Wildfire at Midnight

by Mary Stewart

  I shivered. ‘Don’t you think we ought to go back, Mr. Macrae? I think I ought to give the brooch to the Inspector straight away.’

  He got up. ‘It’s as you wish, mistress. Shall I take down the rods, then?’

  I hesitated. Perhaps it was only the eeriness of the mist-wrapped glen, but, suddenly, violently, I wanted to be gone. I could escape this thing no longer; I must face my problem now, and take whatever uneasy peace was left to me.

  ‘I think we will go back,’ I said at length. ‘I know I ought to go and see the Inspector, and it isn’t right to put it off any more. And I – I don’t like the mist.’

  ‘We can’t lose our way along the river bank even in this. Don’t worry your head about the mist. Just bide still a minute while I get my rod, then we’ll get away back.’

  He turned down-river, and before he had gone ten yards, was swallowed in the mist. I stubbed out my cigarette on the now chilly stone, and watched the grey swirl where he had disappeared. The obliterating cloud pressed closer, on heather, on rock, on the chuckling water.

  The dipper warned me first. It burst from under the fog, fleeing upstream with a rattle of alarm-notes that made my nerves jump and tingle.

  Then through the blank wall of the mist there tore a cry. A curse. A thudding, gasping noise, and the sickening sound of a blow. And a sharp yell from Dougal.

  ‘Lassie! Run!’

  Then the horrible sound of harsh breath choking, rasping in a crushed throat; another thud; and silence.

  20

  The Blasted Heath

  Of course I screamed. The sound was like a bright knife of panic, slashing at the mist. But the grey swirls deadened it; then they were all round me, clawing and fingering at me, as I stumbled forward towards where Dougal’s voice had been.

  I am not brave. I was horribly frightened, with a chill and nauseating terror. But I don’t think anybody normal would unhesitatingly run away if they heard a friend being attacked near by.

  So I leaped forward, only to falter and trip before I had gone five yards, so blinding now was the mist that shrouded the moor. Even the edge of the river was invisible, and a hasty step could result in a broken ankle, or, at best, a plunge into the rock-ridden swirl of waters. I put out my hands, foolishly, gropingly, as if they could pull aside the pale blanket of the mist. I plunged another four yards into it, then I stepped on nothing, and went hurtling down a bank to land on my knees in deep heather.

  It was only then that I noticed how complete was the silence. The sounds of the struggle had ceased. Even the river, cut off from me by the bank, ran muted under the mist. I crouched there, shaken and terrified, clutching the wet heather-stems, and straining with wide, blind eyes into the blankness around me. I found I was turning my head from side to side with a blind weaving motion, like a new-born beast scenting the air. The mist pressed close, the bewildering, sense-blotting nothingness of the mist, so that I no longer knew which way the river ran, or where I had heard the men fighting, or – where the murderer might, now, be supposed to be.

  Then I heard him breathing.

  There was a soft step; another. Water-drops spattered off the heather; the stiff sedge rustled, and was still. Silence.

  He had been ahead of me, to the right. Of that I was certain, but how near. . .?

  The breathing surely came from behind me now. My head jerked round on neck-muscles as tight and dry as rope. I could feel my eyes straining wider, my mouth slackening in panic. My hands tightened on the heather-stems till I thought he must hear the bones cracking.

  And now the breathing had stopped. Somewhere, the river poured its unheeding waters along under the peat-banks. Behind me? Before? To the right? I found I could no longer trust my senses, and, on the heels of that betrayal, panic came.

  All at once the mist was full of noises: the rustle of heather was the murderer’s breathing, the thud of my own frightened heart his footstep; the surging of blood in my temples blended with the rush of the invisible river, eddying, wavering, distorted by the dizzying mist into the very stuff of terror . . .

  There was salt on my tongue; blood. My lips throbbed painfully where I had bitten it, but the pain had checked the panic. I flattened myself in the long heather, closed my eyes, and listened.

  He was there: there had been no illusion about that. He was fairly close, moving towards me, but a little way to one side, between me and the river. I could hear the water now, quite clearly, some few yards away on the right. I went lower in the heather, flat in my form like a hunted animal, glad now of the bewildering mist which was the friend of the hunted more than of the hunter. I had only to keep still; perhaps, when he had passed me, I could break cover and run, and . . .

