Read Online The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene - Free Book Online Page B

Bellairs, ‘and then we’ll turn out the lights.’
    In nightmares one knows the cupboard door will open: one knows that what will emerge is horrible: one doesn’t know what it is . . .
    Mrs Bellairs said again, ‘If you’ll just sit down, so that we can turn out the lights.’
    He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.’
    â€˜Oh, you can’t go now,’ Mrs Bellairs cried. ‘Can he, Mr Hilfe?’
    Rowe looked at Hilfe, but the pale blue eyes sparkled back at him without understanding. ‘Of course, he mustn’t go,’ Hilfe said. ‘We’ll both wait. What did we come for?’ An eyelid momentarily flickered as Mrs Bellairs with a gesture of appalling coyness locked the door and dropped the key down her blouse and shook her fingers at them. ‘We always lock the door,’ she said, ‘to satisfy Mr Cost.’
    In a dream you cannot escape: the feet are leaden-weighted: you cannot stir from before the ominous door which almost imperceptibly moves. It is the same in life; sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die. A memory came back to him of someone else who wasn’t certain, wouldn’t make a scene, gave herself sadly up and took the milk . . . He moved through the circle and sat down on Cost’s left like a criminal taking his place in an identity parade. On his own left side was Miss Pantil. Dr Forester was on one side of Mrs Bellairs and Hilfe on the other. He hadn’t time to see how the others were distributed before the light went out. ‘Now,’ Mrs Bellairs said, ‘we’ll all hold hands.’
    The blackout curtains had been drawn and the darkness was almost complete. Cost’s hand felt hot and clammy, and Miss Pantil’s hot and dry. This was the first séance he had ever attended, but it wasn’t the spirits he feared. He wished Hilfe was beside him, and he was aware all the time of the dark empty space of the room behind his back, in which anything might happen. He tried to loosen his hands, but they were firmly gripped. There was complete silence in the room. A drop of sweat formed above his right eye and trickled down. He couldn’t brush it away: it hung on his eyelid and tickled him. Somewhere in another room a gramophone began to play.
    It played and played – something sweet and onomatopoeic by Mendelssohn, full of waves breaking in echoing caverns. There was a pause and the needle was switched back and the melody began again. The same waves broke interminably into the same hollow. Over and over again. Underneath the music he became aware of breathing on all sides of him – all kinds of anxieties, suspenses, excitements controlling the various lungs. Miss Pantil’s had an odd dry whistle in it, Cost’s was heavy and regular, but not so heavy as another breath which laboured in the dark, he couldn’t tell whose. All the time he listened and waited. Would he hear a step behind him and have time to snatch away his hands? He no longer doubted at all the urgency of that warning – ‘They’ll try to get you in the dark.’ This was danger: this suspense was what somebody else had experienced, watching from day to day his pity grow to the monstrous proportions necessary to action.
    â€˜Yes,’ a voice called suddenly, ‘yes, I can’t hear?’ and Miss Pantil’s breath whistled and Mendelssohn’s waves moaned and withdrew. Very far away a taxi-horn cried through an empty world.
    â€˜Speak louder,’ the voice said. It was Mrs Bellairs, with a difference: a Mrs Bellairs drugged with an idea, with an imagined contact beyond the little dark constricted world in which they sat. He wasn’t interested in any of that: it was a human movement he waited for. Mrs Bellairs said in a husky voice, One of you is an enemy. He won’t let it come through.’ Something – a chair, a table? – cracked,