The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

REGGIE OLIVER The Children of Monte Rosa

IT was my mother who first noticed Mr and Mrs de Walter as they strolled along the promenade. She had a talent for picking out unusual and interesting looking people in the passing crowd and often exercised this gift for my amusement, though mainly for my father. He was a journalist who was always going to write a novel when he could find the time.

My parents and I had been sitting in a little cafe on the front at Estoril where we were on holiday that year. In 1964 it was still unusual to see English people in Portugal, particularly in the north, and the couple my mother pointed out to us were so obviously English. "They're probably expatriates," she said. As I was only eleven at the time I had to have the term explained to me.

They must have been in their late sixties, though to me at the time they simply looked ancient. They were of a similar height but, while she was skeletally thin, he was flabby and shapeless in an immaculate but crumpled white linen suit. He wore a «Guards» tie — this observation supplied by my father — and a white straw Panama with a hatband in the bacon-and-egg colours of the MCC, which I, a cricket enthusiast, identified myself. A monocle on a ribbon of black watered silk hung from his neck. He had a clipped white moustache and white tufted eyebrows that stood out from the pink of his face. His cheeks were suffused with broken veins that were capable of changing the colour of his complexion with alarming rapidity.

His wife was also decked out in the regalia of antique gentility. Her garments were cream-coloured, softly graduating to yellow age at their edges. Their general formlessness seemed to date them to the flapper era of the 1920s, an impression accentuated by her shingled Eton Crop which was dyed a disconcerting shade of blue. Her most eccentric item of dress was a curious pair of long-sleeved crocheted mittens from which her withered and ringed fingers seemed to claw their way to freedom. The crochet work, executed in a pearl coloured silky material, was elaborate but irregular, evidently the work of an amateur, making them resemble a pair of badly mended fishermen's nets.

My mother, who was immediately fascinated, was seized by an embarrassing determination that we should somehow get to know them. I have a feeling she thought they would make "good copy" for my father's long-projected novel, or a short story at least. My father and I went along with her plans, not because we approved them but because we knew that resistance was useless.

We were staying at the Grande, one of the big old Edwardian hotels on the seafront, but my mother noticed that "the ex-pats", as she was now calling them, often took a pre-dinner aperitif on the terrace of the Excelsior, a similar establishment adjacent to ours. Accordingly, one evening we went for a drink at the Excelsior, positioning ourselves at a table near to where my mother had seen the expatriates drinking.

For once, everything went according to my mother's plan. The couple arrived shortly after we had, sat down and ordered their drinks, gin and Italian vermouth, a fashionable pre-war cocktail. ("Gin and It," my mother whispered to us, "it's too perfect!") My mother, who had been an actress in her youth, was the possessor of a very audible voice, so our conversation was soon overheard.

Presently we saw that the lady was coming over to us. She seemed to hesitate momentarily, looming over us, before saying: "I couldn't help noticing that you were speaking English." Her mouth was gashed with a thin streak of dark red lipstick, of a primeval 1920s shade.

So we joined them at their table, and they introduced themselves as Hugh and Penelope de Walter. I was a well-behaved boy at that time and, being an only child, had no siblings with whom to fight or conspire, so I think I made a favourable impression. Besides, because I had either inherited or acquired by influence my mother's appetite for human oddities, I was quite happy to sit there with my sumo d'ananas and listen to the grown-ups.

The de Walters were, as my mother had correctly surmised, expatriates, and they had a villa at Monte Rosa, a village in the foothills above Estoril.

De Walter had been in the wine trade, hence his acquaintance with Portugal, and, on retiring in the 1950s had decided that England was "going to Hell in a handcart", what with its filthy music, its even filthier plays and the way the working classes generally "have the run of the place these days". De Walter conceded that Salazar, the then-dictator of Portugal, "might have his faults, but at least he runs a tight ship". I had no idea what this meant, but it sounded impressive, if a little forbidding.

