The Whisper in the Gloom Page 8

  “Well, I expect there was sudden death there. The land mine. Proper blew the lights out of those houses. It looks a spooky place, anyway. Just like that house in the flick we saw—The Ghoul of Muttering Grange.”

  “Tactful, aren’t you?” was Foxy’s comment.

  Up to this point, the scheme had been for Bert a bold, pleasing fantasy. Now he realized he was expected to go through with it, and the reality did not feel so agreeable: shades of the haunted house began to close around the growing boy. However, assuming an expression at once resolute and insouciant, he said, “I’ll tell her I met Uncle James at the Pleasure Gardens and he invited me to stay with him a few nights. I’ve been there before.”

  No sooner had he said it than Bert perceived he had hit upon the perfect let-out. Although he had indeed stayed once with Uncle James at Wandsworth, he knew that his mother would at once make inquiries, and finding him not there, go to the police. The whole story would then have to come out, but in such a way that his friends could not possibly accuse him of having been windy; honor would be saved and peace of mind secured at one stroke. Bert looked up a little guiltily at Foxy and Copper, but they were regarding him with ill-concealed admiration.

  “The Brain’s got what it takes,” said Copper.

  The meeting then returned to the problem of Mr. Gray and his mail. Of the two letters Foxy had pinched the previous day, one was a printed announcement from a night club called The High Dive; the other was more enigmatic: typewritten, without address or signature, it said:

  D. street party off. Too hot. All laid on for Kingsway.

  The Martians stared at this message again, utterly baffled. It could not be innocent—otherwise it would have a signature at least.

  “Look here,” said Bert at last. “Suppose this chap is a master criminal….”

  Before the great bomb came gently swaying down on its parachute, the house had been a charming example of early Victorian domestic architecture, a small eligible property in a quiet road, embowered behind laurels and flowering shrubs, wisteria trained up its white stucco façade, with a veranda facing south at the back. The blast had taken off most of the roof, twisted into different, insane patterns the once elegant wrought-iron of balcony and grille, sucked out the window panes, and cracked the walls. Outside, the shrubs had grown dense and weeds proliferated: within there was a pervasive dankness, as though the house were still sweating with the fear of that terrible night.

  Such of the furniture as was worth salvaging had long since been removed by the tenants. Children, playing on the waste ground nearby, where the rubble of the direct hit had been cleared away, had dared one another to enter the house and from time to time dismantled it further. The landlord being dead and his affairs in confusion, negotiations had only recently been concluded through which the house and its rickety neighbors were scheduled for clearance by the Borough Council.

  It was this house which had been chosen by the red-faced man as a very temporary domicile for the murderer of Dai Williams. He, too, had realized that it was the best concealed of the derelict houses. It was less clean than ordinary condemned cell, but hardly less homey; and it had the advantage that a dead body could lie there for months with little risk of discovery. The red-faced man was only an intermediary, a link in the chain. He had received orders to find a suitable spot and arrange that the Quack should be there at a given time; he did not even know who the executioner would be. All he knew was that the Quack had outlived his usefulness to the organization, and indeed, now the police were hunting for him, could be a deadly danger to it—as great a danger, perhaps, as the man he had murdered. At any rate, Camden Town was too hot to hold the Quack just now; it had been decided, at short notice, that he must be moved—first moved, and then removed for good. What better place could there be for this final removal than a derelict house in a road of detached, derelict houses, where no one could overhear the Quack’s last words? One with a lot of nice shrubs around it.

  The red-faced man had been pleased with himself this afternoon—first, to have found the ideal spot on which the Quack could be put; and second, because it looked as if no trouble could be coming now through the Hale nipper. If the nipper, he argued, had gone to the police with his story, the police would be taking a keen interest in Mrs. Hale’s lodging house and any strange visitors there. But he himself and Fred had both gone there without being picked up by the flatties. It had been a risk, of course, but they were paid well to take risks; they were less frightened of the police than of their own organization; and in any case, the police would have hell’s own job proving they had done anything more than try to buy a boat from a nipper.

