The Scarecrow (4 page)

‘Next stop, Klynham,’ he informed them. ‘You’ll be into Oporenho in time for tea.’

The guard, having punched their tickets, returned to his van immediately aft of the passenger coach. The door slammed on the racket of the wheels. Miles ahead, it seemed, the engine hooted.

Now Lynette’s mouth fell open in astonishment. At the other end of the carriage the man who suffered from nightmares was
on his feet, arms above his head as if in abject terror. He was grey-faced, gibbering. He shrank back against the door.

‘Aunty, aunty,’ said Lynette, urgently. ‘Look, look!’

‘What is it?’ said her aunt. ‘This must be Klynham.’

Lynette looked out and saw the scattered lights of a town in the gathering dusk. When she looked along the carriage again there was only the folded newspaper on the seat to be seen. The cardboard box had dematerialised and so had her favourite zombie. For a man who looked so old and ill he must have whirled about and ducked away at incredible speed. Either that or the encounter had been all a dream. Lynette opened her mouth to address her aunt but sighed and closed it again. She had a feeling it would be just a waste of breath to tell her aunt about the zombie man.

The train gradually creaked to a standstill. Things banged and a voice shouted. Lynette rubbed a hole in the mist on the closest window and pressed her snub nose against the cold glass. She thought she glimpsed a shadow, like that of a huge bird, stumbling across the tracks into the gloom.

When Pop and I had jumped down from the guard’s van at Klynham and sneaked back along the line a little way as we knew Jim Coleman wanted us to do, Pop said, ‘I’ll go over and see Connie for awhile. Yuh just tell yuh mother I’ll be back home shortly and if yuh take my advice yuh’ll steer clear of elaborating on our disastrous journey as if ever there was a woman to make a mountain out of a molehill and vicky verky it’s yuh good mother, bless her heart.’

And so I found myself following the sinister scarecrow man up the dusky streets. It makes my flesh creep to remember.

Although there had been no steady rain, no downpour, for over a week, there was a big puddle of water in the middle of Klynham’s main street. It was always there, even in the heart of summer. It was a feature of the town. It had nothing to do with rain, but owed its existence to subterranean forces, seepage, impermeable strata and so on. The puddle was right outside the Federal Hotel and had been the looking-glass of many dissolute visages, many coyly lopsided moons. One night when the wide street was empty and the moon shepherded a few dark clouds from well aloft the puddle gave to an evil face a setting of jewels and muddy mountains. The face was owned by a phenomenally tall man and the devil himself could not have conspired with a street lamp to cast a longer shadow. It was also the face of a phenomenally thirsty man. A tongue flicked parched lips, eyes sought in vain for a chink of light, some flaw in the armour of
the Federal Hotel. He began to cross the road. The puddle, automatically skirted, faithfully recorded his stealthy, purposeful passing.

Ever since, earlier that night, he had jumped down from the coast-bound train, Hubert Salter, for such was the tall man’s name, had been skulking in a back street, concealing himself in the shadows of Hardley & Manning’s rear entrance. No one had gone past. He had crouched back against the door when he had seen a group of figures gather on the corner, but it was only the Salvation Army band, who almost immediately began to serenade the deserted streets. To the sound of hymns and, in the intervals, the preacher’s upbraiding and vehement voice, Salter finished off his squat bottle of schnapps. The alcohol dispersed his fears. He began to feel certain that he had been in panic-stricken flight from nothing more tangible than his over-wrought imagination. He cursed his folly. He was glad he had slipped away from the city, given such a golden chance, although there would have been little danger in remaining; but to end up in a little township like this, in the still of a Sunday evening was dangerously conspicuous. At Oporenho, small as it was, there would have been the port and the big freezing-works with its army of seasonal workers to absorb him. Even in the remote event of being questioned Salter could have proved that, always in the past, whenever the current travelling show he had been with had folded, he had headed for a port and freezing-works town to seek casual employment.

‘The wolf bane is blooming again,’ Salter muttered. The highlight of his life over the last few days suddenly flashed back to numb his brain. Ecstasy flooded his loins and his genitals.

‘And say unto you, I am Jesus,’ came the preacher’s voice.
The drum began to thump and the band struck up again.

‘Yes, and I am Death,’ proclaimed Salter dramatically, peering crazily up from his hiding place at the moon which was drifting at a cock-eyed angle over the Jubilee Hotel. He began to mutter crazily to himself, and hammered against his temples with his fists. Crouching down he sought through his cardboard box for the butt of a cigarette. The box contained a strange assortment: coloured handkerchiefs, billiard balls, a black velvet bag, a length of silken cord, a wand and so on. There was even a pair of handcuffs. The half-smoked cigarette was in an unusual type of tumbler that featured a mirror partition. When Salter lit the cigarette the acrid smell of hashish filled his nostrils. Eagerly and deeply he inhaled, holding the smoke in his lungs for as long at a time as he was able.

