The dark fantastic (22 page)

There was a moment of silence before the summons to prayer. A leaping flame in the fireplace threw a rosy shadow across the face of the clock, and Judith saw that the hands, which had been fixed at half-past one, now pointed to a quarter of three.

Abigail had died at a quarter of three.

When the others knelt in the nightly petition Judith did not join them. Her eyes searched the room for Thorne. As the concerted murmur of "Our Father which art in heaven" rose about her, she strained her ear for a clear young voice she would have recognized in any choral chant. She did not hear it. Her pale face was glowing with elation when the others rose from their knees.

"This is a trick I had nothing to do with," she thought. ''This time we've caught Thorne red-handed."

There was no comment on the clock's behavior as long as the strangers were present. But when they had been shown to a room upstairs Judith demanded that Richard examine the erratic timepiece. He inquired mildly why he should examine a clock at this time of night.

"To see who's inside it," said Judith.

Amid a pregnant silence, with the entire household looking at her most strangely, she repeated her demand that Richard explore the interior of the clock.

"There's no one inside it," said Richard. "There couldn't be."

Judith pointed to a little door in the side of the cabinet

large enough to permit a very small person (or child) to conceal himself in the clock.

"Where were the children during the Bible reading?" she asked.

Miss Ann answered for her grandsons. They had sat throughout the evening, where they were at this moment, on the hearthrug.

People were looking at Judith very curiously now.

''Where was Thorne?" she asked sharply.

A husky voice answered, "Here," and Thorne rose up from a cushion in the corner, so nearly invisible in her gray dress that she seemed a part of the shadows.

"You were inside the clock, weren't you, Thorne?" said Judith.

Thorne said, "No," and looked surprised.

Richard said, "Of course she wasn't in the clock," as though the idea were absurd. "She never left that stool, I saw her there all evening."

He couldn't have seen her; Judith knew he couldn't have seen Thorne from where he was sitting. Something tightened in her throat: anger for her husband's partisanship and a desperate need to prove Thorne guilty. She felt that she could not bear it if the girl were cleared of this mischief. The mere thought filled her with uncontrollable nervous excitement. She was conscious of intense cold; the temperature of the room seemed to have dropped several degrees. Shadows closed round her like a smothering fog. She had the strangest difficulty in breathing. . . .

When she looked about the room she found that she and Richard were alone. He was standing beside her, a glass of water in his hand, and she was tugging at the band of ribbon around her throat. She asked where everyone was. He told her his mother had taken the children upstairs; the others had retired. She thought, "Here! I can't have anything like this happening. What made me faint?"

He asked, ''Feel all right now?"

She answered, "Certainly," as though the question were irrelevant. But she noted that she was sitting on the couch. She had been standing when that queerness seized her.

"There's a reasonable explanation for all this, Richard." She resumed the argument as though there had been no interruption. "The sound we heard did not come from this room. Somewhere else in the house a clock was striking."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Judith. There's not a clock in this house that strikes."

"I know that. That's why I say someone was hiding in the cabinet, making the clock strike."

"You mean that clock?" Richard turned to look at the tall clock in the shadowy corner. "That clock couldn't be made to strike. Half its works are missing. It has no bell."

"But it did strike," said Judith. "It struck one hundred and forty-four times. I counted. And the hands moved from half-past one to quarter of three."

He picked up a candle and went over to the clock and held the taper so that the light fell across its face. The hands rested, where they had rested for years, at half-past one.

He said quietly, "The clock didn't strike, Judith. It couldn't have struck without my hearing it."

Judith gasped, "You—didn't hear it?"

He shook his head.

"But you must have heard it. Everyone else did."

"No." His eyes rested on her, half curiously, half solicitously. "No one heard anything. When you fainted, Mother asked what there was about the clock to alarm you."

