Midnight Is a Lonely Place

by Barbara Erskine

  For a long time nothing happened. No lights came on. There was no sound. She was beginning to panic that there was no one there when at last she heard the sound of a door opening somewhere inside.

  ‘Who is it?’ A man’s voice sounded strangely hollow from behind the door.

  ‘Hi. I’m sorry to arrive so late. My car couldn’t make it down the track. I’m Anne Kennedy. Kate’s sister.’ It felt faintly ridiculous, speaking to a bolted door. She wished they would hurry up and open it. There was something not right out here, something frightening in the air. ‘Please. May I come in?’ She tried to keep the panic out of her voice.

  ‘Wait.’ The voice was curt. Almost rude.

  Anne stared at the door in disbelief. It had not crossed her mind that they might not let her in. She glanced behind her at the dull white sheen which was a snow-covered lawn.

  ‘Anne? Is that you?’ Suddenly Kate’s voice came from behind the door. The flap of the letter box rose and a torch shone out into the darkness. ‘Crouch down, so I can see your face.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Kate. Of course it’s me. I sincerely wish it wasn’t!’ The last of her stamina was going. Anne bent over and stared into the letter box. ‘What is the matter with you all?’

  ‘It’s her. Let her in.’ She heard the muffled words as the letter- box sprang shut followed at once by the sound of bolts being drawn back.

  ‘Quickly. Come in.’ Kate pulled her over the threshold into a darkened hall. Anne was dimly aware of a guttering candle on a saucer as someone closed the door behind her and shot the bolts across once more, then she was ushered into a candlelit living room. It was warm, and smelled of wonderful cooking and it was full of people.

  She stared round, doing a double take. ‘It’s like the hospital at Scutari,’ she blurted out. ‘Kate, love, what’s been happening?’

  A woman, wearing a sling and with a black eye lay on the sofa; a girl, wrapped in rugs was lying on pillows in the corner; a man, his bandaged foot propped up on a stool sat beside the fire. Behind her the two men – one man and a boy, she corrected herself as she glanced at them – who had opened the door with Kate were standing staring at her as if she had just appeared from Mars. Two other people and a girl stood nearby, all looking at her. ‘What is happening here? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Oh, Anne!’ Kate threw herself into her arms. ‘I’ve never been so pleased to see anyone in my life!’

  ‘The dea ex machina, come to rescue us, I presume.’ The words came from the man with the injured foot.

  Anne stared at him blankly then she turned to Kate. ‘You’d better explain,’ she said.

  LVII

  He rode fast, leaning forward on his horse’s neck, the brooch, the native brooch which had pinned her gown, holding his own cloak now against the wind. The prince of the Trinovantes had paid the price and gone to his gods and the hell-cat woman with him, with her curses and her hate. Well, let her curse. Who would ever know what had happened here today? There were no witnesses, no survivors. Her sister, simple docile girl that she was, would believe him when he told her Claudia had fled with her lover to his brothers in the west. She would be shocked, but she would believe him. And she would understand the need for divorce. He smiled as he rode, and raised his hand to flog his horse on faster as it scaled the rise in the track, its hooves throwing up clouds of dust. He had already decided that he would remarry. Her sister was much like her to look at, much younger and more biddable by far. She could take over his household and raise his son; provide him with more sons if she did her duty well. And he would see to it that the prince’s tribe came no more to Colonia Claudia Victricensis. They incubated sedition and plotted with the Iceni against Rome. A burning straw would ignite the mood against their overlords, but it would not be his straw; no uprising would be of his instigation. Nor hers. Claudia. The woman he had treated as a goddess. No one would ever know what had occurred here today. She would never tell; she had taken her betrayal and her fury with her to her muddy, inglorious death.

  ‘There are ten people in this house.’ Roger stood with his back to the fire, looking down at the others as they sat round him. Allie still had not spoken. She was asleep on a pile of cushions and pillows in the corner and no one suggested waking her. Sue was sitting beside her, holding her hand, her eyes closing as she nodded sleepily in the warmth of the room. ‘I cannot believe that we can’t vanquish whatever is threatening us here tonight. Anne. You are, I gather, the expert,’ he bowed in her direction. ‘And we seem to be agreed that our enemy is not human. Can I ask you to take the floor and tell us what the hell to do!’ He moved to his chair and sank into it with a groan.

