Flay could not see Swelter’s feet, only the silhouetted dome, but by the way it ascended he could tell that the chef was moving one step at a time, his right foot always preceding his left, which he brought to the side of its dace-like companion. He went up in slow, silent jerks in the way of children, invalids or obese women. Flay waited until he had rounded the curve of the stairs and was on the first landing before he followed, taking five stone steps at a time.
On reaching the top of the first flight he moved his head around the corner of the wall and he no longer saw the silhouette of his enemy. He saw the whole thing glowing by the light of two candles. The passageway was narrow at this point, broadening about forty to fifty feet further down the corridor to the dimensions of a hall, whence the second flight led up to Lord Sepulchrave’s corridor.
Swelter was standing quite still, but his arms were moving and he appeared to be talking to someone. It was difficult for Flay to see exactly what he was doing until, a moment after he had heard the voice saying: ‘And I’ll make you red and wet, my pretty thing,’ he saw the dim bulk half turn with difficulty in the constricted space of the passageway and he caught the gleam of steel, and a moment later a portion of the shaft and the entire murderous head of the double-handed cleaver. Mr Swelter was nursing it in his arms as though he was suckling it.
‘Oh, so red and wet,’ came the moss soft voice again, ‘and then we’ll wipe you dry with a nice clean handkerchief. Would you like a silk one, my pretty? Would you? Before we polish you and tuck you up? What, no answer? But you know what Papa’s saying, don’t you now? Of course, you do – after all that he has taught you. And why? Because you’re such a quick, sharp baby – oh, such a sharp baby.’
And then Mr Flay was forced to hear the most disgusting sound – as of some kind of low animal with gastric trouble, Mr Swelter was laughing.
Flay, with a fair knowledge of low life, was, nevertheless, unable to withhold himself and, kneeling down quickly upon the great pads at his knees, he was silently sick.
Wiping the sweat from his brow as he rose to his feet he peered again about the angle of wall and saw that Swelter had reached the foot of the second staircase where the corridor widened. The sound of the rain, though less intense, was perpetually there. In the very sound of it, though distant, could be felt an unnatural weight. It was as though the castle were but the size of a skull over which a cistern of water was being rapidly emptied. Already the depressions and valley-like hollows in the castle grounds were filled with dark lakes that mounted momently, doubling and trebling their areas as their creeping edges met. The terrain was awash.
A closer degree of intimacy had been established in the castle between whatever stood, lay, knelt, was propped, shelved, hidden or exposed, or left ready for use, animate or inanimate, within the castle walls. A kind of unwilling knowledge of the nearness of one thing to another – of one human, to another, though great walls might divide them – of
Lying awake, for none could hope to sleep, there was not one in all the dark and rattling place who had not cogitated, if only for a moment, on the fact that the entire castle was awake also. In every bed there lay, with his or her lids apart, a figure. They saw each other. This consciousness of each other’s solid and individual presences had not only been engendered by the imprisoning downpour but by the general atmosphere of suspicion that had been mounting – a suspicion of they knew not exactly what – only that something was changing – changing in a world where change was crime.
It was lucky for Flay that what he had relied on, the uncommunicative character of the Countess, held true, for she had not mentioned his banishment to a soul, although its cause still smarted in her prodigious bosom.
Hence Swelter’s ignorance of the fact that, as he made his first few porridge-like paces along Lord Sepulchrave’s ill-lit corridor, he was approaching a Flay-less darkness, for immediately before the door there was impenetrable shadow. A high window on the left had been blown in and glass lay scattered and, at the stairhead, glittered faintly by the light of a candle.
Mr Flay, in spite of the almost unbearable tension, experienced a twinge of ironic pleasure when, having mounted the second flight, he watched the rear of his enemy wavering into the darkness, in search of his own stalker.
