by Jack Mann
He lifted the crowbar with its dangling, rustling bundle, and went out and down the stairs again.
Norris followed him out and to the mere, along the side of it farthest from the house, till he stopped.
“Deep here?” he asked.
“Deepest—I could never find bottom,” Norris answered.
Gees swung the crowbar once, twice, and thrice, the last a mighty, heaving swing. Bar and bundle went out toward the middle of the mere, splashed, and vanished instantly from sight, and Gees turned away.
“Now the attics,” he said.
“Man, is there no end to it?” Norris demanded, half-angrily.
“I told myself I’d clean up Nightmare,” Gees retorted. “You go home if you like. I’m going to finish the cleaning up, now I’m here.”
Without a word Norris followed him. Back to the room with its broken-down wall, and the gloomy recess beyond. Gees took up the torch he had put down from the pallet, switched it on, and directed it toward the narrow stairway leading up from the back left-hand corner of the secret room. As much of it as was visible receded directly from the back and parallel with the end wall of Robert Hunter’s hiding place.
“Comes out in the attics directly over the scullery, by the look of it,” Gees commented. “Halfa minute, though.”
He took the pick, and went out to stand under the trapdoor that gave access to the attics. It was still padlocked, and he got the point of the tool in the loop of the lock and wrenched. Lock and staple both came away and clinked down on the floor. Then he half-struck, half-pushed, at the trapdoor itself with a sudden jerk, using the end of the pickaxe handle, and the door flew up, hung poised for a fraction of a second, and fell flat back from the oblong it had covered.
“Just in case of needing another way down,” Gees remarked. Then he went back to the staircase up which those two tenuous, guggling things had fled from the light, took out his automatic pistol and switched on the torch he meant to carry in his left hand.
“Just a second—I’m coming too,” Norris said.
He switched on the second torch and followed Gees to the staircase. It was roughly hewn in the thickness of the chimney wall, narrow and straight, and the brick steps appeared as fresh and unworn by the tread of feet as if newly cut. Gees went up until he came to a flat wooden barrier at the top of what was apparently the highest step.
“Is it a cure for turnip-fly, then?” he asked.
“Eh?” Norris, behind and much lower, asked. He could see nothing, for Gees’ shoulders touched both walls, so narrow was the stairway.
“A mere—Ah!” Gees had found that he could rock the wooden barrier from side to side, and he got it so far over to the right that he was able to thrust a hand past its edge. A push sideways, and it yielded easily to let him pass through and stand on a beam of the attic floor—or rather, a beam on which no flooring had been laid, so that the laths and plaster of the first-floor ceiling were visible in the ray of his torch. He held the squared piece of wood aside until Norris had emerged from the stairway, and then let it swing back to cover the hole, when it was indistinguishable from any of the upright beams that helped to support the rafters of the slated roof.
“Clever,” he said. “It’s one chance in a thousand that anyone would ever find that beam was movable instead of fixed.”
“I never guessed it,” Norris remarked. “But then, as you can see, these attics have never been floored for use—Whup!”
A twittering, fluttering bat had struck him full in the face. Scores of them fluttered and shrilled, disturbed by the lights and flashing through their rays—Gees shook off one that had fastened on his hand by its claws. He heard or imagined a different sort of rustling, somewhere back among the shadows thrown by the maze of beams, but could not be sure of it. Stepping away from the chimney, he saw the oblong of dim light that marked the trapdoor opening, and nothing else, no movement nor sign of life but that of the swarming bats.
“Norris, they’re gone!” he said confidently.
“But how do you know—and how could they go, if you say they can’t vanish ghost-fashion?” Norris demanded perplexedly.
“Maybe they just floated off—I dunno,” Gees answered. “But I can feel they’re not here. These darned bats—faugh, get out, you brute!—they’re uncanny enough to frighten you, but I’m absolutely sure nothing else is up here to trouble us. They’ve gone—maybe gone out to join the one that scared us so when it bolted off downstairs.”
“What next, then?” Norris asked.
“Drop through the trapdoor—I’m not going back down that staircase, nor even going to look for the swinging beam,” Gees answered. “T’other way looks a lot easier, to me. Come on—we’re finished up here.”
He led the way, stepping gingerly from beam to beam, bending to dodge the timbering that supported the roof, and coming at last to kneel beside the trapdoor opening after pocketing his automatic pistol, and lower himself to swing by his hands and then let go. He stood from under, and Norris dropped beside him.
“One more look at the hole in the wall,” he said persuasively.
“This is getting monotonous,” Norris remarked, and grinned.
