The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) (42 page)

She could, of course, knock on the communicating wall, as she occasionally did, especially if she were unwell. But that seemed unkind. The child had been out with her sick mother and needed her sleep; but she herself would not sleep until she knew. She must know. She rose, put on her slippers and dressing-gown and took her candle.

The sight of the empty room threw her into a fluster. Up to that point her thinking had been logical and lucid and her anxiety natural enough. Now here she was, all alone, and she'd lost Damask. Her world began to break up. Secrecy, she thought, wildly; that was the thing. Once the Saunders knew that Damask had gone...Oh dear, oh dear! They mustn't know. She trembled to think what would happen. They'd have it all their own way again. She must escape, get away and find somebody to help her----

Furtive as a thief, she padded down the stairs and reached the front door. It was locked and the key had been removed--oh, how cunning they were. But not cunning enough, or else luck was with her, for the key lay there, on the table in the hall. She inserted it, turned it, and opened the door, inch by inch, lest she should make a sound. There, she was out! And lucky again in that she had brought down the covered night candle-- an ordinary one would have soon been quenched by the thick, fog-laden air. She held the candle out well ahead of her and followed it, steering an erratic, zigzag course along the drive, sometimes plunging into the wet bushes of the shrubbery on one side or blundering on to the wet grass of the lawn on the other, and muttering to herself as she went. Eventually she reached the gate. This time it did not cry out its message of betrayal; somebody must have oiled it since her last attempt to escape in search of help. One of those kind people to whom Mrs Saunders had given a shilling, perhaps.

Now, which way? The Stone Bridge was a good place; people often lingered there, people with nothing to do. On the other hand, that way led to the village where Charles and Felicity lived. She'd avoided the village since their marriage; she hadn't even attended church since that Sunday when Charles had come out of the porch with his bride on his arm. But in this fog it was safe enough. Even if they came by they wouldn't recognise her...wouldn't know that she was the one whom Charles had jilted in the very middle of a dance because, over her shoulder, he had seen the beautiful pink-and-white mask that hid the face of a mad devil. Funny, the way men never saw behind masks and women always did. She could have told him. She could have said, 'She'll want a purple garden, you know, and a house in London and twenty-four pairs of high-heeled shoes, and all that unnecessary expense will wreck your plans for recuperating your finances.' But of course to have said that would have drawn attention to the fact that she herself was an heiress; it would have been in bad taste. Besides, she had never had a chance. Charles had avoided her for years. Ashamed, no doubt. It was not until Felicity was dead and the baby grown into quite a big boy that he had come visiting again.

She had now reached the Stone Bridge, and having lost all sense of time was momentarily disappointed to find it deserted, all its embrasures empty. But she was soon comforted, for she recalled a dream. In the dream she had stood there, just like this, waiting, and the girl in the ugly dress of the Poor Farm had come along. So everything was all right, and she had only to wait. In the dream it had been a warm night, with a great copper-coloured moon; now there was no moon and the weather was foggy and cold. Very cold, thought Miss Parsons, ineffectually huddling her dressing-gown around her. The poor child would feel the cold too, in that thin print dress; she hoped the waiting would not be too long. However, perhaps her name would keep her warm. It was a warm, red name, Damask, like the rose: the very word called up a picture of a dark, deep-hearted rose, sweet-scented, basking in the sun on a red wall. She said the word over and over again and the foggy darkness took the sound, hushed it away into silence.

In the hidden place Mr Mundford's 'experiment' neared its climax. And about time too, Richard thought; the rites seemed to have gone on for hours and were becoming tedious. In the beginning he had watched Alec's actions with interest and curiosity and had been mildly surprised --but' interested--by the discovery that he was still capable of physical revulsion. Blood he had been prepared for. Alec had made no secret of his intention of sacrificing the pheasants, had indeed gloated over the beauty and rarity which made them so suitable to his purpose; and to see some of the blood drained off into a little brass bowl was tolerable--after all, Richard had been cupped in his time! Fastidiousness made its first protest when Alec dipped his tallowy fingers in the bowl and, using the blood as though it were paint, began to draw strange patterns on the floor. Richard had looked away then and his thoughts had begun to wander. He would never again--he thought--be able to watch those long pale fingers handling knives and forks at table or cards in a game without remembering how they looked at this minute.

