He was amazed and oddly relieved. “More than fair.”
“Excellent. Up to Christmas and after. Until . . . oh let’s say until New Year, shall we?”
Downstairs, the Hall was in darkness. Paula had gone; her overalls swung on their hook. Tom let himself out into the cold. Overhead, the frosty stars glinted; far out to sea a great cloudbank streamed from the west. As he stood on the porch, the gargoyles were openmouthed against the light. Behind, footsteps stirred the crisp leaves.
“I wondered where you’d got to,” he said. “Did you hear what he’s paying?”
There was no answer. He turned, quickly. “Simon?”
Cloud drifted from the moon; eerie light lit the eyes of the gargoyles, their gleaming teeth.
Under them, the blond girl from the post office was watching him curiously.
eighteen
He stared at her. “Where did you spring from?”
“Keep your voice down!” She glanced at the moon anxiously; cloud was drifting over it again. “Is Azrael in there?”
“Yes. But . . .”
“Blast.” She swung the backpack up; it seemed heavy. He remembered the cans of food she had bought. “One of those thugs in the post office said your mother was the cleaner here.”
He was annoyed. “So?”
“So you owe me a favor. I need you to get me inside. And I need a key. Someone’s changed all the locks.”
“I can’t!”
“Of course you can.”
Tom was silent. There was something about her that puzzled him. Something not quite right. Over his shoulder he said to Simon, “What is it?”
“Never mind him,” the girl snapped. “Give me the key.”
Astonished, they stared at her.
“You can see me?” Simon came out of the shadows, intensely interested. “You really can?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“This is brilliant!”
“Quiet!” Tom shook his head. This scared him. “If it’s thieving, forget it.”
The girl looked tired. She almost smiled. “I just need somewhere to stay. Till New Year. This place is empty till term. There are plenty of beds.”
An owl hooted; she looked up quickly. “You owe me. No one else needs know, not your mother. Especially not Azrael.”
“And Mr. Scrab?”
She sighed. “Him too.”
A window clattered above them. Instantly the three of them flattened into the shadows, Tom feeling Simon’s warmth at his shoulder. A slot of faint light shone out briefly into the dark trees, a man’s indistinct shadow flitting across it. Then the shutters were slammed.
The girl hissed with relief. “Let’s get inside.”
“But he’s living here. Azrael. Isn’t it . . .”
“It doesn’t matter where I go in the end. Now come on!”
Tom hesitated. “Do it,” Simon said quickly.
So he unlocked the door, turning the well-oiled catch silently. As they slipped in he whispered, “I don’t know your name.”
“Sarah.” She looked around the black-and-white hall.
Tom bit his lip “You could go . . .”
“I know where to go,” she muttered. Quickly she climbed the curved stairs and they followed, among small creaks of floorboards and the old building’s shifts and murmurs in the windy night. The girl knew the way. She went up to the old servants’ quarters, tiptoeing carefully past the library wing. Everything was in darkness. Azrael must have gone to bed, Tom thought.
The servants’ stair was a mass of shadows; they inched their way up, keeping to the edge of the steps, Sarah letting a small mouse run over her feet with only a sudden intake of breath.
Beyond the alcove filled with filing cabinets she seemed suddenly lost. “They’ve changed this,” she whispered, close to his ear. “There used to be a corridor here.”
“Through there.” He opened the fire door; it slid behind them with a slow swish. This area was the sixth-form bedrooms; in his wanderings he’d been up here often, pretending, dreaming. He had a favorite room halfway down that he used as his. To his surprise, that was the door she stopped at.
“My room. Open it.”
He fumbled with the keys. Around them the vast house was silent, the only sound the chink of iron in the lock and almost too far off to hear, the thunder of the tide in Newhaven Bay.
And suddenly, something else.
A low sound. It rose from the depths of the house, so that Simon muttered “Listen,” and the key stopped in mid-turn.
Water. Deep, rumbling water, as if it ran inside them, in their veins, vibrating, a sound almost felt.
The girl was the first to move. “The Darkwater. Haven’t you heard it before?”
“Sometimes. It’s not often you can.”
“Give me that.” She took the keys, slid off the ones she needed, and dumped the rest back in his hands. “You’ll get them back.”
Then she had opened the door and slipped through. He took a step after her; the wooden panels closed firmly in his face.
“See you tomorrow,” the keyhole whispered.
In the morning he took the long way around the village. Up Deerham Lane and over the fields. It was cold and the sky was gray, and Simon ran ahead and opened the small kissing-gates for him so he wouldn’t have to take his hands out of his pockets.
“It sounds like a nice job,” his mother had said last night, eating toast and turning the newspaper pages. “I’m amazed he’s paying you so much.”
So was Tom. “What about this girl?” he asked now.
“On the run,” Simon said wisely. “You watch the papers, there’ll be something.”
“Should we tell someone?”
His brother shrugged, climbed the last stile, and jumped down. “Not till we know more. One thing: She’s been in that school before.”
“Ex-pupil?”
“Too young.”
“Maybe she came and then left.”
“Possible.”
