No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories

THE PICNICKERS

This story comes from a long time ago. I was a boy, so that shows how long ago it was. Part of it is from memory, and the rest is a reconstruction built up over the years through times when I’ve given it a lot of thought, filling in the gaps; for I wasn’t privy to everything that happened that time, which is perhaps as well. But I do know that I’m prone to nightmares, and I believe that this is where they have their roots, so maybe getting it down on paper is my rite of exorcism. I hope so.

The summers were good and hot in those days, and no use anyone telling me that that’s just an old man speaking, who only remembers the good things; they were better summers! I could, and did, go down to the beach at Harden every day. I’d get burned black by the time school came around again at the end of the holidays. The only black you’d get on that beach these days would be from the coal dust. In fact there isn’t a beach any more, just a sloping moonscape of slag from the pits, scarred by deep gulleys where polluted water gurgles down to a scummy, foaming black sea.

But at that time…men used to crab on the rocks when the tide was out, and cast for cod right off the sandbar where the small waves broke. And the receding sea would leave blue pools where we could swim in safety. Well, there’s probably still sand down there, but it’s ten foot deep under the strewn black guts of the mines, and the only pools now are pools of slurry.

It was summer when the gypsies came, the days were long and hot, and the beach was still a great drift of aching white sand.

Gypsies. They’ve changed, too, over the years. Now they travel in packs, motorized, in vehicles that shouldn’t even be on the roads: furtive and scruffy, long-haired thieves who nobody wants and who don’t much try to be wanted. Or perhaps I’m prejudiced. Anyway, they’re not the real thing any more. But in those days they were. Most of them, anyway…

Usually they’d come in packets of three or four families, small communities plodding the roads in their intricately painted, hand-carved horse-drawn caravans, some with canvas roofs and some wooden; all brass and black leather, varnished wood and lacquered chimney-stacks, wrinkled brown faces and shiny brown eyes; with clothes pegs and various gew-gaws, hammered trinkets and rings that would turn your fingers green, strange songs sung for halfpennies and fortunes told from the lines in your hand. And occasionally a curse if someone was bad to them and theirs.

My uncle was the local doctor. He’d lost his wife in the Great War and never remarried. She’d been a nurse and died somewhere on a battlefield in France. After the war he’d travelled a lot in Europe and beyond, spent years on the move, not wanting to settle. And when she was out of his system (not that she ever was, not really; her photographs were all over the house) then he had come home again to England, to the north-east where he’d been born. In the summers my parents would go down from Edinburgh to see him, and leave me there with him for company through the holidays.

This summer in question would be one of the last—of that sort, anyway—for the next war was already looming; of course, we didn’t know that then.

“Gypsies, Sandy!” he said that day, just home from the mine where there’d been an accident. He was smudged with coal dust, which turned his sweat black where it dripped off him, with a pale band across his eyes and a white dome to his balding head from the protection of a miner’s helmet.

“Gypsies?” I said, all eager. “Where?”

“Over in Slater’s copse. Seen ’em as I came over the viaduct. One caravan at least. Maybe there’ll be more later.”

That was it: I was supposed to run now, over the fields to the copse, to see the gypsies. That way I wouldn’t ask questions about the accident in the mine. Uncle Zachary didn’t much like to talk about his work, especially if the details were unpleasant or the resolution an unhappy one. But I wanted to know anyway. “Was it bad, down the mine?”

He nodded, the smile slipping from his grimy face as he saw that I’d seen through his ruse. “A bad one, aye,” he said. “A man’s lost his legs and probably his life. I did what I could.” Following which he hadn’t wanted to say any more. And so I went off to see the gypsies.

Before I actually left the house, though, I ran upstairs to my attic room. From there, through the binoculars Uncle Zachary had given me for my birthday, I could see a long, long way. And I could even see if he’d been telling the truth about the gypsies, or just pulling my leg as he sometimes did, a simple way of distracting my attention from the accident. I used to sit for hours up there, using those binoculars through my dormer window, scanning the land all about.

To the south lay the colliery: “Harden Pit”, as the locals called it. Its chimneys were like long, thin guns aimed at the sky; its skeletal towers with their huge spoked wheels turning, lifting or lowering the cages; and at night its angry red coke ovens roaring, discharging their yellow and white-blazing tonnage to be hosed down into mounds of foul-steaming coke.

Harden Pit lay beyond the viaduct with its twin lines of tracks glinting in the sunlight, shimmering in a heat haze. From here, on the knoll where Uncle Zachary’s house stood—especially from my attic window—I could actually look down on the viaduct a little, see the shining tracks receding toward the colliery. The massive brick structure that supported them had been built when the collieries first opened up, to provide transport for the black gold, one viaduct out of many spanning the becks and streams of the north-east where they ran to the sea. “Black gold”, they’d called coal even then, when it cost only a few shillings per hundredweight!

This side of the viaduct and towards the sea cliffs, there stood Slater’s Copse, a close-grown stand of oaks, rowans, hawthorns and hazelnuts. Old Slater was a farmer who had sold up to the coal industry, but he’d kept back small pockets of land for his and his family’s enjoyment, and for the enjoyment of everyone else in the colliery communities. Long after this whole area was laid to waste, Slater’s patches of green would still be here, shady oases in the grey and black desert.

