The Lily Hand and Other Stories (5 page)

I didn't know the car well enough to have the drill to numbers, and the job took me longer than it should have done. And before I'd gone ten miles farther, my other back tyre ripped open on a piece of glass.

I had to walk two miles into Neustadt to find a garage, and it rained hard all the way, and when I got there it took me twenty minutes of exhaustion to make myself understood.

Once they'd grasped the situation they made short work of fetching the car, patching the inner tube that was still worth patching, and selling me a replacement for the other; but even so, it meant that I had to kick my heels in Neustadt for two hours, and it was past six when I got on my way again.

All it meant was that I should have to drive later than I'd intended. I put up the best speed I could, but towards evening that road is infested with enormous lorries, eight-wheelers and worse, and they drive hell for leather, and take an age to pass, so the whole run into Würzburg was tough on my nerves, even apart from the falling dusk, which seems to come inordinately early there by English standards, and the frequent and fierce thunder showers.

If I hadn't already been somewhat daunted I don't suppose I should have picked up the hitchhiker with the Union Jack on his rucksack who thumbed me hopefully outside the village of Enzlar. He had a beard, and glasses, and hobnailed boots, a discoloured windjacket, and about half a ton of impedimenta dangling round him, camera, tape-recorder, everything you can think of. I suppose he was rising fifty, and deadly serious. Not my type. But he was advertising the fact that he was British, which meant that he could at least talk English to me, and prevent me from going completely melancholy for want of a human voice.

He talked! The first thing he told me was that he'd come all across Europe without walking more than two miles at a stretch, which made me want to ask why he needed the boots. I'd hoped he was going all the way to Aschaffenburg or Frankfurt, but he was only bound for Kitzingen, on the near side of Würzburg.

‘Where are you spending the night?' he asked me, hoping I'd stay in Kitzingen, too, and take him on with me next day.

‘Hanau,' I told him firmly. It might have been sensible to draw in my horns and settle for somewhere nearer, but I was determined not to alter my plans just for a run of bad luck.

I knew what he'd say, and he said it. Straight out of the guidebook. For that matter, it's the only thing there is to say about Hanau. ‘Ah, the birthplace of the brothers Grimm!' he said, beaming at me with queer, light, opaque eyes; and he began to talk about the folklore of fairy tales with the gusto of a devotee.

I'd always thought the Grimm fairy stories a pretty grisly collection of horror comics in their own right, but this fellow knew exactly how sinister they really are when considered in all their implications. And what he knew he meant to share with me. The sky sank low over our heads, copper and lead in mottled patches, the darkness came down hours before its time, and the thunder rolled along mile for mile with us on our left quarter, and slashed at us with vicious scuds of rain. And this fellow talked. Like a book.

‘You know, of course, what the dwarfs and ogres and gnomes of fairy stories really are, don't you? They date from the dawn of history, when new races were sweeping westward out of the Danube valley. They're the new people's view of the old, the survivors of the old civilization depressed and submerged into decline, pushed out of the fat lands into the hills and forests, where living is hard and precarious. They're the relics of submerged peoples, dispossessed gods, outmoded cults. The stories turn them into grotesques, shrunken in stature, ugly, wicked, because the people who made the stories were afraid of them still. They made them malevolent because they knew they'd given them reason for hatred, reason to be inimical and vengeful. And they
are
malevolent – they
do
hate – they
are
inimical and vengeful. Because they have reason to be.'

His eyes glowed at me gleefully. He talked as if the old war were still going on, and all the guerrillas of innumerable doomed races were lurking in ambush for stragglers from among their supplanters, not half a mile from the road.

‘Or of course, in the ultimate analysis,' he said blithely, ‘they're the spirits of the dead, who are also dispossessed and submerged, and have reason to bear a grudge against the living. In either case, they're to be feared and avoided at all costs. And all those princesses, and elder brothers, and younger sons who fall into their clutches in the stories – well, in the stories they're always rescued in the end, of course. But how do we know how many of the dominant race went missing to provide all those legends? And
weren't
rescued?'

