by John Burke
Very slowly he came down the stairs. From below he had seemed young, but as he drew closer Sylvia saw faint lines about his eyes which spoke of deep, rather frightening adult experience.
She got to her feet. He came right up to her and stared at her curiously, without a change of expression. Then, with a sudden ferocity, he turned and hit Denver so hard across the mouth that he went spinning across the hall. Denver went down to his knees, shook his head so that blood splashed from his mouth, and got up hazily. He raised his arm to shield himself from another blow, but the man was on him again, beating him backwards.
“Now get out of here.” He glared round. “All of you—get out of my sight!”
The bloods slipped away, Denver tottering in their midst.
Sylvia felt sickened by it all. She did not know who this newcomer was and had no reason to suppose his intentions were any better than those of the others. In spite of her shrinking horror she managed to preserve an air of defiance.
He said: “Miss Forbes, I know it is useless to ask that you forgive my . . . friends. Such behavior is beneath contempt and beyond forgiveness. I only ask that you accept my solemn word that I knew nothing of what was going on.”
“How do you know my name?”
“The arrival in as small a village as this of a beautiful young lady and her distinguished father can scarcely go unnoticed.” He gave a little bow. “My name is Hamilton. Clive Hamilton.”
So this was the distinguished, good-looking squire on whose perfections Alice had dwelt with such warmth. Sylvia had to agree that he was not an old dodderer. She was by no means so sure of his charm.
“Will you kindly take me home, Mr. Hamilton?”
“I fear you have not forgiven me.”
“Your fears are well founded. I have not. Now, will you kindly escort me home—or do I have to walk?”
“There’s nothing I can do to convince you of my personal innocence?”
He spoke glibly and with apparent sincerity. There was no reason why she should not accept his word: indeed, his fury when he saw Denver clutching at her had been unquestionably genuine. Yet beneath the veneer of apology and polished civility she detected a note of mockery. He was going through all the correct formalities but somehow he was deriving a perverse enjoyment from it.
She said: “Nothing. I take it that I have to walk?”
“My carriage is at your disposal,” said Hamilton. “Unfortunately I can’t leave just at the moment, so I cannot escort you myself. I shall be pleased to instruct one of my . . . young guests . . .”
“Thank you,” Sylvia cut in decisively. “I prefer to walk.”
She turned towards the door. He moved quickly beside her.
“Miss Forbes, I wouldn’t advise it. The countryside is not very kind to strangers during the night hours. You might be attacked.”
“I have already been attacked,” she pointed out, “by guests of yours—here, in your own house. Please open the door.”
Reluctantly he turned the great iron handle and pulled the creaking door open.
“Tomorrow,” said Sylvia, “I shall go straight to the police.”
Before she could storm out into the night he had barred the way.
“Please don’t do that, Miss Forbes.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“I am the squire of this little community, and as such I am responsible for the welfare of everyone in it. They respect me and they rely on my judgement. I wouldn’t wish them to be . . . shall we say, disillusioned? If there were any scandal attached to my name, dear lady, the effects could be disastrous. You may find that hard to understand, but our ways here are not city ways. I can only ask you to take my word for it.”
“And what about those . . . your charming guests?”
“Will you leave me to punish them in the way I think fit? Believe me, they will suffer for what they have done—and what they intended to do.”
She wavered. It was true that if he had not arrived in time she would have been at the mercy of those ruffians; and the meaning of the word mercy was one which they would have been unlikely to comprehend.
“All right, Mr. Hamilton,” she said. “I won’t go to the police . . . this time.”
“Thank you.”
He stood to one side and held the door back so that she could walk out. As she stood at the top of the steps for a moment, allowing her eyes to get accustomed to the uncertain light, he said:
“I still think that my carriage—”
“Thank you. I can find my way.”
“Please take care not to stray from the path. Turn right at the end of the drive and you will get to the village on a straight route. But there are old tin mines under this land, and if you wander away from the path . . . well, the ground above the mines has been known to subside.”
Sylvia nodded and went off down the drive. She had gone some distance before she heard the door closing behind her.
The path took her along the edge of the woods. She half expected Martinus to come blundering drunkenly out again; and when she emerged into the open her heart beat faster as she waited for the horsemen to appear and jubilantly ride down on her once more.
But the night was still.
She had no sooner thought this, thankfully, and quickened her pace down the slope, than there came a strange rasping, mumbling sound. There was the faintest tremor in the earth.
Sylvia stopped, all her old fears flooding back. She looked round.
There was nothing to be seen save the winding wheel of the nearby minehead, silhouetted against the cloudy sky. For a moment she could have sworn that she saw it turning. But it was obviously an illusion. She blinked, and stared fixedly at the wheel until she was sure that it was still.
The rumbling stopped, then resumed.
The path led straight down to the village. She ought to walk down it without looking to either side, and get back to the safety of the Tompsons’ house. She remembered Clive Hamilton’s warning about possible subsidence of the ground. But curiosity was too strong. She left the path and went cautiously towards the dark huddle of the old mine workings.
