by Ellis Peters
“Where shall we go?” asked Pussy in Dominic’s ear; and at this eerie hour even Pussy whispered.
It was the tail-end of the evening’s play, and they had almost exhausted the charms of every ordinary hiding-place. At this hungry and thirsty and yearning hour, with the uneasiness of the dark and the inevitability of bedtime clutching at them, something more was needed than the spidery tunnels of the furze and broom, and the clay hollows of elders and watery pits of willow, full of lean shadows. Rustlings and whisperings and tremors quivered across the vanishing face of the waste land after the feet of their companions. The pit mounds inhaled with one great sigh, and the children were swallowed up. And Pussy and Dominic, straight as arrows, restless, wanting something more, set their course directly upward from the well across the ribbon of wilderness, and fetched up breathlessly under the pale fence of the Harrow preserve, looking into a sweet, warm, olive-green darkness within.
Dominic panted: “I never thought it was quite so near.” He shook the pales, and looked along the fence, and saw nothing on his side but the same thickets in which he had already buried himself grubbily half a dozen times this same evening.
“Where shall we go?” repeated Pussy. “Quick, they’ll be coming, if you don’t make up your mind.”
But he had made up his mind already. It might not have happened, if the pale had not been broken out of its place, rotted away with its top still dangling in the circle of wire. Only fifty yards along the fence there was a gate, and with no wire atop, either, and a path ran tidily away from it into the dark of the plantation, heading for the Harrow farm; but the gate would not have charmed him, because it was a right of way, whereas this was a way to which he had no right. And all the guns had ceased now, and the darkness had a hush upon it as if the wood held its breath to see if he would really come. He slid one leg through. The pale behind him gave unexpectedly, swinging aside to widen the gap as his negligible hip struck it. He didn’t even have to wriggle.
“You’ll catch it,” said Pussy practically, “if anyone comes.”
“Who’s going to come, at this time of night? Come on— unless you’re scared!”
But though she put the case against it, she was already sliding through the gap after him. Her head butted him in the side smartly. He tugged her through and away into the warm grassless deeps of the trees. “Come on! I can hear Sandy moving off. You take an age!—and the gap’s big enough for a man.”
Pussy said giggling: “Who d’you suppose made it? I never knew about it before, did you?”
“No, but I’ll bet there are dozens like it. Poachers, of course! Who d’you think would make quick ways out, if it wasn’t poachers?”
“Dope, I meant which poachers! Because I know several of the special ways that belong to special people, so there!”
“Oh, yes, they’d be sure to tell you!” said Dominic, unkindly and unwisely.
“I keep my ears open. You ought to try it some time! I could draw you maps—”
They crashed suddenly a little downhill, slithering in the thin, shiny coating of pine-needles, blind, wrapped in a scented, sudden, womblike darkness. They were not accustomed yet to the black of it, and Dominic, treading light and quick upon the light, quickening heels of his intuition, suddenly checked and felt ahead cautiously with one toe, putting out a hand to hold Pussy back as she made to pass him.
“Look out, there’s a hole!”
“I can’t see a thing,” she said blithely, leaning forward hard against the pluck of his arm.
“Shine the light! You’ve got it.”
“But they’ll see it. We don’t want to show it till we have to.”
“They won’t see it from here, if you keep it this way on the ground. Be quick!”
Clawing it indifferently out of the leg of her school knickers, she felt for the button of the pencil-slim torch, the button which always stuck, and had to be humored. “Besides, I’m not sure we’re not cheating, coming in here. They’ll take it for granted it’s out of bounds beyond the fence. Nobody ever does come in here.”
“Well, there’s never been anything to stop ’em. We never said it was out of bounds. And anyhow, when we have to shine the torch they’ll know.”
“I don’t believe the silly torch intends to be shone. I can’t get it on.” She shook it, and it made a ferocious rattling, but no light. “Maybe the bulb’s gone. And if old Blunden comes along and hears us in here there’s going to be trouble.”
