The Murderous Mr. Pip
Philip Pirrip IV tried furiously to keep a respectable count of German bombers as they flew over him and the
Each time he looked up into the gray skies, his Home Guard helmet slid a little more on the back of his head. Finally, he’d had enough of the bloody thing, unloosed the chinstrap, and let it fall to his backyard.
He’d lost count. Best to improvise. With six bombers abreast and three large formations of five rows he ciphered about a hundred so far. They’d rip the living hell out of
As he sighted another formation just coming into view, he saw a black object fall out of one of the bombers. A man perhaps, but why would Fritz jump out of a perfectly able craft?
“What the hell?” he said aloud as the black dot grew larger on its freefall towards—well, towards him, it seemed. It traveled very fast and if it indeed was a man, the bloody idiot best open his chute soon or he’d fall to a certain death, all right, and might just take Philip with him.
Philip dodged to the left and the object seemed to follow. It was nearly on him and he knew he should run for shelter, but continued his fixed gaze, mesmerized by its progress.
The object was only a few seconds from impact when Philip realized what it was. A bomb. A bomb and in a few seconds he would be dead, blown apart because of his damn curiosity.
It did not hit Philip, but nearly did so. He fell to the ground as he had been trained by the military and was flipped on his back by the concussion. He had no time for regrets, not even enough to make peace with a God he was not sure he believed in.
There was a strange silence as Philip stared up at the fast moving clouds. The bombers were gone. He turned his head left, then right, and then patted his head, chest and legs. He seemed to be all there.
Why hadn’t he blown up with the bomb? He stood, brushed off a good deal of dirt, and walked over to the crater in his backyard. It was the size of a man. In it was a large green bomb, perhaps 50 or 100 kilograms, its red fins mangled by the impact. A dud. It must have fallen out of a bomber by accident. It would be no real coup for Hitler to bomb a dilapidated house of an engineer in
It must have been an accident, then. Some Jerry had erred and let loose a bomb early. Lucky for Philip the trigger had not gone off, probably because it was not armed. It was difficult to think a German airman could be so careless when they supposedly take so much pride in their morbid efficiency.
Philip looked around. It seemed that no one other than him had seen the missile fall into his backyard. Millie was at her sister’s in
It was at that distasteful moment in thought that Philip concocted his dastardly plan. Was it possible? Could he actually take advantage of this act of providence and finally rid him of his adversary, his foe, his nemesis, his daughter of Satan, his beloved bride of twenty years? Yes—he could.
He knew this bomb. He knew everything about it, its size, how it functions, its enormous capability for destruction. He could do it and he would. But he would have to act fast. Millie would be home soon after the bombs hit
There was little time to waste. First, he must dig the device out of his backyard. The two hundred kilometer per hour velocity of the projectile impaled it a good five feet into his soggy yard.
Philip rushed to the gardening shed to retrieve a shovel. The shed was all that was left of a brewery owned by the first Philip Pirrip. It, along with the Satis House, was property willed to his wife Estella by the mysterious Miss Havisham, the original owner. The house was now a shambles from years of neglect. Philip made little income from his engineer’s job and saw no need to waste what wages he made on the enormous ancient structure.
Ah—but the bomb and his plan would solve that little problem. Philip may have had small wages and no savings but he did have a life assurance policy on his beloved Millie that would be worth a bit more than the Satis House was worth.
He dug quickly but carefully to clear the dirt and muck from around the bomb. Yes, it was a 50 kilogram as he had thought. A Sprenbombe SC type with an ECR 15 electrical fuse. He knew of the bomb and many others like it. He felt it was his duty to
It was nearly ten p.m. when Philip finally secured the bomb with chains that were attached to a two-meter tri-pod he and his brother used for lifting engines out of automobiles. Roger had quizzed Philip on the need to borrow the contraption but Philip successfully fended off his brother’s curiosity by making up some excuse about removing old stumps.
Philip cranked the handle of the tripod and a half hour later the bomb swung heavily above the hole. There was still enough sunlight in the winter evening to haul his prize into the house.
Using a dolly, Philip carefully pulled the bomb up the front steps, through the back door and into the hallway separating the storage room from the kitchen.
