Personal Darkness (6 page)

There had been no commotion, and the peace of the house seemed undisturbed.

Ruth stood looking at her two kills, in the dark.

She had learned butchery from horror films. It did not require great skill, only decision and some strength, both of which she had.

The Millses were not vampires, she had not had to stake them.

It was she, of course, who was the Scarabae.

She drank Amanda's blood first, daintily, fastidiously. Then she visited Clive on the other side of the bed. When she had had some from both of them, she lightly stepped across the room and came out, closing the door quietly behind her.

Out in the corridor there was the impersonal silence of comparatively modern houses, whose central heating was off and whose plumbing was reliable. This was not comparable to the notes of an old house, which shifted in its sleep like an animal, ticked and purred and sighed.

Ruth arrived at Timothy's door and opened it. She remembered the layout of the room well, but in any case could see it exactly,

Timothy lay on his back and, as she entered, he raised his heavy lids.

He thought he was dreaming. But it was not a dream. Christ, she had sneaked out after all, to join him. He had thought she was sexy, but given up. After the disaster of the evening's end, he had hoped for nothing.

Timothy was wide awake now. He sat up.

He hissed at her: "
Shut the door
."

"It won't matter," said Ruth.

"Jesus—keep your voice down."

The streetlamp shining faintly through his curtains had enabled him to see her, though not well. Now as she slid toward him he realized there was something in her hand.

What was it?

She was a couple of feet away when he understood it was a kitchen knife, and it was wet.

Instinct shot him out of the bed. But the duvet snared his foot and he rolled onto the carpet. Before he could get his feet under him, the girl whirled down.

Timothy screamed.

He screamed loudly and violently. But it had been a rainy day and his window was shut. In the house, there was no one left to hear.

Because he tried to fight her off, he was slashed in the arm and across the face before the knife tore home through his neck. He died against the pastel wall, which he had blackened with his blood.

Ruth took only a sip of this. She had had enough.

She left the knife beside Timothy, not needing it anymore.

By three-ten, Ruth was downstairs in the kitchen again, frying herself eggs in one of the copper-bottomed pans.

She had gone through the house carefully, or those areas which might be of interest. She had put on some of the lights, for the cupboards and drawers were easier to search this way.

From Amanda's wardrobe Ruth had taken a large brown suede shoulder bag. This she then filled with other items. Amanda's chest of drawers had yielded a packet of unused cotton panties and some tights in cellophane. In Timothy's room Ruth located new jeans, and three plain black T-shirts, but left the other tops which had colorful designs. She also found a leather jacket of Timothy's. It was a little too big but not cumbersomely so. She kept the trainers.

Amanda's jewelry had no attraction for Ruth. There seemed to be no books or proper music in the house.

In Clive's wallet Ruth discovered a wodge of notes, and elsewhere a stack of pound coins. She ignored the plastic credit cards, and also the heap of small change in a dish. In Timothy's desk, too, there were some ten- and twenty-pound notes, as well as useless change and the Visa card. If Amanda had money it did not surface.

Ruth did take one small thing from the living room. This was a green glass apple.

From the main bathroom she appropriated toothpaste, Amanda's deodorant, and a wrapped tablet of soap, some tissues and cotton wool, and a miniature oval mirror.

In the kitchen Ruth switched on all the lights, and first made herself some sandwiches from the wholemeal bread and cold half-chicken in the fridge, adding pickles for a garnish. The sandwiches were placed in plastic sandwich bags and stored in her suede container, with a liter bottle of diet Coke.

Then she poured herself a large gin and added tonic.

She could find no bacon, but put three eggs into sunflower oil to fry, grilled five tomatoes, and opened a can of beans. She had watched Emma Watt, and later Cheta and Maria, and later still, others, cook—long ago —and learned the rudiments from observation, just as she had learned the methods of slaughter.

Ruth finished the wholemeal loaf with her breakfast, and then she ate a packet of dates, and the last apples from the fruit bowl. She drank some orange juice, and put an unopened carton also in her bag.

The light had not yet come, but there was an insubstantial quality now to the dark. Outside the windows, the garish streetlamps stood like sentinels, seeing nothing.

Ruth took the pan of cooling oil off the stove. She donned one of Amanda's tan washing-up gloves, and then fetched the Cook's Matches from the work surface. She lit a match, and dropped it in the oil.

The pan lit with a thin blue flame.

Ruth carried her new coat and the bag of provisions up into the hall. Then she returned for the frying pan.

She went into the dining room first, and touched the blue fire to the seats of the chairs, the fringes of the lamps.

She came out, leaving the door open, and crossed into the living room. Here she spilled fire onto the sofa, and gave it to the curtains, and the teasels in the fireplace.

Nothing else was needed. In each room a pale animate bonfire was now in progress. Fire was very fast.

Ruth came out again, into the hall.

There she hesitated a moment. Then she walked to the dying flowers under the mirror, and offered them, too, the kiss of flame. They sprang up prettily, blue and saffron, as if all the life had come back to them, and in the mirror Ruth saw her face behind the fire.

She set the frying pan, still burning, carefully down on the hall carpet.

Then she removed Amanda's glove, put on her jacket, and took up her bag.

The house, which had once been Emma's, was full now of a textured noise, crackings and gushings, little pops and gasps.

Ruth turned out the hall light, and the light of the fire took over, ancient and beautiful, as she remembered.

She undid the front door and moved out. She closed the door gently, and went down the steps.

At the end of the street she looked back.

The house was not yet blazing, only gleaming, flickering, as if full of the beating of yellow wings. Its light, however, had begun to put out the streetlamps. False dawn.

