She stopped him. She said, as if he were not speaking:
“I know Monterey. Very well. And the country. I think somewhere we could hide very well. If it hasn’t changed.”
He said: “Where is it?” and asked her nothing more.
“It’s about three miles,” she said. She was looking straight into his eyes, and he saw that over her eyes was a sort of polished shield of blankness.
“You follow,” she said—and turned away from him and walked out from between the white walls.
For an hour which seemed like six he followed the steady, stiff little figure as it walked, with unvarying pace and gait, up the hills and out of the white small town. He did not think it strange to be following her thus blindly. Sometimes he was only thirty yards behind it, at others he deemed it wise to be as much as a hundred. But she never turned her head. She walked on. If he had not known this was Clare; if the back which he followed had been pointed out to him as Clare’s back and he had not seen her face, he would have denied that this was Clare. The free, lovely, synchronized swing of the lithe body was gone—as the life and feeling had gone from the soft deep voice. He felt fear again—fear and other, tenderer emotions which clutched him by the throat and frightened him the more.
She led him up and up and away from the white buildings and along barren hillside roads. The greyness paled and became the bright hard light of dawn. They left the yellowing hillsides and were on the plateau behind the peninsula, and there was greenness everywhere about them, as far as a man could see. Green grass and green growing things and the darker, more ominous green of the trees—cypress and spruce, fir and pine. . . .
They came on to a main road, and Otto crossed to the other side of it and increased his distance from the implacable, steadily moving back and covertly scanned each of the few vehicles which passed them and was again satisfied—with an increase of the weird fear that such satisfaction gave him—that no one of them was other than it seemed.
She struck off the main road and climbed a gate and was lost in a forest of tall, dark pines. He hastened, since there was nothing which could see him upon the road, and vaulted the gate himself and plunged into the chill shadow of the trees and saw her, still walking ahead of him with no alteration in pace or stride or carriage, along an aisle between the harsh, straight boles.
He followed—and near the edge of the trees, when he could see beyond them bright sunshine golden upon feather-tipped wild grass, she halted.
She turned to face him, waiting.
He drew level with her and she turned and pointed ahead, off to their right, through the thinning trees.
“Look!” she said. “That’s the place I meant.”
He followed the pointing finger with his eyes and saw a house. It seemed to be in a bay made by the curving outline of the limits of the fir-wood.
It was black and gaunt and sprawling in the hard early light. It had an air of indescribable desolation. Around it wild grass and high weeds flourished in a mess of gold and green and brown which despite the colour was ugly to the eye. It was a clumsy shape—a disproportioned L with a bulging small crosspiece athwart the shorter arm. Its windows were filled with cracked and jaggedly rotting boards. Beyond it, the trees bulged out again. It was a hideous island in a sea of sombre, overshadowing green.
She said: “It’s been here, like that, since I was a child of fourteen. Some old Spanish people had it. Somewhere, there’s someone who owns it—and the land around. But he won’t sell it—or have it touched. People say he’s mad. The Spanish people in Monterey have a name for the whole place—they call it Desalinos—and they won’t come near it. Nobody ever comes near it.”
They got in through a window at the back, in the shade of the first rank of lowering pines. Otto gently pried a rotting shutter from its hinges and climbed through a glassless window and leaned out and lifted Clare in his arms and swung her over the sill to stand beside him. Her body was rigid, with every muscle tense.
He pulled the shutter back into position and wedged it. The porch in which they stood grew dark again, with criss-cross bars of sunlight stabbing through the holes and crevices of the gaping woodwork of the shutter and even the walls. There was a sweet, sick, musty smell of decay which pressed around them. She did not say anything. She was not leading now. She had brought him here, and she was waiting. She stood motionless beside him.
He was going to speak to her, but he changed his mind. He started for the door to the inner body of the house: it had a great splash of yellow sunlight right across its lock. He tried the handle and it came away in his fingers. But the haft stuck out from the wood and he twisted it and the door opened and a bloated spider struck against his cheek and clung there a moment and then scuttled across his neck before he brushed it to the ground and set a heavy foot upon it.
Clare was at his shoulder. They went through the door and into what had been a kitchen and through that again into the rest of the house. It was darker here, with fewer fingers of sunlight creeping in.
Under the dust and rot of years, the place was furnished; completely furnished. Otto stood in the centre hallway and peered about him. Clare was beside him, straight and stiff and silent. He could not speak to her. He was afraid of her.
And then, without warning, she swayed. Her whole body swayed as she stood. Her weight fell against him, and he put quick arms about her. But she straightened her body and thrust the arms violently away. She said:
“I’m all right! I’m all right!” But then she swayed again and this time he picked her up like a child and set her down in a high-backed oaken chair. He said:
“Wait. Wait there. Do not move until I come back! You understand?”
She did not speak, but she closed her eyes and let her arms fall along the arms of the chair and rested her head against its carven back.
He left her. He knew she would not move—and he must find somewhere for her to rest. He went into one of the rooms which must be a bedroom. Cobwebs burst stickily across his face and he brushed them off and strode to the bed in the far corner. Beneath the dust it was completely made, with covers and pillows and what must have been a quilt. He touched it—and a great flaky mass broke away under his hand and a sudden waft of musty throat-catching odour set him coughing.
He went out of the room quickly, a new thought spurring him. He had remembered the cellar door which they had passed—a half-door in the wall, coming no higher than his waist.
He ran to it and pulled it open. It was of oak and unrotted and lay like a flap upon the floor. Through the dark square which gaped at him he could see nothing, but he felt steps and groped his way down them.
The cellar smelt dank and earthy, but nothing worse. It smelt like any cellar anywhere. He lit a match and held it high and saw brick-lined walls and a bare earthen floor and nothing else.
He ran back up the steps again and quickly closed the door-flap to keep out the sick miasma of the house. He remembered the doors of a closet he had noticed in the hallway. He went to them and pulled them open—and was faced by shelves of mouldering wool and linen.
But on the lowest shelf were packed tier upon tier of canvas in its virgin original flat packing. He pulled out three of the bundles—and although their outer folds were mildewed and flaking, the better part of each was strong and sound.
He tumbled them out upon the floor and ripped off the bad parts and took it all in one great armful and carried it, feeling his way carefully, down the cellar steps. He dropped it then and began to fold it piece by piece and threefold. The pieces thus treated were over six feet long and some three feet wide and he set them down, one atop the other, in the farthest corner from the steps. The result was thick and reasonably soft, and he spared the last piece to roll into a sort of bolster which he laid at the head.