Read Online A Night of Errors by Michael Innes - Free Book Online

seen that in the Sherris hinterland some enigma of mystery reposed. And Lucy saw this too – or perhaps Lucy had less an intuition than some positive if fragmentary knowledge. It was a bond between them. And she had actually asked him to investigate – to tackle some ill-defined problem of family relationship troubling the awareness of each. That in a situation so nebulous the two of them might have quite different notions of where the mystery lay was an intellectual conception which did not occur to Mr Greengrave. Now, driving carefully through the deepening summer dusk, he was about to let his mind play upon the Dromios with whatever result might come. But this never happened. For, quite suddenly he saw .
    Really saw . For it was a revelation as purely visual as it was spontaneous, and it was won sheerly from the void, without preparation or labour, like some line that precipitates a great poem. And this vivid and revealing appearance, astounding in itself, of course rendered much more disconcerting what was to happen to Mr Greengrave a few minutes later.
    He continued to see the winding road to Sherris Parva, familiar in the lengthening shadows. But floating upon this he saw two faces – faces which were also familiar enough, but which had the superior reality of images compelled upon one by powerful forces deep in the mind. The two faces floated before him more or less at opposite ends of the windscreen. And then they coalesced, drifting together rather like complementary pictures viewed through a stereoscope. And at the moment of their coming together Mr Greengrave exclaimed aloud. ‘Well, I’m damned!’ he said.
    Instantly the vision vanished. Mr Greengrave was astounded and shocked at what he had seen, but he was perhaps even more distressed at what he had said. What would Canon Newton think of an ejaculation so little pious – so profane, indeed? And it was the more offensive in that what was untrue of himself had been revealed to him as a painful approximation to plain fact in the case of certain other persons. People among whom such things happened must surely feel like lost souls… Mr Greengrave drew into the side of the road and stopped his car. The thing needed thinking out. Moreover the shock of his discovery – for he never doubted that it was that – had upset whatever precarious control he had achieved over the physical world about him. The ditch was in motion; it was behaving less like a ditch than a reptile. The poplars undulated like great dark flames. The road flowed as if it were water.
    Mr Greengrave closed his eyes and laid his head on his arms, the better to cope with the situation which had started upon him. His discovery, he knew, imposed some duty, but for the moment he could by no means discern what that duty was. He was not a policeman, nor was he yet assured that there was matter in which the law would interest itself. For instance, questions of inheritance might be involved. Supposing there had been a marriage –
    At this moment Mr Greengrave’s interior counsels were interrupted by the sound of an approaching motor car. He looked up, turned round and saw that it was about to overtake him. Twilight had barely fallen; the moon was still mere tissue-paper in the sky; at close range visibility was scarcely affected. Nevertheless the shades of evening lent something insubstantial to the scene, and would have done so even were that scene not faintly gyrating under the influence of Canon Newton’s wines. The car approached. And once more Mr Greengrave saw two faces. Once more they were familiar. But this time they did not drift together; rather it was as if by some monstrous alchemy they had been torn apart. Moreover this was no vision, no mere retinal image. To what he now saw something in the external world did after some fashion correspond.
    The car passed on. To Mr Greengrave what had happened was at once clear and humiliating. There was still only one moon in the sky and he himself