The Haunted Storm Page 6

  “Oh! Mr. Locke! “ she said, and paused for breath, looking swiftly at Matthew; she didn’t seem to recognise him, but looked straight through him, he thought, in fear – “Poor little Jenny Andrews – she’s dead – Peter found her in the wood – she’s dead – she’s been murdered!”

  Matthew’s heart leapt; he looked at his uncle, and then back at Mrs. Parrish, who stood trembling in front of them with one hand on her breast, as if she were swearing to the truth of what she said. There was panic in her face.

  No-one said anything for a second; and then Harry said “You’d better ring for the police, and I’ll go over to the farm. Matthew knows where the telephone is.”

  He set off along the path. Matthew, dazed, said to her “Yes, yes – well, of course, you know where the phone is, too;” and ran to the back door of the house, and let her in. They hurried into the hall, and Matthew wondered why his uncle had made him stay behind. Mrs. Parrish was talking nervously.

  “It was in the seven-acre field, down the end where it borders the wood, you know the place; Peter was down there looking at the fence and he said there she was, poor lamb; he had to carry her all the way back to the farm, and then he realised he shouldn’t have done, of course; oh, I don’t know who’s going to tell poor Mrs. Andrews…”

  “There, sit down,” Matthew said automatically, pulling a chair out from beside the hall table. “What’s the number? Is it 999?”

  She sat down and dialled the number. “Hullo? Emergency – police it is – and ambulance – at South End Farm, Barton – yes – Barton 685, this is – there’s been a murder…”

  Matthew leant against the wall, and then had to sit down on the stairs. Where, in heaven’s name, did this come in? He tried to picture the body of a girl – how old could she be, he wondered? Perhaps she was only a child; and he tried to imagine her body, flung down casually near a clump of trees at the edge of a field, discarded, and the murderer turning away in loathing. When had it happened? In day light, perhaps – in the cold dawn – that was horrible –

  Mrs. Parrish finished speaking, and put the telephone down.

  “Poor Mrs. Andrews – I wonder if I’d better ring her up – oh, it’s awful – no; I couldn’t tell her on the telephone, I couldn’t; I’ll have to go round straight away, before the police get here.”

  She was still greatly agitated; but it was only just beginning to sink in to Matthew.

  “Who’s the girl?” he said. “How old was she?”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Parrish; and as she spoke she began to cry, “she was only eleven, the poor little thing; oh, I can’t believe it. When Peter came into the kitchen, I didn’t know what it was he’d come back for, he’d only been gone half an hour or so; and ‘Mum,’ he said, ‘be careful, listen, don’t be upset, I’ve found Jenny Andrews and she’s dead;’ and he was shaken, I could tell that, and he went on ‘I’ve taken her and laid her in the dairy, now go and find Mr. Locke and ask him to ring the police and the doctor.’ I didn’t know what he could be talking about, Jenny Andrews dead, what’s he mean, I thought, but then he sat down and sort of groaned and put his face in his hands and said ‘Now I’ve done it wrong! I should have left her, mum, now they won’t find any clues! I’ve messed it all up, I should have left her there.’ and then I saw he must be telling the truth. Mr. Parrish is out on the tractor; he doesn’t know about it; oh Lord, it’s too horrible.”

  “Christ,” said Matthew in a whisper. “How was she killed? Do you know how long she’d been there?”

  “She’d been strangled; oh, the brute, he must be mad. Peter said she was stiff and her clothes were all wet. She must have been there all night, and her mother wondering where she was – now she’ll have to hear this, on top of it – oh, it’s just wickedness, it’s pure wickedness!”

  Matthew was silent. He stared at the wallpaper without seeing it. “Now then,” he thought, “this is another gulf opening – this is the world moving again – it’s like the girl on the beach – I don’t move as fast as I thought; I don’t move at all, it’s the world that moves, it strides like a giant and I can’t keep up with it…”

  But in fact his mind was racing, darting here and there over the whole image of murder. It shocked him like thunder; and like thunder it was a natural phenomenon, perhaps; it came out of a clear sky, and demonstrated contemptuously how deep in sleep he was. It spoke too loudly to be human.

