“And how do you know that the conclusions of Phantometry haven’t been arrived at through immensely complex procedures and trains of reasoning? Who are the experts on ghosts and magic? You, who’ve never condescended to study the subjects at all, and never will? Or these members of the Magic and Witchcraft Association who’ve concentrated on these subjects, and studied them in depth, for years and years? Have you seen their library? Shelves and shelves, from floor to ceiling, all filled with books on these sort of things: Ghosts; Parapsychology; Extra-Sensory Perception; Near-Death experiences; Telekinesis. What right have you, who haven’t read even one of these books, to dismiss it all as nonsense?”
Arnold shrugged, beginning to be bored. Probably these silly women hadn’t read any of the books either. And anyway, Flora was only arguing, as she so often did, for the sake of arguing.
“Oh, well, Flora, if you want to believe in this sort of nonsense, I’m not going to waste my time on …”
“I did not say I believed it. I just don’t disbelieve it. I haven’t enough evidence either way. And you haven’t either. In a case like this, it’s just as irrational to be certain that a thing isn’t true as to be certain that it is.
“But I’ll tell you one thing. Sir Humphrey thinks there’s something strange lurking in that dungeon. He’s seen things. Heard things. That door in the East Wall that’s supposed to be always locked because of the staircase behind it being dangerous – well, it’s not always locked, whatever you may think. He’s seen it slowly opening, more than once. He’s seen things coming out of it, at dead of night. He knows, you see, the things that once happened here … the things that were once brought down that winding staircase. He knows. He’s an expert about this sort of thing.”
“Was an expert,” Arnold corrected her. “You really must remember, Flora, that he’s a very old man now, his mind is confused, and full of fancies. You’re not doing him any good, you know, by encouraging these delusions …”
“They are not delusions! And how do you know what is doing him good and what isn’t?” Flora was growing really angry. “Talk about experts! Who is the expert on Sir Humphrey’s mental state? You, who’ve never exchanged three words with him? Or me, who’s talked with him and listened to his ideas for hours and hours; who’s really interested in them, and has given them lots of thought? You know, Arnold, there’s no one in the world quite as illogical as you logical people. You assume you know everything, and so anything you don’t know is by definition nonsense.”
One way and another, it was quite a relief when Flora took herself off immediately after supper. Joyce had been invited to a party to celebrate a friend’s sixtieth birthday, and for the first time in years she had felt able to accept such an invitation. “I may be back really quite late,” she’d warned Flora, in tones of excitement mixed with pride at her own unprecedented daring; and Flora, imperturbable as usual, had assured her it was O.K. Any time. As late as you like.
Arnold suspected, though he was taking pains not to find out for certain, that Joyce had taken to paying Flora for her sitting-in sessions. How much, and whether it approached the going rate, he didn’t know and didn’t want to know. To know all may or may not to be to forgive all, but it certainly exposes you to the probability of being blamed if something goes wrong.
As often happened when he had a quiet evening on his own, Arnold found himself getting sleepy earlier than usual. In a leisurely way he prepared for bed, treating himself to a long, hot bath in which to relax. Well, he deserved some relaxation. It had been a trying day, what with the Sunday crowds, followed by that awkward encounter with Mildred; and then, to top it all, the wearisome argument with his daughter. Most of their conversations, he reflected, looking back over the past few weeks, had consisted of arguments: mostly quite pointless ones, from which no conclusion was ever going to be reached. To Flora, he felt sure, it was a sort of game; one which she couldn’t fail to win, for the simple reason that she was young and could thus effortlessly discount his opinions as being out of date and typical of his generation. Or perhaps, on a deeper level, it was a game she played with him because she really didn’t know how to relate to him in any other way. Or he with her, come to that?
Musing thus, he felt the water cooling around him, and when he turned on the tap to remedy this, he found to his annoyance that it ran tepid. Reluctant and shivering, he climbed out and got himself dried and into pyjamas at top speed. He wasn’t going to wait up for Flora – goodness knows when she’d be back, and she now had her own key to the flat. Not, of course, the Estate keys, these he kept always with him. He’d even taken them with him into the bathroom, just in case.
