Tomato Cain and Other Stories Read online

  When it ended at last there was a rush for the door. But Eli Cain was before the first of his tormentors, hat in one hand and book in the other, out in the road as they pressed through.

  “Mr Cain, I’m surprised at you!” he heard, and “better than turnips, eh Eli?” “Festival for somebody, anyway!”

  He shambled up the road, mouth half-open, feeling as if the skin had been peeled off him. His brain had abandoned useless argument.

  Tomato Cain!” piped a voice, loud and shrill.

  There was a great roar of laughter. That would be Joseph Kelly’s cheeky Benjamin.

  “Tomato Cain!” shouted others, and again “Tomato Cain!” Their noise filled the whole valley.

  He quickened his steps, heart galloping, stopping only to snatch up the hymn-book when it flew from swinging hand into the mud.

  The laughter continued louder as he glanced back, hunted.

  “Tomato Cain!”

  “Tomato! Tomato Cain!”

  He knew, with a sudden twitch of agony, that Eli Cain Esquire had ceased to exist at a touch of Quilleash’s podgy finger.

  Panting, followed by a fading surge of chuckles, Tomato Cain fled up the hillside.

  END

  Chapter 3

  Enderby and the Sleeping Beauty

  A double-size chin. With a wide, pleasant mouth to say the thoughts from the long, tipped-back cranium above. These thoughts were just so many, docile and wholesome, like a well-ordered flock. Most concerned the laws and functions of machines, for Fred Enderby had been a mechanic since he began to screw strips of painted tin together in his mother’s back-yard in Warrington.

  LAC Enderby, Frederick, is the only man, I believe, to know the factual core of a legend that every child can tell when it has reached half a dozen years. How a princess pricked her finger on a magic needle and slept for a hundred years, with the whole palace, courtiers, scullions, dogs, in a trance where they fell. Round the palace grew a hedge of thorns so that no one could get in, or, once in, out. Until at the end of the appointed time, a handsome prince broke through and kissed the princess back to life, while every creature in the court stirred and moved again. That is the legend. Here are the facts:

  In 1942, Enderby was in North Africa on maintenance duty with an RAF survey truck. They were far to the south of the battle area when the great retreat to El Alamein reached its height. Helpless in the radio silence, knowing only from the rumbling, and the glow by night, that the enemy was closing on Egypt.

  Several times the party spotted planes, slow, sightless specks. To avoid the chance of capture they turned to the south-east, deeper into the desert. Flat barrenness gave place gradually to the wallowing Sahara.

  They were deep in that wilderness when the kamsin storm came upon them.

  The wind was of unnatural violence, Enderby said. Sand shifted in whole dunes. The party were totally unprepared. To go on was impossible. To leave the truck seemed suicidal. The sides of the thing trembled and drummed. Cans of petrol and a spare wheel tumbled away into the whirling dust.

  The truck itself became unstable. Twice they felt the three offside wheels lift and settle again. Then, even while they shifted gear to balance it, the vehicle went over.

  The officer in charge had his head crushed by falling equipment. Another man was trapped. A third smelt petrol, forced his way out, and was choked to death a few yards from the truck he could no longer see.

  Enderby was in the cab, unconscious.

  He woke at last from his own coughing. There was sand in his mouth. He lay upside down across the body of the driver.

  Enderby levered himself up and examined his mate. The man was dead, his face buried in a soft, suffocating layer that covered the inside of the splintered window.

  Enderby forced up the other door. Sand poured from it. The simoon had become a gritty breeze across the reshaped land. He slid out, coughing.

  The truck was half-buried. The rear door, once opened, had been held wide by the blast that poured inside. Nothing lived in there now. The man from Warrington rested a while, still half-stunned, among the smothered shapes.

  When Enderby set off alone the sun was still fierce. He had water in a full bottle: some fresh, some from the truck’s tank: and sufficient emergency rations to reach safety, if he could trust the sun and himself. He felt weakly bitter that the radio had smashed itself.

  At the top of each rise he stopped and turned about, shading his eyes: blinked and went on. He walked slowly, to conserve his strength. The glare beat up against his body.

