A white, European face. Hands plunged into coat pockets. He had a foreign inflection, very soft and sweet. “Yais?”
“I want to speak to you alone,” said Katinka, looking full at Carlyon.
The man glanced over his shoulder uncertainly. Carlyon drew back at once. He gestured the man forward into the hall and, with Mrs. Love, stepped back into the sitting-room and closed the door. Mrs. Love followed him obsequiously; but it was not with the air of a servant that she had been following the little man out of the sitting-room door; taking, if anything, precedence of Carlyon.
The man stood gazing at Tinka. His brown eyes were opened very wide, his mouth was a little o of bewilderment. He looked a mild little man, with a shock of brown hair under a round, pork-pie hat, and those two round staring eyes and the little, open jam-tart mouth. He said again, softly: “Yais?” and remembered the pork-pie hat and took it off and held it in front of him. The ghastly brown hands were covered up now with bright yellow wash-leather gloves.
She began to talk, eagerly, gabblingly, pouring out her plea for enlightenment, for explanation, for help. … “You see I know, I know, that that girl’s in the house. And today. I heard the—the screaming. You know something about that. You do, don’t you? What are you doing up here in this house? I saw you, I saw you standing in the corridor upstairs. You were… Your hands… What were you doing there? What had you been doing, why was she screaming?” As he merely stared at her speechlessly, she grabbed at his arm and shook it till the yellow gloves flailed helplessly in the air. “I warn you, I’m not going to just let this thing slide. If you, if someone, doesn’t give me a reasonable explanation, I warn you I’m going to the police, I shall tell them everything I know.”
He looked at her blankly, blankly. He lifted his wash-leather glove and solemnly replaced the little pork-pie hat, and began quietly to force a way past her, to the front door. “Excusse pleasse. I am from Char-many. Nineteen-thirty-four refuchee from NazioppressedChar-many. …” He had obviously rolled it out so many times before. “Excusse. I do not speak English.” He turned back to rattle with his stick against the sitting-room door, and after a moment Carlyon appeared there with Mrs. Love. He gave her just the bare hint of a mocking smile, and quietly followed the little man out of the hall. This time, Mrs. Love walked in the rear. They disappeared round the bend of the little path; and far away across the river, Katinka saw that, by the makeshift landing stage, there was no crazy old boat. Evidently Miss Evans had been hired to bring the man across to this bank and wait an hour or so for his return. Miss Evans the Ferry, more like! she thought; but no doubt it added to the meagre income of Miss Evans the Milk.
She went out onto the gravelled path that surrounded the house and stood there uncertainly, wondering what to do next. The evening sun lit the glass windows to a rosy glow, but in the wing which turned at an angle from the main frontage the windows were in shadow. (How odd, when one came to think of it, had been that discussion as to which room she should occupy. In what other house did the man-servant lay down the law as to which room should be given to a guest? “The front room,” he had said, flatly, and Carlyon had chimed in with a sort of you’ve-got-something-there inflection. Was it not that the room over the dining-room lay at the end of a corridor, a little apart from the rest of that too-compact house? She remembered the laughing words of Miss Let’s-be-Lovely in their cosy pink offices a thousand, thousand impassable miles away: “He probably keeps a mad wife in the attic, a la Jane Eyre!” and shuddered at the memory.
Behind a window pane, something was moving. In a room far removed from the room she had been given, someone was stirring. And she could hear Dai Trouble singing softly in the kitchen. And Carlyon and Mrs. Love were not in the house. She stood looking up at the window.
Dai Jones sang on—a little, crooning tune that swelled and soared into full-throated song, sung as only the Welsh can sing, tossed up into the air like a fountain of silver notes; thundering down the scale, shivering to a thousand fragments of whispering music dying away upon the silent air. “The tail of little David’s shirt is hanging out,” sang Dai Jones Trouble in his liquid Welsh; and something was moving inside that shadowed window pane, fumbling at the clouded glass in little, baffled movements, trying to find its way out. Something was knocking softly at the window pane. “Bread from Evans’s, bread from Evans’s,” carolled Dai’s golden tenor; and Tinka screamed out above the singing, “Break the window! Break the window and tell me what you want!”
