MR SCRAB UNDER THE GRATE

I found that I was standing on top of a small metal grate, set into the ground like a drain. There was something there beneath the bars. A face was looking up at me.

HEUGH! HEUGH! HEUGH!

My first impulse was to run. But my second impulse was to investigate. Yet another mysterious inhabitant of Morbing Vyle! And a very foul-smelling one too. There was a ripe rotten whiff rising up from the grate. I bent down closer to investigate.

HEUGH! HEUGH! HEUGH! A-HEUGH-HEUGH -HUKKKK!!!

I moved my head just in time, as a great green gob of catarrh shot up through the bars. High in the air it sailed, hovered for a moment, then back down splattering onto the grate.

'Arrrrggh!' said the face. 'That's better !'

It was a revolting old man's face, diseased and sickly. Just looking at it made my stomach turn. The pockmarked cheeks, the hairless scalp, the tiny pustules all over the skin. And then the two red boils swelling up on the chin, the dry cracked lips crusted over with sores. And the eyes! - worst of all, the huge bloodshot eyes oozing at the corners with a gummy white liquid. They stared up at me like the slow unwavering eyes of some deep-sea creature.

'Arrggh! And who be you then?'

The breath from his mouth befouled the air. I clamped my hand tightly over my nose.

'I'm Martin Smythe.'

'Newcomer, is it? Come to join us here in Morbing Vyle?'

'Yes, that's right.'

'Good, good. We need new people. Many a year since our last one joined. That actress woman - what was her name now?'

'Melestrina.'

'Ay, Melestrina. She was the last.'

He nodded to himself. The tip of his nose and his forehead scraped against the underside of the bars.

'And who,' I asked, 'are you?'

'Me? I'm Scrab, Mr Scrab. Have they not told you about Mr Scrab?'

'No.'

'Pah!' He spat. I saw it coming and dodged the spray. 'Not tell you about me! The oldest inhabitant in Morbing Vyle!'

'You were here before the Caulkisses?'

'Dang the Caulkisses! I've lived here for ninety eight years! I was here in the time of the vicar himself!'

'The vicar -?'

'The vicar of Morbing Vyle! With these two eyes I saw him! How about that!'

'Remarkable,' I murmured.

'Yes, I was a follower in the early days. There were more of us then. 'Course, I was still only a boy at the time. But I tell you this. I was one of the ones was with him when - when . . .'

He broke off in mid-sentence. Suddenly his face flushed a bright red colour. The sweat started to pour from his skin. I could feel a wave of heat rising up through the bars.

'Here it comes,' he muttered. He screwed up his eyes and clenched his jaws. 'Mmmrrr!'

With a sudden loud POP! one of his two boils exploded. Yellow pus spattered over his face and neck and over the underside of the grate. The smell was worse than ever.

'Enough of these bloated boils,' he gritted through his teeth. 'I feel a change coming on.'

Again his face took on a straining pained expression. There was another loud POP! The second boil vanished in a second pus-spattering explosion.

'Filth! Slime! Infection!' he cried, opening his eyes again.

'Are you all right?' I asked. I didn't like to see the putrid yellow matter just lying there on his face and neck.

'Of course I'm not!' he yelled. 'Look!'

I looked. A succession of gruesome dark patches were appearing above his eyebrows. Wider and wider they grew, like blots of ink. In a matter of moments, right before my eyes, a new form of disease had spread across his entire forehead.