As a rule, Doctor Robert did not approve of Valium or for that matter, any of her cousins.
It was not that he was against proscription drugs, obviously. But in matters of the mind he was keen to explore alternatives. In the case of self-diagnosed depression, insomnia and other evidence of patient intransigence, he would throw out a line from the latest Reader’s Digest or the bulletin from the Maharishi University. Sometimes, if he was in an adventurous mood, or he perceived adventure in the soul of his patient, he might even suggest they try yoga or mediation; he himself was a secret practitioner of the transcendental kind.
When Doctor Robert, however, began to explore such options with the patient before him, Eileen Bell showed visible signs of frustration – wrinkling her brow, then scrunching up her nose with disgust at his tentative suggestions.
“Doctor,” she said, “it’s not a question of exercise or walks, or sitting in the lotus. It’s not that I can’t go to sleep, but I won’t.”
Eileen Bell was not a regular patient, although she was on the books, as were her two children, Leslie and Stig (apparently a nickname). Leslie was eight, and Stig was nine and a half. Doctor Robert did not know her husband, Douglas Bell; but he was also on the books under the charge of his colleague, Doctor Stoppard. There was no suggestion of hypochondria or anxiety around illness or disease in the family. If anything, they were a model family; normally healthy and responsible. Both Eileen Bell’s pregnancies had gone smoothly. The children had been inoculated against all the usual suspects including tetanus after they fell on top of each other and on to some barbed wire in the Swallowship Wood. As far as the Doctor could tell, Douglas Bell hardly ever came near the surgery.
“Mrs. Bell,” he said, “you do realise you can become addicted to Valium?”
“Doctor,” she replied, “at the moment I don’t care if I become addicted to Heroin, I just want to get to sleep.”
Then she sighed deeply and began to tell Doctor Robert her story.
About three months prior to her visit, one Saturday morning, the children had been watching a programme called Why Don’t You Switch Your Television Off and Do Something Less Boring Instead where they learnt about the delights of looking for buried treasure. Doctor Robert could not help but raise a smile, since even he knew of the programme which played an ironic role in his wife’s struggles with getting his own children to stop watching the dreaded box.
“Needless to say, Doctor, I had no wish to dampen the enthusiasm for Roman coins or sherds of Medieval pots or bowls, or whatever it was the little blighters were going to dig up. But you see, I’d just planted some tulips and begonias down by the fence on the Tatchell side of the property, I didn’t want them digging there. However, there is a patch of grassy bank which is really part of the wasteland on the other side of the bottom fence. Douglas is always threatening to dig it up, so I said, thinking we could kill two birds with one stone:
“Why don’t you go and dig over there? And while you’re at it, pick up the weeds and put them in the wheelbarrow. You can take them to the compost later.”
It was Leslie, apparently, who found the heads. There were in a little cluster among some weeds and broken brick. – Doctor Robert became rather curious at this point pressing for details which would be confirmed by the photos in the local newspaper a while later. – Each head was no bigger than a golf ball; you could easily fit them in the palm of your hand. You could just about make the eyes and the nose on one. One was a slightly darker hue, which apparently sent a little shiver down Eileen Bell’s spine when she saw it. The other looked as though it had some hair, too. The third head was quite a bit smaller – as though it was the head of a child. It did not have a nose, but you could make out the shallows where the eye sockets were supposed to be.
Stig of course was incredibly disappointed, because he wanted to find some heads, too. But neither he nor Leslie had any further luck, so their mother called them in for tea and fish fingers.
When Douglas Bell came home from work, the Bells had a long discussion about the heads. It was decided they should contact the local museum.
A chap called Tony Soper came around to look at them. He wanted to make some drawings and asked if he could take one of the heads away to show to his colleagues. But Douglas wanted instant answers. “As you probably know,” Tony Soper said, “there’s an Anglo-Saxon site up the road. But we haven’t found anything Celtic or Roman around here.”
But Douglas wouldn’t leave it. “Surely, Mr Soper, you can say more than that. I mean you’re not among colleagues now.”
“Mr. Bell, I understand what you are thinking. But we’re always coming up against the general public who want us to make pronouncements about Druids, human sacrifices and all that. We’re trying to turn what we do into a science. Afterall, there are enough so-called experts around who consider archaeology a pseudo-science.”
“I could not agree more,” said Douglas, “but surely you have an off-the-record opinion.”
“Well, I must say,” said Soper. “They remind me of something I have seen somewhere. In fact, I think it was a paper from a German site at Battenberg.”
“Battenberg, where is that exactly?”
“Westphalia.”
“So, they’re not from around here. They’re from the continent. Teutonic, like the bloody royal family?”
“I didn’t say that,” said Soper, laughing. “But the site was an iron age site, so what you might call Celtic.”
“What did I tell you, Eileen? – They’re bloody Celtic.”
Eileen Bell was amused by this exchange. Apparently, her husband was more than a little bit of a Wellsian know-all. And Doctor Robert could not help but raise a smile for the second time at Mrs. Bell’s description of her other half. – More Selwyn Cavor than Alphonse Moreau as she put it.
The Bells did not hear from Soper and the museum; and the heads were left on the mantelpiece in the dining room until one day, just before school, Leslie went to check on them.
“Mum,” he said, “the heads have moved.”
“What do you mean, the heads have moved?”
“I mean, either someone’s moved them or they’ve moved themselves.”
According to Mrs. Bell, Leslie was a rather impressionable little boy; in contrast to Stig who was not very talkative, especially with adults, but inclined to go off into his own little world.
