by Cave, Hugh
On the Great House veranda he sank onto a chair and looked down over the moonlit metal roofs of the village from which he had just climbed. A nondescript cluster of peasant farmers' homes in the mountains of a Caribbean island, he thought. Until now, nothing more notable had happened there than the usual petty quarrels over wandering cows or goats. What had brought about the change?
The devil's work, as Mother Jarrett had hinted? She might believe that, if the tales about her were true. According to the people who praised her so highly, she had taught religion or proclaimed her philosophy—whatever it was she actually did—in parts of the world as far away as India and China. Certainly she was no ordinary woman.
But "the devil"? There had to be some less esoteric explanation of what was happening here, even if, as she had suggested, the word might be taken to mean something more than a mere person. There had to be something he could sink his teeth into.
The metaphor made him think of the ham again, possibly poisoned. Of the many poisonous roots, berries, leaves that grew on the plantation. He had lost donkeys to certain deadly weeds, and the poor beasts had seemed to go mad before succumbing, as though brain as well as body were affected. But would poison, however virulent, send a man in search of a shotgun in the middle of the night, then down the road half a mile to murder a youth who had never harmed him?
His head throbbed as he vainly sought answers. He watched the moonlight merge into daylight and saw a morning mist creep up the valley. Armadale had always been such a peaceful place. You could sit on this old wooden veranda with your feet propped on the railing and watch night turn into day and feel you had found your destiny. And now . . .
Startled by a sound of footfalls, he turned to see Edith Craig step from her bedroom doorway. She wore a dressing gown over pajamas, both garments the blue of the forget-me-nots in the garden. At sight of him she stopped short, as startled as he.
"Well, hello," she said. "I didn't expect to find you out here. When did you get back?"
"Back?"
"From your 4:00 A.M. walk with the gun."
"You saw me?"
She sank onto a chair beside him. "Alton did. He couldn't sleep, he said, and was standing at a window looking out at the mountains in the moonlight. When you suddenly appeared with the gun, he came and woke me." A smile made her attractive mouth even more enticing. "I really believe he thought you must be up to something, and wanted me to be a witness."
There was nothing to be gained by trying to hide the truth, Peter decided. She and her Alton were probably planning to leave, anyway. In fact, he would now be urging them to. "I was up to something," he said.
"I wish you'd be frank with me, Peter."
"You wish what?"
"You'd be honest with me. Because Alton wants me to leave here today, even if we only go to the capital and wait there for a flight out. To be truthful, he is convinced you're involved in something nasty."
Peter studied her for a few seconds. As the light improved and pushed the night back, she emerged as the most physically attractive woman he had ever known, and he already knew how he felt about her as a person. "Are you convinced of that, too?" he said. "You're not, of course, or you wouldn't be telling me this."
"I don't think you know what's going on here any more than we do, Peter."
"You're right about that, at least. But about last night, Alton is the one who's right."
"Oh?"
"I went out intending to kill someone."
"What?" she said with a gasp.
"It's true. The hypnosis—call it what you like—that got to us at the John Crow's Nest, and to me later at the river. . . All I know for sure is that a voice in my head ordered me to take the gun and go down to Bronzie Dakin's house and kill her son Gerald. I probably would have done it, too, but for Mother Jarrett. Her voice was more powerful than the one she says belongs to the devil."
Edith Craig looked at him. Finally she said, "I can't believe this, Peter. Not of you. I can't believe anything could make you want to kill someone."
"Then I hope you'll do what Alton suggests."
"What?"
"Leave here. Let me drive the two of you to the airport this morning."
"No. I intend to find out what's behind all this."
"Edith, leave. Please. I might have gone to your room with that gun!"
She could be a very stubborn person, he realized as she vigorously wagged her head and said again, "No."
"You're determined?"
"I'm determined. I have a decision to make about this property, and I'm going to make it calmly and sensibly—after we've put all this ugliness behind us."
"Then I'd better leave," Peter said.
"What?"
"Hasn't it occurred to you that I may be losing my mind?"
"Don't be ridiculous."
"Why did I go down there to kill Bronzie Dakin's son, then? Tell me. I like the boy."
"I don't know what made you do that, but you're not losing your mind. I tried to walk off that cliff, didn't I? And I know I'm not crazy."
"The point is, how do we know what I may try to do next? You or Alton might be the target."
The answer to that came unexpectedly from the drawing-room doorway, in Alton Preble's voice. "What's that about me?"
Edith and Peter both turned their heads. In the doorway, wearing a dark dressing gown over white pajamas, stood the tall, long-faced barrister from London. As he came along the veranda to a vacant chair, he said, "Hope I'm not interrupting. I heard voices out here and wondered what was going on so early in the morning." He sat. "Have you told him we want to leave today, Edith?"
She gazed straight at him. "I haven't said yet that I want to leave, you know."
Preble looked annoyed, even angry. The argument about their leaving must have been a long one, Peter speculated. Perhaps even a bitter one. These two might hold hands while walking in the garden, but they obviously were not of one mind about everything.
The barrister folded his long arms now and scowled at Edith in preparation for what promised to be a stern statement of some sort. But it was never uttered. At that moment a noise in the driveway brought Peter to his feet.
