Nightshade and Damnations (17 page)

I said: “Tell me, why have you—even you, Chief—stayed away from that place?”

He grew grave. “I fear no man and no beast,” he said.

“Bu
t
—?”

“But.” He gulped some more black beer. “There are things.”

“What things?”

“Things. Little people.” He meant fairies. “I’ll fight anything I can see. But what of that which man cannot see? Who fights that? Stay away from The Bad Place. Marry
her
. . . Stay here. Feel her—fat! Don’t go. Nobody goes. . . . Hup! I like you. You are my friend. You must stay here.”

I gave him a can of peaches. He crowed like a baby. “You are my friend,” he said, “and if you want to go, then go. But if you get away, come back.”

“
If?
” I said.

“If.”

“I don’t believe in fairies,” I said.

His eyebrows knotted, his fists knotted, and he bared his teeth. “Are you saying that what I say is not true?” he shouted.

“King, Great Chief,” I said, “I believe, I believe. What you say is true.”

“If I had not given my word I should have had you killed for that,” he grunted. “But I have gi-given my word. . . . Hup! My-my word is a word. I . . . you . . . go, go!”

Next morning he was ill. I gave him magnesia in a pot of water, for which he expressed gratitude. That day I set out with ten squat, sullen warriors; killers, men without fear.

But when we came in sight of the place that was called The Bad Place, The Dark Place, or The Dead Place, they stopped. For no consideration would they walk another step forward. I offered each man a steel knife. Their terror was stronger than their desire. “Not even for that,” said their leader.

I went on alone.

It was a dead place because there was no life in it; and therefore it was also a dark place. No grass grew there. It had come to nothingness. Not even the coarse, hardy weeds that find a root-hold in the uncooled ashes of burnt-out buildings pushed their leaves out of its desolation. Under the seasonal rain it must have been a quagmire. Now, baked by the August sun, it was a sort of ash-heap, studded with gray excrescences that resembled enormous cinders. A dreary, dark gray, powdery valley went down; a melancholy dust-heap of a hill crept up and away. As I looked I saw something writhe and come up out of the hillside—it came down toward me with a sickening, wriggling run, and it was pale gray like a ghost. I drew my pistol. Then the gray thing pirouetted and danced. It was nothing but dust, picked up by a current of warm air. The cold hand that had got hold of my heart relaxed, and my heart fell back into my stomach, where it had already sunk.

I went down. This place was so dead that I was grateful for the company of the flies that had followed me. The sun struck like a floodlight out of a clean blue sky; every crumb of grit threw a clear-cut black shadow in the dust. A bird passed, down and up, quick as the flick of a whip, on the trail of a desperate dragonfly. Yet here, in a white-hot summer afternoon, I felt that I was going down, step by step, into the black night of the soul. This was a bad place.

The dust clung to me. I moved slowly, between half-buried slabs of shattered granite. Evening was coming. A breeze that felt like a hot breath on my neck stirred the ruins of the ancient city; dust devils twisted and flirted and fell; the sun gray-red. At last I found something that had been a wall, and pitched my tent close to it. Somehow it was good to have a wall behind me. There was nothing to be afraid of—there was absolutely nothing. Yet I was afraid. What is it that makes a comfortable man go out with a pickaxe to poke among the ruins of ancient cities? I was sick with nameless terror. But fear breeds pride. I could not go back. And I was tired, desperately tired. If I did not sleep I would break.

I ate and lay down. Sleep was picking me away, leaf by leaf. Bad place . . . dead place . . . dark place . . . little people. . . .

Before I fell asleep I thought I heard somebody singing a queer, wailing song:—
Oh
-
oooo
,
oh
-
oooo
,
oh
-
oooo!
It rose and descended—it conveyed terror. It might have been an owl, or some other night-bird; or it might have been the wind in the ruins; or a half-dream. It sounded almost human, though. I started awake, clutching my pistol. I could have sworn that the wail was forming words. What words? They sounded like some debased sort of Arabic:—

Ookil’ karabin

Ookil’ karabin

Isapara mibanara

Ikil’ karabin

Ookil’ karabin

As I sat up the noise stopped. Yes, I thought, I was dreaming; I lay back and went to sleep. Centuries of silence lay in the dust.

