THAT NIGHT Katharine had a curiously vivid dream. Once again she seemed to be in the deserted cafeteria, but this time it was not Mary who was her companion, but a dark man in a raincoat. The raincoat was lightish in colour, shabby, and hung shapelessly from his sloping shoulders; and the man himself was dark, not merely in the sense of having dark hair and complexion, but more as if his whole face was enveloped in darkness; as if a deep shadow was thick upon him, hiding his features. At the beginning of the dream, Katharine was not paying much attention to the man; it seemed natural that he should be there. Her attention was wholly taken up with anxiety about the time. For before she could go back to the office, she must clear these tables; pile on to trays all those dirty cups and plates, and wipe away the crumbs, the flakes of pastry, and the sugary spills of tea. Not just from her own table, but from all the tables—dozens, scores, hundreds of them, scattered in derelict emptiness all over this great, echoing room. And it was then that she noticed that not a single other customer remained—no waitresses—nothing. Just herself and this man. And for some reason, inexplicable to the ordinary waking mind, she knew that she could not start on her task of clearing up while the man was still sitting there. She was impatient for him to go—to leave her—to get out of her dream: for somewhere, already, long before waking, there was growing in her brain a flickering awareness that all this was only a dream.
But the man would not go: and as Katharine turned to look at him more closely, perhaps even to speak to him, the darkness about him grew thicker … it was spreading … the whole cafeteria was in twilight now, as if night was already falling. And already the man was not quite there any more…. Only the raincoat, sitting there, upright and empty, still breathing, and somehow this, too, seemed perfectly natural, and not in the least surprising. What else would a raincoat do if its wearer was suddenly no longer there?
“A figment of knives!”
The senseless words leapt into Katharine’s brain with that strange, precise clarity, that more than natural importance, that meaningless phrases sometimes acquire in dreams. The phrase seemed to explain, to answer everything—the vast room, her own presence there, and even the alert, near-living raincoat … which now, after all, lay limp and ordinary over the back of the chair. Only the great, encroaching darkness seemed unexplained … the vast, swift twilight swooping …
Katharine woke with a feeling of having been roused by a wild storm blowing round the house; a sense of roaring wind, of rattling window frames, of strange, howling hollow sounds in all the boarded-up fireplaces in all the upstairs rooms.
But everything was still, and in darkness. The stillness forced itself upon Katharine’s waking mind with strange emphasis; with a shock of sudden stillness like the shock of sudden sound. She lay very still, alert, the dream running out of her, full consciousness swiftly taking over.
And then, clear and unmistakable, there came through the open window the sound of the dustbin lid being replaced on the bin. Quickly, and very quietly, Katharine was out of bed, out on the landing, and peeping, automatically and absurdly, and from an instinct too deep to question, into each of her children’s rooms. She knew it was absurd herself; for why in the world should the sound of a dustbin being tampered with outside in the back garden mean that some disaster was being enacted in one of the upstairs bedrooms?
Reassured that all her three children were sleeping peacefully, Katharine set off down the stairs to investigate. Lightly, tensely, she tiptoed down, with feelings more akin to exhilaration than to fear.
The back door was unlocked—was it she or Stephen who had forgotten to lock it?—and in a moment Katharine was standing on the soft, spongy grass of the lawn, the wetness already soaking through her slippers, and the damp, windless air chill and soft about her face. The dustbin stood at the entrance to the side passage; its battered curves shone greyly in the shaft of moonlight that speared through the narrow gap between the houses. Katharine approached it gingerly, wondering what, exactly, she meant to do? What did she hope to discover by lifting the lid and peering into the confusion below?
It was a newspaper parcel, right on top of everything else—but had she put it there herself, last night? There were heaps of things she might have wrapped in newspaper during her hurried evening chores—potato peelings—ashes—the contents of the sink tidy. No—those were still visible just below the newspaper—egg-shells, orange-peel, and a mass of sodden tea-leaves gleaming in the moonlight like seaweed in silvery shallows.
Katharine softly replaced the lid. She would have another look in the morning, when she would be able to see properly. Or—it suddenly occurred to her—had she been mistaken in thinking that the sound came from her own dustbin at all? Didn’t the Prescotts keep theirs in almost the same place, just across the dividing wall? It was rather odd of them, of course, to be emptying rubbish at three o’clock in the morning, but it was harmless, and certainly none of her business.
Just to satisfy herself that their dustbin was where she was imagining it, and that the noise might therefore have come from their garden and not from hers, Katharine moved softly across the lawn towards the wall, meaning to look over.
But how was it that these few steps should have set her heart beating in this way? Why should she suddenly feel so weighed down by dread that it was almost impossible to raise herself on tiptoe sufficiently to look over the wall? Was there indeed such a thing as premonition? Or had the misty autumn moon, now shining full across her face, triggered off some ancient fear of leaving cover … of showing oneself defenceless in the open … a target for watchers in the surrounding darkness?
Slowly, clutching with both hands on the damp, rough surface of the brickwork, Katharine raised herself on tiptoe, and found herself staring into a face so hideous, so motionless, that for a moment her wits completely left her. Just as in her dream, the shabby fawn raincoat drooped from sloping shoulders; but now the wild, mad eyes stared straight into hers with crazed expectancy; the whole figure sagged and drooped against the wall in an attitude of dreadful, senseless leisure. It was a dream again. It could only be a dream because there was Stephen’s old frayed yellow scarf knotted round the creature’s throat.
It was this final touch of horror that brought Katharine to her senses. It was not madness, after all, which lay behind those expectant cardboard eyes; it was not even sense, nor life of any kind. It was just Jane’s and Angela’s guy that they’d been making yesterday evening, over in Angela’s playroom. They must have brought it outside to work out some way of propping it up on the bonfire, and left it here. It would spoil, left out like this all night. Those painted eyes would run in black and orange streaks; the cardboard cheeks would warp and buckle; it should be brought in at once.
And I wouldn’t touch it for a thousand pounds.
Katharine amazed herself with the suddenness and definiteness of this conclusion. After her surge of relief at finding the thing was only a guy, why should she still feel this repugnance—yes, this sickening fear—at the very thought of touching it?
Katharine crept softly back into the house, fastening the back door behind her, bolting it, putting up the chain—locking out the moonlight, and the guy, and her own strangely beating heart as she had stared into its eyes.
But when she crept back to her darkened bedroom, tiptoeing, holding her breath so as not to wake Stephen, she suddenly knew that Stephen wasn’t there.
“Stephen!” she cried sharply, and switched on the bedside light “Stephen——!”
“What is it? Hush Katharine, you’ll wake everyone!”
Stephen, blinking in the sudden light, was standing in the doorway behind her.
“Where have you been?” they both asked simultaneously—then both laughed a little, uneasily. And then a sort of paralysis descended on them, which took the form of a halting stilted sort of conversation. Katharine, it seemed, had thought she heard a noise in the garden and had gone to investigate: Stephen, it seemed, had woken and found her gone, and had been looking for her. As simple as that. And with this simplicity they both had to be satisfied, and, much later, in the far, fag-end of the night, to fall asleep.