And Afterward, the Dark

by Basil Copper

  He filled up three pages with closely detailed cuttings and photographs on the career of an obscure South American diplomat, culled mainly from Brazilian newspapers, and blotted the gum at the edges of the cuttings with satisfaction. He wondered idly what tomorrow would bring; Dr. Fabri invariably left the names of the day's obituary subjects for him in the master ledger, in the distinctive green ink that he had already come to know so well. Trumble did not start this work until mid-morning so he imagined that his employer would make his selections from the principal daily newspapers and possibly from announcements via other media, such as radio and television. The main material for the file arrived by mail two or three days later, usually from three major cuttings agencies in England and from a number of news services overseas.

  The work had its own fascination, though Trumble might once have felt it to be morbid; it was certainly no more so than similar departments kept up by the major newspapers and known to their respective staffs as "The Morgue." In fact, Trumble felt Dr. Fabri's own system was preferable, as he understood the newspapers wrote their obituaries in advance, which did rather smack of the macabre, to his way of thinking. He put down the pen, looked at the completed page, and replaced the ledger on the shelf with the others. He would do the indexing on these last items tomorrow.

  Trumble ate dinner on his own that evening and was sitting in the lounge engrossed in a novel at about nine o'clock when he heard Dr. Fabri's car in the drive. A few moments later the hall door slammed with hollow resonance and the measured tread of his employer passed up the staircase; shortly afterwards Dr. Fabri's bedroom door closed. Trumble picked up his half-finished drink and resumed his book.

  The house was unnaturally quiet and occasionally he would put down the volume and listen briefly but the only sounds were the faint sputtering of wood from the fire, for the nights were still cold as yet, and the muted sounds of Joseph from his quarters at the back of the house. The mantel clock measured a few minutes after ten and Trumble was thinking about retiring to his own room when the sharp, peremptory strokes of the front door bell, jabbed by an evidently impatient finger, startled him.

  He gained the hall and was opening the door before Joseph had made his appearance. A tall, silvery-haired man of some distinction, wearing a dress suit and black tie under a dark raincoat, stood in the porch. In the background shimmered the gleaming bulk of a grey Mercedes. Trumble hesitated for a fraction and the man in the porch seemed slightly taken aback also. The older man was the first to recover himself.

  "I would like to speak with Dr. Fabri if it isn't too inconvenient," he said."He is expecting me.''

  Trumble introduced himself and the two men shook hands. "I usually arrange his appointments but I am new here and the doctor may have forgotten to tell me," said Trumble. He motioned the visitor forward into the hall and closed the door behind him. Joseph had now appeared and took the tall man's coat.

  "However, if you made an appointment I have no doubt Dr. Fabri is expecting you," Trumble continued. "He came in about an hour ago."

  The visitor seemed pleased at this, but just then the sound of Dr. Fabri's footsteps sounded at the stairhead.

  "Would you like me to announce you?" Trumble asked.

  The visitor shook his head. "That won't be necessary," he said decisively. Joseph was hovering at the back of the hall but Dr. Fabri was now halfway down the staircase, and he vanished in the direction of the kitchen.

  "Delighted to see you, my dear fellow," said Dr. Fabri, shaking his visitor warmly by the hand. "I was worried in case you might have been delayed.''

  "Not this night. You know, certainly, not this night of all nights," said his visitor sharply.

  Dr. Fabri laughed shortly. "No, no, of course not," he said soothingly, laying his hand on the other's arm. "You go ahead into the study and I will join you immediately."

  He turned to Trumble, his strong face impassive in the soft light of the hall lamps.

  "I shan't require you any further tonight, Robert," he said. "We shall be quite late. I have told Joseph he may retire. I will show my guest out myself.''

  Trumble nodded. He went back into the lounge and finished his drink. There was no sound from the direction of the study, into which both men had disappeared. He dragged the heavy brass guard over the remains of the fire, recovered his book from the armchair, and switched off the lights. Joseph nodded to him darkly as he crossed the hall. The big, taciturn handyman was hovering near the study door, behind which could now be made out the low murmur of voices. Trumble walked up to the landing and sought his own room.

  He quickly prepared for bed, drew the covers over him, and again settled down to another chapter of his book; this time, for some indefinable reason, the texture of the writing did not seem to absorb him as it had done formerly and it was still a few minutes short of eleven when he put the book aside on the table and extinguished the lamp. Thin cracks of light came through under his bedroom door from farther down the landing; Trumble was just about to shift his position so that he would be facing the darker side of the room when he saw a shadow briefly cross the light coming in under the door. A moment later he heard the faint click of the key as someone locked the door from the outside.

  Trumble smiled to himself in the semidarkness; he supposed he ought to object to this rather peculiar procedure, but he could not say the practice inconvenienced him. He had a self-contained suite and if Dr. Fabri liked to confine the occupants of his house to their own portions of the building during the dead hours of the night, he supposed that was his own business. Perhaps he would tackle the doctor about it when he had got to know him a little better. In the meantime no useful purpose would be served by kicking up a fuss; and the position was quite the best thing of its kind which was likely to come his way in the course of a lifetime.