Their life at the Villa Monte Rosa — so named because it was the grandest if not the oldest dwelling in their village — was, they told us, more serene and civilized than any they could have hoped to afford in Worthing or Eastbourne. I wondered, though, if it were not a little lonely for them among all those foreigners, but said nothing.

I think it was after a slight lull in the conversation that the de Walters turned their attention on me. In answer to enquiries I told them where I was presently at school and for which public school I was destined. De Walter nodded his approval.

"I'm a Haileybury man myself," he said. "Are you planning to go to the 'varsity after that?"

I looked blank. My father came to my aid by informing me that "the 'varsity" meant Oxford or Cambridge. I said I hoped so without really knowing what was meant.

"Never got to the 'varsity myself," said de Walter. "I was due to go up in '15, but a certain Kaiser Bill put the kibosh on that."

The First World War was ancient history to me — a series of faded sepia snapshots of mud-filled trenches and Dreadnoughts cutting through the foggy wastes of the North Sea, a tinkle of «Tipperary» on a rickety church piano. Trying to imagine a young de Walter going to war all those years ago silenced me.

"Do you have children yourself, Mr and Mrs de Walter?" my mother asked.

There was an unpleasant little silence. My father, who was frequently embarrassed by my mother's forthrightness, passed a hand through his thinning hair, a familiar gesture of nervous exasperation. The broken veins in de Walter's face had turned it a very ugly shade of dark purple. Mrs de Walter seemed about to say something when her husband restrained her by tightly grasping one of her stick-like arms.

"No," said de Walter in a lower, firmer voice than we had hitherto heard. "We have not been blessed with that inestimable privilege." There was another pause before he added: "We couldn't, you see. War wound."

With Old World courtesy, he cut off my mother's abject apologies for raising the issue. "Please, dear lady," he said, "let us say no more on the subject." Soon we were discussing the present state of English cricket in which de Walter took a passionate interest, even if he could not quite grasp that Denis Compton was no longer saving England from the defeat at the hands of the Australians, or some people whom he called "the fuzzy wuzzies".

My father, an enthusiast whose information was rather more up-to-date, was able to correct some of de Walter's misapprehensions, while Mrs de Walter told my mother how she had all her clothes made up and sent over to Portugal by her dressmaker in England.

Everything passed off so amicably that we found ourselves being asked to take lunch with the de Walters the following day at the Villa Monte Rosa.

The next day a taxi delivered us to a pair of rusty wrought-iron gates in the pleasantly unspoilt hill village of Monte Rosa. The gates were situated in a high stone wall that surrounded what looked like extensive grounds; a drive from the gates curved into the leafy obscurity of palm and pine trees, and other overgrown vegetation.

We were about to push open the gate when down the drive came a wiry middle-aged woman in overalls. Her head was tied up in a bandanna and she had a narrow, deeply lined face, the colour and consistency of an old pigskin wallet. Silently she shook our hands with an attempt at a smile on her face, then gestured us to follow her up the drive.

The grounds were not well kept, if they were kept at all, but we saw enough of them to guess that they had once been laid out and planted on a lavish scale. Once or twice through some dense and abandoned screen of leaf I caught a glimpse of a lichened piece of classical statuary on a plinth. Then we turned a corner and had our first sight of the Villa Monte Rosa.

It looked to me like a miniature palace made out of pink sugar. Both my parents were entranced by it, but, as they told me later, in slightly different ways. To my father, the ornate neo-Baroque design evoked a vanished world of elegant Edwardian hedonism. Had it been only a little more extensive, it could have passed for a small casino. To my mother, this rose-coloured folly encroached on all sides by deep, undisciplined vegetation, was a fairy-tale abode of the Sleeping Beauty. She said it reminded her of illustrations by Edmond Dulac and Arthur Rackham in the books of her childhood.

The de Walters were there to greet us on the steps that led up to the entrance portico. Lunch, simple and elegant, was served to us on the terrace by the woman who had escorted us up the drive. She was their housekeeper and her name was Maria. The terrace was situated at the back of the villa and looked down a gentle incline towards the sea in the distance. What must once have been a magnificent view was now all but obscured by the pine trees through which flashes of azure tantalized the spectator.

