They Walk in Darkness

by Gerald Verner

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Peter.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Peter,’ said Ann, after lunch. ‘I wish the car was in working order . . .’

  ‘Oh, it is, my dear,’ exclaimed Miss Wymondham. ‘I meant to tell you but I forgot all about it. Tom Acheson came up, himself, this morning while you were out and put it right.’

  ‘What was the matter with the thing?’ asked Peter.

  ‘I really couldn’t tell you that,’ said Miss Wymondham. ‘Tom Acheson did try to explain, but it conveyed nothing to me — a short something-or-other I think he said . . .’

  ‘Circuit?’ suggested Peter.

  ‘I believe that’s what he said, but I wouldn’t be sure,’ agreed his aunt. ‘Anyhow it doesn’t matter, does it? The main thing is that it’s all right again.’

  ‘What do you want to do, darling?’ Peter turned to his wife.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I thought it might be nice if we went for a drive round the district this afternoon. Perhaps Aunt Helen would like to come, and . . .’

  ‘No, my dears, not me,’ interrupted the old lady, shaking her head. ‘You go on your own. I always have a nap after lunch. It puts me right for the evening — I think it’s so good for one when one gets to my age, and Doctor Culpepper agrees. He says it helps to keep the arteries from hardening, or something like that . . .’

  Peter laughed.

  ‘What you really mean is that you like it and you’d do it whether it was good for you or not,’ he said, and Aunt Helen gave him a beaming smile.

  ‘Well, dear, perhaps you’re right,’ she remarked, complacently.

  It was three o’clock when they set out from Wymondham Lodge, and they planned to be back at half-past four for tea. But for a whim of Ann’s they would, in all probability, have carried out this intention and would never have made the ghastly, and almost incredible, discovery which was to delay their return to Wymondham Lodge for so long. Peter often wondered, during the ensuing weeks, whether some queer, subconscious prevision, unknown to her conscious mind, had not prompted Ann to make that request. Whatever it was, pure chance, or something more difficult of explanation, she made it.

  ‘Which way shall we go?’ he asked, as they came to the turning by the church.

  ‘Let’s go the way we came,’ answered Ann. ‘I mean, last night when we had to walk. I’d rather like to look at that old cottage again . . .’

  ‘Witch’s House?’ said Peter, and she nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Now that we know something of its history, it’s interesting.’

  ‘Are you hoping to see ‘the something that still lives there’?’ said Peter, as he swung the car round into the road along which they had walked.

  ‘No,’ she said, seriously. ‘But I got a very strange impression before. I’m wondering if I’ll get it again . . .’

  ‘You probably will, if you think you will,’ said Peter. ‘It’ll be interesting to see what sort of impression I get.’

  They passed a few scattered cottages, and then the road ran straight with nothing on either side but the flat, snow-covered marshland. In the pale sunlight it looked less bleak and forbidding than it had done under the lowering, grey-yellow sky and gathering dusk of the previous evening — less bleak, but still desolate. They could see traces of the great dykes that drained the fens, and the rushes that marked the edge of the broads. Presently they came in sight of the pollard willows that grew beside the old stone cottage, and Peter slowed down.

  ‘Surely, darling,’ said Ann, in surprise, ‘we haven’t got there already? It seemed much farther than this from the village . . .’

  ‘You were walking then,’ said Peter. He brought the car to a halt. ‘That’s the place. There’s the old broken stone wall and . . .’ He stopped abruptly, staring through the window.

  ‘What’s the matter? What is it?’ asked Ann, quickly.

  ‘Somebody’s been here since we left last night,’ said Peter, in surprise. ‘Several people, apparently. Look at the snow . . .’

  She twisted round in her seat and peered past him. The snow which had been smooth and white in front of the porch when they had last seen it, was now marked with innumerable footprints.

  ‘We made some, but we didn’t make all those,’ muttered Peter. ‘Who could have been here, do you think?’

  Ann shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘It’s — queer, isn’t it?’

  He looked round sharply, attracted by a change in her voice. Her face had gone pale and her eyes were unusually large.

