The Pan Book of Horror Stories

THE LADY WHO DIDN’T WASTE WORDS Hamilton Macallister

She had legs that stuck down from her dress as if they ought to have had castors on them, and under each ear was a thick glass ball. They were the only two passengers in the whole of the last carriage. They’d sat there in silence, until he said, “Excuse me, d’you mind?” He held his pipe in his hand.

She just smiled. One front tooth was missing and one was as black as soot.

“D’you mind if I smoke?”

She continued to smile: he took in her various oddities. “I said,” he said, “d’you mind if I smoke?”

“Words,” she said to him, “that aren’t in the praise of God are wasted words.”

“I’m sorry.” He put it back in his pocket, and fixed his eye on a picture of Barnard Castle. After a bit he gave her a quick look: she was smiling full at him. He looked away and prepared to sleep.

He opened his eyes in a tunnel that was so dark he couldn’t even see the walls of the compartment. No lights went on: an old, decrepit carriage, without corridors, peeling and dirty. He kept his eyes open in the close, dusty blackness, and out of it came the lady’s smile, facing him. She had moved.

He produced a small smile that got itself twisted, and closed his eyes again.

But he didn’t sleep. He drowsed, and returned sharply to consciousness with the dark over his retina again. He opened his eyes in the complete blackness. He wondered if she were still smiling. But when the light returned, she was there no longer. Then he saw that she had moved on to his seat, and was two or three feet away, by his side.

It was becoming annoying. He gave her a deliberate, I angry look. She was still smiling at him, face half turned; she looked quite stupid, obviously was. He turned his attention to the hedges, opening and closing past the window. They were getting into the mountains.

They were in another tunnel soon. The four sharp cries of the wheels became dull. And now he began to feel an intense discomfort and irritation. He moved his right hand up and down the wood in his preoccupation. He met the line of the communication cord, just within reach, which he caressed with one finger. He was furious with himself. He dropped his hand and managed to pull himself together just before they left the tunnel.

She’d moved again. She’d edged along the seat till she was about two feet from him; he could see this out of the corner of his eye. He opened his mouth to say something angry, and she said, smiling and waggishly shaking her head, “It’s no good pulling the communication cord in a tunnel. Trains never stop in tunnels.”

After that they sat together in silence till they entered the next tunnel.

In the darkness he couldn’t hear the slightest movement, but he felt her smile on him, all the time. Gradually he began to have an extraordinary feeling that she was crawling past his legs, still smiling up at him as she crawled. His legs tingled all over, but he felt he couldn’t move them an inch. He nodded his head violently up and down and pressed into the seat with his fists, and this helped him slightly. Suddenly the light came back.

The lady was on the other side again, so she had moved past him. Furious, he looked straight at her to tell her to damn well stay where she was, but as he encountered the impact of her silly smile, the words dried in his mouth.

In the daylight it was absurd. Physically, she was intensively repulsive. He could feel sorry for her, out of the tunnels; she was an obvious mental, half his size. When he saw the next tunnel coming up—and it was going to be the main one, by the look of the mountain that was folding over them—he’d made up his mind that he wasn’t going to bother with her; she could prowl about where she wanted. For a minute or two he sat still, relaxed.

Very cautiously he put out his left hand an inch or two. After another minute of tunnel he raised it to shoulder level, and did the same. The third time he touched something, soft and cold like the horn of a snail, so yielding as to be almost unfelt. Like a snail’s horn, it withdrew. Then it came again. Then it stayed. He felt its length: oval, and underneath it hung a round glass ball. It moved closer.

He pulled the communication cord.

The train pulled clear of the tunnel before it stopped. There was a peculiar sort of silence, after which he heard the guard coming down the track.

The lady sat by his side. He looked at her, and found her smiling away. “What’s the idea?” he said.

She put her hand to her mouth and said, “Sh!”

“What d’you mean?” He could hear the guard coming nearer, looking in at the carriages as he passed.

“Words——” she said, smiling.

“Oh to hell!” he said. He felt indescribably foolish. He was a heavy man, fat and powerful, and she was dumpy—a sticky-looking woman. He grabbed his suitcase and opened the door on the other side from the approaching! guard. There was a rail track and a steep drop over the embankment. He looked back at the lady; she had stopped smiling at last, and was looking shocked now. Then he jumped, in front of an express train.

The guard opened the carriage door and said, “Yes, lady?” He could see that this was the one.

But she just sat very still, looking shocked.

“Did you pull the cord?” he said. But her eyes, in dumb horror, indicated the swinging door. He crossed the carriage and looked out: the express had gone by with a roar and a flicker of windows. “Good—God!” he said. “Well, I’ve served the railways for fifteen years and this is IT.” He went back and took the lady’s hand very sympathetically. “Did ’e do anything to you afore ’e jumped out?” The poor old thing was trembling. She wouldn’t say anything. “Maybe ’e got what ’e deserved,” he said. “Are you all right then, lady?”

