Watcher in the Shadows (21 page)

I decided on a booby trap to distract his attention. Close to my hand were the remains of a stable door, hanging from one hinge and swaying and creaking in the slightest breath of wind. I lifted a truss of hay and balanced it on the door. On the truss I laid my torch and covered it with more hay. I switched it on. No trace of light showed.

Then I moved on hands and knees to the angle of wall and floor on my side of the doorway. The wind or even a heavy footstep ought to bring the whole teetering pile down and give me a moment to leap out of the barn while St. Sabas charged the light or shot at it.

There we lay, separated from each other by fifteen feet of lighter space into which neither dared venture. He was there, all right. I once heard him draw a deep breath. I was very tempted to risk a shot parallel to the wall and six inches above the floor. But if I missed or only wounded, exactly the same shot in reverse would get me.

I waited a quarter of an hour for my delicately balanced bundle to collapse. It did not. No obliging rat. No puff of wind. Too damned ingenious. So I thought I might employ my time to better advantage. It would cost me a shot, but the shot might very well hit.

With infinite precautions I discarded my gaiters, took off my boots and stuffed them inside the top of my pullover with laces knotted behind my neck; I have never moved so slowly in my life. Then I started to circle the barn keeping close to the far wall so that I knew where I was. My plan was to crawl up behind St. Sabas and shoot whether I could see him or not. He would assume that he was faintly visible, and his only possible move was to hurl himself away from the wall into deeper darkness. That gave me a split second to get through the door before he recovered from the shock.

The circling of the barn tried patience hard; but my long practice in moving imperceptibly counted. There were numerous small scraps of barbed wire and old iron about. Each foot had to go down slowly feeling for the floor. At last I struck the front wall, followed it towards the door and stopped a couple of yards short of the point where I believed St. Sabas to be. I did not want to touch him. There was no telling what his exact position was. He might have heard me. Even if he hadn’t, the instinct of the hunted could be strong enough to make him turn round to face the imagined danger.

Bent low and with my left hand on the ground I fired into the darkness ahead. St. Sabas cursed and seemed to charge the spot where I had been but was not. I tiptoed in two strides round the doorpost and into the open.

So easy. So unhurried. And it was successful just because I had used my superiority in stalking, though not under the conditions I expected. I sat down and put on my boots. It was nearly as dark outside as in the barn. The wind had dropped. A soft, straight drizzle was falling. Low down on the horizon was the faint streak of the false dawn.

I lay down on the left of the door between the pile of rubble and the dung heap. He could never see me there until he stepped on me. If he tried to break out it was the end of him.

It was now my turn to wear down his nerves. He did not know whether I was inside or outside the barn; and he had to know, for time was against him. On the top of that, loss of blood from my first shot might be telling. All I had seen when he tried to ride me down was the edge of a stained cravat and his coat collar pinned up over it. The last shot, too, could have scored. His exclamation seemed to carry more than surprise, but whether pain or just anger I was not able to tell.

I intended him to waste himself by useless cunning and empty attacks until he lost patience. Meanwhile I waited, covering the door. Several times I heard him. Once he made a rush, but there was no shot. After that was silence. He was listening for me.

It was essential that he should go on thinking I was inside, so I cautiously heaved a clod of earth obliquely through the door. When it fell, it sounded exactly as if I had tripped over something soft. The result was a rustle of movement and an audible stumble. I could feel that his nerves were at last giving way. By this time there was a curious occult sympathy between us; I imagine it was the effect of intense concentration upon the other’s mind. In another minute he would have charged out of the door, regardless of the consequence.

And then that blasted bundle of hay collapsed when it was no use to me. The torch rolled tinkling across the floor. It was still lit, of course. There was no immediate reaction from St. Sabas. He was holding his breath and living only in his ears.

I never knew such a tiger of a man for swift decision. The lighted torch, falling without any sound or action to back it up, convinced him that I was not in the barn at all. If I was not, then it did not matter whether his figure was outlined for a second in the window. I might be watching it from the outside, but it was a hundred to one that I was watching the doorway. Perhaps that clod of earth clinched it. Whatever the object was, it had been thrown in through the door.

I heard him run across the barn and drop down to the ground through the window without any precautions at all. I ran on a parallel course along the outside wall, but arrived at the corner of the barn just too late. All I saw was a movement into the copse without any clear outline. I fired at it and he replied from the trees as I hurled myself into cover a few yards away from him.

This at last was the game as I wanted it to be played. I knew on which black square he was and the particular complex of shadows which held him. But the beech leaves underfoot were not packed and there were too many dead and crackling stems of some kind of umbellifera. To stalk him was not easy. It was impossible to move quietly — or quietly enough for ears trained by those hours of terror in the barn.

In a sense we were nearly always in sight of each other. But which shapeless specter was a man and which a bush or a tuft of coarse grass was hard to tell — unless, that is, it deliberately moved to draw a shot. Each knew that the other knew exactly what he had left in the magazine, and neither could be tempted by anything less than a certainty. Myself, I would have considered a certainty any solid which still looked like part of a man at a range of a dozen feet.

He seldom used the ground for cover. His technique was to jump from tree to tree. As soon as I had appreciated that, I shepherded him towards the edge of the copse, which was at its narrowest behind the barn, hoping to force him out into the open —grayer than the wood though no longer moonlit.

But now, I think, he did take to the ground; and I could not turn his flank and keep him on the run without venturing into the open myself. That may have been just what he wanted me to do.

I had threatened him twice already with a noiseless approach over favorable ground; so, when silence had gone on long enough to alarm him, he retreated along the limit of the windbreak parallel to the barn. Still not a shot was fired. It was a savage hunting, all the more vile because of its discipline. Neither would lose contact, but neither had any intention of being left with an empty gun. Two shots were not enough. It was so obvious that if one fired the other would reply at the flash, and then all must be staked on the last cartridge immediately. He must have longed, as I did, for both magazines to be exhausted and the way open for hands and the butt.

