Norman Invasions Page 2

  It seems clear the prankster, whatever might have been his original intent, perhaps to discomfit a visitor, has decided to expand the scope of his hoax. His object, it seems, is to frighten the village. I do wish he would stop, as the men are losing workdays. I think perhaps the culprit here is young Gavin, a bold, outspoken, rather flairful lad, who is rather close to my own age. He seems a cut or two above the local folk, and has more schooling, at least a year at Edinburgh. I once challenged him on this matter outside the pub, but he was very firm in his denials, even when I promised to keep his secret, if he saw fit to share it with me. After all, I, too, could see the sport of this, though I think it had gone too far, and told him so. “It is not my doing,” he said. “But there must be a fooler in the village! Who could it be?” Well I certainly had no idea, if he did not. Most of the younger folk, when they came of age, either left the village, or drove, or, going to the highway, bused to work in one of the nearby towns. A diligent, sober crew they were, none of whom seemed a likely source of a hoax. The older people we rather automatically excluded. To my amusement, Gavin informed me that he suspected the prankster was none other than myself, and he, too, promised to hold the secret, if I should choose to impart it to him. This seemed to me a delightful turnabout.

  We concluded our conversation under the eaves of the pub, as it began to pour.

  I returned to Hill House, drenched, and shaking with cold, and certainly much the worse for a pint too much at the pub.

  The cat was inside, the night so miserable. She came up the stairs, after a few minutes, and made her presence known outside the door. I admitted her, as I would, and she was soon curled at the foot of the bed, asleep.

  It seemed I should have fallen asleep almost immediately but I was unable to do so. The night at the pub was still muchly in my mind. There had been much wild talk about the prints, which were attributed, as ignorance and superstition would have it, to no ordinary cause, of course not, but to any number of uncanny, preternatural visitations, presumably all ill-omened, foreboding, and demonic. You know how superstitious simple folk can be. Old Duncan insisted they marked the calpa’s return, after almost a generation. That seemed then to be the consensus, at least among the older fellows. How tiresome is superstition!

  Gavin and I did our best to soothe these wretched, brittle fears, and bring the light of at least a little rationality into the evening’s discourse, but I fear we were largely unsuccessful. “There are the prints!” would say a fellow. “Put there,” we said. “A hoax!” “By who, then?” asked another. “We don’t know,” I said. “There are the prints,” would reiterate another, shuddering, and so it went.

  Although the calpa takes many forms, or, perhaps, more accurately, is given many forms by those who see it, the most common seems to be that of a gigantic, horselike being, with massive hoofs, a long, flowing mane, and huge, wild, burning eyes. Sometimes it is thought to be seen under the water, abeam, or gliding in the cold darkness beneath the keel, or rising toward the bulwarks, then descending again. Sometimes it is claimed to have broken the surface, only to submerge again. This has led some to speculate that it is some sort of sea creature, reptilian, long thought extinct. Other speculations have supposed a small whale, or other aquatic mammal. Some see it, too, sometimes, it seems, as having arms and a human head. Surely the imposition of some sort of discipline would be appropriate for sailors found drunk on their watch. I have wondered if that form was not, perhaps subconsciously, suggested by the image of a centaur. But that seems an unlikely image for mariners. To be sure, the image of the centaur may have been founded, long ago, not on Scythian horsemen, but on that of the calpa. Many were the galleys which brought tin from England to the Mediterranean. Some think that to see the calpa is itself a sentence of death, a forewarning of doom, but this is inaccurate. There is no reason why seeing the calpa, if one could actually do so, would, in itself, be a sign of impending death. Of what interest or concern are we to the calpa? Is this not vanity on our part? Are we so important that denizens of metaphysical realms would find it incumbent upon themselves to oblige us with such unsolicited, unwelcome notices? Let us dismiss the fanciful, self-regarding vanity of that thought. On the other hand, there would perhaps be dangers in bearing this dreadful witness, perhaps rather as in meeting a dangerous animal unexpectedly, eye to eye, within a critical charging distance. Seeing a lion is not in itself a sign of impending death, but it is quite true that these events are not always unassociated. It is true, however, that the calpa is territorial, and that it will protect itself. One does not enter certain cold, tidal caves, one does not swim in certain waters. As the legends have it, the calpa will kill, usually by drowning. Presumably it does not like to seen. Like the cat, it likes to conceal its presence. That is not uncommon with many forms of life. On the other hand, there are some legends, too, though admittedly rare, that the calpa has carried some to safety.

