by John Wyndham
The house had retired for the night before Rachel came through again.
'We're going home, mother and me,' she told us. 'Anne's turned everyone out, and she's alone there now. Mother wanted to stay, but Anne is beside herself and hysterical. She made them go. They were afraid she'd be worse if they insisted on staying. She's told Mother she knows who's responsible for Alan's death, but she wouldn't name anybody.'
'You do think she means us? After all, it is possible that Alan may have had some bitter quarrel of his own that we know nothing about,' Michael suggested.
Rachel was more than dubious. 'If it were only that, she'd surely have let me in. She wouldn't have screamed at me to go away,' she pointed out. 'I'll go over early in the morning, and see if she's changed her mind.'
With that we had to be content for the moment. We could relax a little for a few hours at least.
Rachel told us later what happened the following morning.
She had got up an hour after dawn and made her way across the fields to Anne's house. When she reached it she had hesitated a little, reluctant to face the possibility of the same sort of screaming repulse that she had suffered the previous day. However, it was useless simply to stand there looking at the house; she plucked up courage and raised the knocker. The sound of it echoed inside and she waited. There was no result.
She tried the knocker again, more decisively. Still no one answered.
Rachel became alarmed. She hammered the knocker vigorously and stood listening. Then slowly and apprehensively she lowered her hand from the knocker, and went over to the house of the neighbour who had been with Anne the previous day.
With one of the logs from the woodpile they pushed in a window, and then climbed inside. They found Anne upstairs in her bedroom, hanging from a beam.
They took her down, between them, and laid her on the bed. They were too late by some hours to help her. The neighbour covered her with a sheet.
To Rachel it was all unreal. She was dazed. The neighbour took her by the arm to lead her out. As they were leaving she noticed a folded sheet of paper lying on the table. She picked it up.
'This'll be for you, or maybe your parents,' she said, putting it into Rachel's hand.
Rachel looked at it dully, reading the inscription on the outside.
'But it's not —' she began automatically.
Then she checked herself, and pretended to look at it more closely, as it occurred to her that the woman could not read.
'Oh, I see — yes, I'll give it to them,' she said, and slipped into the front of her dress the message that was addressed neither to herself, nor to her parents, but to the inspector.
The neighbour's husband drove her home. She broke the news to her parents. Then, alone in her room, the one that Anne had shared with her before she had married, she read the letter.
It denounced all of us, including Rachel herself, and even Petra. It accused us collectively of planning Alan's murder, and one of us, unspecified, of carrying it out.
Rachel read it through twice, and then carefully burnt it.
The tension eased for the rest of us after a day or two. Anne's suicide was a tragedy, but no one saw any mystery about it. A young wife, pregnant with her first child, thrown off her mental balance by the shock of losing her husband in such circumstances; it was a lamentable result, but understandable.
It was Alan's death that remained unattributable to anyone, and as much of a mystery to us as to the rest. Inquiries had revealed several persons who had a grudge against him, but none with a strong enough motive for murder, nor any likely suspect who could not convincingly account for himself at the time when Alan must have been killed.
Old William Tay acknowledged the arrow to be one of his making, but then, most of the arrows in the district were of his making. It was not a competition shaft, or identifiable in any way; just a plain everyday hunting arrow such as might be found by the dozen in any house. People gossiped, of course, and speculated. From somewhere came a rumour that Anne was less devoted than had been supposed, that for the last few weeks she had seemed to be afraid of him. To the great distress of her parents it grew into a rumour that she had let fly the arrow herself, and then committed suicide out of either remorse or the fear of being found out. But that, too, died away when, again, no sufficiently strong motive could be discovered. In a few weeks speculation found other topics. The mystery was written off as unsolvable — it might even have been an accident which the culprit dared not acknowledge. . . .
We had kept our ears wide open for any hint of guesswork or supposition that might lead attention towards us, but there was none at all, and as the interest declined we were able to relax.
But although we felt less anxiety than we had at any time for nearly a year, an underlying effect remained, a sense of warning, with a sharpened awareness that we were set apart, with the safety of all of us lying in the hands of each.
We were grieved for Anne, but the grief was made less sharp by the feeling that we had really lost her some time before, and it was only Michael who did not seem to share in the lightening of anxiety. He said:
'One of us has been found not strong enough...'
11
The spring inspections that year were propitious. Only two fields in the whole district were on the first cleansing schedule, and neither of them belonged to my father, or to half-uncle Angus. The two previous years had been so bad that people who had hesitated during the first to dispose of stock with a tendency to produce deviational offspring had killed them off in the second, with the result that the normality-rate was high on that side, too. Moreover, the encouraging trend was maintained. It put new heart into people, they became more neighbourly and cheerful. By the end of May there were quite a lot of bets laid that the deviation figures were going to touch a record low. Even Old Jacob had to admit that divine displeasure was in abeyance for the time being. 'Merciful, the Lord is,' he said, with a touch of disapproval. 'Giving 'em one last chance. Let's hope they mend their ways, or it'll be bad for all of us next year. Still time for plenty to go wrong this year, for the matter of that.'
