Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark Page 5

  But Alan Fitzroy was not very communicative. No, he didn’t know any of the members of this group. No (modestly) he didn’t write much—well, not very much. No, he hadn’t brought anything to read—well, not really—anyway, let everyone else read something first, please!

  And so the meeting began. Alan Fitzroy sat motionless his eyes closed. To everyone’s disappointment he took no part in the comments and criticisms that followed each reading, and it was only when he was asked for his contribution that he roused himself.

  “Well,” he admitted, “I have brought a little thing. Actually, it’s part of a larger work. I’m writing my autobiography, you see. In three volumes.” He looked round the room expectantly, and there was an almost audible sigh of disappointment. This, somehow, didn’t sound like a real writer; it sounded much more like an ordinary member of the group. However….

  “I want you to understand,” the stranger continued “That the whole object of this book is to bring the reader into real contact with my ego—to draw him—or her—into the life of my mind in a way which I believe has never been done before….”

  As he spoke, he fixed his brilliant eyes on Eileen’s face, and again she felt a little flicker of uneasiness—or was it even fear? Quite irrational, anyway, she assured herself; there couldn’t possibly be a more harmless little man; and she settled herself to listen as he began to read from an enormously thick and dog-eared manuscript:

  “The self-doubt and self-awareness of any repressed, frustrated childhood….”

  The voice went on … and on. At intervals Eileen glanced at the clock. She hoped that Mr Fitzroy wouldn’t be offended if she went out and made the tea before he had finished. She hoped, too, that he hadn’t noticed that Mrs Perkins was asleep inside her fur coat and might at any moment begin to snore. Mr Wilberforce, at Eileen’s side, was fiercely making notes on the back of one of his own manuscripts. No doubt he was building up a pungent criticism of the weary verbiage through which this poor little man was ploughing.

  “Go easy with him!” whispered Eileen softly—somehow it seemed very important to her that nothing should be said to upset the newcomer—“Remember he’s new.” But Mr Wilberforce only nodded his head irritably and went on writing.

  Wasn’t it ever coming to an end? But listen! At last! Those, surely, must be concluding sentences:

  “In conclusion, to point the significance of these psychodynamic disturbances to my infantile ego, I must relate a nocturnal hallucination from which I used to suffer. Or, in common parlance, a dream. I dreamed I was walking along a passage, a long stone passage, my feet clanging as I went, as if I were wearing boots of steel—armour—something like that. At the end of the passage I knew I should find my cradle—the cradle I had as a baby—and I should have to get into it and lie down. And I knew that as I lay there I would see a face slowly rising over the side of the cradle, and the face would be mad. I never knew what would happen next, because I always woke up. In fact, I always woke up before I had even reached the end of the passage.”

  Abruptly the little man laid down his manuscript. He looked round triumphantly, and there was a little embarrassed silence, broken by a snore from Mrs Perkins.

  “Well,” said Eileen at last, wondering how to avoid hurting the little man’s feelings, “it’s a very profound piece of work, of course….”

  “But it’s too long!” exploded Mr Wilberforce. “And too self-centred—self pitying! You’ve used the word “I” eighty-seven times in the first four pages! I was counting!”

  Alan Fitzroy turned on him indignantly.

  “But I have to use the word ‘I’! The whole book is about myself! I told you! The idea is to get the reader involved with me—to bring him right into my very mind, if you understand me—”

  “I understand you perfectly,” said Mr Wilberforce heavily, ignoring Eileen’s nudges. “The idea is far from being a novel one. But, if you will allow me to say so, I think you are deceiving yourself. You speak of bringing the reader right into your mind, and in fact you don’t even interest him. The whole thing is too wordy—too abstract. There’s nothing in it to grip the attention.”

  The little man flushed angrily.

  “Nothing to grip the attention?” he cried. “What about that dream, eh? Doesn’t that grip your attention? Doesn’t it?”

  “Frankly, no,” answered Mr Wilberforce. “It’s simply an account of a childish nightmare such as all of us have had at one time or another. I appreciate that it may have frightened you as a child, but believe me, it won’t frighten anyone else!”

