Fear by Night (10 page)

“Honest, Charles—you'd better go. Mrs. Halliday would have a fit if she found I wasn't in the house. It—it was nice of you to come—it was really. But there isn't anything you can do. It's a good job and good pay, and I can't afford to lose it. You will go—won't you?”

“I'll go—but I shall come back. You won't forget about the branch?”

“It's all nonsense, really,” said Ann. She laughed again. “We're being romantic—knight-errant, distressed damsel, and all the rest of it! But there's nothing in it, and if you get me the sack, I shall sue you for damages. It would make a nice up-to-date ending—wouldn't it?”

“I prefer the old one,” said Charles. “All right, I'm going. Good-bye.”

Ann heard him going away along the path. She stood where she was for some minutes, and then she followed him. When she came to the turning which led to the beach she hesitated and then went down that way. Charles would be in the water by now. She thought she would wait until he was across. There would be plenty of warning if the boat came in.

It was very dark on the beach. The two headlands enclosed it and the island rose up behind. But out on the loch there was a little moonlight which came and went as the clouds moved overhead. In the last hour it had turned warmer. There must be a breeze high up, because the clouds flowed past without ceasing, but here, at sea-level, the air was perfectly still—still, warm air and warm, calm water. The clouds were not nearly so thick as they had been. They made an opal veil across the moon and parted to show deep stretches of blue-black sky. Ann could see a dark blur that was Charles' head with the bundle on it, and every now and then a little spray that caught the light as he swam, and then he was out of the water and shaking himself. And then he was gone. After a little while she thought she could hear the sound of his car going away behind the fold in the hills.

Ann went on looking at the water. She didn't want to go in. There were bright ripples in a wide path across the loch. The moon was not quite overhead. The clouds kept coming and going, and the ripples sparkled and dimmed and darkened. The stillness gave her a feeling of expectation. It was like the hush before something happens. Ann felt as if something was going to happen, but she did not know what.

Under the veiled half light she saw something that moved among the ripples—something without shape, a darkness in the water, a darkness that moved. The clouds above were denser, and the half light failed. She couldn't see. She couldn't see at all. She felt a cold and dreadful terror of the dark. And Mary had said,
“Keep away frae the water or it'll get ye
.” She couldn't see, but she thought that she could hear the wash of that dark, moving thing. The cold fear broke into panic, and she ran, scrambling and slipping, up the steep path to the house. Half way up she looked back and saw that the clouds had shifted. The water lay bare and open to the moon. There was nothing there.

CHAPTER XII

Gale Anderson came back next day. Ann did not know when he came or how, but when she got down to breakfast he was there, and so was Jimmy Halliday.

She had heard Jimmy Halliday come back just as the light began to change towards the dawn. At first she had not slept, and then she had slept to dream that she was running across a desert of black sand with something coming after her like the wind. However fast she ran, she could never get away from it. The sand began to heave under her feet, and it wasn't sand at all, but water. And then, just as her heart stopped with terror, she heard footsteps come clumping over the lawn, and she was awake in bed, with her face half buried in the pillow and Jimmy Halliday swearing muffled oaths under the window because he couldn't find the key.

She wondered if he had brought Gale Anderson back with him. Perhaps he had. They certainly seemed to take each other very much for granted and made no attempt to talk.

No one talked except Mrs. Halliday, who was quite able to sustain the whole conversation. She went on pouring herself out cups of tea, each one weaker and more heavily sugared than the last. By the time she had reached six lumps in a pale straw-coloured fluid, she had told them all about Jimmy's great-grandfather Pointer, who was first mate on a sailing vessel, and who swore to seeing a ship with nothing but ghosts aboard her and all sail set in a gale that was fit to tear the solid land up by the roots and break it into islands—“And his mother says to him when he come home, ‘If it's ghosts you want, you can see 'em as well at 'ome as abroad, any day. So you stay 'ome. And there's a haunted 'ouse right next the Jug and Bottle,' she says—‘if you're set on such.' And Ned Pointer, he turned as red as a turkey-cock, and if she hadn't been his mother he'd have told her to shut her mouth, for he'd been sweet on Martha before she married Jem Ricketts that was landlord of the Jug and Bottle. And his mother ups and says, ‘It's all right,' she says, ‘Jem's been took, and if you're not afraid of his ghost, I dare say Martha'll take you into the business for the matter of a wedding-ring.' And that's how you come by your great-great-grandmother—and a nice bit of money she had in her stocking foot.”

