The Tryst

10

Uneasy hints of spring struggled against the wintry dusk like a river running feebly against the incoming tide. At the corner where Steve turned out of the main road, two men and two women were standing around an empty pushchair. The boy mechanically noted the tell-tale signs of impairment: the bodies swaying back and forth like plants in the wind, feet continually shuffling to maintain balance, the rigid tunnel-vision gaze, the blurred voices all spluttering away at the same time. The two men were grasping cans of Carlsberg Special Brew. One of the women was holding a baby in her arms while the other lit a cigarette. The quartet kept up a constant patter, a verbal scaffolding on which they leant, tilting in towards each other.

‘… do for him …’

‘… little darling …’

‘… wants he wants …’

‘… bet your life …’

‘… just the job …’

‘… little pet …’

‘… right as rain …’

‘… never worry …’

One of the men took a feeding-bottle from the pushchair and poured beer into it. The two women, feinting and weaving like wrestlers, were trying to pass the baby from one pair of outstretched hands to another. The shopping hurt Steve’s shoulder, which still ached from the beating he’d received the week before, but he was determined to keep going until he reached the public lavatory. There he could not only have a rest but also put to use the pen he’d bought out of the money the old man allowed him. The stotters wouldn’t be getting it any more, not after what they’d done to him. Dave and Alex had started in as soon as he got home. Jimmy hadn’t been there, and if it hadn’t been for Tracy, Steve was sure they’d have killed him. They’d stood at either side of the room, tossing the boy back and forth between them, but instead of catching him, they’d stuck out their knees or elbows or fists or stood aside at the last moment and let him hit the floor or the wall before kicking him to his feet again. His helplessness had excited them and they went about their work with grunts and squeals, like when they were labouring over Tracy late at night.

The worst of it had been their silence. Steve had expected angry questions which he would somehow satisfy, making up versions of the truth good enough for people who could hardly remember their own names half the time. But they hadn’t asked any questions. They had just hurled him about until he lost all sense of time and place, of who he was and who they were and why this was happening. Once the stotters got started on something, fucking or fighting or whatever it might be, it was almost impossible for them to stop unless someone came along and switched them off. That was normally Steve’s task, but now he had fallen into the machine himself, and it was slowly but surely beating him to a pulp. There was nothing personal about it. That was the whole problem. Dave and Alex couldn’t have stopped even if they’d wanted to. They wouldn’t have known how.

In the end he had been saved, though, and by Tracy, which almost made it worthwhile. After screaming at the two men in vain for some time, she’d eventually thrown herself on Steve, wrestling him to the ground and daring Dave and Alex to come and take him back. But they didn’t even try. They just stood looking about them with bewildered expressions, like children whose favourite toy has been snatched away. Then Alex turned on the television, Dave cracked open another can of lager and a few minutes later they had forgotten all about it.

But Steve didn’t forget, and during the week that followed he decided that the time had come to celebrate his feelings for Tracy publicly. If it hadn’t been for her he would have left, taken his chances sleeping rough again, or perhaps even asked the old man if he could stay there. But he felt that he had to stand by Tracy, ready to protect her as she had protected him, deflecting the stotters’ moods, playing them off against each other, managing them without their being aware of it. Steve saw it as a bond between them, and although they had never spoken about it, he was sure Tracy considered him her friend and ally.

Sometimes, despite his caution, she caught him looking at her, and then the look she gave him was so dense and heady, so charged with meaning, that it seemed to make words both impossible and unnecessary. So the following week Steve added a felt-tipped pen to his shopping list, and on the way back to Grafton Avenue he stopped at the lavatory to share his feelings about the person he loved. He didn’t yet know what he was going to say, although he knew that it would be different from the other stories on those closely covered walls. Steve was not interested in Tracy’s underwear or shoes, and there was certainly no point in imagining her carrying on like the women in the other stories: he saw all that at home just about every evening. In any case, that had nothing to do with love, so he’d just skip it, the way the other writers skipped the bits that didn’t interest them, and get straight to the point: the warmth, the tenderness, the cuddles, the love that grew stronger and stronger until it could hold the whole world at bay.