  ‘Last night was the Eve of All-Hallows,’ she said, almost in a whisper.

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Peter. ‘Those footprints were made by real people . . .’ He twisted the handle, opened the door, and got out. For a moment he stood looking at the cottage, and then he walked across to the broken gap in the stone wall. The footprints were a confused jumble. They came from the direction of Fendyke St. Mary, turned in through the gap, and proceeded towards the porch. There were many different ones; the large size of men’s and the smaller size of women’s, each partly obliterating the other, so that none was very clear. Peter was able, after a moment or two, to pick out the footprints made by Ann and himself on the previous evening, and it was while he was doing this that he saw a very extraordinary thing. With the exception of Ann’s and his own, none of the footprints returned! They went in the direction of the cottage but there was none coming back in the opposite direction. It was curious, and the discovery sent a queer little quickening of the blood through his veins. These people, who had come to Witch’s House since the previous evening, had either left by the back way or they had not left at all! Stepping cautiously over the tracks in the snow, Peter entered the gap in the wall.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Ann had left the car and joined him.

  ‘Up to the cottage,’ answered Peter. ‘There’s something very strange been going on here. I’d like to find out what. Be careful how you walk, darling. Don’t tread on those prints if you can help it.’

  Avoiding them himself, he moved slowly up to the porch, with Ann close behind him. The door was closed but, to his surprise, when he pushed it, it opened with a rasping of rusty hinges. Peter peered into the gloom of the musty-smelling passage beyond. The place was thick with dust, and the cobwebs of a dynasty of spiders hung in grey shrouds everywhere. The confusion of footprints were clearly visible in the dust that covered the rotting floor, but there was no sound anywhere. Complete silence that was almost oppressive. There was a closed door in the left-hand wall, just below the narrow staircase that led upwards, and the prints all merged and concentrated in front of it. Delicately, on tiptoe, Peter went to the door and tried it. It refused to move. It was either jammed or locked. He experienced a sudden and intense desire to see what was behind that closed door. He frowned at it for a second, and then, making up his mind, he flung himself against it. It flew open with unexpected ease — so unexpected that he only saved himself from falling by clutching frantically at the frame . . . Ann uttered a startled exclamation at the noise.

  ‘Peter, what’s happened?’ she called from the porch. ‘What was . . .?’

  ‘Stay where you are!’ snapped Peter, sharply. ‘Don’t come any farther, Ann . . .’ But she was already at his side and peering through the open door into the room beyond, although he tried to prevent her.

  ‘Peter . . . look!’ she whispered, huskily. ‘Look . . .’

  The room, which was small and low-ceilinged, was lit with a dim grey light that filtered in through the small, dirt-encrusted panes of the lattice window. A very old worm-eaten table occupied the centre of the floor and this was laid for a meal. There were lace table-mats, an array of shining glass, expensive-looking china, and a six-branched candelabra in which six candles had guttered out. Places were laid for five people, two on either side of the table and one at the head, and four of the guests at this ghastly meal were still present. They sat in strangely contorted att
itudes, their set, rigid faces and staring eyes turned towards the empty chair at the head of the table with such appalling expressions of horror that they looked like a company of the damned. Peter recognized Laura Courtland, still wearing her dress of scarlet, but the two men and the other woman were strangers to him. Mrs. Sowerby could have told him that the dark man next to Laura was Robin Mallory. Old Ted Hoskins could have identified the man with the greying hair, seated opposite, as Monsieur André Severac. Mrs. Bossom would have known that the rather passée, fair-haired woman on his right was Fay Bennett . . .

  ‘Peter,’ Ann’s voice was husky and almost inaudible. ‘Peter . . . they’re dead . . . . They’re all dead . . . It’s horrible . . . they look as if . . . as if they’ve been blasted . . .’

  Peter nodded. They were all dead. There was no doubt about that. A line from Wordsworth’s Peter Bell came flashing, unbidden, into his mind. ‘. . . All silent and all damned.’

