“I see,” said Vickery. “And what if you aren't there when we come?”
“Then it will be up to you two to find out what's happened to me,” Thunstone answered him, “and if you have to do that, get hold of a young constable there by the name of Dymock, and maybe he'll get more police help if he thinks it's needed.”
Spayte drained the last drops in his mug. “You talk about this Ensley man of yours and how he can be mysterious. I must say that you've learned the trick from him, learned it very well indeed. Very good, Thunstone, we'll see you sometime Monday morning, I hope.”
“I hope,” Thunstone echoed him.
They left the Friend at Hand. Spayte headed for his office at the university and Vickery took the underground with Thunstone to see him off at the bus terminal.
The ride to Claines was uneventful. Thunstone occupied his time with jotting down in his notebook some of the things his friends had said at lunch. He pondered the adventure of the Englishwomen at the Trianon gardens as summarized by Vickery, wished he had their book to read, and promised himself to get hold of it as soon as possible.
He got off the bus at the Moonraven parking lot at some time after four o’clock and crossed to Mrs. Fothergill’s. He entered his room, and had a sense of familiarity there, as though that had been his living quarters for much longer than three days. The bed had not been disturbed. He pulled back the coverlet and the sheet and saw that the spear lay exactly as he had left it. He took it out and examined it thoroughly.
The haft, he decided, was of ash, and it was as straight as a measuring rod. The point was beautifully chipped to a tapering point, perfectly symmetrical, with toothed edges on both sides of the blade. And the lashing was of stout sinew, of what animal Thunstone could not decide. He hefted the weapon at the balance, wondering how far his unskilled effort could send it.
One thing was certain; it looked new, looked recently and knowledgeably made. Nothing about it suggested a hundred centuries of age. If he showed it to Spayte or Vickery, it would hardly convince them.
Again he made it up in his bed, and went out again.
Mrs. Fothergill met him in the lower hall. She wore a dress the color of daffodils. “So you’re back from London after so short a trip; Mr. Hawes said you were going there. On business, I daresay.”
“I went to talk to a couple of my friends there,” said Thunstone, “and I told them some things about Claines that interested them. They said they might come here for a visit, and I recommended your house to them.”
“Thank you so much. Any friends of yours would be entirely welcome here.” She smiled again. “By the way, Mr. Thunstone, I thought I’d invite you to take dinner with me after church service tomorrow.”
“You’re very kind, but I’m invited to Chimney Pots at noon,” said Thunstone, rather surprised that one small fact about him was unknown throughout Claines.
“Oh, ah,” she said. “If you’ll be with Mr. Ensley at noon, might we make it Sunday night supper here, then?”
“Thank you, yes; I’ll be with you at supper.”
“Just some simple thing, it will be. Pd planned a ham and veal pie; would that suit you?”
“I’ll look forward to it,” he said. “Sam Weller liked ham and veal pie, as I remember.”
“Who? Oh, Sam Weller. In that Pickwick book, isn’t he? Yes. Then I’ll expect you, Mr. Thunstone.”
He bowed and she simpered. He crossed the street again and walked as far as the post office. Dymock stood in front and greeted him with: “Back from London, I see, Mr. Thunstone.”
“News of my comings and goings does seem to get around,” said Thunstone.
“In a place no larger than Claines, everyone knows all about everyone else, and imagines the rest. And you, sir, an American stranger going here and there, are more or less the topic of the day. London, eh? Great place, that. I hope to be there some day.”
“With Scotland Yard,” ventured Thunstone.
“Yes, sir, if I’m so fortunate and they decide to want me. By the way, sir, have you seen Connie Bailey about?”
“No, not since I got back from London. Perhaps she’s somewhere about Mrs. Fothergill’s.”
“Not there,” said Dymock. “I called around at the back door there not long ago, and she wasn’t in.”
“Might she be somewhere in the open, perhaps gathering the herbs she uses in her cures and charms?” Thunstone suggested.
“If so, I hope she didn’t go up on Sweepside,” said Dymock.
