Tails of Wonder and Imagination

ARTHUR’S LION Tanith Lee

That year I had some business to see to in Kent, and it wasn’t long after arranging this that I received the letter from my uncle. It came as a surprise; at first I hadn’t the faintest idea who was writing to me so familiarly. When I realized, I was in two minds. But curiosity got the upper hand.

I had better explain that I was nephew only to one uncle, Arthur, the brother of my then-deceased male parent. Arthur had made a lot of money in the north of England, as my mother had been wont to say: “By exploiting the workers and putting them into marmalade.” This had always been the joke, that Uncle Arthur had made a fortune in marmalade, some exotic variety which, I’m pretty certain, never appeared on our table. Frankly, once I’d grown up and moved into my own life, I may well, here and there, have eaten the fabulous spread—and not known it. Basically, Arthur had removed himself from the family early on, and never afterwards himself maintained any contact. My father had seen his brother last in childhood. “I was only five when he took himself off. But I always remember, he was a funny chap,” said my father. “Peculiar things stick in your mind, even when you can’t recall what they were all about.” The peculiar Arthurian thing which had stuck, apparently, concerned an Arthur then sixteen years of age, letting out a loud cry and promptly fainting to the ground.

“We were in some sort of park—I think it was a park. We were going somewhere, but there was such a fuss, we didn’t go. I’ve no memory as to where. All I recollect is Arthur yelling at the top of his lungs and sprawling on the gravel path.”

“Perhaps,” postulated my mother, “it was the first time making a fortune in marmalade occurred to him.”

In fact, though Arthur did become extremely rich, it formed a dark mark on his escutcheon that none of this wealth was ever put in the way either of my grandparents, or my father’s family, of which it seemed Arthur had been told.

Arthur’s contemporary letter, however, when it reached me, was friendly and warm in tone. He said that he had come across my name in a promotion in the local newspapers, relating to the theatrical performance because of which I was going down to Kent. Since our name is rather unusual, he had decided it must be me, and an inquiry at a London theatre provided him my address. The substance of his letter was to invite me to stay with him at his house. This was, he assured me, only three miles from my business venue, and his chauffeur would, of course, drive me in each day and retrieve me in the evening. Arthur was sure, besides, I would appreciate the comforts of a house over an “inn,” and added that he sincerely hoped I would visit him, we had been “estranged” too long.

Initially I tossed the letter in the waste-paper bin. But then, as I say, curiosity won me round. By that era of my life, I was involved in work I found both fascinating and highly remunerative, so Arthur’s fortune had no allure. But I’d heard of the house, which I will call Blue Firs, a place, it seemed, of luxury. And I confess I wondered very much what Arthur would be like—and if at all like my father, or even myself.

I therefore rescued his letter, and replied in the affirmative. The next morning, I travelled down to Kent.

It was a mild October afternoon when I arrived at Kesslington Station. Arthur’s huge shining car, complete with respectful driver, picked me up and bore me away down autumnal lanes thick with yellow foliage and cows peering across gates.

Blue Firs was a large house, if by no means a mansion. It had been built in the 1800s for someone or other’s mistress. Enormous trees framed the views as we drove up through the grounds, and there gradually appeared a cream-and-rose façade with pillarings and tall windows. Long roofs, with sun-gilded red tiles, had put up the periscopes of rather charming ornamental chimneys, modelled on an earlier design. I could imagine my mother saying, “Ah, the house built of marmalade.”

When I’d got inside, I found myself in one of those polished echoing halls, whose acoustics are normally so bad for actors—a whisper carries like an unintelligible roar, and a roar like a rumble.

I asked the housekeeper if my uncle was about. She told me he was lying down but would meet me at the drinks hour. I went to unpack. It seemed Arthur hadn’t after all lost his social gracelessness, at least where it could be applied to relatives.

But my room was large and airy, with a fire laid ready for later, and the great bed comfortable, and the bathroom well-appointed. Someone had also supplied gin, whisky and soda, and a bowl of hot-house oranges. Not so bad.

When I went down at six, a butler showed me at once into the long, narrow drawing-room that looked out across the lawn. No one else was there.

“Is my uncle coming down?” I asked, rather impatiently.

“Yes, sir. He’ll be here directly.”

“Are there other guests for dinner?”

“No, sir.”

Left alone, I sat by the fireside, watching the brown shadows gather over the room, and the bluer ones fill in the sweep of grass and trees outside.