Mrs de Walter informed us proudly that the Villa Monte Rosa had been built in the 1890s by a Russian Prince for his ballerina mistress. It might not have been true, but it was plausible.

The conversation did not greatly interest me. It consisted largely of a monologue on wine from de Walter, who obviously considered himself an aficionado. Though my father knew more than enough to keep up with him, he had the journalist's knack of displaying a little judicious ignorance. My mother and Mrs de Walter, who appeared to have less in common, sporadically discussed the weather and the flowers in the garden of the Villa Monte Rosa.

After lunch, Maria wheeled out a metal trolley on which a large selection of ports and unusual liqueurs were displayed. De Walter proposed a tasting to my parents and then turned to me.

"Why don't you go and explore the grounds, young feller? We won't mind. We'll hold the fort for you here, what? All boys like exploring, don't they? Eh?" This project appealed to me and was acceptable to my parents.

"Don't get lost!" said my mother.

"It's all right," said de Walter with a raucous laugh. "We'll send out search parties if you do!"

So I walked down the shallow steps of the terrace and into the gardens of the Villa Monte Rosa. After crossing a small oval lawn with a lily pond at its centre, I took a serpentine path that led down through shrubberies. Great tropical fronds stooped over me. The gravel path was riven with weeds, and more than once I tripped over a thin green limb of vegetation that had clawed its way across it in search of nourishment. I imagined myself to be an archaeologist uncovering the remains of a lost civilization.

It is often a great shock to find one's fantasy life confirmed by reality. I came down into a dell to find a structure consisting of a statue in a niche above a stone basin in the shape of a shell. It looked like the fountain at the gate of some ancient city. The statue was of a naked woman, lichened and weather-worn, holding a jar, tilted downwards, from which, water had once fallen into the basin which had been dry for a long while. The figure, I now think, was probably modelled on Ingres' La Source, which made it mid- to late-nineteenth century in origin. On its pedestal was carved the word DANAIDE. This meant something to me even then. I knew from the simple gobbets of Greek prose that I was beginning to study that the Danaids, because they murdered their husbands, had been condemned to fill leaky vessels for all eternity in Hades, the Land of the Dead.

I stared for a long time at this ancient conceit, turning its significance over in my mind, but coming to no conclusion, until eventually I decided to follow the path around it and travel further down the slope. After a few minutes I came to another clearing, where I received my second and more prodigious shock.

Within a little amphitheatre of box and yew, both rampant and un-pruned, was a hard floor of grassless grit in which was built out of smooth, dressed stones a low circular wall that I took to be the mouth of a well. On the wall sat a pale, fair-haired boy of about my age. He wore grey flannel shorts and a white flannel shirt, of the kind I was made to wear out of doors in the summer at my school. We stared at each other for a long while. To me he was horribly unexpected.

One reason why I spent so long looking at him was that I could not quite make out what I was seeing. He was a perfectly proportioned flesh-and-blood boy in all respects but one. He seemed smaller than he should be, not by much, but by enough to make him seem deformed in some subtle way. As he sat on the wall, his feet dangled a foot or so above the ground when they should have touched it, but he was not dwarfish. His legs were not bowed or stunted; his head was not too big for his body. Apart from the extreme pallor of his skin and hair, he was, I suppose, rather a handsome boy. I could have gone closer to him to confirm my suspicions about his size, but I did not want to.

"Hello," I said, then recollecting that the boy, his appearance notwithstanding, was almost certainly Portuguese, I said: "Bom Dir."

"You're not Portugoose, are you?" said the boy. "You're English."

"Yes," I said. He had a voice like mine. He belonged to the middle classes. He asked me my name. I told him and he said his name was Hal.

"Hal what?" I asked.

"Just Hal."

"What are you doing here?"

"What are you doing here?"

