The Grotesque (14 page)

I climbed out of the bath and stood dripping and shivering on the mat as he rubbed me down with a towel. I wonder, now, what he thought as he performed this service. Did he realize, for instance, just how pleasant it is to be scrubbed and toweled by one’s manservant? Was he seething inwardly with resentment that it was I, and not he, who was in a position to order such a toweling? No, I’m more inclined to think that he was filled with a sort of cold certainty that within a few months it would all be different, that he would be the master of Crook, and that I would be—dead. Nor was this the first time that I’d contemplated the fact that Fledge undoubtedly intended to murder me; and knowing this, but knowing also that he himself did not know that I knew it, I experienced that inimitable tingle, tha
t frisson,
that a brave man feels in the presence of real danger. “That’s enough, Fledge,” I said. “Give me my dressing gown.” My wiry little body shivered for a moment in that bleak chilly bathroom in the east wing. Turning toward the mirror I noted with pleasure the redness of my hard-scrubbed back, then slipped my arms into the dressing gown that Fledge held open for me. Tying the cord tightly about my waist I told him to bring me a scotch while I dressed for dinner, then along the corridor I went, leaving him to pick up the damp towels and clean out the bathtub. The point is, there was a period when I felt stimulated by the challenge Fledge represented, by the vigor of the conflict he offered. As I dressed I thought with a dry snort that he was a fool to imagine he could outwit me. Events, however, were soon to occur that gave him the advantage; and these events were beyond my control, they originated with that meddling old woman, Giblet.

❖

The early part of February was very damp in our part of the county, and it was also, as I’ve said, a very busy and nerve-wracking time for me. For quite apart from the complex and delicate, and deadly serious, game I was playing with Fledge, I was also preparing to deliver my lecture on the seventh. So I was in the barn every day, rehearsing the thing to a group of shrouded bones and a raucous crow that had roosted in the rafters. I’d had to shroud
Phlegmosaurus,
in tarpaulins and old sheets, because the roof leaked and the rain dripped through. I paced up and down, reciting my revolutionary thesis on the taxonomic classification of the dinosaur and reveling, I admit, in my imagination, in the storm of applause and controversy I expected to arouse. I expected, frankly, soon to be dominating the discourse of natural history—or at least its paleontological strand—I, the gentleman naturalist, the amateur! I intended, you see, to take my audience slowly and carefully through the fossil record, from bottom to top, showing how the first primitive reptiles were succeeded by the advanced “reptiles”—dinosaurs with birdlike bodies—after which came primitive birds with teeth, like
Archaeopteryx,
then advanced birds with teeth, then modern toothless birds. I would show how the bone structure of
Phlegmosaurus,
and his upright, bipedal posture, are distinctly avian, and I would
not
accept the argument that because he had lost the large collarbone required by all flying birds his relationship to the birds was therefore a distant one. No, I would suggest that the
potential
for growing a collarbone was still there in the phlegmosaurian genes, but dormant, simply. I would suggest that as my
Phlegmosaurus
went darting across the Mesozoic landscape, he reached high enough speeds to become airborne. I would suggest that natural selection would then favor any mutation through which his long-suppressed collarbone reappeared. And this reappearance of suppressed characteristics—
atavisms,
we call them—are not as uncommon as you might think. Whales with legs occasionally turn up, as do horses with toes. Such throwbacks even occur in our own species: babies with tails, for instance. By way of the atavism, then, I would show that
Phlegmosaurus carbonensis
grew a collarbone, sprouted feathers, and took to the air. He was thus the father of the birds, and not to be classed among the reptiles.

❖

Harriet, I remember, was showing signs that my fouler-than-usual mood was beginning to irritate her. She has a remarkably high tolerance for mean-spirited unsociability, but there is a limit; and the peevish frown crinkling her brow indicated to me that her threshold would shortly be reached. I should have told her that after the lecture I’d be a changed man, but I didn’t feel up to it. It occurs to me now, though, that perhaps her uncharacteristic ill-humor was not related to my behavior at all, but was, rather, a symptom of the struggle going on in her own heart; for in Harriet the spirit and the flesh were at war at this time, I’m convinced.