  Without removing his eyes from that incredible and dreadful tableau, he spoke:

  ‘Take the car and go back to Fendyke St. Mary,’ he said. ‘Get hold of the police and tell them what’s happened. I’ll wait here . . .’

  PART TWO

  THE BLACK MAN

  ‘. . . black it stood as night,

  Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell . . .’

  — John Milton. Paradise Lost.

  Chapter One

  Peter Chard heard the sound of the car dwindle away to silence, and fumbled mechanically in the pocket of his overcoat for his cigarettes. He had taken one from the packet and raised it halfway to his lips when he concluded that perhaps, in the circumstances, he had better not smoke, and put it reluctantly back again. There would be a certain amount of time before Ann could find the police and bring them back, and the interval offered him a chance, that might not occur again, of putting in a little investigation on his own account. Now that he had, more or less, recovered from the first shock of his incredible discovery, his mind was able to take in and record more details of that horrible room. The table, he saw now, was not only laid for a meal, but a meal had been partly eaten. The plate in front of each of those dreadful figures still contained the remains of food, and the glasses were half full of wine. Death had come, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the middle of that uncanny supper, leaving them in an awful and grotesque semblance of life, like a waxwork tableau, only more hideous than any waxwork tableau could have been. Peter noted that they were all in evening dress. The fair-haired woman wore a very low-cut, backless gown of some flimsy black material, and was elaborately made up; the two men were in dinner suits and black ties. Laura Courtland’s fur cape, which she had worn at Miss Wymondham’s on the previous evening, hung over the back of her chair, and a heavy cloak of deep blue, fur-trimmed velvet was draped over the back of the other woman’s. The men’s overcoats hung on a rusty nail in the wall by the fireplace. Amid the dirty dilapidation of that low-ceilinged, grimy room, the effect was, somehow, queerly tawdry. Why had these people dressed with such care to come and eat an uncomfortable meal in this damp, draughty, and neglected old cottage? Why had they come there at all, and in what manner of way had they died? What was it that had stamped that look of stark, naked horror on their dead, distorted faces? Something, or somebody, that had occupied that empty chair at the head of the table and towards which those sightless eyes were all staring with hideous and horrified intentness? The plate in front of that chair was clean; the polished glass empty. Had the person for whom that place had been laid failed to come, or . . . Fantastic and impossible ideas began to creep insidiously into Peter’s mind. Last night had been the Eve of All-Hallows . . . He pulled himself up sharply. It was absurd to what lengths one could go if one let their imagination run riot. The thing was gruesome and unusual, but it must have a practical explanation. There was no such thing as an effect without a cause. Here were four dead people, and somebody had killed them. That was quite obvious and indisputable. Or was it? Perhaps they had met here together, in this strange way, to carry into effect some extraordinary suicide pact? It was possible, but Peter found himself rejecting the explanation almost before it occurred to him. The expressions on their faces were not the expressions of people who had been prepared for death. Death had come without warning, or with so little warning that they had only realized its approach when it was too late . . .

  He entered the room cautiously and made a closer inspection of the table. The remains of the food on the plates looked like kidneys and liver. There was a big dish in the centre, close beside the silver candelabra, standing on a spirit-heated hot-plate, which also contained traces of liver and kidneys. Somebody had gone to an enormous lot of trouble to provide this meal in the empty cottage to which death had come as an unbidden guest. Was it the person who had occupied, or should have occupied, the vacant place? There were several bottles of wine on the floor beside the empty chair, but only two had been opened. The corks of the other bottles were intact, with the wax seals unbroken. Reluctantly, and with every nerve in his body shrinking from the contact, Peter laid his hand on one of Laura Courtland’s bare arms. It was icy cold and stiff, as though it had been made of stone. Rigor mortis was apparently in an advanced state, which accounted for the distorted and unnatural attitudes of the bodies. The freezing cold had contributed to that, of course, though there were signs that a fire had recently been lighted in the rusty, broken grate. It couldn’t have been a very large one, however, and must have long since burnt out . . .

