Beneath her resolve she was still very frightened, but this entire thing was starting to take on a dream-like quality. Antonia found herself wondering if any of it was actually happening, or if she was asleep and dreaming it all.
The dark figure ahead of her looked real enough. He was going swiftly along the footpath with the high hedges on each side. The tinny music was tangling eerily with the night and Antonia remembered Richard’s theory again. Out here, pragmatism was not so easy, the rain itself was starting to turn into the dancing feet of the demons who had pranced through the legends.
But this was a flesh and blood man, and there was nothing other-worldly about any of this. As he vanished around the curve in the path, the music momentarily fainter, Antonia stopped, and reached into her pocket for the pewter jug, because if he had some idea of hiding and leaping out at her…
No, it was all right. The music was moving away, towards Quire House, and she went on again. As she came out onto the main driveway, she saw him ahead of her. He stopped and glanced back as if to be sure she was still following, and then he ran towards Quire’s main entrance, vanishing inside.
Antonia took a deep breath, and went across the lawn in pursuit.
Quire’s main door was partly open, which was unexpected. What now? thought Antonia, glancing uneasily about her. Is this a trap, and do I walk into it, like one of those wimpish horror-film heroines going artlessly into the dark spooky old house?
Quire was not especially spooky but the ground floor seemed to be in near-darkness, and the person Antonia had been following might very well turn out to be the chief villain in this particular scene. And if there was not the throbbing organ notes of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue for atmospheric background, there was a piece of music composed by a man whose contemporaries had believed him to practise devil-worship.
What if this madman belonged to Quire itself? How possible was that? Nice little Godfrey Toy with his white-rabbit scurryings and his eager, elderly-cherub face? Oliver Remus, with that impenetrable reserve but sudden disarming smile? But Antonia thought that although she could believe a great many things, she could not believe that.
The music was still faintly discernible, and she stood very still, trying to sense exactly where it was coming from. The hall was in shadow, but there was a faint spill of light from the two narrow windows on each side of the main door. There must be a security light on somewhere, because it was not as dark as she had expected. But as her eyes adjusted, she saw the light, whatever it was, came from a room at the far end of the hall.
The music room. Of course it would be the music room. Then this is certainly where I go bounding up the stairs to hammer on Godfrey Toy’s door, to tell him there’s an intruder and please call the police at once.
She began to move cautiously across the hall, and she was almost at the foot of the stair when the Caprice suite faded and then cut off altogether. There was the faint scrape of something–a window opening?–and then nothing. Antonia hesitated, and looked towards the music room. The door was wide open and from here she could see that the narrow French windows were wide open as well.