The Ghost Road Read Free Page A

cheap cod. Muscles flabby
but not wasted, as they would have been in a case of spinal injury, though he'd
been unable to walk for more than three months, an unusually long time for
hysterical paralysis to persist.
    The history was, in one sense, simple. Moffet had
fallen down in a 'fainting fit' while on his way to the Front, shortly after
hearing the guns for the first time. When he recovered consciousness he could
not move his legs.
    'It was ridiculous to expect me to go to the
Front,' he'd said in their first interview. 'I can't stand noise. I've never
been able to stay in the same room as a champagne cork popping.'
    You poor blighter, Rivers had thought, startled out of
compassion. More than any other patient Moffet brought the words 'Pull yourself together, man' to the brink of his lips.
    'Why didn't you apply for exemption?' he'd asked
instead.
    Moffet had looked at him as if he'd just been accused
of eating peas from a knife. 'One is not a pacifist.'
    He'd tried everything with Moffet. No, he hadn't.
    He'd not, for example, tried attaching electrodes to
Moffet's legs and throwing the switch, as Dr Yealland would certainly have done
by now. He'd not held tubes of radium against his skin till it burnt. He'd not
given him subcutaneous injections of ether. All these things were being done to
get men back to the Front or keep them there. He'd not even hypnotized him.
What he'd actually tried was reason. He didn't like what he was going to
do now, but it had become apparent that, until Moffet's reliance on the
physical symptom was broken, no more rational approach stood any chance of
working.
    'You understand what I'm going to do?' he asked.
    'I know what you're going to do.'
    Rivers smiled. 'Tell me, then.'
    'Well, as far as I can make out, you... er... intend to draw...' Minute muscles twitched round Moffet's nose and lips, giving him the look of a
supercilious rabbit. ' Stocking
tops? On my legs, here.' With delicately
pointed fingers he traced two lines across the tops of his thighs. 'And then,
gradually, day by day, you propose to... um... lower the stockings, and as the stockings are unrolled , so to speak, the... er... paralysis will...' A positive orgy of twitching. 'Retreat.'
    'That's right.'
    Moffet's voice drooled contempt. 'And you have no
doubt this procedure will work?'
    Rivers looked into the pupils of his eyes so intently
that for a moment he registered no colour except black. 'None
whatsoever.'
    Moffet stared at him, then turned away.
    'Shall we get started?' Rivers lifted Moffet's left
leg and began to draw a thick black line on to his skin, two inches below the
fold of the groin.
    'I hope that's not indelible.'
    'Of course it's not. I'm going to have to wash it off
in the morning.'
    Rivers looked at the length of Moffet's legs and tried
to calculate how long it was going to take him to reach the toes. Two weeks?
And that would have to include Sundays, which put paid to his plans for a
weekend in Ramsgate with his sisters. Katharine was far from well; in fact she
was virtually bedridden and for much the same reasons as Moffet. Rivers frowned
with concentration as he carried the pencil line under the thigh. Moffet's
flabby skin kept snagging the pencil point.
    Elliot Smith's comment on the serpent: 'That's
interesting.' It was no more than he'd thought himself. Evidently snakes had
lost the right to be simply snakes. Dodgson had hated them, a quite
exceptionally intense hatred, and the woods round Knowles Bank were full of
them, particularly in spring when you regularly stumbled across knots of
adders, as many as thirty or forty sometimes, drowsy from their winter sleep.
They'd gone for a walk once, the whole family, Ethel and Katharine holding
Dodgson's hands, himself and Charles trailing behind, imitating his rather
prissy, constipated-hen walk, though careful not to let their father catch them
at it. They rounded a bend, Dodgson and the girls leading, and there, right in
the centre of the path, was a