  After a second or two Mrs. Parrish had recovered a little. She stood up and smoothed her hands over her skirt. “Oh dear, I’m all trembling; look at my hands. I’d better go and see what they’re doing over there, then I’ll go to Mrs. Andrews’; the police’ll be here in a minute, I suppose…”

  “Can I do anything, Mrs. Parrish?” said Matthew, feeling that he ought to say something, “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do, really – I don’t want to get in the way. There’ll be so much going on in a minute.”

  She went across to the window beside the front door that overlooked the drive and the entrance to the farm, and leant forward to look out, resting her hands on the window sill.

  “No; I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think you’d better get in the way, Matthew, because the police’ll have lots to do; I should just stay here, if I was you.”

  Whenever his emotions were excited, as they were now, he found himself experiencing a curious kind of over sensitivity; he responded in the most extravagant way to the most minute stimuli. It amounted almost to clairvoyance. He was aware of every smallest degree of feeling in Mrs. Parrish, and even felt a momentary flare of lust for her thickset body, because unconsciously she had put her weight on one hip and bent the other leg in a way that gave her an unusual lightness and grace. As soon as she turned round, of course, the spell would be broken, but he was astonished by the strength of it, while it lasted. Perhaps the murderer had seen the girl like that, and been unable to resist – it would only take a moment… But the words she had just spoken would have protected her, because Matthew had been hurt by them, feeling them to be a harsh rebuke to his presumptuous desire to interfere. Consequently he sat absolutely still, hiding his feelings but still being aware of every tiniest gradation of the light around her body, every variation in the emotional atmosphere between them. He could even smell her, among the other smells of furniture-polish, of cooking oil, of soap, of flowers through the open window; he caught the warm smell of her flesh, not entirely clean, but certainly not dirty. And he heard quite distinctly, over and apart from the flooding of his own blood, the rush and pull of the tides of hers, and felt her heart above him like the moon.

  And before he could become aware of what was happening, he was swamped, overcome by her; and she didn’t move an inch, but stood there quite still, with her back to him. The quiet hall they were in suddenly assumed the proportions of a womb or a cradle or a pair of enveloping maternal arms, and the air of the afternoon swept around him, imperious and amniotic, so that all he had of self-awareness and independence was swiftly and momentarily annihilated.

  And then she turned to him and smiled briefly, and said, “Well, the Lord knows what He’s up to, but we don’t; sometimes I wish He’d make it all a bit clearer. Poor Mrs. Andrews; her heart’ll break.”

  And with that she opened the front door and went out.

  Matthew thought of grief and terror bounding out greedily through the village, straining forward like gaunt spectral dogs from their birthplace on the edge of the wood; and in his mind he watched them, impersonally.

  “What does it mean? What does it mean? What does it mean for me?” he thought.

  Chapter 4

  NEXT DAY being Sunday, Matthew decided as soon as he was awake that he would go to church. There was an impulse of refuge-seeking in this idea, for he had had a disturbed unpleasant night, waking in the grey dawn from a nightmare of the girl’s broken body that hung straddling a fence, with black blood pouring from it, and he could neither run away nor take his eyes off it. He lay awake, frightened at fir
st by the singing of the birds, which seemed to be resounding in a bare, damp, grey place, the wood of the self-murderers, extended in his head; he lay still in misery for almost half an hour until the sky cleared and the sun rose, and then he fell asleep again. When he woke for the second time he felt tired and oppressed.

  Harry had told him the night before that he’d be gone when Matthew woke up; he was going to preach in Silminster. Matthew wished he’d got up earlier and gone with him. But the church would do; it would have to. Such a craving he had for order now, and stability! He had not set foot willingly in a church for years – not when there was a service on, at any rate – but this morning the thought of singing psalms and hearing prayers spread over his senses like balm.

  The morning outside was bright and cloudless and windy; he shaved and dressed quickly and went downstairs. The clock in the hall said it was nearly ten o’clock. Mrs. Parrish had made him some breakfast and left it in the oven to keep warm, and he ate it in the kitchen, staring dreamily through the window on to the back garden.

  He washed up carefully when he had finished and then wandered outside. He supposed that they still held services at eleven o’clock, but perhaps he had better set off and find out. He went out into the road and turned up towards the village. He dawdled; the warmth of the sun on his head kept slowing him down to a standstill, and he felt as weak on his knees as a newborn calf. For the matter of that, everything felt newborn and unfamiliar. He could not give a name to a single one of the wildflowers and grasses that grew by the side of the road. He felt small in the face of the world.