The moment he passed through the doorless portal, Steve knew that something strange and sinister had occurred. The building was bare, stripped and featureless. Even the familiar smells had been usurped by an alien odour. As for the walls, the change was almost too much to take in at first. The stories were gone! All those tightly organized patches and clusters of writing had been brutally erased, all that concentrated passion and pain diluted by powerful industrial solvents to a thin grey film smeared over the basic beige. Steve groped his way to the cubicle with the broken window and collapsed, his head in his hands and tears running down his cheeks. How could they do such a thing? Those stories were like friends to him, as reassuring and predictable as the doors he’d got to know on his newspaper round; individual and interesting, yet perfectly safe. Any time he happened to be passing he could drop in and visit them. And now some faceless fucker in a wanker’s uniform had come along and said they had no right to be there! It was too cruel, worse than any pain the stotters had been able to think up. It made everything meaningless.

Several minutes passed before the boy noticed that a few words had miraculously escaped. They had formed part of the story about taking a schoolgirl out to eat. This had been a late addition to the collection, and so the writer had been forced to fit his story into the space left empty by those who had come before him. As a result, four of the lines had been pushed so far to the right that the final word had spilt over on to the doorframe and thus escaped the solvent. Steve read the words over and over, trying to remember how they had fitted into the rest of the story, and exactly what it had been about. But it was no good. He hadn’t even understood it at the time.

His plans to write about Tracy were forgotten. That expanse of blank wall terrified him. He had hoped to scribble a few words of homage that would have been lost among all the other stories, but to start again from scratch, to found a new tradition for others to follow, that was beyond him. Nevertheless, there was something that he could do. He snatched up the orange sling full of groceries and hurried back outside. Half-way down the street he stopped by a lamp-post with a bulbous base. He uncapped the pen and wrote the word EAT. After a quick glance to make sure no one had seen, he added SHIT underneath, as it had appeared on the door frame, then DIE and BOX. He put his pen away and surveyed his work with a satisfied smile. This was just the beginning. Those four poor orphaned words would come back to haunt the dark powers that had ordered and executed the destruction of the rest. They would appear everywhere, on doors and walls and public places all over the city, until no one could do anything or go anywhere without seeing them!

Steve approached the house with particular caution that day. The old man had made it clear the week before that today he would finish his long story, and the boy was worried that Hazchem might try and intervene to stop this happening. The fact that he didn’t believe in the story made no difference. The old man’s fear was real enough, and until that was explained it was only sensible for Steve to be frightened too.

‘Now then, lad, let’s see if you’re still as clever at remembering what I told you.’

They had finished their tea and eggs and buttered bread, and Ernest Matthews had settled in his armchair to load and light his pipe. Steve duly recited the story of the moonlit vigil on the roof of the Hall, the footprints in the dew, Maurice’s disappearance and the discovery of his body in the wood.

‘Very good!’ Matthews nodded. ‘But I wonder if you’re clever enough to guess what I thought when I heard all this, hundreds of miles away in a foreign land, on the eve of the great battle that was to be my baptism of fire? First of all, though, let me tell you exactly what it was that I heard. When Maurice’s body was discovered, the police were informed and a doctor fetched to examine the corpse. He reported that death had occurred about two years before, as the result of a fall. The police immediately rounded up the forest dwellers I told you about earlier, and sure enough, they admitted burying Maurice’s body. They said they had come upon it by chance one morning, and knowing that they would be turned out and made homeless a second time if it should be found there, they had dragged the body into the wood and concealed it where it might have remained undiscovered for ever if the trees had not been felled and the ground ploughed up once the war came. This much they confessed, but nothing would make them admit to the murder itself, and since there was no further evidence against them, the case remained a mystery. For my part, I was thinking of what the surgeon had said about the time of Maurice’s death. It had been almost exactly two years earlier that I had watched Maurice leave the Hall one night in pursuit of a female will-o’-the-wisp. Now, there had been two sets of tracks leading away from the Hall, remember. My idea at the time had been that Maurice had gone out and then returned, but supposing he hadn’t, what then?’

