Consulting his map he asked if it wasn’t possible to cut across the hills. ‘It nearly halves the distance,’ he added.
The porter, a red-faced man with a cheerful frown, said that he wouldn’t advise it. ‘Bad ’ills to cross, you see. They’re nice enough now, but come three and they’ll be black with clouds, likely as not. Unpredictable. You wouldn’t want to try crossing them. Bleak things to be on in a storm, I can tell you.’
Melbury thought a moment, biting his lips till they were white. After eight years of lecturing at college, he was more used to giving than receiving advice. Somewhat tartly he said that he didn’t see how the weather would change today. ‘It looks fine enough to me. Not a cloud in sight.’
No doubt noticing the well-used rucksack by Melbury’s feet and the look of someone who felt himself to be an expert camper, the porter just said: ‘Maybe, maybe,’ and left it undecidedly at that.
Leaving the station, Melbury hitched his rucksack well up on his shoulders, put on a pair of Polaroid sunglasses and made his way through the village and out along a lane towards the hills. As he went, he could not help picturing in his mind, as thoughts of everyday life were left further and further behind him, how like it was now this landscape must have been in the days of the Celts and the Roman legions marching against rebellious Brigantes, of days before cars were invented and horses were the only means of travel besides one’s legs.
Laughing to himself at the porter’s advice, he strolled along a footpath across the first and smallest of the undulating hills, setting off from its windswept summit to where the sun, now and then, glittered on a meandering stream amidst a gathering of trees.
Feeling refreshed and invigorated by the walk so far after the warm drowsiness of the train, he half ran, half stumbled downhill, ending in a cautious clambering through the tangled undergrowth to thrust his hands gratefully into the cold water of the stream, splashing it across his face. Guelder rose and hazel grew luxuriantly about him with the buttressing trunks of several elms that had long since fallen at sharp angles against their still upright neighbours, brightly putrescent with honey agaric fungi and abundant patches of Pleurotus sapidus, alarmingly attractive with their lily-like caps set off against spreading rugs of moss. There weren’t many trees, and most further in were lying grotesquely yet pathetically on their sides with their shrunken roots poking the air. Some were completely overgrown with moss, speckled yellow where Jew’s-ear fungus had grown.
‘Are you lost?’
Surprised, he turned around to see a girl—perhaps eighteen or nineteen—standing some five yards upstream. Like Melbury, she was dressed for hiking, with a heavy floral blouse and blue jeans, a small white handkerchief which she’d just been wetting in the stream, as well as a small, slate-grey rucksack held with one strap on her shoulders.
Taken aback—though pleased by the beauty of her hair, which lay attractively on her shoulders, and by the even contours of her face—he said that he wasn’t. ‘Not really.’ Reconsidering the lameness of his reply, he added that he was just admiring the view before continuing on his way. ‘I’ve more than a good idea of the geography of this place from my map.’ To underline the point, he took it out of his anorak, making his way towards her, safely if not elegantly across the ferns and slippery stones along the bank. Pointing at the map, he said: ‘This is where we are now. I’m headed due east for Kendal. That’s just across these hills here. It’s not really far as the crow flies. Just a stiff walk.’
‘And worth it for the view,’ she said, looking around at the wind-brushed trees.
‘Exactly how I feel. I can’t stand the lanes. So many cars on them that you might as well be in a city at times. Which way are you going?’
‘Fenley. But I’ve got to go through Kendal to get there.’
‘Then we can go on together,’ he said. ‘It’ll make a pleasant walk even pleasanter.’
Having agreed, they cooled themselves off at the stream, before wading across it to make their way leisurely uphill. As they talked, he learned that her name was Janet and she came from Cheltenham, using what free time she had before starting work in the autumn to see as much of the better parts of the English countryside as she could. Originally she’d been with a friend but they’d had an argument and parted.
Very soon they were immersed amongst the hills. Yet, despite the many features about them, he found her company so utterly fascinating that it was not until they were rising from a valley several hours later when they came upon a farmhouse, that his attention wavered, though even then it was she as much as Melbury who aided this diversion with her enthusiasm for looking at it.
Giving her a hand as they clambered over the debris surrounding it, he joked about the farm’s weirdisms: the peculiar angle at which it sloped, the whole building being several degrees off the vertical, the ugly gash in its roof and the fungi that covered its walls like dilapidated veins. Over a colourless door at the front was an embossed stone with the legend 1743 upon it, though it had been worn by age and caustic elements into nothing more than a weather-pitted plaque. Age showed from its every blurred contour as Melbury took out a torch from his rucksack and shone it through one of the grimy windows. ‘It’s so wrecked it must be deserted,’ he said finally. Inside, haphazard lengths of rotting wood were entangled with flaking strips of plaster and even more ragged, veil-like drapes of webs, whilst the gash in the roof was mirrored by an even larger gash in the first storey floor, the whole being dulled by damp and nightmarish shadows which resisted the torch beam with a dogged belligerence, loping about the quaking walls as he shone it about the room. In one corner stood the remains of a table, whilst a gigantic hearth leered at them from one wall; a grotesquely shaped thing that was made of iron and served as a fireplace and oven. A repugnant smell of decay surrounded the edifice like a vile miasma, whilst the ground near to it was slimy as though thick with mud.
