Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

Hilary hesitated. Almost certainly, if it had not been for the absence of other topics, other possible activities, other interests, he would never have mentioned Mary Rossiter at all. He had never spoken of her to a soul for the twenty years since she had vanished, and for at least half that time he had thought of her but infrequently.

'Well, if you like, I will tell you. For what it's worth, which isn't much, especially to a third party. But we've nothing else to do.'

'Thank the Lord!' commented Callcutt.

'I feel the Brigstocks should do more to provide entertainment'

'Good God!' rejoined Callcutt.

So, for the first time, Hilary imparted much of the story to another. He told how sweet Mary Rossiter had been, how they used to go for surprisingly long walks together, how they found the crumbling wall, and heard, and later saw, the shapeless, slithery dog, which seemed the colour of the wall, and saw also the collapsing mansion or near-mansion, which Mary, just like a kid, had immediately said must be a haunted house. Hilary even told Callcutt about the maps that the two children had drawn together, and that they had been maps not only of Surrey, but of Fairyland, and Giantland, and the Land of Shades also.

'Good preparation for the army,' observed Callcutt.

But Hilary did not tell Callcutt about the lean, possibly naked, man he had so positively seen at the extremest angle of the wall. He had been about to tell him, simply without thinking, at the point where the incident came in the narrative; but he passed over the matter.

'Bloody savage dogs!' said Callcutt. 'I'm against them. Especially in towns. Straining at the leash, and defecating all over the pavements. Something wrong with the owner's virility, I always think.'

'This was the worst dog you ever saw,' Hilary responded. 'I'm quite confident of that.'

'I hate them all,' said Callcutt sweepingly. 'They carry disease.'

'That was the least in the case of the dog I was talking about,' observed Hilary. And he told Callcutt of what had happened next — as far as he could tell it.

'Oh, God!' exclaimed Callcutt.

'I suppose it was what people used to call a mad dog.'

'But that was well before your time, even if you were a kid. There aren't so many mad dogs these days. Anyway, what happened to the dog? Shot, I take it?'

'I have no idea.'

'But surely it must have been shot? Things couldn't just have been left at that.'

'Well, probably it was shot. I just don't know. I wasn't supposed to know anything at all about what had happened.'

'Good God, it should have been shot. After doing a thing like that.'

'I daresay it was.'

There was a pause while Callcutt wrestled with his thoughts and Hilary with his memories; memories of which he had remembered little for some longish time past.

'It was the most frightful thing,' Callcutt summed up at last. 'I say: could we pay a visit to the scene of the crime? Or would that be too much?'

'Not too much if I can find the place.' This was indeed how one thing led to another. 'I haven't been there since.'

'I suppose not,' said Callcutt, who hadn't thought of that. Then had added: 'What, never?'

'Never,' said Hilary. 'After all, I'm not here very often.'

'Whose car shall we take?'

'As far as I can recall the lie of the land, we had better walk. I daresay it's all caravans and bungalows by now.'

And so, substantially, it proved. It would no doubt be wrong to suggest that the municipal authority or statutory body or honorary trustees responsible for the conservation of an open space had in any major degree permitted the public heritage to diminish in area or beauty, but whereas formerly the conserved terrain had merged off into pastures and semi-wild woodland, now it seemed to be encircled almost up to the last inch with houses. They were big, expensive houses, but they had converted the wilderness of Hilary's childhood into something more like a public park, very beaten down, and with the usual close network of amateur footpaths, going nowhere in particular, because serving no function. Round the edge of this slightly sad area Hilary and Callcutt prowled and prospected.

'It was somewhere about here,' said Hilary. 'Certainly on this side.'

'I should have said it had all changed so much that we were unlikely to get far without comparative maps. None of these houses can be more than ten or twelve years old.'

They varied greatly in style: from Cotswold to Moroccan, from Ernest George to Frank Lloyd Wright. Some seemed still to value seclusion, but more went in for neighbourliness and open plan. Despite all the desperation of discrepancy, there was a uniformity of tone which was even more depressing.

'I agree that my place has disappeared,' said Hilary. 'Been built over. Of course it was pretty far gone even then.'

The houses were served by a rough road, almost certainly 'unadopted'. It assured them a precarious degree of freedom from casual motor traffic.

One of the biggest houses was in the Hollywood style: a garish structure with brightly coloured faience roof, much Spanish ironwork, mass-produced but costly, and a flight of outside steps in bright red tiles. The property was surrounded by a scumbled white wall. Hilary and Callcutt stared in through the elaborate, garden-of-remembrance gates.

'It's like a caricature of the old place,' said Hilary. 'Much smaller, and much louder — but still. .'

The windows were all shut and there was no one in sight. Even the other houses seemed all to lie silent, and on the rough road nothing and no one passed. The two men continued to peer through the bars of the gate, ornate but trivial.

From round the back of the house to their left emerged, in like silence, a large, moulting, yellow dog. They could hardly even hear the patter of its large feet on the composition flagstones.

Hilary said nothing until the dog, which originally they saw head on, had turned and, with apparent indifference to them, displayed the full length of its right flank. Then he spoke: 'Bogey,' he said, 'that's the same dog.' Callcutt was known to his intimates as Bogey, following some early incident in his military life.

Callcutt thought before speaking. Then he said: 'Rubbish, Hilary. Dogs don't live twenty years.' But he wasn't quite sure of that.

'That one has.'

But now the dog began to bark, growling and baying most frighteningly, though, as on the previous occasion, not coming right up to the gate, or attempting to charge at them. If the fact that, a moment before, it seemed not to have seen them, might have been attributed to extreme senility, there was nothing remotely senile about its furious, almost rabid aggression now; and even less, perhaps, about the calculating way it placed itself, whatever might have been the reason. It stood a shapeless, sulphurous mass on its precisely chosen ground, almost like a Chinese demon.

'That is just what it did before,' Hilary shouted above the uproar. 'Stood like that and came no nearer.'

'If you can call it standing,' Callcutt shouted back.

He was appalled by the dog, and did not fail to notice that Hilary had turned white, and was clinging to the decorative gatebars. But in the end Callcutt looked upwards for a second. He spoke again, or rather shouted. 'There's a wench at one of the upstairs windows. We'd better clear out.'

Before Hilary had managed any reply, which the barking of the dog in any case made difficult, there was a further development. The glass-panelled front door of the house opened, and a woman walked out.

Perhaps she had emerged to quiet the dog and apologize, perhaps, on the contrary, to reinforce the dog's antagonism to strangers: to Hilary it was a matter of indifference. The woman was of about his own age, but he knew perfectly well who she was. She was the grown-up Mary Rossiter, who twenty years before had been killed by a dog, probably a mad dog, possibly a dog that had been shot, certainly a most unusual dog, this very present dog, in fact.