Читать книгу The Dark Gateway: A Novel of Horror - John Burke - Страница 6

CHAPTER TWO

The man who ploughed his way up from the village through the snow drifts, heaped up before and around him like fantastically-shaped meringues, was not suitably dressed for the occasion. He was wearing a dark suit, a sober black overcoat, and a black hat, and looked as though he had come straight here from some city office. He was carrying a small case that brushed against the snow along the side of the lane, and his trousers were soaked up to the knees.

Nevertheless, he was smiling as he looked up at the farmhouse and the shattered castle beyond. Small, black, and incongruous, he stood at the foot of the slope up to the house and looked with apparent equanimity—almost with satisfaction—at the waist-high drifts through which he had yet to fight his way. About him and below, the dazzling, painfully white glaring fields sloped and reeled away, the village itself almost lost in what appeared as an uneven hummock of snow broken only by occasional grey roofs or patches of street that had been cleared.

The man pushed onwards. He was breathing heavily by the time he reached the front gate of the farm, his face an unhealthy colour. He coughed—a hoarse, smoker’s cough. It took all his strength to open the small gate, cutting a wide swathe through the white carpet that lay evenly and indiscriminately over the front lawn—its untidiness now hidden—and the gravel path. There were no marks of footsteps up to the front door and the ramshackle porch because no one who knew the family ever used the front door. The house was shaped like a large, grey L, two doors opening from the back into the farmyard. Everyone came and went by means of the door that gave access to the kitchen. The path that led around the side of the house by the once ornamental hedge was overgrown in summer, and was now choked with snow. It was rarely used; only strangers came to the front of the house.

The visitor took his last few steps, glancing around with a smug look of satisfaction, and knocked.

The use of the large brass knocker invariably created confusion throughout the house. Anyone who knocked at the front door must be a stranger, and that, according to Mrs. Morris, meant bad news. She would turn white, clutch her pinafore to dry her hands—even if they were not wet—and say: “Oh, dear. Now what? And I haven’t done my hair neither.” She would tremble and fiddle with her hair…even today, when she must have known who it would be. In the end it was, as usual, Nora who went to open the door.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Jonathan. We didn’t expect—”

“Good afternoon, Miss Morris.”

“We didn’t really expect you. We thought the weather would have put you off.”

She pulled the door open wide; it creaked a squeaky protest. Mr. Jonathan entered and stood in the narrow stone passage, holding his case away from his damp legs and grimacing.

“I had no idea how wet I was becoming,” he said, in a precise voice that did not quite eliminate his Liverpool accent.

Nora took his coat, shook it, and hung it beside her own. Mr. Jonathan put down his case, then picked it up again.

“Come into the kitchen and dry yourself,” said Nora. “And perhaps I’d better take your coat and hang it on a chair. If you’ve brought a change of clothing—”

“I’m afraid I omitted to take that precaution. As it was only for a weekend, you know. Foolish of me, wasn’t it?”

Nora was trying to fight down her disappointment. This was what she ought to have expected. If she had not allowed her imagination to dictate to her memory, she would not at this moment be feeling so annoyed. It was her own fault. Since the day that Jonathan had written, asking if he could come down for a weekend, she had been building up the most extravagant hopes.

Why should he want to come down in the middle of winter to a place where he had spent one week’s holiday in the summer? Without consciously wishing the thoughts to come to her, she had imagined—only imagined, at first—what it would be like if he had been so attracted by her that he had decided to come back and ask her if she would leave the farmhouse, to go with him.… It was the dream of leaving the house that had attracted her, and at once she was able to find reasons for believing that she might, at last, get away from it. She was surprised to find that her recollections of Mr. Jonathan were vague, but she filled in details and built up quite an attractive picture of him. A middle-aged, understanding sort of man, with a quality all his own. Her youth had appealed to him, and he was coming back. What had started out as a dream became reality. She had almost expected that when she opened the door—well, what had she expected? It was all gone now. Already it was incredible that she should ever have found it hard to thrust such an absurd idea from her mind.