The moving whiteness swam behind the pane. There was a tinkle of falling glass. And still the song rolled on.
It was a small pane, low down in the window. Now it was starred with a hole, surrounded by jagged points of thick, patterned glass. A hand felt its way delicately through the hole, a little hand, very soft and smooth, with long, red, varnished nails; and groped about the empty air. It was horrible, it was like the head of a blinded snake, feeling its way about in the empty air. It groped its way to the angle of the stuccoed wall, and found a flat surface and, for a moment, rested there. The little, soft white wrist was thrust cruelly through the jagged hole in the glass.
And the scarlet-tipped forefinger began to trace letters on the surface of the wall. An A… A long pause. “Go on, go on!” screamed Katinka above the lovely notes of Dai Trouble’s song. “Yes, write it! What do you want me to do?”
An M.
“Yes, yes, I can read it, I understand, I’m here to help you. Yes. Go on!”
An I.
A—M—I… There was a tinkle of glass, more broken glass crashing to the gravel beneath as the hand was suddenly withdrawn; a tinkle that sounded loud and sharp in the sudden silence. For the song was ended; and Dai Jones Trouble stood at the angle of the wall and his eyes were blazing like the eyes of a cat in the dark. He took one step towards her. She moved back a step. “I… Oh, Dai, there you are… I was just…” He looked down at the broken glass beneath the window and up at the broken pane; and back at Katinka. She ran screaming away from him along the beaten track that led up the mountainside away from the house.
To be hunted… Nothing on God’s earth was so terrible as this—to be hunted like a wounded animal, struggling sobbing and panting up the steep mountainside, rough and bare with no hiding place on all its limitless slopes—sobbing with the pain in her injured ankle, with the pain where the breath caught at her aching side, fighting her way on and up the unendurable way, and all the time with the knowledge that no sanctuary lay beyond—no rock, no tree, no hiding place, no refuge, no respite. She had had a good start, but Dai Trouble was gaining fast upon her; she could not match him on the upgrade and she turned and made off along the mountain, circling the house and leaving it behind. Now shale slithered beneath her stumbling, agonized foot, progress was impeded, she was thrown back ever in her own tracks; it was like trying to run under water, with the strong tug of the tide against her legs. Slipping and stumbling, she struggled across the wide landslide of shale that imperceptibly slithered down the mountainside; and suddenly saw in front of her the mouth of a cave. And towering up, two hundred feet above her, cut into the mountainside, the great Red Precipice, the Tarren Goch.
Mr. Chucky had told her about the cave—about the chain of caves that had been formed by the tumbled boulders piled upon one another up the steep edge of the long-abandoned quarry, a corridor formed of the hollows beneath the piled rocks, lit only by “windows” looking down into the lap of the quarry from ever-increasing heights. As children they had played up and down the corridor under the rocks, coming out suddenly at the top of the precipice, onto a tiny ledge from which the unwary might hurtle two hundred feet down to their death. He had said it was “dangerous,” but to Katinka, now, it seemed a very haven of safety and peace. She dragged herself into the kindly dark of the cave and for a moment gave herself over to exhaustion.
But the slipping and slithering of the shale that had impeded his progress, as surely as hers, was ended; he must be coming across the brief
patch of grass between the shale and the mouth of the cave. She forced herself up to her feet again, and stumbled on upwards into the cave above her, climbing on through the glimmering corridor under the tumbled boulders towards an unobtainable haven of darkness that seemed always a little ahead of her. At the bottom of the passage, the light was blotted out; she saw him clearly for a moment, framed in the entrance to the lowest of the caves, against a background of river and valley a thousand feet below. He paused for a moment, as she herself had done; and then began, panting, to claw his way up the mountainside, through the narrow cleft of the rocks, struggling up after her. On and on and up and up, she clambered away from him; and on he came.
