Clay Read online

  ***

  We found Jeremy Bone quite easily. Apparently, he had simply secured the hangrope to the crossbar of the bell, slipped the noose about his neck, and jumped into the black well of the tower. Without a word, Wickford and I drew him up to our level. I loosened the rope; the fragile body lay sprawled on the tower floor in a puddle of moonlight. The eyes bulged; the head was twisted at an ugly angle. The body was still warm, but Jeremy Bone was not breathing. His neck was broken.

  Wickford sounded sick.

  “I tell you, it’s mad, Lambert. We’re rational men of science. Not ghost-hunting women. There must be a more logical answer.”

  “And that vision in the dark?”

  “Mutual delusion… something we both thought we saw. Something we expected to see.” The big head shook, staring down at the limp body. “No. I won’t believe it. It’s physically impossible! A mere boy strangle a man as strong as Gaunt? Nonsense! Why his hands wouldn’t have been powerful enough… Besides, he always wore those gloves, gray gloves that would never leave the sort of stain we saw on Gaunt’s throat.”

  “But, if he took off the gloves?…”

  Wickford did not answer. The bell moaned a death knell. We exchanged one more glance, then I knelt beside the corpse of Jeremy Bone. I unsnapped the wrist-button, and slowly peeled the glove from his clawed right hand…

  ***

  Now, in the quiet passage of days and nights that comprise my life as a general practitioner in a small town, there are moments when I might bring myself to believe it was all a hellish nightmare; that there is, indeed, a more “logical” explanation of the events which led to Peter Gaunt’s death; or that Doctor Wickford retired because he wanted to, and not because he could never again be certain—not because he could never rid himself of Gaunt’s quiet voice: “Can we ever draw definitely the boundary line between sanity and insanity?” Perhaps I could tell myself that madness is a definable state after all, and creatures like Jeremy Bone are truly insane, not merely pitiable beings who have seen beyond a veil that should never be drawn aside. I could rationalize; and, in the end, I might convince myself. But for one detail.

  It will never be possible to explain away the thing I saw that night in the Chapel tower. As long as I live, I shall hear the mournful booming of the bell and see frosty moonlight shifting across Jeremy Bone’s hand; that tremendous, sinewy hand of a man of prodigious strength; that hand whose gnarled fingers were coated with clay from the crumbling walls of an ancient grave.