No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (23 page)

“A little chap with a floppy black hat and a hump,” Benton patiently, worriedly repeated himself. “He was sitting in the bar corner. Had a pong like a dead rat.”

Joe thought about it for a second, then said: “Yer sure yer got the right pub, guv’? I mean, we gets no tramps or weirdos in ’ere. ’Arry won’t ’ave ’em, will yer, ’Arry?” He directed his question at the barman.

“No, he’s right, sir. I get upset with weirdos. Won’t have them.”

“But…this
is
the Bull & Bush, isn’t it?” Benton almost stammered, gazing wildly about, finding unaccustomed difficulty in speaking.

“That’s right, sir,” answered Harry the barman, frowning heavily now and watching Benton sideways.

“But—”

“Sorry, chief,” the stocky Joe said with an air of finality. “Yer’ve got the wrong place. Must ’ave been some other pub.” Both the speaker and the barman turned away a trifle awkwardly, Benton thought, and he could feel their eyes upon him as he moved dazedly away from the bar towards the door. Again lines remembered of old repeated themselves in his head:

“Here, sir!” cried the barman, suddenly, remembering. “Do you want a beer or not, then?”

“
No!
” Benton snarled. Then, on impulse: “Give it to—to
him
!—when next he comes in…”

Over the next month or so certain changes took place in Benton, changes which would have seemed quite startling to anyone knowing him of old. To begin with, he had apparently broken two habits of very long standing. One: instead of remaining in his compartment aboard the morning train and reading his newspaper—as had been his wont for close on nine years—he was now given to spending the first half hour of his journey peering into the many compartments while wandering up and down the long corridor, all the while wearing an odd, part puzzled, part apologetic expression. Two: he rarely took his lunch at the office any more, but went out walking in the city instead, stopping for a drink and a sandwich at any handy local pub. (But never the Bull & Bush, though he always ensured that his strolling took him close by the latter house; and had anyone been particularly interested, then Benton might have been noticed to keep a very wary eye on the pub, almost as if he had it under observation.)

But then, as summer came on and no new manifestations of Benton’s—
problem
—came to light, he began to forget all about it, to relegate it to that category of mental phenomena known as ‘daydreams’, even though he had known no such phenomena before. And as the summer waxed, so the nagging worry at the back of his mind waned, until finally he convinced himself that his daydreams were gone for good.

But he was wrong…

And if those two previous visitations had been dreams, then the third could only be classified as—nightmare!

July saw the approach of the holiday period, and Benton had long had places booked for himself and his wife at a sumptuously expensive and rather exclusive coastal resort, far from the small Midlands town he called home. They went there every year. This annual ‘spree’ allowed Benton to indulge his normally repressed escapism, when for a whole fortnight he could pretend that he was other than a mere clerk among people who usually accepted his fantasies as fact, thereby reinforcing them for Benton.

He could hardly wait for it to come round, that last Friday evening before the holidays, and when it did he rode home in the commuter special in a state of high excitement. Tomorrow would see him off to the sea and the sun; the cases were packed, the tickets arranged. A good night’s rest now—and then, in the morning…

He was whistling as he let himself in through his front door, but the tone of his whistle soon went off key as he stepped into the hall. Dismayed, he paused and sniffed, his nose wrinkling. Out loud, he said: “Huh! The drains must be off again.” But there was something rather special about that poisonous smell, something ominously familiar; and all of a sudden, without fully realising why, Benton felt the short hairs at the back of his neck begin to rise. An icy chill struck at him from nowhere.

He passed quickly from the hall into the living room, where the air seemed even more offensive, and there he paused again as it came to him in a flash of fearful memory just
what
the awful stench of ordure was, and
where
and
when
he had known it before.

The room seemed suddenly to whirl about him as he saw, thrown carelessly across the back of his own easy chair, a monstrously familiar hat—a floppy hat, black and wide-brimmed!

The hat grew beneath his hypnotized gaze, expanding until it threatened to fill the whole house, his whole mind, but then he tore his eyes away and broke the spell. From the upstairs bedroom came a low, muted sound: a moan of pain—or pleasure? And as an incredibly obscene and now well-remembered chuckling whisper finally invaded Benton’s horrified ears, he threw off shock’s invisible shackles to fling himself breakneck up the stairs.

“Ellen!” he cried, throwing open the bedroom door just as a second moan sounded—
and then he staggered, clutching at the wall for support, as the scene beyond the door struck him an almost physical blow!

