Silence — in which he wondered what her part was, what held her at that place, involved her with those people: loyalty? Self-interest? Daring? Silence, before she said, ‘Henry, you’ve made things damned awkward for me — sending Crowther and — and you’re making a fuss about nothing.’
He took advantage of the uncertainty in her voice. ‘Nothing. Wynter is unbalanced and possibly dangerous. He stopped functioning as a rational creature long ago, instead he’s constructed this — fantasy that he can conjure his niece out of thin air. What happens when the fantasy fails? You don’t know that, do you? This is the first time you’ve been involved —’
‘How do you know all this? How long have you known?’
‘Never mind. Will you just keep clear of it tonight. We can talk about it tomorrow.’
‘You can’t have known long, you’d have tried to stop me before. I was afraid you’d find out, you’re so devious.’
‘I’m devious.’
‘Yes. You mean well, you must manage things, though. But if you really thought anything dangerous or criminal was going to happen, you’d do something official. I know you, Henry, you’re bluffing, you think you can stampede me out of a situation you don’t approve of. Well, you can’t, there’s nothing here to concern you, it’s perfectly harmless.’
‘Then why are you twittering like a pregnant canary?’
There was a gulped silence before she answered, ‘I’m not ... am I?’
‘You’re not sure, are you? The pantomime appeals to you — but supposing it turns into a tragedy? It’s too late to run then, isn’t it?’
She did not answer. He said. ‘Cass, it isn’t a question of approval, they can do as they like. I care about you, I don’t want you involved in anything unpleasant, or frightening; you’re not made of the stuff that can take it. Please do as I say.’
She murmured, ‘Well ... perhaps.’
‘No. Promise.’
‘Yes, all right, I promise. I must go now, someone’s coming.’
The line went dead.
10
The whispering of a cloak, the soft fall of a sandalled foot on grass, the measured movements of gliding figures ... these were the hauntings of a night terrible in its suspense and power.
Seven lamps — six forming a circle, one set in the centre — burned with a low, guarded glow, the spaces between them swallowed into a blackness that was intensified by each trembling rim of light. There were no words; the actions, the intricate movements proceeded to a preordained pattern, and as each stage of the ceremony was completed the six figures melted into the black spaces, reappearing again to stand motionless, waiting, one to each lamp of the circle.
The wavering light played weirdly on the hollows of the hoods, giving nightmare glimpses of masks the colour and texture of stone, masks that — annihilating human identity — imitated, deceived and placated the demonic powers brooding up on the hill.
He felt the danger, he felt it stealing through the night, thickening and surging about the boundaries of his control. But ritual was his defence, and his faintest, most ambiguous gesture of such magical portent that the figures responded faultlessly, passing and repassing, gathering and diverging, pacing out the invisible maze at whose centre that single, unguarded seventh lamp glowed.
The slumbering earth force had been woken, daringly encompassed; the figurine had been offered, accepted. In silence it was dismembered, placed in its coffin, interred; the tiny, bowl-shaped grave was filled and smoothed ... The voices began: the spell whispered by one voice, then another, then another, as the figures stirred and moved — for the final time treading the maze, the perilous enchantment of the nowhere that linked light and darkness, life and death, this world and the Otherworld.
... by stick by stone I’ll bring you home
by stone by ley you’ll find the way
by ley by grove your form will move
by grove by flash your feet will pass
by flash by lane you’ll live again
by lane by tree you’ll come to me ...
The murmuring grew fainter as the voices died one by one, until at last the figures were in their places at the circle of lamps — the drape of a cloak folding silently into stillness, a pale hand at rest in the half-hidden shadow of a sleeve, a mask rigid in a gleam of light.
All notion of movement ceased, every echo of sound failed; in the hah of time between one moment and the next the fatal eye of the full moon glanced from behind a cloud. Then it seemed there was a tremor, as if dark sifted upon dark, changing the texture of the air; a ripple quickened the circle of six figures as a seventh stepped from the gloom of the nearby trees.
Robed and hooded, with the cold radiance of the moon eerie on her unmasked face, drawn forward on a gliding sleepwalker’s step, she approached the figures, oblivious of their consternation. Looking neither to right nor left, but stepping soundlessly, she passed between them, entered the circle and took her place by the seventh lamp.
*
In the dawn the old village, networked by ancient tracks, lay overwhelmed by the slumber of its long, long history.
Henry, driving through the gossamer light, came upon his house as something insubstantial, floating out of the mist. It’s as if I’ve never seen it before, he thought ... and drawing up, stepping from his car, he paused and stood with his hand on the cold metal of the door.
He willed himself to move; but suddenly there was an instant in which all will, all movement were deferred. Time — or his senses — had been dislocated, reality had dissolved in the stealthy breath of mist; he knew his defenceless mortality, his intrusion into a realm of utter strangeness that trembled like the invisible aftermath of some transforming shock. Every trace of the familiar was lost. He stood in a world retrieved from another time, when at the inspiration of a dark and remote beauty legends were born, the earth was sacred and gods dwelt in trees; he had come, unprepared, upon a consciousness of the great division of the old year and the new: the November death. In the night the hinge of the year had swung, hanging upon the gape of the Otherworld, releasing the heroes and the kings, the spirits and bodies, those who were lost and those who had been enchanted away from themselves ...
