Kingsley Amis - The Green Man

That went down very satisfactorily, but she still had a piece of finessing to do. ‘It’s not true, though, is it, about lending a hand? You want company. You’re afraid to do it on your own.’

I nodded with pretended ruefulness. The last bit was not true either: if there was going to be anything out of the ordinary to see in that graveyard, I just wanted somebody else on hand to see it too. But I had not lied when I said that Diana was the only one I could ask. That was something substantial in her favour.

‘Has it got to be at night?’

‘Well, yes, I think so, don’t you? with people passing by on the road all day long, and sterling chaps doing things to the soil. It shouldn’t take more than half an hour or so.’

‘There’s no curse or anything on it, is there?’

‘Oh, good God, no, nothing like that. The fellow was just after a safe place to stow a few things.’

‘Oh, very well, then. I’ll come along. It might be quite fun.’

‘Out of the ordinary, anyway. What about tonight? No point in hanging about. Can you get away?’

‘Of course I can. I do as I please.’

We had reached the corner. I arranged to pick her up at half-past midnight at a spot nearer her house. On the way back home, I stopped at the graveyard and looked Underhill’s grave over with some care. I could foresee no special difficulty later: there was nothing in the way of a stone to lift, and the soil, when I prodded it, seemed to be as light as elsewhere in the area. Whatever the place might feel like in the dark, at five o’clock on a summer afternoon it was solidly un-eerie, giving no impression of age or decay, merely of rankness and dilapidation, heavily overgrown for the most part (though not in Underhill’s corner), and littered with more ice-cream wrappers and beer-cans than fragments of headstone.

I drove to the Green Man, went upstairs and started on a quick drink before bathing and changing. I sat in a nondescript but comfortable armchair beside the fireplace, facing the window in the front wall. This had its curtains drawn, but there was plenty of light from the other Window to my left, where the French girl stood. Amy’s gramophone was playing some farrago of crashes, bumps and yells from her room down the passage. As I listened, or endured hearing it, the noise stopped abruptly. Sipping my Scotch, I waited half-consciously for another record to go on. How quiet it was by contrast; totally quiet, in fact. And that was not just odd, it was impossible. No inn is silent for more than a couple of seconds at a time, except for four or five hours between the last departure to bed and the stirrings of the first servant. I went to the door and opened it; there was no sound whatever. When I turned back to the room, I found that it looked different in some way, different, at any rate, from how it had looked when I entered it five minutes before. It was darker. But how could that be? Sunlight was streaming in as brightly as ever from the side window. Ah: it was the other window that was darker. There was no light at all showing between the curtains and at their edges. That was impossible, too. Feeling for the moment nothing but a great curiosity, I hurried over to those curtains and threw them apart.

Outside, it was night, absolutely dark it seemed at first, as if I had opened my eyes thousands of fathoms under water, at the sea bed. Then I saw it was not really as dark as all that: there was a three-quarter moon low in the sky, and no cloud to speak of. The horizon and the distance were the same as any night, except that a plantation of conifers just below the sky-line was missing. In the middle distance, small fields under cultivation replaced the areas of grassland I had always seen before. And in the foreground, immediately below me, the hedge lining the road had gone, and the telegraph-poles—of course—had gone, and the road itself had dwindled to a rough track. Although nothing moved, it was a living scene, not the equivalent of a still photograph.

I turned back to the dining-room, which was quite unchanged. My five sculptured people looked into space as ever, but for the first time I thought I found something slightly malignant in their impassivity. I crossed to the side window, and looked out on the familiar daytime landscape. As I watched, a light-blue sports car, a TR5 by the look of it, emerged from the direction of the village and moved, accelerating sharply but in complete silence, up the road towards the house. It did not—of course—come into view at the front window.

I stood and thought. There was an obvious case for rushing along to Amy and bringing her here, in the hope of proving to myself and everybody else that I was not seeing things, or rather that what I saw was really there, or at least that I was not insane. But I could not subject that child to the terror of either seeing what I saw, or finding that she and I were seeing differently. And, if I did go down the passage to her room, I was far from sure that I would find her there, or anything there that I knew.

At this point of irresolution, I heard voices below me, male and female, and then an outside door shutting at the front of the house, but it was not the sound of my front door. The woman I had twice seen on the landing came into view carrying a small lantern and set off towards the village—I caught the merest glimpse of her face, but her general outline and her gait left me in no doubt. Very faintly, the man’s voice was again audible from the floor beneath, this time with a different intonation, one of a peculiar monotony, one I could identify, or, if I tried, name a close parallel to. Yes, a parson, a priest, intoning a part of the service that is best got over quickly.

The woman was almost out of my view; I could just see the swaying light of her lantern. Then I picked up a movement on the other side, from the direction of, among other things, what at this stage I need only call the wood. A tall and immensely broad figure came stumping awkwardly along the track, massive legs, apparently of not quite the same length, pounding away with the implacable vigour of machinery, long arms pumping in an imperfectly synchronized rhythm. If it had been human, it would have weighed twenty-five stone at least, but it was not human: it was made up of lumps of timber, some with thickly ribbed bark, some with a thin glistening skin, of bundles of twigs and of ropes and compressed masses of green and dead and rotting leaves. As it drew nearer, laboriously quickening its pace, I saw that its left thigh, the one nearer to me, was encrusted with a plate-like fungus, fragments of which fell off at every stride, and I heard the creaking and rustling of its progress. When it was exactly level with me, it turned its lumpish, knobbled head towards the house, and I shut my eyes, having no more desire to see its face now than when it had appeared to me before, in my hypnagogic vision of two nights ago. At the same moment, a cry of alarm or loathing came from beneath my feet; I knew that Underhill was at that very moment (whenever it was) watching from the window of the dining-room, which was now (my now) closed and empty.

When I opened my eyes again, the creature was beginning to move out of sight at a grotesque, lurching trot. I waited, wondering what I would do if this show simply went on and on, leaving me poised somewhere between Underhill’s time and mine. If I could manage to get myself into the view I could still see by way of the side window, perhaps its sound would come back and I should be all right. But how was I to get there? I had listened, not looked, when I opened the door a moment earlier, but I had no doubt at all now that this room was the only part of the house that had not reverted to what it had been nearly three centuries previously. Through the side window and down the wall seemed the only possible route. I was beginning to be worried by the thought that that version of reality might turn out to be a visual hallucination, but then I heard screaming, not near by, perhaps two hundred yards away, but very clear in the utter silence, and very loud, and accompanied by another sound, also loud, a wailing or an unsteady hooting, like something quite often heard but inappropriate in the context, like a high wind, through trees. I put my fingers in my ears and went on staring at the now deserted nocturnal landscape in front of me. How long could I stand its going on being there?