The Nonesuch and Others Read Free

happened next?”
    “Next—he’s coming back down the street! I can hear him: click , pause, click , pause… click, pause, stilting it along the pavement—and I can see him in my mind’s eye, doing his impression of a lamppost with every pause. And suddenly I get this feeling, and I sneak a look round. I mean, the frontage of this garden I’m in is so tiny, and the house behind me is—”
    I saw it coming. “Jesus!”
    “A thin house,” he confirmed it, “right!”
    “So now you were in trouble.”
    He shrugged, licked his lips, trembled a little. “I was lucky, I suppose. I squeezed myself into the hedge, lay still as death. And click , pause… click , pause, getting closer all the time. And then—behind me, for I’d turned my face away—the slow creaking as the door of the thin house swung open! And the second thin person coming out and, I imagine, unfolding him or herself, and the two of ’em standing there for a moment, and me near dead of fright.”
    “And?”
    “ Click-click , pause; click-click ,pause; click-click —and away they go. God only knows where they went, or what they did, but me?—I gave ’em ten minutes start and then got up, and ran, and stumbled, and forced my rubbery legs to carry me right out of there. And I haven’t been back. Why, this is the closest I’ve been to Barchington since that night, and too close by far!”
    I waited for a moment but he seemed done. Finally I nodded. ‘Well, that’s a good story, Bill, and—”
    “I’m not finished!” he snapped. “And it’s not just a story…”
    “There’s more?”
    “Evidence,” he whispered. “The evidence of your own clever-bugger eyes!”
    I waited.
    “Go to the window,” said Bill, “and peep out through the curtains. Go on, do it.”
    I did.
    “See anything funny?”
    I shook my head.
    “Blind as a bat!” he snorted. “Look at the street lights—or the absence of lights. I showed you once tonight. They’ve nicked all the bulbs.”
    “Kids,” I shrugged. “Hooligans. Vandals.”
    “Huh!” Bill sneered. “Hooligans, here? Unheard of. Vandals? You’re joking! What’s to vandalize? And when did you last see kids playing in these streets, eh?”
    He was right. “But a few missing light bulbs aren’t hard evidence,” I said.
    “All right !”he pushed his face close and wrinkled his nose at me. “Hard evidence, then.” And he began to tell me the final part of his story…
     

    Three
     
    Cars!” Barmy Bill snapped, in that abrupt way of his. “They can’t bear them. Can’t say I blame ’em much, not on that one. I hate the noisy, dirty, clattering things myself. But tell me: have you noticed anything a bit queer—about cars, I mean—in these parts?”
    I considered for a moment, replied: “Not a hell of a lot of them.”
    “Right!” He was pleased. “On the rest of the Hill, nose to tail. Every street overflowing. ’Specially at night when people are in the pubs or watching the telly. But here? Round Barchington and the Larches and a couple of other streets in this neighbourhood? Not a one to be seen!”
    “Not true,” I said. “There are two cars in this very street right now. Look out the window and you should be able to see them.”
    “Bollocks!” said Bill.
    “Pardon?”
    “Bollocks!” he repeated. “Them’s not cars !Rusting old bangers. Spokewheels and all. Twenty, thirty years they’ve been trundling about. The thin people are used to them. It’s the big shiny new ones they don’t like. And so, if you park your car up here overnight—trouble!”
    “Trouble?” But here I was deliberately playing dumb. Here I knew what he meant well enough. I’d seen it for myself: the occasional shiny car, left overnight, standing there the next morning with its tyres slashed, windows smashed, lamps kicked in.
    He could see it in my face. “You know what I mean, all right. Listen, couple of years ago there was a Flash Harry type from the city used to come up here. There was