The Vanishment (21 page)

There was no help for it. I went to the door and opened it.

In the darkness and mist, I did not recognize her for a moment. Then she stepped forward into the light from the hall. It was Susannah—Susannah Adderstone.

She paid the taxi. As he drove off into the mist she turned and came back to the door, where I was still standing. Not a word had passed between us.

"I thought I'd find you here," she said.

"You know, then?"

She nodded gravely.

"I heard about it on the news yesterday. Father and I talked about you all last night. He was against my coming down, but I insisted. He says it's out of his hands now. I made him tell me all he knew. About what really happened here."

"And you still wanted to come, knowing that?"

She hesitated.

"Yes. You don't mind, do you?"

"Mind? It's not for me to mind. This is your house. Your father's, anyway."

I noticed that she had brought a small case.

"Let me take that for you. We can't stand here talking; it's freezing."

She stepped into the hallway, into the light. For the second time I was shocked by how beautiful she was. As she came in she glanced around at everything, as though reassuring herself that it was all real. I closed the door and helped her off with her coat.

"Let's go to the kitchen," I said. "I've just been having tea there with Rachel."

"How is the little girl?" asked Susannah.

"How did you expect her to be? Beaten up, maybe? Dead?"

"No, of course not, I. . ." She reddened.

"That's quite all right. Whatever the papers say. I'm not a murderer."

"I never thought you were." She paused. "Does Rachel . . . ? Have you told her about her parents yet?"

I shook my head.

"No, not yet," I replied. "There's all this to go through first."

"That's why I came, Peter. To tell you it's not too late to pull out of . . . whatever it is you think you're doing here. Rachel's safe. I can tell the police I sent you the keys to this place, that you told me you wanted to bring her down here for a break after the accident. They've no reason not to believe you."

Such blinding stupidity. As if I had come all the way here to leave this thing unfinished.

"It isn't possible," I said. 'Something has started here; I have to finish it. Rachel knows what's happening; in some ways she knows more than anyone. Her memory is coming back. The house is acting on her, reawakening Catherine in her."

Susannah looked frightened.

"Perhaps you should leave," I said. "It's not too late. I can drive you back to Penzance."

She shook her head.

"I'm part of this thing, too," she said. With a smile, she took a step toward the kitchen. "Come on, it's time I met Rachel."

I followed her. The moment I stepped through the door, I knew something was wrong. Susannah looked at me, puzzled. The smile had faded. The table was still laid for tea. The pot of tea and the half-drunk glass of milk were still there. But Rachel had vanished.

Susannah was the first to notice that the backdoor was tying ajar. I thrust a flashlight into her hand and led the way into the darkness outside. It was bitterly cold; any warmth there had been in the air had been sucked from it by the mist. Even with the flashlight, I could see only a few feet in any direction.

"Rachel!" I shouted. "Where are you? Can you hear me?"

There was no answer. I looked around. The lights of the house had already disappeared into the mist somewhere behind us. Or was it to the side? I was already growing disoriented.

"Peter, she may not be out here at all." Susannah was still close to me.

"The door was open," I said. "And we would have seen her if she'd come down the passage from the kitchen. You would have seen her—you were facing that way. She has to be out here."

"But surely she wouldn't have gone far. Not in this."

"She's four years old, Susannah. There's no knowing what she may do. Once she got into the mist, she would have lost her way in seconds. She could be anywhere."

As I said the words I heard a sound that made my heart shrivel. Waves slapping a cliff face, waves coming in fast. If Rachel were to walk that way, she could miss the cliff edge in the mist and crash to her death. I resumed shouting with all my strength.

"Rachel! Are you out there? Answer me!"

But the only sound that came back to me was the crashing of waves.

"Stay beside me," I said. "We can't afford to get separated from each other."

I saw Susannah halt.

"Peter." Her voice was strained, awkward. "I want you to tell me the truth. Has something already happened to Rachel? Has there already been an accident? Because, if there has, this is just a charade, and I don't want anything more to do with it."

