Hum Drum

Hum Drum

By Gary McMahon

Sometimes grief is like a suit of clothing, a favorite outfit that we have held on to for far too long, worn too many times. We cannot bring ourselves to throw it away, it cost a lot to acquire and we have grown accustomed to its fit. Sometimes that grief is all we have at hand to wear, and the other clothes in our wardrobe are nothing more than a row of shoddy hanging corpses.

The roads were busy that time of the day, but still the journey was mercifully brief. I was in London by 4 p.m., and standing on the banks of the Tames as Big Ben struck the hour of five.

I held the drum in my hand, the jocular words of the shopkeeper running through my mind: Perhaps old Harvey just wants his drum back. It was the only hope I had of ending this; the alternative I had lef in the capable hands of Probert, and I knew that he would not fail to make provisions.

I’d told him to wait until bedtime, and if by then I had not returned he was to put Plan B into action. Probert thought that he could pull together at least five thousand pounds in hard cash in less than three hours. Back in the Victorian era that much would have been considered a vast amount of money; a fortune. If I was not back in Yorkshire before Probert retired for the night, he was to leave out the money for Bellows`s restless spirit to collect. Hopefully, this would be enough to send him on his way, to pay off whatever debt Probert now owed.

Hum Drum. Photo by Elena

Standing on the breezy embankment beneath the segmented concrete finger of Waterloo Bridge, I put the drum to my ear. That humming reverberation was still present, continuing like an endless echo, a subdued song of the dead. The sky reared above me like a huge airborne spirit threatening to swoop down and tear me to pieces; the voice of civilization was a quiet threat at my back – the distant thunder of traffic, the constant thrum of feet on concrete.

I took the drum from my ear and raised my hand to throw. In that instant, the sound ceased; the drum was silent. I hurled it into the lapping black waters, hoping that I was doing the right thing, that the hex would be broken.

The drum bobbed like a buoy for a while, and then dipped sharply down beneath the choppy surface as if pulled from below. As I watched, something appeared momentarily, a bulky oval shape rising from the water – a partially deflated football covered in river slime, or possibly a skull trailing muddy decomposed matter. The shape was gone before I could make out any details. I was never certain what it was that I saw there, floating atop of sharp gray waves.

Then I heard the noise again: a low, distant hum. The sound of the drum had not diminished; if anything it had increased in volume now that the instrument had been returned to its maker. Its hushed, solemn beat joined with the gentle swelling of the waves, and for an instant the wole world was filled with its monotonous rhythm.