The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

Keenen was outside the stables, arming his contracted gardeners with hoes, rakes, and other implements. He glanced my way as I passed, then turned back quickly to his charges. It was a sure-thing bet that he knew as much as Mrs. Winton why I was being guested here at the Manor, against, as I was beginning to suppose, the Earl’s instructions. It all had to do with the maze.

I stopped at its entrance, remembering its complexity, feeling defeated, already lost. I didn’t have much faith in my copy of the diagram. Still, I stepped through the gate—straight into a sticky splash of whitewash. A few steps on was another splash, and another, and another. Soon I was following a trail of whitewash and the prints of gardeners’ Wellingtons past the dead flower beds and dry ornate fountains, over dwarfish bridges and dusty ruts, in and out of wall gaps, past stone benches and statuary and a sundial that was an hour behind the times.

Following this whitewash paper chase, it took me only ten minutes to reach the center. Unsurprisingly, the ancient padlock was gone, the iron gate ajar.

Retine quod aqua coercetur.

“I think those Indians are friendly, General Custer,” I muttered, and pushed hard on the gate.

It grated open onto a lawn run amok. The sight of all that long grass made me think instinctively of snakes. Then I remembered where I was and that Britain has just one poisonous snake whose track record is ten people in a hundred years. Hoping there wasn’t an adder out there that could count to eleven, I waded in.

It’d once been a sloping lawn, and what it sloped down to was a pond that was perhaps fifteen meters across. I stumbled down to the edge, where the water was deep green with algae. With a long stick I tried to find the bottom, and couldn’t. I looked out over the lake. It was utterly flat, undisturbed by fish or bird, and I began to wonder what I might see break the surface if I sat down to wait.

But I didn’t want to sit down. Instead I set off along the stone path running beside the lake, kicking moss pads into the water. At one place I almost joined them as I tripped over a rusty ring fixed into the stone. It sported a rag of rope, giving it the look of a mooring point, which I supposed it to be. But whatever, it’d been a hell of a time since anyone had taken a punt out here.

Farther along were the wooden remains of what may have been a small summer house halfway up the slope. Once upon a time this had been a pleasure garden of the most stylish kind. Today all it had were its memories (whatever they were) and an air of ruined elegance. Why, with the rest of the grounds so carefully manicured, had this garden been forgotten?

I spotted the island.

It’d been hidden by the foliage. In an instant I had the binoculars out of the bag and up to my eyes.

An island, a tiny island overgrown with grass and bushes. But here and there they were threaded through by pathways, and in a couple of places the weathered stone of some broken structure poked into view. Something moved.

I joggled the glasses, trying to sharpen focus. I could’ve sworn something had flitted past a break in the bushes. But, no. Nothing out there moved now. Perhaps it’d been imagination, or maybe a bird flitting from one branch to another. If it had been a bird, it was the only animal life I’d seen so far in this garden. The pond, if properly cleaned out, would’ve been ideally suited for ducks and carp; probably had been once, though that would’ve been long, long ago. I continued on, hoping to find a bridge to the island. Instead I found something else.

It lay in the water ahead. Stenciled letters and numbers along one side of the rubber raft proclaimed it a navy surplus job, which put the kybosh on my “good fairies” theory. Obviously it was a setup, and it was obvious by whom. Only the why of it all remained as murky as the pond. But here was the raft and over there was the island.

Paddling slowly, I did a circuit of the island, looking for a place to land. In a sort of little cove I found a jetty. But its fungus-covered poles, rotted boards, and smell of decay kept me paddling. Finally I found a bit of pebbly beach and ran ashore there.

There was a path of discolored stones winding round and round, looking like a maze within a maze. The notion seemed to fit the landscape. But no other path crossed this one, so I supposed it led to a definite destination. I was right, and I came to it suddenly—what had to have been the original for the white marble Second Pavilion out in the grounds. But this one was much smaller and a ruin. Its foundations had sunk, cracking the walls, toppling one of its columns, and opening the roof. The interior was a green riot of weeds.

