Dark Dance Read Online Free PDF

wood.
    She was high up. She heard the rush of the sea.
    It was twilight, the sun had gone out inland. The sky was closing. She saw two stars, and away over the open land before her, a building.
    There was a tower with a cone of roof. Crenellations and walls slanting. Some last hint of light cast a weird burnish on to ranks of slender windows. It was a large house, and in the dusk it became a masonry vegetable. Beyond its shape the land gave way. Below the sea dashed itself against rock and gulls or silence cried.
    Here? She was to confront them here ? To confront what?
    Dizzy with her tension, she had put down the two slabs of lead.
    She must cross the formless ground between herself and the house. She must ring a bell or knock some primitive knocker, and then one of them would come. She would go in and so begin to know.
    It was cold on this headland. Now she could see seven, eight tinfoil stars, burning icy, thin and hard.
    She took up the cases and wands of pain struck at her shoulders. She walked towards the house, stumbling a little on stray stones, the tufted wintry grass.
    The house came nearer, drifting over the navy dusk.
    She reached an outer wall broken by two posts. No gate. The way was open wide but not necessarily inviting.
    Above her, afloat over a tall crowd of garden trees, a window lit up in the house.
    Rachaela stared. The light was dull but the window became a fruit of coloured glass, liquid crimsons, dense purples, and damson green.
    What did the window propose? Anything? Nothing?
    It was not a welcome, rather a shutting out.
    The path from the wall to the house was straight. There were massive ancient yews on either side, cemetery trees, where darkness lurked and rustled.
    The house too, but for its one lit window, was faceless and black.
    A porch became visible. Ebony wood, intricately carved, above five shallow steps, each patterned dimly, which she mounted. No light within the door. A solid wood frame. No bell. Rachaela searched for a knocker, for some semblance of willing communication.
    But the door was ajar. It stood open on the empty world, the night and trees. She put down her cases once more and disbelievingly pushed at the door—and it gave.
    Blackness and, again, the dim pattern on a white tile underfoot. A black oblong in blackness, there was a second door within the first. Gradually she made out an old-fashioned doorknob, a globe that turned as she gripped it. But the inner door was also open.-A smothered red ember of light appeared, so vague, so intangible, like the glim of a dying candle.
    She must go forward into this cobweb half-light.
    Or stay outside in the cold and whispering darkness.
    Inside the second door was a huge open oblong of space, a hall or lobby with a chessboard floor of russet and black marble. It was as wide as a great room and from it there fell away massed shadows that might be anything, doorways, passages, crouching bears.
    On a mahogany table softened by a grape-bloom of dust burned a ruby oil lamp, its wick turned low, while from the ceiling hung, unlit, a snow-flake chandelier. Filmy webs knit the glass prisms of the chandelier, which slipped softly to and fro in the draught of the opened doors. Beads of the red lamp caught on it like drops of red ink.
    Rachaela could smell the dusts of the house, and the damp vaults of it, but there was too the smell of the oil, a scent like fur, herbs and powders, tinctures unguessable.
    She dragged her suitcases into the hall, and turned to close the inner door.
    ‘Please leave it open,’ said a flat soft voice.
    She moved quickly to face the lobby. A thin, small figure, male, leaning slightly forward, stood at the far side of the lamp.
    The doors are always left a little open after dark.’
    This strange statement unnerved Rachaela. She left the door alone. She poised by her cases, for what came next.
    ‘I shall fetch someone for your bags. Will you allow me to show you the room which has been made ready.’
    ‘Who are