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Run!
Patricia Wentworth
I
The fog was getting worse every moment. There was not much daylight left, and in another half hour darkness would be there to give the fog a solid backing. James Elliot drove forward through it, keeping the Rolls at a cautious ten miles an hour. His face was as expressionless as the indeterminate grey eyes set about with very thick fair lashes. Very thick fair hair stood up in a thatch all over his head. It was too thick to curl, too thick to lie down, too thick for any sort of control. He kept it short, and brushed it more as a rite than because brushing produced any effect upon it. His large square hands held the wheel.
Anyone looking at him might have supposed his mind to be a complete blank, yet this was very far from being the case. To start with, he was feeling both pleased and elated, since he had almost certainly sold the Rolls to Colonel Pomeroy. That would give him a leg-up with the firm, and it would also annoy Jackson, whose idea of selling a car was to talk the customer’s head off. Jackson thought no one could sell cars but himself. All right, Jackson would see. All that gas might go down with women, but when it came to a man who knew something about cars, well, it put him off. Talking wasn’t James’s line, but he had sold the Rolls, and he felt elated and pleased.
He also felt rather anxious. He didn’t want to bring the car in with a dented wing or a scratch on her paint. Extraordinarily easy to get dented and scratched in a fog like this. James’s face showed neither elation nor anxiety. It was just a face.
Driving became steadily more difficult. If it had been like this when he came through Warnley, he would have stopped there and not risked the car, but at Warnley there had been no more than a light general haze. There was nothing for it but to go on. Staling should be within a mile or two if he hadn’t got off the road. A gloomy conviction that he was no longer on the Staling road had, however, begun to gain ground. He had come that way before, and there should have been a steepish hill and a hump-backed bridge. You can miss a lot of things in a fog, but you are bound to know when you are on a hill, and you can’t miss that kind of bridge.
It became borne in upon James that he had missed it, and that meant he was on some other road. He stopped the car, got out, and prospected.… He was certainly on the wrong road. He couldn’t see a yard, but this was an enclosed place, overhung with trees by the feel of it. Moisture dripped from them. He had the sense of being shut in. There was a smell of wet woods. But the road from Warnley to Staling ran over a bare open heath.…
He tried to think where he had got wrong, but could make no hand of it. It might have been anywhere after he had run into the fog. He remembered a place where four roads met. He had glanced at the signpost on his way down, but having seen the name he was looking for, he hadn’t bothered about the others. And there had been other cross roads. He couldn’t remember. He was, in fact, lost.
He got into the car again and went on driving at ten miles an hour, because any road is bound to arrive somewhere if you follow it far enough. There was hardly any daylight now. The feeling of being hemmed in by trees grew stronger. The off wing touched something. James braked and got out again, to find his feet on grass and the wing pressed against some smooth-barked tree. He had run right off the road on to a grass verge. This was his first thought. Then he wasn’t so sure. The off wheels were on grass all right, but it didn’t feel like the rough grass of the roadside. It was too smooth, too even under foot for that. He stooped and felt it with his hand. Tame grass, mown grass, rolled grass, with a neat clipped edge—that’s what he’d run on to. And the road under his feet now wasn’t a road at all. It was somebody’s gravelled drive.
He backed the car gently and stopped to consider the position. A gravelled drive meant a house, and a house meant people. If he went up to the house, he could at least find out where he was, and how far from the nearest garage. He wasn’t going to run the Rolls a yard farther than he could help. She was off the drive on the grass and as safe as she would be anywhere else for the moment. He took an electric torch and set out in what he supposed to be the direction of the house.
The torch wasn’t any good. The beam struck the fog and dazzled back at him. He switched it off, and felt with his foot for the edge of the drive at every step—a very tedious business.
He hadn’t gone a dozen yards before he had completely lost his sense of direction. Any fog is baffling, but this was the worst he had ever encountered. It produced the feeling, which comes with you from a bad dream, of being in some unknown dimension without the sight or sense which it demands. It occurred to James that he might not be able to find his way back to the car.
He put that away. The immediate need was to find the house. He meant to find it. He went on feeling with his foot and hoping that the drive wasn’t going to be one of the mile-long kind. He might, of course, have been driving up it for some time. He couldn’t remember taking anything like a turn, but a lot of these drives emerge upon a bend, so that what had probably happened was that the road had turned and he hadn’t. He had driven straight on through somebody’s gates, and it was a bit of luck that they hadn’t been shut.
The edge along which he was feeling with his foot stopped suddenly and was no more to be found. He was still on gravel, and guessed that he had come out upon a sweep before the house. There was a more open feeling, and no more drip from the trees. If the house was near, it was showing no light. It would be a big house. There ought to be some light showing. The fog was like a blanket, but you would expect some faint seeping through of light. There wasn’t any.
