Death in the dusk

by Virgil Markham

For a woman was standing by the far corner of the conservatory, half-turned from me, looking at an object which she held in her hand.

With her other hand she made a slight gesture to someone around the corner, and the next moment I beat a swift retreat to the shelter of a rank of low birch trees. A man in his shirt sleeves dashed out from the behind the House, running like mad. He was a man I had never seen before!

With great galloping strides, his arms working like pistons, his knees rising incredibly high, he rushed straight for the clump of cypresses; there he turned as sharply as his momentum would permit and sped back to his starting point out of my view.

He had come and gone so quickly that I had little chance to take in his appearance. Decidedly, however, he was a long, lank man, and there was a touch of red about his face in hair and beard. But any attempt to mark him closely was defeated by mere astonishment at his presence, and wonder, in the name of reason, at what he was doing.

I quickly balanced the courses open to me. Should I reveal myself and challenge these unknowns? Or return secretly to the house and awake Crofts and Salt? Or continue my journey?

This last was what I did, for the cloaked woman happened to turn her head in my direction, and I saw that she was one of the Clays. Unless the Clays are to be relied on, no one is. As for my curiosity, which was more than a little, I smothered it. If the many perplexing incidents in the Vale have not by this time chastened the inquisitiveness of each one of us, we are difficult to school.

I went safe in the hiding of the birches until I reached the unshorn grass of the summer-house park; the blades were loaded with dew. While I crossed toward the regular path, I caught sight of the unknown racing again in my direction, and was half-alarmed for fear that he had espied me and was on my trail. Once more, however, he turned beneath the cypresses and fled back full tilt.

I had much to ponder on while I marched through the bleak and clammy dawn, and pondering made the miles seem shorter. I thought of Maryvale, who had walked here with me yesterday, of his dark sayings and the blight upon his spirit—of Doctor Aire, whose theorisings strike a vague discomfort into my mind. He, by the way, has taken full responsibility for the sudden madness of Maryvale. He blames himself for relating the story of the man found decapitated near the summer-house. That account, together with my yarn a little later about the witch sisters and the subsequent failure of Maryvale to destroy the cat, turned the balance of the unfortunate man’s intellect, which had previously given token of a disposition towards instability. The incredible fact that three bullets did not injure the beast Aire says he cannot account for; yet I suspect him, somehow, of keeping close counsel on the point.

But even with these matters to turn over and over in a tussle of thought, constantly I kept wondering about the pair on the lawn, the man from nowhere practising his uncouth capers, the woman so intent on what she held in her hand.

I came to the spot where Salt and the others had parted from Maryvale and me the evening before, and now I turned aside too, for my determination was to cross the stream by the fallen tree and to assault the eastern wall of the Vale. There was no trouble in clambering along the improvised bridge; I leaped to the ground and in ten minutes reached the steep base of Great Rhos, prepared for an hour’s battle with the densely-wooded slope.