Norman Invasions (5 page)

I must find her, and help her, I thought.

She will not escape, I thought.

How different she now was from the prim maiden of my dreams. that well-bred, high-born, elegant maiden, so prudish, so proper, so fashionable, reserved, haughty and formal. So aloof, so icy, so cold, so indifferent. Gone now were the stiff, crisp, white, high-collared shirtwaist, closed by a brooch at the throat, the severe, ankle-length black dress, the dark stockings, the high, soft, black shoes, coming above the ankle, buttoned closed. She was reduced now, fleeing in the storm, naked, her hair unbound, outside civilization, to her female essentials, whose nature she had refused to recognize, whose meaning she had striven to suppress, whose destiny she had denied.

“Hello!” I called. “Where are you?” Surely she was risking illness in such weather. “I mean you no harm!”

I wondered if she were mad, but I was somehow sure she was not. From where had she been brought? What was her purpose here?

“Hello!” I called.

There was no answer. Only the wind and the rain.

She has disobeyed, hasn't she, I thought. That will require discipline. Then I thought, no, it is appropriate, now, that she disobey. It is fitting, and expected. She can be taught later.

The switch, the riding crop, the whip, cords, suitable feedings, I thought, can reform, and make more precise, her behavior.

Then I dismissed such thoughts, for they were improper, and radically inappropriate. My heart went out to the shivering waif.

“Hello!” I called, again, loudly, into the darkness.

“Hello!” I heard, from several yards away, out toward the cliffs and beach. A man's voice.

I hurried toward the voice. “Gavin,” I cried, “is that you?”

“Aye,” he responded. He was carrying a lantern.

“Did you see her?” I cried.

“Aye!” he said. “She ran toward the cliffs.”

We came within a few feet of one another.

“Who is she?” asked Gavin.

“I don't know,” I said. “We must find her. What are you doing here, this late, in the storm?”

He looked away, angrily, confused.

“Did you want to talk to me?” I asked.

“No,” he said, surlily.

“Why are you here, about Hill House?” I asked.

He did not respond.

“You were spying on me,” I said. “Why?”

“I caught you now,” he said. “Going out to the beach! To make more mischief. Who is the girl?”

“I don't know,” I said, angrily. “And I assure you I am not in the habit of busying myself with the making of idle mischief, nor of taking trips to the beach in the dark, in the middle of storms.”

He, at least, had dressed for the weather.

“It is you, I note,” I said, “whom I find here in the dark.”

“You are not the fooler?” said Gavin.

“No,” I said. “And if there is a fooler here, it is surely you, not I.”

In a flash of lightning the heath toward us, between us, who were near Hill House, and the cliffs, was suddenly, brightly illuminated.

We saw no sign of the girl.

“No hard feelings?” asked Gavin.

“No,” said I, and we clasped hands, warmly. I put the blanket over my head, to gain what protection I could from the weather. I pulled it out a bit, so my eyes were shielded. I tried to wipe the rain from my eyes with the back of a wet hand.

“She was running toward the cliffs,” said Gavin.

“That is dangerous,” I said.

“Let's find her,” he said. The rain was pouring over the brim of his hat.

Stay back.

“Why?” asked Gavin.

“What?” I called.

“Why should I stay back?” he asked.

“I didn't say anything,” I called to him.

“It was the wind then,” said Gavin.

We then, separated by some twenty yards or so, in the downpour, the moon muchly obscured by clouds, Gavin holding up the lantern, the heath brightened intermittently by flashes of lighting, went toward the cliffs.

“There she is!” cried Gavin, pointing.

The small, white, pathetic figure was crouching near the edge of the cliffs, the waters roiling in the wind and tide below.

“Don't move!” I called to her. I was uncertain if she understood where she was. “Don't frighten her!” I called to Gavin. “She is close to the cliff's edge!” Then I called out to the girl. “Stay where you are,” I called. “We are friends. We mean you no harm. Come back with us to the house. We will see that you get home safely. Have you been attacked? Have you been robbed? Are you frightened? Come back with us. You will be all right! Things will be all right. Don't run! Stay where you are! We'll make tea! Have you eaten? Please! I have a blanket!”

