Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

So I tried to make myself a bit brusque. I said: “Come on, man. If you want to speak to me, speak up! I can give you” — I looked across at the clock — “exactly nine and a half minutes.” He spoke then, damn him! He said: “You are Mr. Lorimer, sir? The K.C. sir? The Mr. Lorimer who was actin’ for the fellow in that red bicycle case last twelve-month?”

I nodded. I didn’t want to draw things out any longer by answering when it wasn’t necessary. Really, I was waiting for him to get on with it. I tried hard, really very hard, to take in some accurate impression of him. But d’you know, I couldn’t. He was utterly and most determinedly indeterminate. He was a great mass. A shapeless mass with no outlines which man’s eye could take in; no salient points. No incongruity, no congruity...

I don’t mean, you know, that he was fluid or anything crazy like that. I mean that, somehow, I didn’t seem to be able to make my eyes take him in...

And then, just as this was beginning to annoy me, with that half-fearful, half-petty annoyance which the inexplicable often gives a man, he began to speak again. As he began to speak he lifted one of his great arms with a semi-apologetic gesture. It had been hanging down beside the chair, almost out of my sight, but now it came into sight. And it had grasped in a massive indeterminate hand, a little wicker basket. It was the size and shape of those baskets in which old women carry cats; but in that hand it seemed much smaller than this. He stood it upon his knee. Every now and then, with his breathing, it creaked a little. He said, in that small voice which ought to have been incongruous; that small voice which ought to have been ridiculous; that small voice which was neither:

“It’s advice I want, sir. And your advice.” He paused for ten seconds which seemed to me quite ten minutes. He went on then: “It’s like this, sir. I’ve killed some’un, sir...”

D’you know, I very nearly laughed. So nearly that I had to get out my handkerchief and turn what would have been a laugh into an unconvincing cough... I nearly laughed because — I hope I can make this part clear — because this statement seemed, after all the extraordinary-impressiveness (impressiveness is the only word to use) of his entry, his coming, his — well, everything about him — this statement seemed, I say, to have about it a queer, almost bathetic humor. It was a most flagrant anti-climax.

He seemed, now, again to be waiting for me to say something. He sat there in silence. I was silent too. I couldn’t think of anything to say. First, there was that feeling of anti-climactics. Secondly... well, what do you say when a man comes in and says he’s just killed another?

I could hear the little clock on the desk, its hand pointing nearly to the hour of ten. I could hear, with his breathing, the creak of the lid of his quaint little basket, as, with his breathing, the basket moved.

The silence went on. It seemed, to my mind, rather as if there was a contest of some sort going on between us. A. contest in which the loser was the man who first said anything. If that was it, I won all right. Because he suddenly leaned forward, the basket giving a loud creak as his chest came against it. And he said, fixing his eyes on me — to this day I can’t tell what color or size those eyes were; I can’t even tell you where they were in his face — he said:

“So, as I’ve done this, sir, I’m what they call a murd’rer. And I want, sir, to know what’s the best I can do... I’m... ’m sort of out of touch, as you might say, sir...”

He told me then that he was a seaman. He had been away, he said, for seven years. This seven years wasn’t his fault. He was one of the three survivors of the wreck of that unfortunate ship, the Hesperides. Five years it had taken him to get home again... When he had got home...

But now, with the whispered tick-tock of the little clock drumming into my head the minutes of Claire that I was losing, I grew brutal. And this despite that still, terrible, most gripping urgency in the small, dead voice.

I cut him short in mid-sentence. I said: “For God’s sake stop that damned basket squeaking!”

You know, that thing had got on my nerves, all the time creak, creak, creak. It seemed so even, so systematic, that just when I thought I was going to get into the swing of the thing and he able to anticipate the next creak, the time would change. I’d never meant those words to leave me. I was sorry for the way in which I said them.

He stopped talking again, and looked at me. Again I tried to place his eyes but couldn’t. He said: “I’m sorry, sir.” He set the basket down on the floor beside him, but then changed his mind. He lifted it, and with a humbly apologetic gesture which rippled oddly over his bulk, set it upon the edge of my table...