Cleo was no help. She wouldn’t eat with us, she wouldn’t let Harriet into her room, and she absolutely refused to go back to Oxford. I should have told Harriet not to worry, that it would “blow over,” like the rain (all emotion is like weather, I think: if you wait long enough it passes), but I didn’t feel up to that either, I was much too engrossed in my own drama. Doris was still functional; Fledge was inscrutable. This was Crook, then, as the rain kept falling on its moss-infested tiles and even came dripping through, in places, especially at the back of the house, where buckets had to be placed on landings and stairwells to catch the drips. It was Fledge’s job to empty them; I saw him one morning, a bucket in each hand, coming down the back stairs, and it made me think of George, off to feed the pigs. The contrast between the two men could not have been stronger, I remember thinking, though oddly enough, if one were to strip them naked, tear off the uniform of social identity, as it were, the difference would not, I think, be nearly so pronounced. In terms of bone structure and general physical build they were quite similar. They might even have been brothers, strange thought.

And all the while Mrs. Giblet was out on the marsh, searching for signs of upheaval, a bone in the mud to set her mind at rest about her missing child. It made people uneasy. Old John Crowthorne told me about it in the Hodge and Purlet one afternoon, then spat in the fire. Anyone who knows John Crowthorne will tell you what it means when he spits in the fire. The rain did not deter her, apparently; she was out there in the wettest weather beneath a huge black umbrella, squelching through the mire. Each evening she ate alone at the back of the saloon bar, but fortunately she did not appear while I was there. I slept very badly; I may have had more dreams; I never remembered them in the morning, however. The Fling flooded its banks near Pock and carried off a sheep.

❖

There was nothing, as far as I can remember, to indicate that February 5 would be such a crucial day in these unfolding events. Perhaps the signs were there, the omens and portents, and I was blind to them. My empiricism was more or less intact then, and maybe that was what rendered me blind to warnings. I was drinking whisky in the barn at half-past two in the afternoon when Fledge came in and delivered a message: Mrs. Giblet had succeeded, she had found Sidney’s bones. The news alarmed me deeply—I was thinking of Cleo, of course, and what this terrible development would mean to her.

I
n retrospect it was, I suppose, not so much the finding of the bones that alarmed me as it was the state in which they came up. You see, I have dug up quite enough bones in my time to visualize clearly the scene out there on the marsh, though of course I have always dug up dry bones, and these were damp. But the patient labor of exposure and retrieval, with this I am deeply familiar. Mrs. Giblet apparently stumbled upon a piece of rib—this was more than a mile from where the bicycle had come up—a piece of rib that the earth was in the process of disgorging. By means of a small gardening trowel that she carried on her person she then uncovered the entire rib cage, and, close by, the skull. As I say, I am no stranger to such activity. But when I heard that the skeleton continued to come up piecemeal, bone by bone—and that there were
teethmarks
on the bones—it was then that I became truly alarmed. For
(experto crede)
it sounded to me very much as though Sidney had been chopped into pieces before being dumped in the marsh, and that in the meanwhile someone, or something, had chewed him clean of flesh and gristle. In other words, he had been butchered, and then gnawed.

Butchered and gnawed. Limp and his men were soon on the marsh, and by dint of energetic excavation had the entire skeleton up by nightfall. The grisly remains were then rushed to the forensic laboratories for analysis, and speculation, in the hours that followed, was intense, not to say macabre. The lab report came the following morning, and did little to allay my fears: Sidney had indeed been butchered and gnawed—butchered by men and gnawed by pigs!

The vague unease I’d been feeling since the bones came up now took definite form, for I quickly understood the implications of this. That it was a piece of typical police bungling I was in no doubt, no doubt at all; but you see, the pig farm in Ceck’s Bottom
—my
pig farm—was the only pig farm in the vicinity of the Ceck Marsh, and it was not hard to predict what Limp would do next.

I was in the public bar of the Hodge and Purlet on the evening of the sixth, and there I met old John Crowthorne. That afternoon, he told me, just as he’d been crossing the farmyard with a bucket of swill in each hand, two police cars had come racing through the gate and squelched to a halt on the dung-puddled stones (it was rather a wet and overcast afternoon). Limp leaped out of the first car. “George Lecky?” he shouted.

