The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories Part 16

Peter shook his head and explained his mission: Dora wanted something from her desk.

'Why didn't she ask me to bring it?' her mother protested.

'She only thought of it just now.'

'It must be very urgent if it couldn't wait till tomorrow.'

'Itis urgent,' Peter a.s.sured her. 'It's a matter of life and death.'

She followed him reluctantly to Dora's bedroom, where the desk was kept unlocked. It was a walnut Queen-Anne-style model with small drawers that pulled out sideways, but there was no fir-cone in any of them. Peter began to poke about among the papers stuffed into pigeonholes above the writing flap.

Mrs Matthews watched him in silence, like a professional burglar a.s.sessing an amateur's attempts. I I knew what you were looking for..she suggested.

'I'm looking for a fir-cone,' Peter said.

'A fir-cone!' Mrs Matthews's voice was remarkably like her daughter's. 'You're not going to tell me that Dora sent you here to pick up that?'

It has sentimental a.s.sociations,' Peter said lamely.

'A fir-cone, indeed! I can tell you, you won't find that.'

'You mean you know where it is?' Peter asked hopefully.

'I put it in the dustbin last week.'

'What!' Peter spun round, leaving the desk-drawers gaping. 'What in heaven's name possessed you to do that?'

'I take it I may act as I wish in my own home,' Mrs Matthews reproved him. 'Dora is my daughter, after all.'

'That doesn't give you the right to dispose of her belongings. Couldn't you have waited till she was dead?'

'Peter!'

'I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. Forgive me.'

'My poor boy, you're thoroughly overwrought.' Such demented distress was so flattering to Dora that Mrs Matthews was prepared to be generous in return.

But Peter ignored her generosity. 'Which day does your dustman call?'

'Tuesday morning,' Mrs Matthews answered.

'Then there's just a chance that the fir-cone is still there.'

He was already on his way to the kitchen when Dora's mother succeeded in catching his arm. 'Peter, listen. I know you hate to disappoint her, but there's no point in turning my dustbin upside down. The fir-cone won't be any use if you find it. It was mouldy. Rotten to the core.'

With a cry, Peter broke away from her. 'Are you certain?'

'Of course I am. That's why I threw it away. You don't really think I'd dispose of Dora's things for no reason?'

'But she told me the fir-cone was all right.'

'I expect she hadn't looked at it lately.'

The sweat was standing out on Peter's brow. 'I've got to have it,' he cried. 'Oh G.o.d, I've got to have it.'

He made a dive toward the kitchen-door. There was a clatter as the dustbin was up-ended. The refuse rolled in all directions over the yard. Mrs Matthews watched with mingled alarm and horror as Peter, unheeding, flung himself on his knees among the cinders, tin cans, withered flowers, empty bottles and rotting cabbage-leaves.

Even so, he almost missed the fir-cone, which had rolled as if trying to escape. Then he spied it and rose, stained but triumphant.

Dora's mother looked at him pityingly. 'You see? It's exactly as I told you - not worth keeping. Dora won't want to have it now. In fact, I doubt if the hospital would allow it. It's not a very hygienic souvenir.'

Something about the fir-cone's soft, rotting substance made Peter's gorge rise until he wanted to retch. He fought down the nausea with an effort. It was as though his fingers had touched decaying flesh.

He put it in his pocket and turned to Dora's mother. 'I'll take it back,' he said in a hollow-sounding voice.

'I should leave it till the morning,' she said gently. 'They won't let you see Dora now.'

'No, no. I don't mean to Dora. I mean I'm taking it to the lie des Regrets.'

To Peter, that evening was the beginning of a nightmare. It proved impossible to book a seat on a plane. The Easter holiday rush had already started and there was nothing for it but to travel by boat and train. But he had already missed the night boat from Southampton and he could not afford another twenty-four hours' delay. The fir-cone in his pocket seemed to be mouldering faster. Eventually he settled for the crossing Newhaven-Dieppe. From Dieppe he could travel crosscountry to Quimper, and from Quimper by bus to K6roual-hac. He did not know how he would cross from there to the island, but trusted that he would find some means of accomplishing this last lap. He would beg, buy, borrow, even steal a boat if need be. Desperation would show him the way. The fircone had to be returned if Dora's death were not to be on his conscience, for had he not wished that their marriage might never take place? Admittedly he had not wished that any disaster should befall Dora and nothing had been further from his thoughts; but it was the way of the lie des Regrets to grant a wish and cause one to regret its granting - as Dora regretted being ill.