Steve raised his eyes to the old man’s face.

‘Someone followed him.’

‘Good. But who?’

‘His brother.’

The old man gaped.

‘How … how did you know?’

Steve shrugged. The videos that the stotters hired often had a story of this kind as a pretext for the scenes of mayhem and carnage, and having seen a lot of them by now Steve had got quite sharp at spotting the clues.

‘You said the footprints split up,’ he explained. ‘One lot came from the front door and the other …’

‘From the east wing, yes. And that should have told me that they couldn’t have been made by Maurice returning to the house, because all the doors save the one he’d come out of would have been bolted on the inside.’

‘And his brother slept there, didn’t he? And he hated him and everything.’

The old man nodded curtly. He seemed rather put out at having his thunder stolen.

‘Quite so. But the question was, what was I to do? I thought of telling one of the officers, but how could I explain it all to a stranger, who didn’t know the place or the people? Then I had what seemed at the time like a stroke of luck. As I said, fresh troops were constantly arriving in preparation for the attack, and one day as I was returning from fatigue duty I happened to see Maurice’s friend Aubrey Deville in a lieutenant’s uniform. Taking my courage in both hands, I approached him and explained the situation. It seemed a great presumption for a lad of my age, a housekeeper’s son and a raw recruit, to presume to interfere in such matters. I didn’t blab out my suspicions of Rupert, of course. I merely told him what I had seen that night, saying that since the discovery of Maurice’s body I felt I could no longer keep silent. At first Deville listened with a condescending sort of smile, but as I spoke this slowly faded and his eyes began to probe away at me like a surgeon searching a wound. When I’d done, he stood there as silent as a statue for what seemed like an eternity. Then he nodded curtly and told me to report that afternoon to an old farm behind the lines that served as a junior officers’ mess for that sector. The afternoon was a quiet time for us, when we tried to get some sleep, for we were up all night on fatigues, digging huge pits. But orders were orders, so rather regretting my rashness already I duly went to the farm, where I found Deville and a group of other officers sitting around on old ammunition boxes. My heart almost failed me when I recognized Rupert Jeffries among them. But military discipline has the great advantage that no one expects you to act naturally. I marched forward and came stiffly to attention with no more expression than a pillar-box. Aubrey Deville told me to stand at ease. “Now I want you to tell us all what you told me this morning,” he says. So I did. When I had finished, Deville turned to the others and said, “You have heard this lad’s evidence. I can vouch that it is true. But I can do no more than that. I can tell you what happened afterwards, and I can reveal how Maurice came by his death.”

‘Naturally this caused quite a stir. “When Maurice told me that he had seen this woman,” Deville went on, “my first thoughts were of grave disquiet for my friend’s health. All of you here knew him to some extent, but few perhaps appreciated the extent to which the catastrophe which has now overwhelmed us preyed upon his mind in those months. Maurice was increasingly distressed by the prospect of a war which he considered would plunge society into a new Dark Age, so much the more terrible than the first as our capacity for organized inhumanity is greater. In those final months of seclusion in the country, this idea had come to preoccupy him to an extent which alarmed even those of us who shared his concern. Thus when he told me about this woman who had supposedly come wandering across his lawn at midnight dressed in a shift, I feared the worst. If I agreed to sit up and watch with him, it was not in any hope that any woman would actually appear, but merely from a desire to verify my fears with a view to urging Maurice to consult a specialist in nervous diseases. But although the spirit was willing enough, the flesh proved too weak, and after waiting in vain for many weary hours, spent listening to Maurice’s increasingly incoherent eulogies of this woman he claimed to have loved all his life, despite telling me he had seen her for the first time a few weeks before, I retired to get some sleep, having begged my friend to do likewise. Scarcely had I reached my room, however, than I heard Maurice’s voice calling out, “Who are you? Where are you going?” The room I had been allocated was in the east wing, so I could see his window from mine, and when I looked out I beheld him gesturing frantically towards the lawn. As young Matthews here has testified, there was absolutely nothing to be seen. Maurice had already told me that he intended to follow the woman if she should appear again, so when he abruptly vanished from the window I knew what to expect. I felt that he should not be allowed to roam about all alone in the middle of the night, brainsick as I now knew him to be. Quickly drawing on again the boots I had just that moment put off, I hastened downstairs and let myself out of a side door.