When I dropped him at last in Kitzingen I had a furious headache, and a mind full of monsters. I've never been so glad to get rid of a passenger in my life.

‘It'll be pretty late when you cross the Spessart hills,' he gloated at me through his ginger beard as he took his leave. ‘I often think many of the wildest Grimm stories must have come out of those forests. Only a few miles from Aschaffenburg and Hanau, and yet you might be in another world and another age. There are places, you know, where the veil is very thin. Spessart always seems to me to be one of them.'

He went off dangling his plethora of equipment and hunched under his enormous rucksack, and in the half darkness he looked like one of his own ogres.

As for me, I crept through Würzburg feeling uncommonly miserable, and along the narrow road under the ominous shadow of the Marienburg, and out into the rain-soaked countryside again. By eight it was dark; pitch dark because of the low and heavy clouds which brought the night down on me untimely. Then the real thunderstorms began, streaming with rain until there seemed no air to breathe between the slashing jets of it, and visibility was nil.

I slowed down to a timorous crawl, and edged along by feel, through sudden pools that tried to tug me to a standstill. It was plain night now, and a black night, too, hot and heavy and crushing, so that even between the rainstorms the very air seemed solid.

I should have stopped. I should have had sense enough to settle for the pub in the nearest village. But I went obstinately on, determined not to give in to my luck. And in the Spessart hills I lost my way.

It couldn't happen now. The autobahn has been extended right to the outskirts of Würzburg, and you roll along through the wilds on a moving belt. But at the time I'm talking about, only a few years ago, the motorway had only reached Aschaffenburg, and you did the rest of the trip on the old, winding road. After you passed the well-known Spessart Inn it was forest, forest all the way, rising and falling with the road, and not a solitary house to be seen in miles of it.

It was pouring with rain again, my head was thudding like a steam-hammer, and all I could see by my headlights was drowning, drenching streams of water, and occasionally the merest glimpse of the long, unchanging procession of tree-trunks on either side. The road was a river, and had narrowed considerably on this stretch, so that I didn't notice for some time how extreme this narrowing process had become, or how bad the surface was; and exactly how and where I left the road I shall never know.

But at last I realized that there were no more lorries, and that was odd. Whatever my speed, I should either have overtaken one or two, or been myself overtaken. But now there were no more lorries. There were no more cars at all. Nothing but the Ford and me.

I was afraid to stop my engine, so I kept going, but wound down my window and stuck my head out into the saturated darkness. There wasn't a solitary sound left in the world except the indignant note of the car and the slashing fall of the rain. Then the rain stopped, and all round me I could feel the silence pressing in, and the darkness, and the wet, green, earthy, ancient smell of the forest. And I was afraid. Not of being lost, not of an uncomfortable night in the car, not of anything comprehensible or reasonable, just afraid. Perhaps of the immensity and antiquity of the world outside the tiny shell of the car, and of the insignificance and ephemeral nature of the car and its driver, those intruders from a new world. A world which thought it had displaced the ancient one, a world from which I was now a straggler, and vulnerable.

I knew it was nonsense, but the knowledge resided in a part of my brain, the reasoning part, which had shrunk into a corner and assumed the defensive. All the rest of my mind moved now irrationally, by instinct, memory, hypersensitive touch.

I told myself that the rough track on which I found myself was bound to lead somewhere, to a village, or at least a clearing where there would be a house, or to another road which, since I was not conscious of having changed direction in any considerable degree, would surely bring me to Aschaffenburg. So I went on, creeping gingerly along the sodden wheel-ruts as the track grew greener and narrower; but all the intuitive part of my mind, quivering with outspread tentacles like the hair erected on a frightened man's head, stretched outward into the primeval darkness and fended off terror. The old things, the buried things, came into their own by night and in solitude. How many of the dominant race have vanished, to provide all those legends? Cut off from their kind, astray from their daylight world, like me—

That was when the car rocked suddenly sideways into a bigger hole than usual and, grind away as I might, I couldn't get it out again. I got out to try to push it clear, and it did move on to an even keel, but then the engine died on me, and I couldn't start it again. I was quaking with exhaustion, fever, fury, and fright when I stopped shoving to wipe the rain out of my eyes and peer ahead through the sighing darkness; and somewhere, small and distant between the trees, I saw a glimmer of light, steady light, like the glow from a window.