  It was perhaps an hour after starting, Enderby says, that he first saw the thing.

  As he came to the sliding, coarse top of a shallow dune, its brighter colour struck his eye. A few hundred yards away. There was something man-made about that pale stone that he could just barely see.

  Enderby shouted once and began to run, slithering among the brown ripples.

  It was a building. Sand was heaped about it on every side. Only a part jutted from the desert, like a half-buried box. The roof and corners were formless, the pale walls deeply corroded.

  Enderby’s heart sank. He walked haltingly along the bare side of the place, turned a corner into the black, cool shadow. Just where the desert rose up under his feet and hid the building, he found a door.

  It was recessed between two of the flat, shallow buttresses that ran up the walls at intervals. Surprisingly, the lock was on the outside of the thin stone. (As Enderby said later, “An ordinary lock mechanism with no cover. It was all made of stone bars and big - it must ‘ave spread over ‘alf the door.”)

  He was able to open it. His dread of the desert forced and fought the lock until it submitted. The door ground and scraped until there was a gap wide enough for a man to enter. On the other side was complete blackness. “’Allo, in there!” Enderby shouted. “Ey!”

  The answer was a long, clapping echo.

  He found matches, stepped into the cool darkness and struck one. He was in a small, bricked antechamber. As the second match flared up he saw a heap of faggots. (“Sort of compressed fibre, they were made of,” Enderby said. “They lit easily. Queer. Made you feel you were kind of expected.”)

  With the slow-burning, smoky torch held high, and two cold spares stuffed inside his shirt, he entered a passage. The air was dry and dead and sweet.

  Then he dived to the wall, crouching, quivering.

  Nothing stirred.

  “Who's that?” said Enderby. “If it’s anybody, come ‘ere!” Then, remembering, he threw the torch.

  (“I saw a statue,” he said afterwards. “I felt - well, a sort of daft relief. Like a false alarm in a U certificate thriller.”)

  The figure stood man-high against the wall. Stone drapes exposed one polished shoulder and its arms were crossed. Round the head was a wide beaded band of blue stones. And the face —

  (That's what'd given me the start,” said Enderby. “The eyes, long, bulging black ovals - no pupils - they were the worst. And the mouth and that - as if ‘e’d sucked every dirty thing in the world into ‘is mind, and was damn ‘appy about it.”)

  When he picked up the torch he began to see others. They stood in two facing rows, lining the walls of the high tunnel.

  He walked in the middle. The black eyes flickered in the light. His feet were like a cat’s in the deep, black dust.

  The figures were of both men and women. Some were painted, in dull colours: blue and green stones sparkled in their dress: more than once Enderby saw gold in the carved folds of a woman’s hair. And every face repelled him.

  They were amazingly expressive, he said. Each seemed to have a double meaning. A twisting of the brows and a wrinkling round the empty eyes, and madness showed through the face’s laugh. Were they heavy and stupid, there was vicious cunning also. In eagerness was slavering depravity: in innocence treachery. Gentleness meant cruelty. (“It was like people in a bad dream. They wanted to make y’ see through them. Indecent.”) He was puzzled by small holes drille
d in the centre of each forehead and throat, and in the robes below.

  On the walls between them, depressed in the brick, were tablets of writing. Symbols were nicked out like tiny tooth-prints, row upon row. (“Like something a tike’s chewed.”)

  The tunnel curved gradually. Enderby reckoned himself fifty yards along when he could no longer see the entrance. He began to whistle without a tune because hope had dropped to vague curiosity. The walls echoed against him. He walked in silence.

  Then he saw that the figures ended just ahead. He passed the last leering face into an open darkness that must have been far under the desert. The air was thick.

  Enderby crept like a glow-worm in his circle of light. His eyes went left and right.

  He watched the guiding walls so intently that his knee struck what he did not see. It was a high-mounted slab. The top was carved to such a likeness of soft cushioning. (“Like petrified silk. It'd ‘ave made y’ sleepy to look at it. Like the mattress adverts.”)

  Enderby strongly disclaims any knowledge of art. Sculpture bores him and his only visit to a gallery was to the engineering section.

  But what he saw on the stone couch, he says, was not sculpture.

