The Green Man (18 page)

I
nodded with pretended ruefulness. The last bit was not true either: if there
was going to be anything out of the ordinary to see in that graveyard, I just
wanted somebody else on hand to see it too. But I had not lied when I said that
Diana was the only one I could ask. That was something substantial in her favour.

‘Has it
got to be at night?’

‘Well,
yes, I think so, don’t you? with people passing by on the road all day long,
and sterling chaps doing things to the soil. It shouldn’t take more than half
an hour or so.’

‘There’s
no curse or anything on it, is there?’

‘Oh,
good God, no, nothing like that. The fellow was just after a safe place to stow
a few things.’

‘Oh,
very well, then. I’ll come along. It might be quite fun.’

‘Out of
the ordinary, anyway. What about tonight? No point in hanging about. Can you
get away?’

‘Of
course I can. I do as I please.’

We had
reached the corner. I arranged to pick her up at half-past midnight at a spot
nearer her house. On the way back home, I stopped at the graveyard and looked
Underhill’s grave over with some care. I could foresee no special difficulty
later: there was nothing in the way of a stone to lift, and the soil, when I
prodded it, seemed to be as light as elsewhere in the area. Whatever the place
might feel like in the dark, at five o’clock on a summer afternoon it was
solidly un-eerie, giving no impression of age or decay, merely of rankness and
dilapidation, heavily overgrown for the most part (though not in Underhill’s
corner), and littered with more ice-cream wrappers and beer-cans than fragments
of headstone.

I drove
to the Green Man, went upstairs and started on a quick drink before bathing and
changing. I sat in a nondescript but comfortable armchair beside the fireplace,
facing the window in the front wall. This had its curtains drawn, but there was
plenty of light from the other Window to my left, where the French girl stood.
Amy’s gramophone was playing some farrago of crashes, bumps and yells from her
room down the passage. As I listened, or endured hearing it, the noise stopped
abruptly. Sipping my Scotch, I waited half-consciously for another record to go
on. How quiet it was by contrast; totally quiet, in fact. And that was not just
odd, it was impossible. No inn is silent for more than a couple of seconds at a
time, except for four or five hours between the last departure to bed and the
stirrings of the first servant. I went to the door and opened it; there was no
sound whatever. When I turned back to the room, I found that it looked
different in some way, different, at any rate, from how it had looked when I
entered it five minutes before. It was darker. But how could that be? Sunlight
was streaming in as brightly as ever from the side window. Ah: it was the other
window that was darker. There was no light at all showing between the curtains
and at their edges. That was impossible, too. Feeling for the moment nothing
but a great curiosity, I hurried over to those curtains and threw them apart.

Outside,
it was night, absolutely dark it seemed at first, as if I had opened my eyes
thousands of fathoms under water, at the sea bed. Then I saw it was not really
as dark as all that: there was a three-quarter moon low in the sky, and no
cloud to speak of. The horizon and the distance were the same as any night,
except that a plantation of conifers just below the sky-line was missing. In
the middle distance, small fields under cultivation replaced the areas of
grassland I had always seen before. And in the foreground, immediately below
me, the hedge lining the road had gone, and the telegraph-poles—of course—had
gone, and the road itself had dwindled to a rough track. Although nothing
moved, it was a living scene, not the equivalent of a still photograph.

I
turned back to the dining-room, which was quite unchanged. My five sculptured
people looked into space as ever, but for the first time I thought I found
something slightly malignant in their impassivity. I crossed to the side
window, and looked out on the familiar daytime landscape. As I watched, a
light-blue sports car, a TR5 by the look of it, emerged from the direction of
the village and moved, accelerating sharply but in complete silence, up the
road towards the house. It did not—of course—come into view at the front window.

I stood
and thought. There was an obvious case for rushing along to Amy and bringing her
here, in the hope of proving to myself and everybody else that I was not seeing
things, or rather that what I saw was really there, or at least that I was not
insane. But I could not subject that child to the terror of either seeing what
I saw, or finding that she and I were seeing differently. And, if I did go down
the passage to her room, I was far from sure that I would find her there, or
anything there that I knew.

