The Dark Gateway: A Novel of Horror. John Burke
now. Already it was incredible that she should ever have found it hard to thrust such an absurd idea from her mind.
But if he had not come to see her, what could have brought him down on a day like this?
Mr. Jonathan, still clinging to his case, went thankfully towards the fire, greeting Mrs. Morris in his clipped, sibilant voice. She pulled up a chair for him, and he sat down before the leaping flames, the steam from his trousers mingling with the steam from the spout of the perpetually-boiling kettle.
“That’s better,” he said, and he put his case on the floor beside the chair.
“A cup of tea, Mr. Jonathan?” said Nora.
“Thank you. Yes, it would be very welcome.”
Mrs. Morris hovered anxiously about him, going “Tch, tch,” and saying: “If your clothes—well, with all the damp there is…I expect Rhys could find you something.”
“No, really. Very kind of you, but I’ll soon be dry. If only I had realised how bad it was going to be—”
“I s’pose it wasn’t like this when you left Liverpool?”
“All the snow was trampled into slush days ago. People and traffic, you know. I was quite surprised to see how white and clean everything looked when we left Chester. The further we got into Wales, the thicker it got.”
“You picked a bad time to come down here. We don’t get many visitors this time of year.”
“Very good of you to have me—very kind indeed. I don’t mind the weather.” He smiled strangely. “I had to come this weekend. I’ve found out so many things just lately.”
Nora watched him without seeming to. She was shocked by the change in him. At least, there seemed to be a change, though that may have been because she had built up such an idealised portrait of him. He was older than she had thought, and there was something malignant about him. He crouched rather than sat. His hands twitched nervously. He looked scared, yet indefinably anticipatory. Nora knew that he had certainly not come down to see her, and she was unexpectedly relieved. He was a small, unprepossessing man, with his creased forehead and eyes never at rest. His nose was faintly pockmarked at the end, and although he could not have been much more than forty, he was going raggedly bald, his lank, dark hair smoothed back from his walnut-shell forehead. No, thought Nora with a shudder, not even if it had been a way of escape from the farm: no, not with this stunted little clerk, bringing with him the atmosphere of his Liverpool office. Even if he had come because of her—and now she was quite positive that he had not done so. She wondered again what could have brought him; and, glancing at her mother, she saw that she, too, was puzzled.
“It’s a small world,” said Mr. Jonathan, with an important little cough.
He obviously wanted their attention for what he had to say.
“I made some surprising discoveries when I was down here last time,” he went on, turning around to face the room. He looked about, at the clock with its pendulum doggedly nodding from side to side in its glass case, at the calendar advertising cattle cake, and at the hooks in the beams of the ceiling. “I didn’t like to say anything until I’d been back to Liverpool and made sure that it all fitted. It seemed too good to be true, after all these years—centuries, rather. But it’s true. No mistake about it. I always like to be sure of my facts: I’m a careful man.” He beamed. “This”—his voice rose and he waved his hand, with its bitten nails, all-embracingly—“was the home of my family. Long time ago, of course.”
Nora and her mother stared at him. The fire glowed behind him, flickering redly behind his drab, saturnine figure.
“The people who had it before us,” said Mrs. Morris, vaguely, “were the Mountjoys. I don’t know who there was before them.”
“It was a long time ago,” said Mr. Jonathan. “Long before this house itself was here. We’re an old family, you know—very old. Came from the Continent. It’s all in the books you’ve got in the other room. I was delighted to find them…oh, yes, delighted. Our ancestral home—our entrance to Britain. A gateway, as it were.” And he smiled to himself as though hugging some strange secret.
“In the books?” said Nora.
“Our whole history is there.”
“But I didn’t think any of them dealt with family history of any sort.”
“The history of what came before history was written,” he murmured, so that she could hardly hear him.
He was trying to sound important, she decided. She had met them before, these little clerks who talked big when they came to the country, as though being a city dweller gave them some superiority over farmers and the like.
Mr. Jonathan got up from his chair. “I’m dry now,” he said. “Perhaps I could have another glance at the books, if you don’t mind? Checking up, and so on. Mustn’t make any mistakes.”
“Welcome,” said Mrs. Morris, who had been listening with only half an ear. “But it’s cold in there. We could light a fire,” she added doubtfully.
“Quite understand,” said Mr. Jonathan. “Fuel shortage.… No, I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s very kind of you to have me at all. I just want to look at a few odds and ends—won’t stay long. Too freezing for the fingers, eh?”
His trousers were wrinkled and twisted, stiff where they had dried. When he went towards the door and out into the passage, he moved eagerly, like a traveller nearing his goal.
They watched him go. Mrs. Morris said: “Still, he’s not as funny as that old minister we had for weekends all that summer. Drawing pictures he was in a book out on the lawn, and what pictures they were. Do you remember him, Nora?”
“Yes, mother,” said Nora automatically, her eyes still on the door. “I remember.”
She heard her father splashing across the yard.
“And to think he’s only come to look at those old books!” said her mother with her little explosive hiccough of a laugh. “They’re all the same.”
Mr. Morris was stamping his feet on the thickly-encrusted step. Nora waited, pervaded by a sort of jeering resignation. She knew how the latch would crash as her father put his hand on it, how the coats on the back of the door would mutter as the door opened, and already in her ears, like an echo that has come too soon, even before the sound has been made, she could hear the grinding noise as the woodwork met the uneven tiles. This is serious, she thought. When little things like that get on your nerves.…
The door opened and jarred to a halt as it met the raised tiles. If only things weren’t so much the same, day after day; if only something unusual, unexpected would happen.
“Might as well give up,” said her father with a bland smile.
He did not say what he was proposing to give up. He clumped his routine three paces across the room, pulled his chair forward so that the legs snarled along the floor, and sank down with a gusty sigh.
“That’ll be all for now,” he said. “And if it gets any worse”—he favoured his daughter with a prodigious wink—“I won’t be able to get down to chapel tomorrow. A great pity it will be, but they will not be able to say it’s my fault, is it?”
Mrs. Morris came to help him pull off his boots. It took a lot of energy for him to do it, nowadays, and made him very red in the face. There were times when the phenomenon of getting old puzzled him, and he would hold his hand up before his face as though to read in his palm the answer to the questions that were, perhaps, beginning to worry him. Sometimes that hand trembled when he held anything—his razor, for instance: Nora noticed that he did not shave so often as he had done in the past. No one said a word about it, but often her eyes were drawn to the fine silver stubble that gleamed around his chin and up to his ears. He had been several years older than his wife when he had married her, and it irked him now that she should be able to get about so briskly while he felt