There May Be Danger (18 page)

A piece of ice cracked under her foot, and instantly a dog set up a volley of barks on the bank in Pentrewer yard. It was a startling sound in the stillness, loud enough to call Mr. and Mrs. Davis and Colin from their beds, and even, perhaps, the elemental from his age-old grave.

“Sh! Good dog! Good dog!” said Kate, very foolishly, from the lane below, at which the dog redoubled his efforts to rouse the countryside. And another dog, farther off, perhaps at Gwyn Lupton's cottage, awoke and joined in. Between them, they made din enough to warn any night malefactor to be on his guard. She hurried back away from that noise, and made her way up the fork which led to the empty cottage. The track here, unused was narrow and overhung with trees, and very wet as she went farther up it in the shelter of the hill-sput. The barking of the dogs, thank heaven, soon died down.

Before the peaceful normality of Pentrewer Farm, under the silent empty sky, Kate had been inclined for a moment to discredit her fifth-column fancy, and to think that, after all that light must have a more or less innocent explanation. But now, as she ploughed her way up the narrowing trackway, treading on she knew not what uneven ground which sometimes sucked wetly against her soles and sometimes struck hard against the toe of her rubber boot, conscious of the smell of vegetable decay which hangs around such enclosed, neglected places, surrounded by a bosky darkness that she could almost feel upon her staring eyes, she heard again that ominous throb, throb, throb, of a distant bomber, and the notion of a deliberate signal did not seem fanciful. In fact, she half-regretted that she had not aroused Colin, she had a half-impulse to go back.

Recognising and sternly subduing the fright that underlay this impulse, she went on. The bomber came on, too, as if it were looking for her. She dared not put her torch on now, and floundered in and out of miry, crackling puddles which seemed all the more disgusting because she could not see them. Once she went right off the track into a bramble bush, which whipped her face and caught at her skirt as strongly as if a detaining spirit were in its hooks. She had to use her hands to free herself, and as she stood there struggling with the thorns, she became aware, by some graduation in the darkness that lay ahead of her, some freshness in the fir-scented air, that she was not far from a clearing in the trees.

She judged that she had come nearly half-a-mile from the fork at Pentrewer Farm, on a gradually rising track. The queerly named Hymns Bank must be quite close. But there was no light to be seen in or beyond the clearing, and no sound except the close throb, throb, throb of the bomber overhead. Kate got herself free from the brambles, and went on, and quite suddenly found herself dose up against a rough stone wall.

The bomber had passed and was nothing now but a faint warning in the distance over the hills, and Kate ventured to switch on her torch for a second, long enough to see that the wall was the yard wall of small stone house that stared at her with dark menacing windows like eyes that said: “I see you!” to her torch. She switched it off, and a darkness seemed to throw itself upon her like a wave. But she had upon her retina the picture of a gate in the wall, close to her left hand, a straight path up to the door of the house, a low-roofed, one-storeyed, darkly staring house of stone, with a tangle of wild leafless creeper hanging over a lopsided porch.

Kate dared not put on her torch again, for those windows must not cry “I see you!” to her as she crept up to the front door. She was glad of her silent-treading rubber boots. But when she felt for and put her hand on the gate to push it open, she felt something move, cold and clammy—a large slug, perhaps—under her palm, and it took all her presence of mind to repress a little cry of disgust. She did repress it, and at once, as if she had driven her disgust into her heart, her nervousness was enhanced, and she felt as if an omen of danger had been given her. She disregarded it, and went up, feeling her way by an overgrown box hedge that ran alongside the path, to the front door. A creeper-end, hanging from the porch, touched her face. She brushed it aside with a shudder, and stood there, not breathing, listening for she knew not what, considering what to do.