And in the trees of Slater’s Copse…Uncle Zachary hadn’t been telling stories after all! I could glimpse the varnished wood, the young shire horse between his shafts, the curve of a spoked wheel behind a fence.

And so I left the house, ran down the shrub-grown slope of the knoll and along the front of the cemetery wall, then straight through the graveyard itself and the gate on the far side, and so into the fields with their paths leading to the new coast road on the one side and the viaduct on the other. Forsaking the paths, I forged through long grasses laden with pollen, leaving a smoky trail in my wake as I made for Slater’s Copse and the gypsies.

Now, you might wonder why I was so taken with gypsies and gypsy urchins. But the truth is that even old Zachary in his rambling house wasn’t nearly so lonely as me. He had his work, calls to make every day, and his surgery in Essingham five nights a week. But I had no one. With my ‘posh’ Edinburgh accent, I didn’t hit it off with the colliery boys. Them with their hard, swaggering ways, and their harsh north-eastern twang. They called themselves ‘Geordies’, though they weren’t from Newcastle at all; and me, I was an outsider. Oh, I could look after myself. But why fight them when I could avoid them? And so the gypsies and I had something in common: we didn’t belong here. I’d played with the gypsies before.

But not with this lot.

Approaching the copse, I saw a boy my own age and a woman, probably his mother, taking water from a spring. They heard me coming, even though the slight summer breeze off the sea favoured me, and looked up. I waved…but their faces were pale under their dark cloth hats, where their eyes were like blots on old parchment. They didn’t seem like my kind of gypsies at all. Or maybe they’d had trouble recently, or were perhaps expecting trouble. There was only one caravan and so they were one family on its own.

Then, out of the trees at the edge of the copse, the head of the family appeared. He was tall and thin, wore the same wide-brimmed cloth hat, looked out at me from its shade with eyes like golden triangular lamps. It could only have been a sunbeam, catching him where he stood with the top half of his body shaded; paradoxically, at the same time the sun had seemed to fade a little in the sky. But it was strange and I stopped moving forward, and he stood motionless, just looking. Behind him stood a girl, a shadow in the trees; and in the dappled gloom her eyes, too, were like candle-lit turnip eyes in October.

“Hallo!” I called from only fifty feet away. But they made no answer, turned their backs on me and melted back into the copse. So much for ‘playing’ with the gypsies! With this bunch, anyway. But…I could always try again later. When they’d settled in down here.

I went to the viaduct instead.

The viaduct both fascinated and frightened me at one and the same time. Originally constructed solely to accommodate the railway, with the addition of a wooden walkway it also provided miners who lived in one village but worked in the other with a shortcut to their respective collieries. On this side, a mile to the north, stood Essingham; on the other, lying beyond the colliery itself and inland a half-mile or so toward the metalled so-called ‘coast road’, Harden. The viaduct fascinated me because of the trains, shuddering and rumbling over its three towering arches, and scared me because of its vertiginous walkway.

The walkway had been built on the ocean-facing side of the viaduct, level with the railway tracks but separated from them by the viaduct’s wall. It was of wooden planks protected on the otherwise open side by a fence of staves five feet high. Upward-curving iron arms fixed in brackets underneath held the walkway aloft, alone sustaining it against gravity’s unending exertions. But they always looked dreadfully thin and rusty to me, those metal supports, and the vertical distance between them and the valley’s floor seemed a terribly great one. In fact it was about one hundred and fifty feet. Not a terrific height, really, but it only takes a fifth of that to kill or maim a man if he falls.

I had an ambition: to walk across it from one end to the other. So far my best attempt had taken me a quarterway across before being forced back. The trouble was the trains. The whistle of a distant train was always sufficient to send me flying, heart hammering, racing to get off the walkway before the train got onto the viaduct! But this time I didn’t even make it that far. A miner, hurrying towards me from the other side, recognized me and called: “Here, lad! Are you the young ’un stayin’ with Zach Gardner?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered as he stamped closer. He was in his ‘pit black’, streaked with sweat, his boots clattering on the wooden boards.

“Here,” he said again, groping in a grimy pocket. “A threepenny bit!” He pressed the coin into my hand. “Now run! God knows you can go faster than me! Tell your uncle he’s to come at once to Joe Anderson’s. The ambulance men won’t move him. Joe won’t let them! He’s delirious but he’s hangin’ on. We diven’t think for long, though.”

“The accident man?”

“Aye, that’s him. Joe’s at home. He says he can feel his legs but not the rest of his body. It’d be reet funny, that, if it wasn’t so tragic. Bloody cages! He’ll not be the last they trap! Now scramble, lad, d’you hear?”

I scrambled, glad of any excuse to turn away yet again from the challenge of the walkway.

Nowadays…a simple telephone call. And in those days, too, we had the phone; some of us. But Zachary Gardner hated them. Likewise cars, though he did keep a motorcycle and sidecar for making his rounds. Across the fields and by the copse I sped, aware of faces in the trees but not wasting time looking at them, and through the graveyard and up the cobbled track to the flat crest of the knoll, to where my uncle stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, all scrubbed clean again. And I gasped out my message.

