‘Get the hell out,’ shouted Mossy. ‘There’s nothing we can do here.’
But we saw it all, from the front gate, through the front windows of Abbeywalk. The leaping red flames inside, that slowly turned into a molten heart of fire, and rolled and dripped among the fallen masonry within.
And then, incredibly, we heard the voice again, still singing:
‘A fire goeth before him
And burneth up his enemies roundabout
His lightnings enlightened the world
The hills melted like wax in the presence of the Lord.’
‘That’s from higher up,’ shouted Hermione. ‘He’s escaped. He’s on the first floor. I could swear it.’
‘You can’t tell that,’ shouted Mossy. You could hardly hear his voice, above the roar of the flames. ‘He could be anywhere.’
But, as if in answer, we saw a human figure, gesturing, at a first-floor window. James. Blackened. But James.
‘Jump!’ we shouted. ‘Break the glass. Jump!’
But he paid no heed to us.
‘It’s got hold of him,’ said Hermione bitterly. ‘It’s got hold of his mind, now, like it got hold of us.’
Now the window where James had stood was a mass of flame; the glass shattered and tinkled outwards.
And all around us, through the darkened London air, came the sound of sirens. Police, fire, ambulance. Too late.
A screech of brakes, a shower of gravel. Then Crittenden’s voice at my shoulder. Sarcastic as ever.
‘What’re you up to now, Mr Morgan? Arson? For the insurance?’
I opened my mouth, but I never had time to think what to say.
For I heard another sound now, another voice. A voice so huge it deafened. A voice of garbled syllables, in a dreadful language I had no wish to understand. A voice that must have been heard all over London. In St John’s Wood, and Chalk Farm, and even on the Heath. A voice of pure rage, that shouted and was silent.
‘My God,’ said Crittenden. ‘What’s that?’ Even in the ruddy light of the fire, his face was white and chalky.
‘That’s what killed Margie Duff,’ I said. ‘And Tony Tanner.’
The dreadful yell came again. And there was more than rage in it now. There was agony and despair.
‘It knows it’s going to die,’ whispered Hermione.
And so we listened in silence – police, firemen, even ambulance men – to those gigantic death-yells. Almost, it invited pity. It is a fearful thing for any creature to die in agony. And yet, till the end, it repelled pity. It was a long time in dying, for it must have been a gigantic thing.
By the time it had melted into silence, the whole of Abbeywalk was on fire. A dancing red showed in every window. Only the roof was still black, and that was showing forth wisps of smoke and steam from every crack, a grey wool that writhed round the pinnacles and gargoyles.
It was then that we saw him. James. Clinging to a pinnacle, above a second-floor gable. And still singing, though his voice was hoarse with smoke, and half-choked with coughing.
‘Let burning coals fall upon them,
Let them be cast into the fire,
Into the deep pits . . . that they . . . rise not up again.’
And at the same moment, I saw the top of a monkey-puzzle tree in the front garden, rising to within a few feet of where he crouched.
And something made me shout, ‘Jump, you silly sod.’
The death of the creature must somehow have released him. He heard me. He turned and looked at me, as a normal human being might. Now, everybody was shouting ‘Jump’, as the first section of roof, at his back, caved in, leaving a red gaping mouth like a furnace.
Whether sense came back to him then, or whether his holy work was done, or whether even a madman fears the fire, I shall never know.
He leapt. He reached the thin tip of the monkey-puzzle tree and embraced it. Under his weight, it began to bend outwards; more and more. Just when it should have snapped, it collided with another, smaller tree. Now both trees were bending outwards. I heard and saw the first trunk snap. The second one bent more quickly. And then James was catapulted off into the centre of a mass of rhododendrons and, inside it, we heard him crash to the ground. And then we were all running, and burrowing into those bushes like mad.
I was the first to reach him, to hear his high panting. His two strong hands grasped me, and with their strength, I knew he was going to live.
‘They . . . that wait . . . upon the Lord . . . shall renew their strength,’ he said.
‘I don’t call that mounting up on wings as eagles,’ I said. I was that glad to have him back.
Then the ambulancemen were moving in, with their calm, slow cleverness.
‘I suppose I ought to charge you with arson,’ said Sergeant Crittenden, taking me aside. ‘But I heard that . . . thing. And I reckon you did Wheatstone a public service. Now I don’t know what the hell to do. I mean, what are we going to find in there? What’s the fire brigade goin’ to find?’ He nodded to where a few firemen were playing their hoses to contain what was now just a deep pit full of glowing red ash.
‘A burnt-out Landrover,’ I said. ‘I doubt you’ll find much else. I can’t see you getting a giant misshapen skull or thighbone. Not at that temperature.’
‘Pity,’ he said thinly. ‘A gigantic misshapen skull is just what our nick needs.’
How could we have laughed? But they tell me people laughed in the Blitz, when they’d just been blown twenty yards by a bomb. We were none of us quite sane that night.
‘They will also find traces of phosphorous, all over these burnt trees. And pitch, and Semtex . . .’
‘Oh shit,’ said Crittenden. ‘Bought the stuff off the IRA, did you?’
‘Don’t know. He didn’t leave a calling-card.’
‘Mebbe they’ll blame it on the owner of the premises. Mebbe they’ll think he was after the insurance.’
‘It couldn’t happen to a nastier guy,’ I said. ‘In my opinion, he knew perfectly well what was going on. Just went off to sunny climes, and let the thing get on with it.’