If there was no one in the house, she might safely feel for the door-handle, turn it, press on it, use her shoulder, break her way in. But it took a good deal of nerve to make a noise in this stillness, with the possibility of a silent someone in the house listening to her. Kate hesitated, her hand raised to feel for the door-latch or a handle. What else could she do but go boldly in? She could not, at least she would not, go away and leave the place unsearched. She might tiptoe round the house shining her torch in at the windows. But that would be simply to give warning to whoever was in the house—if there was someone in the house. But there was probably no one in the house. Why should she think, because from a mile away she had seen a light shining from she knew not where, that there was someone in the house?

Of course there is someone in the house!
the dangling creeper, touching her shoulder, whispered.
Of course there is someone in the house!
swished the wind in the tree-tops.
Of course there is someone in the house!
the darkness bellowed in a sound as loud as silence round Kate's ears. There is always someone in the house. Do you think there can be a house, and no one in it? If there is no human in the house, there is someone there who is not human. Do you think that generations of people can live in a house, and go, and leave nothing, no one, huddling in the chimney corner or dragging a slow foot up or down the stairs? If there was no one in the house before you came, shouted the darkness, there is someone now!
You
know who is in the house! Your fear is in the house, all the fear of darkness and the unknown that has ever driven men mad, has taken shape in the house and is waiting for you.

Gosh! if I stand here listening to nothing any longer, I shall start running away! said Kate to herself. She heard a funny little noise very close to her ear. It was her own front teeth gritting together. The next moment she had the door-handle in her hand and her shoulder ready for the shove.

No shove was necessary, for the door opened to the turn of the handle, with a loud click that seemed to burst the dark in two. Kate stood on the threshold. Her eyes were no use to her however, she stared about in the blackness. Her ears heard nothing but the soft noise of the wind. Her nose smelt the odours, dank, close and cold, of dry-rot and damp earth and mildewed plaster.

The effort of entering had quieted the voices of the night, and though Kate was aware of the running of her pulse, she was not much frightened. There was nothing to hurt her in a dark, empty house but her own fears, and she had the remedy for those in her own hands. Action was the remedy. She had applied it, and had better apply it again. Leaving the door open behind her, she switched on her torch and looked about her.

The empty, low-ceilinged room, with its rusty oven grate and damp paper hanging from the walls, looked as she had expected from the smell of it—forlorn, damp, rotting. The brick floor was sweating, and the bricks buckled here and there by rats, and littered with dry, gnawed nut-shells. A jam pot, stained a pond-like brown with dirty water long since evaporated, was the only domestic property on the scene. The loose door of the stairway next to the chimney-breast hung ajar.

Kate supposed she had better go upstairs while she was about it. But first she went out to the scullery at the back, which was in much the same long-neglected, long-deserted condition as the living-room. Some small thing was hanging stiffly from a hook in the ceiling, and Kate, examining it, found that it was the body of a fox, no more than a skeleton clad in a mummified skin as hard as wood.

This was a very old cottage, Kate surmised, observing the heavy timbering, set close together, of the main wall, and remembering what Rosaleen Morrison had told her at the Veault. She thought of Mr. Morrison, that ardent antiquarian, as she went cautiously upstairs, and wondered whether any hidey-holes existed here. She went cautiously, because the floorboards had rotted through at the top of the staircase. A door led off the little room, or landing, in which she found herself when she reached the stairhead, and to get to the door she had to tread carefully, close to the big chimney-stack where the broken boards still stood firm over the joists.

The door stuck a little on the damp, swollen floor, and Kate gave it a hearty push, for she had quite recovered from the fear of making a sound that had at first afflicted her, and felt scarcely more nervous than if it were daylight and she, a prospective tenant with an order-to-view in her pocket.

This room, too, was dark and silent. But not empty. As Kate pushed open the door with her right hand, in which she held her torch, another hand, a gloved hand, soft and cold, came quietly from behind the door, and took her torch from her, and turned it out.

Half, perhaps a quarter or less, of a minute crept by like an age, before a man's voice said so close to her that she gasped:

“Excuse me taking your light. My ferret's got loose, and I doesn't want him to be frighted up the chimney.”