And suddenly she was in darkness—deep, sweet, total darkness, hiding her, covering her up, equalizing her with the hound on her trail. She was in a cave so hemmed in with rocks that no glimmer of light could reach it. She crouched against its dank wall and heard his labouring breath as he stood at the entrance not six feet from her.
After a moment, he said, quietly: “May as well come out now. I got you trapped.”
She crouched against the slimy wall, fighting with all her power to stifle the sobbing of her breath.
He began to move. He was feeling his way softly along the rough, rounded, slimy wall of the cave. He must come to her. Slowly, relentlessly, he was feeling his way towards her; soon, his hands outstretched like a blind man’s in the dark, must touch her face. … Must close round her throat. … She dropped to her knees and, with infinite care, began to crawl out towards the centre of the cave. She heard him cursing under his breath as his hands brushed along the sides of the rock walls. After a bit he said suddenly, “Ugh!” and then: “I got you!” and there was a sound of sudden movement and a stamping on the floor and he said: “Where ever you are—look out! That was a snake.”
Her nerve gave way. She scrambled to her feet and made for the single exit from the cave, and he burst into triumphant laughter and came after her.
The chain of caves led steeply up again. She could see, as she scrambled over the slime-covered rocks, that to her left the side of the quarry fell sheer away; could see, through a break here and there in the heaping of the boulders, how, at a right angle from the corridor of rocks, the Red Precipice fell in a sheer, vertical drop down to the lap of the quarry where the strewn boulders now looked like pebbles tossed down by a child. Above her light glimmered, beckoning. With torn hands and bursting heart, she fought her way up and, filling the cave with the echoes of his voice, Dai Trouble came up steadily behind her. And where the light glimmered she knew there must be the tiny ledge that Chucky had told her of; and the two-hundred-foot drop. But she must go on; he was close behind her and there was no room for turning back.
Twenty feet. Fifteen feet… Her legs began to fail her, she was sick and dizzy, her throat and chest were rasped with the agony of her labouring breath. She felt his hand on the hem of her skirt, whisked the skirt away and stumbled on, but knew that in one moment he would be upon her again. Above her—ten feet, five feet—the blessed light; the will-o’-the-wisp that beckoned her out of the slime and the darkness that had once seemed comforting, into the light of day. Precipice or no precipice, she must get out of this horror of darkness into the clean light of day. The mouth of the corridor shone before her like a star.
And suddenly the star was blotted out. Up and up came the creature after her; and now, like a huge black crow, a figure stood in the mouth of the corridor of rocks and barred her way with outflung arms.
She could not turn back. Her failing legs, unbidden by failing consciousness, toiled on. Blinding light. The precipice, falling away beneath her tottering feet. And a man’s arms caught out at her and grasped her and flung her to the ground.
Neat and precise as ever in his horrid brown suit, Mr. Chucky looked down at her.
The edge of the precipice had crumbled away a little, and now formed a narrow ledge a few feet below the main cliff-top, jutting out over the perpendicular drop of the Tarren Goch; it was almost as though a builder’s wooden cradle had been slung on ropes over the edge of the cliff, and on to this cradle the corridor of rocks debouched. Mr. Chucky took her by the arm and hauled her to her feet. She could not look back at the dizzy drop to the foot of the precipice, but climbed up after him off the ledge and onto the rolling grassland of the mountain and away from the edge of the cliff. Dai Jones came up quietly after them and stood with Mr. Chucky looking down at her as, released, she fell again exhausted to the ground, and lay there sobbing and gasping on the rough brown grass. Mr. Chucky said, as though it were all the most natural incident in the world: “Well, well, then, Dai bach—playing a bit of hide and seek on the mountain, is it—you and Miss Jones.”
“Duw, duw! Miss Jones indeed!” said Dai, standing over her, anxiously shaking his head. Whatever will Miss Jones do next, his tone implied.
“Good thing I happened to be here, mun,” said Mr. Chucky quite reproachfully. “One step to the left when she come up out of those caves, and she’d have been over the edge. Just strolling over the mountain from the Neath road, I was. I like a bit of a walk now and then, for exercise sake, and I thought rather than take the old bus back into Pentre Trist I’d come back over the mountaintop. …”
Katinka sobbed exhausted on the rough grass. Her knees ached, her ankle was now one vast, throbbing, burning stab of agony, her hands were sore, her head swam, she was sick with fear and dread.