Without a word, nodding, he went to the lean-to and started up the bike, and I climbed slowly and dizzily to my attic room, panting my lungs out. I took up my binoculars and watched the shining ribbon of road to the west, until Uncle Zachary’s bike and sidecar came spurting into view, the banging of its pistons unheard at this distance; and I continued to watch him until he disappeared out of sight toward Harden, where a lone spire stood up, half-hidden by a low hill. He came home again at dusk, very quiet, and we heard the next day how Joe Anderson had died that night.

The funeral was five days later at two in the afternoon; I watched for a while, but the bowed heads and the slim, sagging frame of the miner’s widow distressed me and made me feel like a voyeur. So I watched the gypsies picnicking instead.

They were in the field next to the graveyard, but separated from it by a high stone wall. The field had lain fallow for several years and was deep in grasses, thick with clovers and wild flowers. And up in my attic room, I was the only one who knew the gypsies were there at all. They had arrived as the ceremony was finishing and the first handful of dirt went into the new grave. They sat on their coloured blanket in the bright sunlight, faces shaded by their huge hats, and I thought: how odd! For while they had picnic baskets with them, they didn’t appear to be eating. Maybe they were saying some sort of gypsy grace first. Long, silent prayers for the provision of their food. Their bowed heads told me that must be it. Anyway, their inactivity was such that I quickly grew bored and turned my attention elsewhere…

The shock came (not to me, you understand, for I was only on the periphery of the thing, a child, to be seen and not heard) only three days later. The first shock of several, it came first to Harden village, but like a pebble dropped in a still pond its ripples began spreading almost at once.

It was this: the recently widowed Muriel Anderson had committed suicide, drowning herself in the beck under the viaduct. Unable to bear the emptiness, still stunned by her husband’s absence, she had thought to follow him. But she’d retained sufficient of her senses to leave a note: a simple plea that they lay her coffin next to his, in a single grave. There were no children, no relatives; the funeral should be simple, with as few people as possible. The sooner she could be with Joe again the better, and she didn’t want their reunion complicated by crowds of mourners. Well, things were easier in those days. Her grief quickly became the grief of the entire village, which almost as quickly dispersed, but her wishes were respected.

From my attic room I watched the gravediggers at work on Joe Anderson’s plot, shifting soil which hadn’t quite settled yet, widening the hole to accommodate two coffins. And later that afternoon I watched them climb out of the hole, and saw the way they scratched their heads. Then they separated and went off, one towards Harden on a bicycle, heading for the viaduct shortcut, and the other coming my way, towards the knoll, coming no doubt to speak with my Uncle Zachary. Idly, I looked for the gypsies then, but they weren’t picnicking that day and I couldn’t find them around their caravan. And so, having heard the gravedigger’s cautious knock at the door of the house, and my uncle letting him in, I went downstairs to the latter’s study.

As I reached the study door I heard voices: my uncle’s soft tones and the harsher, local dialect of the gravedigger, but both used so low that the conversation was little more than a series of whispers. I’ve worked out what was said since then, as indeed I’ve worked most things out, and so am able to reconstruct it here:

“Holes, you say?” That was my uncle.

“Aye!” said the other, with conviction. “In the side of the box. Drilled there, like. Fower of them.” (Fower meaning four.)

“Wormholes?”

“Bloody big worms, gaffer!” (Worms sounding like ‘warms’.) “Big as half-crowns, man, those holes! And anyhow, he’s only been doon a fortneet.”

There was a pause before: “And Billy’s gone for the undertaker, you say?”

“Gone for Mr Forster, aye. I told him, be as quick as you can.”

“Well, John,” (my uncle’s sigh) “while we’re waiting, I suppose I’d better come and see what it is that’s so worried you…”

I ducked back then, into the shadows of the stairwell. It wasn’t that I was a snoop, and I certainly didn’t feel like one, but it was as well to be discreet. They left the house and I followed on, at a respectful distance, to the graveyard. And I sat on the wall at the entrance, dangling my long skinny legs and waiting for them, sunbathing in the early evening glow. By the time they were finished in there, Mr Forster had arrived in his big, shiny hearse.

“Come and see this,” said my uncle quietly, his face quite pale, as Mr Forster and Billy got out of the car. Mr Forster was a thin man, which perhaps befitted his calling, but he was sweating anyway, and complaining that the car was like a furnace.

“That coffin,” his words were stiff, indignant, “is of the finest oak. Holes? Ridiculous! I never heard anything like it! Damage, more like,” and he glowered at Billy and John. “Spade damage!” They all trooped back into the graveyard, and I went to follow them. But my uncle spotted me and waved me back.

“You’ll be all right where you are, Sandy my lad,” he said. So I shrugged and went back to the house. But as I turned away I did hear him say to Mr Forster: “Sam, it’s not spade damage. And these lads are quite right. Holes they said, and holes they are—four of them—all very neat and tidy, drilled right through the side of the box and the chips still lying there in the soil. Well, you screwed the lid down, and though I’ll admit I don’t like it, still I reckon we’d be wise to have it open again. Just to see what’s what. Joe wouldn’t mind, I’m sure, and there’s only the handful of us to know about it. I reckon it was clever of these two lads to think to come for you and me.”