  They were one jump ahead of the police, then, in knowing the whereabouts of the boy who had received Dai Williams’ last message. It only remained to get hold of that message—the real one, not the phony screed which the little bleeder had fobbed off on them—to get hold of it one way or another, and he and Fred could indulge in a period of well-earned retirement. A quiet chat with young Hale was long overdue: Mrs. Hale’s house would not be the most convenient one for the purpose, so the nipper would be taken elsewhere. It was all lined up….

  The Quack settled down in what had been the dining room of the derelict house off Campden Hill Road. It looked out upon the garden at the front—or would have looked out if the window had not been shuttered. He had got in after nightfall, without difficulty, through a window at the side—the boards nailed across it had worked loose—and selected his present room because it gave him a peephole onto the street and felt less damp than the others on the ground floor. His last shot of dope and the prospect of a new life filled him with exhilaration. An hour or two in a rotting house was a small price to pay for safety, let alone the future in another country which the organization had planned for him. Now that the police description of him had appeared in the papers, it was obviously time to fade. He would be picked up here, given papers and money, smuggled out of the country. He could leave all that to the organization, in which he had implicit confidence: indeed, he felt toward it as he would have felt, when a child, toward his father, had his father not died before he was born. It appeared to him all-wise and all-powerful; it made stern demands on him, which had to be obeyed, not questioned; it provided a sort of framework for his erratic, disintegrating life; it looked after him. When he was told to be here at a certain hour, without any identifiable possessions in his pockets, he accepted it for a wise, if slightly mysterious, piece of paternalism.

  As an ex-public-schoolboy, the Quack retained the vestiges of a certain code—an attitude of mind which quite barred out the idea of betrayal by one’s associates. It was his reassurance, and his undoing.

  Copper had been sent to case the joint that afternoon to make sure everything was in order. He had eeled his way into the pantry and noted that the kitchen taps produced no water, that a tread was missing from the stairs which led up to the first floor, and that, on the damp-stained plaster of the kitchen wall, among other, less reticent writings, was an announcement “Dudley Jarvis goes with Rita Bloggs.” He found the side door to the basement. It was not locked, but heavily bolted. He treated the bolts with some bicycle oil he had thoughtfully brought with him, but found it impossible to shift them. After nosing around a bit—the house had a disagreeable, charred smell, as though someone had started a fire which the damp had presently extinguished—Copper wrote on the wall “Foxy loves Lady Durbar,” and took his departure.

  Some five hours later, Bert and Foxy entered the house from the back. Copper himself was keeping cave in the road outside; he would give them five minutes, then go home. They lit a storm lantern which Foxy had acquired, laid out the blankets on the tiled floor of the kitchen, and opened the haversack. It contained four bottles of Coca-Cola, a loaf, two tins of pilchards, some cakes with vermilion icing, a slab of chocolate, and a science-fiction work—enough to last Bert till they refueled him tomorrow night. Foxy had agreed to stay with him for an hour, so that he could get acclimatized.

  “Lovely place you’ve got here, Sir Albert,” said Foxy. “Ring for the butler and let’s have some champagne.”

  “Wish we could light a fire,” said Bert. He was shivering already, though not entirely with the damp chill of the room.

  “Plenty of loose wood about. Why shouldn’t we?” said Foxy, shining his torch round the bedraggled room.

  “Don’t be a fool. They’d see the smoke.”

  They were still speaking in hoarse whispers, as though there might be someone else in the house.

  “What’s that?” asked Foxy. His torch beam had picked out a ledge and panel in the far wall.

  “That’s a serving hatch. Must be the dining room the other side.”

  “The idle rich. Our mum dishes up in the kitchen. I wonder what them Durbars are eating off their gold plates tonight,” said Foxy dreamily. “Smashing judy, Lady Durbar is. I could go for her in a big way.”

  “Wasn’t she in pantomime or something? My mother said—”

  “Lady Durbar on ice. Bet she knocked ’em.”

  “Women are all right. But I shan’t get married. It’d interfere with my scientific studies. A man’s got to put his career first.”