At this
point of irresolution, I heard voices below me, male and female, and then an outside
door shutting at the front of the house, but it was not the sound of my front
door. The woman I had twice seen on the landing came into view carrying a
small lantern and set off towards the village—I caught the merest glimpse of
her face, but her general outline and her gait left me in no doubt. Very
faintly, the man’s voice was again audible from the floor beneath, this time
with a different intonation, one of a peculiar monotony, one I could identify,
or, if I tried, name a close parallel to. Yes, a parson, a priest, intoning a
part of the service that is best got over quickly.

The
woman was almost out of my view; I could just see the swaying light of her
lantern. Then I picked up a movement on the other side, from the direction of,
among other things, what at this stage I need only call the wood. A tall and
immensely broad figure came stumping awkwardly along the track, massive legs,
apparently of not quite the same length, pounding away with the implacable
vigour of machinery, long arms pumping in an imperfectly synchronized rhythm.
If it had been human, it would have weighed twenty-five stone at least, but it
was not human: it was made up of lumps of timber, some with thickly ribbed
bark, some with a thin glistening skin, of bundles of twigs and of ropes and
compressed masses of green and dead and rotting leaves. As it drew nearer,
laboriously quickening its pace, I saw that its left thigh, the one nearer to
me, was encrusted with a plate-like fungus, fragments of which fell off at
every stride, and I heard the creaking and rustling of its progress. When it
was exactly level with me, it turned its lumpish, knobbled head towards the
house, and I shut my eyes, having no more desire to see its face now than when
it had appeared to me before, in my hypnagogic vision of two nights ago. At the
same moment, a cry of alarm or loathing came from beneath my feet; I knew that
Underhill was at that very moment (whenever it was) watching from the window of
the dining-room, which was now (my now) closed and empty.

When I
opened my eyes again, the creature was beginning to move out of sight at a
grotesque, lurching trot. I waited, wondering what I would do if this show
simply went on and on, leaving me poised somewhere between Underhill’s time and
mine. If I could manage to get myself into the view I could still see by way of
the side window, perhaps its sound would come back and I should be all right.
But how was I to get there? I had listened, not looked, when I opened the door
a moment earlier, but I had no doubt at all now that this room was the only
part of the house that had not reverted to what it had been nearly three
centuries previously. Through the side window and down the wall seemed the only
possible route. I was beginning to be worried by the thought that that version
of reality might turn out to be a visual hallucination, but then I heard
screaming, not near by, perhaps two hundred yards away, but very clear in the
utter silence, and very loud, and accompanied by another sound, also loud, a
wailing or an unsteady hooting, like something quite often heard but inappropriate
in the context, like a high wind, through trees. I put my fingers in my ears
and went on staring at the now deserted nocturnal landscape in front of me. How
long could I stand its going on being there?

Then,
slightly to left of centre, and almost dazzlingly bright, and instantaneously,
a light or flame sprang up, a yellowish green in colour. After a few moments
another switched itself on, apparently in the sky and of tremendous size, like
a sun, only jigsaw in shape and of a deep blue. There was a longer pause before
two more such flared into being almost together, a second yellowish-green one
near the first and another, larger blue one on the opposite side of the sky.
The former of these, shaped like a fat, slightly jagged pillar, had a thin dark
vertical bar running up nearly through the middle of it. I recognized this, at
first without being able to name it, then saw that it was part of a
telegraph-pole. Further lights appeared at short, irregular intervals, like
splotches of molten metal thrown on to a dark photographic plate. Three of them
coalesced to give me a view of some yards of sun-lit metalled road. I took my
fingers out of my ears. More rapidly than any physical approach would have made
possible, the noise of a car grew in volume outside. I heard men’s voices and
the sound of a front door being opened and shut—my front door. When there were
only a few isolated patches of darkness remaining, the door into the room
opened behind me..