Grasping at reality, he thought, it’s something in the air, the clarity, the stillness; it’s being alone in this silent countryside where some things have scarcely changed in hundreds of years, where the stones and the leys and the hill fort haven’t changed in thousands of years. I’ve been driving for hours, shut up in the warm car, thinking of Samain —
But a shiver had touched his skin, the hair on his neck had stiffened, and he knew that for an instant — from the superstitious, marvelling core of himself — he had glimpsed the landscape of the dreams that had haunted his sleep and vanished from his waking mind.
A figure formed from the mist, at first no more than a muffled stranger then — by the lightness of her step and the way that she moved — recognisably Cass, dressed in a thick jersey and trousers. She hesitated in sight of him, a wry expression on her face. He knew, before she said anything at all, that she had not done as he asked.
‘You stayed. You stayed at that damn house last night.’
‘I stayed at that damn house. You see, I’m all right.’
‘Thank God for that,’ he said flatly.
She moved closer to him, there was a suppressed air of excitement about her. ‘Oh — you meant — I understand, you were being kind ...’
‘And a blinding fool. That should give you a laugh.’
‘Oh, no — no.’ She gestured impatiently, dismissing his surliness. Then, as he leaned against the car and folded his arms, she said, ‘You must be tired, you’ve driven miles, and you haven’t had any sleep.’
Neither had she, probably, but she was fizzing. ‘No, I can miss a night and it doesn’t affect me. I’m fed up. I can never trust you, you said on the phone —’
‘I know, I know, I know. But listen, you can’t imagine what happened.’
‘No, listen. Well it was a bit like that, a bit self-conscious and — daft, at first. W’e stage it, you see, for Augustus. He thinks he only has to move a little finger and everyone interprets what he means by magic — in fact, we all knew exactly what to do beforehand. Henry, oh, listen ...’
‘I am, I can do this at the same time,’ he was getting things out of the car. Her voice tumbled after him, rapid and insistent with details: they had been in the drop of ground behind the house, in a clearing, where the trees thronged down to the distant river and the stark hill climbed beyond that, up to the avenue of stones. They had made a tiny grave and put pieces of a doll in it; they had moved to and fro in a pattern that represented a journey through a maze; they had whispered a spell ...
‘You must have felt a lot of prunes when she didn’t show up.’
She gave a little wail of protest and tugged at his arm. He turned from what he was doing to look at her. The wonder flickered in her eyes; she stood close to him, speaking softly, as if afraid some other presence, concealed by the mist, strained to hear. ‘But that’s just it. Somebody did.’
His response, a sigh and a hopeless look, made her shake his arm urgently.
‘Somebodydid. At exactly the right moment. She wore a cloak — she walked straight to the place that was waiting for her —’
‘Oh, come on, Cass. One of your lot set it up —’
‘Nobody. Don’t you understand? Nobody setthat up. Nobody even knows who she is.’
*
Cass curled in the corner of the big settee in his sitting room. A rush of physical tiredness made her shiver; but she remained overstrung: talking, talking, repeating events again and again, in sequence and out, voicing her amazement. He let her chatter on, not only because the more she said the more he could select, but because at the edge of his mind there was an uneasiness he wished to pin down.
At first he took it to be the after-effect of the hallucinatory moment when he had stepped from his car; then he wondered if it was a selfish reaction to the way her voice and presence cheated him out of the quiet welcome the house always opened to him when he returned to it. A mental nudge pushed him closer ...
Here ... the house ... where, immune from the fretting of her voice, a subtle alteration in the atmosphere impressed itself gently upon him. At a loss, his attention divided, he could only fumble for an explanation of the feeling and — finding none — only compare it to the experience of entering an empty room, where an imperceptible change of density in the air is all that there is to tell of someone just gone soundlessly away.
He made coffee and took it into the sitting room, putting a mug in to Cass’s tense hands. As she paused to take a sip he suddenly thought he had found the answer. In the silence. The grandfather clock in the corner of the room had stopped, its hands seized vertically by midnight.
He loved the clock, not for its antique value, which for all he knew was considerable, but for its dignified aspect, its unhurried and melodious way with time; kind and reliable as an old friend, it gave him company when he was alone, and in return he gave it the respect of his care. He felt guilty at having failed to wind it (although he could have sworn he had) and with a silent apology to it thought what a fine degree of receptiveness the human mind possessed that it could be disturbed by the absence of a stately, measuringtick-tock.
Relieved, he set about cleaning the grate and laying the fire, giving his interest exclusively to Cass, listening, sometimes asking questions.
Six actors in the drama (leaving aside, for the moment, the unaccountable seventh); but he could only make four: Cass, Wynter, Evelyn and Mandy.
‘Who were the other two?’
‘Oh ... um. Nobody really. Extras, I suppose.’
‘You’re going to tell me next you recruit out-of-work actors.’
‘They gotta eat,’ she said weakly, offering no further information.