I don't know why it wasn't immediately reassuring. But I know that it wasn't. The hair rose on my neck and scalp with foreboding. And yet I went forward towards the light, between the thinning trees.

The obstinate rational corner in my mind was still functioning. This must be a house, it said, go and ask where you are, and how to get back on the road to Aschaffenburg and Hanau. And I did what it told me to do, though I didn't believe in its reasoning. I went straight towards the window, for it was certainly a window. There was no clearing to be seen, just a low fence erupting quite suddenly in the streaming gloom, and a bushy, tangled garden, and then the long, low huddle of the house, hardly distinguishable from the surrounding darkness of trees and night.

Only two storeys, with a verandah all along the upper face and a flight of wooden steps leading up to it from one end. A squat, secret, unwelcoming house, low-browed behind its bushes, unbelievably solitary and sinister. A shaded light in one upper window, and that unshaded one below. I walked up to the fence, and there was a little gate in it, rolling open on a broken hinge. I went through into the garden, among the dripping bushes, and crept closer to the house.

It was then that a door opened in the dark face, and let out a flood of light into the garden; and in the light, a grotesque little black silhouette stood, a figure I didn't care to think of as human, though its movements caricatured the motions of man.

I saw no features, only a shape. There was a huge head, sunken into thick shoulders, a paunchy body that tapered off into skinny little bowed legs. The creature was about three feet high, for it came only half-way up the lighted frame of the door. It stood a moment looking out into the night, and then it went in and shut the door. There wasn't any doubt about it. I hadn't imagined it. It was there, and it was alive.

I don't know what it is in a man that can drive him forward towards something that threatens and terrifies him. Not courage. Courage ought to be reasoning and reasonable, ought to have an objective. There was every reason in the world why I should turn and run for it, feeling the way I felt, and no reason at all why I should creep shivering through the wet bushes towards that lighted window.

But that's what I did. Curiosity must be a passion as strong and fundamental as love, to hold its own with the sort of panic terror I felt blazing up in me. I was incandescent with it, my erected hair giving off sparks into the darkness, all my skin tensed and burning with its heat. And yet I was crawling through the tangled branches, soaked, shuddering, my knees quaking under me, drawn to the window as to a magnet.

The house waited for me, quiescent, biding its time. I reached out and touched the wall beneath the window, drew myself up, and looked into the room.

There were six of them. In that little, wood-panelled, ancient brown room, six of them sat, some at a table, some with their backs to the green-tiled stove with its sunken radiation eyes. One of them was smoking a short briar pipe. One, the one I'd seen in the doorway, was just closing the door of the room behind him, and now I saw his face, and it was ugly, tragic, and ferocious. Two of the others were females. The word ‘women' didn't occur to me in connection with them. They were thick-bodied, neckless, with gross lips and broad noses. I swear not one of them was taller than the first.

All the voids in my racial memory, all those dark hollows of ignorance that might so easily, so horribly be peopled after all, swelled into one darkness and filled the night for me. The antique darkness in which the enemy lurked still, and still was dominant, the territory where the daylight laws of reason and credibility were not current, gripped and held and contained me. For my reason denied this, but my senses recorded it. The forest house was full of dwarfs. The very air outside its confines was heavy with their tragedy and hatred.

In the stories, you'll remember, the hero still advances, that indestructible inquisitiveness overcoming his fear even when he knows his enemy. Now I know it can happen, because it went on happening to me. I'd seen them, and still there was something else I had to see. In that upstairs room, too, there was a subdued light burning. I felt along the wall until I reached the wooden staircase to the gallery, and step by step, clinging to the wood with cold hands, I climbed it, and edged my way to the window. The sill was low and one half of the window was slightly open so that a draught stirred the drawn curtains. I put my hand in, and parted the curtains an inch or two, just enough to peer in.