Night Music (23 page)

Well, as soon as the General recovered himself, and accepted that I hadn't caused the damage, the question was raised as to who might be responsible and, more to the point, whether the individual in question might still be around. The General was a hunter, and had served in the Uganda protectorate against the Banyoro and the Nandi. He took his old Africa shotgun from the cabinet, and I picked up a stout walking stick. Together we searched every room in the house, but we found no trace of an intruder, and the mud petered out somewhere near the General's bedroom, halfway along the upstairs hallway. As far as the General could tell, nothing had been touched and nothing taken, but it was a queer business. The footprints only went up, not down. I mean, I suppose that by the time whoever it was arrived upstairs, most of the mud had probably dropped off his boots, but I would have expected some traces of it to appear on the way down, too, certainly if they'd been that muddy to begin with.

The General called the police, and a constable came along to take a statement. There wasn't much that he could do except promise to keep an eye out for suspicious characters and advise the General to ensure that his doors and windows remained locked for the time being. I helped the housekeeper to clean up the mud, and filthy stuff it was. I wouldn't have eaten anything that grew out of it, not even if it had been boiled to within an inch of disintegration.

I offered to sleep in a chair outside that night, just in case our visitor tried to come back, but the General told me not to be silly. He liked his own company, the General. I think he was secretly glad that Lady Jessie had chosen to stay in London. I kept working in the garden until darkness fell, though, and I walked the housekeeper to her home, just in case.

•  •  •

That night, the General was woken by a frantic scratching at his bedroom door. He was still half-asleep when he opened it, and a white-and-brown form shot by his feet. It was the cat, Tiger, a big, lazy old beast that had once been the terror of every bird and small mammal within a square mile of the house, but now spent most of his time napping and swatting at flies. The General hadn't seen him move so fast in years, but something had clearly frightened Tiger enough to cause him to relinquish his place in a basket at the foot of the stairs and make his way up to the General's bedroom. Tiger climbed onto the headboard of the bed and stood against one of the posts, hissing at the open door, every hair on his body raised in fright.

The General had brought his shotgun to bed with him, something Lady Jessie would never have permitted had she been present, not even if the whole German army had been threatening to invade through the rose garden and annex the vegetable patch. Now he grabbed the shotgun and called out a warning, but received no reply. That smell was back, though the stench of filthy, polluted mud, and he could hear movement in the darkness of the hallway, low against the wall. Even at the risk of exposing himself further, he turned on the lights.

A rat was running along the carpet by the sideboard, but it was no ordinary rodent. This creature was bigger than the cat, its pelt caked with mud, its belly swollen with carrion. As it sensed the General's approach, it raised itself on its hind legs and sniffed at the air. It had no fear of him, not even as he leveled the shotgun at it. In fact, just before he pulled the trigger, the General felt certain that the thing was about to launch itself at him. Then he fired, and the rat was no more. But even when I saw it the next day in its ruined state (for the General had let it have both barrels, leaving little of it but fur and regrets) I could tell what a monster it had been. The tail was enough of a gauge. It was as long as my forearm.

But what I remember most about that day is the stink of mud. It had permeated the entire house. You couldn't take a breath but that you smelled it, and you couldn't put a bite in your mouth but that you tasted it. The carpet and floorboards kept their own memory of it, too, for even after all our efforts they retained the marks of footprints upon them. I feared that even a professional would be hard-pressed to do much about the damage. The carpets would, in all likelihood, have to be replaced, and the boards sanded down and varnished again. That might get rid of the smell, too, although it wasn't any worse if you got down low and sniffed at the marks. It was just there, in the air, and every door and window left wide open failed to rid the house of it.

•  •  •

The General returned to work on his memoir. If anything, the events of the previous twenty-four hours seemed only to spur him on to greater efforts. I glimpsed him through the window, writing furiously. He'd rubbed a little clove oil under his nose to help with the stench.

As for myself, I disposed of what was left of the rat, but I still had no idea where the mud on its fur might have come from—or, indeed, the origins of the creature itself, for I had never before seen one so big, dead or alive. It was only as I was dumping it among the trees near the house—for the insects and birds would do a better job of ridding the world of it than I ever could—that it struck me how little blood there had been in the aftermath of its destruction. Now that I thought about it, I couldn't recall seeing any blood at all, only bone and fur and some unidentifiable gray matter. I examined the remains more closely, and it seemed to me that the fur wasn't quite of a whole, for it was not uniform, even through the mud congealed upon it. After a while, I became convinced that the patches of fur were not even from the same animal. Similarly, the bone fragments appeared to be of different ages—I could tell by their color—and as I began laying them out I thought I discerned what might have been part of a bird's wing, and an upper jawbone that belonged more correctly to a smaller mammal: a squirrel perhaps, or even a bat, for I saw that it had two short fangs in the center with two longer ones at either side, and no rat that I had ever seen bore such teeth.

I sat back on my heels and considered the problem. It was, I thought, as though a rat had somehow been assembled from whatever pieces of other deceased animals might be found in the undergrowth or the soil, the fur and bones formed into a whole that, from a distance, might well resemble a large rodent but would not bear closer inspection. Yet how could such a thing be animated? Surely the General must have been mistaken in believing that he had seen it run, for this was a dead thing formed of other dead things. Someone must have been playing a nasty trick on him, perhaps the same individual responsible for tracking muddy footprints through his house.

And as my thoughts returned to the mud, so I made a kind of connection. I rose and walked through the trees to the pond at the heart of the woods. It wasn't much of a body of water, even when swelled by rain, and the level was now as low as I could ever recall. Had I made my way to its deepest point, I doubt that I would have been submerged above my waist. The water was cloudy, and the bank was dry. I looked for traces of footprints, but could find none. Flies filled the air: nasty black brutes that went for my ears and eyes.