"He's lying," thought Judith, and pushed back the creeping horror that assailed her. They were all lying to protect that girl. She must believe this, even though it was the last step in the progress of her defeat. She was more conscious at the moment of defeat than of fear, because she saw with terrible prescience that there would be no end to eerie mischief in

this house. And Richard would defend Thorne to the extent of denying what his ears had heard and his eyes had seen. That the alternative to Thorne's guilt was one which filled his wife with horror apparently had no weight with him. The calm finality of his allegiance was devastating.

She heard his voice remotely. ''Come upstairs, Judith. You'll feel all right after a good night's sleep."

CHAPTER 18

It was the hottest summer in years: the greatest corn weather, the most bountiful harvest since the war. It seemed to Judith that she never saw her husband any more. He was out of doors from daybreak till dark and at night he was asleep, from sheer healthy exhaustion, as soon as he touched the bed. She grew to hate the summer before it was over.

The children, too, were out of doors all day. Sometimes when Judith appeared belatedly for breakfast and inquired for them, she was told, "They went with Richard over to the south forty this morning." This tract of Timberley land lay beyond Little Raccoon. When the men worked there they seldom came home at noon. They took a substantial lunch with them.

"Did Thorne go too?"

"Yes. The men wanted coffee for dinner, so Richard took Thorne along to make it."

All day Judith's mind held the picture of a picnic shared by congenial spirits on the bank of a shady creek.

Day after day it was like that. Thorne never seemed to be in the house when Richard was out of it. Judith took to watching from windows when it was time for his return. If the two came in together she was wretched. If he came in alone her unleashed imagination ran rampant.

She suggested to her mother-in-law that Thorne be given more duties about the house. Indoors, as well as outdoors, the work of the farm was doubled during the summer months. Endless preserving of the abundant fruit, drying of beans and peas for winter, cooking for the additional labor employed. The Tomlinson daughters frequently lent a hand, but there was still work enough to keep Miss Ann busy from morning till night.

"Thorne should be taking some of this drudgery off you,' said Judith, ignoring her own remissness. But the older woman did not agree.

''Thorne does enough for her age. Let her play while she can."

Ann Tomlinson felt, as she grew older, an increasing yearning toward the young. She had not felt it so much with her own children because she had been still young herself. But now that she was old and seasoned with living, she could understand the pain of growing up. She could not look at Thorne these days without a strange compassion. So she said to Judith, "Let her alone. This is the last summer she will be a child."

May had come and gone, likewise June and July, but there had been no party for the children. Perhaps Richard had forgotten; perhaps he had been too busy. Since only Judith remembered his plan, there was no one to remind him—or be disappointed.

In August the trees hung motionless, heavy with foliage; the air was murmurous with the drone of insects. Judith would go up to her room at night to find it swarming with mosquitoes, gnats, and millers. She would drive out as many as possible with a paper fly brush, then pull down the windows, strip off her clothes, and fling herself upon the sun-baked bed. She might as well have flung herself upon a hot griddle. In a matter of seconds she was off the bed, divesting it of sheets and pillows, in the delusion that the bare mattress was cooler. When Richard came in he would gasp, ''Whew! Why don't you raise the windows?" and immediately fling them wide open. In would troop the old enemy with reinforcements, and the battle with the insects would begin again. There was mosquito netting over the beds, but wire screens were an innovation which had not yet reached Woods County. Judith wondered how she had ever fancied the country would be more pleasant in summer than the town.

"You don't have to sleep up here," Richard reminded her. "There's a bedroom downstairs with an eastern exposure, and it's comfortable on the hottest nights. There's no point in punishing yourself by sleeping up under the roof."

He refrained from mentioning the obvious fact that she was punishing him too. He was still very polite in all their intimate relations. If she preferred to swelter upstairs, he would not leave her to swelter alone. But he delicately hinted that he considered it a piece of foolisliness.

"This is the hottest room in the house because it's only a half story. Last summer when Thorne had it, she used to sleep outdoors in the hammock because she couldn't stand it up here."

