The House on the Strand Read Free Page A

built of the mixture of clay and straw that they call cob, and the floor was plain earth, without even rushes upon it.
    A ladder at the far end led to a loft, only a few feet above the living-space, and looking up I could see straw pallets laid upon the planking. The fire, stacked with turf and furze, lay in a recess let into the wall, and a stew-pot simmered above the smoke, slung between iron bars fixed to the earthen floor. A girl, her lank hair falling below her shoulders, was kneeling by the fire, and as the horseman called a greeting she looked up at him and smiled.
    I was close upon his heels, and suddenly he turned, staring straight at me, shoulder to shoulder. I could feel his breath upon my cheek, and I put out one hand, instinctively, to fend him off. I felt a sudden sharp pain on my knuckles and saw that they were bleeding, and at the same time I heard a splintering of glass. He was not there any longer, neither he, nor the girl, nor the smoking fire, and I had driven my right hand through one of the windows of the disused kitchen in Kilmarth's basement, and was standing in the old sunken courtyard beyond.
    I stumbled through the open door of the boiler-room, retching violently, not at the sight of blood but because I was seized with an intolerable nausea, rocking me from head to foot. Throbbing in every limb, I leant against the stone wall of the boiler-room, the trickle of blood from my cut hand running down to my wrist.
    In the library overhead the telephone began to ring, sounding, in its insistency, like a summons from a lost, unwanted world. I let it ring.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
     
     
    IT MUST HAVE taken the best part of ten minutes for the nausea to pass. I sat on a pile of logs in the boiler-room waiting. The worst thing about it was the vertigo: I dared not trust myself to stand. My hand was not badly cut, and I soon staunched the blood with my handkerchief. I could see the splintered window from where I sat, and the fragments of glass on the patio beyond. Later on I might be able to reconstruct the scene, judge where my horseman had been standing, measure the space of that long vanished house where there were now patio and basement: but not now. Now I was too exhausted.
    I wondered what sort of figure I must have cut, if anyone had seen me walking over the fields and across the road at the bottom of the hill, and climbing the lane to Tywardreath. That I had been there I was certain. The state of my shoes, the torn cloth of one trouser leg, and my shirt clammy cold with sweat—this had not come about from a lazy amble on the cliffs.
    Presently, the nausea and vertigo having passed, I walked very slowly up the back stairs to the hall above. I went into the lobby where Magnus kept his oilskins and boots and all the rest of his junk, and stared at myself in the looking-glass above the wash-basin. I looked normal enough. A bit white about the gills, nothing worse. I needed a stiff drink more than anything. Then I remembered that Magnus had said: Don't touch alcohol for at least three hours after taking the drug, and then go slow. Tea would be a poor second-best, but it might help, and I went into the kitchen to make myself a cup. This kitchen had been the family dining-room when Magnus was a boy; he had converted it during recent years. While I waited for the kettle to boil I looked out of the window at the courtyard below. It was a paved enclosure, surrounded by old, moss-encrusted walls. Magnus, in a burst of enthusiasm at some time, had attempted to turn it into a patio, as he called it, where he could flop about nude if a heat-wave ever materialised. His mother, he told me, had never done anything about the enclosure because it led out from what were then the kitchen quarters.
    I looked upon it now with different eyes. Impossible to recapture what I had so lately seen—that muddied yard, with the cow-house adjoining, and the track leading to the wooded grove above. Myself following the horseman through the