“No,” said old John, who I’ve no doubt presented a most unwholesome aspect to the bustling little police inspector, for he sports a pair of huge brown whiskers and his face is deeply grooved down the vertical, and each groove seems to be full of earth. “No,” he said, as large policemen clambered out of the cars.

“You are?” said Limp.

“John Crowthorne. Afternoon, Hubert,” he said, addressing Cleggie, the Ceck policeman.

“Where is George Lecky?” demanded Limp; then, without waiting for an answer: “Right, we’re going to search the farm. We have a warrant”—and, turning to his men: “In you go!”

Standing in the public bar, listening to all this, I became very annoyed. This business of pigs gnawing Sidney’s bones—this, as I say, was a lot of rot. And that that officious little bastard Limp should go down to the pig farm
—my
property, don’t forget, it still belonged to the Crook estate—and start searching the place, and carting off George’s tools, his knives and saws and choppers, as old John told me—it was not to be borne. “Good Christ,” I muttered, tossing my cigar into the fire, “the nerve of that bloody little man!”

Old John’s eyes narrowed, and he glanced at me shrewdly. Odd, this, considering that old John’s eyes tend to dart constantly about the walls and ceilings of any room he’s in, some sort of nervous tic, I suppose. He turned briefly toward the fire, and spat a large gob of saliva into the flames; there was a brief hiss. Then he told me what happened next, and quite dramatic it was too. Just after they’d loaded a pile of blood-caked sacking into one of the police cars there came a sudden great roaring sound from over by the marsh, and through the murk could be seen a huge shining eye, moving at speed down the Ceck’s Bottom road in the direction of the farm. Limp and the constables apparently stood as if rooted to the stones as this one-eyed thing came lurching and backfiring into the farmyard—it was George, of course, at the wheel of the swill lorry. He came careering into the yard, swinging the lorry in a wide U-turn that forced them all up against the walls, and knowing the condition of that lorry, and the size of the yard, I can well imagine how he must have dragged at the wheel and stamped madly at the foot pedals to pull off such a maneuver. Then, said old John, he went reeling and roaring by, and then he was rattling out of the farmyard, still backfiring loudly, and away up the Ceck’s Bottom road toward the village. A faint smell of petrol and burning oil hung in the air; porcine grunting continued, basso profundo, in the background. “It were like he cast a spell on us, the way he come round the yard like that,” said old John, his voice lowered and his eyes bright. “The odd thing seem, Sir Hugo, that I seen his face as he come by me, and he were
afraid,
were George, he were in a
panic!”
Limp apparently broke the spell. “Right!” he shouted. “Into the cars! Let’s get after him!”—and beneath the bemused gaze of old John Crowthorne the police cars raced out of the farmyard, sirens wailing, in pursuit of George.

The Ceck’s Bottom road is not ideally suited for high-speed car chases. It is rutted and potholed and strewn with boulders and dung and the occasional stray cow. They never did catch up to George; by the time they reached Ceck the quarry had long since been lost sight of. Into the Hodge and Purlet ran Limp—this I heard from Bill Cudlip, who was there at the time—then out again. “Back the way we came!” he shouted. “He must have gone into the marsh!” Hearty chortles, by the way, from Crowthorne and Cudlip at the ease with which George had shaken off his pursuers, and privately I, too, exulted. George had indeed gone into the marsh, they found his vehicle halfway down the cart track, and I can imagine the headlights of the police car picking out the filthy mudguards, the swill-crusted tailgate, the ranked dustbins on the bed of the familiar lorry. Beyond the channel of the headlights, however, the trees heaved up in a black and impenetrable wall. They would then have got out of the cars and stood listening to the marsh, which stretched for miles beyond the trees, a dark and treacherous tract of land that a man would be a fool to enter after dark, unless he knew it well. A deep silence lay upon the place. “Let him run,” murmured Limp. “I’ll have fifty men out here in the morning.”

But Limp’s fifty men failed to find George, though they searched the marsh quite thoroughly, and quite systematically, for several days. That night, though, the night of the sixth, I stood gazing into the fire and thought of my old friend George, at that very moment somewhere out on the Ceck Marsh, fleeing the law. Why? What had he done? What had he to be afraid of? A terrible suspicion begin to take shape in some dark corner of my mind— no, I would not heed it, I pushed it down—no, not that.