Fortnight of Fear (27 page)

Mrs Bristow stared at me with wide warning eyes. “You shouldn't have stuck your nose where it wasn't wanted, Mr Moore. You should have stayed in Room Seven with your baked beans and your naughty magazines.”

“I'm still going to call the police,” I told her. I sensed that I had her worried, and I wanted to know why. Besides, if there was any chance of saving Nancy, I wanted to find out what it was.

Mrs Bristow said nothing for almost half a minute. Nancy, her bony shoulders bowed, began softly to sob. It sounded like the sobbing of an old, old woman, who suddenly and vividly remembers her girlhood. Cornflowers, sunshine, straw hats.

“Very well,” said Mrs Bristow. She reached over, and opened the wardrobe door.

To my total horror, a man was standing motionless in the wardrobe. He was stocky, heavily-built, about forty-five years old. His hair was oiled and combed back from his forehead. He wore a neat little bristle mustache. He was naked, with a huge reddened penis hanging down between his thighs. His legs were shaggy with ginger hair. His eyes were totally bloodshot, totally red.

“Is he dead?” I asked, in a voice that didn't sound like me at all.

Mrs Bristow shook her head. She allowed me one last look and then she closed the wardrobe door.

“My husband, Mr Bristow.”

“I don't believe this,” I protested. “That's your husband, and he's hiding in the wardrobe?”

“Not hiding, Mr Moore. He lives there. Or rather he
ekes out his existence there. His real living is done inside his mind.”

She went to the window, opened it an inch, and flickered her cigarette butt out into the night. Then she turned back, and blew out a last puff of smoke. “He's a great lover, Mr Moore. Greater than you'll ever understand. He takes a great deal out of every woman who loves him; but he gives just as much in return; if not more.”

“But what the hell has he done to Nancy?” I demanded. “He's killing her!”

“In one sense, yes, I suppose he is,” Mrs Bristow replied, patting the pockets of her housecoat to find her cigarettes. “But she won't know greater ecstasy, I can assure you of that. Now and forever after. Real ecstasy. I envy her. I envy
all
of them. But somebody has to take care of things on the outside, don't they? That's what a wife is for.”

“He's killing her,” I repeated.

“Almost gone, yes,” Mrs Bristow agreed. She lit another cigarette. “Just like poor Miss Coates; and poor Miss Unwin; and poor Miss Baker; and poor Miss Dadachanji. But they're all still there; he has them all. And as long as he lives, so will they.”

I stared at her. “So when you gave Nancy this room – you
knew
– you did it on purpose.”

Mrs Bristow nodded. “We all have to live, Mr Moore, the best way we can.”

Something burst inside my head. It was like a melon blown up with dynamite. I lost all of my reason, all of my self-control. It was bad enough that this stuffed-dummy of a man had taken Nancy away from me; but now he was killing her, too. I shouldered Mrs Bristow aside, and yanked open the wardrobe door, and confronted the naked man who stood there with his shaggy thighs and his bloodred eyes and shrieked, “
You bastard! You murdering bloody bastard!
”

I was about to grab him by the shoulders and heave him out of the wardrobe when he stretched open his mouth and he roared at me.

I stopped dead in absolute paralytic terror. It wasn't just a roar of anger. It was a roar like a blast-furnace; like the rumbling exhaust of a jet. It seemed to toss aside blankets and papers and tumble over bedside lights. It was deafening, and it went on and on and relentlessly on.

As he roared, the man's face swelled. His veins stood out like pulsing snakes. Then his face stretched and twisted, and turned into another face, the face of a pale-skinned girl. Her eyes, too, were filled with red, and she was roaring.

I took a stumbling step backward. I was full of rage, full of anguish, but I wasn't brave enough to face up to anything like this. The girl's face knotted and contorted. Her forehead bulged, her nose folded in on itself, and another girl's face appeared, slimy and dark-skinned, still roaring. I saw face after face, all women, roaring at me red-eyed, an unholy portrait gallery of hundreds of different personalities; all of them absorbed into one man's body.

Mrs Bristow had talked of ecstasy, of love. But all I saw was agony and distortion and screaming helplessness.

