Michael Innes - Lament for a Maker

The passage outside my room was pitch dark and I hadn’t gone a couple of yards before my candle blew out. At that I remembered Sybil Guthrie’s electric torch; it seemed a shame to arouse or alarm her – not that she is of a timid sort – but at the same time I felt the circumstances of the moment demand all the aids I could lay my hands on. So I turned back and knocked at her door. There was no audible reply; not surprising this, for the wind was rattling in a hundred places round about. I tried again and then I opened the door and went in. I called, struck a match, presently summoned hardihood to grope about on the enormous bed. Suspicion became certainty: there was no one in the room.

If leisure had been given me I believe I should have felt uncommonly apprehensive. But at this moment I caught a glint of light from the corridor; I went out expecting to find Sybil and found instead the abominable Hardcastle, holding a lantern in one hand and thumping at my bedroom door with the other. He looked at me evilly – no doubt he was putting a construction agreeable to himself on my emergence from Sybil’s room – and then he said the laird sent his compliments; he was better now and would I join him in a nightcap in the tower?

I looked at my watch – the refinements of politeness would be wasted on Hardcastle – and saw that it wanted five minutes of midnight. The very eve of Christmas.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As it happens, I was just going there. Lead the way.’

The lantern gave a jump in the brute’s hand; I suppose I must have spoken about as grimly as his grim master. For the message that had come from the tower by Hardcastle – hours after it was known I had gone to bed – was scarcely less problematical than the one that had been brought by the rat: the two of them, coupled with Sybil’s disappearance, were evidence of some devilment or other that I couldn’t now do less than probe. So I tramped down the corridor after Hardcastle in a wrathful mood that probably concealed a good deal of trepidation. Whatever was happening, I had a good notion it was a trap. Some fly was walking into the spider’s parlour. Was it Sybil? Or myself? It never occurred to me it might be Guthrie!

But it did occur to me that Hardcastle was one of nature’s own spiders. Positively, I had told him to lead the way because I was not without anxiety about my throat and I kept a wary eye on him as we went down the great staircase and along what I rather uncertainly conjectured to be the schoolroom corridor. It must have been about half-way that he hesitated and came to a momentary halt, as if listening. I drew up behind him and listened with all my ears too. At first I thought I heard hurried footsteps approaching us; I strained my eyes down the gloomy corridor and could see no one; then, hair-raisingly, the footsteps pattered past me without visible sign. Absurdly – for one can’t brain a ghost – I wished I had brought the poker which had accounted for the learned rat: then I realised that I had been listening only to the peculiar flap-flapping noise of that long tattered carpet that works like a sea on the corridor floor. At that I recovered my wits sufficiently to hear what Hardcastle was hearing: voices from somewhere near the far end of the corridor.

They were a mere murmur – until suddenly some trick of the fragmented Erchany winds caught them and we could distinguish the voice of Christine. I was rather relieved, for I presumed that Sybil was with her and that they were sitting up, perhaps, for Christmas. Hardcastle may have had the same thought; he looked at his watch as I had done a few minutes before; and then a further waft of wind brought us the other voice, a man’s voice – elderly, I guessed, and very Scottish. A second later a door opened in the direction of the murmuring and we could just distinguish a figure slip out and disappear into the darkness in front of us.

The execrable Hardcastle hesitated a moment longer and then we went on. As you know, I hadn’t so far had much chance of getting the lie of the remoter parts of the castle, and our progress now was quite bewildering. The tower is the oldest part, the original keep or donjon, and as we had descended from the bedroom floor I concluded it must be structurally distinct from the later buildings and connected with them only at ground level, making it an isolated place indeed. And presently I got the measure of this isolation. We passed through a small heavy door and then, no more than three yards on, a door that was exactly similar: the intervening space, I realized even in my rather rattled state, represented the thickness of the wall of the tower. And then we climbed a staircase.

I recalled, as one might recall something peculiarly absurd in a dream, that I was a chance guest going to welcome Christmas Day in the apartments of a friendly and courteous host. And again I wished I had brought that poker. We climbed steadily – Hardcastle in front moving with a sinister deliberation, like a warder setting a decent pace to the gallows – an unexpectedly broad staircase that went to and back in short flights, lit at every second flight by narrow windows. The skies must have partially cleared for the moment; through the windows came the faint pallid gleam of an uncertain moonlight reflected from snow; and it was this that gave the few seconds succeeding their most macabre effect. We had climbed it seemed interminably – I was just deciding that Guthrie must hold his vigils at the very top of the tower – when from above us there rang out a single fearful cry. A moment later the gleam from the window I was passing momentarily vanished as if a high-speed shutter had been flashed across the moon. And then – and after an appreciable interval – a faint, dull sound floated up from below.

We must both have guessed more or less what had happened. I felt that faint thud as infinitely more horrible than the cry which had preceded it; Hardcastle, three or four steps above me, called out: ‘Great God, if I didn’t warn him!’ And then we heard footsteps.

What happened then happened in a flash. A young man appeared at the turn above us. Hardcastle’s torch caught him for a second and for a second only – nevertheless I received an extraordinarily vivid impression of passion: a dark skin drained of colour and stretched over a set jaw, an eye that smouldered like Guthrie’s own. Hardcastle cried out: ‘Lindsay!’ and made a lunge so clumsy it occurred to me to wonder if he were drunk; a second later the lad had slipped past us unheeding and was gone. Perhaps I ought to have grabbed at him myself; I suppose at the vital moment I felt the situation too obscure for action. Hardcastle seemed to hesitate whether to turn back; then he gave a curse and hurried on. I could only follow.

We were still a couple of storeys from the top, but now the staircase narrowed and there were no more windows. On each landing as we came up I had noticed a single massive door; we now passed one more of these and arrived panting together before the last of all, which was if anything more massive than the rest. Hardcastle threw it open. We were looking into a low, square room furnished as a study and lit as usual by a few candles. In the middle of it stood Sybil Guthrie.

For a moment we stood like actors holding a scene for the curtain; then Hardcastle bore down upon Sybil in a sudden unaccountable fury. ‘You wee limmer – !’

The phrase was no doubt insulting. I gave myself the satisfaction of taking the scoundrel by the shoulder – perhaps by the collar – and telling him to shut up. The action had a more decisive effect than I intended. Hardcastle at once became glumly and pertinaciously passive, with the result that from that moment I found myself saddled with the direction of affairs at Erchany. Willynilly, I am in charge until some competent and interested person arrives.