It has been rightly said that travel as you will, seek as you can, risk what you dare, never will you find anything to match the horrors that you left behind at home.
I have been a solitary man and a restless one, by nature and by practice both. Being blessed in the possession of a good fortune and far, very far from the want of a wife, I found myself able to indulge both those predilections as far as I chose. At the age of twenty-one I engaged a man of business and left my affairs cheerfully in his competent hands, to nourish as he could. Myself, I promptly departed this drizzly demi-paradise with a thousand pounds in gold and notes and promises—it seemed a fortune to the callow youth I was—and the firm intent of returning only when I lacked the funds to keep away any longer.
That noble experiment took me thirty years to realise.
I did come back at last, as I had always known I must. The John Furnival who stepped off the packet steamer in Southampton was as light of frame as the boy of the same name who had departed the same way three decades sooner, if not so light of heart. He was more sallow of skin, malarial, and inclined to limp in damp weather; he carried a record of his adventures in scars both public and private, both visible and otherwise; he had a fund of stories on which he rarely drew, and nothing of value besides, except experience dearly bought and highly prized.
I rode north, two days on a hired hack. My destination was a spa town in the hills, whose name need not detain us. Once there, and with my pockets entirely to let, my first enquiry was necessarily for my man of business. He, it transpired, had in my absence become a company. I paid a call, then, upon the firm of Alshott, Stroud and Alshott; presented my card and asked for Mr Alshott and was ushered into the presence of a stripling, a mere youth whose efforts at gravitas were mocked by the very desk he sat behind.
“Ah,” I said. “I think, perhaps, your father…?”
The boy laid my card—cheap Indian pasteboard, florid print, in itself sufficient to declare my history, my status and my recent impoverishment to anyone with eyes to see—upon his blotter, rose to his feet and walked around that imposing edifice of a desk, smiling ruefully.
“My father is in Sussex, sir, enjoying a very comfortable retirement. I am sure he would wish me to remember him to you; had we but notice of your coming, I am sure he would have written. I am Sylvester Alshott.”
We shook hands, but I was shaking my head. “You were…not born, I think—heavens, I think your father was not married!—when I left England. And retired now? Good grief! I had not supposed him to be ten years older than myself.”
“Oh, barely so much, sir. A number of happy years in the business induced him to relinquish an active role with us far sooner than might otherwise have been the case. Or at least, to relinquish a public role. His name, you have seen, remains on our letterhead; he himself remains deeply interested in our activities. It might fairly be said that his retirement has been more comfortable for him than for those of us who toil beneath his vigilance. If you are concerned about your own investments, Mr Furnival, let me assure you that my father has been assiduous in overseeing my endeavours on your behalf, and that your position is…robustly healthy, shall we say?”
By now I was laughing internally, and trying to disguise it for the sake of his amour-propre, while still being grateful to his father for that careful and no doubt onerous supervision.
“Thank you,” I managed, knowing the little phrase to be hopelessly inadequate to the occasion—either of the two occasions, indeed, his injured pride or my own relief.
He offered me sherry, of course—that utterly English ceremony that I have acted out a thousand times, from Gibraltar to Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong—and bade me sit with him at a fireplace, where we could talk without that monumental desk between us. We spoke of trade, of ’Change, of my various properties and his investments on my behalf; at last, rather diffidently, I asked whether I might still actually have a house.
“Of course, sir!” For a moment there, he looked like a startled owl. Had we not been speaking of houses, among other benefits, all this half-hour gone? “Did I forget to mention that Minscombe has been let this last year on most advantageous terms?”
Minscombe was my childhood home, a bare ten miles north of where we sat, and he knew quite well that he had not forgotten to mention it.
I smiled at his blushing awkwardness, and shook my head. “I’m sorry, I have confused you now. I have been attending, I promise, despite this intriguing sherry,” and despite the more simple pleasures of watching young Sylvester Alshott as he strained to impress upon his most senior and unexpected client how very much he justified his father’s confidence. “What I mean is, do I have a house that I can actually live in, without dispossessing any of my tenants or disrupting your other arrangements? Preferably a house close at hand, that I might occupy this week? Tonight, even? To be frank, Mr Alshott, I find myself embarrassed—temporarily embarrassed, thanks to your excellent stewardship—to the point where even a room in a posting-house is a strain on my resources.”
Again I had startled him, again he had to struggle a little with his composure. This time, I thought, he was trying not to laugh. My mind had perhaps not yet caught up with my new, my resumed position. After one has spent many months counting every copper coin and ekeing out every meal—after one has spent the better part of a year, indeed, travelling overland because the cost of even a third-class sea-passage had been beyond one’s means—it is not easy immediately to shrug off habits of parsimony.
“Mr Furnival,” the boy said earnestly, with a glance at the clock, “it is too late now, but a visit to your banker in the morning will resolve any such difficulty, and should quite set your mind at rest,” in a way that, to his clear chagrin, he had failed to accomplish himself. He was back to thinking me a little simple, I suspected. “In the meantime, I hope you will consider yourself my guest.”
