by Steve Harris
It left a red streak behind it. The remaining phosphorus on the tip of the match fell off when she tried again.
Bastard! she mouthed, but didn’t say the word.
‘Where are you, Snowy?’ Philip’s voice said.
S’n’J tried another match. The same thing happened, except that this time some of the crumbling pieces of head sizzled reluctantly as they broke away. The following match stayed whole, glowed incandescent for a moment and went out. The one after that actually lit, but went out before the stalk caught.
‘I can smell something in the library,’ Philip’s voice announced. ‘Something like burning. You wouldn’t be down there making mischief, would you?’
S’n’J shook her head in reply and plucked out a match from the centre of the booklet. This one lit, guttered, and began to burn.
She touched it to the edge of a sheet of crumpled paper willing the tiny orange flame to grow.
Then she began to rejoice. We’ve got ourselves a fire, Diamond! she thought, picking up another piece of paper and touching it off against the growing flame.
‘you’re burning me!’ Philip’s tinny voice screamed, ‘put it out!’
He was in my book too, S’n’J told herself. That’s why it’s so bloody long. He didn’t just write down my story in it, he wrote his as well!
She split up the stack of pages and started crumpling sheets of paper at random and throwing them on to the growing bonfire.
Overhead, the cloud began to rain.
‘You bastard!’ S’n’J screamed, glancing up at the layer of cloud.
It was thinning and now she looked, all that was falling was a thin drizzle.
The pages on her little bonfire hissed and spat where the rain fell, but there wasn’t enough liquid to put it out. The fire was spreading rapidly now, becoming more fierce by the moment.
‘put it out put it out put it out!’ Philip’s voice screeched.
‘Put it out yourself, if you’re so good!’ S’n’J shouted back, balling more paper.
The rain increased for a moment and then the cloud was gone.
What now? she asked herself.
The answer was nothing except the screaming of a man whose reality was going up in flames.
For the next five minutes, she worked like a Trojan, building fresh bonfires. But S’n’J knew she wouldn’t be able to burn everything even if she stayed here all night. And she also knew that whatever she did the house wasn’t going to burn down because the room was airtight. When all the oxygen was gone the fire would go out.
She balled one last sheet, threw it into the fire, then she set about spreading out as many pages as she could across the floor. The air in here, what little there was left of it, was already hot and choking.
She turned to the dog, and said, ‘OK, we’d better get out now. We’ve done all we can.’
‘don’t! snowy! you’re killing me!’ Philip’s strangled voice screamed.
S’n’J looked up at the roof. ‘Good,’ she said venomously. ‘I’m glad to hear that Philip. Very glad indeed!’
She hobbled over to the corner of the room where Diamond was waiting for her, got down on her hands and knees and followed him through the wall.
They came out into the hall from the door that led down to the cellar.
Diamond turned and pointed at it.
S’n’J looked at the door. The padlock was undone and the door was slightly open. ‘I can’t go down there,’ she said.
The dog, evidently didn’t care whether she could or not. He nosed the door open and started down the steep stone steps.
S’n’J didn’t have any choice but to follow the dog, just as the ghost of Ellen had advised. But she couldn’t walk down those steep stairs. She had to sit down on the top one and bump herself down a step at a time.
During the descent Philip’s screaming ceased and the voice of the house and the rock began to make itself known to her. It was soothing and seductive and it didn’t speak in words. It sang like a Siren in short bursts of pleasing tones that conveyed more information than Philip’s thousand-page books. During the long slow passage down the steps S’n’J learned of delights which she hoped she would soon forget, felt emotions and thoughts stirring inside her which surely couldn’t exist in an ordinary human being.
By the time she reached the cellar - where the voices of a thousand ruined bodies sang their sweet song of pain - she understood how Philip had come to kill the thing he loved most. Understood how he had wanted to become a god.
The cellar was a cube of fifteen feet or so. The overhead bulkhead that provided the lighting was out, but it was still easy to see. It was like the work-room upstairs. When you wanted light, you got light. Philip had evidently favoured subdued, romantic lighting.
There were manacles on three of the walls and a small wooden desk against the other. A big tape recorder stood on it; two huge microphones lay beside it. This wasn’t plugged in, but its ready light was flashing and the VU meter needles registered S’n’J’s movements.
He recorded what he did! S’n’J realized, and suddenly understood the sense of it. Then she was disgusted with herself. She only hoped she wouldn’t be too warped when she got out of here.
Not when you get out of here, but if you get out of here, she told herself. Not many people have walked out of this room alive.
But Sarah-Jane Dresden was going to be one of them. She promised herself this.
