Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark Page 6

  OLD DANIEL’S TREASURE

  “OH, GRANPA, DON’T be silly!”

  “For pity’s sake, Pa, don’t start that again! We can’t stop in every evening, me and Lissa, just for your fads and fancies!”

  The two female voices, one young and one middle-aged, spoke in unison; the two pairs of female eyes were fastened on old Daniel in a united glare of exasperation.

  But Daniel’s sharp old eyes could glare, too; and if there was fear behind his defiance, he wasn’t going to let those two see it.

  “I’m not asking you to stop in,” he retorted with spirit. “It’s not a pack of chattering women I want with me for a thing like this. It’s a man I need—a man with a bit of strength in his arms. Where’s that good-for-nothing husband of yours—?”—he turned on his daughter in sudden spite—“Why can’t he stop in sometimes of an evening? Forgotten his own address, if you ask me!”

  Edie flushed, as he had known she would; and the flush was unbecoming to her heavy face, deeply lined by the years of pretty frustrations and annoyances.

  “You mind your own business!” she snapped. “Find yourself a good book to read. Play a game of patience. And don’t let me hear any more nonsense about footsteps when I get back! Footsteps, indeed! Footsteps!” In her rising annoyance she clipped the first syllable so that the word sputtered from her lips like the crackle of damp wood. “Come along, Lissa, darling,” she added—in exaggeratedly gentler tones, for Daniel’s benefit— “Time you got ready.” The two of them fussed and thudded their way noisily from the room, and Daniel was left alone.

  Well, not really alone, yet. For a few minutes longer they would be thumping and shuffling about upstairs, and then they really would be gone; he really would be alone in the ugly, over-furnished little house, full of shadows.

  And it was Thursday evening. Three Thursdays running it had happened now; on just the evening when he was alone; on just the evening when the whole neighbourhood knew that he was alone, with Lissa off at the dance-hall—dancing, if you please, and her wearing a pair of trousers like a man—Lord, what a world it had become!—And Edie off to her Something-Or-Other Group—some piece of modern flapdoodlery which hadn’t even a name to it, when he was young. Both of them out till midnight, and he, Daniel, alone. Alone, that is, except for the peculiar sound.

  It began, usually, after they had been gone about two hours—maybe two and a half. Each time, when he first heard it, he tried to persuade himself that it was the wind; then that it was some big dog, snuffing and nosing round the back garden. Then, sometimes, as the clock ticked on, the ticks seem to ring with a strange, separate life in the little cluttered room, he would try to persuade himself that he was imagining it all; that there was, in fact, no sound. Then he would lean forward in his chair, straining his ears, his whole soul, in the hope of hearing nothingness.

  And then, louder, unmistakeably, he would hear the sound again. Not, now, a sound that could be the wind; nor one that could be a dog, padding unconcerned on purposeless light paws. No, this was a purposeful sound; a measured sound; a furtive but unmistakeable shuffle of steps … round to the back door … to the side door; and then a terrible, breathing silence.

  Ah, if only he were a young man again! If only he could leap from his chair, across the little hall, and fling open the door upon the intruder! Instead, there was the heavy labour of getting himself from his chair; of fumbling for his stick; and then the slow, intolerable progress across the room … out into the kitchen…. No wonder that by the time he reached the side door there was no one to be seen. Only the dustbin, squat and monstrous, with its lid askew; and out of the darkness the strange, stale smell of a side entrance at night, with its huge, stifling walls, higher and narrower than any canyon.

  The first time, it had not seemed to matter. A tramp, maybe. A drunk, lost and bemused in his search for home. But when it happened again … and then again … and always on a Thursday … always when the old man was alone….

  “Cheer—o, Pa!”

  Edie, resplendent in her best clothes, and certain now of her evening out, could afford to soften a little. “Keep smiling! And don’t go hearing any more footsteps! Remember what the doctor said.”

