He forced Joseph to stumble toward the road. Joseph stared back over his shoulder, crying, 'He brought it here!' until his captor shoved him into the back of the van.
Alan felt dizzy with guilt, but the red-faced policeman was apologetic. 'I may have to bother you again,' he said, 'but I hope there won't be any need.'
When the police had taken Joseph away, Alan stood for a while at the edge of the cliff. The sea glittered jaggedly, the pebbles on the beach looked like stubble in brown flesh. Another police van arrived to collect the carcass. It was undoubtedly their most sensational case for years. Suddenly he didn't want to be alone, though he wasn't sure if he should tell Liz what he felt, or even if he could. He hurried back to the house.
Liz was waiting for him in the back doorway. She must have persuaded Anna to stay alone in the playroom for a while. 'I'm sorry I behaved as if you were imagining things,' he said at once. 'It must have been Joseph all the time. At least it's over now.'
'I suppose so.' She seemed understandably depressed, yet relieved. He held her for a while, but that reminded him that he wasn't telling her the whole story. Telling her might upset her for no reason; and anyway, he knew what he had to do. Eventually she said, 'Maybe I shouldn't leave Anna by herself too long,' and he was able to go up to his workroom.
He sat staring out of the window at the cliff-top, at the reddened patch of grass where the goat had lain. He was right, he knew. He'd known what Joseph was going to say even before he spoke. It explained so much – Anna's apparently irrational fear, his own glimpse on the video-cassette, perhaps even the things Liz had seen: he no longer knew how real they'd been, and it didn't seem to matter. Above all, it explained the change in Joseph, and that showed how serious the situation was. Thank God, he knew what to do.
He made three phone calls quickly. His agent was booked up for the rest of the week, but Teddy the Editor was free. It wouldn't have mattered if he hadn't been, but he was a good excuse, a means of making things look more natural to Liz. Alan made one more call, then he went downstairs to her. 'Shall we take Anna to the hotel for dinner?' he said.
'To celebrate, you mean?'
'Not quite that.' Liz had immediately regretted her sarcasm. 'I just thought it would take the pressure off you a bit,' he said.
'God knows I need that. All right, let's.' Then she looked suspiciously at him. 'Are you trying to soften me up for something?'
He was glad she thought so; that way she wouldn't realize that what he really wanted was to get all three of them out of the house for a while, away from whatever was there. 'Well, Teddy wants me to go into London and have lunch with him tomorrow. You don't mind, do you? You've got your at-home with the girls in the afternoon.'
'Do you have to go? Yes, all right, I know you do. I only hope I can persuade Anna that everything's all right without mentioning Joseph.'
'I'm sure you will. I'll try not to be back too late.'
Seeing that she'd accepted the excuse, he was able to say, casually, 'And I'll take that African thing with me.'
Thirteen
That night Alan couldn't sleep. Either the heat was tropical, or he'd had too much to drink at the hotel. Long after Liz had fallen asleep he lay awake beside her, sweating and prickly, bothered by the vague idea that there was something he had to do. 'All right,' he found himself muttering at the dark, Til do it, I'm going to do it tomorrow.' But still his compulsion wasn't satisfied; it kept jerking him back from the edge of sleep, stranding him in the rumbling seaside dark with fragments of the day – Joseph stumbling backward as the raw intestine unravelled; Joseph helpless on the ground with the policeman on top of him, himself carrying Anna asleep in his arms, out of the hotel to the car. Why did all these memories make him feel uneasy?
He slept at last, and woke late, feeling as if he'd run for miles. By the time he'd rushed through washing, shaving and dressing, Anna was sitting by Liz on the bed, and Liz was blinking herself awake. He kissed them both, then grabbed his briefcase and hurried out to the car. As he passed the living-room he glimpsed the empty space on the mantelpiece where the claw had been before he had packed it in his briefcase, and felt intensely relieved.
He backed his dented car out of the garage and drove to Norwich. Soon the sea fell behind. Golfers and hikers wandered over the green landscape, barges roamed the waterways. Luckily there wasn't much traffic on the roads – for he was driving before he was fully awake – and he drove through the villages without mishap. A postman cycled from house to house, women with wicker baskets chatted outside shops – but Alan barely noticed them, intent on his driving.
He reached Norwich earlier than he had expected. The train reminded him of the railway museum, for his carriage was faded and empty. Why did these musty old carriages always seem so dim, even on sunny days like this? He sat and gazed along the ranks of deserted seats, settees crammed together. His briefcase was on the floor beside him. He pushed it away a little with one foot, so that it wouldn't be quite so near him.
The carriage was still empty when the train jerked forward. The jerk felt like an awakening – except that he was still trying to struggle awake five minutes later. The landscape was rushing past faster now, but it hardly changed at all and wasn't enough to distract him from the contents of his briefcase, nor from the muttering of his thoughts. He wasn't sure if he believed his intuition of yesterday. Hadn't he been thinking too much like a writer, trying to make everything fit together too neatly? Could such an insignificant object really have influenced Joseph so profoundly? But if not, why had the anthropologist been so anxious to get rid of it? It didn't matter what Alan thought; whatever his reasons he had to deliver it to the Foundation.
That relieved his anxiety, a little. The train was rocking him back to sleep, and there was nothing in the landscape that his mind could seize upon to stay awake. He moved over on the seat and placed the briefcase between himself and the window. In a few moments he was nodding. There was something he had to do. His head was nodding, it seemed to agree. His body knew what he had to do; why couldn't it let him into the secret? One more nod that he was distantly aware of, and then he was lost in a dream.
Perhaps it was the answer, for he was close to home. He had to find Anna. There she was, running through the murky fields ahead. He didn't know exactly where he was, but he could hear the sea, though it sounded as he thought a rainstorm in a jungle might sound. He had to catch up with Anna, for a shape was running beside him on all fours, a naked shape with a human face, a shape that glistened red all over, even in the dark,. Now he had outdistanced the shape and was running effortlessly, his feet hardly touching the ground. In a moment he would catch Anna. That was when she looked back, and he saw the terror in her eyes. He felt as if the ground beneath his feet had fallen away. She knew that he hadn't been chasing her to save her. He sprang at her, raising the claw that had been in his hand all the time.
Had he closed his eyes so that he couldn't see what he'd done? Certainly he'd had a blackout of some kind, because now he was somewhere in the jungle, stumbling through the greenish light beneath enormous dripping trees. Now he knew: the scene with Anna hadn't happened yet, and he was here to prevent it from ever happening. Here was a clearing with a few conical huts, a pot steaming over a fire, a thin leathery man with small blank eyes like a spider's, squatting with his back to a tree. Alan stumbled toward the man with the spidery eyes, for he was Alan's one chance to stop what was going to happen. Then, for a moment too brief to grasp, he realized what he would have to do in order to make sure of that chance, and it was so dreadful that he woke shrieking.