I felt—and now for the first I admitted it—distinctly uneasy. Was I worried then, to be confronting my “peculiar” uncle? Or was it the big quaint house? I thought not. Already once or twice I had stayed with various theatrical royalty and been in buildings far more eccentric and grandly expanded. Besides, I have never been the nervous type. Even First Nights move me only to extra diligence. A cool head: I’ve been mocked for it.

The shadows thickened. I got up and switched on a pair of lamps, and turning again, saw the light reflecting on a short stocky man, formally dressed for dinner, standing in the wide doorway, and staring at me with enormous eyes. It struck me, extraordinarily, he was most like a child, an anxious child. I had the urge to put him at his ease. And too the wild notion he was truly frightened, scared at meeting at last this alien nephew, son to a brother he had barely troubled to know.

What did I call him?

I decided on mundane family courtesy. “Uncle Arthur?”

“Oh,” he said, “Arthur. We’re both past the age of needing ‘uncle’ shoved in. And you must be—” he named me.

And I found myself saying kindly, “Oh, please call me Jack. It’s what I generally answer to with friends.”

“I hope we shall be,” he said.

“I hope so too.”

He stole forward—no other way to describe it. We shook hands. His was warm enough, but slightly stiff and swiftly withdrawn. He then came to the fire and stood there, lit by the flames and the lamps, his melancholy gaze now on the hearth and now, in fleeting glimpses, on me. Neither of us sat down.

Finally he glanced at the drink in my hand, but didn’t seem to want one for himself. Suddenly he said, “You must think it odd, my contacting you like that, out of the blue.”

“It was a pleasant surprise.”

He looked away from me then, discounting, I thought, the shallowness of my reply. He looked instead at the dark lawn beyond the window, and the trees heavy with a new night.

“Don’t you think,” he said, “this lighted room is like a camp in some jungle place, or on some open plain? A fire, a pair of lamps. Anything might be there,” he said, strangely, “beyond the light.”

“Do you mean in your grounds? I suppose—”

“No, not in the grounds. Nothing’s there.”

Somewhere from the depths of the house there came at that moment a long, indefinite sound. It was, I thought, the timbers shifting at the chill of evening. But Arthur looked round now at it, scanning the doorway, as if he expected someone—something—to appear. He seemed less startled, though a little startled, than apprehensively resigned.

At that second moment too, something did move into or over the doorway. It was a large bulky shadow, reeling across the duller lighting of the hall. And it was instantly followed by its cause. The butler filled the doorframe.

“Have you locked up?” asked Arthur, rather breathlessly, I thought.

“Yes, sir. All but the usual door.”

“Good. That’s good.”

The butler then spoke about the dinner arrangements, which sounded ordinary enough that a report seemed unnecessary. Arthur must be a very pedantic and unsettled man. I pondered also why the house had been locked so early, and why the “usual door” was not. Perhaps to let particular servants, who didn’t sleep over at the house, return to the village?

When the butler again went out, he left the drawing-room door wide open. Looking after him quite idly, I saw that flowing shadow veer again along the hallway. This time it seemed not to match his movements, nor that of anything in the room. But firelight can play tricks.

In any case Arthur now sat down, and I with him. He helped himself to a drink and me to another. And then at last, in the expected way of relatives, he began to question me about my father and mother, our past life, my present one, and so on, until a maid came to call us to dine.

The meal was very good, with local fish and roast, and a wonderful sugary dessert concocted by Arthur’s cook. All through the courses he seemed fairly relaxed, and only once got the jitters, for some reason I couldn’t fathom at all. But he swallowed another glass of wine and cheered up again.

We went into an old-fashioned smoking-room after dinner, with the brandy and cigarettes—it was a tradition of Arthur’s, because smoking otherwise was permitted everywhere about the house.

The velvet curtains were drawn, and another fire sparkled. Everything all told was very appealing and comfortable. Had it not been for the constant sense of unease and alertness—most like a vague, almost undetectable smell—that also hung over virtually every instant. Even Arthur’s relaxed periods had begun to seem forced. What was bothering him? I had come to the conclusion, whatever it was, it would be the very same matter that had prompted him to invite me to his home. I’m afraid I felt quite irritable at this. Once tomorrow dawned, I would have my hands full with the theatrical event in the town, and little time for sudden extra dramas.

Throughout dinner we’d spoken only of trivial things, mostly to do with the family. Arthur had remarked that I resembled my grandfather, when young, which I valued. In him, although I didn’t say so, I could see no likeness to any of our tribe.

