He sneaked downstairs in his dressing gown, shaking with sickness and, yes – he acknowledged – fear, as well!
The street light outside cast enough illumination for him to make out the shape of a figure on the other side of the distorting glass in the front door. Well enough for him to be sure that his visitor earlier in the day, who he had kicked, had returned. The man was bending forward, pushing clumsily at his letterbox, trying to get something through. Part of a small package and the tips of two fingers and a thumb protruded through the slot.
Maurice went and picked up the telephone he had flung at the wall in rage after his conversation with good old Neville Gale.
The ancient instrument had survived in one piece. It was satisfyingly heavy. He went to the door, held the phone up high, and brought it down with brute force on the letterbox.
There was a sound from beyond the door that made Maurice drop the phone and hide his face in his hands. It was a wail of pain, outrage, and despair, and somehow it expressed, with acute accuracy, the fears, thoughts and emotions that had been haunting him that night, and during the recent past. It gave voice to them exactly. It was as though his own soul stood out there, lost, alone, and in great agony. Maurice felt a sickening mixture of compassion and self-pity.
He was sick. He tried to reach the washing-up bowl in the kitchen, but didn’t make it.
After he had cleaned himself up, he forced himself to inspect the letterbox, expecting to see blood. There was none. Fragments of charred newspaper were caught in the flap, nothing else.
“No finger-tips,” he thought, “thank God!”
On impulse, he turned the locks, shot back the absurd, over-ornate bolts, and opened the door wide. He peered out at his morbidly tidy garden (his one hobby) and found it empty. All was quiet.
His cat ran urgently towards him across the road, then changed its mind, and scampered back. Something behind the privet hedge, near the spot where the cat had changed direction, moved heavily, shaking the bushes. Maurice stared hard, but could see nothing through the darkness under the tight, trimmed leaves.
A shadow passed swiftly across his lawn towards the house, as though a large bird had passed above.
But that was impossible! Nothing had moved below the streetlight, that could cast a shadow!
Then he saw something tall and thin, like the trunk of a narrow tree, in his neighbour’s garden. He was sure it had jerked into brief motion; had scuttled quickly a little closer, then gone still.
It did it again, seeming to cover ten feet of ground in a split second. It was now close enough for Maurice to form some idea about what manner of creature it was.
It had many legs.
Maurice ran inside and slammed the door. He locked and bolted it. The doorbell was operated by batteries. He removed them and put them into the pocket of his dressing gown. He sat on the stairs watching the front door for ten minutes, waiting for the bell to ring. He knew that it couldn’t, but thought perhaps it would.
He ran upstairs and threw himself into bed. He lay face down, with a cushion over his head, cocooned in his sheets and blankets.
Later, he heard a movement on the roof. Something had climbed up there, and was making its way along the gable above his bedroom. It made harsh, scratching sounds on the tiles, and dislodged some of them. Maurice heard them crashing down into his garden. From the sounds, he judged that whatever it was had clambered out to a position just above his window.
As if to confirm this speculation, there came a loud, spasmodic tapping on the glass.
Maurice half sat up. He was glad that his curtains were pulled shut. As he stared at them, the window behind was shattered and one of them twitched open. A long, grey, scrawny limb, perhaps an arm, but without a proper hand on the end of it, waved a little bundle at him. It dropped the bundle and withdrew.
There were more scampering sounds from above as Maurice fled from the room.
He didn’t go near the packet; he thought he knew what was in it.
Something he didn’t want.
He locked himself in his office, turned all his equipment on, and played the CD his wife had given him, of soothing natural and artificial sounds, as loud as he could stand it. It had no calming effect, but it drowned out other noises. Maurice sat perfectly still in the one comfortable chair until daybreak.
Then he dressed and went out to his car.
To his surprise, hundreds of birds were singing enthusiastically all round him. It was the dawn chorus. It was just like the sounds on the CD he had been playing, and it scared him stiff.
He got hurriedly into his car and drove towards Dove Holes again.
When he reached the entry to the Victory Quarry he found the tip was closed. A heavy chain, joined at the ends by a fat padlock, was looped through the metal grill on the gates. He remembered then that it was four-thirty on a Saturday morning. The tip would be shut for another forty-eight hours at least.
He got out of his car and pushed the gates hard with the heel of his shoe. They hardly moved. He climbed back into the driving seat, backed the car away as far as he could, keeping in line with the gate, then accelerated straight down the centre of the access path.
The chain and lock held when the car hit, but the hinges on the left split from the concrete gatepost, and the gates whipped up over the bonnet. Something smashed the windscreen, which fell in fragments on his lap. The car slewed round out of control when he applied the brakes, and tobogganed along on top of the crust of dried mud which opened behind him like a huge wound. The line of trees flashed by as the vehicle spun. The air was full of flying earth, scraps of refuse, and noise.
The rear left side of the car smacked against the right front end of the porta-cabin which reared up under the impact. It did not topple over, but jumped some distance out of its original position. The side caved in and the door flew wide open.
Maurice sat stunned in the driving seat. He didn’t seem to have hurt himself in the crash. He felt nothing except numb, possibly from all the pills he had been taking. Too many, maybe. He noticed his reactions were slowed down and movements faltering. His fingers felt wooden as he fumbled with the clip of the seatbelt. The door lock was jammed and he couldn’t open it. He crawled over the passenger seat and let himself out that way, emerging face down and on his hands.
He stood up, shook himself, and climbed onto one of the big skips to take stock of his situation.
Although the sun was hardly up, the landscape was bathed in clear, soft, almost creamy light. There were shreds of thin cloud squatting on the fields that clung to the sides of Combs Moss, and frozen billows of morning mist hovered above the surfaces of the small lakes that had formed, over the years, in the quarry bottoms. Something in motion caught his eye, running away from him along a line of wall, but he realized at once, from its russet coat, that it was only a large fox. There were rabbits, too, munching the tall grass around the edges of the tip. The air smelt clean and dry, as he imagined desert air must.
Except for the regular clanking and glugging of a distant pump engine somewhere down in the old diggings, all was stillness and silence.
Nothing moved or made a sound in the line of dark trees.
He clambered over the broken steps leading up to the cabin, and went inside.
The pile of mattresses had fanned out like a pack of cards. The old caretaker was spread-eagled across them on his back. His face looked raw, and was mottled with dark stains like those that had remained on Maurice’s hands after he had crushed the egg-like object he had found. The man looked dead, but wasn’t. A heartbeat was just detectable under his overalls, and he was drawing rasping breath through his mouth. Maurice tried to rouse him, but soon gave up. The man seemed in a trance, or coma.