“I doubt if she would, considering that Gram Ensley warned her away pretty sharply,” said Thunstone.
“I wasn’t thinking of Mr. Ensley in particular. I say, see here, Mr. Thunstone,” and Dymock swung around to face him. “I think I can flatter myself that you and I have become friends of a sort. I can trust you with what some would call fantastic—ridiculous.”
“The fantastic isn’t necessarily ridiculous,” Thunstone said.
“All right, it’s this. We’re at a special time of year in Claines, when they shape Old Thunder up, and at midnight 6n the fourth day of the month—that’s your Fourth of July, tomorrow, Sunday midnight—a bunch of men turns the Dream Rock over. The thing can be uncanny for any man of imagination, but this year, this particular year, the time seems more of a time than it should. A little much, if you take my meaning.”
“I confess I don't quite,” said Thunstone.
“Just more than the usual sense of tenseness,” said Dymock. “Sir, in your place I'd be watchful and careful.”
“Thanks,” said Thunstone. “I will.”
He walked along to Ludlam's store and inside. He searched at counters until he found a display of hanks and balls of cord. Looking these over, he found one, of lean but strong plastic, with the label 100 feet. There was another of the same kind. He took the two to a man behind the counter.
“Do you have any more of these?” he asked. “One more would do me.”
“Why, yes, sir, I think we can supply you. Let me look there in the back.”
The man went through an inner door and came out with another ball of the plastic cord. “Three in all, you say, sir? Three hundred feet, that will run. Ah, let's see, the price—”
Thunstone paid it and left the store with his three balls of cord in a paper sack.
It was six o’clock, or nearly. Thunstone went to the Moonraven, where Hawes greeted him at the door and Mrs. Hawes from behind the bar. Thunstone asked her for a pint of lager and sat at a table, where the plump, smiling waitress Rosie came to say that the ordinary on Saturday was roast chicken. Thunstone asked her to bring him some, the dark meat if convenient, with whatever vegetables they had that didn't come out of a can. She whipped away with his order.
The place was fairly well filled with customers. At a table across the room sat Porrask. He caught Thunstone's eye and nodded, rather embarrassedly.
The dinner was brought and Thunstone paid for it and ate it, almost without deciding whether it was good or bad. As he was finishing, Constance Bailey came to his table and sat down.
“I thought you'd be here, Mr. Thunstone,” she said in her hushed voice.
“Will you have something?” he invited. “Shall 1 bring you a gin and bitters?”
“No, no thank you. I only want to talk.”
“Constable Dymock was looking for you a while ago. He seemed concerned about you.”
“Really?” She bowed her head shyly. “He’s a good man at his post in life; I hope he keeps his eyes and wits about him tonight and tomorrow. But what I was wondering, you went into town, and I hope you’ll let me ask you if you found out anything about—about—”
“Yes,” said Thunstone. “I had my attention directed to an interesting case of going back to a former time, and something like an attempt to rationalize it. Apparently some people, maybe only a few people, have the ability to make that trip. People like us, like you and me.”
“But why us?” she wondered.
“I don't suppose that
’s easy to answer. The point is, we've accomplished it. I’m going to try it again when it’s dark.”
“Not me,” she said, her voice trembling. “I’ll stay in my room, and 1 won’t turn off my light all night.”
“That’s just as well. I’ll do better alone. Don’t worry; I’ll keep my weather eye out.”
“I wonder,” she said, “what would happen if all the lights in Claines were to go out—if a whacking great storm or something put out the electricity and made all dark, everywhere.”
“That’s interesting to think about,” said Thunstone, “and let’s hope it doesn’t happen. But I’ll just darken my own room for the sake of the experience. Now I’ll be going.”
Back at his room upstairs in Mrs. Fothergill’s house, he made various preparations. First he brought the spear out of his bed and laid it across his knees. He took one ball of the plastic cord he had bought, loosened the end of it, and lashed the end tight to the middle of the spear’s haft. The other two balls of cord he tucked into the side pockets of his jacket. He found his pencil flashlight and clipped it into his breast pocket. He drew his silver blade from the shank of his cane and hooked the handle on his arm. Finally he sat on the edge of his bed, where he had put himself on the two previous nights. There he waited, with his thoughts for company.