But if he had not come to see her, what could have brought him down on a day like this?

Mr. Jonathan, still clinging to his case, went thankfully towards the fire, greeting Mrs. Morris in his clipped, sibilant voice. She pulled up a chair for him, and he sat down before the leaping flames, the steam from his trousers mingling with the steam from the spout of the perpetually-boiling kettle.

“That’s better,” he said, and he put his case on the floor beside the chair.

“A cup of tea, Mr. Jonathan?” said Nora.

“Thank you. Yes, it would be very welcome.”

Mrs. Morris hovered anxiously about him, going “Tch, tch,” and saying: “If your clothes—well, with all the damp there is…I expect Rhys could find you something.”

“No, really. Very kind of you, but I’ll soon be dry. If only I had realised how bad it was going to be—”

“I s’pose it wasn’t like this when you left Liverpool?”

“All the snow was trampled into slush days ago. People and traffic, you know. I was quite surprised to see how white and clean everything looked when we left Chester. The further we got into Wales, the thicker it got.”

“You picked a bad time to come down here. We don’t get many visitors this time of year.”

“Very good of you to have me—very kind indeed. I don’t mind the weather.” He smiled strangely. “I had to come this weekend. I’ve found out so many things just lately.”

Nora watched him without seeming to. She was shocked by the change in him. At least, there seemed to be a change, though that may have been because she had built up such an idealised portrait of him. He was older than she had thought, and there was something malignant about him. He crouched rather than sat. His hands twitched nervously. He looked scared, yet indefinably anticipatory. Nora knew that he had certainly not come down to see her, and she was unexpectedly relieved. He was a small, unprepossessing man, with his creased forehead and eyes never at rest. His nose was faintly pockmarked at the end, and although he could not have been much more than forty, he was going raggedly bald, his lank, dark hair smoothed back from his walnut-shell forehead. No, thought Nora with a shudder, not even if it had been a way of escape from the farm: no, not with this stunted little clerk, bringing with him the atmosphere of his Liverpool office. Even if he had come because of her—and now she was quite positive that he had not done so. She wondered again what could have brought him; and, glancing at her mother, she saw that she, too, was puzzled.

“It’s a small world,” said Mr. Jonathan, with an important little cough.

He obviously wanted their attention for what he had to say.

“I made some surprising discoveries when I was down here last time,” he went on, turning around to face the room. He looked about, at the clock with its pendulum doggedly nodding from side to side in its glass case, at the calendar advertising cattle cake, and at the hooks in the beams of the ceiling. “I didn’t like to say anything until I’d been back to Liverpool and made sure that it all fitted. It seemed too good to be true, after all these years—centuries, rather. But it’s true. No mistake about it. I always like to be sure of my facts: I’m a careful man.” He beamed. “This”—his voice rose and he waved his hand, with its bitten nails, all-embracingly—“was the home of my family. Long time ago, of course.”

Nora and her mother stared at him. The fire glowed behind him, flickering redly behind his drab, saturnine figure.

“The people who had it before us,” said Mrs. Morris, vaguely, “were the Mountjoys. I don’t know who there was before them.”

“It was a long time ago,” said Mr. Jonathan. “Long before this house itself was here. We’re an old family, you know—very old. Came from the Continent. It’s all in the books you’ve got in the other room. I was delighted to find them…oh, yes, delighted. Our ancestral home—our entrance to Britain. A gateway, as it were.” And he smiled to himself as though hugging some strange secret.

“In the books?” said Nora.

“Our whole history is there.”

“But I didn’t think any of them dealt with family history of any sort.”

“The history of what came before history was written,” he murmured, so that she could hardly hear him.

He was trying to sound important, she decided. She had met them before, these little clerks who talked big when they came to the country, as though being a city dweller gave them some superiority over farmers and the like.

Mr. Jonathan got up from his chair. “I’m dry now,” he said. “Perhaps I could have another glance at the books, if you don’t mind? Checking up, and so on. Mustn’t make any mistakes.”