  He was level with me now, between me and the river. His breathing was shallow, rapid, excited. He stopped.

  Then, further away, down along the river-bank, I heard something else. Footsteps, heavy, uncertain footsteps that thudded on heather and then scraped on rock. Dougal Macrae’s voice called, thickly: ‘Lassie . . . lassie, are ye there?’

  A great sob of thankfulness tore at my throat, but I choked it back, wondering wildly what to do. If I answered . . . the murderer was within six yards of me, I knew. I heard his harsh indrawn breath; sensed the tensing of his muscles as he realized that he had failed to eliminate Dougal. If I called to Dougal, was there anything to save my throat from that bright butcher’s knife not twenty feet away? A knife which could despatch me in a matter of seconds, and then turn its dripping point to wait for Dougal to answer my call . . .

  But I must call . . . Not for help, but for warning. I must cry out, and tell Dougal that he is here, the killer is here, just beside me. Somehow I must cry out, and then run, run into the lovely blinding mist, away from the knife and the excited hands of the butcher coming behind me.

  And Dougal was coming. He plunged towards us, as bold and heavy as an angry bull. I was on my knees, and my mouth was gaping to shout a warning, when suddenly the murderer turned, and was running up-river like a stag. I could hear him bounding, sure as a deer, through the long heather. And Dougal heard him too. He let out a yell that was a curse, and flung himself after the escaping man. I saw him looming through the fog: I caught the gleam of a blade in his lifted fist, and I saw in his face such a white blaze of anger as to make him unrecognizable. He looked like some avenging giant out of an old myth.

  I gasped out something as he plunged past me, but he paid no heed. He brushed by me as if I were not there, and blundered on into the mist after the killer. Even as I cried, in panic: ‘Dougal!’ he vanished up-river into the fog. He must have glimpsed or heard his quarry, because my cry was drowned in a harsh eerie yell that startled the sullen heather with its pagan echoes, and sent a flock of oyster-catchers screaming up into the mist like witches.

  ‘A mhurtair! A mhich an diabhil! Aie! You bloody murthering bastard! Aie!’

  One of the birds rocketed over my head with the screech of a damned soul, the mist streaming from its wings in swaths like grey grass under the scythe.

  It vanished, and the mist swept down in its wake, and the sound of the men’s running was blotted out once more by the muffled silence.

  I turned and ran blindly in the opposite direction.

  I do not know how long that stumbling terrified flight through the heather lasted. I had succumbed finally to pure panic – mindless, senseless, sobbing panic. I was no longer frightened of the killer: reason had stayed with me just long enough to show me that he was no longer concerned with me. Attacking an unsuspecting man out of the mist was one thing: facing an armed Highlander, fighting-mad on his own ground, was quite another. No, the murderer had to lose Dougal very effectively in the fog before he dared turn back to me – and then he had to find me.

  But panic has nothing to do with reason. Reason, now, had slipped her cogs, and my brain was spinning sickeningly, uselessly, out of control. I ran and jumped and slithered, and the salt tears slid down my face with the wet mist-drops, and flicked i
nto my open mouth on to my tongue. The white mist met me like a blank wall; my hands were out like a blind man’s; the skin of my face and my palms was wincing as I thrust myself wildly against the intangible barrier. And as I ran I chattered crazily to myself: ‘No – oh no – oh no . . .’

  What brought me up, all standing, with the panic knocked out of me as at the slash of a whip, was the fact that the ground over which I blundered was shaking beneath my feet.

  Half-dazedly I peered at the tufted mosses over which I had been running. Tentatively I took another step. The ground shivered, and I backed quickly, only to feel the surface of the moor rocking like the bottom-boards of a punt.

  I stood very still.

  There was a small dreadful sound beneath my feet, as if the ground had sucked in a bubbling breath.

  21

  Slough of Despond

  My lapse from reason had cost me dearly enough. I was well out in the bog of which Roderick had once spoken, and how far out, I had, I found, no idea. Nor could I tell at all accurately from what direction I had been running when I made this last frightening discovery.

