Stop Press (40 page)
It was as well, then, that dispositions had been made. An electricity supply which festoons itself across a park cannot be guarded against active and informed mischief; the chauffeur in the switchroom had been merely a fragmentary precaution; another now came into operation. The lights had been out a matter of seconds only when a body of Mr Eliot’s servants entered with lamps and candles. Bowles, who had a sense of style, brought up the rear with Rust’s fifty electric torches on a large silver tray.
Patricia chuckled even in the midst of her alarm. This was John’s first active stroke at Rust – a stroke at once beneficent and disturbing. It was beneficent because it prevented imponderable confusion and it was disturbing because it gave the show away to the stones. Lights may go out by accident. But accident prepares no counter-measures to operate with a swiftness and efficiency which might be the envy of a Cabinet. All but the vaguest of Mr Eliot’s guests realized, as Bowles passed solemnly among them with his tray, that this was equipment for some obscure but imminent battle. Colonel Dethleps, who was a great hand at the rural fortification of neo-medieval England, began to talk of getting the women to the cellars. At this moment Miss Cavey yelled.
It was natural that Miss Cavey should yell; it was her habit in a crisis, and she had endured a horrid day. Only the stones thought to look for any special occasion for her demonstration; it was the stones who first saw what she had seen. In the doorway there loomed a lurching, reeling figure. Two storm lanterns had been placed on the floor near by; these and the flicker of torches showed momentarily only an enigma of mass and line, like some common object projected at a precious angle on a screen. The figure advanced and became Archie Eliot. Miss Cavey yelled again. Chown began to push himself forward from the window. Archie staggered, fell, rolled over like a stage casualty; raised himself on an elbow, pointed waveringly at the door, hoarsely exclaimed ‘Richard!’ and with a final slow turn like the last momentum of a billiard ball half-disappeared under a table and lay still. Chown bent over him; because he had done this just twenty-four hours before the scene had a quality as of ghostly music. ‘Sir Archibald’, said Chown, ‘is wounded in the head. Cold water, towels, quiet and take Miss Cavey from the room.’
There was immediate hush; it made an effective background for the entrance of Mr Eliot’s chauffeur. He hurried over to Timmy and spoke in a penetrating whisper which carried to everyone present. ‘Mr Timothy…at the front door…I don’t know what. Would you and some of the gentlemen come?’
The request licensed action. Timmy and Belinda pushed their way out; Colonel Dethleps, assuming command of the stones, created in so many seconds a garrison and a reconnoitring force; the latter he led into the hall. It seemed to Patricia that the stones, with dramatic instincts of their own, were nicely calculated pawns in what was going forward – but it was not the moment for penetrating reflections and she hurried after Belinda. She was in time for the scene beneath the portico.
Air, sharply cold, struck through Ionic pillars which framed a night of snow and stars. The moon was at a zenith; trees about the park waded in shadows of ink; the farther prospect shimmered in uncertain perspective, like invisible mountains photographed through a screen. Snow was on the steps to the terrace and had crept in a thin powdering round the base of the pillars and beyond. The terrace itself was a great open page of snow. The party looked down on it as from a lectern and read the imprint of violence.
At the innermost verge of the snow’s drift beneath the pediment two sets of footprints came into being, leading away from the house. Side by side they went down the steps, turned right, skirted a little shrubbery and disappeared in chaos. Over an area perhaps the size of a boxing-ring the snow, a thin carpeting on the ground, had been scraped and scarred in a score of bold arcs and thrusting gashes – dark lines of force which told of digging toes and skidding heels. It was a battlefield and deserted; at its farther limit an obscure trail, as of a pygmean army in retreat, disappeared down the drive. On these evidences the moon, the stars, and Mr Eliot’s horrified party looked down.
The reconnoitring force, a dark mass with Belinda, Patricia, and an escorting Mrs Moule as a sort of colourful cavalry in the midst, ran over the terrace. The trail down the drive elucidated nothing: here and there a footprint, half obligerated by some dragging, tumbling process behind. A voice called out, ‘There’s something down the drive.’
