The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (17 page)

‘I fail to see what it has got to do with you,’ said Jules who walked up to the statue to feel its polished surface. ‘It’s far too valuable to stay here.’ Something odd struck him as he felt it. How could it have remained so long neglected and yet stayed so pristine. And what was this? As he touched Pan’s hair his fingers became slippery, as if there was oil on it.

‘Don’t touch him!’ shrieked Quinton.

The sound was so shocking that both of them remained quite still, staring at each other until the last faint echo of the cry had died away.

As the thoughts came to Jules, he spoke them: ‘You’ve been in here, haven’t you? You know it well. You’ve known it for a long time. You come in here and put oil on it.’

‘He’s my god! You move him. You lay a finger on him. I’ll set him on you and her and the children. I will!’

‘Get out!’

Jules thought Quinton was going to jump at him, but perhaps prudence restrained him. Jules was younger and stronger. Instead Quinton let out a series of cries, almost howls, except that they seemed to be in some inarticulate language. Occasionally Jules could distinguish something which sounded like: ‘Io Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan Pan! Io Pan!’ Then Quinton turned and ran from the Folly.

Jules followed him and watched him go. As Quinton reached the drive he began to walk, bending almost double as he did so from breathlessness. Just then Tonia, who had been fetching her mother from Moreton-in-Marsh station, was driving up to the house, and narrowly missed hitting him. Oblivious of her, he went on stumbling down the drive.

‘It’s all right,’ said Jules, hurrying up to the car. ‘We’ve had an argument. I doubt he’ll be coming back.’ Tonia merely nodded, noting a new firmness in his tone, and helped her mother from the car.

‘Come and see what I found in the Folly,’ said Jules, quite ignoring Tonia’s mother. Tonia’s mother, whose name was Lady Hope-Gore, and who expected to be greeted with respect and some affection on her arrival, looked at him stonily.

A minute or so later all three were in the Folly standing in front of the glistening black statue of Pan. ‘Oh dear,’ said Lady Hope-Gore. ‘I hope you’re not going to keep him.’

‘I won’t,’ replied Jules.

‘No. I shouldn’t,’ said Lady Hope-Gore who liked to have the last word. Jules thought that he had misread the stare of Pan when he first had seen it. Its expression was not ambiguous: the stare was unequivocally malign. As they left the Folly Jules locked it and pocketed the key.

That evening over dinner Lady Hope-Gore, the widow of a senior civil servant, gave the whole family the benefit of her views on a wide variety of subjects with such exhaustless energy that Jules and Tonia had no opportunity to discuss Quinton’s departure. Tonia thought: Heavens! She must be lonely to have to talk so much. Jules thought: Tonia must be thinking how lonely her mother is, will she ask her to live with us?

That night when the children had gone to bed, Jules, Tonia and Lady Hope-Gore took coffee in the drawing room. Lady Hope-Gore was still talking but Jules had reached that stage of weariness when he found her conversation soothing rather than irritating. He allowed it to drift across his consciousness while he nodded occasionally to show he had not actually fallen asleep. For Lady Hope-Gore the semblance of attention was always a perfectly adequate substitute for the real thing, especially since most of the time she was unable to distinguish between the two. How many opinions, how little thought, reflected Jules, and then, because his ears had attuned themselves to hearing his mother-in-law’s talk as a mere blur of noise, they caught something else. It was a faint sound and yet sharp and clear as faint sounds can be. It was like a wind instrument, as high pitched as a recorder, and yet somehow with a fuller tone. It was playing a continuous melody, or what seemed like one, for it returned to almost the same sequences of notes, but always with a slight variation which led on to some new theme. Fragments of it seemed familiar, but Jules could never quite identify it. It seemed uncannily modern and ancient at the same time. Ravel of
La Valse
could have written some of it; there was a touch of Debussy’s
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune,
a moment or two from Warlock’s
The Curlew,
the vocal line of Britten’s
O Rose thou art sick.
All these were hinted at
;
or was it the other way round? Was it that Britten and Ravel, Debussy and Warlock had all drawn from the well of which this melody was the fountainhead? Jules’s mind began to shut out Lady Hope-Gore altogether in order to follow the sound: and the metaphor of following the sound seemed very exact because it seemed to lead his mind out into strange territory.

