Strange Stories Page 14

  I peered, and there was no wood, no green patch on the map, but only the wavering line of dots advancing across contoured whiteness to the neck of yellow road where the short cut ended. But I did not reach any foolish conclusion. I simply guessed that I had strayed very badly: the map was spattered with green marks in places where I had no wish to be; and the only question was in which of these many thickets I now was. I could think of no way to find out. I was nearly lost, and this time I could not blame my father.

  The track I had been following still stretched ahead, as yet not too indistinct; and I continued to follow it. As the trees around me became yet bigger and thicker, fear came upon me; though not the death fear of that previous occasion, I felt now that I knew what was going to happen next; or, rather, I felt I knew one thing that was going to happen next, a thing which was but a small and far from central part of an obscure, inapprehensible totality. As one does on such occasions, I felt more than half outside my body. If I continued much farther, I might change into somebody else.

  But what happened was not what I expected. Suddenly I saw a flicker of light. It seemed to emerge from the left, to weave momentarily among the trees, and to disappear to the right. It was not what I expected, but it was scarcely reassuring. I wondered if it could be a will o’the wisp, a thing I had never seen, but which I understood to be connected with marshes. Next a still more prosaic possibility occurred to me, one positively hopeful: the headlight of a motor-car turning a corner. It seemed the likely answer, but my uneasiness did not perceptibly diminish.

  I struggled on, and the light came again: a little stronger, and twisting through the trees around me. Of course another car at the same corner of the road was not an impossibility, even though it was an unpeopled area. Then, after a period of soft but not comforting dusk, it came a third time; and, soon, a fourth. There was no sound of an engine: and it seemed to me that the transit of the light was too swift and fleeting for any car.

  And then what I had been awaiting, happened. I came suddenly upon a huge square house. I had known it was coming, but still it struck at my heart.

  It is not every day that one finds a dream come true; and, scared though I was, I noticed details: for example, that there did not seem to be those single lights burning in every upstairs window. Doubtless dreams, like poems, demand a certain licence; and, for the matter of that, I could not see all four sides of the house at once, as I had dreamed I had. But that perhaps was the worst of it: I was plainly not dreaming now.

  A sudden greeny-pink radiance illuminated around me a morass of weed and neglect; and then seemed to hide itself among the trees on my right. The explanation of the darting lights was that a storm approached. But it was unlike other lightning I had encountered: being slower, more silent, more regular.

  There seemed nothing to do but run away, though even then it seemed sensible not to run back into the wood. In the last memories of daylight, I began to wade through the dead knee-high grass of the lost lawn. It was still possible to see that the wood continued, opaque as ever, in a long line to my left; I felt my way along it, in order to keep as far as possible from the house. I noticed, as I passed, the great portico, facing the direction from which I had emerged. Then, keeping my distance, I crept along the grey east front with its two tiers of pointed windows, all shut and one or two broken; and reached the southern parterre, visibly vaster, even in the storm-charged gloom, than the northern, but no less ravaged. Ahead, and at the side of the parterre far off to my right, ranged the encircling woodland. If no path manifested, my state would be hazardous indeed; and there seemed little reason for a path, as the approach to the house was provided by that along which I had come from the marsh.

  As I struggled onwards, the whole scene was transformed: in a moment the sky became charged with roaring thunder, the earth with tumultuous rain. I tried to shelter in the adjacent wood, but instantly found myself enmeshed in vines and suckers, lacerated by invisible spears. In a minute I should be drenched. I plunged through the wet weeds towards the spreading portico.

  Before the big doors I waited for several minutes, watching the lightning, and listening. The rain leapt up where it fell, as if the earth hurt it. A rising chill made the old grass shiver. It seemed unlikely that anyone could live in a house so dark; but suddenly I heard one of the doors behind me scrape open. I turned. A dark head protruded between the portals, like Punch from the side of his booth.

  “Oh.” The shrill voice was of course surprised.

  I turned. “May I please wait until the rain stops?”

  “You can’t come inside.”

  I drew back; so far back that a heavy drip fell on the back of my neck from the edge of the portico. With absurd melodrama, there was a loud roll of thunder.

  “I shouldn’t think of it,” I said. “I must be on my way the moment the rain lets me.” I could still see only the round head sticking out between the leaves of the door.

  “In the old days we often had visitors.” This statement was made in the tone of a Cheltenham lady remarking that when a child she often spoke to gypsies. “I only peeped out to see the thunder.”

  Now, within the house, I heard another, lower voice, although I could not hear what it said. Through the long crack between the doors, a light slid out across the flagstones of the porch and down the darkening steps.

  “She’s waiting for the rain to stop,” said the shrill voice. “Tell her to come in,” said the deep voice. “Really, Emerald, you forget your manners after all this time.”

  “I have told her,” said Emerald very petulantly, and withdrawing her head. “She won’t do it.”