Tom climbed the stile and walked into the wood. “Her face is familiar,” he said softly.
At the Devil’s Quoits someone had broken the iron fence around the stones. On the largest one was written STEVE WAS HERE in white letters made from straggly dollops of paint. Standing looking at it, hands in pockets, was Azrael.
He glanced up darkly. “Look at this! Who’s Steve?”
Tom shrugged. “Probably Tate. His father runs the post office.” Then, hastily, he added, “But don’t say I said so.”
Azrael glanced at him sidelong. “Don’t get along?”
“No.”
Azrael laughed. He had his dark coat on. “I’m just taking a stroll around the old place, Tom. I’d be grateful if you’d go to the lab and start up. I’ve left instructions. Be careful of the one burner; it takes ages to light.”
He turned. Tom said, “What sort of research is it?”
Azrael ducked under the low fir branches. “Didn’t I say? Transmutation. Of elements. A very long process.”
There was no sign of Scrab, and Paula had gone to Truro Christmas shopping, so he went up and tapped on the girl’s door. “Sarah? It’s Tom.”
No answer.
He tried the handle, but it was locked. Worried, he wandered down to the library, where Simon was waiting.
“Maybe she’s gone.”
“No such luck,” Tom said gloomily.
Azrael’s instructions were written on a rectangular white card pinned to the mantelshelf. Tom assembled the listed glassware, spooning in chemicals from the rows of jars over the shelf. The bottles of acid were huge and heavy; he poured from them with infinite care, seeing one drop of the sulfuric escape and burn into the bench with a whiff of acrid vapor.
“Your trouble,” Simon sighed, “is that you’re too serious. That’s why they make fun of you.”
His brother jammed the stopper in furiously. “Drop dead.”
Simon giggled, and went over to the wall safe. “I wonder what’s in here.”
“It’s locked. And Azrael keeps the key.”
The girl was leaning inside the door; she came in and closed it and looked around. “Well. This brings it all back.”
Tom straightened. “I think you should tell us . . . I mean . . . We don’t know anything about you.”
Amused, she perched on a bench, her feet on a stool. She wore muddy walking boots and a thick fleece jacket, expensive-looking. Her hair was dyed. She looked about sixteen, he thought.
“Tell you what?”
“Well, have you run off?”
“No.”
“Left home, I mean.”
“No.” She grinned. “The opposite. This is my home.”
“It’s a school,” Simon said, and came and sat by the telescope.
She looked at him. “Maybe it is, now. But not always. I used to live here; in fact, I still own the place. I’m Sarah Trevelyan.”
Tom turned the burner down; the hot hissing died but the heat had warmed the lab. “Her descendant, you mean? Sarah Trevelyan was the woman who made this place a school—they read her will every year on Founder’s Day. A kid that goes here told me. She left money so that . . .”
“Every child that is able, whether boy or girl, rich or poor, may receive, without payment, the education that their heart desires. I know. I wrote it.”
A flask bubbled suddenly. Tom stared at her. “Are you crazy?”
Sarah smiled sadly. She hugged her knees. “I’ve dreaded this, but now it’s come, it’s such a relief. Keeping a secret for a hundred years is a torment—it bubbles inside you like that potion—it’s never still and you can’t stop it rising to the surface.” She laughed at their bemused look. The shapes of the planets began to drift in the warming air.
“I was born in 1885. I made an arrangement with a . . . creature. A supernatural power. The one you know as Azrael. He gave me a hundred years to live, and my own estate and fortune. The time runs out at New Year. That’s why he’s come back. He’s come for me.”
“Oh yes,” Tom said. “And I’m the Queen of Sheba.”
Sarah shrugged. “Kids. I thought you’d be different.” She glanced at Simon. “Having him around, I mean.”
“What about him.”
She got up, impatient. “All right. I’ll prove it. Come on.”
She went to the door and out along the crowded library corridor with its chained volumes to a room by the entrance to the wing. On one wall a mothy rhinoceros head peered down. On the other was a painting.
Tom had seen it many times. The young Sarah Trevelyan looked down at him from a luxurious Victorian sofa. Her dress was dark blue, with an ivory lace collar, her brown hair long and intricately pinned.
“It looks like you,” Simon said, considering. “Was she your great-grandmother?”
“It’s me.” Sarah stood with her back to the painting.
The likeness was incredible, if you could ignore the short blond hair. Tom was shaken, but he shrugged.
“How could it . . .”
“Look at her hands.”
The girl in the painting had her hands on her lap. She was looking at the watcher with an amused, knowing smile, and her palms were turned up. Across one of them were five red weals.
Sarah held up her own hand, facing him.
Five red marks crossed it. Identical.
“I had it painted like that deliberately, though the wretched artist had to be nagged to put them in. I knew I might need them.” She leaned back against the bookshelves. Tom said carefully, “How did you get them?”
“Beaten. You think they should have faded in a hundred years, don’t you? But when the clocks started ticking, I just stopped. My nails didn’t grow, my hair stayed the same length. I never lost a tooth or an eyelash. It took me a while to notice it, but then I knew I was static. The world moved around me, but I never grew up.”