I told him and then I said it was his turn to tell.

"I come here sometimes," he said.

"Do Mr and Mrs de Walter know?"

"Of course, they do, you ass," said Hal. "Anyway, what's it got to do with you? Mind your own beeswax!" Mind your own beeswax. It was a piece of slang I had heard once or twice at my school, but even there it had seemed dated, culled perhaps from a reading of Billy Bunter or Stalky & Co.

Hal asked me about my school, in particular about games. I boasted as much as I could about my distinctly average abilities and my exploits in the third eleven at cricket. He kept his eyes fixed on me, but I wondered how much he was taking in.

He said: "When I grow up I'm going to be a cricketer, like Wally Hammond."

"Who's Wally Hammond?" I asked.

"Crikey, don't you know who Wally Hammond is? You are of blockheads the most crassly ignoramus."

"Is he a cricketer?"

"Is he a cricketer? Of course he's a cricketer, you utterly frabjous oaf! Don't you know anything?"

As I was one of those boys who had learned by heart the names of the entire England cricket team, together with their bowling and batting averages, I took great offence at this. Later in our conversation I slipped in a reference to Geoffrey Boycott.

Hal said: "Boycott what?" I did not reply, but I felt vindicated.

It was not long after this that I began to feel that my company was no longer a pleasure to Hal. Something about his eyes was not quite right. They seemed to be darker than when I had first seen them — not only the irises and pupils, but the whites had turned a greyish colour. Perhaps it was a trick of the fading light that may also account for the fact that he was beginning to look even smaller.

Suddenly he said: "Who are you anyway?"

"Who are you for that matter, and what are you doing here?" I said, taking a step towards him.

"Go away!" he shouted. "Private Property!"

The sound of his cry rang in my ears. I turned from him and ran up the path to the top of the slope. When I had reached it, I turned again and looked back. Hal was still sitting there on the lip of the old well, his heels banging against the stones. He was facing in my direction but I could not tell whether he was looking at me or not. The light, which was not quite right in that strange garden, had turned his eye sockets into empty black holes. I turned again and ran. This time I did not look back.

For some time I found that I was lost. In that dense foliage I could not tell which way was the sea and which way the Villa Monte Rosa. I remember some agonizing minutes during which I could not stop myself from going round in a circle. I kept coming back to the same small stone statue of a cat crouching on a plinth. It was perhaps the tomb of a pet, but there was no inscription. I began to panic. The cat looked as if it were about to spring. I decided that the only way of escape was to ignore the paths and move resolutely in one direction.

Surprisingly enough this worked, and in a matter of minutes I found I was walking across the little lawn towards the terrace where my parents were. I was about to set foot on the steps to the terrace when I saw Mrs de Walter at the top of them, scrutinizing me intently. She came down to meet me.

"So you've found your way back," she said. "We were beginning to wonder if you were lost.

I shook my head. She laid her thin hand lightly on my shoulder.

"Did you meet anyone on your travels?" she asked. It was a curious way of expressing herself and I was wary. "You did, didn't you?"

I nodded. It seemed the course of least resistance.

"A little boy?"

I nodded again.

"An English little boy?"

I gave her the same response. The pressure of her hand on my shoulder became so great that I imagined I could feel the bones in her fingers through my thin shirt, or was it the cords of her strange crocheted mittens? She said: "We won't mention the little English boy to anyone else, shall we? Not even our parents. This shall be our personal secret, shan't it?"

I was quite happy to agree with this suggestion, because I had a feeling that my parents would not believe me if I did tell them about Hal.

"Come!" said Mrs de Walter. "I want to show you some things which will amuse you. This way!" Her hand now pressed firmly against my left shoulder blade, she guided me anticlockwise around the villa to a part of it which I had not seen — a long low structure with tall windows abutting onto the main building.

"We call this the orangery," she said. "But it's many years since anyone grew oranges here." She took out a key and turned it in the lock of a door made from grey and wrinkled wood to which a few flakes and blisters of green paint still adhered.

