Dark Companions (6 page)

In the hall the thing she had thought was Maureen’s coat shifted wakefully. Alma ignored it, but her flesh crept hot and cold. At the far end of the hall mirror, a figure approached, arms extended as if blindly. Alma smiled; it was too like a childish fear to frighten her: “enjoyably creepy”—she tried to recapture her mood of the morning, but every organ of her body felt hot and pounding. She broke and ran to her room; the light, oddly, was still on.

In the rooms below, her father’s desk creaked; the flower arrangements writhed. Did it matter? Alma argued desperately. There was no lock on her door, but she refused to barricade it; there was nothing solid abroad in the house, nothing to harm her but the lure of her own fears. Her flute—she wouldn’t play it once she found it; she’d go to bed with its protection. She moved round the bed and saw the flute, overlaid by
Victimes de
Devoir.
The flute was bent in half.

One tear pressed from Alma’s eyes before she realised the full horror. As she whirled, completely disoriented, a mirror crashed below. Something shrieked towards her through the corridors. She sank onto the bed, defenceless, wishing all were over. Music blasted from the record player, the
Nocturne
; Alma leapt up and screamed. “In roaring he shall rise,” the voice bawled, “and on the surface—” A music stand was hurled to the floor. “—
die
!”
The needle scraped across the record and clicked off. The walls seemed on the point of tearing, bulging inwards. Alma no longer cared. She’d screamed once; she could do no more. Now she waited.

When the figure formed deep in the mirror she knew that all was over. She faced it, drained of feeling. It grew closer, arms stretched out, its face inflated grey by gas. Alma wept; it was horrid. She knew who it was; a shaft of truth had pierced the suffocating warmth of her delirium. The suicide had possessed the house, was the house; he had waited for someone like her. “Go on,” she sobbed at him, “take me!” The bloated cheeks moved in a swollen grin; the arms stretched out for her and vanished.

The house was empty. Alma was surrounded by a vacuum into which something must rush. She stood up shaking and fell into the vacuum; her sight was torn away. She tried to move; there was no longer any muscle to respond. She felt nothing, but utter horror closed her in. Somewhere she sensed her body, moving happily on her bedroom carpet, picking up her ruined flute, breathing a hideous note into it. She tried to scream. Impossible.

Only in dreams can houses scream for help.

Down There

“Hurry along there,” Steve called as the girls trooped down the office. “Last one tonight. Mind the doors.”

The girls smiled at Elaine as they passed her desk, but their smiles meant different things: just like you to make things more difficult for the rest of us, looks like you’ve been kept in after school, suppose you’ve nothing better to do, fancy having to put up with him by yourself. She didn’t give a damn what they thought of her. No doubt they earned enough without working overtime, since all they did with their money was squander it on makeup and new clothes.

She only wished Steve wouldn’t make a joke of everything: even the lifts, one of which had broken down entirely after sinking uncontrollably to the bottom of the shaft all day. She was glad that hadn’t happened to her, even though she gathered the sub-basement was no longer so disgusting. Still, the surviving lift had rid her of everyone now, including Mr Williams, the union representative, who’d tried the longest to persuade her not to stay. He still hadn’t forgiven the union for accepting a temporary move to this building; perhaps he was taking it out on her. Well, he’d gone now, into the November night and rain.

It had been raining all day. The warehouses outside the windows looked like melting chocolate; the river and the canals were opaque with tangled ripples. Cottages and terraces, some of them derelict, crowded up the steep hills towards the disused mines. Through the skeins of water on the glass their infrequent lights looked shaky as candle flames.

She was safe from all that, in the long office above five untenanted floors and two basements. Ranks of filing cabinets stuffed with blue Inland Revenue files divided the office down the middle; smells of dust and old paper hung in the air. Beneath a fluttering fluorescent tube protruding files drowsed, jerked awake. Through the steamy window above an unquenchable radiator, she could just make out the frame where the top section of the fire escape should be.

“Are you feeling exploited?” Steve said.

He’d heard Mr Williams’ parting shot, calling her the employers’ weapon against solidarity. “No, certainly not.” She wished he would let her be quiet for a while. “I’m feeling hot,” she said.

