by Mary Stewart
I opened my eyes again, and the dimming torchlight met them. He was standing beside the pile of rubble, smiling down at Danielle. She lay there, still, looking up at him. I could see the glint of her eyes. The sweat on his face made the wide fleshy cheeks gleam like soapstone. He stood quite still, smiling down at the girl who lay at his feet staring back at him, her bright skirt all tossed-looking in the dust.
I thought, with crazy inconsequence: how uncomfortable she looks. Then, suddenly: she looks dead.
Presently Angelos stooped, took her body by the shoulders, and dragged it across the cave to pitch it down in the rubble beside Nigel.
And that is how Danielle Lascaux was murdered within twenty yards of me, and I never lifted a finger to help her.
18
Go while the going’s good,
Is my advice …
SOPHOCLES: Philoctetes.
(tr. E. F. Watling.)
BY the mercy of providence I didn’t faint, or I’d have pitched straight out into the torchlight. But the narrow cleft held my body up, and my mind (numbed, I suppose, by the repetition of shock) seemed only very slowly to take in what had happened.
It was as if some sort of mental censor had dropped a curtain of gauze between me and the scene in the cave, so that it took on a kind of long distance quality, the murderer moving about his dreadful business at a far remove from me, as a creature of fiction moves on a lighted stage. I was invisible, inaudible, powerless, the dreamer of the dream. With light would come sanity, and the nightmare vanish.
I watched him, still in that queer dead trance of calm. I think if he had turned in my direction I would hardly have had the wit to draw back, but he didn’t. He dropped Danielle’s body down in the dust beside Nigel’s, and stood for a moment looking down at them, lightly dusting his hands together. I wondered for a moment if he was after all going to shovel the dirt over the bodies, then it occurred to me that Danielle’s useless spark of instinct had been right; his plan for disposing of Nigel in the jeep had come a little too pat. It was Danielle who had brought the jeep; it was Danielle who was to be found with the wreck of it … That had been his plan all along. I saw it now clearly. I didn’t believe for a moment that he intended to kill his cousin Dimitrios – but, even if that were true, he had certainly never intended to share anything with Danielle. What she had to offer was only too easily found elsewhere. What was equally certain was that he hadn’t wanted to kill her here. He must have intended to save himself the transport of her body by killing her when the job was over, but her half-frightened queries had aimed just a little too near the mark for comfort. Better kill her now, and risk the extra load to be ferried down after dusk.
He had turned back now to the pillar where the torch was lodged. I watched him, still as if he were an actor in a play – a bad actor; there was no expression on his face, no horror, or anxiety, or even interest. He reached up a hand, picked up the torch, and switched it off. The darkness came down like a lid on a stifling box. He seemed to be listening. I could hear his untroubled breathing, and the tiny rustle of settling dust under the girl’s body. There was no sound from outside.
He switched on the light again and went out of the cave. A bridle jingled as the mule moved, but it appeared that he hadn’t untied it. I heard him move off, his soft footsteps unaccompanied by the sharper ones of the beast. He must have decided to reconnoitre the corrie before daring to lead out the mule …
The footsteps dwindled steadily. I couldn’t hear them any more. I waited, straining my ears. Nothing but the soft movement of dust in the cave, and the restless shifting of the mule’s hoofs in its corner. He must have left the corrie – perhaps to look for Dimitrios’ approach.
One thing was certain: Angelos had no idea that Simon had any reason for further curiosity about the corrie. He felt as safe from discovery in this remote stretch of Parnassus as he would on the mountains of the moon.
