'It's becoming disgusting,' the man said—but his hands were already cupped toward her. 'I know a country club not far from here.'
'Thanks, but it's getting late,' Val said. 'I must be leaving in a minute.'
'Never mind. I'll run you home.'
'It's kind of you to offer.' But Len wouldn't clutch her, she thought suddenly; he'd be gentle, shy enough to woo her—she'd read his expression when he'd driven her home earlier. 'My fiance is calling for me,' she said.
'You might have told me sooner.'
But she hadn't known sooner. As she waited for the last bus she could see above a football ground on the horizon blue interlocked bars of light, harsh as the razor-edged November night. The night, however, only met the alcohol which weaved within her; it didn't purge her. The bus ar-arived; she was amused when its poles slid from her hands. She sat upstairs. On the sharp glittering pavements lights peered through leaves which rippled, sometimes forming into what might have been a face. Val was warm; imagining the flat ahead, she had an idea.
Her warmth decided for her. It would be her mystery, something to withhold from Jane. Tomorrow she'd tell Len; he might admire her for it, or he might be angry, upset that she'd risked herself; that would be pleasant too. When she reached the flat, climbing past a purring shadow on the ground floor, she raced to the top door.
Before it she quietened for a moment, listening. Their flat had been dark; the building held its breath with her. The door was indistinguishable from the gap of darkness within. She caught hold of the cold doorknob; it seemed to move beneath her fingers. She laughed and opened the door.
It merged with the darkness. Ahead she saw a grey rectangle; between the houses opposite she could see cranes, their distant heads dipping like dinosaur skeletons. The sky flared pink. On the floor something caught the color and faded; next to it she made out a huddled shape. Reaching behind the door, she found the light-switch.
The room leapt like the closing walls of a toy house. The walls were bare; in the corners of the ceiling a few triangles of flowered wallpaper had resisted stripping; the bare boards stretched to the plaster. She entered, and a figure moved towards her. It was herself, projected on the window opposite.
From there her eyes found the boards beneath the window. Dust hung about her feet like ground-mist, but where she looked a rectangle of board was defined. It must have been a trunk; whoever had lived here last had taken it with him. He'd left only a crumpled grey blanket spread on newspapers, and two wine-glasses. Val felt disappointed; the room had been drained of danger. Then she saw that the glasses held dregs. She stooped to examine the crimson globule in each, and on the floor between them and the blanket saw the imprint of hand. No, it couldn't be; to lie like that it must have been boneless. Someone had dropped a glove.
For no reason that she could discover, this did for her what the night could not: the alcohol evaporated, and she chilled. She turned to leave. Then, among the folds of the blanket, she noticed something tangled as if suffocated. She didn't want to touch the blanket. But there was no need. From what she could see between the folds she had guessed what it was. It was Jane's lost stocking.
When she'd locked the door of their flat she sat upright on a chair in the front room. She moved the clock away from the window. Glancing about for something, anything, to distract her, she caught sight of the fingers closing around the girl. She leapt up and tore the calendar to shreds. Then she watched for the hands of the clock to crawl. Behind her the upstairs window was reflected, if the light was on. She thought of Len asleep; she thought of Jane's face when she'd said she had been to the bathroom, and what her face had masked. She knew she'd never see Jane again. By dawn she'd have made her choice; but now, while the night surrounded her and the alcohol swam back, she didn't know what she might do if she heard footsteps descending the stairs: barricade the door, or simply sit and wait.
The Sentinels (1973)
They were the last people Douglas expected to see in the village pub, but their appearance could hardly have been better timed.
'Good Lord,' he called, 'Ken! Maureen! Come and help persuade Barb to drive up to Sentinel Hill.'
'Doug,' Barbara said uneasily, looking to the newcomers for help but finding none: they'd hurried to the table through the sawdust, eager as children kicking sand. She searched the pub: farmers' faces propped on elbows like florid gargoyles, puffing clouds of pipe-smoke which buoyed up a last moth circling the oil-lamp on invisible elastic: ten miles from home and not a face to which she could look for aid.
'Barb, don't be anti-social,' Doug reproved. 'This is Ken and Maureen—I met them at the science-fiction convention. You two want to go Up on the hill, don't you?'
'If the young lady's driving I don't see why not,' Ken said, 'but first I must buy you a drink.'
He took their orders and Maureen sat opposite Barbara, setting a transistor radio between them. 'Why don't you want to go?' she asked Barbara. 'You won't be scared with Doug, surely. The hill's got a terrific atmosphere, more so than this pub.'
Barbara thought of Sentinel Hill. They'd driven past at dusk on their way to the pub: the sloughed stone faces mobile with shadow; a few cars, uniformly grey, from which their passengers had climbed to count the stones and count again and descend baffled; a child at the center of the circle prancing awkwardly and, as she'd slowed to let Doug watch, turning to her a cardboard demon's face. 'I can't see any sense in going,' she told Maureen. 'It's warm in here, but it'll be icy cold up there this time of year.'
'I'm sure Doug will keep you warm,' Maureen said.
Barbara watched Ken returning from the bar, his arm beneath the tray supple as a waiter's. 'Ken moves beautifully,' she said to Douglas.
'You can judge better than I.' That morning he'd awoken to rhythmic thuds in the next room; he'd strode across her bedroom, past the framed embroidery, the flowers in a cut-glass vase fragile as the chime of the bell her mother used to denote dinner, and found her leaping, graceful as a fountain, before a propped ballet manual. She hadn't noticed him; he'd tiptoed back to his side of the bed and The Eighth Pan Book of Horror Stories. 'Barb says you move beautifully,' he told Ken.
'I shall find a way to repay the compliment.'
'How did you two meet?' asked Maureen.
'Quite by accident,' Douglas said. 'Someone invited me to what I thought was an all-night party, only it turned out to be a musical evening. Six weeks ago, that was. I suppose the Brichester SF Group was up in arms about that diatribe in the Herald, Ken?'
'These days we ignore the critics. Let's face it, only fans appreciate sf. Mundanes never will. At least, it'll never be appreciated as literature while the critics insist on setting it apart from the mainstream.'
'I'm a fantasy man myself.'
'I wish he'd read something else,' Barbara said, looking away as the moth toppled inside the oil-lamp: a flare, a wisp of smoke. 'Not that science fiction's any better.'
'Don't start that again,' Douglas warned.
'Fantasy's indistinguishable from sf? At the Convention you'd be shot at dawn!' Ken said. T don't mind fantasy, but I do wish people wouldn't call it sf. Still, it explains why you're drawn to the hill, Doug.'
'Not drawn,' Douglas said, glancing sharply at Barbara, 'just interested.'
'It's like Rollright,' Maureen interrupted. 'Do you remember that girl at the Convention talking about the Druid circle at Rollright?' Douglas thought he did: they had found her asleep on a bed in Dave Kyle's room, her hands full of change for one of the' card-playing writers. It had been Douglas' first Convention: the first night he'd staggered sickly from the Liverpool Group's party, and the next day he'd had to sidle out from lectures as the stage began to slip below his vision. On the Saturday he'd met Ken and Maureen in the Brichester Group's room, and then had gone early to bed, hearing someone putting his fist through a pane, the thud of a bottle, what sounded like a mob breaking down a bedroom door. It must have been the strangeness of it all. Even in the horror fans he'd never recognized his visions, the thrill of slipping into its niche the last of a set of magazines, the membranous wings against the moon, the face which peered back from the pool, the pale stone steps descending into darkness. He'd thought when he'd met Barbara that he could reflect his images in her. He was still trying.