Murderer’s Trail. J. Farjeon Jefferson

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       2

       Ben versus Ghosts

      ‘Oi! Git orf me!’

      Ben sat up abruptly, with a clammy sensation that a nightmare had pattered over him. Then fear of death was succeeded by indignation against life. Why had life, as momentarily represented by a black and shadowy dockyard, nothing better to offer a weary man than the horrible spot on which he lay?

      Ben did not often sleep between clean sheets, but he had his standards. A bit of a carpet, with a footstool under your head—the corner of an empty attic, particularly if the attic were triangular to improve the wedge-like snugness of the angle, and if the peeling wall-paper kept off your nose—a couple of chairs with a minimum of seven legs—even a table, either on it or under it, according to which least reminded you of granite—these were supportable and permitted you to retain the one per cent of self-respect unfeeling life had left you. But cold and slippery stone, an equally cold and slippery post that vanished from behind you every time you moved your head half an inch to scratch it, leaving you outstretched, and rats!—these were conditions that even a worm might turn at, destroying its faith in the god that looks so inadequately after the Lesser Things!

      Yes, the rats in particular. Ben hated rats. Nasty, slimy creatures, with evil eyes and bodies four sizes too large. Mice, now—they were different. You could chum up with a mouse when you knew how, and give them little bits of cheese. But rats took the cheese without waiting to ask. They just watched you from a dark corner or a crack, then darted forward with a swift swish, clambered heavily over you like giant slugs fitted with feet, used your face as a floor, and left their foot-marks on your soul.

      ‘Next rat I see,’ thought Ben, ‘I’ll wring its neck!’

      A large dock rodent accepted the challenge, leapt at his cheek, and bounced away again into the blackness. Ben’s eyebrows only escaped contact through being raised out of the rat’s route in terror. A month previously an Asiatic’s eyebrows had been less fortunate in Smyrna.

      ‘Blimy, wot a life!’ muttered Ben, wiping his forehead with a red handkerchief. The handkerchief was already four weeks late for its annual laundering, but, even so, handkerchief was preferable to rat, and he wiped hard to make certain that no trace of rat remained. ‘I ’opes I’m born somethink dif’rent nex’ time!’ He carried the thought a stage farther. ‘I ’opes there ain’t no nex’ time!’

      Indeed, it was a life! Why did one hang on to it? Not far away dark water oozed and sucked around big, stationary ships. All one had to do was to get up, feel one’s way over the damp ground, avoiding posts and chains and ropes—there wasn’t any need to hurt yourself on the way, was there?—until there wasn’t any wet ground, but only the dark water. ‘Couple o’ gurgles, and yer’ve done with knocks,’ he reflected. Then he chided himself. Wot, ’im a swizzicide? ’Im wot ’ad been in the Merchant Service and ’ad once asked a captain for a rise? ‘Ben, yer potty!’ he announced to his weaker nature. ‘Come orf it!’ And so, instead of seeking the dark water, he sought the post again, with the more temporary sleep it offered, discovered too late that the post wasn’t there, and found himself flat.

      He gave a yelp. The yelp was echoed. Now Ben was no longer flat. He was on his feet, shaking like a struck tuning-fork. For if the second yelp had really been an echo of the first, its character had changed uncannily in the tiny space of time between!

      Ben’s yelp had been the yelp of one in sudden pain. The other seemed to have come from one in sudden panic.

      ‘Well, I’m in a panic, ain’t I?’ chattered Ben, struggling for comfort in the thought.

      He stood, listening—for thirteen years. The echo was not repeated. Then, deciding that any place was better than where he was, a condition which possibly explains the source of most human energy, he groped his way through darkest dockland in search of a happier spot. He did not know in what direction he was walking saving that, if the second cry had come from the north, he was unerringly walking south.

      He came upon another post. It wasn’t a nice post. It was unnaturally white, and it fluttered. All at once it occurred to Ben that it wasn’t a post at all, and that he had better hit it. The blow proved, painfully, that it was a post, but the fluttering white costume still needed explaining. A match explained it. Matches, at certain moments, are wonderful company. The service performed by the present match, however, might have been improved on. The costume turned out to be a newspaper poster tied round the post with a piece of string, and the poster said:

      OLD MAN

      MURDERED

      AT

      HAMMERSMITH

      ‘Gawd! Ain’t I never goin’ ter git away from it?’ muttered Ben.

      For a few seconds the match-light flickered on the gruesome words—words against which the holder of the match might have laid his head. But sleep was no longer in the immediate programme. A rat, an echo, and a placard had combined to demonstrate that dockland—or, at any rate, this particular corner of dockland—was unhealthy, and that the best thing to do was to get right out of it.

      The match-light touched his fingers. He dropped it spasmodically, but suppressed the exclamation. He had an idea that ears were listening, and in the darkness that followed the match’s descent the policy of retreat became instantly more appealing. Even in the darkness the horrible placard was still visible. It shivered palely as a little night breeze slithered from the sides of ships, and suddenly Ben turned and darted away. His foot caught in a chain, and he made a croquet-hoop over it.

      He remained, croquet-hooped, for nearly half a minute. Only by utter staticism, he felt, did he stand any chance that Fate would lose him and pass him by. He knew for certain by now that Fate was hunting him, and that the invisible fingers were groping to make their catch. It was only when he considered that it would not be dignified to be caught in the shape of a croquet-hoop that he cautiously rose and proceeded on his miserable way.

      He trod gingerly. He raised his feet high over many chains that were not there, and failed to raise them over another that was. He didn’t fall this time, however. As the ground rose up towards him, like the deck of a rolling ship, he lurched his left leg forward with a bent knee, recalling a trick of his old sea days. ‘Not this time, cocky!’ He glared at the chain. But a couple of seconds later he looped over some fresh obstacle, and his hands descended on something soft.

      ‘Wot’s ’appened?’ he wondered. ‘Is the bloomin’ ground meltin’?’

      Or was it grass? But what would grass be doing here? Soft. Soft and warmish. Now, what was soft and warmish?

      The solution came to him in a sickening flash. Suddenly weakened, the human croquet-hoop went flat, doing a sort of splits north and south from the stomach. Then it bounded up towards the unseen stars. It is doubtful whether anything in dockland had risen so high in the time since the days of bombardments.

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