One Foot in the Grave (2 page)

Turning from the cupboard, he looked at himself in the long mirror. He saw a ghost, the ghost of Jimmy Pibble, the faintest of faint remains of a life once lived. He was standing in the beam of light from the bathroom door, so he was only half a man, all his left side as invisible as the dark side of the moon. The other half wavered in the dimness—face pale as mist, lips a dark scab, no sign of an eye in the deep socket—a creature as weightless as the dry bone of a bird. All that was left. Not long now. The last storm of winter. The cut of the coat added to the ghostliness of the image; if anyone did glimpse him they might well think him a revenant from the days of Edwardian house parties. The storm whined at a gutter. It was a night for ghosts.

Moving ever more confidently as the plan proceeded without mishap, he took another overcoat and two suits to the bed. He rolled the bedclothes carefully aside and laid the coat and suits down where he had been sleeping. Not enough bulk. Quite definitely walking now and no longer shuffling, he went to the bath cubicle and fetched the fat towel and the extravagant sponge, laid them on the clothes and patted the whole pile into shape. He had to brace his thighs against the edge of the bed to pull the bedclothes back over the dummy without dragging it out of shape. All his life he had tended to sleep with his head drawn well down into the bedclothes, and since the plan had taken shape he had exaggerated the habit. She had teased him about it, but he'd simply said the night-lighting disturbed him. And since there was no chance of his remaking the bed to her standards, he had coaxed her to stop tucking the bedclothes in. She hadn't liked that. Dangling blankets, all night. Tsk.

“I wouldn't let any of the others sleep like that, you know.”

“Why?”

He'd only meant what was the harm in sleeping as one chose, but she'd answered another question.

“Because they aren't really real. So they might as well do things my way.”

“Am I real? I hardly feel it, in this place.”

“Don't talk nonsense
—
it's bad for you. Just remember you're real, but the others are all
—
all gnomes.”

“Hobbits?”

“Orcs more likely. Retired orcs. I bet Mr. X has got his dragon hoard somewhere.”

How long had all that taken? Another nine minutes. Would she have finished with Mr. X? Lady Treadgold refused to be bedded down until two in the morning, and in any case Jenny was frightened of her. …

Almost but not quite in panic, he pushed the visitor's chair into place, shut the wardrobe, crossed to the door and looked round. Anything she wouldn't expect to see? The clothes he'd worn that day were as she'd left them, folded neat as a map on the dressing-table stool. The dummy … who could tell? He'd never seen himself from this angle. He nodded to it. You're not real either now, he thought. Bye.

He entered the bath cubicle, switched off the light, closed the door to a chink. Very carefully, mistrusting the reliability of touch, he felt his way to the tall stool that stood by the handbasin and eased his buttocks onto it, leaning his back against the tiled wall. A long sigh wandered from his lips. Rubbish, he thought. You aren't exhausted—you've hardly started. Rest. Between three and seven minutes, on previous form.

Now that he was still he became more conscious of the storm noises. Rain turning to snow, the wireless had said. Deep drifts in the north. He had sat in his chair, watching the last light fading, and seen thin flakes like ice chips beginning to swirl past the darkness of the big cedar. The storm was hissing now through those somber needles; one of the branches creaked in the gusts. The grip of his will, the impetus of the plan, began to fade, and his mind floated into its weary trick of repetition of phrases jumbled beyond meaning or memory of an origin … the boiler house is blowing in the wind … there's that Frenchman … forty-three degrees of thirst. …

Dark and chill. Waiting, hour after hour, motionless, just in case. Smell of fresh-sawn timber and river reek from the wharf. Unfamiliar constant nudge of pistol holster against ribs. “They might come back,” Dickie Foyle had said. “I've a bit of a hunch they won't, but we've got to give it a go. We'll tell the press Monday we've found where it all happened.” Two young men had died, very slowly, in this rickety office, their screams drowned by the squeal of the sawmills. No sense of horror or haunting, only the blankness of waiting. No one came. Dickie's hunch right, as usual, but not suspiciously right. Not yet.