“Welcome,” said Mrs. Morris, who had been listening with only half an ear. “But it’s cold in there. We could light a fire,” she added doubtfully.

“Quite understand,” said Mr. Jonathan. “Fuel shortage.… No, I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s very kind of you to have me at all. I just want to look at a few odds and ends—won’t stay long. Too freezing for the fingers, eh?”

His trousers were wrinkled and twisted, stiff where they had dried. When he went towards the door and out into the passage, he moved eagerly, like a traveller nearing his goal.

They watched him go. Mrs. Morris said: “Still, he’s not as funny as that old minister we had for weekends all that summer. Drawing pictures he was in a book out on the lawn, and what pictures they were. Do you remember him, Nora?”

“Yes, mother,” said Nora automatically, her eyes still on the door. “I remember.”

She heard her father splashing across the yard.

“And to think he’s only come to look at those old books!” said her mother with her little explosive hiccough of a laugh. “They’re all the same.”

Mr. Morris was stamping his feet on the thickly-encrusted step. Nora waited, pervaded by a sort of jeering resignation. She knew how the latch would crash as her father put his hand on it, how the coats on the back of the door would mutter as the door opened, and already in her ears, like an echo that has come too soon, even before the sound has been made, she could hear the grinding noise as the woodwork met the uneven tiles. This is serious, she thought. When little things like that get on your nerves.…

The door opened and jarred to a halt as it met the raised tiles. If only things weren’t so much the same, day after day; if only something unusual, unexpected would happen.

“Might as well give up,” said her father with a bland smile.

He did not say what he was proposing to give up. He clumped his routine three paces across the room, pulled his chair forward so that the legs snarled along the floor, and sank down with a gusty sigh.

“That’ll be all for now,” he said. “And if it gets any worse”—he favoured his daughter with a prodigious wink—“I won’t be able to get down to chapel tomorrow. A great pity it will be, but they will not be able to say it’s my fault, is it?”

Mrs. Morris came to help him pull off his boots. It took a lot of energy for him to do it, nowadays, and made him very red in the face. There were times when the phenomenon of getting old puzzled him, and he would hold his hand up before his face as though to read in his palm the answer to the questions that were, perhaps, beginning to worry him. Sometimes that hand trembled when he held anything—his razor, for instance: Nora noticed that he did not shave so often as he had done in the past. No one said a word about it, but often her eyes were drawn to the fine silver stubble that gleamed around his chin and up to his ears. He had been several years older than his wife when he had married her, and it irked him now that she should be able to get about so briskly while he felt his vitality ebbing away. Living on the land for the space of a lifetime, giving it all the strength he had, and now feeling that strength gradually seeping away.…

Nora went out of the room, snatching up a duster as she went. Her father and mother began to talk together. She was sure they had nothing new to say, but the buzz of their voices followed her along the passage.

She could hear Jonathan’s dry cough from the parlour. It was a fidgety, throaty cough. She knew that when she reached the door she was going to turn into the parlour. You didn’t do any dusting on a Saturday afternoon, but carrying a duster made things look better. There would always be an excuse to hand when she went in.

It was already becoming dark. As she entered she said: “Goodness, it’s black in here. Don’t you need a lamp?”

For a moment her voice did not reach him. His head was bowed over a book that he held open, resting on his two hands. She stopped by the door until he looked up slowly, like a preacher about to deliver a text. His eyes were burning with a far, remote passion, but he spoke flatly, without interest.

“Thank you, no.”

He closed the book and slipped it back on the shelf, allowing his fingers to rest on it for a second when it had been replaced.

“Are these books very valuable, do you think, Mr. Jonathan?” she asked suddenly.

“Valuable?” he said, his voice regaining its normal fussiness. “My dear young lady—oh, indeed, yes. Very valuable.”

“How much?” she said bluntly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“How much do you think they’re worth?”

“Oh, I couldn’t say how much. Really, I have no idea.”

“But if you think they’re valuable—”

“I have no idea of their value in terms of money.”

