McHarg answered very quietly, with the utter finality of despair. “No,” he said. “I just feel as if I’d like to die. Leave me alone.” He slumped back into his corner, dosed his eyes, and seemed to resign himself entirely into George’s keeping. He did not speak again during the remainder of that horrible journey.
In the half-darkness, illuminated only by the instrument panel of the car and the eerie light of the moon, George and the driver looked at each other in mute and desperate interrogation. Presently the driver moistened his dry lips and whispered:
“What are we to do now, sir? Where shall we go?”
George thought for a moment, then answered: “We’ll have to go back to his friend’s house, I think. Mr. McHarg may be very ill. Turn round quickly, and let’s get there as soon as possible.”
“Yes, sir! Yes, sir!” the driver whispered. He backed the car round and started off again.
From that point on, the journey was just pure nightmare. The directions they had received were complicated and would have been hard enough to follow if they had kept to the road they had first intended to take. But now they were lost and off their course, and had somehow to find their way back to it. Through what seemed to George nothing less than a miracle, this was finally accomplished. Then their instructions required them to look carefully for several obscure cross-roads, make the proper turns at each, and at the end of all this find the lonely country lane up which McHarg’s friend lived. In attempting it, they lost their way again and had to go back to a village, where the driver got his bearings and the true directions. It was after ten-thirty before they finally found the lane leading up to the house which was their destination.
And now the prospect was more sinister and weird than any they had seen. George could not believe that they were still in England’s Surrey. He had always thought of Surrey as a pleasant and gentle place, a kind of mild and benevolent suburb of London. The name had called to his mind a vision of sweet, green fields, thick-sown with towns and villages. It was, he had thought, a place of peace and tranquil spires, as well as a kind of wonderful urbs in rure, a lovely countryside of which all parts were within an hour’s run of London, a place where one could enjoy bucolic pleasures without losing any of the convenient advantages of the city, and a place where one was never out of hailing distance of his neighbour. But the region they had now come to was not at all like this. It was densely wooded, and as wild and desolate on that stormy night as any spot he had ever seen. As the car ground slowly up the tortuous road, it seemed to George that they were climbing the fiendish slope of Nightmare Hill, and he rather expected that when the moon broke from the clouds again they would find themselves in a cleared and barren circle in the forest, surrounded by the whole witches’ carnival of Walpurgis Night. The wind howled through the rocking trees with insane laughter, the broken clouds scudded across the heavens like ghosts in flight, and the car lurched, bumped, groaned, and lumbered its way up a road which must have been there when the Romans came to Rye, and which, from the feel of it, had not been repaired or used since. There was not a house or a light in sight.
George began to feel that they were lost again, and that surely no one would choose to live in this inaccessible wilderness. He was ready to give up and was about to command the driver to turn back when, as they rounded a bend, he saw, away on the right, a hundred yards or so off the road and at some elevation above it, a house—and from its windows issued the beaconing assurance of light and warmth.
36. The House in the Country
The chauffeur brought the car to a jolting halt. “This must be it, sir,” he whispered. “It’s the only ‘ouse there is.” His tone indicated heightened tension rather than relief.
George agreed that it was probably the place they were looking for.
All the way up the hill McHarg had given no signs of life. George was seriously alarmed about him, and his anxiety had been increased the last few miles by the inanimate flappings and jerkings of the long, limp arms and bony hands of the exhausted figure every time the car hit a new bump in the road or lurched down into another rut. George spoke to him, but there was no answer. He did not want to leave him, so he suggested to the chauffeur that he’d better get out and go up to the house and find out if Mr. McHarg’s friend really lived there; if so, George told him to ask the man to come down to the car.
This request was more than the chauffeur could bear in his already, terrified state. If before he had been frightened to be with them, he seemed now even more frightened at the thought of being without them. What he was afraid of George did not know, but he spoke as if he thought the other members of their bloody gang were in that house, just waiting for him.