And Simon? Simon, too …
I was out of the cleft and flying across the dark cave. There was no light, but I don’t remember that I needed it. My body was acting of itself, like a sleepwalker’s, and like a sleepwalker’s it must have dodged every obstacle by instinct. My brain, too … I had no conscious plan, not even any coherent thought, but at some queer submerged level I knew I had to get out of that cave, to Simon … There was something about Dimitrios coming back, and Simon … something about warning Simon that here was not one shifty little crook to deal with, but two men who were murderers … something important to tell Simon … And more important than anything, I had to get out of the darkness, out of that stifling cage of rock, into the blessed light …
The sun struck down at me like a bright axe. I put a hand to my eyes, flinching as if at an actual blow. I was blinded, swimming in a sea of light. My other hand, groping out before me, touched something warm and soft, that moved. I jerked away with a little gasp of terror, and in the same moment realised that it was the mule, tethered in the narrow corner outside the cave. Its muzzle was deep in the grass, and it hardly paused to roll a white eye back at me before it resumed its eager cropping. The warm ammoniac smell of its coat brought a momentary, comfortless memory of Niko. I thrust past it, ducked heedlessly under the buttress, and ran out into the corrie.
There was no sign of Angelos. I turned and ran for the foot of the cliff-path.
The heat in the bottom of the corrie was palpable. I felt the sweat start out on my body as soon as I left the shade. The air weighed on me as I ran. My lungs laboured to drag it in, and dust was burning and rough in my throat. The corrie was a well of heat in which nothing moved except me, and I thrust through it blindly, with the whip of panic on me …
I reached the foot of the cliff. I believe I realised that if Angelos had gone to meet his cousin, he would have gone by the gateway, and not up the cliff. But this again was not a conscious thought. I only knew that I had to get up, out of the hot enclosing walls of rock, out on to the high open stretches above the cliff.
The afternoon sun shone full on the cliff where the path lay. The brightness of the white limestone splintered against the eyes. As I plunged up the steep, twisting little goat-track I felt the rock burn the soles of my shoes like hot metal. When I put a hand to the face of the cliff it seemed to scorch the flesh.
I climbed as fast as I dared, trying to make no sound. The dust hissed like sand under my feet. A pebble rolled and fell to the foot of the cliff with a crack like a pistol-shot. My breathing was as loud in the still air as sobbing.
I was a little less than halfway up when I heard him coming back.
I stopped dead, pilloried against the naked rock, clamped to it, like a lizard on the bare stone. The rock burned through my thin dress. As soon as he got to the gateway he would see me. I couldn’t possibly get to the top in time. If there were somewhere to hide …
There was nowhere to hide. A bare zigzag of goat-track; a couple of steep steps of natural rock open to the sun; a ledge holding a low tangle of brown scrub …
Regardless now of noise I scrambled anyhow over the rocky steps, pulled myself off the path on to the ledge, and flung myself down behind the meagre shelter of the dead bushes.
There was one small holly-oak, shining green, among a mass of foot-high tufted stuff like a tangle of rusty wire-netting. This was prickly to the touch, but as I dragged myself nearer its shelter, pressing against it, it crumbled under my desperate hands. I remember that it seemed quite a natural part of the nightmare, that the barrier between me and murder should crumble as I touched it.
I drew back from the dead bushes and pressed myself deep into the dust of the ledge, as if like a mole I could dig myself into the ground for safety. I put my cheek to the hot dust and lay still. Above me an overhang dealt a narrow shade, but where I lay the ledge was exposed to the sun. I could feel its cruel weight on my back and hand, but I hardly heeded it. Through the wiry scrub I was watching the corrie below me.
Angelos came up into the gateway and then walked quickly dow
n the ramp and across the corrie. He didn’t look up, but made straight for the cave, disappearing from my view in the corner.
I waited, pressed down in the burning dust. He didn’t appear, and I couldn’t hear anything. I wondered if he would load the mule now, or if I would have time to reach the top of the cliff, and shelter, before he came once more into view.
I was just getting ready to move, when I saw him again. He came out into the sunlight, moving very quietly now, and looking about him. He had brought his jacket out of the cave, and held it carefully over one arm. In the other hand he held something that shone in the sunlight. It was the torch I had dropped by Nigel’s body. Angelos’ own torch.
The black arched brows were drawn frowning over his eyes.
The smile pulled the thick lips. He stopped in the centre of the corrie, turning the torch over in his hand.