  What the doctor said, indeed! Daniel’s secret throb of fear at the final slam of the front door was swamped in sudden rage. “Remember what the doctor said”—just as if the doctor had been able to get a word in edgeways, with Edie there in the surgery, self-appointed mistress of ceremonies!

  “He suffers from a sort of clicking in his ears, Doctor,” she had shouted—Edie always shouted when talking of other people’s business—“He keeps thinking it’s footsteps, he kind of gets nervy about it, if you understand what I mean, Doctor.”

  Well, if the doctor didn’t understand what she meant, it wasn’t for lack of being told. For twenty minutes they had sat there in the surgery, and she hadn’t stopped talking once, not for a second. And she had only once lowered her voice—and then not very much—to say to the doctor, in piercing confidence: “We think perhaps he’s going a bit—you know!—” and she had tapped her forehead meaningly, slyly, as if the slyness would, somehow, make the gesture incomprehensible to the patient.

  Well, the doctor must have said something—or perhaps conveyed something by signs through this cataract of talk—for a bottle of eardrops and a little round box of pills had materialized, both of which old Daniel had thrown in the dustbin while Edie was out at work next day, and so that had been the end of that. “A little bit—you know—” indeed! If he wasn’t careful Edie’d be going a little bit—you know—herself on of these days, with all this busy-bodying and nosey-parkering, and none of it doing her any good, either, she never found out anything she wanted to know….

  Or did she? And if she didn’t, ought he to tell her? Daniel’s brow creased itself into deep furrows as he remembered that night—the Thursday before last—when she’d come home just before midnight and he’d told her about the footsteps.

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Pa,” she’d said, briskly. “We’ve never had burglars here. What’d they come for? A precious lot we’ve got for anyone to steal!”

  The resentful scorn with which she had glanced round the room as she spoke had seemed genuine enough; and Daniel had been half relieved, half dismayed to realize that she didn’t after all, know about the emerald.

  Daniel’s brows creased more deeply still, pinching his face into an expression of strange intensity. Ought he, perhaps, to have told her of it, then and there? She would then, without doubt, have taken his story of the footsteps seriously, and would not have left him alone like this with so valuable a thing in his sole charge. He wondered, a little, why he had been so determined never to tell her about the emerald; why even now, when it was threatened, he could not bring himself to tell her.

  Was it because she would have made him sell it? The thought of a jewel worth thousands of pounds lying idle, unused, in an old man’s trunk would, he supposed, be too much for most women—too much, certainly, for a woman like Edie, who moaned so incessantly about the discomforts and privations of her narrow suburban life. But, on the other hand, what could she have done? She couldn’t have made him sell it. She could have complained—scolded—wept—anything she liked, but she couldn’t have made him sell it, for it was his.

  His? Well, of course it was his! Daniel’s mind sheered away, almost in terror, from recalling the method by which he had acquired the emerald. Always, his mind did this. He would sit, sometimes, alone in his room, the old trunk open in front of him, and he would feel the lovely smoothness of the jewel, peering for minutes together into its unfathomable greenness, his heart almost bursting with the joy of possession. And then, in the middle of the ecstasy, an uncomfortable, half-frightened feeling would come over him: would lead him back, back through the uneasy labyrinth of thought, towards that time when the emerald had come into his hands; and if he did not switch his thoughts away quickly, all his joy in the great jewel would be spoilt, lost in the
pangs of—

  Well, of what? Not a guilty conscience, surely. What guilt could possibly attach to such a deed? It wasn’t theft—it wasn’t, really, a crime of any kind. Call it piracy, if you like—that was the very worst you could call it. Gay, swashbuckling, heroic piracy—a deed of many-coloured splendour against the drab background of London pavements. What man could be ashamed of such a deed as he looked back over the years? Why, he could remember as if it was yesterday….

