But already his strength was giving out. The dizziness was intensifying. Maybe it was the gas he had inhaled. Was the snow getting deeper, or was it just that he found it harder to drag his feet through it? It was no longer cold, but suffocatingly hot. His face was wet and glistening with sweat and still he pushed as hard as he could. He might have been running forever. His lungs and throat were burning and tears sprang from his eyes with the rush of cold air.
A dry stone wall, three or four feet high, divided the fields ahead of him. Beyond that there was maybe a three hundred metres stretch before he would reach the comparative safety of the trees. The thought was fatal. He slowed to a stagger. About a metre in front of him, fractionally to his right, the small red spot appeared as if by magic and began searching the ground. It was strangely elongated. A small plume of snow lifted up from the rest. The sound of the gun followed a fraction of a second after. The red spot zig-zagged ahead of him and the second bullet struck the stone of the wall throwing off splinters in the moonlight. Again the now-familiar crack of the rifle.
He almost fell into the wall, scraping knuckles and tearing fingernails in his eagerness to be over it. A crippling numbness overtook him as he sprawled in the snow on the shadowed side. His heart hammered painfully against his ribs, each breath tearing at the next as his body fought to recoup the oxygen it had burned from his blood.
He had no idea how long he lay this way, and he was not sure he cared any longer. He was not hot any more. The cold had crept back. It was wrapping itself around him in a welcome mist of growing unconsciousness. Somewhere in his head a voice was screaming in warning. Don’t let it take you! Keep going, keep going! Don’t succumb to it, it’ll kill you! It took a supreme effort of will for him to roll over and get up onto all fours. He blinked furiously to stop his eyes from closing on him. The lids felt so heavy, as though they were weighted with lead. His fingers found the wall and he pulled himself up onto it so that he was looking back the way he had come. He could see his tracks in the snow as clear as day. He followed their line back several hundred metres until his eyes fell on the dark shape of a man walking towards him. His silhouette stood out vividly against a strange orange glow in the sky.
For some seconds Bannerman was confused by this. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. The whole house was ablaze. Flames licked fifty feet into the sky. Through the glow he could see the black, crumbling frame of the building. Bannerman re-focused on the man. He was tall and thin and wore a heavy jacket of some sort. His rifle was held across his chest and he was moving relentlessly nearer. But he was still just a shadow, a shape in the night. He had no face that Bannerman could see. Bannerman felt hope and life slipping away from him.
He slid back down behind the wall and he knew that he could not last much longer in the open. He had expended all his reserves and now, if this man with the gun did not finish him off, the cold and the open would. ‘God damn you!’ he shouted defiantly at the night. But his voice sounded feeble. Keep going, keep going, the voice in his head was screaming. He heard himself sobbing, but he was on his feet again, though he was not sure how, and he was staggering towards the trees.
Afterwards, there was no recollection of how he covered the ground between the wall and the trees. He was certain there had been no further shots. All he knew was that overhead the protective boughs of many trees spread and intertwined between him and the stars. He threw his arms around a trunk, the bark scraping against his cheek. His legs were liquid. Looking back he could see the man with the rifle no more than twenty metres away, coming through the line of the trees. Bannerman pushed himself off and felt the ground falling away beneath him. He fell for what seemed like an eternity. Down and down until suddenly all his senses became sharply focused by the ice-cold water that soaked his clothes and burned his flesh. He heard the sound of running water and felt it wash over him. Chunks of snow and stone were rattling down the bank after him. Oh, how easy it would be just to slip off into the blessed unconsciousness that beckoned so enticingly. But the shock of the water had brought back some of his awareness and his will to keep going.
His fingers scrabbled in the dirt until he found a hold, and he pulled himself clear of the water and clung to the bank. He had never realised how the coldness could be such a bitter and deadly enemy.
Suddenly his ears were filled with a roaring and just for a second the night seemed alive with fire. Then almost as quickly it was over and a softness of earth was showering down from the sky on top of him. The silence that followed then was quite extraordinary. It was the last thing Bannerman could later recall with any great clarity. He had no memory at all of how he clawed his way to the top of the bank, and only a broken recollection of seeing the crater in the ground, the tree half torn up by its roots, the scorch marks on the surrounding trunks, the remains of the man with the rifle, a white, wide-eyed face, sandy hair matted with blood — the rest barely recognisable as human. And all he could recollect of the next minutes was the urge to keep going. He did not even try to understand. The voice in his head, the trees behind him, the flames of the burned-out house dying in the distance, the sound of his feet dragging through the snow, the fence and the roadway. And then the lights that came out of the darkness that descended on him like a shroud, stealing him finally into a black unconsciousness.
III
Light came slowly into his world of darkness. But before the light came he was aware of sounds around him, jumbled at first, unrecognisable. Then they grew clearer. Feet moving across wooden floorboards, the rustle of material, a woman’s voice. Words he could not understand. As awareness increased he could pick up smells, odours evocative of many distant memories. The musk of a woman’s perfume, the smell of hot food, cigarette smoke.
He opened his eyes and the light flooded into his head in a startling, swimming brightness. He screwed them tight shut and then opened them again slowly so that he could control the light. Where was he? He felt warm and stiff and all around a softness rubbed his skin. Above him he saw a white plaster ceiling supported by black painted beams. A woman’s face peered down at him and smiled. It was a round, pleasant face. She spoke to him, but he could not understand. Her head turned away and she spoke to someone else that he could not see. His consciousness was fully returned now, and with it came a pounding pain in his head. His body ached and he found it almost impossible to move.
With a great effort he pulled himself up on his elbows so that his horizon dropped. Beyond the end of the bed du Maurier sat on a hard-backed wooden chair, watching him. He still wore his hat and coat, and a weariness was deeply etched in the lines of his face. His dark eyes stared sadly back at Bannerman. The woman bent over him, blocking the policeman from his sight, and she plumped the pillow behind his back so that he had support to sit half up in the bed. Then she had a bowl of hot soup at his lips. He accepted it gratefully and took rapid gulps of the hot, thick liquid, allowing a little of it to spill out at the corners of his mouth in his haste. It tasted good in a way that nothing had ever tasted before. It filled him with a core of warmth that seemed to penetrate outwards to reach every part of him. He finished it and let the bowl drop away from his mouth, suddenly self-conscious of the eyes watching him. With the self-consciousness returned the memory of the events of a few hours ago. The red spot, the choking gas in the moonlit bedroom, that agonising chase across the snowy wastes, the remains of the man in the crater. The rest was hazy. The dragging stagger through the snow, the lights on the road. He held out a bowl and the woman took it. ‘Thank you,’ he said.