He looked at the time once, and said, “You should be getting back to bed, Mandy. Another long day ahead.” But when she maintained that she was fine, and not at all tired, he did not press things. He filled her glass again, and his own, and went on talking.
At two o’clock, she reminded him to call Selby. She went to bed, then, hearing them talking quietly on the stairs.
George came up soon afterward. He got into bed, and was soon asleep. For a while, she lay awake. Caesar, she thought … the way the kitten used to play with him, jumping on his back, putting its small head in his slobbering mouth. But which kitten? Not Franklin. Joey. Who had died, an old cat, in forty-seven, in the year Lois was born … And it was not sad then, because she had not seen him for so many years, had almost forgotten him. And because there was so much to live for.
For all her lateness in getting to sleep, she awoke at the usual time, and did not feel particularly tired. She found the matches, and lit the lamp. George was sleeping, hunched on one side, his face relaxed and peaceful. She had her drink, found wrap and slippers, went to the bathroom, washed face and hands and brushed her hair quickly, and went downstairs. Douglas heard her coming, and came out of the bar. She asked him, “Is everything all right?”
“Fine. I had a very quiet watch.”
She nodded. “You can go to bed now. Marie will be down in a minute.”
He stretched himself. “It doesn’t really seem worth while.”
“I’ll be making a cup of tea.”
“Good. Then I’ll stay up.”
He came with her to the kitchen, and they chatted while she put the kettle on, and started preparations for breakfast. He was, in his quiet manner, a pleasant young man —rather serious, callow, perhaps, in the English way, but good-natured, she thought, and with more of a sense of humor than one would think. He told her some things, stories from his life as a lawyer, that were really droll. One, a complicated story about a divorce, with agents bursting into the wrong bedrooms, brought her genuinely to laughter. She said then, “That girl ought to be down by now. Probably she’s dozed off. I’ll just go up and call her. Can you make the tea when the kettle boils, Douglas?”
He said, “Making tea is the beginning and end of my cooking. I pride myself on it.”
She would have gone right up to the attic, but from the foot of the narrow stairs she saw that the lamp was burnmg up there. So she stood at the bottom, and called quietly, “Marie. Are you coming?”
Marie said, “Madame … Can you help me?”
She sighed. More of Marie’s helplessness. Her foot on the stairs, she said, “What’s gone wrong now?”
“The lamp. It does not burn properly.”
Everything she touched she maltreated. She had very likely succeed in getting the wick burning unevenly. But there was no reason why she should not have brought the lamp downstairs. And the light that diffused through her open door looked clear and steady. A shadow … She had a feeling of constraint and awkwardness, reminding her of the other girl, the Austrian, and how she had stumbled on her with her Italian boy friend in the room. That could not be the case now. But the shadow on the wall just inside the room … unmoving, though Marie, as she could hear, was moving about. It was not her shadow. Then whose?
I am being silly, she thought. A trick of the light—was it the shadow of a person or of something else—a coat, perhaps, a chair …? Her eyes were not very good, and the light was not bright. It was ridiculous not to go up and see what was happening.
Marie said, “Will you come, madame?”
And her hackles rose.
She said, “In a minute, Marie. I’ve got something to do.” George woke at her touch. She whispered, “Marie … It may not be anything, but I’m worried. Do you think…”
He sat up, snapping out of sleep easily, as he always did. He said, “The gun?”
“Douglas has it downstairs.”
“Get it. Bring him up.”
When they returned, George was at the foot of the stairs leading to the attic, motionless, looking up. Marie’s door was still partly open, light flooding out. The shadow had gone from the wall. George motioned to them for silence and, leaning toward Mandy, said softly, “Call her down.”
She called, “Marie. Bring the lamp down and we’ll fix it in the kitchen. Hurry, girl. We’re late this morning.” There was no reply. She called again, “Marie! I want you down here right away. No nonsense.”
Silence answered her. She looked at George. He reached out his hand, took the gun from Douglas, and began climbing the stairs. His face was grim and she saw his eye twitch. Douglas, after a moment’s hesitation, followed him, and she went after them. The stairs groaned under their feet. She waited for some sound from above—reproach, outcry, she did not know what. But none came.
George kicked the door open and went in, the gun tucked beneath his right arm and his finger inside the trigger guard. Now, fearfully, she expected the gun’s explosion, and its hideous aftermath. But there was no shot. Instead George’s footsteps quickened, running across the room.
It was empty. The window was open, and George was there, looking down. The cold blast of the outside air made her shiver, but she followed Douglas and stood beside her husband. It was very dark, and the mist was as thick as ever. The snow on the ground was a dim white blur, showing nothing.
And forty feet below.
10
Leaning out, Douglas said, “My God! She must have killed herself.”
“She? Or they?” George turned away from the balustrade. “I wonder.”
Mandy had turned, too, and was hurrying toward the door. George called, “Where are you going?”
“Only to see if she’s all right.”
George went after her, and caught her arm. He said, “Don’t be a fool, Mandy. You’re probably meant to do just that.”
She stared at him. “But we can’t. .
