“They?” I asked again.
“People!” Despite his short, bowed legs, he was half a pace ahead of me. “The thin people.” But where his first word had been a snarl, his last three were whispered, so that I almost missed them entirely.
Then we were up Larches Avenue—the Larches as Barmy Bill had it—and closing fast on 22, and suddenly it was very quiet. Only the scrape of dry, blown leaves on the pavement. Autumn, and the trees half-naked. Moonlight falling through webs of high, black, brittle branches.
“Plenty of moon,” said Bill, his voice hushed. “Thank God—in whom I really don’t believe—for that. But no street lights! You see that? Bulbs all missing. That’s them.”
“Them?” I caught his elbow, turning him into my gateway—if there’d been a gate. There wasn’t, just the post, which served as my landmark whenever I’d had a skinful.
“Them, yes!” he snapped, staring at me as I turned my key in the lock. “Damn young fool!”
And so up the creaky stairs to my little cave of solitude, and Barmy Bill shivering despite the closeness of the night and warmth of the place, which leeched a lot of its heat from the houses on both sides, and from the flat below, whose elderly lady occupier couldn’t seem to live in anything other than an oven; and in through my own door, into the ‘living’ room, where Bill closed the curtains across the jutting bay windows as if he’d lived there all of his life. But not before he’d peered out into the night street, his eyes darting this way and that, round and bright in his lined, booze-desiccated face.
Barmy, yes. Well, maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. “Gin,” I said, passing him the bottle and a glass. “But go easy, yes? I like a nip myself, you know.”
“A nip? A nip? Huh! If I lived here I’d need more than a nip. This is the middle of it, this is. The very middle!”
“Oh?” I grinned. “Myself, I had it figured for the living end!”
He paced the floor for a few moments—three paces there, three back—across the protesting boards of my tiny room, before pointing an almost accusing finger at me. “Chirpy tonight, aren’t you? Full of beans!”
“You think so?” Yes, he was right. I did feel a bit brighter. “Maybe I’m over it, eh?”
He sat down beside me. “I certainly hope so, you daft young sod! And now maybe you’ll pay some attention to my warnings and get yourself a place well away from here.”
“Your warnings? Have you been warning me, then?” It dawned on me that he had, for several weeks, but I’d been too wrapped up in my own misery to pay him much heed. And who would? After all, he was Barmy Bill.
“Course I have!” he snapped. “About them bloody—”
“Thin people,” I finished it for him. “Yes, I remember now.”
“Well?”
“Eh?”
“Are you or aren’t you?”
“I’m listening, yes.”
“No, no, no! Are you or aren’t you going to find yourself new lodgings?”
“When I can afford it, yes.”
“You’re in danger here, you know? They don’t like strangers. Strangers change things, and they’re against that. They don’t like anything strange, nothing new. They’re a dying breed, I fancy, but while they’re here they’ll keep things the way they like ’em.”
“OK,” I sighed. “This time I really am listening. You want to start at the beginning?”
He answered my sigh with one of his own, shook his head impatiently. “Daft young bugger! If I didn’t like you I wouldn’t bother. But all right, for your own good, one last time…just listen and I’ll tell you what I know. It’s not much, but it’s the last warning you’ll get…”
Two
Best thing ever happened for ’em must have been the lampposts, I reckon.”
“Dogs?” I raised my eyebrows.
He glared at me and jumped to his feet. “Right, that’s it. I’m off.”
“Oh, sit down, sit down!’ I calmed him. “Here, fill your glass again. And I promise I’ll try not to interrupt.”
“Lampposts!” he snapped, his brows black as thunder. But he sat and took the drink. “Yes, for they imitate ’em, see? And thin, they can hide behind ’em. Why, they can stand so still that on a dark night you wouldn’t know the difference! Can you imagine that, eh? Hiding behind or imitating a lamppost!”
I tried to imagine it, but: “Not really,” I had to admit. Now, however, my levity was becoming a bit forced. There was something about his intensity—the way his limbs shook in a manner other than alcoholic—which was getting through to me. “Why should they hide?”
“Freaks! Wouldn’t you hide? A handful of them. Millions of us. We’d hound ’em out, kill ’em off!”
“So why don’t we?”
“’Cos we’re all smart young buggers like you, that’s why! ’Cos we don’t believe in ’em.”
“But you do?”
Bill nodded, his three- or four-day growth of hair quivering on jowls and upper lip. “Seen ’em,” he said, “and seen…evidence of them.”
“And they’re real people? I mean, you know, human? Just like me and you, except…thin?”
“And tall. Oh—tall!”
“Tall?” I frowned. “Thin and tall. How tall? Not as tall as—”
“Lampposts,” he nodded, “yes. Not during the day, mind you, only at night. At night they—” (he looked uncomfortable, as if it had suddenly dawned on him how crazy this all must sound) “—they sort of, well, kind of unfold themselves.”
I thought about it, nodded. “They unfold themselves. Yes, I see.”
“No, you don’t see,” his voice was flat, cold, angry now. “But you will, if you hang around here long enough.”
“Where do they live,” I asked, “these tall, thin people?”
“In thin houses,” he answered, matter-of-factly.
“Thin houses?”
“Sure! Are you telling me you haven’t noticed the thin houses? Why, this place of yours very nearly qualifies! Thin houses, yes. Places where normal people wouldn’t dream of setting up. There’s half-a-dozen such in Barchington, and a couple right here in the Larches!” He shuddered and I bent to turn on an extra bar in my electric fire.
“Not cold, mate,” Bill told me then. “Hell no! Enough booze in me to keep me warm. But I shudder every time I think of ’em. I mean, what do they do?”
“Where do they work, you mean?”
“Work?” he shook his head. “No, they don’t work. Probably do a bit of tealeafing. Burglary, you know. Oh, they’d get in anywhere, the thin people. But what do they do?”
I shrugged.
“I mean, me and you, we watch telly, play cards, chase the birds, read the paper. But them…?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to suggest maybe they go into the woods and frighten owls, but suddenly I didn’t feel half so flippant. “You said you’d seen them?”
“Seen ’em sure enough, once or twice,” he confirmed. “And weird! One, I remember, came out of his thin house in Barchington; I could show you it some time in daylight. Me, I was behind a hedge sleeping it off. Don’t ask me how I got there, drunk as a lord! Anyway, something woke me up.
“Down at its bottom the hedge was thin where cats come through. It was night and the council men had been round during the day putting bulbs in the street lights, so the place was all lit up. And directly opposite, there’s this thin house and its door slowly opening; and out comes this bloke into the night, half of him yellow from the lamplight and half black in shadow. See, right there in front of the thin house is a street lamp.
“But this chap looks normal enough, you know? A bit stiff in his movements; he sort of moves jerky, like them contortionists who hook their feet over their shoulders and walk on their hands. Anyway, he looks up and down the street, and he’s obviously satisfied no one’s there. Then…