to arrest you for the murder of William Hingest.”
IV
Dr. Dimble drove out to St. Anne’s dissatisfied with himself, haunted with the suspicion that if he had been wiser, or more perfectly in charity with this very miserable young man, he might have done something for him. “Did I give way to my temper? Was I self-righteous? Did I tell him as much as I dared?” he thought. Then came the deeper self-distrust that was habitual with him. “Did you fail to make things clear because you really wanted not to? Just wanted to hurt and humiliate? To enjoy your own self-righteousness? Is there a whole Belbury inside you, too?” The sadness that came over him had no novelty in it. “And thus,” he quoted from Brother Lawrence, “Thus I shall always do, whenever You leave me to myself.”
Once clear of the town, he drove slowly—almost sauntering on wheels. The sky was red to westward and the first stars were out. Far down below him in a valley he saw the lights already lit in Cure Hardy. “Thank Heaven it at any rate is far enough from Edgestow to be safe,” he thought. The sudden whiteness of a white owl flying low fluttered across the woody twilight on his left. It gave him a delicious feeling of approaching night. He was very pleasantly tired; he looked forward to an agreeable evening and an early bed.
“Here he is! Here’s Dr. Dimble,” shouted Ivy Maggs as he drove up to the front door of the Manor.
“Don’t put the car away, Dimble,” said Denniston.
“Oh Cecil!” said his wife; and he saw fear in her face. The whole household seemed to have been waiting for him.
A few moments later, blinking in the lighted kitchen, he saw that this was not to be a normal evening. The Director himself was there, seated by the fire, with the jackdaw on his shoulder and Mr. Bultitude at his feet. There were signs that everyone else had had an early supper and Dimble found himself almost at once seated at the end of the table and being rather excitedly urged to eat and drink by his wife and Mrs. Maggs.
“Don’t stop to ask questions, dear,” said Mrs. Dimble. “Go on eating while they tell you. Make a good meal.”
“You have to go out again,” said Ivy Maggs.
“Yes,” said the Director. “We’re going into action at last. I’m sorry to send you out the moment you come in: but the battle has started.”
“I have already repeatedly urged,” said MacPhee, “the absurdity of sending out an older man like yourself, that’s done a day’s work forbye, when here am I, a great strapping fellow sitting doing nothing.”
“It’s no good, MacPhee,” said the Director, “you can’t go. For one thing you don’t know the language. And for another—it’s a time for frankness—you have never put yourself under the protection of Maleldil.”
“I am perfectly ready,” said MacPhee, “in and for this emergency, to allow the existence of these eldils of yours and of a being called Maleldil whom they regard as their king. And I——”
“You can’t go,” said the Director. “I will not send you. It would be like sending a three-year-old child to fight a tank. Put the other map on the table where Dimble can see it while he goes on with his meal. And now, silence. This is the situation, Dimble. What was under Bragdon was a living Merlin. Yes, asleep, if you like to call it sleep. And nothing has yet happened to show that the enemy have found him. Got that? No, don’t talk, go on eating. Last night Jane Studdock had the most important dream she’s had yet. You remember that in an earlier dream she saw (or so I thought) the very place where he lay under Bragdon. But—and this is the important thing—it’s not reached by a shaft and a stair. She dreamed of going through a long tunnel with a very gradual descent. Ah, you begin to see the point. You’re right. Jane thinks she can recognise the entrance to that tunnel: under a heap of stones at the end of a copse with—what was it, Jane?”
“A white gate, sir. An ordinary five-barred gate with a cross-piece. But the cross-piece was broken off about a foot from the top. I’d know it again.”
“You see, Dimble? There’s a very good chance that this tunnel comes up outside the area held by the N.I.C.E.”
“You mean,” said Dimble, “that we can now get under Bragdon without going into Bragdon.”
“Exactly. But that’s not all.”
Dimble, steadily munching, looked at him.
“Apparently,” said the Director, “we are almost too late. He has waked already.”
Dimble stopped eating.
“Jane found the place empty,” said Ransom.
“You mean the enemy have already found him?”
“No. Not quite as bad as that. The place had not been broken into. He seems to have waked of his own accord.”
“My God!” said Dimble.
“Try to eat, darling,” said his wife.
“But what does it mean?” he asked, covering her hand with his.
“I think it means that the whole thing has been planned and timed long, long ago,” said the Director. “That he went out of Time, into the parachronic state, for the very purpose of returning at this moment.”
“A sort of human time-bomb,” observed MacPhee, “which is why——”
“You can’t go, MacPhee,” said the Director.
“Is he out?” asked Dimble.
“He probably is by now,” said the Director. “Tell him what it was like, Jane.”
“It was the same place,” said Jane. “A dark place, all stone, like a cellar. I recognised it at once. And the slab of stone was there, but no one lying on it; and this time it wasn’t quite cold. Then I dreamed about this tunnel . . . gradually sloping up from the souterrain. And there was a man in the tunnel. Of course I couldn’t see him: it was pitch dark. But a great big man. Breathing heavily. At first I thought it was an animal. It got colder as we went up the tunnel. There was air—a little air—from outside. It seemed to end in a pile of loose stones. He was pulling them about just before the dream changed. Then I was outside, in the rain. That was when I saw the white gate.”
“It looks, you see,” said Ransom, “as if they had not yet—or not then—established contact with him. That is our only chance now. To meet this creature before they do.”
“You will all have observed that Bragdon is very nearly water-logged,” put in MacPhee. “Where exactly you’ll find a dry cavity in which a body could be preserved all these centuries is a question worth asking. That is, if any of you are still concerned with evidence.”
“That’s the point,” said the Director. “The chamber must be under the high ground—the gravelly ridge on the south of the wood where it slopes up to the Eaton Road. Near where Storey used to live. That’s where you’ll have to look first for Jane’s white gate. I suspect it opens on the Eaton Road. Or else that other road—look at the map—the yellow one that runs up into the Y of Cure Hardy.”
“We
