The Grotesque

night. These “visits,” she insisted, were not dreams: she distinctly remembered awakening. The first time he had been standing beside her bed, and his skin, she said, was chalk-white, translucent, and tinged with a faintly greenish hue. He smelled unpleasantly sweet, said Cleo. He was wearing the suit he’d been in the night he disappeared, a beige tweed affair, jacket and plus fours, with a faint check pattern in yellow and sky-blue. What had riveted her attention, however, was the great ragged angry gash beneath his chin: Sidney had had his throat cut.

Apparently he spoke to her; she did not remember his words exactly; she had been in a state of shock throughout, and could concentrate only on the blackly clotted flap where his neck had once been. But his purpose, it seems, was to warn her. Warn her about what? About the “evil creeping thing” that prowled the countryside after dark. More than this he did not say, that first time. But this time, said Cleo, this time… She shuddered violently. “His voice, Daddy,” she whispered. “He’s lost his cords. He’s hoarse, like an old man. He doesn’t say words, he wheezes them out in this dreadful whisper. And he tells me things.”

I took the girl’s hands in my own. Speaking very quietly, very gently, I said: “What things, darling?”

“He says the creature that tore out his throat came from this house.”

I said nothing. She gazed at me with wide and terrified eyes. “Daddy,” she whispered, “it must be Fledge.”

¦

I gave her some scotch (I keep a bottle in my bedroom) and managed to settle her down. I sat for some time beside her bed, and watched her as she slept—peacefully now, thank God. I lit a cigar, and by the light of a candle I pondered her strange disclosure about Fledge. So she, too, had intuited his evil. What did this signify? I pondered this question into the small hours, but reached no satisfactory conclusions.

I was still pondering it when, the next day, as I sat in a bathful of tepid water, I shouted for Fledge to come and scrub my back. I was not yet aware that part of his campaign to usurp me involved the seduction of Harriet, though in retrospect, piecing it all together from my wheelchair, I would guess that by this time— we were now in late January—Harriet had already been to see her priest. And I’ve no doubt he proscribed the thing on pain of hellfire and damnation. Clearly it wasn’t enough. “But I am a woman!” cried Harriet. “You are God’s child,” the priest replied. “My marriage has been a travesty!” she wailed. “Then you must offer it up as a sacrifice,” he said. She came away unconvinced, though perhaps she did not admit this to herself. Something was awakened in her that would not be easily stifled. When Fledge next touched her, she repulsed him, but weakly. He knew she would soon succumb.

Yes, I knew my Harriet, and I knew she would require a period of soul-searching before she abandoned herself to the affair. When, I wonder, did that actually occur? Perhaps it had already happened, and I, preoccupied with my work and, when in the house, with Fledge, failed to notice a change in her. Or perhaps—and this I think more likely—it didn’t happen until later, while I was in hospital. “Harder, Fledge,” I said—he was scrubbing my back with a piece of coral, and I liked to get the skin red and tingling with the friction, makes one feel marvelously alive. “That’s better,” I said, as he started to put some muscle into it. Was this not foolhardy, you say, making myself so vulnerable to a man who had killed once already? No, it would have been foolhardy if I had suddenly forbidden him entry to my bathroom; then he would have guessed that I knew, and that would have been dangerous. Fledge felt secure, he felt that no one suspected him; and this was the way I wanted him to feel.

I climbed out of the bath and stood dripping and shivering on the mat as he rubbed me down with a towel. I wonder, now, what he thought as he performed this service. Did he realize, for instance, just how pleasant it is to be scrubbed and toweled by one’s manservant? Was he seething inwardly with resentment that it was I, and not he, who was in a position to order such a toweling? No, I’m more inclined to think that he was filled with a sort of cold certainty that within a few months it would all be different, that he would be the master of Crook, and that I would be—dead. Nor was this the first time that I’d contemplated the fact that Fledge undoubtedly intended to murder me; and knowing this, but knowing also that he himself did not know that I knew it, I experienced that inimitable tingle, that frisson, that a brave man feels in the presence of real danger. “That’s enough, Fledge,” I said. “Give me my dressing gown.” My wiry little body shivered for a moment in that bleak chilly bathroom in the east wing. Turning toward the mirror I noted with pleasure the redness of my hard- scrubbed back, then slipped my arms into the dressing gown that Fledge held open for me. Tying the cord tightly about my waist I told him to bring me a scotch while I dressed for dinner, then along the corridor I went, leaving him to pick up the damp towels and clean out the bathtub. The point is, there was a period when I felt stimulated by the challenge Fledge represented, by the vigor of the conflict he offered. As I dressed I thought with a dry snort that he was a fool to imagine he could outwit me. Events, however, were soon to occur that gave him the advantage; and these events were beyond my control, they originated with that meddling old woman, Giblet.

