Grey Shapes

2: Beyond Odder-1

2: Beyond Odder

THERE was a one-armed, crankily-sagging signpost beside the road, and, glancing up at it as he slowed, Gees read on its decrepit arm

ODDER 3

DOWLANDSBAR 6

and, having got too far past it by the time that he read his destination thereon, braked to a stop, reversed, and then swung the long bonnet of the Rolls-Bentley into the narrow, uneven way indicated by the sign.

"The shades of night were falling fast," he quoted to himself, "and if that lad had had to drive along a lane like this, it's not 'Excelsior' he'd have been shouting to the landscape, but Gordelpus."

The nose of the car went burrowing down and down, and the narrow lane wound snakily until there appeared a hump-backed bridge of grey stone, just wide enough to admit the car between its weathered parapets. But, short of the bridge, Gees braked suddenly to a standstill, for, looking down the bonnet into the gathering gloom of evening, he saw the vanguard of a flock of sheep on the hump of the bridge, and beyond them, as far as the next bend of the lane, was a greyish mass of their fellows. They went scuttering past the car, enveloping it in a woolly flood, and darkness had advanced perceptibly when the shepherd, a tall, gaunt, black being with a patient dog walking beside him, came abreast.

"Good evening," Gees saluted him. "Am I right for Dowlandsbar?"

"Aye, ye're right," said the shepherd, "an' can't go wrong. Through Odder, an' 'tis but a step. Ye'll see the slats of the roof above the trees. A long hoose—Squire Tyrrell's place. Gude night to ye."

"Good night, and thank you," Gees answered, and went on.

As it had burrowed down to the bridge, so the nose of the long car now sought heaven for awhile. The hard-pumped tires—Gees always traveled with tires ten pounds above the recommended pressure—bumped and scraped in the ruts of the lane, and even with the perfect springing and steering of this car ten miles an hour was the limit for safety. The crest of the climb gave place to descent with such abruptness that Gees feared lest his exhaust pipe should scrape on the summit of the ridge: again he dipped down and down and down, until he saw four cottages of grey stone, two on each side of the way, and beyond them an inn which declared itself as the Royal George, with, almost facing it, a slightly larger cottage with a brightly lighted window in which were displayed bottles of old-fashioned sweets, packages of much-advertised soaps, and cigarette placards, together with a festoon of sausages.

"Odder," said Gees to himself, noting the white-lettered, blue enamel plate which declared this emporium as a post office and gave the name, "but it should be Much Odder".

By this time, he had switched on his headlights, and the village slid into darkness behind him as the car wheels splashed through a tiny rivulet that crossed his way without the formality of a bridge.

He traveled another tortuous mile or so, dipping and lifting, and then into the long ray of his headlights came a man who kept to the middle of the lane and, as the car approached him, raised his right hand above his head. Recognizing Tyrrell, Gees braked to a standstill.

"It is you, of course," Tyrrell observed as he came abreast the car. "I thought I'd come along and act as guide."

"Kind of you," Gees answered, and opened the near side door. "I know now why you talk about fells in this part of the world."

"Yes?" Tyrrell seated himself in the car as he spoke. "Why, then?"

"Because when my radiator wasn't pointing horizontally upward along this trail, it fell, and I wondered if I were going to fall too—out over the windscreen. Yes, fells by all means, here."

"That's an old one," Tyrrell told him. "I suppose you know nearly everyone in the district has one leg longer than the other?"

"I'll buy it," Gees offered. "Hereditary disability?"

"Not exactly. Walking along the slopes of the hills does it."

"They never come back, then," Gees reflected. "Well, I don't wonder at it. What do I do—just go ahead?"

"Yes—keep straight," Tyrrell bade.

"Since this lane would break a snake's back, I'll forgive you for that advice," Gees promised. "But why guide me, if I can't go wrong?"

"Because Locksborough Castle gateway is half a mile this side of mine, and you'd probably have turned in at it if I hadn't come along."

"If there's a borough round here, it's a rotten one," Gees declared solemnly. "A sound one would have gone off to level ground long ago."

"It never was a borough," Tyrrell told him. "Amber—he's our vicar and a bit of an archaeologist—he explains it as a corruption of barrow, Danish or more ancient, and the Norman occupation didn't destroy the name, though they built a castle on the site. Here—this is the gateway. No—bear to the right, don't go in. That's why I met you."

Two rugged monoliths reared up almost directly in front of the car, and Gees swerved sharply to the right to pass them and keep to the uneven, narrow main way. Beyond them, as he passed, he caught a glimpse of rugged, jagged-topped walls rising against the clear night sky.

"Ruins," he observed. "I thought you said somebody lived there?"

"It was possible to restore the keep—three floors of it—to a habitable state, and McCoul bought the place and did the restoring," Tyrrell explained. "The rest of it is still ruinous. If he hadn't taken it, I think the ancient monuments people would have taken it over. You know—the National Trust. But McCoul is a bit of an antiquarian."

"And your nearest neighbor," Gees remembered, and felt that his London flat and office, in which he had talked with this man only two days before, was already several worlds and centuries away.