“No, no, there is no need for—”
“Please,” he said. “I insist. My father bequeathed me his house when he departed for the salt air of the Suffolk coast, and to be blunt with you I rattle in it alone. I should be glad of the company, and you will find it more comfortable than any hotel in town, let alone a posting-house. That is, assuming that you can tolerate the bachelor lifestyle…?”
It was rather neatly done; that question of course made it impossible for me to refuse. So I laughed at him and drew his attention to the fact that I had myself lived the bachelor lifestyle for more years than he had been alive, and a rather rougher version of it recently. Then I graciously allowed him to buy me dinner, on the grounds that my fortune had been the foundation of his father’s and hence his own. Conversation proved easy, and by the time his front door had closed behind us both we were on the way to becoming fast friends; by the time the sun surprised us the next morning, we had ventured rather further.
It was nothing but curiosity—my besetting sin, I confess it—that took me north the following week, on a borrowed hunter of my host’s. I meant no more than to overlook my former home from a convenient hill, a childhood haunt of mine. Minscombe was let out now to a philanthropic gentleman, Alshott had told me, who took in orphaned boys; I had half an idea that I might run into some of the lads playing as I used to play myself. Perhaps I wanted to find one alone, who might stand in for me exactly.
The oak was there yet, the particular oak that overhung the cliff above the house. I used to sprawl panther-like on a branch some days for hours together, to the voluble horror of my anxious guardian, just watching the slow passage of life below. My tree was untenanted that day, though, as was the hill entire. I took my mount as near the edge as was comfortable for him, and looked down. The house seemed as empty as the countryside around. It had never bustled even in my time—my guardian having been of a retiring disposition—but I saw not a soul at work in the grounds, not a servant crossing the yard, not a boy running through the park or capering on the leads or indeed anywhere about.
Perhaps they were all at luncheon. My pocket-watch had stopped and I kept misreading the sun, forgetting how low it lies even at noon in northern latitudes. Or perhaps the philanthropic gentleman was a tartar who laid all his charges down for a nap in the early afternoon. Or he was a generous soul, and had taken them on an expedition for the day or for the week—there seemed no more life in the stable-block than there was in the house, neither hands nor horses shifting the light—and the staff was taking advantage of this opportunity to idle. Or…
I could list half a hundred reasons if I cared to. Nevertheless I thought it curious, unless I was simply disappointed not to find that analogue of myself. Perhaps I had built too much on a dream of continuity, as though there must always be one lonely boy at Minscombe, hopeful and bereft …
One lonely horseman on the road below drew me down unexpectedly. It might only have been that the glimpse of movement in an otherwise still world acted as a trigger to my own need to move, or as a reminder that I could not sit there all day gazing into the pool of memory and speculation. It might have been coincidence that I emerged from Home Wood just as he rounded the last hedge before the boundary wall.
His horse shied at the sight of me, but she was nervous already. That was his doing, I thought, the fat man who sat her, who sweated in her saddle and shied more dramatically than she did.
He huffed with relief when he saw my face, when he saw that I meant no harm, or else perhaps when he saw that he didn’t know me. I saw that he was clumsy with his horse, but not unkind. Once they were both settled I saw another thing, that he had a doctor’s bag strapped to the saddle at his back.
“Is someone unwell here, sir? One of the boys, perhaps—or their benefactor?”
It was a fair guess. This road was practical no farther than Minscombe, petering out in farmland that bordered the river, which offered neither bridge nor ford for three miles in either direction. And illness would explain the quiet, perhaps.
His eyes narrowed none the less. “Do you have some connection with the house, sir?”
His question was equally fair, and I might fairly have said no, none at all. Certainly I had no legitimate interest in my tenant’s doings, so long as he paid his rent and kept his children orderly. Still, I had come too far this morning to be willingly balked; I took advantage of the way the question was framed. “You might say so, sir, as it belongs to me.”
He frowned. “I understood the owner to be expatriate?”
“Indeed. I have just now returned to this country, after a life abroad. My name is Furnival.”
“Ah. Barnabas, Rowland Barnabas.”
We shook hands, there with our horses restless beneath us. I said, “You are a doctor, I collect? Unless the shape and significance of a man’s saddle-luggage has altered radically since my last days here.” When he still hesitated, I added, “I have no connection with the Minscombe tenant, sir, except that he lives in my house; but I confess to a growing curiosity, and perhaps a hint of unease. And, well, he does live in my house.”
“Yes.” He came to a decision, visibly. I had been confident that he would. He was a few years younger than me, I thought, and not a confident man himself. He carried a burden he would like to share, once he was sure of my bona fides. Perhaps he wanted to confess; he looked to me unquiet in his conscience.
He said, “You are right to be uneasy. Your tenant”—he was quick, I thought, to attach me to the situation—“is not a man to inspire ease of mind. Nor are the orphans thriving in his care. My whole concern is for the boys, you understand,” in a sudden outburst.
Mine too, but I did not intend to say so. “Will you explain it to me?”