¦

The early part of February was very damp in our part of the county, and it was also, as I’ve said, a very busy and nerve-wracking time for me. For quite apart from the complex and delicate, and deadly serious, game I was playing with Fledge, I was also preparing to deliver my lecture on the seventh. So I was in the barn every day, rehearsing the thing to a group of shrouded bones and a raucous crow that had roosted in the rafters. I’d had to shroud Phlegmosaurus, in tarpaulins and old sheets, because the roof leaked and the rain dripped through. I paced up and down, reciting my revolutionary thesis on the taxonomic classification of the dinosaur and reveling, I admit, in my imagination, in the storm of applause and controversy I expected to arouse. I expected, frankly, soon to be dominating the discourse of natural history—or at least its paleontological strand—I, the gentleman naturalist, the amateur! I intended, you see, to take my audience slowly and carefully through the fossil record, from bottom to top, showing how the first primitive reptiles were succeeded by the advanced “reptiles”—dinosaurs with birdlike bodies—after which came primitive birds with teeth, like Archaeopteryx, then advanced birds with teeth, then modern toothless birds. I would show how the bone structure of Phlegmosaurus, and his upright, bipedal posture, are distinctly avian, and I would not accept the argument that because he had lost the large collarbone required by all flying birds his relationship to the birds was therefore a distant one. No, I would suggest that the potential for growing a collarbone was still there in the phlegmosaurian genes, but dormant, simply. I would suggest that as my Phlegmosaurus went darting across the Mesozoic landscape, he reached high enough speeds to become airborne. I would suggest that natural selection would then favor any mutation through which his long-suppressed collarbone reappeared. And this reappearance of suppressed characteristics—atavisms, we call them—are not as uncommon as you might think. Whales with legs occasionally turn up, as do horses with toes. Such throwbacks even occur in our own species: babies with tails, for instance. By way of the atavism, then, I would show that Phlegmosaurus carbonensis grew a collarbone, sprouted feathers, and took to the air. He was thus the father of the birds, and not to be classed among the reptiles.

¦

Harriet, I remember, was showing signs that my fouler-than-usual mood was beginning to irritate her. She has a remarkably high tolerance for mean-spirited unsociability, but there is a limit; and the peevish frown crinkling her brow indicated to me that her threshold would shortly be reached. I should have told her that after the lecture I’d be a changed man, but I didn’t feel up to it. It occurs to me now, though, that perhaps her uncharacteristic ill- humor was not related to my behavior at all, but was, rather, a symptom of the struggle going on in her own heart; for in Harriet the spirit and the flesh were at war at this time, I’m convinced.

Cleo was no help. She wouldn’t eat with us, she wouldn’t let Harriet into her room, and she absolutely refused to go back to Oxford. I should have told Harriet not to worry, that it would “blow over,” like the rain (all emotion is like weather, I think: if you wait long enough it passes), but I didn’t feel up to that either, I was much too engrossed in my own drama. Doris was still functional; Fledge was inscrutable. This was Crook, then, as the rain kept falling on its moss-infested tiles and even came dripping through, in places, especially at the back of the house, where buckets had to be placed on landings and stairwells to catch the drips. It was Fledge’s job to empty them; I saw him one morning, a bucket in each hand, coming down the back stairs, and it made me think of George, off to feed the pigs. The contrast between the two men could not have been stronger, I remember thinking, though oddly enough, if one were to strip them naked, tear off the uniform of social identity, as it were, the difference would not, I think, be nearly so pronounced. In terms of bone structure and general physical build they were quite