The patterns were completed at last. The peculiarly vile-smelling candles threw little light on that part of the floor, and all that Richard could see when he looked that way again was a kind of cross with extra pieces added to each extremity and some interlinked triangles--or it could have been a star. Not that it mattered, he thought sceptically as Alec took a measured pace backward and began to mutter a brief incantation.

Richard allowed his attention to drift towards the stone slab where Damask lay. Interest stirred again; the girl appeared to be dead! Not one of the sculptured figures beyond the pillars was more white or more still, or--come to that--more shapely. He remembered, viciously, those moments when he had been nailed to his chair and how, soon after, Alec had announced in high glee that he had found the perfect instrument, and he had protested against any dealings with the insolent little baggage. Alec had said, 'You may safely leave her to me!' Was that what he had in mind all along--human sacrifice? Immediately he was conscious of irony because he realised that the idea of Damask Greenway losing her life in the cause of this fantastic nonsense moved him not at all, whereas what Alec was doing now...really, too utterly revolting. Even if one had retained one's childhood belief in the Devil, hoofs and horns and smell of brimstone and all, one could hardly credit that such a nasty--childishly nasty--performance could be pleasing to him.

Averting his eyes, Richard thought back over his association with Alec Mundford. There'd been the promise of two thousand pounds, of course, and the indisputable matter of the luck with cards, but the rest was mainly talk --promises, hints. There'd been that time when they'd come down and brought Dunhill and Saxstead and the girls and there'd been what Alec called an attempt to establish the right atmosphere in the temple, and that, except for one detail, had seemed to Richard just another drunken orgy carried to extremes but not, in essence, different from similar affairs in Angelina's house and other places. The only thing that made it memorable was the behaviour of the girl who ran away...Rose? Right at the height of the excitement she'd suddenly begun to cry and scream and pray and cross herself. There'd been also the visit they'd made to London, where, years ago, there had, it was said, been an outbreak of demoniac possession. It was a small, dismal place with nothing to do and Richard had been bored and said so. Alec had said, 'Mecca and Jerusalem aren't particularly pleasant places either, but they have their pilgrims.'

Now there was this, pompous, disgusting, going on and on and getting nowhere, just like everything else in life. Well, tomorrow he'd collect his two thousand pounds from Mundford and just drop him...

It was at that point that he realised that while he had been thinking Mr Mundford had made a fire and thrown upon it something which gave off a powerful scent and a great deal of smoke; and now he was on his knees, praying, if you could rightly call it that, aloud, and praying for something which appeared to put Richard's fee in jeopardy--for what Alec Mundford was praying for was that the Power which had granted him an increased span of years should now take away the gift and grant him instead instant and sudden death.

Richard listened, and saw suddenly that the logical, reasonable and inevitable conclusion of cynicism and boredom was the desire for death, there was no other end, Yet he himself did not wish to die. All he wished was to find a relief from boredom, and something vital still existed in him, because he was still searching and, yes, hoping to find that relief. That was why he was here in this fantastic situation, why he was taking part in this fraud.

He was sure now that that was what it was----

And then, all at once, something of imminence and expectancy filled the temple, sweeping through it like the wind, with the rush and the sound and the overwhelming though invisible presence of the wind, and even Richard Shelmadine knew the almost-forgotten, longed-for quickening of the sluggish blood.

Damask had gone. Her body lay there, slim, white, virginal, but it was as inanimate as the other things with which Mr Mundford busied himself. He had noticed the moment when the induced, drugged trance gave way to true coma and again congratulated himself upon his choice. The girl might even die.

She was back in the place which she had visited once before, when she lay on the floor of her mother's kitchen and Julie had feared her dead. She recognised it with a sense of wonder that her memory of it should have been so blurred and imperfect and her one attempt to describe it to Mr Mundford so halting and imprecise. Yet she understood--because here she understood everything-- that this was because there were no words in which to convey a description of this place, this state. You could no more do it than you could describe colour to a man blind from birth.

She had remembered, and mentioned, voices...but voices were physical things utterly disconnected from the method of communication which one experienced here...