Once in the smoking-room, a silence drifted down. We sat in armchairs, and Arthur stared long into the fire. And I thought, by now highly apprehensive myself, any minute and he’ll come out with it. Whatever the hell it is. And then let’s hope it can be put right very simply. Otherwise it must wait until the play is done.

Arthur said, again, “Yes, I can see my father in you. My brother must have grown to be a strong, well set-up young man. I know he can have been afraid of absolutely nothing. As a little child, even, he was fearless. I remember his nanny, the very woman who had terrified me as a child with her ghost stories, having no effect on him whatsoever.”

I said, “Yes, he was a brave man. I’ve seen as much myself from his war record.”

“Indeed. But I suppose,” said Arthur softly, “we are all of us, in the end, afraid of something. Otherwise, could we be human?”

“Certainly, I’m terrified of several things. The British tax system for one thing. Oh, and I admit, a certain well-known actress who shall be nameless.”

Arthur smiled, but the smile slipped off like water.

His face was closed-in, bent to the fire, his eyes viewing, it seemed, only that.

“Yes, but there are other fears, aren’t there? Inner fears. Fears located—how do they say it now—within the Id.”

I said nothing. This promised to be more weird and much more time-consuming than I’d supposed.

Arthur stirred the fire slowly with a poker. Then he sat there, holding the poker loosely in his hand.

“Since I was a boy,” he said, “since then, about six years of age. Something. I saw it first in a book, one of those stupid highly-coloured old illustrated books for children. Though I’d guess now it was meant for a much older child than I then was. It was on a low table, in the library. Thinking back, I believe it must have been my father’s property, when he was little. Had it terrified him? Apparently not. And why anyway was it lying out open where I could find it? I’ve often wondered that. I’d think, really, almost any child might have been frightened by it. The drawn picture—was very crude, all reds, yellows, blacks—horrible—” He raised his eyes straight up to mine. And they were full of utter terror, that glowed like tears. “I know now it was a book about Ancient Rome. And this picture concerned the Emperor Nero’s habit of having Christians thrown into the arena, and savage hungry animals let loose on them. An awful subject to illustrate. Probably meant to be improving. But me it did not improve. I rather think,” he lowered the poker slowly back into its place, “it ruined me.”

I was then, and am, no psychiatrist. I said, no doubt with inappropriate foolishness, “Of course, as a child, you might be afraid at it. But—how can it have ruined you?”

“I’d been quite a bold little boy. Always in scrapes. Brave. I used to lead a little local gang. We had some piratical name. But after I saw in that book—after I saw that picture, a change came over me. I used to dream, you see. I used to dream over and over about the picture.”

“The Christians being killed in the arena by the animals.”

“Killed, and devoured. Yes. They were—” he hesitated, and the oddest small twist of a smile distorted his lips, “they were lions,” he said. And then again, “Lions.” As if to repeat the name took a great effort of will, which he must exert.

Something in how he had stirred the fire had upset the logs. It sank and darkened, and the room seemed to darken too, despite the electric lamps.

I said, encouragingly, “Well, what you describe could be enough to give any kid nightmares.”

“Perhaps. But I must explain. My dreams were very specific. I was in the arena, you see. I, as a child. And I was alone. Alone that was but for a huge, formless, faceless crowd shouting and baying all around me from the seats. And I would stand there on the sand, naked, shivering and afraid—sickeningly afraid—and then a kind of black hole would come in the side of the arena, and a lion would come out. Only one, you see. Only one.” Arthur stopped. He put his head into his hands, but not before I’d seen his face was now almost green.

“Don’t go on if it distresses—”

“I must go on,” he said. He lifted his head and brought his brandy to his mouth and gulped the lot. “One lion,” he said. “I know him so well. A huge ochre beast, with a vast black-ruffed head. There were bloody welts on his side—they must have whipped him up from the cages below—that filthy book showed all that too… Each of his eyes were like yellow-red coals. He stank. I could smell him. He stank of butcher’s meat. And then he ran towards me—right at me—and I stood there screaming—and as he leapt his great claws flashed like silver hooks—and I woke—always I woke—just before his weight could come down and his talons and teeth could go into me. Always. And always, screaming. It happened every night, yet only ever once—once every night. It happened once every night for a whole year. I was afraid to go to bed. I would make myself keep awake, sitting up in the darkness—but in the end always I fell asleep. And then I’d be in the arena, alone but for the crowd, and he would come, the lion. And he would run and leap and in that split second, when the rush of his stinking flesh and his claws already felt like a boiling wind across my body—I’d wake up. I would escape him.”