He walked with his hands stretched out before him and every sense straining—eyes for anything to break the dark, ears to catch the faintest sound. Some people have another sense. It tells them, without sight or touch, when they are approaching an obstacle. They will stop short for a wall, a tree, or a bank with as much certainty as if they could see it. James possessed this sense. He became suddenly aware that the house was on his left. He could see nothing, but he could feel it there, very large and not very far away.
He turned and went towards this invisible house, walking more quickly than he had done yet. The space in front of him was a large one. He seemed to have been crossing it for a long time, when he stubbed his toe against a step. But time is one of the things which behave oddly in a fog. He had no certainty as to how far he had come, but was gratefully sure that he had arrived.
The step was the bottom one of six. He guessed at a portico overhead. Arrived at the top, he put on his torch and looked for the bell. At such close quarters the beam came into action again. It showed glimpses of stone, glimpses of a close-growing creeper, all sodden and sunken in the fog. It was like looking at drowned things under water. The bell hung to his right, a stirrup handle on a long iron rod. He put his hand to it and pulled, and immediately became aware that the thing was broken. It swung loose as he pulled, while from overhead came a rattle of wire.
He went down the steps again, and very nearly fell over a bicycle which was leaning against them. He had gone up on the left and missed it, but crossing to find the bell, he had come down on the opposite side. The balustrade which guarded the steps ended in a stone pillar. The bicycle had been propped against it. It now lay sprawling on the gravel. James, picking it up, discovered it to be a woman’s bicycle. He leaned it against the pillar again and went back up the steps. If this woman had got into the house, he supposed he could get in too. There would be a knocker.
There was a knocker, a plain solid ring. The light of the torch showed it weather-stained and dark. Whoever kept this house had very little pride in it. A dirty doorstep and uncleaned brass
are an advertisement of neglect. James gave the house a bad mark. He didn’t like brass very much, but if you had it, it ought to be shiny. In the moment that it took him to think about this he became aware of something odd about the angle of the knocker. It didn’t look at him straight, it slanted at him. He ran the beam of his torch across to the left-hand jamb and found out why. The door stood a black hand’s-breath open.
James looked at it. It seemed odd. Of course if the bicycle woman had just gone in and banged the door behind her, it might have started open again. Their last house but three had had a door like that, and his father blew up every time it did it because the dogs got out. Or was it the last house but four? He wasn’t sure. They had been moving ever since he could remember, because life in the army is like that. You came home from Egypt and settled into a house at Aldershot, and then you got orders to go to China, and presently you came back to Aldershot again by way of India. But it wouldn’t be the same house.
He went on looking at the door. It might be that, or it mightn’t. There wasn’t any light in the hall. James loathed people who kept their halls dark. It was one of his Aunt Lucy’s pet economies, and he loathed his Aunt Lucy, at whose house he had spent some of his dreariest holidays.
He considered the lightless condition of the hall with Scottish deliberation. It was all very well for a thrifty spinster aunt to switch off the lights of an Ealing villa, but a house as big as this ought to have a light in the hall. Would have a light in the hall. Unless something was wrong.
James shifted the beam of his torch again and found the knocker. He put up his hand to it, but instead of knocking he pushed the door a little wider and took a step forward. The air of the house came out to meet him, mingling with the fog. James snuffed at it rather like a dog. Then he pushed the door with the flat of his hand and stepped in over the threshold. There was a sense of space, a sense of cold, a most clammy, damp, uninhabited smell.
James sent the ray of his torch into the space and found it very large and dusty, with a stair going up at the far end. He was in some kind of lobby, but the inner door stood open to the hall and he could see through it to where the beam shifted and slid from floor to panelling, from panelling to the grey stone of a huge, empty fireplace. He came through the inner door and stopped. The travelling beam just grazed the back of a gaunt archaic chair. The place was not unfurnished. It was certainly very bare. His feet were on stone. The stair gloomed in the darkness.
He switched off the torch and waited to see if there was any glow of light from the upper floor. Everything immediately disappeared in a complete black-out. The place might not be there at all for all he could see of it. He thought it was very odd. He thought it was none of his business, and that he had better be getting back to the car. On the other hand, the bicycle obviously belonged to someone, and that someone had probably left the door open. He, James, had set out to discover where he was, and he had a constitutional objection to giving up half way. He thought it might be a good plan to go back to the front door and do something rousing with the knocker.
He turned on his torch again, and the beam fell on the stair. It made a bright ring in a dim, dusky circle. The edge of the circle touched something which had not been there before. The stair had been empty. It wasn’t empty now. He swung the bright ring sideways, and saw it dazzle on a girl’s white face—just a ghost of a face which seemed to float on the darkness, eyes wide in a stare of terror, mouth open as if to scream.
But she didn’t scream. She came running. There wasn’t any sound at all. Her face slipped out of the circle of light, and she came running like the wind. She really did run like the wind, because he lost sight of her and could hear nothing, and then she had him by the arm, and she said “Run!” in a breath which came warm against his cheek.
II
James stood his ground and said “why?” He said it in his normal voice. The torch made a spot of light on the floor at his feet. It was a very dusty floor. And then, before there was time for anything else, someone fired at them.