All the same, in that abominable loneliness I felt that I was not alone. I awoke five times before dawn, to listen. There was nothing. Even the flies had gone away. Yet when day broke I observed that something strange had happened.

My socks had disappeared.

In the dust, that powdery dust in which the petal of a flower would have left its imprint, there were no tracks. Yet the flap of my tent was unfastened, and my socks were gone.

For the next three days I sifted the detritus of that dead city, fumbling and feeling after crumbs of evidence, and listening to the silence. My pickaxe pecked out nothing but chips of stone and strange echoes. On the second day I unearthed some fragments of crumbling glass and shards of white, glazed pottery, together with a handful of narrow pieces of iron which fell to nothing as I touched them. I also found a small dish of patterned porcelain, inscribed with five letters—
R E S E N
—part of some inscription. It was sad and strange that this poor thing should have survived the smashing of the huge edifices and noble monuments of that great city. But all the time, I felt that someone, or something, was watching me an inch beyond my field of vision. On the third day I found a red drinking-vessel, intact, and a cooking-pot of some light, white metal, with marks of burning on the bottom of it and some charred powder inside. The housewife to whom this pot belonged was cooking some sort of stew, no doubt, when the wrath of God struck the city.

When the blow fell, that city must have ceased to be in less time than it takes to clap your hands: it fell like the cities of the plain when the fire came down from heaven. Here, as in the ruins of Pompeii, one might discover curiously pathetic ashes and highly individual dust. I found the calcined skeleton of a woman, clutching, in the charred vestiges of loving arms, the skeletal outline of a newly-born child. As I touched these remains they broke like burnt paper. Not far away, half-buried in a sort of volcanic cinder, four twisted lumps of animal charcoal lay in the form of a cross, the center of which was a shapeless mass of glass: this had been a sociable drinking-party. This lump of glass melted and ran into a blob, the outlines of which suggest the map of Africa. But in the equatorial part of it so to speak one could distinguish the base of a bottle. I also found a tiny square of thin, woven stuff. It must have been a handkerchief, a woman’s handkerchief. Some whimsy of chance let it stay intact. In one corner of it was embroidered a Roman letter
A
. Who was
A?
I seem to see some fussy, fastidious gentlewoman, discreetly perfumed—a benevolent tyrant at home, but every inch a lady. Deploring the decadence of the age, she dabbed this delicate twenty-five square inches of gauzy nothingness at one sensitive nostril. Then—psst! She and the house in which she lived were swept away in one lick of frightful heat. And the handkerchief fluttered down on her ashes.

Nearby, untouched by time and disaster, stood a low wall of clay bricks. On this wall was an inscription in chalk. A child must have scrawled it. It said:
Lidia is a dirty pig
. Below it lay the unidentifiable remains of three human beings. As I looked, the air-currents stirred the dust. Swaying and undulating like a ballet dancer, a fine gray powdery corkscrew spun up and threw itself at my feet.

That night, again, I thought I heard singing. But what was there to sing? Birds? There were no birds. Nevertheless, I lay awake. I was uneasy. There was no moon. I saw that my watch said
12
:
45
. After that I must have slipped into the shallow end of sleep, because I opened my eyes—instinct warned me to keep still—and saw that more than two hours had passed. I felt rather than heard a little furtive sound. I lay quiet and listened. Fear and watchfulness had sharpened my ears. In spite of the beating of my heart I heard a
tink
-
tink
of metal against metal. My flashlight was under my left hand; my pistol was in my right. I breathed deeply. The metal clinked again. Now I knew where to look. I aimed the flashlight at the noise, switched on a broad beam of bright light, and leapt up with a roar of that mad rage that comes out of fear. Something was caught in the light. The light paralyzed it: the thing was glued in the shining, white puddle—it had enormous eyes. I fired at it—I mean, I aimed at it and pressed my trigger, but had forgotten to lift my safety-catch. Holding the thing in the flashlight beam, I struck at it with the barrel of the pistol. I was cruel because I was afraid. It squealed, and something cracked. Then I had it by the neck. If it was not a rat it smelled like a rat.
Oh
-
oooo
,
oh
-
oooo
,
oh
-
oooo!
it wailed, and I heard something scuffle outside. Another voice wailed
oh
-
oooo
,
oh
-
oooo
,
oh
-
oooo!
A third voice picked it up. In five seconds, the hot, dark night was full of a most woebegone crying. Five seconds later there was silence, except for the gasping of the cold little creature under my hand.