  Who knows the nature of those it might save?

  Why would it do so?

  But I am speaking now as though there might be such a beast.

  As the storm beat on the roof, and the wind whirled about Hill House, and lightning flashed beyond the window, off seaward, my mind, from the ale, wandered as it would.

  Suppose, I thought, there might be such a thing as the calpa. If it is so secretive, so withdrawn, so jealous of its privacy, why would it mark a beach with its hoofs? So here, surely, was some sort of inconsistency.

  Then I smiled, so silly was the thought, as if there might be such a thing.

  I wondered how the prints came there. They would now, in the storm, be muchly washed away. Too, the tide would take most of them. They would be gone by morning.

  Suppose there were such a thing, I thought. You can see how drunk I was, how tired, so disordered, lying there, pulling up the blankets, listening to the storm. The cat stirred when I pulled at the blankets, but did not, as far as I could tell, awaken.

  Lightning flashed outside the window. The framing of the window, in its partitions, suddenly became a terrible shadow on the wall, one that looked for a moment, in the swiftly following crash of thunder, like the gigantic thrown-back head of a rearing horse.

  So distraught was my fancy!

  At the same time the cat, startled, awakened with a screech, and stood at the foot of the bed for a tense, wicked instant, ears back, back arched, hair erected like bristling wire, a forepaw lifted, claws exposed, fangs bared, hissing, spitting, toward the window. Then she turned as suddenly and leapt from the bed, and fled out the door, which I had left ajar for her passage.

  She had been frightened by the storm, the noise.

  There had been the prints on the beach. What if it were not a joke, not a hoax, even a stupid, cruel hoax.

  What if the old men, and old Duncan, were right.

  But the calpa, I thought, no more than ghosts, or devils, or demons, or angels, or such things, would leave prints, nor stir pebbles, nor mark beaches.

  Thus such marks must have some natural, explicable origin.

  But there may be diverse natures, of which we are familiar with only one.

  And suddenly I wondered, the thought chilling me, if such a beast, if such there were, in its passage, had even needed to leave such prints, now doubtless muchly washed away. Any more than fog, swift and zealous, need leave marks. And I had the odd sensation that it might have chosen to leave them. But, if so, why? Could fog, if it so chose, take on might and form, and weight, and speed, and a hungry ferocity, what might be its tracks? Could even the hoofs of an eager fog, massive, palpitating and alive, luring, blinding mariners, so torment the earth? Might its claws scour beaches, furrow stone? But if it, or, better, some such thing, could take on equine form, donning a foreign coat and metaphysical mask, perhaps one even incongruous to its nature, might it not leave such marks? There had been prints on the beach, dark, deep prints. I had seen them, and so had others, coming down to the beac
h in the light. This was no fancy private to me. Something had passed there. That seemed clear. Need such marks have been put here? If not, why had they been put here? Could they be curiously annunciatory? Was this a signal, a knell, from a far-off place, betokening something, a visitor, a presence? I thought of a scratch on a sidewalk, a mark on a wall, scrawled in colored chalk. Was this a flag, or cairn?

  Or perhaps it was only an exuberance of movement, of a creature of great power, bursting into an unfamiliar reality, testing itself in a new space, excited by a new body, trying it out, exulting like a horse racing its phantom fellow in the midnight darkness, in the cold, between the cliffs and sea, the wind stinging its eyes, whipping in its mane.

  I have come home, I thought. But I must soon leave.

  Or could this be its announcement, this racing, reflective of its power, its joy? Is this the way it claims its territory, I wondered. Thusly marking it? Against whom? But why would it claim territory? Why does an animal do that? The antelope has all the grass of the plains, I thought. Why does it stop in one place, and put down its horns, and stamp its hoofs?

