contact with this malice that pursued her with a defilement worse than guilt. Behind her she heard Friedl break into hard, breathless laughter, and swoop through the bushes to follow her victim still.
‘Run… faster, faster… He is on your heels!’ Tearlessly sobbing, half-demented, Maggie clawed her way out to the open path at last, and began to run unsteadily along it, her course wavering from one grassy edge to the other, her hands spread to ward off the leaning trees. Once she fell, and picked herself up with wincing haste and blundered on. The voice had fallen far behind now, abandoning her to her own torments. No sound pursued her. She halted for a moment, clinging to the resinous trunk of a fir tree in the fragrant darkness, her chest labouring, her ears straining, awed and soothed by the night’s huge silence.
It was then that she heard the sound. Not loud, if the measure of the preceding silence had not newly alerted her spirit, not even significant, if it had been the first time she had heard it. But this was time returning, experience rounding on itself to celebrate her destruction. This she had heard before, a long time ago, and pushed away from her strenuously into the limbo of disbelief because it must not be true. Some way behind her, distantly but clearly, echoed the mute, remembered splash of a body into water. She was mad, or damned, or both, she was the quarry of a specific retribution. History had dragged back a September night of many years ago, so that she should not be able to forget, or find it possible to mistake her hour.
When she could breathe again she crept on, mindless, exhausted, sunk now into the indifference of despair. The comfortable brown bulk of the hotel rose before her out of the trees. She dragged herself up the wooden steps to her own verandah, and let herself in by the curtained door. The furies were hard on her heels, but she could not run any more, and it was not from them she was in flight. Without putting on the light she fell face-upwards on her bed, and lay with spread arms, staring up at the high ceiling, waiting to embrace the judgment.
She knew, she acknowledged, her mortal guilt. A fellow-creature had leaned upon her in his extreme need, and she had shrugged him off and let him fall. She admitted to her consciousness at last the truth of what she was. She was Robin Aylwin’s murderess.
She was roused from her timeless, aimless waiting before the first light of dawn had turned the sky from velvet black to smoke-grey. Something was pecking irritably at her senses, a small, insistent, nagging thing that hurt, and meant to hurt. With infinite labour her mind gathered its abandoned powers to locate and understand. Someone was tapping, tapping, softly and tirelessly at the glass of the door in her sitting-room, the door that led to the verandah and the lake.
She rose like a sleepwalker, and felt her way across the bedroom. All the shapes within the room were defined in shades of grey. The sky framed in the window was metallic and bluish, like steel, and the outline of the figure pressed into the angle of the door-frame was black, sexless, without identity, one edge of it merged into the wall. Only the hand that tapped and tapped at the glass with some small hard object had a perceptible shape and size. A man’s hand, tapping out that minute but penetrating sound with his keys to wake her.
She had no thoughts, no curiosity, and no fear. She drew back the bolt. The cool of the outer air gushed in before him as he slid into the room quickly and silently, and closed the door behind him. Her hand had gone up automatically to the light switch, but he caught her by the wrist before she could reach it.
‘No, don’t! No lights! They’d see them.’
She passed a hand confusedly over her eyes, for she was surely seeing and hearing things that could have no reality. The voice she knew, and the face, so close to her own in the dimness. If he had not been many miles away in England, she would have said this was Francis Killian in the flesh, so solid did the apparition seem. She stood passive, not trying to free herself, not even recoiling from being handled, from having her haunted solitude trampled, from having to experience at close quarters his love and rage and fear for her. The force that frowned off the world to a respectful distance had deserted her and left her a shell.
He stood between her and the paling light from outside, and turned her about in his hands, saw the grass stains on her skirt, the torn stockings, the deep bruises under her eyes. He took her by the chin and turned her face up to him with a groan of exasperation.
‘My God, my God, what have you done?’ he said, hardly audibly, but that was to himself, not to her. ‘Oh, God, why did I ever take my eyes off you? Even at night! I thought you were safe in your bed…’
‘It
‘I followed you. Did you think I could just wash my hands of you and let you go to hell alone? Why, for God’s sake,’ he demanded his enforced whisper shaken and thick with fury, ‘did you have to do this crazy thing? Couldn’t you trust me and take my word for it? Why did you have to come here and expose yourself to
She had nothing to say. He held her by the shoulders and she stood silent and submissive, looking at him, looking through him, with eyes huge and dulled, as though she still dreamed of him and had no interest in waking. Her passivity terrified him. He shook her between his hands, too frightened to be gentle.
‘Don’t you understand? Don’t you realise your position? Don’t you know that Friedl never came in last night?
CHAPTER SEVEN
« ^ »
Something came to life again in the dull depths of her eyes, a quivering intelligence that proved she was still within reach of argument and persuasion, if only he had had time for either. But it was growing lighter every moment, and he had to get out of there quickly, or she would have no chance at all. There was no time to question her. He made one attempt, and she said nothing, merely stood withdrawn into some remote dream of horror. There was nothing he could do but take charge of her, and hope to God she would do what he told her, and be too numbed to realise what a tightrope she was walking until she was safely over.
He drew her across the room in his arm, and thrust her into her bedroom.
‘Get those clothes off, quickly! Give me the stockings and the dress… Hurry, I’ll get them out of here.’
She went where he urged her and did what she was told like an automaton. In a few moments she emerged in her housecoat, the torn stockings and stained dress in her hands. He bundled them into his pockets, and drew her to the bed, and sitting her down there, held her by the shoulders eye to eye with him.
‘Listen to me! The police will be here all day, asking questions of everybody. You, too! You’ve got to be ready for them.
It was then that her face awoke suddenly, stirred into agitation and pain, for it was then that it dawned on her that he half-believed she had killed Friedl. And in a sense so she had. There was a doom on her. People who came too near her died, without any motion of her will. And so might he, if she did not send him away from her.