At the thought of that mysterious malady, Peter's scalp p.r.i.c.kled. Dora, like the fir-cone, was rapidly wasting away. Unless he could return it in time, he knew too well what would happen. And now, when he most needed speed, he encountered only adversity and delay.

The Channel was rough and the boat was an hour late on the crossing, which meant he had missed his connection with the fast train. At St Malo a porter gave him wrong information and allowed his train to pull out under his nose. The excited Englishman in a stained suit, unshaven, untidy, speaking unintelligible French, was an object of mirth rather than of pity to this Breton, who, when he understood the purport of his questions, amused himself with over-literal replies. No, there were no more trains until tomorrow. The last bus? That had left an hour ago. There would not be another till Sat.u.r.day. A daily service?Bien sur there was a daily service, but it did not run on the Friday before Easter, of course. Yes, monsieur could hire a car if he preferred it, and no, the garage was not open this afternoon. And who had said anything about there being no means of getting to Quimper? Monsieur had been asking about getting theredirect. But if he took a bus to La Rocaille and there changed to another bus, he could be in Quimper by half past four tonight. Only the bus for La Rocaille was on the point of departure; one would telephone and ask it to wait..

It was when he was on the bus and had got his breath back that Peter first saw the Face. Small and malignant, it leered at him from a peasant-woman's market-basket and seemed to require some leer or gesture in return. Its expression was one of malicious satisfaction, as though it were pleased that the journey was late and slow. Yet when Peter moved his head in an effort to escape its triumph and looked again at the basket, it was no longer there.

Thereafter it played hide-and-seek with him among the pa.s.sengers; it peered at him from over the shoulder of the man in front; it grimaced at him from the crook of a woman's arm hung with parcels; where two children put their heads together and whispered, it made an evil and, to all but Peter, invisible third.

It vanished each time he moved abruptly on the narrow seat, to the discomfort of his neighbour who glared at him with such intense ferocity that Peter felt impelled to explain.

'II y a quelquechose dans le panier de cette dame-la/ he murmured.

'Et vous, vous avez quelquechose dans le cuV Between dread of seeing the Face and mortification, Peter did not know which way to look. No one else seemed to have perceived this grotesque, non-fare-paying pa.s.senger. Peter began to wonder if he was imagining things; he had slept very little on the crossing. And then the Face put out its tongue at him.

Quick as lightning, Peter returned the compliment, only to meet the horrified then angry gaze of the woman opposite. She gave a small, involuntary scream. Peter's neighbour cautioned him to mind his manners. Any trouble and they would put him off the bus, him and his remarks about 'something in her market-basket'. Just let him try anything with Madame Blanche, that was all.

In vain Peter protested that his gesture was not intended for the lady. The whole bus looked at him with pity and scorn. 'Mais voyons V his self-appointed gaoler-neighbour expostulated, 'there is only Madame Blanche who sits there. Therefore you intended to insult her. Whom else could you have intended to insult?' And the other pa.s.sengers joined with the Face in looking at him accusingly all the way to La Rocaille.

The second bus was waiting in the town square. It appeared incredibly old. The windows did not fit, and they b.u.mped and rattled as the bus threaded its way over La Rocaille's cobblestones. The woman with the market-basket was no longer with them, but as he turned to look at the landscape, Peter saw with a shudder of fear that the Face still was. Only now it had been joined by other Faces. There was a whole row of them above the electric lights. They grinned and gibbered, put out their tongues and made long noses, leered and winked at him in an obscene, revolting way. He pa.s.sed a hand across his eyes, and found it wet with perspiration. The sweat was standing out in beads upon his brow.

'Stop the bus and let me off,' he commanded.

Someone behind asked if he felt all right.

'Yes. No. I want to get off,' Peter repeated.

Impossible, the bus was late already, he was told. There was no time to wait for someone to puke by the roadside. From somewhere his fellow pa.s.sengers produced a stout brown paper bag.

'But I don't feel sick!' Peter protested emphatically.

