The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror (5 page)

AT THIS TIME in the morning, the sun showers a blinding swirl of motes through the branches of a nearby tree which, spilling through the window, scatter about the room. It is one of those superb, warm mornings in late spring when not a breath of wind stirs outside and one sits, cosy and contented with the tingle of summer in one’s nostrils. Outside, the occasional car shunts past, disturbing the air, caught hard and bright in the sun’s perpetual gaze. Passersby appear infrequently, devoid of coats and ready for the heat of the afternoon. There is a kind of hazy, half-life to the scene, as though people and their attendant technology had become immured indoors waiting; this early dazzle of summer perhaps merely an hallucination, not to be trusted.

I used to sit by the window sometimes and gaze across the street watching life pass by in its lazy fashion. Watching the still, sombre houses on the opposite side of the road face the challenge of harsh daylight, their red bricks soiled with grime, windows dark, half-lidded with mesh curtains. Doors would be brown or green, gloss paint peeling here and there in an orgy of ultra-violet acceptance; gaining no suntan, but curling under an invisible wave of burning insistence.

My room was on the first floor, a flat, a hideaway, cool. Solid walls of books, a small gas fire, a tropical bamboo screen leading to the bedroom and beyond, the small kitchen. From my window I had a minor vista of the street below, the people, the traffic and the houses. An isolated world where folk would drop in unexpectedly, walk past the view and leave the stage finally past either the left or right hand window frame. Not much amazing happened on that stage, except once, just the daily life of part of a community. This microcosm settled easily upon my mind many a bright morning—I was the watcher, those out there the watched.

Not that I was bored by other things that the mere existence outside my window could hold my fascinated surveillance, but I would often be working on catalogues at the table next to the window which allowed an uninterrupted view out, down to the grey strip of road below and up into the pale sky. I would quite often cease work and dream easily, letting whatever happened to appear through the glass to settle on the retina, there to be converted by a brain that was normally imaginatively dormant into some bizarre saga of modern life. Life had for me become a solitary affair, a routine job working at home in which I saw few people for long periods at a time. My line was in indexing, a laborious business, but one in which I reveled. I suppose, in a way, the complete negativity of indexing,
its alien-ness from life, made my desire to watch folk go about their daily tasks all the more important to me. The fantasy of words, words and more words, meaninglessly jumbled together (for so it seems sometimes) could suck the mind dry and leave a hollow, black space. The printed page has a certain fascination, but it is nonetheless an escape and there is a relief sometimes in climbing back to some sort of reality; one puts down the book and the world seems to snap suddenly back.

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.