It was as if he had passed through the dark garden of Wyvern into a wild landscape, scratched and scrubbed, untouched by cultivation, yet oddly like the part of the Cotswolds where they lived. Across the landscape roamed herds of savage creatures whose shape he could not define. The string of notes seemed to wind itself round his brain like a garrotte, strangling every other idea or image except these grotesque and shaggy pictures. He entered a primitive world where vision and feeling were one and by-passed altogether the language of conscious thought. Earth and sky were not dumb objects, but beings with which he held a constant tongueless dialogue.

‘Jules!’ said Tonia. Jules gave a start. ‘Were you asleep?’

‘No. Just thinking.’

‘Been working too hard, I expect,’ said Lady Hope-Gore with reproach.

‘Can you hear that music? Sounds like a flute or something.’

‘You ought to go to bed if you’re so tired,’ said Lady Hope-Gore.

Just then they all heard Millie and Tam crying out for their parents. Jules ran up stairs at once. Tonia had to shake off her mother who disapproved of being left alone in the sitting room just for the sake of the children.

Millie and Tam, who shared the same bedroom, were sitting bolt upright in their beds and yelling. What was the matter? asked Jules. There had been a face at the window, pressed against it. It had been black—everything black, hair, teeth, eyes, skin—black and shiny and it had looked at them as if it wanted them. Jules looked out of the window but saw nothing. By the time Tonia arrived her daughters had calmed down, but they were still tearful and afraid. Jules said he would stay with the children until they fell asleep again. Lady Hope-Gore in the doorway said that one shouldn’t indulge children who had nightmares, it only made them worse.

‘The children or the nightmares?’ asked Jules.

‘Both!’ said Lady Hope-Gore.

‘It wasn’t a nightmare,’ said Millie. ‘We saw it.’

‘You stay here, then,’ said Tonia to her husband. ‘Mother and I will go to bed.’

Jules heard them arguing away down the corridor. It was a soothing sound. He sat in the old nursery armchair, quite prepared to read his daughters to sleep, but they settled themselves and were soon at peace again. Jules himself began to drift off. He had listened out for the music, but heard nothing. All was silent outside: no nightingale, not even any cars along the Broadway road. It was almost worryingly quiet.

Jules did not quite fall asleep. Something deep in his brain stayed alert, turning over the day’s events. He could not help making connections: the statue, the face at the window, the pipe music, Quinton’s rage. It was all very strange, he thought, but his mind balked at a conclusive deduction. Then, into his dozing consciousness came a sound. This time it was close and it was not music. It was a thudding sound, like heavy hooves on the grass outside. But the rhythm beaten out was like no horses’ hooves he had ever heard.

Jules roused himself into full alertness and looked out of the window. He could see nothing at first; then he began to make out vague dark shapes on the lawn outside. They seemed to be living forms which belonged to no particular animal or plant. It was as if the whole garden had become restless and was beginning to dance about the house. The thudding grew louder. Millie and Tam woke up screaming. The house was beginning to shake in time with the thundering hooves. Then the banging was on the wall and the doors of the house. Lady Hope-Gore and Tonia came running into the bedroom and clasped Millie and Tam to them. The sound increased until none of the family could hear themselves speak. The banging and thundering became intolerable and then went on increasing in sound.

Jules decided to go downstairs. He did not know why, but he knew he must act. He also knew that if the sound abated he would be able to hear Tonia telling him not to, so he resolved to act immediately. As he came down into the hall he felt himself surrounded by rhythmic thunder, trapped in a universe of pure percussion. Strange shadows, irrationally projected chased each other round the walls of the stairwell. It was as if some pagan orgy was being played in shadow and sound all through the house, and in Jules’s head. Each step Jules took down the stairs became more difficult, and yet he dared to go on.

When he reached the bottom step he stood still, wondering what to do next. Every moment the noise and the moving darkness seemed to be increasing its grip on the house. It was threatening to break in unless . . . unless what? Then Jules knew. Instinctively he realised that a victim was being demanded and that if his wife and children—not to mention Lady Hope-Gore—were to be saved, the victim would have to be him. This conclusion was not rational except in the wholly irrational circumstances in which he had come to it. He took a step towards the front door.

