* unspeakable desolation pouring down from the stars *
CHAPTER EIGHT
"HELLO!" I CALLED "I'VE come about the tap!"
After waiting for forty five minutes, I was admitted to the gloomy vestibule of Plunkett Hall. The servant who ushered me in was a tall, blond, windswept lad of about my age. He seemed completely out of place in the tenebrous interior, dressed as he was in a T-shirt and shorts, carrying what I imagined to be a surf-board under his arm. His voice, too, was anomalous: not the gravelly croak foretold by my spectre, but a cheery, beach-bum boom, all bonhomie and brag. I have always hated people like that: at school I had devoted much of my time to plotting fantastic calamities for them, none of which I was ever able to realise.
"Sit yourself down there, sport," yelled the lad, pointing to a wooden stool frantic with carvings of imps, basilisks, dragons and devils, "I'll get someone to see to you right away."
With that, he pranced off in his flip-flops. I sat down and peered through the gloom, trying to take cognizance of my surroundings. The walls of the vestibule were hung with grim and ancient oil-paintings, their gilt frames dulled by smoke and soot. Huge dark wooden furnishings, each as ornately carved as the stool on which I sat, cluttered the place. The air was thick and stifling. Underfoot, the flagstones were partially hidden by frayed and tattered rugs, on which a large quantity of birdseed had been spilled. Next to the bench stood a three-legged table which had been varnished with shellac, upon which was a tray of buttons. Idly, I picked one up. At that instant, a door crashed open and a towering brute stomped towards me, all fangs and slaver. I dropped the button on the floor.
"Cur! Wretch!" cried the brute, swiping at me wildly with his great fists, "Those are the Buttons of Beb! Tikes like you durst not touch them! Scum!"
He finished knocking me half-senseless, then took from his pocket a duster, and wiped the button with surprising daintiness. Replacing it on the tray, he spat at me and charged out of the room as suddenly as he had come. As I rubbed my head, the athletic young man reappeared.
"Crikey!" he shouted - people like him always shout - "You've had a scrap and a half! Been mucking about with the buttons, I bet."
I nodded.
"I should have warned you," he continued, "But it completely slipped my mind. Scatterbrained or what?", and he let loose ten seconds of the jolliest and most irritating laughter I have ever heard. "Anyway, never mind. Everyone else seems to be busy at the moment, so I'll take you to the tap myself. Come on!"
I followed the youth through a series of rooms which I cannot be bothered to describe. He was still carrying his board. I made a few churlish efforts at joining in with his incessant banter, but my mind was concentrating on a plan of action. Yet again, I found myself imagining what Fig would have done in my place.
We got to the room wherein lurked the tap I was presumably meant to fix. It was a huge iron spigot, standing alone in the centre of what I was told was an abandoned indoor hockey pitch.
"OK?" yelled the blond boy, "You do your stuff. I'll be back in a jiffy."
"Wait," I said, scheming, "There's paperwork, you know."
I made a great show of rummaging in my haversack for non-existent documentation, uttered a few oaths, and took out my notebook and biro.
"Great heavens to Betsy," I said, "I seem to have mislaid the forms. Ah, well. Luckily I've done so many of these jobs I can remember all the questions. I'll just note the answers down in my pad and fill in the forms when I get back to the depot."
I was overacting a bit, but the boy seemed convinced.
"Fire away, old bean!" he shouted, leaning his board against the wall.
"Who is the owner of the property?" I asked.
"The tap or the house?" he replied. He was either stupid or sly: probably the former, but I decided to be careful.
"Are they not one and the same?"
"Oh, I suppose they are," he said, "The ownership of Plunkett Hall is a bit of a mystery, though. I think the lease is held by the Hooting Yard Bell-Ringing Society, but I'd have to check."
This was going to be more difficult than I thought. I scribbled down what he had said and, improvising, pretended to paraphrase question number two.
"Names of all those resident in the property."
"Phew!" he phewed, "Now I can't help you there. All of them?"
"The lot," I insisted.
"I only know some of them, you see. We sort of do shifts. I'm here for the first half of the month, but then someone else takes over. There's so many comings and goings. Mr Slop and Mr Cravat do alternate weeks. Mrs Skim comes in every Thursday. The Flue brothers each do six months on and six months off. It's incredibly complicated."
I scribbled rubbish in my notebook, playing for time.
"What I need for the form," I said slowly, trying to think of something, "Is a list of the people resident in the property at the time of the repair. On the day of the repair." He didn't say a word.
"The repair of the tap," I added, desperately.
