Chocky by John Wyndham

Author:John Wyndham
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780141191492
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1970-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Seven

For our holiday that summer we took a cottage jointly with Alan and Phyl Froome. They had married a couple of years after we did, and had two children, Emma and Paul, much of an age with our own. It was an arrangement, we thought, which would give the adults opportunities to go off duty for a bit, and have some holiday themselves.

The place was Bontgoch, a village on an estuary in North Wales, where I had enjoyed several holidays in my own childhood. In those days it was simply a small grey village with a few larger houses outside it. During summer it had a scatter of visitors who were for the most part the children and grandchildren of the owners of the larger houses; they affected it very little. Since then it has been discovered, and bungalows now dot the shoreline and the lower slopes about the village. Their occupants are mostly seasonal, transitory, or retired, and during the milder months the majority are addicted to messing about with boats. I had not expected that. Bontgoch is by no means ideally situated for it, for the tides run fast in the estuary and navigation can be tricky; but the crowded state of the small boat world with its five-year queues for moorings in many more favoured waters had overridden the disadvantages. Now it even had a painted-up shed with a bar at one end called the Yacht Club.

We were, perhaps, a little odd in not having even one boat amongst us, but for all that we enjoyed it. The sands are still there for children to dabble around on at low tide and catch shrimps and flat fish. So, too, on both sides of the estuary are the not-too-steep mountains on which one can climb and explore the pockings of old workings fascinatingly reputed to have been gold mines. It was good to be able to go off in the car for the day and leave Phyl and Alan in charge of the children – and quite good, too, to take charge when it was their turn for freedom. Everything was, in fact, a great success – until the Monday of the second week…

On that day it was Mary and I who were free. We drove almost off the map by very minor roads, left the car, walked along a hillside and picnicked by a stream with the whole Irish Sea spread out below us. In the evening we had a good dinner at a roadside hotel and dawdled back to Bontgoch about ten o’clock. We paused a moment by the gate to admire the serenity of a superb sunset, and then went up the path.

One had only to set foot on the threshold of the cottage to know that something had gone wrong. Mary sensed it at once. She stared at Phyl.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’

‘It’s all right, Mary. It’s quite all right,’ Phyl said. ‘They’re perfectly safe and sound. Both upstairs in bed now. Nothing to worry about.

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