House of Bells (32 page)

‘That's how we communicate,' Mary said, ‘between the world below and the world above. Fire and smoke are the tools we use, the gods and we. The gods and me, at least. Though I'm not alone. Other believers have other ways to talk to heaven and to hear, I am sure; but fire has always been a tradition. From burnt offerings to altar candles. And smoke, incense, that too. From Catholic thurifers to Chinese joss. I use candles and joss in my own worship, of course, to catch the attention of the gods and speed my prayers on high. Sometimes they choose to use the same means, to bless me with an answer.

‘I've always felt a special connection to fire,' she went on musingly. ‘From a child, I knew there was importance in the flame. More significance than simply warmth and light. The people here let the distinctions blur, and I'm sorry about that. Even the captain doesn't see what seems so obvious to me. Even though he's spent so much time in the east, far more than I have . . .

‘That's where the scales finally fell from my eyes, you see. That's where I saw what fire really means. The captain sent me to India, where people live closer to nature and closer to their gods, both at once; where fire is still a clear messenger, as it used to be for us. More than a messenger, indeed: where people use it to convey their very souls to the next life. I saw a young woman, newly widowed, dressed in her wedding clothes and seated on her husband's funeral pyre. I saw the fire lit; I saw her burn beside him. She never stirred to flee the flames, she never raised her voice. Only her hands – I saw her lift her hands to heaven as she burned. That, yes. That has stayed with me all these years.'

She was sure that it had. Hands, clutching out of flame: how not? Never ask if the girl had been tied to her chair, perhaps, or drugged. Or both. Mary had the image that she wanted, with the meaning that she chose. In this place, that was enough. More than enough. Fire and smoke, and hands to do her work for her, oh yes . . .

Mary didn't need her own hands, apparently, not any more. She spoke a word, and all the candle flames stiffened in response. ‘Blessed be the gods,' she said quietly, her gaze calm and settled. ‘Now, I have prayers to say, but I can do that quietly in my head and still listen to you. I've told you my story. Why don't you tell me yours? Oh, I know who you are, Grace Harley, and I know what the public knows, what the papers say about you. The party girl who put the Tory party in bed with the Communist party, or might have done. Found guilty of taking money for sex, from the men who were acquitted of paying it. That's always the way. But I think there's more to you than that, isn't there? You've made some devil's pact with the yellow press, I know that too – that you're here like Frank was, to spy for them – but it's more than that too. You may as well tell me, you know. No secrets now. It's just you and me and the gods in here. Nobody will be coming through that door until we're done.'

A sudden fierce light stood to confirm that. She had set candles in jars on either side of the double doors – but that was no candlelight that leapt out of them. They were pillars of light, rather, cold and tall, as broad around as her arm, thrusting up full-width from the mouths of their jars and then criss-crossing like laces, back and forth across the space between them. She couldn't imagine what would happen to anyone who forced the doors open and tried to come through. Perhaps the light would hold the doors closed, against any human strength; or else nobody would dream of disturbing Mary while they remained shut. One or the other, she supposed. Or both.

Well, then. No reason not to share her secrets. She never had, with anyone – but one way or the other, it wasn't going to matter here. Whoever eventually walked out of that door, they were going to do it alone.

She said, ‘I was pregnant, when they sent me to jail before the trial.'

‘Yes, dear, I know that. The whole world knows. Pregnant and unmarried and couldn't even name the father, there had been so many candidates.'

Couldn't, or wouldn't. But she didn't interrupt; Mary had a head of steam and was forging onward.

‘What better proof could you offer that you were guilty of everything they said? No wonder they locked you away. But then you lost the baby, and the judge took pity on you.'
I wouldn't have done
, her manner said.
Never mind what's happened since, or whatever's happened here. Hippy morals, never mind those either. Guilty as charged, and you met your just deserts.

No. Never that. No punishment enough: not even this raw confession, made in raw light to a woman who was mad, and who despised her.

She said, ‘I didn't lose my baby. I killed him.'