“My God,” I said. Finally, I thought, the elements of his fear had truly communicated themselves to me. As with a powerful acting performance, the catharsis of empathically induced emotion. I was shaken.

“Well,” Arthur said presently. “I must tell you why the dreams stopped. First my parents tried to laugh and tease me out of them. Then they tried to bully me out. You perhaps have wondered why I’ve been a stranger to my own family all these years. Partly it began there. I never forgave them for it, their crass lack of understanding. And though in later years I could grasp almost perfectly that it came not from cruelty, but from a genuine, if entirely misplaced, conception of how best to deal with me—the rift had widened and was too enormous to heal. However, long before that, when I was seven years old, I met a gypsy in our garden. He’d just walked in at the gate, and was going round to the back of the house with some tinker’s stuff he’d got for the kitchen. But seeing me, he pulled a face, and then called to me, quite politely and gently. Come here, young master. That was what he said. And for some reason, to him I went. I was by then a thin, pale-faced child, with rings under my eyes from never sleeping well. I must have looked haunted enough; our doctor had already apparently warned my father I might be in the early stages of some incurable malady—which idea alarmed mother, but my father scoffed at it, saying I was just in a silly mood, trying still to be a baby, and waking everyone by yelling every night. But the gypsy man stared into my face, and then he said, ‘I can make him go away. One day he will come back. But you’ll be a man then, and perhaps a man will have the strength to turn him off for good.’ I gaped at him, and because I’d been brought up a certain way, I feebly said to him, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Hush now,’ he answered. Then he put his hand on my head. It felt scalding hot, his hand, and he breathed in my face, and his breath was bad, because I suppose, poor fellow, his teeth weren’t up to much. But somehow that didn’t repulse me. When he lifted his hand away, I felt something go with it. He said, ‘Done now. Not till you’re a man will it come back. Go and tell the cook you took a toy off me from my sack, and I’m owed half a shilling.’ I did what he said, and later I received a smacking from my father, who told me off for making the cook pay for a paltry toy for me. He asked where the toy was. I said it had broken, and my father said that served me right. He would have broken it if I had not. That night I crept up to bed, and sat there in the dark as usual, my back sore from the blows, and biting my hand to keep awake. But I kept thinking of the gypsy, too. And in the end I let go. I let go and I slept. I slept right through. It was the first night in a year I didn’t have the dream. But after that, night followed night without it. Gradually then my general health improved. I was soon at school, and began to lead my own boy’s life again. Although I was never as I had been before I saw the book. I hadn’t the stamina I had had, even though I’d grown older and bigger. I tended to weight rather than muscle, I had headaches and once or twice fainted, if I was too hot or cold, and sometimes in church. But the dream was entirely gone. Gone till I should be a man and have the strength to face it once more, and then be able to send it away, to turn it off for good. Nevertheless—I could never be reconciled to that word, that name, or if I saw any picture of them, even a fine painting. Or if it was in a lesson. In Latin, for example. I even fainted then, too. Something in Suetonius, I think it was, about the Roman Circus.”

The fire was dying. I took it on myself to poke at the logs and drop on another one. Arthur poured us more brandy, but said nothing. His face was less pallid, but had the greasy look of light sweating.

When I straightened up I said, “What happened then, when you were sixteen?”

“Oh,” said Arthur, “your father remembered that, did he? Yes. It was nothing really. Nothing for them. We were to visit a garden. A zoological garden. By that time I’d got much better at suppressing my fear. Or I told myself I had. I’d been nerving myself to the excursion, thinking it might be a test I could overcome. But then—I heard them roaring, you see. In the distance. Over the trees. Lions. I knew instantly what the noise was. I screamed, as I had in my nightmares, and screaming is all I recollect after this, until I found myself at home again. I left my father’s house as soon as I was well enough to do so. I led then a quite unadventurous life. I won’t bore you with the details. They bore me, too, you see. Until that piece of luck with the recipe, the marmalade—more an orange jam, you understand. An old Scottish formula. Pure luck. Idiotic. But it made us rich, my partners and I. I can assure you, however, such good fortune doesn’t hold off loneliness. I have always found it awkward, to mix with people, to find companions. And so I have been a lonely man. Unmarried—childless—I can’t imagine such things as wedlock or paternity, for myself. Even so, I have got by. I have lived. And now,” he said. Arthur leant back in his chair as I sat down again in mine. “And now,” he repeated.