He was hesitant again, thinking perhaps of his Hippocratic Oath and his duty of confidence. At last he said, “I would prefer to show you, if you will come in with me.”
I thought he would be glad of company, as well as of witness. “I think,” I said, “my tenant would find it difficult to keep me out.”
“So do I, by Jove! Come on, then!” His mood suddenly and inexpressibly lightened, Dr Barnabas actually led the way down the road, that last hundred yards to the gatehouse.
The gatehouse was unoccupied and the gates stood open, as they never had in my late guardian’s tenure. The drive, I was sorry to see, was weedy and the park unkempt. Did my tenant’s lease not require upkeep of the grounds, or was he a cheeseparer, had he endeavoured to save money by depending on his boys to do the work? If so he must have been disappointed, and so was I.
We rode to the house, where all the windows were shuttered or shrouded, as though there had been a death. Again that would explain the stillness, but I thought my companion would have forewarned me. Something there was, that he wanted me to see for myself; I thought death did not fit the case.
Nothing here seemed to fit the case. We rode around to the stable yard, and no one stood to our horses’ heads, no one came to the house door to ask our business here. Dr Barnabas clearly expected this neglect, sliding ungainly down from his mare and himself leading her to an empty stall, loosening her girths, fetching her a bucket of water. I did the same by my own mount, apologizing to him the while for the inadequacies of service. He was a fine animal, and deserved better. Meanwhile, the stout doctor was apologising to me: “I am afraid it is always so these days. Mr Royce seems quite unable to retain a servant, inside the house or out.”
“Ah. Mr Royce is my tenant’s name?” Matters did not bode well for Mr Royce, if he wanted to retain his lease. I had not especially wanted to live at Minscombe myself—I had no particular fondness for the place and, while not a great house, it was a monstrous edifice for a man alone, who had neither interest in nor prospect of children—but I would not willingly see it fall to rack and ruin.
Doctor Barnabas confirmed the name but said no more, only beckoning me to follow him in through the house door.
“Oughtn’t we to announce ourselves?” I murmured. “A knock, perhaps…?”
“There is no need, no point. No one would come.”
It felt strange to walk in uninvited, even here; it felt exceedingly strange to heel another man into what had been my home. After the first minute, though, the strangeness was entirely the other way about. This place was not my home, and everything I saw reminded me of that.
To begin with, the house was cast into unutterable gloom, even at this height of the day. Never a broken beam of sunlight found its way in to play with the dust—and there was a great deal of dust. Filth, too. Mud beneath our boots, tramped heedlessly into the house.
Well. Barnabas had said that Mr Royce could not keep a servant. I would have countered that boys can sweep and scrub as well as maids, if they are put to it—but perhaps he lacked the discipline to do so. Or perhaps there was another reason. The doctor was here for the boys, after all…
More mildly than I meant, I said only, “Do they never draw a curtain in this house?”
“Nor open a shutter, sir, no. Daylight is an affliction here.”
Lamps and candles stood everywhere, with tapers and lucifers to hand, but there was enough indirect daylight to show us our way; more than enough to show me the grimy state that Minscombe had been allowed to fall into. I should have been angry if the doctor weren’t so imperative, if he hadn’t given me to understand that there were worse things here than disregarded dirt. Besides, to criticise my tenant was to criticise my man of business, and I was disinclined to do that. Soap and water and elbow-grease would soon restore Minscombe to her rightful state; no house falls to ruin in a single year.
Dr Barnabas led me up the back stairs, up and up to the servants’ rooms in the long attics. He puffed and gasped at the climb; I reflected that Mr Royce was not generous to his orphans in their accommodations. With no one else in the house, he might decently have slept them in the guest wing, even in the family wing. Perhaps he was a practical man, not wanting to give them ideas above their station, which must inevitably be disappointed when they moved on into the world beyond the gates? Or—with no servants in the house—perhaps he was practical in another consideration, thinking that the sparse comforts of the attic rooms would be easier of maintenance. Or—if the boys were indeed sick, as Dr Barnabas’ presence and anxieties must suggest—perhaps this was a measure of quarantine, mark of a sensible man…
The good doctor sweated and hauled his bulk upward, and needed a minute to recover at the head of the stairs, before we ventured the jute mats of the corridor. At least, he wanted me to believe so, lifting his hat and patting a handkerchief across his brow. My suspicion went unvoiced, that in truth he wanted only to delay the moment of discovery a little longer.
Even up here, the dormer windows had been masked with some thin stuff that kept the sun at bay, though it did let in light enough to see by. Dr Barnabas opened the first door, to what had been a housemaids’ room in my day. Here were the twin iron beds, the worn rug on bare boards, the washstand and dresser, just as I remembered.
And here were the promised boys at last, one to a bed, pale and clean in the shadows: quite startlingly clean they seemed, in all this gloom and grime. Their nightshirts too were brightly, unexpectedly white.
“I have my girl wash these,” Barnabas murmured, fingering a pristine collar as though he read my mind. I hoped not so; he wouldn’t have liked where my mind went next, as his fingers strayed through the boy’s dishevelled hair.