Diamond was nosing the corners of the room as if he wasn’t quite certain which was the right one.
There was dried blood on the floor, but the thing S’n’J had feared most was not here. She had dreaded seeing the ruined bodies of Ellen and Janie.
Diamond barked once and went to another corner where something glittered.
She limped over to it and crouched, tears already springing to her sore eyes. It was Janie’s gold wedding band. It was all that was left of her now. S’n’J picked it up and put it on her own wedding finger.
Up on the bench, the tape machine began to roll.
The cell was filled with the agonized screams Janie had made. The stereo effect and the recording were perfect. S’n’J could almost see the victim manacled to the wall, tearing the flesh off her wrists as she tried to escape.
‘This’ll happen to you too, Snowy,’ Philip’s voice grunted over the screams. ‘You won’t get out. Getting in is easy. Getting out is impossible. We’ve seen to that, the house and me.’
S’n’J grabbed hold of the tape recorder and heaved it to the floor, killing it.
Over by the steps, something began to sound as if it was being pushed with a great deal of force. There was a creaking sound and dust began to bloom around the floor. The creaking became a dull rumble and the entrance to the cellar heaved itself shut.
Trapped! S’n’J told herself. He fixed it so I’d be trapped.
She turned away from the seamless wall of black rock that now covered the stairway to look at Diamond who was
pawing at the far corner of the room and whining.
‘Nice try, Diamond, but he’s blocked off that one too,’ she said and fancied she saw a look of canine dismay on his face. ‘They’ll find our bones here one day. Maybe in a thousand years or two,’ she told the dog.
Diamond whined and pawed at his corner. Then he tried the next corner, then returned.
S’n’J watched him, crying silently. This was how her life was to end, watching a dog running from one side of a room to the other because the animal was too stupid to believe its exit had gone. He would do that until he dropped from exhaustion. And when he recovered he would try again.
And somewhere along the line he was going to get hungry.
S’n’J only hoped she died of asphyxiation before they reached that point.
‘Diamond! Sit!’ she commanded. ‘Sit down and relax. There’s nothing we can do. We’re stuffed.’ She sat down against the blocked entrance and closed her eyes.
And then Diamond was beside her, pawing at her.
She looked into that sad, lonely face. ‘You want a pat, I’ll give you a pat,’ she said and did so, closing her eyes again. She was starting to feel hot and sleepy now, as if the air was already used up.
The dog backed away from her and barked.
When she opened her eyes he was pointing at her.
And wagging his tail.
‘What?’ she asked, suspiciously.
Diamond wagged and pointed.
It took her a while to catch on but suddenly she understood and she was crying again. With relief this time instead of despair.
Philip had closed off one of the house’s metaphysical back alleys, but when the wall had formed behind them another had been created.
‘You good dog!’ she said and planted a kiss on his bony skull. Then she let go of him and moved aside.
Diamond leapt at the wall and vanished through it.
S’n’J got up on her hands and knees, and placed her head against cool rock.
She fancied she heard someone call her name as she forced herself through the rock. It was a distant voice, and sounded very sad. It was a voice that didn’t belong to anyone she knew. It might have been, she told herself later, the voice of the house itself. And then she was falling.
She crashed down on to a sheet of ice which crackled and groaned under the impact. It was dark where she’d landed but there was a semi-circular light nearby. When her eyes focused, she realized she was no longer in the house, but in a cave whose floor consisted of frozen sea water. The air was fresh and cold and tasted of freedom.
S’n’J punched the air. ‘out!’ she yelled into the echoing cave, ‘can you hear me, philip winter, you bastard? i’m out! drezy is free!’
She picked herself up, looking around for Diamond. He wasn’t there.
And no reason why he should be. He’s done his bit and he’s a free dog now, she shivered. The ice was already biting her bare feet and she was only wearing her jacket and one of Philip’s shirts.
She hobbled towards the entrance of the cave, suddenly remembering having seen it before. On her one and only trip to King Arthur’s Castle she had spotted it from the hillside and had wanted to go down and explore. But her parents had told her it was too dangerous. The cave was in the rock on which the house stood.
Which means I’m walking on the sea, she told herself, glancing down at the crackling ice. She hoped it was thick enough to support her weight.
She hobbled out of the entrance of the cave into the worst snowstorm she had ever seen. It was snowing so hard that she couldn’t tell whether she was walking out to sea, or in towards the land. She reasoned that if she’d seen the cave from King Arthur’s Castle, it meant that the two faced one another and that the land should be to her left, so she turned that way and began to walk.