Though never having myself walked out on the boards, save in the most administrative capacity, I found myself responding as if we two, he and I, were spot-lit now at the centre of a stage. Faultless on my cue I announced, “And now it has returned.”

Arthur met my eyes. His had changed to flat dark stones. “Yes. It has come back.”

“As the gypsy said it would.”

“As he said.”

“Do you know why?”

“Oh yes. Something very ordinary.”

I leant forward. “Which is?”

“I saw the damnable picture again.”

“Good lord—where? Where did you see it?”

“Oh, not in that vile little book. No, it was reproduced in a catalogue. It seems the ghastly work is now something of an antique, and this illustration, the particular one, the one I think was fashioned in Hell, for me alone, that picture had been reproduced in the brightest, gaudiest detail. Leafing carelessly through the catalogue in the house of a business associate, suddenly it was all before me again. I had to leave the house immediately, making some incredible excuse, I can’t remember what. That night I tried to reason with myself. But it was no use whatsoever. I found myself at 2 a.m., wandering about with the whisky decanter. Afraid to go to bed, just as I had been, night after night, when a child. In the end, of course, adult common-sense propelled me to my room. I downed a final glass of whisky and fell instantly asleep. Half an hour later I woke half the servants with my shrieks. My poor housekeeper believed criminals had broken in and were murdering me. It might have been amusing, if this state of affairs hadn’t, then, continued for six further months. Yes, naturally, my doctor, and then several specialists, were summoned. They could do nothing, only drug me to a deathly moribund slumber from which—despite all the muck I had swallowed—I still woke once a night screaming in terror. The lion—” Arthur spoke the name now in a loud clear stroke, like the movement of a surgeon’s knife, “— the lion came for me, as he always had. Out of the dark hole in the arena wall, over the dirty sand, leaping, his claws raking the air, just missing me as I sprang awake.”

I too lifted my glass and drained it.

“But,” I said, “six further months, I heard you say. Do you mean you found a way again to stop the dreams?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Arthur stared downwards into nothingness. “A last specialist arrived here two months ago. In his demeanour he reminded me once more of my father, though he was younger than I am now. A strong-minded, bullying man, himself brave as—I was going to say, brave as a lion. He told me roundly I was a nervous wreck, and that the fault lay only with me. I had let this literary phantasm prey on me, and had offered no resistance. To drug myself with morphine or liquor was past the point. I must instead lie down to sleep and face the beast, in the knowledge that it was nothing. Nothing at all. It was only, he told me sternly, my own fear which had birthed, and subsequently sustained the nightmare. Forgivable, he admitted, in a very young child but in a grown man nauseating and absurd. ‘It is your cowardice,’ he bluntly said, ‘which is destroying your sleep, your health and your life. You and you alone can be rid of it. You must cast it out. Then you will be free.’ When he’d quite done with me, I was trembling like a boy. But I could see, as I can see now, that he was fundamentally in the right. My terrors had formed this curse. I must turn my back on them. And so I ate a light supper, had a couple of drinks, and went to bed. I stayed awake about half an hour, during which time I refused myself a single thought of the nightmare, and fell asleep abruptly. I dreamed of nothing at all. Since then too, the dream hasn’t plagued me once. Indeed, I can sleep at any hour of day or night without any inconvenience.”

I sat looking at him. His hands were folded down, one on each arm of his chair. He stared on into the abyss, invisible to me, which opened at his feet.

Arthur said, “I think you’ll be both too mature and too young to know the fears and nervousness, in their way not unlike those of infancy, which can come on with increasing age. I suspect, too, being so like my own father in appearance, that you yourself may never succumb to this form of trepidation, even in old age. Death may never tap you on the shoulder to expound his prologue. You may never think about it. Your kind, and please do not think I insult you, I am only very jealous, can stay impervious to most horrors and frights. Your nerve holds in battle, and if there are ever such things as ghosts or demons, you would confront them, face them down. Or produce a revolver and shoot them, perhaps, back to mortal life.”

Embarrassed by his accuracy, I too lowered my gaze. Where my glance fell then, I saw, across the fine Aubussin carpet, a curious baroque shadow, thick and black, lying oddly sidelong from the lamps. What was it? Puzzled, I turned my head and looked straight up into the corner of the room. There was a slice of darkness there also, and in the dark, something—no, two things—glittered in a sudden crushed flicker of brilliancy, now yellowish, now red.

“Ah,” he said, in a quiet, cracked little voice, almost sarcastic, almost bitter. “Is it there? Can you see it?”

