Frequent Hearses (21 page)

Nicholas Crane lay sprawled on his back at the drive’s verge. His lips were curled back from his teeth in a kind of snarl; his hat had dropped off and his immaculate fair hair was spattered with mud; his eyes were open but sightless; beside his right hand lay an automatic pistol. A long knife had been driven upwards through his ribs into his heart, and even in that faint and waning light it needed no more than a glance to tell Judy that he was dead.

No more than a glance; and since the moment of the attack scarcely twenty seconds had passed. That meant that the attacker must still be near at hand—and no sooner had Judy realised this than her blurred senses became sharply focused as she tried to determine which way he had gone. Though her heart was beating fast, she was for the moment queerly devoid of both fear and repugnance. To pursue seemed somehow natural and inevitable, in spite of the appalling peril it must certainly involve; and long before this primordial instinct had taken conscious shape she found that she was, indeed, pursuing.

Hearing guided her. Nicholas Crane’s murderer, who had obviously heard her running up, was plunging noisily away through the undergrowth in blind flight. Racing frantically after him, Judy was conscious that the automatic was in her hand—though she had no recollection whatever of having picked it up—and conscious, too, that the butt was still warm where Nicholas had held it. It gave her immeasurable confidence, and that despite the fact that she had never fired any sort of gun in her life. In an Amazonian frenzy she ran recklessly ahead.

And now, as if at a signal, darkness had shut its jaws over the last remnants of day, and its annihilating conquest was complete. The rain was falling again—but Judy was past caring about rain, was transmuted, indeed, into a creature wholly compounded of impulse, wholly devoid of calculation. Her heart pounded; the salt sweat dripped from her forehead into her eyes; in a dozen places her clothes were ripped and rent by brambles, and there was scarcely a square inch of her stockings that the brush had not mauled. A Maenad figure, physically splendid, she fled through the unkempt grounds of Lanthorn House like an arrow, stumbling sometimes but always recovering, beating against hardly visible obstacles yet never falling, oblivious of reason, stripped in a second of the veneer with which centuries of civilisation had overlaid what was natural in her… And Chance, rejoicing in the overthrow of its age-old enemy the considering intellect, took her into its special care, driving her along the track of her quarry, whenever sense faltered or doubted, as unrelentingly as a ravenous brute in pursuit of its prey.

The terrain was rising as she ran, up towards the rim of the bowl in which Lanthorn House lay secluded; and presently the chase led out of the trees and thickets on to bare turf which ascended, at the last steeply, to what was apparently a flat, grassy terrace of some description. Judy’s foot struck a fragment of submerged masonry and she fell. She was up again instantly, but by wretched bad fortune the automatic had flown out of her hand, and her helpless groping failed to discover it again. If she lingered to search for it her quarry would irrevocably elude her; she must not, therefore—the decision was made at once and unhesitatingly—linger to search for it. And she was running again even before that decision was made.

The person she hunted must be tiring, for she was closer to him now—so close that she could hear his frantic breathing above the sound of her own. What she was to do on overtaking him she never once paused to consider: it would be a hand-to-hand fight now, and she would have to be extremely lucky to get the best of that. But circumspection had altogether deserted her. She dimly sensed that, once undertaken, an affair like this must in honour be carried through to the end, however mortal its issue might be. Her stride lengthened; her breath and pulse grew quicker; and she knew she was gaining ground fast.

The distance between the two of them cannot have been more than a couple of yards at the moment when the high hedge—at least two feet higher than a tall man—loomed up out of the obscurity and the ground became overgrown again. For an instant Judy paused, feeling for the gap through which her quarry had blundered. Then she found it and followed. A second hedge immediately confronted her, and after briefly listening for the sound of her quarry she turned right between it and the first. It had been a gruelling run and her energy was flagging now, but so also must be the energy of the person she pursued, and she pushed on, grimly determined to make up the leeway she had lost in seeking a breach in the hedge. To the left she turned, to the left again, to the right; and was obscurely though incuriously aware that hedges were all about her. But presently, at a bifurcation, she halted, the better to choose her direction, and for the first time realised that she could no longer hear the attacker’s movements; which meant, of course, that he had gone to ground and was lying in wait… Judy took a few uncertain steps along the left-hand fork; stopped, bewildered, when she saw that this alley forked again…

Then, somewhat belatedly, she understood where she was.