After a while she began to feel as if she was walking on stilts. The cold numbed her legs from the knees down. She stumbled and fell and picked herself up again, wondering if her bad leg was making her turn away from the land.
I should be there by now! she told herself, tripping again.
The next time she got up, the wind whipped the snow from her vision and she saw the little snow-covered beach that formed the tiny bay at the foot of the Castle.
I did it! she told herself, not thinking of the long and difficult climb up to the village.
For a moment, as she drew closer to the beach, she thought she saw a reflection of herself, limping towards her.
‘Drezy?’ a voice called.
Through the flurries of snow she saw the reflection of herself again, dragging its bad leg as it half-hopped, half-walked towards her.
‘Drezy? Is that you?’
It was a man. Her hammering heart began to sink. It was surely Philip.
‘It’s me! Drezy! Over here!’
And there was James. He had come back for her. S’n’J had never been so pleased to see anyone in her life.
‘James!’ she screamed and increased her pace.
They fell when they flung themselves into one another’s arms and rolled on the protesting ice, smothering each other with cold kisses.
The moment didn’t last long enough.
‘We have to get out of here,’ James said. ‘Before we die of hypothermia.’
S’n’J nodded. ‘What happened to your leg?’
James grinned sheepishly. ‘I fell, climbing down the rocks. Acting like a book hero. I’ll be all right. Are you OK to walk?’
S’n’J got up, dusted snow from her numb hands and smiled. ‘There isn’t a thing on this planet that could stop me now/ she said.
They held each other as they walked back to the beach.
36 - The End of Black Rock
During the long, lazy days that followed her release from hospital, Sarah-Jane Dresden wrote the only other piece of fiction she ever intended to write. She and James were both kept in for a couple of days while they were treated for hypothermia and broken ankles, and afterwards they moved into her flat and acted like star-crossed (if somewhat delicate) lovers during the daytime and sex-crazed teenagers at night. In spite of the plaster casts.
And when James fell asleep, S’n’J sneaked out into the kitchen and, using a pencil and paper, wrote an end to Black Rock. She wasn’t happy with her literary style, but as she constantly told herself, it was the thought that counted. And in her version, she had Martin make a speedy recovery.
In reality, it was going to take a miracle to make Martin’s leg better and S’n’J didn’t dare hope for one of those. She knew what hoping for miracles and magic could do to you.
The hospital had saved Martin’s leg, but were doubtful about how useful it was going to be to him. The nerves were severed, apparently, and couldn’t be reconnected. A good deal of the flesh of Martin’s leg had vanished down the throat of the lion (or into the combine harvester if you happened to be a doctor). Martin didn’t seem particularly worried about the prospect of losing the use of his lower leg. Or even if the whole leg had to be amputat
ed. He didn’t seem particularly worried about anything any more, and that was a miracle in itself, S’n’J supposed. Martin had changed. Radically and for the better. If it hadn’t been for her aching love for James, S’n’J might have considered having him back.
In her story, Martin did regain the full use of his leg. He went back to work and she and James stayed here and stayed hopelessly in love.
And Black Rock sat on a part of Barras Nose, waiting.
It was this fact that had started S’n’J writing her story in the first place. The house still stood, waiting for the next Peter Perfect to arrive. And S’n’J wanted the building razed to the ground. Or pulled apart brick by brick and ground to dust. Or blown up with an atomic bomb.
Or, most fittingly, burned down.
And on the kitchen table, while James was asleep, S’n’J was furtively arranging it. In her story, she and James would come home one day to see the light flashing on the answering machine. And when she rewound the tape and played it, it wouldn’t contain a rendition of ‘Frosty the Snowman’ or the voice of Peter Perfect, but the cheery voice of Martin, who would announce, ‘Guess what, Essy! I’ve done the deal of the decade. Can you guess what it is? You can’t can you? I’ve bought Black Rock.’
At which point there would be a pause in which S’n’J and James would look at one another in wordless horror.
And then Martin’s voice would say, ‘But not for the reason you’re thinking. Now look, guys, I know you’ve both vowed never to go near the place again, but on Tuesday at six-thirty I want you to drive to the top of the track, walk down it until you can see the house, then wait there. I’ll be down at the house and I’ll be joining you shortly. And when I get there you’re gonna see the sight of your life. The house is going to be rigged with incendiaries. The fucker is gonna burn, Essy. That’s why I bought it, to burn it. We’ll stand up there and watch it go, Essy, me, you and James, and we’ll dance and sing and punch the air. We beat the fucker and now we’re gonna burn it! And afterwards we’ll have a celebration party. OK? I’ll ring back later!’
