The New Uncanny (6 page)

‘How will you spend the rest of Christmas day?’ he asked.

‘Exercising,’ I replied.

‘Exorcising?’

‘Past the school, if you must know.’

‘The school.’ Christie’s face was a mischievous grin. ‘I taught you there once.’

‘I know. You died while reading us a story.’

‘I came in especially, the day after that business with the fox. To teach you all a lesson.’

I watched Possum’s face blacken and bubble, collapsing gradually into soft clear rivers of molten wax.

‘Now that was a game to remember,’ Christie continued. ‘The looks on your faces. You should have seen them.’

‘I’ll be out all day,’ I said, zipping up my coat.

‘Children talk such rubbish.’ The flames began to rise again as he turned over a pile of burning rags. ‘When there’s no one around to reassure them.’

The eyes fell out together, exposing two pallid-looking sockets. Soon, these, too, would disappear.

I had meant to purchase my return ticket, but realised upon reaching the station that there would be no trains leaving until the following day. I wandered for an hour or so until I summoned up enough courage to enter one of the few pubs that were open. There I stomached a strong whiskey and some fatty sandwiches as the sun went down, before heading out once more, away from insufferable partygoers, into the darkness of the surrounding streets.

I gazed into people’s houses through open blinds as I passed. The gaudy house-fronts, plastered with coloured lights and cheap decorations, one after another, left me feeling lost, so I sought darker avenues as I fled the town centre in the direction of my old school.

The ground through the adjacent lane was slippery, as if many people had been rushing along it during the day, and I found myself slowing involuntarily and glancing across at the disparate group of buildings that made up the school. A single lamp lit the area of the playground, exposing the large painted face that marked the area where Christie had chased us, full of life having feigned his sudden heart attack. Someone, I assumed a janitor, was watching television in a small hut on the far side of the concrete field. I stopped for a moment to stare at the small alley in which I had sat alone many times during my final year, attempting to make sense of all that had happened to me. When I heard something enter the lane behind me, I moved on, quickening my pace.

I raced down the stone steps, crossed the old platform and dropped down into the abandoned line, pausing only to adjust my vision once more to the surrounding darkness. I moved off carefully, the noise of my footfalls interrupted only by the soft rush of wind moving through the nearby treetops. It took me longer than usual, but I eventually found the small hidden pathway into the trees and walked along it, noting that the ground here, like the school lane, was wetter and more broken up than before.

I found the place again instinctively, clear as the event still was in my memory, and stood up straight upon the spot, making sure I didn’t slouch or bend my back in any way. I unzipped my coat and drew out the small lunch box I’d filled secretly after Christie had left the house, having failed once again to force open the lounge door. I removed the lid and, one by one, thrust my peeling hands into Possum’s ashes, noting the sharp, unpleasant smell my skin now emitted. Once I was satisfied that the remains were truly soiled, I tipped the powdered mess onto the ground where the man had first shown himself to me, and smeared what was left into the earth, tossing the empty box into a nearby bush, where he’d dragged me.

It was while I was wiping my hands clean with my handkerchief that I heard the dog. It had followed me through the empty station and was nosing through the bushes behind, tracking my scent. I thought of playing dead, but instead strode out into the footpath, holding out the diseased hands he had hated touching. I shrieked loudly at the top of my voice and this time the dirty creature stalking me ran a mile.

I mouthed words into the receiver as my fingers tapped nervously on the dull, metallic surface of the dial pad, flashing blue lights from the distant caravan site reflecting against it. When I looked up again, the policeman who’d come over to watch me hadn’t moved.

‘He put me in his bag,’ I said aloud, to the faint electric buzzing of the dial tone. ‘And took me to his caravan.’

The rain had returned. I peered out across the grass slope, trying to look preoccupied, as he began walking towards me.

‘Always had something on his face,’ I said, starting to sweat. I nudged the door ajar to inhale the fresh sea-air.

‘…he never took it off.’

I hung up.

Foolishly, as the officer reached me, I smiled.