There was, however, no sign of a falling-off. The later vegetables showed nearly as high a degree of orthodoxy as the field-crops. The weather, too, looked set to give a good harvest, and the inspector spent so much of his time sitting quietly in his office that he became almost popular.
For us, as for everyone else, it looked like being a serene, if industrious, summer, and possibly it would have been so, but for Petra.
It was one day early in June that, inspired apparently by a feeling for adventure, she did two things she knew to be forbidden. First, although she was alone, she rode her pony off our own land; and, secondly, she was not content to keep to the open country, but went exploring in the woods.
The woods about Waknuk are, as I have said, considered fairly safe, but it does not do to count on that. Wild cats will seldom attack unless desperate; they prefer to run away. Nevertheless, it is unwise to go into the woods without a weapon of some kind, for it is possible for larger creatures to work their way down the necks of forest which thrust out of the Fringes, almost clear across Wild Country in some places, and then slink from one tract of woodland to another.
Petra's call came as suddenly and unexpectedly as before. Though it did not have the violent, compulsive panic which it had carried last time, it was intense; the degree of distress and anxiety was enough to be highly uncomfortable at the receiving end. Furthermore, the child had no control at all. She simply radiated an emotion which blotted out everything else with a great, amorphous splodge.
I tried to get through to the others to tell them I'd attend to it, but I couldn't make contact even with Rosalind. A blotting like that is hard to describe: something like being unable to make oneself heard against a loud noise, but also something like trying to see through a fog. To make it worse, it gave no picture or hint of the cause: it was — this attempt to explain one sense in terms of others is bound to b
e misleading, but one might say it was something like a wordless yell of protest. Just a reflex emotion, no thought, or control: I doubted even if she knew she was doing it at all. It was instinctive.... All I could tell was that it was a distress signal, and coming from some distance away....
I ran from the forge where I was working, and got the gun — the one that always hung just inside the house door, ready charged and primed for an emergency. In a couple of minutes I had one of the horses saddled-up, and was away on it. One thing as definite about the call as its quality was its direction. Once I was out on the green lane I thumped my heels and was off at a gallop towards the West Woods.
If Petra had only let up on that overpowering distress-pattern of hers for just a few minutes — long enough for the rest of us to get in touch with one another — the consequences would have been quite different — indeed, there might have been no consequences at all. But she did not. She kept it up, like a screen, and there was nothing one could do but make for the source of it as quickly as possible.
Some of the going wasn't good. I took a tumble at one point, and lost more time catching the horse again. Once in the woods the ground was harder, for the track was kept clear and fairly well used to save a considerable circuit. I held on along it until I realized I had overshot. The undergrowth was too thick to allow of a direct line, so I had to turn back and hunt for another track in the right direction. There was no trouble about the direction itself; not for a moment did Petra let up. At last I found a path, a narrow, frustratingly winding affair overhung by branches beneath which I had to crouch as the horse thrust its way along, but its general trend was right. At last the ground became clearer and I could choose my own way. A quarter of a mile farther on I pushed through more undergrowth and reached an open glade.
Petra herself I did not see at first. It was her pony that caught my attention. It was lying on the far side of the glade, with its throat torn open. Working at it, ripping flesh from its haunch with such single-minded intent that it had not heard my approach, was as deviational a creature as I had seen.
The animal was a reddish-brown, dappled with both yellow and darker brown spots. Its huge pad-like feet were covered with mops of fur, matted with blood now on the forepaws, and showing long, curved claws. Fur hung from the tail, too, in a way that made it look like a huge plume. The face was round, with eyes like yellow glass. The ears were wide set and drooping, the nose almost retroussé. Two large incisors projected downwards over the lower jaw, and it was using these, as well as the claws, to tear at the pony.
I started to unsling the gun from my back. The movement caught its attention. It turned its head and crouched motionless, glaring at me, with the blood glistening on the lower half of its face. Its tail rose, and waved gently from side to side. I cocked the gun and was in the act of raising it when an arrow took the creature in the throat. It leapt, writhing into the air and landed on all fours, facing me still, with its yellow eyes glaring. My horse took fright and reared, and my gun exploded into the air, but before the creature could spring two more arrows took it, one in the hindquarters, the other in the head. It stood stock-still for a moment, and then rolled over.
Rosalind rode into the glade from my right, her bow still in her hand. Michael appeared from the other side, a fresh arrow already on his string, and his eyes fixed on the creature, making sure about it. Even though we were so close to one another, we were close to Petra, too, and she was still swamping us.
'Where is she?' Rosalind asked in words.
