The Little Stranger

  He had, as I knew, been dubious about the party from the start. He hadn’t liked the sound of the Baker-Hydes, he said; he was uncomfortable with the idea of playing ‘master of the house’, and he felt a fool about putting on evening clothes, which he hadn’t worn in about three years. But he’d gone along with it all for Caroline’s sake, and to please his mother. On the evening in question he really had been delayed at the farm, though he knew that everyone would suppose he’d ‘simply been dawdling’. He’d been kept there by a piece of failing machinery, for just as Makins had been predicting for weeks, the Hundreds pump had looked like it was finally about to blow, and leaving the farm to deal with the problem without help was out of the question. Rod knew as much about things like that as any mechanic, thanks to his time in the RAF; he and Makins’s son patched up the pump and kept it working, but it took until well past eight o’clock. By the time he had crossed the park and was hurriedly letting himself back into the Hall by the garden door, the Baker-Hydes and Mr Morley were already arriving at the front. He was still in his farm clothes, and filthy with dust and grease. He didn’t think he had time enough to go upstairs and have a proper wash in the family bathroom; he thought he’d make do with hot water in the bowl of his washing-stand. He rang for Betty, but she was busy with the guests in the saloon. He waited, then rang again; then finally went down to the kitchen to fetch the water himself.

  Now, he said, came the first queer thing. His evening clothes were on his bed, laid out and waiting to be put on. Like lots of ex-servicemen he was a neat and orderly dresser, and he had brushed the garments down himself earlier that day, then set them ready. When he had returned from the kitchen and hastily washed, he put on his trousers and his shirt, then looked for his collar—and couldn’t find it. He lifted the jacket and looked beneath it. He looked under the bed—looked everywhere, in every likely and unlikely place—the wretched collar was nowhere to be found. This was all the more maddening because the collar in question was, of course, an evening one, meant to go with the shirt he was wearing. It was one of the few unpatched or unturned collars he had left, so he couldn’t simply go to the drawer and bring out another.

  ‘How idiotic it sounds, doesn’t it?’ he said to me, miserably. ‘I knew it was idiotic, even at the time. I didn’t want to go to the bloody party in the first place, but there I was—the host, supposedly; the master of Hundreds!—keeping everyone waiting, chasing around the room like a twit, because I only owned one decent stand-up collar!’

  It was at this point that Betty arrived, sent by Mrs Ayres to find out what was keeping him. He told her what the matter was, and asked if she had moved the collar herself; she said she hadn’t seen it since that morning, when she had brought it up to his room with the rest of his laundry. He said, ‘Well, for God’s sake help me look, will you?’ and she spent a minute searching with him—looking in all the places he’d already looked, and finding nothing—until at last he grew so frustrated with the whole business he told her ‘rather sharply, I’m afraid’ to let things alone and go back to his mother. When she had gone, he gave the search up. He went to his drawer, to do what he could to improvise an evening collar out of one of his daytime ones. Had he known that the Baker-Hydes had arrived so informally dressed, he might have been less anxious. As it was, all he could picture was the disappointed face he thought his mother would turn on him if he stepped into the saloon ‘done up like a sloppy bloody schoolboy’.

  Then another much odder thing happened. As he was going crossly through the drawers he heard, in the empty room behind his back, a sound. It was a splash, soft but quite unmistakable, so he guessed at once that something on his washing-stand must somehow have toppled into the bowl. He turned to look—and couldn’t believe his eyes. The thing that had found its way into the water was his missing collar.

  Automatically he darted across to fish it out; then he stood with the collar in his hand, trying to figure out how such a thing could possibly have happened. The collar had not been on the washing-stand, he was positive of that. There was no nearby surface it could have slipped from—and no reason for it, anyway, to slip. There was nothing above the stand that might have held it and then let it drop—no dangling light, no sort of hook—even supposing that such a thing as a stiff white collar could have found its way up, unnoticed, to a light or a hook in the first place. All there was, he said, was ‘the faintest sort of smudge’ on the lattice-work plaster ceiling above his head.

