Read Charles Palliser for Free Online Page A

would be the carter whose waggon travelled overnight to Sutton Valancy. It clattered and rumbled Past the house and I traced it into the distance along the road out of the village.

    20 THE

    HUFFAMS

    Sleep was reclaiming me when suddenly I became aware of the low murmur of voices very near to the house. My first thought was that Sukey might have returned, but then I realized that they were men’s voices. I wondered if I dared to leave my warm safe bed and brave with my bare feet the spiders that might be lurking on the floor. I managed to place my feet on the ground and begin to cross the chamber. I started once at something that moved behind me, but it was only my own shadow crossing the light that came round the edges of the shutters. Because of the thickness of the wall, the window was set in a recess several feet deep and had a window-seat onto which I now clambered.
    Noiselessly I lifted the bar that secured the shutters and drew them back. The moonlight flooded in and by its aid I opened one of the casements and knelt to look out.
    I could see nothing that moved except, on the wide High-street before me, the shadow of clouds passing the face of the moon. The railings that separated the house from the carriageway caught my eye as they glinted in the bright moonlight, and then for a moment, as my gaze moved on, I was puzzled by something lying at the bottom of the area on my side of the building, before I recognised it as the ladder left by the men working on the roof.
    Raising my head I could just make out the chimneys of the houses opposite above the tops of the trees that lined the other side of the road. Our house stood on the outskirts of the village and the few houses here were set far apart from each other. I could see no lights in any of the other dwellings and it seemed to me that I might be the only person awake in the world. Suddenly a dog barked and the sound was so clear, though it obviously came from far away, that I realized that whoever had been out there must have gone or I would have heard their footsteps.
    At that moment I heard noises from within the house and recognised the sound of Bissett coming up to rest. Quickly I hurried back to bed, crept between the sheets and was soon asleep.

chapter 3
    I ran through a door and found myself climbing stairs. Round and round and up and up I went and all the time I could hear the sounds of my pursuer behind me. The staircase seemed to go on forever and as I ran my heart pounded and my legs laboured without seeming to be conveying me at all. I looked back and saw something advancing up the stairs just behind me with a strange smoothness of motion. It was a large, pale face that was hideously pitted as if by the smallpox and whose deep eye-sockets seemed to be staring sightlessly at me. There seemed to be no body supporting it but only a trailing black garment. As it grew closer the figure grew taller and taller so that now it was no longer beneath me but towering above me, its great arms spread out like the wings of a bird or the webs of a huge bat, and I knew that it was about to pounce.
    In my sleep I screamed, and then I found myself awake, my heart thumping, my forehead bathed in sweat, and the bedclothes scuffed up around me. Had I really screamed and called out? I seemed to have started no echoes for the room was still and peaceful in the moonlight which streamed through the open shutters. And then, as I looked at the window I saw a head framed within it.

    A WISE CHILD

    21

    This must still be the dream and I must have only dreamed that I awoke, I thought, for no-one could reach up to this window. I couldn’t see the features, for the moonlight was coming from behind so that the face itself was in shadow, but the head was large and had a lot of hair which stuck out. But how could I be dreaming, for my eyes were open?
    Was I only dreaming that my eyes were open? Or was it that …
    “Keep quiet or I’ll tear off your arm and beat you to death with