  I am not sure, but I think I then fell asleep.

  I had the sense of rising from the bed once, but I do not know if this occurred, or if it was part of a dream.

  I went to the window, or seemed to do so, which was cold, and streaked with rain. It felt chilled to my fingertips. In another flash of lightning, I looked down into the yard and, for an instant, it seemed to me that below, looking up at me, was a girl, illuminated, streaming with rain, unclothed save for long, bedraggled, soaked yellow hair clinging about her body like seaweed. She looked up, indifferently, unmindful of the storm, and then turned away. When lightning flashed again, the yard below was empty, save for some debris, a barrel, some puddles into which the fierce rain pelted, the drenched, smitten grass, the glistening stones of the walk. It must have been in a dream, as otherwise the poor thing, naked, and exposed to the elements, would have been half frozen. I had seen her before, I was sure, but only in dreams. In my earlier dreams, perhaps oddly enough, as they were the dreams of a young man, she, unlike the accommodating, sensuous maidens of many other dreams, had always been fully clothed, indeed, decorously, primly so, in Victorian propriety, in a starched, white shirtwaist, with a cameo brooch, with a long, black skirt to her ankles, with her yellow hair bound back behind her head. Her image in these recurring dreams was that of an upper-class scion from another era, one rather removed from ours, one more refined than our own, the image of a self-assured, self-possessed, proudly prudish, deliberately reserved, exquisitely formed, exquisitely feminine, exquisitely beautiful young lady, a lady as if of another time and place, a young lady well-bred, elegant, fashionable, proper, and genteel, very much so, aristocratic, self-satisfied, priggish, frosty and distant. She had always, in these dreams, had a look of smug, sheltered Victorian innocence, almost affectedly so, and of an almost contrivedly demure purity, and chastity, mingled with an expression of coldness and disdain. Sometimes this had excited my fury. How she regarded me. For something told me, in the dream you understand, that she, though this was unknown to her, belonged to me, that she, though at the time quite ignorant of the fact, was mine, literally. Sometimes, behind her, I had seen, briefly, the image of a great horse.

  I was awakened once later, in the night, by the return of the cat. Her fur was wet, so I conjectured she had left the house through the kitchen, where there was a cat flap. I toweled her down a bit, and soon, again, curled about herself, her tail wrapped neatly, delicately, about her small, golden body, she had purred herself asleep.

  In the meantime the rain had abated.

  I lay there for a time, and then, as I could not get back to sleep, rose, drew on boots, and some clothes, and, taking my torch, went downstairs. I left the house through the kitchen, quietly, in order not to awaken Mrs. Fraser, or any of her roomers. In the yard, under the window, I shone the light about.

  The grass had been muchly depressed by the night’s rain. The stones were wet, and reflected the light of the torch. There were puddles here and there, and, in places, narrow, arrested trickles of rain, like stilled, small rivers, arrested in their passage, shored by mud and pebbles. Though I had come down with trepidation, I soon felt a fool in the darkness, blazing the light about on the sodden grass, the stones, the bordering gravel. I am sure that, by then, I had slept off the fumes of alcohol, but I was undeniably agitated, even trembling. I was muchly unsettled in my thinking. Work on the article, too, had not been going well. I might well return to London, I thought, perhaps as soon as the morrow. Given the obscurities, the troubling oddities, of recent days, the hoax of the prints, the rumors, the uneasiness of villagers, I now found myself less loath than I would have been earlier to exchange the tranquility of the village, supposedly ideal for gathering together one’s thoughts, for the distractive bustle of Mayfair.

  I shall return to London, I thought.

  I have wondered, sometimes, if that would have been possible.

  I was about to return to the room when the beam of light fell upon a small patch of bare, damp ground, some feet within the wall, at the end of the yard. I focused the light on the ground. I looked up. I could see the window. The cat must have awakened, and noted my absence, for I could see her. She sat on the sill, within the panes, looking down at me. How silly she must think humans, I thought, to be prowling about so late, in a muddy yard, when they might be snug abed in a warm, dry room. I put the beam down again. The mark was not absolutely clear, because of the rain, as it had softened the earth, but what I saw, at least if casually observed, might have easily been taken as the print of a small, delicate, well-formed foot; there was the print of the heel, and of the sole, and of the toes; it seemed, clearly, the print of girl’s foot, of a small, delicate, feminine, naked foot.

