'The Night Walker' began as an ordinary country legend. No two stories agreed on the details and Paul Donovan's attempts to sift out the facts seemed doomed to failure. He was on the verge of omitting it from his new series of articles on East Anglian Folklore when a sudden, sinister coincidence brought the old story sharply back into focus. An eccentric old wildfowler was taken to hospital where he babbled incoherently about "the man in the stove-pipe hat" before dying of inexplicable injuries. Donovan restarted his enquiries and found an unexpectedly determined ally in Shelia Morrison, an outcast from her village, who had been befriended by the dead wildfowler. together they hunted for intangible clues across the lonely reed beds and slow mysterious rivers of Broadland - the areas holiday-makers rarely see. Piece by piece the puzzle fitted together to reveal a chain of horror linking the past and present...connecting the mid-1960s with the ghoulish outbreak of body-snatching at the start of the Nineteenth Century. Not all the victims had gone for medical research...
'The Night Walker' is abroad again and fear treads beside him.
Release date:
January 1, 1966
Publisher:
Badger
Print pages:
320
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The long, low, streamlined shape of the Nashville Supreme nosed its way carefully, somehow frustratedly, along the B 1354 from Potter Heigham to Ludham. The winding road was bathed in the powerful white beams of the four American headlights. The vertical 8 pottered idly in third gear. Paul Donovan’s keen eyes looked out at the grey green fields, the mysterious shadows beyond the hedges, and the stark silhouette of an occasional tree. An old thatched barn loomed up derelict and macabre, its high pigeon windows seemed to blink in the light from the powerful American sports car. The beams picked up the figure of an elderly cyclist, sitting like a wooden Indian on a contraption that reminded Donovan of a bedstead.
The Irish-American slowed carefully and matched speed with the ancient one. The old man braked thoughtfully and looked at the sports car with distrust and suspicion.
“Could you tell me how far I am from Ludham, please?”
“Thass a mile.”
“Is there an inn there? Anywhere I could stay for the night, perhaps?”
“Arr. There’s the ‘Green Elephant’.”
“Is it on the main road?”
“Arr. Right hand side. You can’t miss it.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Thass a’ right.”
The ancient one chugged towards the fence, put his foot on the low green bank, and re-mounted his bedstead. Donovan moved slowly up through the gears and drove into the village. Sure enough, with a conveniently large car park in front of it, on his right hand side, stood a quaint old thatched hostelry bearing the sign of a green elephant. It was quite definitely a pub elephant. No zoologist would have owned that geometrically rotund creature with the improbable howdah on its back, and the fierce miniature black face peering over the top. It seemed a strangely bizarre thing to find in a Broadland village, thought Donovan. He smiled wryly as he alighted from the now still Supreme. That, too, was an odd thing to find in a Broadland village. The Nashville wasn’t just decorative. Two years running Donovan had been placed in the Indianapolis, that race of races which separates the men from the boys. He parked carefully, locked the Nashville, and pulled up the tonneau cover, for the sky, dark and threatening, showed no moon, and there was a smell of incipient rain in the Norfolk air. Paul opened the thick, oak portal of the old-world public house. There was a small foyer and then he found himself confronted by two doors, one of which read ‘Lounge’ and the other ‘Public’. Donovan opened the lounge door and was glad that he had done so. The first thing that took his gaze was a superb rough brick fireplace of Elizabethan proportions. On its wide mantel gleamed an array of brass and copper ware that glowed with a mellow, welcoming warmth; a warming pan hung by the side of the fire. Kettles and saucepans were ranged above it. A pair of antique duelling pistols were crossed carefully on the wall. A sword that might well have been used at Malplaquet glinted hints of history from its scabbard. On either side of the bar horse brasses depended; not the cheap, artificial things made for tourists and amateur interior decorators, but real, old Norfolk brasses, collectors’ pieces, connoisseurs’ items every one, brasses that had once hung at the shoulders of dray horses.
The other side of the lounge was covered with framed maps and prints; an ancient coaching map took Paul’s attention. It was carefully placed under a small wall light, and the quaint representations of land marks beside the skilfully drawn road attracted the Irish-American’s aesthetic senses. He was brought back to the mid-twentieth century reality of the ‘Green Elephant’ by a rather high, thin tenor from the other side of the bar.
“Good evening, sir. What is your pleasure?”
“Blonde nymphomaniacs; but right now I’ll settle for a small whisky,” grinned Donovan.
“Thank you, sir. Scotch or Irish?”
“Irish.”
Paul studied the little publican carefully. The licence notice outside the door said that William Carter was licensed to sell beers, wines, and spirits. So this, presumably, was William Carter. The ‘Green Elephant’ didn’t look the kind of place that could employ a barman.
“A fine collection you have here, Mr. Carter.”
Donovan gestured in a way that took in the contents of the lounge in general.
“I’m glad you like it. It’s taken me a long time.”
“I can believe that.”
“The warming pan is Queen Anne.”
“Really.”
“Most of the copper ware is seventeenth and eighteenth century but one or two pieces are considerably earlier. I have some pewter over here. Perhaps you hadn’t noticed.”
The wizened Carter came out from behind the bar, lifting his flap like a winkle removing the ‘door’ of its shell. Some words of a half-remembered nonsense rhyme went through Donovan’s head.
“Picture, if you can, a winkle,
Striding, fearless through the night.