  At this point he was baffled, but not unnerved. The collar was dripping soapy water, but a wet collar seemed to him to be better than no collar at all, and he dried it off as best he could, then stood at his dressing-table mirror to fix it to his shirt and to tie his neck-tie. After that he had only to fasten his cuffs, and grease and comb his hair, and he would be ready. He opened up the little ivory tub in which he kept his dress cuff-links; and found it empty.

  This, he said, was so absurd and so exasperating that he laughed. He had not seen the links that day with his own eyes, but just that morning he had accidentally knocked against the tub with his fingers, and he remembered very clearly the rattle of the metal inside. He had not touched the tub since then. He couldn’t believe that Betty or Mrs Bazeley had removed the links, or that Caroline or his mother could have come and taken them away. Why would they have? He shook his head, and glanced around, and addressed himself to the room—to the ‘fates’, or ‘spirits’, or whatever it was that seemed to be playing games with him tonight. ‘You don’t want me to go to the party?’ he said. ‘Well, how about this: I don’t want to go, either. But want’s not in it, I’m afraid. Just give me back my f—g cuff-links, will you?’

  He closed the ivory tub and returned it to its place beside his comb and brushes; and in the very second of drawing back his hand he saw, through the dressing-table mirror, and from the corner of his eye, something small and dark dropping down in the room behind him—like a spider dropping from the ceiling. It was followed almost immediately by the striking of metal against china: a crash so relatively violent in that still room that it ‘frightened the life out of him’. He turned and, with a rising feeling of unreality, walked slowly over to the washing-stand. There at the bottom of the bowl were his cuff-links. The stand itself was splashed, the cloudy water in the bowl still heaving and slopping about. He put back his head and looked up. Again, the ceiling was seamless and quite unmarked—except that the ‘smudge’ he had noticed before was now considerably darker.

  This was the moment, he said, when he realised that something really uncanny was at work in the room. He couldn’t doubt his own senses: he had seen the cuff-links drop, and had heard the tremendous splash and rattle of them in the bowl. But where on earth could they have dropped from? He drew over his armchair, and stood precariously on it to examine the ceiling at closer range. Apart from that queer dark smudge, there was nothing. It was just as if the links had materialised into, or out of, thin air. He got heavily down off the chair—his leg beginning to hurt him now—and peered again into the bowl of his washing-stand. A whitish scum was already closing over the surface of the water, but all he had to do was put back his sleeve and dip in his hand to fish the cuff-links out. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He didn’t know what the hell to do. He thought again of the brightly lit saloon—his mother and sister waiting, the Desmonds, the Rossiters, the Baker-Hydes—even me, and Betty—all of us waiting, waiting for him, with glasses of sherry in our hands; and he began to sweat. He met his own gaze in his circular shaving-glass and seemed to see the beads of perspiration rising ‘like worms’ from the pores of his skin.

  Now, however, came the most grotesque thing of all. He was still gazing at his own sweating face when, to his disbelief and horror, the shaving-glass gave a sort of shudder. The glass was an old Victorian one, a bevelled circular mirror in a pivoted brass frame, on a porcelain base. It was, as I knew myself, pretty heavy: not a thing that would slip if nudged or shaken by footsteps on the floor around it. Rod stood perfec
tly still, in that still room, and watched as the shaving-glass shuddered again, then rocked, then began to inch its way across the washing-stand towards him. It was just, he said, as if the glass were walking—or, rather, as if it were in that moment discovering its own ability to walk. It moved with a jerky, halting gait, the unglazed underside of its porcelain base making a frightful, grating sound on the polished marble surface.

