Free Gordon Williams by The Siege of Trencher's Farm--Straw Dogs Page A

fell on top of Pawson. He started to cry. Mister Pawson didn’t move. Henry shouted. Nobody came. Sometimes they came when he shouted, sometimes they didn’t. The ambulance doors were open, one flap resting on snow. He clambered out, his whimpering stopping when he found his feet in snow.
    He remembered it, white and cold and wet. Men had chased him over a big space, he didn’t know why they chased him, he’d run and run and run until he’d fallen in it, they were shouting so loudly his ears had almost burst. Then he remembered why they were chasing him. He did remember, some times, but most of the time he was able not to think about it. He knew that men didn’t like him.
    Many psychiatrists and psychologists and doctors had tried topenetrate the mind of Henry Niles, the mental defective who had murdered three children before, at the age of twenty-five, he’d been put away for the rest of his life in Two Waters. These men had come to an almost unanimous conclusion – that Henry had a mental age of eight. None of them could explain why other humans with the same mental age – children of eight years old, for instance – did not have Henry’s deadly compulsion to rape and strangle little girls. Occasionally they detected signs of a more mature intelligence in Henry, but it was impossible to draw him out. With adults he behaved like a frightened child, with children he was a giant ogre. As long as grown-up people were present he tended to cower in corners, like a savagely beaten puppy. But when he was alone in a world of children, he grew up.
    He stood alone beside the upturned ambulance. It was nine years since he had been on his own in the fresh air. Back up the slope he saw the other man, the driver, lying in the snow. Sniffing heavily, he started up the slope. Behind him was the great moor, dark now as the snow fell in earnest. He slipped several times as he scrambled up to the driver. He looked down on a face half-pushed into snow. Blood trickled from the ear and moved in a throbbing stream down the man’s cheek.
    “Gentle Jesus meek and mild,” Henry moaned. He began to clamber desperately to the top of the slope. He shouldn’t have seen that blood. They would blame him for that. There was blood that other time. It wasn’t his fault. He would have to run away before the men came, shouting.
    He had walked about half a mile in the snow, down the road to the Fairwater Ford and over the little footbridge beside the ford and halfway up the hill on the other side, before a car pulled up beside them.
    “Want a lift then?” said one of three young farm workers in the car. “It’s a funny ol’ day for walkin’. We can take you’s far’s Compton Wakley, that suit you?”
    “It wasn’t my fault,” said Henry.
    One of the men laughed. Henry looked at him through the open window.
    “We ain’t blamin’ you for walkin’,” said the first man, “Got caught, did you? Don’t do to risk it on the moor. Changes fast like.”
    The car made good time to Compton Wakely. The men talked among themselves. Henry was happy. They didn’t think it was his fault. They were nice men.
    At Compton Wakley he stood by the side of the road until the car drove off. Then he began walking down a road marked by a signpost: FOURWAYS CROSS. He had gone only a few hundred yards when another car stopped and a farmer offered him a lift as far as Compton Fitzpaine. He got into the car.
    “You’ll be goin’ to the dance at Dando then?” said the farmer. “You must be dancin’ mad to try and walk it on a night like this.”
    “It wasn’t my fault,” said Henry.
    The farmer snorted.
    “It’ll be your own fault if you don’t get back this night,” he said. “I reckons us’ll be the last car along this road the way it’s comin’ down.”
    “I don’t want to go back,” said Henry Niles.
    “Just as well then,” said the farmer. Dances, he thought, always attracted them.

FIVE
    George Magruder wandered about the silent