“There are four of them out there, five if we count the boy. A couple of them may be injured, but we don’t know about that. You’re staying in the house. Go and wake Selby, and get him up. He and Douglas and I will go and have a look at things. With the gun.”
“But she may be badly hurt!”
“Yes. And it might be better if she were dead. Go and wake Selby.”
When she had gone, George closed the windows. There was a hook-and-eye catch which he put on. Going out, he locked the door from the outside, and did the same for the other room, which had been Peter’s. He put the keys in his pocket, and motioned Douglas to go down the narrow stairs ahead of him.
Selby met them on the first-floor landing, buttoning up his trousers. He had a white exhausted look; he had had much less sleep than the others the previous night, Douglas remembered, and the graveyard watch on this one. And physically a person with more febrility than stamina, he would have thought.
Selby said, his rather high-pitched voice sharp, “Well? They’ve got Marie? How did they get at her? I’m pretty sure no one went up during my watch.”
Douglas said, “Nor during mine.”
“I’m guessing,” George said, “but Peter was a mountain climber in his young days. I think maybe he came up the side of the house, and in at the window. She had left the catch off.” He exhaled heavily. “A pretty careless girl, in some ways.”
Douglas said, “In his young days … but now? How old is he—getting on for seventy?”
“Sixty-four,” George said. “He was born the day Queen Victoria died. He was a bit proud of that.”
Douglas thought of Peter, his white hair and his slight rheumatic limp. “Even so …”
“It’s possible,” Selby said, “if you don’t much care what happens to you. Or whoever’s in charge of you doesn’t care. Mandy says she jumped from her balcony. I suppose both of them did. Same thing applies.”
George said, “I reckon we ought to go outside and see. If one of them broke a leg …”
“That would be a help,” Selby said. “We haven’t had a chance to lo
ok one of them over properly, except at the beginning. And then we didn’t know what we’d got hold of.”
Them, Douglas thought. The enemy. And it was true, of course. But what kind of enemy? He asked, “What had we got hold of?”
“I don’t know,” Selby said. “I’m beginning to get some ideas. The first thing is to go and see what we can find out there.”
It was very dark still, and bitterly cold. Elizabeth had got up by now, and she and Mandy stood by the door— George had instructed them to bar it after they had gone, and only open up again on clear recognition. Douglas carried a torch and George had the gun. They were to stick close together, on either side of Selby. He led the way up the slope from the front door, and to the right around the side of the house. The snow had drifted to a depth of several feet; there was a brittle crust but it was fairly soft beneath the surface.
“Here,” George said.
Douglas shone the beam of the torch. There was no doubt that they had found the place. A hole in the snow, and a second a little distance off—a hole made by a heavy body, presumably a falling body. There were tracks around them, confused and uninformative. Douglas flashed the torch in different directions. It revealed nothing but the snow and the mist.
George said, “No point in looking further. We might as well go back into the warm.”
“They may not have gone far,” Douglas said. “If one of them were hurt, for instance.”
“Not badly enough to stop him or her walking away,” Selby said. “Or being carried. Either way, we’re not likely to find them in the dark.”
They went back in silence. Mandy peered through the glass when they rang the bell, and admitted them. She said, “Was she hurt?”
George shook his head. “We don’t know. She didn’t stay to tell us. I’ll lock up, Mandy. Can you rustle us up a cup of coffee?”
“None left. Only tea.”
“Right, tea it is.” He pressed her arm affectionately. “But make it quick, love. And get some breakfast on— we’re all hungry.”
Elizabeth had gone to get Stephen up, and had said she would awaken Jane and Diana. The three men, when they had got rid of their outdoor clothes, went through to the kitchen, and joined Mandy, who was preparing breakfast. She made them tea, and they sat around the table drinking it.
Douglas said, “It would have been a good piece of climbing by a young man. And why go all the way up there? Why not break in on one of the lower floors?”
George said, “Whoever was on guard might have heard him. Up there he was pretty safe. He probably guessed there was a chance Marie had not fastened her window properly—he knew how careless she was—but if she had, he could have broken into his own room without making much noise.”
“And the plan of action?” Selby asked.
“He gets Marie, presumably while she’s asleep. Converts her, or infects her, or whatever it is. Then if they can get Mandy up there, they have her as well. It’s the right time, isn’t it? One or two people stirring, the rest in bed. Marie and Mandy come downstairs to Douglas, Peter a little way behind them so that he’s not noticed. Till it’s too late. After that … open the door, I suppose, and let the others in. All over in half an hour.”
Selby nodded. “It sounds reasonable.”
“Too bloody reasonable altogether,” George said. “It only went wrong because Mandy had a hunch.”
Mandy turned from the stove. “It was something about her voice. Her speech … not slurred exactly, but kind of slow. Slower than she usually spoke.”
“That’s one of the things,” Selby said. “Or seems to be. Remember Andy, and Ruth. Reflexes just a little bit slower, I would guess.” He rubbed his hands together restlessly. “My God, I’d like to get hold of one of them, to examine at leisure.”
“Would it help?” Douglas asked. “I mean, we know they’re dangerous.”
