33

Several hours later John was woken by a strange sound. At first he thought it was the murmur of an engine hauling through the tunnel beneath the escarpment. Then he had the impression that someone was in his room. As he rose from the bed, however, it became apparent that the noise came from the door. There was someone standing there, waiting. The sound was that of breathing, but so heavy and deliberate that it could scarcely be human. It was more like an animal scenting. As he peered across the darkened room he gradually distinguished the door set in faint relief by the illumination on the landing. It was across the tiny cracks of light that a shadow periodically moved.

He watched and listened for some time, transfixed first by a sense of terror, then more certainly by the idea that what he was watching could not be real. Then, as he moved towards the door, the movements abruptly ceased and a second later the shadow disappeared altogether. He paused, then opened the door very slowly.

The landing itself was deserted although he could see now that the illumination came from a light in the kitchen reflected up the stairs to his right. Further along, at the darkened end of the landing, it seemed that the door leading into the main part of the Place was slightly ajar.

Certain unrecognisable sounds came from the kitchen and John went to the head of the stairs. As he did so he noticed that Elizabeth’s door was also open; suddenly filled with the worst apprehensions, he rapidly descended the stairs.

As he reached the kitchen he saw Elizabeth at the opposite end of the room. She was standing perfectly still and appeared to be completely absorbed by a voice which filled the room. At the same moment he realised that the greater part of the illumination of the room came, not from the solitary bulb above Elizabeth’s head, but from the fire. An unnatural and extravagant brightness flickered continuously across her bewitched face. A moment later she looked up and stood silently regarding him across the length of the room. The voice had grown louder and more excited.

Then there was a huge and terrifying cry, as Leonard’s figure leapt from a chair at the side of the room directly towards the fire. With a second cry he plunged both arms into an inferno of flames and pulled out a single blazing mass which, as he tried to carry it across the room, disintegrated in his hands.

John instantly moved forward, flinging the burning debris aside so wildly that Leonard himself was knocked to the floor. He lay on his side unmoving as John stamped out the flames.

‘But why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you call me?’ he said to Elizabeth as he lifted Leonard into a chair. ‘Why didn’t you call me, love?’ He seemed scarcely able to control his agitation. ‘You’d better fetch your mother.… Are you all right? Do you feel all right?’

Elizabeth hurried out. John pulled Leonard more comfortably into the chair and took a piece of soap from the sink in the corner and began to rub it over Leonard’s hands. He was completely preoccupied with this task, almost massaging the hands, when Stella came down followed at some distance by Elizabeth.

‘He’ll be all right now,’ John said to her. ‘If you can just take care of Elizabeth. She shouldn’t have come down. She shouldn’t have come down with him.’

Leonard, pale and staring abstractedly at the ceiling, had suddenly turned in the chair. ‘No, don’t go, Elizabeth … Elizabeth is so silent, father. She frightens me. She says so little. Why did he touch her? Why did he? Why did he? Wasn’t it enough that he had me?’

As they tried to distract him he turned away in frustration, looking at none of them, more at the walls and the ceiling. ‘What can a woman say? A woman does. A woman says nothing. Women are preachers in their silences, men in their actions. All the time. Then there are castles.’

Neither John nor Stella interrupted him; he was sinking back, looking round at them calmly.

‘If I could have lived in a castle. Surrounded by moorland … how complete that would have been. Or in a tent.…’ He laid his head against the arm of the chair and almost immediately fell asleep.

After a while John said, ‘I’ll carry him up.’

He stooped forward, listening to his regular and undisturbed breathing; then he lifted him quickly and lightly and took him up to his room.

As he laid him down on his bed and removed his jacket, some weight in the pockets attracted his attention. From the side pocket of the jacket Leonard had been wearing John took out first the metal clasp of a belt, then several large buttons. He took them down with him to the kitchen.

‘But what was he burning?’ he asked Elizabeth, laying these objects on the table.

‘His raincoat.’ She seemed distracted still, gazing about the room as though Leonard were still there.

‘His coat?’

‘I heard some sort of noise. And when I came down, he was crouched in front of the fire with my sewing scissors, cutting the buttons and the buckle from his raincoat. He just cut them off. I couldn’t do anything.’

‘But what was he doing with the coat?’ her mother asked.

‘I don’t know … I don’t know.’

‘Didn’t he say anything?’ John said.

‘I think he’d had the coat in the fire already. There were holes burned in it. When he saw me he finished cutting the buttons off and pushed the coat back in the fire. He kept asking me, “What will they think? What will they think?”’

John stood at the table fingering the buttons, turning them over in his hand. ‘But why was he burning it?’ he said, then suddenly stood back from the table as though forewarned before a prodigious crash echoed through the Place.

All three cried out. It seemed to shake the walls of the building as though a weight had been hurled against them; and scarcely had its echo disappeared than a second and louder crash, a massive percussion, shook the entire room. As John moved instinctively towards the outside door, taking Stella and Elizabeth with him, a third and even heavier blow fell against the walls followed almost immediately by a loud cry.

Leaving the two women to escape by the kitchen door, John ran back up the stairs to the landing. Leonard’s door was open and his room deserted. Numerous drawings lay scattered over the bed and across the floor as though flung there in rage. As he re-emerged onto the landing he saw that the door into the Place was now fully open. Flurrying to his room for a torch, he entered the main part of the building.

He went from room to room, briefly exposing each to the beam of light, working his way quickly along the first floor. There was a strange smell of decomposition, though nowhere any sign of damage. Only when he reached the York Room did any sort of hysteria overtake him. As his torch swept erratically around the shuttered interior Leonard was suddenly revealed lying on the floor at the opposite end, immediately beneath the fireplace.

He lay in fact within the stone base of the fireplace, his right arm extended as though he had fallen in the act of reaching up. As John hurried into the room he was suddenly aware of an unnatural warmth of the air, and the now almost stifling smell of decomposition. He bent down over his son’s body and at the same moment heard behind him a hoarse and deliberate breathing, and the movement it seemed of some heavy and resilient weight.

For a moment the torch swung weirdly across the room illuminating first the shuttered features of the windows, then the wild vortex of mouldings that composed the ceiling. Then it shone on a massive creature pinioned to the wall. It was like a slug, struggling out from the smooth surface, its bulbous features glistening in the light. Even as John recognised the relief, wildly animated now in the agitated beam of light, he was lifting Leonard and hurrying with him to the door.

Once in the passage, however, he was compelled to lay him down. For a while he knelt over his son, panting and scarcely able to regain his breath. It was as though some peculiar weight had entered Leonard’s body, for when he lifted him again it was as if he were carrying a muscular and heavy man. When he looked at him more closely he saw that, in fact, Leonard was breathing quite deeply and seemed perfectly relaxed.

He laid him on his bed, went back and secured the partition door. Then he called Stella and Elizabeth from below. They stayed together in Leonard’s room for some time, scarcely speaking, watching his calmly sleeping figure and occasionally glancing at one another like people waiting impatiently for some event to begin.