The Wanderer Read Online Free Page B

Nearer at hand, several mineral deposits rose from the floor like the gnarled, grasping fingers of some monstrous buried crone. I clambered down to the foot of the slope, then, crossing over, hid myself amid them.
    A large crucible of burning liquid, source of the fitful glow, limned the faces of the crowd with red. They were many, at least two hundred, all elderly, all attired in Sunday best, all staring straight ahead. I craned my neck to see what transfixed them, but my sight of it was blocked by a man head and shoulders taller than the rest. Cowled and robed figures walked through the throng swinging fuming thuribles. Then, the tall man, nudged by someone behind him, shifted, and I saw what held the throng rapt: the weird Punch and Judy man’s blue fit-up. I stared aghast.
    Then the mutterings of the crowd were silenced by an eerie, drawn out, ‘That’s the way to do it!’, the sound of the swazzle keen and strident, and the play began.
    Ritual mayhem, brutalizations and murders, the throng replying to Punch’s asides solemnly and with one voice – a dire litany. Under open sky, the play had seemed merely grotesque; now, beneath ground, by a baleful glimmer, under an acrid pall, it seethed with dread.
    But was familiar. The same script. Till the end, when, after being hauled kicking and wailing to the scaffold, Punch did not submit to the noose, but began to chaff his hooded executioner.
    ‘Mister Jack Ketch, if you please, what must I do?’
    ‘Mister Punch, it’s simple enough, place your head,’ here he knocked his knuckles against the hunchback’s skull, ‘through this loop.’
    ‘What for? I don’t know how!’
    ‘Now, Mister Punch, no more delay! It’s very easy.’
    ‘Alright. Let me see. Is
this
the way to do it?’
    Here Punch jutted his head forward to one side of the noose.
    ‘No, no! Here!’
    ‘Like
so
, then?’
    Punch thrust his chin out on the other side of the halter.
    The hangman threw his hands up in frustration.
    ‘Not so, fool.’
    ‘Mind who you is calling fool. It’s tricksome. See if you can do it yourself. Only show me how and I’ll do it directly.’
    ‘Very well, I will.’ The hangman poked his head through the hempen collar.
‘There
. You see, it’s easy.’
    ‘And then pull on it,
so!’
yelled Punch, with glee, grabbing the free end of the rope and hauling the hangman into the air, kicking and howling. He threshed a while, then hung lifeless, swinging to and fro.
    ‘Huzza, huzza!’ Punch crowed.
    He cut the body down, laid it in a coffin dragged from the wings. Before nailing the lid shut, he took the hangman’s hood, put it on. Two pallbearers entered, picked up the box, and toted it off on their shoulders, performing an antic jig as they did so.
    ‘There they go. They think they have got Mister Punch safe enough.’
    The hook-nose took off the hood, threw it into the crowd, then whirled about like a dervish, trolling in a cracked and strident tone.
    They’re off! They’re off! I’ve done the trick!
    Jack Ketch is dead: I’m free,
    I do not care, now, if Old Nick
    Himself should come for me.
    The curtain fell. When it rose again the backdrop had changed to a moonlit London street, St Paul’s looming behind. Punch stoodsinging and beating time on the setts with his stick.
    Right foll de riddle loll,
    I’m the boy to do ‘em all.
    Here’s a stick,
    To thump Old Nick,
    If he by chance upon me call.
    A head peered around the drapes at the edge of the proscenium then. I glimpsed bloated features, malevolent eyes, a forked tongue, crooked ram’s horns, stifled a gasp; the other puppets’ faces were fixed, this one was hideously expressive. Gripped by convulsive shivers, Punch retreated.
    ‘Oh dear!’ he quavered. ‘Talk of the Devil and he pops up his horns. That is the old gentleman, sure enough.’
    The dread thing emerged from behind the curtains, approached Punch, walking with a strange scuttering gait. It was arrayed in a gore-daubed suit of plate,