Dark World Read online

  When she came the following weekend I avoided her as much as I could until finally she caught me early on Sunday morning as I was passing her door on the way to the bathroom. She dragged me inside and closed the door. She was strong for her age and build.

  ‘Where is it?’ She hissed into my face. She wore a Chinese silk dressing gown covered in dragons over a red flannel night-dress.

  ‘Where’s what?’

  ‘Don’t you play games with me, little man. You know perfectly well what I wanted. Why didn’t you get it for me?’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ I extemporised. ‘The drawer was locked.’

  ‘Little liar!’ She said. ‘I’ve seen your father open that drawer a thousand times and never once has he used a key. Dear God, can’t you do just one simple little thing for me?’

  ‘Why can’t you get it yourself?’

  ‘Because I can’t. Never you mind. Because I need you to prove to me that you’re not a nasty sneaking little boy, but someone who is loyal and will do his aunt a small favour. I am very disappointed with you. As a matter of fact, I was planning a little treat for you if you had succeeded. I was going to invite you up to London like a proper grown-up guest, and I would have given you tea in the Victoria Hotel with toasted tea cakes covered in butter and taken you to see a pantomime, and the Victoria and Albert Museum and shown you the beautiful and valuable things in my home. You’d have liked that. You like nosing into other people’s property, don’t you? But now you’ll never have any of that because you won’t do a simple thing for your poor old aunt.’ She paused for breath and studied me closely. She could see I was unimpressed.

  ‘Do you know what is going to happen to you if you don’t do as I say?’ She said, putting her face so close to mine our noses almost touched.

  ‘No,’ I said. Then, suddenly feeling that she was engaged in a game of bluff, I added: ‘And I don’t care.’

  ‘Don’t care, eh?’ She said withdrawing her face and studying me intently. ‘Don’t care was made to care. I want to see that file by Christmas, or else. . . .’

  ‘Or else what?’

  Aunt Harriet once again put her huge old face very close to mine. I was almost overwhelmed by her musky perfume. In a loud croaking whisper, she said: ‘ “I can show you fear in a handful of dust.” Do you know who said that?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘A very famous poet called Tom Eliot. I knew him once: rather well, actually. He was very much in love with me at one time. A great many famous men were in love with me in those days, you know.’

  I found this impossible to believe then, but years later when I was going through my late father’s things I found a single photograph of Aunt Harriet as a young woman in the mid 1930s. It was a studio portrait and she was posed, rather artificially, elbow on knee, face cupped in her palm, staring at the camera. She wore a long double rope of pearls knotted in the middle as was the fashion and a loose rather ‘arty’ dress. Her dark shiny hair was cut in a page boy bob which framed a perfectly oval face, like one of Modigliani’s women. Below the fringe of hair her big dark eyes had allure. You might well have described her as attractive; you might also have said that the hungry look in her eyes and the sulky, sensual mouth signalled danger.

  ‘I can show you fear in a spider’s web,’ she said. ‘Do you know who said that?’

  Again I shook my head.

  ‘I did. And I can too. So beware, my young friend. Beware!’

  With that I was dismissed. I was inclined to regard her threats as empty, or rather that is what I wanted to believe.

  In the months running up to Christmas she came, much to our relief, less frequently at weekends, but when she did she always found an opportunity to get me on my own. Then she would ask one question: ‘Have you got it yet?’ I would shake my head and that would be that, or so I thought. She seemed strangely untroubled by my refusal to co-operate. Then came Christmas.

  She always spent several days with us over Christmas, arriving on Christmas Eve and occasionally lingering until New Year’s Day. Her presence was not so annoying as it might have been because my parents were hospitable during the season. In the company of people other than family Aunt Harriet would occasionally make an effort to be pleasant, provided that she felt that the guests were not beneath her notice socially. It was the one time too when my mother would not make any concessions to my aunt’s vegetarian diet, simply feeding her with the vegetables that dressed the turkey.