"Oh, right," he said, "Let me think. There's me, of course, and Mr Slop, and Ignacio Housemartin, the gardener, and two people whose names I don't know, who work in the attic, and Pansy Crague, and the Bingle family..."
He carried on like this for longer than I could bear. Not once did he mention my quarry, Istvan Plunkett. I interrupted him.
"Who is the head of this confounded household?"
He looked blank, but some sort of activity was taking place inside his head.
"Oh, you must mean the old geezer with the wooden leg!" he yelled, eventually, "The nurse says he's too ill to come out of his room. I've never even seen him myself, but you hear all sorts of strange stories..."
I pondered whether or not to let the youth continue with his prattle, and decided against it.
"I have to have his signature," I invented brilliantly, "I'm not allowed to do the job without his written permission."
It was the boy's turn to ponder, but I had bureaucracy - albeit fictional - on my side. After some blather, he caved in, and we left the tap-room and spent half an hour traipsing through various dank corridors until we fetched up outside a door marked The Master's Chambers. I felt triumphant. Over half a century ago, the sainted Mister Patch had had his stamp collection stolen, and now I had run to earth the man who, I was convinced, held the album in his guilty paws. The youth rapped on the door and fled, muttering that he would leave me in the hands of the nurse. A minute passed. I rapped on the door myself. It was opened at once, and I found myself face to face with the great film actress Vilma Banky. Of course, it wasn't really that siren of the silver screen, all kitted out as a house-nurse, but the resemblance was astonishing.
"Yes?", she drawled, detaching a cheroot from her lips.
"Er," I managed, "I've come about the tap. I need Mr Plunkett's signature."
"Come on in," she rustled. I edged past her into a room sumptuous with wall-hangings, decorative fire-screens, and plush soft furnishings. In the middle of it all was a business-like desk, at which the nurse now sat down. Playfully, she flicked the ash from her cheroot into an ashtray, opened a drawer in the desk, and took out a small dictaphone.
"Don't perturb yourself," she breathed, "I always tape my conversations here. One has to be careful."
"Um," I replied.
"Mister who did you say?" she asked, switching on the little machine, which hummed gently.
"Mr Plunkett," I repeated.
"Would that be Istvan Plunkett, the noted philatelist?"
"Yes, it would."
"Be kind enough to speak up a bit," she said, "You're not registering on the mike."
"Oh. Yes. It would." I said loudly, but not loudly enough: she got me to repeat it a second time.
"That's fine," she said. "Now let me understand you. You've come here to get Istvan Plunkett's signature, is that right?"
What was it with the people in this house? The youth had struck me as something of a dunderpate, but if anything he was quicker on the uptake than the nurse. But I have always prided myself on my almost inhuman patience.
"Yes," I said, then, remembering to raise my voice, explained, "I have come here to mend the tap. I cannot proceed without Mr Plunkett's signature. I have to witness him signing the paper."
"I see," she replied, "And what tap would that be?"
If, reader, you are losing patience at this point, imagine how I felt. I think it best to pass over the next ten minutes, which consisted of an unbelievably tedious little dialogue, of interest to no one except perhaps a plumbing fanatic. Eventually, I was rescued from death by boredom when the dictaphone tape ran out.
"Excuse me," said the nurse, "I shall have to fetch another tape."
"Look," I said, "Look look look. Surely I can just be shown to Mr Plunkett and he can sign my paper and I'll be on my way?"
She was already heading for the door, but stopped, and turned towards me.
"You must be under a misapprehension," she said, gazing at me with her houri eyes, "There is no Mr Plunkett in this house."
Well, stap my chives! I was, and this is not an understatement, flabbergasted. Please forgive another hiatus in the narrative, but you would be ill-rewarded by a detailed description of me huffing and spluttering, and the nurse explaining calmly that the noted philatelist Istvan Plunkett had died in his bath seventeen years ago, and that the house which bore his name was now rented by the elderly, ailing, and wooden-legged ex-president of the Hooting Yard Bell-Ringing Society, Rudyard Splint, who was languishing in what promised to be his death-bed in an adjacent room, stuffed up to the eyeballs with tablets, infusions and pills.
When I had calmed down, I realised that I needed time to think. The nurse was most solicitous, lying me down on one of the room's many sofas and handing me a bone-china mug and a decanter of 1899 vintage Feisty Pillager.
"You just rest your little head," she purred, and was gone.
I said I needed time to think, but first I decided to get horribly drunk. I drained the decanter in minutes, and soon discovered further supplies of hooch in a corner cabinet. I picked out a bottle of Gormless Wastrel, sucked on that for a while, and eventually found oblivion with a hefty flagon of Mahout's Dropsy, which was hidden behind the dressing-table.
* a novel by frank key *