Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Davis Grubb Cry Havoc

In 1923 the family Pollixfen migrated from Hire to settle in the small Ohio river town of Glory, West Virginia. Sean Pollixfen was a big florid boast of a man of common heritage. His wife, Deirdre, was a lady of gentle breeding: raised in a Georgian townhouse in Dublin’s Sackville Street, she deplored Sean’s harsh upbringing of their only child — ten-year-old Benjamin Michael.

The Pollixfen house was a rambling one-story structure with a great blue front door and slate flagstones set level with its threshold. Their nearest neighbor was a man named Hugger who dwelt a good three blocks up Liberty Avenue.

When the Thing began, it was an autumn night at supper. Benjy abruptly laid down his knife and fork and tilted his ear, harking. “But for what?” Sean asked him.

“I was listening for the auguries of the War that’s coming, sor.”

“Wisht, now, boyo!” cried Sean. “ ’Tis 1932. The Great War ended fourteen years ago this November. And surely there’s not another one in sight.”

Scan paused, reminiscing, smiling.

“Still, somehow I’d favor another War,” he said. “I’m proud to be wearing the sleeve of this good linen jacket pinned up to me left shoulder. I lost that hook at First Ypres. Yet, despite that, it was a Glory.”

Benjy made no reply, though a moment later he left the table, went to the bathroom, and threw up his supper.

Next morning at eight two men pulled up in a truck out front. Moments later they had laboriously borne a huge pine crate to the flagstone threshold and rang the bell. Sean, on his way to his Position at the Finn, answered their ring.

“Is this here the residence of Master Benjamin Michael Pollixfen?”

“It is that,” Sean replied, rapping the crate with his malacca cane. “ ’Tis another gift for me boy Benjy from his Uncle Liam in Kilronan. He’s always sending the lad a grand present, no matter what the occasion!”

That night when they had finished supper, Sean went to Benjy’s room. He stared at the great crate’s contents, all ranked round the room so thick that one could scarce walk among them. There were 5000 miniature lead soldiers — Boche, French, and English. There was every manner of ammunition and instrument of warfare, from caissons and howitzers to hangars and tarmac for the landing fields of the miniature aircraft of all varieties and types — from Gotha bombers for the Boche to D.H.4’s for the British and Bréguets for the French.

“Now Liam is showing good sense,” Sean said. “Rocking horses were fine for you a year ago. But you’re ten now, Benjy. ’Tis time you learned the lessons of Life’s most glorious Game!”

Benjy stared at the little soldiers, cast and tinted down to the very wrinkle of a puttee, the drape of a trenchcoat. Moreover, no two soldiers wore the same facial expressions. Benjy could read in these faces Fear, Zest, Valor, Humdrum, Cravenness, Patriotism, and Sedition. And somehow each of them seemed waiting. But for what? For whom? Scan missed seeing these subtleties. Yet Benjy saw. And Benjy knew. Aye, he knew all too well.

“They are green, dads,” Benjy said. “Green as the turf of Saint Stephens Green park. The British officers are just days out of Sandhurst, the gun crews hardly a fortnight from the machine-gun school at Wisquies. They don’t know the noise of a whizgang from a four-ten or a five-nine. Yet once they’ve been through a bloody baptism such as Hannescamps or the Somme they’ll know. Aye, they’ll know then.”

“And what would you be knowing of Hannescamps or the Somme?” Sean chuckled.

Benjy made no reply.

And so the three strange weeks of it began. Benjy spent every waking hour working feverishly in the great black lot of nonarable ground beyond Deirdre’s flower-and-kitchen garden. While about him all the world seemed filled with the sound of locusts sawing down the great green tree of summer.

Benjy carved out the laceries of trenches with his Swiss Army knife. He found strips of lath and split them to lay down as duckboards. He sandbagged the trenches well in front. Beyond this he staked, on ten-penny nails, the thin barbed wire which had come on spools in the great crate. Some distance to the rear of both sides he set up his little field hospitals, and his hangars and the tarmac fields for the little fighter, reconnaissance, and bombing planes.

