The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories

A SMELL OF FEAR By William Sansom

Young Diana Craig bent over her big white bath. All she could see was curved white enamel, and her own pink hands, as she snicked at finger-nail after finger-nail with scissors.

The door behind was locked. March sunshine blew in white as snowlight, it showed up everything very clearly. After her hot bath, Di Craig felt rosy warm under her wrap. She had run the water away, and now the bath was empty save for an odd spatter of water drops, as if it had rained and stopped.

From outside came a rattle of drilling from men building the new flats beyond the end of the garden. A concrete mixer throbbed regularly underneath. The noise made your head ache: though it was company too, it was a sound of life and movement.

Suddenly she started back. The scissors flew open and cut lightly along her thumb. 'Help!' she yelled. She yelled it making no sound at all, only the word shouting huge in her mind. Then her hand went up to the little left breast that covered her thumping heart and she said: 'Honestly, Craig, nerves, you're just like an old lady of ninety!' Again she spoke silently, not even moving her lips. She pressed at the lightly cut thumb and looked again into the bath. And still she gave a little shudder.

She had thought the bath was full of shrimps and fleas.

Even now, it looked very like it. Many of the nail parings had caught themselves up in separate globes of water. However white such nails looked on her fingers, they gleamed yellowish against the white enamel. They just looked curled, and wet, like shrimps or sandfleas. And the surface tension of the water gave them a greyish blur of legs and feelers.

Now a big dark drop of blood splashed down among the shrimp parings, it washed out pale pink and brought her abruptly to her proper senses.

Tool,' she said, and went back along the passage to her room for the colourless, odourless iodine, 'I hope it stings you.'

Nerves. Nerves, she thought — too much time alone, not lonely but alone, bedsitting in a bedsitter, not going out enough, not seeing friends enough. Why? Shy. Cloaking your shyness in a pretence laziness, cloaking yourself too in the huge comfortable anonymity of London. For in this Victorian suburb where among peeling grey houses you had your bed-sitting-room, there might be companionable gardens and trees — yet everyone still went strictly about their own business. Impartial plum blossom blew like confetti on everybody's shoulders: but only those who had been introduced exchanged a smile.

Nerves. There was that man, for instance, breathing hot down your neck in the fish queue. You had noticed him before, he seemed to hang about the shopping centre in the mornings, you had caught him looking at you once or twice, and once in a rather frightening way, darkly photographed behind in the glass of a shop window — your image and his looming like figures seen through dark glasses, two photographs greyly cut by the reflected sunshine among the coloured calendars and paints of an art-craft shop. Being behind you, he had seemed about to lean forward and, overshadowing, pounce.

In the fish queue, you had edged so far forward against the woman in front that this lady had looked round with shocked grey eyes. Yet the man behind had also edged closer. You had to move further in against the woman. A few feet away in the shop, the straw-hatted fishmonger went red-faced and muscular about his business of slapping the fish up and weighing and wrapping it in newspaper; the cash-till rang busily; a hose tap splashed in the gritty basin: everything was everyday and breezily safe. Yet a curious curtain of home-cured haddocks had been erected above the fish-slab. These hung like long yellow autumn leaves caught in a wire mesh, and the sunlight shining through them indeed sent a kind of leaf-dappling on to the white tiles further inside the shop. Perhaps this curtain, though of haddocks, had thrown a net over your nerves?

So you had left the queue, Ashless, for the spacious cold meat counters of a delicatessen a good few minutes away.

Yet — she considered as now she wound a scrap of sticking plaster round her thumb — what had really happened? Nothing. Why should the man not go shopping every morning? He carried a worn black oilcloth bag, he wore what amounts to one of the uniforms of artists — bright narrow trousers, a coloured shirt, slightly straggling hair: perhaps he was a painter, living by himself and working at home? All the more reason for him to be looking into that art shop. In any case, plenty of men nowadays did their own shopping. And had he really breathed down her neck? She could not be sure at all. Nor, for that matter, was she at all sure that a man had ever purposely put himself against her that other day in the underground: the train naturally jolted, and where else could the man have gone to in that pack of bodies?