“You because you’re the doctor, and because you were closest,” said Forster grudgingly, “and me because they’ve damaged my coffin!”

“No,” John Lane spoke up, “because you built it—your cousin, anyhow—and it’s got holes in it!”

And off they went, beyond my range of hearing. But not beyond viewing. I ran as quickly as I could.

Back in my attic room I was in time to see Mr Forster climb out of the hole and scratch his head as the others had done before him. Then he went back to his car and returned with a toolkit. Back down into the hole he went, my uncle with him. The two gravediggers stood at the side, looking down, hands stuffed in their trouser pockets. From the way they crowded close, jostling for a better position, I assumed that the men in the hole were opening the box. But then Billy and John seemed to stiffen a little. Their heads craned forward and down, and their hands slowly came out of their pockets.

They backed away from the open grave, well away until they came up against a row of leaning headstones, then stopped and looked at each other. My uncle and Mr Forster came out of the grave, hurriedly and a little undignified, I thought. They, too, backed away; and both of them were brushing the dirt from their clothes, sort of crouched down into themselves.

In a little while they straightened up, and then my uncle gave himself a shake. He moved forward again, got down once more into the grave. He left Mr Forster standing there wringing his hands, in company with Billy and John. My binoculars were good ones and I could actually see the sweat shiny on Mr Forster’s thin face. None of the three took a pace forward until my uncle stood up and beckoned for assistance.

Then the two gravediggers went to him and hauled him out. And silent, they all piled into Mr Forster’s car which he started up and headed for the house. And of course I would have liked to know what this was all about, though I guessed I wouldn’t be told. Which meant I’d have to eavesdrop again.

This time in the study the voices weren’t so hushed; agitated, fearful, even outraged, but not hushed. There were four of them and they knew each other well, and it was broad daylight. If you see what I mean.

“Creatures? Creatures?” Mr Forster was saying as I crept to the door. “Something in the ground, you say?”

“Like rats, d’you mean?” (John, the senior gravedigger.)

“I really don’t know,” said my uncle, but there was that in his voice which told me that he had his suspicions. “No, not rats,” he finally said; and now he sounded determined, firm, as if he’d come to a decision. “Now look, you two, you’ve done your job and done it well, but this thing mustn’t go any further. There’s a guinea for each of you—from me, my promise—but you can’t say anything about what you’ve seen today. Do you hear?”

“Whatever you say, gaffer,” said John, gratefully. “But what’ll you do about arl this? I mean—”

“Leave it to me,” my uncle cut him off. “And mum’s the word, hear?”

I heard the scraping of chairs and ducked back out of sight. Uncle Zachary ushered the gravediggers out of the house and quickly returned to his study. “Sam,” he said, his voice coming to me very clear now, for he’d left the door ajar, “I don’t think it’s rats. I’m sure it isn’t. Neither is it worms of any sort, nor anything else of that nature.”

“Well, it’s certainly nothing to do with me!” the other was still indignant, but more shocked than outraged, I thought.

“It’s something to do with all of us, Sam,” said my uncle. “I mean, how long do you think your business will last if this gets out, eh? No, it has nothing to do with you or the quality of workmanship,” he continued, very quickly. “There’s nothing personal in it at all. Oh, people will still die here, of course they will—but you can bet your boots they’ll not want to be buried here!”

“But what on earth is it?” Forster’s indignation or shock had evaporated; his voice was now very quiet and awed.

“I was in Bulgaria once,” said my uncle. “I was staying at a small village, very tranquil if a little backward, on the border. Which is to say, the Danube. There was a flood and the riverbank got washed away, and part of the local graveyard with it. Something like this came to light, and the local people went very quiet and sullen. At the place I was staying, they told me there must be an ‘Obour’ in the village. What’s more, they knew how to find it.”

“An Obour?” said Forster. “Some kind of animal?”

My uncle’s voice contained a shudder when he answered: “The worst possible sort of animal, yes.” Then his chair scraped and he began pacing, and for a moment I lost track of his low-uttered words. But obviously Mr Forster heard them clearly enough.

“What? Man, that’s madness! And you a doctor!”

My uncle was ever slow to take offence. But I suspected that by now he’d be simmering. “They went looking for the Obour with lanterns in the dark—woke up everyone in the village, in the dead of night, to see what they looked like by lantern light. For the eyes of the Obour are yellow—and triangular!”

“Madness!” Forster gasped again.

And now my uncle was angry. “Oh, and do you have a better suggestion? So you tell me, Sam Forster, what you think can tunnel through packed earth and do…that?”

“But I—”

“Look at this book,” my uncle snapped. And I heard him go to a bookshelf, then his footsteps crossing the room to his guest.

After a while: “Russian?”

“Romanian—but don’t concern yourself with the text, look at the pictures!”

Again a pause before: “But…this is too…”

“Yes, I know it is,” said my uncle, before Forster could find the words he sought. “And I certainly hope I’m wrong, and that it is something ordinary. But tell me, can anything of this sort be ordinary?”

“What will we do?” Forster was quieter now. “The police?”