  He forgot the darkness, the unnatural figures, the choking air. He forgot the truck disaster and that he was lost in the desert.

  (“She wasn’t just wonderful in the ordinary way. I can’t tell you ‘ow. Look ‘ere, if y’ take the most smashing film stars - Betty ‘Utton, Garson - as many as y’ like - and all they've got between ‘em, and multiply it by ten, and then… oh, I dunno! She was different to them anyway - Eastern, of course - but so different in other ways. What I said, I just can’t begin to describe her …”)

  But she was made of stone.

  Enderby stood worshipping until the torch hand sank and the figure was shadowed.

  He went to the magnificent head. The stone, he says, was tinted to life, but no paint showed itself.

  Light from one raised hand smoked down across the Lancashire man’s wide eyes and long chin and tunic: and over the pale-sallow nestling stone creature with the sleeping eyes. At last Enderby leaned forward.

  Very gently he kissed the sculpture on the mouth.

  (“She was - I've told you. Oh, I suppose it was, well - perverted. A statue, I mean. Her lips were cold.”)

  Then fear replaced all he felt.

  For the figure moved.

  Enderby started back. The delicate face had turned away. Now it came back again, very slowly. Coy. Away, back. Away, back. Rhythmically, swivelling on the carved throat, the beautiful lady shook her head.

  “‘Inge,” said Enderby’s whisper, because he was very much afraid. “‘Inge, that.”

  The movement grew stronger, pendulum-regular. And now the eyes opened, black, horribly void. His throat seemed to wither.

  Points of light moved. In the tunnel. From side to side they went, slowly. Jet eyes in metronome faces. (“Like the Chinese ornaments that keep rocking their ‘eads when y’ve started them. Only slowly. Terribly slowly. And these shook them.”)

  Enderby sweated. He pulled the other faggots from his shirt. A moment later the whole chamber flared into light.

  From it led not one passage, he saw, but five. And in each were figures that leered in perfect time. Somewhere there was a heavy murmuring rumble.

  Enderby collected himself. He touched the icy stone body of the beauty. From a pocket of his shirt he fumbled a stump of blue copying pencil.

  Across the perfect waist he printed, thick and almost steadily: “F ENDERBY, WARRINGTON, RAF, 1942.”

  He stuffed the defiling pencil away. “And now,” he said, much too loudly, “I will go and get started again.”

  It was when he turned towards the tunnels that he saw the spikes.

  They were coming out very slowly. About the pace of a common slug in a Warrington allotment, and with no more noise.

  One from the forehead, one from the throat and one from the folded hands; others from the studded robes. From each figure, and above to the ceiling, the points shone and grew, sprouting across the passages. Closing them.

  “Christ!” Enderby said.

  He sprang into the centre tunnel, opposite the slab, ran with the waving treble torch. It cast stubby points in a forest of pikes upon the ceiling. Nightmarishly, the dust muffled his boots.

  Twice he kicked up yellow-white human fragments. He tripped on a carpeted cage of ribs and slashed his hand on a lengthening spike.

  He saw no daylight.

  Instead, a wall of arrow-lettered brick faced him at the end. He tore and kicked, trying to open it, before he realised he could be in the wrong passage.

  Then he was flying back between the sprouting pikes. They covered half the space with a mass of jagged bars. Even the spaces between them would be death cages. Back across the bones.

  The chamber itself, when he reached it, sprouted iron from each wall. A deep throb shook everything. The whole building was thrusting at him.

  Enderby panted by the slab without a glance. Down the left-hand tunnel.

  At each nod from the jet-eyed lines, the points sprang a little farther across.

  If he had not seen the light of the entrance, Enderby swears he would have been insane before the points took him.

  As it was, he dragged himself through the last twenty feet when they were little more than a foot apart. Another second and the spike which ripped open his water-bottle would have held him by the rib bones.

  But he was outside. He stood in the shadowed sand with blood and water trickling together down his body (“In the nick of time. Like a film ‘ero.”) One of the last things he remembers is heaving the door shut and stumbling away from the ponderous booming that hung in the still heat.

  Four days later Enderby was spotted by a reconnaissance car. He was walking in small circles.