He was exhausted, but after a short break, pulled the dolly and its heavy load up the fifteen steps and into the great dining room with its four-meter length ebony table and giant fireplace. The room was filled with thick dust that covered great stained glass windows and choked Philip’s throat. He placed the bomb underneath the majestic dining table.
That was enough for the night. He was too spent to continue further. The great plan would continue in the morning. He would have more than enough time to fill the crater out back and set the trap for Millie. It was time for bed. Time for sleep and dreams of a pleasant future.
The next morning, the telephone woke Philip. It was Millie. She would leave
“And why didn’t you come to
Ah, but if only you were dead, Philip thought to himself.
Millie had been a looker when they first met, a fine looker. The sort of bird men fancied to look at and be with. A fine figure of a woman.
He so much adored that figure he ignored her shortcomings, a slight cockney brogue and a passion for food. Now the gluttony had done its work as the once svelte maiden now waddled like an emperor penguin. He probably could still tolerate her if she hadn’t perfected the art of the nag. How could the Nazis pinpoint a bomb on top of a tiny spitfire and not hit a woman the size of a house?
“I expect you’ll have dinner when I arrive home, Pip, and I don’t fancy cheese sandwiches, either. ’Ow you can be an engineer and not provide for ’ouse and ’ome is beyond me, I tell you.”
“You know, I don’t like to be called Pip, Millie. My name is Philip.”
“Aaowww! Excuse me yer ’ighness. I forgot your royal blood, I did. Just pick me up at the station and have a dinner with some meat in it. Is that so ’ard—Pip!”
Philip hung up on her. He’d have something for her all right. He’d give her a nice present for Christmas of the 50-kilogram type. Call him Pip, will she. He hated the nickname. It made him feel below his station in life.
Pick her up at the station, indeed. Doesn’t she know there’s a war on? Waste what little ration of petrol they had on a trip to the station. She should bicycle like everyone else except for the strain it would put on the poor two-wheeler.
But enough of that. He was wasting time needed to prepare. He fetched his small compass saw and carefully climbed a long ladder to the roof of the Satis House. In an area above the old dining room, Philip loosed several slate tiles and cut a hole in the roof the approximate diameter of the bomb. He peered through to see sawdust on top of the old table. Perfect.
After negotiating the climb down the gothic structure to the safety of the ground, he hurried to the kitchen with a coil of eighteen gauge electrical wire. He spliced the wire to a spare car battery and push button circuit that he had installed in a cabinet earlier. From there he ran the wire under the carpet up the stairs, into the dining hall and over to the bomb. Then he ever so carefully removed the ECR 15 fuse out of the bomb. Mustering all of his engineering skill, he attached the wire to the fuse and placed it back in the bomb.
When Millie was in position later, Philip would make the electrical circuit up to the fuse with a push of a button.
Naturally, he would have to remove the wire before the army came to investigate the explosion. Hopefully there would be enough roof left to determine where the projectile penetrated and destroyed the old dining hall and of course, Millie.
The ride from the train depot seemed endless. Millie blabbered non-stop about the bombing, and their last minute escape to the tube tunnel, and how upset she was at him for not coming to
Philip tried to tune her out as she continued her belittling of him all through dinner. He thought she had tired herself out and would retire soon when she unfortunately looked out the kitchen window to the backyard.
“What’s that now?”
“What?” Philip said.
“That patch of dirt near my garden, that’s what. What have you buried there? Something I should know about, Mr. Pip?”
Philip cringed at the name. Could he wait until the bombers returned or would he strangle her first? God knows.
“Cold must have killed it last week. I saw some snow in that area, I believe. Yesterday I dug it up and mixed a little seed is all. It’s nothing.”
“Nothing, Pip?” Millie said. “I’d say it’s something when I go away to visit me sister for a few days and I come back to find my garden under attack. You leave the gardening to me and you worry about your machining and your Nazi bombers. You ’ear me?”
Philip mumbled something unintelligible.
“What’s that Pip? Did you say something?”
“I said I heard you.” And he did hear her. Hopefully not for much longer though if the German manufacturers are as good as they say.
On Christmas day, Philip watched, listened and waited for the hoped bombers and their lethal cargo destined for
Then the drone of the engines floated on the air, across the marshes and the villages to Satis House and the gleeful ears of Philip.
