Mandrake (11 page)

He accelerated unhappily through the town. The few people walking the streets raised their heads curiously as he went by. He thought he heard one of them shout; and then he thought he had imagined it. But for a moment the sound had shaken him.

He drove up the dark hill out of Amesbury, the Lagonda humming deeply, and out on to Salisbury Plain. The road had been climbing gently for a long time; now, suddenly, he was out on the roof of England. The darkness all round, like a black fog in the air, was the darkness not of enclosing hills or trees but of the open sky. There was no moon. He could see, beyond the down-thrown white path of his headlights, the faint bright points of stars in the night. He felt a sudden oppressive loneliness, and accelerated again.

The signpost and the forked crossroads were on him before he had remembered to expect them, and fumbling for the proper direction he swung the car squealing and gravelgrating round into the right-hand road. But within a few hundred yards the picture of the map flashed belatedly into his mind, and he knew that he was wrong. This road led up to Devizes; it was the left-hand fork that pointed to Warminster and Bath. He stopped, and began to reverse the car. It slid backwards a little way, with a peculiar unwillingness, and then the engine gave a long diminishing moan, and died.

The starter howled ineffectually as he pressed it, and he frowned. The fuel gauge still showed the tank two-thirds full. With the beginnings of foreboding, Queston felt for a torch and the dipstick, and got out of the car. The slam of the door made him jump, and he stood for a moment frozen by the silence of the Plain, a silence that hung all round him like an immense motionless force. He had switched off the headlights, and the silence was in his eyes and ears, the voice of the dark.

He felt for the switch of the torch, and in its small light tried the dipstick in the fuel tank. It emerged dry.

‘Damn
,’ he said, aloud.

He stood still, thinking, and instinctively switched off the torch again. The vast solemn darkness sprang in on him at once. Stepping back to the grass verge, away from the vulnerable ring of footsteps that the road gave, he moved forward through the long swishing stems to see if the lights of a house showed anywhere within reach.

On the other side of the road a distant prickle of light-dust showed a village far away across the Plain, a graze on the blackboard of the dark. Over his head the stars were fierce now, remote points of fire. He had always liked the stars, in a thousand nights spent open to them; but here in this empty silence they did not seem the same.

He turned his head, and looked away from the road over the sweep of the dark land; then suddenly he was aware of a darkness more solid than the rest. Things, tangible. His head sang with shock for a moment, until he realized that he had stopped beside the pointing circle of Stonehenge.

Wariness did not occur to him; only the warmth of recognition. He walked forward again in relief towards the stones. From visits long ago he felt vague memories of fences, and an official turnstile, and souvenir-touting huts; but none of these seemed to stand in the way now. Only the empty grass stretched out to the old silent stones. He was moving without uneasiness, and growing accustomed to the dark. And then it hit him.

Without warning, he was flung backwards by an impact as fierce as if he had walked into a wall. Fear came simultaneously; a dreadful paralysing terror that brought his blood throbbing up into his chest and ears, and dried his throat. But afterwards he remembered the split second before the fear, when he had felt the overwhelming thrust of an astonishing force of ill will.

As a man can radiate even in silence a hostility that is vocal, so the place was shouting at him. Go away. Get away. And then the terror drowned it, drowned everything. He knew as he stood there, appalled out of movement, that he had never understood fear before.

Small and helpless and uncomprehending and more than any of these
unimportant
… he knew for a flaring instant that only that was the answer, as the silence roared through his mind, and he cringed mutely begging mercy from an immense annihilating anger that filled the night.

Beside the looming stones he saw, suddenly, a bobbing light that grew nearer. He heard himself gasp, a hoarse unfamiliar squeak, and backed away, released by the sound, towards the refuge of the car.

From the direction of the light, still wavering closer, a voice hailed him. The fear that had hold of Queston paused, and he stood listening, uncertain. The air was cold on his face; when he touched the skin it was wet. The call came again, and the light moved out towards the road ahead. Shaking, he reached inside the Lagonda, and switched on the spotlight.