Nerves. She stood now in her room paring the last nails and despising herself — or that other person who must be considered as herself. 'Nerves' must be stopped. In her present clinical mood she was quite sure she could stop them. She had read quite often, too, of a kind of plain girl who, for want of admirers, began to imagine herself followed by men. Was this perhaps something to do with it? But she was not plain. Regular features, green-brown eyes she felt to be 'interesting', and quite pretty hair nearly blonde. With a natural curl. At dances, she was quite in demand. Did she lack something vital? Or was it more that she had just — quieter habits? For instance, she really preferred to spend an evening at a concert rather than at a dance or a film: she preferred the quietness, if one could say such a thing, of music.

Sometimes in a double mirror she had caught sight of her profile and had noticed a tone of placidity in the face, as though this profiled stranger were all a little too heavy or pallid or something, shapely but overdone, like a Roman bust. Lips — not enough colour? Pale eyelashes? Cheeks too full and flat? It could not be exactly said — and she avoided saying it.

A mixture of vanity and humility told her that she was a good-looking, unattractive girl.

Part-time work in an office and various home-typing assignments took Miss Craig about a bit: she grew to know very well the twelve-minute walk from where she lived to the bus and the underground station. The walk involved her in four or five streets and turnings, leading slightly uphill towards home, and becoming quieter, more spacious and nerve-racking as she went. The houses became bigger, with ample gardens and bushes and trees, with suspicious laurel-hedged drives. Some were so large that nowadays small top turret windows were no longer cared for, and stared uncurtained like eager eye-sockets. Golden privet hedged its dull yellow against cream stucco and grey London brick; lime trees hung low; and particularly the dark-leaved may-tree grew here. The first road home was lit with a furnace glow of orange sodium lamps; then these ended abruptly at the first turning, and the next streets with their branch-mottled Victorian lanterns became all the darker, and in the darkness, dangerous.

The day after Miss Craig cut her thumb, she had to go to the post office to dispatch a manuscript. While she waited at the counter, she happened to glance round at the telephone kiosks behind — and there, in the shadow, she saw a glassed-in face studying her. She looked harder, trying to make out whose face it was — then shut her eyes. It was indeed that same man, the man from the fish queue. And his teeth had smiled. She turned quickly away. Her heart struggled with her breath. Had he smiled directly at her? Or had he only been smiling to himself at words spoken to him through the little black earpiece?

She paid for her parcel and turned to leave. But the telephone box opened and she saw quite close his hand as it swung the booth door open. It was coloured mauve and red; it seemed to be all birthmark.

Out in the street, the man followed her. He turned in her direction — away from the shops. She saw him limping after her. He had a lame leg? Desperately she pretended not to be looking round at him but back up at a clock sticking out above a jeweller's shop.

She walked as fast as she could, and turned the first corner. She hurried on a hundred yards — to her bowed head endless yards of pavement squares and kerb and iron telephone and electric casings — before she dared look round again. But he had turned the corner and was coming after her.

It was broad daylight, two o'clock in the afternoon, an early spring afternoon, the trees sprinkled with buds, bright yellow dots on the branches everywhere; and she pretended to herself, even then, that she only kept her eyes lowered against all the dazzle and the slanting bright sunlight that flashed on the empty windows along the street. Wet tearful lowered lashes made rainbow colours close to her eyes. But. empty windows? Her heart stuttered again in absurd daylit terror, for empty was exact, no one stood at a window, and there was no one at all abroad in the street, it was like a city suddenly emptied of its people, the deader for the bright sunlight, dead but for the two, herself and the man limping after her. Simply the lunch hour, she breathed, simply the dead hour of eating, when everybody sat behind doors at the backs of their houses.

Round a corner came sailing a butcher's boy cycling with folded arms, whistling at the top of his breathless breath. A policeman, a far-away blue-domed sacristan, strode from behind a lonely parked car.

'Officer! Quick!' she shouted — from pale lips that never moved nor made a sound. But what should she say? Her footsteps slowed, she walked sure on her heels again, she smiled to herself.

And she turned round once, quickly, to look back at the man. He was standing stock still, legs apart, in the very middle of the pavement, watching her. He looked like a man who has given up the race. But then she saw him make a sudden movement. He fumbled out a small white thing from his pocket, seemed to hold it out to her — then in the same movement circled the thing round and slipped it into a bright red pillar-box suddenly sprouted, it seemed, in that place. A letter! Posting a letter! She felt ashamed, and the more sorry for herself.

But then… why walk all that way from a post office to post a letter?

