The Green Man (27 page)

It was
from hereabouts that the next development came. There was a stirring of some
sort, and two obscure shapes started to emerge, moving with the foreshortened
effect I had noticed earlier, so that the sideways component of their progress
was unnaturally emphasized. As they moved, the illumination died down, but
enough remained for me to be able to make out a sort of quadruped about the
size of a small pig, and secondly a biped creature with the same kind of skin.
It was of the rough general shape of a man, but it was not a man, nor any kind
of ape or monkey.. I could not name what it and its companion were. The flesh
of both looked soft and loose, and was indeed becoming softer and looser, was
beginning to disintegrate and at the same time form itself anew. Limbs, if they
could any longer be called limbs, dwindled and disappeared while fresh
appendages came bulging, bursting, twisting out of the main trunk, which
itself continuously changed shape in both cases. At one moment the two entities
were united by a swelling rope of what could have been living matter, at the
next the larger of the two started to divide about its longer axis. Either the
whole sight was a reproduction, by another intelligence, of the hypnagogic
hallucinations I was subject to, or I was imposing it on top of whatever
illusions were now being directed at me, this while fully awake and with my
eyes open. I felt my equanimity wearing thin.

The
accompanying noise, though as before destitute of pitch or any rhythm, still
retained the capacity to vary in volume. In the quieter moments I could just
make out Underhill’s voice, speaking in a monotone—the liturgical monotone I
had heard coming from this part of the house during my night-vision of the
previous afternoon. I looked down at the table in front of me. The silver
figure had gone.

This
was much worse than anything that had happened so far. It was time to make a
move. When I got to my feet, immediate and complete darkness descended, and at
the same moment the noise changed to the beating of many wings and a shrill,
cawing clamour, and the smell changed to that of an aviary or hen-house, though
intolerably intensified. After a few seconds, the air round my head was full of
tiny scarlet-green birds, scores of them, evidently phosphorescent, for they
were as bright as if the sun had been shining on them, and yet there was no
external source of light. Clacking their tiny beaks, they wheeled and plunged
and dived at my face, striking me head-on in the cheekbone, at the point of the
chin, over the eye, though I felt nothing, and then vanishing, winking out like
a snuffed flame, though their number did not grow less. I closed my eyes, and
they were there as before, put my hands over my closed eyes, and they were
there, stuck my fingers in my ears, and the cawing and clacking went on. I had
no breath to scream; from moment to moment I stove to work out where the door
was, but each time one of them flew into my face I had to stop and start again.
With my orientation hopelessly lost, I heard, through it all, Underhill
laughing, and instantly found myself standing next to the ripped-up area of
floor in my dining-room upstairs, putting the crucifix in my pocket (an action
I had at once forgotten). The next instant I was back among the birds, but with
my hand still, or again, holding the crucifix. With the birds redoubling their
attacks and positively shrieking, I threw it where Underhill’s voice had seemed
to come from, and heard it strike wall or floor.

Slowly
and steadily, what was happening to me changed. The birds began to confine
themselves to the middle and left-hand side of my vision, and were growing
oddly flattened, though they flew at me as before, while their noises progressively
deteriorated in quality, with the precise effect of a wireless receiver being
detuned a little at a time. Now the birds were gathered in a narrow and
narrowing sector to my left, becoming wafer-like, as though the screen on which
they were projected were being turned away from me towards the end-on position,
and I could hear only a faint and undifferentiated roaring. Soon I was looking
at a vertical line of flecked scarlet-and-green light, which faded to nothing
in the silence. I was standing alone in the middle of the room, in darkness but
for the moon through the windows.

I
realized that I must have turned off my table-lamp at some earlier point, and
started to move to the switches by the door. On the way, my eye was caught by a
gleam of metal on the floor in the corner where Underhill had first appeared. I
picked up, not the crucifix, but the silver figure, and at once heard, from
outside, a faint but familiar and dreadful rustling sound off to the right, and
Amy’s voice calling me from the opposite direction.