As the beam of light leapt down the road, splitting the dark, he saw a man twenty yards away, starting back, raising an arm to shield his eyes. He carried a hurricane lamp in one hand; he wore a rough jacket, and the light glinted on leather patches over his elbows and knees. He moved out of the beam and Queston switched it off. The darkness sprang in on him again, but it seemed less powerful now.

The man came up close to him. His stride was firm, and the face and shoulders massive, square, solid-blurred as a rough carving from rock. Only the springing grey hair and eyebrows showed that he was older than his body. He said, unemotionally: ‘Havin’ trouble, are you?’

Queston blessed the level, normal voice, and heard the shake of his own. ‘I’ve run out of petrol, I’m afraid. Hell of a place for it to happen.’

‘Where are you going, then?’

‘Bath.’

The man shook his grey head, slowly. He seemed to be looking past Queston, over his shoulder. ‘You’ll never get across. Not at night.’

It seemed an odd tone, with more conviction than was called for, but Queston was relaxing into companionship, shamefacedly trying to forget his alarm. ‘Well, the main thing is to get some petrol. Or paraffin. I suppose there’s nowhere nearer than Amesbury?’

‘Nowhere,’ the man said.

‘I’d better walk back. Perhaps I can get a lift.’ His voice died as he heard it. A lift? On a road where no single car had passed him?

‘It’s a long walk,’ the man said, with the same abstracted air.

‘O well. I’ll spend the night there, and get a garage to bring me out in the morning. Better get the car off the road, though. If you wouldn’t mind helping me give her a push-?’

The man did not move. ‘Amesbury won’t take you.’

Was the strangeness of the words anything more than local idiom? Staring at him, Queston felt uneasiness return. ‘Why not?’

‘My place will take you. For the one night.’

‘That’s awfully kind of you, but—’

‘My place will take you,’ the man repeated. He jerked his head towards the dark plain. ‘Half a mile or so. I have a farm. It would be better.’

Puzzled but grateful, Queston thought of the silent, unlit road back to the town, and the unsteadiness that still drained him.

‘Well… thank you very much.’

There seemed after all no point in moving the car. He took his suitcase from the boot and set off with the man into the dark, walking behind his deliberate striding bulk along a beaten path. They passed close beside a great fallen stone lying in the grass, and Queston stared belligerently past it into the darkness which hid the rest. But this time there was only silence in his mind.

The house, and the farmer’s wife, were indifferent. He could feel that he was silently suffered to be there; without welcome, without hostility. The woman, small and mouse-like, with the same air of calm resignation as her husband, seemed not to hear his falsely jovial words of thanks. He saw on her pointed grey face the dazed look of inside listening that he could recognize now, but still did not understand.

The night would not let him alone. A dozen times, as he was on the point of falling asleep, something would suddenly wrench him back to consciousness: a shout, or a chord of music, that rang loud in his ears but came, he knew, only from within his mind. Once he thought he heard a long rumbling, grumbling sound outside, far off. He lay alert, listening, for a long time, and it seemed only a moment later that the man was there, shaking at his shoulder. The window was a square grey glimmer of light.

‘Time to go. There’s breakfast downstairs.’

‘Uh.’ Queston struggled to wake up.

The farmer’s voice was urgent, as uneasy as before it had been calm. ‘Time to go.’

‘All right. Coming.’ He dressed, and went downstairs. Day broke like a sudden beacon, and the windows were white, pink, gold as the sun rose. They ate boiled eggs and heavy, home-made bread in silence; the woman was nowhere to be seen. The farmer could barely eat for nervousness, flicking swift glances round the room like a guilty child waiting for punishment.

Queston said uncomfortably: ‘I hope I haven’t put you out.’

‘What? No. No. That was last night. Have you finished now? Are you ready?’

Queston could have eaten twice as much, but he stood up. ‘Fine.’

The man led him out, picking up a can in the kitchen. ‘I can let you have three gallons of petrol. I keep it in reserve. I have more, but this will get you away. The path is up here.’ He set out so swiftly that they were half running. Striding beside him in the cold early sun, Queston gave him money, and wondered as the man uneasily took it whether he was nervous of his small silent wife. She hadn’t looked a shrew. At least, not the human kind. He looked at the man thoughtfully. ‘Why on earth didn’t you suggest my having the petrol last night?’

