“Okay,” Tuck said begrudgingly, but at least continued to eat his eggs.
It was just as David was about to pull away from the table that the sound of a motorbike met their ears, and both he and Melanie stood and saw Luther Blundell pull into their driveway.
“Now, what can he want?” David asked.
As David left the kitchen he noticed that Melanie followed close behind. Tuck also went to pull away from the table, but David admonished Mrs. Comfrey to keep both him and Katy in the house. He went out into the yard.
As he watched Luther get off the motorbike he noted that the gangly teenager had inherited, in a masculine version, all of his mother’s looks. His long, simian arms were pale and the size of sticks, and his face the spitting image of his barmaid mother, save that it was dappled with adolescent acne. Even his hair was a strident and artificial yellow, although it was short and choppily cut in what, David bemusedly thought, might be called Fenchurch St. Jude punk. His amusement faded, however, when he saw the look on Luther’s face. The teenager was clearly upset over something.
“What can I do for you?” David asked as Luther ran up to where he was standing. His face was pale and frightened and he seemed on the verge of punching David out.
“My mother!” he blurted out.
“What about her?”
“She’s missing. Have you seen her?”
“Not since last night.”
Luther’s panic increased. “Oh no. Oh my God.”
“When was the last time you saw her?” David asked. “She didn’t come home last night.”
David did not know what to say. “Might she have stayed with a friend?”
“Not without calling.”
“Perhaps this time she forgot.”
Luther turned to him angrily. “No, she didn’t. She’s gone. Without so much as a good-bye.” He seemed torn between fury and tears.
“Have you been to the authorities?”
“Of course. I’ve talked to Constable Crease. But he knows...” Luther trailed off into silence.
“Knows what?” David asked.
The teenager just looked at him in frustration. “If it was your mother, I’m sure you would care.”
“I’m sure I would,” David agreed. He noticed that tears were beginning to well up in Luther’s eyes as he turned to leave. He strode down the driveway and once again straddled the bike.
“But, Luther!” David called after him, and the boy looked up one last time in his direction. “Constable Crease knows what?” David asked again.
Still, Luther Blundell regarded him with irritation, as if he considered the question somehow superfluous. “That it’s happening. That it’s starting again.”
“What’s starting again?” David called, but Luther only revved up the motorbike and left.
David stood there for many long moments puzzling over what he could have meant when he noticed Melanie had come up beside him.
“Winnifred Blundell is missing?” she asked.
“So he says.”
“Oh, David, what do you think could have happened to her?”
“I don’t know, honey. But you saw what happened last night. She ran out of the pub in a blind panic when she saw that moth. Maybe when she got outside she saw another and just kept on running.”
Melanie was not amused. “Come on, David, this is serious. You don’t think she’s been shot, do you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Like the woman in Leeming. Maybe that’s what Luther meant when he said ‘starting again.’ Maybe there’s a serial murderer in Fenchurch St. Jude, one that’s never been caught and has been inactive for a number of years, but who’s starting once again to kill people.”
“Don’t you think you’re jumping to hasty conclusions? I mean, we don’t even know that Winnifred Blundell is dead, let alone if she’s been shot. Let’s wait until we know a little more before we try to piece this thing together.”
“Okay,” she said begrudgingly.
He hugged her, but as he looked again in the direction of the moors, he wondered if she was on to something.
The next day David and Brad received from Oxford the results of the carbon-dating tests and discovered, as they had expected, that the bodies were indeed from the first century B.C. Although the question of their antiquity had never really been in great doubt, confirmation reinforced the zeal with which the two men went at their work. They also sent off photographs of the bite marks to a zoologist at Oxford and continued to explore various intellectual culs-de-sac, conjecturing what the creature might be as they awaited the results.
Although David’s work continued to go well, his home life deteriorated further. They still had found no trace of Ben, and this caused Tuck to sink deeper into depression. Try as he might, David seemed only temporarily able to raise his son’s spirits, and this fact increasingly eroded his own. In addition, no trace of Winnifred Blundell was found, and although Melanie continued to revel in Mrs. Comfrey’s prodigious and extraordinary success at running the household and cleaning every stray and remote corner of the cottage, David could tell that the moth incident continued to weigh heavily on his wife.
Three days after Winnifred Blundell’s disappearance he went into town and asked Mary Thoday what Luther might have meant by his “starting again” comment, but Miss Thoday was as vituperative as ever and asserted that she did not know. As for Luther, he spent his days in the Swan with Two Necks drowning his sorrow, and avoided David like the plague whenever he came near. Indeed, after Winnifred Blundell’s disappearance, everyone in Fenchurch St. Jude avoided them as if they were contaminated, and it was rare to get so much as a furtive glance from even those who had previously been the most prying.
It was for these reasons as well as the memory of his previous encounter that David brooded for another day before he finally placed a telephone call to the Marquis de L’Isle to ask permission to continue their excavations on his land. The phone was answered by the butler and David was put on hold for nearly five minutes. Finally he heard the click of another extension being picked up and a second click as the first extension was placed back on its receiver.
“Hello?” came a voice that he presumed to be the Marquis’s.