I wandered around it, trying to find an answer to this garden’s isolation. Not that I knew what I was looking for, nor was I sure it was here just because this was the middle of the maze. It just seemed a more likely place than any other.

All I found was a bone, half buried in the dirt. Although I wasn’t sure what sort of bone it was, I was fairly sure what sort of bone it wasn’t. It wasn’t human. Trying to remember my biology lessons I thought it might be the wing bone of some large bird. A swan seemed the likeliest. I dug into the dirt a bit deeper, but couldn’t find any more of the beast.

It was good to sit in the English sun, eating roast beef sandwiches and drinking orange cordial on that extraordinary within-a-maze island, my back propped against marble ruins. But soon clouds were scudding over from Cornwall, and before I was even through the inner gate heavy raindrops were pattering down.

Getting wet wasn’t my only problem. The whitewash marks on the path were blurring as the rain increased, and before long the best I could do was to look for white streaks on the stonework.

I was pretty much a white streak myself as I splashed through the East Front and shook the water off like a dog. The smell of brewing coffee and a cheery crockery clatter did nothing for me at all. But I stopped outside the kitchen door in the hope of overhearing something.

Keenen was saying, “It’s come on to rain.”

Has It? I thought, and squelched upstairs to change.

The distance to the local village of Harringford-in-the-Vale was longer than I thought. But the rain had gone, the afternoon sun was out, and I felt I needed a good long walk to anywhere away from Woodthorpe Manor.

Coming down from changing I’d met Mrs. Winton like a specter on the stairs. “Went into the maze again?” she asked at once, a question I dodged with a few unpleasantries about English weather. She took the hint, but I knew she wouldn’t let up for long. I could see now with the clarity of 20-20 hindsight that her curious behavior had started the moment she’d clapped eyes on my ghost books, and was compounded by my blabbing about my ghost hunting experience. Yes, and how disappointed she’d looked when I voiced my attitude toward further ghost hunts. So now it was subterfuge and manipulation. And it all centered about the maze. The only thing that puzzled me was why she’d waited for a ghost hunter to fall accidentally into her clutches when Britain is the home of the ghost hunter. The only difference I could see was one of nationality, but I couldn’t think how it would have a bearing on the matter. A ghost is a ghost is a ghost, no matter who hunts it.

Perhaps I could’ve, perhaps I should’ve, confronted Mrs. Winton then and there on the stairs, ask her if she was having me look into a haunting without me knowing I was doing it. But then she would’ve just said, “How lovely, the sun’s back out. Run along and play in the maze again.” I could’ve threatened to leave, of course, but that seemed childish somehow and might’ve only made matters worse. Besides, I’d never find out what it’d been all about, and that would’ve driven me crazy. The only way to tackle the situation was to arm myself with some information, and the only place to get it was in town.

Harringford-in-the-Vale was an inn, a church, a huddle of shops, a scatter of cottages along a main road or “high street” that was neither as main nor as high as it had been before the advent of the motorway bypass. But it did possess a side street, and at the end of this side street I found Scudamore’s Engineering Workshop, a do-it-all, fix-it-place that repaired just about anything; a grand sort of name for what looked like a First World War airplane hangar. Fact is, I thought I could make out SOPWITH in faded paint over the doors.

Asking about, I was told Mr. Scudamore himself was working on the Norton. I found him off in a corner of the workshop, refitting the exhaust system, handling the machinery with an expertise that had me wondering if he’d learned his engineering from James Landsdowne Norton personally. He seemed old enough. He said, “So you’re Ernie Pine. His Lordship telephoned, said he’d put you up at the inn, but when I called there they’d not heard of you.”

“No. The last two days I’ve been staying at the Manor.”

He peered at me over the bike’s petrol tank as if I’d just admitted to being Jack the Ripper. “Do what?”