way in, or of prising a window open, he decided to climb the chestnut tree whose branches fingered the windows on the second floor. He tethered the llama to the foot of the chestnut and began to climb and eventually to make the jump.
Standing on the sill, with a thirty-foot drop below him, he continued to stare for some while at the glow of embers in the grate, before he climbed carefully at last over the sash and down into the darkness of the room.
He had been in this room before, several times, but long ago, and it seemed very different tonight. He knew that Juno’s bedroom was immediately below and he started to make for the shadowy door.
He grinned to think what a surprise it would be for her. She was wonderful in the way she took surprises. She never
It was when he was but a few steps from the door that he heard the first sound. With a reflex stemming from far earlier times his hand moved immediately to his hip pocket. But there was no revolver there and he brought back his empty hand to his side. He had swung in his tracks at the sound and he faced the last few vermilion embers in the grate.
What he had heard exactly he did not know, but it might have been a sigh. Or it might have been the leaves of the tree at the window except that the sound seemed to have come from near the fireplace.
And then it came again: this time it was a voice.
‘Sweet love … O, sweet, sweet love …’
The words were so soft that had they not been whispered in the profound silence of the night they would never have been heard.
Muzzlehatch, motionless in the seemingly haunted room, waited for several long minutes, but there were no more words and no sound save for a long sigh like the sigh of the sea.
Moving silently forward and a little to the right Muzzlehatch became almost immediately aware of a blot of darkness more intense than the surrounding shades and he bent forward with his hands raised as though ready for action.
What kind of a creature would lie on the floor and whisper? What kind of monster was luring him forward?
And then there was a movement in the darkness by the dulling embers and then silence again and no more stirrings.
The moon broke free of the clouds and shone into the library, lighting up a wall of books – lighting up four pictures: lighting up a patch of carpet and the sleeping heads of Juno and the boy.
Walking with slow, silent strides to the window; climbing through; jumping for the chestnut tree; lowering himself branch by branch; slipping and bruising his knee; reaching the ground; untying the llama and riding home – all this was a dream. The reality was in himself – a dull and sombre pain.
FORTY-FOUR
The days moved by in a long, sweet sequence of light and air. Each day an original thing. Yet behind all this there was something else. Something ominous. Juno had noticed it. Her lover was restless.
‘Titus!’
His name sprang up the stairs to where he lay.
‘Titus!’
Was it an echo, or a second cry? Whichever one it was it failed to wake him. There was no movement – save in his dream, where, tumbling from a tower, a skewbald beast fell headlong.
The voice was twelve treads closer.
‘Titus! My sweet!’
His eyelid moved but the dream fought on for life, the blotched beast plunging and wheeling though sky after sky.
The voice had reached the landing –
‘My mad one! My bad one! Where are you, poppet?’
Through the curtained windows of the bedroom, a flight of sunbeams, traversing the warm, dark air, forced a pool of light on the pillow. And beside that pool of light, in the ash-grey, linen shadow, his head lay, as a boulder might lie, or a heavy book might lie; motionless; undecipherable – a foreign language.
The voice was in the doorway; a cloud moved over the sun; and the sunbeams died from the pillow.
But the rich voice was still a part of his dream, though his eyes were open. It was blended with that rush of images and sounds which swarmed and expanded as the creature of his nightmare, falling at length into a lake of pale rainwater, vanished in a spurt of steam.
And as it sank, fathom by darkening fathom, a great host of heads, foreign yet familiar, arose from the deep and bobbed upon the water – and a hundred strange yet reminiscent voices began to call across the waves until from horizon to horizon he was filled with a great turbulence of sight and sound.
Then, suddenly, his eyes were wide open –
Where was he?
The empty darkness of the wall which faced him gave him no answer. He touched it with his hand.
Who was he? There was no knowing. He shut his eyes again. In a few moments there was no noise at all, and then the scuffling sound of a bird in the ivy outside the tall window recalled the world that was outside himself – something apart from this frightful zoneless nullity.