“Hello,” David returned nervously. “This is Professor Macauley, the archaeologist you’ve rented your cottage to. I’m sorry to disturb you at home like this, but I’m afraid we’ve run into a snag at the site of our excavations.”
For several seconds there was a deafening silence on the other end, and then finally the Marquis spoke again. “Yes?”
David swallowed. “Well, I was wondering...” He paused. “I mean, as I showed you when we met, we’ve made some amazing discoveries at the bog, and our evidence indicates that there are still more to be made. The problem is that one of the richest sites encroaches upon your land, and I was wondering if you might possibly give us permission to dig up soine of the portions of the bog that you hold ownership to?”
Again there was another awful silence at the other end of the phone and David braced himself for a pyrotechnic outburst from the temperamental Marquis.
After another moment the Marquis said calmly: “We may be able to arrive at some terms.”
“Terms?” David asked.
“The time has come for us to get to know one another,” the Marquis said emotionlessly. “If you, your assistant, and your wife would be kind enough to honor me with your presence here at Wythen Hall for dinner tomorrow night, I will grant you the permission you seek.”
This time it was David’s turn to be silent as he recovered from the shock of the Marquis’s invitation. “That’s very kind of you. We would be flattered to be your guests for dinner tomorrow night.”
“Very good,” the Marquis ended. “Then I’ll see you at seven thirty. Will that be convenient?”
“Yes, we’ll see you then.”
“Very good. Tomorrow at seven thirty. Good-bye then.”
“Good-bye.”
>
David hung up the phone, surprised, to say the least.
As the evening approached, his surprise turned to unease as he started to wonder about the Marquis’s mysterious show of hospitality. At their first meeting he had been disconcerted enough by the Marquis’s granting them permission to rent the hunter’s cottage. Now, the Marquis’s invitation to dinner only increased his bewilderment and he could not shake the feeling that somewhere there was something vaguely fishy about it all.
Nonetheless, to his delight, Melanie was thrilled by the invitation and even Brad seemed uncharacteristically excited at the idea of rubbing elbows with a nobleman.
About half an hour before they were due to leave and while Melanie was putting the last finishing touches on her appearance, David decided to look in on Tuck. As he approached the door to Tuck’s bedroom he caught a glimpse of his son inside, sitting on the edge of his bed. What drew David’s attention, however, was the look on his son’s face. It was rapt, as he apparently listened to something with spellbound interest, but also oddly tortured, as if whatever he was listening to were disturbing him to his deepest fiber.
David could also hear the sound of Mrs. Comfrey’s voice coming from the room, and as he came closer he could make out her words.
“... and a terrible-looking old wizard with a face dark and knotted as the faces you may sometimes think you see among the tree boughs, said to the wicked fairy-men, ‘What we must do is persuade a human maiden to marry one of us. That way, the child will be half man and half fairy, and we may once again regain the power in the world that we are losing so fast.’”
David stepped into the doorway and both Tuck and Mrs. Comfrey looked up at him wonderingly.
“Mrs. Comfrey, may I see you out here in the hall for a moment?”
Mrs. Comfrey set down the book she was reading and walked out into the hall. “Yes, sir?”
David stepped back and lowered his voice so that Tuck couldn’t hear them. “Mrs. Comfrey, I wonder if you’d mind playing a game with Tuck or doing something else that isn’t so frightening.”
“My goodness,” she clucked. “It was only Stories from King Arthur.”
“I know, and I don’t mean to condemn what you were doing. It’s just that Tuck’s been overly sensitive since Ben’s disappearance, and I’m not sure stories about wicked fairy-men and faces in trees is the right thing for him to be hearing right now.”
Mrs. Comfrey stared at him blankly, a glint of strange disapproval in her eye. “I’ve raised many children in my lifetime and I haven’t failed yet,” she said, clearly piqued that he was challenging her judgment.
David too grew irritated. “I don’t mean to cast doubt on your ability to take care of Tuck, but he’s my son and I just wish you wouldn’t read such things to him right now.”
Mrs. Comfrey gazed coldly at him for a moment, and as David stood looking back at her it occurred to him for the first time that he really didn’t like her very much. As he continued to examine her features, her lilac perfume enveloping him in a suffocating pall, he also realized why. She was efficient and remarkable in the way that she performed, but there was an odd emptiness in her eyes, as if there really wasn’t much more going on inside her head other than her almost mechanical dedication to her work.
At length, she conceded. “As you wish, sir.” But he could tell that she was still annoyed.
He went downstairs. In the living room he found Brad sitting and sipping a martini that Katy, as was her new habit, had prepared and served. Katy sat across from him, pummeling him with questions about the digs.
“You’ve never been this interested before in archaeology,” David said, smiling.
“Sure I have,” Katy argued, trying to save face. She turned and was about to ask Brad another question when behind them Melanie swept down the stairs. She was wearing a white, high-collared Victorian blouse and a long Norma Kamali skirt.
“You look great,” David said.
“Thank you,” Melanie said, pleased. She looked over at Brad to see if he greeted her efforts with equal approval, and then, when she realized what she was doing, nervously glanced away.