By eleven o’clock he was in bed, and asleep before midnight. He was vaguely aware, just as he was dropping off, of the sound of the front door being softly opened, and then closed.
Good, Flora was safe back. Joyce would have rung by now if there had been any problems.
*
They say that dreaming does not occur randomly at any hour of the night. It comes in cycles, every hour-and-a-half, and if you are wakened in the middle of one of these dreaming periods, you will recall your dream vividly and be able to describe it in detail. Otherwise, it will fade away during your subsequent sleep, and by morning you will remember nothing.
By this calculation, it must have been about half-past one when Arnold had his frightening dream. And he did indeed wake from it with the feeling that something had woken him: and, yes, in accordance with the theory he remembered it with awful vividness, and could describe it in exact detail, though of course he had no intention of doing so. Who wants to listen to someone else’s dreams? Also, in this particular case, it would be impossible to convey to another person the nature of the terror with which the dream had been imbued as it galloped inexorably towards nightmare.
He’d dreamed he was back in the dungeon. Well, nothing surprising about that, he’d been working down there only the previous afternoon. But in the dream the dungeon had been darker than usual; this was the only thing, at first, that bothered him. He sought to turn on the strip-lighting, but somehow he could not find the switches. Which was absurd, even in a dream, because he knew perfectly well where the switches were located, conveniently hand-high alongside the heavy oak door. Yet somehow they weren’t there. Up and down the rough stone wall his dream-hand wandered; but there was nothing.
All this was particularly unfortunate, because laid out on the flat surface of one of the old torture instruments (the rack, it must have been) – were the October accounts of his Department: the Accounts Department of the Town Hall, that is, where he’d worked for most of his adult life. In his dream, he knew that his job was to check them and to get a report off to Head Office this very day. It was urgent, a top-priority job. Filled with the kind of anxiety that had intermittently dogged his accountancy days, Arnold abandoned the fruitless search for the light switches, pulled up his office chair (yes, somehow it was here in the dungeon) alongside the rack which seemed to be serving as a desk, and peered as best he could at the piles of close-typed papers. There was a dim grey light from somewhere; it was just enough for him to make out the headings, but the columns of figures, insofar as he could distinguish them, made no sense at all. His anxiety mounted; and now, between one moment and the next, it crossed some dark threshold in his brain, ceased to be mere anxiety, and became fear.
He could hear breathing. Very faint, but coming nearer. Someone was behind him. He could feel a light touch on the side of his neck, and then another. He was aware of a probing by long white fingers, though how he could know they were white just by the sense of touch he did not know: did not even wonder, as is the way of dreams. He knew now that he was to be strangled. The fingers that fluttered so lightly round his ears had in them a terrible secret strength as they prepared to home in on his windpipe.
And still he could not move. The paralysis of nightmare had invaded every limb, all his muscles were useless, still trapped in sleep. He was like a corpse being
handled by a mortuary attendant: like a murder-victim whose assailant is making sure that he is really dead, that his breathing has quite stopped.
And then, at last, he was able to scream. In reality, of course, it was only a tiny whistle of a sound; but in that same moment the fingers ceased their probing, and he was awake, safe in bed.
He lay for a moment, sweating with relief, and waiting confidently for the fading of those last shreds of terror which a bad nightmare always leaves in its wake.
But the relief was short-lived. As he struggled into full wakefulness he became aware of a disturbance in the air, a rushing as of a small wind through the room. He struggled into a sitting position, switched on his bedside light, and looked round.
Everything seemed to be in order. All the same, the sense that something was amiss was heavy upon him, even now he was properly awake, and the first thing he checked on – for it was always on the edge of his awareness – was the bunch of Estate keys.
Yes, it was there all right: not merely under his pillow, but tucked well inside the pillow-case where no one could possibly get at it without waking him.
