by Steve Harris
She went back into the lounge, and just as the book had predicted she would, began to align the ornaments, chairs, cushions and almost everything else she was able to move so that they pointed at the front wall of the house.
Snowy glanced over her shoulder several times as she worked, but Philip hadn’t magically appeared, wasn’t suddenly standing there smirking at her.
‘I will get out,’ she heard a voice say, and for a few moments wasn’t certain that the voice belonged to her. It sounded quite a lot more like the voice of Zara Winter than the one which belonged to Snowy Dresden.
The two leather sofas were incredibly heavy and difficult to move across the deep pile of the carpet and the second one caught in the sheepskin rug on which she and Philip had sealed the deal for the computer. Then there was the question of the pile of logs on the hearth. Their hewn ends already faced the front of the house and Snowy hoped this was right. She had no idea what constituted the face of a log. A sofa was easy - its face was the front, the bit you sat in - but a log was another matter. She had already taken both the poker and the tongs and set them in what she was sure was the right direction - business ends facing the front wall - but she didn’t know about the logs. If it didn’t work this way, she would just have to try placing their bark-covered length forwards.
Snowy left the logs as they were, adjusted the last ornament on the mantel (a priapic Greek satyr, whose erection she neatly aligned) and went to the front door.
‘Now open for me, you bastard!’ she hissed at it, taking hold of the handle.
Snowy took a deep, shuddering breath and tugged.
Then she went back into the lounge and adjusted the pile of logs.
Two minutes later, she stood before the front door again. ‘Open Sesame,’ she breathed, and took the cool door knob in her hand again.
She pulled gently.
And almost screamed when the door swung slowly open.
The sharp tang of sea air bit her nostrils, contrasting sharply with the still, dead air she seemed to have been breathing inside the house.
The air smells alive, she thought crazily, drawing in a huge breath of cold, fresh air and exhaling it in a plume. It was cold outside. And bright. Snowy suddenly realized that she hadn’t been outside the house for more than a week. Looking out of the door seemed like crashing back into reality after a bad dream.
You did it, Snowy, she congratulated herself. Now get the hell out of here while you still can.
It wasn’t until then that she realized the keys to Philip’s Porsche, which stood invitingly before her, its soft top down, were not in her hand. She had left them on the drainer in the kitchen when she’d rushed upstairs to get a drink that didn’t exist.
Her toes on the threshold, Snowy rocked back and forth, wanting very badly to go out through the door whether or not she had the keys. The door was currently open and she wasn’t sure it was going to stay that way if she went back through the house. It would probably close again, like the door to Philip’s work-room had done. And if that happened, she doubted it would want to open a second time. But she couldn’t get far without the car. The only thing she was wearing was Philip’s shirt, for one thing. And the ground was rough from here right up to the village; her bare feet weren’t going to stand it.
So she had to risk going back for the keys.
She took another deep breath of air, turned away from the door and sprinted down the hall to the kitchen, fully expecting that the keys would be gone.
The keys were exactly where she’d left them.
She snatched them off the drainer, turned, ran back out to the hall and stopped, her heart sinking.
The door had closed.
”Don’t do this to me!’ she yelled.
But when she held the door knob and pulled, miracle of miracles, the door slowly began to open.
This time, she paused no longer than it took for the door to swing sedately towards her. By then she’d already sprinted out, through the porch, on to the gravel forecourt…
And into the arms of Philip Winter.
Then she screamed, long and hard.
‘Snowy?’ Philip said in a concerned voice. ‘Whatever’s wrong?’
13 - Reading Chapter Three
As stated by Alexander Graham Bell’s third immutable law, the telephone had begun to ring just as S’n’J had settled into the bath and started to read. And as Pavlov would have been pleased to point out, the acquired human response to the ringing of a telephone bell while in the bath is to heave yourself out of the water and try to get to the damned thing before the ringing stops. There is another law which states that the caller will quit just as you arrive, dripping, at the phone, but this wasn’t what stopped S’n’J from going to answer it.
What stopped her answering the phone was several flavours of fear concerning who might be on the other end of the line.
S’n’J stopped reading and sat there, bolt upright and quivering with tension, like a rabbit in a field upon spotting a distant dog.
It’s Martin, she told herself. Wanting to know how you like the latest chapters. Phoning to tell you that he’s in the call box at the end of the street and that he wants to come up and talk to you.
But there was another part of her that feared that it might, instead, be the mysterious person who had delivered the envelope: Mr Peter Perfect himself.