The buildings were mournful and dilapidated. Doors hung from rusted hinges, and bricks had fallen out of the walls so that the wind could moan gently through the gaps. The noise she had heard was louder now. It seemed to come from the winding shed. Sylvia hesitated to go too close. The shaft had not been bricked over, but a protective wall had been hastily erected round it. The hawser still plunged from the wheel down into the earth.
And from the depths came the strange, deep boom. It was like a subterranean wind, crooning a lower note than the wind through the spokes of the wheel.
Sylvia felt a chill seeping into her bones. She was in a world of ghosts—a tiny, abandoned world that must once have been busy but now was dead. And the melancholy rumbling from beneath her feet . . . ?
She could not imagine what silliness had brought her here. It was late. If her father found that she was missing and started a search for her, there was no telling how far he would roam or how furious he would be when at last they met.
She turned and went back towards the path.
Behind her there was a creaking noise, as though the wheel had started to turn. She spun round; and the wheel was still.
Sylvia forced herself to hurry away. In the uncertainty of the night, in this alien landscape, she was beginning to imagine absurd things. Every sound would terrify her if she did not soon turn her back on the place and hurry off to bed.
But as she reached the far side of the shallow saucer in which the outer buildings of the mine lay, she could not resist glancing back for one more look.
A figure stood on the rim of the hollow. It was humped in a strange posture against the sky, its outlines indefinable.
Then the moon came out, full and clear; and in its light she saw every detail.
There were two figures. One was tall and grey, dressed in the vestments of the grave. The breeze stirred the clothes and
tangled hair. The face was as grey as the shadowy clothing, and the upturned eyes were sightless. The other figure was the body of a woman, carried in the creature’s arms. And in the moonlight there could be no mistake: the body was that of Alice Tompson, smothered in blood.
The dead thing which carried Alice took a hesitant step forward, jerking down the slope into the hollow.
Sylvia screamed.
The creature’s mouth opened. It seemed to be laughing, but no sound came. There was only the twitching of the lips in a macabre, vacuous grimace.
“Alice!” Sylvia screamed again, and at the peak of her terror found herself stumbling towards the terrible vision.
The creature swayed and stopped as though unsure of itself. Sylvia took another step. Suddenly Alice’s body rolled forward from the creature’s arms and crumpled to the grass. The other grey, ghastly figure turned and made off.
Sylvia went on her knees beside her friend.
“Alice,” she pleaded. “Alice . . .”
But when she turned Alice’s head and looked into her face she knew that it was no good. Alice was dead. Newly dead. When Sylvia looked down at herself she saw that her clothes were soaked in Alice’s blood.
7
Peter Tompson plodded across the square, so weary that he had difficulty in putting one foot in front of the other. At his front door he stopped and scraped some of the churchyard mud off his shoes against the old iron scraper.
There was still a light on in the parlor. Sir James must be sitting up waiting for him, or else he had left it as a welcome. Peter went in.
Sir James was in fact waiting. His face was drawn. Through his own tiredness Peter found time to think that the old man was ageing rapidly: the night’s work had really taken it out of him.
“Done,” he said as he slumped down at the table. “All covered in.”
Sir James nodded. He seemed unable to speak. At last he forced the words out:
“I . . . I have some shocking news to tell you.”
“News?”
“Please try to take it . . . I won’t say calmly . . . but steadily. Oh, my God.”
“Sir James, what is it?”
“Alice.”
“She’s ill. I knew she was weakening, but I didn’t let myself believe it.” He got up and went towards the stairs. “I must go to her.”
“No.” Sir James seized his arm and held on to him.
“Let me go,” said Peter. “I want to see her. I’ve known all along—”
“Peter! She’s not there.”
He was drunk with fatigue. But Sir James spoke so gravely and impressively that the words reached him through the haze. He wanted to go on, to see Alice, to learn the worst . . . but he was dragged round to face his old tutor.
“She’s not there,” Sir James repeated. “She’s outside somewhere, on the moors. And, Peter . . .” His voice cracked pitifully. “Peter—she’s dead.”
It was insane. He could not have heard what he had just heard. Even in a nightmare there had to be some kind of logic, and this was just grotesque.
“No,” he said. “No.” And that word, too, meant nothing: it was a way of taking breath, of waiting for things to settle down and become normal again.
“Sylvia found her.”
“No,” said Peter. He went on saying it. “No . . . no . . . no . . .”
Sir James went to the sideboard and took out the whisky bottle. He poured a stiff drink and held it out. Peter began to cry. The sobs came slowly and rackingly, building up to the rhythm of hysteria. As though from a great distance he observed his own symptoms, almost clinically, and waited to hear himself scream and begin to shout meaningless filth. But that very detachment, the existence of that other self within him, stopped him. He took the drink and downed it. It scorched his throat. He made himself stand quite still, and although he could feel the tears begin to trickle down his cheeks he was not going to shout, not going to give in.
With terrible clarity he saw one thing: whatever had happened, it was his fault. He had not paid enough attention to Alice’s illness. Harassed by his other patients, and by the hostility and lack of cooperation with which he had to contend all over the district, he had let his own wife succumb without doing anything to help her. Tired by his work outside, he hadn’t wanted to listen to medical problems at home.