At the kitchen door Sean would watch the boy and listen as Benjy chanted songs that Sean and his man had sung at Locrehof Farm or Trone Woods once they’d billeted down for a night in some daub-and-wattle stable. He could fairly smell the sweet ammoniac scent of the manure of kine, lambs, and goats, and the fragrance as well as the Gold Flake and State Express cigarettes they smoked, saving only enough to barter for a bottle or two of Pichon Longueville ’89 or perhaps a liter of Paul Ruinart.

Strange to relate, it had not yet begun to trouble Sean that the boy knew of these things, that he sang songs Scan had never taught him and sometimes in French which no one had ever taught him. As for Benjy he soon began to show the strain. Deirdre’s scale in the bathroom showed that in ten days he had lost twelve pounds. He seldom finished supper. For there was that half-hour’s extra twilight to work in. Sean gloated. Dierdre grieved.

“Why in Saint Brigid’s blessed name don’t you put an end to it?” she would plead.

“No, woman, I shan’t.”

“And why not then?”

“Because me boyo shall grow up to be what I wanted for myself — a soldier poet more glorious than Rupert Brooke or the taffy Wilfred Owen.”

“And them dead of their cursed war — dead before they could come to full flower of Saint Brigid’s sacred gift.”

“So much the better,” Sean replied icily one night. “We must all die one day or another. And no man knows the hour. Death it has no clocks. Moreover, we are Pollixfens. Kin on me father’s side to Eire’s glory of poets — William Butler Yeats.”

“But Yeats died in no war,” Deirdre protested.

“Better he had,” Sean said. “ ’Twould have increased his esteem a thousandfold.”

Deirdre went off to bed weeping.

Next night in Benjy’s room Sean spoke his dreams out plain.

“ ’Tis stark truth, old man,” he said. “Real War is a rough go. But there is that Glory of Glories in it.”

Benjy said nothing.

“Don’t you understand me, boyo? Glory!”

“I see no Glory,” said the child. “I see poor fools butchering each other for reasons kept secret from them. Oh, they give reasons. King and Country. They leave out, of course, Industry. No, dads, there are no fields of Honor. There are only insane abattoirs.”

Sean colored at this, got up and strode from the boy’s room. Yet a minute later, unable to contain himself, he was back.

“Now, boyo!” he cried out. “Either you shed from yourself these craven, blasphemous, and treasonable speculations or I shall leave you to grow up and learn War the hard way. As did I.”

“And what might that mean, sor?”

“It means that I shall go to Al Hugger’s garage and fetch home three ten-gallon tins of petrol and douse the length and breadth of your little No Man’s Land of toys and then set a lucifer to it.”

“That would be a most fearsome mistake, sor. For on the morning when the little armies came they were mine. Now I am Theirs. And so, poor dads, are you.”

“That does it then! ’Tis petrol and a lucifer for all five thousand of the little perishers!”

Benjy smiled. Sadly.

“But ’tis no longer a skimpy five thousand now, man dear. ’Tis closer to a million. Perhaps more. Even files-on-parade could not count their hosts.”

“Wisht, now! How could that be? Did Liam send you another great crate?”

“No, sor. There’s been Conscription on both sides. And enlistments by the million. A fair fever of outrage infects every man and boy of the Kings Realm from Land’s End to Aberdeen since Lord Kitchener went down in one of his Majesty’s dreadnaughts off the Dolomites. Then there’s Foch and Clemenceau and Joffre. They’ve whipped up the zest of Frenchmen to a pitch not known since the days of Robespierre and Danton in the Terror. In Germany the Boche seethe at every word from Hindenburg or Ludendorf or Kaiser Willie.”

Benjy chuckled, despite himself.

“Willie — the English King’s cousin! Willie and Georgie! Lord, ’tis more of a family squabble than a War!”

He sobered then.

“No, sor,” Benjy said. “Cry havoc now and let loose the dogs of War!”

Sean stared, baffled.

“Tell me, boyo. If you loathe War so, why do you go at your little War game with such zest?”

“Why, because there’s twins inside me, I suppose,” Benjy replied, and press him as he might, Sean could elicit no more from the boy.

