Page 82 of The Splendour Falls
I looked round wildly, and then, to Thierry’s sheer astonishment, I dropped the photograph and ran. I ran like a rabbit pursued by a hawk, up the curving stairway to the first floor landing, and out onto the empty terrace through the door that still stood open, as it had been open on the afternoon that Paul had died. I ran across the terrace and down the narrow stairs and out of the little door into the crowded square. No one paid me any attention. They kept on sipping wine and drinking coffee at their tables round the fountain while I turned and bolted up the breakneck steps to the château.
I didn’t stop running until I’d reached the top, and I only stopped then because I thought my lungs would burst if I went one step further. With my back to the low wall I slumped forward, hands on my knees, drawing in deep, sobbing, painful breaths of air.
The sudden scraping of a match in front of me brought my head up with a jerk, in time to see the gypsy’s black eyes smiling at me as, against the cliff face opposite, he touched the brief flame to his yellow-filtered cigarette.
Chapter 28
“Would rather we had never come! I dread
His wildness, and the chances of the dark.”
The match flared in the breeze and died abruptly.
“It is not safe, Mademoiselle,” he told me, in coarsened English, “to stand so near the edge.”
I was gathering breath to cry blue murder when he moved. But he didn’t move toward me. Instead he turned and started slowly up the road, toward the château, with the little mongrel dog trotting on ahead of him.
I hadn’t expected that.
Stunned, I let my breath escape without a sound and felt my fear flip over into fascination. By the time he’d gone ten paces from me I had found my voice again. “Wait!” I called after him. “Please wait!”
He stopped walking, looked back. The dog stopped too, impatiently, close by his master’s feet. I cleared my throat and asked the question.
“You know what happened to him, don’t you? You were here.”
It was a rather ambiguous question, but he didn’t pretend to misunderstand me. He met my eyes and nodded slowly. “But I,” he said, “was not the one who pushed him, Mademoiselle.”
At that he turned away again and walked on a few steps to where a wooden door hung scarred and derelict in the face of the yellow cliff. Through that door both dog and gypsy went without a backward glance. “Wait!” I cried again, but it was too late. They were gone. A swiftly moving cloud passed over the sinking sun and in its shadow the breeze struck chill upon my face. “Follow,” the wind whispered, swirling against the ancient stone. “Follow…”
My brain resisted. Don’t be an idiot, it told me. Go right back down those stairs, my girl, and straight to the police… But the unseen forces calling me, compelling me, did not respond to rationality. They pulled me numbly to that door and sent me through it like Alice on the trail of the White Rabbit. The door swung wide, and in a slanting triangle of light showed me a shallow flight of steps descending into darkness, a darkness that grew palpable as the door creaked gently to behind me.
Oh, hell, I thought. Why did it have to be a cellar? I held my breath, and swallowed down the cowardly swell of panic. Think of Paul, I told myself. The gypsy knows what happened…
There were only six steps in all. I counted them as I went down, with a hand braced on the cool stone wall to guide me—six steps and then a level stretch. The wall at my hand fell away, and I moved onward cautiously, only to be brought up short by another wall directly to the front.
Confused, I took a small step backwards, reaching out my hands to feel the inky blackness that surrounded me. Deprived of sight, my other senses rose to fill the void. The lingering smell of the gypsy’s cigarette bit sharply at my nostrils, as did the dank sweet smell of stone that never sees the sun. Above the rasp of my own breathing my straining ears picked out the faintest clicking of the little dog’s toenails on the stone floor, a sound that echoed and receded steadily along the passage to my right.
My groping hands touched chiseled stone above my head, as dry as parchment, brushed with dirt, a ceiling arched and rounded like the one I’d seen in Armand’s cellars. And then I knew, with a strange instinctive certainty, where I was. Not a cellar, I corrected myself. This was no ordinary cliff house. I was in the tunnels.
My first thought was to turn back while the door was still just steps behind me. A labyrinth, that’s what everyone I’d met had called the tunnels of Chinon. A labyrinth of twisting passageways that burrowed through the hills, unsafe, uncharted, half of them forgotten and collapsed through lack of use. You’ll get lost, warned the nagging little voice inside my head. You’ll get lost down here and no one will ever find you. The wave of panic swelled again and I hesitated, heart pounding.
Some distance off, the clicking footsteps of the dog paused in their progress, as if the beast had sensed my indecision. The gypsy whistled softly and that echoed, too, along the stone walls back to me. “Allez!” he ordered. Come along! He was speaking to the dog, I knew, but nonetheless the single command shifted me. I set my face in that direction, squared my shoulders, and plunged on into the darkness.
I didn’t stumble, which surprised me, since the floor was anything but even. I slid one hand along the wall, to keep my bearings as best I could, and strained my ears to hear the gypsy’s steps in front of me. He knew I was following. I fancied that he kept his pace deliberately slow to aid me, and just before I reached a turning in the tunnel where I might have lost my way, the gypsy started whistling in the darkness up ahead, drawing me onward as a beacon draws a ship.
For the most part, though, the tunnel ran straight on with neither bend nor break, and only the straining muscles of my legs to tell me when we sank deeper into the rock or rose again toward the surface.
We were rising now. Ahead of me the little dog’s staccato rhythm altered to a sort of surging scrabble and the gypsy’s boots fell heavily with measured sureness on the stone. My brain, attuned to darkness, told me: Stairs, they’re climbing stairs. I slowed my pace expectantly. My searching hand trailed off the wall and into emptiness, and a sudden spear of light came hurtling down to trap me where I stood.
My ears had not deceived me. I had reached the bottom of a long and narrow flight of stairs, like cellar stairs, that stretched invitingly toward the world above. Someone was standing on the upper landing, poised against the open door—the gypsy, I presumed, although he was at best a silhouette. I couldn’t see his face. He pushed the door wide and left it open, passing through into whatever lay beyond.
It had seemed a good idea at the time, I reminded myself as I climbed the stairs—now, I wasn’t so sure. God knows where I would find myself when I emerged, and what would happen to me there. My feet dragged just a little up the final few steps. And then I thought again of Paul, and why I’d followed in the first place, and squaring my shoulders I stepped across the threshold.
I was completely unprepared, coming from the cold and ancient darkness of the tunnels, to find myself standing in a one-roomed house with fridge and cook-stove and a cheery fire burning in the fireplace. I’d expected a cave, I think, some sort of wild dungeon of a place, with sullen eyes that peered at me from the corners. But this was no cave, and the only eyes I saw belonged to the gypsy, the dog, and the young man lying on a bed in the far corner. A pale and rumpled young man who smiled and sent the gypsy a look of congratulation.
“Oh, well done, Jean,” my cousin said. “You found her.”
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