He said: “I killed her.”
“Pull yourself together and don’t talk rubbish,” said Sir James sharply.
Peter had talked like this to some of his own patients. Now he knew what it felt like to be in agony and to be bullied.
“It was my fault. And now there’s nothing I can do. Nothing.”
“You can let me perform an autopsy.”
“On Alice?” He thought of his wife, of their happiness and then the despair that had somehow settled on them and on the village. But most of Alice, his wife, his love. Alice as she had been, beautiful and desirable. “You can’t ask me—”
“Can’t I? After all you said about the other people in the village who made things hard for you? If she, too, was attacked by this vile disease I want to find out about it . . . and destroy it.”
Peter took another drink. Bleakly he said: “Yes. You’re right, of course. I agree.”
“I shall need help.”
Peter felt dizzy with apprehension. Was there to be no end to the things that were demanded of him? He kept his voice steady. He wasn’t going to back out. But when it was over . . . when it was over . . .
He stared into the desolate future.
“Where is she?” he whispered.
“I’ll show you.”
Sylvia had come into the room without making a sound. She was very pale but stood erect and determined.
“Sylvia”—her father turned sternly to her—“you should be resting. If you’ll describe the place, we’ll wake the sergeant and his colleague, and we’ll find it somehow.”
“No. I can’t rest. We can’t rest, any of us, until we know . . . until we know all there is to know.”
She was looking so compassionately at Peter that he came close to tears again. But a hard knot of determination was tightening inside him. He saw that he and Sylvia had this in common: despair must be kept at bay until the job, whatever it was, could be completed.
Sergeant Swift and his constable had only just gone to bed with aching limbs after their work in the churchyard. The sergeant grumbled when he was dragged out once more; and his grumbles changed to incredulity when he was told of what Sylvia Forbes had seen.
Peter did not hear all the details until they were striding up the path towards the moors. If they had been told to him back in his own home, in the quiet parlor, he would probably have been as sceptical and outraged as the sergeant. But here on the gloomy hillside, with the stark moors ahead of them, he could believe anything evil of this place and its people.
A dead-looking creature bearing Alice in its arms? Blood and death and a sinister menace over all the land?
They trudged on towards the moor and he was ready to face anything.
“Along here,” said Sylvia in an undertone. She was beginning to shiver.
They skirted a wood. She slowed, getting her bearings so that they should not be led astray. The sergeant and constable watched her with a mixture of respect and incredulity.
Then, as they turned past some bushes, the constable grabbed his superior’s arm.
“Sergeant . . . !”
The light from the lantern he was carrying fell on a pair of boots protruding from the undergrowth. The sergeant bent over them and pushed back a branch. Peter sighed. He had not known quite what to expect. It was grotesquely ordinary—Martinus lying on his back snoring, sleeping off his drunkenness.
Then the lantern cast its glow farther back. And there was the horror. There was what he had felt, right up to this moment, would prove to be untrue, would not be there, couldn’t be.
Alice’s dead body was huddled among the bushes, her clothes caked with dried blood.
Martinus grunted in his sleep. The sergeant, wincing at the sight of the corpse, relieved his feelings by yelling at the drunkard:
“Come on, Martinus. Wake up.” He prodded the man with the toe of his boot. “Let’s have a word with you.”
Martinus awoke slowly and reluctantly. And then, driven by some more swiftly waking instinct, he pushed himself up and ran. He ran blindly, and tripped headlong over the corpse. As he sprawled to the ground, the constable threw his weight on him.
It was a slow process getting the drunken Martinus back to the police station and Alice’s body back to her home. Dawn had begun to touch the treetops as they came up the path, and daylight was bright over the land as they returned. Nobody in the fields observed the grim procession. When they reached the village square, the sergeant made sure that the way was clear before they carried Alice into the house.
Peter was emotionless now. All his faculties had been numbed. The corpse was not Alice: she had ceased to exist, she had left him and there was nothing but a shell for them to examine. If he thought of her as a dead husk, without any real connection with anything he had known, he could go through with what had to be done.
His consulting-room was behind the parlor, overlooking a small flagged yard. The latticed window fragmented the lights into staggering, twisted diagonals. The naked shape that had once been Alice lay on the padded couch. Peter continued to assure himself that there was nobody there; but he refrained from looking too directly and too steadily at her face.
Sir James was, on the surface, quite unperturbed. Perhaps he was merely setting a good example; or perhaps he had reached a stage at which his professional skill took over and thrust all other considerations into the background.
He prodded the corpse with apparent indifference, and pinched the skin above the hip as though testing the tenderness of a boiling fowl. Then, frowning, he said:
“Extraordinary. What do you make of this, Peter?”
Keeping it on the same matter-of-fact level, Peter examined the patch of flesh. It was cold yet not lifeless—not as he understood the symptoms. Alice’s heart had stopped, and from what Sylvia had told them they could roughly establish the time of death; yet there was no sign of rigor mortis.