The Ghost Writer (39 page)

Anne had been braver than me. Far braver. I still had the last of the torch, and a full box of matches. My second candle was more than half gone, and I hadn't once dared sit in the dark. It would swallow me soon enough. Like Anne I had given up scraping at the granite-hard timber; I wondered whether she had sat where I was sitting, huddled on the top step with her back against the door. I was shivering in August; she must have frozen to the bone. Perhaps she had died of cold. It was supposed to be painless at the end. Better than radiation poisoning. You felt warmth stealing over you, and a great desire to sleep, and in the last moments of consciousness you might see brightly coloured visions, blossom and hedgerow and birds singing when you were actually freezing to death on the ice. One of the Antarctic explorers had written about it. Though he couldn't have died that time. I thought of the bottle of sleeping tablets beside my bed in the hotel room and wished I'd brought them with me. I wished they had caught Phyllis May Hatherley and hanged her. Though she was already pregnant by then; they would have had to wait until Gerard Hugh Montfort was born. He at least might have survived if they had.

I thought of Phyllis coming back to dispose of Anne's body. If I was going to die here I wanted to die before the last candle dripped away to nothing and the whispering began again.

I had set the candle about half-way down the steps. The flame burned steadily, motionless except for the faint pulsing of the shadow around the wick. Darkness lurked behind the wreckage of the shelves, biding its time.

I could burn the shelves, I thought. Pull the rest off the wall, build a fire in the middle of the floor and burn them one at a time. It would hold off the darkness for at least another hour, maybe several. If I kept it low there should be enough air to breathe. And if enough smoke got past the door, there was a very faint chance that someone might see it and call the fire brigade.

The door was made of wood too. I could build my fire at the top of the steps ... but if it got into the floorboards directly above the door, the whole house could go up, and me with it. Horrible but quick; I'd probably suffocate before I burned. No water to control the fire ... but I could empty those damp sandbags and use them as beaters.

Breaking up the shelves and building a pyramid of fragments at the base of the door was easy enough; the hard part was getting it to burn. The wood was too damp to catch. After twenty matches had yielded only faint yellow flames that crawled and turned blue and died, I was beginning to panic again. Two sheets of newspaper would have set the whole lot blazing, but I had no paper to burn.

Except ten sheets of typescript, proof—the only decisive proof—that my mother had murdered her sister.

The second candle was almost gone. It had burned much faster while I was trampling pieces of shelving. If I get out of here, I promised Anne, the whole world will know what happened to you, proof or no proof. I arranged five sheets, loosely crumpled, at the centre of the pyramid and got the other five ready to feed in.

The whole cellar lit up for a few seconds; the heaped wood caught and hissed and died with the blazing paper. I added another sheet, then two more in quick succession. The wood flared again and dwindled; now the flames had a small hold, but they were turning ominously blue as I fed in the last two sheets of typescript. The fire blazed and dimmed for a third time, but now the wood was crackling and catching and licking at the scarred planking. Fragments of Anne's last message floated around me, glowing and fading and sinking to the stones below.

For a couple of minutes, the fire seemed docile enough. The burning patch on the back of the door crept upwards.
I
was beginning to cough, but the draught was clearing the smoke and bringing up fresh air for me to breathe. Small tongues of flame began to lick over the edge of the stone lintel at the joist and floorboards above.
I
beat at them with the sack, and the fire leapt back at me. Smoke burned my throat.
I
turned to retreat, missed my footing and fell in a burst of pure white light that exploded inside my head and went sailing away into the dark.

T
HE PAIN CAME FIRST, THEN THE HEAD IT WAS POUNDING
in. Throat and lungs, a shoulder, an elbow and a hip materialised, burning, throbbing and stinging in chorus. Somebody was moaning in the darkness nearby. Me.
I
began to cough instead. Slow dripping sounds; a sour, acrid reek of ash.
I
was lying in a pool of water.