  Anne felt a thousand times better than she had walking on her own through the woods, but now that the full horror of the situation had been explained to her even a bowl of hot soup had not managed to dispel the chill which had settled in her stomach. She shook her head. ‘I’m a psychologist, not a psychic. I know very little about ghosts. As far as I know I’ve never seen one.’ Then what or who was the mysterious horseman who had thundered past her on the track? No one in the house knew anything about him.

  ‘You must help Allie, Anne,’ Kate put in from her seat on the floor. She was leaning against the side of Greg’s chair, gazing into the embers. His hand was resting lightly on her shoulder.

  ‘I think she’s possessed.’ Greg said quietly. ‘Her strength, her voice, her actions. None of them belong to Alison.’

  ‘Greg. Don’t!’ Diana’s voice was anguished. She glanced across at the two girls. Sue’s head had fallen forward; her grip on Alison’s hand had loosened and her fingers were slack. She was dozing. Alison moved her head restlessly from side to side and then lay still again. Her eyes were not properly closed. Beneath the half-open lids the whites showed as pale slits.

  Anne bit her lip. They were all looking at her and she didn’t know what the hell to say. ‘Has she been seen by a doctor recently?’ she asked at last. ‘There are quite a few conditions which could fit some of what has happened to her. For instance, has she had a head injury in the last few months? Even quite a mild knock could do it.’ She looked from Diana to Roger and back. Diana shook her head. ‘And there has been no organic damage at any time as far as you know? Cysts, lesions, tumours, anything like that? Has she complained of headaches?’

  ‘Yes, she has.’ Patrick and Greg spoke simultaneously.

  ‘But you’re on the wrong track there,’ Greg went on. ‘Quite wrong.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Anne looked at him seriously. ‘There could be a medical reason for her suffering these strange blackouts and we need to rule them out if we can.’ Again she looked at Diana. ‘Is there any family history of schizophrenia or genetic disorders as far as you know?’

  Diana shook her head.

  ‘And there is no possibility that she is taking drugs?’

  ‘None at all.’ Diana pressed her hands to her cheeks. ‘I was a nurse, Anne. Do you think I haven’t thought of these things? Besides, Allie is not the only one to have had strange experiences.’

  Anne paused. She bit her lip. She had felt on reasonably safe ground talking in medical terms. ‘OK.’ she went on carefully. ‘Let’s explore some other possibilities and find out exactly what we are talking about. I take it that nothing has happened actually inside this house.’ Her eyes rested speculatively for a moment on Greg’s hand on Kate’s shoulder.

  ‘Except for Allie going peculiar; but that probably happened, as Kate said, on the beach.’

  ‘And my books on the floor,’ Paddy put in.

  ‘And I smelt her perfume. It was in your study, Roger.’ Kate hugged her knees more tightly.

  Roger raised an eyebrow. ‘What does she use? Chanel?’

  ‘Something with flowers – jasmine and musk and amber. And with it there is always the smell of wet earth.’

  Anne looked at her carefully. ‘How often have you smelt this?’

  ‘Often. In the cottage too.’

  ‘And it
always precedes some kind of phenomenon?’

  Kate shrugged. ‘Not always. Sometimes that is all there is.’

  ‘And him. Marcus. Does he have a smell too?’

  Kate looked up at Greg. He shook his head. ‘I can’t say I’ve noticed. When he’s around one is too shit-scared to notice anything.’

  ‘Is it mass hysteria?’ Diana said slowly. ‘Are we all infecting each other?’ She was shivering in spite of the heat of the fire.

  Anne shrugged. ‘It’s possible. How many of you have actually seen something?’ She looked at Roger, who shook his head almost regretfully. ‘Diana?’

  ‘No. It’s all hearsay – except for what happened to Allie, of course.’

  ‘Kate and I have seen both Marcus and Claudia,’ Greg said slowly. He caressed Kate’s neck gently. ‘Cissy and Sue saw him clearly. Allie obviously has seen them both. Paddy –?’

  ‘I felt him,’ Patrick said slowly. ‘And we saw him out there. I shot at him. And he wrote a message on my computer.’

  ‘He wrote it, or you wrote it without knowing you’d done it?’ Anne asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember doing it. But how would a Roman know how to use a computer?’

