The Underground Man (8 page)

But my joy very soon grew muted, after a moment's reflection made me realize that these stones would likely require surgery of some sort. For once a stone gets itself inside a man, one cannot imagine it being easily shaken out. Presumably big knives would be necessary and my belly would need completely opening up.

Question – How did these stones get inside of me to begin with? In my bread? In my soup?

Whichever way they got in, the dictionary seemed to suggest that, by now, they had most likely set off on a journey through my insides, which is apparently what causes the pain. I pictured great boulders … stationary at first … then slowly starting to roll … and gathering some unstoppable speed as they went along.

They made a terrible rumbling. I lay there listening for a full hour, not knowing what to do.

When I woke I was all in a lather, having dreamed how a tiny carriage had got inside me and how its progress through my personal tunnels was making my stomach ache. I was, if I remember rightly, the man in the carriage as well as the man whose innards I journeyed through.

It was seven o'clock when Clement brought me some fruity-tasting game pie. I insisted he check no carriages were missing and that none of the tunnels were in use.

Tomorrow I will get me another doctor. Not some ape in a waistcoat, but one who really knows his stuff. I will get me a qualified surgeon and tell him about the stones.

My head is a barometer. Has been all my life. And though blood, not mercury, creeps through my veins and my face lacks a needle to point at
Fair
or
Change
the anticipation of the shifts in climate are registered there just the same. So when I was woken last night in the pitch-dark by a sickening pressure behind the eyes and my scalp a nest of shooting pains I knew before I was properly conscious that some tempest was on its way. If there had been a hint of daylight I could have looked out of the window, consulted the barometer tower and had my findings verified. But I was marooned in the depths of night-time and everything was as black as could be.

Pains in my head I am used to– I have twinges every week
or two – but these were not the familiar forebodings of a downpour or the premonition of a blustery day. A storm of colossal proportions was coming, for my head felt completely pumped full of air and my skull was about ready to crack. Yet the discomforts up top were nothing compared with the stresses and strains I was experiencing down below. My belly was so bloated I was having trouble breathing. I was ridden with pain. It had rendered me awake.

I leant out of bed and lit a candle to try and calm me down, but its flame barely dented the dark. It merely slunk back a foot or two and continued to study me. I sat myself up, blinking, in my big four-poster. Looked out from my small corner of candlelight, still reeling from dreams. The shadows swung lazily to and fro as if the whole house pitched in the night, while the pains in my head and stomach squeezed me like a vice.

The bedsheets had fallen from me to reveal a stomach straining at my nightshirt's seams. I stared down at it – at my own unrecognizable stomach. What, in God's name, was I full of? If it were indeed a stone then it was growing at an incredible speed, must now be a good ten inches wide. Fearfully, I slipped my fingers under my nightshirt and peeled it back over my spherical belly. The flesh, usually slack, was now tight as a drum. My belly button, an aperture normally capable of swallowing half my thumb, had been forced out into a tight, bulging knot – a wildly staring eye. Some little monster had picked me as its place of refuge. Some evil had made me its home.

The storm kept on advancing. ‘God help me,' I heard me say.

The thick curtains at the windows danced a little, twitching in the gusts from the cracks. Outside, a gate rattled madly on its latch, as if the wind shook it with its very own hands.

I thought I heard the creaking of an ancient ship: ropes and timbers straining to hold it all together. An awful chorus of discordant screeching and scraping, it was, before some final coming-apart. But the sound came not from beyond the windows, nor even the bed where I failed to sleep. I was sickened to discover that the sound came from me, and that I was that creaking ship.

Something heavy lurched inside of me. Turned and slid to one side. Whatever creature had recently taken up in me stirred. What was in me had come alive.

A tear crept out from the corner of my eye and hurried down my cheek. Such
pain
! I had never known such pain. The monster inside me forced my legs apart and began to burrow its way out. I grabbed the candle from the bedside table. Held it between my legs and peered into the light. One hand gripped a bedpost behind me while the other tried to keep the candle in place. And the next moment I was seized by the most incredible agony, as if I was being ripped in two. A mountain moved inside me; the first raindrop dashed itself against the window-pane.

A high-pitched rasping noise came out of me, like the tearing of a sail. It caught the candle and transformed itself into a blinding, billowing flame. Purple-blue, it was, and six foot long, lighting up the entire room. The flash came back from the mirrors and bounced from wall to wall and that dreadful noise continued to launch itself from me as I clung to the bedposts with both hands. But just as my own great flame began to dwindle and the pain had begun to abate I became aware of other, new flames in the room. The netting round my bed had been caught up in it and my sheets were all alight.

I leapt from the bed, dancing madly. Tripped and fell. Got to my feet. Tripped again. The flames swept up the muslin with an evil crackle and multiplied themselves.

‘Fire!' I shouted, as if to wake me. ‘Fire!'

