Endless Night by Endless night

Author:Endless night
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-06-27T08:54:22.126000+00:00

"Fortune telling?"

"No, not particularly. Why, has she told your fortune?"

"I don't know if you can call it a fortune," said Ellie. "It was more a warning to me against coming here."

"That seems rather odd to me." Major Phillpot's rather bristly eyebrows rose. "She's usually got a honeyed tongue in fortunes. Handsome stranger, marriage bells, six children and a heap of good fortune and money in your hand, pretty lady." He imitated rather unexpectedly the gipsy whine of her voice.

"The gipsies used to camp here a lot when I was a boy," he said. "I suppose I got fond of them then, though they were a thieving lot, of course. But I've always been attracted to them. As long as you don't expect them to be law-abiding, they're all right. Many a tin mug of gipsy stew I've had as a schoolboy. We felt the family owed Mrs. Lee something, she saved the life of a brother of mine when he was a child. Fished him out of a pond when he'd gone through the ice."

I made a clumsy gesture and knocked a glass ashtray off a table. It smashed into fragments.

I picked up the pieces and Major Phillpot helped me.

"I expect Mrs. Lee's quite harmless really," said Ellie. "I was very foolish to have been so scared."

"Scared, were you?" His eyebrows rose again. "It was as bad as that, was it?"

"I don't wonder she was afraid," I said quickly. "It was almost more like a threat than a warning."

"A threat!" He sounded incredulous.

"Well, it sounded that way to me. And then the first night we moved in here something else happened."

I told him about the stone crashing through the window.

"I'm afraid there are a good many young hooligans about nowadays," he said, "though we haven't got many of them round here - not nearly as bad as some places. Still, it happens, I'm sorry to say." He looked at Ellie. "I'm very sorry you were frightened. It was a beastly thing to happen, your first night moving in."

"Oh, I've got over it now," said Ellie. "It wasn't only that, it was - it was something else that happened not long afterwards."

I told him about that too. We had come down one morning and we had found a dead bird skewered through with a knife and a small piece of paper with it which said in an illiterate scrawl "Get out of here if you know what's good for you."

Phillpot looked really angry then. He said, "You should have reported that to the police."

"We didn't want to," I said. "After all, that would only have put whoever it is even more against us."

"Well, that kind of thing has got to be stopped," said Phillpot. Suddenly he became the magistrate. "Otherwise, you know, people will go on with the thing. Think it's funny, I suppose. Only - only this sounds a bit more than fun. Nasty - malicious - It's not," he said, rather as though he was talking to himself, "it's

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