Raising his head he saw out of the corner of an eye the reflection of his great beak of a nose in the glass doorway of the shop. A cry escaped him. The reflection went back and back along the tunnel of the years. The sequinned pink tights and big beautiful legs of Zita, his assistant in the great mind-reading act, loomed up in the reflection. One of her hands rested on the arm of a wavy-headed young man and her pretty face was twisted in a sneer. They did not know that Salter, in the mirror, had seen them sneering at him, sneering at Salter the Sensational. For a long time he had roamed the benighted amusement park and then he had seen her shadow against the lamplight in her tent, as she wriggled her plump, soft buttocks to discard what little she did wear. Exultantly the crimson haze had befogged his brain. That night fire had raged through the camp and destroyed for ever her ravished, sneering body. So easy it had been. So almost unbelievably exciting. Such mad exhilaration, such sexual power the
mad, evil moment granted. So easy it must always be.

The reefer was scorching Salter’s lips. The Salvation Army band was packing up. Salter chuckled. Coming from the dark doorway, the chuckle had a devilish sound.

As soon as Alf Yerbey, the licensee of the Federal Hotel, heard the rap on the back door he switched off the light in the little back bar. The only illumination now came from the passage, through a transom. Alf Yerbey’s main reason for switching off the light was to impress on his customers the importance of keeping silent. He knew the futility of trying to shush men who had been drinking beer for some hours; but he knew, by switching off the light, he could temporarily shut up even the most garrulous and intoxicated of his Sunday night customers.

In the dim light the men slid coins and cigarettes off the bar and returned them to their pockets. They began to shuffle into an adjoining room, a storeroom that had bottles of beer and wine in crates and cartons stacked half-way up three of its walls. Only a stranger, or the police, would have rapped on the back door in such a way. Anybody who was in the know would have scratched on the door three times with a coin.

In the gloom the publican lifted the flap in the bar and stepped through it. Besides himself, the only person who had not evacuated the bar was Charlie Dabney, the undertaker, who was perched up on a stool peering owlishly around.

‘Great Scott,’ mumbled Charlie Dabney. ‘The jondomorohso. The minions of the law, what, what. Ignorant pack of bastards. No respect for gracious living. Place cordoned off. Innocent citizens—’

‘Ssssh, sssh,’ said Alf Yerbey.

‘Victimised,’ concluded the plump little undertaker, clamping the corner of his mouth tightly on an unlit cigar which waggled uncertainly. He nodded solemnly and then looked up abruptly. ‘Nicely put?’

‘Very nicely put, Charlie,’ said Alf Yerbey, who had no intention of offending his most regular customer and biggest spender by far.

‘Why can’t they go catch a burglar or something?’ Charlie demanded to be told. ‘People getting murdered right left ’n’ centre. Hotbed crime. Gutters running red with gore. Assassins looking every friggin’ doorway. Wharah police do? Cordon off friggin’ pub. Storm last bastion of gracious living. Nicely put?’

‘Certainly Charlie,’ said Alf Yerbey.

‘Wheresh Athol?’ said Charlie Dabney. ‘Need moral support in this, our darkest hour.’

Hearing the mention of his name, Athol Cudby peered out of the storeroom.

‘You’re all right, Claude,’ said the publican. ‘Charlie’s booked into room twenty-three as usual and you can be his guest. Keep your money out of sight while I see who the hell it is. Let me do the talking.’

When he said ‘room twenty-three’ he spoke louder and looked hard at Charlie Dabney, who was never able to remember his room number when he was questioned by the police. Although Charlie Dabney’s place of business, which also served him for a home, was just across the alley from the hotel, the police had finally recognised that they would never convict him for after-hour drinking, unless they caught him in the White Hart or Commercial. He had a permanent room (which he never occupied) and sat down to quite a number of meals
(without eating anything) at the Federal. Charlie Dabney was a well known oddity in the town. Some called him ‘old Nicely Put’ others ‘old Episode Closed’. Everyone agreed he was a ‘dag’, a ‘real dag’. He had been mixed up in some extraordinary and side-splitting incidents. The last of the Dabneys, he appeared to have almost completely ruined the business and yet still have a supply of folding money as limitless as the twinkle in his eye. Everyone liked him, except for a few wives who had waited all night in vain for the return of their spouses, but he was a man to be avoided like the plague, unless one had a few days to spare. To be lured into his shop for a convivial spot was disastrous. The place was stocked with enough food and booze (all hidden in the queerest places) to withstand a siege.

The knock came again. Whoever it was had, by this time, rapped on the back door several times.

When Alf Yerbey opened the door his heart sank. The height of the shadowy figure standing at the foot of the steps suggested officialdom.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Whadda yuh want?’

‘Mer friend,’ said the tall stranger. ‘Please forgive me influctuating on yer at this hour uv night. I am a stranger in yer town, stranded here on account of a breakdown in mer limousine.’

He laughed hoarsely and laid a hand on the publican’s elbow. The light from the passage now illuminated his gaunt countenance. Alf Yerbey’s fear of a raid was completely set at rest by the colour of the stranger’s nose. He had not been a hotel-keeper twenty years for nothing. He was puzzled and intrigued by the black bow tie.