They strained their eyes ahead. In a pool of moonlight between the shadows of gigantic elms an indeterminate black blotch stained the snow. Strung out, as if in a race already far advanced, they hurried forward; the less controlled of those behind were exclaiming, ‘Who is it?’ when those in front had already discovered – so deceptive are the proportions of things in moonlight – that it was a hat, a soft black hat such as a dinner-jacketed gentleman might take up. It passed from Colonel Dethleps to Belinda. In a sudden stillness she said ‘Daddy’s.’ At the same instant from somewhere to the left came a single dreadful cry.
Mrs Moule said, ‘The river.’ Colonel Dethleps called out, ‘Keep to the trail.’ He was too late; a bevy of the more impetuous – stones and queer fish mingled – had wheeled and were plunging in the direction of the sound. The main body continued to pound down the drive. They rounded a corner and were at fault. The trail seemed to split. There was a momentary scattering. A heavy cloud, pat as a tactician who had bided his time, made an extinguishing pounce on the moon.
As if the game of the night before had been bundled incontinently out of doors, the firefly-flicker of torches criss-crossed about Rust Park. Patricia’s torch, circling, illuminated Wedge. For a man whose principal asset was at an unknown hazard Wedge looked remarkably composed. ‘Do you’, he asked – and the military nature of the situation seemed to have impressed itself upon him – ‘know this damned terrain?’
‘Not well. But we’re still on the drive, and the drive begins by circling the house.’
‘And the river? Wedge was a sedentary soul; he had visited Rust for years without straying beyond the gardens.
‘Quite a bit away – almost certainly not in the picture.’
‘Those confounded action-stories’, said Wedge, ‘put things in people’s heads. I think I’ll transfer to talking-fiction. Come on.’ He lumbered forward and Patricia followed. Wedge had greatness in his kind; this fantastic alarm had really started in his consciousness some Napoleonic change of plan. But Patricia’s own immediate concern was in having lost contact with Belinda. She paused and listened. Behind them the night was filled with distressed murmurs, sudden exclamations of despair. One group of searchers had been betrayed between the false avenue and the true; the luckless fishponds were about them and they were exchanging snow for abundant mud. On this confusion the moon once more emerged, like a farmer popping up his head to view some unseemly scene over a hedge. The reconnaissance had disintegrated badly; the cold and flooding light revealed a scattering of figures arabesqued about the park. It was a composition perfectly picturesque; a junketing, wintry and nocturnal, in the manner of Teniers or Both – macabre and crazy comedy on which the moon appropriately looked down.
Dethleps summoned his dispersed levies; waving an arm in the air, he clapped a hand on the crown of his head: for Patricia, unversed in the art of war, the gesture held a crowning lunacy. Other senior stones decided that the time had come to shout; commandingly, encouragingly, urgently they bawled the name of Eliot to the stars. A bubble of hysterical laughter grew in Patricia; it was mercifully pricked by a firm clasp on her hand. Mrs Moule was beside her – had grabbed to steady herself while kicking off high-heeled shoes. ‘I don’t think’, said Mrs Moule obscurely, ‘they ought to mind.’ They ran together in stockinged feet. ‘There’, said Mrs Moule triumphantly, ‘is Belinda. I think we should all keep together on a night like this.’
The drive had taken those who held to it – the party with Dethleps at its head – on a half-circle; the park had wheeled on them as if they were after a hare; the house, momentarily concealed, must still be close to them on their right. Patricia, coming up with Belinda and Timmy in the van, glanced behind her to get her bearings. Everyone else was staring ahead; she alone witnessed the defection of Kermode.
Kermode was out of condition and laboured in consequence more than people who had never been in it. Patricia’s eye caught him as he had dropped to a walk. His expression could be clearly read; with a troubled face he was staring absently up at the moon. Perhaps he was an anxious as everybody else; perhaps his was merely an intellectual resentment of mystery. He looked from the moon to the ground and then across the park. The line of his gaze was towards a solitary light which shone perhaps half a mile away. Suddenly his expression, as if under the force of some inner illumination, changed to glee. A moment later he had slipped from the drive, climbed a stile or fence, and was sauntering across the snow. Patricia was about to turn back to investigate when she was arrested by the most violent stroke yet achieved on this alarming night.
