The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror Page 5

  Anyhow, that’s how I sat on that fateful morning, sheets of paper and manuscripts untidily scattered about my table, the typewriter buried under a mound of carbons. It was about eleven o’clock and I’d just finished a cup of welcome coffee and was staring out at what I considered to be my own small world, my “theatre” on which I would direct the actors through their dingy roles, and there, across the road, like a patch of brighter yellow on the sun-basked pavement stood a little girl. She was about six or seven years of age, with hair of an unusual silver-straw colour, fixed in plaits. She had a strangely moulded face with a protruding chin, blue eyes and a small, inscrutable mouth. A white turned up nose peeped through the surface dirt, which covered the rest of her face. She wore a pair of cheap, brown plastic sandals, and in complete incongruity to the rest of her clothing, a pair of torn, grey woollen socks, one of which fitted snugly to the knee and the other bulging round the ankle. A plain yellow cotton dress hung from her small, thin shoulders and her bare arms were pale in the sun.

  The funny thing was, I don’t remember her walking into my view; one minute I stood there with the empty mug in my hand and she wasn’t there, and with the blink of an eye she stood across the way. No ball or skipping rope to play with and no friends chatting, she just stood there and her eyes burned into mine passionately. I looked away in surprise, suddenly caught in the act of “watcher”. The unusual thing was, that from that distance she really shouldn’t have been able to see me at all—the window would have appeared as dark and lifeless as those grim panes on the other side of the street. Anyway, briefly I had turned my gaze, now quickly I looked again.

  But she was gone.

  It was so silly of me to feel—what was it... afraid?—of those blue eyes of hers, but they held such a yearning and drilled into my brain for that minuscule moment of time. They were ineffably intense, with a cold kind of passion, and I realized in the quiet moments afterwards that I was shivering. That little girl had inexplicably become a major character in my dramas though so brief a bit part she had played, and I simply could not for the rest of that day shift her from my mind. Needless to say, it was not the last time, unfortunately, that I would see that bright yellow vision.

  The following day I received a package from Stavely, a publisher friend of mine who invariably pushes work my way. It was a thick manuscript that required indexing, two weeks solid work at least, so I set to with a vengeance and had little time to view my small plenum.

  However, one Thursday evening I looked up casually from the typewriter to see a sky darkening towards night. One or two stars had appeared high up and were winking on and off. The street lamps had just been switched on, and I think it was that which had caught my attention and caused me to look up. A breeze was scuttling a sheet of newspaper along the gutter and its line of direction led me to a billowing movement of yellow on the right. There stood the little girl, dainty and pretty even though dirty and wearing those tattered and mismatched boys’ socks. Her weird eyes were burrowing through my retina in a supernatural fashion. I was so taken aback that I found I’d jumped back from the window, throwing my chair over, and was peering round the edge of the curtain like a criminal… I felt hot, and then cold and the hair along my arms moved, bristling like a haunted cat.

  It was such an unnatural occurrence it left me a little watery at the knees and I had to sit down a while. The girl was no longer to be seen, but no sooner had I recovered my thoughts however, when the doorbell rang, a long shrill note, rattling inside my befuddled head. I went downstairs.

  As I pulled the door back I tried to stifle a gasp, since standing there in the half-light was the little girl. I choked. I couldn’t say anything, my mouth was dry and my tongue seemed swollen inexplicably.

  ‘You want to come and play, Mister?’ the voice inquired, a normal, girlish voice. A natural, smutty little girl in all respects except for those eyes, asking an innocent question of a stranger.

  ‘Nnn... no... not today!’ was all I could stammer back and I closed the door sharply. I dashed back upstairs and slammed the door to my flat, expecting any minute the clamour of the doorbell again. I sat and breathed deeply for several minutes, trying to fathom my seemingly acute fear of what was purely a natural, if isolated incident. A girl who merely wants someone to play with, who has no friends, who sees me from time to time at my window, always available; and only now has she plucked up the courage to reach up the tall door and press the bell which will bring me to her. My bell! Since there are three flats in the house, how did she know which of the three bells was mine?

  I couldn’t rid myself of my thoughtlessly bad manners to this small, frail human being, no matter how strangely cognizant she was of both my doorbell and me. Innocent as yet of the tortuous passages of the grown-up world and its madness. My sleeping hours would not let me forget either, and I was tormented by the fragmented images of a horrible nightmare…

  In the dream I was looking out across the road to where the girl stood in her yellow dress and her eyes were red holes that sent rays of eerie light into the room. Her mouth opened slowly and mouthed silent words, her lips contorting into cruel shapes as she did so. The face stood wax-white and a slow wind moved her dress like gossamer… the image blurred, changed… She was now hacking at the front door with her fingers, the wood like soft, grey fungus giving way before her malefic onslaught. The face was twisted in a wide grin of horror, the chin protruding, saliva dripping from it, the eyes screwed tight into little knots of red hate. Then she broke through the door, the fungus falling away, tearing silently, plopping down in soggy lumps, spores puffing out clouding the scene in a multitude of minute stars… I lay under the bedclothes, her coarse breathing sounding louder as she ascended the stairs and entered the flat. The covers slipped away leaving me cold in the ball of black night. In the dark shone those twin orbs, soulless and evil, yet full of fear. Her arms outstretched, covered in something dark and foul. Everything bathed in an unearthly red light… the red light became bigger… bigger like a huge flame, a burning and crackling…