‘ “Despite my haste, Maurice was already out of sight when I left the Hall, but the line of footprints marked in the dew on the lawn showed me the way he had gone. I followed it to the gravel path which leads from the other wing past the church to the west gate of the park. It was a fine night and I had no difficulty in finding my way. However, when I came to the gate I was at a loss. I knew that Maurice could not have gone out towards the village without rousing the gatekeeper, of whom there was no sign, but he might either have turned right towards the stables or left along the old track leading up into the woods. Then, looking in the latter direction, I seemed to see a flurry of movement about half-way up the hillside. The next moment it was gone, swallowed up in the darkness of the trees, but I immediately started running that way as fast as I could. The track was straight and steep, treacherous and uneven, the mere memory of a road. At that hour, by that light, it looked inconceivably ancient, as indeed it may well have been. The woods seemed to lower above me like a bank of fog. Once I entered their vast penumbra I could see only fitfully, by snatches. Gradually the track levelled out, and I knew that I must have reached the crest of the hill. The night was perfectly calm and still except for the sounds of my own progress and the small noises of creatures going about their business, killing and being killed. I could see almost nothing but the parting of the trees against the hazy sky, which showed me my way. At length this strip of sky broadened out as the trees on either side fell back. I thought at first that I had reached the other side of the wood, but then I saw that it was only a clearing, although a large one. In it stood a house, separated from the track by a garden with a low wall. The garden looked as wild and overgrown as the underwood itself, but the house was surprisingly handsome and large, much too imposing for a woodsman’s dwelling. It may have been a hunting lodge dating from the time when those woods were a royal demesne. However that may have been, it was now quite clearly untenanted and in a state of abandonment. I was about to pass on when a jarring noise startled me. After the gentle forest murmurs I had grown used to, it sounded as loud as a shot, but I soon saw that it had been made by someone opening a window high up in one of the gables of the house. The next moment Maurice appeared at the window, smiling and waving. Overcome with relief, I hailed him. He took not the slightest notice of me, however, but continued gesturing and smiling as before. My relief rapidly turned to alarm as I realized that these demonstrations were not intended for me. ‘Yes, yes!’ he cried loudly. Then, to my utter horror, I beheld my friend step out and stand on the ledge. I shouted at him repeatedly, endeavouring to awaken him from his fatal delirium, but he was no more aware of me than a lover alone with his mistress is aware of the barking of a distant dog. His face was pale, rapt and ecstatic in the moonlight, even at the moment when he stepped forward off the ledge. A moment later I heard the terrible impact, like a sack hitting the ground. I rushed forward and found my friend lying on the stones of the yard. His face was uninjured, and on his lips the blissful smile I had seen before was just beginning to fade. A moment later it had gone, and his features started to set in the calm mask of death. But I had no doubt then and I have no doubt now that Maurice Jeffries died a happy man.