It took a long time for the light to fade, but Thunstone knew how to wait. As dusk followed twilight, he turned on the electric lamp above his bed. He sat silently.
Darkness came to the window and deepened there. The late summer night had come. Thunstone put his hand to his light and turned it off, and the darkness rushed around him, too.
At once he sat on the rocky, lichen-tufted hummock. Again his room was gone from around him. He was in the open, with stars in the sky overhead, with a brisk chilliness in the dark air, with, over yonder, flickering, ruddy points of fire and a distant mutter of sound.
CHAPTER 11
Again Thunstone examined the spear in his hand, tested the spring of the haft, examined the hard knot with which he had made it fast to the cord. Then he groped to find a crevice in the rock on which he sat, pushed the stone point well into the crevice, and bore down with all his strength. When he was sure that the head of the spear had driven well in and was firmly lodged in the rock, he stood up, holding the ball of cord in his left hand, his sword in his right.
He took a careful step, two steps more, feeling his way with his feet on the dark, tangled turf. As he moved away from the lump of rock which was his sole point of reference, he unrolled the line, loop by loop of it. The sky above his head was strewn with stars in patterns he knew. The air had a chilly bite to it.
Up ahead there, the noise grew greater, seemed to be of voices raised in chorus. There was a definite melody to them. Lights shone at that place, but faint ones, as of several very small fires. The darkness everywhere else was deep, it was oppressive. He peered to see what was yonder, at a distance perhaps like that of Chimney Pots in the Claines he knew.
No, not so much firelight there as he had seemed to see the night before. What light there was picked out human figures, a stirring group of them, as many, perhaps, as twenty. They chanted, or at least a sound like a measured chant came from them. Thunstone kept paying out his cord as he stole along, doing his best to keep it from slackening or tangling. Now the ball had rolled away to its end. He had walked a hundred feet from his rocky hummock. He stood with his blade hung by its crooked handle to one forearm. He took a fresh ball of cord from one of his side pockets, picked an end free and knotted it securely to the end of the cord he had already paid out. Then he moved forward again.
Maybe he was being a fool. Leslie Spayte would call him one, if Spayte should ever come to believe this adventure of his. Yet, Thunstone argued to himself, fools were needed to take the unnecessary chances—the first explorers risking their lives in voyages on unknown seas, the first men to dare to fly into unknown space. And time here became space, that was what Vickery had said, bringing Einstein and Dunne into it.
Standing still for a moment, he gazed to his right at the dimly defined expanse of Sweepside. Upon its surface lay Old Thunder, the tracery of the figure showing palely as though with a light of its own. Constance Bailey had said something about that night before last, about Old Thunder “shining like.” Thunstone wondered if the exposed chalk could have a quality of phosphorescence, or if the light of the stars was reflected. He looked at Old Thunder and felt that Old Thunder looked at him.
He advanced again, step by careful step, over grassy ground that was strange, forbidding, under his feet.
The length of that first paid-out stretch of cord must have taken him well away from what, in the time he knew, would be an upper room in Mrs. Fothergiirs house. By now he was walking over grass- tufted ground, where the neighboring cottages would stand someday —where they already stood, in that other extension of time. How could he remember those cottages when, here in this now, they had not yet been built? The matter took thinking about, and did he have time to think? Time here, in this here, this now? He doubted it. He walked on, sliding his feet to be sure of where they held to the ground.
It took him almost no time at all to reach the end of his second hundred feet of cord. He spliced on the third ball, and looked back the way he had come. Nothing showed there in the heavy night. No sign of where his journey had begun, or of the place to which he must return to be safe again.
