Mr. Adamson set off across the common, as usual increasing his pace until it reached a jogtrot. This was the speed that suited him. Joints loosened; heartbeats and breathing steadied; the air was on his face, only the sky above him. His mind felt both satisfied and empty: free. This was going to be the run of his life.
He planned to run across the common to the ponds, then take the main exit route from the common, leading to the bus terminus and shopping center, but he would veer away just before reaching them, taking a side path that circled the base of London Hill, and so home.
When he got home, he would ring the doctor or the police, or both, to report his brother’s accident. He had no fear of the police. No fear of anyone.
Now, as he ran, he began to get his second wind and to feel that he could run forever. No, the police would never catch up with him. No one could ever catch up with him.
Pleasantly he ran as far as the ponds, whose shores were deserted even of ducks. Mist was rising from the water, as dusk descended from the sky. Mr. Adamson wheeled round by the ponds and took the path toward the terminus and shopping center. He was running well, it seemed to him, superbly.
A runner going well is seldom aware of the sound of his own footfalls, even on an asphalted surface. But Mr. Adamson began to notice an odd, distant echo of his own footsteps: perhaps, he thought, an effect of the mist or of the nearness of London Hill.
Running, he listened to the echo. Unmistakably, running footsteps in the distance: a most curious effect.
Running, listening carefully, he began to change his mind. Those distant footsteps were neither his own nor an echo of his own after all. Someone behind him was running in the same direction as himself, trotting so exactly at his own pace that he had been deceived into supposing echoes. The footsteps were not so very far in the distance, either. Although the pace was so exactly his own, yet the footsteps of the other runner seemed all the time to be coming a little nearer. The impossibility of this being so made Mr. Adamson want to laugh, for the first time in many years. But you don’t laugh as you run.
Very slightly Mr. Adamson increased the pace of his running, and maintained it, and listened. The runner behind seemed also to have very slightly increased his pace; the footsteps were a little more rapid, surely, and clearer. Clearer? Nearer? Mr. Adamson had intended to leave the main way across the common only just before it reached the terminus and shops; now he decided to take a side path at once. It occurred to him that the runner might just be someone hurrying to catch a bus from the terminus. That supposition was a relief.
He turned along the side path, and the feet behind, in due time, turned, too. They began to follow Mr. Adamson along the side path, never losing ground, very slightly gaining it.
Mr. Adamson quickened his pace yet again; he was now running rather faster than he liked. He decided to double back to the main path, across the grass.
The grass was soft and silent under his feet. He heard nothing of his own footfalls; he heard no footfalls behind him. Now he was on the main path again and still could hear nothing behind him. Thankfully he prepared to slacken his pace.
Then he heard them. The runner behind him must have crossed the soundless grass at a different angle from his own. The strange runner’s feet now struck the asphalt of the path behind Mr. Adamson nearer than he could possibly have expected—much nearer.
The pace was still the same as his own, yet gained upon him very slightly all the time. He had no inclination to laugh now. He ran faster-faster. The sweat broke on him, ran into his eyes, almost blinding him.
He reached his intended turning off the main path and took it. The feet, in due time, followed him. Too late he wished that he had continued on the main path right to the bus terminus and the shops, to the bright lights of streets and buses and shops. But now he had turned back over the common, duskier and mistier than ever. He had before him the long path winding round the base of London Hill before it took him home. It was a long way, and a lonely, unfrequented one at this time of evening. The hill was straight ahead of him, and he knew there would be groups of people at the top, people who walked there in the evening to admire the view. Never before had he chosen to go where there were other human beings, just because they were other human beings, flesh and blood like himself. Now he did. He took the path that led directly to the summit of the hill.
The evening strollers on the top of the hill had been looking at the view, and one or two had begun to watch the runner on the slopes below. He was behaving oddly. They had watched him change course and then double to and fro—“like a rabbit with something after it,” as one watcher said.
“He’s coming this way,” said another.
“Straight up the hill,” observed someone else in the little crowd. Most of them were now peering down through the dusk. “Straight up the hill—you need to be young and really in training for that.”
Straight up the hill he went, his heart hammering against his ribs, his breath tearing in and out of his throat, his whole body dripping with sweat. He ran and ran, and behind him came the feet, gaining on him.
On the hill, they were all staring now at the runner. “What’s got into him?” someone asked. “You might think all the devils in hell were after him.”
“He’ll kill himself with running,” said a young woman. But she was wrong.
Now he was laboring heavily up the steepest part of the slope, almost exhausted. He hardly ran, rather, staggered. Behind him the feet kept their own pace; they did not slow, as his had done. They would catch up with him soon.
Very soon now.
He knew from the loudness of the following feet that the other runner was at his back. He had only to turn his head and he would see him face to face, but that he would not do; that he would never do, to save his very soul.
The footsteps were upon him; a voice close in his ear whispered softly—oh, so softly!—and lovingly—oh, so lovingly! “Ken!” it whispered, and would not be denied.
The watchers on the hill peered down.
“Why has he stopped?”
“Why’s he turning round?”
“What’s he- Oh, my God!”