  Aunt Harriet came that Christmas Eve, as usual with great fuss and circumstance. She did not drive, so my father had to fetch her from the station in the car. It was dark when she arrived at our house and a light snow was falling, the little specks of white dancing in the wind. I remember looking out of the window of our house as her vast black bulk squeezed itself out of our car and onto the drive. She seemed to regard the snow as a personal annoyance, and flapped her hand in front of her face to brush away the flakes, as if they were stinging insects. As she lumbered towards the front door my father was busy getting her suitcases and parcels out of the boot.

  I knew about these parcels from previous Christmases. They were all very grandly wrapped and decked out with tinsel and fancy ribbons, but they never contained anything anyone really wanted. To my father she gave cigars which he very rarely smoked; and to my mother, almost invariably, a Poinsettia plant with its piercingly red and green foliage.

  I once heard my mother say to my father: ‘Doesn’t she know I hate Poinsettias? Nasty gaudy plants. They look like cheap Christmas decorations. Ugh!’

  ‘Why don’t you tell her?’ said my father smiling.

  ‘Good grief, no! Can you imagine the scene she’d make?’ And they both laughed.

  Louise and I always got books, but they were hardly ever new ones, and never what we actually wanted. Some of them, I now think, were probably quite valuable, but even that was a cheat, as I’ll explain later.

  My mother, Louise and I were lined up in the hall, as usual, to greet her. When she got to me she murmured: ‘have you got it?’ I shook my head. She sort of smiled and pinched my cheek in a would-be friendly manner, but she pinched so hard that my face was red and sore for quite some time afterwards. I had a feeling that there was worse to come.

  Christmas passed off much as usual. Aunt Harriet refused to come to church, saying that she worshipped God in her own way, whatever that meant, and that anyway the whole business of Christmas was just a debased and commercialised pagan ceremony. When the turkey was being carved she insisted on referring to it loudly as ‘the bird corpse’. It was no better and no worse than usual. Then, after the dinner, came the present giving.

  My father got his usual cigars and my mother her hated Poinsettia. I forget what Louise received, but I certainly remember my present. It felt heavy inside its red and gold Christmas paper.

  When I unwrapped it I found, not much to my surprise, that it was a book. Of its kind it was rather a sumptuous volume, bound in green artificial leather, heavily embossed with gold. It was in astonishingly good condition considering that the date on its title page was 1866. The pages were thick and creamy, their edges gilded. I noted that the book was illustrated throughout: ‘drawn’, as the title page announced ‘by eminent artists and engraved by the brothers Dalziel’. All this might have attracted me, but for the title of the book itself:

  A CHILD’S TREASURY OF INSTRUCTIVE

  AND IMPROVING VERSE

  I did not like that at all. Now, I was nine at the time, but I already considered myself a young adult, not a child. Louise, at six, was still a child, not me. I read quite grown-up books like Sherlock Holmes, and Treasure Island, and The Lord of the Rings. Moreover, I did not want to be instructed and improved: I got quite enough of that at school, thank you. I felt the first sting of Aunt Harriet’s revenge for my failure to do as she had told me. Then I looked at the fly-leaf.

  It was not quite as smooth as the other pages. It was slightly buckled and looked as if it had been treated with some kin
d of bleach. On it Aunt Harriet had written in purple ink: ‘to Robert. Happy Christmas from Aunt Harriet.’ Then, in smaller writing a little further down the page she had written: ‘p256.’

  When I thanked Aunt Harriet for her present with a rather obvious lack of enthusiasm, she merely smiled and tried to pinch my cheek again, but I avoided her. ‘It’s a very precious book,’ she said. ‘I think you’ll find it interesting.’

  ‘Oh, it’s beautiful,’ said my mother, for once backing up my aunt. ‘Those wonderful Dalziel engravings. They were the best, weren’t they? And such perfect condition! Where did you find it, Harriet?’

  Aunt Harriet gave my mother a dark look, as if she suspected some kind of insinuation in her question. Then, seeing that my mother was, as always, being innocently straightforward, she smiled. ‘I have my methods,’ she said.