I caught a smell. It was fainter than the odor at the house, but I thought that I could detect it nonetheless. Then again, the stink of the mud at the General's residence had attached itself to my clothing, my hair, and my skin, or so it felt to me, and I couldn't be certain that what I was smelling had its source at the pond or had simply been carried there with me. I admit to feeling uneasy, though. I can't say why. A kind of stillness, I think: a sense that something, somewhere, was holding its breath.

•  •  •

I met the General when I was on my way back to the house. He was carrying his shotgun, and I wondered if he had been thinking along the same lines as I. But no good could come of making the trek to the pond, for the day was unpleasantly warm and those flies annoyingly persistent. I told him I'd been out to take a look, and that the banks were caked hard by the sun. He appeared content to take my word for it, and we returned to the house together. I was glad of his company until we cleared the woods. Again, I can't say why, except that the smell faded the farther we got from the pond, and then grew more noticeable again as we reached the garden. The General returned to his study to write, and I locked up my tools and went home.

•  •  •

I have what happened next only from the General himself. I saw nothing of it and can bear no witness. All I can tell you is what he told me after I found him out by the pond just as the rain began to fall.

He had remained in his study until after dark. His hopes of writing a memoir were, he realized, excessively optimistic, and he had instead determined to produce a piece for the
Times
or the
Telegraph
, revisiting again the events at High Wood and offering the truth of them, as he saw it. He immersed himself in his work, regularly smearing his upper lip with more clove oil to keep away the smell until his mustache was soaked in the stuff. Eventually, though, even the clove oil no longer worked, and he could only conclude that, somehow, the stench was getting worse, if such a thing were possible. The window before him was slightly ajar, but all the other doors and windows in the house were secured. He set aside his pen, poured himself a glass of whisky, then remembered the blasted clove oil. He could have one or the other, but not both, and he determined to wash the oil from his mustache and make do with the Scotch.

He stepped from his office, and his foot slipped in mud. The front door remained closed, but muddy footprints led from it to his study—where they appeared to have paused, as though someone outside had listened for a time to the scratching of the General's pen—then made their way left to the dining room and the kitchen, and across the hall to the drawing room, and upstairs to the bedrooms. The footprints crossed one another, and even in the dim lamplight he could see that they were not one set, but many, for the feet were of different sizes, and the tread marks were not the same.

And the smell! God, the smell!

He followed the prints as if in a daze, heedless now of whom he might find, seeking only an answer to the mystery of their presence. In the drawing room he found smeared finger marks upon a photograph of his wife. The taps in the bathroom were clogged, the sink stained with dirt and, he thought, dark smears of blood. There were blemishes upon the wallpaper in the halls, and mud dripped from the door handles. The linen on his bed was no longer white, as though someone caked in filth had been overcome by the urge to rest upon it. Every room, with the exception of the study that he had occupied, bore traces of intrusion, but of the intruders themselves he found no sign.

The front door was open when he returned downstairs, and moonlight shone near bright as day on the lawn and the muddy tracks upon it, all now leading away from the house and into the trees. He walked in those footsteps, and the woods closed around him, drawing him deeper and deeper into themselves, until at last he found himself by the banks of the pond. He stared into the water at its base, the dankness of it seeming to swallow the moonlight, and as he did so, the water level sank, seeping away until all that was left in the pond was foul gray mud.

And in the mud, something moved.

The General caught sight of a shape ill defined, a figure that appeared both of the mud and yet a thing apart. It forced itself up from the mire, its back bent, its hands and knees braced against the bed of the pool. Fragments of old wood and rotting vegetation partly concealed its head, like the hood of a shroud, but he caught a glimpse of pale features, like the face of a second moon, and clouded eyes that turned toward him yet did not see, not truly.

Now all was movement, the mud in a state of slow yet constant turmoil as more and more men emerged, and the General had a vision of an immensity of bodies being forced up from below, a great eruption of the dead, hundreds of thousands of them, all with names to whisper, all with stories to tell, a generation of the lost that would give the lie to his every word of self-justification and crack the hollow shell of each excuse.

Because he had known. He had always known.

He sank to his knees and prepared to join their number.

•  •  •

That was where I found him the next morning, his clothes caked with gray mud, his body shaking from something more than cold. As I raised him to his feet the rain came, washing him clean, and the pond began to fill again. The General babbled as I half-carried him home, and I thought him unhinged. Even then, he seemed unsure of what was mud, and what was not mud. He thought, he said, as he shivered against me, that what he saw that night might not have been men at all but merely the memory of them given form by whatever substance was closest to hand.

He never told the tale again, and never mentioned it to another soul, as far as I know. He's gone now, of course. He died in 1941, just as another generation was facing the guns. As for his great rebuttal, I never heard him speak of it again, and I believe that he burned to ash what he had put down.

I'm not a scientific man, but I can read and write, and I retain a curiosity about the world. I have learned that we contain billions of atoms in our bodies, and all of those atoms at one point formed part of other human beings, so that each one of us carries within us a trace of every man and woman who has ever walked this earth. It is to do with the law of averages, as I understand it. If it is true of us, then is it true also of other things? Like mud, I mean. Ten million soldiers died in the Great War, most of them laid to rest in mud and soil. Ten million, each containing billions and billions of individual atoms. If each human being can contain within himself every other, could not something of those dead men be retained in the very ground, a kind of memory of them that can never be dispelled?

There are all kinds of mud, you know.

All kinds.

Through Chancery, pausing only to wipe the dung from my boots.