Don't Look Behind You by Samuel Rogers

Author:Samuel Rogers [Rogers, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XI

As soon as Harold stepped into her hallway that same evening, Daphne could see that he had discovered something. After he had kissed her rather hurriedly he lit a cigarette, and she noticed that his hands were trembling. His eyes were unnaturally bright.

“What is it?” she asked, half dreading to hear his answer. “Did you see Edwin?”

“I saw him this afternoon,” he said. “Yes.”

“And you think it helped you?”

Harold had begun to pace the room. He stopped now and gave her a long look.

“I think he’s our man,” he said. “I’m almost sure of it.”

Daphne felt no particular surprise or shock, simply because she was unable to realize emotionally what Harold had told her. He might have been making some historical statement, referring to the death of some king, the loss of some battle, which remained in her mind nothing but words, because the reality was so remote. It was impossible to associate Edwin as she knew him with the gray airless forest through which she roamed in her dreams.

“But Harold, how can you know?” she asked after an instant. “You might guess perhaps, but how can you be so sure?”

“I didn’t say I was sure,” he corrected her. “I only said I was almost sure.”

“But what did he say? What did he do, to give you this idea?”

“I know at any rate that he gets the greatest excitement from watching the spectacle of terror and the destruction of life. In other words, he has a marked sadistic impulse.”

“If he said anything to give you that impression, I’m sure he was just talking for effect. I could imagine Edwin’s doing that—being very dry and ironical, if he guessed why you were questioning him.”

“It was nothing he said,” Harold explained. “I simply had the luck to be there when he noticed one of those big ladder spiders approaching a moth in its web. It was not a pretty sight—neither the spider nor Edwin.”

For a moment from somewhere behind her picture of the familiar harmless Edwin there appeared another, a new one, so quickly gone that she could hardly tell what he looked like. He had merely signaled to her in recognition, as if to remind her that everything familiar and comforting was only a deluding film over the depths where they would meet again, the depths through which all life at every moment was blindly, helplessly groping. Then Edwin was himself once more, and the room, dappled with warm pink sunlight, was the room she had always known.

“I can imagine that it wasn’t pretty,” Daphne said, “but I don’t see that that is very much to go on. Isn’t such an impulse a fairly common one, especially in children? I admit Edwin seems a trifle queer. I could easily believe that in some ways he may be still living in his childhood.”

“Of course such an impulse is common,” Harold exclaimed. “To a certain extent, I suppose you could call it universal. But not to the extent that Edwin showed it—not even in a normal boy.

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