We looked round and then spotted the small figure twelve feet up a young tree. She was sitting in a fork and clinging round the trunk with both arms. Rosalind rode under the tree and told her it was safe to come down. Petra went on clinging, she seemed unable to let go, or to move. I dismounted, climbed the tree and helped her down until Rosalind could reach up and take her. Rosalind seated her astride her saddle in front of her, and tried to soothe her, but Petra was looking down at her own dead pony. Her distress was, if anything, intensified.
'We must stop this,' I said to Rosalind. 'She'll be bringing all the others here.'
Michael, assured that the creature was really dead, joined us. He looked at Petra, worriedly.
'She's no idea she's doing it. It's not intelligent; she's sort of howling with fright inside. It'd be better for her to howl outwardly. Let's start by getting her where she can't see her pony.'
We moved off a little, round a screen of bushes. Michael spoke to her quietly, trying to encourage her. She did not seem to understand, and there was no weakening of her distress-pattern.
'Perhaps if we were all to try the same thought-pattern on her simultaneously,' I suggested. 'Soothing-sympathizing-relaxing. Ready?'
We tried, for a full fifteen seconds. There was just a momentary check in Petra's distress, then it crowded us down again.
'No good,' said Rosalind, and let up.
The three of us regarded her helplessly. The pattern was a little changed; the incisiveness of alarm had receded, but the bewilderment and distress were still overwhelming. She began to cry. Rosalind put an arm round her and held her close to her.
'Let her have it out. It'll relax the tension,' said Michael.
While we were waiting for her to calm down, the thing that I had been afraid of happened. Rachel came riding out of the trees; a moment later a boy rode in from the other side. I'd never seen him until now, but I knew he must be Mark.
We had never met as a group before. It was one of the things that we had known would be unsafe. It was almost certain that the other two girls would be somewhere on the way, too, to complete a gathering that we had decided must never happen.
Hurriedly, we explained in words what had occurred. We urged them to get away and disperse as soon as possible so that they would not be seen together, Michael, too. Rosalind and I would stay with Petra and do our best to calm her.
The three of them appreciated the situation without argument. A moment later they left us, riding off in different directions.
We went on trying to comfort and soothe Petra, with little success.
Some ten minutes later the two girls, Sally and Katherine, came pushing their way through the bushes. They, too, were on horseback, and with their bows strung. We had hoped that one of the others might have met them and turned them back, but clearly they had approached by a different route.
They came closer, staring incredulously at Petra. We explained all over again, in words, and advised them to go away. They were about to, in the act of turning their horses, when a large man on a bay mare thrust out of the trees in the open.
He reined in, and sat looking at us.
'What's going on here?' he demanded, with suspicion in his tone.
He was a stranger to me, and I did not care for the look of him. I asked what one usually asked of strangers. Impatiently he pulled out his identity tag, with the current year's punch-mark on it. It was established that we were neither of us outlaws.
'What's all this?' he repeated.
The temptation was to tell him to mind his own damned business, but I thought it more tactful in the circumstances to be placatory. I explained that my sister's pony had been attacked, and that we had answered her calls for help. He wasn't willing to take that at its face value. He looked at me steadily, and then turned to regard Sally and Katherine.
'Maybe. But what brought you two here in such a hurry?' he asked them.
'Naturally we came when we heard the child calling,' Sally told him.
'I was right behind you, and I heard no calling,' he said.
Sally and Katherine looked at one another. Sally shrugged.
'We did,' she told him shortly.
It seemed about time I took a hand.
'I'd have thought everyone for miles around would have heard it,' I said. 'The pony was screaming, too, poor little brute.'
I led him round the clump of bushes and showed him the savaged pony and the dead creature. He looked surprised, as if he'd not expe
cted that evidence, but he wasn't altogether appeased. He demanded to see Rosalind's and Petra's tags.
'What's this all about?' I asked in my turn.
'You didn't know that the Fringes have got spies out?' he said.
'I didn't,' I told him. 'Anyway, do we look like Fringes people?'
He ignored the question. 'Well, they have. There's an instruction to watch for them. There's trouble working up, and the clearer you keep of the woods, the less likely you are to meet it before we all do.'
He still was not satisfied. He turned to look at the pony again, then at Sally.
'I'd say it's near half an hour since that pony did any screaming. How did you two manage to come straight to this spot?'
Sally's eyes widened a little.
'Well, this was the direction it came from, and then when we got nearer we heard the little girl screaming,' she said simply.
'And very good it was of you to follow it up,' I put in. 'You would have saved her life by doing it if we hadn't happened to be a little nearer. It's all over now, and luckily she wasn't hurt. But she's had a nasty fright and I'd better get her home. Thank you both for wanting to help.'
They took that up all right. They congratulated us on Petra's escape, hoped she would soon get over the shock, and then rode off. The man lingered. He still seemed dissatisfied and a little puzzled. There was, however, nothing for him to take a firm hold of. Presently he gave the three of us a long, searching stare, looking as if he were about to say something more, but he changed his mind. Finally he repeated his advice to keep out of the woods, and then rode off in the wake of the other two. We watched him disappear among the trees.