The boy didn’t wake or stir beneath these attentions. Nor did his brother in misfortune, though Barnabas was heavy-footed, heavy-handed too, and made no great effort at discretion.
I opened my mouth to ask what ailed them, what could keep lads seemingly unconscious but not apparently sick otherwise, in no apparent need of nursing. Barnabas forestalled me, moving to the door and beckoning, onward, more to see…
Indeed there was, but it was all the same. Room after room, two or three boys in each and each of them asleep or comatose, oblivious. It needed a dozen before at last I could stop Barnabas and put the question; he needed me to see, I think, the scale of what faced him.
“Dr Barnabas! What disease is this?” Something infectious, surely, to strike so many—and yet he seemed quite unconcerned about his own danger, fussing intimately over each of his patients, touching where there seemed no need to touch.
He sighed, straightened, shook his head. “I…do not know. It is like anaemia in some senses, a peculiarly pernicious anaemia—but anaemia does not produce an aversion to sunlight, photophobia, such as these boys exhibit. Even in this state, if I pulled back that scrim across the window, you would see them flinch. They will rouse at evening, a little: enough to take whatever medicines I prescribe, but my best endeavours do no good. One boy was so weak, I transfused him with my blood, my own,” and his big hand stroked the arm of the boy he stood above, while his eyes gazed at the blank of the window, while his mind I thought saw another boy altogether, “but he died regardless. He might have died anyway, there are five in the churchyard now,” death after all and he had not warned me; “but for all I know, my actions helped him on his way. I cannot tell. I am…” I am out of my depth, he meant to say, but a shake of the head was all he had to offer.
“And their guardian, Mr Royce? What does he say?”
“Little enough. Nothing, in recent days; I rarely see him. He pays my bills, and perhaps thinks he has done his duty. And, true, they are only parish boys who would be in the poorhouse else, but I feel their loss most dreadfully, I for one…”
The only one, he thought himself. I thought he was probably right.
And might have thought little more about it, except for wishing this were not happening in my house and wondering how soon we might revoke Royce’s lease, Alshott and I between us—but Barnabas went on, speaking half to himself, touching another boy at the throat. “They have these contusions, too, these sores that form on their necks; I’ve never seen anything quite like them.”
“What? Show me!”
It must have come out in a bark, most unlike my previous sickroom mutter. He startled physically, but turned back the high collar of the nightshirt to let me see.
I looked, I saw.
He said, “Your face…! Do you know what this is?”
“I…have seen its like,” I admitted, though I hated to hear the words come from my mouth. “More than once. In India, years since, and in the Carpathians just this winter gone. The snows came early, and closed the road; I was obliged to overwinter. The valley folk were kind to me, but they were much afflicted by just such a plague as this. Happily, I was able to offer my assistance.”
“How, oh, how…?”
I am a hunter: the words were on my lips, but I was merciful. What would he benefit, from knowing? I shook my head and said, “Because I had seen it before, in India. Come, Dr Barnabas. We can do no good standing over these poor boys. You have done magnificently, but it is not a case for you,” you are out of your depth. “Let me gather what I need to treat this scourge and I promise you, by the time of your next visit, your boys will be on the mend.”
It took more work than that to remove him from Minscombe, but not much. He was frankly eager to be gone, only that his professional curiosity was piqued and perhaps his pride also, in a way that flattered him less. I gratified neither, keeping as obscure in my responses as I could achieve.
I put him on his horse and saw him off the grounds and away down the road. Then I turned Alshott’s fine hunter to the fields and a wild ride, partly for his satisfaction and partly for my own, to chase the megrims out of my head. This was no disease—no wonder the doctor had been baffled!—but a devil: a foreign devil, by all that ever I knew or dreamed. I had never thought to encounter such a thing in my own county, in my own house yet…!
Here it was, though, and at least I knew what it was. And how to address it. Horror might drive me, but it was tempered by experience.
We came hot and hard into Alshott’s yard, his horse and I. I tossed the reins to his stable-lad and jumped down, to be met by the man himself in his doorway. His face showed disapproval, as he gazed at heaving flanks and a sweat-soaked crupper; he said, “I suppose I should thank you for giving him a good work-out, but truly, Furnival—”
He cut himself off abruptly, as he saw my own face for the first time. “Good God, man, what is it? What’s happened? Your house…?”
“Minscombe is very well, or will be when I have her in my care again. Her current tenant, though—he is the devil!”
“Oh! Have I been mistaken in Mr Royce?” His expression changed again, as he thought himself at fault. The young are so mobile, and so revealing. Therein lies their charm, I think, far more than in personal beauty. “I might have taken more care over his references; but he settled so quickly on the first sum I asked, I was perhaps too hasty…”
“No, no. Be easy on that score, his references could have told you nothing.” I would much have preferred to have done the same thing exactly, told him nothing; but I had said too much already, in my heat. There could be no backing away now. I consoled myself briefly with the thought that I knew my host already to be a sportsman, a huntsman, and one who kept a vigorous and testing stable. He would not resile from a grim task, if I could only bring him to trust me.