  “I could do with one of those fancies. Makes you hungry, camping in a haunted house.”

  “You can have half,” said Bert, breaking a cake. “It’s my iron ration.”

  “Iron! You’ve said it,” Foxy exclaimed, after biting into the delicacy. “Bent my best pair of false teeth on it.”

  They both giggled; then a sighing, strumming noise from outside began to fill up the silence—rain tapping and strumming faster on the dry leaves of the laurels. A loose board in a window somewhere gave one loud, peremptory rap.

  “Postman’s late tonight,” said Foxy.

  “Turn it up. That was the wind.”

  “So’s this,” said Foxy, belching resonantly. “Don’t strike a light, there’s an escape of gas!”

  Presently Bert’s resolution broke down, and he began to devour the food, ably assisted by Foxy. When they had eaten half of it, Bert looked at his watch. To his dismay, he realized they had been here less than an hour: it seemed ages, and the rest of the night stretched before him like an eternity.

  “Well, I’ll be drifting,” Foxy said.

  “Let’s explore the house first.” Anything to keep his friend with him a little longer, in this dark, dank tomb.

  Bert took up the storm lantern: they sallied forth into the passage, and climbed the stairs, stepping carefully over the missing tread which Copper had reported. On the first landing, Bert stopped abruptly, with a little gasp of fear. The faint glow of the lantern had shown a door, and the door had moved—swung and stopped.

  “See that?”

  “It’s the wind,” whispered Foxy, with less than his normal confidence. “Drafty old dump, this.”

  The wind had indeed risen, flinging handfuls of rain against the window shutters and sending drafts like scurrying rats along the passages. The boys pushed each other forward into the room whose door had swung open. It had been the drawing room once, long and elegant, three tall sash windows looking out over the top of the veranda onto the garden, where ladies in bustles, moving with the heraldic dignity of peacocks, had played croquet.

  “Funny smell,” said Bert.

  “Corpses,” said Foxy.

  He shone his torch round the walls. The faded but still too exuberant patterns of the wallpaper, relic of some Edwardian tenant, writhed under the torch beam; here and there the paper had been torn away from the wall and hung like flaps of stained, flayed skin.

  “If you’re starving, you can always eat them things,” said Foxy heartlessly, indicating some baleful-looking fungi growing on the skirting board in a corner. “Let’s go.”

  They examined two little rooms on this floor, which yielded nothing but emptiness and rot. The staircase to the next floor was so rickety that they decided to go no farther; indeed, up here, it felt as if the whole house was swaying and tilting like their own shadows on the landing wall. Foxy executed a few jive steps, admiring his shadow, causing the floor to creak and the drawingroom door firmly to close itself. They started downstairs.

  “Change and decay in all around I see,” sang Foxy in a throaty contralto. The next moment, forgetting the missing tread, he had tripped, and tumbled down the remaining stairs into the hall. The hollow house clattered like a smithy; some flakes of plaster fell; then silence returned in a backwash so powerful, so engulfing, that Bert’s heart seemed to stop beating under its influence. He opened his mouth to ask Foxy if he was hurt, but the silence stifled his voice.

  And worse was to come. Foxy had picked himself up, jerked his head at the dining-room door.

  “What’s in there?” he said.

  Bert tried the door. It gave a little, then stopped giving: in fact, it was almost as if it had pushed against him. He swallowed hard, before he could speak.

  “No good,” he said, “it’s stuck,” and quickly led the way back into the kitchen. He knew that he could not stay the night here now, until the mystery of that almost human pressure, on the other side of the door, had been solved. It must have been his imagination. “Bert’s such an imaginative boy,” his mother was always saying.

  “Try that sliding panel, Foxy. The serving hatch thing. You can see into the room through it, if it’ll move,” he whispered.

  Unlike the dining-room door, the panel did not stick. If flew open with alacrity. Foxy’s torch beam, darting through, stopped dead on a dead-white face, two yards away from his own; a mouth hanging open, with a little saliva dribbling from one comer; eyes that seemed all whites, like a corpse’s, glaring at him.