  The little man was trembling with rage now, and his face was scarlet.

  “It will frighten people!” he almost screamed. “It will! I have a special gift for this sort of thing, I know I have! Let me tell you, a person once died of fright from hearing that dream!”

  There was an awkward little silence. No one knew what to say to the absurd boast. Eileen got hastily to her feet.

  “I think we all need a cup of tea!” she said, loudly and brightly, and escaped from the room. As she hurried down the passage to the kitchen, she became aware that Audrey Williams, the young psychological novelist, was following her.

  “Thought I might help you, dear,” explained Audrey; and added, as she piled cups and saucers on to a tray: “Whoever is that pompous little ass, do you suppose?”

  “I can’t think,” said Eileen. “I felt rather sorry for him, really. He must have worked terribly hard on that stuff, you know. He had chapters and chapters of it written. I could see them.”

  “You’re telling me!” giggled Audrey. “I thought at one point that he was proposing to read the whole lot! I nearly died….” Her voice trailed away, and both women were aware of Alan Fitzroy standing silently in the doorway.

  “Funny you should say that,” he said, looking straight at Audrey. “And you?” he went on, turning to Eileen. “Did you nearly die, too?”

  Eileen flushed awkwardly. No wonder the poor little chap was bitter! It was a shame of Mr Wilberforce to have laid into a newcomer like that! She said, gently:

  “Don’t take too much notice of Mr Wilberforce. He’s a very stern critic. He’s like that to all of us sometimes, isn’t he, Audrey?”

  Audrey Williams nodded dumbly; and Alan Fitzroy spoke again, addressing himself to Eileen.

  “And what did you think of my little effort? I sense a certain sympathy in you. Were you impressed by my dream?”

  “Why—yes—” lied Eileen nervously, searching for words. “I thought it was quite—well—quite unusual. If you’d brought it in a bit sooner, though, instead of quite so much theory….”

  “But I do bring it in sooner!” exclaimed the little man eagerly—he seemed to have quite recovered his temper—“I bring it in at intervals all through the book—just as it has come to me at intervals all through my life. But the reader doesn’t know why I keep repeating it until the last episode! Don’t you think that’s a good idea? Keeping him in suspense, kind of thing?” He glanced with pathetic eagerness from one to the other of the two women; and Eileen, anxious to show the poor fellow a little encouragement, paused in piling biscuits on a plate to say: “Do tell us: What is the last episode?”

  “Oh, well, you see, it was like this. This dream used to worry me, it really did. I’m not a nervous man—that is to say, my type of nerves, as I explain in the first eight chapters of Book Two—”

  Hastily Eileen brought him back to the point.

  “But the dream?” she said, counting out teaspoons on to the tray, and Alan Fitzroy continued:

  “Yes, yes. The dream. What worried me, you see, was that each time I dreamt it I got a little further down the passage towards the cradle, where I knew I would have to lie down and see the Face. In the end, I was so worried about it, I told my wife. ‘If only you could be with me, my dear’ I said—just in fun, you understand—‘Then I wouldn’t be so scared’. Well, that very night I dreamt it again, and, believe it or not, she was there! She was walking
along in front of me, wearing her old dark dressing-gown. She was a big woman, my wife—a big, strong woman, and she quite blocked my view of the cradle—the cradle where I knew the madness would begin. So I felt quite safe. I didn’t mind the dream a bit. And when I woke up”—the little man looked eagerly from Eileen to Audrey, like a conjurer bringing off a successful trick—“When I woke up, what do you think my wife told me?”

  “Why, that she’d had the dream too, of course!” said Audrey promptly—wasn’t that the obvious climax to the tale? But Alan Fitzroy shook his head. “No,” he said. “No—that didn’t come till later. No, she told me, that as she lay there, her head near to mine, she heard what she thought was my watch ticking under my pillow. But a funny, metallic tick, she said … like a far off clanging of armour … of steel boots. And then she knew that it came not from under the pillow but from inside my head. It was my boots clanging in my dream, you see, and she’d heard them.”