  When they brought him in, three of the deep lacerations in his side and arms were infected. He was totally collapsed. During his travels he had written two half-legible letters in his pay-book. One to his fiancee, a feverishly confused apology for something unspecified. The second was addressed to the Warrington Town Council, complaining of floods. He had almost died of thirst.

  As he recovered, Enderby was eager at first to tell his story. Coupled with his letters, it made them prescribe further sleep.

  “Do y’ think it could ‘ave been only that?” he asked me later. “Sometimes it makes y’ wonder.” Then he indicated the parallel scars. “Truck accident I don’t think!”

  He told me the story while he carved a piece of perspex into a Spitfire badge to send his fiancee. “Y’ know,” said Enderby, as I had not laughed, “if I ‘ad a lot more leave and that, I wouldn't mind ‘aving a look back there some time. Bet it’s covered up again, though.

  “Y’ see, I ‘ardly touched ‘er face more than a feather, like. And it started all that. Stone weights and pendulums, I suppose.

  “Now, listen! Where did the acceleration come from? Tell me that!” He put down the transparent Spitfire and prodded me and paused to impress.

  “There’s a machine in that place, boy! Damn near perpetual motion, that’s what. They'd be worth something, I tell y’, them plans —”

  First and last a mechanic, Enderby.

  But also a prince. Who left his claim in writing.

  END

  Chapter 4

  Minuke

  The estate agent kept an uncomfortable silence until we reached his car. “Frankly, I wish you hadn’t got wind of that,’ he said. “Don‘t know how you did: I thought I had the whole thing carefully disposed of. Oh, please get in.”

  He pulled his door shut and frowned. “It puts me in a rather awkward spot. I suppose I’d better tell you all I know about that case, or you’d be suspecting me of heaven knows what kinds of chicanery in your own.”

  As we set off to see the property I was interested in. he shifted the cigarette to the side of his mouth.

  “It’s quite a distance, so I
can tell you on the way there.” he said. “We’ll pass the very spot, as a matter of fact, and you can see it for yourself. Such as there is to see.”

  It was away back before the war (said the estate agent). At the height of the building boom. You remember how it was: ribbon development in full blast everywhere; speculative builders sticking things up almost overnight. Though at least you could get a house when you wanted it in those days.

  I've always been careful in what I handle - I want you to understand that. Then one day I was handed a packet of coast-road bungalows, for letting. Put up by one of these gone-tomorrow firms, and bought by a local man. I can’t say I exactly jumped for joy. but for once the things looked all right, and - business is inclined to be business.

  The desirable residence you heard about stood at the end of the row. Actually, it seemed to have the best site. On a sort of natural platform, as it were, raised above road level and looking straight out over the sea. Like all the rest, it had a simple two-bedroom, lounge, living-room. kitchen, bath-room layout. Red-tiled roof, roughcast walls. Ornamental portico, garden-strip all round. Sufficiently far from town, but with all conveniences.

  It was taken by a man named Pritchard. Cinema projectionist, I think he was. Wife, a boy of ten or so, and a rather younger daughter. Oh - and dog, one of those black, lop-eared animals. They christened the place ‘Minuke’, M-I-N-U-K-E. My Nook. Yes, that’s what I said too. And not even the miserable excuse of its being phonetically correct. Still hardly worse than most.

  Well, at the start everything seemed quite jolly. The Pritchards settled in and busied themselves with rearing a privet hedge and shoving flowers in. They’d paid the first quarter in advance and, as far as I was concerned, were out of the picture for a bit.

  Then, about a fortnight after they’d moved in, I had a telephone call from Mrs P to say there was something odd about the kitchen tap. Apparently the thing had happened twice. The first time was when her sister was visiting them, and tried to fill the kettle: no water would come through for a long time, then suddenly it squirted violently and almost soaked the woman. I gather the Pritchards hadn’t really believed this - thought she was trying to find fault with their little nest - it had never happened before, and she couldn’t make it happen again. Then, about a week later, it did: with Mrs Pritchard this time. After her husband had examined the tap and could find nothing wrong with it, he decided the water supply must be faulty. So they got on to me.