Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror (9 page)

'Excellent.' He flexed his long bony fingers, his face becoming a mask of seriousness once more. 'Excellent . . .'

It was a crisp, bright October morning. Yellow and brown leaves were slowly falling through the chill air. Frost shimmered in the shadows.

A boy called Simon Hawkins leaned on the cold damp wall, staring at the old woman in the garden beyond. Though Simon could see her, she could not see him, for Old Mother Tallow was blind.

The children in the village called Old Mother Tallow a witch and dared each other to knock on her door. None had even mustered the nerve to enter her garden. On Halloween they threw eggs at her house and ran away. Simon had wandered there in a moment of boredom to see if blind Old Mother Tallow was up to anything exciting. It seemed unlikely.

She wore a grey coat with a thick shawl over that. A heavy dress fell all the way to her feet, the edge of which was soaking up the dampness from the grass. She wore black boots and fingerless gloves. She had a woollen bonnet on her head and her face was red with the cold.

The old woman was examining one of four old apple trees in front of the house. Simon studied her with the same sort of fascination he would were she a bee or an ant going about its business.

She was running her sinewy fingers over the trunk and branches with one hand while opening and closing a pair of secateurs with the other. She reached a point at the end of one branch and raised the secateurs, closing the blades round a twig and cutting into it. As she snipped through it a flock of redwings took flight from a nearby holly tree.

'Who's there?' she said suddenly, making Simon jump. Her voice was low and whispered and yet it seemed to crack like a whip in the silence of the garden. Simon did not answer.

'Come,.' she said, without looking round. 'I may be blind, but I'm not deaf - or stupid. If you have come to frighten an old woman, then shame on you.'

'My name is . . . Martin,.' said Simon.

'
Martin
, is it?' said the old woman with what sounded to Simon like doubt in her voice. But how could it be doubt? How could she know any different? 'And what do you want, Martin?'

'What are you doing?' he said.

'Pruning,.' said the old woman. 'I am pruning my apple trees. If I did not prune them they would not give me such delicious apples. They would waste all that energy growing new branches and leaves. They need to be tamed.' As she said the word 'tamed', the secateurs yawned open and quickly snapped shut.

'Now I ask you again: what do you want?'

'Nothing,.' he said defensively.

'Nothing, is it?' she said. 'I know you children and your greedy clutching little fingers.' Simon was a little taken aback by the sudden venom in the old woman's voice.

'I'm not doing anything,.' he said.

'Then go away.'

Simon did not move.

'Go away,.' she said again.

'Why should I?' said Simon. 'I'm not doing any harm. I'm not even in your garden. I'm not scared of you.' It was a brave boast that was not helped by the tremble in his voice.

The old woman turned and began to walk towards him. Her eyes were as frosted as the grass on which she trod. There was something so horrible about the gaze of those clouded marble-like eyes that Simon found he could not bear it. He pushed himself off the wall and ran down the hill back to the village, laughing nervously to himself when he was well clear.

Simon was bored. He and his mother had recently moved to the village from the city and to the house that had been his mother's childhood home. Simon's grandfather - his mother's father - had died, leaving them the house and the hardware shop that went with it. Simon's own father had been killed fighting for his country in a far-off land when Simon was a baby and their life had not always been easy. His mother thought the move might give them both a new lease of life.

'Do you know anything about Old Mother Tallow?' said Simon as he and his mother ate lunch.

'Old Mother Tallow?' said Simon's mother with surprise.

'Yes,.' said Simon. 'The blind old bat up the hill.'

'Simon, really,.' said his mother. 'Up at the top of Friar's Lane, you mean? But she can't still be alive.

Why she must have been a hundred when I was a little girl. Mind you, she can't have been, because my mother could remember teasing her when
she
was a girl.' His mother stopped and stared into space. 'Wait a moment. That cannot be right, can it?'

'Well, there's an old lady there,.' said Simon. 'And she's blind and that's what everybody calls her.'

'Maybe it is a daughter,.' she said. 'How odd. They used to say she was a witch, you know.'

'They still do,.' said Simon with a grin.

'We were terrified of her,.' said his mother. 'We used to call her names and run off.' She shook her head at the memory of it and blushed a little. 'Poor woman. How horrible children can be.'

'Speak for yourself,.' said Simon, grabbing an apple from the bowl and taking a bite. 'Why were you so scared of her?'

'Because of her being a witch, of course,.' she said, laughing to herself. 'Honestly, the nonsense we used to come out with! They used to say she was immensely rich - though if she was, goodness knows why she was living alone in that tiny cottage - and that she captured children who came into her garden and ate them.'

'Ate them?' said Simon, chuckling.

'Yes,.' said his mother with a mock growl. 'Ate them or threw them down a well or something awful! We were terrified! You know, I can still see her standing in the front garden with those two creepy old apple trees beside her. They used to say that the apples were delicious, but how anyone knew I don't know, because they also said that once you took one step on to the lawn she flew at you like a crow and pecked out your heart.'

Simon laughed and his mother couldn't help but join in. 'I mean it,.' she said. 'I was very scared of her. The way she seemed to look through you with those awful eyes of hers.'

'But she's blind,.' said Simon.