“If I’m anything like you, the look of us isn’t,” Gees told him. They were grimed from head to foot, dusty, cobweb-draped, as disreputable a pair as one could imagine, let alone find in duplicate anywhere. Again Gees entered the room that had been May’s, and again saw the faded blue bow lying in the angle of the wall.
“If we’d spent a morning in a cement factory, and an afternoon wrestling with sweeps and getting the worst of it, we might be nearly as bad as we are now,” he said. “But look!” Passing on, he had come to a halt facing the opening they had made. “Now d’you see why those irons are planted inside the chimney, up to this level and no farther?”
There was a plain door of planks and crossbars in the back wall of the secret room. Gees took the remaining crowbar and, entering the place, struck at the door with the round end of the tool. A broad plank fell, and a shower of soot dusted down and round him.
“Complete—sooty as well as all the rest, now,” he remarked. “I think you’ll find that plank on one of the hearths, if you look—the one directly under us, probably. That was his way in, I’d say—up the chimney and through that doorway. The easiest way in, anyhow, and whether he came by it or down from the attics is more than we shall ever find out. And not a solitary paper or hiding place for any!”
“Did you expect that, then?” Norris asked.
“I didn’t expect anything—didn’t know what to expect. I felt sure this was a hidden apartment of some sort, but you could have knocked me down with this crowbar when I saw Robert with his white-streaked beard. And by heck, Norris, we’ve broken up their home! We’ve driven ’em out, made this place no more than any other to ’em, and Nightmare is a nightmare no longer! D’you get that? And oh! for a gallon of Nick Churchill’s best! Two pints to get rid of the dust, and the rest for sheer enjoyment.”
“Cosham keeps some good cider,” Norris ventured.
“Lead me to it, man! Half a minute, while I get my coat and weskit. I propose jettisoning the pick and crowbar—I’m far too done in to carry either of them. Lead me to that cider, and have him tap a fresh barrel. One won’t be enough, I know!”
CHAPTER XVI
MERELY HOMELESS
VIGOROUS AND WAVING in the light breeze after the storm, the dark-green field of wheat struck Gees anew as a remarkably fine crop when, with Norris, he reached the inner end of the roadway to return to Cosham’s. He wished now that he had driven to Nightmare instead of walking. The exhaustion that he had felt and Perivale had evinced after the exorcism in Denlandham church was on him again, though perhaps in rather lesser degree than then: Norris beside him dragged wearily, too.
“You farmed well, here,” he remarked.
“I think I said to you once before, in farming you’ve got to give to get,” Norris answered
as they began their walk along the sodden strip of may-blossom petals. “Got to pet and coax the land, just as you did with that cow of Cosham’s, and it’ll yield, give back double all you put into it. There’s seasons to beat you sometimes, I know, but—well, suppose we’d had a drought the last few weeks, instead of rain as we have. A crop like that wheat covers the land in, keeps the moisture from evaporating twice as long as a poor crop would. So you win again.”
“The old chap who taught me all I know about it—including making me learn to milk—told me that if you couldn’t raise five quarters of any corn to the acre on reasonably good land, then you’d better go and get apprenticed to a sweep, because you’d never make a farmer,” Gees observed. “Five as a minimum—given the season, as you said.”
“And Nightmare’s good land,” Norris asserted gravely. “But—I felt all nervy when we came along here a little while ago. Now it’s different. Maybe because I’m too bone-tired to feel anything else.”
“It may be that,” Gees assented, though he knew it was not. Only that those travesties of shapes had gone—where? On that head, he knew only that the roadway was free of them, as the house had been when he and Norris left it.
“I think I’ll try that cider some other time,” he remarked when they were near the gateway leading to the road. “Just hop into the car when we get back to Cosham’s, and buzz off to the inn and clean up. I’m in no state even to pat a dog on the head, let alone meet a decent human.”
“You could clean up just as well at Cosham’s,” Norris urged.
“No, I’ll get along. And, by gosh! I’ve just thought of it. I left the car hood down! It’ll be swimming, after that storm.”
“All the more reason for coming and getting a clean up—I can get one of Cosham’s men to mop it out for you. He’s got a bathroom, too.”
“Bathroom?” Gees thought of the mere basin and jug on the old-fashioned washstand in his room at the inn. “The bloated sybarite! All right—I cave. But let’s sneak in by the back way.”
Of that, though, there was no chance. They emerged from the gateway to see May Norris within a few paces of it, and still hurrying till she saw them. Then she stopped, facing her father.
“Mother and I both got so anxious about what had happened to you,” she began, “that I—why, what on earth have you two been doing?” She gazed from Norris to Gees and back in amazement.
