Выбрать главу

The exercise and the occupation were good for our nerves. But late in the afternoon my uncle grew anxious; twilight was closing in swiftly under a sky heavy with clouds, and we were some distance from Fleer. He gave final instructions for the penning of the sheep by night, and we turned our horses’ heads for home.

We approached the castle by the back drive, which was little used: a dank, unholy alley, running the gauntlet of a belt of firs and laurels. Beneath our horses’ hoofs flints chinked remotely under a thick carpet of moss. Each consecutive cloud from their nostrils hung with an air of permanency, as if bequeathed to the unmoving air.

We were perhaps three hundred yards from the tall gates leading to the stable yard when both horses stopped dead, simultaneously. Their heads were turned toward the trees on our right, beyond which, I knew, the sweep of the main drive converged on ours.

My uncle gave a short, inarticulate cry in which premonition stood aghast at the foreseen. At the same moment, something howled on the other side of the trees. There was relish, and a kind of sobbing laughter, in that hateful sound. It rose and fell luxuriously, and rose and fell again, fouling the night. Then it died away, fawning on satiety in a throaty whimper.

The forces of silence fell unavailingly on its rear; its filthy echoes still went reeling through our heads. We were aware that feet went loping lightly down the iron-hard drive... two feet.

My uncle flung himself off his horse and dashed through the trees. I followed. We scrambled down a bank and out into the open. The only figure in sight was motionless.

Germaine Vom lay doubled up in the drive, a solid, black mark against the shifting values of the dusk. We ran forward...

To me she had always been an improbable cipher rather than a real person. I could not help reflecting that she died, as she had lived, in the live-stock tradition. Her throat had been torn out.

The young man leant back in his chair, a little dizzy from talking and from the heat of the stove. The inconvenient realities of the waiting-room, forgotten in his narrative, closed in on him again. He sighed, and smiled rather apologetically at the stranger.

“It is a wild and improbable story,” he said. “I do not expect you to believe the whole of it. For me, perhaps, the reality of its implications has obscured its almost ludicrous lack of verisimilitude. You see, by the death of the Belgian I am heir to Fleer.”

The stranger smiled: a slow, but no longer an abstracted smile. His honey-colored eyes were bright. Under his long black overcoat his body seemed to be stretching itself in sensual anticipation. He rose silently to his feet.

The other found a sharp, cold fear drilling into his vitals. Something behind those shining eyes threatened him with appalling immediacy, like a sword at his heart. He was sweating. He dared not move.

The stranger’s smile was now a grin, a ravening convulsion of the face. His eyes blazed with a hard and purposeful delight. A thread of saliva dangled from the corner of his mouth.

Very slowly he lifted one hand and removed his bowler hat. Of the fingers crooked about its brim, the young man saw that the third was longer than the second.

Ten O’Clock

by Philip MacDonald

I must make everybody understand, somehow, that I was quite normal that night when I came back from my month with the Vansittarts. Quite absolutely, stone-cold, righteously, smugly normal. Normal with a capital N. I could, you know, have stayed another fortnight. Mary asked me to, and so did Tom, and the others all joined in. I must have been damn popular in that house. It was a good house, and a good party, and I’d another month before the long vac ended. But I had to come back.

It was Claire who made me come back. Not, you must understand, by writing to me, or telephoning to me, or wirelessing to me, or even telepathing me... She wasn’t a girl who would do that. She wasn’t one to worry a man. She made me come back simply by the very fact of her existence.

London was very hot. A damn sight hotter than it was full. But I didn’t care... I’d sent her a telegram that I was coming.

It was rather queer about that telegram. Queer, I mean in a way that will show you how absolutely my very existence was governed by Claire’s being in the world. I could have sent that wire, of course, from the Vansittarts’ house. Or if I hadn’t liked to do that I could have hopped out one evening and sent it from that little pub at the top of the hill. I could have tipped the grocer’s boy a shilling to take it to the post office and send it for me. I could have done this, and I could have done that, and I could have done the other. But I didn’t. It wasn’t that I was frightened that anybody should know about Claire, because she didn’t care two hoots in hell what they thought, and I was in that state where outside opinions, outside influence, anything outside that utterly pagan, beatific world in which we two dwelt when we got the chance, didn’t matter one solitary jot. I didn’t send that wire from the house, because to have done that would have seemed a violation somehow of that wonderful privacy. I meant to send the damn thing from the station before the train left, but with the usual perversity of things Vansittart, the Vansittart clocks that day were all about a quarter of an hour slow. As we got to the top of the short steep hill before the little station, we saw the train just coming out of the long tunnel. So Peters whipped up the cob, and we rattled down the slope just in time for me to scramble into the last carriage before the guard’s van...

What I did will just show you the state of mind I was in. I got out, actually got out of the train, at Greyne and sent the wire from there. So it cost me an hour’s wait for the next train. That’ll show you how normal I was. It was one of those damn fool things that only a sane man will do. A madman’s got more logic.

I was saying just now that London was hot. It was. Hot as hell in a frying pan. And empty. Empty as Piccadilly Circus is of virgins. I got a taxi at Waterloo, made the old fellow — I’ll never forget him, he was exactly like an old crab with long white whiskers — shove down the top, and off we trundled. Empty as the town was, it took that rattling taxi at least half an hour to get to the Temple. By the time I got there I was hot and sticky, and in fiendish temper.

Bascombe, with that seventh sense of his which made him the best valet my old father ever had, and certainly the best servant that any young K.C. could wish for, had in his miraculous way anticipated my arrival. He was actually standing under the arch of Dr. Johnson’s chambers waiting for the taxi. He took my bags, and paid the driver. He shepherded me upstairs like an old hen getting chickens back into the run. He gave me a drink. Told me that my bath was ready. That he presumed I would like to dine early, and could do so within an hour. That no one had called, rung up, or written that day. That Simpson — my chief clerk — had told him there were seven new briefs. That he had taken the liberty of paying two bills. That he hoped I was feeling refreshed and exhilarated by my holiday...

And that’ll show you the sort of fellow Bascombe was. One of the best, if not the best.

I had that bath and that drink. In pyjamas and dressing-gown I went to the telephone. Bascombe was just leaving the room, a tray in one hand, an empty tumbler in the other. I said to him:

“Any telephone messages, Bascombe? Special messages?” I didn’t look at him. I knew perfectly well that he knew I meant Claire. And he knew perfectly well that I knew. He shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “Had there been, sir, I should have taken the liberty, of informing you over the wire.” A good fellow, Bascombe.