"Yes. I—er—I hope you don't mind, but he and his daughter Gyda are dining with us tonight. It was arranged before I went to London, and I forgot about it when we arranged for you to come today."

"Well, I packed a tuxedo, thank God," Gees reflected piously.

"Well, really!" Tyrrell protested. "Did you think I wanted you to bring your own provisions when I asked you to stay with me?"

"A tuxedo," Gees explained, "is an apology for not dressing for dinner—respectability without tails. You'd call it a dinner jacket."

"Oh, sorry," Tyrrell apologized. "Here—turn in here. Left."

Gees swung the wheel in time, and found himself on a graveled drive which, after the bumpy, rutted lane, made driving a pleasure.

"The term is American, I believe," he explained. "My father wants to brain me every time he hears it, being a soldier of the old school."

"Yes?" Tyrrell queried interestedly. "What regiment?"

"Oh, some obscure crowd of footsloggers for a start—Coldstreams, as a matter of fact. But being a general with a K.C.B., he doesn't brag about his regimental service. I went for distinction when I joined up—the Metropolitan police was my mark. But their discipline was so strict that I chucked it after two years, and wished I'd gone for the army instead, as the old man did. Still, it was useful for my present business. What I don't know about police methods—well!"

He swung the car alongside a long frontage of grey stone, a two-storied mansion with deeply set windows—most of it showed plainly in the ray of the headlights before he swerved to halt beside the deeply-receded, wide main entrance. A pendent electric bulb in a quaint old lantern revealed a great oaken door with vast hinges of scroll worked iron—it was an antique in itself, that door, as Gees realized.

"Well, constable," Tyrrell observed, "you'll have good time for a bath and change before dinner, if you feel like it. We'll get your traps out, and then I'll show you where to stable this beauty."

Gees followed him out from the car, and went to the back to open it up and haul out his big suitcase. Then he turned to Tyrrell.

"You're a good scout, and I like you," he said.

THE FLOOR BOARDS of the room were old as time, with wide cracks between them, and the floor sloped as, in a past age, the foundations of the house had settled. The furniture was plainly Jacobean, all but the full-length mirror, which, Gees decided, was more probably Tudor, re-silvered. There was a press in which he dared not hang his clothes lest he should never find them again, so vast it was. And, like the floor, the ceiling beams were black with age.

He made a final adjustment of his tie before the mirror: the electric light by which he had dressed was incongruous in such an apartment, and he could hear the engine, by which in all probability the light was provided, pulsing somewhere. Beat, beat—miss—beat—miss—beat, beat, beat. Suction gas plant, he decided, and, opening his door, switched off the light and passed along the corridor until he came to the head of the staircase. There, for a moment or two, he paused.

The staircase itself was magnificent. Wide stairs curved down to the big entrance hall of Dowlandsbar, and there was a balustrade which was pure renaissance, black, like the floor and ceiling beams in his room, with age, and so delicately carved as to appear the work of a Cellini or Da Vinci. The hall into which he gazed as he stood, for the moment unnoticed by the people occupying it, had an oaken floor black and old as the rest of the house's woodwork that he had seen so far, and there were rugs, and little tables, and a great fireplace inside which Tyrrell stood warming himself at a log fire, while, nearly facing him, stood a man and a woman who for the period of this little pause absorbed all Gees' attention.

The man, he decided, was somewhere in the fifties, and stood well over six feet in height. His hair was iron grey, as was the half of moustache that Gees could see—both the man and woman were in profile to him. Of greyhound leanness, and with an almost regal pose, the man accentuated his own height. Tyrrell was tall, as was Gees himself, but this man appeared to stand over him, look down on him—such was the impression Gees gathered in this first view—and the profile was hawk-like, finely, even beautifully molded. An arresting type, this man, and, if his mentality were equal to his appearance, one worth knowing.

And the woman, at a first glance, would be about the same age, for her hair was snow-white, a crown of little ripples that shone softly, like old satin in the lighting of the big hall. Gees saw her more nearly three-quarter face than in profile, and saw that, like the man, she had classically fine features—gazing down from his height, he could not see their eyes—with richly red lips almost too full for such a face, and daintily molded chin over a neck that Praxiteles might have rejoiced to model. She too was of unusual height, almost as tall as Gees himself, and very slenderly-fashioned, with beautiful, ringless hands. "Give her a bow and arrow," said Gees to himself as he began to descend the stairs, "and there's Artemis—in grey crêpe-de- chine or something of the sort. But what a pair!"

But, as he faced her and was introduced to Gyda McCoul, he found his estimate of her age was wrong—the white hair had misled him as he had looked down, for she was obviously still in her twenties. Her eyes were amber and green—he could never determine their real color, or whether they were green-flecked amber or amber-flecked green. Either way, they completed as bizarre an attractiveness as he had ever seen, though, as for a moment he took her hand, he felt a sense of—was it fear? Or was it that faint thrill that comes with the sight and realization of something utterly new, an unhoped experience to be faced? He could not tell, and he turned for his introduction to the man and met the gaze of a pair of eyes as nearly black as any he had seen. Here again was new experience: McCoul's eyes held all the fire and light of youth, while his faintly-lined face was that of one who has known all things—the face of a disillusioned cynic and old, past belief.