John Wyndham - The Chrysalids

With that we had to be content for the moment. We could relax a little for a few hours at least.

Rachel told us later what happened the following morning.

She had got up an hour after dawn and made her way across the fields to Anne’s house. When she reached it she had hesitated a little, reluctant to face the possibility of the same sort of screaming repulse that she had suffered the previous day. However, it was useless simply to stand there looking at the house; she plucked up courage and raised the knocker. The sound of it echoed inside and she waited. There was no result.

She tried the knocker again, more decisively. Still no one answered.

Rachel became alarmed. She hammered the knocker vigorously and stood listening. Then slowly and apprehensively she lowered her hand from the knocker, and went over to the house of the neighbour who had been with Anne the previous day.

With one of the logs from the woodpile they pushed in a window, and then climbed inside. They found Anne upstairs in her bedroom, hanging from a beam.

They took her down, between them, and laid her on the bed. They were too late by some hours to help her. The neighbour covered her with a sheet.

To Rachel it was all unreal. She was dazed. The neighbour took her by the arm to lead her out. As they were leaving she noticed a folded sheet of paper lying on the table. She picked it up.

‘This’ll be for you, or maybe your parents,’ she said, putting it into Rachel’s hand.

Rachel looked at it dully, reading the inscription on the outside.

‘But it’s not—’ she began automatically.

Then she checked herself, and pretended to look at it more closely, as it occurred to her that the woman could not read.

‘Oh, I see — yes, I’ll give it to them,’ she said, and slipped into the front of her dress the message that was addressed neither to herself, nor to her parents, but to the inspector.

The neighbour’s husband drove her home. She broke the news to her parents. Then, alone in her room, the one that Anne had shared with her before she had married, she read the letter.

It denounced all of us, including Rachel herself, and even Petra. It accused us collectively of planning Alan’s murder, and one of us, unspecified, of carrying it out.

Rachel read it through twice, and then carefully burnt it.

The tension eased for the rest of us after a day or two. Anne’s suicide was a tragedy, but no one saw any mystery about it. A young wife, pregnant with her first child, thrown off her mental balance by the shock of losing her husband in such circumstances; it was a lamentable result, but understandable.

It was Alan’s death that remained unattributable to anyone, and as much of a mystery to us as to the rest. Inquiries had revealed several persons who had a grudge against him, but none with a strong enough motive for murder, nor any likely suspect who could not convincingly account for himself at the time when Alan must have been killed.

Old William Tay acknowledged the arrow to be one of his making, but then, most of the arrows in the district were of his making. It was not a competition shaft, or identifiable in any way; just a plain everyday hunting arrow such as might be found by the dozen in any house. People gossiped, of course, and speculated. From somewhere came a rumour that Anne was less devoted than had been supposed, that for the last few weeks she had seemed to be afraid of him. To the great distress of her parents it grew into a rumour that she had let fly the arrow herself, and then committed suicide out of either remorse or the fear of being found out. But that, too, died away when, again, no sufficiently strong motive could be discovered. In a few weeks speculation found other topics. The mystery was written off as unsolvable — it might even have been an accident which the culprit dared not acknowledge….

We had kept our ears wide open for any hint of guesswork or supposition that might lead attention towards us, but there was none at all, and as the interest declined we were able to relax.

But although we felt less anxiety than we had at any time for nearly a year, an underlying effect remained, a sense of warning, with a sharpened awareness that we were set apart, with the safety of all of us lying in the hands of each.

We were grieved for Anne, but the grief was made less sharp by the feeling that we had really lost her some time before, and it was only Michael who did not seem to share in the lightening of anxiety. He said:

‘One of us has been found not strong enough…’

The spring inspections that year were propitious. Only two fields in the whole district were on the first cleansing schedule, and neither of them belonged to my father, or to half-uncle Angus. The two previous years had been so bad that people who had hesitated during the first to dispose of stock with a tendency to produce deviational offspring had killed them off in the second, with the result that the normality-rate was high on that side, too. Moreover, the encouraging trend was maintained. It put new heart into people, they became more neighbourly and cheerful. By the end of May there were quite a lot of bets laid that the deviation figures were going to touch a record low. Even Old Jacob had to admit that divine displeasure was in abeyance for the time being. ‘Merciful, the Lord is,’ he said, with a touch of disapproval. ‘Giving ‘em one last chance. Let’s hope they mend their ways, or it’ll be bad for all of us next year. Still time for plenty to go wrong this year, for the matter of that.’

There was, however, no sign of a falling-off. The later vegetables showed nearly as high a degree of orthodoxy as the field-crops. The weather, too, looked set to give a good harvest, and the inspector spent so much of his time sitting quietly in his office that he became almost popular.

For us, as for everyone else, it looked like being a serene, if industrious, summer, and possibly it would have been so, but for Petra.

It was one day early in June that, inspired apparently by a feeling for adventure, she did two things she knew to be forbidden. First, although she was alone, she rode her pony off our own land; and, secondly, she was not content to keep to the open country, but went exploring in the woods.

The woods about Waknuk are, as I have said, considered fairly safe, but it does not do to count on that. Wild cats will seldom attack unless desperate; they prefer to run away. Nevertheless, it is unwise to go into the woods without a weapon of some kind, for it is possible for larger creatures to work their way down the necks of forest which thrust out of the Fringes, almost clear across Wild Country in some places, and then slink from one tract of woodland to another.

Petra‘s call came as suddenly and unexpectedly as before. Though it did not have the violent, compulsive panic which it had carried last time, it was intense; the degree of distress and anxiety was enough to be highly uncomfortable at the receiving end. Furthermore, the child had no control at all. She simply radiated an emotion which blotted out everything else with a great, amorphous splodge.

I tried to get through to the others to tell them I’d attend to it, but I couldn’t make contact even with Rosalind. A blotting like that is hard to describe: something like being unable to make oneself heard against a loud noise, but also something like trying to see through a fog. To make it worse, it gave no picture or hint of the cause: it was — this attempt to explain one sense in terms of others is bound to be misleading, but one might say it was something like a wordless yell of protest. Just a reflex emotion, no thought, or control: I doubted even if she knew she was doing it at all. It was instinctive…. All I could tell was that it was a distress signal, and coming from some distance away….