  Later that night when I was in bed I began to ponder over Aunt Harriet’s present and that cryptic little note, so I got the book and turned to page 256. It was a poem entitled ‘The Spider and the Fly’ by someone called Mary Howitt.

  ‘Will you walk into my parlour?’ said the Spider to the Fly,

  ‘ ’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;

  The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,

  And I’ve a many curious things to shew when you are there.’

  ‘Oh no, no,’ said the little Fly, ‘to ask me is in vain,

  For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again.’

  At the time I wasn’t much into poetry and this was really not my thing at all, but the verse had an oddly compelling quality. I somehow had to read on. There was this ridiculous conversation going on between a spider and a fly—as if two insects could talk! —and the spider was enticing the fly into her den and the fly was, so far, refusing. It was so strange, this weird blend of insect and human life, like a dream, that I was held. I turned the page.

  It was then that I got a shock. I was confronted with a black and white engraving. It showed a creature standing in front of a cleft in a rock with the winding stair within going up into the darkness. I say ‘a creature’ because it was half human half spider, and it appeared to me to be a ‘she’, mainly because the head bore a quite shocking resemblance to Aunt Harriet. There was the same longish nose and wide shapeless mouth; above all the bulging eyes had the same predatory stare. The head was fixed, without a neck, onto a great bloated, bulbous body, again rather like Aunt Harriet’s. From the base of this sprang two long, thin legs that sagged at the knee joints as if the great body was too heavy to be held upright. From the body—or thorax, I suppose—came four almost equally thin arms, two from each side. The muscles on the arms were as tight and wiry as whipcord, and what passed for hands at their extremities were more like crabs’ pincers and looked as if they could inflict terrible pain.

  Standing in front of this monstrous creature, its back to the viewer, was what I assumed was the fly, though it barely resembled one. It looked more like a very tall thin young Victorian dandy. Its wings were folded to form a swallow tailed coat, one thin arm rested on a tasselled cane and a top hat was set at a jaunty angle on top of its small head. It looked a feeble, doomed creature.

  The picture and the poem seemed to me all of a piece, at once surreal and yet frighteningly vivid, inhabiting a world of its own, full of savage, predatory monsters and enfeebled victims. I read on until the inevitable ending.

  With buzzing wings he hung aloft, then near and nearer drew,

  Thinking only of his brilliant eyes, and green and purple hue—

  Thinking only of his crested head—poor foolish thing! At last,

  Up jumped the cunning Spider, and fiercely held him fast.

  She dragged him up her winding stair, into her dismal den,

  Within her little parlour—but he ne’er came out again!

  There were some moralising lines after that, something about ‘to idle, silly flattering words, I pray you ne’er give heed’. But that was just a piece of nonsense put in to give the poem respectability. It was the image that remained, and the torturing fear of being seized and carried up a winding stair into the darkness.

  I barely slept that night, and when I did it was worse than being awake. Waking or sleeping there was the sense that something was in one corner of my room. I saw it—if I saw it at all—only on the edge of my vision, and not when I looked at it directly: a bloated thing with a head but no neck, and with several arms or legs that waved at me in a slow way, like a creature at the bottom of the sea. This torment lasted until the frosty dawn when light began to filter through my thin window curtains. At last I managed some untroubled sleep until, hardly two hours later, I was summoned down to breakfast.

  On Boxing Day afternoon my parents had a party for neighbours and their children. Aunt Harriet was less than enthusiastic about the affair and went out for a walk immediately after lunch so as not to involve herself in the preparations. On her return, just as a cold sallow sun was setting, the party had begun. She sat among the guests in the sitting room sipping tea and smiling on the proceedings as if she were a specially honoured guest. Occasionally she would condescend to talk to some of our older friends. Various games were organised for the children who came, including Hide and Seek. When this was proposed Aunt Harriet beckoned me over and said: ‘I give you permission to hide in my room. They’ll never find you there.’