“What?” (my uncle’s snort.) “Sergeant Bert Coggins and his three flat-foot constables? A more down-to-earth lot you couldn’t ask for! Good Lord, no! The point is, if this really is something of the sort I’ve mentioned, it mustn’t be frightened off. I mean, we don’t know how long it’s been here, and we certainly can’t allow it to go somewhere else. No, it must be dealt with here and now.”

“How?”

“I’ve an idea. It may be feasible, and it may not. But it certainly couldn’t be considered outside the law, and it has to be worth a try. We have to work fast, though, for Muriel Anderson goes down the day after tomorrow, and it will have to be ready by then. Come on, let’s go and speak to your cousin.”

Mr Forster’s cousin, Jack Boulter, made his coffins for him; so I later discovered.

“Wait,” said Forster, as I once more began backing away from the door. “Did they find this…this creature, these Bulgarian peasants of yours?”

“Oh, yes,” my uncle answered. “They tied him in a net and drowned him in the river. And they burned his house down to the ground.”

When they left the house and drove away I went into the study. On my uncle’s desk lay the book he’d shown to Mr Forster. It was open, lying face down. Curiosity isn’t confined to cats: small girls and boys also suffer from it. Or if they don’t, then there’s something wrong with them.

I turned the book over and looked at the pictures. They were woodcuts, going from top to bottom of the two pages in long, narrow panels two to a page. Four pictures in all, with accompanying legends printed underneath. The book was old, the ink faded and the pictures poorly impressed; the text, of course, was completely alien to me.

The first picture showed a man, naked, with his arms raised to form a cross. He had what looked to be a thick rope coiled about his waist. His eyes were three-cornered, with radiating lines simulating a shining effect. The second picture showed the man with the rope uncoiled, dangling down loosely from his waist and looped around his feet. The end of the rope seemed frayed and there was some detail, but obscured by age and poor reproduction. I studied this picture carefully but was unable to understand it; the rope appeared to be fastened to the man’s body just above his left hip. The third picture showed the man in an attitude of prayer, hands steepled before him, with the rope dangling as before, but crossing over at knee height into the fourth frame. There it coiled upward and was connected to the loosely clad body of a skeletally thin woman, whose flesh was mostly sloughed away to show the bones sticking through.

Now, if I tell my reader that these pictures made little or no sense to me, I know that he will be at pains to understand my ignorance. Well, let me say that it was not ignorance but innocence. I was a boy. None of these things which I have described made any great impression on me at that time. They were all incidents—mainly unconnected in my mind, or only loosely connected—occurring during the days I spent at my uncle’s house; and as such they were very small pieces in the much larger jigsaw of my world, which was far more occupied with beaches, rock pools, crabs and eels, bathing in the sea, the simple but satisfying meals my uncle prepared for us, etc. It is only in the years passed in between, and in certain dreams I have dreamed, that I have made the connections. In short, I was not investigative but merely curious.

Curious enough, at least, to scribble on a scrap of my uncle’s notepaper the following words:

“Uncle Zachary,

Is the man in these pictures a gypsy?”

For the one connection I had made was the thing about the eyes. And I inserted the note into the book and closed it, and left it where I had found it—and then promptly forgot all about it, for there were other, more important things to do.

It would be, I think, a little before seven in the evening when I left the house. There would be another two hours of daylight, then an hour when the dusk turned to darkness, but I would need only a third of that total time to complete my projected walk. For it was my intention to cross the fields to the viaduct, then to cross the viaduct itself (!) and so proceed into Harden. I would return by the coast road, and back down the half-metalled dene path to the knoll and so home.

I took my binoculars with me, and as I passed midway between Slater’s Copse and the viaduct, trained them upon the trees and the gleams of varnished woodwork and black, tarred roof hidden in them. I could see no movement about the caravan, but even as I stared so a figure rose up into view and came into focus. It was the head of the family, and he was looking back at me. He must have been sitting in the grass by the fence, or perhaps upon a tree stump, and had stood up as I focused my glasses. But it was curious that he should be looking at me as I was looking at him.

His face was in the shade of his hat, but I remember thinking: I wonder what is going on behind those queer, three-cornered eyes of his? And the thought also crossed my mind: I wonder what he must think of me, spying on him so rudely like this!

I immediately turned and ran, not out of any sort of fear but more from shame, and soon came to the viaduct. Out onto its walkway I proceeded, but at a slow walk now, not looking down through the stave fence on my left but straight ahead, and yet still aware that the side of the valley was now descending steeply underfoot, and that my physical height above solid ground was increasing with each pace I took. Almost to the middle I went, before thinking to hear in the still, warm evening air the haunting, as yet distant whistle of a train. A train! And I pictured the clattering, shuddering, rumbling agitation it would impart to the viaduct and its walkway!

I turned, made to fly back the way I had come…and there was the gypsy. He stood motionless, at the far end of the walkway, a tall, thin figure with his face in the shade of his hat, looking in my direction—looking, I knew, at me. Well, I wasn’t going back that way! And now there was something of fear in my flight, but mainly I suspect fear of the approaching train. Whichever, the gypsy had supplied all the inspiration I needed to see the job through to the end, to answer the viaduct’s challenge. And again I ran.

