Tony Walker

Amelia dragged herself to the great stone-vaulted kitchen and raked up the fire.

She had begun to tremble again, and never did she glance behind her.

Once she paused, as though listening, her face revealing the greatest anxiety.

Several times her mouth moved as though she were muttering something, but no sound came.

Presently she finished cooking and took the results to the dining room where Miss Pendleham was already seated.

The meal was eaten in dead silence and very quickly, for Miss Pendleham always attacked her food like a starving panther.

On the wall facing Amelia was a tattered 17th-century tapestry,

It depicted a company of knights and ladies riding in pairs along a sinister serpentine path.

On the left of the path were three rotting corpses in open coffins.

The air above them was thronged with vile flying things.

Amelia's eyes always flickered around the room, trying not to see it.

Miss Pendleham watched her covertly.

At the end of the meal she said what she always said, wash up quickly and come and read to me.

Very good, Miss Pendleham.

When she got back to the drawing-room, Miss Pendleham handed her a book.

It was a translation of the Abbé Boissart's Life of Gilles Deray, realistically illustrated.

Amelia had already read it out endless times before.

She read well, though the details of the abattoir ritual came oddly from her precise and virginal voice.

Presently Miss Pendleham stopped her.

Something very similar, she said in her high metallic tone, is known to have been done here by an ancestor of my own.