The Wanderer (3 page)

On a Saturday afternoon, six weeks, or so, earlier, out shopping in central London, I was walking by way of Covent Garden from Neal Street to the Strand. On James Street, I was forced to weave through crowds of tourists queuing for cheap theatre tickets and watching street-performers bedizened as aliens, robots, classical statuary. Entering the Piazza itself, I heard, over the bustle, the harsh stridulation of a Punch and Judy man’s swazzle. It was
some moments before I saw the booth itself, hunched in one corner of the square. Its chipboard surround was painted to mimic an ornate proscenium, two ivy-twined columns supporting an arch, keystone ornamented with a carving of Punchinello’s head, three cherubs, each cradling a lyre, perched atop, smirking down at the stage. The drapes around the fit-up were blue, not striped red and white as they usually are. A small group had gathered, elderly for the most part. There wasn’t a single child among them, which struck me as odd. I crossed over for a closer look.

The play was part-way through. Punch meted out blows to a portly man carrying a black doctor’s case.

‘I the medic now!’ screamed Punch, striking the other with his stick. ‘A littel of your own physic will do you a power of good.’

‘No more, I pray, Mister Punch,’ the good doctor pleaded. ‘I am quite cured now, I swear to it!’

‘Oh, but you still look peaky, you bad still. Physic! Physic! Physic! Physic!’

With each repetition of the word, Punch laid a blow on the leech’s cranium.

‘Mister Punch, no more. One pill of that physic is a dose, I tell thee.’

‘Quacky, quacky, quack, quack,’ screamed Punch, a berserk mallard, chasing the physician around the stage, administering a vicious pummelling.

‘A few more and you’ll not want curing again, quacky, quack, quack. Maybe you don’t feel the medicine inside?’

And with this, the hook-nosed hunchback poked the doctor, hard, in his vat of guts, and the man fell down dead.

‘Hee, hee, hee,’ laughed Punch, casting the body over the front of the stage. ‘Heal thyself now, if you can!’

The antic capering continued, the bloodless, but brutal cudgelling, as Punch beat to death: a horse, a rich man’s servant, a ghost, and a milk maid and her cow, a glum beast with dangling
udders, which yielded to fate with a doleful low and a slow shake of its massive skull. Finally two lawmen, dressed in tricorner hats, frock coats, and pantaloons, entered, and, managing to dodge Punches swipes, seized hold of him and took him to court.

The play was violent and bawdy, the drubbings savage, the puns lewd – in court, the judge, a puppet with a sagging face, wearing the full-length wig, described the hunchback’s mistress, Pretty Poll, as having, ‘on many occasions, suffered a good length of rod.’ It definitely wasn’t suitable for children, it was good there were none in the audience. I was surprised no one complained, but all just gawped on, listless.

Following the trial, a guilty verdict was delivered. Punch, sentenced to death, was strung up on a gibbet by a hooded hangman, kicking and screaming to the last.

‘Surely some mistake. I no bad man. I was just having a littel fun!’

After Punch’s burial, the curtains closed. The rest who’d been watching shuffled off, but I hung around, intrigued to see the puppeteer behind the bizarre, archaic show. After five minutes, when no one had emerged from the fit-up, I walked round to the rear; the curtain there was drawn back, the booth empty; it seemed he or she had somehow slipped away without my noticing.

Over the next few weeks I saw the booth on a number of occasions, in various places around town. Mostly I ignored it, walked straight past, but occasionally I’d a moment to spare and stayed to watch the buffoonery. It appeared the puppeteer was following a script, not improvising; there were minor changes to the dialogue at each performance, but the order of events remained the same. I never saw the Punch and Judy man, he never came out from the fit up to take applause, of which anyway, there was only a smattering, never passed round a cap. The audience was always, aged, and I recognized many of the
same faces each time. It was all odd, passing odd, but I never suspected malignancy (perhaps because I was preoccupied by work: it was busy at the office then). It wasn’t till the evening I, lacking patience, got off the bus, broken down but soon fixed, I realized a weird evil was at work.

