Mask of Night by Philip Gooden Read Free Book Online

enough to move at some speed. For an instant you wonder what kind of figure you cut as you glide through the trees and across the grass, still muddy and scrubby from the winter. Anyone looking from a distance would surely be struck dumb to see a shape clad in a great black coat, carrying a white cane and surmounted by a headpiece with a beak. They might believe that the devil himself was walking abroad on this fine spring morning in the country.
    But you will not be seen, you are as good as invisible. The costume confers invisibility.
    As you near the house of the old woman your heart beats even faster. This is the first time you have approached the place since that occasion, many years ago, when you were hauled indoors struggling and screaming. The apple trees are still there, the branches knotty and twisty. The cottage is a comfortable-looking place, fit for comfortable yeomen. You push open the door – it is ajar anyway – and listen to the silence within. Once more you hear the blood rustling in your ears and, beyond that, those little tapping and sighing sounds which every place makes even when empty, especially when empty perhaps.
    Except that the house isn’t empty. Old mother Morrison lies a-dying somewhere within. You raise your beak as if to snuff the air and scent out death. Sure enough – and it must be that your senses are heightened by all this bustle and activity – you know that the old woman is in a room on the next floor. You mount the uneven stairs rapidly but careless of any noise. Who is there to hear you or, hearing you, stand in your way?
    There is a choice of three doors up here but, by instinct, you make for just one of them and listen outside. After a moment you are rewarded by a wheezing sound from within. You know that she will be alone. Since she is sick she will be allowed a room to herself. Perhaps for the first time in her life she is sleeping alone in a bed. You lift the latch of the door and enter the room.
    The window faces east and the light is good and strong on this fine spring morning. There is a pinched-looking bed in one corner containing a woman lying on her back. She is breathing heavily, with her eyes open but unseeing and her arms outstretched. Her hands are clenched on the quilt. Her nose, hooked, is the most prominent feature of her face. The rest of her flesh seems to have fallen away from it.
    You stand in the doorway. The wheezing stops. Then, after an age, it resumes, although nothing else about the supine woman changes.
    You waver in your purpose. What is that object lying there before you in the corner? A mortal woman who once beat you until her stick broke and who then lived on in your dreams. Look at her now, helpless and alone, wheezing her way out of this world. You wonder whether it was necessary to send her the poisoned sweetmeats since she could plainly have managed the business of dying all by herself. She cannot have more than a few days left . . . a week at most.
    You have seen enough and are about to turn round and exit the room when old mother Morrison, sensing the presence of someone, shifts her head on the bolster and stares at you. The eyes which were gazing blankly at the rough ceiling suddenly spark with life. These eyes are overtaken by horror at what they see but there is a moment before that horror when they are filled with an expression which you remember well. An expression of rage and contempt. Jolted, you are dragged back to childhood. You hear your own screams echoing through the walls of this solid yeoman house.
    A sudden desire seizes you, a wild desire, to raise your thin cane and bring it down on her head, on her exposed arms and her tight fists, on her entire shrunken frame, and to dole out to her the punishment she meted out to you all those years before. You step closer to the bed and the eyes of old mother Morrison, like black pits on either side of her sharp nose ridge, enlarge in terror. So acute are your own senses now that, despite