‘On your way,’ he ordered, studying my face. As I walked back to town, one of the their cars followed me home.

Christie was drunk when he opened the door, and laughed openly at the state of my hands.

‘That won’t help you this time.’

I snatched the bottle from him and wandered through into the kitchen, swigging heavily from it as I sat down.

‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Are you now?’ he replied.

‘Thanks for putting me up.’

‘Always a pleasure.’ He grinned inanely, performing an awkward, drunken dance. ‘Always was.’

He began to sing an obscene song.

‘Why don’t you go to bed?’ I snapped, taking another swig from the bottle. I stood up, swaying, and put what was left back in the cupboard beneath the sink.

‘Your present’s in the lounge,’ he said.

I felt like I’d been hit.

‘The lounge?’

‘Sorry everything’s so late.’ He stopped moving long enough to light a cigarette. He appeared to be gasping for breath.

‘They’ve found something up at the site,’ I said.

‘They have indeed.’ He inhaled heavily, and blew the smoke back into my face. ‘I’ll have a car collect you tomorrow.’

Suddenly sheepish, he stumbled off in the direction of the stairs, moving up them much faster than I’d thought he was capable of.

I didn’t go in immediately, as the whiskey had made me feel nauseous. I smoked a couple of cigarettes and listened for a while to Christie crashing about in my room above.

When I did finally venture into the lounge, unlocked for the first time in thirty years, I noticed that our tree remained in exactly the same position it had stood on the day Christie first arrived. It was still bare, all its decorations having been burned ceremoniously by him in the weeks following my bereavement. Now, instead, something horribly familiar sat at the top, where my Daddy had once lifted me to place the fairy.

It was the man’s dog mask, and although all I could now see through its cruel eyeholes was the damp wall beyond, I realised that it belonged to Christie, and that he’d worn it here with me all these years, waiting for my courage to awaken.

And below, beneath the tree, was my present, wrapped up in newspapers and tied at the top with an ancient ribbon. It was a large, odd-looking object, bearing an old gift tag addressed to me that hung, quite still, from a small thread of dull, red cotton.

As I got down on my knees and crawled towards the parcel, the thread began to twitch and twist. A faint rustling noise sounded from the wrapping, where the taut sheets had begun to bulge gently back and forth, as though something trapped beneath them were beginning to breathe. When its long leg burst through the paper and pawed violently at the carpet in front, teeming with life, I rushed forward, eager to unwrap the rest.

HIS MOTHER HAD died when he was born. His mother had been young and at the end of a long and very hard labour, made more exhausting by the size of the baby’s head. The mid-wife had acted promptly, gathering in the baby and carrying it away. She had washed and dressed it, before bringing it back to the mother, with a delicate lawn and lace bonnet framing its sweet little face. The mother had taken the child in her arms and smiled, though wearily; but she had made no apparent attempt to count its toes, fingers, eyes and mouths, and after a moment the midwife had turned away to her immediate duties. When she turned back the mother was dead; her face was frozen in a strange rictus, which might have been the consequence of a sudden sharp pain or might have been terror. The midwife, a woman of sturdy good sense and addicted to neither gin nor gossip, deftly massaged the mother’s face back into a more seemly expression and closed her large blue eyes forever.

His father, a hero of the nation, loved admired and honoured, but now retired to his family home in the mountains, grew gentle and sad. He spent most of his time walking in the high hills above the forest or in his library where he was slowly but steadily compiling a taxonomy of the local flora and fauna. He took tender but perhaps slightly distanced care of his only son. He created a pleasure palace for the child – his own small suite of rooms, opening through large airy glass doorways onto a pleasant shaded portico and beyond that a delightful secluded garden with high walls, climbable trees and a pool designed for swimming in. At considerable expense, and to the irritation of the local community, he employed the midwife as a permanent nanny and found a blind but nimble servant to assist her.