I turned back and glared at Arthur. “See what, precisely?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No, frankly. Of course I’m sympathetic to what’s happened to you. But even you yourself are now calling it a form of neurasthenia. So what is there to gain from dramatizing any of it further?”

“I can’t help myself, it seems. When that clever specialist rehearsed my case before me, he mercilessly showed me exactly what I had most to fear: my own fear itself. My terrors, whether real or groundless, are my worst enemies. But I have to tell you, for such a person as myself, terror is now basic to my personality. And by refusing to let it visit me in sleep, it seems—it seems—I’ve let it out into the concrete world, at last. Where, having had me consistently elude it for so long, it has always yearned to follow me. My nightmare—has become a reality, and my terror feeds it every hour. Perhaps not even only terror, either. My accustomedness.”

“Rubbish,” I said. “Utter rot.”

Behind me, some entity stirred, a velvet sound, edged with something rasping and barbed. Like the noise of a cat, amplified.

I stood up and looked round again. Something was there. No doubt of it. In deep shadow, between the top of a wooden cupboard and the cornice of the ceiling. It looked most like a large full trunk. It hadn’t, I thought, been there previously.

My conclusion was that my Uncle Arthur had become insane, and was playing some type of bizarre, possibly dangerous, trick on me. I’ve had dealings with the unstable before—the profession on whose perimeter I work has presented to me some fine examples. To humour Arthur therefore seemed the best course.

Reluctant to stay with my back to whatever it was which had manifested in the corner, I moved my chair to a different angle, before sitting back down.

“Very well,” I said. “But you’ve got your answer to it, haven’t you? Cast out fear. Then it will go.”

“I try,” he said. “I try. It’s a war that never stops. That gypsy man who helped me in my childhood, he thought I might eventually prove the stronger, and the victory be mine. Or maybe that was only his pretense, because he could foresee what was more likely. I try, and try, and try. But the fear never goes. How can it? The evidence of what there is to fear is frequently in front of me. Besides, by now, I believe it is less fear—than how mighty that fear it has already fed on has made the—creature. How else has it done what it has? Perversely, at last, it’s only in sleep I ever evade it. Others here,” he said, with a weary, flat, matter-of-factness, “see the thing too. Oh yes, that’s how actual, despite my resistance, it has become. They see it. As you just did over there, up by the ceiling. And look now, the shadow on the carpet moving, the tail of it wagging slowly to and fro.”

I stared resolutely into the fire. Behind me, far off, vague, I heard a kind of soft grumbling guttural, that might only be some freak sound of the autumn wind in the chimneys.

“You should pack up and leave this house,” I said, lighting another cigarette.

“It would go with me,” he said. “By now it goes with me always. Sometimes it disappears, as if it has other little tasks it likes to see to about the place. Then it’s there again. My housekeeper has seen it. You can ask her. She’s decided it’s the ghost of a dog that once lived here. And my butler. The cook and maids somehow generally refuse to see it. Those that do sometimes complain of a large cat that has got into the main house from the kitchen.”

There was a long, slipping, heavy noise.

Arthur’s eyes went over above me. I saw him watch something move quickly across the upper air. His face was green again, but again he smiled. He nodded. He said, “It’s gone for the moment. I could see them then, the welts on its side. Poor thing. It must suffer. Poor damnable thing.”

I’d had enough. I got up again and said, “Sir, I have a very busy schedule, which begins quite early tomorrow. I understood you were aware of that when you invited me here. This matter, whatever it is, is beyond me. I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

“Only to listen. What else is feasible? I’d ask you to shoot it, if that were any good. But how could it be? It came out of the dark inside me. The dark where we go in dreams. It wants to take me back there, to keep me, to play with perhaps, or only to fulfill its function. Rend me. Devour me. Like the hapless Christians in the book.”

“You’ll have to excuse me,” I said. “It’s midnight. Perhaps I could ring for your man… Do you have any opiates to help you sleep?”

“Yes, go to bed,” Arthur replied. His face was icy with disgust.

I stood in the doorway of the smoking-room. The hall outside was rosily low-lit from a single lamp standing on a table. At the curve of the staircase, one of the maids was crossing, with an armful of what looked like table linen, to the baise door giving on the servants’ area. I looked at her, her trim brisk figure, and how, just before she reached the baise, something loped across her path, from shade to shadow, and she hesitated, as if to check the fall of one of the pile of linens she held, which were not slipping at all.