I thought I could do that. I believed it, indeed, profoundly. I had amassed evidence enough, these days beneath his roof. Sylvester Alshott was a young man who inspired confidence, and deserved it.
Even so, I begged his indulgence while I washed and changed my dress. Nothing could happen yet in any case, and whether or not he believed the tale I had to tell him, it would be briefly told.
In my absence he’d had his man clean and press my evening clothes, and lay them out ready for me. I had grown unused to such service in recent years; now I felt an unexpected surge of sentiment, as though somehow I had come home. It was inappropriate, of course, in another man’s house. Also, it was all too easy to see it in relation to the danger that would confront me this night—confront us both, if I was any judge of men—and still I was absurdly moved by such a little, such an ordinary attention.
I couldn’t speak of it, of course, when I met him in the library. Besides, we had other graver matters to discuss. I cursed his lawyerly sherry and demanded a brandy and soda; he laughed at me and mixed a strong one, but would not be bullied—he said—into joining with my barbarity, when his father had laid down three dozen of a fine oloroso and this was the last of it.
Unchallenged, then, by each other’s tastes, we sank into heavy leather chairs and a brief silence while he waited, while I reached for words.
“I have travelled,” I said, “far and far. I have seen strange things, dreadful things, most of them the work of men. This, though: this is something other. Bear with me, while I try to explain—and if you can, suspend your rational mind, which must revolt at what I have to tell you.
“There is a…creature, a spirit; a more godly man than I would call it a demon, no doubt. It inhabits the dead, I think. Certainly it is not human, although it can look so, although it is intelligent enough to pass. Certainly it kills. It feeds on the blood of the living. I have met it in the slums of Calcutta, and again in the mountains last winter; I told you of that before, though not in these terms. Not honestly. I spoke only of a beast that must die, an endless hunt through snow and storm. You must forgive me, but I did not see the need for more, where more is always worse.
“Now there is a need. This day I have seen its spoor again, at my own Minscombe, and I would ask your help.”
“Of course,” he said. Instantly, unquestioningly. Ignorant as he was—and knowing exactly how ignorant he was—he yet gave me blind trust, quite untrammelled.
I might have melted, I think, if I hadn’t had the fires of Hell in mind.
I leaned forward, nursing my glass, and told him punctiliously what lay before us, what we would have to do. If we could achieve it.
He listened gravely, nodded, laid his life in my hands.
I would have prayed not to abuse that, if only I believed in anything good enough to pray to.
So it was, then, that two men rode out late that night, still in evening dress. He had protested, laughingly, until I pointed out that black clothes would help us pass unseen on a moonlit night, and in the shadows of a dark house. After that he was quiet and thoughtful for half an hour together.
Minscombe had been my childhood home, the setting for all the adventures of my youth. Of course I knew where we might leave the horses in a grove of trees, where a natural spring would give them water, where deep grass would offer them both forage and rest. Of course I knew the path that would bring us unseen from there to the boundary wall.
Minscombe wasn’t a bridewell; the wall was high, but still a statement as much as a barrier. As a lad I used to slither over it without a second thought, to save myself the trek around to the gate. Sometimes, indeed, to avoid questions at the gate. I didn’t always want news of my excursions to reach back to my guardian.
Alas, that boy was long ago, and my body had seen hard uses since. Alshott eeled up the old stone with a young man’s easy grace, then perched atop and reached down a hand to help me. I might have ignored it, might have snorted pride and hauled myself up alone; I may be twice his age, but a rugged life keeps a man limber. That I chose not to do that, that I gripped his hand and depended on its warm steel grip as I scrambled to the top, I think that says as much as I need to about trust and commitment. On the night, I think it said it all.
Side by side we let ourselves down the other side, into the moonshadow of the trees. Broad lawns stretched between us and the house, but no need to expose ourselves: again I knew a way, my old poacher’s path home, following the treeline until it met the wall of the kitchen garden. As a boy I’d have shinned over that and helped myself to a peach or a pair of apples on my way to the scullery window with the broken sash, paid for them with a rabbit left in tribute on the long deal kitchen table for the cook to find in the morning.
Now, though, we had another end in view. Literally in view: there was light in the old library window, where the shutters had been flung back. Some creatures love the night.
I beckoned Alshott forward. We crept along the wall to my guardian’s sacred rose-bed, let run now to ruin in neglect. Runners tangled our ankles, thorns ripped at our trousers: no matter. I was overdue new evening dress in any case, and I suspected that Sylvester’s had come down to him from his father. Certainly from a man broader than he was, and not so tall. My memories of the elder Alshott were grown vague with the years, but would accord with that description. Also with that habit of mind, to pass on an old suit to a newgrown son rather than send him to a tailor. Parsimony is no doubt a useful trait in a man of business—but I thought I would ask Sylvester to recommend me a good tailor, and then take the boy along. I could legitimately point out that he had ruined his good clothes in my service, so I was duty-bound to replace them…
I should probably not have been thinking about clothes, just then. Nor plotting my way through an inevitable argument with young Mr Alshott. The human mind is a curious artefact, in both what it is drawn toward and what it resiles from.