"Who is Hal?" I asked Mrs De Walter.

"Come inside," she said. "There are some things here which I'm sure will amuse you."

We entered a long, dingy space feebly lit by the tall dirty windows that faced onto the garden. At the far end of the orangery was a curtain of faded green damask drawn across a dark space, and along the wall which faced the windows was ranged a series of rectangular glass cases set on legs at a height convenient to the spectator.

"These are bound to amuse you," said Mrs de Walter. "All boys like you are amused by these." Her insistence on my reaction was beginning to make me nervous.

At first I thought that the glass cases simply contained stuffed animals of the kind I had seen in museums, but when I was placed firmly in front of one I saw that this was not quite so. There were stuffed animals certainly, but they were all mice, rats and other rodents, and they had been put into human postures and settings.

The first tableau depicted the oak-panelled parlour of an old-fashioned inn. A red squirrel in an apron was halfway through a door bearing a tray of bottles, glasses and foaming tankards of ale. At a table sat four or five rats and a white mouse. Playing cards were scattered over the table and on the floor. The white mouse was looking disconsolately away towards the viewer while the rats seemed to be gloating over the piles of coin that had accumulated on their side of the table. The white mouse wore an elegant embroidered sash of primrose-coloured silk, while perching on one of the finials of his chair-back was an extravagantly plumed hat. The setting and costume accessories suggested the Carolean period. Two moles wearing spectacles and Puritan steeple hats were watching the proceedings with disapproval from a corner table. It was clear that the rats had gulled the wealthy but innocent young mouse out of his cash at cards.

The tableau looked as if it had been made in the Victorian era and had, I am sure, been designed to amuse, as Mrs de Walter kept reminding me, but there was something dusty and oppressive about the atmosphere it evoked. Perhaps it was the implied moralism of the display, a sort of rodent "Rake's Progress" that disheartened me.

In the second case the scene was set outside the inn. The two moles were now observing the action from an open first floor casement window to the right of the inn sign that bore the image of a skull and a trumpet. On the road in front of the inn, a brawl was taking place between the white mouse and one of the rats. Both were being urged on by groups of their fellow rodents, the mice being smaller obviously, but more elegantly equipped with plumed hats and rapiers swinging from their tasselled baldrics. The rats had a proletarian look about them and had leather rather than silk accoutrements.

The third tableau was set in a forest clearing where the mouse and his comrades had just ambushed the rat with whom he had been brawling in the previous scene. The mouse was plunging a rapier into the belly of the rat, which was now in its death throes. I was slightly surprised by the graphic way in which the creator of these scenes had shown the blood. It surrounded the gaping wound, which the mouse had created. There was a dark, viscous pool of the stuff on the yellow soil beneath its body, and great splashes of it on the mouse's white fur. One could just see the faces of the two moles peeping out from a dense belt of undergrowth to one side.

The final glass case depicted a courtroom, presided over by an owl judge. Other participants were all rodents of one kind or another. The white mouse, his coat still faintly stained with blood, stood in the spike-hedged dock between two burly ferret policemen. A rat in a wig was interrogating one of the moles, whose head was just visible above the wooden sides of the witness box. The entire jury was composed of rats and, as if to confirm the inevitable outcome of the trial, I noticed that a small square of black cloth already reposed upon the owl's flat head.

"I thought these would amuse you," said Mrs de Walter who was standing behind me. I started. In my absorption I had quite forgotten her presence. Amused was not the word, but I was held by a morbid fascination. These scenes with their lurid subject matter and their dusty gallows humour were redolent of long-forgotten illustrated books and savage Victorian childhoods.

"Ah! But you haven't seen behind the curtain, have you?" said Mrs de Walter with a dreadful attempt at a roguish smile. It was then that I became very much afraid. I can only account for the suddenness of my panic by the fact that uneasiness had built it up inside me over the course of the afternoon, that it had reached a critical mass and was now in danger of erupting into sheer terror. One thought dominated: I must not see behind the curtain, and yet, at the same time, I knew I could not look away.

