by John Burke
“They,” said Mad Peter simply. “Didn’t you hear them just now? Listen—you’ll hear them again.”
These were the ramblings of a lunatic. Yet his conviction was such that Harry stood motionless and listened. There was no sound. He couldn’t imagine what they were supposed to be listening for, and he was in no mood for spending any more of the night here in the company of the village idiot.
“Now look, Mr. Crockford—”
“Look?” echoed Mad Peter. “There’s nothing to see, you know. Only to hear.” He put his head on one side, then moaned and touched his shoulder tenderly. “I do think you’ve broken something, I really do. You had no right to go skulking about in the dark like that.” Again he tilted his head and there was something oddly endearing in it, like the pleading antics of a dog. “You don’t happen to have a drop of brandy on you? Medicinal, you know. Or a cup of coffee?”
Harry laughed. It was impossible not to like this strange creature. And there were things he had said which deserved following up.
“Come on,” he said, turning back towards the cart, “you’d better be our first guest.”
“Guest?”
“My wife and I. For supper.”
“Supper?” cried Mad Peter, as ecstatic now as he had been mournful a few seconds ago. “How perfectly delicious!”
The two of them climbed back on to the cart and Harry flicked the reins. The horse at once started off without protest.
In less than five minutes they reached the cottage. Light was muted by the patched-up curtains. The cottage looked self-contained—almost smug. It was a world of its own in a bleak, moon-silvered landscape. Harry was eager to be back in that world. He was jabbed by a twinge of regret that he should have brought this peculiar stranger back for a meal which would have been so much more delightful if shared only by Valerie and himself; yet he had a presentiment that this eccentric had a great deal to tell him.
Valerie heard his footsteps on the path. The door was thrown open to greet him. She opened her arms to him.
It was only when she drew back, flushed and happy, from his embrace that she realized Harry was not alone. He introduced Peter Crockford, who bowed formally and behaved with the greatest deference when shown into the sitting-room and offered a drink.
The meal was ready. “I’ve been wondering if you would ever come back!” said Valerie. Her laugh hid—but not very adequately—a tremor of apprehension. He laughed back, but knew that he must not leave her alone too often until they were quite sure of their ground here.
Without fuss she laid an extra place, so unobtrusively that even the most sensitive guest would not have been embarrassed or felt impelled to stammer out apologies for having arrived without warning.
They sat down and ate. Harry found that he was hungry. A lot had happened since they had had their last meal. Time had flown past, filled with rather too many incidents for his liking.
Mad Peter ate as heartily as his host. Valerie cast him a covert glance every now and then as he sucked noisily at a chicken bone and burped over his glass of wine. But she knew that he appreciated every mouthful, and when she caught her husband’s eye she could not repress a smile.
“Well, Mr. Crockford?” said Harry at last, as the meal reached its final stages.
“Much better, thank you,” said Peter cheerfully.
“We’re waiting.”
“Waiting? Ah, waiting. But then, aren’t we all?”
“We’re waiting,” said Harry, “for your explanation.”
“And with every right.”
Peter relinquished the last shred of chicken bone with undisguised regret. He looked hopefully at the coffee cups which Valerie had set to one side. After a minute or so it became apparent that he had no intention of offering any explanation or anything else until it was forced out of him.
“Well?” Harry persisted.
“Would there be any coffee, Mrs. Spalding?” asked Peter ingratiatingly.
Valerie rose, but Harry stopped her with a gesture.
“Not until he’s told us something.”
Peter looked from one to the other and tried to make a facetious grimace. It failed and he was suddenly quite sane, sober, and earnest. He said:
“Yes, you’ve got a right to know. Excuse me a moment. I . . . I have to be sure that I know what I’m going to tell you.”
Valerie subsided into her chair. Peter took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Harry wanted to snap an order at him but did not like to break into that unworldly trance. The man was making a big effort—the sort of effort a drunkard makes when he knows he must walk straight and talk coherently. The strain tightened a blue veinous thread across his forehead. At last he opened his eyes again and began to speak in a laborious, painstaking way.
“May I tell you something about myself? It may not be of any great importance in itself but it may help to convince you that what I’m about to say is the truth and not some colorful figment of my imagination. May I?”
“Please,” breathed Valerie.
“Thank you. I’m not mad, you know. They call me Mad Peter because I find it difficult to grasp some of the things which seem so important nowadays, like being able to make money and juggle with it and make more money. I can’t even make the first little bit. But I’m not mad. A little vague, yes. Sensitive—oh, my nerves are too close to the surface, I feel too much, everything is too hot or too cold. I feel it and know it. I have a strong sense of good and evil: not just knowing what’s good and what’s evil but sensing the presence of the fine thing and the bad thing. Knowing where it exists.” He leaned forward suddenly across the table, jarring a plate to one side and not noticing it. “This is an evil place,” he said.
Harry glanced quickly at Valerie and tried to smile. Valerie must pay no attention to this kind of nonsense. There must be no clouds in Valerie’s sky: it was his job to make sure that there were none.
