Fortnight of Fear (21 page)

In the far distance, the sky was very black; granite black; and thunder rumbled. A rush of warm wind crossed the hay-field, like a premonition of early death.

Eric left school and found a job at a color-separation company in Lewisham, in south-east London. He lived in a mews flat over a lock-up garage only a one-and-sixpenny busride from where he worked. He was tall now, tall and long-legged, with a strange diving stride that could only have been adopted by a man who never walked with women; because no woman could have possibly caught
up with him. He wore National Health tortoiseshell spectacles and his hair was cut so short that it always stuck up at the crown, like a cockatoo.

He sat at his drawing-board at work, painting out flaws on color separations, his head bowed, his nose so close to the celluloid film that his face was reflected in its blackness. He hardly ever spoke to anybody. He brought a Thermos of Ovaltine, but nobody ever saw him eat lunch. Deborah Gibbs, who was new in accounts, thought he was lonely and strange and rather alluring. “He's Byronic,” she said; and Kevin in the platemaking section wanted to know if it was catching.

Every night Eric stood on the corner outside the works and waited for the bus which would take him back home. He would sit downstairs on the 3-seats where his thigh would be pressed against the thigh of some homegoing typist or some big West Indian woman in a bright print frock, with bagfuls of Sainsbury's shopping on her lap. He liked to feel their warmth. He liked to feel their life. There were airless days in summer when his leg was pressed close to the woman next to him, and he could have ducked his head down and taken a bite out of her living flesh.

The mews was almost always deserted when he returned; the late sun hanging in the sky like a yellow badge. Occasionally Mr Bristow was tinkering with his old Standard Twelve, but usually it was Eric's echoing footsteps and Eric's jingling keys and nothing else. Only the deep ambient roar of suburban London.

He would climb the metal fire-escape stairs and let himself into the flat. A small kitchenette with a wooden draining-board and a tap that constantly dripped. A curled-up calendar for 1961, Views of the Lake District. He would sniff, whistle, switch on the electric kettle. Then he would walk through to the sitting-room; which at this time of day was always dark, and smelled of damp.

He would switch on the black-and-white television but
he would turn down the sound. Nobody on television ever had anything to say which interested Eric in the slightest. The news was all about President Kennedy and Mr K and death; or pop music, which he didn't understand. He heard it all day, every day. They played it on transistor radios at work. But he simply didn't understand it. That endless nagging bang, bang, bang, bang. It gave him a headache. It made him feel that he had been imprisoned by some primitive tribe that didn't even realize that that night sky wasn't a lid.

The only program that Eric liked was
Hancock's Half Hour
, although it never made him laugh. He liked lines like, “I thought my mother was a bad cook, but at least her gravy moved about.”

In the bedroom, Eric's unmade bed. And all around it, pinned to the wall in their hundreds, Eric's drawings. Anatomical studies of insects, rats, dogs and horses. Anatomical studies of woodlice, anatomical studies of pigeons. Everything that Eric had eaten, meticulously drawn in pencil. Each one signed, each one dated, a catalog of Eric's living meals. Each one bore the legend, “You are what you eat.”

Under the bed were drawings which he kept tied up in a large gray fiberboard portfolio. These were special drawings which he didn't want the landlady to see, in case she visited his flat when he was out at work.

These were drawings of things that Eric had never eaten, but which he would like to eat. New-born babies, as they emerged from their mothers, still hot, still steaming, like offerings from some sacred oven. Afterbirths, Eric would have given anything to be able to eat an afterbirth, plunge his face into hot pungent gristle. Men's faces; children's thighs. Slices of women's breasts. Eric drew them in painstaking detail, shading and shading with his 2B pencil until the heel of his hand was silvery-black with rubbed-off graphite.

Later, when the sun had gone down, and the mews was very dark, Eric used to go down to the garage. He would lay his hand flat against the green weather-blistered paint. He would say nothing; but close his eyes. Sometimes he felt as if he didn't belong on this planet at all. At other times, he felt that he owned it, and that everybody else was intruding on his privacy.

