The Fog - James Herbert [42]
His wife stared at him from the landing window, her face white in the moonlight, her hands clutching the window-sill. She had heard the commotion from her bedroom, at first ignoring it, assuming her husband was in one of his fits of rage. But then the urgency, the terror in the screams had reached her and she had flung herself from the bed, fearful at what she might find when she reached the landing window. And what she’d found had left her in open-mouthed disbelief.
A figure had emerged from the coop at the end of the small roof, a figure that seemed scarcely human in the moonlight. It moved in crouched, lurching steps and was surrounded by wildly-beating wings. She drew in her breath in horror as she realized it was her husband, just recognizable, and he was being attacked by the pigeons he loved. She stood there, her mouth agape, for once in her life speechless, unable to move, unable to help him. His next cry broke the spell and she struggled to climb through the window, her heavy body hindering her progress. When she was halfway through, her hands on the roof, her buttocks high in the air on the window ledge, she looked up to see her husband stumble towards the edge. She opened her mouth to scream his name, but no sound came. Her lips silently opened and closed twice and only when he stepped off into space did any sound emerge.
‘Herby!’ she screamed, and the scream covered the squelching thud as the body hit the concrete thirty feet below.
She crawled towards the edge of the parapet, sobbing and calling his name over and over again. She lay flat and peered into the darkness below. His body was barely visible, a dark form lying perfectly still, legs twisted outwards at odd angles. A sudden movement gave her hope, but she saw it was the weak fluttering of a dying bird that had plunged to the ground with him. She knew he was dead.
‘Oh, Herby, my poor darling. Oh Herby,’ she wept.
Above her, on the roof of the coop, the pigeons had gathered. They gazed down at her and were still. The one called Claude cooed softly.
Much earlier, on that same day, Edward Smallwood had been fishing. He was a tall, nervous man, prematurely balding and, at the age of thirty-five, still living with his parents. His nervousness was largely due to his domineering father, a man much smaller than himself but a man with strict principles and harsh ideals, who made no effort to hide his disappointment in his ‘weakling’ son. Edward’s even smaller mother doted on her son and kindly, but misguidedly, tried to shield him from the discordances of life and the severity of his father. Nevertheless, both parents loved their gangling, stoop-shouldered ‘boy’ in different ways, and both as damagingly. They supervised his life to an intimidating degree so that any spark of initiative, any mood of impulsiveness had been carefully drained from his nature at a very early age, not maliciously, but in a kindly, patronizing way. And because it was done in kindness, albeit a stricter kindness from his father, the effects were more testing. They had guided him into his first and only job at the age of sixteen, a job in the bank managed by a friend of the family; a good job, ‘safe, respectable’. There he had stayed and worked his way up to the position of assistant manager through dogged perseverance rather than natural ability. He had refused any transfers that had cropped up from time to time, not wanting to move from the busy but pleasant enough town of Ringwood on the borders of the New Forest, and knowing his parents would not allow it anyway. He had not even felt disappointment when the manager, the friend of his family, had died two years before and he had not been offered the appointment. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he should and he was puzzled by his father’s beratement over the matter.
Edward had never really hated anyone before that; disliked, certainly, been afraid of, most definitely, but the feeling of hate had never before intruded upon his life. But Norman Symes, the new