felt I knew I’d be able to do whatever might be required of me.
There was one other thing to get settled. I said to Jane, we were in the bedroom by this time, I said, If he turns up, what am I going to use against him? You see, in the book, Maurice Allington has dug up a sort of magic object that sort of controls the Green Man. I hadn’t. Jane saw what I was driving at. She said she’d thought of that, and took off and gave me the plain gold cross she wears round her neck, not for religious reasons, it was her grandmother’s. That’ll fix him, I thought, and as before I felt quite confident about it.
Well, after that we more or less sat and waited. At one point a car drove up and stopped in the car park. A man got out and went in the front door. It must have been Allington. I couldn’t see much about him except he had the wrong colour hair, but when I looked at my watch it was eight minutes to midnight, the exact time when the Allington in the book got back after his evening out the night he coped with the creature. One more bit of . . . call it confirmation.
I opened our bedroom door and listened. Soon I heard footsteps coming upstairs and going off towards the back of the house and then a door shutting, and then straight away the house seemed totally still. It can’t have been much later that I said to Jane, Look, there’s no point in me hanging round up here. He might be early, you never know. It’s a warm night, I might as well go down there now. She said, Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you? Absolutely sure, I said, I’ll be fine. But I do want you to watch from the window here. Okay, she said. She wished me luck and we clung to each other for a bit, and then off I went.
I was glad I’d left plenty of time, because getting out of the place turned out to be far from straightforward. Everything seemed to be locked and the key taken away. Eventually I found a scullery door with the key still in the lock.
Outside it was quite bright, with a full moon or not far off, and a couple of fairly powerful lights at the corners of the house. It was a pretty lonely spot, with only two or three other houses in sight. I remember a car went by soon after I got out there, but it was the only one. There wasn’t a breath of wind. I saw Jane at our window and waved, and she waved back.
The question was, where to wait. If what was going to happen – assuming something was – if it went like the book, then the young girl, the daughter, was going to come out of the house because she’d thought she’d heard her father calling her (another bit of magic), and then this Green Man creature was going to, from one direction or the other he was going to come running at her. I couldn’t decide which was the more likely direction.
A bit of luck, near the front door there was one of those heavy wooden benches. I sat down on that and started keeping watch first one way, then the other, half a minute at a time. Normally, ten minutes of this would have driven me off my head with boredom, but that night somehow it was all right. Then, after some quite long time, I turned my head from right to left on schedule and there was a girl, standing a few yards away; she must have come round that side of the house. She was wearing light green pyjamas – wrong colour again. I was going to speak to her, but there was something about the way she was standing . . .
She wasn’t looking at me, in fact I soon saw she wasn’t looking at anything much. I waved my hand in front of her eyes, you know, the way they do in films when they think someone’s been hypnotized or something. I felt a perfect idiot, but her eyes didn’t move. Sleepwalking, presumably; not in the book. Do people walk in their sleep? Apparently not, they only pretend to, according to what a psychiatrist chum told me afterwards, but I hadn’t heard that then. All I knew, or thought I knew, was this thing everybody’s heard somewhere about it being dangerous to wake a sleepwalker.
So I just stayed close to the girl and went on keeping watch, and a bit more time went by, and then, sure enough, I heard, faintly but clearly, the sound I’d written about, the rustling, creaking sound of the movement of something made of tree-branches, twigs, and clusters of leaves. And there it was, about a hundred yards away, not really much like a man, coming up at a clumsy, jolting sort of jogtrot on the grass verge, and accelerating.
I knew what I had to do. I started walking to meet it, with the cross ready in my hand. (The girl hadn’t moved at all.) When the thing was about twenty yards away I saw its face, which had fungus on it, and I heard another sound I’d written about coming from what I suppose you’d have to call its mouth, like the howling of wind through trees.