  The idea did not appeal to me at all, but it stayed in my head. Those of us who were to hide began to disperse about the house and I remember finding myself in the passage outside my aunt’s room. It was a moment when the temptation to enter her room seemed unconquerable as I heard the numbers being counted inexorably down to one in the hallway below. I entered her room.

  I did not turn the light on. The room was warm and had that familiar musky smell. In the dim light I felt my way across to a walk-in cupboard which I entered and then shut behind me. I was now in utter darkness and silence. The noise and bustle of the house had vanished and the only sensation to which I was alive was that of touch. As I sat down on the floor of the cupboard my face was brushed by the soft cool tickle of my Aunt Harriet’s fur coat. How did she reconcile the possession of this article with her vegetarianism? That was a question that only occurred to me long years later.

  At first I felt a curious exhilaration. I was alone, unseen and quiet. I had myself to myself and no-one would break in on my solitude for a long while. I was free of the importunings of my little sister or the more serious demands of my parents. Moreover, the house, heated generously for once by central heating, Christmas candles and company had become a little stuffy. In here it was exquisitely cool. I allowed my undistracted thoughts to slow to a standstill; I may even have fallen asleep.

  Darkness is a strange thing: it is both infinite and confining: it holds you tight in its grasp, but it holds you suspended in a void. Silence operates in a similar way. Slowly, the two combine to become a threat. I had no idea how much time had passed before I began to feel that it was time that someone found me, but how could they? I was so well hidden. It was then that I decided to open the cupboard door and let myself out. But it would not open.

  My heart’s thumping was suddenly the loudest noise in the universe. I was trapped forever in darkness and silence. I banged and kicked at the cupboard door, but to no effect. It seemed to have the strange unyielding hardness of a wall rather than a piece of wood. I shouted as loud as I could, but my voice was curiously close and dead as if I had entered a soundproof studio at midnight.

  It was then that I became aware that the space I was in was not entirely dark. Yet, I was confused because, though I knew the cupboard I was in to be about three feet by six feet square the light that I saw seemed to be coming from a great distance. It was an indeterminate blue-green in colour, a rather drab hue, I thought. I stretched out my hand towards it in the hope of touching the back of the cupboard, but I felt nothing but the faintest brush of cold air, as if someone were blowing on my hand f
rom beyond my reach.

  By this time I had no sense of where the front, or the back, or the sides of the cupboard were. All appeared to be beyond my reach, and when I felt upwards I could not even sense the cold softness of my aunt’s fur coat. Moreover the floor began to feel icy and damp. I stood up. Nothing now existed but the distant blue green light.

  The next thing that happened was that the light began to grow. The difficulty was that I could not be sure whether I was moving towards it or it towards me. All I knew was that with each move, the atmosphere became more icy, as if I had been transported out of doors into an Arctic void.

  The light began to assume shape, and I started to sense that it was a luminous object that was moving towards me. It came not steadily but in little fits or scuttlings. The thing had six legs or arms and a bulbous body that glowed. The head, smaller but equally round was darker, though the eyes shone. Their colour was reddish, like amber. It came on and my own body became paralysed with fear, so that I could not retreat from it.

  The eyes fixed themselves on me. I tried to raise my hands and found them confined by some fibrous substance, heavy and sticky. In an imitation of my movement the creature stopped and raised two of its forelimbs in the air and began to wave them in front of its face. It appeared to be in the act of communicating with someone or something, but not with me. Then with a sudden leap it was on me and its sinewy, fibrous legs were pawing at my face. I cried out and fell, and when I opened my eyes again I found that I had fallen out of the cupboard into my aunt’s room. I was covered in cobwebs.

  When I emerged from her room the house was quiet and for a moment I thought it was deserted, but a faint sound from below reassured me. When I came downstairs, I found that my parents, Aunt Harriet and Louise were there, but all our guests had gone. I was chided for having fallen asleep in my hiding place. My Aunt Harriet smiled, but my mother was looking anxiously at me.