I could not see her. When I spoke, I did so in the direction of the light she was holding.

"You saw the milk on the table. And you know it hadn't been put there for your benefit."

"I'm not saying she was never here. Just that . . . something may have happened, something you didn't intend. Like before . . ."

If she had not been hidden, I might have struck her. But it was only a voice, I told myself, only a voice. I turned and walked on into the mist. Susannah could look after herself.

As I started walking I heard a sound. A child's voice. It was Rachel, calling from quite near at hand.

"Rachel? Stay where you are! Do you hear me? Don't move. Just keep calling. Do you understand?"

"Yes." She sounded very frightened.

"Keep calling, and I'll come and get you. I'm not far away."

Rachel was an intelligent child. She did exactly as I told her. It took about ten minutes to grope my way to her through the mist. Time and again I thought I had her, only to find that something had distorted her voice or given me a false sense of the direction from which it was coming. And then, suddenly, there she was, standing shivering on the grass in front of me.

I picked her up in my arms and held her dose for a long time. Just as I set her down I heard a voice behind me.

"I'm sorry, Peter. It was wrong of me not to believe you."

Susannah must have followed the light of my flashlight. Her own was switched off. Now she turned it back on again.

I introduced her to Rachel.

"This is Susannah," I said. "That's who came to the door earlier. She's come to stay for a few days. Her daddy owns Petherick House."

Rachel seemed unimpressed.

"I'm cold," she said.

"We're all cold, love. It's freezing out here. Let's get back to the house."

But that was easier to say than to do. Petherick House had been swallowed up entirely by the mist, and I had no idea which direction it lay in. The sound of waves was the only guide we had to the location of anything. We could try walking away from it, but that might as easily send us right on past the house as into it. One thing was certain: we could not spend the night outside. None of us was dressed for it. There was a real danger that we would all die from exposure.

I do not know how long we stumbled about there. All I can remember is the mist writhing through the dark while all the time I grew colder and weaker. I could feel Rachel shivering against me as I held her in my arms, trying to press some warmth into her. The batteries of our flashlights were rapidly losing their first strength. Not that they helped a great deal anyway. What little they showed of the terrain across which we were walking was of absolutely no use in establishing our position.

Susannah was the first to catch sight of the light.

"Look!"

I saw her pointing up at what we knew could only be a light from the house. The next moment it was wiped from sight by a great hand of mist. And then the mist moved on, and we could see the light as clearly as before. With a cry of triumph, I started for it. Susannah followed.

As we neared the house—which had not, after all, been very far away—other lights became visible. At the last moment a bank of mist rolled away, uncovering the entire rear of the building. It was only then that I realized that the light we had been following had not been, as I had thought, a downstairs light, but one in an upstairs room. In a room in the top floor, to be precise. Susannah Trevorrow's bedroom, to be more precise again.

As our feet touched the gravel path that circled the house, the light flickered and went out.

It took us a long time to get warm again. While Susannah watched Rachel in the kitchen I ventured upstairs alone to fetch some quilts. It was silent up there. Silent and dark.

As I was taking the quilt from my bed, I glanced across the room. Rachel's bed had been made up first thing that morning. But something seemed odd about it. I went across and looked down.

On the pillow lay a doll. A doll in a sailor suit, identical to the one I had burned in London. It almost seemed to glare at me as I picked it up and shoved it under my own bed.

Downstairs again, I made hot soup and poured it into mugs for us to hold. Bit by bit, we thawed out. Seeing one of the whiskey bottles, Susannah suggested hot toddies. I found some sugar and powdered cinnamon I had bought to put on hot chocolate for Rachel. The toddies—large ones for Susannah and myself, a much smaller one for Rachel—warmed us from top to bottom.

