The Nonesuch and Others (2 page)

“Hell, no!” he snorted. “You can fold your arms on your elbows, can’t you? Or your legs on your knees? You can bend from the waist and touch your toes? Well I sure can! Their joints may be a little different from ours, that’s all—maybe like the joints of certain insects. Or maybe not. I mean, their science is different from ours, too. Perhaps they fold and unfold themselves the same way they do it to other things—except it doesn’t do them any harm. I dunno…”

“What?” I asked, puzzled. “What other things do they fold?”

“I’ll get to that later,” he told me darkly, shivering. “Where was I?”

“There he was,” I answered, “all fifteen foot of him, standing in the shadows. And then—?”

“A car comes along the street, sudden like!” Bill grabbed my arm.

“Wow!” I jumped. “He’s in trouble, right?”

Barmy Bill shook his head. “No way. The car’s lights are on full, but that doesn’t trouble the thin man. He’s not stupid. The car goes by, lighting up the walls with its beam, and where the thin man stood in shadows against the wall of his thin house—”

“Yes?”

“A drainpipe, all black and shiny!”

I sat back. “Pretty smart.”

“You better believe they’re smart. Then, when it’s dark again, out he steps. And
that’s
something to see! Those giant strides—but quick, almost a flicker. Blink your eyes and he’s moved—and between each movement his legs coming together as he pauses, and nothing to see but a pole. Up to the lamppost he goes, seems almost to melt into it, hides behind it. And
plink
!—out goes the light. After that…in ten minutes he had the whole street black as night in a coalmine. And yours truly lying there in somebody’s garden, scared and shivering and dying to throw up.”

“And that was it?”

Barmy Bill gulped, tossed back his gin and poured himself another. His eyes were huge now, his skin white where it showed through his whiskers. “God, no—that wasn’t it—there was more! See, I figured later that I must have got myself drunk deliberately that time—so’s to go up there and spy on ’em. Oh, I know that sounds crazy now, but you know what it’s like when you’re mindless drunk. Jesus, these days I can’t
get
drunk! But these were early days I’m telling you about.”

“So what happened next?”

“Next—he’s coming back down the street! I can hear him:
click
, pause,
click
, pause…
click,
pause, stilting it along the pavement—and I can see him in my mind’s eye, doing his impression of a lamppost with every pause. And suddenly I get this feeling, and I sneak a look round. I mean, the frontage of this garden I’m in is so tiny, and the house behind me is—”

I saw it coming. “Jesus!”

“A thin house,” he confirmed it, “right!”

“So now
you
were in trouble.”

He shrugged, licked his lips, trembled a little. “I was lucky, I suppose. I squeezed myself into the hedge, lay still as death. And
click
, pause…
click
, pause, getting closer all the time. And then—behind me, for I’d turned my face away—the slow creaking as the door of the thin house swung open! And the second thin person coming out and, I imagine, unfolding him or herself, and the two of ’em standing there for a moment, and me near dead of fright.”

“And?”

“
Click-click
, pause;
click-click
,
pause;
click-click
—and away they go. God only knows where they went, or what they did, but me?—I gave ’em ten minutes start and then got up, and ran, and stumbled, and forced my rubbery legs to carry me right out of there. And I haven’t been back. Why, this is the closest I’ve been to Barchington since that night, and too close by far!”

I waited for a moment but he seemed done. Finally I nodded. ‘Well, that’s a good story, Bill, and—”

“I’m not finished!” he snapped. “And it’s not just a story…”

“There’s more?”

“Evidence,” he whispered. “The evidence of your own clever-bugger eyes!”

I waited.

“Go to the window,” said Bill, “and peep out through the curtains. Go on, do it.”

I did.

“See anything funny?”

I shook my head.

“Blind as a bat!” he snorted. “Look at the street lights—or the absence of lights. I showed you once tonight. They’ve nicked all the bulbs.”

“Kids,” I shrugged. “Hooligans. Vandals.”

“Huh!” Bill sneered. “Hooligans, here? Unheard of. Vandals? You’re joking! What’s to vandalize? And when did you last see kids playing in these streets, eh?”

He was right. “But a few missing light bulbs aren’t hard evidence,” I said.

“All
right
!”
he pushed his face close and wrinkled his nose at me. “Hard evidence, then.” And he began to tell me the final part of his story…

Three

Cars!” Barmy Bill snapped, in that abrupt way of his. “They can’t bear them. Can’t say I blame ’em much, not on that one. I hate the noisy, dirty, clattering things myself. But tell me: have you noticed anything a bit queer—about cars, I mean—in these parts?”

I considered for a moment, replied: “Not a hell of a lot of them.”

“Right!” He was pleased. “On the rest of the Hill, nose to tail. Every street overflowing. ’Specially at night when people are in the pubs or watching the telly. But here? Round Barchington and the Larches and a couple of other streets in this neighbourhood? Not a one to be seen!”

“Not true,” I said. “There are two cars in this very street right now. Look out the window and you should be able to see them.”

“Bollocks!” said Bill.

“Pardon?”