I reached the far side well in advance of the train, and looked back to see if the gypsy was still there. But he wasn’t. Then, safe where the walkway met the rising slope once more, I waited until the train had passed, and thrilled to the thought that I had actually done it, crossed the viaduct’s walkway! It would never frighten me again. As to the gypsy: I didn’t give him another thought. It wasn’t him I’d been afraid of but the viaduct, obviously…

The next morning I was up early, knocked awake by my uncle’s banging at my door. “Sandy?” he called. “Are you up? I’m off into Harden, to see Mr Boulter the joiner. Can you see to your own breakfast?”

“Yes,” I called back, “and I’ll make some sandwiches to take to the beach.”

“Good! Then I’ll see you when I see you. Mind how you go. You know where the key is.” And off he went.

I spent the entire day on the beach. I swam in the tidal pools, caught small crabs for the fishermen to use as bait, fell asleep on the white sand and woke up itchy, with my sunburn already peeling. But it was only one more layer of skin to join many gone the same way, and I wasn’t much concerned. It was late afternoon by then, my sandwiches eaten long ago and the sun beginning to slip; I felt small pangs of hunger starting up, changed out of my bathing costume and headed for home again.

My uncle had left a note for me pinned to the door of his study where it stood ajar:

Sandy,

I’m going back to the village, to Mr Boulter’s yard and then to the Vicarage. I’ll be in about 9.00 p.m.—maybe. See you then, or if you’re tired just tumble straight into bed.

—Zach

P.S. There are fresh sandwiches in the kitchen!

I went to the kitchen and returned munching on a beef sandwich, then ventured into the study. My uncle had drawn the curtains (something I had never before known him to do during daylight hours) and had left his reading lamp on. Upon his desk stood a funny contraption that caught my eye immediately. It was a small frame of rough, half-inch timber off-cuts, nailed together to form an oblong shape maybe eight inches long, five wide and three deep—like a box without top or bottom. It was fitted where the top would go with four small bolts at the corners; these held in position twin cutter blades (from some woodworking machine, I imagined), each seven inches long, which were slotted into grooves that ran down the corners from top edge to bottom edge. Small magnets were set central of the ends of the box, level with the top, and connected up to wires which passed through an entirely separate piece of electrical apparatus and then to a square three-pin plug. An extension cable lay on the study floor beside the desk, but it had been disconnected from the mains supply. My last observation was this: that a three-quarter-inch hole had been drilled through the wooden frame on one side.

Well, I looked at the whole set-up from various angles but could make neither head nor tail of it. It did strike me, however, that if a cigar were to be inserted through the hole in the side of the box, and the bolts on that side released, that the cigar’s end would be neatly severed! But my uncle didn’t smoke…

I experimented anyway, and when I drew back two of the tiny bolts toward the magnets, the cutter on that side at once slid down its grooves like a toy guillotine, thumping onto the top of the desk! For a moment I was alarmed that I had damaged the desk’s finish…until I saw that it was already badly scored by a good many scratches and gouges, where apparently my uncle had amused himself doing much the same thing; except that he had probably drawn the bolts mechanically, by means of the electrical apparatus.

Anyway, I knew I shouldn’t be in his study fooling about, and so I put the contraption back the way I had found it and returned to the kitchen for the rest of the sandwiches. I took them upstairs and ate them, then listened to my wireless until about 9.00 p.m.—and still Uncle Zachary wasn’t home. So I washed and got into my pyjamas, which was when he chose to return—with Harden’s vicar (the Reverend Fawcett) and Mr Forster, and Forster’s cousin, the joiner Jack Boulter, all in tow. As they entered the house I hurried to show myself on the landing.

“Sandy,” my uncle called up to me, looking a little flustered. “Look, I’m sorry, nephew, but I’ve been very, very busy today. It’s not fair, I know, but—”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I had a smashing day! And I’m tired.” Which was the truth. “I’m going to read for a while before I sleep.”

“Good lad!” he called up, obviously relieved that I didn’t consider myself neglected. “See you tomorrow.” And he ushered his guests into his study and so out of sight. But again he left the door ajar, and I left mine open, so that I could hear something of their voices in the otherwise still night; not everything they said, but some of it. I wasn’t especially interested; I tried to read for a few minutes, until I felt drowsy, then turned off my light. And now their voices seemed to float up to me a little more clearly, and before I slept snatches of their conversation impressed themselves upon my mind, so that I’ve remembered them:

“I really can’t say I like it very much,” (the vicar’s piping voice, which invariably sounded like he was in the pulpit). “But…I suppose we must know what this thing is.”

“‘Who’,” (my uncle, correcting him). “Who it is, Paul. And not only know it but destroy it!”

“But…a person?”

“A sort of person, yes. An almost-human being.”

Then Mr Forster’s voice, saying: “What bothers me is that the dead are supposed to be laid to rest! How would Mrs Anderson feel if she knew that her coffin…” (fading out).

“But don’t you see?” (My uncle’s voice again, raised a little, perhaps in excitement or frustration.) “She is the instrument of Joe’s revenge!”

“Dreadful word!” (the vicar.) “Most dreadful! Revenge, indeed! You seem to forget, Zachary, that God made all creatures, great, small, and—”

“And monstrous? No, Paul, these things have little or nothing to do with God. Now listen, I’ve no lack of respect for your calling, but tell me: if you were to die tomorrow—God forbid—then where would you want burying, eh?”