  Anne smiled. ‘He wouldn’t.’

  ‘I wrote something strange on my computer too,’ Kate added. ‘A curse. “May the gods of all eternity curse you Marcus Severus Secundus for what you have done here this day …”’

  She spoke the words quietly, but they hung in the room for what seemed an uncomfortably long time. Kate sat still, her eyes on the fire. ‘I wonder what he did to her.’

  ‘It must have been something pretty awful,’ Greg said softly.

  ‘Murder. I think he murdered her. Her dress is covered with blood.’

  ‘And it’s her grave Alison has uncovered in the dunes.’

  Anne shivered. Pulling one of the cushions from the end of the sofa she threw it down in front of the fire and sat down on it, hugging her knees just as her sister was doing. ‘Just supposing you are right,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘What are we assuming here? That Alison’s excavation has uncovered a long-dead crime? That a murdered woman is still crying out for vengeance after two thousand or so years and that for some reason she and the man who murdered her are attacking everyone in sight. That they are capable of clubbing a man to death, burning down a barn, throwing a car into the sea, cutting off the phone, manifesting soil and maggots and perfumes and physically threatening anyone foolish enough to go outside?’

  ‘It sounds a pretty grim scenario, put like that,’ Roger commented wryly. ‘But for want of a better theory, and because it is more or less midnight, which is traditionally the witching hour, and because whatever has happened has scared the daylights out of a fairly large, responsible group of people, most of whom are otherwise sane adults, I would say it sounds fairly convincing for now.’

  ‘Perhaps Kate is right and we should pray,’ his wife put in tentatively. ‘I appreciate your intellectual opposition to prayer, darling, but it would seem to be the only option left, and traditionally, to use your word, it is the only sensible response.’

  ‘It’s the only possible response,’ Patrick muttered.

  ‘Rubbish,’ Roger retorted. ‘The sensible response is for us all to get some sleep. In the morning we will have some breakfast and some of us will walk up the track with Joe and call the police. There has, after all, been a murder committed. If there is anyone out there, and I doubt if by now he is still there, my judgement is that he is human. Some kind of maniac on the loose from somewhere. Poor Bill happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The police will get him. But for the rest of us to end up basket cases because of what has happened is insane in itself. I am sure we will find a concrete explanation. You do what you like. I am going to bed.’ He stood up.

  No one else moved. ‘There aren’t enough beds for everyone, Roger,’ Diana put in absent-mindedly.

  ‘Then whoever wants to can stay down here by the fire. There are lots of rugs. No one need be too uncomfortable.’ Roger stooped and threw a couple of logs onto the fire. It roared up the chimney in a shower of sparks. ‘Joe. I suggest you take my son’s bed as he shouldn’t climb the stairs. Kate, you and Anne – ’

  ‘We’ll stay down here, Roger, thank you. I’m very comfortable by the fire.’ Kate smiled at him.

  ‘Me too.’ Patrick put in.

  Kate glanced up at Greg. ‘You go and lie down in the study, Greg. Rest your foot. We’ll keep watch. If anything happens we can call you.’

  He reached down and put his hand on her shoulder again. The touch was only light, a brush, no more. ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll stay here. I’m too comfortable to move.’

  When the elder members of the group had gone upstairs, Anne seated herself on the chair Roger had vacated. ‘Have any of you heard the weather forecast?’ she said quietly. ‘It’s unbelievably bad. I don’t know whether being near the sea makes it better, but they are predicting blizzards for tomorrow. It’s not going to be easy to go for help.’

  ‘You think we should try now, before it gets too bad?’ Greg leaned forward.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to think. I just wanted to warn you.’

  ‘I don’t think we should go out again,’ Kate put in. ‘We’ve been lucky so far.’ Her eyes strayed down to Greg’s foot. ‘But I don’t think we should risk anything else.’

  ‘I think we should open a bottle of wine.’ Greg levered himself to his feet. ‘If we’re going to stay awake we may as well enjoy ourselves, and if it helps us sleep that would be no bad thing.’

  He hobbled across to the kitchen. Then he stopped suddenly. ‘Where are the cats?’

  Paddy shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen them.’

  Greg frowned. ‘Are they upstairs?’

