Nothing to be scared of.
Nothing.
Be scared.
Ferelith had told her the legend of the Hall, of this room.
If the legend were true, then somewhere is a place where Ferelith is sitting watching her, just as the doctor waited for his victim’s end, and she suddenly looks round the room again, staring through the gloom at the walls.
She can see nothing, but the thought that Ferelith might be watching her through some slit or grille makes her mad again.
‘Ferelith!’ she yells, startled by the strength of her own voice, startled by the fear in it. ‘Ferelith! If you’re there . . . You listen to me. You come and let me out right now! Let me out now and I’ll forget about it. Ferelith! Ferelith? Are you there? If you’re watching me, I swear . . .’
She stops, and then suddenly the panic rises in her throat, bubbling up from her beating heart, throwing itself out of her mouth with rage and anger, and she screams.
She screams, a desperate, incoherent scream. A shriek, and then she screams something that terrifies her. It terrifies her because she means it.
‘Ferelith! I’ll kill you!’
She screams again and then her head hangs and she begins sobbing, and before long she’s choking on her tears and snot, unable to wipe it away, since she’s bound to a chair in a darkened room.
Four Sea Interludes - IV
I went for a walk, because to tell the truth I find it a bit creepy in the Hall. It’s dark and dusty and there’s this whole feel about it. Like an aura, but not an aura of light, an aura of sucking darkness.
I went to the Lover’s Seat and sat in the sun and fiddled with Rebecca’s phone. After a while I got too hot and took my hoodie off and it was nice to feel the sun on my shoulders and arms.
I scrolled through her address book but nothing was very interesting.
Then I went to her inbox and looked through her texts. The most recent ones were from me, and I noted that she’d deleted some of mine, but not others. She’d kept ones where I’d said something nice, like one where I called her Best of Friends. I scrolled down to a couple from her dad, and again she’d kept boring ones which said I love you, or You are my angel, that kind of thing. It kind of makes me sick, apart from the fact that I liked the way he called her an angel.
Because if Rebecca was an angel, then that must make me the devil. That made me laugh.
Then I found some texts from Adam, the boy. She was holding on to them, though why she’d want to do that when he’d dumped her I don’t know.
They were the usual mushy stuff.
Miss you! xxx
Hey. I was just about to text you! I love you too x
I’m always happy to hear from you. Call me? X
The usual mush.
Then I checked her sent items, because lots of people forget to delete the texts they’ve sent, and to my great joy I discovered that Rebecca was one of them.
The battery gave me a warning beep then, and I knew I wouldn’t have long.
There they all were.
Texts to me. Texts to her dad.
I hate you. How can you be my father?
What am I supposed to do? I don’t know what to say.
And an older one.
Daddy. Please tell me that what they’re saying isn’t true. Please.
That had to be about the start of the case, when it hit the papers. I checked the date on the text and it pretty much fitted with what I remembered reading. So Rebecca must have been at school with all her friends when the news came out about how her dad made the wrong decision, and how he called off the team that were investigating the woods, and how if he hadn’t they might have found that girl tied to a table in a hut. While she was still alive, that is.
Then I found some texts to Adam, and among them I suddenly realised she was talking about me.
It’s okay for you. I’m stuck here with a freak. She’s weird.
I looked out to sea.
I watched the blue-grey waves heaving and felt like going for a swim, but I knew there wasn’t really time for that. I had to get back to the Hall.
Eventually.
Maybe.
I played with my knife for a bit, stabbing the dry earth around me, digging up the dusty soil, idly thinking about sun and rain. Lots of the first, none of the second. And me being a freak.
I stabbed the dry ground again, and I thought about Rebecca and Adam. Texting about me.
I was just doing that when her phone rang.
It surprised me so much that I dropped it. I picked it up again and read the display.
Dad.
I answered it.
‘Hello?’ he said.
‘Hello, Mr Case,’ I said. ‘Your daughter is with the angels now. Or the devils.’
And that’s when the phone died, the battery finally gone.
1798, 12m, 10d.
A Christless day today.
We toiled hard and long, but I was merely an innocent. I had become a simple labourer in the employ of Dr Barrieux.
The doctor was in a foul and sunken mood, and he spoke little, indeed, he spoke only to give me further command or direction.
And Lord! The reek and stench from the lower chamber is becoming unbearable. Our coffins are thin and makeshift, and do not keep as much in as we had hoped. The air in the chamber has become noxious, and though we wore wettened kerchiefs across nose and mouth, it was poor defence against the onslaught of putrefaction.
The day ended. The doctor straightened his back as we pulled ourselves from the tunnel and back into the candle room.
- So, he said, and he looked at me with a level countenance. Tonight will make number seven, will it not?