While I was trying to keep a distance from the girl, who crouched in the grass, coaxing her to trust us, doing my best to avoid alarming her, Gavin had been approaching more closely.

Go back, now. Leave us! Go! Now!

Gavin raised his lantern, and shook his head, negatively. I did not understand his gesture.

What is wrong with him, I wondered.

He took another step, tentatively, toward the girl, the lantern raised, his other hand extended out to her, as though she might grasp it, and be led to safety.

“Don't be afraid,” I called to the girl.

Perhaps the wind drowned out my voice.

She backed away from Gavin, her hand held out, as though to fend him away.

It is not he, little fool.

She looked wildly about, as though she had heard something. Perhaps Gavin had spoken to her, though I saw no indication of that in the storm.

He reached quickly toward her, and she stepped backward, and I cried out “Beware!” and, with a scream, she had twisted backward in the storm, and plunged from the cliff toward the cold, violent waters and cruel rocks below.

Gavin cried out with misery and ran to the edge of the cliff, holding up the lantern. I stood transfixed where I was, with horror. Those were not waters in which things were likely to live.

Suddenly behind Gavin there materialized a mighty, angry shape, yards in height, as though created from lightning and the storm itself. The shape was that of a monstrous horse, or horselike beast, and its eyes blazed, and it reared, and Gavin was suddenly, the lantern cast aside, his arms raised, beneath those plunging, anvil-like hoofs. He slipped backward and, as had the girl, plunged downward, in that terrible descent to the sea.

I threw aside the blanket, and ran to the cliff's edge and looked down.

The beast had disappeared.

I tore off my shoes, and dove from the cliff. I am a strong swimmer, but I had few allusions about this place, and the dangers. It was not a place one chooses to swim, even in summer, in daylight, in the best of weather. The waters were cold, the currents treacherous. But the girl had fallen, and Gavin had fallen. If there was a possibility of saving them, or one of them, I would seize it. I had waited a moment for a flash of lightning to illuminate the sea below me, before diving, to avoid, as I could, the large, scattered rocks some hundred or so feet below. Then I dove. Some of the rocks, I knew, might be just below the surface, invisible from above, in the night, but this was a risk I elected to accept. There was no time to make my way back, by the path, down to the beach, to enter the water and return to the point where the girl and Gavin had disappeared. In a moment the cold waters had closed over my head. I had missed the rocks. I tried to stroke my way to the surface, to see if I might see any sign of the girl or Gavin. I broke the surface, gasping. I felt myself swept to the side, and then back, away from the cliff. I tried to fight against the current. But I was being swept outward, away from the cliffs. Then, to my horror, I felt myself being drawn beneath the surface, almost as though by hands. It was one of the undertows in the area that made swimming so hazardous. I struggled to come again to the surface, to get my head out of the black waves, to breathe. Then I was drawn deeper and deeper, downward. My action, I saw, had been irrational. Surely more impulsive than brave, more stupid than noble. I have lost the gamble, I thought, bitterly, lungs bursting, aching for air.

I am not clear what happened then.

I had thought I was drowning and then, oddly, it seemed, for an instant, that below the water I had somehow breathed, and just before I lost consciousness I had the sense of a mighty body beneath me, rising from somewhere below in the icy waters, and I was afraid, thinking Atlantic shark, come near the shore, or perhaps it was some large marine mammal, or some archaic, indomitable reptilian form of life, perhaps one of a handful of creatures, anachronisms, lingering past the prime of their species, and my hands clutched at the thing beneath me and I felt vertebrae, the articulations of a wide, massive, sinuous spine, and then what might have been kelp, but was somehow sensed as a rude, flowing, cold, salt-encrusted mass of coarse hair. I clung to this, and felt myself drawn upward, through the freezing waters, toward the shore.

I came to consciousness on the rocky beach, below the cliffs, perhaps a hundred yards from where I had entered the water. I lay there, on my stomach. I was cold, terribly cold. It was still raining, heavily. The storm showed little sign of abating. My clothing was torn away, save for some shreds. I must have discarded it in the water, probably in panic, to free myself of the impediment it constituted, to rid myself of its dangerous, sodden drag.

