The Bell - Iris Murdoch [35]
CHAPTER 6
Michael Meade was awakened by a strange hollow booming sound which seemed to come from the direction of the lake. He lay rigid for a moment listening anxiously to the silence which had succeeded the sound, and then got out of bed and went to the open window. His room faced the Abbey. It was a bright moonlit night and he could see as he looked out, intent and nervous, the great expanse of the lake, and the Abbey wall opposite to him, clearly revealed in the blazing splendour of the moon which was well risen above the market-garden. Everything looked familiar and at the same time rather eerie. He looked further along, his eyes following the wall towards the place where it ended and the Abbey grounds stretched un-walled to the edge of the water, descending to a wide pebbly strand. Here to his surprise Michael saw with extreme clarity that a number of figures were gathered. Several nuns were standing close beside the lake. He could see their black shapeless habits swaying as they moved and the sharp outline of the blue shadows which the moon cast behind them, and by some trick of the light they seemed strangely near. They were leaning down now over something which they were drawing slowly out of the water. It was something large and heavy at which several of them were awkwardly grasping and pulling. He thought he could hear the thing grating upon the pebbles. Then he realized with a thrill of terror that the long limp object which they were pulling out onto the shore was a human body. They were taking a corpse out of the lake. Michael stood chilled and paralysed, not knowing what to do, and wondering what strange disaster it was of which he was witnessing the final scene. Who was the drowned person whose form lay now quite still upon the farther shore? The fantastic thought came to him suddenly that it was someone whom the nuns themselves had murdered. The scene was so unutterably sinister and uncanny that a suffocating fear came upon him and he pulled desperately at the neck of his pyjamas while trying in vain to utter a cry of alarm.
He turned about and found himself still in bed. The early morning light filled the room. He sat up in bed, still wrenching at his throat, his heart pounding violently. He had been dreaming; but so powerful was the experience that he sat there dazed for a minute, not sure if he was really awake, still overwhelmed by the horror of what he had seen. It was that evil dream again. That was the third time now that he had dreamt more or less the same thing, the scene at night with the nuns pulling the drowned person out of the lake, and with it the conviction that it was their own victim that lay at their feet upon the strand. Each time the dream was accompanied by an overwhelming sense of evil; and each time too Michael had the strange impression that the booming sound which preceded the dream was not a dream sound, but a sound which sleeping he had really heard and which had stirred him towards waking.
His watch said twenty minutes to six. He got up now and crossed to the window, half expecting to see something odd. Everything was as usual, with the derelict and deserted look of the early morning. On the clipped grass near the house a number of blackbirds were running about, following the mysterious activities of newly risen birds. Nothing else stirred. The lake was bland and unbroken, brimming with the pale diffused light of the sun which was risen in a thick haze. It would be another hot day. Michael looked across to where the Abbey wall ended and the take water lapped among bulrushes along the shore. There was no pebbled