I lay still. Invisible, the mule moved restlessly, and metal clinked.
Angelos raised his head and sent one long look round the corrie. It raked the cliff, touched me, passed me by. Then the massive shoulders lifted in a tiny shrug, and he thrust the torch into a pocket of the jacket. I saw him slide his hand into the other pocket and bring out a gun. He weighed this for a moment in his hand, thoughtfully, and then turned back towards the cave.
My hands braced themselves in the dust. He would have recognised the torch, no doubt of that. He was going back into the cave to search for whoever had dropped it. And this time I didn’t propose to linger till he came out again. I wasn’t going to wait here, to be brushed off the cliff by that gun like a lizard off a wall.
I felt my muscles tighten up like vibrating wires. He was moving deliberately across the corrie floor. Soon he would be out of sight.
Something fell on to my hand with a sharp little rap of pain that nearly made me cry out. A pebble. Then a shower of dust and small stones, dislodged from somewhere above me, rattled down the cliff like a charge of small shot.
Angelos stopped dead, turned, and stared upwards straight at me.
I didn’t move. I didn’t think he could see me at that angle. But my mind stampeded with another, and worse panic, as I heard the sounds approaching the top of the cliff. Dimitrios, as yet scatheless, with Simon behind him? Or Simon, coming cheerfully to tell me that justice had been done on ‘last night’s marauder’? Any hope I had had that Dimitrios might have been forced into telling Simon himself about Angelos, vanished now as I listened to that incautious approach.
I saw Angelos stiffen, then he whipped out of sight behind a jut of rock.
The sounds came nearer. I turned my head till, by twisting my eyes in their sockets, I could see the cliff-top. If it was Simon I must shout … my mouth opened ready for the cry, and I licked the dust off my dry lips. Then something moved suddenly against the sky at the brim of the cliff, and I saw what it was.
A goat. Another. Three big black goats, yellow-eyed, flop-eared, peacefully intent on the dry scrub at the cliff’s head … They turned aside at the brink of the cliff and moved slowly across above me, outlined against the deep blue of that translucent sky. As they went I thought I heard again the sweet faraway stave of the goat-herd’s pipe. The coolly pastoral sound fell through the heat like the trickle of Apollo’s spring.
The relief was dizzying. The rock swam in the dazzling light. I shut my eyes and put my head down beside the dusty scrub. Something smelt sweet and aromatic – some memory, wisping out of the dust, of potpourri and English gardens and bees among the thyme …
I don’t know how long it was before I realised that the afternoon held no sound at all.
When I looked again Angelos had come out of concealment, and was standing where he had been before, in the centre of the corrie floor. He was standing very still, staring up, not at me, but at the edge of the cliff above me where the goats had been. Slowly I followed his gaze. I could feel the breath of the hot stone on my cheek.
The goats were still there. They, too, were standing stock-still, side by side, at the brink of the cliff. They were looking down, with ears forward and eyes intent and curious … six yellow satyrs’ eyes, staring fixedly down at me, some forty feet below them.
Angelos dropped his coat on to a boulder beside him, and started for the foot of the cliff.
At his movement I heard the flurry of dust and pebbles as the goats fled. It echoed the quick pump and kick of my own heart. But I didn’t move. Whether some instinct kept me clamped still like a hiding animal, or whether the flood of fear that washed and ebbed through my blood actually drained the power of movement from me, I can’t tell. At any rate I lay flat for a few decisive moments during which the Greek crossed the corrie and plunged up the goat-path towards me. And then it seemed that he was almost on me, and it was too late to escape. I remembered the gun and lay there, unbreathing, pressed flat to the hot earth.
I had a shelter of a sort from below, and from above the overhang might partly hide me. The path sloped sharply past the end of the ledge where I lay. It was possible – it was surely possible? – that he might hurry past it and never look back to see me lying there behind the crumbling scrub? My dress was of pale-coloured cotton, now sufficiently streaked with dust. Against the glaring rock and the red pebble-strewn dust he might miss me. He might yet – surely? – miss me.