  No, he didn’t want to think of the details. There was something about those details, even now, that he could not face. Something that made him uncomfortable—no, more than uncomfortable—frightened. There had been—he must admit it even if he could not understand it—there had been something terrible about the acquiring of that emerald, and now, if it was to be stolen from him, there would be something terrible about its loss. Oh, not the loss itself—that, of course, would be terrible enough in its matter-of-fact way; but there would be something more than that. Something that he did not dare to think of; something that he had known, in his heart of hearts, was lying in wait for him, inexorably, from the very moment when he had laid hands on its cool, fathomless loveliness….

  Daniel awoke, conscious that he had dozed off for a while, and that the fire was burning low. Ten o’clock. Was it, then, the striking of the little clock that had roused him, with its noisy, insistent ping-ping, ping-ping?

  He was now fully awake. It wasn’t the clock at all; it was the telephone—ringing, ringing, ringing as if it would shake the house.

  Stiff and feeble from sleep, Daniel reached clumsily for his stick, and, cursing his own slowness, made his way into the darkened hall, where the telephone was still ringing, wilder than ever it seemed in the surrounding darkness.

  And, after all that, there was no answer.

  “Hello!” Daniel kept repeating. “Hello. Hello. Speak up, cantcher?”

  And still there was no answer. Only an eerie, purposeful silence; and then, faint and far away, a tiny, final click: and the instrument resumed its impersonal, senseless buzzing.

  Angrily Daniel replaced the receiver. Dragging a fellow out of his comfortable chair like that for nothing! And at this time of night! No consideration, no manners—that was the trouble with the present generation.

  And all the time, underneath the bluster that he was trying to keep in the forefront of his mind, Daniel knew that his fear was growing. They would know, now, not that the house was empty, but that the old man was at home, and alone. The old man, who took a whole minute to get from his armchair to the telephone—he wouldn’t be much hindrance! Perhaps they even wanted the old man to be at home…. Perhaps that was part of their plan….

  Daniel wiped the sweat from his forehead, and looked in front of him, up the dimness of the stairs: beyond them, into the dimness of the kitchen: and behind him, towards the black gulf of the front door.

  They would be coming tonight. He knew it; and as if this very knowledge had some deadly power of speeding his fate towards him, he heard, at that very moment, the sound.

  Silently, swiftly—more swiftly than he had managed them for years—Daniel got himself up the stairs—into his bedroom—and closed the door. He did not dare to switch on the light, but his eyes, grown accustomed to the darkness, could see the big trunk well enough. In the darkness it seemed somehow menacing; like some huge, legless monster left over from some more ancient world than ours.

  Daniel hesitated. He had formed no clear plan, as yet, for protecting his precious emerald; and, half to gain time, half from the sheer, blind instinct for self-preservation, he crept painfully into the wardrobe, and partly closed the door, leaving just a crack through which he might see and listen.

  The darkness here was complete; the silence almost so. Here, among the fusty stir of the old garments, Daniel found it impossible to guess whether or not those light, stealthy footsteps were still prowling round the back door.

  It was when they reached the stairs that he knew for certain; and with the certainty came a strange spark of triumph. “A clicking in his ears” indeed! “A bit—you know—” indeed! Edie’d sing a different tune when she found all the fish-knives gone, and the inlaid tea-caddy, and goodness knew what else beside! It was burglars right enough, and they could strip the house for all he cared: except, of course, the emerald….

  The bravado left him, suddenly, with a horrible, disembodied lurch, like that of a sinking lift. For the footsteps were coming on … round the bend of the stairs now. Creak … Creak…. Regular and relentless as a clock ticking, slow as death…. And then the faintest shuffle … shuffle … on the landing. And it was then that old Daniel knew, knew without the help of conscious thought, that what was coming upon him was something more than robbery; more, even, than murder. No door, no lock could protect him now from the terror that was on its way.

  Should he have flung himself out on them, then and there, as the torch wavered through the doorway, steadied itself, and then moved inexorably towards the trunk? Only the old can answer; for only the old understand what it is to be tied to a body they can no longer trust; to muscles that no longer spring promptly to action at the order of the will; to limbs that may falter, unpredictably, when the moment of action is at hand.

  “They may not find it. If I just keep still, they may not find it….”