As I strode, irked, through London’s night-quiet, heading for Highbury Corner, I saw a primly-attired old woman coming towards me down the centre of the road. She was walking along the broken white line like it were a tightrope: feet splayed, painstaking, arms flung out as if for balance. From time to time, she stumbled. Overhead, in a clear sky, hung a moon like a dollop of bacon grease in a black pan. I crossed over and, drawing closer, saw the old woman was in a stupor. She threw her head back, jaws agape, and screeched, in a tone that possetted my blood, ‘That’s the way to do it!’ It was then I recognized her as one of the wonted spectators of the Punch and Judy show.

Letting her go on ahead, I followed after, allowing myself to believe I acted out of kindness: not rousing her, lest the abruptness of her waking caused distress, but keeping an eye on her, ensuring she didn’t come to harm. Thinking back on things now, I realize my true motivation was less noble: curiosity.

The old woman walked on, south, back the way I’d come, her progress slow, halting. Due to the lateness of the hour, there were not many vehicles about, and the drivers of the few cars and vans that passed spotted her in time to slow, skirt round. As the warmth, if not the whirl, of the drink wore off, I began to shiver, my headache worsened. Looking at my watch, I saw it was half past midnight, heart of the witching hour. On Kingsland Road, I kept to the shadows, wary lest anyone see me creeping in the woman’s wake and presume my intentions were ill. Under the railway bridge near the junction with Old Street, a powerfully built man with close-cropped hair, dressed in a well-tailored suit, staggered out of a club. Sighting the old woman, he slurred a hail
in an Estuary accent. Getting no response, he reached into his jacket, took out a gun. I stopped. Calling out again, he loosed off a round. The bullet caromed off the tarmac near the old lady’s feet. When she still did not react, he snorted, went back inside the seedy bar. My pent-up breath escaped me in a rush, and I ran to catch up with the woman.

She continued walking down Shoreditch High Street, turned onto Commercial Street, then stopped before Christ Church Spitalfields, stood looking vacantly up at the heathen obelisk that served as its spire. I also turned my gaze on it. It towered skyward to rend the veil of cloud shrouding the moon. Before, I’d remarked it seemed to bear down on an observer as if poised to topple; that night this caprice of perspective struck me as an ill augury (would that I’d listened to that mantic tremble and not followed the woman further). I concealed myself in one of the entrances to Spitalfields Market and watched the woman. She was motionless some time, then, with an agility and strength belying her seeming stiffness and frailty, hauled herself up and over the gate, dropped down, darted off, and disappeared out of view behind the church.

Running over, I too scaled the fence, though with greater difficulty than my quarry, and caught sight of her ducking into a mausoleum at the rear of the boneyard. I crossed the small cemetery plot, but paused, uneasy, if intrigued, on the threshold of the sepulchre. I stared up at the firmament hoping to compose and nerve myself by tracing patterns in the strewn disarray of the stars, but the sky was silted by the city lights, and only the very brightest of them were visible. But I found the mettle anyway, went in. Inside there were several memorial tablets and a marble sculpture on a granite plinth: a female angel in prayer, wings outflung, face raised to heaven. Water stains lined the statue’s cheeks, imparting a melancholy air to her devotions. In one corner of the sepulchre, there was an archway giving on to stairs going down into the dark. I descended and passed through
a narrow entrance into a crypt. There was a sputtering taper set in a wall sconce that gave out a wan light, a large sarcophagus, whose stone surface was covered with intricately carved designs, and, in an alcove at the rear of the tomb, a pile of human bones, stacked neatly according to type: mandible with mandible, femur with femur, skull with skull…This arrangement struck me as antic, disquieting; some bones had fallen from the shelf and lay heaped on the floor – their confusion did not perturb half so much as the harmonious disposition of those in the nook.

And there was no sign of the woman. I was perplexed. I could almost believe she’d lain down to rest on the jumbled bones piled on the floor, and, undergoing the processes of putrefaction and decay in an instant, been reduced to a tawny skeleton and lost among the other relics.

In all likelihood, I would have quit that place and returned home, had a rat not drawn my attention to a place of concealment so obtrusive, and so macabre, I’d not considered it. The rodent emerged, squealing, from a small crevice at the base of the sarcophagus. Upon closer inspection, I found a slight draught to emanate from the fissure and decided to try opening the stone coffin’s lid. I tried it, but it was too heavy to lift by hand. Realizing a tool of some kind was needed, I cast about and discovered, in a gloomy niche I’d previously overlooked, a crowbar. I supposed the elderly woman had moved the lid aside just enough to allow her to climb inside, chucked the crowbar into the nook, and, once lying prone, slid the lid back into place; a feat, though one she’d shown she’d the strength for, vaulting the churchyard gate.

