Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark Read online

  Margaret smiled as she thought of the odd assortment of friends her sons had managed to collect during their six months here. Such a queer mixture of children in a neighbourhood like this, ranging from real little street toughs to the bespectacled son of a divorced but celebrated professor. Always in and out of the house—Margaret couldn’t put a name to half of them. That crowd this afternoon, for instance—who were they all?

  Margaret wrinkled her brows, trying to remember. Alan, of course, the freckle-faced mischief from the paper shop at the corner. And Raymond—the fair, sly boy that Henry said she shouldn’t let the children play with—but what could you do? And William—stodgy, mouse-coloured William—who simply came to eat her cakes, it seemed to Margaret, for he never played at anything in particular with the others.

  Oh, and there had been another one today—a new one, for whom Margaret had felt an immediate revulsion. About eight or nine he must have been, very small for his age and yet strangely mature, with a sharp, shrewd light in his pale, red-rimmed eyes. He had a coarse mop of ill-cut ginger hair and the palest of pale eyebrows and eyelashes, almost invisible in his pale, pinched face. And he was painfully thin.

  In spite of her dislike, Margaret had been touched by the thinness—and puzzled, too—real undernourishment is so rare in children nowadays. She had pressed on him cakes and bread and jam, but he had not eaten anything—indeed, he seemed scarcely aware that anything was being offered him—and in the end Margaret had given up and let the others demolish the provisions with their usual speed.

  Margaret shivered, suddenly cold, and leaned forward to put more coal on the fire. The memory of this queer, ginger-haired child had somehow made her feel uneasy all over again. She wished she’d made more effort to find out who he was and where he came from, but the boys were always so vague about that sort of thing.

  “What, Mummy?” Peter had said when she had asked him about the child that evening; “Mummy, you said I could have the next corn-flake packet, and now Robin …”

  “Yes, yes, darling, but listen. Who was that little ginger-haired boy you brought home from school today?”

  “Who did?” interrupted Robin helpfully.

  “Well—Peter, I suppose. Or do you know him, Robin? Perhaps he’s your friend?”

  “Who is?”

  Margaret had sighed. “The little ginger-haired boy. The one who hardly ate anything at tea.”

  “I didn’t hardly eat anything, either,” remarked Robin smugly.

  “Ooo—you story!” broke in Peter indignantly. “I saw you myself, you had three cakes, and …”

  Margaret had given it up, and determined to ask the child himself if he ever turned up again.

  And, strangely enough, as she had gone across their own landing to put on the boys’ bath, she thought she caught a glimpse of the little creature in the hall below, darting past the foot of the stairs. But she couldn’t be sure; dusk always fell early in that dim, derelict hall, and the whole thing might have been a trick of the light. Anyway, when she had gone to the back door and called into the damp autumn twilight, there had been no answer, and nothing stirred among the rank, overgrown shrubs and weeds.

  Margaret picked up her book again, slightly reassured. All this could quite reasonably explain her nervousness tonight. She was feeling guilty, that’s what it must be. There was something peculiar about the child, and she should have made more effort to find out about him. Perhaps he needed help—after all, there were cases of child cruelty and neglect even nowadays. Tomorrow she would really go into the matter, and then there would be nothing more to worry about.

  Leonora hesitated, wondering which way she should turn.

  *

  Sometimes, on waking from a deep sleep, one knows with absolute certainty that something has wakened one, but without knowing what. Margaret knew, with just this certainty, that something had made her raise her eyes from the book. She listened—listened as she had listened before that night—to the deep pulsing in her ears, to the tiny flickering murmur of the coals. Nothing more.

  But wasn’t there? What was that, then, that faint, faint shuffle on the landing outside? Shuffle, shuffle, soft as an autumn leaf drifting—shuffle shuffle—pad pad … silently the door swung open and there stood Robin, blinking, half asleep.

  Margaret let out her breath in a gasp of relief.

  “Robin! Whatever’s the matter? Why aren’t you asleep?”

  Robin blinked at her owlishly, his eyes large and round as they always were when just wakened from sleep.