I did not want to look through that library window. But we were here now, just beneath the stone lip of it, and we had come for this. Exactly for this. I lifted my cautious head above that lip, and looked. And ducked back down, and would have kept Sylvester from looking if I could: only that he needed to see it, to confirm his faith in me and the needs of the night.
So he looked, and I watched his tender young face change in what lamplight spilled out of the window. He shuddered and dropped back to my side, wordless.
Silence was just as well, because such creatures have preternatural hearing. I had told him that. Everything that I knew, I had told him and he had seemingly accepted, at least to come this far on an adventure. Nothing that I said, nothing that I could have said would have prepared him for the actuality of that room that night.
It was worse for him than for me. I had seen such sights before, and grimmer ones than this. Also, he had seen my tenant in other guise, the man he knew as Royce.
No one could mistake the creature for human tonight, for all that it wore a human shape and human clothing. It seemed nothing more than beastly, as it hunched over the white-gowned body of a boy; nothing less than demonic as it lifted its face from his neck, its mouth and chin painted with fresh blood.
I was glad, I had to be glad that Alshott my companion had seen this; I could be nothing but sorry that Sylvester my new young friend had had to see it. I wished that my hand could express those opposite feelings, both at once, as it gripped his upper arm. I did think that perhaps he was sensitive to my wishing, that at least, as his fingers closed over mine.
We had no more time for sentiment. I led him away from the window, softly, softly: back through the rose-bed, back to the walled garden, this time over that wall and swiftly up to the house, confident that the scullery window would still be just as yielding. I could only hope that some at least of the boys now resident had had the chance to discover it before the monster’s teeth began to steal their joy, their energy, their life’s-blood.
What will let boys out, will let grown men in: even if their shoulders have grown broader than they knew. I went first, by my mute insistence. It took more squirming than was perhaps dignified—especially as Sylvester had my rear half to watch, my helpless kicking legs—but I was through soon enough, and had the resentful pleasure of watching him ease after me as if he’d been greased for it.
That was the last of our light for a while, what moonlight fell through one small window that we couldn’t leave open. Again, though, I had all the years of my boyhood to draw upon. Nothing in this house was a stranger to me in darkness. Or the whole house was strange now, rather, a devil’s home and not my own: but the walls and doors and stairs remained untouched, the furniture was all the same, more or less all its arrangements. I could find my way, and Alshott could follow me.
To be sure of him, I took his hand and set it on my shoulder, held his gaze until he nodded compliance.
Like that, then—the blind leading the blind, except that I was blind but knowing—we made our way through the kitchen to the back stairs. The monster in the library would never come this way; it would be beneath his dignity to use a servants’ passage.
There was a greater danger that we might meet a boy. The one we had seen in the library would never move again, but Dr Barnabas had said that his patients grew more lively in the evening. Even so, I was not expecting to find them careering about the house in the dark.
And did not: wise or lucky, we made our way unchallenged to the Great Hall on the first floor.
The name was a joke. My guardian and I had felt—or I had asserted, and he had agreed—that an establishment so large as Minscombe merited a great hall, and that our own dignity demanded it. Lacking anything suitably baronial or mediaeval in a house that could claim nothing older than ramshackle Jacobean—and that was doubtful—we had settled eventually on the ballroom. Neither of us was much inclined to dancing. So my ancestors’ surviving weaponry and military paraphernalia went up above the fireplace, eked out—I have always suspected—by judicious purchases on the part of my guardian, and the Great Hall became an established fact. On wet days my friends and I enacted battles all up and down its length, to the constant complaint of servants who had polished its sprung floor for a generation or more.
The maids and footmen were gone now, but little else had changed. I had counted on that. I picked up a candle on the way, I had a lucifer-case in my pocket; Alshott closed the doors at our backs and I struck a light.
Chairs lined the walls, and there was a stack of tables at the further end. Otherwise the long room was clear, as it always had been.
Alshott took the candle and made his way methodically from one wall to the next, lighting every lamp and sconce and candelabrum that he could.
“If we’re going to have light,” he said, “we might as well have enough light.”
There was sense in that, of course. I didn’t argue.
There was danger in it, too. There was danger in everything, in our simple presence here and in every telltale. The least glimmer of spilled light could catch a wary eye; the lightest footfall could carry on a quiet night; the best-laid floorboard could creak unexpectedly, the best-laid plan betray. Even the smell of a smoking candle could reach too far.
The library was directly below us. I watched the high doors almost in expectation. Surely, however little we spoke and however carefully we trod, surely he must hear something…?
I suppose we must have been right, I suppose he did; but for all my vaunted knowledge of the house and of his kind, still he confounded me.
We were watching the doors, waiting for him.
He came through the window.
Our eighteenth-century ballroom was mirrored—forgive me!—on the famous Galerie des Glaces, at least in its barest bones. It couldn’t hope to rival the ostentation of Versailles; happily it hadn’t tried. Nevertheless, there was the run of mirrors along the inner wall, standing opposite a matching run of windows. Outside our windows was a balcony, where guests could cool off with fresh air and long views over the park.
