Strange Stories by Robert Aickman Page A

instantly recalled, that the light paintwork had speedily become blotched and suffused. They had naturally supposed it to be something wrong with the pigments, and had spoken between themselves of vegetable dyes and the superiorities of Giotto and Mantegna. Stephen had hidden the festering canvas in the communal basement storeroom, and had forgotten about it immediately. Now he could see it perfectly well, not over the bed, but in front of it, as always.
    ‘Come back,’ said Nell. ‘Come back to me.’
    The music, which once, beyond doubt, had been the music of love, was dying away. In its place, was a persistent snuffling sound, as if the house from outside, or the room from inside, was being cased by a wolf.
    ‘What’s that noise? That noise of an animal? ’
    ‘Come back to me,’ said Nell. ‘Come back, Stephen.’ Perhaps she was quite consciously dramatizing a trifle.
    He had gone to the window, but of course could see nothing save the misleading huge shapes of the flapping birds.
    He went back to the bed and stretched out both his hands to Nell. He was very cold.
    Though there was almost no light, Nell grasped his two hands and drew him down to her.
    ‘You see and hear so many things, Stephen,’ she said.
    As she spoke, he had, for moments, a vision of a different kind.
    Very lucidly, he saw Nell and himself living together, but, as it might be, in idealized form, vaguely, intensely. He knew that it was an ideal of which she was wonderfully capable, perhaps because she was still so young. All that was required of him was some kind of trust.
    Held by her strong hands and arms, he leaned over her and faltered.
    ‘But whatever animal is that? ’ he demanded.
    She released his hands and curled up like a child in distress. She had begun to sob.
    ‘Oh, Nell,’ he cried. He fell on her and tried to reach her. Her muscles were as iron, and he made no impression at all.
    In any case, he could not stop attending to the snuffling, if that was the proper word for it. He thought it was louder now. The noise seemed quite to fill the small, low, dark, remote room; to leave no space for renewed love, however desperate the need, however urgent the case.
    Suddenly, Stephen knew. A moment of insight had come to him, an instinctual happening.
    He divined that outside or inside the little house was Nell’s father.
    It was one reason why Nell was twisted in misery and terror. Her father had his own ways of getting to the truth of things. She had said so.
    Stephen sat down on the bed and put his hand on her shoulder. Though he was shivering dreadfully, he had become almost calm. The process of illumination was suggesting to him the simple truth that, for Nell too, the past must be ever present. And for her it was, in common terms, the terms after which he himself was so continuously half-aspiring, a past most absurdly recent. How could he tell what experiences were hers, parallel to, but never meeting, his own?
    It would be no good even making the obvious suggestion that they should dwell far away. She could never willingly leave the moor, even if it should prove the death of her; no more than he had been able all those years to leave the flat, the job, the life, all of which he had hated, and been kept alive in only by Elizabeth.
    ‘What’s the best thing to do, Nell?’ Stephen inquired of her. ‘Tell me and we’ll do it exactly. Tell me. I think I’m going to dress while you do so. And then perhaps you’d better dress too.’
    After all, he began to think, there was little that Nell had ever said about her father or her sister which many girls might not have said when having in mind to break away. He would not have wanted a girl who had no independent judgement of her own family.
    The processes of insight and illumination were serving him well, and the phantom portrait seemed to have dissipated completely. The snuffling and snorting continued. It was menacing and unfamiliar, but conceivably it was caused merely by a