Mrs de Walter appeared to take all this in, but she showed neither concern nor indifference to my state of mind, only a kind of intense curiosity. She bent down and looked directly into my eyes.

"I wonder if you should see this one. It might shock you." She approached the curtain and put one hand on it so that in an instant she could pull it aside. There was a pause before she asked me a question. "Are you by any chance a pious sort of a boy?"

For several seconds I simply could not grasp what she meant. Of course I understood the word «pious». It was the name of a recent Pope; monks in the Middle Ages were pious; but I had never heard it applied to a living human being, let alone myself. I said I didn't know. She smiled.

"All right," she said, "the tiniest peep, then," and she flicked aside the curtain. It was only a few seconds before she released the curtain and all was hidden again, but my impressions, though fragmentary, were all the more vivid for that.

It was a glass case like the others, but the scene within it was very different. I remember the painted background of a lurid and stormy sky, torn apart by zigzags of lightning. Against them the three crosses on a grey mound stood out strongly. I cannot say too much, but it was my impression that the three toads had still been alive when they were nailed to the wood.

I can remember nothing after that until Mrs de Walter and I found ourselves on the terrace again. I saw a table strewn with little glasses and open bottles full of strange-coloured liquids. Mr de Walter and my parents appeared to be having a lively discussion about race.

"I've knocked about the world a bit in my time," de Walter was saying, "and I've met all sorts, I can tell you. And of all the peoples I have met, the best, for all their faults, are the English. 'Fraid so. Modesty forbids and all that, but facts is facts. Next best are the Germans. Now, I know what you're going to say, and I'd agree, your bad German is a Hun of the first water — dammit, I should know! — but your good German is a gentleman. Your Frenchie is an arrogant swine; your Arab is a rogue, but at least he's an honest rogue, unlike your Turk. Don't waste your time with the Swiss: they all have the mentalities of small town stationmasters. Nobody understands the Japs, not even the Japs. But your absolute shit of hell in my experience is the Bulgarian. Scum of the earth; sodomites to a man; rape a woman soon as look at her, but not in the natural way of things if you understand me."

"Hugh!" said Mrs de Walter reproachfully, indicating my presence.

"What about the Portuguese?" said my mother quickly, in an attempt to smother any further revelations about the Bulgarians. "You must like the Portuguese. We've found them to be absolutely charming."

"Your Portugoose is not a bad fellow, I grant you," said de Walter rather more thoughtfully than before, "but he's a primitive. You've seen the folk around here — dark, squat little beggars, stunted by our standards. Well, there's a reason for that in my opinion. It's because they're the direct descendants of the original Iberian natives. There's been no intermingling with Aryan races, not even the Romans when they invaded, or the Moors for that matter. They're like another species. I call them the Children of the Earth."

My parents did not know how to respond to this without either compromising themselves or causing offence, so there was a silence. It was broken by de Walter's suggestion that he take us on a tour of the house.

The rooms were luxuriously furnished in an opulent Edwardian style with heavy brocades and potted palms. On side-tables of dark polished wood were ranged treasures of the kind that used to be called «curios» — ostrich eggs mounted in silver, meerschaum pipes whose bowls were shaped like mermaids or wicked bearded heads, little wild animals carved in green nephrite by Faberge. On a side-table was a gold cigarette case of exquisite workmanship with the letter «E» emblazoned in diamonds upon it. De Walter opened the case for us. Resting in its glittering interior was a charred and withered tube of white paper that might once have been a cigarette.

"I'd blush to tell you how I got hold of this little item, or what I paid for it," he said. "This case once belonged to a very beautiful and tragic lady, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria. And that little scrap of paper was the last cigarette she ever smoked. I have the documents to prove it. She was assassinated, you know. Stabbed by an Italian anarchist in Switzerland of all places. Ghastly people, the Italians: blub over a bambino while holding a knife to your guts under the table."