  “I don’t like that little boy in my bed,” he observed.

  “What little boy? Whatever are you talking about, Robin?”

  “That little boy. He’s horrid. He pinches me. And he’s muddling the blankets. On purpose.”

  “Darling, you’re dreaming! Come along and let’s see!”

  Taking the child’s hand, Margaret led him back into his own room and switched on the light.

  There was Peter, rosily asleep with his mouth open as usual; and there was Robin’s little bed, empty, and with the clothes tumbled this way and that as if he had tossed about a lot in his sleep.

  This confirmed Margaret’s opinion that he had had a nightmare. After all, what was more likely after her cross-questioning about the mysterious little visitor that evening? In spite of his apparent inattention, Robin had no doubt sensed something of the anxiety and distaste behind her questions, and it was the most likely thing in the world that he would dream about it when he went to bed.

  However, to reassure the child, Margaret embarked on a thorough search of the little room. Under both the beds they looked, into the clothes closet, behind the curtains—even, at Robin’s insistence, into the impossibly narrow space behind the chest of drawers.

  “He was such a thin little boy, you see, Mummy,” Robin explained, and the phrase gave Margaret a nasty little pang of uneasiness. The hungry, too-old little face seemed to hover before her for a moment, its eyes full of ancient, malicious knowledge. She blinked it away, shut the lid of the brick box (what an absurd place to look!), and bundled Robin firmly back to bed.

  “And do you promise I won’t dream it again?” asked Robin anxiously, and Margaret promised. This was the standard formula after Robin’s nightmares. It had always worked before.

  Nearly twelve o’clock. There was nothing whatever to stay up for, but somehow Margaret couldn’t bring herself to go to bed. She reached out towards her library book, but felt that she could not face Leonora’s indecision again, and instead picked up yesterday’s evening paper. She would look for something cheerful to read before she went to bed. The autumn fashions, perhaps—or would it be the spring ones they’d be writing about in October? It was all very confusing nowadays.

  But it wasn’t the autumn fashions she found herself reading—or the spring ones. It was the blurred photograph of the wanted man that caught her eye—a man in his fifties perhaps—from such a bad picture it was difficult to tell. A picture of the murdered woman, too—a Mrs Harriet somebody—and a description of her …

  Margaret’s attention suddenly became riveted and she read the report from beginning to end, hardly daring to breathe. This man, at large somewhere in London tonight, had escaped from a mental institution where he had been sent some years ago for strangling another woman in somewhat similar circumstances to this Mrs Harriet …

  Margaret felt her limbs grow rigid. Both women had been the mothers of small boys … both had lived in tall derelict houses converted into flats … both had had black hair done in tight curls … Margaret fingered her hairstyle with damp, trembling fingers, and tried not to read any more, but her eyes seemed glued to the page. Why had the man not been hanged that first time?

  There followed the story of his childhood—a story of real Dickensian horror. Brought up in a tall ruined old house by a stepmother who had starved him, thrashed him, shut him in dark rooms where she told him clawed fiends were waiting … her black, shining curls had quivered over his childh
ood like the insignia of torture and death. The prison doctors had learned all this from him after the first murder—and had learned, too, how the sight of a black-haired woman going up the steps of just such a derelict house as he remembered had brought back his terror and misery with such vividness that “I didn’t just feel like a little boy again—I was a little boy … that was my house … that was her”—that was the only way he could describe it. And he had crept into the house, locked himself in one of the empty rooms until the dead silence of the night, and then crept out, with a child’s enormity of terror and hatred in his heart, and with a man’s strength in his fingers …

  Margaret closed her eyes for a second, and then opened them again to read the description of the murderer: “About fifty years of age, medium height, ginger hair growing grey, eyebrows and eyelashes almost invisible …” With every word the face leaped before her more vividly—not the face of the ageing, unknown man, but the little malevolent face she had seen that afternoon—the ill-cut ginger hair, the little red-rimmed eyes filled with the twisted malice of an old and bitter man …

  “I didn’t just feel like a little boy again, I was a little boy …” The words beat through Margaret’s brain, over and over again.