As we grew more relaxed I took Rachel on my knee. I saw Susannah watching us. Had our discovery of Rachel, safe and sound after all, restored her trust in me? Or was she still like all the others, unbelieving and afraid?

"Darling," I said to Rachel, "you must never ever do that again. If you go outside in the dark, you can have an accident. A bad accident. I've already shown you the big cliff at the bottom of the garden, haven't I? You wouldn't want to fall over there, would you?"

She shook her head. She seemed troubled about something.

"What is it, Rachel? You can tell me, I'm not angry."

She hesitated, then began to speak.

"I'm sorry I went out," she said. "But she said it would be all right."

I felt the skin on the back of my neck go cold.

"She? Do you mean your aunt Agnes?"

She shook her head.

"No," she said. "The little girl. The little girl who came to the door when you were out. She wanted to play. She said you wouldn't mind."

We had an early supper. After eating, we headed for the main room, what our Mrs. Rudd from Truro would have called "the parlor." I proposed to Susannah that she join me in drinking more of the whiskey, not in a toddy this time, but in glasses, neat.

"I've had enough already, thanks. Spirits go to my head."

"Do you mind if I have one?"

"Of course not; go ahead."

Rachel amused herself with a bunch of coloring books and felt-tipped pens I had bought for her in Safeway. Every so often, she would bring a page across for us to admire.

"She's a lovely child," said Susannah. "It's a pity about. . ."

I stopped her with a frown.

"We can talk about that later," I said. "I think perhaps it's your turn to tell me a little about yourself."

She had studied as an interior designer and worked for a couple of years in London before going back to Yorkshire to look after her father.

"Like your namesake," I said.

"My great-aunt? Yes, I suppose so. But I never had a sister. I was an only child. It makes Father all the more my responsibility."

"Aren’t there other relatives?"

There was a moment's hesitation before she answered. She shook her head, spilling her hair across one shoulder.

"No one close. It's up to me, really."

"Don't you have anyone else? I mean, a boyfriend or . . . someone in London."

I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about her. She might have been married, divorced, widowed, the mother of three children .. . anything.

She laughed.

"No. There hasn't been a man in my life for some time."

"I can't believe that. Why, you're . . ." I hesitated, knowing it was taking a risk. "You're really very lovely."

She blushed.

"Now you're embarrassing me," she said. But I could see that she had not been displeased.

"No," I said, encouraged. "I do mean it. It's hard to believe you don't have men fighting over you."

She said nothing to that. Rachel came over with another completed drawing. She had taken a perfectly innocent cow standing in a field and transformed it into a purple space monster surrounded by what must have been its victims.

"It's beautiful," I said. 'It looks just like me."

She giggled and went off to desecrate another page of the book.

"Tell me about your daughter," Susannah said. "The one who died."

What other one had there ever been? It was a direct question, but she must have known how hard it would be for me to answer. I swallowed the whiskey that was left in my glass and poured myself another.

"You've read the book," I said. "You know it all already."

"No, that's just what everybody knows. I want to hear it from you. Face-to-face."

I looked at her. What did she really want with me?

"She was almost four years old, Rachel's age. A very beautiful child. I still have dreams of her. In some ways, Rachel reminds me of her. They look a little alike."

"How did she die?"

"I'd had too much to drink. You'll have read that, of course. I drank because I was unhappy, and I was unhappy because life wasn't what life should have been. Maybe you can't understand that, I don't know. I'd given up my school job to try my hand as a writer, but it hadn't worked out. There were no school places to go back to, so I took a job as a language teacher. English for foreign students. It was all I could find. Maybe it was all I was qualified to do. By the end of the first year. I'd had enough, but there was nothing else, and I began to think there never would be. Sarah wasn't working then, so I had to keep at it. Day after day, the same idiotic examples of the same idiotic grammatical rules. 'Where a verb is used with more than one auxiliary, make sure that the main verb is repeated.' '"Require" should not be used as an intransitive verb in the sense of "need."' I started drinking just to keep going."