I saw its eyes gleam, fitfully. It glanced at me, indifferent. In its half-seen, solid shape was all the intangible presence of the night. But as he had said, it was an indoor beast, a beast of locked houses that left only one door open for it, in the frantic hope it might go out and lose itself. A beast too of the indoors of the brain, the psyche. A beast of the indoors of the human soul.

Like a scene from a play, I saw it, his dream, and how the beast leapt at him, missed him, always missing, as he fled outward to the world. And then his fear coming out of him, rejected, but still inextricably attached. Externalized.

The lion had gone around the corner and the maid passed through the servants’ door and the hall was empty.

I walked back into the smoking-room. He was sitting quietly crying, poor old child, with the welts of horror blistering on his side.

“All right, old chap,” I said. “All right.”

“I don’t,” he said, apologetically, “want to be alone.”

“Then you shan’t be. Hang the theatre. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

After a while, we went upstairs, and along one of the corridors to his room. Nothing was about, all was silence, and in the cracks of windows, where curtains didn’t quite meet, a low moon floated on a cloud.

We had another brandy, and he went to bed, or at least lay down with the coverlet over him. His round fallen face on the pillows stared at me.

“Nothing can be done. I know that,” he said. “When it comes back—”

“I’ll wake you,” I said. “Sleep for now.”

I’d asked myself if it could come in when he slept, but of course it could, that was the whole point to it now. It was in the world, and outside of him. And his former fear of meeting it in his mind had been replaced, not unreasonably, by the fear it would eventually seize him while he slept.

The electric light on the upper floors was dimmer. I sat in an armchair in this duller glow, and midnight passed into one, and so on through two. I smoked, and watched the clock, and wished I’d thought to bring some coffee upstairs.

But even so, I was wide awake. Arthur slept, deep and dumb. He might have been dead, I couldn’t help thinking that. I had no inspiration of what I could do. Keep the creature off him, then in the morning drive him somewhere, look up any one of a number of people who dealt in fractured minds and hallucinations—God knows. The brain ticks away in its backrooms often, and we’re unaware of its secret progress. I sincerely hoped it might offer me a plan, but hadn’t much faith it could.

For I knew too, of course I did, this now was more than a dream or mirage. I’d seen it. I’m prosaic enough, and it was merely pragmatic now to admit to having seen it. To deny the situation further would be to enter myself the lists of the fanciful or mad.

It returned when the clock said a quarter past three.

It came up through the floor.

That was like a stage effect, something clever with traps and levers, but involving no dry ice to mask it.

Arrived, it shook itself. The housekeeper had convinced herself it was a phantom dog, and there was something doglike about it certainly, as there often is with the big cats; tigers, panthers, and the rest. But its face was savage and evil, its eyes two mindless sumps of decayed fire that seemed to have given off the smoke of its mane. It did faintly stink, as he’d said. How had he known, as a child, what it might smell of? But perhaps lions don’t smell of meat; it was only something he’d heard and so made this one do it. For it was all his own work—his, and that of the artist who first so luridly depicted it and its kind, in the arena of Nero.

I’d promised him I would wake him when it came back. I called his name sharply, and Arthur opened his eyes, instantly fully conscious. “Is it there?”

“Across the room by the window.”

The moon had gone, but the low-burning electric light illustrated the lion as accurately as its initial paint.

It did not look at him or me. It looked about itself at the massively furnished room. Then it padded away, across the floor, and nudging open the bathroom door, went inside.

In the total noiselessness of the night, Arthur and I listened as it drank from some trickle of water, real or etheric, issuing from the taps of the bath.

When it had finished, it returned, not through the door, but simply out of the wall. It stood, its heavy head lowered, its tail swinging.

Something struck me then. I couldn’t have described it. But abruptly I saw the cruelty in its face was only instinct, and perhaps the pain from the stripes on its side, which anyway looked partly cured. It was an animal of sorts, at least. It was hungry, and had been thirsty, and chose sometimes to use a door rather than pass through a blank floor or wall.

So then I spoke to it, by its name. “Lion.”

It made a snorting noise, and turned, and looked at me, that terrible look, the hellish eyes that were really only reflecting light.

“There he is,” I said to it. “There. Look there.”