Without waking him? But he had woken, hadn’t he? Those dream-fingers – had they been wholly a dream? Or had someone, who knew where he kept the keys, been feeling for them?
Flora, of course! That tiresome, mischievous unprincipled daughter of his! Had she been attempting to purloin the keys in pursuance of some allegedly beneficent scheme which involved opening up some bit of the building at dead of night? She’d done this sort of thing before. He wouldn’t put it past her. He wouldn’t put anything past her. And she, undoubtedly, was the person most likely to know where he habitually hid the keys.
It was an outrage! Pulling on his dressing-gown he hurried across the passage and burst none too quietly into his daughter’s room: only to find that she wasn’t there. Well, she wouldn’t be, would she? And at this very moment, as he stood in the doorway hesitating, the telephone rang.
“Hullo, Dad?” As if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And calling him “Dad”, too. What could be the cause of this unwontedly friendly and non-contentious tone? He longed to take it at face value, but how could you tell?
“Look, Dad, I hope I didn’t wake you (a somewhat vain hope, one would imagine, at 2.30 in the morning, but it’s the thought that counts). “The thing is, I thought I’d better just let you know that I won’t be back tonight. In case you’re worrying, I mean …”
What was at the back of this incomprehensibly considerate behaviour. He hated to find himself thinking on these lines, but how could he help it after all that had happened between them? He braced himself to listen with an open mind to the explanation that was about to follow; and indeed it turned out to be plausible enough. Joyce, apparently, had only just arrived home after her party – good for her! Living it up at last! – and had suggested that Flora should stay for the rest of the night on the settee in the living-room, it being already so late.
All very sensible, very rational. Arnold rang off, greatly relieved that his unhappy suspicions had been proved quite unfounded. Joyce’s cottage was a good ten minutes’ walk away from here across the dark grounds, and so Flora’s telephone call proved conclusively that she couldn’t have triggered-off the nightmare from which he had woken barely five minutes ago. Those searching fingers must have been just part of the dream, as unreal as all the rest of it.
He turned away from the telephone, weak with relief: and found himself face-to-face with a tall, gaunt figure standing silently in the doorway.
CHAPTER TWENTY
That Sir Humphrey Penrose was mad Arnold had never doubted; but he would never have guessed it now from the sight of the upright, commanding figure that stood before him. Dressed in a robe of dark velvet edged with ermine, as became a high-ranking Tudor nobleman on ceremonial occasions, he appeared not only sane, but calm, authoritative and full of purpose. Beneath his jewelled cap his silvery eyes flashed and sparkled in the lamplight as he began to move, slowly and with immense dignity, in Arnold’s direction. Strangely, Arnold did not feel fear exactly; more a sort of incredulous awe. He felt, for that moment, in the presence of greatness.
But only for that moment. As the old man moved nearer, his robe swinging as he walked, the flapping legs of a pair of pyjamas were revealed, and a pair of down-at-heel bedroom slippers.
At the sight of these, fear returned to Arnold with a rush. The grandeur was gone: the calm, authoritative confidence was cancelled out. This was indeed a madman, a senile old fool who had been childishly dressing-up as a sixteenth-century nobleman, and – yes – with a sword at his side. A real sword. The light glinted from the razor-sharp blade as the trembling old hand rested upon the jewelled handle. Extracted from the Armoury? From some long-hoarded collection of his own up at the cottage? At that moment, this seemed to matter little. What mattered at the moment was that this dangerous and serviceable weapon was in the hands of a madman, suffering from who knew what delusions and fantasies?
“For Flora, it may be just a game of play-acting,” Joyce had anxiously observed on one occasion, “but for him it’s a deadly reality”; and Arnold had little doubt that she was right. Was the old man even now taking his imaginary part in some desperate enterprise belonging to that blood-stained epoch of plots and counter-plots, of conspiracies, persecutions and murders which lay between the death of the boy King Edward VI, and the accession of Queen Elizabeth? Was he even now surrounded by enemies, by informers, by treacherous, turn-coat conspirators? And if so, was Arnold one of them?
