The Devil's Cook

23

The lane was a tunnel in darkness; the hedges hemmed in the road; the wind whispered in the hedges. Once the road had been graveled, but the gravel was gone, pressed into the clay bed or thrown aside by wheels. The clay had been softened by rains and rutted while soft; now it was frozen hard, and the ruts writhed treacherously underfoot.

Farley had approached the lane alone, after parting from Bartholdi some distance from where it began. He walked along at a measured pace, counting his steps. He had not been told to do this, but he did it for such comfort as it provided, having anticipated that what could be a five-mile walk along a lonely road on a dark night was nothing to bring home to one’s dreams.

“Take your time, Mr. Moran,” Bartholdi had said. “There’s no telling when you’ll be contacted — if you’re contacted at all — but I have a hunch it will be on your return trip. This kidnapper will want to wait as long as he can before he makes his move, just to be sure there’s no trap. Remember, you won’t be alone. My men have got to stay back some distance, of course, but one of them will always be close enough to protect you. Here, take this police whistle. After you’ve been contacted by the kidnapper and he’s left, give two blasts on it. The alarm will be passed along from station to station, and in a matter of seconds we’ll close in.

“The chances are at least even that the kidnapper will slip through, considering the terrain. That can’t be helped. So you’ve got to get a good look at him, if it’s at all possible. And don’t go being a hero, Mr. Moran.”

“Don’t worry,” Farley had said, “I won’t.”

“Be sure you’re safely away from him before you use the whistle, then hide yourself in a bush and stay put till one of my officers shows up. Here’s your package. It’s got nothing but paper in it, of course.”

The night was cold. The sky was remote, it’s blackness pricked by pinpoint stars. Farley heard the wind in the hedges; he heard from somewhere, dying, the fluty boom of an owl.

His foot struck something that rolled away in the darkness, and he sprang aside, heart in his mouth. His other foot jammed into a deep rut and he staggered, almost falling Pain shot up his leg; he had twisted his ankle.

The road felt like cement as he knelt on it. He rubbed the turned ankle, trying to massage the pain away. Finally, the pain dwindled to a throb... He could see, nearby, faintly on the dark clayey road, the object he had tripped over. He crawled ahead and picked it up. It was an orange from an Osage hedge. He cursed and hurled it away. It struck the frozen ground with a crash, like a rock, and bounded away.

Farley got up on his feet, testing his ankle cautiously. Limping, he walked on. His hands, ungloved, were cold, and he shoved them into the big patch pockets of his thick wool jacket. In one pocket bulged the dummy package. The whistle lay in the other.

He came suddenly on a concrete culvert spanning the dry bed of a shallow ravine that ran with water when the rains fell and the snows melted. The culvert was no more than a flat slab without railings. He sat down on the slab, dangling his legs into the ravine. All at once, it seemed, the entire earth had dropped into a profound silence, in which all living things crouched mute, listening for — what? He, too, was listening, leaning forward on the slab; then, becoming aware of what he was doing, the tension left him, and he laughed:

Farley, he mocked himself, you are about to fall under the spell of the witches and the goblins and that old black magic. Get with it, man!

The spell was instantly broken; the night was filled at once with a thousand small, comforting sounds. Rising, Farley went on. He had developed a blister, and the ankle prevented his going too briskly; but he came soon enough to the intersection — the end of the lane.

He had met no one on the way, he had seen no one, and now nothing remained but the tiresome ordeal of walking back. He waited for a few minutes, thinking that an officer might approach him, but nothing happened. He started back the way he had come.

Walking aggravated the pain in his ankle. He stopped every two or three hundred yards to massage the ankle, trying to determine by touch if it was swelling or not He cursed the fatuity of his mission as he limped from one stop to the next.

It was now his urgent desire to be done with it as soon as possible. But his progress was so slow because of his ankle that he had to fight a rapidly growing irritation.

Out of this mood, having paused once more to rub his ankle, he was suddenly jolted. Ahead of him somewhere, along the dark road, he heard the throb of an idling engine. A car had entered the lane and was parked, lights off, in the most dense shadow of the hedge.

He followed the sound, limping and silent, and soon came upon the car. It was so nearly absorbed by the shadows that he might have passed without seeing it. It was pulled off the road in the rough opening of a hedge that led to a field beyond, no doubt broken through by some fanner to give access to his machines. Farley leaned forward to peer into the interior of the car. Canted against the door on the right side of the front seat he made out what appeared to be the shadow of an enormous and grotesque head.

He felt about on the hard road until his fingers came in contact with some gravel. This he tossed at the car. The head, at the ping of stones on metal, flew apart as if riven by the sound. There was a frantic flurry of movement. Farley had barely time to jump aside. The headlights flashed on, the car backed with a rush from the opening in the hedge, and tore off in a shower of gravel.

Farley resumed his trek. His feet on the frozen clay bed of the road were numb with the cold. He began counting cadence again, limping along to the count; and after what seemed infinity, he reached the terminus of the road where he had started. He began trudging down the crossroad as he had been directed. He had gone perhaps fifty yards when Bartholdi materialized from the night.

“Nothing?” said Bartholdi.

“Not a damn thing.”

“A car entered the road a while ago. Did you see it?”

“Yes. A couple. They parked. I scared them off.”

“They were stopped at the other end.”

“What do suppose went wrong?”

“Who knows? Maybe the whole thing was a rehearsal. For whatever reason, we’ve been stood up.”

“Well, I’m tired, and I’m freezing, and I twisted an ankle. Do you need me any longer?”

“No, Mr. Moran, you did fine. There’s a police car over there. The driver will take you home.”

Bartholdi continued to stand there, thinking. An officer stepped out of the darkness.

“Dry run?” the officer said.

“Dry run.”

“What about the car that went in?”

“A couple making out.”

“In my day, we called it necking.”

“In your day, that’s all it was. Today...” Bartholdi sighed.