Unhallowed Ground (26 page)

But she is just an ordinary person trying to get on with her life. Never the centre of anyone’s interest. Even at her most overwrought Georgie had never before been beset by such dark, astounding happenings as these.

Is it outside the bounds of reason that someone related to Angela Hopkins is conducting their own vendetta against her? Following her down to Dartmoor, stalking her, frightening her, driving her mad, venting his fury in some obsessive bid for justice? To make her pay the ultimate price? And if that is the case, would they be wrong…? And if that is the case, by coming here she has played straight into their hands.

In her mind she sees him in the distance, a tall man, wide-shouldered with thick limbs, a lumbering in his movements and a heaviness in his stance.

With appalled horror Georgie notices how her hands have taken to shaking again.

Stephen remains insubstantial. Only scraps of information occasionally come her way, like how he religiously fed the birds, how he would set off alone with a rucksack and not be seen for days, and Mrs Buckpit unfolds her face enough to reaffirm, with distaste, that Stephen refused all help at the end, insulted the doctor, turned away the ambulance, and the only person he allowed to come near him was the melancholy Horace.

Mrs Buckpit adopts her most menacing tone. She might well prefer to cross herself. ‘He got drunk regular. You could hear him, you’d see him performing out there on the road when he got very bad. He was disgusting.’ If she considers Stephen disgusting, what does she think of her own two boys? Or doesn’t she know that they piss in the parlour in full view of her husband’s ashes?

‘But what about when he was sober?’ Georgie pleads to no avail. Mrs Buckpit, reluctant to give any more away, wipes all expression from her face. ‘And surely when Stephen first arrived he couldn’t have been as bad as you paint him? After all, he was a young man.’

‘He never wanted no-one, not at the end, or the beginning. He should never have painted those naked women. Drove him quite mad in the end.’

And that seems to be that. The real truth at last. Mrs Buckpit had somehow got wind of Stephen’s few innocent nudes and considered him pagan thereafter. And the truth about Stephen’s life is probably equally simple, he chose his retreat, paid for the cottage—cheap in those days, no doubt, compared to today’s standards—by selling his paintings, and refused to abandon it. But had he never felt an urge to move on?

Georgie regularly phones her friends. With a bright and breezy air, she says, ‘I am absolutely fine. It’s all rather novel, being on my own, but I’m fine.’ She turns every problem into a joke and sits and listens as they laugh on the other end of the long, long line. And that is another feature of horror films she has always despised, that abysmal lack of communication, almost deliberate, that strikes the victims and turns them mute so they can’t seek the help they so urgently need.

And she tries to remember the useful activities she promised to do with her time.

Helen and Roger Mace and the kids are coming to stay for Christmas, so there is a break to look forward to, if only for three days. But after that there’ll be three long months to endure before the tenants are out of her flat and she can sell it, get rid of the cottage and move back to the city.

Should she take up her old job again? She toys with the idea of a brand-new career, in law perhaps, or teaching, but does not progress very far with that.

The days are so long. She can’t go for long walks because of the steady, penetrating drizzle. Born on a Dartmoor wind, it breaks through whatever protection you use, you are soaked to the skin by the shattering rain after five minutes’ exposure. Drives in the car are nothing but a depressing battle with wipers and demister. ‘I want to come. How can you be so mean, driving off and leaving me here?’ pleads Donna, struggling with her infatuation, which time only seems to intensify.

‘Donna, you can’t always be with me. It’s not good for either of us. I’m only off for a drive, dammit! Go and find something better to do.’

Concentrating on books is beyond Georgie, life gets so bad that she finds herself looking forward to bedtime, and tries to prolong that longed-for moment. She watches TV until well after midnight, and only then will she release herself and plod up the stairs to try to sleep. When it comes it is balm. More often than not it does not come. She remembers being a child at home, jumping when the door creaked open. She shouted into the terrible silence, ‘
But I locked the door, you can’t get in!
’ and wakes to discover she was asleep, having another terrible nightmare. So Georgie lies there tossing and turning, listening to the stream rushing relentlessly under her window, the moaning wind and that infernal rain, ceaseless during this long October. Drip drip drip. It patters off the thatch with such weary regularity it is a Chinese water torture. And so is the fact that Lola, on the floor beside her, sleeps the sleep of the just and feels no need to keep one eye open. Like she does.

