Anna, Where Are You?

CHAPTER XXXII

Whilst Peter Brandon stood looking up at her window Thomasina was following the footpath across the park. Like Peter, she had a torch but she didn’t want to use it. She could manage, because all you had to do was to get away from the trees and then there was enough diffused light from a hidden moon to show the direction of the big house and to help you to follow the path. All the same, she was not half way across the open park before the thought of the lighted room she had left behind her was tugging at her. She had to keep on thinking about Anna, and how infuriating Peter had been, and that only the most despicable kind of coward started out to do something and then turned back because he was afraid.

With these useful thoughts to spur her she got as far as the courtyard. Her feet came upon the slippery winter moss which furred the stones. You could walk without making any noise at all, but where you bruised it in the dark a faint smell of decay came up and hung in the air.

Insensibly she kept a little to the right, because behind the curtains of that right-hand wing there were people-six of them -Mr. and Mrs. Craddock-the three children-Miss Silver. The rooms would have had fires in them, and lights, even if they were dark now and growing cold. If she called out, someone would hear.

Why on earth should she call out? And why, if you please, had she come here at all? Not to stand in the dark and wonder if Miss Silver would hear her if she screamed. She had come to see whether she could get into the deserted part of the house and stop the horrid, growing thought that it might be hiding some dreadful secret about Anna Ball. This possibility, which had seemed quite strong and vigorous an hour ago, now dwindled to the merest wraith. The house was an empty ruin. The damp deserted smell of it came seeping through the rickety boards which blinded its shattered windows. It came to her that if she stood there for another single moment she wouldn’t be able to make herself go on, and that if she didn’t go on she would never stop despising herself.

She turned her back upon the inhabited wing and had taken a single step forward, when something moved, away to the left. She couldn’t have said that she saw even so much as a shadow, or that she heard anything at all. Only something had moved. She stood where she was. The movement came from outside the courtyard. She had a sense of its continuance. She thought someone or something was coming in from outside. She couldn’t see, and she couldn’t hear, but she thought that something went by in the dark.

And the next moment she was sure. A foot slipped on one of the shallow steps which went up to the door, a torch flickered, the door moved, and someone went in. She couldn’t see at all who it was, but she meant to find out. That thread of light from the torch had just touched the edge of the door and gone out. But it had taken with it nine-tenths of Thomasina’s fear. Silence, and darkness, and decay-these are the things which sap courage at the very roots of the race. Man has always been afraid of the enemy whom he can neither see nor fight. Thomasina certainly wasn’t going to let herself be afraid of an ordinary everyday object like an electric torch. That single flicker of light brought the whole thing down to a common human level. Somebody with an electric torch had just gone into the house, and she was going to make it her business to find out who that someone was. Ordinary visitors come up to a door and knock or ring. If they have got a torch they put it on. The person who had just gone into the house didn’t want to be seen or heard any more than she did herself.

She came quite silently up to the door and tried it. Since she had heard no click of the latch, no sound of a key being turned or a bolt slid home, she was sure enough that it would move under her hand. But when it did so she had a faint stirring of fear-it opened upon so total a darkness and released so damp and mouldy a smell.

It takes too long to tell. Thought is so much quicker. It really was only a moment since she had seen the flicker of the torch and the door slide back from it to let a shadowy somebody into the house. As she came in herself she was aware of a footstep going away and a single brief lightening of the darkness as the torch flashed on and off again in some passage which ran out of the hall. It served to show her where she was-on the threshold of a lobby leading into the black cavern of the hall. No detail, just a black cave running back into the house and the impression of a stairway-all very vague and formless, and then in an instant swallowed up again by the dark.

She began to walk in the direction from which the light had seemed to come, hands stretched out in front of her and feet that felt their way. There was no second flash of light. By the time she had taken about twenty of those slow steps she was no longer sure of the direction from which the light had come. As she stood at the entrance, it had been somewhere away to the right, but she did not know whether she had kept a straight line as she walked towards it. It is a very hard thing to do in the dark. Some people pull to the left, and some to the right. It is the hardest thing in the world to keep a straight course.

She ought to have left the door wide behind her. It would not have let in any light, but looking back, there would have been just enough difference between the outdoor darkness and the enclosed gloom of the house to show her where she was. But she had left the door as she had found it, no more than an inch or two ajar-it had seemed safer somehow. The person she was following might have turned and looked back, or someone else might have come, and then that open door would have given her away.

She stood where she was, looking back and listening. There was a sound-or was there-she wasn’t sure. An old empty house has sounds of its own. This sound wasn’t in the house. It came from the the other side of the door which she had left ajar. Or she thought it did-she couldn’t be sure. But if anyone was coming in, she mustn’t stand there and be caught. She must get away.

She had put out her foot to take the next step, when, with a blinding shock, imagination passed into actual happening. She had come farther than she knew and she had veered to the right. If her foot had taken that next step, her hand would have touched the panel of a door. But before there was time for the step to be taken the door was wrenched inward and the beam of a powerful electric lamp struck her full in the face.