Read Online Mandrake by Susan Cooper - Free Book Online Page A

without moisture; even tonight, though dew would form before morning, the stars were brilliantly clear. It would be the same until winter came, a sudden, brutal winter, biting into the year with animal teeth. No heat or mildness then; only cold, low cloud, and snow in the wind.
    He lay on his back on the bed, looking out. Downstairs he could hear the dog whimpering restlessly in her sleep. There was no sound outside. No sound at all. For a long time now the noises of the night had been still. He could not get used to that silence. No scrape of crickets, no bats squeaking, or hooting owls, no sudden chatter of a night-jar. Even the cottage had ceased to mutter and creak. It was as if the whole countryside waited, holding its breath. Waited for what?
    Queston turned on his side. A cold runnel of sweat trickled down his bare chest. He felt oppressed, uneasy, and troubled at his uneasiness. For two years he had felt no sensation unconnected with the determined pattern of his days: to work, eat, sleep. Perhaps the breaking of the pattern, with the end of the book, had beaten down the barricades, and the arrival of the stranger only linked him again to the reactions he should have felt before. Perhaps this overwhelming sense of doom was natural to other men when they were alone.
    He lay listening to the silence, and did not sleep.
     
    The important thing now was for the book to be published. Fantasy or not, it might strike home. He had found it developing strangely as he wrote; the long analysis of man’s two-way relationship with place, interwoven with a great unexpected diatribe against those who manipulated it for their own ends (he thought of the indignation Thorp-Gudgeon would splutter at him, and grinned). But both those were straightforward enough. It was when he had come to write of the deeper implications of it all—of the fate of the cave people, and all others who surrendered, without knowing it, to a force they had unleashed and could not now control—that he began to frighten even himself. He was not sure even now whether he had produced fantasy or prophecy; whether he would present the book as a fictional exercise or a solemn warning backed by all the force of his name and reputation. The more he thought about his curious visitor, the more he leaned towards the second of these. It might at least show Mr Mandrake what he was playing with. Unless he would simply laugh.
    He had written to his publishers, but now he decided to go to London without waiting for their reply. He could deliver the manuscript, at any rate.
    He stripped the car of its plastic covering, and inspected the engine. Better play safe; it hadn’t seen much use, and no one had looked at it for a long time. He worked on it all the morning, checking the battery and cleaning the single sparking plug with infinite care. At midday, admiring the purring turbine, he decided it was too late to set out.
    The next morning, very early, he topped up the tank with petrol from the cans he had stacked in the cellar when he first came—there was no garage in the village, and he had been determined never to go farther away than that. Then he looked critically at the Lagonda again, and decided it needed polishing. He had turned to fetch a clean rag from the cottage when he realized with a peculiar shock what he was doing. The engine could have been checked within half an hour. The car could be washed down far more easily at a garage. All these things were excuses.
    He was making excuses for delaying the journey to London. Something in his mind was struggling to produce reasons why he should stay at home. Just one more hour, just one more day.
    The early mist was fading, and the sun growing warm. Queston looked round at the cottage, and the soft light on the reddening trees. A humming silence lay over it all; suddenly he was stirred by the beauty of the place that had housed him for two years. You never liked London, said the thing in his mind, gently insistent: a