‘ “For some reason that conviction served only to increase my mortal terror of the place where I had witnessed these uncanny events. I took to my heels and ran back the way I had come as fast as I could, intending to raise the alarm. But once I was out of the wood and back in the civilized precincts of the Hall, I began to realize how incredible my story would sound. Of course, I was not to know that I had a witness in young Matthews. On the contrary, Maurice had impressed on me that he had told no one else about the woman. Surely if I were to offer such a tale, at five o’clock in the morning, as an explanation for a man’s violent death, I would come under the gravest suspicion myself. After some reflection, therefore, I determined to wait until it was light, then ride out to the house in the wood as if for exercise and report the discovery of Maurice’s body as though I had come upon it for the first time. It was not only to spare myself that I took this decision, but also to protect the Jeffries family from the pain and embarrassment of having to confront fully the fact that Maurice had done away with himself in a fit of madness. Perhaps I was wrong. Had I been sitting quietly in my study all evening, deliberating the issue judiciously, I might have acted otherwise. But after the horrific experience that I had just lived through, I was not quite myself. And all would have been well enough, except that when I returned to the clearing the next morning, Maurice’s body was not there.

‘ “I was absolutely astounded. I searched the house and the garden without finding anything. In the end I began to wonder if I could have imagined the whole thing. Had it been nothing but an unusually vivid dream brought on by my wakeful night and Maurice’s story? In any event, the arguments that had induced me to remain silent the night before now applied with redoubled force. In the absence of the corpse, I was left with nothing but a tissue of wild improbabilities which I had no hope of bringing anyone else to believe, since I could scarcely believe them myself. No doubt if hostilities had not broken out immediately afterwards, I would have told someone sooner or later. As it was, the matter rested there until I heard that Maurice’s body had been found. But I was still at a loss what to do until Private Matthews approached me this morning. Here was a witness who would support at least half my story. I resolved to risk the rest and break my silence.” ’

The old man broke off suddenly, his jaws working away as though he was chewing. His breath came in little puffs through his nose. It reminded Steve of the way the stotters acted when they overdid the glue, and it suddenly occurred to the boy how easy it would be for Matthews just to keel over and never get up again. It would seem natural. The stotters had to work hard to damage themselves that badly, but the old man was like a wasp in October: bumbling, vulnerable and doomed.

‘That was as much as I heard about the matter,’ Matthews went on at last, ‘for the next morning, just after dawn, the great attack began. It was a beautiful summer day. The sun was shining, and when our guns finally fell silent you could hear the birds singing. Then the officers blew their whistles and off we went. I wasn’t afraid. We’d been told that the enemy had all been killed by our bombardment. My chief concern was to act the part and not disgrace the uniform I had tricked my way into. I tried hard not to fall like a lot of the others. We were all carrying heavy packs and I supposed they must have lost their footing somehow, but I remember saying to myself, “Here I am, a mere boy, and if I can carry on then you should be able to!” Then I felt something pluck my arm. It might have been someone tugging at my sleeve to attract my attention, except there was no one near. The next moment I tripped over someone lying on the ground and fell headlong like the rest. When I started to get up, I saw to my surprise that there was no one left on his feet, although just a moment before there’d been hundreds and hundreds of us walking up the hillside. I thought that there might have been an order that I hadn’t heard. “Do what the others are doing” was the general rule of Army life, I’d learned, so I decided to stay where I was. My arm ached, and when I rubbed the place my hand came away all red and sticky, as if I’d been eating blackberries. I realized then that I’d been hit. It didn’t bother me much at the time. I’d seen worse at home, like that time the miller’s son got his leg caught under a millstone they were changing. What I didn’t understand, though, was where the bullet had come from, if the enemy were all dead. I thought perhaps I’d caught one of ours going the wrong way. I could hear all manner of yelps and groans around me, mixed in with the twittering of a lark overhead. I thought I could hear a woodpecker too, and that was strange, for there were no trees near.

