Tomato Cain and Other Stories Read online

  It was blatant exhibitionism now: as if he were proffering a bill on a plate, with himself itemised in it.

  “There’s a limit even to journalists’ curiosity,” I said.

  Hutchinson was ahead of me, solemnly explaining. “Now! This is my theory! You’ve heard of poltergeist phenomena, of course? Unexplainable knockings, scratchings, minor damage and so on. I’ve studied them in books - and they’re always connected with development, violent emotional development, in young people. A sort of uncontrolled offshoot of the … personality. D’you follow?”

  “Wait a minute,” Joe said. “That’s taking a lot for granted if you like!”

  But I remembered reading such cases. One, investigated by psychical researchers, had involved a fifteen-year-old boy: ornaments had been thrown about by no visible agency. I took a glance at the unchipped gilt dancers on the sideboard before Hutchinson spoke again.

  “No, my wife may not have been adolescent, but in some ways … she was … so to speak, retarded.”

  He looked as pleased as if he had just been heavily tipped. If that was pure intellectual triumph, it was not good to see.

  “Then … the sounds began,” Joe said, “while she was still alive?”

  Hutchinson shook his head emphatically.

  “Not till three weeks after the funeral! That’s the intriguing part, don’t you see? They were faint and unidentifiable at first - naturally I just put down traps for rats or mice. But by another month, they were taking on the present form.”

  Joe gave a back-street sniff and rubbed a hand over his chin. “Hell, you ask us to believe your poltergeist lies low until nearly a month after the - the - ”

  “After the medium, shall we say, is dead!” His cold-bloodedness was fascinating.

  Joe looked across at me and raised his eyebrows.

  “Gentlemen, perhaps I’m asking you to accept too much? Well, we shall see. Please remember that I am only too happy that you should form your own - your own - ” Hutchinson’s voice dropped to a whisper. He raised his hand. His eyes caught ours as he listened.

  My spine chilled.

  Somewhere above us in the house were faint sounds. A scuffling.

  “That’s it!”

  I tiptoed to the door and got it open in time to hear a last scamper overhead. Yes, it could have been a kitten, I thought; but it had come so promptly on cue. I was on the stairs when Hutchinson called out, as if he were the thing’s manager: “No more for the present! You’ll probably get another manifestation in forty minutes or so.”

  “Cue for the next performance,” I thought.

  I searched the staircase with my torch. At the top ran the little passage Hutchinson had described; open on one side, with banisters, and on the other, a dark papered wall. The linoleum was bare. There was nothing to be seen, nor any open doors. The very dinginess of this narrow place was eerie.

  Downstairs I found Joe feverishly unpacking his apparatus. Hutchinson was watching, delighted.

  “Anything I can possibly do, Mr Banner? Threads across the passage - oh, yes? How very ingenious! You’ve your own drawing pins? -excellent! Can I carry that lamp for you?”

  And he led the way upstairs.

  We searched the shabby bedrooms first. Only one was in use, and we locked all of them and sealed the doors.

  In half an hour preparations were complete. Hair-thin threads were stretched across the passage at different levels; adhesive squares lay in patterns on the linoleum. Joe had four high-powered lamps ready to flood the place at the pressure of a silent contact. I took the Leica; he himself now carried an automatic miniature camera.

  “Four shots a second with this toy,” he was telling Hutchinson, while I went to check a window outside the bathroom. I still favoured the idea of a cat: they so often make a habitual playground of other people’s houses.

  The window was secure. I was just sticking an additional seal across the join when I sniffed scent; for a moment I took it to be from soap in the bathroom. Sickly, warm, strangely familiar. Then it came almost overpoweringly.

  I returned as quickly and quietly as I could to the stairhead.

  “Smell it?” Joe breathed in the darkness.

  “Yes, what d’you suppose - ?”

  “Ssh!”

  There was a sound not four yards away, as I judged it: a tap on the linoleum. Huddled together, we all tensed. It came again, and then a scamper of feet - small and light, but unmistakable - feet in flat shoes. As if something had run across the far end of the passage. A pause - a slithering towards us - then that same shuffle we had heard earlier in the evening, clear now: it was the jigging, uneven stamp of an infant’s attempt to dance! In that heavy, sweet darkness, the recognition of it came horribly.

  Something brushed against me: Banner’s elbow.

  At the very next sound he switched on all his lamps. The narrow place was flung into dazzling brightness - it was completely empty! My head went suddenly numb inside. Joe’s camera clicked and buzzed, cutting across the baby footsteps that came hesitating towards us over the floor. We kept our positions, eyes straining down at nothing but the brown faded pattern of the linoleum. Within inches of us, the footsteps changed their direction in a quick swerve and clattered away to the far corner. We waited. Every vein in my head was banging.

  The silence continued. It was over.

  Banner drew a thick raucous breath. He lowered the camera, but his sweaty face remained screwed up as if he were still looking through the viewfinder. “Not a sausage!” he whispered, panting. “Not a bloody sausage!”

  The threads glistened there unbroken; none of the sticky patches was out of place.

  “It was a kiddie,” Joe said. He has two of his own. “Hutchinson!”

  “Yes?” The flabby face was white, but he seemed less shaken than we others.