  Eileen and Audrey had drawn close together. Eileen’s voice trembled a little.

  “I think we ought to take the tea in—” she began; but the little man laid his hand on her arm beseechingly.

  “Just a moment more!” he begged. “Just a few more words! After that, whenever I dreamed that dream, my wife would hear the clanging in my head, louder each night, until at last the night came when she had the dream, too! The clanging somehow forced her to go to sleep, she told me, though she tried hard to stay awake—and there she was, she said, right in my dream, walking down the passage in front of me, hearing my boots clanging behind her. What do you think of that?”

  Eileen had recovered herself. Of course, this was just a piece of fiction on which he wanted her opinion. Mr Wilberforce’s crushing comments on the autobiography had stung him into trying to enliven it.

  “Well,” she said consideringly. “I suppose you could work that up into something quite dramatic. But however would you end it?”

  “The way it did end, of course!” said the little man sharply. “It ended with my wife actually getting into the cradle. Naturally. It was my dream, wasn’t it, and I made it end that way. Though there were one or two terrible struggles first. I told you, my wife was a big, strong woman.”

  “And—and what happens to her in it?” asked Eileen. “Does she see the face? And does she tell you afterwards what it was like?”

  “Oh no!” said the little man, sounding surprised. “Of course not. She couldn’t tell me any more after she’d got into the cradle. Naturally. She wasn’t dead, but she was an imbecile by then. I found her in bed in the morning all curled up as she would have to be to fit into this little cradle, and she could no longer speak. Naturally. That would be the effect of looking at the face I am speaking of.”

  Eileen and Audrey looked at each other. Both noticed that the other had gone rather white; but the little man went cheerfully on, apparently quite unaware of their dismay:

  “They took her away, of course, and put her into some sort of home. But it was all right, I knew I was safe now, because if she was in the cradle of course I couldn’t be, could I? Each time I had the dream, there she was, filling up the whole cradle in her dark dressing-gown so that I couldn’t even see it. I felt wonderfully safe for months.

  “Until, one night, she wasn’t there any more. That was terrible for me. I knew then she must be dead—and sure enough a day or two later I had word from the Home that this was the case. But come—” he seemed suddenly to rouse himself— “I mustn’t keep you ladies from your tea—allow me!—” and taking one of the two trays he hurried off along the passage to the sitting-room.

  Eileen and Audrey had only one thought—to get back to their companions. Hastily they loaded the other tray and a minute later they were in the sitting-room.

  To their surprise, Alan Fitzroy was no longer there.

  “Oh, he went as soon as he’d brought the tray in,” explained Mr Wilberforce. “Said he had to catch a train to Guildford, or somewhere. Asked me to apologize to you—Why, what’s the matter with you both?”

  Eileen recounted briefly the story Alan Fitzroy had told them in the kitchen; and Mr Wilberforce looked grave.

  “Fellow must be crazy!” he said. “I thought he looked a funny piece of work. Wouldn’t have let him go if I’d known. Should have kept him, and rung the police.”

  “Oh, I’m only too thankful he has gone!” said Eileen. “I don’t want a fuss. Besides, he must have meant it as fiction—though even so, he must be a bit abnormal to try—”

  “Abnormal? Of course he was abnormal!” interrupted old Mrs Perkins. “I could see that in the very first moment! ‘That’s an Egalomaniac!’ I said to myself—”

  “Ego-maniac,” corrected Audrey Williams, who was well up in the jargon needed for her novel. “Or do you mean megalomaniac—?”

  The chatter went on, and the clink of tea-cups, and Eileen felt more and more thankful that the strange little man had gone. Suppose he had been the last to go instead of the first? She couldn’t very well have turned him out….

  Eleven o’clock now. One by one the members left, and at last Eileen was left alone.

  “I must get all this cleared up,” she thought, glancing wearily round the untidy room; and she began to move about collecting ashtrays and dirty cups. As she passed the ottoman she noticed Mr Wilberforce had left his gloves there; and so she was not surprised when a moment later the front door bell rang urgently.

