Willy’s principal reading matter since the torture of his schooldays had been horror comics. Indeed, he often wished he could live in a cartoon world, one in which all of life’s difficulties could be resolved by the stroke of an artist’s brush; in which everything was flat, simple and brightly coloured; and in which all sources of menace were clearly defined and understandable. He had always had an inner conviction that the night world contained many monsters and he was, therefore, neither surprised nor distressed by his discovery that something alien and dangerous lived in the polluted waters of the river.
But there was one aspect of the affair which puzzled him. How, he wondered, could such a slow-moving creature have got close enough to an active man like Des Martin to … to do whatever it had done? There was not much light down by the water’s edge, yet it seemed strange that Des should have walked straight up to a ravenous beast, like a lamb to the slaughter, and allowed it to devour him.
The lurid, but limited, bestiary of Willy’s imagination was unable to offer an immediate solution. He spent many hours speculating on the exact manner of Des Martin’s death, occasionally chuckling as a particularly satisfying vision crossed his mind.
Frames 27 to 38
Two days had gone by and things were returning to normal when—late at night—Willy saw the dark shape make its next appearance. As before, it emerged from the water with the slowness of a garden slug, remained motionless for several seconds and then passed out of sight.
An hour, then two hours, ticked by in the chilly silence of the attic and Willy began to think that the chances of anybody coming along were remote. Suddenly he heard, from the next street, echoing up through the night-time stillness, the sharp ringing sound of high heels on the pavement. Willy frowned for a moment until his torpid brain, in which were stored detailed timetables for almost everyone in the district, came up with an identification.
The wearer of the noisy shoes had to be Jane Dubois, who worked in the coffee bar up on the main road. She was only a waitress there, but had taken it on herself from time to time to refuse admittance to Willy, even when he had money. The rapid clicking of her heels grew louder, then began to fade away again as Jane went down the hill towards the river.
Quite suddenly her footsteps ceased.
Willy listened carefully, but there was no sound of a front door being dragged shut. And he knew that the thing from the river was feeding.
He continued his vigil until, some time afterwards, the patch of creeping blackness returned to the water. He closed the window and lay down, smiling in the darkness—the taste of revenge had none of the bitterness caused by the guilt of personal participation. The only thing marring his contentment was the nagging curiosity about how the dark horror caught its prey. Jane Dubois was young and agile, yet she had been taken, instantaneously it seemed, in a well-lit street. Was it possible that the monster could make itself invisible?
Willy turned the problem over and over in the dim recesses of his mind until he fell asleep.
Frames 39 to 56
The second disappearance caused a greater commotion than the first, and people began to stay off the streets late at night. Willy did not miss them and, even if he had, there were police patrol cars which swished past the house every now and then to provide him with something to watch. He would have been quite happy if there had been no people on the streets—ever.
On the third night after Jane’s disappearance, Willy’s friend—which was how he was coming to think of the entity in the river—went hungry. It came out of the river around midnight, as usual, and flowed out of Willy’s field of view. The streets were deathly quiet, and Willy sensed at once that no victims would be abroad. A vague unease began to build in his mind. The thing returned to the water just before dawn, and came out earlier that night—only to be disappointed once more. Willy began to worry.
When Willy was absent-minded it reduced him to a state of near-imbecility. Once, while hanging around the shop, he knocked over a basket of tomatoes, and another time dropped a crate of empty Coca-Cola bottles on the tiled floor. Jack came home from work just as Willy was brushing up the broken glass and he shouted for a full five minutes. Willy stared down at his brother’s angry oil-stained face and stocky denim-clad figure. He did not say anything, but he wished that Jack would go for a walk down by the river late at night. He began to wonder if there might be some way to get Jack to go out at the right time and in the right direction.
That night the creature came out earlier than on any previous occasion, and Willy knew it was becoming very hungry. He watched and waited all night, but nobody came, and in the darkness of pre-dawn the thing reappeared on the river’s edge on the way back to its lair. Somehow Willy could feel its anger and disappointment and hunger, as though the creature was a part of himself. He leaned out of the window, straining his eyes, wishing he could think of a way to help his friend. Suddenly he froze.
The shape had paused on the edge of the water and, although he could discern only a black patch in the darkness, he knew it had seen him. In some way, alien to humans, it had become very much aware of Willy—and it dawned on him that the mysterious entity was not his friend at all.
It began to inch its way up Ridgeway Street.
Willy fell back from the window in terror. High up above the street he had imagined himself safe, but he had no idea what powers the thing might have. It might be able to climb a vertical wall. Willy had a vision of a black monster, hideous jaws agape, bursting in through his window. Or it might, like some horrors he had seen in his comics, be able to exert telepathic control over him and make him go down the stairs and out into the street …
All at once there was a burst of sound and a flash of light outside. Willy moaned in panic, then realized it was a police car going by. He returned to the window and looked out. The car had swung off into one of the smaller streets which branched off Ridgeway and, down at the river, only a few ripples catching the first light of dawn showed that anything had ever been there.
Frames 57 to 63
Even in the brightness of morning Willy remained afraid. That one instant of mental contact with the alien horror had burned itself far into his mind, and had changed his whole outlook. He would have to tell somebody what he knew.
This presented a whole series of problems.
The first time he had seen the thing he had decided it would be pointless to try making people believe him—and that had been before the two disappearances. The story he had to tell now was so fantastic that he would receive greater derision, or greater punishment, than ever.
He was brooding on the situation over breakfast when Ada and Emily came into the kitchen with instructions from Jack that he was to spend the day painting the walls of the yard at the back of the shop. Willy shambled out, lay down in the dusty shed where the potato sacks were stored, and thought hard about what he might do. Finally, he decided to write an anonymous letter to the police—that way he would receive more credibility and still remain out of trouble.
He slipped upstairs to his room, where he managed to find some reasonably clean sheets of paper. The letter took him several hours. In it he told the events of the past days as clearly and simply as he could, covering four sheets with his ungainly scrawl. After much deliberation he signed himself, “A Well Wisher’.
It was late in the afternoon before the letter was sealed in an envelope, and then Willy remembered he needed a stamp. He hung around the shop until there was a lull in business, and Ada and Emily went into the kitchen to prepare a meal for Jack coming home from work. Willy took a stamp from the till and went upstairs for his coat. When he came down Jack was waiting for him with an intent, furious look on his square face, his eyes narrowed to slits.