I became aware, lying there, from the whitish light on the wet, pitted sand, that the full moon shone on the beach. The clouds must have opened for a moment.

I then stood on the cold beach, in awe, for not yards away was the calpa. It chose then to show itself in a form congenial to me, one familiar to me from antique and classical studies, that of a mighty, broad-chested centaur. Surmounting the gigantic, monstrous, hoofed, stallionlike frame was the human torso, hairy and bared, it, too, gigantic, but in ideal proportion to the body that bore it, from which it majestically arose. The thing stamped its hoofs. Then it pawed with one hoof at the sand, scattering sand and pebbles behind it. Its head was mighty, with beard and flowing hair, a head wreathed with kelp, like laurel. Its head was turned toward me, and I trembled. Yet was I pleased that it had deigned to show itself in a form I could comprehend, one that would not hurl me in a moment into the throes of madness. I lifted my hand, in surprise. In the mighty arms of this monster, held, cradled, sheltered, helpless, was the girl, carried there as easily, as securely, as might have been a small, lovely, living doll, or pretty toy.

She cast me a piteous glance. She was small and naked. Her wrists were crossed before her, and I suddenly realized they were bound, bound with her own golden hair. What fate might lie now before her, my pure, chaste, prudish, haughty, cold, aloof Victorian maid, now that she was stripped and bound, and clasped in the arms of such a brute?

How pleased I was, and then I struggled to put aside such thoughts.

He will teach you the flames of passion, I thought. He will melt your ice, you vain, stinking little bitch. You will learn to scream with need, and beg, as the slut you are!

“Release her!” I cried. “Let her go, you mindless brute!”

She extended her bound wrists to me, piteously, pleading.

“Put her down!” I cried.

The centaur, or centaurlike creature, put back its head, and laughed, a laugh which was like the wind and rain, like a force of nature, and it reared on its hind legs, and its prisoner, lifted so high in the air, yards over the beach, cried out with fear, and I stepped back, lest I be destroyed by the descent of one of those mighty hoofs.

The creature turned then, and, not hurrying, began to move along the beach, parallel to the shore, a bit away from the village, sometimes wading, splashing, through small inlets, the water to its fetlocks. I staggered after him. He stopped not far from the place where I had dived into the water, where the beach, at that point, ended, before the violent interval of waves, the hurtling, crashing sea, the rocks.

A few yards behind, I fell into the sand. I was weary, my body ached, I was exhausted. I was shivering with cold. I was on my hands and knees. I felt I could hardly rise. “Release her!” I whispered. “Let her go!”

There was at that point a large rock, rather boulderlike. It had been smoothed by centuries of tides, of rain and wind. Its lower portions were now washed by the sea.

“Let her go!” I whispered.

The centaurlike creature then, with callous indifference, threw the girl on her belly on the smooth rock, her small hands, bound with her own hair, over her head, before her. She cast me a look of misery and terror over her right arm. For a moment his mighty hands held her in place. Then she was pinioned. Then she was covered. She shrieked.

“Stop!” I begged.

It was a ghastly scene, as though mythology had suddenly leapt ferociously alive.

Have her. Take her. Own her. She is yours.

“No!” she wept, shaken, struck, rocked, held. “Please, no!” These were the first words I had heard her ever utter. Then it seemed she could only endure, like a rag or boot. I feared she might be destroyed.

I staggered to my feet, and, blind with rain and rage, threw myself on the hideous, dispossessing, expropriating creature. My hands dragged at its hair.

In that moment it seemed that the creature was gone, and I lay beside her, she, his victim, his pleasure, his toy. She was shuddering, and wet and slick. Her hands were still over her head, bound. I could not but note how well the turned strands of golden hair, twisted together into fine, smooth, thick cords, served to bind her tiny wrists. I was gasping, and sore, from my ordeal in the water, from my efforts in somehow managing to dislodge her assailant.

Soberly, I did not see how that had been possible.

But it was gone.

She was breathing heavily. I could see the sweet fullness of her breast against the rock. She seemed not to dare to move.