  I lay in bed, awake now, shaking with the aftermath of the dream. The bedclothes lay in a heap on the floor, the nightlight beside my bed had burned right down until the wick, floating in a pool of wax, was flaring and sputtering. I blew it out with a groan of relief and reached for the light switch. Bathed in the friendly glow, I re-made the bed and tried to finish what was left of the night in untroubled sleep, but the picture of the girl, maniacal in her intensity to breach the door, strangely made of fungus and smothered in a universe of sparkling stars, did little to bring unconsciousness to me.

  Nightmares have a habit of doing that.

  By the end of the next week I had finished the index for the manuscript and had typed it up into a final draft. I had been so busy that the horrors of the dream were almost erased from conscious memory. I phoned Stavely and told him the thing would be with him in a day or two, which he greeted with delight, so that as I replaced the receiver I felt quite elated. The sun glowed outside, everything was right with the world, the murmur of contentment was there, and soon a big fat cheque would be on its way, doing no end of good to my failing bank balance.

  I decided to spend the rest of the weekend absorbed in a few good books, maybe even take in a film if there was anything worthwhile showing, and a drink at the pub. Relax, I thought, time to relax. So I took myself out that morning to the local library and browsed for a couple of hours. I finally came away with four books, a wide variety from poetry, novels, to a book on modern Astronomy—an old pastime of mine. I still had the four-inch refractor that I used for stargazing, or more correctly, Moon and planet studying.

  The day was warm, but by the time I reached the local it was raining. I sat in the lounge for a while, talking to Tom Gerrard, a neighbour of mine, a pensioner who took time out in the pub most lunch times when the weather wasn’t too cold. With a couple of pints of lager inside me and with the atmosphere of the place, I was soon in pleasant conversation with Tom
.

  ‘I might be getting old, Doug,’ he nodded at me after a lengthy scan of my face, ‘but to me you don’t half look washed out—like a worn out old rag I’d say.’

  Tom was a friendly chap who invariably wore a dark suit, shiny with age, and a waistcoat with a silver pocket watch and chain strung from it. He had a thin, weather-beaten face and his white moustache was yellowed in places from his smoking a pipe.

  ‘I agree,’ I said, ‘I’ve been working like the devil the past two weeks, but then, you don’t want all the boring details do you?’ I smiled.

  ‘Good Lord, no!’ he answered in mock consternation, then added, ‘I dunno how you do such a thing as indexing. I’ll stick to my allotment any day! I ’ad enough of your kind of work when I was setting type for old Barnaby.’

  ‘Not quite the same, though is it Tom—’

  ‘Hmmph. You don’t know the half of it,’ he said sourly.

  And so the day wore on, both of us exchanging pleasantries and gossip until it was chucking-out time. I walked home with Tom and saw him to his gate, where he caught me with a final bit of grapevine news before departing.

  ‘Oh, now did you hear about Mick Geddie’s little Sally—gone missing she has. About three weeks now. Only a little mite too. Always used to play hereabouts—always wore a yellow dress.’ He paused contemplatively. ‘I don’t reckon on her chances in this day and age,’ he finished with a macabre inflection.

  I was glad to say that Tom didn’t see my face after he’d said all that. It hit me like a thunderbolt. I knew the Geddies vaguely, but I didn’t know their children at all. However, I was sure the girl across the street must have been Sally Geddie. The protruding chin, you see, is a marked characteristic of Mick, her father.

  I just couldn’t believe it though. I’d seen her only the other day… or was it more than a week ago; I’d lost track of time just recently. But no, it couldn’t be the same child. Still, there was a persistent plucking of a chord in my mind that insisted on this girl being the one who was supposed to be missing. I felt like calling in at the police station, but I would be a fool if it turned out to be someone else’s daughter I had seen. After all, lots of kids wear yellow dresses. The nightmare I’d had must have mingled with reality until it had heightened the apparent none-event of my original sighting of the girl; without the dream it was a minor incident little worth further thought. I decided not to go to the police.

  Instead, I took myself off to the park for the afternoon, with a book to read and sat on a shady bench and dozed and browsed through a few short stories while the sun dried up the rain that had fallen earlier. It might have been an extremely pleasant afternoon, but I was not to be lucky…

  I sat almost asleep when I heard a voice call through the bushes behind me: ‘Mister… Mister,’ it said, ‘want to play?’ I jerked round startled, and in an instant saw those same penetrating eyes peering at me in their frightening way, but this time I was going to remain calm. Ignoring the stare, I stood up, placing the book on the bench, and said, ‘Are you Sally Geddie?’ The eyes blinked, the bushes rustled as she moved about and nothing further was said for a short while. Those damnable eyes still remained however, searing my retinas in unholy steadfastness. Then:

  ‘Want to play?’ she giggled and leapt out of sight. Further off I heard her shout, ‘Hide-and-Seek!’