  “How the hell did you - ?” Banner sagged against the wall and his camera dangled, swinging slowly on its safety strap. “No - it was moving along the floor. I could have reached out and touched - My God, I need a drink!”

  We went downstairs.

  Hutchinson poured out. Joe drank three whiskies straight off but he still trembled. Desperate to reassure himself, he began to play the sceptic again immediately. As if with a personal grievance, he went for Hutchinson.

  “Overdid that sickly smell, you know! Good trick - oh, yes, clever - particularly when we weren’t expecting it!”

  The waiter was quick with his denials: it had always accompanied the sounds, but he had wanted us to find out for ourselves; this time it had been stronger than usual.

  “Take it easy, Joe - no violence!” I said. He pushed my hand off his arm.

  “Oh, clever! That kind of talc, gripe-watery, general baby smell! But listen to this, Mr Bloody Hutchinson: it should be more delicate, and you only get it quite that way with very tiny babies! Now this one was able to walk, seemingly. And the dancing - that comes at a different stage again. No, you lack experience, Mr H! This is no baby that ever was!”

  I looked at Hutchinson.

  He was nodding, evidently pleased. “My theory exactly,” he said. “Could we call it … a poltergeisted maternal impulse?”

  Joe stared. The full enormity of the idea struck him.

  “Christ … Almighty!” he said, and what grip he still had on himself went. He grabbed at his handkerchief just in time, before he was sick.

  When he felt better, I set about collecting the gear.

  Hutchinson fussed and pleaded the whole time, persuasive as any door-to-door salesman in trying to make us stay for the next incident. He even produced a chart he had made, showing the frequency of the manifestations over the past three months, and began to quote books on the subject.

  “Agreed, it’s all most extraordinary,” I said. “A unique case. You’ll be hearing from us.” All I wanted was to be out of that house. “Ready, Joe?”

  “Yes, I’m all right now.”

  Hutchinson was everywhere, like a dog wanting to be taken for
a walk. “I do hope I’ve been of some service! Is there anything more I can possibly - ? I suppose you can’t tell me when the publication date is likely to be?”

  Nauseating. “Not my department,” I said. “You’ll hear.”

  Over his shoulder I could see the girl’s face in her chromium frame. She must have had a very great deal of life in her to look like that on a square of paper.

  “Mr Hutchinson,” I said. “Just one last question.”

  He grinned. “Certainly, certainly. As the prosecution wishes.”

  “What did your wife die of?”

  For the first time he seemed genuinely put out. His voice, when it came, had for the moment lost its careful placing.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “she threw herself under a train.” He recovered himself. “Oh, shocking business, showed how unbalanced the poor girl must have been all along. If you like, I can show you a full press report of the inquest - I’ve nothing to hide - absolutely nothing - ”

  I reported the assignment as a washout. In any case Banner’s photographs showed nothing - except one which happened to include me, in such an attitude of horror as to be recognisable only by my clothing. I burnt that.

  “Our Mr Hutchinson’s going to be disappointed.”

  Joe’s teeth set. “What a mind that type must have! Publicity mania and the chance of a nice touch too, he thinks. So he rigs a spook out of the dirty linen!”

  “Sure he rigged it?”

  Joe hesitated. “Positive.”

  “For argument’s sake, suppose he didn’t: suppose it’s all genuine. He manages to go on living with the thing, so he can’t be afraid of it … and gradually … ‘new emotional depths’ … ” The idea suddenly struck me as having a ghastly humour. “Of course, publicity’s the only way he could do it!”

  “What?”

  “Banner, you ought to be sympathetic! Doesn’t every father want to show off his child?”

  END

  Chapter 31

  Notes

  ORIGINAL PUBLICATION DESCRIPTION

  Here is a book of short stories which have been collected over five or six years. Nigel Kneale is a young author who has lived most of his life in the Isle of Man, and who brings to the art of the short story a talent which is certainly arresting. To describe his stories to those who have not read them is to attempt the impossible, for Kneale’s vision is completely his own, and the world in which his characters move is one which, though it owes something to his native island, owes more to his imagination. It must be enough to say that these are real short stories, each of which begins with the first sentence and ends when the author has made his point. If they are sometimes humorous and often macabre, they all possess a literary quality which is both remarkable and exciting.

  Tomato Cain went on to be awarded the Somerset Maugham Award for 1950.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  Originally published by Collins, London: 1949

  US edition (variant contents) Alfred Knopf, New York: 195o

  UK Paperback edition (edited contents) Fontana Books, London: 1961

  UK Paperback partial reprint as Paart Dy Skeealyn Elley / Tomato Cain and Some Other Stories (Multilingual English / Manx) 2014 (Partial reprint)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Zachary Crebbin's Angel was broadcast on the BBC Light Programme and on the Northern Regional Programme. Tomato Cain was broadcast on the Northern Regional Programme, Lotus for Jamie appeared in Convoy, The Calculation of N’Bambwe in the Strand Magazine, Enderby and the Sleeping Beauty in Argosy.

  E-BOOK NOTE

  This ebook was primarily prepared using the text of the original hardback edition of the collection. It also includes The Patter of Tiny Feet, one of the three short stories that was only included in the US edition.