In only one way did this place resemble the world, this state the state of being alive in a physical sense, and that was in the perpetual pull, the conflict between the Good and the Evil...Names again, symbols...but how else could she explain to herself? For although she was here, knowing and understanding and experiencing, she was not part of it yet, she did not belong; the physical world, where 'I' was a thing of hands and feet and eyes and ears and a mind which could only understand through a mesh of symbolism, was waiting to claim her again. Soon, too soon, before she was ready, cleansed and reinstated. For here, eyeless, handless, mindless, the naked spirit was still faced with the same choice as in the other place, the world...one side, or the other. She remembered the last time and how she had chosen, and where, in the end, that choice had led. With the whole of her being she cried, 'God forgive me and take me back!', knowing that the words 'God' and The' were also symbols--one standing for a great vibrating power, the other for something no more than a dust mote, visible for one second in a ray of sunshine. But the dust mote was capable of choice. Last time it had willed itself one way; now it willed itself the other, and knew itself to be accepted. In its turn it accepted the fact that there would be pains to bear, difficult things to be done. 'I'll do anything, anything. Only show me the way,' she cried.

And it seemed that she was shown. Straight before her face was a great cloud of smoke, the heart of which slowly cleared into a tulip-shaped radiance. In the clear space she saw John Whitwell, exactly as he had looked when he stood in the barn in the evening light and called to her to come to Jesus, except that now the brightness about his head was spiked, plainly denned. Of course--the crown of thorns. And now behind his outstretched arms was the cross of rough wood; and there was Mr Mundford, horned and hoofed, grinning maliciously, hammering home the nails.

She stared for a long while with a double awareness. The scene was as real as any she had ever looked at; yet at the same time she knew that John Whitwell and Mr Mundford were only symbols, that understanding had to creep in this way just as the light of the sun must creep through the cracks of a shutter. But none of what was important; what mattered was what she must now do.

Mr Mundford watched the core of brightness grow and knew that at last he had succeeded. Lucifer, Son of the Morning...

Richard Shelmadine watched too, his feeling of expectancy recoiling in the old familiar way. A complete hoax. Nothing but a nasty mess and a dead naked girl on a stone slab! He might have known, he thought.

Seeing nothing at all save a column of smoke, he was sufficiently in possession of his ordinary senses to be aware when the girl moved. Not dead, then. It would be of some slight interest to watch her behaviour when she woke up sufficiently to realise that she was stark naked in the presence of two men, one of whom at least would stare at her with unfriendly eyes.

He saw her move, with the precise, weighted movements of a somnambulist, and reach out for the knife which Alec had used on the pheasants. He was a little slow in realising what she intended to do with it; then he remembered that Alec now owed him two thousand pounds and that was not a debt which his heirs and executors would be likely to honour. Alec, self-deluded fool, was now on his knees with his hands clasped over his eyes, gabbling away like a crazy man, praying for death again.

Richard shouted 'Look out, man!' and moved between the two and reached out his hand to take the knife. Then the feeling of complete, incredulous wonder to which he had so long been a stranger was briefly his. The knife plunged home, and with his life-blood spurting out over his clutching hands he knew for a moment, too late, the value of life.

The spell was broken. Mr Mundford felt his dark master's withdrawal and sagged forward with a cry of despair.

The spell was broken. Damask cried out too, for the re-welding of body and spirit was as painful as the birth-wrench.

Up at Fuller's inspiration came. 'Danny,' cried Mrs Fuller, 'I have just thought of something. Fetch me the pepper, quick!' Danny blundered down the stairs and up again and thrust the wooden canister into her hand. Shaking a spoonful into her damp palm, she went to the bed and knew a decline of hope. Sally's pudgy little nose had gone sharp, its pinched-in nostrils bluish-white, so dead-seeming that to hold out the pepper seemed almost like desecrating a corpse. Mrs Fuller's hand trembled and some of the pepper spilled as she said, 'S'too late, my pore dear, too late.' But she was wrong. Sally drew a snuffling breath and the pepper stirred; then she gasped and gave a mighty sneeze, with, hard on its heels, a scream that rent the night. And there was the baby, as fine and lively as though he had arrived exactly at the right time and in the ordinary way. Mrs Fuller didn't even have to slap him to make him draw his first breath, and that was just as well, for she was taken completely by surprise and was crying and saying, 'Oh, thank God, thank God.' It was almost a minute before she could proceed with all she had to do.