  And now the two figures were kneeling over the trunk … they were raising the great lid….

  He knew the contents of the trunk by heart, and he could tell almost by ear what it was that they were taking. His scarcely-worn white shirts: the gold cuff-links: Aunt Mary’s silver photograph frame: the little enamelled locket with his wife’s picture inside: the great linen table-cloth that no one used any more. And, under that, they would find the emerald.

  They had found it. For just one moment the torch flashed upon its translucent splendour, and then it dropped to the floor. Quietly, methodically, the two men packed the remainder of their booty, leaving the emerald where it lay.

  And a minute later they were gone.

  But the terror was not gone. In the empty house, now safe and silent again, old Daniel still crouched in the darkness of the wardrobe, not daring to move or think. For out there in the ransacked room the ghastly memory was waiting, ready to pounce at last—the memory that he had managed to fend off for all these months, in and out of the doctor’s surgery, and under the whiplash of Edie’s tongue. Now it could be fended off no longer, for there, not six feet away, lay the emerald, scorned and unwanted. Even burglars had no use for it. Just so must it have been scorned by whoever had thrown it into the gutter where Daniel had found it that rainy, dreamy evening all those months ago; found it, and snatched it up, joyful as a little child newly arrived in fairyland.

  Edie had been right after all. He was a little bit—you know. This was the terror that had been waiting for him.

  The ringing in his ears grew louder, and he prayed that it should be the harbinger of death: that death should come immediately, swift and kind, now that he knew that his mind had gone.

  *

  Heart failure, the doctor said; and no wonder. You could hardly expect the poor old gentleman’s heart to survive the shock of finding burglars in his room. It was easy to understand how it had happened.

  But what was not so easy—what no one, not even Edie or Lissa could understand—was why there should have been an old-fashioned green glass bottle-stopper lying on the floor a few inches from the old man’s hand.

  “And not even a bottle to go with it!” Edie remarked later; as if this added, somehow, to the tiresomeness of the whole affair.

  FOR EVER FAIR

  AS SOON AS I saw him, I guessed that he wasn’t a proper doctor. “J. Morton Eldritch, Authorized Practitioner”—that was how he described himself. But “Authorized” by whom? “Practitioner” of what? As I looked into the weak, slightly bloodshot blue eyes of the small man sitting opposite me, my suspicions grew.

  Suspicions? Let me not deceive myself: they were mo
re than suspicions. In my heart I had known all along that he couldn’t be a real doctor. For one thing, real doctors don’t advertise at all, let alone in the Personal column of a local paper; and for another, the claims made on behalf of this “Fantastic, unrepeatable offer” to “any woman who fears the loss of youthful attraction” had sounded just about as phoney as it is possible for a rejuvenation racket to sound.

  Yes, he was a quack all right. But the thing that was disconcerting—the thing that was beginning to send nasty little shivers down my spine—was that he didn’t even look like a competent quack. I may be a fool—desperation, in the end, turns any woman into a fool—but I was not quite such a fool as to have supposed that J. Morton Eldritch’s “Treatment”, whatever it was, would work by any other means than by a sort of autohypnosis. By some sort of abracadabra, I supposed, he would make me imagine that I looked young and beautiful again; and that in itself might—might it not?—give me the sort of confidence a woman needs to win back the love of her middle-aged husband. Love that has been stolen from her by an innocent little smiling blonde, kitten-sweet and young as the morning.

  But this shabby, shifty little man in front of me, with his pasty, ageless face and sleep-starved eyes, did not look as if he would be able to give anyone confidence in—anything. Where was the dark, hypnotic gaze that should by now be fixed on me, boring into my very soul? Where was the rich, mellifluous voice, warm with concern (however bogus) for my pitiable middle-aged problems? Where was the practised smile, the perfect teeth, the calculated aura of father-figure-cum-admirer that should by now be making me feel feminine and desirable again? Surely this was what one paid for in these rackets—with a bit of black-box, or relaxation, or what-have-you, thrown in?