I
turned sharply. Victor galloped up, threw himself at my feet and fell on to his
side. Behind him was Amy. I hurried to her and put my arms round her.

‘What’s
happening, Daddy?’

‘Nothing.
It’s all right. I was just feeling a bit sad.’

‘Oh.
Didn’t you hear the screaming?’

‘The
what?’

‘The
screaming. Somebody in the street, it sounded like. A long way off, but
sounding sort of as if it was near. Didn’t you hear it?’

‘Yes.’
Trying to look and sound calm was such a severe effort that I could hardly speak.
‘But … weren’t you playing your…?’

‘I was
between records and it was all quiet.’

‘It
wasn’t dark outside, was it?’

‘Dark?
No. How could it be?’

‘What
sort of person was it who screamed, do you think?’

‘You
said you heard them.’

‘Yes,’
I said, picking up my whisky and draining it, ’but I want to hear what you
thought.’

‘Oh.
Well … it was a lady. She sounded very frightened.’

‘Oh, I
don’t think it was that, darling. More like just one of the village girls
having a lark.’

‘It
didn’t sound like that to me.’

‘Did
you hear any other sort of noise?’

‘No.
Ooh yes. A sort of … calling-out howling noise, or like someone singing
without any words, just going on and on. And going up and down all the time.
You heard it, didn’t you?’

‘Oh
yes. Just people fooling about.’

Amy
said nothing for a moment, then, ‘Would you like to come and watch Pick of the
Hits with me? It comes on at five forty.’

‘I
don’t think I will, thank you, Ame.’

‘You
said you enjoyed it last time.’

‘Did I?
Yes, but I’m going to be busy tonight. I’ll have to change and get downstairs
as quick as I can.’

‘Okay,
Dad.’

‘I’ll
look in later.’

‘Okay.’

She
went off quite pacifically. For once, I should have preferred an outbreak of
temper. Amy was not reconciled, only preoccupied, and not in any comfortable
way: she knew I had not told her the truth. But how could I say that there was
no need to worry about what she had heard, because it had happened in
1680-something?

Despite
this, and despite feeling fairly thoroughly shaken up by what I had witnessed
and how, I was much relieved. Few people are tough enough to rest solely on an
inner conviction that, in the face of what might be impressive evidence to the
contrary, they are not going mad. In celebration, as much as anything else, I
drank two brimming tumblers of Scotch and water in two minutes and with no
effort. Then I went to have my bath.

Lying
torpidly back in the hot water, I felt almost all right. It was certainly true
that heart and back had kept themselves to themselves since first thing that
morning. Jack Maybury would have had something to say about that, though I
could hardly tell him what had formed a substantial part of the day’s
distractions from egotistical brooding. I felt sober, or rather, since feeling
completely sober had been disagreeable to me for some years, fairly sober. Very
nearly completely all right. The green man. The Green Man. Dozens, perhaps
hundreds, of English pubs and inns bear the name, in reference, I remembered
reading somewhere, either to a Jack-in-the-green, a character in traditional
May Day revels, or merely to a game-keeper, who would formerly have worn some
kind of green suit. Was it possible that my own house, which had been so called
from its beginnings in the late fourteenth century, was a different case, that
Underhill’s supernatural employee had existed even then? If true, to christen
the place after such a creature was an odd way of inviting custom. But an
interesting speculation.

I grew
more torpid. Staring in an unfocused way towards the junction of wall and
ceiling, I saw a small scarlet and green object moving slowly from right to
left. First lazily, then as alertly as I could, I tried to decide what it was. A
fly of some sort, or a moth. But surely there were none of either coloured like
that, not in England. And the thing was not travelling with a fly’s quick
darting motion, such that wings and legs disappear into a round or roundish
dark blob, nor in the un-steady, fluttering style of a moth. The wings of what
I saw— two of them—were beating the air in an easily perceptible slow rhythm,
and, not so easy to make out, its legs—two of them— were tucked up underneath
the body, and there was a neck, and a head. It was a bird. A bird the size of a
fly, or small moth.