  ‘If they’re like C.J. they will be in the middle of the best bed,’ Anne commented. ‘No cat is going to be anywhere else in this kind of weather.’

  ‘They don’t usually go upstairs.’ Greg bent down and hauled a bottle out of the wine rack in the corner. ‘It’s too cold most of the time. The cosy places are all in here round the fire or the Aga.’ He took the corkscrew out of the drawer and tearing the foil seal off the bottle, he began to wind into the cork. ‘We’re all used to fifteen blankets and duvets each and night storage heaters and things but that is hardly up to feline standards. Here, Paddy, carry this for me, there’s a good chap and we need some glasses.’ He hopped back to the fire and sat down again with a groan. He put his hand on Kate’s shoulder again, more firmly this time, and he let it rest there. ‘Cheer up, we’re all safe now.’

  She shook her head. ‘I keep thinking of poor Bill in the cottage, all alone.’

  She accepted a glass from Paddy and took a sip. ‘I can’t believe any of this has happened. It’s ridiculous. It’s not possible. Things like this don’t happen to people in real life.’ Greg’s hand was still on her shoulder. Without thinking, she reached up and grasped his fingers. They were warm and reassuringly strong as they returned her grip.

  ‘I’m afraid they do happen to ordinary people,’ Anne put in. She smiled at Patrick as he gave her a glass. ‘But I’m glad to say there is usually a mundane explanation for even the strangest phenomenon. I’m inclined to think that most of your weird goings on here have been a combination of ordinary things. Cars skid in bad weather; they crash on steep icy lanes. People imagine they see things when the weather is bad. Oh, yes they do, Kate. And people infect one another with something like hysteria very easily when they’re scared and you’ve had something real to be scared about. A man has been murdered.’

  ‘But before he was murdered. When I phoned you. All the things we discussed.’ Kate shifted slightly to lean against Greg’s good knee.

  ‘Poltergeists.’ Anne nodded. ‘Centred on Alison. I think that is very possible. She seems to be emotionally very disturbed at the moment.’ She glanced at the two girls who appeared to be sleeping soundly on their makeshift bed in th
e corner.

  ‘So you consider poltergeists to be real?’ Greg asked.

  ‘Yes. I do, in that they are an outward manifestation of inward conflict; the energy created by the brain is quite astounding, you know.’

  ‘Astounding enough to throw a large car out into the saltings? Astounding enough to set fire to a barn?’

  ‘The latter could easily have been a prowler, Greg.’ Kate had accepted the loss of her car with astonishing calm; after everything else that had happened it seemed almost unimportant on the scale of things.

  Paddy was half way through his own glass of wine when he looked up suddenly. ‘The cats couldn’t have been in the barn, could they?’

  ‘Of course not. They never went there except bird-nesting in the summer. They can’t get in when the door’s locked anyway.’

  ‘Of course they can. There are – or were – loads of holes they could get in through.’

  ‘They won’t have been there, Paddy, don’t worry,’ Anne put in, hearing the panic so near the surface in Patrick’s voice. The boy was very near the end of his strength. ‘The first hint of trouble and they would have been away. Cats are psychic about these things.’

  There was a moment’s silence then Greg let out a short bark of laughter. ‘Not entirely a happy choice of words under the circumstances.’

  She grimaced as she hauled herself to her feet. ‘Sorry. Listen, is there a loo downstairs? I don’t want to disturb anyone who’s asleep.’

  ‘Just across the passage, behind the study.’ Kate gestured towards the door. ‘Here, take this candle.’

  The passage was very cold after the heat near the fire. Sheltering the flame with her hand, Anne pushed past the coats and boots, past the closed study door. She could feel the draught from the front door on her neck. They should have a curtain for it. The passage was cluttered with things: carefully she held the candle up, trying not to trip over baskets and shoes, walking sticks, a box of cat food, an old electric fire – heating this house was obviously a problem – a box of what looked like stones, some rolls of Christmas paper and a box of decorations, obviously ready to go up, and – she stopped. Something had moved ahead of her, just out of candle range. It must be one of the cats. She raised her hand a little trying to throw the dim circle of light a little further from her. There it was again. Something in the shadows. But not on the floor; this was full height. Human height. ‘Who’s there?’ To her disgust her voice was shaking.