“Millie! Millie! Come quick!” He wondered if she could hear him over the noise of the bombers?
“Millie!”
“What?” Millie said, the contempt evident in her voice. She held the backdoor open.
“Go and fetch my posters, quickly!” exclaimed Philip. “In the hall. I’ll need them to identify the class. Now quickly!”
“Fetch yer own damn posters.”
“Millie, please!”
“Oh all right, but it’s the last time—’ear?” She turned and shut the door.
Philip looked up to see the last formation of bombers overhead. He needed to hurry. He opened the backdoor and furtively made his way to the kitchen. Millie slowly worked her way up the stairs. When the squeaks of the old staircase ceased, Philip would count to five to allow enough time for his large wife to waddle to the door of the dining hall. Then he’d push the button to detonate the bomb.
He opened the first cupboard on the left, moved a ceramic vase away from the button and waited. The squeaks stopped. He counted. One—two—three—four—five.
There was a long silence. Philip held his breath. He was about to question his handiwork when the blast shook the house, the shockwave knocking him to the ground. He instinctively covered his ears but it was too late as he felt his eardrums might burst from the ringing.
Bits of plaster fell from the kitchen ceiling onto his face and clothes. Philip gathered himself enough to stand and brush himself off.
The blast was not nearly as large as he thought it might be. Perhaps the neighbors hadn’t even heard the explosion. If that were the case he would have to ring the police to inform them a bomb landed on his house and killed his wife.
“Look sir,” he’d say. It came in right there and left that hole.” The constable would agree and then they’d find the poor Mrs. Pirrip under the debris—quite dead.
First, though, Philip would have to go upstairs to make sure that was true. He stepped over debris on the staircase. The last two steps had collapsed so he had to jump across the gap to the dust-filled hallway. The door to the room lay there, blown out from the blast. He stepped over it into the great dining room, no longer so great. The hole in the roof had disappeared along with a portion of the roof itself. The four-meter dining table had disintegrated. Only a few chairs had survived the blast.
Where was Millie? Had she disintegrated also? He nearly fainted when he heard a woman’s voice behind him.
“Pip.”
Surely she couldn’t have lived through the destruction. How could God treat him so cruelly.
“Pip,” the faint voice again said.
It came from the fireplace. He tentatively moved some busted wood pieces away from the hearth and bent down to peer up inside the flue.
“Aaaayeeee!” The high pitched shrill startled Philip knocking him back to the floor. A long streak of white mist flew from the fireplace and danced about the room at tremendous speed, darting from wall to wall, a luminous apparition that took no shape yet screamed that awful sound, “Aaaayeeee! Aaaayeeee!”
Philip covered his ears to no avail, the piercing screech tormenting him until he fell to his knees. “Stop—oh please, God—stop. It hurts so. Please I beg you—stop!”
It did. The apparition went silent and stopped directly in front of him. It metamorphosed into the translucent figure of a woman. She floated a meter or so above the debris that was once a grand table, her hair long and dirty grey, unkempt, yet her face beautiful, near angelic.
Philip’s brain did not want to believe what his eyes saw but there it was. An apparition—a specter—a ghost. The ghost of a middle-aged woman, dressed in a worn, yellowed wedding gown, her feet shoeless and dangling like small church bells from the hem.
“Pip!” she screamed.
He couldn’t speak. It was as if the air had been knocked from his lungs.
“Why?” she asked.
“Wh—why what?” he said, his voice cracking.
“Why have you called me back, Pip? Did you not finish what you had planned? Did you not get everything you wanted? The Satis House, the brewery, my Estella. Is there something more?”
“Who are you?” he asked.
She laughed for several seconds. “You don’t remember your first benefactor. I, who helped you to leave the life of a smithy to enter a gentleman’s world. Please tell me, Pip, you know the owner of the house you destroyed.”
“Miss—Havisham?”
“The one,” she said.
“Am I dead?” Philip asked.
“Not yet, but there’s plenty of time for that, my dear. First, Pip, I expect an apology for my murder. You have come to apologize, have you not?”
The specter drew closer to Philip. He outstretched his arm to touch her. His hand passed through as if it were smoke.
“But no, you’re confused, Miss Havisham. I’m not Pip.”