I ran
out into the hall, to the front door, not stopping to turn on any lights, but
my fingers knew the bolts, and I was out of the house almost immediately. Amy
was about a hundred yards away down the road, wearing white pyjamas and carrying
something in her arms: I assumed it was Victor. As she walked slowly towards
the village, she was looking about her— in search of me? From the other side,
that bizarre, rough-hewn, malformed shape was approaching, stiffly and
clumsily, but steadily, with reserves in hand, and I remembered how I had seen
its phantom quicken up as it drew near the house, and with what eventual
result. This, however, was the reality, not the phantom, and I knew now, had
known before I reached the front door, what Underhill’s second purpose had
been—not merely to survive death, nor to subdue a living person to his will,
but to reach from beyond the grave to bring about what I would see enacted
within a minute, unless I could prevent it.

The
creature was jolting along at this stage in a version of a brisk walk,
crackling as it moved, It looked larger than before, but also less compact,
perhaps even yet not having achieved its final form. Evidently it had so far
not seen me. I had lost three or four seconds already: I started forward and
ran at top speed towards Amy along the grass verge, as silently as I could, but
she heard me before I was within twenty yards of her, and began to turn. I
shouted to her not to look round—in vain: she saw me, and then the green man,
and her face went stretched and rigid. I reached her.

‘What’s
that, Daddy?’

‘It’s
somebody bad. Now you put Victor down and run into the village as fast as you
can and just shout and shout till people come.’

‘What
will you do?’

‘Don’t
worry about me,’ I said, with a rustling, creaking jog-trot behind me. ‘Off you
go at once. Run.’

I faced
about. The thing was coming up fast now, its legs driving powerfully and arms
crooked, still accelerating. If it were left to itself, Amy would never reach
the village. I stood in its path and marked out a place in the left groin that
seemed made only of twigs and creepers, so perhaps vulnerable to a fist.. I saw
its face now for the first time, an almost flat surface of smooth dusty bark
like the trunk of a Scotch pine, with irregular eye-sockets in which a fungoid
luminescence glimmered, and a wide grinning mouth that showed more than a
dozen teeth made of jagged stumps of rotting wood: I had seen a version of that
face before. Then the green man was upon me, its dissimilar arms held out
before it, and that cry as of wind through foliage issuing from its mouth,
exultant as much as menacing. Before I could close with it, it swung a forearm
without breaking its stride and dealt me a blow across the chest that flung me
to the ground a couple of yards off. I was not knocked out, but for the moment
all strength had left me.

Amy had
retreated a little way, then stopped and turned, and between her and the pounding
bulk of the creature stood Victor in a posture of defiance, his back arched and
tail swollen. A kick from a wooden foot smashed into him, with a snapping of
twigs or bones, and he went skidding, a lifeless bundle, across the road and
into the ditch. Then
Amy
turned again and ran, ran in earnest, in
long-legged strides, but even when she reached her best speed, she was not
gaining on the green man. By now I was aware of what I still held in my hand,
and saw what it was I must do, and pushed myself to my feet and ran in my turn
down the road towards the graveyard. Ahead of me, the pursuit continued; from
where I was I could not judge the distance between the one and the other, and
did not try, but drew back my arm and hurled the silver figure over the graveyard
wall. I heard it touch ground, and immediately that misshapen being came
lurching to a halt, did more than halt, was bowed down, was borne backwards by
some immense force, step by step, shaking and flailing, while portions of it
detached themselves and came whirling towards me, around me and over my head,
leaf, twig, bough, stump, so that I crouched down and crossed my arms over my
face, ducking instinctively as a stout length of wood swished past, and again
when a thorny tendril scored my wrist, eyes screwed up and ears filled with a
drawn-out, diminishing howl of inhuman pain and rage.