“Mind you,” she added, “I do remember once he got scared during a Doctor Who episode, particularly when those reptilian sea monsters appear from the gloom.”
Eileen Bell made a point – in front of the children – of putting the heads back in their original place on the mantlepiece. From time to time she and Leslie, and sometimes Stig would go to check on the heads. This went on for several hours. She’d turn to Leslie and say: “What about the heads? – Have they moved yet?”
She was upstairs, cleaning when Leslie came in the bedroom. “Mum,” he said, “the heads have moved again.”
Leslie was really quite upset; in fact, he burst into tears when Stig started teasing him and calling him scaredy-cat.
“I’m not a scaredy-cat.”
“Yes, you are. Scaredy-cat! Chicken!”
“I’m not a scaredy-cat and I’m not chicken!”
Stig could be quite nasty like that, baiting Leslie till he was apoplectic, or did she mean epileptic? But Doctor Robert did not like to correct her.
“Anyway, when I found out it was Stig all along,” she went on, “I got properly cross. Sometimes you see it’s the only thing that works with Stig. So I told him off for making Leslie cry like that and sent him to his room.
“That, you would have thought was the end of it, doctor. The following day Stig and Leslie went off to school. I thought a normal day could begin. I had to go out to do the shopping. I got some fruit and veg from the market. When I got home, about midday, I was putting the things away, and I went into the dining room to put some apples in the bowl on the dining room table, and I saw one of the heads had fallen off the mantlepiece…”
“Out of interest,” said Doctor Robert, “which head fell on the floor?”
“The small one.”
“You mean the one you thought of as the child.”
“That’s right, the child head.”
If these incidents had just been isolated, no doubt Eileen Bell and the children would have forgotten all about the heads. But they didn’t. In fact, how could they? Because very soon there were, as she put it, more funny goings on.
A few days later, while Douglas was away on business, she received a visit from Mrs. Tatchell.
Mrs. Tatchell, who was a widow, kept herself very much to herself. She rarely spoke over the fence, and had been even less inclined since Mr. Tatchell’s death the previous year (Doctor Robert noted Mr. Tatchell had also been a patient – a rather lugubrious patient at that, who had – towards the end – suffered terribly from insomnia that could plausibly be attributed to his Japanese prisoner-of-war experiences). Mrs Tatchell was not then a visiting type, but when she rang the front door, Eileen Bell invited her in and sat her down in the kitchen.
“I got the china out because it makes a better cup. Besides which,” she went on, “when someone like Mrs. Tatchell comes to tea, you don’t give her a mug with a smiley face or a mickey mouse.”
“What seems to be the trouble, Mrs. Tatchell?” I asked.
“You didn’t see it,” she says eventually.
“What. Mrs. T?”
“The beast that came from your garden.”
“What are you talking about, Mrs. T?”
“A beast, Mrs. Bell,” she says, “a beast.”
“Mrs. Tatchell began to describe what she saw. I listened. While I listened, I did not burst out laughing or stop her with a sarcastic remark as I might be so inclined with some of the other neighbours such as Doreen Lovelace. It transpired, the beast in question was not exactly a beast. Even though it looked like a beast, it was not walking on all fours. It was walking upright, like a person.”
“You mean, it was a biped, Mrs. Bell.”
“No, doctor, I mean a beast walking on two legs. Mrs Tatchell was coming out onto the patio when she saw it. It looked at her for moment, before it turned tail and disappeared.”
“It disappeared, Mrs. T?” I said.
“Yes,” says Mrs. Tatchell. “It disappeared and I didn’t see it anymore.”
“And you say it was walking upright, not on all fours.”
“Yes,” says Mrs Tatchell, “it was walking upright. Like a person. Only it looked like a beast.”
Mrs. Thatcher thanked Eileen Bell for the tea and went home.
Eileen Bell had not said anything about it, although it was the first thing that crossed her mind was the heads.
“I don’t want to make big fuss,” Eileen Bell went on. “When Douglas got home from his business trip, he was extremely tired. In fact, he’d gone straight to bed. Douglas was already asleep when I came up. As I often did, I read with the bedside light on. I must’ve dropped off over Mr. Chips. When I opened my eyes, someone was standing in the doorway.”
“I’m telling you,” said Eileen, suddenly looking over at the doctor. “It wasn’t Douglas at the door, if that’s what you think.”
“It was over six foot. And it had teeth like this,” she said, seizing upon the surgery notepad.
Doctor Robert noted the expression on Eileen Bell’s face.
“You’re laughing at me, aren’t you, doctor?”
“I assure you, Mrs. Bell. I am not laughing at you.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I believe you or not, Mrs. Bell.”
At which point Eileen Bell burst into tears.
Doctor Robert was somewhat taken aback as he fumbled around for a box of tissues, which he managed to locate in the bottom drawer of his desk by which time Mrs. Bell had found a handkerchief in her handbag.
Doctor Robert waited patiently as Eileen Bell wiped her eyes with the handkerchief and endeavoured to pull herself together.
Without a doubt, he thought, she was looking tired and worn out. Whether it was on account of stone heads, two-legged wolves or something else that would require more than the mindful prayers of the Maharishi University, he could not say. On this occasion, he decided to break his rule and began to write out the prescription.
No doubt Doctor Robert would have forgotten all about Eileen Bell and her stone heads. About a year later, however, he happened to be driving down the street where the Bells lived. He noticed there was a for sale sign up in the front garden. As he drove past, he could not help thinking of the heads and the strange story Eileen Bell had told him in his surgery.
It was then that he drove into the back of a parked Ford Cortina and swore obscenely. For he knew he could not claim on the insurance regarding a figure so beastly.