“I’ll go pull the car out in front,” David offered as he straightened his tie in the mirror and went outside.
Melanie walked into the middle of the living room. “You know, Brad, I’ve been thinking about what you said last week about the impetus Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto gave to the gothic revival.”
Katy rolled her eyes to the ceiling and sighed audibly.
Melanie glanced at her daughter but continued. “The only question that remains is whether Walpole went about his task consciously or unconsciously.”
Brad shifted his weight nervously. “That’s a good question. I would imagine unconsciously, but what do you think?”
“My first guess would be unconsciously also, but Walpole was an avid collector of gothic memorabilia. He could have known what he was doing. There are several pieces of information to back this up.”
“I’ve been thinking of changing my name,” Katy announced abruptly.
“Katy, you interrupted me,” Melanie pointed out, somewhat peeved because she was in the middle of making what she considered a very clever point.
Katy ignored her. “To Natasha,” she said, looking only at Brad.
Brad grew uneasy, knowing something was going on but not knowing quite what.
“Katy,” Melanie repeated.
“What, Mommmm?” Katy sneered.
“You interrupted me.”
“Well you were only talking about some dumb old novel.”
“It doesn’t matter, you don’t just interrupt someone when they’re speaking.”
“But if I didn’t interrupt you I wouldn’t get a word in edgewise. Sometimes you don’t even come up for air.”
Melanie was mortified. “How dare you speak to me like that!” She was about to add something else when they noticed that David had come back inside.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Melanie turned to him, her face red with anger. “Katy just interrupted me.”
“Well, it can’t be that bad.” He looked at his daughter. “Katy, tell your mother you’re sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” Katy said petulantly.
“She wants to change her name,” Melanie continued, still nettled by what had just transpired.
David smiled, trying to spread oil on troubled waters. “I told her she couldn’t.”
“You told me I couldn’t unless Mom said it was okay,” Katy corrected, and David blushed, realizing he had committed that most horrendous of parental crimes, the old pass-the-buck ploy.
“And, of course, Mom won’t let me,” Katy ended unhappily.
“We’ll discuss it later,” Melanie said sharply as they stood and prepared to leave. David went back outside and Brad followed close behind. Melanie and Katy were left momentarily alone and Melanie turned resentfully toward her daughter.
“That was very rude the way you just treated me in front of Brad.”
Katy remained belligerent. “I don’t think so.”
“Katy!” Melanie cried. For several seconds they just glared at each other, Katy’s normally innocent eyes filled with an unusually mature hostility.
Finally Melanie pulled a shawl around her shoulders and started to leave.
“You’ve got a crush on Brad, don’t you,” Katy challenged suddenly as Melanie passed just an arm’s length away from her. Melanie turned and looked at her daughter with utter astonishment, and again was shaken to see that the venom in Katy’s look was disturbingly adult. And then, before she knew what she was doing, she reached out and slapped Katy very hard across the face.
“How dare you say such a thing to me!” she cried, and suddenly Katy was once again a child, blinking and looking very hurt and very stunned. She burst into tears and ran upstairs.
It took Melanie several seconds to compose herself. Of course she didn’t have a crush on Brad, she thought ind
ignantly to herself. Why the very idea was absurd. Her hand stung and she was abruptly filled with remorse over the force with which she had just struck her daughter. She looked worriedly upstairs, but realized that she would have to deal with it later. Her thoughts still in tumult over Katy’s suggestion that she felt more than friendship for Brad, she turned and left.
As they drove to Wythen Hall, David noticed that his wife was unusually quiet, and he worried that she was getting into one of her moods again. He hoped that her spirits would improve when she was confronted with a new social situation, but he was much too preoccupied with his own thoughts to ponder over her reticence for long. Brad had also reverted to his normally silent self, and they made the remainder of the drive with hardly a word said among the three of them.
At length, they passed through the huge and rusted wrought-iron gates that marked the perimeter of the Marquis’s estate, and against the jagged backdrop of the hills, Wythen Hall came into sight. As he had first observed from the hill overlooking the bog, the facade of the old manor house was late Elizabethan, but the crenallated tower and several of its wings dated at least from the Middle Ages. As he might have expected, the dark and imposing granite walls of the structure were weatherbeaten and deeply eroded by wind and time, and the casements of the windows were almost completely concealed by a vast sea of leather-green ivy. What he had not expected, however, was the well-manicured appearance of the lawn. Beneath the canopy of the great oaks and firs that filled the grounds it was as smooth and velvet green as the green baize of a gaming table, and through this fairy-tale glen of emerald and jade, the black waters of the bog lake beyond seemed restful and even strangely beautiful.
They pulled up to the front of the ancient edifice and parked the car. As they approached the door, David noted that it was so roughly hewn and weathered that it had to date from at least the fifteenth century. Each of the two massive sections composing it was divided into four quadrangles, and they peaked in a high Gothic arch over their heads. He hoisted up the immense black iron knocker in the right-hand panel of the door and let it fall back loudly. A deep and resonant thud echoed throughout the unknown spaces beyond.
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