He turned to look at her. She gazed at the half-laid fire with studied nonchalance. ‘Good God, Cass ... that’s not true?’
‘We had to make up the numbers. At one time there used to be more, more people involved. There was the original crew to draw on ... but not now. And Augustus has this extraordinary fixation about there being exactly the right number. So we had to make it up somehow. We daren’t use anyone from round here, there’d be gossip, curiosity —’
‘Tell me,’ he said, restrained. ‘I don’t bloody believe it, but tell me.’
She looked defiant as she explained. Once a week Mandy caught the train to London and spent the day there, a habit unbroken through the years, by means of which she kept in touch with old friends, went to a beauty parlour and a gymnasium, circulated socially, shopped ... Henry had a mental picture of her, garrulous and tireless in her Minnie Mouse shoes, working her way through her day’s programme with the unexpected resolution of a commando tackling a combat course. The character of Mandy, emerging from the candy-floss in which Cass had cocooned it, provoked thought.
‘She still has contacts in the profession, cultivates them, it’s all part of the myth that one day she’ll pick up her career where it left off. The mind boggles. Anyway ... she made the engagements through theatrical agents, fixed the dates —’
‘Dates? Not just the one night?’
‘No. Well, beforehand there had to be something in the nature of a rehearsal ...’ Bored, as always, with the practical and explicit, she shrugged them aside, her voice dipping again to its wondering tone. ‘Henry — the woman who turned up — you will help us? To find out who she is.’
‘Why don’t you try asking her?’
‘Wehave — but it wasn’t any good. At first she was so confused — no, more like a sleepwalker — Henry, we can’t ask anyone except you. Evelyn has her life here, her husband’s position to consider, we daren’t have the rumours flying, the press raking everything up. And we can’t get Crowther round, licking his pencil and looking comfortable — he’d just go away again. As it is he regards us as animated cartoon characters. Besides, he’s official, and worse than you. If he can’t write it in his notebook in words of one syllable it doesn’t exist.’
‘Thanks,’ Henry said, in case he had just been complimented. ‘Go on about this rehearsal. What form did it take, for God’s sake?’
‘Oh, simple. The less details there are the less there is to go wrong. There were two actors. The first one came down on the train a week beforehand. Mandy met him, showed him the lie of the land, explained what he was to do on the night. Saw him off again. The second one came down the next day (we kept them apart, they didn’t evenknow about each other), Evelyn met him — and soon. We did it that way to keep things as quiet as possible. We didn’t want strangers turning up here, asking the way to the house, perhaps talking to people — you can’t trust actors, they’re so dim and narcissistic.’
‘One of them came that morning I saw you — when I drove Lydia to the station. That’s what you were doing in town.’
‘Yes ... how do you know?’
‘Putting things together in my head. You were very concerned — when you knew I’d seen you — about where, and who you’d been with.’
‘Oh, God, it was one of those awful days that start disintegrating from the word go. The man Evelyn was supposed to meet hadn’t turned up. It was all right, though, the silly bugger had missed his train, he arrived on the next one. Mandy and I waited in my car to watch. Then when I came here, you were waiting like Armageddon ‘ With an impatient sound she made short work of inconvenient recollections.
Henry persisted. ‘And we went out for a walk, later. You kept looking across at Mark Hill as if checking that someone was there. Were they? Did your sister take him there?’
‘Ye
s. Stupid twit wore an anorak the colour of a radish, he was easy enough to pick out.’
‘But why up there? You didn’t go there last night, did you?’
‘No —’ She looked rather shocked, almost awed.
‘Augustus would never ... No, as I said, it was to give the actors — well — the feel of the part. Up there, you can see clearly how the house is lined up with the avenue, how the stones seem to — to —’
‘To march down the hill towards it.’
‘Yes ...’ She was hesitant, looking inward for a moment to her own thoughts. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? Not this thing or that — but everything put together, as if it should form a pattern one can’t quite grasp. The way Augustus invested those stones with a supernatural violence, and goes on living in a house that lies in the path of them, waiting, believing, ritualising. If you look at it one way: he’s a bit ga-ga and we do things to humour him. But if you look at itanotherway: whatever goes on inside his head — however irrational it is — he’s manipulating us into giving expression to it ... No, it’s too involved, I can’t untangle it.’ She shrugged, abandoning the complexities she sensed lay beneath the situation. ‘Henry, let’s have something to eat, I’m starving, you must be. Then you must come and see that woman, you must talk to her. Augustus won’t, he’s shut himself away. Oh, that’s how he lives most of the time, but you’d think ... I mean, it’s what hewanted to happen, and now, it almost seems he won’t accept it. Shock, I suppose. Mandy’s used to coping with him, she’s tough. Mind you,’ she added reflectively, ‘she’s never had anything like this to cope with before. She was pretty shaken herself last night. There was something — for a while — something in the atmosphere that was so uncanny ... We all felt it, even my sister, and she’s got as much imagination as an egg.’
Before Cass’s imagination ran away with her again, Henry doggedly put in order her haphazard account of what had happened from the moment when the strange woman had walked into the circle.
Samain Page 13
