The King of Terrors

for her son’s condition. She even briefly considered it was something to do with eating too much beetroot whilst she’d been pregnant with him, hence his purple urine, but they reassured her politely that it wasn’t so. It didn’t entirely convince her and she remained riddled with guilt.

He became something of a medical curiosity, told that one in half a million people might suffer with some form of the condition. It did not make him feel better; it made him feel he’d been purposely singled out, imagining God’s giant index finger reaching down through puffy white clouds and a booming voice saying: ‘This is the boy. Let’s make it him!’ He was forever being prodded, poked, swabbed, injected, stripped, bandaged, and talked about as if he weren’t in the room. Then they took him to that horrible room, laid him gently on the bed, his reassuring mother almost tearful and saying it was for his own good. They attached something to his head, put something in his mouth and told him to bite on it. He had no idea what was happening. The electric shock sent his body into convulsions. It appeared to last an age and then he passed out. But it did not make his condition any better.

And yet he endured all this because he wanted to be cured of the thing and to go out and play in the sunlight with his friends again. He became so lonely it screwed up his insides. That’s when he became attached to his grandfather Tom.

He was one of the few people to visit him, brought over by his mother for the occasional dinner. He liked Grandad Tom. They shared an unspoken bond. Grandad Tom lived all by himself. His wife had died a long, long time ago and he had never remarried. He’d once been a famous detective, his mother (Grandad Tom’s daughter) said, speaking of him as if the man were long-dead. She would often ask her son to excuse his grandfather’s erratic and often eccentric behaviour, putting it down to age and something not being quite right up here, pointing with a flash of her delicate finger to her delicate temple. His visits were reluctant, on his part, and dutiful on hers. He was always in a hurry to get off back to his house and his research, to his special ‘project’ as he liked to call it, and he would not settle because of its constant demands on his limited attention.

‘He does go on about the dratted thing,’ his mother sighed. ‘Can’t he simply give it a rest, just once? It’s not so much to ask.’

‘The old man’s not been himself for a long time,’ defended Charles’ father carefully. ‘At least he’s happy,’ he said. ‘It gives him something to do, to concentrate the mind upon. That’s no bad thing, considering.’

‘He’s so obsessed with the thing,’ she said. Charles noted how she always sounded upset and angry all at once. ‘He lets the thing prey on his mind when he should have let it go. After all, there’s nothing he can do about it now, is there? Some things are never resolved. That’s a fact of life.’

‘Well the old boy thinks he has an answer to the case, finally,’ his father chuckled, ever the umpire in these things and wanting to see fair play all round.

‘An answer? The answer he refuses to tell anyone about? He shuts himself away with his dusty old books and maps and things and every day he steps further and further away from the man I knew and loved. Doesn’t he know I have enough troubles with him upstairs? It’s not fair. It’s just not fair!’

And so the conversation downstairs would ebb and flow, bubble into hearing one minute and drop into a simmering, formless moan the next. She didn’t realise, Charles thought, how easily they could be heard through the thin downstairs ceiling. He remembered how his grandfather would sit on the bed beside him, whilst below her mother hammered out her feelings, her frustrations, her fears. He would show no sign that what was said upset him, or that he even listened or understood. Instead he’d tell Charles about his project, and Charles had a willing ear.

‘I’ve got most of the answers, Charlie boy,’ he’d say. ‘Most but not all. Got a way to go yet, a few more leads to follow, but this will make me when I publish it. They won’t say I failed ever again, because I’ll have the answer, and boy, is that answer going to knock them dead!’

And young Charles Rayne would simply listen to him. He didn’t pass any judgements on the old man. How could he? He loved him, and he never made a big fuss out of the fact he had to sit in a room with the heavy curtains closed; never really seemed to notice. Once, though, he did pause in talking about his project and, looking querulously about him, said:

‘Strange thing, old chap, having to sit here like you do in the gloom, and only venture outside in the dark.’

‘I’m used to it,’ Charles lied.

‘Nothing wrong with coming out at night, Charlie boy. Nothing wrong at all. Pipistrelles, they come out at night.’

‘Pipistrelles? What are they?’

‘Bats, old chap. Little bats. You’re my little Pipistrelle,’ he said, snaking an arm around his shoulder. He thereafter called him this whenever they met. Privately, of course, never in front of his mother and father. It was their little secret.’

‘They think me mad, old chap,’ he confided in Charles one day.

‘Who would think that?’

He gave a sideways nod of his head to his mother and father downstairs. ‘They think me a bit batty. A bit batty, eh, Pipistrelle?’ They both laughed at the pun. ‘But not a bit of it. Marbles quite in order. Still playing with a full deck, eh, lad?’

The next thing he knew his grandfather was dead, and Charles Rayne was devastated, overcome with debilitating grief, plunged into dark loneliness with his loss. He wasn’t even able to go to the funeral. That’s when he couldn’t take it any longer; he had to get out, into the sunshine, into the fresh air. He did not want to be a bat. He wanted to be human again.

They thought he would die. He wished he would, for now there appeared not a single reason for him to go on living. As he lay in his shadowy, fevered limbo, he once again heard his mother expressing her upset and anger all at once, this time over him. What had she done to deserve this, he heard her rant one evening? Charles felt for her, but he could offer no answer. Some things, after all, are never resolved.

Then the trunk was delivered to his room. ‘Your grandfather wanted you to have this,’ his mother said. He noticed she could not look straight at his bandaged face, and averted her gaze as she placed the hefty keys to the trunk into his bandaged hand.

‘Thank you, mother,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added, his lower lip splitting as he spoke. He dabbed away the blood with his hand. The bandage came away marked with a scarlet dash. He saw how upset this made her.

‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she said hurriedly and left him staring at the trunk.

It was a full half hour before he inserted the key into the huge padlock and lifted the lid. The smell was the smell of his grandfather. There was his army uniform, his medals, a leather binocular case, his battered old trilby. Beneath these everyday items he found notebooks, many of them tied together with string into blocks, each of them numbered and dated. And at the very bottom a number of dusty old books and rolled up maps. He also discovered a quantity of brown cardboard files, these too carefully dated and numbered. They contained press cuttings, pages ripped from books annotated with his florid scribbles in red pencil, photographs, notes, more press cuttings, pieces of paper with nothing more on them than strange symbols. He was drawn to two photographs of a very pretty young woman sat outside in a sort of arbour, the sunlight gilding her smooth cheeks, bouncing off her shining hair. He was instantly captivated by her, and he fell in love immediately. A young man’s love. On the back of each was the name Evelyn Carter. Who was she? Who was this mysterious woman with the enigmatic smile and faraway eyes?

He sifted through more paper and he knew at once that this was his grandfather’s prized project.

He lifted out the topmost set of bound notebooks, titled rather grandly The Unpublished Memoirs of Detective Inspector Thomas Rayne of the Yard.

As he read them he soon came across the case of the Body in the Barn and was drawn into the gruesome tale. And beyond — far beyond, for he realised that the remainder of the trunk’s contents were given over to this single case. For weeks he sifted through the memoirs, the copious notes, the cuttings, the articles, and finally gasped at the enormity of what his grandfather had uncovered, at what he was suggesting.

From that moment, Charles Rayne knew what he must do. He must take what his grandfather had started and make it his life’s work, to finally put to rest the mystery of The Body in the Barn, no matter how extraordinary the findings. And like his grandfather before him he sank down into his work, till it absorbed him fully and he heard his mother say one evening:

‘He’s obsessed with the thing!’ Sounding both upset and angry all at once.