  Fear flickered its bats’ wings at me afresh, but I shook my head sharply, as if by doing so I could drive it away. I stood exactly where I was, trying to ignore the ominous trembling of the earth, and listened for the sound of the river.

  But it was of no use. The more I strained my ears, the more confused were the sounds that eddied and swung round me in the mist. I heard, faintly, the muted murmur of flowing water, but it seemed to come from every quarter at once, reflected off the banks of fog, and, over it, all the time, whispered and clucked the invisible life of the bog – small lippings, suckings, a million tiny bubbles popping, uneasy breaths . . .

  My feet were sinking. With an almost physical effort, I gathered the last rags of my self-control round me, then stepped quietly towards a tussock of heather a couple of yards away. The feel of its tough, resistant stems under my feet did much to steady my nerves, but my body was shaking uncontrollably now, and my teeth were chattering. I stood islanded on my little tump of heather, peering vainly along the ground in every direction and being met, in every direction, by the same few feet of boggy green, swimming and shifting under the treacherous mist.

  But I knew that I must move, must leave my little tuft of safety and go in some direction – any direction. I told myself that the bog was unlikely to be really dangerous, but here, again, reason was no real help. I think it was the fact of being blinded that brought panic pressing so persistently close. If I could have seen even four yards in front of me, seen where my feet were going five steps ahead, it would not have been so bad. But I should be moving blindly over this hideous shivering bog, ignorant of the real gravity of the danger; and moving, possibly, further out into a worse place . . .

  I clenched my hands into icy knots, turned in what I imagined to be the direction of the river, and walked slowly forward.

  The sheer effort of self-control needed to make me move slowly was so enormous that, mercifully, I could not think about anything else. I wanted to run: dear God, how I wanted to run! But I made myself go slowly, testing each step. Once I trod unwarily on a patch of lighter green, and went up to the knee into black mud. And by the time I had skirted the light patch, stepping warily from one moss hag to the next, I had completely lost all sense of direction again, so that, when a ghostly skeleton-shape floated out of the mist beside me, my whole body jerked like a marionette’s with fear. It was only the pale ghost of a young birch, a bone-bare branch that lay rotting on the bog: touch-wood, crumbling to decay; but in that misty morass it looked solid, and where it lay the tufted reeds were tall and dark and promised safety.

  And I drew a breath of hope. The shape that showed so insubstantial through the fog was one I had seen before. Surely Roderick and I had passed quite near a fallen birch on that first evening’s walk? It had lain on our left, not many yards away, between us and the river. I had only to remember which way it had lain in relation to our path, and I could make without delay for the safe ground.

  I trod towards it warily, trying to see it again in my mind’s eye as I had noticed it the first night. It was quite possibly not the same tree, but in the mind-annihilating swirl of mist even this frail compass was as sure as the pillar of fire in the wilderness. I stood by it, anchored by its deceptive solidity, and tried to remember, steadying myself quite deliberately with hope.

  It had been lying, roughly, north and south. Of that I felt sure. And surely I must still be to the river side of it? In which case the safe ground was beyond it, about thirty yards beyond. If I could once reach that, I would, sooner or later, find a sheep-track that would lead me down the glen, to within sound of the sea. Or I might find some trickle of running water, that would lead me safely to the river and the hotel.

  A black shape shot out of the mist at my back, and skimmed, whirring, into invisibility. A grouse. I swore at it under my breath, and quieted my hammering pulses once again. Then I stepped carefully over the birch tree and took what I thought were my bearings, straining my eyes once more against the mist.

  It was only then that I became fully conscious of something that had been tugging at the skirts of my senses for a little time. The ground was shaking. I was standing perfectly still, but the ground was shaking.

  So complete had been my absorption in my new fear that I had actually forgotten that, somewhere out in the blind world, there was a murderer looking for me with a knife . . . And here he was, moving steadily across the quaking bog.

  I dropped to my face behind the skeleton of the birch. The rushes were thick and tall. Beneath me the ground shivered and breathed. I lay frozen, this time not even frightened, simply frozen, icy, numb. I doubt if even the knife, ripping down through the mist, would have had the power to move me.

