The Unsettled Dust (37 page)

‘It will be better when it’s day. He has to eat so often.’

It would be utterly impossible for Stephen to enquire any further; not at the moment. He might succeed in finding his way to the bottom of it all later. He was already beginning to feel cramped, and the smell of the fungi and the algae were metaphorically choking him and the moss realistically tickling him; but he put his arm round Nell in the blackness, and could even feel his letter safe against her soft breast.

She snuggled back at him; as far as circumstances permitted. He had only a vague idea of how big or small their retreat really was.

Nell spoke again in that same lowest possible voice. She could communicate, even in the most pitchy of blackness, while hardly making a sound.

‘He’s directly above us. He’s poised.’

Stephen mustered up from his school days a grotesque recollection of some opera: the final scene. The Carl Rosa had done it: that one scene only; after the film in a cinema near Marble Arch. Elizabeth had thought the basic opera
convention
too far-fetched to be taken seriously; except perhaps for Mozart, who could always be taken seriously.

‘I love you,’ said Stephen. No doubt the chap in the opera had said something to the like effect, but had taken more time over it.

Time: that was always the decisive factor. But time had been mastered at last.

‘I love
you
,’
said Nell, snuggling even closer; manifesting her feeling in every way she could.

*

Curiously enough, it was at the verge of the small, lustrous pool that Stephen’s body was ultimately found.

A poor old man, apparently resistent to full employment and even to the full security that goes with it, found the corpse, though, after all those days or weeks, the creatures and forces of the air and of the moor had done their worst to it, or their best. There was no ordinary skin anywhere. Many people in these busy times would not even have reported the find.

There were still, however, folk who believed, or at least had been told, that the pool was bottomless; and even at the inquest a theory was developed that Stephen had been wandering about on the moor and had died of sudden shock upon realising at what brink he stood. The coroner, who was a doctor of medicine, soon disposed of that hypothesis.

None the less, the actual verdict had to be open; which satisfied nobody. In these times, people expect clear answers; whether right or wrong.

Harewood, almost his pristine self by then, enquired into the possibility of a memorial service in London, which he was perfectly prepared to come up and conduct. After all, Stephen was an O. B. E. already, and could reasonably hope for more.

The view taken was that Stephen had been missing for so long, so entirely out of the official eye, that the proper moment for the idea was regrettably, but irreversibly, past.

The funeral took place, therefore, in Harewood’s own church, where the father and the grandfather of both the deceased and the officiant had shepherded so long with their own quiet distinction. People saw that no other solution had ever really been thinkable.

Doreen had by now duly become indispensible to the rector; in the mysterious absence of Stephen, to whom the rector had specifically allotted that function. At the funeral, she was the only person in full black. Not even the solitary young man from the Ministry emulated her there. It had not been thought appropriate to place Stephen’s O.B.E. on the coffin, but during the service, the rector noticed a scrap of lichen thereon which was different entirely, he thought, from any of the species on the walls, rafters, and floors of the church.
Performing
his office, Harewood could not at once put a name to the specimen. The stuff that already lined the open grave was even more peculiar; and Harewood was more than a little relieved when the whole affair was finally over, the last
tributes
paid, and he free to stumble back to Doreen’s marmite toast, and lilac peignoir. The newest number of the
Journal
had come in only just before, but Harewood did not so much as open it that evening.

As Stephen’s will had been rendered ineffective by
Elizabeth’s
decease, Harewood, as next of kin, had to play a part, whether he felt competent of not, in winding everything up. Fortunately, Doreen had been taking typing lessons, and had bought a secondhand machine with her own money.

The flat was found to be in the most shocking state, almost indescribable. It was as if there had been no visitors for years; which, as Harewood at once pointed out, had almost certainly been more or less the case, since the onset of Elizabeth’s malady, an epoch ago.

A single, very unusual book about Harewood’s own
speciality
was found. It had been published in a limited edition: a minute one, and at a price so high that Harewood himself had not been among the subscribers.

‘Poor fellow!’ said Harewood. ‘I never knew that he was really interested. One can make such mistakes.’

The valuable book had of course to be disposed of for the benefit of the estate.

Stephen’s car was so far gone that it could be sold only for scrap; but, in the event, it never was sold at all, because no one could be bothered to drag it away. If one knows where to look, one can see the bits of it still.

Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in 1914 in London. He was married to Edith Ray Gregorson from 1941 to 1957. In 1946 the couple, along with Tom and Angela Rolt, set up the Inland Waterways Association to preserve the canals of Britain. It was in 1951 that Aickman, along with Elizabeth Jane Howard, published his first ghost stories entitled
We are the Dark
. Aickman went on to publish eleven more volumes of horror stories as well as two fantasy novels and two volumes of autobiography. He also edited the first eight volumes of
The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories
. He died in February 1981.