Sean’s face sobered. He went off with a troubled mind to Dierdre in their goosedown bed. Lying there on his back he could hear Benjy singing an old war ditty — The Charlie Chaplin Walk. Sean’s batman, a Nottinghamshire collier, had used to sing that before the Somme. Sean was drowsy but could not sleep. Yet soon he roused up wide-waking from the drowsiness. Was it thunder he heard out yonder in the night? And that flickering light across the sill of the back window. Was it heat lightning?

He stole from Deirdre’s sound-sleeping side and stared out the rear window. A river fog lay waist deep upon the land. Among the tinted autumn trees the cold sweet light of fireflies came and went as though they were stars that could not make up their minds. Yet the Hashes and flames that flickered beneath the cloak of mists on the black lot were not sweet, not cold.

Sean could hear the small smart chatter of machine guns. There were the blasts of howitzers and whizbangs and mortars. Above the shallow sea of leprous white mists the Aviatiks and Sopwith Strutters swooped and dove and Immelmanned in dogfights.

Far to the rear Sean could see Benjy in his peejays, standing and watching. The child’s wild face was grievous and weeping. He had flung out his spindly arms as if transcendentally to appease the madness to which he bore such suffering witness.

Scan crept shivering back into the bed. He lay awake, again thinking of Liam’s great gift that had come to life, proliferated, and had now taken possession both of himself and Benjy.

And it went on thus. For another two weeks. Then one morning all was changed. Pale, half staggering from lack of sleep and haggard-eyed from poring over the war map thumbtacked to his play table beneath the gooseneck lamp’s harsh circle of illumination, Benjy — almost faint — came down to breakfast all smiles.

“What does that Chessy cat grin on your face mean, boyo?” Sean asked.

“C’est la guerre, man vieux, c’est la guerre!” cried Benjy. “But last night the news came through—”

“C’est la guerre and so on,” Deirdre intervened. “And what might that alien phrase mean to these poor untutored ears?”

“ ’Tis French,” Scan said. “That’s War, old man, that’s War.”

“But now — tomorrow night at midnight — it will be over!” Benjy cried brightly.

“Tomorrow night and midnight be damned!” Sean exclaimed. “Tonight at midnight it shall end! I am unable to endure another night of it, and so I have determined to end it all myself! Benjy, I swear now by the holy martyred names of the Insurrection of Easter ’16 — Pearse, Casement, John Connolly, and the O’Rahilly — that I shall not let this thing possess the two of us for even one night more! I shall end it with me petrol and me lucifer at midnight tonight!”

“Lord save us, dads, you mustn’t talk so!” cried Benjy. “Word has been flashed to all forces up and down the lines that the cease-fire is set for tomorrow’s midnight. Already the gunfire is only token. Already the men crawl fearlessly over sandbags and under the barbed wire and march boldly into the midst of No Man’s Land to embrace each other. They barter toffees and jars of Bovrils and tins of chocs for marzipan and fastnacht krapfen and strudels and himbeer kuchen! They show each other sweat-and-muck-smeared snapshots of mothers, sweethearts, and children back home. Men who a day ago were at each others’ throats!”

Deirdre watched and listened, helpless, baffled, appalled.

“No matter to all the sweet sticky treacle of your talk!” Sean cried. “I’ll not let this madness take possession of our home! So ’tis petrol and a lucifer to the whole game tonight at the strike of twelve! And a fiery fitting end to it all!”

“Bloody ballocks to that!” shouted Benjy, outraged.

“Go to your room, boy,” Sean said, struggling to control himself. “We have man’s words to say. Not words for the hearing of your mum.”

A moment later Sean was strutting the length and breadth of Benjy’s bedroom like a bloated popinjay. His swagger stick was in his hand: it seemed to give him back some of his old lost Valor, some long mislaid or time-rotted Authority. As he walked he slapped it in vainglorious bellicosity against his thigh.

Benjy watched him solemnly, sadly. “They’ll not let you do this thing,” he said. He paused. “Nor shall I.”

Sean whirled, glaring.