Stiff-legged with fear, I reached down and scooped Simon awkwardly out of his cot. Nancy, her head bowed, did nothing to stop me. Mrs Bristow remained by the wardrobe door, her housecoat fluttering in the roaring draft, expressionless, waiting for me to leave.

I took one last look at that hideous naked creature in the wardrobe with its heads twisting and changing, one after the other, and then I hoisted Simon up against me shoulder and I hurried out of 5a Bedford Row and out into the windy, brine-smelling night. I didn't realize that I was crying out loud until I was well past West Buildings.

I suppose I should have gone to the police right away.
But I was too frightened and too numb, and too worried about Simon. God knows how much cough medicine Nancy had given him, but he flopped in my arms like a little hot doll. I carried him up to Sandra's flat in Surrey Street; up three flights of stairs, sweating and gasping, and pressed the doorbell with my elbow.

Sandra came to the door in a striped man's shirt and long socks. “David?” she frowned. “What on earth's the matter?”

I spent the night drinking coffee and keeping a lonely watch over Simon. Around seven he stirred and opened his eyes and frowned at me. “Uncle Dave? Where's mummy?”

I returned to 5a Bedford Row about eleven o'clock the next morning, accompanied by two police officers. As we drew up outside the house, I was just in time to see a black pickup truck disappearing around the corner on to the seafront. I couldn't be sure, but in the back of the pickup truck, I thought I glimpsed a large wardrobe, half-covered with a sheet of tarpaulin.

On the other side of the road, next to the bus garage, a black Daimler hearse was parked without any consideration for any other traffic that might have wanted to get past.

The police officers rang the doorbell. One of them said, “D'you hear about Chalky collaring that JP for drunken driving? Laugh?”

The door was opened. It was Mrs Bristow. She looked at me sharply, and then at the two policemen. “Mr Moore? Is anything wrong?”

“You know bloody well what's wrong,” I told her. “Where's Nancy?”

“I'm sorry, Mr Moore; but old Miss Bright passed away this morning, in the early hours. We think it was probably her heart.”

“
Old
Miss Bright?” frowned one of the policemen.

We climbed the stairs to Room Two. The curtains were drawn, and the room was in semi-darkness, but I could see at once that the wardrobe had gone. Nancy lay on the bed, thin and white-haired and really dead; the same way that Miss Coates had been really dead. Mr Pedrick and his young assistant were preparing to lift her into her coffin.

“Who's this, then?” asked one of the policemen.

“The name's Pedrick,” said Mr Pedrick.

“I mean the deceased.”

“Oh, mistake me for a fucking corpse, please,” Mr Pedrick complained.

“This is Nancy,” I told the policeman.

“I'm sorry?”

“This is Nancy Bright. My girlfriend, Simon's mother.”

The constable peered at Nancy closely. “Well, you'll have to forgive me, Mr Moore, but she looks a trifle long in the tooth to be your girlfriend. And she can't possible be young Simon's mother now, can she? She must be eighty if she's a day.”

“That's how they killed her,” I insisted. “They took everything out of her – everything. Her youth, her looks, her blood for all I know. It's Mr Bristow. Every woman he wants becomes part of him. Mixed up inside him, almost. It's really hard to describe until you've seen it for yourself.”

“Too right,” said Mr Pedrick.

“Where's this fellow now, then?” asked the constable. “This Mr Bristow?”

“He was in the wardrobe. The wardrobe was right there, almost exactly where you're standing. Look, you can see the mark of its legs on the carpet. And it must have been really heavy, because the marks are so deep.”

“Oh, yes,” said the policeman, rubbing the mark with his shoe. “Sherlock Holmes strikes again.”

“So where's this wardrobe now?” asked the other policeman.

“It's gone,” I admitted. “They've taken it away.”

“With Mr Bristow still inside it?”

“I don't know. I suppose so.”

There was nothing more that I could do. The police just didn't believe me and nothing I said could persuade them. I managed to telephone Vince and ask him to help, but apart from being ever so sorry that Nancy was dead, he didn't want to get involved. All the same, his mum and dad drove down from Thornton Heath in their Cortina and collected Simon from Worthing Hospital, and promised to bring him up like a good young South London tyke. Nancy didn't have a mother, and her father was in Hull, working as a printer. I phoned him up at his digs while he was trying to watch
Coronation Street
and he said, “I see. Well, it doesn't surprise me,” and hung up.