The fire brigade had arrived in time. But where were they? Apart from the drip drip drip of water, the cellar was deathly still. At least
I
hoped it was water
I
was lying in, and not my own blood.
I
discovered
I
could move, and then prop myself in the angle between two walls.
I
coughed for several agonising minutes. Everything hurt, but nothing seemed to be broken.

How long had
I
been unconscious? Had thé firemen simply not seen me lying below the steps?
I
felt in my trouser pocket for the matches, and remembered putting the box down on the top step, along with the torch.
I
stood up, wincing, and felt along the wall to my left until
I
found the edge of the steps.

As
I
began to feel my way upward, it seemed to me that a rectangular patch of the darkness above was fractionally paler, an impression that strengthened step by step until a gleam of silvery light appeared in the distance. Moonlight at the top of the basement stairs. The door must have burned right through.

I felt around for the torch, but couldn't find it. There was surprisingly little debris on the steps; the floorboards overhead seemed quite intact. I stepped into the tunnel, put out a hand to steady myself, and the door rattled against its hook. My foot struck something metal that went clanging and clattering across the flagstones. A bucket. There was water on the tunnel floor.

Definitely not the fire brigade. Someone had opened the cellar door within seconds of my fall and flung a bucket of water over the blaze on the steps. Someone who was already in the tunnel when I lit the fire. Listening—for how long?—to my frenzied efforts to escape.

Beneath the distant gleam from the landing, the tunnel was in darkness. Whoever—or whatever—had let me out could be waiting in the black cavern of the laundry. Where perhaps it had been waiting when I first came down here. I backed against the end wall and crouched down. If anything moved, I should see it against the band of moonlight.

Until the moon passed over the roof of the house and the darkness became absolute.

My mouth and tongue were coated in thick black glue; I was appallingly thirsty. Better to make a dash for the stairs now. And then? Out by the courtyard door, clear a path through the nettles to the back wall. I felt for the keys and realised they were lost in the cellar. Useless anyway: I had bent or broken every one.

But the courtyard door was only bolted shut. I strained to listen over the blood pounding in my ears until the effort brought on another fit of coughing. Panic sent me lunging forward, straight into another clash and clatter of rolling metal.
I've kicked the bucket again.
The echoes pursued me through the kitchen and up into the moonlight. I had drawn the two bolts, and twisted and tugged several times at the handle before I realised that the door—which had certainly been Unlocked three days ago, and which I could not possibly have locked, because I had never found the key—was not going to open.

No one else has keys. Miss Hamish was most insistent about that.

Pale light shimmered down the basement steps, over the empty seed trays in the conservatory. The latticework in the French windows was solid metal. On my right, the door to the breakfast room stood partly open; those windows too were barred. Above the pool of moonlight, the stairs leading up to the dining-room landing were shrouded in darkness. The house was completely silent.

One last bruising rush up those stairs and along the doglegged corridor that ran between the library and the drawing-room would carry me to safety. If I could face the dark. And if whoever was waiting somewhere in that darkness hadn't also deadlocked the front door.

But if I ran I wouldn't be able to hear. I crept across the flagged floor towards the stairs, and began to climb. In the stairwell overhead I became aware of a faint yellow light, which could only be the moon shining through the stairwell windows. Odd, because the moonlight in the basement was a stark, silvery white.

Three more steps brought me on to the landing. Staircase on my right; dining-room beyond that; library to the left; corridor straight ahead. I felt certain I had left those doors open; now all three were closed. In the hall it would be pitch black. Here at least, I could see; the yellow moonlight seemed to be shining directly down on me.

I looked up and saw that it was not the moon, but a light bulb suspended above the half-landing.

I am afraid the electricity was disconnected many years ago.

I tried the switches on the wall beside me. More lights came on, none of them very bright, in the stairwell, beside the dining-room door, in the basement below.