Judith asked idly, "Wasn't she afraid?"

"What of? The hammock was swung between two trees just outside my window. She couldn't have moved without my hearing her."

"I see. You slept downstairs last summer."

"I did. And there wasn't a night that I couldn't stand a sheet over me."

She scarcely heard him. Her mind was filled with a picture of Thorne asleep in a swaying hammock beside an open window; and on the other side of the window Richard, alert even in slumber for every movement in the hammock.

"I wish you'd try it downstairs just one night, Judith. If you don't have the best sleep you've had in weeks I'll never mention the subject again."

Her own discomfort finally drove her to accept his suggestion. Her reluctance in the first place had come more from morbid distaste than superstitious fear. Now, on investigation, she found that the room in summer dress did not reek so strongly of Abigail as she had expected. The bed was gay with cool fresh chintz, the fireplace banked with honeysuckle, and the tree-shaded south windows were covered with cotton netting. It was possible to keep both cool and unbitten down here. The candlelit bogies of a winter fireside vanished in the bright white heat of an August day.

She slept one night in Abigail's room.

She was fully prepared to lie awake in nervous insomnia or be troubled with fitful dreams. Instead, she slept so soundly that not even Richard's rising at daylight wakened her. He dressed quickly, quietly, and left her sleeping. But as he opened the outer door and stepped immediately into the morning coolness of dew-drenched shrubs and bluegrass, the comfort and convenience of his old room struck him as never before. He hoped fervently that Judith slept till she was rested. He wanted her to be so charmed with this room that she would never wish to sleep upstairs again.

The children came round the corner of the house, barefoot and scantily clothed. Ricky and Rodgie wore nothing but panties and Thorne the briefest of pinafores. They hailed Richard with the announcement that they were bound for the creek and invited him to join them in a swim. He hushed them softly, vehemently, and led them away from Judith's window. Ten minutes later, stripped to his underclothes, he was splashing in the deepest pool in Little Raccoon, teaching the boys to float. When he offered to teach Thorne she paddled away from him and climbed out on the bank. He shouted to her, but she called back that she was going to look for berries and ran dripping toward the woods. He decided the boys had had enough swimming and ordered them out of the water, but by the time he had dressed there was no sight of Thorne. She had disappeared.

Judith slept until the sun rose high enough to pierce the east window. There was no net over this window because Abigail had had it nailed down against the winter snows. But there was a window blind, and Judith wished drowsily that Richard would lower it. Then she realized that Richard was up and abroad and she had overslept.

She did not rise immediately. The outer door was open, and she lay luxuriating in the fresh breeze coming from the south. How silly she had been to hold out against this delightful room. Coming down here was like moving to a different climate.

At the first peal of the breakfast bell she sprang up and dressed briskly. She was so rested, so full of energy, that she could think of any number of pleasant things to do this morning. She paused for a last glance in the mirror of the big walnut dresser, which stood in the corner between the east window and the south door. She heard a pane of glass shatter in the window and something hurtle behind her to fall with a thud near the door.

She screamed, wheeling in alarm to stare at the object that had narrowly missed her head. It was a half brick, heavy enough to have killed her had it struck her.

A murmur of voices came down the hall. There were hurried footsteps in the passage and Richard's voice outside the door. "Are you all right, Judith?"

She said, "Come in."

"I thought I heard you scream," he said as he entered. "What happened?"

Judith said, "A brick came through that window. It was thrown."

"Where is it now?" asked Richard.

Judith pointed to the spot where the brick had landed.

It was gone.

Richard said, "There's nothing there."

She stared at the spot, dumfounded. "It came through the east window. I heard the crash of glass."

"That window is open," said Richard. "I got up in the night and pried the nails loose and raised it." He went over to the window and pushed back the muslin curtain. Neither glass nor netting prevented the breeze from blowing through the room. "I guess you heard Millie break something in the kitchen," he said lightly.