  On the right-hand side of the road he passed the great yard of Locke and Son. It used to be the firm’s headquarters, but nowadays most of the large construction work was carried on from Silminster, leaving the Barton yard free for smaller contracts and carpentry work. It looked this morning as clean and tidy as if it had just sprung naturally out of the earth, like a huge flower or a tree; and, like a tree, there was something powerfully organic about the way it functioned and rested. The piles of timber and bricks, the fleet of lorries with the firm’s name on them in black and red, the neat offices and sheds – there was order there, and it was visible and clear. Matthew lingered for a long time, staring through the screen of trees that separated it from the road, marvelling at it.

  He got to the church at a quarter to eleven and looked at the notice-board by the lych-gate. He didn’t recognise the vicar’s name; he only vaguely remembered the man who’d been here when he was a child and had gone to the Sunday School. The church itself was not especially beautiful, but it was old and untouched and fairly small. The graveyard rose steeply behind it and bordered a green field, where sheep were grazing and where a hawthorn hedge led up and across the brow of the tiny hill. The weather was exhilarating. The sky was clear one minute and half-covered with huge dazzling billowing white clouds the next, that raced and swept across the whole intense blueness of it and disappeared. The sun was warm, except when a cloud crossed it momentarily, and the air was fresh and cool.

  Matthew leant on the wall until the bell began to ring, and then wandered slowly inside.

  He sat in a pew at the back of the church, on the right hand side next to a window, and watched the rest of the congregation come in. There were not many of them, naturally; a few old ladies, a smartly-dressed man who might have been a doctor or a lawyer and his wife, two or three other middle-aged couples, and that was all. Matthew thought he recognised some of them, but he was not sure, and in any case no-one seemed to know him. He sat still, feeling oddly peaceful.

  As the organist began to play a prelude he realised that he would not, after all, find much of an answer here, if he had ever really expected to. It was all too familiar and ordinary. Salvation lay in extremes, in things like that murder, even, and unless the vicar was a saint or a madman he wouldn’t find it here.

  Then from the back of the church the vicar’s voice announced the first hymn; and immediately Matthew felt a small obscure shock, and involuntarily turned round. He saw a small man, slightly balding, looking mild and preoccupied, whom he’d certainly never seen before. It was his voice that puzzled Matthew, because it was loud and rich, and intensely melodious, almost the voice of an actor.

  He stood up with the rest of the congregation and sang dutifully as they did. It was a short hymn, and when it was over and they were kneeling down Matthew was astonished again at the volume and richness of the man’s voice, reading the prayers. It was not a “parsonic” voice, over-ripe with self-admiration and piety; but it rang out like a bell, effortlessly powerful. “He should have been an actor,” thought Matthew, wondering at it.

  It formed a great contrast with his appearance: for he looked ill-at-ease, absent, even slightly nervous. His eyes were very light in colour and made him look half-blind and a little weak. He was not looking at the prayer-book, but staring obliquely down the church, with an uncertain frown on his forehead every now and then.

  As the service went by the sun crept round and a beam fell through the window beside him on to Matthew’s side, warming him and causing red and green pools of light to shimmer and coalesce on the wood of the pew in front of him. They sang the psalms, and recited the creed, and sang another hymn which the vicar did not join in, rather to Matthew’s surprise. “Perhaps he’s tone-deaf and doesn’t like to throw everyone off their pitch,” he thought; “but he ought to sing well, with that voice.” And then the vicar went to the pulpit and arranged his notes, and waited impatiently for the hymn to end.

  He opened the Bible before the congregation had sat down and began to read his text. He read a sentence from St. John which Matthew didn’t recognise: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” Then, without any other preamble, he went straight into an extraordinary, rambling, wandering maze of a sermon that worked itself up into a vivid excess of passion. Matthew listened greedily.

  “You will have noticed that whenever we talk about the entry of God into the world we use the word descent. Christ, we are told, descended into the world; but we don’t perhaps consider as often as we should what this word descent implies. Quite evidently we don’t believe that God is up there in the sky; it is a spiritual height from which he descends, and spiritual depth which receives him. When we say that a man is in the spiritual depths, we mean that he is rotten and sick with anguish for himself and for his life in the world. These are the spiritual depths; and it was to this that the Christ descended – otherwise the phrase has no meaning.”