Miss Hamish had lied to me. Though there might be a perfectly innocent explanation: she had changed her mind and got the electricity reconnected before the stroke put her in hospital. The power could have been on the whole time I'd been searching the house.

But someone had switched on the stairwell light while I was in the cellar.

I stood irresolute, glancing from one door to another, trying to decide which way to go. The murky yellow light only accentuated the shadows all around me. I felt the pressure of unseen eyes; the feeling of something monstrous waiting behind one of those doors mounted until the dark stained timbers seemed to bulge towards me and I found myself retreating up the stairs to the half-landing and on to the first floor, where again the door to the passageway was closed, as it surely had not been before.

The stairwell lights burned steadily. I could wait here, I thought; daylight can't be more than two or three hours away. But my thirst had become intolerable, and the craving for water dragged me upwards, towards the bathroom on the second-floor landing.
Bathrooms have locks
: the thought carried me all the way to the top of the creaking staircase. As below, the door to the bedroom corridor was now closed.

The bathroom door was ajar, as I felt sure I had left it, but the door to the attic stairs stood wide open, and those stairs too were lit from above.
The attic where I was conceived,
I thought stupidly, and then,
no, that was the other Gerard.

I pushed open the bathroom door. But the light did not work, and the bolt had rusted solid. I wedged the door shut with my foot and gulped down handfuls of cold, metallic water. The pane of glass over the door gave just enough illumination ... but what if the lights went out again?—and then if something began to push against the door, a slow, stealthy, irresistible pressure ... Outside at least I could run.

A floorboard popped and snapped as I stepped back on to the landing. Whoever had turned the stairwell lights on
must
know I was here. What were they waiting for? Why had they closed the connecting doors? Why let me out of the cellar at all?

Perhaps they really had gone for help.

From where I was standing, I could see all the way up to the attics while keeping the main stairwell and the door to the bedrooms more or less in view. Something about the attic stairs—no, the landing above them—looked different. I moved a step closer and saw that a doorway had appeared in what I had thought was a blank panelled wall at the top of the stairs.

W
ITH THE SAME DISEMBODIED, SLEEP-WALKING SENSATION
that had propelled me into the cellar, I went on up the stairs. A section of panelling had opened into a low, cavernous room, dark except for a glowing crescent a few paces to my left: a reading lamp, with its shade swung right down on to the surface of a large desk. An upright chair stood in front of the desk; heavy curtains were drawn across the wall behind it. Bookcases along the opposite wall; an armchair and chesterfield like the ones in the library; various chests and cabinets. The floor was thickly carpeted; the air smelt of dust and worn fabric and decaying paper and a faint, archaic medicinal odour: something like chloroform or formaldehyde. Nothing moved; the stillness remained unbroken.

Drawn by the light, I moved towards the desk. A humped shape beside the lamp resolved itself into a computer monitor. The screen was dark. Glancing fearfully around, I raised the lampshade and saw that the desk drawers were partly open, as if someone had been disturbed in the act of going through them. In the top right-hand drawer lay a thick bundle of typescript, its tide obscured by a band of black ribbon. A
novel. By V.H.

The dusty animal smell of the carpet rose and filled my nostrils, and I was looking down on my ten-year-old self, crouched beside my mother's dressing-table on that stifling January afternoon, staring directly over his shoulder at a large manila envelope addressed to P.M. Hatherley, the row of English stamps with their heavy black cancellation marks along the top of the envelope, the slit in the end, the creases formed by the typescript of 'The Revenant'...

It was gone in an instant, leaving only the conviction that I had missed something vital, something that ought to have been blindingly clear. I tried the left-hand drawer and it rolled smoothly outwards to reveal a long row of folders, all crammed with papers ... no, letters...

From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
Subject: None
Date: Wed, 11 August 1999 19:48:21 +0100 (BST)

Something very weird has happened. I've discovered a diary—Anne's diary—hidden in my mother's room—I'll tell you about that in a second—but in the library this afternoon I found...