Then the conversation faded a little, or perhaps I was falling asleep. But I do remember Jack Boulter’s voice saying: “Me, Ah’ll wark at it arl neet, if necessary. An’ divven worry, it’ll look no different from any other coffin. Just be sure you get them wires set up, that’s arl, before two o’clock.”

And my uncle answering him: “It will be done, Jack, no fear about that…”

The rest won’t take long to tell.

I was up late, brought blindingly awake by the sun, already high in the sky, striking slantingly in through my window. Brushing the sleep from my eyes, I went and looked out. Down in the cemetery the gravediggers John and Billy were already at work, tidying the edges of the great hole and decorating it with flowers, but also filling in a small trench only inches deep, that led out of the graveyard and into the bracken at the foot of the knoll. John was mainly responsible for the latter, and I focused my glasses on him. There was something furtive about him: the way he kept looking this way and that, as if to be sure he wasn’t observed, and whistling cheerily to himself as he filled in the small trench and disguised his work with chippings. It seemed to me that he was burying a cable of some sort.

I aimed my glasses at Slater’s Copse next, but the curtains were drawn in the caravan’s window and it seemed the gypsies weren’t up and about yet. Well, no doubt they’d come picnicking later.

I washed and dressed, went downstairs and breakfasted on a cereal with milk, then sought out my uncle—or would have, except that for the first time in my life I found his study door locked. I could hear voices from inside, however, and so I knocked.

“That’ll be Sandy,” came my uncle’s voice, and a moment later the key turned in the lock. But instead of letting me in, he merely held the door open a crack. I could see Jack Boulter in there, working busily at some sort of apparatus on my uncle’s desk—a device with a switch, and a small coloured light-bulb—but that was all.

“Sandy, Sandy!” my uncle sighed, throwing up his hands in despair.

“I know,” I smiled, “you’re busy. It’s all right, Uncle, for I only came down to tell you I’ll be staying up in my room.”

That caused him to smile the first smile I’d seen on his face for some time. “Well, there’s a bit of Irish for you,” he said. But then he quickly sobered. “I’m sorry, nephew,” he told me, “but what I’m about really is most important.” He opened the door a little more. “You see how busy we are?”

I looked in and Jack Boulter nodded at me, then continued to screw down his apparatus onto my uncle’s desk. Wires led from it through the curtains and out of the window, where they were trapped and prevented from slipping or being disturbed by the lowered sash. I looked at my uncle to see if there was any explanation.

“The, er—the wiring!” he finally blurted. “We’re testing the wiring in the house, that’s all. We shouldn’t want the old place to burn down through faulty wiring, now should we?”

“No, indeed not,” I answered, and went back upstairs.

I read, listened to the wireless, observed the land all about through my binoculars. In fact I had intended to go to the beach again, but there was something in the air: a hidden excitement, a muted air of expectancy, a sort of quiet tension. And so I stayed in my room, just waiting for something to happen. Which eventually it did.

And it was summoned by the bells, Harden’s old church bells, pealing out their slow, doleful toll for Muriel Anderson.

But those bells changed everything. I can hear them even now, see and feel the changes that occurred. Before, there had been couples out walking: just odd pairs here and there, on the old dene lane, in the fields and on the paths. And yet by the time those bells were only half-way done the people had gone, disappeared, don’t ask me where. Down in the graveyard, John and Billy had been putting the finishing touches to their handiwork, preparing the place, as it were, for this latest increase in the Great Majority; but now they speeded up, ran to the tiled lean-to in one tree-shaded corner of the graveyard and changed into clothes a little more fitting, before hurrying to the gate and waiting there for Mr Forster’s hearse. For the bells had told everyone that the ceremony at Harden church was over, and that the smallest possible cortège was now on its way. One and a half miles at fifteen miles per hour, which meant a journey of just six minutes.

Who else had been advised by the bells, I wondered?

I aimed my binoculars at Slater’s Copse, and…they were there, all four, pale figures in the trees, their shaded faces turned toward the near-distant spire across the valley, half-hidden by the low hill. And as they left the cover of the trees and headed for the field adjacent to the cemetery, I saw that indeed they had their picnic baskets with them: a large one which the man and woman carried between them, and a smaller one shared by their children. As usual.

The hearse arrived, containing only the coffin and its occupant, a great many wreaths and garlands, and of course the Reverend Fawcett and Mr Forster, who with John and Billy formed the team of pallbearers. Precise and practised, they carried Muriel Anderson to her grave where the only additional mourner was Jack Boulter, who had gone down from the house to join them. He got down into the flower-decked hole (to assist in the lowering of the coffin, of course) and after the casket had gone down in its loops of silken rope finally climbed out again, assisted by John and Billy. There followed the final service, and the first handful of soil went into the grave.

Through all of this activity my attention had been riveted in the graveyard; now that things were proceeding towards an end, however, I once again turned my glasses on the picnickers. And there they sat cross-legged on their blanket in the long grass outside the cemetery wall, with their picnic baskets between them. But motionless as always, with their heads bowed in a sort of grace. They sat there—as they had sat for Joe Anderson, and Mrs Jones the greengrocer-lady, and old George Carter the retired miner, whose soot-clogged lungs had finally collapsed on him—offering up their silent prayers or doing whatever they did.