The two men went off in the boat again after lunch. Ann watched them go from the high heathery knoll at the top of the island. There had been a mist all the morning, but the sun had drawn it up and the loch reflected the pale, cloudless blue of September. She saw the boat swing into the channel and pass out of sight under the lee of the island.

Could it have been a boat that she had seen last night?

No, it wasn't a boat.

Why wasn't it?

“I don't know—but it wasn't.”

She put her head in her hands and tried to think why it couldn't have been a boat. Her closed eyes gave her the scene again—half light; and water; and sonething breaking the surface. That was it. A boat doesn't break the surface unless—A submarine would break the surface just like that. It would be very reassuring to think that what she had seen was only a submarine. Would it?
Would it
? She wasn't sure. The cold, black terror touched her again. She threw up her head and opened her eyes wide on the sunlight. She jumped up. She was a perfect fool to sit there frightening herself.

“I probably saw Jimmy's boat, and there's an end of it.”

She looked out over the water and wondered where the boat was now. It ought to be coming into sight again if they were going out to sea.

When she had watched for ten minutes, she was puzzled. If they had gone up the loch, she would have seen them long ago. They must be close in under the island, or she would be seeing them now.

She went scrambling down towards the water until she came to the steep overhang, which stopped her. She worked along it in the direction of the house. Sometimes there was a slippery cliff, and sometimes a lot of great boulders piled cliff-high.

Quite suddenly she stopped. She thought that someone had spoken her name, and as she turned, bewildered, to see who it might be, it came again, and this time the direction was plain enough.

It came from under her feet.

She was in a cleft among the great huddled boulders, with the sea below her and out of sight. The rocks were over her head on either side, and behind her they ran away to a narrow rift down which a thread of water trickled. She had swung herself round one jutting point and was wondering whether she could manage the next. And then, there was her name echoing up from under her feet. It didn't come from the sea. After the first moment of astonishment she felt sure of that. It would have sounded clearer off the water—and different.

She turned her back on the loch and crept as far into the cleft as she could. When she couldn't get any farther, she bent down and listened again. A whispering of voices came indistinctly to her ear, mixed with the dropping of the tiny stream. The most devastating curiosity filled her to the brim. Whose were the voices, and where were they coming from?

As voices they had no more individuality than the rustling of dry leaves. They were just sound. And the sound came and went. Ann cupped her hands over her ears and leaned her forehead against the rock, and at once the sound changed tone and ran into a word—a strange and awful word which set her pulses thudding. One voice said, “Murder,” and then another voice broke into laughter that crept and echoed in the unseen windings of the cleft. She felt her forehead wet, and did not know whether the moisture came from the clammy rock or whether it was the dew of sudden fear. The echo smothered whatever other words there were. She waited for it to die away, and all at once she heard Gale Anderson's voice: “You should encourage her to learn to swim. As it is, I suppose it'll have to be a boating accident.” And then, whether because he turned his head or because he moved, the sound fell back into confusion. Once someone said, “I won't,” and, “What's the hurry?” And then there was nothing but the whisper, whisper, whisper of two voices, and upon that there came to her, sharp and clear, the recollection of how she had sat in the lounge at the Luxe waiting for Charles and heard two voices whispering on the other side of a group of palms. What had they said?… “
You must get her away at once.”—“And then
?” And after that a silence, and she had felt afraid without knowing why. And one of the voices had said, “
Well, devil take the hindmost
.” And then they had gone away.…