I was calm now, and I saw that it was not a rat. It was something like a man; a little, distorted man. The light hurt it, yet it could not look away—the big eyes contracted, twitching and flickering, out of a narrow and repulsive face fringed with a pale hair.

“
O
,
O
,
O
,” it said—the wet, chisel-toothed mouth was quivering on the edge of a word.

I noticed then that it was standing on something gray—looked again, and saw my woolen jacket. It had been trying to take this jacket away. But in the right-hand pocket there were a coin and a small key: they had struck together and awakened me.

I was no longer afraid so I became kind. “Calm,” I said, as one talks to a dog, “Calm, calm, calm! Quiet now, quiet!”

The little white one held up a wrist from which drooped a skinny, naked hand like a mole’s paw, and whispered:

“
Oh
-
oooo
.”

“Sit!” I said.

It was terrified and in pain. I had broken its wrist: I should say
his
wrist—he was a sort of man; a male creature; wretched, filthy and dank, dwarfish, debased; greenish-white like mildew, smelling like mildew, cold and wetly-yielding like mildew; rat-toothed, rat-eared and chinless; yet not unlike a man. If he had stood upright he would have been about three feet tall.

This, then, was the nameless thing that had struck such terror into the bloody old chieftain of the savages of the Central Belt—this bloodless, chinless thing without a forehead, whose limbs were like the tendrils of a creeping plant that sprouts in the dark, and who cringed, twittering and whimpering, at my feet. Its eyes were large like a lemur’s. The ears were long, pointed, and almost transparent; they shone sickly-pink in the light, and I could see that they were reticulated with thin, dark veins. There had been some attempt at clothing—a kind of primitive jacket and leggings of some thin gray fur, tattered and indescribably filthy. My stomach turned at the feel of it, and its deathly, musty smell.

This, then, was one of the fairies, one of the little people of The Dead Place, and I had it by the neck.

I may say, at this point, that I have always believed in fairies. By “fairies” I do not mean little, delicate, magical, pretty creatures with butterfly wings, living among the flowers and drinking nectar out of bluebell blossoms. I do not believe in such fairies. But I do believe in the little people—the gnomes, elves, pucks, brownies, pixies, and leprechauns of legend. Belief in these little people is as old as the world, universal, and persistent. In the stories, you remember, the outward appearance of the little people is fairly constant. They are dwarfish. They have big eyes and long, pointed features. They come out at night, and have the power to make themselves invisible. Sometimes they are mischievous. They have been known to steal babies from their cradles. The horrified mother, starting awake, finds, in the place of her plump, rosy infant, a shriveled little horror. The little people have carried her baby away and left one of their own in its place—a changeling as it is called. It is best to keep on the good side of the little people, because they can play all kinds of malevolent tricks—spoil the butter, frighten the cows, destroy small objects. You will have observed that they have no power to seriously injure mankind; yet they carry with them the terror of the night. In some parts of the world, peasants placate the little people by leaving out a bowl of hot porridge or milk for them to drink, for they are always hungry and always cold. Note that. Every child has read the story of the cold lad of the hill: A poor cobbler, having spent his last few coins on a piece of leather, fell asleep, too tired to work. When he awoke in the morning he found that the leather had been worked with consummate skill into a beautiful pair of slippers. He sold these slippers and bought a larger piece of leather, which he left on the bench together with a bowl of hot soup. Then he pretended to fall asleep and saw, out of the corner of his eye, a tiny, pale, shivering, naked man who crept in and set to work with dazzling speed. Next morning there were two pairs of slippers. This went on for several days. Prosperity returned to the house of the cobbler. His wife, to reward the little man, knitted him a little cloak with a hood. They put the garment on the bench. That night the little man came again. He saw the cloak and hood, put them on, with a squeal of joy, capered up and down the cobbler’s bench admiring himself, and at last sprang out of the window saying, “I have taken your cloak, I have taken your hood, and the cold lad of the hill will do no more good.” He never appeared again. He had got what he wanted: a woolen cloak with a hood.