For Mr. Adamson had turned and seen what none of the watchers on the hill could see, and he gave a shriek that carried far over the common and lost itself in darkness and distance—a long, long shriek that will never be forgotten by any that heard it.
He fell where he stood, in a twisted heap.
When they reached him, he was dead. Overstrain of the heart, the doctor said later, but being a wise man, he offered no explanation of the expression on Mr. Adamson’s face. There was horror there and—yes, something like dreadful recognition.
All this happened a good many years ago now, but runners on the common still avoid London Hill, because of Mr. Adamson and whatever came behind him. There may be some runners who fear on their own account—fear the footsteps that might follow them, fear to turn and see the face of their own dearest, worst wickedness. Let us hope not.
Beckoned
Tawcett’s, as the house was called, stood alone. It was not very much older or very much larger than the pink-bricked houses that surrounded it in their rows and courts and crescents, but the unkemptness of its garden and its own dark, desolate aspect set it apart. No one lived there but old Mr. Fawcett, a widower, ailing. No one used its weedy front drive but the district nurse and Mrs. Pugh (who had cleaned and shopped and cooked for Mr. Fawcett for years) and the occasional baffled hawker. Mr. Fawcett never went out, never.
The play space for the children of the housing development extended to Fawcett’s boundary, marked by a grim old brick wall, now broken or breaking in several places, but a formidable barrier still. Of the children, Peter was the one who went over oftenest, because he was the best at finding old tennis balls or footballs. He had a knack. He didn’t mind looking for a lost ball, which most people hated doing, because of his special trick, but he didn’t much like Fawcett’s.
“Go on, Peter!”
they said. “Find it for us!” And gave him a leg up over the wall.
Once over, Peter stood absolutely still among the brambles and the nettles. The voices on the other side of the wall had become indistinct to him, seemed unimportant. He let the playground and the game and the other children drift out of his mind. His mind emptied itself. All that was left was an intentness upon finding a certain old tennis ball.
Then, as always before, he began to move toward the ball. He dodged under a half-fallen tree; he circumnavigated a huge bramble bush; he had his eyes fixed now on a tangle of grass where the ball must be, when he was interrupted.
Something interfered with his reception of the message of the ball’s whereabouts; something deflected his course. He hesitated, stopped, then turned aside and began to move along what, from the feel of the ground under his feet, might once have been a graveled path. The path took him through garden jungle until he found himself facing the back of Fawcett’s itself, across the weedy rankness of a neglected lawn. He saw the house as a whole, almost black against the winter sunset. The windows were all blank and unlit, except for a weak glow from one upper room. But his attention focused on the ground floor and on the French windows that opened—if they could ever be forced over the weeds just outside—onto a little paved tenace. He became aware of a slight movement and a variation of darkness on the other side of the French windows. He realized that he was looking at someone on the other side of the glass, someone who was almost certainly looking at him. Whoever it was moved close up to the window and thereby became more distinct. He saw the tallness of a human figure, wrapped in some long dark striped garment, presumably a dressing gown; he saw the pallor of face and hands and the movement of the hands: one hand moved to the middle of the window, where the catch would be; the other hand was raised in a gesture which Peter guessed rather than clearly saw. The figure beckoned to him.
Peter knew that he was trespassing, but perhaps that was not all that frightened him. He felt his skin sweating, warm for an instant, then cold. The chill made him shiver, and the shiver set him free. Suddenly his mind was empty no longer: he was thinking of his own fear, and of his trespassing, and of the boys waiting in the playground, and of his own fear again.
He slued round and rushed back the way he had come, to the wall and over it, into the playground again.
“Where’s the ball?” they cried, crowding round him.
“I couldn’t find it.”
“You always find it! Why couldn’t you find it? We haven’t another. Go back, Peter. Find it. You always find it. Go back.”
“No,” said Peter. “I shan’t. I’m going home.” He set off at a run, with the others jeering at him, saying they would go over in a body to find the ball.
In the end none of them went, either singly or in a group. No one quite liked going into Fawcett’s after dark, and it was gloaming already.
When Peter reached home, he did not speak of his experience at Fawcett’s, partly because he knew his parents would be sharp with him about his trespassing right up to the house, especially as he had been caught at it, partly, too, because the incident had been unimportant, and partly for the exactly opposite reason: that it had been important to him. He tried to recall what little he knew of Fawcett’s: that the Fawcetts had always lived there, but old Mr. Fawcett was the last of them; he had once had a wife, but she had died, not so very long ago; he had once had a son, but he had died as a boy, and that had been a very long time ago indeed. And had there been a daughter, too?
“Yes,” said Peter’s mother, talking through the whisper of television and the sputter of fat in the pan. “Yes. A daughter—oh, yes. A good girl, but her father was one of these girls-are-worth-nothing men.” Peter’s mother tutted, and it was not because of hot fat spitting out onto her hand. “He cared nothing for her. Then the boy was born. He was the apple of his father’s eye, of course. When he was killed—it was a car accident, I think—old Mr. Fawcett went nearly out of his mind. According to Mrs. Pugh, who’s always helped there, he went around shouting that the wrong child had died. After that he couldn’t bear to have the daughter about the house. In the end she had to go. She was just eighteen. A good girl—very like her mother, in some ways. I remember her mother well.”