A boxer dog strode stiff-legged from behind a gate-post and sniffed at her. She flinched, began to circle round it, then pulled herself together and walked straight by, containing her slight fear as hard as she could. They smell fear, they can smell it, she muttered, I must hide it. But how could you hide something inside you that they smelled?

Several days passed. He seemed always to be about, she saw him in the distance or across the shopping street at least once each day.

He gave her the impression of 'hanging about'. Why? He seemed to be watching people, touching them with secret thoughts, establishing a one-sided contact with them in which

— though nobody seemed to notice him — they were nevertheless used. But then — men shoppers are always slow, they wander about with a hopeless look, they have no children and kitchens to hurry back to. With a grocery list in their pocket you find them dreaming away into an ironmonger's window, dreaming up wire-netting, bone meal, nuts and bolts. So why attribute so much stealth to this one particular man? Because he stared at people? Don't, then, all people stare from time to time? Yes. But so much?

She stood trying to wedge a parcel in the crook of her arm, getting it caught up with the brolly handle and her bag, when she saw him suddenly across the street and in panic she dropped the lot.

A woman stood shrinking opposite him, and he in his corduroys was dancing to and fro. The woman was trapped by a pram behind her, and she looked desperate, not knowing which way to go as the man, his whole body face on to her, blocked her movement forward. Miss Craig's lips let out a little scream

— but stopped it just in time as she saw both the man and the woman smile at each other and pass on their various ways. They had simply wanted to pass each other, dodging face to face. but how awful, thought Miss Craig, if it had been me what would I have done? Her heart jumped again, as she bent blushing down to pick up bag, brolly and parcel — these at least excused her scream to anyone watching her, but she felt a dozen eyes scornfully boring at her, giants passing above as she squatted low on the pavement.

Once more she shook her head and muttered: 'Must snap out of this. Far too jumpy.' And she took immediate action, turned to a telephone box and rang up a couple of friends with the idea of arranging an afternoon's tea. They were both out. It left her lonelier than ever. Yet also relieved. The cure for loneliness is not necessarily other people. Often, having arranged to meet 'other people'-she then envisaged the meeting, the hours spent then with the too well-known, quite well-liked faces, and this only erected a further kind of cage about her. She enjoyed it when they came. But the anticipation was dulling.

When now she walked home through her four streets, she made a point of stopping to talk with a woman she knew by sight. This woman was always hurrying about the little front garden — clipping hedges, changing milk bottles, cleaning windows: her flat must have had no access to the back garden, she came out this way for air. They had first met over a stream of water flooding the pavement from this woman's house. Now, unusually, she was dressed in a smart tweed suit, off and out somewhere, yet pulling at a weed on the way.

'Hello,' said Miss Craig brightly, 'all dressed up and nowhere to go?' She bit her tongue. As usual, at these self-conscious times, what she said seemed to have a double bearing _r on the situation, as jokes about cemeteries crop up in the company of the recently bereaved. Why, now, shouldn't this woman have somewhere to go?

The woman looked down at her suit. 'Oh — this? I've had it years. But it's nice to know it looks like new. Of course that little tailor's a dream, I'd give you her name, only—' and she looked up and down Miss Craig rather slyly.

'Only?'

'Well…'The woman gave a merry little laugh.'Only, you're the arty type, aren't you — and I was wondering, would it suit?'

Miss Craig's eyes opened wide with surprise. It was true, then! Often in the solicitor's office, where for half the week she helped with the overflow documents, the others had hinted at her Artistic' connections — freelance typing for dramatists, novelists, poets! Indeed, among a local draper's stock-taking lists and an architect's endless specifications, she had once dealt with a few chapters of a shorter guide to 'practical philosophy' and once a few poems by a poet who had never paid her — and drawing from these memories, she now half believed herself to have an entree into some kind of vague Bohemia Indeed she wore her fair hair in plaits coiled in a bun, and about her dress there were many small touches of velvet and even tufts of fur, though these derived less from her 'poetic' connections than a kind of camouflage-adaptation to the other women who attended musical concerts.

However, what this woman had now said gave her something to think about for the rest of the way home. Perhaps she was artistic? She thought of the green velveteen curtains she had fixed up in her room, the majolica plate on the wall, the floppy suede volume of Tennyson. Otherwise, why had she kept these particular things from the break-up of the old Bristol home?