“Well, why did you come, if you’re scared? I never made you! And I don’t believe old Blunden would be so very fierce, either; he’s always quite decent about things, if you ask me.”
“Not people with torches in among his pheasants at night,” said Pussy positively.
“Well, we haven’t got what I’d call a torch—”
But they had. The button sprang coyly away under her finger at that precious moment, and a wavering wand of light sailed out ahead of them and plucked slender young tree-trunks vibrating out of the dark like harp-strings, with a suddenness which sang. They saw each other’s eyes brilliant and large as the eyes of owls in the night, as the eyes of cows encountered unexpectedly nose to nose when short-cutting by gaps in the hedges. Their hearts knocked hard, for no good reason except the reminder of the combat of light and dark, before they even saw the chasm yawning under their toes. Then Pussy squeaked, and scuffled backwards and brought them both down in the pine-needles.
But it wasn’t the abyss it had seemed at first glance. Dominic took the torch from her, and crawled forward on his knees to shine it into the hole, and the plunging hell of dark dwindled into a pocketful of dingy, cobwebby shadows. A filled-in pit-shaft, narrow among the trees, but still thrusting them a little aside to make room for it. Gray clay slopes breaking barrenly through poor grass and silt of needles, like a beggar’s sides through his tattered shirt; a few bricks from the shaft beaten into the composite of clay and earth, showing fragmentarily red among the gray and green. The place had been leveled, long before the trees were planted, but the earth’s hungry empty places underneath had not been nearly satisfied, and now the inevitable shifting fall had made once again a pit, ten or a dozen feet deep, and steadily settling deeper. Grass clawed at the rims of it, trying to hold fast The slopes of clay which descended into it were furrowed and dried and cracked into lozenges by the dry season, and down in the bottom a small abrupt subsidence within the large and slow one had exposed a curved surface of brickwork pitted with darker holes. Round it the young trees leaned, fearfully and inquisitively peering in, and Dominic with the torch in his hand was only one more strange young staring tree, curious and afraid.
“Just another old shaft!” said Pussy, recovering her aplomb.
“Yes. I didn’t know about this one, did you? But there are dozens all over the place.”
“ ’Tisn’t a nice sort of place, is it?” said Pussy, wrinkling her nose with distaste. “Look at those holes down there! I bet you there are rats!”
“I bet there are! It’s all right, though. I thought for a minute it was an open shaft, didn’t you?”
They had forgotten Sandy and the fat girl, until a sudden howl and hubbub broke out on the other side of the fence, rustle of stealthy footsteps first, then giggles, then a shriek of triumph and discovery, and crashing of running bodies among the bushes. “It’s Pat and Nancy—I heard you! Come on, Pat, you devil—show!” And a pencilly beam of light, wavering and striped among the branches as the detected pair switched on, and the thunder and protest of pursuit, sibilant slithering of willows, hard obstreperous clawing of gorse, dangerously near.
“Duck!” hissed Dominic, clamping a hand over the torch until she could wrestle the button back. “Quick, they’re coming this way!” She struggled, and the thread of sheathed light dwindled away into the warm dark of his palm. The hunters, returning in triumph, quested along the fence, traced by their steps back and forth, back and forth, whispering.
“Someone else up here! Sure of it! Who? Can
’t be! Can’t hear a thing! But there was somebody. Who? Try Dickie! Oi, Dickie! Come on, show a light—Dick-ie!!” No light, no sound. “Hullo, here’s a paling loose. Think anybody’d dare go inside?”
“It’s trespassing. And there might be traps!”
“Rot, it’s against the law.”
The pale creaked. Danger prickled at Pussy’s spine, at Dominic’s. Only one way to go for cover. Softly, softly, over the rim of the slope, his hand on her wrist, down the smooth-rough, needle-glazed, heat-ridged sides of the funnel, down into the pit, down among the cobwebs, down where the rats go. They slid down inch by inch on their bellies, feeling the way gingerly with outstretched toes, and holding by the tufts of coarse grass which had such a different texture in the dark.