‘The slope we were lying on, smooth and bare, reminded me of the hillside above the village. The sun grew hotter and hotter. I couldn’t understand why we had been ordered to lie down, and after a while I called to the man I’d tripped over and asked him what was going on. I got no answer, so I crawled over to him. The dust all around started kicking up, the way it does when the first big raindrops hit during a summer storm. That was another strange thing, for there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. When I got close enough, I saw why the man had taken no notice of me. Young as I was, I’d seen dead men before, and I knew he was dead. Then another man nearby started to lift himself up on his arms, making a kind of noise that made me look at him. I hailed him, but then the woodpecker sound started up again, and all of a sudden the man’s face just disappeared, the way your reflection does if you drop a stone in a pond. It was then that I finally twigged what had happened. The enemy hadn’t all been killed. They were sitting pretty in their trenches, and as we advanced they’d opened fire with machine-guns and cut us down. And the men lying on the ground around me weren’t obeying some orders I hadn’t heard. They were wounded or dying or dead.

‘By now the sun was scorching, and when I tried to reach the water bottle in my pack I got hit again. What was making the dust kick up, I learned, was bullets. The enemy had snipers on the lookout for any movement and one of them got me through the foot. After that I could do nothing but lie still, or as still as I could with the pain, pretending to be dead. Later on, great clouds of smoke came billowing across from our side, and I saw men running forward inside it. Another attack had started, and I hoped for a moment to be rescued. But straight away that damned tap-tap-tapping started up again, and when I looked again the men were gone. After that the enemy laid down a barrage into no-man’s-land, where I was. Shrapnel started flying all around, along with other things. I saw what I thought was a glove bounce on the ground just in front of me, and when I looked again I saw that it was a man’s hand cut off at the wrist. When it finally started to get dark, I set off to try and crawl back to our lines. At first I tried to avoid the bodies that were lying everywhere, but in the end I just dragged myself over them, planting my hands on their stomachs and my feet in their faces. They weren’t all dead, either. Many moaned and moved when I touched them, and one even begged me to shoot him, just like a child pleading for a sweet. It came on to rain, which made everything slimy and the going even more difficult. As day broke, I realized that I was still a long way from safety.

‘There was a large shell-hole nearby, so I crawled in there so as to be safe from the sniper fire. My water was all gone and I had a raging thirst, so I was glad to see that a puddle of rainwater had formed at the bottom of the hole. I was about to drink when I noticed what I thought for a moment was my own reflection looking back at me. It was a corpse. He must have crawled into the hole for shelter the previous day and then drowned when the rain came on. I sat there all that day, alone in the shell-hole, staring at that dead man guarding the water that he didn’t need and I couldn’t drink, and listening to the shells exploding all around. I asked myself why he had died and I was still alive. There seemed to be no reason to it. Every time a shell went off, the water rippled, blurring his features. I expected to be blown to shreds every moment, or cut apart by shrapnel. But it didn’t happen, and when night fell I tried once more to make my way back to our lines. By then I was almost mad with thirst, and I must have gone badly astray, for the next morning I found myself lying out in the open less than fifty yards from the enemy trenches. I could hear them calling to each other in their foreign lingo. Once in a while they loosed off a few shots when they thought they saw movement. They’d shoot at the corpses too, just for fun. The dead had begun to swell up and change colour by now, and I was afraid that the enemy would know I was alive by that. To keep my mind steady, I concentrated on watching this scrap of khaki cloth I could see, snagged on the barbed wire. It must have been part of the uniform of one of our lads who’d made it that far. All day long I watched it flapping about in the wind like some bird caught in a snare and struggling to free itself. As soon as it grew dark I set off again. Luckily it was a clear night this time, and by keeping an eye on the stars I was able to keep moving towards our lines. At daybreak I saw figures moving nearby. I didn’t know if they were living creatures or ghosts, still less whether they were from our side, but I called out as loudly as I could and they came running. It was a British stretcher-party on the lookout for casualties from the previous day’s action.’

The old man picked up the brass-handled poker, opened the stove and stirred the coals for some time. Steve glanced surreptitiously at the clock, which showed ten to six.