This was the only moment of the night which had any resemblance to a true duel. When there was movement it was quick and intense as lunge, parry and ripost. Then came another interval while I tried to work round his flank.

Always I was the attacker, infiltrating behind him while he believed I was in front, and always he fell back from tree to tree to avoid the threat. Once either of us could have been killed. I had noiseless grass under my knees and I crept very close to a shadow which I had recognized as him. But where grass can grow there is some light from above. I remembered that just in time. When the shadow moved I was already poised to roll sideways into greater darkness. Even so no shot was fired. That was typical of the sudden disengagements.

The pace was getting faster now. After all these weeks he was the hunted, and he knew it. He was driven back on the western side of the barn where the trees thinned out and the windbreak stood well back from the wall. I circled round outside him, trying to force him into the open or into a hopeless frontal attack. At last I pinned him on the edge of the open space, and little chance he had of moving to any other cover without offering a target. But the cover which he did have gave him a formidable position. He was cradled in the roots of a big beech. I doubted if I was looking at him. In any case there was no possibility of distinguishing the roundness of a body from the roundness of roots.

Conditions underfoot were satisfactory. The prevailing westerly winds sweeping round the corner of the barn had cleared away all leaves and debris. I cautiously disengaged and crawled back through the darkness of the copse parallel to the northern wall. When I was out of all possible sight I crossed the open strip to the wall itself, and began to work my way back along it towards the corner. There I was behind his position. It would be a longish shot — for that light — across the bare ground, but I reckoned I should have time to aim carefully.

Hugging the wall, I peered round the northwest corner of the barn. I could not see him. I came to the conclusion that he must be standing up against the trunk of the tree.

He fired. The shot struck me full in the forehead. I was sure of that, yet the body refused to believe that it was dead. It scuttled away like a rat, back along the wall, and staggered into the safety of the trees. I think it even turned and twisted among them to throw off pursuit. It dropped behind some low, black thing, while the person carried in this automaton of terrified muscles put his hand to his forehead and collapsed.

I have the impression that my unconsciousness was not total; if it was, then there is some primitive savior in the damaged animal watching on its behalf until the higher nervous centers regain control. Something must have been listening, for I knew that St. Sabas had not followed me. That something, when I was capable of checking intuition, was right. There was no sound at all of riding boots shuffling lightly over leaves.

I raised my face just off the ground and took my hand away from my forehead. Immediately blood poured over my eyelids. Very delicately and still wondering, I dabbled in the mess. There was no hole in the skull.

Then what had happened? It seemed likely that I had forgotten dawn and misjudged the light. St. Sabas, taking an occasional look behind him, had seen my head peering round the corner of the barn with insolent over-confidence against the streak of eastern sky. He had missed —but either the bullet ricocheting off the wall or a chunk of stone dislodged by it had plowed across my forehead. I tried to get the flap of scalp back into position and bandage it with a handkerchief. I could not lift my hands behind my head to tie a knot. Again I fainted.

When I drifted back to consciousness the light was growing gray — still a dark gray, but where there were trees one behind another I could distinguish them all as separate. I was lying behind a fallen branch and easily to be seen if St. Sabas looked for me. I could not understand why he was not on me already. He need not even use his last shot. A boot would do.

It was an effort to remember that he was human, that he had no power to follow scent or see in the dark. Of course his right game was to wait another ten minutes for a little more light and crouch over the blood trail which would lead him to me.

I remembered beasts from my shooting days before the war which I never found. Did they die or did they recover? They had a better chance of escaping than I. Often the loose skin, stretched by running, no longer corresponded with the hole in the flesh, and the blood trail petered out. Then the brown eyes, dull with pain and fear, must often have watched me pass the cover — likely as not another fallen branch — and go ignorantly away.

The light grew. St. Sabas could see the blood now whenever he chose to look. There must be little pools of it, not just traces on grass and leaf. A scalp wound, when fresh, is the messiest of all.

At last I heard him. He was still opposite the western side of the barn and trying to choke down a fit of coughing — which, earlier, would have killed him. The effort he made reminded me that in his eyes I was still dangerous.

I had forgotten that he too was wounded, once if not twice. That was the likeliest reason why he had not charged out after me when I was hit; he was thankful for a rest. Whether dying or not, at any rate I was out of action. He could be sure that this time I was not bluffing. With a bit of luck I might be blind. But meanwhile I still had two rounds in the magazine.

He was right. I was not harmless at all, and if I could lie up safely a little longer I might still have a last spring in me. Through all these minutes of half-conscious self-pity I had been identifying myself with some harmless creature dying defenseless in the forest. But it was I who was the wounded tiger, not he. I raised my head for the first time and looked round. My fallen branch gave no cover for even half-light, and the patches of blood must point straight at it.

Was it possible to change position? If I were going to try, I must begin at once. I could not. The thought of any physical action was so repugnant that I welcomed excuses. I should faint in the open. I should leave such a trail that it was futile to hide myself. In imagination I could see him bobbing intently from tree to tree until he reached … but until he reached whatever I wanted him to reach, of course!

It was a grim and cruel thought from which to recover morale. Yet that was its effect. If I could find the strength to lay a blood trail which led past the barrel of the Mauser, I and my future were safe.

I looked round for some shelter, not too far away, into which I could reasonably have stumbled at the end of my first blind rush. There were two possibles. One was a bit of broken wall near the edge of the windbreak; the other, a little hollow which might once have taken the overflow of the spring. Neither was any use for defense, but both had to be approached closely before St. Sabas could see whether my body was lying on the ground.