'You wanted to stop the bus.'

'Only so that I could get out and walk a little. Away from those Faces up there.'

He jerked his head in the direction of the light-bulbs, three of which had failed to come on. His fellow pa.s.sengers followed the gesture blankly. It was evident they saw nothing there. One or two of them tapped their foreheads significantly. The woman behind Peter ostentatiously moved away. Only his gaoler-neighbour seemed unaffected. Peter wondered if he could see the Faces too. He concentrated on staring out of the window at the countryside, still desolate after a late cold spring, while the row of faces looked down with their air of malicious triumph, whose cause he was to discover soon enough.

A few miles from Quimper the bus stopped with a particularly bone-shaking rattle, and the driver-conductor got down. He walked, bandy-legged but purposeful, towards the radiator, unscrewed the cap and let off a head of steam. 'Encore une foise,' Peter heard the other pa.s.sengers whispering all around him. It was evidently not a rare event. The driver leaned negligently against the bonnet, while clouds of steam rose into the evening air. From somewhere he had produced a can of water; he had also produced a cigarette. The pa.s.sengers inside were likewise furnished. Everyone seemd prepared for a wait. And through the window Peter could catch a glimpse of the sea in the distance, sullen and heaving, and the tide was coming in.

In another hour the tide would make the channel between Keroualhac and the island impa.s.sable. And after that, darkness would descend and he would be subject to another night's delay. In vain Peter tapped his feet and fidgeted with impatience, drumming his fingers on the rattling window-pane. Through it he could see the line of white which broke against a headland, and watch its progress, whipped by the wind, along the sh.o.r.e. If he looked inwards, he could see the mocking Faces, whose mockery was reserved for him alone. One of them in particular had descended from the ceiling and hovered a little way to the left of him in the air. The tongue ran over the lips in antic.i.p.ation as they pursed themselves, ready to spit...

With a cry, Peter struck out at this monstrosity, an ill-aimed buffet which caught his gaoler-neighbour's lighted cigarette, knocking the glowing stub among the other pa.s.sengers in an avalanche of swearing and stamping it out.

'Can't you save your tricks until you're back among the inmates?' the angry victim exclaimed. I could report you to the gendarmes for this one. You a pyromaniac, or what?'

I beg your pardon,' Peter murmured in English.

'English, hein? We know that the English are mad. But, sacre nom! why can't you go mad on your side of the Channel? Don't you know that's what the English Channel's for?'

Peter's answer (if he made one) was lost in the revving of the engine. The bus, recuperated, moved off with a spine-jarring jerk. Through the window he could see that the line of white around the headland had devoured a good deal more of the sh.o.r.e.

At Keroualhac he was one of the first pa.s.sengers to alight. The bus had stopped outside the Coq d'Or, which, as yet not open for the summer, presented a shuttered, cloistered front to the main street. Pausing only to note this inhospitable welcome, Peter sought the short cut to the harbour through the churchyard. Here there was no lack of hospitality. An open grave, boarded over, yawned near the path. The Faces, whom Peter had temporarily forgotten, peered at him round the corner of the church. In his pocket, where his hand stole now and then for rea.s.surance, the fir-cone seemed deliquescent to his touch.

As he came out of the churchyard into the harbour, he became aware for the first time of the baying of the sea. It kept up a continuous worrying of the weed-covered rocks and the sea-wall, like hounds who have cornered a beast and are holding him at bay. The few boats drawn up on the hard were beached in safety. The fishing fleet had not left the port today. The only sign of life was a dinghy chugging its way across the harbour, piloted by an oil-skinned and sou'westered man.

Peter leaned against the harbour wall and feigned interest in the water, watching the man out of the corner of his eye. There was no other boat he could use to reach the island, and his chances of hiring it seemed small. No boatman would venture outside the harbour, let alone entrust the boat to someone else, for within the next half-hour the tide-rip would block the channel to the island; it was already dangerous to attempt to cross.

The man in oilskins seemed unaware of Peter's presence. He made fast the dinghy to a ring in the harbour wall and scaled the iron ladder from the water, leaving his boat bobbing below. He had stripped off his heavy oilskins for ease of movement and he wore the usual seaman's jersey underneath. A local fisherman, Peter thought - perhaps one of those who had been hostile when he and Dora returned from visiting the lie des Regrets.