Through the tree shadows there, two obviously exhausted figures stumbled uphill toward the house, one more or less supporting the other.
Still fully dressed from his visit to Bronzie Dakin's, Peter excused himself and ran to meet them.
The less weary of the two was sturdy little Sergeant Wray, leader of the Defence Force group whose truck still stood near the carriage house. The other, seemingly at the end of his endurance, was one of Wray's men. Peter helped them up the steps and guided them to chairs. Almost at once Edith Craig appeared at his side, saying, "They need water, Peter. I'll get some."
While she was gone, Peter simply stood and waited, unwilling to press the men for an explanation of their condition. Their uniforms were dark with sweat and nearly in shreds, their shoes all but destroyed. Hands and faces had encountered enough thorns of assorted kinds to transform them into puffy red horrors.
Seemingly filled with relief at having finished their journey, the two men simply slumped forward on their chairs, arms on knees, and stared blankly at the veranda floor. They gulped down the water when Edith brought it, though.
Turning to Peter, she said, "I'd better go to the kitchen for some food, don't you think? These men look famished."
He nodded, and she disappeared again. Alton Preble rose from his chair to lean against the railing.
Peter gazed at Leslie Wray and recalled when the jaunty little sergeant had so energetically led his men up the track taken by the missing scouts. Wray at last looked up at him.
'Sorry to come to you like this, sir. We've been walking all night. Since four o'clock yesterday afternoon, in fact."
The group had left the Great House Wednesday morning, Peter reminded himself. They had planned on spending that night near Morgan Peak and going along the main ridge to Blackrock Peak on Thursday—yest
erday. "What do you mean, four o'clock? Isn't that about the time you expected to reach Blackrock?"
"Yes, sir. And we reached close to there with no problem. But then things went bad." Turning his head, Wray gazed sadly at his companion. "Look at Private Pennock here, sir. You see what's happened to him?"
Something had certainly happened to the man, Peter realized—but what? About thirty, taller than Wray, and well built, he must have been a fairly soldierly-looking fellow before his ordeal. But now, in addition to what the thorns had done to his face, there was a frightening emptiness in his eyes.
"Everything was in good order as we approached Blackrock," Wray said. "Not a thing wrong, except one man had turned an ankle and was limping. Then something really strange happened—something we were not prepared for. We were just hiking along, keeping an eye out for a helicopter supposed to have crashed somewhere near there, when the whole place filled up with fog."
"Fog?" Peter asked. "You mean a green mist?"
"Whatever. I say 'fog' because I go fishing a lot and this was like what sneaks up on you sometimes when the sea is extra calm at daybreak. But it was green, yes. Up there near Blackrock it closed around us and we could not see one another. I called out to the men to halt and stay together, but the order was disobeyed. It seems the fog did something to us like what those two scouts say happened to them, though I don't remember if they ran into any fog."
"I didn't hear it mentioned on the radio," Peter said. "But go on. This fog or mist—I've had a brush with it, too. I know what you're talking about."
"You found you couldn't think or act proper, sir?"
"Something like that. What did you do?"
"I can only say what I alone did. After the fog came at us, I couldn't see the others. It did something to my mind, I believe. I was not able to think right. Instead of continuing to yell to the men to stay together and wait for it to clear, like how I should have done, what I did was go blundering around trying to get out into the sunlight again. And I could not. No matter which way I turned, that green fog was there doing this thing to my mind as if I was drunk or going crazy."
The sergeant stopped talking and looked up. Edith had come with a tray. On it were two plates of sandwiches and two dark brown bottles of St. Alban's Strong Man Stout.
Peter placed a small table between the chairs on which Wray and his silent companion sat, and Edith put the tray on it. Murmuring "Thank you, ma'am," the sergeant filled his hands with sandwiches and began eating as though he had not seen food in days. But then he paused and, scowling at his companion, said sharply, "You don't see the food here, Paul? Eat, man!"
Peter glanced at Alton Preble. Still leaning against the veranda railing, the Englishman surveyed the scene with as little visible emotion as though he were a critic appraising a play.
The sandwiches, Peter noted, were not of ham. Edith had opened some tins of bully beef and used the local hard-dough bread and Armadale lettuce. Was she still suspicious of the ham?
"So, as I was saying, sir," Leslie Wray went on when his mouth was empty enough, "I behaved badly because of what this green fog was doing to me. At least, I hope it was the fog and not bad soldiering. Then, after I don't know how long, the fog thinned and I started calling to the men again, but only one of them answered. That was Pennock here, and when I reached him, he was wandering about the same as I had been doing, not knowing where he was. And he was looking just about like how he looks now, sir. Not in full possession of his senses, I mean."
Peter looked again at the vacant eyes of Private Paul Pennock. The man was not even very hungry, it seemed. Having taken a single corned-beef sandwich and eaten it at Wray's urging, he was again sitting there motionless, as though in a trance.
"Drink up your stout, man," Peter said.
The soldier glanced at him but did not respond.
