The Grotesque (13 page)

I did not go further. The marsh was no use to me unless I found solitude there. I returned to the car and as I started it up a gentle, drizzling rain began to fall. I backed out into the road and turned in the direction of Ceck’s Bottom. The light was perceptibly fading when I reached the farm. I found George in his slaughterhouse, a dimly lit shed that reeked of offal beneath an old roof of corrugated tin on which the rain came softly pattering down. It was a dark and primal place, George’s slaughterhouse, and old John Crowthorne was in there with him, the pair of them in long, filthy aprons caked with blood; they were butchering the carcass of a freshly killed pig. It was a huge animal, and it was hanging upside down from its trotters from a hook in the beam overhead, sliced down the belly. Two buckets of faintly steaming blood stood on the floor nearby. George saw me in the doorway. He promptly whacked his chopper into a block of scarred wood and, wiping his hands on his apron, followed me out into the damp murk of the yard. His eyebrows meshed in an angry frown when I told him what I’d seen on the marsh, but it caused him no surprise. It seemed that the old woman was employing the children of Ceck in her search for the remains of Sidney; she gave them each sixpence for a day’s work. Apparently she had a theory that when the earth thawed it tended to shift about, and in its shifting about to disgorge its contents, unless they were deeply buried. There was some thawing that January; Mrs. Giblet hoped it would cause to rise that which had remained buried during the police search.

We had a smoke, and then George tramped back across his dung-running farmyard to the shed. The rain came drizzling down upon him, and a sudden gust of wind molded his shirt to the ridges and hollows of his long, knobbled back. He reached the door of the shed, turned, and through the scrim of rain I watched him lift a hand and bare his big teeth at me. I touched the horn of the Morris and pulled out onto the Ceck’s Bottom road, just as it began to rain in earnest. I mention this meeting only to demonstrate that George gave me no inkling, none at all, that he did, in fact, know what had happened to Sidney’s body. Hardly surprising that he gave no sign of it; he was a dour and cryptic man at the best of times, and certainly knew how to keep a thing to himself.

❖

I presume it was because I’d been out to the marsh in the afternoon that I dreamed of a Mesozoic swamp that night. It was very early in the morning, in the dream, and a sort of bluish gloom suffused the scene. Through a low fog that clung to the surface of the swamp darted small, shadowy, flying creatures that jinked and glided on delicate leathery webbed wings as they swept back and forth in search of prey. The tropical forest fringing the swamp was already steaming in the damp heat of dawn, and but for the steady buzzing and grating and chirping of the insects in the stands of giant pine and redwood nearby, a thick, heavy silence lay upon the place. Vast fallen tree trunks, indistinct in the gloom, their jagged stumps clawing high in the air like great drowning fingers, and trailing clumps and sheets of moss, lay moldering on the edge of the swamp, sinking back into the primeval slime from which they had originally risen. From out of one of these huge dead trunks there suddenly darts a tiny mammalian creature, covered with hair. It stops, one paw raised and its little snout twitching, then thirstily drinks from a pool of brackish black water puddled in the mud. Up comes that timid, twitching, hairy little head once more, and then the animal slips quickly back into its tree, back to its lair. A moment later a sort of muted rumbling sound can be heard from the forest, the crashing of huge bodies advancing through the undergrowth.

The light is growing stronger. All is quiet as death, out there on the swamp, as from the forest the din of approaching huge beasts grows thunderous. And then they appear through the trees, plodding along in single file, their little heads nodding from side to side from long swaying necks and vast, barrel-shaped bodies: a herd of gentle
Brontosauri,
small-brained herbivores, a dozen of them, coming to the swamp to drink. Their gray, leathery hides are blotched and stippled with faint, rust-red markings, and their long, tapering tails are held out stiffly behind them, the whiplike tips flicking back and forth as they come. They move with dogged and stately grace toward a pool of water in the center of the swamp, and their footpads make great gloopy sucking noises in the mud. A low mist still clings in wisps and streaks to the surface of the swamp, lending the creatures a vaguely phantasmal aspect. But the sky is growing lighter by the moment, the great blocks of shadow framing the swamp are fading, and the trees come dimly into view. On they plod, beneath a sky in which the undersides of a few fleecy clouds are touched now with the rich pinks and reds of the dawn.