As the man approached Peter, he stared curiously. It was too early in the year for visitors.

Peter, feeling that some remark was called for, could think only of inanities.

'A bad day,' he volunteered with a glance towards the fishing fleet in harbour.

'Not unusual at this time of year?'

The fisherman was pa.s.sing without so much as a second glance in his direction when Peter remarked: 'Not much activity here today.'

'Ah, monsieur, you come at a time of sorrow. We mourn the death of one of our best-loved men. I knew him all my life. He was like a brother. And now he is drowned, G.o.d rest him, and to be buried in the morning. It is sad when a man must carry his best friend to the grave.'

'The storm must have been a very bad one.'

'He was not drowned in the storm. He was drowned here in the harbour in calm water by that boat of his on which there was a curse. We urged him to get rid of her, but he was stubborn. He laughed at us for believing in bad luck. But last night the boat, a dinghy like mine with an outboard motor, capsized near the harbour mouth. The motor struck Yves on the head as he went under. He was dead by the time we got him out. In all my days I have never known a dinghy capsize like that one. There was no reason for it, except that the thing was accursed.'

'What do you mean?' Peter asked uneasily.

'A stranger would not understand, monsieur.'

'No,' Peter insisted, 'please explain. I am interested.'

'It has to do with the island in the bay, the lie des Regrets, as we call it. The place is unlucky; no one from Keroualhac will go there, Yves no more than the rest. But last summer a young English couple of more than usual stupidity helped themselves to Yves's boat, which thus spent some hours on the island. The boat has been accursed ever since.'

'And the couple? What happened to the English couple?' Peter tried to keep the urgency out of his voice.

I don't know, but I hope they have not gone unpunished. Since they have caused a death, they deserve to atone.'

'No!' Peter cried, and was astonished at his own vehemence. 'One of them has atoned enough. She lies sick of an illness that has defeated all her doctors, and unless I can reach the island tonight she will die.'

'It would be madness to try to reach the island,' the fisherman warned him. 'Apart from ill-luck, the tide is almost at its height.' He had already stepped between Peter and the seawall, as if to protect his boat.

'I will pay you good money to hire your dinghy,' Peter promised.

'Think I'd ever see my boat again in this sea? Or that I'd ever want to after she'd been to the island? No, monsieur, there's not a man in Keroualhac will help you in getting there.'

'In that case I shall have to help myself,' Peter retorted.

Tt's suicide,' the fisherman warned him grimly.

Peter's hand closed round the fir-cone as he thought of Dora. 'It will be more like murder if I don't.'

The man looked at him strangely, without blinking, and Peter recognised suddenly and with blinding clarity that here was the original of the Face. The lips were not pursed now to spit forth contumely; the expression seemed rather to be one of malicious glee. As Peter watched, the mouth began to stretch and widen until the lips were taut and distorted as an extended rubber band. The eyes, which were narrow and near together, seemed almost to be buried in the flesh. With a cry of horror, Peter lunged at the mask before him and heard rather than felt his knuckles connect with bone. He had no clear idea of what it was he was destroying; he knew only that destroy he must.

The fisherman went down like a ninepin. Peter, not normally a fighter, was suddenly shocked and appalled. His first instinct was to offer aid and explanation. His second to make for the boat. The second won, for already the fisherman was dazedly stirring. Then, as he saw Peter disappearing over the iron ladder, he gave a great shout atad began to struggle to his feet. Peter's fingers wrestied clumsily with the moorings. He cast off the rope just in time. As the fisherman's head appeared over the sea-wall, the boat began to glide away. The fisherman yelled something unintelligible and minatory. Peter stood up, his movement rocking the boat. He fumbled in his breastpocket and produced his wallet, still stuffed with worn thousand-franc notes.

'Here!' he shouted, as a sea-gull screamed in derision. I don't want to steal your boat.' And* he hurled the wallet with all his might towards the quayside, where it landed with a satisfying thump.

The fisherman, whose face seemed to have reverted to a normal Breton peasant's, gazed from Peter to the wallet, but made no attempt to pick the latter up. Then, with a shrug of ma.s.sive resignation and a glance all around the empty wastes of the sea, he made off as fast as sea-booted legs would carry him. He crossed himself before he turned away.