Right down into the uncomfortable oubliette at the bottom, by the invisible shatterings of the arched brickwork and the black holes which Pussy preferred not to remember. The darkness here had a smell, dry, musty, faintly rotten. It made their nostrils curl with repulsion and yet quiver with curiosity—like the vaults of the Castle of Otranto, perhaps, or the family tomb of the Baskervilles. They huddled together in it and froze into stillness, until the stealthy crunching of feet in the pine-silt had withdrawn again, afraid to venture so far beyond the pales.
“How if they fall in?” breathed Pussy in Dominic’s ear, tremulous with giggles.
“Can’t fall far—and we’ll be under. Shut up!”
But the night, settling lower in its pillows, breathing long and gently toward sleep, brought no more echoes of pursuit down to them; and in a few minutes they relaxed, and sorted out their tangled legs from among the dirty trailers of bramble and spears of discouraged grass.
“They’ve gone!”
“I think! But don’t shout too soon. Give them a minute or two more.”
“Be damned!” said Pussy elegantly. “I want to get out of here.” She rumbled at the torch again, and swore because as usual it refused to light until she had almost broken her nail on it.
“Why, what’s the matter with it here? Been in a lot worse places.” Dominic stretched and heaved himself upright by the edges of brickwork, and fragments came away in his fingers and all but tumbled him down again. He groped, and encountered dankness, the caving softness of earth hidden from the sun, cool, dirty, unpleasing opening of one of the holes. Strange how cold! Touch the clay above in the open mounds, and it warmed you even after dusk, but this involuntary contact added to the shock of its recession the shock of its tomblike, dead chill, striking up his wrist, making the skin of his arm creep like running spiders. He was glad that Pussy was busy stamping on his little vaunt, as usual, so that she failed to hear his minute gasp of disgust.
“Oh, yes! Old Tubby’s study this morning, for instance— I heard all about it!”
Half his mind gathered itself to retort, but only half, and that uneasily. How could she have heard all about it? Nobody knew all about it except the headmaster and Dominic himself, and he was jolly sure neither of these two had told her anything. And anyhow, the old boy had been in quite a good mood, and nothing had resulted except a lecture and a few footling lines, which he hadn’t yet done. Oh, hell! Silly old-maid things, lines! The hole went back and back; he stretched his arm delicately, and couldn’t feel any end to it. Filthy the cold earth felt in there. And there was something, his fingertips found it, something suddenly soft, with a horrid, doughy solidity inside it, soft, clinging to his fingers, like fur, perhaps, or feathers. He drew his hand back, and the soft bulk followed it a little, shifting uneasily among the loosened soil. Not alive, not a rat. It just rolled after the recoil of his hand because he had disturbed it, but it was small and dead. Rabbit? But not quite that feel. Spines in the softness, longer here. Feathers— a tapering tail.
“Something in here,” he said, drawing his hand out; and his voice had the small awareness which could stop Pussy in mid-scramble, wherever they happened to be at the time, and make her turn the beam of the suddenly compliant torch upon his face. He was a little streaked and dusty, but not so bad, on the whole; it took a second and longer look to discover how far his mind had sprung from hide-and-seek. He sniffed at his own hand, and wrinkled his nose with shock. A clinging odor of rottenness prodded him in the pit of his vulnerable stomach, but his inquisitiveness rose above that. “Wait a minute! Shine the light this way again. There is something there. I believe it’s a bird—”
He was groping again, more deliberately this time, with his eyes screwed up, as if that would prevent his nose from working since he had no free hand with which to hold it, and his teeth tight clenched, as if through their grip was produced the power which propelled him.
Pussy said, sitting firmly halfway up the slope, where she had turned to stare at him: “Don’t be so daft! What would a bird be doing down a hole like that?”
