The Black Charade. John Burke
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the shop he would usually find her squatting in the middle of the floor, sometimes with the morning paper or a few magazines crumpled beneath her, heedless of the litter she had created.
He had managed well enough before Mrs. Burnett came on the scene, he could manage now that she had gone. What he could not have managed now was to live without Annie.
‘Mind yer not late, now. I’ve warned yer.’
She had pushed up the window over the shop and was leaning out, ghostly in the dusk, again tempting him back. He waved, not trusting himself to answer, and walked away.
He had spent so many dull years, depressing and often shameful. Now he had something to live for. There was so much to come.
Perhaps this very evening it would be his turn to be beckoned on to the next stage.
* * * *
‘So,’ concluded Sir Andrew Thornhill, ‘in a world which is daily yielding up more of its secrets and fitting old beliefs into new contexts, in which ancient and supposedly dead organisms produce the fuels to warm our life and drive our engines, in which medicine shows man’s dependence on the products of the earth and of the very air, in which so-called discoveries prove frequently to be only a revaluation of matters with which our forebears were perfectly familiar under less scientific names, we must increasingly turn our attention to the relationship between apparently inanimate matter and our own life forces.
‘What some would superstitiously cling to—or, at the other extreme, contemptuously dismiss—as sympathetic magic may, after all, be revealed as a valid scientific relationship whose further exploration will make possible the development of powers which man has hitherto misinterpreted and feared to investigate. This is not mysticism: it is the logical extension of the natural sciences.’
He allowed twenty minutes for questions, but replied with less than his usual expansiveness. His mind was already reaching on ahead.
Anticipation mounted as he approached the chapel in its quiet street, a dark shape set back from its neighbours so that no light fell on it. Each time he arrived he was surprised by its existence, and surprised that he of all people should be entering such a place. Somehow it ceased to exist between visits, and if asked about it in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation, he would not have been able to recollect what place was being referred to, or where it could be found. But now, just for an evening, it was the only reality.
He went up the chipped, tiled path and pushed the door open.
Inside, the darkness was leavened only by feeble light from an oblong window beyond the pulpit, as sooty as the glass of a railway station roof. He paced up the aisle. On either side the old horse-box pews were stacked with shrouded objects, some reaching halfway to the rafters. Only the front few ranks of pews remained uncluttered. He stood with his hand on the latch of the one he had been assigned, the top of the door coming to his shoulder. His eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom. Yes, there was the expected shape in the pulpit: the outline of a veiled head.
‘You are the first,’ she said.
It was an opportunity for speaking his mind to her, without challenging her authority in front of the others.
‘Do we really have to sit in the dark all the time? Why can’t we sit and talk in normal conditions, seeing one another, sharing our experiences and working things out between us?’
‘Because for what we are exploring, the dark is a normal condition. Our procedure will function only in accordance with its own specific laws.’
‘I can’t see why a little light on the scene would impede it.’
‘You do not ask gravity to reverse itself just to fit a personal whim. If you find that some experiments work only in the presence of water, and others in a vacuum, you don’t insist on testing them over and over again in the wrong conditions—except to prove that they are the wrong conditions. The phenomena we seek will not flourish in the glare of daylight for anyone to see.’
She was, he realized, soothing him with his own kind of terminology. There was nothing to do but accept.
Respectfully he said: ‘When do I move on to the more advanced studies...to the transformation itself?’
‘Your time will come.’
‘This long-drawn-out procedure—’
‘Again, you must consider it in your own scientific idiom. Certain chemical reactions require certain times and temperatures. Hurry or delay the process, and it is ruined. So with us.’
‘“Us”,’ he echoed. ‘Somehow I get the impression that the others aren’t in the same mould—I’m not sure we belong together.’
‘I assure you that you’re all part of one pattern. You must all partake in the same rituals. You may not understand the necessity for this, but for century upon century it has been proved to work.’
Thornhill laughed. The sound ran away into the dusty recesses of the chapel. Again the woman had struck the right, shrewd note for him. He felt she had invited him closer, acknowledging in spite of what she had said that he was distinct and apart from the others in the group.
All at once she said: ‘Are you beginning to doubt?’
‘No,’ he said hastily. ‘No, I wouldn’t want you to think that.’
‘You’ll not turn back?’
‘I’ll not turn back.’
Behind him the door creaked. He stepped into his pew and sat down. Footsteps came up the aisle and moved into the pew immediately below the pulpit. The steps had been those of a woman. Then came another—and was that the sound of a third?
There was silence.
Thornhill counted. One fewer than last time—or was it two? One of course had moved on since last time: the fortunate, chosen one who had gone ahead. But still they were short.
Something was wrong.
The silhouette in the pulpit was as motionless as if it had been carved from the woodwork.
At last she spoke. ‘Someone is missing. One has failed us.’
Thornhill cursed silently. Behind him a woman let out a pitiful little moan.
‘One has turned back.’ The voice from the pulpit was steady, but thrummed with a fearsome condemnation. ‘We shall have to recall her. Or eliminate her from our calculations—cancel her out.’
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