She laughed again. “Oh, but you certainly look like Pip and you’re living in Pip’s house and I believe you murdered that woman over there who also called you Pip.” She pointed to the old oak door.
“Well, yes, my name is Pip. Actually Philip Pirrip IV. You see, you think I’m the first Pip, my great grandfather who married Estella and inherited this house. That was in 1840. This is 1940. One hundred years later. You have me confused.”
Miss Havisham flew in a circle around Philip, her eyes never leaving his. “And you wish me to take the word of a murderer. Tch-tch Mr. Pip. You are supposed to be a gentleman. Now, apologize.”
“But I am not—“
“Apologize!”
“For something I have not done? Apologize for what?”
“For this!” She screamed and turned her back to him. The scorched flesh dripped off her bones to the dusty floors. Maggots fed on her exposed brain through a black hole in her skull. The insects swept across the bloody matter like a white cloud.
Philip heard a guttural scream, looked for its originator, and then realized it had come from him. He backed away from Miss Havisham but the ghost followed.
“Look at what you did, Pip! You let me burn!” She turned and pointed a bony finger at him. “You murdered me to get my house, my land, my Estella! You!”
“No—no!” Philip screamed. “I’m not Pip! Please! No!”
Miss Havisham rose to the opening in the roof, hovered for a moment, then flew down, down, towards the horrified engineer, her face blood red, her eyes full of death.
* * *
The police sergeant lifted a lion’s claw table leg from the floor and chucked it across the room. “Definitely a Jerry bomb, I’d say,” he said to the shorter corporal. “Yes, not a large one, though. I’d say a hundred kilo, perhaps. Unlucky they were, to be the only recipient in all of
“Yes, quite,” the corporal agreed. “Unlucky.”
“Yes, quite,” the sergeant repeated.
There was a faint moan from the front area of the bombed out room.
“Hello—what’s that?” the corporal said. “Sounds like it’s coming from under that door, sir.”
The police sergeant and corporal lifted the door to see Millie staring up at them. They threw the door to the side.
“It’s Mrs. Pirrip, sir,” the corporal said. “Are you alright, madam?”
Mille sat up. She wiped some blood from her nose with the back of her hand and looked at it. “Oh God. Where am I? What the ’ell ’appened?”
The policemen helped her stand.
“A German bomb, madam,” the sergeant said. “A direct hit, I’m afraid. A lot of damage to the house as you see. We thought you had perished, madam. Thank God for that door. It probably saved your life.”
“Yes—yes, now I remember. Pip sent me up here for some charts or posters or something. I remember now.”
“Mr. Pirrip?” the corporal asked.
“Yes, Mr. Pirrip asked me to fetch the bloody things. I remember opening the door halfway and then stopped when I saw a hole in the roof.”
“Ah yes, madam,” the sergeant said. “That would be from the bomb. Time delay fuse, I’m guessing. Clever lot those Germans.”
“Pip,” Millie said. “Where is Mr. Pip? Is he still in the yard?”
“I’m sorry, madam,” the sergeant said. He pointed to a sheet draped body.
“Oh, God, my Pip,” Millie cried. “Poor, poor Pip, and on Christmas, too.” She walked over to the body. “I must see him, please. Once more afore they bury me husband, gentlemen.”
“Mrs. Pirrip, that’s not a good idea,” The sergeant said. “Mr. Pirrip was—well it’s just not a good idea.”
“No, I won’t have it,” she said and lifted the sheet. Philip’s face was seared black, his eyeballs floating in the hollow sockets, staring up at Millie. She screamed and slumped into the sergeant’s arms. A neighbor rushed into the room and helped Millie down the stairs.
“Wot do you suppose burned him like that, sir?” the corporal asked.
“The explosion of the bomb I gather,” the sergeant replied.
“But sir. Why was he the only thing burned? You would think a fire big enough to do that damage to him would burn some of the room too, but there’s no indication that anything else was set on fire. What do you suppose burned him?”
The sergeant rubbed his chin for a moment. “Friction, I’d say, corporal.”
“Friction, sir?”
“At’s right. I’d say it was a direct hit on this poor chap and the friction set him alit. Friction.”
“Ah,” the corporal said. “Well, I guess that’s why you’re the sergeant, sir.”
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