He beckoned to a doctor whom he had picked up on his way down. “Just look aht the other side,” he whispered. The doctor looked, and told the guard there was nothing left to do. Sightseers had begun to collect, looking into the carriage and at the remains of the man, with a blank, reserved look on their faces, like people suddenly asked to give money. They were sent back to their carriages, and the doctor stayed with the lady.

He was a neat, dark man. He wore rimless glasses, and had a quiet, scientific righteousness. He said to her, “Now what is your name please, madam?”

But she said nothing. She sat very still, looking shaken.

“I take it you’re not—related?” He indicated the other door.

“We’re all brothers in the sight of Him.”

“Oh yes.”

The train clanked into motion again, and the doctor sat down by her. He said, “I’m a doctor, and I’m used to these things, you know. Now the coroner will want to know just what he did. You know that, don’t you? Don’t worry, you’ll be all right now.”

She smiled at him.

The doctor smiled back. “Can I have your name and address?”

“Words that aren’t to the praise of the Lord are wasted,” she said.

“Yes.” He flicked his notebook. “Bit of a shock, eh?”

She said nothing.

“Must have been a bit of a shock.”

He looked at her intently. Something about him seemed to reassure her, and she leaned right up to his face and whispered, “I looked at him!”

“Yes?” He opened his notebook again.

“He said, ‘To hell!’ ”

“And the Lord—struck!” Then she closed her mouth tight, and looked at the doctor with big, shocked eyes.

He put away his notebook and withdrew an inch or two from her. “I see,” he said. She followed him along the seat, and opened her mouth to say something else, then thought the better of it. She broke out into smiles again. They sat in silence, very close together, till they reached the next station. When the train stopped, the doctor got up and asked briskly, “Now before I go, won’t you give me your name and address?”

For an answer she took him by the lapels of his coat and pulled his face right down to hers. She was looking very pleased with herself, as if she had made a discovery. “I’m an angel of the Lord,” she whispered.

“I see,” the doctor said again, disengaging himself. He left the carriage.

It was now quite dark. For the rest of the journey she was on her own again. Each time the train stopped, the guard, as he walked past with his flag, looked in. She smiled at him, and he said, “All right? Wouldn’t you like to come and sit in the van then?” he said at the last stop. She smiled in answer. “No?” he said. “It’d be company now!”

“Sh!” she said.

“Ah yes,” he said. The doctor was with him. They went down the platform, talking, and the train moved on.

Suddenly there was a low boom of thunder. Black clouds, which had hurried the night on, were bringing a storm. The night became charged with electricity. The thunder and flashes grew swiftly stronger and closer together; it was coming right at them. As it folded over the train like a mountain, a flash lit up the compartment, and there was a terrific clap. She stood up and opened the carriage door. Her eyes glittered with excitement; she stood half in and half out of the door, waiting for something to happen. Lightning lit her up and thunder followed, crashing up and down the sky. But nothing happened.

The storm had rushed to its climax and was speeding away. The apocalypse passed into wet black normality. The lightning lost its jagged edge, and after a while a long low sweeping noise indicated rain.

She hung on, and each rumble of thunder sounded as if it would be the last. The rumbling now sounded infinitely far away, like the troubles of another planet, and seemed to be fading more quickly, like the expanding galaxies, as it moved farther away. Eventually she let go her hold, while the thunder was still just audible, leaving the door swinging open behind her in the beating rain. The sky cleared; the rain stopped, and the train slowed into the terminus.

When it had pulled to a stop, the guard came to the window again. He jumped in. “She’s hopped it!” he called, and noticed the far door open again. “She’s jumped out like the other one,” he said.

The doctor pushed past behind him. “It’s my fault,” he cried, looking out; he’d turned bright red with embarrassment and annoyance.

“She’s gone,” said the guard, “gone from our ken.”

“That’s nonsense, man, go and ring down the line again.”

“She’s gone the way she came.”

“Don’t be absurd,” cried the doctor.

They both began talking at once, until the stationmaster, who had come in behind them, was abruptly revealed to them by the electric light which now unexpectedly came on.

They stood and listened to the rain, as if they expected to hear the lady come pattering down the track after them. The guard said to the stationmaster, “She said she was an angel of the Lord!”

He was a hard-bitten old man with a black skin, and he took this without surprise. After a minute or two of silence, he said slowly and contemptuously, “Now there’ll be an inquiry.”

He went to the far side of the compartment, and slowly pushed one finger four inches down the wall, making a path in the dust. Then he held his finger in front of the guard: “Look at this.”

The guard became immediately damped. “Aye; it’s shocking.”

“Right,” said the stationmaster, and the two of them left the compartment together, like two animals of the same breed, leaving the fretting doctor to follow. With its electric light on, the carriage began to lurch and grind towards the siding.