The double click of heels on the parquet snapped him out of his doze. He could sense her nearness. She was looking through the panel at the dummy. If it had been him lying there, and if he had still been awake, he would have moved a hand above the bedclothes to acknowledge her watchfulness and then the heels would have clicked and gone; of course, he had no way of knowing how long she waited on nights when he had already dropped off; but tonight she left barely time for the signal to begin before the heels clicked again—a disturbingly unfamiliar sound, heard from this angle—and she was gone.

He felt an absurd rush of disappointment and knew that a large part of his disjointed will had still been hoping that she would notice something wrong with the dummy, would come in, find him dressed and waiting in the dark—and then he would have to explain, and she would understand, and then. … Deliberately he refused to consider possible thens. Absurd, disgusting. The storm thundered in and out of his mind and left him with regret, now shading into relief and on into vanity that his central will was still in command. No less absurd, but not quite so disgusting.

He looked at his watch and found that his doze had lasted two minutes, so he had barely made it to the bathroom before she had come by. Lucky, again. He eased himself off the stool and leaned his weight on the basin while his legs became used to their function. His shoulders squared. His hand rose unbidden to adjust his neck scarf and hat, just as if he were about to step out and face the world. He left—as easy as that—and without being aware of any conscious decisions, found himself outside his own door, closing it, peeping through the panel at the dummy, grunting with satisfaction, walking down the corridor. The shock of light made him blink a couple of times but did not bother him.

He even took a deep and manly breath, to savor the curiously clashing odors of Flycatchers, the opulence of flowers and expensive perfumes and haute cuisine, all threaded through with the sharp medical smells that arose from the endless, and always losing, battle against old age.

It seemed natural to glance in through the panel of the next door, as if to assert his new apartness from its occupant, Air Commodore Sir Cyrus Turnbull—“My poor old vegetable,” Jenny called him. The mimed gesture of farewell stuck halfway through. She was there, standing by the bedside to take the old man's pulse but frowning at the door … no, not at it but through it, through him and the wall beyond … she had sucked her lower lip under her teeth … she looked like a child doing sums. …

He found he had stopped and was clutching the door-jamb, staring back. It was as though he were truly a ghost now. He could see her, but she could never see him, never … and she should not have been there!

He lurched on at a panic shuffle, reached the fire doors and leaned his way through. His stick rattled loudly as it caught in the closing timber. He tugged it free and plunged for the stairs.

Sense seeped back while he stood gripping the banister rail, willing the bubbling dismay to settle. It might be a bit of routine she had forgotten to tell him about. Perhaps she had had to heave the inanimate old hero around while she cleaned him up and remade his bed, and so could not take his pulse till he had settled—or perhaps she had simply found something wrong on her earlier visit and had come back to check; that would account for her hurrying through with Mr. X and Lady Treadgold. Yes, that would be it.

The stairs steadied him still further, a known task. He was strangely fond of them. They were a refuge from the brightness and luxury of Flycatchers, and from the factitious liveliness for which the staff were instructed to strive. There was an aura of deadness and drabness about them which were proper to old age. The same cobweb had dangled from the ceiling for weeks; the carpet was worn; the lower light bulb had blown and not been replaced. … As far as he knew he was the only person who used the stairs, originally because the upward rush of the lifts drained his blood from his brain and caused him to black out, but later, as the plan took shape, in training for this one night. He put the training into practice—stick down, left leg down, shift grip on handrail, right leg down, stick down. …

At the fringe of the near dark below the busted light bulb he stopped and looked at his watch again. Five minutes still before the man was due back—the unseen figure, known only by footsteps, whom Pibble had nicknamed the Liberator. Hamming self-confidence, he paced out of the dark, his shoes squeaking on the super-hygienic rubber stuff that covered this lower passage. At the kitchen door he hesitated. Because of the storm noises he hadn't actually heard the kitchen staff leave, nor the Liberator's first appearance to lock the outer door behind them. All seemed hushed. He opened the door, gave a tiny sigh of relief at seeing the expected darkness beyond, checked his bearings by the light from the passage, and walked in. Once the door was closed he shuffled through blackness until his stick rapped the leg of the big table. Now, as he'd expected, he could see the pale rectangle of the scullery door, outlined by the reflection of the floodlights from the low cloud layer. Still shuffling in case some stumbling block lay hidden in the floor-level darkness, he moved through the scullery. A jutting cupboard cast a patch of black. During his one reconnaissance visit—affable, dotardly, returning a fork which had somehow got missed from his breakfast tray—he had seen a tall stool standing in the niche. Yes. Perfect.