Her imagination treated her to a hackneyed fantasy of a sinister, knowing voice saying, ‘You don’t know me, but I know you…’
She stayed put, hoping it wasn’t James calling to cancel; she sincerely doubted it was him. Eventually the caller gave up. When it rang again, S’n’J did climb out of the bath. She dripped her way down the hall, waited for the phone to stop ringing, then took it off the hook. ‘Get past that then,’ she challenged whoever had been trying to contact her, thankful that she’d left the answer phone turned off.
The dialling tone ceased and the phone began to broadcast the ‘Please replace the handset and try again,’ message and warning tone. S’n’J hoped she wouldn’t be able to hear it from the bath and went back there to her reading.
Warning bells began to ring inside her head when she got to the part which read: ‘I’ve done my best,’ Snowy heard herself reply, and felt, somehow, as if the words had been placed in her mind for her to think. As though she was not a creature of her own free will at all, but a machine that had been programmed. A character, perhaps, who was being pushed around the stage of some playwright, or written up as a bit part in a story that a playful author was busily constructing.
Because not only did she have a strong sensation of being manipulated by an outside force, but like her namesake Snowy, she felt that it was the author of the work who was doing the manipulating. The nesting effect in the story was also horribly disorientating. She was reading a story about a girl (who to all intents seemed to be her) who was reading a story about herself (ditto) which had been written on an unplugged comp
uter by a man who was going to turn out to be something more than an ordinary writer. And the story looked like a script being prepared for her.
What was even more disconcerting was the hallucination she’d had that afternoon when she’d seen the blinding light shining from an upstairs window. That window, she intuited, belonged not to one of the house’s upstairs bedrooms, but to the room that was supposed to be Philip Winter’s workroom.
Maida Vale 275, S’n’J thought, remembering how she thought she’d seen Mr Winter fold himself up into a tiny dot and then vanish. Who or what is he?
But she knew what he wanted her to believe he was.
A ghost.
And she refused to let him have his way. But that did not stop her jumping when someone rattled the letter-box flap.
She checked her watch and was amazed that more than twenty minutes had passed since she’d got into the bath. Not only had she broken her promise to read for only ten minutes, but she’d also broken her promise to be ready when James arrived.
The letter-box flap rattled again. This time it was a sharp rhythmic beat.
She cursed herself for having been carried away with the damned book, then decided that James would probably be delighted when she answered the door wrapped in only a towel. Apart from which, if she didn’t hurry herself up he would soon conclude that she’d been playing him for a sucker and that she’d gone out.
S’n’J got out of the bath, wrapped herself in a big towel and padded down the hall, tracing the damp tracks her trip to the telephone had left. She pulled the door open…
And viola, madman! No one whatsoever is here!
There were wet footprints leading to, and from, her door, but whoever had been trying to attract her attention had gone.
You couldn’t have given up that easily, James, she thought. Surely not!
But it might not have been him. It might have been the phantom manuscript deliverer. Who, in which case, has very tiny feet, she noted, looking at the footprints. S’n’J knew only one person with feet so small they looked as if they’d been subjected to the ancient Chinese art of binding, and that was Janet from the house next door.
What would Janet have wanted? She’d have rung, surely. She wouldn’t have come round here in this rain.
S’n’J went back inside and realized that Janet - whose aversion to the use of her tiny feet for walking ranked up there with Jesus’ aversion to temples being used as banks -might indeed have tried to ring first. If she had, she would have found that S’n’J’s phone was off the hook.
S’n’J picked up the phone, joggled the cut-off buttons, got a dialling tone and rang Janet, fully expecting to get through to a number that didn’t (and couldn’t) exist. Or to a radio station.
She was relieved when neither of these things happened.
Janet answered.
‘Hi Janet, it’s Drezy,’ she said. ‘You wanted me?’
‘I thought you were out. Or asleep,’ Janet said. ‘How did you know it was me at the door anyway?’
‘Call me super sleuth. You left clues. I saw the little wet footprints on the outside landing and I thought, either it had to be you or Little Red Riding Hood. And as she’s not on the phone I called you. What’s up?’
‘It rang,’ Janet said, and for a moment S’n’J thought she meant the It from the magic house in Tintagel.
‘Martin?’ she said, reminding herself that she wasn’t the only person in the world who held Martin in exceedingly low esteem.