‘I wonder if this is the place all that fuss was about in the papers a few years ago,’ Janet said after a while, pushing open one of the fragmentary windows as she spoke.
‘What fuss was that?’
‘Don’t you remember? About an artist—what was his name?—Preskett, I think—he painted surrealistic Biblical pictures: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Wormwood, Babylon the Great, The Locusts and things like these. He was supposed to have committed suicide in an old farmhouse around here.’
‘Supposed?’
‘That was what all the stink was about. See that hole in the roof? That was what made me think about it. According to the papers he killed himself by covering his clothes with petrol and setting himself alight, burning half the house down with him. But there was talk of other things besides suicide. Ritualistic murder for one. All very dark and mysterious. I’m surprised you don’t remember it. One of the Sundays even did a serial about his life and works, all the juicier bits about his stays in mental homes, divorces, mysticism, drugs, midnight orgies on the hills, of course.’
Melbury stood back, looking the old building over. ‘I think I remember something about it. Slightly mad, wasn’t he? This was his retreat.’
‘But not his last. Somehow even this held something that made him retreat even further, into death.’
Laughing, Melbury said that she made it all sound very mysterious.
‘But I mean to,’ Janet said, laughing too. ‘Come on, let’s have a look inside.’
Saying that he couldn’t stop her, he led the way carefully towards the door. ‘I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘It’s not very safe and we don’t want an accident in an isolated place like this.’
The door gave way quite easily beneath his touch, swinging open wide on its crumbling hinges. The nauseous stench he’d noticed earlier swept up into his face like the belch of something long dead and rotten. It dazed his senses and almost made him lose his balance as he staggered through the pulpy debris that covered the floor inside: the decaying leaves and slime, puffed and discoloured by fungi and mould. Carefully, he ran the torch beam across it, reciting:
‘I spied John Mouldy in his cellar,
Deep down twenty steps of stone;
In the dark he sat asmiling,
Smiling there alone.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A poem,’ he said, with a delicious facetiousness.
‘I know it’s a poem. Who wrote it? Not you?’
‘No, not me. De la Mare. Come on, we’ll go on a bit further.’
An insipid glow seeped through a gash in the ceiling, making everything grey other than the mysteriously black shadows. At one end of the room began a rotting staircase, whilst near to them stood several small but heavy cupboards, all of which seemed to have been modelled from clay and chunks of dead flesh which had since been left to fester into gangrenous mounds. Partly sickened, partly consumed by morbid curiosity, Melbury looked around at the funnels and cones and hammocks of webs and the pus that dripped steadily from the moss-like remains of the ceiling. In one corner amidst a pile of plaster that had given way from the wall, he noticed a rectangle of red and black. He pushed his way through the rubble towards it.
As he leant over it, he discovered that it was a metal box, much like the ones used for keeping petty cash in at offices.
‘Wonder why that was missed when Preskett killed himself?’ Janet said as she knelt beside him.
He shrugged. ‘If this was Preskett’s home. Besides, I’d say it was hidden in the wall by the look of it.’ Pushing more of the plaster from the wall, he put his hand into the gap behind. ‘Quite large,’ he said. ‘The rain and decay probably succeeded in doing what a search party couldn’t.’
Using a stone, he snapped the padlock holding the box lid down and forced it open. Inside were several small books, blackened by damp and stains from the in-running rust. Carefully Melbury picked up the topmost book. Tucked inside the front cover was a sheet of paper. On it, written as though in some haste, was a quotation. Slowly, he read it out loud:
‘Out—out are the lights—out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy ‘Man’
And its hero the conqueror Worm.’
Janet shuddered. As she did so a light film of rain fell through the hole above their heads. Looking out through one of the deep-set windows across the hills, Melbury saw the grey veil of a summer shower covering everything in a myopic blur.
Quickly, they left the farm, deciding as they looked across the darkening hills to pitch one of their tents to give them some shelter till the rain had died down. Deciding on his because it was larger, they erected it and retreated inside as sheet lightning flashed across the hills. Lying back on the ground sheet, Melbury said: ‘I wonder what all that writing was about?’
Janet pulled her face in false mockery. ‘The papers did say that Preskett was mad.’