“Yes, it is a bit much.” He stood up, mopping his forehead theatrically. “I’ll go and sort out Mr Tuttle.”

She doubted that he would find the caretaker, who was no doubt hidden somewhere with a bottle of cheap rum. At least he tried to hide his drinking, which was more than one could say for the obese half-chewed sandwiches he left on windowsills, in the room where tea was brewed, even once on someone’s desk.

She turned idly to the window behind her chair and watched the indicator in the lobby counting down. Steve had reached the basement now. The letter B flickered, then brightened: he’d gone down to the sub-basement, which had been meant to be kept secret from the indicator and from everyone except the holder of the key. Perhaps the finding of the cache down there had encouraged Mr Tuttle to be careless with food.

She couldn’t help growing angry. If the man who had built these offices had had so much money, why hadn’t he put it to better use? The offices had been merely a disguise for the sub-basement, which was to have been his refuge. What had he feared? War, revolution, a nuclear disaster? All anyone knew was that he’d spent the months before he had been certified insane in smuggling food down there. He’d wasted all that food, left it there to rot, and he’d had no thought for the people who would have to work in the offices: no staircases, a fire escape that fell apart when someone tried to paint it—but she was beginning to sound like Mr Williams, and there was no point in brooding.

The numbers were counting upwards, slow as a child’s first sum. Eventually Steve appeared, the solution. “No sign of him,” he said. “He’s somewhere communing with alcohol, I expect. Most of the lights are off, which doesn’t help.”

That sounded like one of Mr Tuttle’s ruses. “Did you go right down?” she said. “What’s it like down there?”

“Huge. They say it’s much bigger than any of the floors. You could play two football games at once in there.” Was he exaggerating? His face was bland as a silent comedian’s except for raised eyebrows. “They left the big doors open when they cleaned it up. If there were any lights I reckon you could see for miles. I’m only surprised it didn’t cut into one of the sewers.”

“I shouldn’t think it could be any more smelly.”

“It still reeks a bit, that’s true. Do you want a look? Shall I take you down?” When he dodged towards her as though to carry her away, she sat forward rigidly and held the arms of her chair against the desk. “No thank you,” she said, though she’d felt a start of delicious apprehension.

“Did you ever hear what was supposed to have happened while they were cleaning up all the food? Tuttle told me, if you can believe him.” She didn’t want to hear; Mr Tuttle had annoyed her enough for one day. She leafed determinedly through a file, until Steve went up the office to his desk.

For a while she was able to concentrate. The sounds of the office merged into a background discreet as muzak: the rustle of papers, the rushes of the wind, the buzz of the defective fluorescent like an insect trying to bumble its way out of the tube. She manoeuvred files across her desk. This man was going to be happy, since they owed him money. This fellow wasn’t, since he owed them some.

But the thought of the food had settled on her like the heat. Only this morning, in the room where the tea urn stood, she’d found an ancient packet of Mr Tuttle’s sandwiches in the waste-bin. No doubt the packet was still there, since the cleaners were refusing to work until the building was made safe. She seemed unable to rid herself of the memory.

No, it wasn’t a memory she was smelling. As she glanced up, wrinkling her nostrils, she saw that Steve was doing so too. “Tuttle,” he said, grimacing.

As though he’d given a cue, they heard movement on the floor below. Someone was dragging a wet cloth across linoleum. Was the caretaker doing the cleaners’ job? More likely he’d spilled a bottle and was trying to wipe away the evidence. “I’ll get him this time,” Steve said, and ran towards the lobby.

Was he making too much noise? The soft moist dragging on the floor below had ceased. The air seemed thick with heat and dust and the stench of food; when she lit a cigarette, the smoke loomed reprovingly above her. She opened the thin louvers at the top of the nearest window, but that brought no relief. There was nothing else for it; she opened the window that gave onto the space where the fire escape should be.

It was almost too much for her. A gust of rain dashed in, drenching her face while she clung to the handle. The window felt capable of smashing wide, of snatching her out into the storm. She managed to anchor the bar to the sill, and leaned out into the night to let the rain wash away the smell.