  Some village girl must have left it, I thought. Perhaps one of those who helps Mrs. Fraser with her cleaning. But this seemed absurd, given the time of year.

  I would not return to London on the morrow.

  I returned to the room and sat up for a time, bent over, my head in my hands. Then, as it was still quite early, I went back to bed. Happily I slept. When I awakened my first thought was that my trip to the yard, of last night, might have been in a dream, as well, but the mud of my boots, and the dampness, and disarray, of my clothing, thrown to a chair, convinced me that I had, indeed, left the room that night. After breakfast I reconnoitered the yard again, returning to the place under the window. I saw nothing, then, that was clearly a print. It had rained again, in the early morning, while I had slept. If the print had been there, it must have been washed away.

  The most rational interpretation of the night’s business was that I had walked in my sleep, as some do, and dreamed, in so walking, of strange things. This was the most rational interpretation, so it was the one I accepted.

  I returned then to some research pertinent to the article, utilizing some of the relevant books and journals I had brought with me, in a small, wooden crate, to the village.

  What occurred three nights later I could not dismiss so easily.

  February 5th. Back late. Another visit to the pub. More conversation with Gavin. Prints not on beach now. Duncan apprehensive, strangely quiet. Cronies subdued. New ale. Things return to normal. Or nearly so. Foolish to have been disturbed. Fear is like contagion, transmitted from one person to another. Some sort of animal communication probably, on some atavistic level. Must resist. Am now above such things. Article going well.

  I was not really back so late that night, as I remember it now. The behavior of the cat was surprising. She fled from me. I read a little, until after midnight, and then retired. I did leave the door ajar so that she might return, if so inclined.

  The villagers are good fellows, but some of them are becoming a bit irritating. Wherever I go in the village, one or another seems to be about, and not just about, but about watching, pretending
not to be watching. If I did not know better, I would suppose they were spying. I find this oppressive, and intrusive. Perhaps I am merely becoming excessively sensitive, or even paranoid. Perhaps I should speak to some of them about it. But that might cause unpleasantness. It is not my fault if I do not share their archaic attitudes, nor choose to sympathetically credit their superstitions. That they have no right to expect. And surely Gavin, one of their own, does not, either. I saw old Duncan today at the end of the village, near the road leading to the highway, talking to a constable. When he saw me, he walked away. I would really resent it if he, or others, were spreading rumors, or making irresponsible allegations, particularly to the law. Perhaps about the prints. But they are gone now. Hopefully that business is over and done with. I trust that the constable, who bikes down now and then to the village, has at least a modicum of common sense. I have met him once or twice, and he seems to be a decent, sensible fellow. If old Duncan’s conversation had anything to do with me, I trust the constable bore his remarks in good humor. But enough of this. I have work to do.

  That night the dream was different.

  She seemed to see me for the first time, that prim, exquisite, coveted thing, and seemed know herself, perhaps for the first time in her life, this astonishing her, and frightening her, coveted. Coveted, as a mere object. Something that could be possessed, that could be seized as a prize, like a jewel, something that could be owned, literally owned, with no rights whatsoever, owned uncompromisingly, totally, callously, without quarter.

  She regarded me.

  Did she then understand that she was seen as a mere object? Did she then understand why she was so seen, and the rightness of it, why she was seen so, that she was seen so because that was what she then was, in that moment, a mere object? An object. How frightening for her, to understand herself as that. Oh, yes, of course, no simple or common object. But a precious, beautiful, living object, wondrous, deep, sentient, and alive—a masterpiece of foresight, preparation and training—but an object nonetheless. Beneath the whiteness, the crispness, the starch, the severity, the formalities and protocols, the conventions, the inculcated restrictions, the rigidities, the enmeshing, conditioned coldnesses and inhibitions, she was a slim, lithe, sleek, well-formed little beast, attractively bred, an appealing animal, an attractive little animal, an extremely desirable little animal.