“Get that gate open!” he bellowed to Paulie.
Paulie ran again, a weary, rolling trot, as soon as she heard the engine. She dragged the gate wide and left it that way, regardless of cattle. Mark threw the door open for her as he bumped past into the lane. Somehow she scrambled in and somehow she got the door closed as he accelerated back to the main road.
“Don’t ever let me in for anything like that again!” she sobbed.
The pylon halted in front of the stone circle like a cat faced with water. But the line was pressing downhill on either side of it. Slowly it moved again, sideways, giving the circle a wide berth, and seemed to set off striding mechanically. It had reached the lane when it stopped, and stood trailing cables, as the sending left it and moved on after its object.
6
It was an awful journey. They could feel the sending pursuing them, taking on other forms as it came. The storm howled around the car, purposefully, and brought rain increasingly heavy as night fell. Once a tree came down in the road just after they had passed it. Mark had to ask Paulie to keep up constant protection, and she was soon tired out and angry.
“Must we go all the way to Gladys’s?” she demanded.
“Yes,” he said. “Even if I hadn’t promised Amanda, that house is the one place I know that can keep out this sending.”
Paulie could not argue with that. When they finally arrived under Gladys’s storm-torn trees, to find another car parked on the verge and the gate fallen down, she refused to move. “I’m past caring about any of you,” she said. “Leave me be.” Mark had to drag her out of the car. “I just want to lie down and sleep!” she wailed as he hauled her through the pelting rain and up the muddy path. But she cheered up at seeing dim lights coming from the house. “There! She’s perfectly okay in spite of all your fussing!”
When Mark tremulously clattered at the ring on the verandah door, it was opened by Amanda. She was carrying an oil lamp, which she held high to see who they were. She seemed pale by its light, and her eyes very big and dark. “Good Lord!” she said. “You two look as if you’ve been through it!”
“We have,” Mark said. “Let us in and shut the door quickly. There’s a sending after me. And is there any coffee? Paulie’s about had it.”
Amanda stood back to let him guide Paulie through to a seat in the jungle room and then shut the door — both doors — with firm claps. There was a sense of something wrong. Mark realized that the dim light in the room came from a row of candles on the mantelpiece. He could have done without the shifting, clawing shadows they made among the jungle.
“The power’s out again,” Amanda explained, casting more shadows, huge, walking ones, as she came back with the lamp.
“That figures,” Mark said, thinking of the pylons.
“Oh, does that mean there’s nothing hot to drink?” Paulie moaned, putting her draggled head in her muddy hands.
“No. She’s got those gas cylinders,” said Amanda. “The kettle’s just boiled, but there’s only tea bags.”
“That’ll do,” said Paulie.
There was still a sense of something not right — a sort of silence and emptiness that was there in spite of the frustrated storm roaring around the house. “What’s wrong?” Mark asked. “Maureen?”
“Gladys,” said Amanda. “Vanished. And she seems to have taken the cats. Have you noticed there isn’t an animal in the place?”
That was it, of course. Mark had never known this house without the soft prowling of cats — and usually the rhythmic scratching of the beast Jimbo too. If Gladys had removed her animals, she had indeed gone. “Didn’t she leave a message?”
“No. I’ve only been here half an hour, but I’ve looked everywhere I can think of,” said Amanda. “There’s nothing, unless you know any secret place—”
“Oh, damn that! Let’s get warm and dry first!” Paulie cried out.
“Yes, yes, of course.” Mark seized one of the candles and forced himself to hurry about looking for dry clothes, while Amanda lit a fire and made tea.
Half an hour later, they were feeling much better. Mark had discovered various strange garments thrown around the bedroom that seemed to belong to Gladys. He selected a flowered kimono for Paulie and got her into it. For himself he found a gown of scarlet flannel, which Amanda, with great surprise, identified as a Cambridge doctoral gown. Now he and Paulie sat side by side drinking tea and staring into the fire, looking as if they were taking part in some new ritual. The sight amused Amanda. She was sitting on the hearth, being too tense to take a chair.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
Mark started to tell her, but Paulie, as she so often did, interrupted him. “Where’s Maureen? I thought she’d be here too.”
“No idea, and she’s not answering her phone,” Amanda said.
On cue, the telephone rang, hidden somewhere in the jungle.
“That’ll be Maureen, I bet.” Amanda leaped up and made the usual search among the plants. When she located the phone and answered, however, it proved to be yet another puzzle. “It’s for you,” Amanda said, holding the receiver out through the leaves toward Mark. “Sounds Scottish.”
“But no one knows I’m—” Mark began. Then he remembered that there was both a sending and a rogue magician abroad, and simply and grimly took the phone. “Mark Lister here.”
The voice was female and, as Amanda said, slightly Scottish. “Mark Lister, are you? I’m sorry to seem to doubt you, but I’ll have to ask you to identify yourself by your title. I was told to do that, you see.”
“Told? Who told you?”
“My mother. She told me particularly that I—”
“Your mother? I’m sorry. I think you may have the wrong—”
“My mother,” said the woman, “is Mrs. Gladys Naismith.”
“Gladys!”
“That’s right. I’m her daughter, Aline McAllister, and I live in Dundee. I have a message for you from my mother if you can prove you have the title to it. The secret title, mind. She was most particular.”
“If you really need—” Mark gave in and gave her his full titles.
“Thank you,” said Aline McAllister. “She said you would be in her house before midnight, and I see she was right as usual. She sent the message up with her cats, you know. I have them all here. Making fifty-two, along with my own, I may say. Dearly as I love my mother, we do not get on, and this is why. Long ago I told her that only in a real, genuine crisis will I do any other thing for her, and this is what I get. Fifty-two cats. So you may take it the message is urgent. This is it. I am to say that my mother has gone after Zillah, partly because of the child, but mainly because you and all the rest of British Witchcraft are in serious danger. In order to find out the nature of the danger, you would do well to consult the girl she and you visited in hospital. End of message. I hope you have it. It’s clear as mud to me.”
“I—I have it,” Mark said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, thank my mother’s cats,” said Aline McAllister, and rang off.
“Who on earth was that?” Paulie said as he came out through the jungle.