  ‘Gianetta . . .’ It was a tiny whisper, no more than a harsh breath. It could have been the breathing of the bog, the exhaling of the marsh gas in its million tiny bubbles.

  ‘Gianetta . . .’ It was nearer now. ‘Gianetta . . .’ The mist was rustling with my name. It floated in little dry whispers like falling leaves, swirling lightly down to rest on the shivering ground.

  He was moving slowly: under my body I could feel the measured vibrations of his tread. His hands would be out in front of him, groping for me: his whispering probed the silence, reaching out to trap me.

  I recognized it, of course. Oh yes, I knew him now, beyond all doubt. I knew now that my unhappy guessing had been right enough; knew now why the Inspector had pitied me; and why Alastair, four nights ago, had given me that look of unexpressed compassion.

  ‘Gianetta . . .’ There it was again, that name – the name that no one else ever called me . . . the name I had heard shouted through the darkness beside Ronald Beagle’s funeral pyre . . . His voice floated down through the mist, a little fainter now, as if he had turned his head away. ‘Gianetta, where are you? In God’s name, where are you?’

  Roderick had guessed, too, of course. I wondered, pressing my body closer to the wet ground, why he had been so sure that I, alone of all the people at Camasunary, would be unharmed.

  ‘Are you there, Gianetta? Don’t be afraid . . .’

  I don’t think I was afraid, now that I knew for certain it was Nicholas. It wasn’t that I believed, with Roderick, that, because of the past, Nicholas would never hurt me. It was just that, as that terrible whispering brought my suspicions to life and made them into truth, I didn’t care any more. Not about anything.

  ‘Gianetta . . . Gianetta . . . Gianetta . . .’ The syllables pattered down through the mist in a fantastic muttered counterpoint. I put my cold cheek down on the soggy grasses, and cried silently, while the fog wavered and whispered with my name, and its ghostly grey fingers pressed me into the marsh.

  And then he was gone. The groping voice had faded, echoed, and faded again. The quaking of the bog had ceased. A bird had slipped silently and unalarmed across the grass. He was gone.

&n
bsp; I got up stiffly, and, myself moving like a weary ghost, trudged uncaring, heedless, mindless, across the bog, away from the last mocking echo of his voice.

  And almost at once I was on firm ground, among stones and long heather. I quickened my pace instinctively. The ground was rising steadily away from the bog, and presently I found the mist was wavering and dwindling round me. I plunged up the slope at an increasing rate as my range of vision extended. The fog thinned, shrank, and ebbed away behind me.

  As suddenly as a swimmer diving up through the foam of a wave to meet the air, I burst out of the last swirl of mist into the vivid sunshine.

  22

  Cloud Cuckoo-Land

  The relief was so colossal, the change so unbelievable, that I could only stand, blinking, in the clear light of the afternoon sun. My eyes, blinded with mist, and still dazzled with crying, took several seconds to get used to the flood of light. Then I saw where I was. I had clambered a little way up the lower slope of Blaven, at a point where a great dyke of rock bisected the scree, a wall laid uphill like an enormous buttress against the upper cliffs.

  The foot of this buttress was lipped by the fog, which held the lower ground still invisible under its pale tide. The glen itself, the loch, the long Atlantic bay, all lay hidden, drowned under the mist which stretched like a still white lake from Blaven to Sgurr na Stri, from Garsven to Marsco. And out of it, on every hand, the mountains rose, blue and purple and golden-green in the sunlight, swimming above the vaporous sea like fabulous islands. Below, blind terror might grope still in the choking grey, here above, where I stood, was a new and golden world. I might have been alone in the dawn of time, watching the first mountains rear themselves out of the clouds of chaos . . .

  But I was not alone.

  Hardly had my eyes adjusted themselves to the brilliant spaciousness of my new world above the clouds, when I became aware of someone about fifty yards away. He had not seen me, but was standing near the foot of the great rock buttress, gazing past it, away from me, towards the open horizon of the south-west. It was Roderick Grant. I could see the dark-gold gleam of his hair in the sunlight.