A few minutes later she had to pass the boxer dog. She skirted round it. Then deliberately retraced her steps and walked boldly back near to, as a discipline. It growled, she ran, and arrived home with her head aching.

She could die of fear. People are afraid of the dark, people are afraid of walking alone — it's not only me, she said, it's not, I know it's not. but still. and that man began to haunt her more and more. On the Sunday evening in the foyer of their local cinema she was buying nuts, and saw him standing about, waiting, watching. She had read in papers that this kind of man had 'staring eyes': but his were not staring — they were dull, glazed, inward-dreaming eyes. She hurried on into the cinema, her face turned away in a last hope that he might not be looking. Throughout the film, as people changed places round her, she imagined it was he, only he, coming closer. Nearer and nearer in the dark, seat by seat. The film showed a simple love story, in the country, with plenty of sunshine: removed from it by her immediate fear, what she saw of it seemed smaller, further away than usual — it looked old-fashioned, or like an amateur film. When at last someone came apologising along the row to take the seat next to her, she rose and struggled out in the opposite direction, never looking back. The lights in the main street outside reassured her: but she called a taxi, fearful of the darker streets home, and sat fingering the coins in her purse, watching the meter, saying: 'Only this once, only this once,' and trying to stop her heart fluttering like a little animal inside her vest.

And the next day again — she was sheltering from a dark rain shower in the station arcade, beside newspaper sellers and a dozen others, Londoners all appalled at the rain, grumbling as if they saw it for the first time in their lives — when edging round a curved shop front inside the arcade she saw first his awful leather shopping bag and then his limping figure following round. She held on, hoping — but he came steadily towards her, head forward. She ran out into the rain, drenched herself crossing the road, rounded a corner and scuttled into a thin hole in the wall, a doorless cafe: men stood against the walls all round. Were they laughing at her voice, even her wetness? She took heart. They were British workmen, they would defend her if he came in.

Why, why am I like this? her dry eyes cried to the little pools of tea on the oilcloth. I'm not afraid of standing up for myself. I'm not a neurotic. I'm all right usually. In the bus queue I told that woman with the stupid goffered hat exactly where she stood — at the end of the line. 'You jumped,' I said. And didn't I give the girl in the sweet-shop a look when she mimicked that coloured fellow?

The next morning began with a shower — then the sun blazed out, cleansing everything, shining like sun at the seaside, water sparkling everywhere. She almost forgot about that man, it was such a lovely day.

As she typed away, the afternoon grew warmer and warmer, the wind changed to a slow-moving draught of warm air fanned up from the south-west — she even had to get up and open the window. At last her work was done, and ready for the post. She hesitated before putting on her coat — surely it would be chilly when night fell? Yet it was still so warm. But she put it on, for safety.

By the time the letter was posted it was dark. The air smelled of warm leaves, people were walking more slowly, strolling in their winter clothes as if it were summer. Street lights picked out the buds speckled against the dark. Miss Craig, too, began to stroll. Even in the darker streets towards home, where the lamp-standards were wider apart, it seemed lighter because of the calm warm air. But the thick laurel hedges were black — and suddenly from behind one of these a man stepped out, her heart jumped, he stood quite still watching her walk towards him, and then she heard a giggle, there was a girl in the shadow of the laurel, and she smiled to herself: 'He was afraid of me. And she warmed with a big love for all lovers linked in pairs, who never walked alone threatening the pavements with an inquiring eye.

Four more streets, one very long, and then home. She turned a corner, and coming across the road — there in the loneliest, darkest part of the walk was that man…

She went on walking forward, terrified to stop, but beginning to veer away in a long wide curve, as if she had turned the corner only to curve away across the road.

But the man changed direction too. He had been going one way, and now abruptly turned toward her. There was no question now. Her head hummed with terror. Home, home, please home, it hummed. There was a roundabout way back. She lost the pretence of her careful curve and made it a complete half-circle and hurried off, trying not to run. Yet as fast as she walked, he was behind her. Everyone else walked slower in the false summer night — only he faster. She could hear the uneven sound of his limp, he must be poling himself hard along, his shadow would be large in the pools of light beneath the lamps as he passed — and how now to get home, by this strange roundabout way, through streets half known?

One corner. Another. She bent forward on her knees, walking faster — and then suddenly broke into a run. She ran a few steps, then slowed, running made it feel worse. and then ahead along the dark street she saw what she had quite forgotten, the big pub at the back behind her own street, the big blaze of light, and now in the warm air people standing about outside… she half walked, half stumbled towards it, then slowed down as she saw several heads had already turned towards her.

