A Dark Dividing (51 page)
Authors: Sarah Rayne
Clustering shadows lay across the narrow track as she walked back down to the road, and Roz quickened her step, trying not to hear the soft rustlings and the faint whisperings, determinedly not looking at the dense blackness of the trees on each side of the path.
Sonia’s ghost was still with her, of course. Sonia had loved Mortmain and she had never been afraid of it; she had never minded the swirling echoes or the eeriness. If there were any ghosts there, she had said, they were the ghosts of people from the stories. How could those people be frightening when she knew them so well?
But Roz had told Sonia, over and over, to stay away from Mortmain: you had to be careful of such places, she had said. Supposing Sonia met an old tramp in there or a gypsy? Supposing she fell down and broke her leg or her arm? But Sonia had only turned away angrily, and said she hated being fussed over. If ever she vanished, Roz would know where to come looking for her, she had said. Sonia could occasionally be wilful, of course; she could even be hurtful as well, saying that she hated living with Roz, she hated not being let to go to school or do the things other girls did. Roz had never minded it when Sonia said this; she knew that it was important to protect Sonia. Sonia was so special, so precious.
Then had come the day when Sonia had vanished, and Roz had gone looking for her, She had seen Simone run out of Mortmain as if the furies were pursuing her—there had been a moment when she had thought it was Sonia, of course, but Sonia had never been able to run like that, or to move so swiftly and so easily. When Roz eventually found Sonia’s body she had known, instantly and for certain, what had happened. She had known that somehow the twins had found one another (how had they done that?) and she had known that the bitch’s whelp had killed Sonia. Clambering down inside the well-shaft and bringing out Sonia’s poor, broken body, Roz had made a vow that one day she would find Simone—God would arrange that she did so—and when she found her she would kill her.
To begin with she had thought it would be easy to track Simone down—she had found the little house where that bitch, Melissa, had brought Simone to live, and in the middle of the anguish and the grief there had been a tiny consolation in knowing that one day those two would pay for Sonia’s death. But before she could make any kind of plan Melissa had vanished from Weston Fferna, leaving only a house agent’s sale board in the garden and no forwarding address anywhere in the village. Sly, you see! Sly as a snake! But there would come a day of reckoning for the creature, Roz had always known that, and now the day was here.
As she went down to the road the thin moon came out from behind a patch of cloud and she looked at her watch. It was a quarter to one. Much too late to book into some local hotel, and in any case she did not want to draw attention to herself. She would drive back to the motorway and check in at one of the service motels. She had never done that before but she knew they were impersonal and therefore anonymous.
Then tomorrow she could drive back here to check on Simone’s cage. It might take the creature a day or two to actually die. Roz wanted to be there when it happened.
Charlotte Quinton’s diaries: 21st November 1914
It is a few minutes after midnight and although I am so tired I can barely hold a pen, I know I will not be able to sleep until I have set down what happened this evening.
I have no recollection whatsoever of our journey to the village near to Machynlleth, although I think Floy cursed our driver several times for going too slow, and at least twice for taking a wrong turning. (One forgets at times that Floy has travelled so much, and that he has spent the last few months moving around France and the Low Countries, gathering stories for his newspapers, and sometimes helping the wounded men from the battlefields.)
Even though there were two box lanterns hung on the sides of the trap, and even though there were no clouds and the night was clear and still, the narrow country roads were dark and difficult. High hedge-rows shut us in on both sides, and after a while I began to feel as if we had been jogging rhythmically through the darkness for ever and that we would go on doing so for ever. At one stage I began to wonder if this was the purgatory that Catholic priests warn of, because it felt as if we were caught in an endless grey misery, stuck between two worlds, unable to go forward or backwards.
But even worlds sometimes end, for eventually we came to lighted buildings and some semblance of life and movement, and ahead of us was a village green with a rather ugly iron cross at its centre depicting something or commemorating someone. On the far side was a long, low-roofed building, probably once some kind of tithe barn, brightly lit from within, with a number of people going inside it.
We paid a fee and were shown to uncomfortable wooden bench seats—could not help thinking it a dreadful irony that the first time I would see my daughters properly would be from a wooden seat in a village barn. All around us people were laughing and talking and there was an air of pleased expectancy. A man was seated at a badly-tuned piano, rather dispiritedly playing snatches by Léhar and Strauss, and the room was getting hotter and hotter, and filling up with various bucolic smells.
