“IS IT STILL following us?” asked Timmie tremulously. “Is it, Vernie?”
It was years since Timmie had called his brother “Vernie”—or, indeed, had turned to him for an opinion about anything whatever. Vernon, although terribly frightened, felt a little glow of pride.
“No—no, I don’t think so,” he answered, looking back along the moonlit tow-path. “I don’t think it can be, Timmie,” he added, more confidently. “I mean, if it was a ghost—and of course it can’t be, there’s no such things as ghosts—but if it was a ghost, then it would have caught us up by now, it could go much faster than we can.”
It was the wrong thing to say. The image it conjured up of the thing gaining on them with huge, effortless strides along the pale, glimmering tow-path, was too much for Timmie. He began to sob. “Oh no … Oh no….”
“But of course it isn’t a ghost,” Vernon assured him, squeezing his hand—it must have been years, too, since the little boys had condescended to walk hand-in-hand—“there’s no such things as ghosts, Timmie, really there isn’t. And it didn’t look like a ghost, did it?”
*
Not to start with, it didn’t. It hadn’t talked like a ghost, either, at the beginning. It had talked quite sensibly. In fact, the whole thing had started so easily, so innocuously: it had never occurred to the little boys as they tiptoed, guilty and excited, out of the front door, that they were embarking on an adventure on this sort of scale. They’d known, of course, that they were being naughty, that they were supposed to be in bed: but then they’d been promised that it would only take a minute or two; and that it was urgent, because Minos might run away if they didn’t hurry; he was only just up the road, but no one could catch him, he wouldn’t come to people he didn’t know….
It wasn’t as if it was a stranger who’d persuaded them. If it had been, then naturally they wouldn’t have gone. They both knew very well that one doesn’t go off with strangers in any circumstances, no matter how good the pretext.
But surely someone who has been to the house, who has stood on the steps talking to Mummy and Daddy, who has brought bars of chocolate, isn’t a stranger? And so when Minos turned out not to be just up the road after all, they felt no great qualms about going a little farther, as far as the Gardens. Lots of cats gathered there (so their informant assured them) alongside the railings, at just this time in the evening, because old ladies came to feed them. Minos, no doubt, would be among the rest.
But he wasn’t; and so one thing led to another, and presently they were down by the boat-house—uneasy by now, but too shy to protest. If Imogen had arrived there just one hour earlier, she would have seen them.
“It was the picnic that made me start to run,” confided Timmie to his brother as they plodded hand in hand through the moonlight. “All that about the picnic…. No real person goes for a picnic in the middle of the night.”
“No.” Vernon weighed the point up anxiously. “Still, Timmie, it doesn’t prove it was a ghost. I mean, I don’t suppose even ghosts …”
“And all that about Grandpa expecting us,” continued Timmie apprehensively. “I didn’t like it. I mean, Grandpa’s dead, he can’t be expecting us….”
“Of course he can’t … it was just … silly,” affirmed Vernon, as confidently as he was able. He was still feeling very frightened. Because, if it wasn’t a ghost, then why did it go on like that about Grandpa waiting for them in the meadows by the river? “No real person would go for a picnic in the middle of the night,” Timmie had said, and of course he was right. No real person would. A river-picnic, too … would Grandpa, too, be a ghost when he came to join them, rowing silently, moth-white, across the dark water, the ghost-oars making no sound as they dipped and rose …?
*
“I think perhaps we’d better run some more,” he said to Timmie, in a tight little voice, “just to keep ourselves warm”—and hand-in-hand they jogged onwards once more, towards nothing and nowhere, under the light of the moon. By the time Imogen passed the same spot, nearly an hour later, there was no tiniest trace of the small footsteps on the rutted, frozen path; no faintest echo of the timid, childish voices lingered any longer on the still night air.
*
Imogen had long since given up calling the children. It seemed terribly dangerous, somehow, to be thus broadcasting their names at random into the infinite spaces of the night. Now and again she glanced furtively at the black, faintly stirring water out there beyond the reeds, imagining, sometimes, that among the small silvery ripples she could detect a brighter swirl of disturbance, a turmoil of ghastly happening. But of course it was never anything; a small fish rising, perhaps; or a floating twig, revolving slowly into silver light. And other times, peering off towards the left instead of to the right, her eyes would scour the grey water-meadows for two black dots trudging away into the white moonscape; and always she saw them, not two merely, but dozens of them, hundreds, dancing, merging, vanishing in front of her eyes. They were there, they weren’t there, bobbing about and re-appearing, drowning in the moonlight as in an infinite sea….
*
Suddenly, there was a woman walking briskly towards her along the tow-path. An elderly—yes, an old woman—wearing a head-scarf…. Imogen stopped dead, for a moment, in utter amazement. Then, clearing her throat, she hurried forward.
“Excuse me,” the woman said, coming to a halt as Imogen drew near. “Have you seen two little boys, seven and eight years old? I seem to have lost them.”