From somewhere in or near the house a pistol-shot rang out over the park. Its echoes were blended with a briefly succession of choked and ebbing screams, an agony of sound more horrible, because more urgent of sheer and unhuman pain, than the single cry which had gone before.
The stones stopped shouting, turned towards the house and ran. The foremost stumbled again upon a clear trail: kitchen gardens, stables, a lawn streamed uncertainly past. Rust rose up before the runners in the unfamiliar aspect of a high blank wall. Ivy-covered, it soared in the moonlight like a frozen and impending sea. Across its waxen glitter the startled bats fluttered, pitching their futile faint exclaimings against unhearing ears.
In the centre of the wall a single dark door stood open.
Timmy and Belinda – because they knew the ground or because, unlike the others, they had hesitated for no fraction of a second – were through first. A dozen people followed; there was a wary flickering of torches; the party discovered itself as being in Sir Gervase Eliot’s theatre once more. The unexpected familiarity of the place was momentarily bewildering, and in a moment’s bewildered pause the theatre made itself felt. High up, the narrows sea-green windows faintly pricked the dark; transparent fingers of sea-green light groped down the walls, grew insubstantial and faded, still high overhead. Dead, chill, and vacant, the theatre was as eerie as an intralunar cage. The acrid smell of gunpowder added its suggestion of some subterraneous mineral recess and from somewhere, like a moist exudation through stratified rock, came the slow drip of liquid falling from a height…
The torches explored a litter of chairs, a glove, a scattering of the programmes which had explained the problematical little play – the debris of the ruined evening. The torches crept farther, searched for the curtain which had been rung down on the confusion of Miss Cavey. It had vanished. Like startled hands which in the dark fail to meet expected resistance, the torches tumbled their light beneath the proscenium-arch and conjured up a cast of shadows in the depth beyond. This was the end of the trail; this was the entertainment to which the evening and the night had moved. The Rust theatricals were over and there had succeeded a show more exquisitely conceived. On the deserted boards Drama in invisible robes sat throned.
For a moment the searchers wavered; then they ran forward and took the line of footlights like the last breastwork in an attack. Timmy and Belinda were in front; Belinda, outstripping her brother, slipped and fell on hands and knees amid a sprinkling of Dismal Desmond’s sawdust. Timmy’s torch flashed downwards. Hard by the sawdust a pool had formed on the floor. Belinda’s trailing white frock was stained with blood.
Again there came a tiny plash of falling liquid and the pool at their feet stirred in little circles. Torches flashed upwards and probed, amid suspended canyons of darkness, the confusion of joists, runners, and hangings. The first through caught, immensely high, the grotesque posteriors of an enormous dog; swept on to catch another creature’s paws, the drooping tail of a third. But Desmond himself was gone; a shout from the wings told that he had been discovered on the floor; his body, horridly eviscerated, was immediately floodlit by a dozen torches, and as immediately disappeared into darkness when the torches swept aloft once more. Stark realization came to almost everybody at once. It was with purpose that Desmond had been removed from his hook. Beside the three noosed, dumpy dogs hung a long darker figure. There was a second’s agonized doubt and a torch, deftly directed, caught amid the obscuring hangings a circle of black and braided cloth.
Chill confusion was cut by the voice of Winter, calling for help with the ropes. Dethleps was beside him; Wedge came up. The dark figure above stirred, sickeningly rotated, began to descend. A pulley creaked – unendingly, like a tumbril heard in some dream of terror.
The body sagged to the floor. Timmy threw himself down beside it; appeared to be hurled by some physical impact once more to his feet.
Before them, transfixed by the great hook and grotesquely bagged in evening trousers, lay the carcase of a middle-black pig.
Shoon Abbey
‘Length and depth.’
England, unwearied and infinitely various mistress, had turned again from darkness to the sun. Never had she yawned and stretched herself in just these diaphanous robes before Time, rolling back beyond the building of the temperance institute at Pigg, beyond the arterial roads, beyond the vanished turnpikes, beyond the bridle paths which had wound through unenclosed pastures; time, retracing the generations of the cattle until they grew long and lank and lathy; time, fading finally away in geological eternities: time had never witnessed just this configuration of light and shadow, just these driftings of mist and vapour over the land; had never garnered in its winter harvests just this November day.