Kate's first feeling was of relief at the amiable and commonplace tone, her next; an odd persuasion that she recognised, or ought to recognise, the voice. A light masculine voice it was, the local accent curiously overlaid on a sort of Cockney intonation. But it certainly belonged to none of her local acquaintances, all of whom spoke with a much broader accent than this.

“Us'd better go outside and shut the door,” suggested the voice. “Them ferrets is nasty customers when they gets frighted.”

Once again, the tone was reassuring, but Kate was not entirely reassured. If there's a ferret loose in this room, she thought, straining her eyes into the darkness, it's a very silent ferret. Had its owner been looking for it in the dark? Certainly he must have been looking for it very silently, for the cottage, when Kate entered, had seemed as silent as the tomb. She backed out on to the landing, saying nothing. She heard a footstep and the click of the door-handle, and felt a living, breathing presence beside her near the chimney-breast in the dark.

“Mind they boards, them's rotten,” said the presence, and switched on Kate's torch. He kept it directed downwards to the floor, but Kate, standing on the sound joists with her back to the chimney, looked, not at the floorboards, but quickly, keenly, at him. She could not tell what manner of man it was who stood beside her. She made a guess at a shaven, longish face under a battered hat, but whether old or middle-aged, or young she could not tell. She gained an impression of a dark tweed jacket and a medium-sized, upright figure. She had a good view of mud-caked shoes and stained grey flannel trousers. The hand that held her torch was wearing a leather glove—not a countryman's working glove, but one of brown calfskin.

“I asks pardon if I frighted you,” said the man, who seemed less curious to get a view of Kate than she was to get a view of him, for he kept the torch pointing down towards the stairhead. “I didn't know who you was, and I isn't supposed to be keeping my ferrets here, see. I didn't make no noise when I heard you come in because I thought maybe you'd go, without coming up here.”

Kate said, with uneasy sceptical bravado:

“Your ferret's very quiet in there.”

The man laughed.

“I'm feared he's gone up the chimney! 'Tisn't easy looking for they creatures in the dark! And I didn't like to put my lights on whiles they planes was about.”

“But you
did
have your light on a little while ago, didn't you?” said Kate. “That's what brought me here.”

“Ah, I put my light on when I first come here, to get they creatures out of the sack and back into their cages,” replied the man, still keeping his torch away from his face. “But when I heard that plane come over I put the light out pretty sharp, and it were then Ginger escaped out of the sack.” He added hesitatingly: “Did you see the light, then?”

“I should think I did! If you're going on keeping ferrets here, I should put up a black-out curtain, if I were you.”

“Reckon I'd better move my ferrets, now you knows as they're here. Or happen you won't tell?” said the voice on an ingratiating, humorous note that would have pleased Kate better had it not been for that uneasy persuasion hovering all the time in the background of her mind, that she ought to recognise the person who was speaking to her. Perhaps it was only the aftermath of her fear. She had been frightened, very frightened, when that hand had come silently from behind the door and taken her torch away from her. Perhaps the fear she had suppressed then still lingered like a warning in her mind, causing this uneasy feeling of recognition and of strangeness. If Kate could once get hold of her torch, she would soon settle this point!

“Could I have my torch back, please?”

“I'll see you down. I've left mine in the room. The stairs is dangerous.”

“I can see myself out, if you'll give me my torch.”

Once again that oddly familiar laugh.

“Nay, you isn't as used to the stairs as I is,” said the other. He made a motion with the torch towards the stairhead, but Kate did not budge from her chimney, for she was not, if she could help it, going downstairs first! Queer that a note of recognition could seem more chilling, give more warning of danger, than something completely strange! Kate pressed her hands against the cold plaster. Her heart performed a heavy little gallop as she realised that the man had no intention of allowing her to see him clearly. She swallowed something in her throat, and asked boldly:

“Do I know you?”

“Happen you've seen me. I've seen you, Miss.”

“Where?”

“About the place on your bike.”

“Do you live in Hastry?”

“Nay!”

“Where, then?”

There was a little pause, then the man answered evasively: