“Then let’s find out,” Jim said, which as a schoolboy I’d once made him say in a tale.
As I drove along the avenue I kept glancing in the mirror. I was nervous of seeing the gates shut like a trap, but they stayed still. They weren’t the only distraction. I had a persistent sense of restlessness on if not above the mounds in the grass on both sides of the avenue, though glancing at them showed me nothing of the sort. I dismissed it as an illusion, some kind of shutter effect produced by driving past the trees. I was more concerned with the sight at the end of the avenue, though I wasn’t sure of it until the car left the trees behind. The front door of the house was ajar.
The strip of darkness seemed to gape to greet me as I drove to the steps, and I could have fancied that the gloom concealed a watcher. Only the car was moving, not the hefty door, and as far as I could make out, the darkness was just dark. Rather than leave the car by the steps I parked closer to the drive. Some confused instinct—certainly less than a thought— suggested that if a speedy getaway was needed, this might help. Or was I loath to leave the car too close to the house? I couldn’t have articulated the feeling to myself, let alone to Jim. “At least it looks as if we won’t have to break in,” I said.
“I hope you weren’t thinking we would.”
Jim was reminding me of his official status, which I’d thought he meant to leave outside the gates. I wasn’t sure how to respond until he said more like the friend I’d known “Let’s see what’s there.”
He was out of the car ahead of me. As I locked it he waved a fierce hand at his face and wiped his brow hard. In a moment an unpleasant chilly tingling settled on my skin. “Something’s breeding round here,” Jim complained.
While it could have been a swarm of insects too minute to see, it felt like electricity in the air. It faded, though my skin wasn’t entirely convinced that it had, as we crossed the gravel. The trees of the avenue blocked off the sun, and I couldn’t see through any of the windows, which made me feel as though the darkness was looming towards us like a watchful occupant or a crowd of them. Jim was first up the steps, and eased the front door inwards. I was wondering whether we should announce ourselves so as not to be accused of trespassing when he stooped to pick up an envelope. “Who’s this?” he said.
He sounded oddly wary, and scrutinised my face as he displayed the envelope. The item of mail was a gas bill, which I found so unexpectedly and inappropriately mundane that I didn’t see at first it was addressed to C. Bloan. “That’s the surname Noble uses now,” I said. “His daughter does as well.”
“You’re sure about that, Dom.”
“I’ve met them both here. I recognised them and they didn’t care.”
Jim stooped to finger the carpet where he’d found the bill and then tested an adjacent patch. When he held out the envelope for me to touch I found it was faintly damp. “That’s been there for a day or more,” he said.
I welcomed his detective skills, not least because his observation proved that whatever had occurred at Safe To Sleep couldn’t have resulted from our having been overheard yesterday in the Crown. “I’d better do this all the same,” he said and turned to shout “Hello?”
The house sent back an echo of the second syllable, which might almost have been proclaiming a revelation. “Is anybody here?” Jim called louder, and eventually turned back to me. “Any idea what can have happened?”
I wanted to believe my previous visit had put a stop to Safe To Sleep, even if I didn’t know how much that could accomplish. “Maybe we’ll find out if we look.”
“Coming in,” Jim shouted up the stairs, where the gloom seemed to diminish his voice and deaden his tone. “I’d say we’ve got the place to ourselves,” he said.
I remembered assuming Noble’s church was more deserted than it had proved to be. If Jim and I encountered anything like I had, at least that should convince him there was more to Noble and his beliefs than he might want to think. Just a hint of wrongness would suffice so long as Jim couldn’t explain it away. He took a step into the house and shook his head. “Where’s the switch for the lights, do you know?”
As he peered at the walls that framed the doorway I ventured into the gloom, which seemed less to gather on my eyes than to accumulate within them. When I strained my eyes in an attempt to dispel the darkness, I might have thought they were simply attracting more. I was reminded how the fogs of my childhood would build up like soot in my nostrils whenever I breathed in. “It’s all right,” I heard Jim say. “I’ve found it now.”
A metallic click came next, and then a series of clicks did, none of which relieved the gloom. “Looks as if they’ve been cut off,” Jim said. “Let’s see if there’s more light further in.”
He meant from windows, but I wondered why the pair above the stairs weren’t admitting more illumination. Granted that the sun was at the front of the house, they still looked darker than they should. “Come out a minute,” I urged Jim. “I’ve got a flashlight in the car.”
“I’ll wait here. It’s not that bad.”
It was for me, and I disliked leaving him alone in that darkness. When I emerged into the sunlight I had to blink my eyes clear of the gloom before I could risk descending the steps, and then I hurried to my car. I’d begun to regret having parked so far from the house, but I hadn’t time to move the vehicle now. I found the flashlight among the maps and guidebooks in the glove compartment, and once I’d switched it on I had to aim it at my face to establish that it was working. As I returned to the house I saw that the sky beyond the roof had clouded over, which surely went some way towards explaining why the windows above the stairs weren’t lighter. At the top of the steps I switched on the flashlight again and directed it into the house. “Hey, that’s dazzling enough,” Jim said.
I hoped he meant it was sufficiently bright, though I had a sense that it was hemmed in by the gloom. When I lifted it towards the stairs, an enormous centipede scurried away up the wall towards the landing—the shadow of the banisters. By the time the beam reached halfway up it was virtually indistinguishable from the dark beneath and between the windows. “Do you want us to go upstairs first, then?” Jim said.
I was simply testing the beam, which I found unhappily feeble. “Let me show you where they took the children,” I said and swung it towards the right-hand corridor.
Even once the walls enclosed the light, they failed to concentrate it much. As I led the way along the passage, the beam shrank to a dull glare on the door of the sleeping room. The gloom closed in behind us, and I resisted an impulse to glance back to make sure nothing else was. Presumably the carpet was deadening our footsteps, but I felt as if stillness was lying in wait for us—as if a presence silent as a held breath was. I took hold of the doorknob, which was so cold that it might never have been touched by sunlight, I had to twist the knob with all the strength of one hand and then nudge the door open with my shoulder.
The flashlight beam spread into the sleeping room and was lost at once. A flat dull glow like an omen of dawn or a postponement of daylight lay in the room, which was empty apart from the ranks of abandoned mattresses. For an instant I thought one of them stirred as though something had burrowed into it, but before I could locate the movement the entire room was still. “Is that it?” Jim said.
I was hoping he’d caught sight of the activity. “Is what, Jim?”
“That’s what I mean. I wouldn’t say this proves much.”
“It’s where they used the children.”
Jim frowned at the mattresses and then at me. “Used them how?”
“Gave them seizures, all of them at once.” As I wondered how much closer I could venture to the truth I felt as though the boundless dark I’d voyaged through with them was eager to reach for my mind. “They indoctrinated Toby and the rest of them while they were helpless,” I tried saying. “They fed the children their beliefs. I’d have intervened sooner, but they’d given me a seizure too.”
“How could anyone do that, D
om?”
“Call it a form of hypnotism. It was a chant that didn’t just put you to sleep.”
I was afraid he found the concept too extreme until he said “Was Bobby involved?”
“She was in a seizure too. I wish I’d been able to take her out of here as well, but I had enough trouble taking my son.”
“How did you manage that when you say you were in a seizure?”
I was uncomfortably aware that his questions were growing more official. “I came here determined that I wouldn’t be susceptible. It took some doing, but I fought it off.”
“Well, good for you, Dom,” The interrogation wasn’t done, however. “Do you remember where you were in here?” Jim said.
“I’m not likely to forget. I was here by the door, and Toby was in this corner.”
“Do you happen to recall where Noble was?”
“I’ll show you.” I paced between the mattresses, stopping opposite the one precisely halfway down the row against the left-hand wall. “He was here,” I said, only to feel as if the mattress covered with a crumpled sheet was drawing me towards it, compelling me to stoop in imitation of its vanished occupant. “Jim, look at this.”
He came to stand next to me and peer where I was indicating. Close to either corner near the wall, four faint but unmistakeable indentations were visible in the edge of the mattress, and a further mark had been dug into the upper surface a few inches from each group. “Did you see how that happened?” Jim said.
“No, but I can guess. He must have held on like that every time to make sure he wasn’t carried off himself.” Afraid I’d used too strange a phrase, I said “I saw him doing it a long time ago.”
“You’ve got to be talking about France.”
“The night we followed him. That’s how he held on to his bed till he got up.”
I hoped Jim wouldn’t ask for an explanation, because I wasn’t sure I had one. Instead he enquired “Bobby, where was she?”
When I pointed at the mattress near the door he moved to examine it, hands clasped behind his back with one finger drumming on a knuckle. “She didn’t hold on, then.”
“I didn’t see her doing it.” Since the look Jim gave me wasn’t far from reproachful, it drove me to protest “Honestly, if I could have got her out without rousing anybody else I would have. I didn’t realise Noble had come after me till I’d put Toby in the car.”
“All right, Dom, I believe you.” As I started hoping this might extend to at least some of the truth about Safe To Sleep, Jim said “Was Tina Noble here as well?”
“She was over there.” When I reached the mattress opposite her father’s I was able to confirm “She must have been holding on too.”
Two sets of faint depressions like the ones across the room remained at the edge of the mattress. As Jim inspected them I said “And Toph was in the middle by the window.”
Jim made a face that might have been trying to clutch at the name.
“Who?”
“Her son. Toph short for Christopher. You’d think they were running out of names.” The weak gibe didn’t lessen the undefined nervousness I began to feel as Jim headed for that end of the room. “He’s a year old if even that,” I said. “I shouldn’t think there’s anything to see.”
Jim bent to examine the mattress, and his finger drummed on the knuckle more insistently. “I don’t see how this can be possible, Dom.”
As I joined him I saw that the outside of the windows was coated with grime—with some dark substance, at any rate. It blurred the view of the grounds that stretched to the hedge through which I’d observed Safe To Sleep. If there was movement on the mounds in the grass, I hadn’t time to spare for it just now. The mattress Toph had occupied bore the imprints of two small sets of fingertips at the length of a pair of infant arms, but that wasn’t all. Opposite these groups of prints were two more, about a yard away and dug equally deep. “How could any child do that?” Jim demanded as if he were the victim of a trick.
“It wasn’t any child.”
Jim stared at me so hard he might have thought I was the problem. “What on earth do you mean, Dom?”
I wasn’t sure I knew or wanted to put much of it into words. “That’s how they’ve made him, his mother and her father.”
Jim’s stare relented or at least returned to the marks on the mattress. “I’m starting to think this could be as serious as you say,” he admitted. “Let’s see what else we can find.”
We left the door open so that the enervated daylight reached along the corridor, though not far. Jim found nothing of significance in the next room, an extensive white-tiled toilet with a mirror above a sink. As we entered the room I had a fleeting impression of movement in the mirror, as if a shape had dodged out of sight within the glass, but thought I’d glimpsed the reflection of the door. Further up the passage we found an extravagantly capacious cupboard where mops and brushes leaned their heads together like gossips, while a dining-room large enough for several generations of a family extended along the opposite side of the corridor. I couldn’t tell which end of the long table was the head, and wondered who had sat in that position. Surely Christian Noble would have, but I had an uninvited vision of Toph clambering up to perch and play the adult, since there was no sign of a high chair. I pictured Bobby dining with the Nobles, isolated by the room and by their triple presence. I preferred not to imagine any conversation they might have had. Wherever the Nobles were now, I hoped Bobby wasn’t with them.
Although the front door was wide open, the lobby was at least as dark as it had been. It felt as if darkness was taking up residence. As I lit the way to Phoebe Sweet’s office, insectoid shadows fled towards the windows above the stairs as if seeking a means of escape. At first I couldn’t see what had changed in the dim room, where the desk and chairs looked somehow ownerless, and then I realised the walls were bare. “She’s taken her certificates,” I told Jim. “She was the doctor they used as a front, Phoebe Sweet.”
“Then if she sets up somewhere else she’ll be traceable.” I made for the desk in case she’d left anything inside, and was reaching for the nearest drawer when I thought I heard movement within. My approach could have disturbed a rodent, but I had the unappealing fancy that whatever had stirred was waiting to take hold of my hand. I dragged the drawer out to see it contained just a few distorted paperclips, and heard a noise in the drawer beneath it. The restlessness was louder now, and rather too much like someone fumbling at the wood. When I tugged that drawer open it proved to be empty, but I’d mistaken where the noise was coming from—one of the drawers on the opposite side of the well of the desk. It sounded as though it was groping to push the top one out, and I did my best not to be put in mind of a wakeful occupant of another sort of box. As I made myself open the drawer, its contents lurched towards me— a splintered ballpoint almost drained of red ink. The furtive noise was in the last drawer, and growing clearer. It sounded less like the fumbling of fingers than lips mouthing at the inside of the drawer, because it seemed to include a wordless mutter. I had a nightmare sense that if I opened the drawer I would see it was full of a face. Taking a shaky breath, I grasped the clammy metal handle and wrenched the drawer open. It contained nothing at all, but I thought I heard a noise under the desk—the creak of a board, mixed with a viscid slither. At once it was gone, and so far as I could see the carpet was bare. I straightened up to find Jim watching me. “Anything?” he said.
I didn’t want to think he was as unobservant as this suggested. “What would you say?”
He stared into the lower drawers, which I’d left open, and then pulled out the upper ones. “I’d say she was making sure she didn’t leave anything that might identify her.”
“You didn’t hear something just now.”
Jim turned the stare on me. “What was I supposed to hear?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said and was disconcerted to find myself echoing Christian Noble. “Let’s move on.”
Even when we left the
office door wide, the corridor stayed unnecessarily dark. Across it was the room where I’d first spoken to the Nobles—all of them. I took hold of the doorknob and then hastened to switch on the flashlight, because I thought the knob felt softened, as if the gloom had somehow diluted its substance. The sight of the metal object seemed to fend off the impression, and I shoved the door wide.
The room was much as I remembered: the four squat leather chairs even darker than the panelled walls, the black dresser in the darkest corner. Last time I’d had no chance to examine the figurines on the dresser, and just one remained. Presumably the Nobles had left it behind because it was broken in two. It was carved out of stone so black that trying to identify what it might represent made my eyes ache. By straining them I saw it depicted a snake with a smooth darkly gleaming face that was to some extent human. The enormous eyes were devoid of pupils, and the thin lips were curved in a smile as wide as the head, protruding a scrawny tongue divided into three at the splayed tip. I drew back my hand from reaching for that portion of the figure, because I felt as though the body was poised to writhe in response. Perhaps the other section would as well, like a worm chopped in half by a spade. As I retreated a pace Jim scowled at the carving. “What would you say that’s meant to be?”
“Noble mentioned something like it at his church, if you remember. There were others on here, but I didn’t see what they were. There were three including this one,” I recalled and was inspired to suggest “Maybe the Nobles used them for some kind of meditation.”
“Meditation,” Jim said in a voice like a grimace made audible.
“Yes,” I said and was dismayed by the realisation that overtook me, “because they would have had one each.”
Jim stared at the fragments as if he was challenging them to have any effect on him, and my gaze strayed back to them. I could have fancied their blackness was taking control of my vision, darkening the room and the view the grimy windows gave of the avenue. I was about to suggest that it was time we explored further when Jim said “We’ll take these with us when we go. Someone who knows about that kind of thing should have a look at them.”
Born To The Dark Page 27