“Bollocks!” he repeated. “Them’s not
cars
!
Rusting old bangers. Spokewheels and all. Twenty, thirty years they’ve been trundling about. The thin people are
used
to them. It’s the big shiny new ones they don’t like. And so, if you park your car up here overnight—trouble!”

“Trouble?” But here I was deliberately playing dumb. Here I knew what he meant well enough. I’d seen it for myself: the occasional shiny car, left overnight, standing there the next morning with its tyres slashed, windows smashed, lamps kicked in.

He could see it in my face. “You know what I mean, all right. Listen, couple of years ago there was a Flash Harry type from the city used to come up here. There was a barmaid he fancied in The Railway—and she was taking all he could give her. Anyway, he was flash, you know? One of the gang lads and a rising star. And a flash car to go with it. Bullet-proof windows, hooded lamps, reinforced panels—the lot. Like a bloody tank, it was. But—” Bill sighed.

“He used to park it up here, right?”

He nodded. “Thing was, you couldn’t threaten him, you know what I mean? Some people you can threaten, some you shouldn’t threaten, and some you mustn’t. He was one you mustn’t. Trouble is, so are the thin people.”

“So what happened?”

“When they slashed his tyres, he lobbed bricks through their windows. And he had a knowing way with him. He tossed ’em through thin house windows. Then one night he parked down on the corner of Barchington. Next morning—they’d drilled holes right through the plate, all over the car. After that—he didn’t come back for a week or so. When he did come back…well, he must’ve been pretty mad.”

“What did he do?”

“Threw something else—something that made a bang! A damn big one! You’ve seen that thin, derelict shell on the corner of Barchington? Oh, it was him, sure enough, and he got it right, too. A thin house. Anybody in there, they were goners. And
that
did it!”

“They got him?”

“They got his car! He parked up one night, went down to The Railway, when the bar closed took his lady-love back to her place, and in the morning—”

“They’d wrecked it—his car, I mean.”

“Wrecked it? Oh, yes, they’d done that. They’d
folded
it!”

“Come again?”

“Folded it!” he snapped. “Their funny science. Eighteen inches each way, it was. A cube of folded metal. No broken glass, no split seams, no splintered plastic. Folded all neat and tidy. An eighteen-inch cube.”

“They’d put it through a crusher, surely?” I was incredulous.

“Nope—folded.”

“Impossible!”

“Not to them. Their funny science.”

“So what did he do about it?”

“Eh? Do? He looked at it, and he thought, ‘What if I’d been sitting in the bloody thing?’ Do? He did what I would do, what you would do. He went away. We never did see him again.”

The half-bottle was empty. We reached for the beers. And after a long pull I said: “You can kip here if you want, on the floor. I’ll toss a blanket over you.”

“Thanks,” said Barmy Bill, “but no thanks. When the beer’s gone I’m gone. I wouldn’t stay up here to save my soul. Besides, I’ve a bottle of my own back home.”

“Sly old sod!” I said.

“Daft young bugger!” he answered without malice. And twenty minutes later I let him out. Then I crossed to the windows and looked out at him, at the street all silver in moonlight.

He stood at the gate (where it should be) swaying a bit and waving up at me, saying his thanks and farewell. Then he started off down the street.

It was quiet out there, motionless. One of those nights when even the trees don’t move. Everything frozen, despite the fact that it wasn’t nearly cold. I watched Barmy Bill out of sight, craning my neck to see him go, and—

Across the road, three lampposts—where there should only be two! The one on the left was OK, and the one to the far right. But the one in the middle? I had never seen that one before. I blinked bleary eyes, gasped, blinked again. Only
two
lampposts!

Stinking drunk—drunk as a skunk—utterly boggled!

I laughed as I tottered from the window, switched off the light, staggered into my bedroom. The barmy old bastard had really had me going. I’d really started to believe. And now the booze was making me see double—or something. Well, just as long as it was lampposts and not pink elephants! Or thin people! And I went to bed laughing.

…But I wasn’t laughing the next morning.

Not after they found him, old Barmy Bill of Barrows Hill. Not after they called on me to identify him.

“Their funny science,” he’d called it. The way they folded things. And Jesus, they’d folded him, too! Right down into an eighteen-inch cube. Ribs and bones and skin and muscles—the lot. Nothing broken, you understand, just folded. No blood or guts or anything nasty—nastier by far
because
there was nothing.

And they’d dumped him in a garbage-skip at the end of the street. The couple of local youths who found him weren’t even sure what they’d found, until they spotted his face on one side of the cube. But I won’t go into that…

Well, I moved out of there just as soon as I could—do you blame me?—since when I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. Fact is, I haven’t thought of much else.

And I suppose old Bill was right. At least I hope so. Things he’d told me earlier, when I was only half listening. About them being the last of their sort, and Barrows Hill being the place they’ve chosen to sort of fade away in, like a thin person’s ‘elephant’s graveyard,’ you know?

Anyway, there are no thin people here, and no thin houses. Vandals aplenty, and so many cars you can’t count, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Lampposts, yes, and posts to hold up the telephone wires, of course. Lots of them. But they don’t bother me anymore.

See, I know
exactly
how many lampposts there are. And I know exactly
where
they are, every last one of them. And God help the man who ever plants a new one without telling me first!