The books that lined the whole of one wall of what he called his «saloon» were nearly all leather-bound and had curious titles which I did not recognize. They were not like the miscellaneous collection of classics and popular novels to be found in our house.

"Here's something that might amuse you, old man," said de Walter to my father, pulling out a gilt-tooled volume in red leather. "Crebillon Fils. The engravings are contemporary."

I saw my father open the book at random. The right-hand page was an engraved illustration of some sort, but he shut it too rapidly for me to see what it was.

My eye was attracted to a group of silver framed photographs on a bureau. Several of them featured younger versions of the de Walters, which showed that they must once have been elegant if not exactly handsome. Others were of strangers, presumably relatives or friends, usually formal portraits, and of these one stood out. It was an old photograph, pre-war at a guess, of a bald man with a short nose, determined mouth and a fierce stare. He looked straight out menacingly at the camera and, it would seem, at us. It was like no photograph I had ever seen before.

"Know who that is, young feller-me-lad?" De Walter asked me.

"I do," said my mother with evident distaste.

"Yes," said de Walter, sensitive to her reaction but unruffled. "He had a certain reputation. The Great Beast, and all that. Queer chap, but he knew a thing or two. Know what he said? Remember this, young 'un. 'Resolute imagination is the key to all successful magical working.' That's what he said. Well, Crowley had the imagination all right. Trouble was, he lacked the resolve. Drugs and other beastliness got in the way. I'm afraid he wasn't quite a gentleman, you see.

"I visited him once or twice during his last days in Hastings. He was in a bad way because the drugs had caught up with him, as they always do. Ghastly, but useful. Got some handy stuff out of him, about the homunculus. Ever heard of that, little man?" he said with a wink. I said I hadn't.

"It means 'little man', little man. Except he doesn't come out of a mother's tummy, he comes out of an egg. But it's a special alchemical egg." I was baffled, but I took comfort from the fact that my parents seemed to be equally puzzled. De Walter went on: "Making the egg. That's the hard part. Now, here's another. Have you heard of a puerculus, my boy?" And he winked again. I shook my head. "Well now, use your nous. Puer in Latin means-?"

"Boy."

"Good. Right ho, then. So if homunculus means little man, then puerculus means —»

"Hugh, dear, hadn't we better be getting on?" said Mrs de Walter.

"Ha! Yes! Call to order from the lady wife!" De Walter led us out of the room and down a whitewashed corridor towards a stout ironbound oak door with a Gothic arch to it quite unlike the others in the house.

"Now then," said de Walter, putting his hand on a great black key that protruded from the door's lock, "my grand finale. The wine cellars! This way, boys and girls!"

My mother, who had become increasingly nervous throughout the trip, suddenly burst into a stream of agitated speech: "No really, that's awfully kind of you, but we must be on our way. Do forgive us. It's been really delightful, but there's a bus from the village in ten minutes — I consulted the man, you see — which we will just be able to catch. Thank you so much, but —»

"Enough, dear lady, enough!" said de Walter. He seemed more amused than offended, though even then I recognized the amusement of the bully who has successfully humiliated his victim.

When we were safely on the bus, among a troupe of uniformed schoolchildren and three black-clad old women who were carrying cages of hens into Estoril, my mother said: "Never again!"

My father, whose courteous soul, I thought, might have been offended by our hastily-contrived departure, said nothing. I think he even nodded slightly.

One Sunday morning, a year or so after our holiday in Portugal, my parents and I were sitting over breakfast in the kitchen. Sunday papers were, as usual, spread everywhere.

One of my father's indulgences, excused on the grounds of professional interest, was to take a large number of the Sunday papers, including the less «quality» ones, like The People and the News of the World. I noticed that my father always picked up the latter first and often read it with such avid attention that my mother had to address him several times before he would comply with a simple request, like passing the butter. I had no interest in newspapers at that time and frequently, with my mother's permission, took a book to the breakfast table.

On this occasion I happened to notice my father turn a page of the News of the World and give a sudden start. My mother asked if anything was the matter. "I'll tell you later," he said and left the kitchen, taking the paper with him.