  He said this briskly and decisively, like a barrister; Matthew settled back and listened carefully.

  “Once we see this clearly there can be no question of our complacent mouthings about there being no God ‘out there’ – about God being nowhere but in our hearts and affections for our fellow men, and so on; none at all. Why should we love each other, after all’? Is there anything noble in us? All humanity is darkness, darkness; the forms of your mind are the forms of darkness – that darkness which perceived not the light that shone in it; we are clogged with darkness and the forms of darkness, and their number is legion: pride; anger; lust; envy; greed; sloth; and avarice – the classical seven, and a host of others: indifference; fear; ambition; vanity; passion for smallness, for small things, a love for the mean, the petty, the perverse, the temporary, the trivial; the craving for popularity, the urge to be pleasant and the urge to be treated pleasantly, yes, dark ness; nostalgia, sadness, melancholy; and hope, expectation, joy, pleasure and even kindness, curiosity, frankness, timidity; the refusal to bear burdens and the refusal to share burdens, because there are some men in whom the flames of pride burn so highly that they will not give any hint of suffering, and it is a form of darkness thus to cling jealously to one’s own afflictions as surely as it is a form of darkness to spread the germs of plague throughout the world by a hasty, panic impulse to run to one’s fellows, cry, weep, embrace strangers, kiss men and women indiscriminately ou
t of fearful lust and the fear of imminent death; and because darkness, darkness, darkness is everywhere it is dark ness to discourse of these things, doubtless, it is folly, ignorance, and sin to make them known, folly, ignorance, and sin to know of them in secret and say nothing, folly, ignorance, and sin not to know of them at all…”

  His voice had become louder; he was speaking almost wildly now, and his voice filled the church and seemed to echo back and forth like a peal of bells. Matthew was overawed. The priest was rocking gently from side to side, his eyes half-closed, the tight intense frown still gripping his brow, his hands spread wide on the pulpit rail.

  “They are all – desires. They are all – a greed for the world; and we lust for the world because it is beautiful, oh, it is sodden with beauty like a sponge with vinegar; there is no truth in it, and there is no health in us. Consider what it is in the world that we love.”

  He paused again and swallowed, and passed his hand over his eyes, and then leant forward and began to speak again, softly at first and then working up to a climax.

  “The sky, first of all; the blue sky, the sun in it and the moon and the stars; the clouds, white, grey, and black; the rain, snow, hail, sleet, thunder, lightning, the rainbows and the haloes around the sun and the moon in strange weather; the mountains and the hills, criss-crossed by valleys and streams and glaciers, overhung with snow or mist or blossoming with spring flowers and green grass; the song of the birds, the lark and the nightingale and the blackbird and the thrush, and the screech of the owl by night; the midnight flitting of the bat, the flight of eagles into the sun, the slow flapping of the crow and the quick dart of sparrows; and the trees, the clear brightness of the larch and the venerable grey of the oak, the dull deep green of elms, the tender lightness of the silver birch and the rich wine-coloured darkness of the copper beech, the straight serried sombreness of pine-trees and the grace of cherry-blossom, of apple blossom; and there are the forms rock takes, the massive grey monolithic granite and the red sandstone, there is chalk with its dazzling whiteness, and near chalk often you find flint, opaque but nearly translucent, like smoky chipped glass, falling in flakes; slate, too, splitting in dark slabs away from the mountain-side; limestone, lava, silt, mud, sand, shingle; rock, piled in confusion, caves, cliffs, scree, wilderness, avalanche, hurled far out pinnacle upon pinnacle surmounted by trails and curtains of snow; the water falls dashing down the cliffs and gullies, leading down again deep into secluded corners, dark unsurveyed pockets and folds, hidden, descending inwards to huge caverns with the drip of water laden with minerals, the stalactites and stalagmites gleaming, their slow growth like teeth into the darkness, and further, ledges, dizzy chimneys and passages, needle-thin, tortuous, intent on their depth, opening out to unseen vast chambers, cathedrals, underground lakes innocent of fish, oh, innocent of life but for the blind gropings and yearnings of soft-bellied creatures without names and the sway of primitive slime at the water’s edge...”