'I know,.' said his mother with a shudder. 'It makes no sense, but there you are. I had nightmares about her.'

'There, there,.' said Simon. 'I'll protect you.'

'You won't go up there, will you?' she said.

'Scared I'm going to get pecked?'

'Of course not,.' she said, slapping him on the arm. 'But you won't, will you?'

'No, Mother,.' he said with a sigh. 'I won't. I promise.'

Simon was not quite the child his mother took him for, however, and this promise, like so many other promises he had made, meant little. Simon's ears had pricked up at the mention of the idea that the old lady might be rich. He was sick of stealing pennies from his mother's purse. He was tired of hearing how little money his father had left them.

The following day he walked up Friar's Lane once again. He raised himself up on to the wall and swung his legs over. He sat there looking at the cottage with its broken-backed roof and lichen-covered tiles, its tiny windows peeping out of climbing roses and honeysuckles, and the unkempt lawn with the gnarled, arthritic old apple trees, twisted and deformed by years of pruning.

Simon smiled when he thought of his mother and her nightmares about this twee old cottage and the crabby old crone who lived there. He stretched out a toe towards the lawn and rested his foot there. A blackbird suddenly fluttered past and he snatched his foot back.

Simon shook his head at his own childish jitters, took a deep breath and hopped down as silently as he could. As soon as his feet hit the grass, the old woman appeared at the garden door, like a spider reacting to a movement in her web.

'Who's there?' she said.

Simon held his breath. Old Mother Tallow edged out of the door, cocking her head to one side with the effort of listening. Her eyes seemed to glow like cat's eyes.

Then it occurred to Simon that perhaps the old woman did this every time she left the house, merely as a precaution, and that it was a coincidence that he was there. She was an old blind woman living on her own. It made sense to check that everything was all right before she left the house.

After all, how could she have heard him from inside? In any case, she seemed satisfied there was no one there and began to busy herself at one of the apple trees. When she snipped through a twig, birds took flight once again - wood pigeons this time - noisily wheeling overhead.

The old woman had left the door open and Simon saw his chance. The grass was long and he found that he could move in silence. His route to the door took him horribly near the glass-eyed old woman, but she seemed oblivious to him as she squeezed the secateurs in her bony hands and cut through another twig. The blades flashed in the sunlight and slipped through the flesh of the wood with a loud SNIP and there was something hideous about the relish Old Mother Tallow seemed to take in this cutting. Simon turned away and walked on.

As he walked through the front door he was filled with relief at having eluded the old lady, but this feeling was immediately replaced by one of mounting unease.

He was now in a small house whose layout he did not know. What if the old woman came back inside? What if she tried to attack him? He thought of the secateurs and their flashing blades. What if she was as mad as everybody said?

Simon shocked himself with the matter-of-fact way he picked up the walking stick, but he reassured himself that hitting the old woman would be a last resort. A weapon made him feel more relaxed and he began to look around.

What Simon saw was a disappointment. If Old Mother Tallow was rich, she did not seem to spend her money. The furniture was old and threadbare. A layer of dust and cobwebs covered everything in sight.

The cottage may have looked like a fairy-tale witch's house from the outside, but inside it was mundanely shabby. There was a smell of damp and though a fire burnt in the lounge grate, it seemed colder inside than out. Simon could see his own breath and rubbed his hands together to get some warmth back to his fingers.

He looked around the tiny rooms downstairs with a growing sense that he was unlikely to find anything of value. He lifted cushions from chairs and looked in vases and under ornaments, but there was no sign of any cash or valuables. The kitchen was equally disappointing.

He crept upstairs. He had heard about old ladies stashing money under their mattresses, but not Old Mother Tallow. A search under her sagging mattress unearthed nothing but a hairgrip and two dead woodlice.

Wardrobes, chests of drawers and linen baskets all failed to deliver any riches. Even a promising-looking jewellery box held only a tinny-looking old brooch. Simon caught sight of himself in the dressing-table mirror as he rooted through the old woman's things and a tiny pang of guilt troubled him for a second, but he shook it off with a smile.

Simon crept downstairs again and was about to leave when he noticed in the little hall by the door there was a strange wooden box on a low polished table. It startled him and made him look about and listen for Old Mother Tallow, because he was sure it had not been there before. But when he peeked through a window, the old lady was standing in the same patch in the garden, snipping away at the tree.

The box was made of a reddish wood and seemed to be the only thing in the house not covered in a layer of dust, as if the old woman polished it every time she walked past.

Simon picked it up. It was warm to the touch. There was a carving on the lid, a carving of the front of the house he was in with the lawn and the apple trees. He noticed that when the box was carved there had been five apple trees rather than the four outside. There was even a carving of Old Mother Tallow herself, pruning the trees just as she was doing in the garden outside.

It was a curious thing. The scene was at once crudely rendered and amazingly realistic. As he moved it in his hand, the light played across the polished surface and gave the strange sensation of movement, as if Old Mother Tallow's movements in the garden were being mirrored in the wooden box.

Simon opened it up and whistled silently to himself. The box was packed with crisp £1 notes. They looked brand new, as if they had never been touched. So it was true. The old witch really did have a secret hoard. Simon grinned wolfishly.