by Craig Rice
David turned and walked slowly up toward the half-ruined house, toward the silent fountain. The mist was fading now, becoming only a delicate, whitish haze; through it he could see the mutilated outline of the great, pale house. From behind him he could hear a faint, whispering sound in the sands as the deaf-mutes stole back to the house, following him.
He would find some way to communicate with them, and keep them at Telefair. Philip Telefair and Angeline and the Reverend Arthur Stone would be buried in the grove. The ruins of the house would be cleared away, perhaps might even be rebuilt—though surely what remained, the central portion and the new wing, would be more than enough for his needs.
Telefair belonged at last to him, he was its master, but now he wished only to keep the rest of the world away from its shores.
David paused a moment halfway through the gardens. Perhaps the injury to the little fountain might be repaired, its waters set in motion again, yet he was not sure he wished to have it done.
It had been a dream, and yet it had not been a dream. He had not murdered old Philip Telefair who had been so kind to him, and yet the little fountain in the garden was silent now. He had not torn away the earth from his father’s burial place in the grove. He had not harmed Edris—Edris whose father had been his father. He had never followed a dark winding passage down into the secret places of the earth, and yet there lay Telefair before him, half-destroyed.
It did not matter, now. It was the dream, and the dream alone that was real.
The rest was a mist, a shadow.
At the steps to the terrace he paused again, looking at the ruin before him. The old wing of Telefair lay in a heap of rubble and splintered wood.
The new wing, blackened with dust, still stood, yet it seemed to David that the very heart of the house had been destroyed.
A wind from the inlet suddenly carried the last of the shifting mist away from the house, mercilessly revealing its desolation.
“I have dreamed of houses that were as real as this,” David whispered.
As before his mind had seemed to spin backward, recalling hours and days he had passed through; now as he stood on the terrace in the early morning light, it seemed to spin ahead, showing him days and years still to come. Telefair would grow older, one more generation toward its ultimate complete destruction, and he would grow old with it, perhaps as old as Philip Telefair had lived to be, through days when the mist buried Telefair and days when the sun whitened it, nights when the Island was swimming in moonlight and nights when the sky was black with rain. And always the smooth waters of the inlet would separate it from the world beyond, leaving him to his solitude.
“Even now,” he whispered, “I do not know what was the truth of it.”
It was day. Now, seen from the terrace, the gardens of Telefair stretched before him as on that first morning on the Island, blazing with sunlight, showing colors never seen before and never to be seen again, moist and glistening, risen up at dawn from the bottom of the sea.
And yet it was a land of perpetual twilight, without sunrise or sunset, bathed in the shadow the sun could not penetrate, and that could not be seen with the eye alone.
An anguished cry rose to David’s lips, a cry of loneliness and desolation, a cry into which crowded the melancholy of all the years ahead on the Island, the emptiness of the house, the perpetual solitude. The cry died and never came to sound, as he thought, in the same instant, that there was no one to hear.
But even then he heard a quiet step behind him on the terrace; he felt a hand on his arm, cold and light.
“This will be our home,” said Laurel Stone.
About the Author
Craig Rice (1908–1957), born Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, was an American author of mystery novels and short stories described as “the Dorothy Parker of detective fiction.” In 1946, she became the first mystery writer to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Best known for her character John J. Malone, a rumpled Chicago lawyer, Craig’s writing style was both gritty and humorous. She also collaborated with mystery writer Stuart Palmer on screenplays and short stories, as well as with Ed McBain on the novel The April Robin Murders.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1942 by The Bobbs–Merrill Company
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4854-5
This edition published in 2017 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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