As he did so he saw a faint glow coming from the drawing room. If there is such a thing as a grey light, this was it. The light flickered at first and seemed to draw back and move forward in a pulsating movement, but with each pulsation it moved forward more than it drew back. Jules took another step forward and the light seemed to come forward to meet him. By this time the light had formed itself into a shape, long and thin. It had begun to acquire the features of a human being, but fitfully. The fully formed semblance of a hand would appear and then regress into a vague woollen mitten of light. A face appeared several times and then blurred again. At last it achieved the full image of a tall thin man in a grey double-breasted suit with an orchid in the buttonhole. The face was narrow, clever, almost-handsome. Jules recognised the face of Adrian Clavering.

‘Did you do this?’ said Jules.

The figure held a warning hand up and walked towards the front door, then passed through it. A moment later the thundering stopped. A complete absence of sound invaded the whole house. Nobody dared to break it. Then a scream was heard, a long wail of terror and despair. This was no spirit scream. It had been squeezed viciously from living flesh and blood. It filled an eternity in ten seconds and was cut off by a single, monstrous thud. There was silence again, but this time, it was a normal, natural silence punctuated by the small sounds of a modern Gloucestershire night.

The front door swung open. On the moonlit drive outside Jules saw the tall willowy form of Adrian Clavering. With a thin finger, spectrally attenuated, it pointed in the direction of the Temple of Pan. As if compelled, Jules walked out of Wyvern House and along the yew walk towards the Temple. The doors had been burst open and were hanging limply on their twisted hinges. When he entered the Temple Jules could see that the black basalt Pan had fallen from its niche and shattered into a thousand glassy shards. On the floor of the Temple was another shape, the contorted body of Peter Quinton. Some kind of bizarre rigor mortis had arched his back up from the floor and pulled his staring eyeballs almost from their sockets. In the centre of his forehead was the scorched black imprint of a single cloven hoof.

Jules left the Temple to walk back to the house. He looked for the shape of Clavering on the drive, but it had vanished. In its place stood Hermes the cat, back arched, watchful. For a moment Hermes stared coldly at Jules, then, as cats do, he relented and trotted up to receive attention.

**

The next few hours were another kind of nightmare, full of policemen and ambulances and interrogations. It was further complicated by Lady Hope-Gore, who had decided that the whole episode was caused by terrorists who had come to kidnap her. She vaguely suggested that her late husband’s connections with the Middle East had been the cause of it all. It was absurd, of course, but no more absurd than any other explanation.

One tiny ray of understanding was shone into the darkness when Jules was talking to an elderly police sergeant who had lived all his life in the area. He was one of the few people who knew something about Peter Quinton.

‘That’s not his real name,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Peter Quinton was a name Mr Clavering gave him. Some kind of joke, he said. His real name was Jack Bly, I heard, and he had a record.’

‘Criminal record?’

‘That’s right. Long before, though. But there was something nasty at the time Mr Clavering died. Peter Quinton, he claimed Mr C. had left something to him in a will he made. The whole of Wyvern, he said. But there wasn’t any will, except the one leaving all to the family. Quinton said there was another will and the Clavering family, they’d destroyed it. He couldn’t prove anything so it was dropped.’

Jules and Tonia discussed this new information and decided that the Reverend Herbert Somers owed them an explanation. It was he who had found Quinton for them, and he must have known something of his history. The next morning, leaving the children in the charge of Lady Hope-Gore, they drove over to Westhill Rectory.

The vicar’s battered Volvo was in the drive but the front doorbell was not answered. Jules and Tonia walked round the house and found the back door open. They entered an old-fashioned scullery, all gloom and dinginess, not dirty, but dull and melancholy. An open door showed a passageway with doors off it leading to the front hall. No lights were on except for a yellow glow coming from an open door to the right. Tonia and Jules were not deterred. A moment later they were standing in that doorway.

What they saw was a room full of books: books in shelves, books on tables, books in tottering piles on the floor, books on the window ledge and the mantelpiece. What little wall space was not devoted to bookshelves was covered in dark oak panelling. The light came from a naked bulb in a single standard lamp under which the Reverend Herbert Somers sat in a brown leather armchair, reading. He looked up from his book with rage in his eyes.