He would turn his key in the Yale lock, and push open the wooden concertina doors. They would always shudder and complain, even though Eric had greased them three or four times. Eric would step into the darkness of the garage and smell 1930s motor-oil and leather and dust; but most of all, blood; and despair.

He would close the doors behind him, and then he would switch on the light. Suspended from the garage ceiling by an elaborate system of weights and hooks and pulleys were six or seven animals – dogs, cats, rabbits, even a goat. Their jaws were bound with fishing-line so that they were unable to utter the slightest sound, even though they were suspended from hooks and wires that must have been causing them intense and endless agony. Most of them had been bitten here and there. A black Labrador dog had the flesh from its hind-legs missing, so that it pedaled the air with nothing but bones. The goat's eyes had been sucked from their sockets, and its udder had been opened up and partially devoured; like a huge bloody pudding.

Eric took life wherever he could find it. Eric ate everything which offered him life. He felt strong and knowledgeable and
many
, as if every animal that he had eaten had given him some of its instincts, some of its intellect, some of its individuality. He was sure that he could run faster, balance better, smell more keenly. He was sure that he could hear dog-whistles. He was convinced that if he ate many more living birds, he would soon be able to fly.

Every night, Eric would lock his garage door, take off all of his clothes, and fold them on a bentwood chair which he had placed by the wall for this very purpose. Then, naked, Eric would feed; trying to keep each of his animals alive for as long as possible. There was nothing like staring into the eyes of a living creature while you were actually chewing its flesh. And digesting it. Sometimes he would bend over naked in front of the suffering, dangling animals and excrete, so that they could witness their final fate. Dropped onto the oil-stained concrete floor, lifeless!

One hot evening in August, 1963, Deborah Gibbs came over and perched her hip on Eric's plan-chest. She was wearing a small white sleeveless top and a short green skirt and Eric, when he looked up, could see chestnut-brown stocking-tops and white plump thighs and white knickers.

Sandy Jarrett in developing had bet Deborah ten shillings that she couldn't persuade Eric to take her out for a drink. Sandy was hiding behind the reeded-glass partition and trying to smother giggles. Eric could see her ginger hair bobbing.

“I was wondering what you was doing tonight,” said Deborah.

Eric wiped his brush and peered at her through his paint-freckled spectacles.

“I'm not doing anything. Why?”

“I don't know. Thought you might like to come down the Blue Wanker.”

“The what?” blushed Eric.

“Oh, sorry. We all call it that. The Blue Anchor. It's the pub over at Hilly Fields.”

“Why should I want to do that?” Eric asked her. His hand lying still and white on the drawing-board, as if it were something dead that didn't belong to him. Fingernails ruthlessly bitten until they bled, and formed scabs, and been bitten again, and bled again …

Deborah wriggled and giggled. Sandy giggled from the next office. “It's hot. Thought you might like it, that's all.”

“Well …” said Eric, staring at Deborah's stocking-tops, staring at the flesh that bulged from Deborah's thighs.

They sat outside the Blue Anchor watching half-a-dozen small boys play cricket. Eric drank two halves of cider and pecked at a packet of crisps. Deborah drank gin-and-orange and chattered incessantly.

“Sandy says you're a mystery man,” she giggled.

“Oh, yes?”

“Sandy says you're probably a spy or something.”

“No, I'm not a spy.”

“You're a mystery, though, aren't you?”

“I don't think so. I just believe in living my life my own way, that's all.”

“And what way's that?”

He stared at her. She hadn't realized before how dreadfully pale he was. He smelled, too. He gave off the strangest of smells. It was sweet, yet sickening. A bit like a gas-leak. She hadn't smelled anything like it since a starling had died in her bedroom chimney.

“You can come and see my flat if my like,” he told her. “Then I'll show you.”

They finished their drinks and took the bus to Eric's flat. The sun was almost gone. Eric seemed to be peculiarly cheerful, and he strode along with his hands in his pockets and Deborah found it almost impossible to keep up with him.

They reached the mews. It was silent and deserted. Mr Bristow's Standard Twelve but no Mr Bristow.

“He's probably inside, having his tea,” Eric remarked.

“Who?” asked Deborah. She had laddered one of her stockings and she was growing worried.