“Ah, so it has come to that then!” he barked out in the voice of a glory-gutted martinet. “ ’Tis they shan’t and I shan’t and you shan’t, eh? Well, we shall see about that! I am King of this house. And I am King of all its environs!”

“No,” Benjy said, his face above the war map tacked to his table. “You are no King. You are a King’s Fool. Though lacking in a King’s Fool’s traditional and customary wisdom and vision.”

Scan broke then. In a stride he crossed the room and slashed the boy across the face with the swagger stick.

A thin ribbon of blood coursed down from the corner of Benjy’s mouth. A droplet of it splattered like a tiny crimson starfish or a mark on the map to commemorate some dreadful battle encounter.

“King, I say! King!” Sean was shouting, pacing the room again. There was a livid stripe across the child’s cheek where the leather had fallen. But there was even more change in Benjy‘s face. And even something newer, something darker in the mind behind that face. The boy smiled.

“Come then,” Benjy said softly. “Let us sit a while and tell sad stories of the Death of Kings.”

The next day neither child nor father spoke nor looked each other in the eye. When occasionally they would be forced to pass in a corridor, it was in the stiff-legged, ominous manner of pitbulls circling in a small seat-encircled arena. Dierdre, sensing something dreadful between them, was helplessly distraught. For what did she know of any of it, dear gentle Deirdre?

Benjy did not appear for supper. Scan ate ravenously. When he was done he drove his car into town and came back moments later with the three ten-gallon tins of petrol. He ranked them neatly alongside the black lot’s border.

At nine Sean and Dierdre went to bed. For three hours Sean lay staring at the bar of harvest moonlight which fell across the carpet from the window sill to the threshold of the bedroom door. Now and again half-hearted gunfire could be heard from the black lot. Soon Sean began speaking within himself a wordless colloquy. Fear had begun to steal from him. Misgivings. He could not forget the Thing he had seen in the boy’s face after the blow of the stiff, hardened leather. He could never forget the strange new timbre of the boy’s voice when he spoke softly shortly after.

As the great clock in the hallway struck the chime of eleven thirty, Sean decided to forego the whole headstrong project. Let the cease-fire come in its ordained time. What could another twenty-four hours matter? There was scarcely any War waging in the black lot anyway. Cheered by his essentially craven decision he started, in his night shirt, down the hallway toward Benjy’s room to inform him of his change of mind.

Within ten feet of the boy’s bolted door Sean came to a standstill. He listened. It was unmistakable. The tiny quacking chatter of a voice speaking from a field telephone. And Benjy’s murmurous voice giving orders back. Only one phrase caught Sean’s ear. And that phrase set beads of sweat glistering on his face in the pallid gaslight of the long broad hallway. The words were in French. But Sean knew French.

“On a besoin des assassins.”

Sean felt a chill seize him, shaming the manhood of him. “We now have need of the assassins.”

Shamed to the core of his soul, Sean fled back to the bedroom. With his one arm he turned the key in the back door. With that same arm he fetched a ladder-back chair from against the wall and propped the top rung under the knob. Then he hastened to the bureau drawer where he kept the memorabilia of his old long-forgotten War and fetched out his BEF Webley.

The pistol was still well greased. It was loaded, the cartridge pins a little dark with verdigris but operable. Then Sean went and lay atop the quilt, shivering and clutching the silly, ineffectual pistol in his hand.

That was when he first heard them. Myriad feet; tiny footsteps and not those of small animals with clawed and padded paws. Boots. Tiny boots. The myriad scrape of microscopically small hobnails. Boots. By the thousands. By the thousands of thousands. And then abruptly above their measured, disciplined tread there burst forth suddenly the skirl of Royal Scots’ Highlanders’ bagpipes, the rattle of tiny drums, the piercing tweedle of little fifes, the brash impudence of German brass bands.

Deirdre still slept. Even the nights of the War in the black lot had never wakened her. It was to Sean’s credit that he did not rouse her now. For, as never before in his life — not even in the inferno of First Ypres or the Somme — had he so craved the company of another mortal. A word. A touch. A look.