Movement, any new undertaking, is a real effort. What the hell did she expect? And what is happening to her mind? Is she turning into a hysteric, the sort she has always despised?

Truly, she is pitiful to see. Georgie is a textbook case. To help herself find sleep she takes to drinking red wine at night. It starts with one glass, but when that fails to work it is two, then three, then the bottle, until the room spins round as she lies there, miserable, wretched, unable to understand what is happening and not knowing how to beat the depression that has gripped her so completely. Georgie never could handle drink. She begins to feel guilty about putting all those empties out, sure that the beady eyes of Mrs Buckpit are watching and counting, marking the results of her failure on some hidden pad to be accounted for afterwards. The cow will think the same boozy weakness runs in the family. She takes to boxing the bottles up, trying to disguise her shameful habits.

Is she heading for a nervous breakdown? This is what frightens her. And no-one would know. Donna, so self-obsessed, probably wouldn’t even notice. She’ll be too far gone, a screaming wreck by the time they find her, too extreme a case for help.

At last November is almost here. Bonfire night was always a favourite, but there’ll be no celebrations in Wooton-Coney. Does anyone here recognize Christmas? That’s doubtful, apart from the Buckpits’ visit to chapel. Bedtime at last, and Georgie picks up the log basket and trails into the woodshed, one of her little habits by which she has learned to tell the time. She likes to pick out a hefty log to burn on the fire all night so the downstairs is warm in the morning. Earlier, when it wasn’t so cold, she let the fire go out, but the stone cottage takes ages to warm through thoroughly. There’s a good stack of wood out there to burn, and the fireguard is a sturdy one, so it’s safe and well worth it.

She turns on the woodshed light and searches for a suitable log. It has to be flat so it won’t roll off. Georgie is fearful of fire, these days she is fearful of just about everything. Something makes her look up, something must have grabbed her attention, and the eye that stares down from the hole in the roof is quite unmistakable.

One horrendous staring eye.

A hideous shock.

Georgie freezes.

Every nerve in her body is screaming.

Bent as she is, arms stretching out towards the log, neck twisted round, her eyes hold to the one that stares back with a glaring intensity. No colour, no blinks, just an eye where the stars should be. Glittering through a hole in her roof. Tense as an animal in a trap she whispers to herself as she backs away, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’ But she cannot wrench her gaze away. She feels her way blindly from the shed, sobbing softly.

Oh God, where is Lola?
It’s OK, it’s OK, the dog is indoors, asleep by the fire. Georgie slams the kitchen door, fixes the chain and stands there frozen, trying to breathe with her jaw slackly open. She wants to press her weight on the door and not let up for an instant lest the thing, lest the creature with the eye, tries to push its way through and grab her. Licking her lips Georgie slyly tiptoes to the phone, the eye might guess what she’s up to and attempt to stop help coming… it might slam itself against the door…

With a hand that is dead, nothing like her own familiar warm one, Georgie dials 999. The voice that gives her address is steady and, astonishingly, sounds like her own. She is careful to give precise directions. It will not do for the police to get lost. She stresses the need for urgency and watches the night through the windows so hard that her eyes hurt, particularly as the curtains are drawn so she can’t see out.

‘I’ll hold,’ she tells the operator sharply. ‘I can’t put this phone down. It’s out there, not yards away, and there’s nobody here except me. I’ll hold on until somebody gets here.’ And she does just that. She grips so hard her hand is a claw, she clings for grim death.

Centuries go by while she waits for the police to arrive. Perhaps it was an animal. Oh my God, and she has mindlessly called the police, of course, it was an animal. What else would climb so soundlessly onto her woodshed roof and wait for her out there, and stare down so vacantly, so totally unblinkingly? The police will arrive and pour scorn on her terror; a Londoner come from up the line, making a fuss over some perfectly natural country occurrence.

Was it an animal?
How can she tell? An eye is an eye, she would hardly have the presence of mind to stand there and sort through the possibilities, not in the state she is in, and how many glasses of wine has she had, and will the police smell it and decide she is just pissed?