“I don’t remember any of them,” said Peter.
“You weren’t born or too young to notice. The girl went to a job away, and then she married and had children, and then her husband died. She must have had a hard life. She never came back; she was never allowed back, even after her mother died. She could be keeping house now for her invalid father and making a proper home for her children, but no! Mrs. Pugh still does it, stone-deaf and one foot in the grave by now.”
“What was the boy like?”
“Just a boy. He was about your age when he died. Your sort of boy, well grown, up to any mischief.” Peter’s mother eyed him sardonically. “I notice you don’t ask about Mrs. Fawcett.”
“Mrs. Fawcett?”
“I suppose you’re one of those women-are-worth-nothing people. But Mrs. Fawcett was really worth ten of Mr. Fawcett, in spite of his loudmouthed cantankerousness and the fuss he made about getting his own way. Mrs. Fawcett was one of those quiet, big women; she was as tall as her husband. Quiet. Patient. Clever. Yes—” Peter’s mother had surprised herself by her own conclusion. “Yes, she was a clever woman, I think. If she’d lived, she’d have got her daughter home again, by hook or by crook, in spite of that brute of a husband.” She began dishing up the supper, having finished all she had to say.
But Peter’s father, who had been drowsing in front of the television set, now entered the conversation. “And if she was so clever, and he was such a brute, why didn’t she leave him?”
“Because some women are saints, and she still loved him.” And Peter’s mother triumphantly dashed a plate of fish and chips onto her husband’s knees. He accepted it, and defeat, together.
Peter went on thinking about Fawcett’s and old Mr. Fawcett prowling downstairs in his dressing gown. He made an excuse to himself to go back; he really must recover that tennis ball. He chose a time early in the morning, when nobody was about, to nip over the wall. There was no need to use his trick of mind emptying; he knew already where the ball was. He made his way to it, found it, and stood with it in his hand, irresolute. He would have liked to have gone on to the house, as he had done before, but yes, he was frightened of that. In the end he climbed back over the wall with his tennis ball.
When he was back outside Fawcett’s again, he discovered that he felt disappointed, flat. Also somehow guilty, as though he had left something undone, as though he had failed someone.
So the next day he went again, very early, before school, with the deliberate intention of going far enough to see the back of the house.
By morning light the house looked less forbidding, but more obviously neglected; there was, of course, not even a light from the upstairs window.
Yet Peter saw that Mr. Fawcett was already up and about; from the deep shadows on the other side of the glass of the French windows the same tall figure in the dark striped dressing gown moved into view. There were the same gestures of opening the windows, of beckoning.
Peter’s earlier fears and any remembrance of his parents’ warnings against the acceptance of strange invitations all vanished. He obeyed the summons. As he crossed the roughness that had once been lawn, the figure behind the glass began to withdraw into the shadows of the interior, still beckoning.
Peter reached the French windows. He had expected to find them ajar for him, but they were not. Perhaps they had been left unlatched but not open. Sure of this, he pulled hard at them, but something resisted. Perhaps the resistance was from the tough grass clumps that sprang in the pavement crevices outside the windows and grew thickly against the frame and glass. He tugged harder, his mind set upon following where he had been beckoned; something gave sharply, and the windows opened to admit him.
By now the room inside—a dank, g
loomy dining room—was empty: Peter did not doubt that old Mr. Fawcett had gone from it to lead the way he was to follow, and certainly the door at the other end of the dining room stood persuasively open. He followed into the hall. Here he was taken aback, for the various doors round the hall were shut, and surely, if he had been meant to follow, a way would have been left open to him. Then he realized that the stairs lay open to him. He mounted them, and even before he reached the top, he could see another door open—to a bedroom, he supposed.
There were several doors from this upstairs landing, but there was only one open, inviting him. He went in.
Instantly he was aware that this must be the room that he had noticed on the first evening, because of its lighted window. Then the artificial light from inside had been dim; now the daylight from outside was largely cut off by half-drawn, heavy curtains. But even by the half-light he could see that the room was old Mr. Fawcett’s, because there was old Mr. Fawcett himself in the big double bed.
It had not seemed to Peter that he had taken very long to enter the house and make his way upstairs, but already Mr. Fawcett was in bed again, lying there in an attitude of exhaustion, his head and shoulders against piled pillows, his arms outside the bedclothes, hands open with palms upward. His eyes were shut. The striped dressing gown, of some soft woolen material, had been discarded and lay rumpled over the bottom part of the bed, like an extra rug.
Peter stood at the foot of the bed, looking at Mr. Fawcett. Slowly Mr. Fawcett’s eyelids went up, and he was looking at Peter. Neither spoke, but each regarded the other with the closest attention.
Peter’s hands gripped the bedrail. If the other did not, he must speak. He opened his mouth, but no words suggested themselves. He closed his mouth again.
Barely, Mr. Fawcett spoke, his eyes never leaving Peter. He whispered a word or half a word: “Rob …”