‘If,’ he added, ‘the farm and the writing were his. One shouldn’t jump to conclusions.’
‘And one shouldn’t preach.’
After talking for an hour they lapsed into silence. Rather than brightening, the weather outside seemed instead to be getting even worse, darkening all the time. Already exhausted after the unusual exercise of his trek across the hills, Melbury began to doze amidst half thoughts of inns and warm beds, hot meals and beer. It was with a feeling of profound and lasting shock that a short time later he jolted awake, a strange sense of solitude, of loneliness, numbing him as though a deep iciness permeated the air. Towns, railways, roads and people seemed so far away, lost through vague vistas of eternity.
Sitting up, and striving to subdue these feelings, he looked across to where Janet had been lying, but she’d gone. Opening the tent flaps, he leant out into the drizzle.
Melbury was surprised to see how long he’d been asleep.
‘Janet,’ he called, stepping outside. He zipped up his anorak as the wind thrust itself against him. ‘Janet!’ When he looked across the hillside all he could see was grass and swaying trees, alive with motion as they were battered by the winds. Still receiving no reply to his calls, Melbury wondered where she’d gone. Prone as he was to worrying, conjectures of the vaguest and, thus, most intrusive type stormed his mind with land sliding rapidity.
‘Janet, where are you?’
The only cover in sight was the farmhouse. Besides this there was nothing that could hide her from view. But why should she be in there? Despite all the tales about it, there was nothing of interest in the place.
Pushing his doubts to one side, he called out again. But still there was no reply.
Remembering the deceptive solidity of the farm’s buttressed walls, with their gaping cracks, and the burnt beams underneath the roof, the warped floor above, the rotting stairs, all with vivid images of incipient collapse, he felt a growing sense of alarm. Suppressing this with the knowledge that panic would only make things worse, he returned quickly to the tent for his torch. Without it a search would be practically hopeless.
As he flashed it on, he noticed a scrap of paper left where Janet had been lying. Picking it up, he read:
In case you wake up before I get back (or, to be gloomy, in case I have an accident), I’m going to the farm for those books we found. It’s stopped raining now, but I don’t want to risk them getting absolutely ruined if it starts up again. Janet.
The paper fell, forgotten, from his grasp as he rushed outside, the air greeting him with an invigorating rush of freshness. Without wasting a second, he ran towards the farmhouse. The books he’d left scattered in the debris fluttered wildly in the winds. A loose leaf from one of them blew against his leg. Picking it up, he saw an etching of great if diabolical quality. It was of a squat, pig-like creature with great knobbly joints, a formidable monstrosity admittedly, yet almost paradoxically showing in such vivid detail pain, agony and anguish on its twisted, entortured face that Melbury winced at regarding it. What Hell must have been the inspiration of this artist? What forbidden delusions, dreams, nightmares had formed within him the inspiration for the ultimate blasphemy, peeling, thrusting its nauseous self from the creature’s floundering body: the snakelike creatures, the worms that gnawed at it like a cancer, springing from its hoofs, its legs, from its chest and ruptured stomach? Grünewald at his most insane could never have perpetrated such a blasphemy as this time worn etching. The realism was veritably obscene, a mockery of life itself. The very suggestion of what was depicted revolted Melbury, sickened him as confronting insanity would, as viewing the foulest of all the foul deeds carried out by man. It was almost indescribable in its cacodaemoniacal entirety, only the etching itself could reveal what it so successfully did.
He threw away the paper. This was ridiculous. He’d never find Janet like this. ‘Janet! Where are you? Where are you?’ He cupped his hands about his mouth and called again. As his cries echoed claustrophobically through the house, he saw something move in one of the corners amidst a Stygian void of shadows.
‘Janet?’
Awkwardly, the girl stepped through the debris into the moonlight fanning through the roof. Her face was pale and still, her arms listless by her sides. It was like the calm tranquillity just after a storm or as one was about to erupt, the peaceful way she stood, statuesquely still in the moonlight.
Relieved, he ran towards her, the torch beam sending shadows fingering about her face, filling her eyes like the profoundest black gems, whilst making her blouse rumple in strangely sensuous ways, with liquescent depths of blackness.
Before he reached her he stopped. Her body seemed to move and yet did not move. Muscles shivered, yet her limbs remained still.
Suddenly he began to scream. He couldn’t stop. The whole world dissolved into an oblivion of tearing hysteria.
Something fell from her face. It was long and thin. Her mouth dropped, and yet another slim, slithering object fell from her. Yet another from her hair, though it looked, even in the gloom, as though it came from her eye. One, two, then four as she collapsed upon the floor, hundreds more spreading out from her shrinking body into every conceivable direction, wriggling soundlessly into the shadows.
‘Out—out are the lights—out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy ‘Man’,
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.’