Silence
fell, broken only by some heavy vehicle speeding towards London on the
A595.
I got up slowly, walked a few paces, then ran on towards the village
calling Amy’s name. She was stretched out at the edge of the road with blood on
her forehead, one knee and one hand. I carried her back to the house, laid her
on her bed and telephoned Jack Maybury.

5: A Movement in the
Grass

‘Physically, there’s
nothing to worry about,’ said Jack just after midday. ‘That’s a perfectly
healthy sleep she’s in now. No evidence of concussion. No fever. And those cuts
and bruises are quite minor. Psychologically, well, I doubt if there’s much
grounds for anxiety there either, not immediately anyway, though I must admit
I’m a bit out of my depth with sleepwalking. Are you sure it was
sleepwalking?’

I
turned from the window of Amy’s bedroom. ‘I don’t know. I just assumed it was.’
I had decided it was, as the most flexible rough version of what had really
happened. ‘The front door woke me up, I saw her passing the window, so I went
and—’

‘So you
said. What exactly happened when you got to her?’

‘I
called out to her, which was probably a mistake, only I didn’t think, and she
gave this great start and half turned round, and tripped.’

‘And
hit her head on the road hard enough to knock her out, but … I just wouldn’t
have thought a bang that caused such a comparatively minor contusion would be
enough to knock a healthy person out. Still. Why were you in the public
dining-room instead of your own place up here?’

‘I go
there sometimes. Less chance of being interrupted.’

‘Yeah.
Just as well you did, this time. Right, well I’ll look in again this evening.
Keep her in bed meanwhile. Light lunch. We’ll see how it goes. There’s a very
good kids’ headshrinker bloke at the hospital I can get hold of tomorrow.
Personally, I doubt whether she was sleepwalking at all.’

‘What
do you think she was doing?’

‘Pretending
to sleepwalk. She’d read about it.’

‘What
would be the point of that?’

‘Oh, to
get herself a bit of attention from someone,’ said Jack, with a full dose of
his censorious look. ‘Anyway, I’ll be off now. How are you?’ he added
grudgingly.

‘Fine.
A bit tired.’

‘Get
some rest this afternoon. No more little birds?’

‘No.
Would you like a drink?’

‘No
thanks.’

As he
started to leave, I asked without premeditation, ‘How’s Diana?’

Jack
stopped leaving. ‘How is she? She’s all right. Why?’

‘No
reason.’

‘I’ll
just say this much, Maurice. I like things the way they are. I don’t like
turmoil or upsets or letting one part of your life interfere with the other.
I’m not against people enjoying themselves in any way they happen to fancy,
provided they don’t start behaving like bloody kids. Okay?’

‘I’m
for that too,’ I said, wondering what Diana could have said to him, but, as a
mere ex-lover of hers since yesterday, not wondering very hard.

‘Good.
See you tonight.’

Then he
did go. Very soon afterwards. Amy opened her eyes in the manner of someone
waking up with tremendous reluctance after a tremendously deep sleep. She
smiled at me, then felt the taped bandage on her forehead and traced its
outline. We hugged each other.

‘Have I
been sleepwalking, Dad?’

‘Well …
you might have been. All sorts of people do.’

‘I had
a funny dream, Dad,’ she went on immediately. ‘You were in it.’

This
was the first time that day she had spoken more than a couple of words. ‘What
happened?’

‘Well,
I dreamt I was lying in bed here, and you were calling to me. You told me to
get up and come downstairs, so I did. I took Victor with me, because he was
here. You didn’t tell me to, but I thought you wouldn’t mind. Then when I got
downstairs, you said I was to go outside into the road. I still couldn’t see
you, but that was what you said. So I went outside, but you weren’t there, so
I started looking for you.’

‘Go
on.’

‘I’m
trying to, but it gets harder to remember after that. You gave me a fright, but
you didn’t mean to. You came up and told me I was to put Victor down and run
into the village, so I did. I started to, anyway. Then I really forget what
happened. But I do sort of remember that you were being very brave, Dad. Was
there a man chasing me?’