The Lamp on the Ridge

That night — the night after we came back from the station — I could not sleep, and so I was at the window at a quarter to two in the morning when the light came on.

It was up on the ridge, on the eastern shoulder, in the direction of the Drumble — a single light, small but steady, not moving; the light not of a vehicle or a torch being carried but of a lamp set down and left standing. It burned for perhaps twenty minutes. Then it went out, and a minute or so later there was another, lower and further east, at the foot of the ridge where the ground flattens out; and that one burned for a few minutes and went out.

I put on my coat and my boots and went down the back stairs, meaning to see Hollis Nord, whose window had been dark for an hour. But when I got out onto the flagstones the whole west front of the house was in darkness except for the one window I had come from, and when I looked at the groundskeeper's cottage at the corner of the orchard, there was a light in it after all, and it was moving.

I stood in the shadow of the porch and watched, and in a few minutes Hollis Nord came out of the cottage door with the lamp in his hand lowered to his side, so that it showed him only his own boots, and went off up through the orchard without once turning his head. He walked the way a man walks a path he could walk blind, and he was carrying over his other shoulder a canvas bag of the kind that is used to carry hay to stock in winter, and it was heavy enough to bow him slightly to that side.

I have thought about what I did next, and I do not defend it. I followed him, outside the fence line, through the wet grass at the edge of the orchard, keeping a hundred yards to his north, for ten or twelve minutes uphill. He went to the top of the ridge and over, and then down a firebreak on the eastern slope, and then along the old fence toward the Drumble, and he stopped at a place where a stone shed stands in the corner of a fallen field, half buried in blackberry, and he set the lamp on the wall of the shed, and he stood back from the doorway, and he said, quite distinctly, in the ordinary voice of a man speaking to somebody he has known all his life:

"It's only me. Come out and eat."

The blackberry in the doorway moved. What came out of it first was an arm, and then a man, and he was small and quick and thin, in a coat that had been made for somebody larger and had been slept in for weeks, with a beard, and with hands black to the wrist — and when he stood up in the light of the lamp with his shoulders hunched and his head down, eating out of the bag the way a man eats who has been hungry for a long time, I recognised the black jacket, and the hood, and the way he held his hands in his pockets.

I did not speak. I did not move. I lay in the wet grass for ten minutes watching a groundskeeper feed a fugitive, and then I went back to the house the long way round, and I sat down in the front room with the fire dead in the grate, and at four in the morning I wrote it all out for Ronan Varley in the plainest words I had, and I ended the letter with the sentence: I do not know what I have seen, but I know that I have been lied to by a man who has been kind to me, and I do not know which of those two things matters more.

The deputy marshal had gone north to the county seat for the rest of the week and was not due back in Quillon until Friday, though she came back early, on the Thursday, because of a boot, and I will confess that I had decided to say nothing to anyone until Varley had answered me. What changed my mind was breakfast.

I came up at half past seven, and there was no breakfast, and no Hollis Nord. The kitchen was cold. Mrs. Nord was sitting at the long table in the middle of it with her hands flat on the wood and her eyes red, and when I came in she stood up at once, in a way that made me certain she had been waiting to hear the door.

"Dr. Ashby." She was a woman of fifty in a cardigan, and she had been crying for hours, and she had stopped crying at some point and set her face. "I've told my husband I'd stop this and he says we can't and I'm going to tell you the truth of it now because if I don't tell somebody I will not last the winter."

"Mrs. Nord —"

"You saw the light." It was not a question. "You followed him. He knew you did; he heard you in the grass at the top of the ridge and he said nothing to me about it until this morning, when he said, 'The doctor saw us and we are going to tell him, because the alternative is worse.'" She pushed a chair out with her foot. "Sit down. Please. I want to be sitting while I say it."

The man in the blackberry at the corner of the fallen field was her brother. His name was Denny Roux, and he was thirty-eight years old, and eleven months earlier he had been sentenced in the county court to six years for the manslaughter of a man in a bar in Eureka, which he had done with a single blow of his fist, which the court accepted had not been intended to kill, and which had killed. He had been sent to a state facility four hundred miles south and had walked away from a work crew in the second week, because, as Freya Nord put it, her brother had a talent for being where nobody could find him, and because he had made up his mind that he would rather live in a bog on his sister's ridge than do six years for a thing he had not meant.

He had been out there since March. There had been four months of it with the ground dry and the nights mild, and then September, and then the rain. Hollis Nord had been feeding him from the cottage every second or third night, with one gap in it: the nine days at the end of October when the man himself was in Quillon, sleeping in a hostel and buying vitamins, and the ridge was empty and the cottage quiet and the food went up to nobody. They had not told the marshal, and I understood why: Freya Nord's brother had left the facility eleven months ago, and if the county found out where he had been and who had kept him, the groundskeeper would have been charged and the family would have been broken on it.

"He is not a bad man," she said. "Say what you like about the man in Eureka, and I have said it to him myself, and I have not forgiven him. But he is not the thing you are looking for, Dr. Ashby. He is a frightened man in a coat. That is why I am telling you and not the marshal, and why my husband is out on the ridge right now moving him, because since the night the light was seen he has been talking in a way I don't like." She looked up at me, and her face was terrible. "Last week he told me there was something out on the Drumble with him. He said it goes along the old cutting, and it goes at night, and it does not make a sound, and it is as tall as a man's heart, and he says it has been coming closer."

I did not go to the marshal. I have wondered since whether that was right, and I have decided that it was neither right nor wrong, and that both answers would have done damage. What I did was send a message to Ronan Varley, and what he replied, within the hour, was a single line that told me he had been ahead of me for days:

Do not touch the marsh. Let the man stay where he is and be fed. If I am right, he is the one thing in this county that is keeping the young man alive, and I would be grateful if neither of you got him killed before Friday.