As he inched his buttocks onto the stool, it tilted on some unevenness, only a bit, but enough to make him fling out a steadying arm. His hand rapped against something which itself began to move. Without orders the fingers clutched, caught, closing on a sticky mess. The thing or things stopped their slither and he detached his hand, holding it forward into the faint light, where it glistened with a long smear across the palm.
Blood. Feeling into the wastebin at the little furrier's. Hand easing down through the catlike caress of scraps till it touched a different sort of softness. Withdrawing it. Staring at the red smear. Sniffing the known reek.
He sniffed at the mess, touched it with his tongue, smiled at the shock of sweetness and began to lick the mess clean. Raspberry jam and little suety crumbs. Jam-roll remains. Staff supper. Yes, he'd almost knocked over a pile of plates stacked ready for Mrs. Finsky to come and wash in the morning. That was part of the whole routine, listened for day after day and night after night, studied in the alteration of lights on the tiles of the kitchen courtyard below his window, smelt for, even … and now in three or four minutes the Liberator would come across the courtyard and unlock the outer door of the kitchen with a rattle of keys. The mortise and then the Yale. The door would open and the kitchen lights go on for a few seconds. There would come the snap of a big switch, the kitchen lights would go out a moment later. Then the man would leave, pulling the door shut behind him but not locking it. Six minutes later he would return, unlock the Yale, come in and lock up properly. Another switch would snap and the floodlights would go out. Then he would cross the kitchen and squeak out of hearing along the passage. …

Six minutes during which the kitchen door was locked only with the Yale, and so could be opened from the inside without a key.

Rest now. Gather energies. Hardest part still to come. Nearly there, though, nearly there. Deliberately he invited into his mind the retinue of nonsense. … There's that Frenchman … and for many a time I had been half in love with elephants … the boiler house is blowing in the wind … monosex cricket club … there's that Frenchman. The storm boomed. He was half aware of cold and without thinking about it shrank further into himself, as if withdrawing the frontiers of consciousness to more defensible positions. Like a dance of conjured souls, the wraiths of meaning moped and gibbered round and round inside his skull. … I dare say, I daren't say … the boiler house. …

Cold squeezed in, shaking him from his doze. Had he really slept? The sense of something unfinished was pungent in his mind, like an aftertaste in the mouth. He stood up hurriedly from the stool, bringing the darkness roaring down, but came to and found himself leaning against the cupboard, still mercifully upright. His watch was hard to read in the half-light. He craned back into the shadow, screwed up his eyes and tried to pick out the feeble gleams of luminosity. Five minutes past! The Liberator had come and he hadn't heard! But the floodlighting was still on!

With a lurching stagger he blundered out of the scullery and into the blackness of the kitchen, slowed as though the dark were an actual thickening of the air that clogged his passage, and stood, groping at nothing. A monotonous thin whisper of air squeezed through a crack. He plunged toward it, tripped sickeningly at the doormat, banged into the door, clutched at nothing but somehow stayed upright. Already, before he had willed his feet into their proper place beneath him, his free hand was patting for the latch. There, now. No doorknob. Higher. There! No grip in fingers, no feeling of shape. Hang stick on crook of elbow, left fingers close on right hand, forcing grip tight, twist with whole body. …

The storm blasted the door open. Wind thumped round the kitchen like an unleashed dog. He leaned himself round the door and along it, through the gap, tottering against the inrushing turmoil. A sudden lull almost toppled his forward-leaning weight, but his hand was still on the doorknob and he found himself pulling the door shut as if that was what he'd been trying to do. He let it happen. As the catch clicked, the storm came howling through the cedar branches once more.