"So I tried to find some of the others," Wray went on, sipping gratefully at his bottle of Strong Man. "But nobody answered, and I was not able to locate anyone. Then, just when I was thinking I must try to return here to the Great House with Paul before anything worse happened, we came upon the Forestry Department man from the helicopter."
He looked at Peter and slowly shook his head. "Sir, I knew that man. All the time he worked out of the Royal Gardens for the Eastern Division, he was my good friend. His wife and mine are related. Excuse me, sir." He put the stout to his mouth and emptied the bottle, then saw that his vacant-eyed companion was not drinking, and emptied that bottle as well.
"Sir. . . somebody had chopped off his head and it was lying there beside his body. Somebody had done that awful thing to my good friend Ronnie Cripp, a nice man married to my wife's cousin. Cut his head off. Hacked it off with a knife, from the looks of it . . ." Lowering his own head, staring now at the veranda floor, the little sergeant began to cry.
"What was he wearing?" Peter asked mechanically. Sometimes an idea simply would not go away.
"Huh?"
"Was he wearing a yellow shirt?"
"Yes, sir, he was. Just like a new shirt I have at home. His wife and mine, they were shopping together one day last month and bought them for us."
"Did you see the chopper?"
"No, sir. After finding Ronnie I didn't look for it, though I suppose it must have been somewhere nearby. I just decided Paul and I must get back here as fast as we could, and thank God there was a bright moon last night to make it possible. Now, what I feel I should do is go to the police station here and use the telephone to call headquarters. Could you drive me down there, do you suppose? I don't feel up to handling the truck yet."
"What about him?" Peter glanced at Pennock. "Will you need him to back you up?"
The sergeant hesitated, and then shook his head. "Let him stay here and rest, sir. He's had a hard time of it."
21
WATCHING THE JEEP GO DOWN THE PLANTATION ROAD, Edith Craig tried to sort out her feelings for the man driving it. She had never known a man like him before.
He was compassionate; his concern for Bronzie Dakin’s boy Gerald proved that. He was a quick-thinking man of action, too. Had he been any less so, she would have stepped off the cliff up there at the John Crow's Nest and would not now be here trying to analyze her feelings for him.
He had worked hard and devotedly here to make Armadale what it was. Why? Not just for the salary her father paid him; that was obvious. A man with his talents and determination could easily earn more at some other job. He really did love the place, then. As she lid. Or as she would like to.
Her glance went to Alton Preble, still leaning silently against the veranda railing. Alton did not like Armadale. That was equally obvious. He liked nothing at all about it. But he, too, was a man of compassion and courage. Anyone who had followed his career as a barrister had to be aware of that. And he loved her.
From Preble her gaze moved to the blank-eyed Defence Force man, Private Paul Pennock, and his zombielike behavior brought her back to the problems of the moment. What, dear God, was going on here at Armadale?
Think about it, she commanded herself. Put aside your feelings for Peter Sheldon and Alton Preble and think about it. Emotions have no place in this decision you have to make. Look at the facts.
Some scouts and their leader were lost in the mountains. Very well, she could accept that if these mountains were as wild as Peter said they were, and as they certainly appeared to be. It was a little hard to accept certain statements made by the two who had found their way back, but perhaps in time there would be an explanation.
Now then, one of the missing scouts was a twin who seemed somehow to be communicating with his brother in Look Up. All right. After seeing reputable doctors mistakenly operate on a twin who was not ill, she could accept that. And she could accept the downed helicopter. Helicopters were more dangerous than ordinary planes, weren't they? She had read that somewhere, or been told it. And weren't they especially dangerous in mountainous country where treacherous updrafts or something like that might be encountere
d?
But—and again she looked at Private Paul Pennock, sitting there less than ten feet from her with his eyes wide open, staring into space—what could explain the hideous beheading of the dead forestry man? Who would do such a ghastly thing? Why?
And who could explain the green mist that had caused her to attempt suicide at the John Crow's Nest, and later caused Peter to behave as he had at the river crossing?
Suddenly Alton Preble broke the silence, and she looked at him again. Since the departure of Peter and Sergeant Wray, he had been leaning there against the railing and his face had been something of a mask, betraying no emotion—as if he were in a courtroom, coolly listening to and weighing the testimony of a witness being questioned by an opponent.
Now, with his eyes narrowed and a scowl on his lips, he had straightened from his slouch and taken two steps toward the man in the chair. And he had said—or at least she thought he had said—"Are you sure of this, Pennock?"
Puzzled, Edith said, "Is he sure of what, Alton?"
"That he can take us to those missing scouts."
"Alton, I didn't hear him say that."
Preble turned his head to look at her. "You didn't?" Again he scowled at the Defence Force man. "That is what you said, isn't it?"
Private Pennock nodded.
Something was wrong, Edith decided. Until Alton had broken the silence, no one had said a word. She was certain of that. Pennock had simply sat there, gazing into space.
But she, too, was hearing something like a voice now, and it was telling her she was wrong—telling her to look at Private Pennock and pay attention to what he was saying. And he was saying . . . what was he saying?
"I will take you to where the scouts are. Yes."
"Where . . . are they?" she heard her own voice asking.
"That is not important. I will take you there."