And the head again turned as if it grasped my meaning. And I saw Arthur brace himself. I said to Arthur then, “It’s yours. You made it. You gave it life. You’re—you’re like a father to the damn thing, Arthur. Stop resisting it, do you hear? It’s your belonging now, whatever it was to start with. It doesn’t want to drag you back into the shadows—if it did it would lose all this new territory you’ve given it. I’m fairly sure it knows that, or it would have done it by now. After all, it’s had a couple of months to try. First you gave it the Roman arena to play in. But now its got a whole house—and anything outside it fancies too. Why do you think it goes off and leaves you? It goes exploring like a bloody cat. And why do you think it follows you, comes back to you? If it isn’t for violence, it must be something else. Maybe that’s where it is like a dog. It knows, if you don’t, it belongs to you.”

The lion, with no warning, sprang. It was too quick for Arthur even to cry out, even to register his fear. It landed, and balanced on his bed, at the foot of it, gazing at him, breathing.

I crossed the room in three strides and pushed it hard in its unmarked side—except there was nothing, nothing substantial to push—but with a grunt it dropped, and flopped down. It lay there sprawled.

It blinked at me, growling.

“Be quiet,” I said. “You must do as you’re told. If you want to stay, you must behave yourself.” The growl changed to a yawn.

We remained watching it, Arthur bolt upright on the pillows, I standing at the bedside, and after a while it lowered its head on to the coverlet. The horror of its eyes shut.

After that, we kept vigil till first light, talking slowly and methodically, discussing it, over its sleeping form, Arthur not moving an inch, I static in a chair. When dawn began to seep in, the lion woke and rose. It kicked its paws and jumped off the bed—and vanished.

At ten to seven some tea was brought up by a maid, and I went down to telephone the town, reporting my absence as due to food-poisoning.

The lion was standing in the echoing hallway when I turned, looking off along a corridor to a narrow, opened door. The morning smelled enticingly there, of trees and mist, and bonfires. While the open door, since the lion could utilize blank walls for exits and entrances, was presumably an aesthetic choice. Outside lay the grounds, with plenty of game—mice and squirrels, birds, rabbits and hares. Any big animal could hunt for itself if it wanted, although I doubted any of the hunted things would suffer much worse than a nasty shock. The lion, though it was visible and could create smell and sound, had no actual substance. But, like the bath-taps, which didn’t leak but had provided water, an idea was conceivably enough for it to feed from. A beast of imagination in more than one way. Arthur’s beast, very apparently. Even as I watched, it made a decision and bounded off along the corridor and out of the open door. Hungry—well, it had had to wait several decades for a meal.

Needless to say, I recounted nothing of any of this when I reached the theatre the next day. My assistant had managed pretty ably without me, and all was soon put in order. I meanwhile secured myself a room in the local hotel.

Arthur survived another twenty-five years, and died without warning, but peacefully, during a fishing holiday in Scotland with one of his partners in the marmalade venture. There had been some talk of a large ghost dog, I believe, being seen often about Blue Firs, and also in other houses where Arthur visited. A slight mythology had connected itself to my uncle, who, apparently, was once or twice spotted, as witnesses thought, throwing sticks for some large hound, in a selection of rural retreats. In Scotland, years before he died, there was a strange story of something lying on the foot of his bed, purring—but it had disappeared by the time others came to investigate. After Arthur’s death, the beast vanished completely, at least according to his housekeeper. Blue Firs is now, I rather ashamedly admit, mine, but I am seldom there. Nevertheless, those who rent the property relate nothing either of dogs, cats or lions.

From Arthur, in the years before his death, I heard very little of anything, and less of his creature. With his renewed sense of safety, our “estrangement” had recurred, which seemed to suit us both. Only a postscript appeared now and then to a rare letter: The lion is in good spirits. Anyone reading this correspondence might take it that Arthur referred sportively to himself. People told me afterwards my solitary visit had done him a power of good.

He had thrown off at once his old timidity and depression, and the recent bad nerves. Instead he took to long, hale walks, and large cuts of meat served almost raw at dinner—though these were barely touched. Sometimes, when alone, he would, it seems, laugh aloud. He informed anybody who asked him, it was at something he had read in a newspaper.

Naturally I have no knowledge of where either of them is now For myself, I assume life ends with the body. But then again, perhaps there are some mind-fashioned heavens in which certain mentally creative people continue to exist. If so, I don’t think for a moment Arthur and his lion are now locked back in any Roman arena. He freed the lion, and ultimately was set free by it. Trite in the paucity of my own imaginative knack, I see them bounding along a seaside, Arthur a gleeful kid of seven, wiry, healthy and tough, and with a great, black-maned dog, scarred a little on one flank, whose claws flash like silver hooks, and leave starry markers on the clean, unearthly sand of the shore.