More slowly he resumed his approach toward the fires and the people, the creatures that moved and chanted there. His three hundred feet of line would never bring him close, but he could see much more clearly now. The people danced, he thought, danced naked. From the point he had reached, he could tell which dancers were male, which female, except for one figure. That one stood motionless in the midst of the dancers, stood head and shoulders above them. It looked blotched or dappled. Thunstone thought it had horns, perhaps a headdress of horns.
As he stood and strained his eyes to see, feet trampled nearer at hand. Shapes came toward him, three of them. They moved fast, almost at a run.
It had been that way the night before. Perhaps these primitive celebrants kept outlying sentinels, to guard whatever ritual was performed there in the glow of the fires. Thunstone watched them as they approached him purposefully. He tucked the cord into his waistband and shifted the blade to his right hand. He held it saber fashion, fingers clasped around the hilt, thumb lying snug at the top. As the three closed in upon him, he advanced his silver point.
"Good evening/' he said.
One of the trio sprang ahead of its companions. It was a stocky figure in some sort of fur tunic, with a great shock of hair to crown its head. One hand flung up an ax or perhaps a stone-headed club, ready to deal a sweeping downward blow. Thunstone chose the exact second to slide his right foot forward and extend his arm in a lunge, and the oncoming body spitted itself on his blade. He heard a strangled cry and saw the thing go stumbling down in the darkness. As it sank, he cleared his weapon and fell on guard to face the others.
They had pressed so close together in their charge that their companion's falling body jostled them, drove them staggering apart. They paused, for only a breath's space. Then the one to Thunstone's left emitted a wordless roar and thrust with a spear held in both hands.
Thunstone slapped the weapon aside with his left forearm. As the spear drove past him, he extended his own point toward the center of an oncoming body clad in some sort of shaggy hide. He felt it go home, felt it grate on a rib as it sank deep into the chest. Then another of his assailants was down, and the third fell away, retreated half a dozen paces.
“You’re biting off more than you can chew,” Thunstone addressed him and took time to try to see this survivor.
The starlight gave him some notion of a rangy shape, bare-armed, bare-legged, with a rude garment covering the chest and loins. That garment was made of a pelt, roughly fitted like the clothes of the others, possibly from some sort of heavy-haired bull, possibly even f
rom a bear. The feet seemed to wear rude buskins, also shaggy and extending halfway up to the knee. Staring eyes twinkled, eyes that in a better light might show pale and icy. The face below them had a frill of beard, not greatly different from that of Albert Porrask. One hand lifted a spear, but the spear wavered indecisively.
All this Thunstone saw in an instant.
“Afraid, are you?” Thunstone taunted. “Then you have a grain of sense, after all. Gram Ensley and I were agreeing that your generation wasn’t altogether senseless.”
Again he gathered his cord in his left hand, sword still raised and ready. He stole forward, right foot sliding first, then the left coming up behind, then the right foot again, the fencer’s half-shuffling advance. The other stayed no longer. He whipped around and ran swiftly, at the same time shouting at the top of his lungs. He was using words; he had language of a sort.
Another loud shout answered from the group around the fire, and by the light there Thunstone could see half a dozen naked figures pull away and start toward him.
He, too, waited no longer, but turned back the way he had come. He followed his cord, hand after hand, along its slim length. Behind him rose a chorus of voices, with menace in them. He quickened his pace as much as he could. The reinforcing group was after him, no doubt about that He thought for a moment of turning to face whatever attack might come; he wanted to turn and face it, but knew that that would be utter rashness and bravado. He continued his retreat as fast as he could run the line through his hands.
The noise behind him grew ever louder. Voices bellowed in hot fury, feet stamped. They saw him, they were angry, and, as he guessed, they were gaining. But then, thank God, he was at his rocky hummock, where the spear stood upright.
At last he took time for a glance back. On the night grass several of the group had stopped, bent down to look at Something, undoubtedly at the bodies of the two Thunstone had stabbed and killed. The others ran toward him. He yanked the spear from its lodgment in the split rock, tucked it under his arm with his blade, and from his pocket snatched the pencil flashlight. He gazed at his pursuers, close at hand, weapons at the ready.
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