  His head occupied with these and similar thoughts, Trumble soon slept. He found himself awake again in the still of the night. He lay trembling for some moments, trying to collect himself. What had awakened him, or rather what he fancied had awakened him, was a long, high scream which sounded like an animal in pain. Trumble had noted degrees of torment in animals, as in humans, and it seemed to him that the sound which had broken his sleep was of some creature in extremis. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch and saw that it was just after 3:00 a.m. He had therefore slept for nearly four hours.

  A glance towards the door showed him that the light in the hall and on the landing had been extinguished. No sound broke the stillness but his own heavy breathing as he listened intently; the darkness of the night pressed heavily on the house and held it as though within a deep vault. Even the owl was silent from the thicket beyond the garden. Trumble felt perspiration in the roots of his hair and he was cold and sticky against his pyjamas. He wondered if he had caught a fever in the damp weather of the last few days. There was no footfall, not the creak of a board; his own heart was like the grumbling of a ponderous piston-engine within the confines of his chest.

  Then the owl sounded, sharp and distinct, from the woods beyond the house and with this commonplace noise all the little sounds of the night crept back; Trumble felt his stiff hands relax their frenzied grip on the sheets and his body, with returning warmth, began to relax. Sleep was so subtle on this second occasion that he was not aware of it when unconsciousness finally overtook him.

  The following day Dr. Fabri did not appear in the morning though Trumble had heard his car earlier; he took his breakfast, as usual served by the unsmiling Joseph, and just before ten began his work in the small cabinet with the bronze door; as before he had the door closed and kept it shut while he was working. The hum of the air-conditioning seemed to keep him in touch with the rest of the house, and the chamber itself ensured him complete privacy as he could easily hear if anyone approached from outside.

  There was a large bronze handle, mate to the one on the face, on his own side of the door and, as if that were not enough, the massive bronze key, made specially to match, was on his
own side to avoid him being locked in. It was this key which he handed to Joseph in the evenings when he had finished his scholarly work among the rare books.

  But already this morning Dr. Fabri must have been down, for as soon as Trumble was seated at his desk and had commenced to examine the material which awaited his attention, he saw that two new names had been added to the register ledger in the doctor's unmistakable green-inked hand. The first was that of Burnett Fairbarn, an internationally known architect. Trumble had heard his death announced on the news the night before; he had died in a mountaineering accident on a peak in the Andes the previous day. The latest name was that of Lyle Bassett, of whom Trumble had never heard; there was no information available on either man, Trumble found when he searched the doctor's heap of notes: the first details for documenting purposes would no doubt come from the evening papers that night. Trumble continued with his usual pursuits and the day slowly assumed the pattern of those preceding. Dr. Fabri returned to the house for lunch; the two men walked in the garden; Trumble took some dictation and, a little later, drove over to Guildford for tea. He bought the two evening papers on his way back, intending to go through them after dinner.

  But another session of note-taking followed and when Trumble returned to the archive room for more indexing at about half-past ten, the newspapers were still on the desk unread. It was only when, his immediate task finished, Trumble turned to peruse the day's news that he saw a long story on an inside page of Fairbarn's climbing accident. There was over a column of space in both papers devoted to this, together with photographs of the architect, and some of his principal buildings. When he had finished pasting these entries into the large book and had suitably indexed them, Trumble remembered the second entry on the ledger. He turned again to verify the name and then went through the inside pages. He found what he was looking for in a short item on the front page of the Evening Standard.

  It merely said that the body of Lyle Bassett, a somewhat obscure ballet choreographer and composer, had been found dead in a blazing car near the Guildford bypass in the early hours of the same day. Trumble entered the notice and found a smaller piece in the stop-press column of the Evening News. It referred to another story on the inside page and this was an expanded version of the facts already known, but giving details of Bassett's career. Trumble closed both books, tidied his desk, and went to bed rather satisfied with his labours.

  The midday post the following day contained a great deal of material for Dr. Fabri's archives, together with a number of business letters which had to be answered, and Trumble was not able to return to his indexing in the room with the bronze door until nearly twenty-four hours later. He then saw that he had rather a lot of leeway to make up; Dr. Fabri had added another four or five names in green ink in the ledger and the pile of clippings and magazine articles had reached alarming proportions.

  Trumble went swiftly through the material, arranging it in piles and subject matter, preparatory to making the entries. His hand faltered when he picked up the last clipping which consisted of several inches of text and a large photograph; the room suddenly became hot and stuffy and Trumble put the cutting down on the desk with a hand which had begun to behave in an uncontrollable manner. He studied the face again; the picture was that of the man he had showed into the hall of Linnet Ridge a little over two days earlier. He checked back over the original entry; it was the man who had died in the wrecked car.

  The name was Lyle Bassett.