“I kept yelling to her to watch out,” said Dai. “She would go on.”
“What were you doing, both? I saw you running across the ridge and down to the bottom of the caves. Better stand here, I says to myself, in case they come popping out at the top, not thinking of the precipice. Not a bad thing I was there, mun; she’d have gone over sure as eggs!”
“Duw, duw!” said Dai Trouble, quite overcome at the thought of it.
“What were you doing, both—for goodness sake?”
“I caught her hanging round outside the place,” said Dai. “Supposed to be in her room, but outside and looking round. Mr. Carlyon doesn’t like that, Mr. Chucky, you know full well. I started off to tell her, but away she runs across the mountain like an old partridge. So I goes after her. And I must say,” said Dai, looking down at the prostrate Katinka, falling now into a more steady rhythm of breathing, “all my boyhood I played over this old mountain and up and down them caves, and I never met a gamer one, and her with her broken wing!” He squatted down beside her. “What were you so frightened of, Miss Jones, bach?”
“You chased me. …”
“I chased you because you ran away, girl.” He put out a square hand to her. “Come on, then. Better you and I go back to the house.”
But she shuddered away from it. “I’m not going back through that passage. I’m not going where there are snakes!”
Dai Trouble sat back on his heels and roared with laughter. “Snakes! Don’t you know that old boy’s trick for smoking a man out? Anyway,” he suggested to Mr. Chucky, standing there nonchalant and perfectly at ease in his too-brown suit and too-town shoes, up on the rough mountainside, “we can take her back along the ridge and down to the house that way.”
He kept his hand on her wrist, but she went with them docilely, her spirit broken. It was true that he had shouted after her; it might be true that he had cried a warning. Anyway, she wanted to believe it, she could not be bothered with terror any more. Hardly able to drag herself along, she followed them, limping along the top of the mountain, plunging down the side of it from above the house, breaking at last on to the beaten path up which a little while ago she had fled; scrunching across the gravelled space beneath the broken window and so into the suburban porchway, into the chocolate-coloured hall.
Something was standing in the hall. A halo of soft gold hair half veiled by a grey-green chiffon scarf; and where a face should have been, a round of flesh, white and bloated, seamed across like a sort of albino football, into innumerable patches—soft pink, dead white, waxy y
ellow, all prickled like a joint of pork with little yellow hairs. … A cobbled lump in the centre with two flaring holes for nostrils; two little pig-like pale blue eyes; and a round hole set with broken teeth, a hole that seemed sewn into the face, a patch torn from the face with the bleeding edges turned in and hemmed with dreadful cobbled stitches of wiry black thread. Something that stood slavering in the centre of the horrible, suffocating little brown hall, snuffling like a bulldog, peering into the mirror among the distended eyes of the wooden hatstand that stood out, snail-like, on their wooden stalks: grunting in terrible little choking sobs, advancing with animal bleatings, holding out a shrivelled white claw, dreadfully tipped with red. … In the doorways, on the stairs, with outstretched arms, Carlyon, Mrs. Love, Dai Trouble, Chucky, prisoned her in with it.
CHAPTER SIX
CARLYON STOOD BESIDE THE wood fire, leaning against the cool, hideous, mottled marble mantelpiece, looking down at his toes. Katinka wept drearily on the horsehair sofa. He said at last: “Well—don’t break your heart over it. You couldn’t know.”
“If I hadn’t interfered…”
“If you hadn’t interfered, she wouldn’t have come down into the hall and looked into the mirror; if you hadn’t interfered, the shawl would still have hung across the mirror and she wouldn’t have seen…” He broke off. He said, with bitter sarcasm: “Never mind. Little things can’t touch her any more: she’s suffered too much. This is only a crown of thorns rammed down on top of her agony for good measure—too bad you couldn’t arrange for the blood to run down into her eyes and blind her before she looked into the glass!”
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