“Madness!” Forster gasped again.
And now my uncle was angry. “Oh, and do you have a better suggestion? So you tell me, Sam Forster, what you think can tunnel through packed earth and do…that?”
“But I—”
“Look at this book,” my uncle snapped. And I heard him go to a bookshelf, then his footsteps crossing the room to his guest.
After a while: “Russian?”
“Romanian—but don’t concern yourself with the text, look at the pictures!”
Again a pause before: “But…this is too…”
“Yes, I know it is,” said my uncle, before Forster could find the words he sought. “And I certainly hope I’m wrong, and that it is something ordinary. But tell me, can anything of this sort be ordinary?”
“What will we do?” Forster was quieter now. “The police?”
“What?” (my uncle’s snort.) “Sergeant Bert Coggins and his three flat-foot constables? A more down-to-earth lot you couldn’t ask for! Good Lord, no! The point is, if this really is something of the sort I’ve mentioned, it mustn’t be frightened off. I mean, we don’t know how long it’s been here, and we certainly can’t allow it to go somewhere else. No, it must be dealt with here and now.”
“How?”
“I’ve an idea. It may be feasible, and it may not. But it certainly couldn’t be considered outside the law, and it has to be worth a try. We have to work fast, though, for Muriel Anderson goes down the day after tomorrow, and it will have to be ready by then. Come on, let’s go and speak to your cousin.”
Mr Forster’s cousin, Jack Boulter, made his coffins for him; so I later discovered.
“Wait,” said Forster, as I once more began backing away from the door. “Did they find this…this creature, these Bulgarian peasants of yours?”
“Oh, yes,” my uncle answered. “They tied him in a net and drowned him in the river. And they burned his house down to the ground.”
When they left the house and drove away I went into the study. On my uncle’s desk lay the book he’d shown to Mr Forster. It was open, lying face down. Curiosity isn’t confined to cats: small girls and boys also suffer from it. Or if they don’t, then there’s something wrong with them.
I turned the book over and looked at the pictures. They were woodcuts, going from top to bottom of the two pages in long, narrow panels two to a page. Four pictures in all, with accompanying legends printed underneath. The book was old, the ink faded and the pictures poorly impressed; the text, of course, was completely alien to me.
The first picture showed a man, naked, with his arms raised to form a cross. He had what looked to be a thick rope coiled about his waist. His eyes were three-cornered, with radiating lines simulating a shining effect. The second picture showed the man with the rope uncoiled, dangling down loosely from his waist and looped around his feet. The end of the rope seemed frayed and there was some detail, but obscured by age and poor reproduction. I studied this picture carefully but was unable to understand it; the rope appeared to be fastened to the man’s body just above his left hip. The third picture showed the man in an attitude of prayer, hands steepled before him, with the rope dangling as before, but crossing over at knee height into the fourth frame. There it coiled upward and was connected to the loosely clad body of a skeletally thin woman, whose flesh was mostly sloughed away to show the bones sticking through.
Now, if I tell my reader that these pictures made little or no sense to me, I know that he will be at pains to understand my ignorance. Well, let me say that it was not ignorance but innocence. I was a boy. None of these things which I have described made any great impression on me at that time. They were all incidents—mainly unconnected in my mind, or only loosely connected—occurring during the days I spent at my uncle’s house; and as such they were very small pieces in the much larger jigsaw of my world, which was far more occupied with beaches, rock pools, crabs and eels, bathing in the sea, the simple but satisfying meals my uncle prepared for us, etc. It is only in the years passed in between, and in certain dreams I have dreamed, that I have made the connections. In short, I was not investigative but merely curious.
Curious enough, at least, to scribble on a scrap of my uncle’s notepaper the following words:
“Uncle Zachary,
Is the man in these pictures a gypsy?”
For the one connection I had made was the thing about the eyes. And I inserted the note into the book and closed it, and left it where I had found it—and then promptly forgot all about it, for there were other, more important things to do.
It would be, I think, a little before seven in the evening when I left the house. There would be another two hours of daylight, then an hour when the dusk turned to darkness, but I would need only a third of that total time to complete my projected walk. For it was my intention to cross the fields to the viaduct, then to cross the viaduct itself (!) and so proceed into Harden. I would return by the coast road, and back down the half-metalled dene path to the knoll and so home.
I took my binoculars with me, and as I passed midway between Slater’s Copse and the viaduct, trained them upon the trees and the gleams of varnished woodwork and black, tarred roof hidden in them. I could see no movement about the caravan, but even as I stared so a figure rose up into view and came into focus. It was the head of the family, and he was looking back at me. He must have been sitting in the grass by the fence, or perhaps upon a tree stump, and had stood up as I focused my glasses. But it was curious that he should be looking at me as I was looking at him.
His face was in the shade of his hat, but I remember thinking: I wonder what is going on behind those queer, three-cornered eyes of his? And the thought also crossed my mind: I wonder what he must think of me, spying on him so rudely like this!
I immediately turned and ran, not out of any sort of fear but more from shame, and soon came to the viaduct. Out onto its walkway I proceeded, but at a slow walk now, not looking down through the stave fence on my left but straight ahead, and yet still aware that the side of the valley was now descending steeply underfoot, and that my physical height above solid ground was increasing with each pace I took. Almost to the middle I went, before thinking to hear in the still, warm evening air the haunting, as yet distant whistle of a train. A train! And I pictured the clattering, shuddering, rumbling agitation it would impart to the viaduct and its walkway!
I turned, made to fly back the way I had come…and there was the gypsy. He stood motionless, at the far end of the walkway, a tall, thin figure with his face in the shade of his hat, looking in my direction—looking, I knew, at me. Well, I wasn’t going back that way! And now there was something of fear in my flight, but mainly I suspect fear of the approaching train. Whichever, the gypsy had supplied all the inspiration I needed to see the job through to the end, to answer the viaduct’s challenge. And again I ran.
I reached the far side well in advance of the train, and looked back to see if the gypsy was still there. But he wasn’t. Then, safe where the walkway met the rising slope once more, I waited until the train had passed, and thrilled to the thought that I had actually done it, crossed the viaduct’s walkway! It would never frighten me again. As to the gypsy: I didn’t give him another thought. It wasn’t him I’d been afraid of but the viaduct, obviously…