The man paused, and looked him in the face, smiling rather ruefully. His grey eyebrows quirked at the corners, and for a moment there was only good humour where the distress had been. ‘Last night? You’d never have got through last night. You don’t seem to understand things. Doesn’t do to be a stranger these days. I don’t know if you’re goin’ far, and I don’t want to know. But you take my advice if you are, and go by day.’

And that was all, and no explanation to it, for suddenly the face that creased in friendliness glazed over, and was fixed in a kind of fear; as if, Queston thought, it had heard some dreadful shouted threat. Yet he had heard nothing. He thought with a shudder of the night before; was it that…? But before he could look again at the man’s face he was away, beckoning, stumbling with speed, and soon they came over the rise towards the car. The Plain rode green towards the sunrise, a thin mist white-levelling its hollows; the horizon was a white haze. When Queston turned towards Stonehenge, he stared in astonishment and the beginnings of shame. Surely the stones had not been so small, so small and mild?

The farmer had brought a funnel with him. Already he had the cap off the fuel tank, and was hastily tilting the can. When it was empty he almost pushed Queston into the car, and his voice was strained, the accent suddenly strong: ‘Go off, then. Back to Amesbury, or you’ll be in the same trouble. You’ll need more than this to cross the Plain. Good luck.’

He turned away, and Queston heard the Lagonda’s familiar whine, and swung round across the road to face the way he had come. As he drove away, he glanced in his driving-mirror and caught a sight of the farmer that almost stopped him again.

The man was lying on the ground, his arms and legs outstretched, writhing as if in pain. But as Queston’s foot faltered on the accelerator the body jerked upright to its knees, and the arms came up, flung wide, and he saw that there was no pain there but only a kind of grovelling horrible obeisance. The man bent forward, his forehead touching the ground, his hands flat downwards moving to caress the grass. As the ugly, unnatural picture telescoped into the little mirror Queston felt his throat contract, and he pushed his foot hard down on the accelerator and let the car thrust him escaping out of sight.

He drove through Amesbury, through Andover, through small villages edging the road; he drove very fast, without stopping, without passing another car. He no longer cared about reaching Bath; nothing could have sent him back to the Plain. Again the road was empty, and in the towns and villages people paused and stared after him. He drove on, the morning sun higher now behind him through the autumn trees. It was just past nine o’clock by his watch. Fear was rising in him fast. Something more than a Ministry was at work in this countryside. He had been right all along. His game of ideas had not been a game. But to think of it as reality was appalling, impossible, and he pushed the flickering ideas away.

Outside Basingstoke he stopped for fuel at a small garage where a round-faced boy of about fifteen filled up the tank. The boy lingered by the window as he gave Queston his change, peering in out of light myopic eyes. ‘Which office you from, mister? ’ His podgy face was fearful, admiring.

‘No office,’ Queston said.

The boy’s eyes widened. ‘But that’s a Ministry car, i’n’t it?’

‘No.’ Careful, careful. To hell with them. No.

‘Cars is off the road now, except the Ministry.’ He looked calculatingly at Queston and then swung round, calling towards the garage: ‘Dad!’

Queston skidded out of the yard and away, without looking back. He drove on through Hook, past row upon row of deserted houses on the old L.C.C. estates that had been the New Town; past, on the Camberley road, empty barracks in endless fines, a military desert. He saw no one. A thin, mangy dog darted across one silent barrack square.

His mind skated and raced. He was in the stockbroker belt now, the big cosy houses set back in their beech-brown gardens from the road; beautiful fake miniature mansions of warm red brick. Before Sunningdale, he drew in to the nearest big pair of gates, left the car, walked up the drive and rang the bell. There was no answer. He drove to the next house, and tried again. No answer. No answer at the next house, or the next.

Queston drove on, slowly. As the fifth roof appeared through the branches he saw smoke rising from its cluster of chimneys in a thin blue stream. He drew up outside, and sat looking out of the car. There was a quick movement at one window, too swift to identify. The house seemed no different from the rest: big, gabled, red-leaved clematis round the door. Queston walked round the car, and in through the gates; and then he stopped abruptly.