He spread the sandwich packet and placed the bottle of water on the table, threatening wiry Arthur with his fist as he grabbed at the paper. Margaret held him back, saying: “We’ll share it, now,” while Fred looked on from a secure position on the bed. Night was a picnic time, when Vera filled a bottle with water and Seaton sliced bread and dripping, saying: “All right then, I’ll cut yer a few slices. Yer must ’ave summat t’eat after you’ve climbed that wooden ’ill. Come on, Brian-Margaret-Fred-Arthur, it’s time you was up that wooden ’ill!”
With each divided portion scoffed, they blew out the candle. “Go to sleep now,” Brian bossed them.
“Tell us a story,” Margaret said.
He’d known they wouldn’t sleep unless he did: “What shall I tell you about?”
“Tell about war,” Fred said, his lips breathing from the darkness of bedclothes.
Arthur’s sharp feet seemed to attack every leg and backbone at the same time. “Stop it,” Brian called, “or I’ll thump you.”
“Thump you back,” Arthur threatened, but kept his feet still. “I’ll tell you what,” Brian said, “I’ll tell you all a serial story.”
They approved and curled up to listen. Arthur’s feet-stabbing subsided, and Brian narrated how three men with machine-guns sat in a cellar that they used as a den, drinking whisky, planning how they would rob a bank. In the middle of the night they came out of their den and drove up the dark street in their big black car, and when they came to the bank they put ten sticks of dynamite under the big doors and stood on the other side of the street while it blew up with a great big bang. And when the smoke had cleared and they could see again they all rushed in through the high doors shooting off their machine-guns. When they got to the strong safes, there was a nightwatchman who said: “Get back or I’ll shoot you with this gun under my coat.” But the robbers took no notice on him and shot him stone dead and put more dynamite under the safes. And when this blew up, they went inside and took all the money, millions of pounds. And when they’d put it all into sack-bags they had with them, they ran out of the bank. A man tried to stop ’em getting into their car, and one of the bandits said: “That’s the means-test man; let’s blow him up.” So they shot him dead. And then another man jumped on ’em, and the boss said: “I know him. It’s the schoolboard man. Let him have it.” And they killed him dead as well. So they got into their big car and drove off over Trent Bridge and out of the town into the country at ninety miles an hour. But later they stopped at a caff to have a drink of whisky and something to eat and a detective called Tom Briggs was in the same caff having something to eat with his girl. And as soon as Tom Briggs saw these three men coming into the caff he knew they was robbers and that they’d just robbed a bank because he saw moneybags that they had under their arms. “Stop, yo’ lot,” he said, and pulled a gun out that he allus carried, but they had their machine-guns ready and tied him and his girl up, and when they had them tight tied up to chairs, the boss of the robbers said: “We’re goin’ ter kill ’em now.” And he put some more bullets into his machine-gun and held it to their heads and said: “Is everything ready, boys?” And the other two said: “Yes, let’s kill ’em. It’s all ready.” So the boss of the robbers said: “All right, I’ll shoot ’em now,” and he started to pull the trigger of the machine-gun, and in two seconds they’d be dead. He killed ’em anyway, and then one of the bandits said to the boss: “Look out o’ that window and you’ll see we’re surrounded with fifty coppers. It looks as if we’re done for.”
“And that’s how part one ends,” Brian said. A car crashed through the silence below. Arthur breathed softly. “It’s smashin’.”
“What happens next?” Margaret demanded.
“I can’t tell you,” Brian said, not yet knowing. “Part two don’t come till tomorrer night.”
“How many parts has it got?” she asked.
“Four, I think.”
“Serials at pictures have twelve,” she said. “Sometimes they’ve got fifteen.”
“Do the coppers get ’em?” Fred demanded from down the bed.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
Arthur put his spoke in: “Now.”
“You’re ever such a good story-teller,” Margaret said. So he told them more, and went on till no one was left awake.
On his way to sleep Brian heard the whistle from a train rumbling out of Radford Station: like a squeal of surrender in the lead-heavy night, a downward note hurled from a black cavern by some unknown terror. He shuddered, rolled in a half-sleep, suffocated among bundles of bodies. The fearful low piping followed him into over-arching slumber, the train gone, and the whistle alone was an almost visible monster crying in the mouth of the night. “Dad!” he wanted to shout. “Dad!” being afraid, and when he looked from wide open eyes, he saw the Devil on the end of the bed.
The sad long wail sounded again, muted and resigned and more discouraging than before, coming from what was beyond his experience because it was nearer than he to the pits and brink of dying. His fear was of the coalswamps, a million years back and a million years on, the dead already calling from the future behind the black flames of life, as if dying and living were no more than a vast circle broken at one tiny place — where he was. The whistle persisted its soul-in-agony hooting, imprisoned in the dark spaces of his brain, even while his eyes were staring at the Devil on the end of the bed.
The Devil wore a crimson triangular hat, had a grey round face, a snubbed nose, and big loose grey lips. Brian was aware of him grinning, and when the whistle blew again it was part and parcel of him, and the jaggle of trucks on the railway line was chains rattling when his arms lifted (though his body did not move); and they were the chains with which he was to take him away.
The small dark room ignored the silver of moon outside, and shrunk in size until the Devil seemed closer. The squat figure grinned and beckoned, and his chains rattled again, impatient to take him to the owl-whistles and mastodon coalswamps. The grey face leered, and Brian stared at the crimson triangular hat that, even in the darkness, he saw was the colour of dried blood. The Devil had come to take him away, and he didn’t want to go. Brian and heart and fibre were against it, and he opened his mouth to cry out. Nothing. Dad! Dad! Dad! No sound came. He couldn’t breathe, as if a giant hook were fixed into the mechanism of his lungs, though in a way it seemed more tolerable to cry out than breathe, except that his cries made no sound, and the figure of the squat Devil sat waiting, patient and assured, wearing an oxblood triangular hat and rattling grey chains in grey invisible hands. The whistle stopped, as if the train had fallen sheer over the missing span of a bridge joining two banks of night; and Brian without knowing it dropped into sleep.
He told his father he had seen the Devil. It was only a nightmare, Seaton said. You often have nightmares from eating too late at night. Brian didn’t believe it. It was the Devil, who had come to take him away. Yes, his mother said, it was the Devil right enough, and if he didn’t behave himself and do all her errands from now on, then the next time the Devil came he would wrap them chains around him and take him away, for good. Then he’d never see anybody again, not even his grandad Merton.