A week later I called round to 5a Bedford Row to pick up my few belongings and Mrs Bristow had moved out. The rooms were being managed by a black-haired woman with a hairy mole and a bad hip. She didn't know where Mrs Bristow had gone, except that it was probably the seaside.

I grew up, like everybody else. I got a job. I got married. The last time I went to Worthing they had demolished 5a Bedford Row and most of the rest of the town, too. I stood for a long time looking at the waste-ground of broken bricks and thinking that was the end of it.

Last week, however, I was walking through The Lanes, in Brighton, when I stopped to look at an antiquarian book and print shop in Duke Street. Right in front of me was a Victorian poster for THE GREAT BRISTOE, Prestidigitator Extraordinaire. He was supposed to be appearing at the Palace Pier, Brighton, on, June 4, 1879.

“Man of 1,000 voices! Man of 1,000 faces! The most remarkable series of Female Impersonations ever Achieved on Stage!! No Mirrors, No Trickery!! The Secret of the
Arabian Harem Conjurors for you to witness in front of your eyes!”

Staring at me in the middle of the poster was a steel-engraved portrait of the man in the wardrobe. The man who could live for ever by absorbing the life and character of one young girl after another; the man in whose body the girl I had once loved still lay physically entangled. According to Mrs Bristow, she was experiencing some kind of unending ecstasy; or maybe some kind of unending purgatory, which is what unending ecstasy usually turns out to be.

I've never mentioned Nancy to my wife; nor to anyone else, before now. It all sounds too mad. It all sounds childish and ridiculous. But oh God, I loved her, you know; and oh God, I miss her. It hurts me so much to think of what unimaginable suffering she might still be going through now. I think of her sometimes and I still have to make an excuse and go out into the garden and sob like an idiot.

And I never, ever open other people's wardrobes, in other people's houses. He's there somewhere, in somebody's wardrobe, and believe you me, I don't want to be the one to find him.

Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme, France

Saint-Valéry lies on the Baie de la Somme, on the Opal Coast of Northern France. It is famous for its annual wild bird festival, and ornithologists come from all over Europe to spot birds, drink wine, eat
moules frites
, drink more wine, and spot more birds. Saint-Valéry has a well-preserved medieval center that is almost eerie in its historical atmosphere, and the remains of a 14th-century hilltop fortress where Joan of Arc was imprisoned. But there is a sadder feeling here, too: the ghosts of all the Allied soldiers who landed here during both world wars, and those who fell on the Somme.

Saint-Valéry is an ideal location for a haunting.

On the other side of the restaurant, a woman with blue hair screamed with laughter.

David couldn't help turning around. The whole table of old-age pensioners was rocking with amusement. “
Armand, tu es si drôle
!” cackled a woman with lavender-colored hair.

David turned back to Robert and Jeremy and shrugged. “I wish I understood French better. That was probably a cracker.”

“Probably dirty,” said Robert. “You know what old people are like.”

David smiled, and refilled his glass with Pouilly Fumé. He was sitting with his sons at a table by the window, looking out over the silvery flatness of the Somme estuary. In the distance, across the marshes, he saw occasional glitters of sunshine; but for the most part the day was cloudy and gray.

At the moment, the only other diners in the restaurant were the rainbow-rinsed pensioners and two men with waxy breathless faces who volubly argued with each other with their mouths full of bread.

The restaurant was crimson-wallpapered and darkly-paneled, decorated with stuffed ducks and lobster pots and a waterfall that trickled over painted plaster rocks. There were three maroon-jacketed waiters: one looked like Jacques Cousteau and the other two looked like Pee Wee Herman if Pee Wee Herman had been twins.

Robert said, “Mummy would have liked this.”

“Ah well,” David replied. “She'll be better by tomorrow. I think it must have been that Camembert. She said it tasted funny when she was eating it.”

Jeremy was trying to scrape all of the mushroom-and-onion sauce off his
poulet gran' mère
. “I wish they wouldn't put all this glop on it,” he complained.

“Some gourmet you are,” Robert restorted. Robert, at 17, was two years older than Jeremy, and considered himself to be totally fearless when it came to food. He had even tried snails, although he had given up after the third, saying that if he was going to eat chewing-gum, he preferred mint flavor to garlic.