I stopped and steadied myself and threw the cross at it and it immediately vanished – immediately. That wasn’t like the book, but I didn’t stop to think about it. I didn’t stop to look for the cross, either. When I turned back, the girl had gone. So much the better. I rushed back into the inn and up to the bedroom and knocked on the door – I’d told Jane to lock it after me.
There was a delay before she came and opened it. I could see she looked confused or something, but I didn’t bother with that, because I could feel all the calm and confidence I’d had earlier, it was all just draining away from me. I sat her down on the bed and sat down myself on a chair and just rattled off what had happened as fast as I could. I must have forgotten she’d been meant to be watching.
By the time I’d finished I was shaking. So was Jane. She said, What made you change your mind? Change my mind? – what about? Going out there, she said; getting up again and going out. But, I said, I’ve been out there all the time. Oh no you haven’t, she said, you came back up here after about twenty minutes, she said, and you told me the whole thing was silly and you were going to bed, which we both did. She seemed quite positive.
I was absolutely shattered. But it all really happened, I said, just the way I told you. It couldn’t have, she said; you must have dreamed it. You certainly didn’t throw the cross at anything, she said, because it’s here, you gave it back to me when you came back the first time. And there it was, on the chain round her neck.
I broke down then. I’m not quite clear what I said or did. Jane got some sleeping pills down me and I went off in the end. I remember thinking rather wildly that somebody or other with a funny sense of humour had got me into exactly the same predicament, the same mess, as the hero of my book had been: seeing something that must have been supernatural and just not being believed. Because I knew I’d seen the whole thing; I knew it then and I still know it.
I woke up late, feeling terrible. Jane was sitting reading by the bed. She said, I’ve seen young Miss Allington. Your description of her fits and, she said, she used to walk in her sleep. I asked her how she’d found out and she said she just had; she’s good at that kind of thing.
Anyway, I felt better straight away. I said it looked as if we’d neither of us been dreaming even if what I’d seen couldn’t be reconciled with what she’d seen, and she agreed. After that we rather dropped the subject in a funny sort of way. We decided not to look for the cross I’d thrown at the Green Man. I said we wouldn’t be able to find it. I didn’t ask Jane whether she was thinking what I was thinking, that looking would be a waste of time because she was wearing it at that very moment. I’ll come back to that point in a minute.
We packed up, made a couple of phone calls rearranging our appointments, paid the bill and drove off. We still didn’t talk about the main issue. But then, as we were coming off the Mill Hill roundabout, that’s only about ten minutes from home, Jane said, What do you think happened? – happened to sort of make it all happen?
I said, I think someone was needed there to destroy that monster. Which means I was guided there at that time, or perhaps the time could be adjusted, I said; I must have been, well, sent all that stuff about the Green Man and about Allington and the others.
To make sure you recognized the place when you got there and knew what to do, she said. Who did all the guiding and the sending and so on? she said. The same, the same chap who appeared in my book to tell Allington what he wanted done. Why couldn’t he have fixed the monster himself? she said. There are limitations to his power. There can’t be many, she said, if he can make the same object be in two places at the same time.
Yes, you see, she’d thought of that too. It’s supposed to be a physical impossibility, isn’t it? Anyway, I said probably the way he’d chosen had been more fun. More fun, Jane repeated. She looked very thoughtful.
As you’ll have seen, there was one loose end, of a sort. Who or what was it that had taken on my shape to enter that bedroom, talk to Jane with my voice, and share her bed for at any rate a few minutes? She and I didn’t discuss it for several days. Then one morning she asked me the question more or less as I’ve just put it.
Interesting point, I said; I don’t know. It’s more interesting than you think, she said; because when . . . whoever it was got into bed with me, he didn’t just go to sleep.
I suppose I just looked at her. That’s right, she said; I thought I’d better go and see John before I told you. (That’s John Allison, our GP.)
It was negative, then, I said. Yes, Jane said.
Well, that’s it. A relief, of course. But in one way, rather disappointing.