He came forward, passing her, and going back towards the kitchen. She could hear the clatter of plates and knew that her mother was getting tea ready. The cold began to tingle at her finger-ends. It was everywhere, waiting for you, sharp, painful, ready to pounce as soon as you left the warmth of the fireside, this bitter cold. She could not stay away from the fire for long. She would have to go back. Soon her brother would come back from the afternoon he had been spending with a friend, and the kitchen would be crowded and noisy. It was a large room, and had once held a larger family than it did now, but noise seemed to ring back from the stone floor and everyone invariably wanted to move about at once. Nora would have liked to stay on in the parlour, just for the sake of being alone, but the discomfort would be too extreme. And the darkness made her uneasy. She had never been affected this way before. Darkness held no terrors as a rule; yet at the moment she became conscious of a sensation of brooding menace. If she had another nightmare tonight, she would have something to say to Simon.

The lamp had been lit when she returned to the kitchen. It glowed richly on the white cloth, the crockery, and the knives and spoons, but the corners of the room were huddled in sullen shadow. Mr. Morris still sat by the fire, his wife’s distorted shadow flickering across him as she moved to and fro. Where lamplight and firelight blended, the walls seemed hazy and unsettled, beating in and out with a wavering, unsteady pulse.

Mr. Jonathan hovered indecisively at the far end of the table, seeing nowhere to sit down that was not in the path of the active, bustling Mrs. Morris.

“Sit down, Mr. Jonathan,” said Mr. Morris gruffly, still looking into the fire. “Draw you a chair up to the fire.”

“Thank you. I will, thank you.” Mr. Jonathan looked around, as though the selection of a suitable chair would be an important matter. Before he could come to any decision, Mrs. Morris, without halting on her way from cupboard to table, picked up a hardbacked chair with one hand and swept it towards the fire.

Mr. Jonathan stared at it, then went and sat on it. He glanced at his host. Nora, cutting bread, watched him covertly. His mannerisms had slipped away for a moment, and he was just a nervous little clerk paying a weekend visit. She thought he was going to speak to her father, perhaps making some remark about “the crops,” hoping to win favour—as so many visitors did—but as she watched, a cunning gleam came into his eye, and that unaccountably self-satisfied expression returned to his features.

“Here’s Denis,” said her father suddenly.

“Pardon?” said Mr. Jonathan, starting violently.

“Denis—my son.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I met Denis last time. Yes.”

Nora heard her brother coming across the yard, and heard also that there was someone with him. She stood with her eyes on the door, holding the butter knife in mid-air as though to make a lunge with it. If Denis had met Simon and brought him home to tea.…

The door opened.

Denis had not brought Simon. He had brought his friend from Pen-y-bryn. They were both caked with snow down one side, and it looked as though they both had grey hair, though actually Denis had aggressively ginger hair, and his friend, shaking his head cheerfully, revealed a thick tangle of curly brown.

And then Nora noticed Mr. Jonathan’s face. He was staring at the newcomers with unmistakable anger, gnawing agitatedly at his right thumbnail. For some reason he was furious that someone else should be here. Did he imagine that this weekend had been set aside especially for his visit? Nora felt a quite inexplicable, ridiculous surge of loyalty towards her family, and a mounting dislike of this silly little intruder. She supposed he wanted to prattle on about his connections with the house and his family history, with everyone hanging on his words. And if it was not that, why did he look so black?

Denis said: “I hope you don’t mind, Mum—”

“No, indeed, though I wonder how you ever got over on a day like this. Denis, I don’t think your sister knows…er—oh, dear me, it’s Fred—no, Frank, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, Mrs. Morris.”

Denis slapped Nora on the shoulder with the odious familiarity that is characteristic of brothers.

“This is our Nora,” he said. “Nora, this is Frank, another of the old Marine roughnecks.”

“How do you do,” she said, very affably because of Jonathan’s scowl.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said.

Mrs. Morris said: “We always seem to get a full house at weekends, Mr. Jonathan.”

“So I see,” said Jonathan. “Yes, so I see.”