- It shall, I agreed.
- Then let us pray that seven is a holy number, a number of God, and that we achieve success tonight?
- Pray? I enquired. Pray? God? Since when have these been your methods?
And at this the doctor had no answer, but hung his head, and disappeared into the Hall proper.
We had several hours to dispense with before our seventh investment arrived, but I did not fancy to return to the Rectory, so I made a turn about the various rooms of the Hall, and read awhile in the library. There I found a translation of a long poem from the Italian tongue, by a man named Dante.
And therein the most accurate and terrifying depictions of Hell I have ever read. I was dumbfounded, struck with mortal terror, and my soul was torn with dismay.
It seems that Hell is far more complex in its multifarious horrors than I ever have imagined. I read of the various circles and planes of the damned, and the appalling and unbelievable tortures that await us there.
I read for hours, then could read no more. I slammed the book shut and lay it back on its shelf with a trembling hand, but though I had closed the covers of the book, what I had read remained burned across my brain like the branding fork of the Devil on the buttocks of the sinner. I had spent too much time, brooding on my own self. For as I wandered around the Hall, I thought that I heard some other presence in the rooms, thought I saw something stir behind a curtain, and knew that I was imagining things. More than once I thought I caught the shape of a small figure, a boy, from the corner of my eye.
I found the doctor later, and he was drunk, half-asleep on the couch, and in his arms he cradled the portraits of his wife and his daughter.
His cheeks were caked with dried tears.
I prodded his shoulder roughly.
- Doctor.
He stirred not.
- Doctor! Awake!
This time he stirred.
- The time is nearly here. Come. We have work to do.
And so he rose to do that work.
Friday, 13th August
Rebecca’s body aches, cramps have come and gone in both legs and arms, but her neck is the worst. It aches so badly, and she thinks again about how long it’s been. She has no idea.
Though she’s wearing a watch, she can’t see the face. She dec
ides to count for a while, doing maths in her head. If she can count to sixty fairly accurately, that’s a minute. So if she can count to three hundred, that’s five minutes.
While she counts, she stares at the candles.
She’s got to six hundred before she starts crying again. None of the candles seem to have burned any way down at all.
Unwelcome notions wander into her head.
Will Ferelith come back before the candles have gone out? Is she coming back at all?
It’s the first time she’s permitted that thought to exist, and though she tries to push it away, like all bad thoughts, it won’t be banished easily. It keeps rising in her mind, and every time it does, it gets stronger.
Supposing Ferelith has left her here?
For good.
She tries not to think it, but fails, so then she decides to let herself think about it, but rationally.
People don’t do that kind of thing, she tells herself, people don’t do bad things like that. Not in the real world, but as soon as she thinks that, she thinks about the girl tied to the table in the hut in the woods. Rebecca knows her father stopped looking for that girl. Supposing he were to stop looking for her too?
She lifts her head and stares at the candles, the four remaining candles, and at last she sees that they have burned lower.
One of them is quite short now, and as Rebecca stares at it, she convinces herself that she can see it actually burning down.
She’s close enough to the candelabra to see the life of the flame.
The candle is creamy yellow-white. The wick is whiter where it’s not burned, and black where the flame has it. The flame is . . . The flame is amazing, and she becomes entranced by it as she realises she’s never looked at a flame properly.
What colour is it?
It’s yellow, she thinks, then realises that there is no name for the yellow-orange-white-gold-blue that a candle flame burns. Its shape is perfect, and it flutters in an unfelt breeze, a draft so gentle that only something as delicate as the candle flame can be moved by it.
And yet the flame is strong. It has burned for hours. It sucks up the molten wax from the bowl formed in the top of the candle stub, and steadily eats it all away, drop by drop.
There’s barely any wax left now in this candle, and Rebecca expects it go out some time soon, but it doesn’t. Despite everything that’s happening to her, she still has the energy to be amazed as the candle enters an extremely long series of death throes, as the last of the solid wax slips onto the stem of the candlestick, and yet the wick remains feeding a flame that now gets bigger if anything, feeding it till it sputters and gutters around the silver lip of the candlestick.
A thousand times it appears as if it will die, and doesn’t, and then from nowhere, it’s gone.
There are three candles left.
She watches them briefly, then she’s distracted as she realises she needs to pee, and knows there’s no chance of that happening in any way she would like.
She’s cold too. As the heat of the day outside seems impossibly far away now. She shivers, and a new fear surges through her, a fear that is totally ridiculous, but which she cannot destroy.