  ‘It was the most sickening thing I ever saw,’ said Rod, describing it to me in a shaking voice, and wiping away the sweat which had started out again on his lip and forehead at the memory. ‘It was all the more sickening, somehow, for the glass being such an ordinary sort of object. If—I don’t know, but if some beast had suddenly appeared in the room, some spook or apparition, I think I would have borne the shock of it better. But this—it was hateful, it was wrong. It made one feel as though everything around one, the ordinary stuff of one’s ordinary life, might all at any moment start up like this and—overwhelm one. That was bad enough. But what happened next—’

  What happened next was even worse. All this time Rod had been watching the glass make its shuddering way towards him, sick with horror at what, to me, he kept calling the wrongness of the thing. Part of this wrongness was his sense that the glass was acting somehow impersonally. It had, God knew how, become animate; but he had the feeling that what was animating it was blind, thoughtless motion. He felt that if he were to put his hand flat in the glass’s path the porcelain base would find a creeping, dogged way over his fingers. Naturally, he did not put his hand there. If anything, he shrank back. But he could see that the glass was now approaching the edge of the marble stand, and he felt a horrible fascination in watching it teeter and fall. So he kept his place, a yard or so away from it. The glass crept onwards, until an inch and then a second inch of its base was projecting over the marble edge. He seemed to see the thing groping for another surface; he saw the mirror tilt as, unbalanced, the base rocked forward. He actually started to put out his hand, in an automatic impulse to keep it from tumbling. But as he did it, the glass suddenly seemed to ‘gather itself for a spring’—and the next moment it had launched itself at his head. He twisted away, and caught a stinging blow behind his ear. He heard the shattering of the mirror and the porcelain base as the glass struck the floor behind him. He turned, and saw the pieces lying harmlessly on the carpet, as if just knocked there by a clumsy hand.

  It was at exactly this moment that Betty returned. She tapped at the door and, tense and startled, Rod cried out. Confused by the sound of his voice, she timidly pushed the door open and saw him gazing, as if transfixed by it, at the broken object on the floor. Not unnaturally, she moved forward, meaning to tidy up the pieces. Then she caught sight of his expression. What he said to her, he couldn’t afterwards recall, but he must have spoken pretty wildly, for she left him at once and went hastily back to the saloon—that was when I saw her, going in a flustered way to whisper in Mrs Ayres’s ear. Mrs Ayres went straight back with her to Roderick, and realised immediately that something was terribly wrong. He was sweating worse than ever and shaking like a man in a fever. He must have looked, I suppose, pretty much as I’d just seen him when he told me this story. His own first impulse on seeing his mother was, like a child, to clutch at her hand; but he’d also gathered his wits enough, he said, to know that he mustn’t in any way involve her in what was going on. He had seen the shaving-glass make that spring at his head: it hadn’t been animated by a senseless impulse, then—he had felt it driven at him by something extraordinarily purposeful and vicious. He didn’t want his mother exposed to that. He gave her a confused, fragmented account of having overtaxed himself at the farm, and told her his head was aching so badly it felt like it was splitting in two. He was so obviously ill and upset that she wanted to send for me, but he wouldn’t let her do it; he wanted only to get her out of that room as quickly as he possibly could. The ten or so minutes she spent with him were, he said, some of the most dreadful of his life. The strain of trying to conceal what he had just been through, combined with his fright at the prospect of being left alone, perhaps to go through it all again, must have made him seem like a madman. Once he almost broke down in tears—and then, he said, it was only the look of dismay and anxiety on his mother’s face that gave him the strength to pull himself together. When she and Betty left him, he sat on his bed in the corner of the room with his back to the wall and his knees drawn up. His injured leg was throbbing, but he didn’t mind it—he was almost glad of the pain, for keeping him alert. Because what he had to do now, he said, was watch. He had to watch every object, every corner and shadow in the room, had to keep his gaze moving restlessly from one surface to another. For he knew that the malevolent thing that had tried to hurt him before was still in there with him, waiting.

  ‘That was the worst thing about it,’ he said. ‘I knew it hated me, really hated me, beyond any sort of logic or reason. I knew it wished me harm. It wasn’t even like being on an op and picking up an enemy fighter: seeing it coming at you, a machine with a man in it doing his level best to blast you out of the sky. That was clean in comparison. There was a logic, a fairness to it. This was mean and spiteful and wrong. I couldn’t have held a gun to it. I couldn’t have raised a knife or a poker to it; the knife or the poker might have come to life in my hand! I felt as though the very blankets I was sitting on might rise up and throttle me!’