“Daft yourself! He’s just lying there, dead, because someone put him there, that’s what. And why did somebody put him there? Why, because he didn’t want to be caught carrying him— Wait a minute, I can’t— There are two of ’em! What d’you know? A brace!”
“Pheasants!” said Pussy, leaping to catch up with him, and came slithering to his side again, a minor avalanche of clay dust and pine-rubbish accompanying her.
They were not, when he drew them out into the light of the torch, immediately recognizable as anything except a draggled and odorous mess, fouled with cobwebs and earth. He held them away from him, swiveling on his heels to get to windward, even where there was no apparent wind; and his stomach kicked again, more vigorously, but he would not pay attention to it. A nasty, mangled mess, with broken feathers, and soiled down. Rat-gnawed, too, but the wobbling light failed to show Pussy the traces. Dominic’s spine crawled, but the charm was already working, his tightening wits had their noses to the ground. He reared his face, taking a blind line across country, clean over Pussy’s stooped, inquisitive head. The fence only a few yards away, the hole in the fence, the tongue of waste land, the clay bowl under the outflow of Webster’s well. He himself had said, only ten minutes ago: “I never thought it was quite so near.” And how long did it take for birds to get—like these were? In a hole in the earth like this, with rats for company, would—he calculated with lips moving rapidly, tantalizing Pussy unreasonably—would ten, eleven days produce this stage of unpleasantness? He thought it might. He shifted the draggled corpses uneasily, shaking his fingers as if he could get the unclean feeling off them that way. Must tell Dad, as soon as possible. It might not be anything, but then it might, and how was he to be sure? And he hadn’t even been looking for them, they were honestly accidental. Except that he would certainly be told, for Pete’s sake keep away from that place!
“Well, some poacher got disturbed,” said Pussy easily, “and thought it best not to be caught with the goods on him, so he dumped them in here. That’s simple enough. If he used this ground he’d know all about the holes already. Maybe he’s hidden things there before. Anyhow, what’s the song and dance about? Ugh! Put them back, and let’s get out of here. They’re horrid!”
“Well, but,” said Dominic, leaning into the thread of wind which circled the funnel of the pit, and surveying his finds out of the wary corners of large eyes, “well, but if a poacher just put them there because he thought he was going to meet somebody who could get him into trouble—maybe the owner, or the keeper—well, he put them away pretty carefully so they’d stay hidden until he could come and collect them, didn’t he? He wouldn’t want to waste his trouble.”
This she allowed to be common sense, jutting her underlip thoughtfully. They had forgotten the very existence of Sandy and his partner by this time.
“Well, then, why didn’t he collect them afterwards? Look, you can see for yourself, they’ve been there days and days. He must have meant to go back for them when the coast was clear. Why hasn’t he been?”
“I don’t know. There could be any amount of reasons. He may have been ill ever since, or something.”
“Or
dead!” said Dominic.
The minute the idea and the word were out of him the darkness seemed a shade darker about them, and the malodorous carrion dangling from his reluctant hand a degree more foul. Dead birds couldn’t hurt anyone, but they could suggest other deaths, and bring the night leaning heavily over the pit-shaft in the wood, leaning down upon two suddenly shivering young creatures who observed with quite unusual unanimity the desirability of getting to some cleaner, brighter place with all haste.
“Outside,” said Pussy uneasily, as if they had been shut in, “we could see them better. It won’t be quite dark yet”
“We don’t want the others to know,” said Dominic, suddenly recalling the abandoned game. “We’ll go the other way, down the little quarry. They’ll soon give us up and go home. Or you could go and tell them I—tell them my mother wanted me, or something—while I go straight home with these.”
Pussy turned at the rim of the pit to give him a hand, because he had only one free for use. She took him by the upper arm in a grip lean and hard as a boy’s, and braced back, hoisted his weight over the edge. Waves of nauseating, faint rottenness came off the drooping bodies. She had no real wish to see them, by this or any light; she reached the open and still kept going, only drawing in a little to be just ahead of Dominic’s other shoulder.