She thinks about the legend of the Candle Room. Despite everything she thinks she knows, despite the fact that this is the twenty-first century, maybe she’s wrong. Most people in the world still believe in God. They don’t believe in the same one, not all of them, though Christians and Catholics and Jews do. And she remembers from World Studies that Allah isn’t so very different from the Christian God. But then there are Buddhists and Taoists, and Hindus and Sikhs. And she supposes, there are Pagans and Wiccans and that kind of thing. And most of the world believes in some kind of god, and if they’re right, and she’s wrong, what then?
If there is heat, there must be cold.
If there is light, there must be dark.
And if there is God, and a phalanx of angels, then there must also be the Devil.
And as she watches the third candle go out, and the room becomes even dimmer and darker, she suddenly thinks that if she’s wrong, and six billion other people in the world are right, then maybe something is going to come and get her when that last candle goes out.
As she sits in the chair and she tries for the twentieth time to pull her wrists out of the shackles, tugging and straining and failing and swearing, she’s overtaken by the horribly real sensation that there is something in the room with her, behind her, unseen.
Friday 13th August
The fourth candle goes quite quickly.
‘Who’s there?’ she calls out. ‘Who’s there? Who is it?’
Nothing.
Except, does she hear a noise somewhere outside the room? It’s gone, whatever it was; mouse or rat. Or Ferelith.
‘Ferelith? Is that you?’
She’s so tired now, she can’t even be angry, she can’t even shout.
She sits still and quiet, and the feeling that someone is there with her slides gently away. But what if there had been someone? What if someone had entered the room? And what about when the last candle goes?
She looks at it, as if it’s her enemy, but maybe it’s her friend.
She has nothing else now. No one else.
Everyone has gone.
Her father, who let her down.
Her friends, who were only there when it suited them.
Adam, who never really cared.
Ferelith, who has actually left her to die in darkness. She remembers the conversation they had a couple of weeks ago. At the time, she took it for another weird conversation with Ferelith, but now it takes on more significance. Ferelith had told her about the man who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories. She knows them, but she doesn’t remember the author’s name. Ferelith told her how this writer made a pact with his brother, the ultimate experiment, so that when one of them died, he would find a way to contact the other, to tell him that the afterlife was real.
‘We could do that, too,’ Ferelith said. ‘Wouldn’t that be cool?’
And Rebecca had smiled and agreed because well, Ferelith wanted to, and, what harm could it do?
‘Do you mean it?’ Ferelith said. And only now does Rebecca realise that she meant it.
She’s tired, she’s cold, she’s hungry, with nothing left in her life but the single spluttering candle flame. Her thoughts grow wild.
The Devil deals with darkness. His tools, she thinks, are the things of shadow. He can only live in the dark places, and he uses the play of illusion to create his monsters, which can only be destroyed by the light of God.
Has she been a good girl, she wonders? Has she led a good life?
Who is coming for her when her candle dies?
She knows she’s done some bad things, but nothing terrible. She’s let a few people down, and she’s told a few lies, but mostly to avoid other people’s feelings being hurt. She stole a mobile phone case from the market once. She felt so bad about it the following day she threw it away.
And she’s done some good things.
She’s sure she has. It’s just that she can’t think of any of them right now, that’s all.
And while she’s thinking all that, she starts to see shapes in the candle flame, sooty shadows of devils dancing in the smoke that twists up away from the tip of the flame.
She sees angels and she sees them speared by devils with tridents in their hands, and grins on their lips. She sees them dance and leap and laugh and stab their spears. An angel tries to wave a sword of light at them, but they surround him, sneering and laughing as they pin him down, and set light to his hair, and put a burning flame to his flesh too.
The angel dies.
The flame of the candle performs a last mad dance, and then, in a puff of smoke that goes unseen in the dark, it dies too.
The room is dark.
And a voice calls through the darkness to Rebecca.
1798, 12m, 11d.
I returned from last night’s labours with a heavy heart.
Our seventh investment was a man from Winterfold itself, by the name of Mason.
He was old, soon to be taken, and desperate to know what lay in store for him. He questioned me continually, but would not look the doctor in the eye.
- If it’s the worst, Father, is it too late? Can I do aught to change my lot? I shall repent. I shall repent! I shall do everything that I might do to change my lot, Father. I’m a good man. I’m a good man.
Thus did he prattle, without end, and I bid him be still, and told him that there is always the chance for the evil man to repent, and to do good, so that he may come to God and be spared at the day of judgement.
This silenced him a little, but the French steel silenced him even more, for, God! He screamed as the chair ran back down its rails to the lower chamber. He screamed as though the very Devil himself was upon his breast, chewing at his throat.
But he became silent enough when the blade cut into his neck.
We were hard upon him at the very moment of his passing, and yet the scream did not merely die, but was cut short, a most eerie effect.
White Crow Page 12