I remember very little about the first part of the performances, although I know the audience displayed some unease at the sight of the dwarfs and then of a grossly fat woman and a skeletally thin man who sang a duet. My heart—that unfailing and often infuriating indicator of emotion!—was beating so fast and so furiously that I was afraid I might swoon before the twins appeared, and there was the feeling of something hovering directly over my head, beating huge invisible wings. In a very few minutes I would see them, I would see my babies…
And then the pianist began to play the light, vaguely Oriental tune of ‘Three Little Maids from School Are We’, and without warning they were there. Sorrel and Viola, the two furled-up beings who had lain together in their cradle… I had named them for harebells and wood sorrel, and the first time—the only time—I had seen them, they had been lying into that helpless embrace and their tiny hands had curled trustfully around my fingers…
They were still in the embrace, but it was no longer the curled-up rosebud embrace I had kept in my memory. It was ugly and unnatural, something to pity and be shocked by. Their voices as they sang were sweet and true and heart-breakingly young, and as long as they remained still there was nothing much out of the ordinary about them. But towards the end of the second song they performed a short dance, and I think that if I live to be a hundred, and if the world freezes and hell burns itself to a cinder, I shall never—
never
!—forget the sight of that dance. I cannot possibly describe it here, it would be disloyal to my babies. But it was the most piteous, most appalling thing I have ever seen, then or since.
The audience felt it as well; a shiver of pity and repulsion stirred them, and some of the women turned uncertainly to their husbands. I thought: I cannot bear this, I simply cannot bear it, but I was aware of Floy taking my hand and I remembered that it had to be borne, because
they
had to bear it. I clung to Floy as if he was the only sane and good thing left in a vicious, splintered world.
But when the performance was over the twins stepped back behind a curtain, and the small audience was ushered politely but firmly outside, and before either Floy or I could do anything about it, two big covered carts mounted on drays were driven away, and we realized that Dancy’s performers had gone off into the night.
I said, in a voice numb with misery, ‘We’ve lost them. Oh Floy—’
‘No, we haven’t lost them,’ said Floy, softly. ‘Stay with the people. Move around and listen to what’s being said. Pick up the clues, Charlotte.’
He moved across the square and I did the same, going to stand near to a small group of women, not precisely eavesdropping, and certainly not
appearing
as if I was eavesdropping (unpleasant practice), merely looking as if I was waiting for my husband to rejoin me. But listening to everything, absorbing all that was being said, just as Floy was doing.
And within a half hour we knew that Matt Dancy had taken his people to a village a few miles on Machynlleth’s south side. ‘Staying at the Pheasant Inn,’ said one of the women in my group, busily informative. ‘My sister’s girl, she helps out there of an evening, and the boss told her to make up extra beds. Quite pleased, they are. Brings a bit of prosperity to the area, see.’
‘We’ll go out to the Pheasant first thing in the morning,’ said Floy as the little trap was jogged back along the moonlit lanes. ‘Yes, my love, I know you’d like to be hammering on the doors right away, but it’ll be midnight before we find the place and I’d prefer not to confront Matt Dancy in the middle of the night.’
I did not speak, and he glanced at me. ‘Charlotte, it will be better this way, I promise you. I don’t want Dancy slithering out of our reach under cover of darkness.’
He’s right, of course, even though it kills me to admit it. And now, writing this in my room at the Bridge, even though I have found Viola and Sorrel, I think I am more desolate than before. I cannot bear knowing that they are being exploited in this pitiful way, and I am terrified that when Matt Dancy knows who I am, he will find a way to spirit them away again.
Unless I can think of a way to outwit him.
Simone came out of the chlorpromazine gradually.
Her head was aching, and she felt weak and slightly sick. But her senses were clearing, and she understood that the hard-eyed woman who had brought her to Mortmain had shut her in here and left her.
She was still by no means sure that she was not inside the nightmare, because this was how it must feel to be buried alive, trapped fathoms down in the earth. Above her was Mortmain, and she had the feeling that its immense weight and the grim echoing emptiness of its rooms was pressing down on her.
But I will get out, said Simone determinedly. I think this might be really happening, and of course I’ll get out. I’ll be able to snap the lock or force one of the iron bars out. Or if I can’t do that someone will miss me and start looking. But how long would it be before that happened? And would anyone think of looking inside Mortmain House?
The blackness was so absolute that she could not make out the time on her watch, and she had no idea how long she had been here because time seemed to move at a different rate when you could not see. She huddled into a corner of the cramped space and tried not to hear the little whisperings and scufflings all around her. They were pretty spooky sounds, but they were ordinary and explainable. Rats and bats and ravens and owls. All of them a bit dark and sinister, no matter how much you tried to ignore them. The spectral owl, dwelling in his hollow in the old grey tower—night’s fatal bellman, Macbeth had called him, and if Macbeth did not know about fate and its heralds, then no one did. And the raven with his dreaming demon’s eyes trailing his own lamplit fantasies in his wake… Yes, owls and ravens were undoubtedly creatures loaded with the macabre, and bats and rats had never had a good press, of course. Not to be thought of in this situation.