‘Well, we’d better finish,’ the old man sighed at last. ‘There’s not much left to tell, though it’s the hardest part. The stretcher-bearers set me down among the other dead and wounded, and I was so exhausted that I fell asleep, lying there on the duckboards. That was nearly the end of me, for I woke with my face underwater and such a weight on my back that I thought for a moment I must drown like a rat in our own trenches. But somehow I managed to twist myself free. A pile of the dead had fallen on top of me, as though they resented me outliving them. Later on, when I was carried back through the trench system to the rear, I saw what became of the corpses, and then I understood why we’d been set to dig those great pits before the battle. The officers had told us that the enemy would all be dead and we could just stroll across to their lines. I realized now that that was just a story, or why dig mass graves in readiness? After that I was moved from one dressing station and casualty station to another. What kept me going, despite the pain of my wounds, was the thought that now I’d be sent back home to England, having done my duty. But I was wrong. It seemed that I’d got off too lightly. To get a ticket home you needed to be more badly hurt. As soon as I was up and about again, I received orders to rejoin my unit, or rather a unit with the same name and number, for the one I’d served with had been wiped out almost to a man. The new troops were all fresh recruits who avoided me as though I had some disease. They knew well enough what had happened to us, although the officers tried to keep it secret. Twenty thousand men killed in a single day, and twice that number left mangled for life. We’d gone innocent to the slaughter, but these men knew what awaited them. I was a living reminder of that, and they wanted nothing to do with me. At that particular moment there was a lull in the fighting, so I had a lot of time to myself. My thoughts turned increasingly to home. How safe and tranquil it all seemed! I thought for the first time that I’d been happy there. I often used to think about the night I’d watched from the roof of the Hall, moving through the moonlit landscape in my thoughts. I realized that I’d been seeing it all for the last time, and that was why I’d felt so sad, because it was a leave-taking. That led me on to think about Maurice’s death, and the story Aubrey Deville had told about this. And suddenly, in a flash, I saw the truth!’

He glared fiercely, challengingly, at the boy.

‘Now then, you’re very clever, but I wonder if you’re clever enough to guess what the clue was that everyone had missed all along until I stumbled on it? A clue so blatant and obvious it was staring us all in the face all the time and yet we ignored it? Can you, eh?’

Steve shook his head. He hadn’t been expecting this. The old man grinned from ear to ear with satisfaction.

‘His name!’ he crowed. ‘Aubrey Deville. Deville! Take away the last two letters and what does it spell?’

The clock whirred like a slow-flying insect and struck six times.

‘D,E,V,I,L!’ the old man shouted. ‘It was he who lured Maurice Jeffries to his death that night, by means of black magic! And when he followed him to the trysting-house, it was not to try and save Maurice from his fate. On the contrary, he went to gloat over his creature’s act of self-destruction! Don’t you see!’

Steve nodded without conviction. It sounded like the old man had been watching that video where women are walking down a street at night and these two yellow eyes glow at them out of the darkness and they burst into flame, all their clothes burning off first so you can get a good look before the skin starts crisping up. ‘Pass the ketchup, darling!’ Dave had yelled gleefully. And in the end it was this man they knew, only he was really the devil, and the women had it coming to them because they were nothing but slags. Steve wondered where the old man kept his video player and TV. Upstairs, perhaps. There might be all sorts of things hidden upstairs.