  She thrust the paper away from her. Don’t be so fanciful and absurd, she told herself. After all, if I really think anything’s wrong all I’ve got to do is call the police. There’s the telephone just there in the hall.

  She walked slowly to the door and out on to the landing, and stood there in her little island of light with darkness above and below. She tried to go on telling herself what nonsense it all was, how ridiculous she was being. But now she dared not let any more words come into her mind, not any words at all. For she was listening—listening as civilized human beings rarely have need to listen—listening as an animal listens in the murderous blackness of the forest. Not just with the ears—rather with the whole body. Every organ, every nerve is alert, pricked up, so that, in the end, it is impossible to say through which sense the message comes, and comes with absolute certainty: Danger is near. Danger is on the move.

  For there was no sound. Margaret was certain of that. No sound to tell her that something was stirring in the locked room upstairs—that dark, empty room so like the locked room where once a little boy had gone half mad with terror at the thought of the clawed fiends. The clawed fiends who had lost their terrors through the years and become his friends and allies, for now at last he was a clawed fiend himself.

  Still Margaret heard no sound. No sound to tell that the door of the empty room was being unlocked, silently, and with consummate skill, from the inside. No shuffle of footsteps across the dusty upstairs landing. No creak from the ancient, rickety steps of that top flight of stairs.

  And in the end it was not Margaret’s straining ears at all which caught the first hint of the oncoming creature—it was her eyes. They seemed to have been riveted on that shadowy bend in the banisters for so long that when she saw the hand at last, long and tapering, like five snakes coiled round the rail, she could have imagined it had been there all the time, flickering in and out and dancing before her eyes.

  But not the face. No, that couldn’t have been there before. Not anywhere, in all the world, could there have been a face like that—a face so distorted, so alight with hate that it seemed almost luminous as it leered out of the blackness, as it seemed to glide down towards her a foot or two above the banister …

  There was a sound now—a quick pattering of feet, horribly light and soft, like a child’s, as they bore the heavy adult shape down the stairs, the white, curled fingers reaching out towards her …

  A little frightened cry at Margaret’s elbow freed her from her paralysis. A little white face, a tangle of ginger hair … and an instinct stronger that that of self-preservation gripped her. In a second she was on her knees, her arms round the small trembling body; she felt the little creature’s shaking terror subsiding into a great peace as she held him against her breast.

  That dropping on her knees was her salvation. In that very second her assailant lunged, tripped over her suddenly lowered body, and pitched headlong down the stairs behind her. Crash upon crash as he fell from step to step, and then silence. Absolute silence.

  Then a new clamour arose:

  “Mummy! Mummy! Who…? What…?”—a tangle of small legs and arms, and in a moment her arms seemed to be full of little boys. She collected her wits and looked down at them. Only two of them, of course, her own two, their familiar dark heads pressed against her, their frightened questions clamouring in her ears …

  And when the police came, and Henry came, and the dead man was taken away, there was so much to tell. So much to explain. It could all be explained quite easily, of course (as Henry pointed out), with only a little stretching of coincidence.

  The little ginger-headed boy must come from somewhere in the neighbourhood—no doubt he could be traced, and if necessary helped in some way. Margaret’s obsession about him would explain Robin’s dream; it would also explain why, in that moment of terror, she imagined the strange child had rushed into her arms. Really, of course, it must have been one of her own boys.

  And yet, Margaret could never forget the smile on the face of the dead man as he lay crumpled at the foot of the stairs. They say that the faces of the dead can set in all sorts of incongruous expressions, but it seemed to Margaret that the smile had not been the smile of a grown man at all; it had been the smile of a little boy who has felt the comfort of a mother’s arms at last.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Celia Fremlin, 1968, 1969, 1970

  Preface © Chris Simmons, 2014

  The following stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine: ‘The Locked Room’, ‘The Special Gift’, ‘Angel-Face’, ‘The New House’; ‘The Quiet Game’ has appeared in She; ‘Last Day of Spring’ has appeared in Best Mystery Stories edited by Maurice Richardson.

  The right of Celia Fremlin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–31270–2