel to the nearside wall of the viaduct. Soon they had climbed out of sight of the poor soul below, but they could still hear his meaningless squawking and shrieking.

A few minutes more of puffing and panting, climbing steeply through trees and saplings, brought them up above the wood and to the edge of a grassy slope. Another hundred yards and they could go over a fence and on to the viaduct. Though no word had passed between them on the subject, it was inevitable that they should end up on the viaduct, one of the most fascinating places in their entire world…

The massive structure had been built when first the collieries of the north-east opened up, long before plans were drawn up for the major coast road, and now it linked twin colliery villages that lay opposite each other across the narrow river valley it spanned. Originally constructed solely to accommodate the railway, and used to that end to this very day, with the addition of a walkway, it also provided miners who lived in one village but worked in the other with a short cut to their respective coalmines.

While the viaduct itself was of sturdy brick, designed to withstand decade after decade of the heavy traffic that rumbled and clattered across its triple-arched back, the walkway was a comparatively fragile affair. That is not to say that it was not safe, but there were certain dangers and notices had been posted at its approaches to warn users of the presence of at least an element of risk.

Supported upon curving metal arms—iron bars about one and a half inches in diameter which, springing from the brick and mortar of the viaduct wall, were set perhaps twenty inches apart—the walkway itself was of wooden planks protected by a fence five feet high. There were, however, small gaps where rotten planks had been removed and never replaced, but the miners who used the viaduct were careful and knew the walkway’s dangers intimately. All in all the walkway served a purpose and was reasonably safe; one might jump from it, certainly, but only a very careless person or an outright fool would fall. Still, it was no place for anyone suffering from vertigo…

Now, as they climbed the fence to stand gazing up at those ribs of iron with their burden of planking and railings, the two boys felt a strange, headlong rushing emotion within them. For this day, of course, was
the
day!

It had been coming for almost a year, since the time when John had stood right where he stood now to boast: “One day I’ll swing hand over hand along those rungs, all the way across. Just like Tarzan.” Yes, they had sensed this day’s approach, almost as they might sense Christmas or the beginning of long, idyllic summer holidays…or a visit to the dentist. Something far away, which would eventually arrive, but not yet.

Except that now it had arrived.

“One hundred and sixty rungs,” John breathed, his voice a little fluttery, feeling his palms beginning to itch. “Yesterday, in the playground, we both did twenty more than that on the climbing-frame.”

“The climbing-frame,” answered David, with a naïve insight and vision far ahead of his age, “is only seven feet high. The viaduct is about a hundred and fifty.”

John stared at his friend for a second and his eyes narrowed. Suddenly he sneered. “I might have known it—you’re scared, aren’t you?”

“No,” David shook his head, lying, “but it’ll soon be lunch-time, and—”

“You
are
scared!” John repeated. “Like a little kid. We’ve been practising for months for this, every day of school on the climbing-frame, and now we’re ready. You know we can do it.” His tone grew more gentle, urging: “Look, it’s not as if we can’t stop if we want to, is it? There’s holes in the fence, and those big gaps in the planks.”

“The first gap,” David answered, noticing how very far away and faint his own voice sounded, “is almost a third of the way across…”

“That’s right,” John agreed, nodding his head eagerly. “We’ve counted the rungs, haven’t we? Just fifty of them to that first wide gap. If we’re too tired to go on when we get there, we can just climb up through the gap on to the walkway.”

David, whose face had been turned towards the ground, looked up. He looked straight into his friend’s eyes, not at the viaduct, in whose shade they stood. He shivered, but not because he was cold.

John stared right back at him, steadily, encouragingly, knowing that his smaller friend looked for his approval, his reassurance. And he was right, for despite the fact that their ages were very close, David held him up as some sort of hero. No daredevil, David, but he desperately wished he could be. And now…here was his chance.

He simply nodded—then laughed out loud as John gave a wild whoop and shook his young fists at the viaduct. “Today we’ll beat you!” he yelled, then turned and clambered furiously up the last few yards of steep grassy slope to where the first rung might easily be reached with an upward spring. David followed him after a moment’s pause, but not before he heard the first arch of the viaduct throw back the challenge in a faintly ringing, sardonic echo of John’s cry: “Beat you…beat you…beat you…”

As he caught up with his ebullient friend, David finally allowed his eyes to glance upward at those skeletal ribs of iron above him. They looked solid, were solid, he knew—but the air beneath them was very thin indeed. John turned to him, his face flushed with excitement. “You first,” he said.

“Me?” David blanched. “But—”

“You’ll be up on to the walkway first if we get tired,” John pointed out. “Besides, I go faster than you—and you wouldn’t want to be left behind, would you?”

David shook his head. “No,” he slowly answered, “I wouldn’t want to be left behind.” Then his voice took on an anxious note: “But you won‘t hurry me, will you?”

“’Course not,” John answered. “We’ll just take it nice and easy, like we do at school.”

Without another word, but with his ears ringing strangely and his breath already coming faster, David jumped up and caught hold of the first rung. He swung forward, first one hand to the rung in front, then the other, and so on. He heard John grunt as he too jumped and caught the first rung, and then he gave all his concentration to what he was doing.

Hand over hand, rung by rung, they made their way out over the abyss. Below them the ground fell sharply away, each swing of their arms adding almost two feet to their height, seeming to add tangibly to their weight. Now they were silent, except for an occasional grunt, saving both breath and strength as they worked their way along the underside of the walkway. There were only the breezes that whispered in their ears and the infrequent toot of a motor‘s horn on the distant road.

As the bricks of the wall moved slowly by, so the distance between rungs seemed to increase, and already David’s arms felt tired. He knew that John, too, must be feeling it, for while his friend was bigger and a little stronger, he was also heavier. And sure enough, at a distance of only twenty-five, maybe thirty rungs out towards the centre, John breathlessly called for a rest.

David pulled himself up and hung his arms and his rib-cage over the rung he was on—just as they had practised in the playground—getting comfortable before carefully turning his head to look back. He was shocked to see that John’s face was paler than he’d ever known it, and that his eyes were staring. When John saw David’s doubt, however, he managed a weak grin.

“It’s OK,” he said. “I was—I was just a bit worried about you, that’s all. Thought your arms might be getting a bit tired. Have you—have you looked down yet?”

“No,” David answered, his voice mouse-like.
No
, he said again, this time to himself,
and I’m not going to
! He carefully turned his head back to look ahead, where the diminishing line of rungs seemed to stretch out almost infinitely to the far side of the viaduct.

John had been worried about him. Yes, of course he had; that was why his face had looked so funny, so—shrunken. John thought he was frightened, was worried about his self-control, his ability to carry on. Well, David told himself, he had every right to worry; but all the same he felt ashamed that his weakness was so obvious. Even in a position like that, perched so perilously, David’s mind was far more concerned with the other boy’s opinion of him than with thoughts of possible disaster. And it never once dawned on him, not for a moment, that John might really only be worried about himself…

Almost as if to confirm beyond a doubt the fact that John had little faith in his strength, his courage—as David hung there, breathing deeply, preparing himself for the next stage of the venture—his friend‘s voice, displaying an unmistakable quaver, came to him again from behind: “Just another twenty rungs, that’s all, then you’ll be able to climb up on to the walkway.”