‘About a week later,’ Matthews went on, ‘I was on lookout duty when I saw a figure walking towards me along the trench. I was surprised at this, for in that direction the trench ran out into no-man’s-land and had been abandoned. The man didn’t respond to my challenge, so I unhooded my lantern and shone it in his face. To my horror, I saw that it was none other than Deville himself, who I’d supposed was dead. He did not speak or return my salute, but simply walked past me along the trench without a glance. As soon as our watch was relieved, I told the others what had happened. The man who held the position next to mine gave me a curious look. “You must be mistaken,” he said. “No one passed by me.” The sergeant got to hear about this, and next day I was called to the lieutenant’s quarters. “I have had inquiries made,” he told me. “Lieutenant Aubrey Deville of the 8th Lincolns was killed in action over a month ago, the same day that you received your wound.” He went on to caution me strongly against saying anything else that might disturb the other men or I would find myself in serious trouble. That was all very well, but two nights later the figure appeared again. At first I could make out nothing but the bulk of it, darker than the night itself, it seemed. When I shone my lantern on it and saw who it was, I guessed that Deville had come back to haunt me and lure me to my death as he had poor Maurice. I fired a shot into the air to raise the alarm, but when the others came running the figure had vanished and my story was coldly received. The next morning I was sent to see the medical officer. He said I was suffering from shell-shock and should be excused lookout duty, but the lieutenant was having none of that. “Every man under my command has to pull his weight,” says he. “I’ve no time for malingering.” That was the cruellest cut of all! No one believed me, just as no one had believed Maurice Jeffries. They all thought I was pretending to have gone off my head so as to get sent home. After that all was quiet again for several nights. This is the way he likes to strike, coming on you when you least expect it. Then one day news came that a fresh attack was being planned for the following morning. We spent the night in the front-line trenches. About three in the morning Deville appeared again. He came straight at me this time, those eyes of his looking through me and an evil grin on his lips. I seized my rifle and warned him off, and when he took no notice I fired. As ill luck would have it, the shot struck one of the other men in the trench. He wasn’t badly hurt, but not even the lieutenant wanted me around after that, of course. I was packed off back to England, where they shut me up in a hospital for mental cases in a big house in the country. It was not so very different from the Hall, and the remarkable thing was that from the moment I entered that place Deville never troubled me again. Not that it was a holiday in other respects! They treated us cruelly, burning us with electric current and cigarettes. It was like medicine, they said, to shock us out of our shock, but I reckoned it was a test, to see who wanted bad enough to stay. Well, I did, for I knew I was safe from Deville as long as I stayed there.

‘At long last the fighting stopped. Shortly afterwards, my mother was carried off by the influenza that came along to sweep up the war’s leavings. I was let out of hospital to attend the funeral, and I had half a mind to slip away afterwards. But just as they were lowering the coffin into the ground, I looked up and there he stood, as plain as anything, on the other side of that awful pit, grinning at me. I pointed him out to the others, calling him a murderer to his face. But of course they thought I was having one of my fits again, and packed me off back to the hospital. I went gladly enough, for my dreams of freedom had all turned sour. I knew that I would never be safe from him anywhere but in the hospital. Remember that, lad, if ever you have need. Get into hospital, whatever it costs you, for there and only there will you be safe from him. I would still be there myself if they hadn’t put me out in the end. There was another war coming by then, and they needed the space I dare say. Luckily for me, I had a place to go. When my mother left service, she had gone to live with her maiden sister in this very house, and when the sister died in her turn she willed me the house and everything in it, having no family herself. I’ve lived here ever since, never seeing anyone nor hardly setting foot outside the door. For if ever I do step out, he’s sure to be lying in wait for me.’

A silence fell. The old man looked at the boy and shrugged. He looked dull and diminished. Steve stood up, taking his orange sling.

‘I got to be going.’

‘Will you come again, now you know the danger?’ Matthews asked him anxiously.

‘What you mean?’

‘Why, you’ve seen him yourself! You said you saw him watching the house, following you home. If he knows you’re helping me then he’ll try and destroy you too.’

Steve shook his head awkwardly.

‘It isn’t the same person.’

Matthews snorted indignantly.

‘How do you know?’

‘All those blokes, they were older than you, right? The one I seen is only about twenty, twenty-five.’

The old man stared at the boy in silence.

‘Why, you don’t think he’s alive, do you?’ he exclaimed.