Free Appleby's End by Michael Innes Page A

about the future to consult the local squire as if he were a black and midnight hag are likelier to have had a past worth writing up. Though I don’t exactly see why.”
    â€œIt wasn’t their past and it wasn’t their future either – except now and then.” Appleby, suddenly incisive, had scrambled from his burrow and was sitting in the icy air, staring across what was now again a moon- and snow-blanched country. “Yours is a forty-year-old story or more – but uncommonly fascinating, I’m bound to say. And, very likely, you would have supplied Ranulph with excellent copy, despite your blameless past and empty future. You’re quite sure it will be empty, by the way?”
    â€œI shall have one or two one-man shows.” Judith Raven too had emerged. “Friends will praise the stuff in sixpenny papers. And before I settle down to my later spinsterhood at Dream there will be several love affairs with practised but chronically inept intellectuals, and perhaps an episode of farcical but painful bewilderment with a dumb and passionate D H Lawrencian yeoman. Or possibly all that is just girlish fantasy.”
    â€œI suspect it is. In fact, your actual future is going to be quite different, I should say. Still, there’s the point.”
    â€œWhat point?”
    â€œThere’s what Ranulph was interested in – and what explains your blind, tappity-tappity companion of childhood. Of course people’s pasts aren’t of much utility to manufacturers of sensational fiction – nor their actual futures either. But their fantasies are.”
    â€œI don’t understand.” Judith was visible now, a slim silhouette against a silver-grey infinity. “Or do you mean…?”
    â€œYes! That was what Ranulph in his snooping round must have developed a technique for eliciting. Perhaps he just took tea with the women and poured beer down the men – that and had rather a subtle way of leading them on. He made stories out of people’s daydreams – out of good, current Victorian daydreams. No wonder his books sold in their time. Of course he had his flair for writing up and heightening actual sensations too – putting the knobs on, as you expressed it. But he had a tap-root on all the eccentric and lurid and scandalous things people saw themselves doing. And sometimes, of course – and perhaps years later – they would really do them , or something tolerably like. And there it would all be already in one of Ranulph Raven’s stories.”
    â€œSo the blind man–”
    â€œEven among illiterate people” – Appleby went on unheeding – “this would sometimes seep out – and the result would be a popular notion that his stories were really a species of prophetic books, crammed with the future. Occasionally, no doubt, people would recall letting slip their less presentable projects to Ranulph. But they’d keep quiet about it. And – yes – now you see the explanation of your blind man. As a lad he cherished a nasty plan to liquidate his brother. He continued to cherish it. But he remembered having let it out to Ranulph. And he had heard the legend and how Ranulph’s stories were all mixed up with actual events. So he had a fear – probably pretty baseless – that it would be risky to commit a crime certain cardinal features of which might have been put into a book donkey’s years before. Hence his fury on being told by your brother that there was such a yarn of Ranulph’s. If he had been scared that would mean he was afraid the published story might lead to the detection of something he had once done . But he wasn’t scared; he was disappointed and angry. He was disappointed and angry because he judged that in the circumstances it would be unsafe – now, years later – to go ahead .”
    â€œI must say you have quite the professional touch.” There was a rustling