“Sandy thinks I'm a mystery man, does she? Well she should come and see this.”

Eric unlocked the garage door and took hold of Deborah's hand and guided her inside. It was so dark that she couldn't see anything at all. Eric let go of her hand and she stood breathless not knowing what to do. But then the garage doors collided behind her, and locked, and Eric switched on the light.

He folded his glasses and set them on top of his trousers. He was white, ribby, blue-veined, but his penis stood out erect and very dark.

Deborah tried to scream, but he had gagged her so tightly that she could only shout mfff, mfff, mfff. He approached her, drawing aside the hooks and chains that dangled down from every beam on the ceiling, and peered at her from only six or seven inches away. She could smell his breath; and it smelled of unspeakable decay.

He had taken off all her clothes except for her stockings and garter-belt and he had tied her in a sitting position in his bentwood chair. He had criss-crossed her breasts with thin cord so that they bulged in diamond patterns. He peered shortsightedly between her legs and then reached out to touch her, but she mffff'd! with such ferocity that he hesitated.

“I've never seen a real girl naked before.”

She tried to scream at him to let her go; but he suddenly turned away, with apparent disinterest. But then he turned back again, and he was holding a craft-knife in his hand.

“You are what you eat, Deborah. Can't argue with that. Cakes, Mars bars, you are what you eat. I always used to think that if I ate too many pies, I'd turn into a pie! Can you imagine that? Eric the Pie!”

He took the triangular-bladed craft-knife, and touched the point of it against her skin, just below the breast-bone. She saw the knife, his smile, his blue-cheese skin.

“Life, that's what it's all about,” said Eric, and sliced Deborah open, all the way down to her light brown public hair.

She looked down and saw her own bloodied intestines, pouring into her lap. There was a fetid smell like nothing she had ever smelled before; blood and digestion and bile. Then she saw Eric plunge his whole head into the gaping cavity of her body,
his whole head
, and felt the unbearable tearing of his teeth. He was after her living liver. He was after her pancreas, and her stomach, and her kidneys. He was trying to eat her alive, from the inside out.

She felt herself fainting; she felt herself dying. She felt her whole world tinged with black. She did the only thing that she was capable of doing, which was to throw herself backward. Her chair fell; she fell; Eric fell. He bellowed with rage, his head still buried in the bloodiness of her body. The goat, nearly dead now, swung heavily against them on its Calvary of chains.

Deborah lay with her head against the concrete floor, quivering with agony and approaching death. Eric sucked and bit and tore at her liver, almost drowned in blood. Deborah turned her face and saw that her fall had loosened her right arm; that her right arm was free.

She also saw the hook that swung on the end of a chain, backwards and forwards.

She didn't care whether she could summon up the strength or not. She was going to do it, no matter what. She was dying; and words like “impossible” didn't mean anything any more.

She snatched at the chain, once, twice, then caught it. Eric bloodily guzzled, oblivious.

With a trembling, blood-smeared hand, she grasped the hook, and lifted it as high as she could. She couldn't scream; she couldn't cry out. She was almost dead. She probably
was
dead, pathologically speaking.

But she dug the hook in between Eric's bare buttocks as
deeply as she could; and she felt sphincter and muscle and tissue tear, and
inside her body
Eric screamed. A muffled, wet, bubbling scream.

His face rose out of the gaping lips of her abdomen like the scarlet mask of the devil himself. His eyes were wide, bloody-black liver clung to his teeth. A fine spray of blood blew out of his nostrils. He roared, hopped, twisted, and tried to pull the hook out of himself. But as he did so, Deborah seized the goat, and the goat fell on top of her, and all of Eric's weights and chains and counterbalances went furiously haywire.

Eric was yanked, shrieking, up to the ceiling, where he dangled and writhed and prayed and wept.

Deborah died. The day died. But Eric circled around all night and still he didn't die. He spun slowly around and around, feeling a pain that was almost dreamlike in its intensity. He slept, and he woke, and the pain still dominated everything.

Near to dawn, he tried to shake himself free, jerking up and down on his hook, until at last it tore through flesh and skin and he dropped heavily on to the garage floor. He lay shivering and weeping, bruised and maimed and unable to move.