Nine feet below her she could see the fifth-floor platform of the fire escape, its iron mesh slippery and streaming. The iron stairs that hung from it, poised to swing down to the next platform, seemed to dangle into a deep pit of rain whose sides were incessantly collapsing. The thought of having to jump to the platform made her flinch back; she could imagine herself losing her footing, slithering off into space.

She was about to close the window, for the flock of papers on her desk had begun to flap, when she glimpsed movement in the unlit warehouse opposite and just below her. She was reminded of a maggot, writhing in food. Of course, that was because she was glimpsing it through the warehouse windows, small dark holes. It was reflected from her building, which was why it looked so large and puffily vague. It must be Mr Tuttle, for as it moved, she heard a scuffling below her, retreating from the lifts.

She’d closed the window by the time Steve returned. “You didn’t find him, did you? Never mind,” she said, for he was frowning.

Did he feel she was spying on him? At once his face grew blank. Perhaps he resented her knowing, first that he’d gone down to the sub-basement, now that he’d been outwitted. When he sat at his desk at the far end of the office, the emptiness between them felt like a rebuff. “Do you fancy some tea?” she said to placate him.

“I’ll make it. A special treat.” He jumped up at once and strode to the lobby.

Why was he so eager? Five minutes later, as she leafed through someone’s private life, she wondered if he meant to creep up on her, if that was the joke he had been planning behind his mask. Her father had used to pounce on her to make her shriek when she was little—when he had still been able to. She turned sharply, but Steve had pulled open the doors of the out-of-work lift shaft and was peering down, apparently listening. Perhaps it was Mr Tuttle he meant to surprise, not her.

The tea was hot and fawn, but little else. Why did it seem to taste of the lingering stench? Of course, Steve hadn’t closed the door of the room off the lobby, where Mr Tuttle’s sandwiches must still be festering. She hurried out and slammed the door with the hand that wasn’t covering her mouth.

On impulse she went to the doors of the lift shaft where Steve had been listening. They opened easily as curtains; for a moment she was teetering on the edge. The shock blurred her vision, but she knew it wasn’t Mr Tuttle who was climbing the lift cable like a fat pale monkey on a stick. When she screwed up her eyes and peered into the dim well, of course there was nothing.

Steve was watching her when she returned to her desk. His face was absolutely noncommittal. Was he keeping something from her—a special joke, perhaps? Here it came; he was about to speak. “How’s your father?” he said.

It sounded momentarily like a comedian’s catchphrase. “Oh, he’s happier now,” she blurted. “They’ve got a new stock of large print books in the library.”

“Is there someone who can sit with him?”

“Sometimes.” The community spirit had faded once the mine owners had moved on, leaving the area honeycombed with mines, burdened with unemployment. People seemed locked into themselves, afraid of being robbed of the little they had left.

“I was wondering if he’s all right on his own.”

“He’ll have to be, won’t he.” She was growing angry; he was as bad as Mr Williams, reminding her of things it was no use remembering.

“I was just thinking that if you want to slope off home, I won’t tell anyone. You’ve already done more work than some of the rest of them would do in an evening.”

She clenched her fists beneath the desk to hold on to her temper. He must want to leave early himself and so was trying to persuade her. No doubt he had problems of his own—perhaps they were the secret behind his face—but he mustn’t try to make her act dishonestly. Or was he testing her? She knew so little about him. “He’ll be perfectly safe,” she said. “He can always knock on the wall if he needs anyone.”

Though his face stayed blank his eyes, frustrated now, gave him away. Five minutes later he was craning out of the window over the fire escape while Elaine pinned flapping files down with both hands. Did he really expect his date, if that was his problem, to come out on a night like this? It would be just like a man to expect her to wait outside.

The worst of it was that Elaine felt disappointed, which was absurd and infuriating. She knew perfectly well that the only reason he was working tonight was that one of the seniors had to do so. Good God, what had she expected to come of an evening alone with him? They were both in their forties—they knew what they wanted by now, which in his case was bound to be someone younger than Elaine. She hoped he and his girlfriend would be very happy. Her hands on the files were tight fists.