  Trumble did not mention this fact to Dr. Fabri. His procedure was strange, even to himself, and no application of logic could account for it. Even more unusual was the fact that Dr. Fabri himself did not bring up the subject; it was impossible that his guest's fatal accident could have escaped his attention, unless Joseph had placed the cuttings in position on the secretary's desk. In which case that would explain the matter; Trumble embraced this theory almost in relief. Joseph's taciturnity was notorious in the household and he might, in his extraordinary way, have kept his own counsel.

  In the meantime Trumble avoided all conversation which might lead round to Bassett's visit to the house and hoped that the doctor himself might make the discovery while going through the record books. But in any case opportunities for conversation with the doctor were becoming more limited; as the weeks went by and the spring advanced he appeared more seldom at meals, and apart from dictation and matters relating to business correspondence, Trumble had little contact with him.

  He worked on in his cabinet and was left more and more to his own affairs, though he had no doubt that Joseph, who was undoubtedly in his employer's confidence, kept a discreet eye on the secretary's movements and reported back to the doctor how his time had been spent. Trumble did not resent this; after all, he reasoned to himself, the doctor was paying him well, he was living in some comfort and style, and though the hours were sometimes irregular, he was not greatly inconvenienced and could not honestly say that he was overworked.

  He slept more easily at nights also and he had noted during the last week that his room was no longer locked after he had gone up to bed; evidently he had proved his loyalty and the doctor had decided that he could be trusted with the run of the house. Trumble was wryly amused at the thought; Dr. Fabri might have an international reputation as an authority on the black arts, but in private life he was perfectly proper and his household disappointingly normal, so far as Trumble could see.

  Not that he had expected out-of-the-way happenings, but he had hoped that his employer would unlock some of the hidden treasures of his mind to him during the long summer evenings, especially as the doctor and the poet evidently shared many tastes and common viewpoints on matters normally considered forbidden among those in what, for want of a better phrase, was termed polite society.

  And yet there was an incident a few days later which illustrated vividly to Trumble the darker side of Dr. Fabri's nature. It had been unnaturally cold for an England poised on the threshold of May and fires had been lit in the principal rooms to supplement the central heating. For some reason or other the doctor and his secretary had forsaken the study and were seated at the dining-room table where Fabri had been dictating sections of one of a new series of lectures for the following autumn.

  He had called this particular talk "The Past Which is to Come," a title which had vividly impressed itself upon Trumble; in fact he wished he had thought of it himself. His pen scratched rapidly over the paper as Dr. Fabri rattled on; his employer proceeded in quick, staccato sentences as ideas came to him, though when the time arrived he would deliver the speech in a steady, leisurely flow in which paragraphs, phrases, sentences were all linked immutably like the loops of a chain. But while dictating, Dr. Fabri would turn his deep, piercing eyes ruminatively on Trumble as he searched for the apposite phrase: then he would proceed to deliver it unfalteringly, so that the secretary was hard put to it to keep up. Once he had found his thought, he would polish and assemble it in his mind before giving utterance, so that he never had to correct the typed word once it was on paper.

  It was an admirable method, a tribute to the skill and precision of Dr. Fabri's remarkable mind, but it was a harsh discipline for a notetaker such as Trumble, whose shorthand had fallen somewhat into disuse and he was sometimes mentally panting far behind in a desperate effort to keep pace with the doctor's finely shaped and elaborately wrought prose. After the first session, which was in marked contrast to Fabri's methods of replying to letters, Trumble practised his note-taking alone in his room for several hours, so that he faced the second and subsequent ordeals more comprehensively equipped.

  "The cancer of time eats inexorably at the fabric of human lives," said Dr. Fabri, the phrase seeming to hang on the hushed air of the dining-room.

  "We drag our pasts behind us as a snail its slime."

  He paused for a moment, his cigar smoke rising steadily upwards towards the panelled ceiling with hardly a tremor, the air within the room was so still.

  Trumble's pen raced on
over the paper until, with relief, he heard Dr. Fabri come to the end of his discourse. He flexed his hand to relieve the cramp, aware of the doctor's eyes fixed upon him with sardonic humour. Dr. Fabri stretched himself in his chair.

  "Is there anything there which you feel requires amplification, Robert?" he asked.

  What he really meant, Trumble understood well enough, was whether the latter had managed to take down everything accurately and wanted him to check anything again. Trumble flipped through his pages of voluminous notes, hoping that he would have no difficult transcription problems.

  "There was a point here, Doctor," he said diffidently. "I believe my note is accurate but I didn't quite understand the meaning."

  He searched for the passage while Dr. Fabri waited politely, his dark eyes a startling contrast to his white hair and tufted eyebrows.

  Trumble found the place and read, "In this Key you may behold, as in a mirror, the distinct functions of the spirits, and how they are to be drawn into communication in all places, seasons, and times."

  "Well?" said Dr. Fabri, a little impatiently. "It is a quotation, of course."

  "I understand that," Trumble replied, "and there are many such passages throughout your lecture. Am I to take it that this is intended to be taken literally?"

  "Certainly," said Dr. Fabri calmly. "I could give you a number of instances. It is, of course, a power given to very few and one certainly not to be abused. You are desirous of learning more of such things—from a personal aspect, that is?"