‘If yer would be so kind,’ said Salter, ’as to provide me with some refreshment, preferably of an alcoholic and reviving
natchuh. Quite candidly, sir, I feel that, unless I have a drink, there is some doubt of me surviving the night. I spent yesterday, sir, with a hectic school of froth-blowers and all day I have been travelling and suffering the agonies of hell. If the milk of human kindness flows in yer veins, yer will not turn me from yer hospitable door.’

Salter also was no novice at appraising his man. In Alf Yerbey’s veined and blotched countenance and distended abdomen, he had recognised the gateway to sympathy.

When the light clicked on in the bar the men who had been skulking in the storeroom emerged and inspected Salter slyly and curiously.

‘Yer will join me, sir?’ asked Salter when he had put the cardboard box he was carrying down at his feet and been given a double schnapps. The publican declined. Salter drank three doubles in as many minutes. He then purchased a packet of cigarettes. It was to be observed that his hands were shaking. Salter’s hands, after the first shock of his overall appearance had been digested, were always the next feature to attract attention. They were hands that would have been noticeably large on a bush-whacker and yet they were as sensitive-looking and as cared-for as those of a concert pianist. He offered a cigarette to Athol Cudby who was standing alongside him.

‘Thank yuh kindly,’ said Athol Cudby, taking the cigarette and holding up a crooked finger of his free hand in unctuous acknowledgment.

‘My name is Cudby,’ he said. ‘Athol Cudby.’

‘Salter, Hubert Salter.’

‘My friend Mr Charles Dabney—Mr Salter.’

‘Deelighted to make yer acquaintance.’

‘Deelighted also. Also delighted not policeman. Horror of policeman. Positively allergic policemen any shape or form. Only hanging on in business for pleasure of burying policeman some day. Bound to come one day. Ole Charlie’ll have the last laugh, never fear.’

‘Mr Dabney is our local mortician,’ explained Athol Cudby in his soft-voiced fashion.

‘Well now,’ said Salter. ‘That’s a very interesting profession, I’m sure, sir. And lucrative I imagine.’ He laughed hoarsely. ‘All flesh is as grass, sir.’

‘People just dying to meet ole Charlie,’ said the little undertaker, his unlit and well-chewed cigar waggling up and down all the time he spoke. ‘See ’em all go down the main street yet. But shed many a tear. But not when police kick the bucket. If a man was having a cup of coffee, who’d be the first bastard to come along and test it with a hydrometer? Smith! Great Scott, Mr Salter, you won’t credit the depth a man could stoop to till you’ve lived in this town under Smith.’

‘Smith is our sergeant,’ explained Athol Cudby. ‘A very bad man is Sergeant Smith. No love lost between him and Charlie.’

‘Pig of a man,’ said the undertaker. ‘Never understand gracious living. Not as long as his hole points at the ground. Watch a pub all night, leaning up against a bank doorway while burglars taking the safe out the back way. See a man lying in the gutter with a knife sticking out of his back and he’d arrest him for being inebriated.’

The cigar waggled furiously and Charlie Dabney’s chest and shoulders heaved with mirth. Athol Cudby sniggered.

The gullies of flesh in the tall stranger’s jowls deepened. He was smiling, but his thoughts were on the rapidly diminishing
pile of change beside his glass on the counter. A financial crisis was one double schnapps distant. If he had managed to reach Oporenho that night he would have soon sniffed out a card game among the freezing-workers, but this town presented a very different picture. In Oporenho he would have kept the uncanny skill of his fingers a close secret but here, he reflected, it might be more profitable to openly startle the natives with some sleight of hand.

‘Yuh right enough,’ said Alf Yerbey as he refilled the glasses. He addressed the stranger. ‘Our sergeant here gives the pubs hell. Examines our registers every damn’ night that passes without fail. Offends bono feedo guests drinking in the lounge. Positively sits on a man’s friggin’ doorstep. Do you know what the bastard did once?’

Salter shook his head.

‘Swang on a man’s legs to break his neck,’ said Alf Yerbey.

‘’S’fact,’ said Athol Cudby. ‘True as a man stands here tonight.’

‘When this Smith was pounding a beat,’ explained Yerbey, ‘he was at a hanging at Mount Davidson. They dropped a guy through the hatch and they made a balls of it. Smith was the guy who grabbed hold of his ankles and swung his sixteen stone on him to snap his neck like a rotten parsnip.’

Alf Yerbey found the reaction to this macabre tit-bit extremely gratifying. He had related it times without number and was always sure of seeing horror register on the faces of his audience, but the tall man seemed positively overwhelmed. His face went chalk-white and he grabbed at the edge of the bar.

‘Gives yuh some idea, eh?’ Alf Yerbey chuckled, taking the man’s glass away to replenish it.

‘’S’fact,’ said Athol Cudby. ‘’S’solid fact. True as a man stands here tonight in this very room.’