They reach the pool and stand at the edge to drink. Their long tails still flick from side to side, and at every moment a head comes up, tiny on its serpentine neck, to sniff the air. The first rays of the morning sun come shafting through the forest and, catching the great back of one of these monsters, brings out the richly mottled russet redness of its hide; and still the heads go up and down, up and down, as from the forest comes the shrill scream of some awakening creature, followed by a long-drawn-out burst of manic chatter. A flying lizard drifts over the trees then wheels sharply and flaps off toward the rising sun. It is then that three events occur in rapid succession. The first is the springing up of a brisk breeze, blowing from the south; from that direction then comes the sound of some big animal moving through the trees; and a moment later the largest of the brontosaurs, a massive bull dinosaur of at least thirty tons, sniffs the air with intense concentration, then utters a sort of distressed whinny.

All drinking ceases. The brontosaurs stand rigid, their heads lifted as they catch the first faint traces of putrid meat drifting on the breeze. There is some shuffling, and more whinnying, as they recognize the unmistakable fetor of a predatory carnosaur—such creatures invariably stink of the carcass of their last meal, for they lie upon the rotting corpse for weeks, in a deep digestive torpor. And then the predator shows himself at the edge of the swamp: a full-grown, mature adult male
Phlegmosaurus carbonensis.

At the sight of him panic catches hold of the timid brontosaurs. The dawn is shattered by great trumpetings of terror as they flounder in the mud, desperate to get off the swamp and back into the shelter of the trees. But in their hysteria they seem only to mire themselves deeper in the ooze.

The mud churns and flies as the trumpeting brontosaurs begin to lumber clumsily back across the swamp. And then
Phlegmosaurus
moves. He darts over the swamp on his strong back legs, the forelegs held in close to the muscle-bound trunk, and the great tail jutting stiffly behind, a sort of rudder, or stabilizer, to his crouched and fast-moving body. His head seems all jaw, champing and roaring as he comes. He has selected his prey, a plump young calf, slower than the rest, which now whinnies pitifully for the protection of the herd, a protection that is, in this extremity, forgone.
Phlegmosaurus
is quickly upon the creature. Nimbly avoiding the lashings and thrashings of the brontosaur’s great tail, he closes with it and in one bound clamps himself to its shoulder. Up comes a hind leg, and that terrible curved claw glints for an instant in the sunlight— and then in a blur of flying mud and flailing flesh the claw goes slicing again and again at the throat of the brontosaur, and the huge creature sinks with a dreadful wheezing sound into the ooze, and great gouts of blood come pumping from its torn throat. Then, still roaring with fury,
Phlegmosaurus
begins tearing at the dying animal, pulling at the flank until a huge piece of steaming flesh comes away; and for some minutes this frenzy continues, as the brontosaur lies kicking and dying in a muddy pool of its own blood. The rest of the herd has disappeared into the forest, and from the trees there has now arisen a cacophony of shrieks and cries and wild chatterings, and already, at the edge of the swamp, scavengers are beginning to assemble. At last the young herbivore lies still, and the frenzy of ripping and tearing subsides. For some time
Phlegmosaurus
eats methodically, clutching the meat with its forelegs, cutting and slicing with its great claws. Every few moments the head is lifted, and turned this way and that, the jaws dripping gore. Then, when the sun is high overhead, and flooding the swamp with heat and light, the beast slumps onto the ripped corpse and dozes there in the warm dead flesh. Over on the edge of the swamp, from out of its tree trunk, the hairy little mammal once more emerges. Sitting up pertly on its hind legs, it wipes its whiskery snout with both paws, gazing with bright keen eyes at the now-slumbering dinosaur.

Suddenly a ragged scream shatters the stillness of the swamp —and I awoke. I had a moment of confusion, thinking I was still out there, and then with a shock I realized that the scream had come from Cleo’s bedroom—she sleeps in the east wing too. Pausing only for my dressing gown and slippers I made my way to her bedside. The poor child was extremely distressed. I found her sitting hunched in bed with her face in her palms. Her curtains were slightly open, and the moonlight that came sifting through the gap spread a pool of illumination on her bed, and in the center of this pool she sat in a white nightgown, weeping. I went to her and she immediately buried her face in my shoulder and clutched me tightly. Huge sobs contorted her thin, trembling frame, and she was quite unable to speak. I held her for several minutes until the sobs slowly subsided and she regained control of herself. At last she lifted her head from my shoulder and I gave her a handkerchief. “Thank you Daddy,” she sniffed. “Oh dear,” she said. “Oh how horrible. Oh how ghastly.”