Abruptly, just beyond the door, there was a command followed by total silence. Sean chuckled. They were not out there. It had been a fantasy of his overwrought mind. A nightmare — a couchmare as the French call it. But his tranquillity was shortlived. He heard a tiny voice in German crying orders to crank a howitzer to its proper angle of trajectory. Another shouted command. Sean sensed, with an old soldier’s instinct, the yank of the lanyard. He heard the detonation, felt the hot Krupp steel barrel’s recoil, saw flame flare as the shell blasted a ragged hole in the door where the lock had been.

The impact flung the door wide and sent the chair spinning across the moonlit carpet. And now, in undisciplined and furious anarchy, they swarmed across the door sill like a blanket of gray putrescent mud. Gone from them were the gay regimental colors, the spit-and-polish decorum of the morning of the great crate’s arrival. Now they were muck-draped and gangrenous, unwashed and stinking of old deaths, old untended wounds. Some knuckled their way on legless stumps. Others hobbled savagely on makeshift crutches.

Sean sat up and emptied every bullet from the Webley into their midst. He might as well have sought to slaughter the sea with handfuls of flung seashells. All of them wore tiny gas masks. A shouted command and small steel cylinders on miniature wheeled platforms were trundled across the door sill and ranked before the bed. Another shout and gun crews of four men each wheeled in, to face the bed, behind the gas cylinders, ten Lewis and ten Maxim machine guns.

At a cry from the leader these now began a raking enfilade of Sean’s body. He had but time to cross himself and begin a Hail Mary when the cocks of the little gas cylinders were screwed open and the first green cloud of gas reached his nostrils. Enveloped in a cloud of gas, the big man uttered one last choking scream and slid onto the carpet and into their very midst.

In a twinkling they swarmed over him like a vast shroud of living manure. They stabbed him with the needle points of their tiny bayonets, again and again. At last one of these sought out and found the big man’s jugular vein. A shouted command again. The lift and fall of a bloody saber.

“All divisions — ri’ tur’!”

And to a man they obeyed.

“All divisions — ’orm rank!”

Again they obeyed.

“All divisions — quick ’arch!”

And with pipers skirling, drums drubbing, fifes shrilling, and brass bands blaring they went the way they had come. The siege was a fait accompli.

Awakened by all the gunfire and clamor at last, and at the very moment of the door’s collapse, Deirdre sat up, watching throughout. First in smiling disbelief, then in fruitless attempt to persuade herself that she was dreaming it all, then in acceptance, and, at last, in horror. Now as the first wisps of the chlorine stung her nostrils she went raving and irreversibly insane, sprang from her side of the bed, and hurtled through the side window, taking screen and all, to tumble onto the turf three feet below.

In the hushed autumn street of the night Deirdre, beneath the moon and the galaxies and the cold promiscuous fireflies, fled back into the hallucination of Youth returned. She raced up and down under the tinted trees. She twirled an imaginary pink lace parasol as if doing a turn on a small stage. She chanted the Harry Lauder and Vesta Tilley ballads from the music halls of her Dublin girlhood.

Wakened by all this daft medley of unfamiliar songs, Al Hugger, the nearest neighbor, took down his old AEF Springfield rifle and came to the house to discover what calamity had befallen it.

When, at last, he stood in the bedroom doorway, he looked first at the monstrous ruin which had been Sean, humped in his blood on the carpet by the bed. Then Hugger saw the blasé and unruffled figure of Benjy, clad only in his peejays and sitting straight as the blackthorn stick of a Connaught County squire in the ladder-back chair now back against the wall. Almost all the gas had been cleared from the room by the clean river wind which coursed steadily between the two open windows.

“No one,” Hugger said presently — more to himself than to the child — “shall likely ever know what happened in this room tonight. Better they don’t. Yes, I hope they don’t. Never. For there is something about it all — something—”

Benjy yawned. Prodigiously. He smiled hospitably at Al Hugger. He looked at the thing — like a great beached whale on the carpet by the bedside. He yawned again.

“C’est la guerre, mon vieux, c’est la guerre,” he said.