  Foxy recoiled with a yelp of terror, bumping into Bert who was just behind him, and knocking the lantern out of his hand. By the time they had picked it up, and were halfway toward the window through which they had entered the house, a voice close behind them said, “Just a minute, boys. What’s the hurry?”

  A hand fell on Foxy’s shoulder. He wriggled under it, then stopped wriggling; for in the man’s other hand was a razor.

  “Take it easy,” said the man. “We’ll have a nice, quiet talk. And when I say quiet, I mean quiet.”

  The razor carved the air caressingly, a foot from the boys’ faces. Not that either of them had the breath to cry out: there was something about those pinpoint pupils, that hoarse, edged voice, which deflated their lungs. The man made a gesture, and they preceded him into the room whose door had so strangely resisted Bert’s effort to open it. Bert became aware of a smell, different from the dank, charred smell of the house, yet also a smell like decay; he knew he had smelled it before, but he was too frightened to remember where, he did not want to remember where.

  “Sit down, boys. Against the wall there. And put down your lantern in front of you. That’s right.”

  The man receded into the gloom, between them and the door.

  “You’re not frightened of me, are you?” he said, his voice cajoling now, almost uncertain.

  “No, sir,” replied Bert.

  “What were you doing in my house?”

  “Camping,” said Foxy. “Didn’t know it was yours. I mean, we thought it was empty, see?”

  “Ah, a boyish excapade. Doing it for a bet, were you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I heard one of you fall downstairs, didn’t I? Not hurt, I hope? I used to—I’m a doctor, so if you’ve any cuts, sprains, bruises, you’ve come to the right shop. Is there a doctor in the house? I expect the last thing you thought you’d find in the house was a doctor.”

  The man gave a little giggle. Huddled together, backs to the wall, the boys felt each other trembling.

  “Yes, sir. No, sir, I mean,” quavered Bert.

  “Where are you at school?”

  Bert told him.

  “I was a public-school man myself: before I became a surgeon, of course. Funny thing, you know, I always wanted to be a surgeon. Even at school. They used to call me ‘the Quack.’ Have you two got nicknames?”

  “I’m Foxy and we call Bert ‘the Brain.”

  “Ah. Clever type, eh? What’s your subject?”

  “Well, I’m keen on science, sir.”

  “Good show. There’s a future in science. I remember a beak saying to me….”

  What shook Foxy to the wick, as he told Bert afterward, was the way the man went on talking: he just couldn’t stop; it was like listening to a mad, boring scoutmaster palavering over a campfire. The chap was obviously nuts—you could see it in his eyes, which were wildly excited yet didn’t seem to look at anything, and in the way his face sagged and twitched. Well, the only thing was to humor him. He couldn’t go on forever.

  Bert’s reactions, meanwhile, were different. His fright temporarily ebbing, allowed his mind to work again. And the first thing it fastened on was the idea that the man must have been as scared by them as they were of him. Why, otherwise, should he have stayed lurking in this room while they were moving about overhead? Why hold the door shut just now? Perhaps it was sheer relief that made him go on gassing away like this. The man had clearly not wanted them to discover his presence in the house; but, now they had discovered it, he was taking good care they shouldn’t give the alarm. No doubt he was relieved to find that the people he had heard moving about were only two boys. The man must be hiding up here, just as Bert was: he couldn’t be just a tramp; he was—

  And, in a lurid flash, Bert realized who this man was. The smell in the room was the same smell, stale and rancid, which he had noticed, on his way to the Round Pond last Sunday, when a man with a prancing gait had brushed past him. That encounter had been quite forgotten. Even the picture in the paper this morning, of a man whom the police wished to interview in connection with the murder of Dai Williams, had not rung a bell with Bert. But now, covertly glancing at the Quack as he talked on and on, reminiscing about school days and hospital days, Bert realized that he was in a room, in a derelict house out of human call, with a murderer.

  He tugged Foxy’s sleeve. The man’s apparently unseeing eyes caught the movement.