Outside the harbour the waves began in earnest. The seabed seemed to be tilting this way and that. The waves did not break, but slid smoothly towards the coastline, intent on trying to vanquish its battered rock. Sea and land were locked in a sempiternal struggle in which countless vessels had been sacrificed to no effect. It seemed too much to hope that a dinghy might survive it, but to Peter's relief it did. After he had got used to the long glide over the surface of a sh.o.r.eward-mounting swell and the heart-stopping moment at its conclusion when another wave reared up ahead, he began to realize that the dinghy (for the moment) could take it better perhaps than a bigger boat. He calculated the distance to the island. He might yet do it in time.

But the wind and water were against him. His progress was maddeningly slow. The tide, frothing in the channel, had made the water-level dangerously high. Without warning, the sea began to boil all around him, the wind and waves contending with the tide. The water, compressed into swirling eddies, began to race with the speed of an express train. The dinghy, almost on the sh.o.r.eward side of safety, was borne broadside, parallel to the isle. In vain Peter struggled to turn her bows into the tide-rip. She heeled over, righted herself, heeled over, further over, and overturned. Peter had a glimpse of her, carried keel upwards towards the jagged rocks at the island's harbour mouth. Then the sea propelled him in the same direction, and he struggled desperately to keep himself afloat.

The wave which flung him finally sh.o.r.ewards was one of the largest yet to break. The impact knocked all the breath out of his body, but at least he fell on sand. The sand was smooth, sliding treacherously beneath his fingers, until he realised he was caught in the undertow. Panting, heaving, straining to gain some purchase, his scrabbling fingers encountered a furrowed slab of rock. His hands were so numb that he could scarcely distinguish rock and fingers. Sea-water streaming down his face left him choking and half-blind. And then another drenching wave broke over him, and again he had to fight the undertow.

This time, by an effort he had believed beyond him, he dragged himself beyond the ocean's clawing reach. Spewing sea-water and retching his heart out, he lay p.r.o.ne and shivering among rock pools and seaweed, too terrified and exhausted even to think.

It was the cold that brought him to his senses. He was cold within and without. But surprisingly, his legs responded to his summons. Dizzily, staggering with the effort, he forced himself to his feet. There was blood on his hands and on his forehead where he had cut himself upon the rocks. His trousers flapped sodden and heavy about him. In the maelstrom his shoes had been sucked off. Behind him was a waste of whirling water, racing like a river in flood. Before him lay the now sharply remembered horrors he had encountered on the Island of Regrets.

At least, Peter thought, wringing the water from his garments, I have not made a wish this time. And that thought reminded him of the fir-cone. Suppose, in that wild sea, it had been washed away? But no! It was safely there in an inner pocket, no more pulpy than everything else he possessed. He beat his arms to restore some vestige of circulation, and set off inland towards the wood.

The path by the stream was spiked with reeds and marshy, with a green-tinged, evil-smelling ooze. His feet sank in above the ankles, his trouser-legs became solid with the slime. The stream which had babbled so delightfully now ran silent, swollen into flood. From the bushes no birds sang, despite the season. The light was beginning to fail.

In the pinewood it was darker still and more silent. A curious stillness prevailed. Peter almost preferred the desolation of bare branches to the pine-trees' sinister, everlasting life. He found the tree without difficulty from which the fir-cone had come. Other fir-cones lay on the damp, decaying needles. Reverently he laid his down. Its mildewed, water-logged appearance made it easy to recognise, yet when he looked a moment later, it had vanished clean away.

At once there was laughter all around him, thin, shrill laughter which had a spiteful ring. At first he thought it was the madman, but it lacked the raucous cackling of his cries. Besides, this was not one laugh but many. A chorus of malice echoed among the trees. And then he saw the Faces all around him, peering from behind tree-trunks, in the branches, even in the air at the level of his eyes.

Awkwardly in his bare feet and sea-sodden garments, Peter began to run. He ran downhill because it was the way he was facing, and also because a house was at least somewhere to go. The tenant might be mad - that did not matter. He was a fellow human-being after all. Anything was better than the company of the unseen dwellers on the island. Almost sobbing with relief, Peter pounded the solid oak of the front door.