I continued running frantically around the room and caught sight of me in a mirror. A small flame clung to the tail of my nightshirt, like some evil party game. I leapt back, aghast, and when I looked again, saw how the flame had spread; now crept around me in a cruel embrace.

‘Fire!' I yelled, louder this time. ‘Fire!'

I hopped from one foot to the other, slapping my flaming nightshirt with bare hands. I was like some demented person, like some injured bird. One second the flame went out – O, blessed relief! – the next it had returned. I patted it out at my shoulder only to see it reappear at my waist. I must have put that same flame out a dozen times – I was beating myself like an African drum – until at long last the blasted thing went down and did not come back up and, with a sudden inexplicable charge in my blood, I set about extinguishing those larger, wilder flames which were consuming my aged bed. ‘Off my bed!' I shouted at them. It was as if a different part of me took over – a brighter and much braver man. I looked around the room. I could not say what for. Then, in a flash, I had dived under the flaming four-poster and come out with my china pot. Almost full. Excellent. I took aim and threw its contents in an ever-widening arc.

There was a moment when the chaos seemed to hang in the air and wait for instruction. The next moment, all the flames were out.

The room was pitch-black again and suddenly silent. I stood listening, gulping in the smoky air. The door swung open and there was Clement, with his lamp held high. The room slid back into the light. The bedsheets were wet and blackened, the muslin hung in tatters everywhere. A thick pall of smoke crowded the ceiling and huddled over the whole sorry scene. I opened a window to let the smoke out, but the
rain and the wind came in instead. A handful of leaves entered, formed themselves into a whirlpool, then skipped like infants around an invisible maypole.

In the long mirror, I caught sight of somebody. An old beggar of a man, he was – all singed and smudged. The charred remains of a nightshirt hung from him and his pale body showed through here and there. I tried to stand a little straighter, but it did no good. Did not improve my opinion of him at all.

Clement looked on from the doorway in his leather slippers and freshly-laundered robe. He had a puzzled expression on his face.

‘Gas,' I explained.

The hairs on my legs are all singed away but my stomach is flat as a pancake. All that talk of stones and my being opened-up like an oyster is done with. I shall sleep in one of the guest rooms until my own is redecorated.

The sky had been lardy all day long – or, at least, since I first set eyes on it around eleven o'clock. I had resolved to get out for my constitutional at some point and charge my lungs but kept putting it off in the vain hope of a little sun and by late afternoon the same grey veil hung over the world so I settled on a swift twenty-minute circular, then getting myself back indoors. I took with me one of the stable dogs – a whippet called Julius, who is blind in one eye – and, all things considered, we were having a quite agreeable time, with Julius
nearly catching a rabbit and me finding a handsome stick. But as we were heading over towards the Deer Park a mist came up around us with all the opacity of a Turkish bath.

It was thickest on the ground, up to a height of about three feet, so that we were able to wade through it like a shallow milky lake. Very strange and quite intriguing at first, but when the great oak towards which we were headed was swallowed up in the fog I began to find myself somewhat at sea. Poor Julius, with only his one good eye, was in right over his head, so I quickly put a leash on him, for he had got into the habit of standing stock-still and I am quite sure I would have lost him if he hadn't been making such a row with all his whimpering.

We had wandered around the meadows long enough for me to go beyond being merely irritated and to start to feel a little troubled, so I thought it best to stop and make some firm decision about which way to go. In the mist the world had lost all its edges; had become vague and unreliable. I searched for some familiar landmark – a copse or fence or stream – without success. Dusk was beginning to slip in all around us and we were neither of us dressed to spend much time out in the cold, but were in no immediate danger, when the most peculiar thing came to pass. Without warning, I recoiled – quite violently – as if I had been stung by a wasp. It was as if some crumb of a dream stirred in me – the smallest fragment, from long ago. Some nightmare, which had haunted my earliest years; no more than an itch to begin with, but I scratched at it and there developed in me the most convincing scene …

Then I have lost it. I lose the carriage at the shout. I think too hard on that particular shout and the carriage disappears.

So I try a different sort of remembering. I dwell on the travelling clothes I wore with such pride. Encourage myself to recall the smell of the sea and look for the sand as it is thrown up by the wheels.

And the carriage gradually re-emerges. Comes up slowly out of the sand. Then …

But here I lose it again. The thing slips from me. It is very hard to hold. When the mist came up it escaped me. So I tell myself to think of the voices. Think of Father's voice …

Then the dream stops in its tracks and collapses, and I find myself back in the Deer Park with Julius, in a lake of mist.

I set off at quite a pace, dragging the half-blind dog behind me. I worry I may be cut off from the house.

How strange. Not five minutes' walk from my own front door and I am frightened that it is out of reach.

As a boy I had great difficulty sleeping; was often troubled by dreams of abandonment. Time and again I would wake sobbing deep in the night and have to wrench my fearful body from the bedclothes to go barefoot down the hallways of the house. For an age, it seemed, I would run the gauntlet of my own ghouls and demons towards the sanctuary of my parents' room.