You have to humour madmen, so the received wisdom goes. You have to placate them by going along with their fantasies; but how do you do this when you don’t know what the fantasy is about? Or what rôle in it has been allotted to you? Briefly, and with unprecedented fervour, Arnold wished that Flora was here, with her alleged empathy with the old man, her familiarity with his twisted thought processes. She might be able to talk him down, get him to lay that dangerous weapon aside; persuade him that her father wasn’t a heretic, or a lackey of the Council, or whatever it was that Sir Humphrey was imagining him to be.
The sword flashed, slicing the air, and Arnold sprang away involuntarily. It was bad policy, he knew, to show fear, but there had been no time to think. How strong the old man was! As if demonstrating his power, his superior swordmanship, he flourished the weapon a few times in front of him, and then laid it down carefully, lovingly, on the small rosewood table, and for several moments stood contemplating its shining length.
Then he looked up, a bemused look coming into his eyes.
“My glasses!” he complained. “They’re always taking my glasses. Why can’t they leave my things alone?” and he pushed impatiently at the sword as if it was impeding his search: “My glasses … My reading glasses? Why can’t they leave my things alone?”
Was this the moment to intervene? Warily, Arnold ventured to step forward and take Sir Humphrey’s arm. “Come along,” he said. “You must go home now. That’s where your glasses will be. I’ll help you.”
But after a few steps, the old man jerked his arm away.
“What’s this place? Where are you taking me?” he demanded, his voice suddenly clear and authoritative: and then: “You’ve hidden them! I know it. The Lady of the Bedchamber warned me of this trickery. You have hidden them under the pillow!”
Not the reading glasses, surely. He must be talking now about the keys. The bemused old brain had reverted to the real purpose of the intrusion: to steal the keys. Why not make him admit it?
“What have I hidden under the pillow?” Arnold demanded. Just because he’s mad, I don’t have to let him make a monkey of me. As soon as he admits that it’s the keys he’s after, I’ll give him a piece of my mind. And Flora too – the Lady of the Bedchamber – indeed! I’m damn sure she’s at the back of it all.
But the old man made no reference to any keys. He merely stared stupidly: and now Arnold realised that his failure to answer wasn’t due to any
reluctance to admit to the attempted theft; it was because he had forgotten what he had come for.
What a pathetic end to a burglary. What could Flora be thinking of, aiding an abetting these crazy escapades? As she obviously must have done; how else could her befuddled protegé have learned that Arnold kept the keys under his pillow at night? Or even have found his way to the flat at all through the dark, autumnal garden?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Flora, almost in tears at the injustice of these accusations, denied everything.
“I didn’t even know he was out!” she protested. “I didn’t hear a thing. I’d settled him in bed, and I was downstairs watching television – well, I suppose I don’t have to stand at his bedside and watch him every minute of the time, do I?”
“Of course you don’t, dear,” Joyce interrupted placatingly. “It’s not your fault. He must have crept out quietly, he does that sometimes, he’s very cunning. Your father doesn’t quite understand how sly old people can get, once they become senile.”
“He’s not senile!” Flora snapped; and Joyce looked pained. Had she not just been taking the girl’s side in the argument? The discussion of the night’s adventure was fast deteriorating into all-against-all bickering: and no wonder, it being four in the morning, and none of them having had any sleep – unless you count Arnold’s brief interlude of nightmare.
By now, some sort of picture of the sequence of events had been hammered out between them. Joyce, still dressed in her black sateen evening dress with touches of cream lace around neck and shoulder, had little to contribute, not having arrived home until nearly two in the morning. Not exactly “living it up” as Flora had surmised, but having inadvertently got herself trapped in a situation which more experienced party-goers are at pains to avoid: the trap that is, of gratefully accepting the offer of a lift from some fellow-guest who then, as the evening goes on, becomes either so inebriated or so full of joie de vivre, or both, as to delay his or her departure far into the small hours.
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