He must have heard us overhead and come the quick way: out through the open window and up the wall, scuttling like some spider-thing, inhuman; and so over the parapet and onto the balcony, and then straight in through the window.
Through the shuttered window, through glass and wood and all, monstrous strong and monstrous unheeding. Any man would have turned aside from such a mad decision; any man who persevered would have taken dreadful hurt in the doing of it.
This creature came through in a tempest of shards and splinters, as careless of its skin as it was of its clothes.
Its eyes glittered in all our lights, as we swivelled around to face it. Was that manic fury that twisted its face, or manic glee? I couldn’t tell. Perhaps it was nothing at all, perhaps the creature was beyond all such human emotion.
Certainly it thought itself beyond us, unreachable.
It charged, directly for Sylvester. It moved dreadfully fast, but even so I managed to interpose myself and what I carried. Neither of us had time to think, or to change our purpose.
It ran, then, directly onto the point of my spear.
I have enjoyed my share of pig-sticking in India. I was ready for the shock of the body striking steel, the sink of blade into flesh.
I wasn’t ready for the cold bitter intelligence that glared back at me from a six-foot distance; nor for the mocking gleam of its smile.
The spear’s blade was steel, and it takes wood to slay such a creature, wood piercing its dead heart.
I smiled mirthlessly back, and pushed harder.
The spear’s blade was sharp, and my strength was desperate.
The spear’s blade might be steel, but its haft was ash.
I had no idea whether this would be effective, but I drove that spear right through the creature’s body until the blade stood out between its shoulders, and what pierced its heart was good plain wood.
It stood its ground, stood on its feet and stared at me, transfixed.
Perhaps it had no idea either, whether it was dead again or not.
It took Alshott to decide the matter.
Alshott, swinging my guardian’s old cavalry sabre, taking Royce’s head clean off his shoulders at a blow.
Then there was mess, a foul mess. Neither of us was much inclined to clean it up, but needs must. I don’t wish to say too much about that: only that there was a sack from the gardener’s shed, and a pit dug far from anywhere that mattered, and something slung in and buried deeply.
“We,” Sylvester said, and stopped; and tried again, speaking not quite at random, not quite. Said, “We should go up, and see to the boys. Don’t you, don’t you think…?”
“Like this?” I said, with a gesture to show him his clothes, his condition, mirrored in my own. Ripped fabric was the least of it; mud from the digging mattered not at all. What mattered was the grue that had spilled from the creature that we slew. No neat dissolution, no crumbling into age and desiccation. All the blood it lately swallowed had come erupting out, mixed with less wholesome effusions, acid bile and I knew not what sprayed from its pierced body and its severed neck. I had been in trouble often and often for spilling on the ballroom floor, taking off the polish. Now I thought nothing would do but to take up the boards and begin again.
Sylvester and I had been sprayed as much as the floor. We both stood in urgent want of a bath. To be blunt, we stank, and our clothes were stained where they were not soaked. We were neither of us in any state to interview sick children, to whom we would be entire strangers. Sylvester acknowledged that, with a rueful expression.
“Besides, they’ll be asleep,” I said. At least, I trusted so. They’d need sleep more than anything: wholesome sleep, not the induced trances of their late master. With his influence lifted, I thought they ought to drift from the one state to the other, first steps on the road to recovery.
“First thing tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll bring Dr Barnabas here. They know him, they’ll respond to him far better than to two filthy strangers in the dark.”
“We could light lamps,” he said mildly. “We could wash, even.”
He didn’t mean it, though, he didn’t urge it; he was as keen as I to remove ourselves from that house. Also he was as reluctant as I to leave the boys unwatched, unguarded, but I thought the alternative was worse.
One thing we could do, we must; together, we laid out the dead boy on the library table and left him wrapped in a linen sheet, cleaner than we were ourselves.
Then back to the grove and the horses. A quick splash in the stream there because neither of us could bear the state of ourselves any longer, though we made the upset of the horses our excuse; and our first move when we reached his house was to fill the copper and boil water for a bath. Sylvester didn’t so much as offer to rouse his man. We could perfectly well do the work ourselves, and attend each other.
Our dress suits both went into the furnace, to make their last contribution to our comforts.
Clean at last, there seemed small point in bed. We lit a fire simply for the comfort of it and sat talking over stiff brandies until the easterly sky turned pink. By then Sylvester was sitting on the carpet at my feet, drowsing against my leg like a much younger boy. I smiled, took my hand from his shoulder and sent him upstairs, pointing out that Barnabas knew only me and wouldn’t need two of us to conduct him to Minscombe.
So I rode out alone, and roused the good doctor from his warm and solitary bed. I told him something of what had happened, an abbreviated tale with no mention of a supernatural monster, or of a body flung into a pit; rode with him to the unguarded gates of my house; and bowed reluctantly to his wisdom when he plied my own logic against me. The boys knew only him, he said, and wouldn’t need two of us to wake them. If they could be woken, if they weren’t too far gone. The dead child in the library would be his care, he insisted; truly, he said, he would prefer to go on and deal with this alone.