  If Laura Courtland had come straight from Wymondham Lodge to this gathering, whatever it was, she would have reached the cottage at about eleven, and it was only reasonable to suppose that the others had arrived at about the same time. Yes, thought Peter, and how had they come? They wouldn’t have walked through the snow . . . He stooped and looked at their shoes. No, they definitely hadn’t walked. The shoes were stained, but not as much as they would have been if they had walked very far. But if they had come by car, where was the car? The footprints in the snow outside came from the direction of Fendyke St. Mary, but there had been no sign of any car tracks, or of a car. If it had been left farther along the road, he and Ann would have passed it on their way to the cottage. Laura Courtland might have picked the others up somewhere in her car, but what had she done with it? Even if they had all got out before reaching Witch’s House, which it seemed they must have, what had happened to the car?

  Peter looked at the vacant place at the head of the table and his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Had the fifth member of the party taken the car? It was a plausible explanation, always supposing there had ever been a fifth person present. It might be possible to prove that from the footprints, if they were not too confused and jumbled. That would be a job for the police. If there had been a fifth person, and this was murder, then he, or she, must be the murderer. Peter thought there was very little doubt that it was murder — some kind of quick-acting poison either in the food or the wine. More probably the wine. That, also, was for the police to find out. He was more interested in the psychological aspect of the crime than in its mechanics. Was this an extension of the lamb and baby killings, or something entirely apart? The result of a careful and logical plan with a more practical motive behind it than the blood-lust of a homicidal maniac? Until he knew more about the people concerned it was difficult to conjecture. Something had brought them all to that empty cottage on the previous night to eat that last weird meal together, which seemed to point to a plan of some kind, but whether the plan had been originated by the murderer, or whether he had merely taken advantage of the opportunity presented, was impossible to say.

  Peter decided to have a look at the rest of the cottage. Beyond the staircase, at the back, he found a kitchen littered with the accumulated rubbish of years; a small, dark, gloomy room that smelt of decay and rats. There was a door here which evidently led to the garden, but it was bolted and barred and hung with festoons of cobwebs. The place was filthy. Great holes gaped in the rotten floor, and the wal
ls had huge cracks running from floor to ceiling due, he concluded, to a subsidence of the foundations. There was nothing of any interest to be seen, and since this, with the passage and the room in the front, constituted the entire ground floor, he decided to explore above.

  Very gingerly he went up the narrow staircase. The treads creaked under his weight and he fully expected the whole structure to collapse at any second, but it held and he arrived on a small landing. There were two rooms up here with low, sloping ceilings and narrow casement windows. Like the kitchen they were full of rubble, and in one the ceiling had partly fallen, leaving a great irregular black gap with broken laths sticking out of it. Quite obviously no one had been up here recently. The dust that lay thickly everywhere was devoid of any footmark. Peter returned to the ground floor and went out into the porch. The cold fresh air was pleasant after the stuffy smelliness of the cottage. He took out a cigarette and lit it. He was halfway through his third cigarette when Ann returned with the police.

  Chapter Two

  Ann had been lucky. She had met a labourer on the outskirts of the village who had directed her to the little police station, and she arrived almost coincident with the return of Colonel Shoredust and Superintendent Odds from a rest after their activities of the night. To them she hastily explained the reason for her visit, which had the effect of reducing the Chief Constable to a state of babbling incoherency, and the still weary Odds to a kind of astonished, but apathetic, resignation. When these immediate results had partially worn off, Colonel Shoredust became intensely energetic and began issuing orders at a prodigious rate, most of which the superintendent tactfully ignored. There ensued a chaotic confusion from which Ann emerged to find herself, without quite knowing how it had been achieved, wedged in the back of Peter’s car between the Chief Constable and Doctor Culpepper, with Superintendent Odds and Sergeant Quilt occupying the front seats. During the short journey back, Colonel Shoredust indulged in a staccato conversation with all four of them, punctuated with many pauses as he adjusted his normal vocabulary to suit the presence of Ann. She was never able to remember what he talked about, and none of the others appeared in the slightest degree interested.