  “Nonsense,” said the other. “You’re always telling lies.” I got the idea that thus she always spoke to Emerald.

  Then the doors opened, and I could see the two of them silhouetted in the light of a lamp which stood on a table behind them; one much the taller, but both with round heads, and both wearing long, unshapely garments. I wanted very much to escape, and failed to do so only because there seemed nowhere to go.

  “Please come in at once,” said the taller figure, “and let us take off your wet clothes.”

  “Yes, yes,” squeaked Emerald, unreasonably jubilant.

  “Thank you. But my clothes are not at all wet.”

  “None the less, please come in. We shall take it as a discourtesy if you refuse.”

  Another roar of thunder emphasised the impracticability of continuing to refuse much longer. If this was a dream, doubtless, and to judge by experience, I should awake.

  And a dream it must be, because there at the front door were two big wooden wedges; and there to the right of the hall, shadowed in the lamplight, was the trophy room; although now the animal heads on the walls were shoddy, fungoid ruins, their sawdust spilled and clotted on the cracked and uneven flagstones of the floor.

  “You must forgive us,” said my tall hostess. “Our landlord neglects us sadly, and we are far gone in wrack and ruin. In fact, I do not know what we should do were it not for our own resources.” At this Emerald cackled. Then she came up to me, and began fingering my clothes.

  The tall one shut the door.

  “Don’t touch,” she shouted at Emerald, in her deep, rather grinding voice. “Keep your fingers off.”

  She picked up the large oil lamp. Her hair was a discoloured white in its beams.

  “I apologise for my sister,” she said. “We have all been so neglected that some of us have quite forgotten how to behave. Come, Emerald.”

  Pushing Emerald before her, she led the way.

  In the occasional room and the morning room, the gilt had flaked from the gingerbread furniture, the family portraits started from their heavy frames, and the striped wallpaper drooped in the lamplight like an assembly of sodden, half-inflated balloons.

  At the door of the Canton Cabinet, my hostess turned. “I am taking you to meet my sisters,” she said.

  “I look forward to doing so,” I replied, regardless of truth, as in chil
dhood.

  She nodded slightly, and proceeded. “Take care,” she said. “The floor has weak places.”

  In the little Canton Cabinet, the floor had, in fact, largely given way, and been plainly converted into a hospice for rats.

  And then, there they all were, the remaining six of them, thinly illumined by what must surely be rushlights in the four shapely chandeliers. But now, of course, I could see their faces.

  “We are all named after our birthstones,” said my hostess. “Emerald you know. I am Opal. Here are Diamond and Garnet, Cornelian and Chrysolite. The one with the grey hair is Sardonyx, and the beautiful one is Turquoise.”

  They all stood up. During the ceremony of introduction, they made odd little noises.

  “Emerald and I are the eldest, and Turquoise of course is the youngest.”

  Emerald stood in the corner before me, rolling her dyed red head. The long drawing room was raddled with decay. The cobwebs gleamed like steel filigree in the beam of the lamp, and the sisters seemed to have been seated in cocoons of them, like cushions of gossamer.

  “There is one other sister, Topaz. But she is busy writing.”

  “Writing all our diaries,” said Emerald.

  “Keeping the record,” said my hostess.

  A silence followed.

  “Let us sit down,” said my hostess. “Let us make our visitor welcome.”

  The six of them gently creaked and subsided into their former places. Emerald and my hostess remained standing.

  “Sit down, Emerald. Our visitor shall have my chair as it is the best.” I realised that inevitably there was no extra seat.

  “Of course not,” I said. “I can only stay for a minute. I am waiting for the rain to stop,” I explained feebly to the rest of them.

  “I insist,” said my hostess.

  I looked at the chair to which she was pointing. The padding was burst and rotten, the woodwork bleached and crumbling to collapse. All of them were watching me with round, vague eyes in their flat faces.

  “Really,” I said, “no, thank you. It’s kind of you, but I must go.” All the same, the surrounding wood, and the dark marsh beyond it loomed scarcely less appalling than the house itself and its inmates.

  “We should have more to offer, more and better in every way, were it not for our landlord.” She spoke with bitterness, and it seemed to me that on all the faces the expression changed. Emerald came towards me out of her corner, and again began to finger my clothes. But this time her sister did not correct her; and when I stepped away, she stepped after me and went on as before.

  “She has failed in the barest duty of sustenation.”

  I could not prevent myself starting at the pronoun. At once, Emerald caught hold of my dress, and held it tightly.

  “But there is one place she cannot spoil for us. One place where we can entertain in our own way.”

  “Please,” I cried. “Nothing more. I am going now.” Emerald’s pygmy grip tautened.

  “It is the room where we eat.”

  All the watching eyes lighted up, and became something they had not been before.

  “I may almost say where we feast.”

  The six of them began again to rise from their spidery bowers.