  But it was not Mr Wilberforce. The little dark figure had slipped past her into the hall before she had properly taken in what was happening.

  She gave a little gasp of horror—and then recovered herself. After all, he looked a very innocuous little man standing there under the hall light and asking if he could look at a time-table. He had missed his last train, he said, but maybe … on the other line … a connection at Croydon, perhaps … if he might just study the time-table a moment?

  Eileen had no alternative but to lead him into the sitting-room and hand him the ABC. He settled himself in the armchair with it, and was soon thumbing through its pages with apparent concentration. Eileen went on with her tidying, trying to appear quite unperturbed. After all, she was saying to herself, what can he do? I’m twice his size, a big, strong woman….

  Where had she heard that phrase before? The words echoed in her head—“My wife…. A big, strong woman….”

  It was then that she noticed how quiet everything was. The rustling of the pages of the ABC had ceased; and when she looked across at him, Eileen saw that Alan Fitzroy was asleep. His head was leaning back against the chair, his mouth was open, and his face was rather white.

  “He looks queer!” she thought, stepping closer. “I think perhaps I will ring the police. Luckily the phone’s in the kitchen, not in here; it won’t wake him….”

  And then she heard the noise. At first she thought it was a clicking in his throat, the prelude to a snore. But no; it wasn’t a click; it was more a tiny clanking noise—distant—metallic—right inside his head.

  Eileen did not stop to put down the tray she was carrying. The telephone! The telephone! That was the only idea in her mind as she hurried through the door and started down the passage to the kitchen.

  But how loud the clanking sound had grown! It seemed to be following her out of the room—along the passage—clank—Clank—CLANK—

  And where was the kitchen? How had this passage grown so long? And why were the walls of stone, and the floor too—stone that echoed to the clanking footsteps behind her?

  She could not look behind. She could only hurry on, and on, and on, down the echoing passage, until in front of her she saw the end: the delicate muslin frills, stirred ever so slightly by an unseen breath. The lacy pillow, white and waiting. The coverlet, just recently turned back, in readiness, by an unseen hand.

  With a strength she never knew she possessed, Eileen made herself stand still.

  “It’s a dream! It’s a dream!” she told herself. “If I won’t go with it, I’ll wake up! I won�
�t go with it! I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!”

  The clanking feet behind came nearer. Hands were pushing—pushing—fighting with her, and Eileen fought back—that dim, strengthless fighting of dreams, which yet somehow takes all a person’s strength and more … I won’t! gasped Eileen silently, I won’t. I won’t I won’t!

  A crash that seemed to split her eardrums: she found she could open her eyes. She opened them on her own kitchen, on the tray of crockery lying smashed at her feet. Sweat was running down her face, and tears of pure relief came into her eyes.

  A dream, of course! A sleep-walking dream brought on by that awful little man, and perhaps by over-tiredness. Why, it must have been part of the dream that he ever came back to ask for a time-table at all! Light-hearted in her relief, Eileen hurried back to the sitting-room.

  No. That at least hadn’t been a dream. But Alan Fitzroy was no longer sitting upright in his chair. He was sprawled on the floor as if he had been struck down by a violent blow, and blood was trickling from his head where it had struck the fender in his fall.

  For one insane moment Eileen thought of that dream struggle at the edge of the cradle—one of them had had to fall—and then, collecting her wits, she rushed to telephone the doctor.

  The doctor felt the little man’s heart, his pulse; then he shook his head.

  “Not a hope, I’m afraid,” he said. “You’ll have to phone the police, my dear, and get them to find out where he comes from and everything. You go and phone them now, while I attend to the poor fellow,” and he turned back to the prostrate figure.

  But why was Eileen still standing there, motionless?

  “Go on—phone!” said the doctor irritably. It was bad enough to be called out to a fatal heart attack at this time of night, without hysterical women delaying things. “Go on! The telephone!”

  As if in a trance, Eileen moved towards the door … along the passage to the kitchen. After all, perhaps it had been the doctor’s watch chain making that tiny clanking noise. Yes, he must still be rattling his watch chain now—louder—Louder—LOUDER.