Free Shadows 7 by Charles L. Grant (Ed.) Page A

shadow. The car was through the gates before she wondered how a shadow could surround a house. She craned over the garden wall as Richard parked the car. It was a ditch, no doubt some trick the Hodges had picked up in Italy, something to do with their gardening. "They're back," she murmured when Richard had pulled down the door of the garage.
    "Saints preserve us, another dead evening," he said, and she had to hush him, for the Hodges were sitting in their lounge and had grinned out at the clatter of the door.
    All the same, the Hodges seemed to have even less regard than usual for other people's feelings. During the night she was wakened by Mozart's 40th, to which the conductor had added the rhythm section Mozart had forgotten to include. Richard mumbled and thrashed in slow motion as she went to the window. An August dawn glimmered on the Hodges' gnomes, and beyond them in the lounge the Hodges were sitting quite as stonily. She might have shouted but for waking Richard. Stiff with the dawn chill, she limped back to bed.
    She listened to the silence between movements and wondered if this time they might give the rest of the" symphony a chance. No, here came the first movement again, reminding her of the night the Hodges had come over, when she and Richard had performed a Haydn sonata. "I haven't gone into Haydn," Harry Hodge had declared, wriggling his eyebrows. "Get it? Gone into hidin'." She sighed and turned over and remembered the week she and Richard had just spent on the waterways, fields, and grassy banks flowing by lake Delius, a landscape they had hardly boarded all week, preferring to let the villages remain untouched images of villages. Before the Mozart had played through a third time she was asleep.
    Most of the next day was given over to violin lessons, her pupils making up for the lost week. By the time Richard came home from lecturing, she had dinner almost ready. Afterward they sat sipping the last of the wine as evening settled on the long gardens. Richard went to the piano and played La Cathedrale Engloutie, and the last tolling of the drowned cathedral was fading when someone knocked slowly at the front door.
    It was Harry Hodge. He looked less bronzed by the Mediterranean sun than made up, rather patchily. "The slides are ready," he said through his fixed smile. "Can you come now?"
    "Right now? It really is quite late." Richard wasn't hiding his resentment, whether at Hodges' assumption that he need only call for them to come—not so much an invitation anymore as a summons—or at the way Hodge must have waited outside until he thought the Debussy had gone on long enough. "Oh, very well," Richard said. "Provided there aren't too many."
    He must have shared Angela's thought: best to get it over with, the sooner the better. None of their neighbors bothered with the Hodges. Harry Hodge looked stiff, and thinner than when he'd gone away. "Aren't you feeling well?" she asked, concerned.
    "Just all that walking and pushing the mother-in-law."
    He was wearing stained outdoor clothes. He must have been gardening; he always was. He looked ready to wait for them to join him, until Richard said firmly, "We won't be long."
    They had another drink first, since the Hodges never offered. "Don't wake me unless I snore," Richard muttered as they ventured up the Hodges' path, past gnomes of several nations, souvenirs of previous holidays. It must be the gathering night that made the ditch appear deeper and wider. The ditch reminded her of the basement where Harry developed his slides. She was glad their house had no basement: she didn't like dark places.
    When Harry opened the door, he looked as if he hadn't stopped smiling. "Glad you could come," he said, so tonelessly that at first Angela heard it as a question she was tempted to answer truthfully. If he was exhausted, he shouldn't have been so eager to have them around. They followed him down the dark hall into the lounge.
    Only the wall lights were on. Most of the