  “Because she cannot go there.”

  The sisters clapped their hands, like a rustle of leaves.

  “There we can be what we really are.”

  The eight of them were now grouped round me. I noticed that the one pointed out as the youngest was passing her dry, pointed tongue over her lower lip.

  “Nothing unladylike, of course.”

  “Of course not,” I agreed.

  “But firm,” broke in Emerald, dragging at my dress as she spoke. “Father said that must always come first.”

  “Our father was a man of measureless wrath against a slight,” said my hostess. “It is his continuing presence about the house which largely upholds us.”

  “Shall I show her?” said Emerald.

  “Since you wish to,” said her sister disdainfully.

  From somewhere in her musty garments Emerald produced a scrap of card, which she held out to me.

  “Take it in your hand. I’ll allow you to hold it.”

  It was a photograph, obscurely damaged.

  “Hold up the lamp,” squealed Emerald. With an aloof gesture her sister raised it.

  It was a photograph of myself when a child, bobbed and waistless. And through my heart was a tiny brown needle.

  “We’ve all got things like it,” said Emerald jubilantly. “Wouldn’t you think her heart would have rusted away by now?”

  “She never had a heart,” said the elder sister scornfully, putting down the light.

  “She might not have been able to help what she did,” I cried.

  I could hear the sisters catch their fragile breath.

  “It’s what you do that counts,” said my hostess regarding the discoloured floor, “not what you feel about it afterwards. Our father always insisted on that. It’s obvious.”

  “Give it back to me,” said Emerald staring into my eyes.

  For a moment I hesitated.

  “Give it back to her,” said my hostess in her contemptuous way. “It makes no difference now. Everyone but Emerald can see that the work is done.”

  I returned the card, and Emerald let go of me as she stuffed it away.

  “And now will you join us?” asked my hostess. “In the inner room?” As far as was possible, her manner was almost casual.

  “I am sure the rain has stopped,” I replied. “I must be on my way.”

  “Our father would never have let you go so easily, but I think we have done what we can with you.”

  I inclined my head.

  “Do not trouble with adieux,” she said. “My sisters no longer expect them.” She picked up the lamp. “Follow me. And take care. The floor has weak places.”

  “Good-bye,” squealed Emerald.

  “Take no notice, unless you wish,” said my hostess.

  I followed her through the mouldering rooms and across the rotten floors in silence. She opened both the outer doors and stood waiting for me to pass through. Beyond, the moon was shining, and she stood dark and shapeless in the silver flood.

  On the threshhold, or somewhere on the far side of it, I spoke.

  “I did nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”

  So far from replying, she dissolved into the darkness and silently shut the door.

  I took up my painful, lost, and forgotten way through the wood, across the dreary marsh, and back to the little yellow road.

  Ringing the Changes

  He had never been among those many who deeply dislike church bells, but the ringing that evening at Holihaven changed his view. Bells could certainly get on one’s nerves, he felt, although he had only just arrived in the town.

  He had been too well aware of the perils attendant upon marrying a girl twenty-four years younger than himself to add to them by a conventional honeymoon. The strange force of Phrynne’s love had borne both of them away from their previous selves: in him a formerly haphazard and easy-going approach to life had been replaced by much deep planning to wall in happiness; and she, though once thought cold and choosy, would now agree to anything as long as she was with him. He had said that if they were to marry in June, it would be at the cost of not being able to honeymoon until October. Had they been courting longer, he had explained, gravely smiling, special arrangements could have been made; but, as it was, business claimed him. This, indeed, was true; because his business position was less influential than he had led Phrynne to believe. Finally, it would have been impossible for them to have courted longer, because they had courted from the day they met, which was less than six weeks before the day they married.

  ‘“A village,”’ he had quoted as they entered the branch- line train at the junction (itself sufficiently remote), ‘“from which (it was said) persons of sufficient longevity might hope to reach Liverpool Street.”’ By
now he was able to make jokes about age, although perhaps he did so rather too often.

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Bertrand Russell.’

  She had looked at him with her big eyes in her tiny face.

  ‘Really.’ He had smiled confirmation.

  ‘I’m not arguing.’ She had still been looking at him. The romantic gas light in the charming period compartment had left him uncertain whether she was smiling back or not. He had given himself the benefit of the doubt, and kissed her.

  The guard had blown his whistle and they had rumbled into the darkness. The branch line swung so sharply away from the main line that Phrynne had been almost toppled from her seat. ‘Why do we go so slowly when it’s so flat?’

  ‘Because the engineer laid the line up and down the hills and valleys such as they are, instead of cutting through and embanking over them.’ He liked being able to inform her.

  ‘How do you know? Gerald! You said you hadn’t been to Holihaven before.’

  ‘It applies to most of the railways in East Anglia.’

  ‘So that even though it’s flatter, it’s slower?’