‘The very same. He must be desperate to have rung here. He said he couldn’t get through to you and that he was worried. Something to do with you needing an ambulance. He wanted me to come round and check if you were all right. I would have told him to piss off, but he got me worried too. I could see the light on from our back garden, so I thought you’d be in. But when you didn’t answer and I couldn’t hear anything - except the phone whining because it was off the hook - I decided you were probably lying doggo because you were expecting Mr Aren’t I Wonderful to call. I went home and told him you weren’t answering the door. That’s it. You are OK, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ S’n’J said. ‘Took a bit of a fall earlier.’
‘You’re hurt?’
‘No. Bruised and scraped, but not hurt.’
‘But you wanted an ambulance?’ Janet said, in a tone which suggested both that she knew S’n’J was lying and that since she was hurt she obviously needed looking after.
S’n’J knew that if she didn’t convince her nothing was wrong, Janet would insist on coming over. ‘It wasn’t for me,’ she said. ‘It was for someone who fell off a roof. I was about to ring for an ambulance on my mobile and Martin called.’
‘Oh,’ Janet said, and just as S’n’J knew she would, wanted to know about the person who’d taken the fall.
And for the second time that night S’n’J found out how good the telling of lies could make you feel. She thought of the message written on the latest envelope: See how easy it is to tell lies? See what power it gives?
‘But you are in one piece and that’s the main thing,’ Janet said after hearing how the falling man (falling from a ladder in front of a bookshop in ‘Plymouth and striking S’n’J a glancing blow before hitting the deck hard enough to hospitalize him) had fared.
‘I’m fine,’ S’n’J said.
‘Will you ring him?’ Janet asked. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t, but he was very worried.’
‘Did he leave a number?’ S’n’J asked, distantly realizing that she’d inadvertently discovered one of the laws of fibbing: The bigger the lie, the easier it is for people to swallow. This seemed significant, but she wasn’t quite sure why.
‘He said he wasn’t at his wife’s,’ Janet said, ‘which means that-‘
‘-that’s exactly where he is,’ S’n’J finished, once again reasoning that Martin couldn’t have written Black Rock. Anyone who told a lie so old and tired it had become a joke between S’n’J and her neighbour obviously didn’t have the imagination to write the material she’d been reading.
‘So will you ring him there?’ Janet asked.
‘I don’t know, Janny. I’ll think about it.’
‘If he rings again, what shall I say?’
S’n’J hesitated. There was a chance that Martin was nearby. He was definitely still in London when she’d spoken to him that afternoon, but he’d had time to get here by now. Time enough to deliver a second envelope?
‘If he rings again, tell him I’ve gone to Scarborough for the weekend,’ she said to Janet. Then added, ‘To stay with my sister.’
‘Scarborough? That’s miles away!’
‘Four hundred and nine, in fact. From here, that is. Probably a bit closer to London. My sister’s name and address is this. You got a pen?’
‘You haven’t got a sister in Scarborough, have you?’
‘Got a pen?’
‘Hang on… yeah. Ready.’
‘Snowdrop Algar. Forty-two Ellenfield Ro
ad, Scarborough. Got that?’
‘Got it! I didn’t know you had a sister in Scarborough though,’ Janet repeated.
‘I haven’t got a sister at all,’ S’n’J said.
Janet giggled. ‘But that’s where he’ll find you, right?’
‘You can tell him I’d be pleased to see him there,’ S’n’J said.
‘It’s a long drive,’ Janet sniggered.
‘Not in a Ferrari, surely?’ S’n’J said, feeling good for a change.
‘I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more. Do you think he’ll go for it?’
S’n’J didn’t for a moment believe he would drive to Scarborough. But it might just make him stop and think. It might make him realize that there were some things he didn’t know about his little Essenjay. And the forename she’d given her imaginary sister might, if Martin was connected to the mystery author, carry the message that she intended to fight fire with fire. ‘Nah,’ she said aloud. ‘He won’t go for it.’
‘Be nice if he did though, wouldn’t it?’ Janet said.
‘Wishful thinking will get you nowhere,’ S’n’J quipped.
‘I can dream.’
‘We both can. See you later, Janny. Gotta go. Gotta date and I’m still half-way through having a bath.’
‘Who with?’
‘The bath isn’t big enough for two,’ she said, intentionally misunderstanding.
‘The date.’
‘James.’
‘James who?’
‘Green.’
‘The tall one from Cars Inc.? Good-looking but shy?’
‘The very man.’
‘Cradle snatcher. God, I could show him a good time. I’d fit him in my bath, big enough for two or not. The second he came through the front door, I’d have his clothes off, the next second I’d have him in the bath and the second after that, I’d have him.’