  I decided to put my embarrassment of children aside and join in the game. After all, I had nothing better to do, and if she was the missing child—though this now seemed most unlikely—I stood a good chance of reuniting her with her parents. So, I took chase.

  A large hollow, ringed with trees and thick bushes and containing a pool of stagnant water lay a few hundred yards distant, and it was towards this that I ran where I saw the telltale yellow dress flying. When I reached the warm air under the trees she was nowhere in sight. I was quite hot and panted heavily while looking here and there in the undergrowth. Then a light, tinkling voice escaped from the greenery, ‘You can’t find me,’ it came in a sing-song manner, tempting, teasing. I moved towards where I thought it came from and there was a rustle of leaves and something yellow slid out of sight. I clawed my way through the thorny bushes but she was gone again.

  I was now becoming very warm and a little excited. It was years since I’d done anything like this—yes, it was exciting playing hide-and-seek. All the mystery, the tingling terror of finding and being found, all this welled up from my childhood. I was breathing heavily.

  ‘Sally? Sally?’ I said lightly so as not to frighten her, ‘Sugar and spice and all things nice! I’m coming to find you!’ I passed a huge oak to see the give-away yellow drift past on the other side of the dell. I decided to break out from the trees and run right round the outside of the wooded hollow which would be quicker than negotiating the bushes and ferns, and, as I reached the other side, there came that soft, tormenting voice again, this time a quickly spoken, ‘Can’t-catch-me!’; then the giggling. I panted. Clearing the trees on the inside I came stumbling down the steep slope to stop by the foul, glistening water at the bottom of the hollow.

  Above, the trees made a huge arc, allowing very little direct sunlight in to play on the stagnant water, where insects buzzed incessantly over the surface and strange bubbling sounds broke through from below. Aside from these odd bubblings the water was quite quiescent, black except where a growth of green plants had half covered the surface. It might have been fathoms deep for all one could see into its depths, but in fact it must have been a couple of feet at the most, the bottom probably thick with the mud and the leaf-mould of generations.

  The trees down there were weirdly stunted and gnarled old things, infested with fungi, rather different than the tall oaks higher up the slope. The ground was a soft, wet carpet of leaf-mould. It was quiet too, no birds singing down there, though if you listened hard enough, you could hear them chirping high up in the branches, in the light. I sat down on the bank and tossed a twig into the water. It splashed and a few ripples moved sluggishly outwards, then all was silent again. I was acutely aware of my laboured breathing: I had to regain my breath. I was sweating profusely, my brow like a wet and sticky fire causing black spots before my dizzy eyes. I saw no sign of the yellow dress, but something caught my eye in the water. It was the broken-off limb of an oak and it rested, due to its curvature, partly in and partly out of the evil smelling pond. It was absolutely infested with fungus, pale brown pulpy things giving it a hideously soft mantle. Down towards the water the growth was torn and smashed and hung limply into the greasy water, as if someone had pulled, clawed at the rotten fibres in desperation.

  I closed my eyes; the dream came back—the door made of fungoid material being ravaged by the girl, her face a mask of hatred… or was it horror? My mind drifted imperceptibly to other things: the heat. It was so damned warm down here amongst the trees, as if the sun’s heat of a thousand years had been captured by this murky pool, held in this great dome of oak and chestnut and pine and released in searing gasps when unwary visitors stepped beneath that forbidden place. I wiped the sweat from my forehead. The black spots before my eyes remained. Lack of oxygen, I guessed. Must regain my breath. The heat seemed to be burning my neck now like a fever.

  ‘Can’t find me,’ breathed a voice, so soft, so quiet now, but even so it startled me.

  ‘Sugar and spice,’ I said lazily, too tired to move at the moment, dazzled by visions recurring in my mind. ‘Boletus and Toadstool,’ I murmured idly.

  Something screamed far off.

  I looked down, down at the black, turgid waters of the pool, the water lapping at my shoes, leaving vile black detritus on them. My head ached. What was it..? Something was making the usually still waters move. My twig… no, that was minutes ago. Something moving… out there by the tree limb! A brown plastic sandal floated dismally near the edge, green scum licking at its sole.

  ‘She’s fallen in!’ I screamed, jumping to my feet, my head, my eyes crushed even further by such sudden action. ‘Hey,
Sally, hey… hey where are you?’ The water lapped gently, lapped thickly like obnoxious, noisesome protoplasm. Out there by the fungus-clothed log something yellow swirled in the water curiously. It was too much to bear. She had fallen in and drowned! But I’d been there all the time; there hadn’t been a splash. Only… only the faint, timeless scream far away.

  A face surfaced by the limb, a final confrontation, the water sliding slimily off the pallid features. The face rolled, bloated, soft like the fungi, chin protruding, eyes choked up with green mud. I screamed, scrambling blindly up the steep bank, slipping, falling, making no way at all. It was all my fault. The face still stared, the mouth open, choked with pestiferous, clinging green weed. I found myself back where I began, by the water’s edge, tears streaming down my face. My hands were black with the luxuriant earth. I scrambled again and fell back, headlong into the pond. I crawled ashore, sodden, steam rising from my body.