She said, ‘While he was inside me still, while I was inside. They were going to make abortion legal, but I couldn't, you know. I couldn't
wait
. He wouldn't hold still and not grow and just wait until the law let me get rid of him.'

She said, ‘It would've been easier on the outside; I could've managed it better. I knew people, outside. Of course I did. But that didn't help me in Holloway. So I asked the women there, and one of them got me something. I don't know what – a powder, green and bitter it was. I mixed it with water and swallowed it, and she said it'd make me miscarry. It . . . didn't do that.'

There were tears leaking down her face now, but she ignored them and so did Mary. ‘I was ill for a few days, I bled a little, but that was all. Only, then I didn't get any bigger, and it didn't move any more, it didn't kick; and the doctors said it was dead, my baby, but I still had to carry it until. Until . . .'

That was it, apparently. A word that grounded on a memory too dreadful to discuss, a door she wouldn't open, a place she refused to go: the day she'd given birth, if that was what it was, to the son that she'd killed weeks before.

No punishment enough. Certainly nothing that Mary could do to her now, maybe not even anything the house had to offer. She had a terrible respect for the house, its own judgement, its insight; more than she'd ever had for the systems of law, the man who had sat in judgement over her. She'd seen too many judges with their trousers off.

Mary was something else again. Not constrained. Not sane, perhaps, but powerful even if she wouldn't admit it. And lethal, of course, that too.

Even now she might claim that she was praying, but what she was really doing, she was setting up to kill.

Where Grace sat – and she was all Grace now, all full of that self and what she had done, full and spilling over – there were candles on either side of her, and their lights were rising: nothing like regular candle-flames, and nothing either like the interlaced pillar-lights that kept the door. These rose like string and stretched like wire, bright golden fierce wires that bent back on themselves and twisted around, scribbled lines in mid-air that burned and burned and would not go out.

Lines that made shapes, yes.

Lines that etched two hands in light, right there in the air, between her and Mary: two hands of flame, each drawn from a thread of candlelight, too big and too bright and too potent, far too near.

Hands that twitched and stretched, that folded their fingers close and stretched them wide, that learned their reach and strength – and then reached out for her throat.

Georgie might just have sat there and let them take it. Take her. Crush or burn or both, she had no idea.

Grace, though? Grace was a survivor.

Full of guilt, overflowing with confession: even so.

Grace ducked and dived. Ducked under the fiery hands as they groped for her; dived sideways, past the candle in its jar, to where the ship's bell stood in its frame there on the floor, bulky and awkward and out of the way.

Snatched at it with her right hand, her good hand; gripped the rope and swung the clapper, struck the bell.

Struck it again and again, clattered it back and forth, sound and fury.

Felt her other wrist rip itself open against whatever stitches had been set there; felt the blood pulse out one more time.

And she had so little to start with, hardly enough; and even so.

She rang the bell for herself, wildly, raucously. And bled coldly, achingly; and heard Mary's puzzled laugh, and heard her say, ‘You don't imagine that's going to call people in, do you? Those doors won't open for anyone, whether they try or not.'

No, she didn't think it was going to call people in. If it did, she didn't think they could possibly come in time. Those hands were feeling for her again, and never mind the nonsense of the gods: Mary was frowning in concentration, her own fingers stretching and curling as she pictured them around Grace's throat. The immaterial hands she'd conjured matched her moves exactly, following Grace down, stretching, curling . . .

She wouldn't burn as Kathie had. These had only the heat of two distant candles behind them, not the concentrated impulse of a bonfire. They looked hot, but their touch was cold, an icy wire against her skin as one brushed across her shoulder. She flinched, and tried to roll underneath their sudden grab. But Mary was quicker now, getting the hang of this unexpected puppetwork, or else Grace was just too slow. Weak and hurt and afraid, not fierce enough, not quite.

One of those hands had a grip on her arm, like a tangle of bitter wire; the other was insinuating itself around her throat. She flung her own hand up to fend it off, tried to tuck her chin deep down into her chest; but there was nothing there to fight against, nothing but the tight wire feel of it around her neck, nothing for her fingers to scrabble at.