  He had kept it up for what might have been thirty minutes—‘but what might as well have been a thousand’—trembling and straining under the frightful effort of warding the malevolence off; and at last it had grown too much for him, and his nerve had snapped. He heard himself cry out for the thing to leave him, to leave him alone, for God’s sake!—and the sound of his own voice appalled him; perhaps it broke some sort of spell. He felt at once that something had shifted—that the dreadful thing had passed away. He looked at the objects around him, and, ‘I can’t explain it. I don’t know how I knew it. But I knew that they were ordinary and lifeless again.’ Utterly shattered, he drank ‘a tumblerful’ of brandy, got under the covers of his bed, and curled up like a baby. His room, as it always did, had that muted feel to it, as if it were slightly insulated from the rest of the house. If presently there were sounds beyond his door, footsteps and anxious murmurs, he either didn’t hear them or was too exhausted to consider what they might mean. He fell into a fretful sleep, and was woken two hours later, by Caroline. She had come to see how he was, and to tell him what had happened with Gyp and Gillian. He listened to her story with mounting horror—realising that the little girl must have been bitten at just about the time he had been calling out at that vicious presence in his room to leave him alone.

  He looked at me as he said this, his sore-looking eyes seeming to burn in his scarred face. He said, ‘You understand? It was all my fault! I’d willed that thing away from me, through sheer bloody gutlessness; and it had gone there, to hurt someone else. That poor kid! If I had known, I’d have gone through anything—anything at all—’ He wiped his mouth, then made an effort and went on more levelly. ‘I haven’t let my guard slip again like that, I can tell you. Now when it comes, I’m ready. I’ve been keeping watch for it. Most days are all right. Most days it doesn’t come at all. But it likes to surprise me, to catch me out. It’s just like a sly, spiteful child. It sets traps for me. It opened the door of my room that time, for me to walk into and bloody my nose. It moves my papers; it puts things in my path, so that I’ll stumble over them and break my neck! I don’t mind about that. It can do what it wants to me. For so long as I can keep it, you see, in my room, I can contain the infection. That’s the vital thing now, don’t you agree? To keep the source of the infection away, from my sister and my mother?’

  SIX

  There have been many times in my medical career when, on examining a patient or on seeing the result of some test or other, it has gradually but ineluctably broken upon me that the case before me is a desperate one. I can think, for example, of a y
oung married woman, just pregnant, who came to see me with a summer cough: I remember very vividly setting the stethoscope to her breast and hearing the first faint but devastating indications of tuberculosis. I can recall a handsome, talented boy brought to me with ‘growing pains’—actually, the onset of a muscle-wasting illness which, within five years, was to take his life. The thickening tumour, the spreading cancer, the clouding eye: they are part of a family doctor’s case-load alongside the rashes and the sprains, but I have never got used to them, never caught my first certain glimpse of them without the heaviest feeling of impotence and dismay.

  Something like that dismay began to creep upon me as I sat listening to Rod tell his extraordinary story. How long it took him, I’m not sure, for he spoke with a certain brokenness, a hesitation and reluctance, a shrinking from the ghastliness of the details of the tale. I kept silent for the most part, and when he had finished we sat together in that quiet room, and I glanced about me at the safe, familiar, fathomable world—the stove, the counter, the instruments and jars, old Gill’s hand on their faded labels, Mist. Scillae, Pot. Iod.—and seemed to see it all grown slightly strange to me, all knocked slightly askew.

  Rod was watching me. He wiped his face, then made a ball of his handkerchief and worked it with his fingers and said, ‘You wanted to know. I warned you what a filthy thing it was.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘I’m very glad you told me.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Of course. I only wish you’d done it sooner. It breaks my heart to think of you having gone through this alone, Rod.’

  ‘I had to, you see. For the sake of the family.’