and blue, set at the top of a carved oak staircase—beyond which the afternoon sun blazed.
Directly ahead of him was an immense refectory table, dark with age like the panelling all around it, with a great bowl of roses on it. Some of the roses had shed their petals in different-coloured piles around the bowl, on a fine coating of dust which the sunlight betrayed. He sniffed, and the scent of the roses, mixed with a damp cellar-smell from somewhere under his feet, combined with the stained-glass to carry him back to this morning's church and Genghis Khan. He wrinkled his nose, uncertain whether it was the cloying rose-scent-plus-church-smell which made him think of funerals, or the memory of Genghis Khan which also made him think of death, that disturbed him more.
His eyes were becoming accustomed to the strange mixture of brightness from the searchlight-beam of the sun and shadow accentuated by the dark panelling, with its ghost-marks of pictures which had once hung on the walls.
Family portraits, maybe? And no prizes for guessing what had happened to them, one by one, as Mr Nigel's horses let him down in the last furlong before the winning post, also one by one; the pictures were always the first thing to go, the easiest things to pack off to Sotheby's and Christie's. All that was left on the walls was a line of old photographs up the staircase, school and college groups of cricketers and oarsmen sun-bleached to pale sepia-brown; and the refectory table, which was too big to sell, and the grandfather clock in dummy5
the furthest corner, silent at ten minutes to noon or midnight
—had that also been too big, or not worth the trouble of selling? Or had Adolf Hitler saved the last furniture with the house by his own pre-emptive bid for Europe and all its contents in 1939?
In spite of the sunlight, the house was cool, almost chilly, he could feel its cold breath against his cheeks. It wouldn't do to let his imagination stray too far here: reason advised him that thick walls and stone-flagged floors could hold winter all the year round when the owner was mostly absent, and fires were only lit occasionally, and that this house had been trapped in the vicious circle of such absences for a generation, so it was no wonder that its atmosphere was unwelcoming; but beneath reason he could sense an older instinct of unreason, which whispered very different rumours inside his head, of the enmity of old things to the flesh and blood of intruders like himself, and to would-be destroyers, like Mr Nigel, who had not lived to come safe home to the house he had neglected.
Of course, it was foolish to let such thoughts unnerve him; and they were only the combined product of his own disturbed emotions, and his own fascination with old buildings, and maybe too much of Ada Clarke's rich fruit cake unsettling his digestion.
It was only an old empty house, and the afternoon sun was shining outside, and Wimpy wasn't far away—Genghis Khan was far away, and Audley was even further, and Mr Nigel was dummy5
bones in a war grave long-forgotten, and none of them could touch him at this moment, any more than the house itself could reach out at him.
There were doors, panelled in the panelling, ahead of him—
to the right, and to the left, under the staircase—that door would lead to the cellars . . . to the wine-cellar, at a guess; which would be full of racks emptied, but not renewed, by Mr Nigel, for another guess . . . cellars full of cobwebs and the damp smell which was in his nostrils, and he certainly wasn't about to scout around in them unless Wimpy was cheerfully leading the way, by God!
The door on the right didn't look much more inviting, but there were those arched passages on each side of him which he'd half-glimpsed in the first moment after he'd ducked the sunlight, before his whole attention had been drawn up to the stained-glass coat-of-arms . . . one way would lead to the day rooms, most likely—the sitting room, and the library, and maybe a study; the other way to a dining room, and a breakfast room, and then the kitchen and the pantries, and the servants' quarters; though with an old hodge-podged place like this, which already seemed vastly bigger inside than it had from the outside, full of unsuspected space, such regularity might well be a bad guess. He could only tell by looking for himself.
Left or right? Roche peered down the left-hand passage, undecided, his eye lifting to the flaking white-washed vaulting above the panelling. For sure this part of the house, dummy5
which had survived the great fire on the day of Elizabeth Tudor's death, had in any case been the older wing. Wimpy had said—
The recollection of what Wimpy had said died unthought as he turned towards the right-hand passage, which was identical with the left-hand one, except that the door at the end of it was open, and that there was someone standing in it staring at him.
Christ! He hadn't heard that door open—there hadn't been a sound after his own footfalls on the flagstones which had carried him through the porch and the archway of the original door into the hallway—
Christ! He hadn't heard that door open because it hadn't opened: the man had been standing there, staring at him, ever since he had entered the house, watching him silently, as soundless as the house itself!
An insect crawled back up Roche's spine as he returned the stare. This right-hand passage wasn't exactly identical ... or ...
or it was, but the wisteria overhung the low window recessed into the thickness of the wall on this side, deepening the shadow with a green cast.
It had to be Ada Clarke's Charlie—it was either Ada Clarke's Charlie or it would vanish in the instant he addressed it—
"Hullo there?" Somewhere between the intention and the final articulation the words lost their planned heartiness, and echoed hollowly down the passage instead. "Good afternoon dummy5
—Mr Clarke, is it?"
That was better. The figure moved, shifting its feet so that the sound of hobnails scraping on stone released Roche from fear. Ghosts didn't wear hobnailed boots; or, if they did, the phantom hobnails wouldn't scrape like that; and ghosts weren't so substantial, and Charlie Clarke was nothing if not substantiaclass="underline" he filled the doorway, all of six-foot-three, with long arms and huge hands in proportion.
Also, the collarless striped shirt, the Fair Isle knitted pullover and the shapeless corduroy trousers was no uniform for any self-respecting spectre in this setting. Doublet-and-hose, or satin breeches, or even Mr Nigel's well-pressed battle-dress—any of those might not be out of place in The Old House, but not a Fair Isle pullover. Not even the faintly green-tinged light which filtered into the passage through a window half-obscured by wisteria could make a convincing ghost of Charlie Clarke on second glance.
But if second glance stripped the supernatural from Charlie it did nothing to lessen the hostile vibrations which eddied round Roche as they stared at each other—the same sensation his sixth sense had picked up moments before, but had ascribed to the house itself. And there was something no less creepy about the sensation now that its source had become tangible: the way both Wimpy and Mrs Clarke had spoken of Charlie, the man was at best a simpleton, but at worst— in his downhill phase—perhaps something more dangerous. And the confirmation of that lay not only in the dummy5
gorilla-length arms and meat-plate hands, but also in the way those addled brains had been able to transmit a signal before Roche had set eyes on the signaller. Which, by any standards, was strong magic to beware of, not to ignore.
"It's 'Charlie', isn't it?" said Roche tentatively. "Charlie, my name's Roche—David Roche." The giving of names freely was an old ritual of peaceful intentions.
The words unlocked Charlie's legs, but not his tongue. He took two slow steps out of the doorway, and then stopped.
But that short advance carried his face out of deep shadow into enough light for Roche to make out the little pig-eyes and heavy chin separated by a button nose and tiny mouth in a brick-red expanse of face. The sum total was so close to being classically oafish, if not actually brutish, with no spark of anything in the eyes, that the contrast between Charlie and his wife was not so much surprising as painful.