In an emergency the human mind is apt to function in odd, incalculable ways. Into Judy’s, as she stood there a little dazed by the sudden knowledge that she had plunged unwittingly into the Lanthorn House Maze, there drifted with the sharp clarity of a lesson learned by heart certain words that she had encountered long ago.

“I have heard or read… of a man who, like
Theseus
, in the
Attick Tale,
should adventure himself, into a
Labyrinth
or
Maze…
but as the Night fell, wherein all the Beasts of the Forest do move, he begun to be sensible of some Creature keeping Pace with him and, as he thought, peering and looking upon him from the next alley to that he was in…”

And Judy shivered. Somewhere in this maze, as in that, there was a tomb.

At heart Judy was superstitious—and let no one mock at her for it. Superstition is not mere intellectual error; it is a part of the emotional life, and the worldly-wise who suppress it do so at the risk of impoverishing their souls, an eventuality which for the most part they do not succeed in avoiding. So the words of the story (
only
a story, she told herself fiercely: nothing
more
than that…) wrought in Judy an effect which in the circumstances was very far from being beneficial. They shattered, suddenly and horribly, the spell of frenzy which the hunt had cast upon her, and as her normal perceptions returned, she realised that she was exhausted and that it would be futile to attempt more…

And as a matter of fact, she reflected sombrely, it had been futile to attempt as much. Worse than futile: crazy… and the recognition of her folly in attempting to tackle a desperate murderer single-handed came upon her like a douche of ice-cold water. Mad,
mad!
She had been possessed, she now saw, possessed by those devils whose name was said to be Legion; and after propelling her headlong down the most appropriate local equivalent of the Gadarene slope, they had deserted her, left her to fend for herself in a condition of physical and spiritual exhaustion, the virtue—so to call it—gone out of her, all passion spent. Common sense, the more insistent for its temporary exile, returned to plague and rebuke her from every side. What ought she to have done? Hurried on to the house, of course, and reported the killing. No one would have dreamed of blaming her for not embarking on this fantastic enterprise, and she would long ago have been safe, with light and warmth and company… Company; Judy was beginning to feel a longing for that, as she stood there in the darkness, between the high hedges, with water dripping off her ruined clothes on to the bumpy, cluttered ground underfoot. Yes, company, she thought, would be a very pleasant thing at the moment.

In the meantime, what strength she had left must be devoted to getting out of this atrocious place and as far away from it as possible.

She was not, as yet, badly frightened. That was to come later. But she knew that somewhere a killer lay in ambush; and a maze, ordinarily an innocuous plaything, can in certain circumstances begin to seem like a trap. With a wry grimace Judy recalled the pleasurable anticipation of just this exploration which she had expressed to David Crane only that morning. Aeons ago, it seemed; and now—

Well, now the thing to do was to make a move, and that as furtively as might be.

Direction? Easy enough. She must go back the way she had come, and fortunately she remembered the turns she had taken. Right at the entrance, then left, left, right. That meant left, right, right and the entrance would be on her left.

What she did not remember was that mazes are designed specifically to confuse people who have made a note of the way they came.

After ten minutes of anguished searching—the more nerve-racking in that her progress was necessarily far from noiseless—Judy, realised that she was indeed trapped. In a Maze with a Murderer, she thought, and because the springs of hysteria were starting to trickle inside her, she giggled inanely to herself. Unless, of course, the murderer had succeeded where she had failed, and got himself out somehow or other. But that was unlikely. Perhaps he was as afraid of her as she was of him—and as this possibility occurred to her Judy giggled again. More loudly, this time. And “My God,” she thought, as with an effort she got control of her nerves again, “if I’m going to go on like this I might just as well shout and tell him straight out where to find me.”