What nonsense to think of that now! All whispering voices sound the same. Those voices had said something about a will, and, “
He's never seen her
,” and “
He's not going to
. You must get her away at once.” What had it got to do with her? It couldn't possibly have anything to do with her. One of those voices had said, “
It's a pity you can't marry her.”
… One of those voices? Or—one of these voices echoing faintly in the cleft?… “
It's a pity you can't marry her
.” …

Ann turned giddy. She was too crouched together to fall, but for a moment she was not fully conscious. What had she heard? What had she
really
heard? Had she heard someone say, “
It's a pity you can't marry her
,” or had she only remembered hearing a whispering voice say it long ago at the Luxe?… It wasn't really long ago, but it seemed so. She felt immeasurably removed from the places she had known.

And what place was this, and what things were talked of here?…
Murder
… The word had ceased to echo in the hidden places of the rock, but in the hidden places of her thought it echoed still.

The whispering fell to faint sound that just fretted the edge of her consciousness, and then the sounds of the air and of the water lapped over it and blotted it out.

Ann felt how stiff she was. She had only been crouching down in the cleft, but she seemed to have strained every muscle of her body. She crawled round the jutting corner, clung and scrambled a few more yards, and came out by the side of the house. She went up to her room, and was glad to get there unnoticed. She shut the door and sat down on the floor beside the window. She was shaking all over, and her thoughts shook too. She couldn't order them or get them to keep still.

The sun shone upon the lawn, and the sky was a clear, pure blue. The air came softly off the water. There were patches of green on the hills, and streaks of red, and black, and purple. Every now and then a scent of pines mixed with the faint salt smell of the sea.

Ann got up and looked at herself in the glass. There was a smudge of green slime across her forehead. Her eyes stared back at her.

“Oh, Ann! What a fool you are!” she said.

She poured cold water into the basin and washed her face and hands. Then she came back to the window again and leaned upon the sill. Her thoughts had stopped shaking and she began to sort them out.

She thought that the whispering voices she had heard in the cleft were the voices she had heard at the Luxe. She thought that the Luxe voice and the cleft voice had said the same thing—“
What a pity you can't marry her
.” She thought those two things, but she wasn't sure. It was maddening not to be sure. She tried to piece together what she had heard.

First of all, at the Luxe: “
What a pity you can't marry her
.” And then, “
You're sure about the will
?” That was one man. And the other had said, “
I'm sure”
; and, “
Don't speak so loud”
; and, “
She must be got away before she knows
.”

Ann thought about that. There was a girl who was coming in for money under a will, and she didn't know about it, because they had said, “
If he dies, the whole thing will be in the papers. She must be got away before she knows
.”

There was a girl.… What girl?… How should Ann Vernon know?… Ann Vernon.… What girl?… Ann Vernon …

“Nonsense!”

Ann said the word out loud in a clear angry voice. She went on saying it. “Nonsense—nonsense—
nonsense!
” If she said it often enough, perhaps that would make it nonsense. How could this girl, who was being left a lot of money, be Ann Vernon? Why, there wasn't a single solitary soul in the world who would leave her a penny.

Elias Paulett.

The name said itself with frightening distinctness.

Her mother's uncle, Elias Paulett.

“Nonsense!” said Ann again.

He was very rich. He had cut her mother off when she married. He must be an old man now.…

“What nonsense! He doesn't know me—he's never see me!”

And at once the voices from the Luxe came tuning in: “
He's never seen her;”
and, “
He's not going to. You must get her away at once
.” And—words with hardly any breath behind them; “
And then
?”

No one has answered that. Someone had said, “
Well, devil take the hindmost
.” No one had answered that “
And then
?”—unless the whisper that had echoed in the cleft had answered it: “
Murder
.”