The child grew, grew strong and straight and healthy. When he was old enough his father would sometimes take him up into the forests and the mountains beyond the forests where he learned the names of all the butterflies and many of the flowers. Sometimes at night they would climb together onto the roof of the house and watch the stars, and his father taught him to trace and see the patterns of the noble constellations and told him the ancient Greek stories that gave the patterns their names.

The Christmas that he was eight, his father gave him a train set and together they built and developed it. When it grew too extensive for the nursery floor, his father opened up the attics and they created a whole little world there, with electric signals and tiny model towns; and model mountains with tunnels through them, so that the boy could wait in eager anticipation for the engine to emerge from the darkness and sound its miniature horn. They made and remade ever more complicated timetables and were anxious that the trains should run on time, and not crash into each other at the points.

Each evening, after his bath, and when he was all clean and warm and ready for bed, his father would come to tuck him up and give him his good night kisses, one on each cheek and one very gentle special one on the back of his head. Then his father would pull up the hood of his pyjamas, tie the strings and say, ‘God bless and keep you, little dark eyes,’ and the boy would snuggle down scarcely conscious of his own happiness.

He was twelve when he found out. One morning Nanny woke up sick – not very sick, but with a feverish headache and heavy eyes. When she did not go to the kitchen to collect the breakfast the housekeeper foolishly sent one of the younger maids through with the tray. The boy was already up, hungry and eager, though of course properly concerned about nanny. He was sitting cross-legged on the sofa reading a book. The maid plonked the tray down on the little table by the window and then stood there, fidgeting. The boy did not often see people other than Daddy and Nanny and the blind servant, and he was not sure how to behave. He smiled at the girl. He had a very sweet smile, like his father’s but younger and more carefree. She smiled back. She was not much older than he was and the differences between them, obvious to grown ups, were nearly invisible to them.

He said, ‘Hello.’

She bobbed a sort of half-curtsey and said, ‘Hello’ back.

There was a pause, in which he smiled some more and she fidgeted some more.

But in the end she could not resist. For fourteen years she had heard the talk and the secret murmurs, because no respect or even love for their Squire is going to keep his tenantry from gossip about him and his, from speculation and a mild mannered sort of malice. She was curious on her own behalf, and more tempted yet by the stir she will create in the servants’ hall at dinner. And he looked so sweet, with his huge dark eyes and a smile like his father’s. And she might never have another chance.

‘Go on,’ she said, ‘show us.’

He almost turned his book towards her, assuming she wanted to see the picture, but there was something, something else; even with his negligible social skills he knew there was something else.

‘Show you what?’ he asked, but still pleasantly, almost in his father’s kindly style, which unfortunately made her bolder.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘it.’

The new pause was longer; he really did not know and she, better attuned, as all servants are, to the nuances of social meaning realised that he really did not know. She had gone too far. She was embarrassed. But her shame made her even bolder.

‘You know,’ she said again, ‘The face, the other face; the back of your head.’

Instinctively he lifted his hand to the back of his head. Through the soft flannelette of his pyjama hood, he felt the back of his head lumpy, then moving. His hand was frozen for a moment. Then he felt something bite sharply into the fleshy pad at the bottom of his thumb.

He screamed.

Suddenly Nanny was standing in the door, her hair down, grey and straggling as neither of them had ever seen it, her face flushed with her fever and fury.

‘Be quiet,’ she said in a commanding tone, and then losing her grip on her anger, ‘Be quiet, you evil, wicked girl. Go away. Go away.’

Sobbing, the little maid ran from the room and the boy and his nanny listened to her clogs go rattling going down the passage.

‘Nanny?’ he said, and had she been well and wakeful it might yet have been alright; she might have given him a cuddle and he would have shown her his hand and she could have magicked a pin out of his pyjama hood and told him she was a silly old nanny for leaving it there. But the headache was stronger than her wisdom and all she wanted was her bed.

‘It was nothing, darling,’ she said quickly, ‘nothing at all. Just a silly girl. A very naughty little girl, probably trying to be funny. We won’t be seeing her again. Now eat up your breakfast and go and play in the garden.’