(“…So he stood still and hilloo’d at the Pitch of his Voice, and he suppos’d that the
Echo,
or the Noyse of his Shouting, disguis’d for the Moment any lesser sound; because, when there fell a Stillness again, he distinguish’d a Trampling (not loud) of running Feet coming very close behind him, wherewith he was so daunted that himself set off to run…”)

Not loud. No, of course it wouldn’t be. That was to be expected.

…But you must make up your mind, Judy my girl, just what it is you’re frightened of: on the one hand, M. R. James-plus-tomb, or on the other Mr. X, who pushed a knife into Nicholas Crane. You can’t have it both ways. Or can you? It rather looks as if you can… Well then, put it like this: which would you rather have waiting for you round this corner you’re coming to, X or—or the inhabitants of the place, whispering in conference? Take your pick, ladies and gents: a guaranteed triple-proof homicidal maniac or a group of fine spectres, jewelled in every hole…

But this won’t do. It won’t do at all. Stand still, Judy. Stand still, get a grip on yourself, and do some hard thinking.

As soon as her own movements ceased, it was very quiet there. There was the unrelenting patter of the rain, of course, but beyond that, nothing. Really nothing? Well, sometimes the hedges rustled, as though there were a person fumbling at them on the other side.

“And, indeed, as the Darkness increas’d, it seemed to him that there was more than one, and, it might be, even a whole Band of such Followers: at least so he judg’d by the Rustling and Cracking that they kept among the Thickets…”

The rustling was due to the rain. Of course it was due to the rain. Or—since this was a neglected, abandoned place—to animals. Small animals.

“…wherein all the Beasts of the Forest…”

Rats?

Judy put two fingers into her mouth and bit them till the blood came. It wouldn’t do to scream, wouldn’t do at all, not with Mr. X lying doggo perhaps only a few feet away… Cats, presumably, lay
catto
—and despite all she could do to prevent it, Judy giggled again, and went on giggling. The imbecile noise of it got out of hand, continued (as it seemed to her last surviving outposts of caution) interminably.

Then, when at last it stopped, the silence that replaced it seemed even more horrible than before.

All at once black misery overwhelmed her: misery bitter and intense beyond guessing, seas of it millions of fathoms deep. It was—had she known it—a reaction altogether healthier and more salutary than the half-wit facetiousness in which her shaken mind had earlier been indulging; but to her it was far more ghastly than that, was the ultimate abyss beyond which there could be nothing,
nothing
worse. On all sides the high, abominable hedges hemmed her in, their unpruned summits just perceptible as a ragged line against the night sky. She was cold, soaked, inexpressibly tired and terribly afraid. And careless, now, of what might happen to her, she fell to sobbing like a lost child.

How long that lasted she was never afterwards able to say, for this was the point at which her mind grew numb and refused—last prophylactic against its own impending ruin!—to accept any longer the messages of her senses. She was vaguely aware that when the sobbing ceased she started to move again, but what impelled her to do this, and how long it lasted, remains unknowable. Probably her blind wandering about that unspeakable labyrinth did not continue for so very long, but to her it seemed like days. She remembers—remotely, like something in an almost-forgotten dream—that whenever she turned into a
cul-de-sac,
which was often, she would emerge from it again without any sense of frustration or disappointment; and the truth is that at this stage she was a mere automaton, as bereft of will and cognition and conation as a robot, without the least consciousness of what she was looking for, or why. Days, it seemed; no, months, centuries…

So that when at last she came out from among the hedges she did not immediately realise what had happened.

But something made her hesitate, staring blankly into the darkness. And at that hesitation her brain began painfully to function again. She was in the open. She was no longer penned in. She had escaped, at last, out of the crazy, bewildering sequence of alleys and bends and
impasses.

So it was all over. For a moment she could hardly take it in. After what she had been through it seemed impossible to assimilate. But it was true. It was true. She could
feel
that she was free… She gave a choking gasp of relief.

And quite near her, something moved.

Judy’s throat went dry; she tried to cry out and could not. Her hand, jerking in a nervous spasm against the pocket of her raincoat, rattled something there. Matches. She did not pause to reflect that the cold rain would extinguish a flame almost instantaneously. With trembling fingers, in a last frantic snatching at courage and reason, she dragged out the box and struck one of the matches.