I didn’t doubt him for a moment. Neither that the boys would prefer to have him and him alone to deal with, for all that I doubted his motives. A known face, a kindly soul would always be better than a stranger.
I left him, then, and rode back to Sylvester.
“What will you do about Minscombe, John?”
In our ongoing attempt to feel clean—“clean on the inside,” Sylvester said, “where I feel most befouled”—I was introducing him to the greatest pleasure of a spa town, the public steam-bath. It was late now and we had it to ourselves, but the servants came and went in the swirling, unpredictable fog; we were accordingly as discreet in our conversation as we were in our persons, sweating a yard apart and swathed with towels.
I said, “I’m not sure. There’s no hurry, at any rate; but—well, if Barnabas offered to rent it for the sake of those poor boys, if he felt it would be best to keep them there, I would have no objection. I don’t feel any great yen to live in it myself, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t know where I will go, but no doubt you can find me a house.”
“I don’t need to,” he said definitely. “You’ll stay with me, of course.” And then, stumbling over his own eagerness, “I mean, that house is far too big for me alone, and, and…”
“I know what you mean. And thank you. I’d like to stay.” I had almost depended on it.
I was determined at least to give Barnabas some time alone with the boys, to recover those he could. If he needed me, or when he wanted me, he knew where I was to be found.
Days passed, a week, two weeks. I heard nothing. When I did encounter the good doctor, it was by chance, and at first I failed to recognise him. I was meeting Sylvester for luncheon, at an hotel close to his place of business. With time on my hands and eager only for his sweet company, I was irredeemably early; but there was a man already at table, eating alone, making swift work of a plate of rare sirloin.
One ought not to criticise the manners of another. It was a remarkably large plate, though, and heaped high, and he was—well, gobbling. I did look twice, I confess. The second time—
“Dr Barnabas?”
He looked up, almost as startled as I was; I wondered if he had come in so early in hopes of avoiding anyone he knew.
It took him a moment to remember the courtesies. Belatedly he set his cutlery down, rose to his feet, held out his hand. “Mr Furnival! You must excuse my not having called on you before this, but, well, my charges are demanding of my time, and…”
“And I think you have been unwell, my dear doctor,” I said. “Please, do continue with your meal. Don’t mind me; I’m meeting Alshott here, but not for an hour yet. I’ll sit with you, if I may,” taking a chair before he could think to offer it. I beckoned a waiter over and ordered a pink gin, to root myself in place. Barnabas had a bottle of claret, and had made fair inroads already. “Tell me truly, doctor, how do you do?”
Truly, he looked terrible. He had lost extraordinary amounts of weight in such a short time, but men who drop stones are supposed to be the better for it. Barnabas seemed utterly fagged, dragged down; drained, I should have said.
“Oh,” he said, applying himself to his meat again with that most extraordinary appetite, “I may have slipped a few pounds. Those young devils take it out of me, you know. Still, I have such a hunger on me, I’m safe to make it up again.”
“The children thrive, I trust?”
“Ah. Some of them. Only some, alas. Others I could not save, they were too far gone. I have seen too much of the vicar. He wanted to come round and bless each of the surviving boys, but I could not have that, no, I could not have it…”
He rambled as he chewed, and I grew more and more worried the more I watched, the more I listened.
Dr Barnabas ordered another plate of beef, and despatched it as keenly. Then he called for the bill, rose, made his excuses and left me.
By the time Sylvester arrived, I was on perhaps my third pink gin, perhaps my fourth. He greeted me cheerfully, said, “You look as though you were mulling over something terribly serious, John.”
“Yes,” I said, in no mood to equivocate. “Yes, I was. I’m sorry, Syl. Will you take a ride with me, this evening…?”
And so we found ourselves riding out again, the same mounts on the same route. They seemed almost to pick their own way to that private grove, and to settle happily to an hour of their own company in the grass there.
I led Sylvester by swift familiar ways to the wall—no nonsense this time about my needing help, or his offering it—and thus the kitchen garden, the library window. It had to be the library. I knew it, and so did he.
Light spilled from the window, as before. We rose and looked together; and ducked back down, and stole away again without a word, without a thought of staying.
We rode halfway home in silence, before he said, “What will you do?”
I said, “I know…some people, who should be here in England now. Former soldiers, from my India days. I will find them out and install them in the gatehouse, with instructions. And let the doctor know, what those instructions are.”
“And they will be?”
“To let no one in or out of the grounds, except himself. They have shikari skills; not the most lightfoot boy could get by them, where they have set themselves to patrol. And each of them is a killer, that’s why they were sent home.”
He mulled that over, at last said, “You will let them live, then, if you can keep them penned.”
“Syl, they’re children. If he can…keep them fed, I can let them live, so long as they threaten no one else.”
Which was the closest we came, the closest we could ever come to discussing what we’d seen: how the doctor sat in the library chair, willingly, arms and legs spread, while half a dozen boys swarmed all over him, biting, lapping, sucking…