Now she had to walk alone into the radius of curious eyes: and defences rose, she shortened her steps for a prettier carriage, she turned her head aside, pretending to look at the opposite side of the road. But the opposite houses lay ridiculously in darkness: so she raised her eyes to the roofs, thinking they would think she was looking at the stars. There were no stars: well, looking for a star, her nerves raved.

But alone? She could still hear him — far behind.

Rustic benches, a broad stretch of gravel back from the pavement, and the wide bottom plaster walls of the pub reflecting light and frosted glass from inside: the figures of a few people in two groups dark against this light: no cars — it was a local pub indeed. In one of the groups there stood two women. The light picked out their coloured coats and one head of bleached hair: women, comforting women. The other group was made of young men leaning and watching, not drinking, passing the time.

She slowed down as she came into this safe circle of light. Safe? But she was ordinarily nervous of going into a pub at night — old prejudices told her these were not nice places for a girl — yet now, it was the only thing to do? But suppose he came in too? And talked to her? Or just sat waiting for her to leave? Sat waiting until the pub closed? There was nothing she could say about him to the manager? Nothing.

Then go in, drink, telephone for a taxi? She gave a high gulp of a giggle, it came out, she swallowed it in disgust and still stood fluttering there outside in the light like a big clothy moth. The group with the women took a casual glance at her. But the five or six young men stared openly, grossly, though they made no sound whatsoever.

It was instead one of the women who suddenly turned, laughed, and gave a little high wolf whistle towards her, and the others with her laughed — and Diana Craig felt the whole world against her and ran off into the dark.

Two of the youths separated themselves quietly and followed her. They were so quiet it might have been part of the shadow of the laurel that moved.

Out of the light, she began to run easily, loping in long strides, coat clutched above her knees — but the two youths ran faster, quick and silent on thick rubber soles, so that when they caught up with her she had not even heard them.

No sound came when she opened her mouth at a dark shape on her right, and another on her left. For a few paces they doubled easily along close on either side of her, jeering at her, quick, smooth, hard words, one after another: 'Whatya runnin' for, princess?' 'Hard to get!' 'Darling, you're killing me.' 'We're friends, be friendly, we're friends.' 'Oh my poor feet.'

It stopped her. She stood panting between them. 'I -1 don't know you,' she said. And then: 'Help, help me.'

Dark shapes against the darkness, no faces, only smiling teeth catching light from nowhere.

'- of course we'll help you. That's what we're here for, aren't we, brother? Just step inside, princess —'

There were no houses. It was where the flats were being built, waste land, concrete mixers, drills going all day to make your head rock, swarming with builders, and now no one, no one at all, no light, only mud —

'- and you can have two helpings of help —' 'Go — go!' she piped high, but her mouth was full of cloth and a hand hard over it and they were pushing her in, stumbling over mud and down behind something, huts, rubble, a fence of doors.

A light did go on. A light from across the street. Shone on doors, doors, doors, all over behind them old doors propped up to make a fence, and now close down their hard young faces

breathing effort, still talking hard at her as one braced her arms and the other fumbled as she went down on her knees.

'It's the spring in us, miss.'

'I gotta daffodil.'

'Where is it, where is it —'

'Ah!'

The hand over her mouth had gone, the cloth cleared, she screamed loud, a fist crashed like a brick at her mouth, the scream gulped, sobbed — and then another voice, loud and clear:

'You bloody bastards!'

The two heads left her, fell back, and she saw with horror the man had come; he was flailing about him with the old black shopping bag; he had it with him even at night, and now like a huge bat it flew round in the air cutting at the youths' faces. They put up their hands, kicked out at him once, then ran, ran, leaving him panting alone with her, and he reached out his arms to her still kneeling in the mud, and his coloured hands were on her, she saw the purple, red, yellow stains as they grasped forward.

'No!' she screamed and screamed. 'No I'

'Quiet, quietly —'

'Ssshh' — he said, lifting her, and she hit him in the face.

'You followed me; I'll scream, you followed —'

'Ssshh — I only wanted to —'

'No-o-o!' she screamed.

— paint —'

Then blackness, as she fainted away in his arms, and the first people came hurrying up from the houses in the dark.

Later, he was jailed for three years.