Taking up the crowbar, I set to prising up the lid. Misjudging its weight, I was too forceful, and the slab overtipped, fell to the ground. There was a violent report, and the clay floor tiles crazed where it hit.

The sight confronting me when I leant over to look into the box confounded: a flight of stone stairs descended into abysmal
darkness. At the centre of each step a shallow trough had been worn by the passage of many feet; they looked hands cupped to catch alms.

I can’t explain what I did next, save to say, intrigued, nerve bolstered by the drink still roiling my blood, I found it easy to deny my misgivings a voice; there was fanned within me a blaze of awe and curiosity that left fear and reason in ashes. Clambering over the side of the casket, I began to descend the staircase.

Once I’d left the light of the taper behind me, it was black as pitch, and I was forced to grope my way. Then, after a while, I saw a glimmer beneath me. The steps came to an end, and I found myself in a tunnel lit by guttering cressets. It sloped sharply downwards ahead. The floor was packed earth, but the walls and ceiling were regular stone blocks. I went on. The masonry soon yielded to stark rock, and several times I was forced to scramble over piles of rubble where the roof had caved in. Soon the last vestiges, bar the torches, of man’s attempt to tame this dread olden place were far behind me. A slick of filth coated everything. I felt I’d wandered into the burrow of some predacious beast. The tunnel forked a number of times, but I was guided on by the trail of burning grease, like someone following will-o’-the-wisps into the heart of a mire.

After passing through a stretch so strait, so low, I had to squirm in the muck on my belly, I felt a faint breeze. Carried on it was a droning; pausing a moment, hand cupped to my ear, I made out what it was: the hushed voices of a large crowd. Reaching the top of a steep incline, I began, cautiously, to edge forwards. A few steps further on, the rock beneath my feet gave way to scree and my legs went from under me. After sliding a short way, flailing, I managed to seize hold of an outcrop, check my descent. By a faint, flickering light, I saw I’d entered a vast cavern. The atmosphere was dank, the dark granite walls, piebald with pallid fungi. Something cold and glairy dripped
into my hair from the roof far above, ran down my nape. Stinking water pooled in hollows underfoot.

A large number of people were gathered on the far side of the cave, but I’d not attracted their notice; they were quite a way off, I was shrouded in shadow, and the pattering cascade of grit I’d started went unheard. Nearer at hand, several mineral deposits rose from the floor like the gnarled, grasping fingers of some monstrous buried crone. I clambered down to the foot of the slope, then, crossing over, hid myself amid them.

A large crucible of burning liquid, source of the fitful glow, limned the faces of the crowd with red. They were many, at least two hundred, all elderly, all attired in Sunday best, all staring straight ahead. I craned my neck to see what transfixed them, but my sight of it was blocked by a man head and shoulders taller than the rest. Cowled and robed figures walked through the throng swinging fuming thuribles. Then, the tall man, nudged by someone behind him, shifted, and I saw what held the throng rapt: the weird Punch and Judy man’s blue fit-up. I stared aghast.

Then the mutterings of the crowd were silenced by an eerie, drawn out, ‘That’s the way to do it!’, the sound of the swazzle keen and strident, and the play began.

Ritual mayhem, brutalizations and murders, the throng replying to Punch’s asides solemnly and with one voice – a dire litany. Under open sky, the play had seemed merely grotesque; now, beneath ground, by a baleful glimmer, under an acrid pall, it seethed with dread.

But was familiar. The same script. Till the end, when, after being hauled kicking and wailing to the scaffold, Punch did not submit to the noose, but began to chaff his hooded executioner.

‘Mister Jack Ketch, if you please, what must I do?’

‘Mister Punch, it’s simple enough, place your head,’ here he knocked his knuckles against the hunchback’s skull, ‘through this loop.’

‘What for? I don’t know how!’

‘Now, Mister Punch, no more delay! It’s very easy.’

‘Alright. Let me see. Is
this
the way to do it?’

Here Punch jutted his head forward to one side of the noose.

‘No, no! Here!’

‘Like
so
, then?’

Punch thrust his chin out on the other side of the halter.