“What, darling?” I murmured, stroking her hair.

“Oh Daddy,” she said—and gazed at me for a long moment from bleary, tear-damp eyes—“oh Daddy, he came to see me again —and it was horrible, much worse than last time.”

“Who
came to see you, darling?” I said, still softly stroking her hair.

“Sidney did, Daddy.”

“
Sidney!
That’s impossible, darling! Do you mean Sidney is in this house?” I looked over my shoulder, as if Sidney might be lurking in Cleo’s closet, or crouching out of sight at the end of her bed.

“No, he’s not here, Daddy, you won’t see him.” She dropped her eyes and sniffed loudly several times. Then up came her face, stark with horror and grief. “He’s dead, you see.” This provoked a fresh flood of tears.

Slowly, then, the story came out. It seems that this was the second time that Sidney had come to Cleo in the night. These “visits,” she insisted, were not dreams: she distinctly remembered awakening. The first time he had been standing beside her bed, and his skin, she said, was chalk-white, translucent, and tinged with a faintly greenish hue. He smelled unpleasantly sweet, said Cleo. He was wearing the suit he’d been in the night he disappeared, a beige tweed affair, jacket and plus fours, with a faint check pattern in yellow and sky-blue. What had riveted her attention, however, was the great ragged angry gash beneath his chin: Sidney had had his throat cut.

Apparently he spoke to her; she did not remember his words exactly; she had been in a state of shock throughout, and could concentrate only on the blackly clotted flap where his neck had once been. But his purpose, it seems, was to warn her. Warn her about what? About the “evil creeping thing” that prowled the countryside after dark. More than this he did not say, that first time. But this time, said Cleo, this time... She shuddered violently. “His
voice,
Daddy,” she whispered. “He’s lost his cords. He’s hoarse, like an old man. He doesn’t say words, he wheezes them out in this dreadful whisper. And he tells me things.”

I took the girl’s hands in my own. Speaking very quietly, very gently, I said: “What things, darling?”

“He says the creature that tore out his throat came from this house.”

I said nothing. She gazed at me with wide and terrified eyes. “Daddy,” she whispered, “it must be Fledge.”

❖

I gave her some scotch (I keep a bottle in my bedroom) and managed to settle her down. I sat for some time beside her bed, and watched her as she slept—peacefully now, thank God. I lit a cigar, and by the light of a candle I pondered her strange disclosure about Fledge. So she, too, had intuited his evil. What did this signify? I pondered this question into the small hours, but reached no satisfactory conclusions.

I
was still pondering it when, the next day, as I sat in a bathful of tepid water, I shouted for Fledge to come and scrub my back. I was not yet aware that part of his campaign to usurp me involved the seduction of Harriet, though in retrospect, piecing it all together from my wheelchair, I would guess that by this time— we were now in late January—Harriet had already been to see her priest. And I’ve no doubt he proscribed the thing on pain of hellfire and damnation. Clearly it wasn’t enough. “But I am a woman!” cried Harriet. “You are God’s child,” the priest replied. “My marriage has been a travesty!” she wailed. “Then you must offer it up as a sacrifice,” he said. She came away unconvinced, though perhaps she did not admit this to herself. Something was awakened in her that would not be easily stifled. When Fledge next touched her, she repulsed him, but weakly. He knew she would soon succumb.

Yes, I knew my Harriet, and I knew she would require a period of soul-searching before she abandoned herself to the affair. When, I wonder, did that actually occur? Perhaps it had already happened, and I, preoccupied with my work and, when in the house, with Fledge, failed to notice a change in her. Or perhaps—and this I think more likely—it didn’t happen until later, while I was in hospital. “Harder, Fledge,” I said—he was scrubbing my back with a piece of coral, and I liked to get the skin red and tingling with the friction, makes one feel marvelously alive. “That’s better,” I said, as he started to put some muscle into it. Was this not foolhardy, you say, making myself so vulnerable to a man who had killed once already? No, it would have been foolhardy if I had suddenly forbidden him entry to my bathroom; then he would have guessed that I
knew,
and
that
would have been dangerous. Fledge felt secure, he felt that no one suspected him; and this was the way I wanted him to feel.