He was just below me now. He stopped. His head was a few feet below the level of my ledge. I couldn’t – daren’t – look, but I heard the climbing steps stilled, and then his breathing close beneath me. He was looking up. My own breath hardly stirred the dust under my mouth.
The next angle of the track would bring him upwards and past the end of the ledge where I lay. He paused where he was for a few seconds, and then I heard the soft steps moving on. But they didn’t come on up the track. They moved carefully away to the left, below my ledge.
Through the pathetic barrier of dead plants I could just see the top of his head. It was turned away now, and I knew that he must have left the track. I could hear loose pebbles slither and spatter down the rock, and the rustle of the dry plants he trod over. He went very carefully, with pauses almost between each step.
I had to know what he was doing. I moved my head slightly, and saw him better.
There was a ledge below mine, with a few sparse plants and a tumble of loose fragments of stone. I had noticed it in that second’s wild glance round for shelter. It wouldn’t have hidden anyone larger than a child. But he searched it, gun in hand, quartering it methodically, like a dog.
Then he left it, and came back carefully on to the track. He paused there briefly once again, so that for a silly moment I wondered if he were satisfied, and would go down again into the corrie, thinking perhaps that the goats had been watching a snake … But he turned without further hesitation and started up the steep section that would bring him up to me.
I don’t even think I was frightened; not now. It was as if fear had been raised to such a pitch that it killed itself, like a light that goes vividly bright just before it goes out. I was back in that dim-lit, remote theatre of unreality. This wasn’t happening to me.
I suppose that nobody, in their heart of hearts, ever believes that they themselves will die. Volumes of philosophies have been written out of this belief alone. And I’m sure that nobody ever believes that a foul thing like murder can overtake them. Something will stop it. It can’t happen. To others, but not to them. Not to me.
I lay, almost relaxed, abandoned to fate and chance, in the hot dust, and Angelos swiftly climbed the path towards me. In a moment now he would reach the end of my ledge. He might see me straight away, or he might turn aside and beat the scrub till he flushed me, scared and filthy with dust, from my hiding-place. He was there now. He couldn’t miss me …
I have read somewhere that when a man is hunted for his life, one of the chief dangers he undergoes is the desperate urge to give himself up, and have done. I had never believed it. I had thought that fear would drive him till he dropped, like a hunted hare. But it’s true. It may ha
ve been that something forbade me to let the man find me crouching, dirty and frightened, at his feet; it may simply have been the terrible blind instinct of the hunted. But the impulsion came and I didn’t attempt to resist it.
I stood up and began to brush the dirt off my frock.
I didn’t look at him. He had stopped dead when I moved. He was standing just where my ledge left the track. To get off it I would have to pass him.
I walked forward through the scrub and stones as if I were walking in my sleep. I didn’t meet his eyes, but watched my feet on the rough going. He moved a little to one side and I passed him. I went slowly down the path again to the bottom of the corrie. He came just behind me.
When I got to the level ground I stumbled and nearly fell. His hand took hold of my arm from behind, and my flesh seemed to wince and shrink from the touch. I stopped.
The hand tightened, then with a jerk he pulled me round to face him. I think if he had gone on touching me I would have screamed then and there, but he let me go, so I kept silent. I knew that if I tried to scream I would be killed out of hand. But I backed away from him a step or so till a boulder touched the back of my legs. Without meaning to, I sat down; I couldn’t have stood. I put both hands flat on the hot surface of the stone as if I could draw strength from it, and looked at Angelos.
He was standing perhaps five feet from me, his legs a little apart, one hand thrust negligently into the belt of his trousers, the other arm hanging loose at his side with the gun dangling. His head was forward slightly, like a bull’s when it is deciding to charge. The heavy face was terrifying with the tight curved smile, the perfect arch of the black brows and the cruel eyes that seemed to be solid, opaque black, without pupils, and without light from within. The thick nostrils were flared and he was breathing fast. The bulls’-curls along his forehead were damp and tight with sweat.