Meanwhile, in the graveyard:

At last the ceremony was over, and John and Billy set to with their spades while the Reverend Fawcett, Jack Boulter and Mr Forster climbed the knoll to the house, where my uncle met them at the door. I heard him greet them, and the Vicar’s high-pitched, measured answer:

“Zach, Sam here tells me you have a certain book with pictures? I should like to see it, if you don’t mind. And then of course there’s the matter of a roster. For now that we’ve initiated this thing I suppose we must see it through, and certainly I can see a good many long, lonely nights stretching ahead.”

“Come in, come in,” my uncle answered. “The book? It’s in my study. By all means come through.”

I heard this conversation, as I say, but nothing registered—not for a minute or two, anyway. Until—

There came a gasping and a frantic clattering as my uncle, with the Reverend Fawcett hot on his heels, came flying up the stairs to the landing, then up the short stairs to my room. They burst in, quite literally hurling the door wide, and my uncle was upon me in three great strides.

“Sandy,” he gasped then, “what’s all this about gypsies?” I put my glasses aside and looked at him, and saw that he was holding the sheet of notepaper with my scribbled query. He gripped my shoulder. “Why do you ask if the man in these pictures is a gypsy?”

Finally I knew what he was talking about. “Why, because of their eyes!” I answered. “Their three-cornered eyes.” And as I picked up my binoculars and again trained them on the picnickers, I added: “But you can’t see their faces from up here, because of their great hats…”

My uncle glanced out of the window and his jaw dropped. “Good Lord!” he whispered, eyes bulging in his suddenly white face. He almost snatched the glasses from me, and his huge hands shook as he put them to his eyes. After a moment he said, “My God, my God!” Simply that; and then he thrust the glasses at the Reverend Fawcett.

The Reverend was no less affected; he said, “Dear Jesus! Oh my dear sweet Jesus! In broad daylight! Good heavens, Zach—in broad daylight!”

Then my uncle straightened up, towered huge, and his voice was steady again as he said: “Their shirts—look at their shirts!”

The vicar looked, and grimly nodded. “Their shirts, yes.”

From the foot of the stairs came Jack Boulter’s sudden query: “Zach, Reverend, are you up there? Zach, why man ar’m sorry, but there must be a fault. Damn the thing, but ar’m getna red light!”

“Fault?” cried my uncle, charging for the door and the stairs, with the vicar right behind him. “There’s no fault, Jack! Press the button, man—press the button!”

Left alone again and not a little astonished, I looked at the gypsies in the field. Their shirts? But they had simply pulled them out of their trousers, so that they fell like small, personal tents to the grass where they sat. Which I imagined must keep them quite cool in the heat of the afternoon. And anyway, they always wore their shirts like that, when they picnicked.

But what was this? To complement the sudden uproar in the house, now there came this additional confusion outside! What could have startled the gypsies like this? What on earth was wrong with them? I threw open the window and leaned out, and without knowing why found my tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth as once more, for the last time, I trained my glasses on the picnickers. And how to explain what I saw then? I saw it, but only briefly, in the moments before my uncle was there behind me, clapping his hand over my eyes, snatching the window and curtains shut, prising the glasses from my half-frozen fingers. Saw and heard it!

The gypsies straining to their feet and trying to run, overturning their picnic baskets in their sudden frenzy, seeming anchored to the ground by fat white ropes which lengthened behind them as they stumbled outward from their blanket. The agony of their dance there in the long grass, and the way they dragged on their ropes to haul them out of the ground, like strangely hopping blackbirds teasing worms; their terrified faces and shrieking mouths as their hats went flying; their shirts and dresses billowing, and their unbelievable screams. All four of them, screaming as one, but shrill as a keening wind, hissing like steam from a nest of kettles, or lobsters dropped live into boiling water, and yet cold and alien as the sweat on a dead fish!

And then the man’s rope, incredibly long and taut as a bowstring, suddenly coming free of the ground—and likewise, one after another, the ropes of his family—and all of them living things that writhed like snakes and sprayed crimson from their raw red ends!

But all glimpsed so briefly, before my uncle intervened, and so little of it registering upon a mind which really couldn’t accept it—not then. I had been aware, though, of the villagers where they advanced inexorably across the field, armed with the picks and shovels of their trade (what? Ask John and Billy to keep mum about such as this? Even for a guinea?). And of the gypsies spinning like dervishes, coiling up those awful appendages about their waists, then wheeling more slowly and gradually crumpling exhausted to the earth; and of their picnic baskets scattered on the grass, all tumbled and…empty.

I’ve since discovered that in certain foreign parts ‘Obour’ means ‘night demon’, or ‘ghost’, or ‘vampire’. While in others it means simply ‘ghoul’. As for the gypsies: I know their caravan was burned out that same night, and that their bones were discovered in the ashes. It hardly worried me then and it doesn’t now, and I’m glad that you don’t see nearly so many of them around these days; but of course I’m prejudiced.

As they say in the north-east, a burden shared is a burden halved. But really, my dreams have been a terrible burden, and I can’t see why I should continue to bear it alone.

This then has been my rite of exorcism. At least I hope so…