When, later that morning, I found the News of the World abandoned in the sitting room, I noticed that the centre pages were missing. However, my father had failed to observe that among the exciting list of contents to be found on the front page were the words: HORROR AT THE VILLA MONTE ROSA.

I forget how I managed to get hold of another copy of that paper, but I did that day, and I made sure that my parents did not know about it. These little discretions and courtesies were part of the fabric of our life together.

Across the centre page spread was sprawled the familiar headline: HORROR AT THE VILLA MONTE ROSA.

Much of the space was occupied by a large but fuzzy photograph, probably taken with a long lens from a nearby vantage point, of three people being escorted down the drive of the villa by several Portuguese policemen. Two of them I could clearly make out. They were Mr and Mrs de Walter, their expressions stony and sullen. The third, a woman in an overall, had bowed her head and was covering her face with both hands. I guessed this to be their housekeeper, Maria, an assumption that was confirmed by the text.

The article itself was short on detail, but long on words such as «horror», «gruesome», «grisly» and «sinister». The few clear facts that I could ascertain were as follows. Over the course of about eight or nine years a number of boys, all Portuguese, aged between ten and twelve had disappeared from the Monte Rosa district.

The last boy to vanish, from the village of Monte Rosa itself, had been seen on the day of his disappearance in the company of the de Walters' housekeeper, Maria. A police search of the Villa Monte Rosa and its grounds resulted in the discovery not only of the boy's corpse "hideously mutilated", according to the article, but the remains of over a dozen other children. Most of these had been found "at the bottom of a disused well in the grounds".

The de Walters, said the article, had "been unable to throw any light on these horrific discoveries", but were still helping the authorities with their investigations.

Some weeks later I confessed to my mother that I had read the article. Her only comment was that I had had a lucky escape, but I am not sure if she was right. The de Walters would not have touched me, and Hal, whom I had met by the well, had not been one of the boys who were killed because they were all Portuguese. Hal, you see, had been English like me and not a Portugoose.

I am writing this now because I have been told to, by my wife and the others. Not that I have any complaint against her. We have been married for over twenty years. We have no children; that inestimable privilege had been denied us, and adoption would have been impossible. I could not have taken an alien being into my house. But we have plenty of occupation, my wife and I. We are great collectors; in fact, I am a dealer in antiques and am recognized as something of an expert on Lalique glass.

One afternoon, about three months ago — I think it was three months, it may have been two, or perhaps even less — we were in Bath. Naturally, we did our rounds of the antique shops. There is a little place in Circus Mews, not far from the Royal Crescent, which we often visit, rather shabbier than the rest; at least not tarted-up in some awful way. I won't say we pick up bargains there because the owner knows his stuff, but he has a way of discovering rare and unusual items that I find enviable.

It was a bright summer day, and shafts of sunlight were penetrating the windows of his normally rather gloomy establishment. That is how I believe I had a sense of what was ahead of me even before we opened the door to the shop.

As soon as I was inside, I saw it.

It was one of Mrs de Walter's glass cases of stuffed animals, the second one of the series I had called in my mind "The Rodent's Rake's Progress", and it was exactly as I had remembered it. In fact, it surprised me that it did not seem smaller to me, now that I was myself older and larger.

The scene, as you remember, is set outside the inn with the sign of the Skull and Trumpet. There were the brawling mice and rats in the foreground, and — yes! — the Puritan moles in steeple hats are peering out of a diamond-leaded casement on the first floor to the right of the inn sign. There are windows to the left, but these are not open. And yet — this is something I cannot remember seeing before — there is something behind those windows, and it is not another rodent.

It is the pale head-and-shoulders of a boy in a white flannel shirt, a boy no more than six inches high. I cannot see him too clearly through the little leaded panes of glass, but I think I know him.

I swear that the head moved and turned its black eyes upon me.

They tell me of course this is rubbish, and I want to believe them.