A cold treachery - Charles Todd [111]
He was sitting up in bed, on his knees, his eyes wide but unseeing.
She stood there for an instant, then awkwardly put her arm around the boy's heaving shoulders.
But her touch was shocking to him and he whimpered as he curled himself into a ball in among the bedclothes, his screams rising in pitch as if afraid of what she would do to him. Yet she thought he didn't recognize her in the middle of whatever nightmare held him in its grip.
“Sybil!” she called to the dog, but it was already on the floor by the bed, hunched and whining.
She could hear words now, incoherent but terrified.
“What is it?” she asked him, her own voice shaking. “Tell me what's wrong!”
He lifted his face out of the coverlet and stared at her, and she thought this time he was wide awake, no longer in the throes of his dream.
“I killed them,” he whispered. “I watched them die. There was so much noise. And then I ran. I didn't want to hang.”
He pointed his finger as if he held a gun. “Bang! Bang-bang, bang! Bang! Bang—”
She had to reach out and shake him to stop the sound, recognizing it for hysteria.
Afterward he just sat there and cried.
Sybil jumped on the bed then and tried to comfort him.
Sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, staring at nothing, Maggie could feel the cold settling in. The stove had been banked for the night, and she didn't have the energy to make herself a cup of tea.
“What am I going to do?” she asked the shadows. “Papa, what am I going to do?”
But her father was dead and buried on the hill.
After a while, when her feet felt half frozen and her head had begun to ache along with her leg, she heard a voice saying aloud, “Nothing has changed. I don't see that anything has changed.”
She was startled to realize that it was her own voice.
Soon after that she got up and went to her bed. But it was hours before she finally fell asleep again.
The next morning he didn't seem to remember anything about his outburst in the night.
And when he was washing up the dishes, she surreptitiously took out the gallows drawing he'd made and burned it in the stove.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
That night, Rutledge drove down the Urskdale road towards South Farm, where the Petersons lived. Leaving his motorcar on the road, he walked partway up the lane, and found a bare patch of rock where he could stand and watch the long outline of the ridge that rose to The Knob and then leveled off as it fell to The Long Back and dwindled towards the south. It was cold, wind whipping down the lake and scudding clouds sailing overhead, obscuring the stars.
From here he was invisible to anyone on high ground, and he could still reach the village faster in the motorcar than anyone on foot. The question was, would this be another nightwatch that failed to bring him any answers?
Turning to look across the mere, he could just see the ragged outline of the fells blotting out the sky. Somewhere in the distance to his right, the clank of a bell told him where sheep were on the move. He could hear his own breathing. And then a rock, dislodged by a careless hoof, rolled and bounced for what seemed to be twenty feet or so.
“If I cough,” he thought, “it will be heard for miles . . .”
The feeling of claustrophobia settled around him again. Pinned where he was by the fells, isolated and lonely, he was one man in a wilderness of stone that seemed to press in on every side. He couldn't push it aside and escape, he couldn't choose his way out. Not without wings.
Shaking off his bleak mood, he pulled his collar up against the wind, and shivered in his heavy coat.
After a time, he had to stamp his feet to keep them warm, and the stars swung across the sky with silent precision that measured the minutes. He kept time by them instead of his watch as the hours crept by.
And then, faintly, across the Saddle, he could see the pinprick of light as a lantern bobbed slowly across the ground.
There was no way to intersect the path the walker had taken. But Rutledge was,