‘Are you all right?’ calls the anxious voice on the phone, her lifeline.

‘Yes, I’m all right. Just so long as you stay there.’

‘Is there anyone I could call who could come and wait with you until we arrive?’

No, there is no-one. She can’t disturb Horace Horsefield in the middle of the night, he couldn’t possibly leave Nancy alone. Mrs Buckpit might come, Georgie supposes, but with such reluctance and bad temper she would be no use at all. Chad would enjoy refusing, and he would never allow Donna to help.

‘No,’ says Georgie in a pitiful voice. ‘There’s nobody. Only me.’ It sounds as if it’s her fault. As if she is unlovable, no friends, no relations. And as if she is one of those difficult neighbours everyone does their best to avoid.

‘Not even a neighbour?’ The operator will not give up and Georgie wants to shout,
This is Wooton-Coney for Christ’s sake. There’s neighbours and there’s neighbours, and I am a stranger and unwelcome here.

Eventually the lights of a police car kiss the hem of her curtains. Georgie weeps with relief. ‘They’re here,’ she sobs to her staunch companion of the night. But not until she has let them in, not until the size of them and their sensibleness fills her living room dare she put the phone down, dare she face the click of being cut off.

The two policemen are both locals, both large and reassuring. She makes them tea. She sips her own with shaking hands. Only when they have finished their tea and she has described what happened in detail do they ask to see the woodshed. She cautiously takes the chain from her door and leads them outside. The woodshed light is still on.

‘Where exactly did you see this eye?’

She points up bravely. Of course it’s not there now.

‘But you heard nothing when you entered the shed? You think it was already in position?’

‘It must have been. There was only one small sound. That’s what made me look up. Without that I might have come and gone without noticing anything and he’d probably still be there now.’ Georgie shudders.

‘We’d better take a look now we’re here.’

So Georgie fetches her ladder and stands back and watches as one of the policemen climbs to the sloping roof. It’s not high. You have to duck to get through the woodshed door, it’s the only part of the roof which is tiled and if you don’t duck you could cut your head on the slates. The policeman shines his torch and shouts down, ‘Can’t see anything here.’ They poke about. They chat and look round while the rain damps their uniforms and their shoulders sparkle in the light from the door. Then they are back inside again, sitting by the fire, and the ruddy-faced of the two asks, ‘And what makes you think there was a man on your roof? Isn’t an animal more likely?’

Oh yes, she had known this was coming. ‘It wasn’t one of those tiny eyes. It wasn’t the eye of a rat, or a mouse.’

‘How about an owl?’ He’s taking notes. The other lights a cigarette and crosses his legs as if he’s at home. It’s pleasing to see him acting like this, she wants them to stay a while longer.

‘It wasn’t a round eye like an owl’s. It was more slanted than that, more human. That’s why I immediately assumed it must be a man.’

‘I dunno what a fox’s eye would look like from below, d’you, Wilf?’

‘Well,’ says the comfortably spreadeagled Wilf. ‘In car headlights they look red, don’t they? But God knows what they’d look like on a roof.’ He turns to Georgie. ‘What d’you think, Miss? Was it a fox’s eye?’

She is nonplussed. This is a ludicrous conversation. ‘I don’t know what a fox’s eye might look like, either.’

‘You see, Miss,’ and the, ruddy-faced man with button nose looks at her kindly and says, ‘frankly, it’s so improbable that an intruder would be there on your roof, not least in weather like this, just staring down silently with intent, it’s so unlikely that we have to discount it. Apart from which, if it was a man, once he’d been spotted he’d be off, wouldn’t he? He wasn’t to know that you’d hurry indoors, for all he knew you could have picked up a spade and attacked him. So you see, I think we’re going to have to discount that possibility, I’m afraid.’

‘I thought that’s what you’d say.’

Wilf says, ‘You disagree with our theory then?’

Georgie pushes at her wet hair frantically. ‘No, I can’t disagree. How can I disagree when you sound so plausible? I don’t know who that eye belonged to, and I admit it seems a bit unlikely that a man would stay there once he’d been seen…’

‘So, you see, you needn’t have been so frightened. I mean, what’s he after?’ asks Wilf, looking round with a speculative eye.