The hunchback lay sprawled naked upon Benton’s bed, his malformed back blue-veined and grimy. The matted hair of his head fell forward onto Ellen’s white breasts and his filthy hands moved like crabs over her arched body. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open and panting; her whole attitude was one of complete abandon. Her slender hands clawed spastically at the hunchback’s writhing, scurvy thighs…

Benton screamed hoarsely, clutching wildly at his hair, his eyes threatening to pop from his head, and for an instant time stood still. Then he lunged forward and grabbed at the man, a great power bursting inside him, the strength of both God and the devil in his crooked fingers—but in that same instant the hunchback slipped from the far side of the bed and out of reach. At an almost impossible speed the little man dressed and, as Benton lurched drunkenly about the room, he flitted like a grey bat back across the bed. As he went his face passed close to Ellen’s, and Benton was aware once again of that filthy whispered chuckle as the hunchback sprang to the floor and fled the room.

Mad with steadily mounting rage, Benton hardly noticed the sudden slitting of his wife’s eyes, the film that came down over them like a silky shutter. But as he lunged after the hunchback Ellen reached out a naked leg, deliberately tripping him and sending him flying out onto the landing.

By the time he regained his feet, to lean panting against the landing rail, the little man was at the hall door, his hat once more drooping about grotesque shoulders. He looked up with eyes like malignant jewels in the shadow of that hat, and the last thing that the tormented householder saw as the hunchback closed the door softly behind him was that abhorrent, omniscient wink!

When he reached the garden gate some twoscore seconds later, Benton was not surprised to note the little man’s complete disappearance…

Often, during the space of the next fortnight, Benton tried to think back on the scene which followed immediately upon the hunchback’s departure from his house, but he was never able to resolve it to his satisfaction. He remembered the blind accusations he had thrown, the venomous bile of his words, his wife’s patent amazement which had only served to enrage him all the more, the shock on Ellen’s reddening face as he had slapped her mercilessly from room to room. He remembered her denial and the words she had screamed after locking herself in the bathroom: “Madman, madman!” she had screamed. And then she had left, taking her already packed suitcase with her.

He had waited until Monday—mainly in a vacant state of shock—before going out to a local ironmonger’s shop to buy himself a sharp, long-bladed Italian knife…

It was now the fourteenth day, and still Benton walked the streets. He was grimy, unshaven, hungry, but his resolution was firm. Somewhere,
somewhere
, he would find the little man in the outsize overcoat and black floppy hat, and when he did he would stick his knife to its hilt in the hunchback’s slimy belly and he would cut out the vile little swine’s brains through his loathsomely winking eyes! In his mind’s eye, even as walked the night streets, Benton could
see
those eyes gleaming like jewels, quick and bright and liquid, and faintly in his nostrils there seemed to linger the morbid stench of the hybrid creature that wore those eyes in its face.

And always his mother’s ditty rang in his head:

But no, Benton did
not
wish the little man away; on the contrary, he desperately wanted to find him!

Fourteen days, fourteen days of madness and delirium; but through all the madness a burning purpose had shone out like a beacon. Who, what, why? Benton knew not, and he no longer wanted to know. But somewhere,
somewhere
…

Starting the first Tuesday after that evening of waking nightmare, each morning he had caught the commuter special as of old, to prowl its snakelike corridor and peer in poisonously through the compartment windows; every lunchtime he had waited in a shop doorway across the street from the Bull & Bush until closing time, and in between times he had walked the streets in all the villages between home and the city. Because somewhere,
somewhere
!

“Home.” He tasted the word bitterly. “Home”—hah! That was a laugh! And all this after eleven years of reasonably harmonious married life. He thought again, suddenly, of Ellen, then of the hunchback, then of the two of them together…and in the next instant his mind was lit by a bright flash of inspiration.

Fourteen days—
fourteen days including today
—and this was Saturday night! Where would he be now if this whole nightmare had never happened? Why, he would be on the train with his wife, going home from their holiday!

Could it possibly be that—

Benton checked his watch, his hands shaking uncontrollably. Ten to nine; the nine o’clock train would be pulling into the station in only ten more minutes!

He looked wildly about him, reality crashing down again as he found himself in the back alleys of his home town. Slowly the wild light went out of his eyes, to be replaced by a strangely warped smile as he realised that he stood in an alley only a few blocks away from the railway station…

They didn’t see him as they left the station, Ellen in high heels and a chic outfit, the hunchback as usual in his ridiculous overcoat and floppy black hat. But Benton saw them. They were (it still seemed completely unbelievable) arm in arm, Ellen radiant as a young bride, the little man reeking and filthy; and as Benton heard again that obscene chuckle he choked and reeled with rage in the darkness of his shop doorway.

Instantly the little man paused and peered into the shadows where Benton crouched. Benton cursed himself and shrank back; although the street was almost deserted, he had not wanted his presence known just yet.