“Cleaning up,” Gees answered before Norris could speak. “A messy job, as you see, Miss Norris. Lots of dust and a certain amount of soot, cobwebs in the attics—bats too. Oh, no end of things!”
“And now Mr. Green is coming in to clean himself up,” Norris added.
“I’ll hurry along and see to towels and hot water in the bathroom,” she announced, and, turning, ran on ahead of them. They followed, in no mood for keeping pace with her. Mrs. Norris conducted Gees to the bathroom without comment as soon as he set foot in the house, and he spent a luxurious quarter of an hour.
“Now, if you don’t mind waiting for my husband,” Mrs. Norris told him when he emerged, “you can both have what ought to have been your midday meal. He’s taken the worst off at the kitchen sink.”
“But—” Gees began, and looked at his watch.
It was far too late, he saw, to go back to the inn for lunch. “Well, thank you very much, Mrs. Norris, it would be most acceptable. We’ve been working hard.”
“Like navvies, by the look of you both,” she said. “Oh, and May and I put the hood of your car up—she saw it was going to rain, and I helped her with it. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Just as much as I mind your hospitality now,” he assured her.
“It was very good of both of you to think of it.”
She escorted him to their room, and he saw the claw-legged table laid in a way which went to show that starvation and this household were utter strangers. By the table stood May, and she pointed at an enormous jug and two glasses as Gees followed her mother in.
“Daddy said you wanted a lot of cider,” she observed. “I’ve just brought this in, and now I’m going to fill another jug.”
“Don’t, please,” he urged. “I’ve had one bath—I meant cider to drink. And thank you very much for saving my car from flooding.”
“It was a bad storm,” she remarked, as her mother left the room.
“There was one big flash—it seemed to be directly over Nightmare, I thought, and mother and I both wondered what had happened—whether the house had been struck with you in it—you and daddy, I mean.”
“It wasn’t struck, though at first I half-thought it was,” he answered, with a thought of the outward-falling section of wall and those three things behind it. “We were in the room you told me used to be yours. The little blue bow was still on the floor. I left it there.”
“Just as well. It was—finished,” she said with a hint of nervousness and a glance at the open doorway, as if looking for her father or mother to reappear. “Quite finished—spoilt,” she added.
“Spoilt—yes,” he agreed. “Far too much so for you ever to touch it again. I didn’t wish to touch it—though it had been yours.”
“You mean—what did you find?” She looked full at him as she asked.
He shook his head. “Dust and soot and cobwebs, as you saw,” he said.
Then Norris entered, freshened and alert, himself again.
“Not started on the cider yet, eh? Pour him a glass, May—one for me, too. You sit there, Mr. Green. I feel half-starved, don’t you?”
“Compared with me, a wolf in a desert would be a mere anaemic trifler,” Gees assured him, and took the glass that May held out to him. “Here’s to you, Miss Norris, and to the man who invented apples at the same time. Ah! ... Now I feel much more like an ex-policeman.”
“But were you ever in the police force?” Norris asked. “Really?”
“Look at these hands,” Gees replied. “If my feet were not under the table, I’d say look at them too. When I used to hold up a hand on point duty the shadow in the sky made old ladies open their umbrellas. If that’s for me, you’d better leave it there and hand me the dish. I mean, it looks as if you intend to leave less beef on the joint than there is on that plate. Hit him over the head and make him stop carving, Miss Norris. He’s worse than Nicholas Churchill.”
“Then they feed you well at the Hunters’ Arms,” Norris observed, passing him the filled plate.
“If I ate as they try to make me, the doorways would need widening,” Gees assured him. “No, thank you”—to May—“I never spoil the flavour of good beef with any sauce but horseradish, and he’s given me enough of that. And this is good beef!”
“And if you don’t stop talking, you’ll never eat it,” she observed as she put down the cider jug after refilling his glass. “Therefore I’m going to leave daddy and you to it, and go and find mother.”
She glanced back at them from the doorway, hesitating a moment, Gees thought. A tall, graceful figure of a girl, far more tastefully dressed than one would expect to find her in such surroundings, and of uncommon beauty. Again, as she stood thus, Gees saw her in profile and realised what cause Norris had for pride in her. She turned her head still more to smile and nod at the two of them, and then had gone.
“I don’t think we’ve spoilt her,” Norris said. “Given her the best, and she’s the only one. I wanted a boy. She’ll marry and I shall lose her—young Hallam from the other side of Ludlow, I expect, though so far it’s more on his side than hers. A boy, now—he’d have taken on where I leave off, whoever he married.”