SPRING MET THE HOTEL IN WAVES OF acid green, in crocuses and snowdrops running up the lawn, and daffodils under the monkey-puzzle tree. There were squirrels in the rose garden. The powdered bloom of jade came out on the giant chestnuts.

The Scarabae lifted their heads, as if they had been sleeping under stones.

One morning, Rachaela met Eric under the topiary.

"There were gardens like this," he said. "Once."

As if the topiary of the mansion was just an illusion, a memory.

They walked down to the pond, where floated the ghostly ectoplasm of unborn frogs.

"We shall be going to the house soon. We've had to wait a long time."

"Do you mean," she said, "the house by the sea?"

Eric looked away through the wild spring morning.

"Never go back," he said. "
Never
."

Not that house, then.

Rachaela said, "This is a new house."

"An old house, of course. But in London."

She was startled.

"But—will you like it there?"

"It will be ours."

"Does that mean I'm included?"

He glanced at her. "Things occur," said Eric. "Time erases deeds."

"No it doesn't. But then, the
deed
was yours. I mean, it was the Scarabae's. Mating Adamus to me. Producing Ruth."

"Don't speak of Ruth."

He said this without anger, almost without expression.

She said, "Surely in London I should leave you."

"We wish you to remain. If you won't, well then."

"I'll—we'll have to see."

Eric nodded. He looked into the pond. The ghostly life trembled between the lily pads.

After a while he left her, walking off under the pyramids.

A week later the two great black cars, the Rolls-Royces, appeared at the hotel.

The Scarabae departed in the afternoon, and Rachaela with them.

She felt disconcerted, leaving the hotel. She thought irresistibly of the morning after the Christmas seance. She had gone out into the gardens and, coming back, everything had been tidied and put right. Magicians had cleaned the walls, hung up the pictures, put back the mirror glass and taps. Even the toothpaste, the needles, and the notepaper were replaced.

They had been safe here, safe from themselves.

She had been one of them, or had she? Out in the world, she must be herself.

The journey was not as long, on this occasion, as she had anticipated. The Rolls ran over motorways into the capital, and they were there at sunset.

So she saw the common on a flaming sky the polarized windows could not completely withhold. The trees and sweeps of earth inside the drum of the city, wild land inside a bottle.

She was surprised by the comparative nearness of a road. She stared at them, Eric, Sasha, and Miranda, Michael and Cheta. Below, beyond the houses of rich people (less rich, evidently, than the Scarabae), lay the London village with its shops and supermarket, its library and pubs, and the quills of the churches, and beyond, the smoky back of London. But London was old, too. Remember that.

It was not like the first house at all. Yet it had been
made
like it. Only the windows were tarot windows instead of puns upon the Bible.

Over the pillared hall were wonderful women in robes, with harps, and rose-red hair. The stairway parted and ran up in two opposing flights, and there the windows had minstrels and flamingo skies.

There was no one to welcome them. The Rolls had driven away. Yet in every room, the machines, the TVs. And in the huge main chamber, white and gold below the stairs, was an ivory telephone.

Rachaela walked boldly to it and picked it up. There was a dialing tone. But who,
who
, should she call?

Miranda followed her to her room. Miranda made her shy. She had wept with Miranda.

"Look, Rachaela. You'll like it."

The room was the shade of a dove. Soft sweet gray lit with hints of amber. And then the bed and chairs deep green like the pines of the common. And beyond, the white bathroom with its antique finish and viridian window.

But the window in the bedroom, which showed a snowy woman with golden hair and wings, holding up her hands to the doves which had created the room, was not the picture of that other room, the Temptation, with its armor and apples, its Eve, its snake. This was a luminous romantic window, without significance, perhaps. And, it stood open.

"The window—" said Rachaela.

"You can see out over the common," said Miranda.

Sasha had appeared in the doorway.

"You must be careful at night," said Sasha, "of bats."

And this absurdity, these bats of vampire myth, improbable in a London park, made Rachaela laugh aloud, and then Sasha laughed, as once before, and then Miranda. So they all stood laughing.

"Do the colors please you?" asked Miranda.

"It's wonderful, yes."

"Do stay," said Miranda.

As if there had always been free choice.

Of course, actually, there had always been.

The Scarabae had snared her, made her live with them. She had always thought so. But in fact they had
invited
. That too was a trap, a web. Adamus had waited for her, in it. And she had been seduced by Adamus. And she had birthed, from that union, Ruth. The web had then rent itself to pieces.

At the hotel, she had played chess with Eric. He had taught her how to play, although she never properly understood, but the pieces intrigued her, the carven kings and queens of black and white, the knights and castles, and the ill-fated pawns.

They had put the board and the chess pieces on the table, so at first she did not recognize it. Then one evening she came down from a long day-sleep, and found Cheta polishing the table. It was the furnishing from the hotel which they had used in the seance, its surface scratched into a peculiar pattern.

Cheta stood aside.

Rachaela poised by the table, staring down at it.

The seance glass, in rushing from letter to letter, had ripped a path upon the table. And yet she saw now—the reason they had kept it—the scratching also spelled a word:
zegnajcie
.

"Cheta," Rachaela said. "This. What does it mean?"

Cheta said at once, "Good-bye."

Then they carried the chess board, loaded with its figures, back between them, and set it over that good-bye.

When Cheta had gone, Rachaela was alone in the room. The Scarabae dinner would not be for another hour, for afterlight still lingered through the glorious windows of walled gardens, roses, palaces upon hills. And through this window above the table, where the knight kneeled before the forest and the burning tower.