The Dark Gateway: A Novel of Horror. John Burke
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“You’d better not go,” said Denis.
“I’ve got to go sometime, old man.” He peered forward, trying to discern definite shapes in the shifting, crisscross patterns. “There’s someone coming.”
“Visitors—at this time?” said Denis, closing the door behind him and standing on the step in order to block the light and see better.
They heard a faint cry
Denis answered it, and the vague figure that at first had seemed only a figment of their imagination came stumbling towards them.
“I never thought…ugh…be able to make it.”
Denis took one arm and Frank supported the other. They opened the door and led the newcomer inside. He was breathing painfully, as though he had come a long way, exhausted by the effort of continually forcing his reluctant legs through the piled drifts. His hair was set hard with frosty whiteness, forced over his head like a glittering, tight-fitting cap.
Mrs. Morris got up at once, concern showing in her face. She asked no questions, but took the man’s heavy coat and gave him a towel. He slumped into a chair.
Mr. Morris stirred, and his paper slipped over the edge of his knee, but he did not awaken.
Jonathan appeared in the passage doorway, a book in his hand. He did not seem annoyed by the arrival of yet another visitor, as one might have expected. In fact Nora, glancing at him, saw that this time he was smiling with deep approval.
CHAPTER FOUR
“A full house we are having,” said Mrs. Morris, without annoyance.
The newcomer had been made comfortable and given a drink of hot rum— “Not up to the old naval rum ration, eh, Frankie boy?” said Denis—and was now seated in the semicircle. Mr. Morris had heaved himself painfully up from his slumbers and gone outside to make a tour of the outhouses, but he was not away for long.
“Piling up,” he said briefly on his return. “Have to dig for the milk tomorrow.”
He slumped back into his chair, fumbled for his pipe, and began to stuff tobacco in with blue, cold fingers.
Frank said: “I’m terribly sorry I didn’t start out sooner. I’ll be an awful nuisance—”
“No nuisance at all,” said Mrs. Morris. “I hope your mother and father aren’t worryin’ about you. Still, they know you’re here. A dreadful night, that is what it is—no night for anyone to be out.”
Automatically they turned to the stranger, whose first breathless, spluttered remarks had not made any coherent impression. Now the cold had been drawn from his limbs and he had had time to collect his wits. He began to explain, reciting the story, thought Nora, as though it had been learnt off by heart, every now and then addressing himself to Jonathan, whose gentle nods seemed to be nods of approval and confirmation.
“I’m sorry I’ve had to trouble you like this. It’s my own fault—I oughtn’t to have tried walking over here, but I wanted to see the view from the top of the Horse.” He referred to the mountain known as the Horse of Gwyn ap Nudd, a humped peak that stood arrogantly above the surrounding hills and valleys. It was not a stiff climb, and an ardent hiker might have been pardoned for wanting a glimpse of the great white blanket over the countryside, bulging and wrinkled over Wales, then flattening out and lying smooth and dazzling upon Shropshire. The only false note was struck by the man himself: he was not in the least like a hiker. “I thought I could make it easily,” he said. “I wanted to have a look from the top, just so I could say I’d been, and then I was going to get down on to the main road near Plas Mawr.”
“The main road would not have been easy to find,” said Mr. Morris.
The stranger waved one stubby hand and grinned. He had a tooth missing from the front of his mouth. “That was just it,” he said. “I missed it altogether, and got mixed up with a lot of hills. As fast as I got up one, expecting to see a village of some sort, there was a slope downwards and then more hills. I knew the castle when I saw it, and I made for it, ’cos I knew once I was over, I could get down to Llanmadoc. But it was dark by the time I made it, and what with the snow and the darkness, I don’t think I could have got down to the village. It was lucky I saw your light.”
“Quite a walk you’ve had, Mr.—er—”
“Brennan.”
When he had spoken of the darkness, a sudden fantastic idea had come to Nora. She remembered, all too vividly, the vision that Jonathan had conjured up, and for one wild moment she wondered if he had also called up this man Brennan, a fiend in human shape. All the ghost stories she had ever read, the lurid films she had seen, and the more dubious illustrations in the books that stood in the parlour bookcase, all these came to the aid of her imagination, and she looked at the stranger with an indefinite but compelling dread.
Her fear died away. If this was a demon that Jonathan had summoned, it was an inoffensive demon. Brennan looked like a shopkeeper, with a worried, pimply little face and one ear that stuck out grotesquely, as though—Nora could have laughed now—as though weighed down by the weight of too many pencils resting on it. He would not look directly at anyone except, for brief spaces of time, at Jonathan, but sighed at intervals and fumbled with scraps of paper in the pockets of his jacket. Twice Nora caught those glances that he exchanged with Jonathan, like a nervous shop assistant who hopes he has not offended an influential customer.
“Perhaps,” he said, “if you would be good enough to lend me a light of some sort, I could try to reach the village.”
“Not safe,” said Mr. Morris sleepily, opening one eye. “Drifts there are that you would get caught in. The snow do give under you if you don’t know every little turn of the ground. Tomorrow, when you can see where you are going.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“For a lonely place,” said Nora ironically, “we get a lot of visitors.”
They all laughed, and for a while, in a babble of general, more or less lighthearted conversation, it appeared that the cloud of unrest that had clung to the house all day would be dispelled. But Jonathan and the newcomer, Brennan, were held together by some mysterious bond. Nora wondered whether anyone else sensed this as acutely as she did. There was something between the two men, and she could not believe that this meeting had been an accident. Come to that, she could not believe that any of today’s occurrences had been accidents: from the moment she awoke this morning she had been conscious of the existence of a certain fatalistic pattern into which the lives of all present had been woven. Things were moving towards a climax. These strange comings and goings—though so far, she thought, there had been a pronounced lack of goings—all meant something that would soon be revealed. She could not imagine where she had picked up these ideas, but they had in the last hour or so become an obsession. Now she was waiting. Waiting, not knowing what she was to expect.
Jonathan stood up, holding the book that had been lying open on his knee.
“Interesting,” he muttered, apparently referring to something he had read. “Would you mind if I went out for a stroll around the buildings?”
Brennan tensed. Nora, with her new, unaccountable sensitivity, felt this at once. So this whim of Jonathan’s—for such it seemed on the surface—was a part of whatever was being planned.
Her father said drowsily: “You could have come round the barn with me if you’d wanted a stroll, and done a bit of heaving on bolts, eh?” He snuffled spasmodically, and this time fell sound asleep.
“You’ll get wet, out in that,” said Mrs. Morris indignantly. “Better wait until you can see instead of splashing about this time of night. No sense in it.”
“I’ll be safe, I promise,” said Jonathan. “A little breath of night air—the raw wind of the great wild mountains, as it were.” He giggled excitedly. “Back in a minute—just steeping myself in the atmosphere, that’s all.”