Picture, if you can, a winkle,
If you can’t — well, then, all right!”
Carter was an antique among his antiques, thought Paul.
“Here’s the pewter I was telling you about.” The wizened landlord held up a fine example of a sixteenth century pint pot. It was dented and scratched in a number of places, yet something about the mellow, silver-grey metal captured Donovan’s attention. There was a quality about it which even the mellow brass and red copper seemed to lack.
“I always think that ale—mulled ale, particularly—tastes at its best from a pewter tankard. Have you ever tried?”
“No, I can’t say I have.”
“Let me mull you one.” The diminutive Carter switched on an electric soldering iron that rested on an asbestos frame at the side of the counter. “I’m afraid we don’t use the traditional weapons for this,” he chuckled dryly. When he considered the iron hot enough, he unplugged it and dipped its well worn end into a half-pint pewter tankard which he had produced from under the bar. There was a hissing, steaming sound and a miniature mushroom cloud of steam smelling deliciously of hot malt and roasting hops. Carter replaced the soldering iron on its stand. He sniffed at the mulled ale and then handed the pewter tankard across to Donovan.
“What do you think of that, then, sir?”
The wizened publican looked up at the big Irish-American with the expression of an energetic terrier which has just unearthed a singularly revolting bone and brought it to its master’s feet. Donovan was an intensely human, and an intensely sympathetic character. He closed his eyes and took a long, hard, trans-Atlantic pull at the beer. To his surprise the taste was a great deal more pleasant than he had expected.
“Say, that’s something! I must remember that for a barbecue when I get back home.”
“Where’re you from, sir?”
“Basically, Boston, New England; recently Philadelphia.”
“You’re on a holiday in our country, sir?”
“A kind of busman’s holiday, if you like. I’m writing a series of articles for a magazine back home. I live in New England because of its historic background.”
“Travel articles?” The little publican seemed surprisingly interested.
“Well, in a way. I hope they’ll increase the tourist trade.”
“So do I, sir. So do I.” Carter perched behind his counter like a thin old vulture, waiting for something to die so that it could eat.
“Actually I write on the supernatural, mainly. I’m doing a series of articles on the ghosts of East Anglia, ghosts of the Broads in particular.”
“You’ve a wide field to choose from there!” Carter cocked his head on one side, making him look more bird-like than ever. Following the direction of his gaze Donovan saw that the emaciated publican was looking at a faded, framed parchment on the opposite wall.
“There’s one I warrant you haven’t got!”
Paul pointed, “That one?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s the one.”
Donovan finished his mulled ale, polished off the rest of his whiskey and went across to the parchment which Carter had indicated.
“This is by no means easy to read. What is it?”
“The old Gothic print is the trouble, but I know it nearly by heart. Shall I read it to you?”
“I’d be very glad if you would.”
“The Legend of the Night Walker,” began Carter in that strangely high, febrile tenor. Peering over the little man’s shoulder Donovan was able to make out about one word in three, the curious black, early English type was like some strange language, like runic or Sanskrit, he thought. It was the printing of a bygone age, the calligraphy of long forgotten men.
“Just how old is that thing?” he asked.
“Not as old as you might think.”
“Oh?”
“The Victorians, especially the early Victorians, loved the medieval. You have heard of the Gothic revival?” The old man laughed again. “This is part of it!”
“You mean that’s not original Gothic?”
“No more Gothic than I am! It has less of the medieval about it than the electric soldering iron with which I mulled your beer. This thing is a blatant early Victorian forgery, nothing more. It belongs to the same period as Mrs. Radcliffe and ‘Monk’ Lewis. It precedes Edgar Allen Poe by a decade or two; you might call it the direct ancestor of ‘Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber’, or the ‘Mystery of Maria Martin and the Red Barn’.”
“I am surprised.” Donovan realized as he spoke how lame the remark sounded.
“I could show you a church in Norwich that looks as if it was put up in the fourteenth century, and I remember it being built.”
Carter pronounced each word with vehemence.
“This Nightwalker legend, is it based on anything older?” asked Donovan, “or is it a Victorian story like—well—Sweeney Todd, for instance?”
“I’m no real expert on the occult, but I would say the legend has an oral tradition that is older than this notice, perhaps late eighteenth century.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been interrupting the story itself. I’d like you to go on reading it to me.”
“Of course.”
It occurred to Donovan that the bar was strangely empty. He knew from experience that English country pubs did not enjoy a roaring trade early in the evening, especially mid-week, but the Green Elephant seemed unusually quiet. While listening to Carter with half an ear, he tried to detect any sounds from the public bar. There was nothing. He and the landlord seemed alone in an oasis of silence. Bottles and antiques ringed them where palm trees should have stood, and the voice of the desert wind was a thin, high tenor, that read from a piece of Victorian, Gothic-revival script. “Striding beside the rivers, wading through the marshes, rustling among the reeds and long grasses, treading on slime where no mortal man can walk, comes the night walker. It’s an interesting style, almost Tennysonian and yet there is a blank verse quality about it,” interpolated Carter, glancing surreptitiously at Donovan from under his thin brows. “‘The wherry men see him by the light of smoking lanterns; wild fowlers see him crouched low over their punt guns; lonely travellers in midnight places see him stepping over tombstones; dark is the night, but darker is the nightwalker. . . .
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