“Corrupt,” said Peter, “and evil. I can feel it taking the goodness out of me. It hasn’t always been so. When I came here ten years ago . . . or was it fifteen, or twenty? . . . when I came here, it was a good place. People were kind and gentle as God willed they should be.” Tears shone unexpectedly in his eyes and began to course gently, unchecked, down his cheeks. “Then they came, bringing their vileness with them.”
“Who came?” Valerie demanded.
Peter held up his hand. “Please. If you interrupt me I shall never remember what it was I must say.” He swayed, blinked, and went on slowly, gathering speed again as he talked. “My parents had high hopes for me, God bless them. They hoped I might go into politics, but”—he giggled—“I was too stupid even for that. In the end they made me a small allowance and let me go my way; put me out to grass, as it were. I wandered the countryside and settled here in my own good time because I found it a good place.” He looked happily round the room, and then the happiness drained away as quickly as it had come. “But I’ve just told you that. Now it’s all going blurred again. I’ve forgotten.”
He lowered his head as though expecting a blow or a contemptuous dismissal.
Valerie prompted him gently: “And then they came.”
Peter shook with alarm. “Who told you that; who told you . . .”
“You just told us,” said Harry.
Peter looked up, looked down again. A gleam of cunning lit his eyes and then faded. He was withdrawing into his own shell again, listening to things nobody else could hear and silently communing with his own fears and desires.
“Are you all right, Mr. Crockford?” asked Valerie.
“Listen!”
Peter sat bolt upright. They listened.
Harry snorted. His patience was running out. “I don’t hear a thing.”
“Listen, damn you!”
Peter’s chair was kicked backwards. He was on his feet, reeling across the room. He dragged the curtains back. A few shreds came loose and fell to the floor. Peter pushed the window open.
The clatter of the chair and
the window had hammered into the head and now were gone. There was silence.
No. Not silence. From the far distance could be heard the elusive, wayward sound of the pipe which had called to Harry on his homeward journey. He was by his own fireside, yet now it sounded more eerie and menacing than it had done on the open, unprotected road.
“Damn.” Peter was near to tears again. “Damn . . . damn. I feel it again.”
“What is it?” Valerie’s head was poised, exquisite above her white throat and slim neck. Harry feasted his eyes on her, only half listening to the ramblings of the eccentric.
“Can’t you hear, woman?”
“Yes . . . I hear it now.” The weird fluting skipped over a flurry of notes and then sank to a slow, mournful dirge. “What does it mean?”
“It means death.”
“How could it—”
“I heard it”—Mad Peter swung towards Harry—“the night your brother died.”
“What are you talking about, man?”
“I heard it, I tell you, the night your brother died. Oh, my God!”
Peter lunged for the door. Harry sprang from his seat and grabbed the man’s arm.
“You don’t leave until you’ve told us everything. Everything—do you hear me?”
Peter’s face was so tortured that it was impossible to threaten him and impossible to hold him in that tight grip. Harry relaxed his hold. And Peter cried “I must go . . . must go” and stumbled out of the room into the night.
The sound of his feet stumbling down the path was cut off when he reached the gate. For a few seconds he seemed to stay on the road and then perhaps to branch off across the grass.
Harry looked at the dark rectangle of open doorway. He strode to the door and closed it.
Valerie said: “Harry . . . I’m frightened.”
He cursed the impulse that had led him to bring Mad Peter back to the house this evening. Yet perhaps he ought to have been cursing not that but his weakness in allowing the man to escape without telling all that he had to tell. Behind the madness and the forgetfulness there had been the glimmer of some disturbing truth.
The question had still not been answered: how had Charles died?
The day had been a tiring one, but Harry was unable to sleep. His weariness had gone beyond the desire for rest. He heard Valerie breathing quietly and steadily beside him—Valerie, who had restored order to the chaos of the cottage, cooked a splendid meal, and who now deserved hours of slumber—but questions kept jangling in his mind. None of them could be answered until morning. In daylight they could start afresh. But he could not persuade himself to relax and abandon the confusions of the past hectic day.
Dozing but still resisting, he heard a long-drawn-out moan. It seemed to come from below the window. Harry opened his eyes. Perhaps, after all, he had been drifting into sleep and this had been part of a dream.
The moan came again. Now it might have been the misery of a dog lamenting at the cottage door.
Harry sat up.
Thickly, struggling up from the depths of sleep, Valerie murmured: “What is it, darling?”
Harry swung his legs out of bed and thrust his feet into his slippers. “I don’t know.”
Before she was fully awake he was on his way down the cramped, twisted staircase.
The sitting-room was dark. The outline of the window was uneven, brightest at the corner where Mad Peter had torn the curtain away.
Framed in the opening was a blackened face, distorted into the grimace of a gargoyle by the thick old-fashioned glass and the treacherous shadows. It mouthed hideously and then fell away.
Harry stopped at the foot of the stairs. An attack on human enemies was one thing. A clash with hideous supernatural powers was quite another.
He swore under his breath and stalked towards the door. It was time to put a stop once and for all to these fears and fancies. He opened the door and looked out.
A crumpled shape sagged against the wall. The sound of its breathing was that of an animal in agony. Harry approached, ready for anything—but not ready for the black, distorted face which was only just recognizable as that of Mad Peter.