She smiled, spinning an old Empire globe, fingering the dusty countries absently. “It’s so ironic. I never wanted to grow old. What I did want was knowledge, and I got it. Do you know how many schools I’ve been to? At least sixteen, till I got sick of it. I’ve got dozens of exams—O Levels, A Levels, Certificates, even a few GCSEs. I’ve had jobs—in the wars it was easy; I worked on the land, in factories, got evacuated from London. I’ve traveled too. Rome, Paris, I know them like you know that beach down there. Every country in Europe, I trailed around them, learned their languages, saw their history happen, was in Berlin when the Wall came down. Trouble was, it wasn’t the sort of knowledge I really wanted. Maybe it took me the first fifty years to realize that.”
They were staring at her. She looked away, up at the picture. How could she tell them how it had all been, that hundred years? More than a lifetime, places and people she could barely remember, all the friends, enemies, houses, mistakes, brief happinesses. And it had changed her. Azrael had known it would.
She remembered the moment the clocks had started; that was vivid, even after all this time. And it was still here, the one on the mantelshelf, still ticking, as it had ticked all down the years. “That first day I told myself Azrael was mad,” she said. “That he’d just gone home, to wherever he came from. But when the days passed, and months, and I didn’t age, then I knew, I really knew I had done it. I had sold my soul.”
Tom leaned against the window and folded his arms. If she was lying, she was good at it. “People would find out,” he said.
“They almost did, a few times. My father died six years after we came back here, and I lived here two more years, but I knew by then I dare not stay anywhere too long. So Sarah Trevelyan endowed her school and went to live abroad, and after that I did everything through letters to the solicitors. When I wrote the will I left the money to myself—my own daughter. And so on. But I couldn’t make friends my own age, because there were none. I’m still sixteen! And yet I’m not.” She smiled, going over to the telescope. “I used to be pretty selfish. I thought having money was important. Then I felt sorry for the villagers—we used to call them the poor, and my God, they were. I tried to help them, to undo what the Trevelyans had done.”
“That was good,” Tom said at random.
She turned sharply. “Yes. But it took me too long to find out that the poor had more than me. Family, for one thing. A hundred years is a lot of loneliness.”
Tom bit his lip. “But Azrael. Does that mean he’s as old as . . .”
“Older. He comes from the world’s beginning, that one. Are you working for him?”
“Yes. He’s paying—”
“Oh he pays well, but don’t make any deals. And never—”
Footsteps came up the stairs. Sarah turned quickly. “He’s back. I don’t want to see him. Not yet. I’ve still got ten days left.”
“But won’t he know?”
“I don’t care!” She backed into the maze of rooms.
The library door opened. Azrael’s voice said, “It’s me, Tom.”
Sarah glanced around. “The fire escape.”
They raced through the rooms of books and papers. “Look at it,” she muttered. “As much a mess as ever.”
Simon had the fire door open.
“Tom?” Azrael called.
Pages ruffled in the chill breeze. Sarah climbed out and crouched.
“Never what?” Tom said.
She grabbed the collar of his coat. “Never touch
the jar. The big one, the one in the safe.”
And then, just as he shut the door, she whispered, “Because I think I may be the one who killed your brother.”
nineteen
Christmas was almost here.
Tom’s mother got the box of decorations down from the attic and he had to put them up, pushing the pins into last year’s holes. Paula always enjoyed Christmas. She made the small cottage cozy, burning logs on the hearth and making swathes of ivy and holly across the fireplace. Lamps were lit and the best china came out, and extravagant cheap boxes of chocolates from Truro market. The house smelled of brandy and fruit cake. That evening Steve Tate’s dad dropped the tree off in his van. Tom kept well out of the way. From the upstairs window he saw Steve in the passenger seat with his feet on the dashboard, whistling to the loud thump of music. He turned his head and glanced up.
Tom dropped the curtain and jumped back. Just too late.
“Where’s your girlfriend, lover boy?” Steve shouted. He took something small out of his pocket and held it up. “Be seeing you.” He grinned.
Tom stood still, chilled and puzzled. It had looked like a key.
All evening his mother decorated the tree with tinsel and small wooden angels painted gold, their tiny haloes needing straightening after months in the box. They’d had them for years. When he’d been small Tom’s favorite had been the one with the tiny broken foot; he picked it up off the floor now and handed it to her. As she hung it he went back to wrapping the presents while Simon lounged on the sofa and ate chips.
What had Sarah meant? How could she have killed Simon? It didn’t make any sense, and it scared him. Like this crazy story of a hundred years of life. Had she deliberately cut her hands to match that portrait?
Folding the silver paper with its galloping reindeer, he bit the tape off and looked at Simon, who muttered, “Just imagine for one minute it’s true. Think of all the things she’s lived through! Both World Wars. The sixties. Politics, fashions, inventions.”
“Maybe.” He turned the package over.
His mother put the last star on the treetop and flicked the switch. Red and blue and gold, small lights sparked into brilliance, lighting the green secret spaces of the tree. Hands on hips she looked at the room with satisfaction.
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