“We might find out the particular ways in which they are dangerous. How they infect others. How vulnerable they are to physical stimuli. We might find out quite a lot of things.”
George stirred his tea again, and drank it. “Any more in the pot, Mandy?” He turned back to Selby. “Not much chance of that, I should think. They’re pretty good at staying out of reach.”
Selby said, “It might be possible. There’s this urge to infect—a kind of hunger, almost. They will take chances for that: look at old Peter. We might be able to do something with it. Set a trap.”
Douglas asked, “In the house?”
George said positively, “Not in the house. Something might go wrong.”
Selby nodded. “Outside would be better.”
“Set a trap?” George said. “With one of us? How? You can’t just stick someone out there.”
“It needs thinking about.”
Douglas had a picture of himself in the role … in the snow, the cold shapeless gray all around, and shapes emerging from it … fear prickled for a moment down his spine. He felt relief when George said, “You couldn’t do anything with the mist as thick as it is. You wouldn’t know where you were.”
“Something in that, I suppose. But it might clear.”
“The sensible thing,” George said, “is to hang on where we are. We’re learning all the time.”
“And losing,” Selby said. “If we had a specimen …” Mandy brought the teapot over to them. “Specimen?” she asked. “How can you talk like that? Marie, Peter, little Andy …”
No one answered her. Selby said, “We need to give it thought.” He stood up from the table. “One thing we can do is bar the other windows in the house. I doubt if they will try to get in during the day, but we can’t rule out the possibility.”
The voices started about an hour later. Mandy was the first to hear them. The kitchen window was barred, but she had opened it to clear the cooking smells. She called up the stairs excitedly, and they left their work on the other windows and came down to see what was happening. She said fearfully, “They were calling—through the kitchen window.”
“Who?” George asked.
Selby said, “Calling what?”
“Marie first. And then I heard Ruth’s voice. And Leonard’s. They were asking me to come out.”
They looked at each other, and headed for the kitchen. There was no sound, apart from the clock ticking. She might have been imagining things, Douglas thought. Then, while they stood listening, the voice came from somewhere outside. Ruth’s voice.
“Mandy. Come out, Mandy. We won’t hurt you. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Mandy. Come out.”
Selby moved quickly and quietly, taking the steps over to the window, and mounting them. He stared out, his head just above the level of the window ledge.
“See anything?” George asked.
“I don’t think so. No.” He called out, “Ruth, you come in here. Come in the house, so that we can talk properly. We’ll open the front door for you.”
There was a pause, and the voice said again, “Come out.” Its tone was neither threatening nor cajoling, merely flat. Others joined with it—Leonard’s recognizably, and then a jumble of voices. “Come out. Come out. Come out.”
“The mist is still thick,” Selby said. “And they’re staying out of range.” He got down from the steps, closing the window first. They could still hear the voices, but only faintly. “God knows what they’re trying to do—not to communicate, that’s certain.”
Elizabeth came in from the hall. She said, “What’s happening? Steve said he thought he heard his mother’s voice.”
Selby said, “He did. Trying to get Mandy to go outside. They may try it on him, too. Make sure he pays no attention.”
She nodded. “I’ll see to that.”
George said, “I don’t get it. They couldn’t really have expected her to do as they said. Unless … I suppose it could be just to get on our nerves?”
“Could be.” Selby shrugged. The voices still came to them, thin and distant. “Obviously, there’s no point in trying to talk to them.”
&
nbsp; Mandy asked, “Are you sure there isn’t?”
For answer, Selby went back to the window and reopened it. The voices were a jumble, but some words stood out: “Come … come out … out… come out, Mandy … out… out…”
Elizabeth said, “Why Mandy?”
“Probably because they expect her to be in the kitchen.” He closed the window once more, shutting off much of the noise. “I think we ought to get back to fixing those windows.”
They nailed lengths of wood across all the windows in the upper part of the chalet. The planks ran out before the end, and they had to break up wooden boxes for the last few small windows—the result was far from neat but looked effective. For Douglas, the work was more depressing than reassuring: they were reinforcing a prison from the inside. The gray mist still cut off the sun, and with wood nailed in front of the glass, the rooms were very dark. From time to time they heard the far-off outcry of the voices; they came and went in a weird periodicity. He was glad when they hammered the last nails in the slats across the frosted glass of the first-floor bathroom, and George said, “I reckon that will do.”
Selby asked, “What about the ground-floor front?”
“No more wood. In any case, there’s always someone on watch down there. I think a small noggin is indicated after all those exertions. Bring the hammer and nails down, Douglas, will you?”
It was a relief to be in a place where the windows let in all the light, even this meager mist-filtered light. Douglas glanced at his watch. Half past eleven. The work had taken longer than he had thought. While George fiddled about behind the bar, he went through to the salon. He had only seen Jane for a few minutes that morning, and was, he realized, looking forward to seeing her again. She was sitting in the armchair by the fire with a book— the same leather-bound book she had had the previous evening. It was this, unexpectedly, which gave him pause, reminding him of the confidences they had exchanged then, and that they had not been alone together since.