It was completely incredible, but it was true. The stair ran up to a gallery, and someone had taken a pot shot at them from this gallery. It wasn’t such a bad shot either, for James felt the wind of the bullet as it went past, and heard the plop with which it buried itself in the panelling.
The girl dragged at his arm. He thought more favourably of her original suggestion. There seemed to be no point about being shot down by a homicidal maniac. They ran down the steps and into the fog, and a second shot followed them. James barked a shin on the bicycle. It clattered down upon stone, and above the noise of its fall he could hear the sound of running steps behind them. The girl pushed him hard to the left. The hand on his arm pinched fiercely. The voice that had said “Run!” said, “Idiot! This way—quick!” all on one soundless breath.
And then they were running again, flagstones under their feet, and the fog in eyes, and nose, and throat. He guessed that they were on a paved terrace which ran the length of the house. He couldn’t see a yard. A yard? He couldn’t see an inch. But the girl seemed to know where she was going. She turned left-handed again. Then she stopped running and went slow, and once they stood listening, and heard what might have been a step on the gravel a long way off. She pulled him on. He made as little noise with his feet as he could, but she made none that he could hear. She might have been bare-foot, or she might not have been touching the ground at all.
She stopped and felt in the dark with her free hand. She said “Steps” in his ear, and they went down six of them and through a gateway into another paved place. James knew that it was a gateway because he scraped his shoulder against the left-hand pillar. He stopped there, and said,
“What’s all this about? I want to get back to my car.”
She leaned so close to answer him that her lips just touched his ear, a little fugitive touch that was instantly withdrawn. Her fingers nipped his arm—small fingers, extraordinarily hard and strong. The pinch hurt sharply. She said in a mere thread of a savage whisper,
“You can’t! Do you want to be shot? I don’t.”
James said, “Nor do I.” He whispered too, but even in a whisper he managed to make it quite plain that he didn’t like being pinched. He considered it a liberty.
The nip was repeated, harder.
“You will be—we both shall! I suppose you can climb a ladder? There ought to be one just about here. No—about ten steps on and a yard or two to the left. Feel about for it.”
It was a little farther than she had said, but they found it. There was no more sound behind them. She let go of his arm and went away up into the dark. A faint rustling came to him from above. He climbed towards it and stepped off the ladder into a foot or so of hay. His arm was caught again. He was first pulled forward and then released. A shutter closed behind him. He heard a long breath taken, and a whispering laugh.
He said again, “What’s all this?” And then, “What’s this place?”
“Stable loft.” Her voice sounded a little farther off. “They won’t find us here. Brr! Nice to be out of the fog! I do hope they won’t pinch my bicycle.”
“Why should they?”
“They might.”
Well, they couldn’t pinch the Rolls, because he had locked the doors and the switch key was in his pocket. All the same—
“You haven’t told me what it’s all about. And I’m not staying here—I’m going back to my car. And what we both ought to do is to find the nearest police-station and put them on to the lunatic who was shooting at us. Unless—” A sudden thought struck him. “I suppose he might have thought we were burglars, but it was a bit drastic shooting like that. He might have hit one of us quite easily.”
There was a faint laugh.
“He meant to. And you can’t be a burglar in the afternoon. It has to be half-past eight or something like that. And anyhow it isn’t their house.”
“Whose house?”
“Theirs.”
“Whose house is it?”<
br />
“How should I know?” enquired a very small, innocent voice.
James felt properly angry.
“What’s the good of trying to put that sort of stuff across when you’ve just been leading me round blind? You’ve got to know a place like the back of your hand before you can do that!”
She laughed again, a little nearer.
“Perhaps it’s the cradle of my infancy.”
“I’m going back to my car,” said James.
His wrist was caught.
“I should hate you to. If you got shot, they might think I’d done it. Let’s stay here and tell each other the stories of our lives. I’ll begin. I’m sure you’d love to hear the story of my life.”
“Not particularly. I want to make sure my car’s all right.”
“Are you going to leave me here?” He wasn’t sure if the voice was quite steady. There was very little of it. He said,
“I could drop you if you’ll tell me where you want to go.”
She seemed to consider this.
“I shouldn’t think we’d get farther than the nearest ditch—not in a fog like this. The lanes round here are exactly like corkscrews. And then there’s my bicycle, and my shoes.”
“Your what?” said James in an exasperated voice.
“Shoes. Things you wear on your feet, you know. Rather a nice pair—crocodiles—quite new. I don’t think I ought to abandon them.”
James became a good deal more exasperated. It wasn’t the slightest use her doing that sort of mournful tone at him. If it had been light, she would probably have been flickering her eyelashes. He hadn’t got a sister, but he had fourteen girl cousins, and he flattered himself he knew all their ways of trying it on. He couldn’t imagine what sort of game this was, and that naturally put his back up, but he did know when a girl was trying it on. He said,
“What have you got on now?”
There was a little sigh in the darkness.
Run! Page 1