He put an arm under the man’s shoulders and supported him, coaxing him away from the wall. Peter lurched against him and was clearly on the verge of collapse. Harry took his weight and shuffled back to the door.
Valerie was on her way downstairs. She reached the bottom step and peered at them in the gloom.
“Who is it?”
“Our guest,” said Harry curtly. “Or what’s left of him. The lamp—quickly!”
As the light spread along the wick and flared up, Valerie let out a scream. Then she put the lamp glass on and made herself look at Mad Peter’s face.
Harry lowered him into a chair, but Peter went limp. There was no strength left in his limbs. His face was swollen into a grotesque, blackened mask, and dry foam flecked his lips.
Harry tore open the collar that seemed to be throttling the man, but the only result was a quick, violent convulsion. Peter’s eyes, lost in the twisted parody of a face, opened for one moment. A grating sound came from his throat; then there was another convulsion and he sagged forward.
Harry said: “He’s dead.”
“No.” Valerie went down on her knees, trying to look into Peter’s tortured face. “Look . . .”
Peter was struggling to say something. “Doctor . . . Doctor . . .”
“Yes.” Harry stood back. “I’ll fetch a doctor.”
Peter’s hand groped out towards him. “Franklyn,” he croaked. “Doctor . . . Franklyn.”
“That’s the man who lives close to us,” said Valerie. “He . . . dropped in while you were in the village. Said we were neighbors.”
“Where?” Harry was reaching for his top-coat from behind the door.
“The big house at the back—that’s all I got from him. There can’t be all that many big houses.”
Harry went out.
The house was easy to find. He struck up the slope at the back of the cottage and went through a small plantation of trees. The winds of the years had bent the trees so that they all stooped in one direction, tired of being beaten and thrashed about. When he emerged he found himself facing a large square building which could well have been the local manor. If it had once known great days, they had ended long ago: a tangle of creepers grabbed at Harry’s ankles as he made his way through the grounds, and the driveway was overgrown with weeds.
It was not surprising that at this hour of the night—or, rather, morning—there should be no lights shining from any of the windows. Yet the house, shrouded as it was in darkness, gave Harry the impression of being awake—secretly, mysteriously throbbing with the pulse of a strange life of its own.
He was getting far too imaginative. He strode up to the front door and seized the ornate knocker.
His touch jolted the door and it swung slowly inwards.
Startled, he ventured in.
One lamp burned dimly at the foot of a wide staircase. Otherwise the place was as still as the grave. But warmer, he thought immediately, than any grave. It was stifling in here. He wondered that anyone could bear to live in such an atmosphere. It was as though a great fire raged below the house in some hellish cellar.
“Doctor Franklyn!” He waited for the echoes to die away up the stairs, then called again. “Doctor Franklyn!”
There was no response. He waited, then crossed the hall and opened the first door on his left. The room was in darkness, the furniture ghostly in what little light seeped through. Harry went back to the foot of the staircase and shouted again. When there was still no reply, his inclination was to turn and storm out of the place. But he thought of Mad Peter’s contorted features—and the memory drove him on up the stairs.
A voice rang out behind him. “Where the devil do you think you’re going?”
Harry turned on the stair. A dark, saturnine man was staring up at him from the hall. The peremptory tone made it clear that this
must be the owner of the house. Relief flooded through Harry as he descended quickly to the hall again.
“There’s a man dying at my cottage. Could you come at once.”
“What is it to me?”
Harry was staggered. The sombre features of the man were impassive. It was impossible to believe that he could have grasped what Harry had just said.
“Look,” Harry tried again, “perhaps I didn’t make myself clear—”
“You made yourself perfectly clear, Mr. Spalding. There is a man dying at your cottage. And I repeat: what has that to do with me?”
“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m a doctor . . . but not of medicine.”
This was something which had not crossed Harry’s mind. He let out a groan of despair.
Doctor Franklyn pursed his lips as though death were somehow a grim joke which, in his own embittered way, he rather enjoyed discussing. “I am a doctor of theology,” he said with a precise, almost prim enunciation. “I fear I can be of little use to you in your trouble.”
Harry was at a loss. He could not go back to the cottage having achieved nothing. He needed help—he was a man of action, not a healer or a comforter. It was unthinkable that Franklyn, if a doctor of theology, should be indifferent to the agonies of a fellow human being.
He pleaded: “Could you just come and have a look? I’d appreciate your advice. We’re new here, I know nothing of medicine . . . and I don’t know who to ask for assistance in this neighborhood.”
Franklyn stood like an implacable judge of human souls and human conduct, incorruptibly weighing one decision against another. He was clearly not to be hurried—and yet, Harry observed, in spite of the bleak manner he tried to preserve, he was breathing rather heavily. And where had he been at this time of night: what had he been doing before he came into the hall behind Harry and challenged him; was he still winded from some mad dash across the countryside? The calm surface was only a veneer.
Harry wiped his brow. The heat of the place, large as the hall was, began to tell on him. He was tired and dizzy.
“Very well,” said Franklyn at last. “But you must clearly understand that my knowledge is limited also.”
