Ellis Peters - George Felse 10 - The Knocker On Death's Door by Ellis Peters Read Free Book Online

the sanctuary knocker, as the best he could do, but the cold iron burned his hand as if it had been red-hot, and forced him to loose his hold. And the devil took him.” Robert’s quiet voice quivered momentarily. Such a pale, still face… Dinah shivered, watching him. She had never really noticed him before, only recorded externals, measuring a potential enemy. “Not physically, however. According to the story, the monks came down for Prime, and found his body huddled at the foot of the door, stone dead. No marks on him, not even a burned hand.”
    “How very odd,” said the old lady with detached disapproval, “that I never remember hearing this nonsense before! And what nonsense it is! Just a perfectly ordinary door!”
    “I quite agree,” admitted Robert. “Most such stories are nonsense, but people go on telling them. The door has always been credited—or discredited—with being haunted, but I can’t say we ever had any odd experiences with it here, or noticed anything queer about it. I don’t know— maybe we’re just inured, because we lived with all these things so intimately and so long. The time might come when one took even ghosts for granted, and failed to see them…”
    Dinah shuddered and shook herself. Perhaps, she thought, even that could happen, when you belong only to the past; not even to the present, much less the future. And she thought, well, yes, there’s always Canada—or Australia, where you have to be real or people fail to see
you
!
    She thought of the antique iron beast, playfully proffering his twisted ring of hope, and grinning as it burned the desperate hand that reached for it. For the rest of the evening—mercifully it was short, old people retire early— she could not get it out of her head. She was grateful to Hugh for his delicacy and affection when he broke up the coffee-party in the drawing-room—Robert had made the coffee, of course!—and took her tenderly home through the thinning fog, at a slow speed which permitted him to keep an arm about her all the way. He was warm, quiet and bracing. She was practically sure that she loved him.
     
    Dave was brewing tea in the kitchen when she came in from the yard, with Hugh’s kiss still warm and confident on her lips, and her backward glance still illuminated by the light from Hugh’s flat over the stable. He hadn’t drawn the curtains, and he had just hauled off his shirt and plunged across the bedroom towards the shower-room beyond. Then the light went out, and the October night swallowed him. Good night, Hugh!
    “That Brummagem bloke didn’t come in for his car,” Dave said. She hardly heard him, she was so far away. “He must be staying overnight. He said he might. Wonder what on earth he expected to find worth his while in these parts?”
    “Ghosts, hobgoblins, pacts, devils… who knows?” said Dinah, yawning. “Witchcraft and such is
news
these days, didn’t you know?”
    “How did it go?” asked Dave curiously.
    “Oh, not so bad! They’re dead,” she said simply, “but never mind, Hugh’s alive.” She wandered to bed, hazy with Traminer. Dave watched her go, reassured. As for Bracewell, he’d be in early in the morning, just as he’d said.
     
    But early is a relative term, and freelance photographers, perhaps, keep different hours from office workers, garage proprietors and such slaves of the clock. The Brummagem bloke had still not put in an appearance to claim his repaired Morris when Dave drove the vicar’s third-hand Cortina back to the vicarage, on its new tyres at just after nine o’clock, as promised. His nearest way back to the garage was through the churchyard. Thus it was Dave who happened to be the first person to pass close by the south porch on this misty Wednesday morning, and casting the native’s natural side-glance towards the legendary door within, register the startling apparition of size ten shoe-soles jutting into the dawn.
    There was a man inside the shoes. The dim light