She'd seen a rabbit in a snare one time, on an early country walk with one of her squires. She must look like that to Mary, she thought: snared and caught, eyes bulging and legs kicking helpless across the floor . . .

Not so helpless. Grace was no ready easy victim. Her foot caught what she was kicking for, the candle in its jar. Caught it and spilled it and sent it spinning across the bare boards, breaking the thread of flame at its source, unravelling its whole hand so that its grip melted away.

Too bad that it was the wrong hand, the one that had held her by the arm, not the one that was choking her still.

Too bad also that it was only one candle out of dozens. The flame of another immediately rose like a snake on a string, questing towards her, starting to weave itself into another hand.

She could see that in the corner of her eye, just where her vision was starting to blur and sparkle. She couldn't breathe, she could get no air; all her neck was sore already, and this constriction was worse than the waxy strangling hands of before, like half a dozen wires cutting deep into her flesh.

She couldn't fight what she couldn't touch. She couldn't reach Mary either, safe on her sofa, too far away. But the bell was still humming, resonance throbbing through her head; blood was soaking the bandage on her wrist. She couldn't do more to summon her baby. He always came to the sound of bells. It was what she was banking on.

It was all she had.

It was nothing.

It was there, he was there: a nothingness so profound he seemed to suck down light itself, a darkness that glowed more vivid than any candle's flare.

Mary hadn't seen it yet. She had risen to her feet in the tension of the moment, taken a step or two away from the sofa; her hands worked as though she wanted to squeeze and crush Grace's throat herself, to feel soft flesh and tough cartilage buckle and yield beneath her rigid fingers.

She wasn't actually close to actually touching, but she was very close to getting what she wanted else; no more Grace and just her body to dispose of. Grace was dizzy in her head, and her sense of the world was diminishing, black curtains closing in. The pain in her chest was fading, even; air didn't seem so important any more. Nothing worth fighting for.

Maybe she was giving up at last. Not a survivor after all, not any longer.
Sorry, Tony.

She could do that, she thought. She could give up now – if it had only been her. She needn't hang on for ever, waiting for things to get justifiably worse. If she could never be punished enough, why be punished at all? Why not just be free of it, out of it, gone . . .?

But it wasn't just her. There was Georgie too, who didn't deserve any of this; and Mary, who shouldn't be allowed to get away with it; and Kathie, who was the truly abused innocent; and Frank, who deserved more than smoke and suicide; and . . .

And above all there was her baby, here was her baby, who hadn't come all this way just to stand witness. Poor baby, never had a chance of life, never had a chance to
do
anything . . .

He could do something now. He could claim Grace, the way he'd been coming to do, coming and coming: given shape by the house, given purpose by her own conscience. Or he could save her. After all, she still hadn't been punished enough, and what else could he be interested in?

He could save her, and save Georgie, and justify Frank. Give something back to Kathie, even – even if it wasn't enough.

Punish Mary. Even if it wasn't enough.

That had to be how it worked. Didn't it?

Really, Grace couldn't decide.

Which was when Georgie took over. Not for long, just a spasm of stubborn refusal to die like this, for someone else's fault. If Grace didn't think her own life worth saving, Georgie absolutely did. Stubborn and scared, she could turn the encroaching, engulfing baby.
No, not me, not us; her, take her . . .

Mary didn't know, she couldn't see. Intent on her target, she never thought to look behind her.

The baby . . . was really not a baby any more. He almost never had been. Not even dead a-borning, he'd never had the chance to grow – but he had grown anyway, hand in hand with his proper time, in his absence. That absence was toddler-sized now, squat and solid. Not really toddler-shaped, no real hint of human: no waving arms or stumping legs, no eyes or dreadful smile. No personality: what chance had he ever had, to be a person? Only the fact of him, the simple hollow absence that he made, indisputable and deadly. Like a whirlpool in the dry, sucking and sucking into nothingness.