‘What worries me is the lack of evidence,’ said Crittenden. ‘Nothing to show.’
‘Oh, I’ve got something that will interest your forensic scientists,’ I said. ‘In an outhouse at my antique shop. A large model steam-yacht. With contents. And they’re welcome to it.’
We flung the doors wide. The smell was so appalling we had to wait half an hour for it to clear. And then it still hung around. I have never used that outhouse again from that day to this.
Wearing the rubber gloves we use for stripping paintwork I gingerly lifted the hatch of the forward saloon of the Circe and craned forward, holding my nose.
Crittenden looked long. ‘What was I supposed to see?’
‘Three tiny skeletons, about a foot long. One bigger than the others.’
‘Get away! And now somebody’s nicked them?’
I poked at the top of three tiny white skulls, like pieces of eggshell, that still protruded from the stinking mass of ooze. But they dissolved under my hand. Like all the rest of the little skeletons.
‘Rotted away, I suppose,’ said Hermione. ‘On contact with the air.’
‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Crittenden, and backed out and went off to his car, holding a white hanky to his nose and blowing vigorously, to get the smell out of it.
For a last time, Hermione and I stood on the shores of the Wheatstone Pond. The old crumbling tarmac had been mashed by the tyres of great lorries. Only odd lumps of the sandstone kerbing stuck up still, like an old man’s rotting teeth. The smell of brick-dust, old sooty London brick-dust, drifted to our nostrils on the breeze, as the line of three JCBs did their gnawing, trampling work, far out on what had once been water. The trees on the ornamental island were mere white stumps. Soon, under those great arcing jaws, they too would be gone. Next week, the earth would be brought in. Soon, grass-seed would be sown. Kids would romp, and mums pus
h prams.
‘I just hope all that foul ooze . . . is all gone,’ said Hermione.
‘Did you notice . . . the local crime figures jumped, just after they’d stopped pumping? A lot of the ooze must have blown round as dust, I suppose. I nearly gave up breathing for a bit, till the smell finally went.’
‘You wonder where the stuff’s gone now . . . bet its still upsetting somebody somewhere.’
‘In smaller and smaller doses . . . adding to the misery of the world.’
‘I suppose we shall never know exactly what happened to J. Montague Wheeler . . .’
‘I reckon it was like Faust and Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles offered Faust all worldly power, in exchange for his soul. Riches, women, all his wildest dreams. Well, I reckon J. Montague Wheeler’s wildest dream was to get inside his dinky model yacht, and sail it round the Wheatstone Pond. In the middle of the night. And it went horribly, horribly wrong. Maybe Mephistopheles got tired of J. Montague Wheeler and his sons. Maybe they were getting crazier and crazier. Maybe they were planning to sail the Circe in broad daylight, to the amazement of their friends in the Wheatstone Yachting Club, Steam Section. Maybe they were threatening to blow Mephistopheles’ cover with their little pranks. Maybe Mephistopheles couldn’t afford J. Montague Wheeler any more . . . or maybe his time was just up.’
Hermione shuddered. ‘I used to have the same dream as a child. To become small, so I could sail on my little model yacht.’
‘So did I. It’s a dream most kids have.’
‘And all the other people, and all their dreams. I wonder what dream the Belgian girl had, or Tony Tanner, or Margie Duff? . . .’
‘We shall never know. We can only guess. Anyway, I’m sticking to faking antiques in future.’
‘And I’ve got an exhibition of model boats to prepare for the City Toy Museum. I don’t know how I’m going to face it.’ She hugged herself with both arms. ‘I know one thing; Circe is not going to be part of it. You can have her.’
‘Mr Makepeace can have her.’
‘Would you sell it to him, knowing what you know now?’
‘Once she’s scrubbed spotless, what his mind doesn’t know his heart won’t grieve . . . it wasn’t the boat’s fault. She’s a lovely bit of British craftsmanship . . .’
‘You’ll never change, Morgan, will you?’
‘Neither will you.’
And on that we parted. How can you fall in love with someone who knows you too well?
But we still dine out on the anniversary. Which is how I know what happened to the bloke who owned Abbeywalk. Hermione told me. He lost his grip on the stock exchange. The late 1987 crisis finished him, and he jumped out of a high window in San Francisco. It seems your sins do find you out in the end.
Well, your big ones, anyway.
YAXLEY’S CAT
One
Rose found the coast of Norfolk very different from the coast of Suffolk.
In Suffolk, around Dunwich, the sea was eating the coast away. The soil cliffs crumbled, exposing tall slender mysterious towers of stone, which turned out to be medieval wells. The children, warned the cliffs were dangerous, still climbed looking for treasure. Timothy had found a vertebra, which he swore was human. It watched Rose beadily from the back shelf of the car. Till an old man in Southwold told her it was only a calf s vertebra; from a midden, not a grave. Whereupon she felt strong enough to ignore it.
Dunwich was a land of fable, like Lyonesse. Once the fourth city of England! Seventeen churches overwhelmed by the sea since the Middle Ages, and local legend said you could still hear their bells tolling under water, on stormy nights.
The old man at Southwold said the inhabitants of Dunwich would tell you any lie; even that a ship full of pianos was torpedoed there in the war, and that on stormy nights the mermaids still sat playing them . . .
But in spite of his sarcasm, and the spookiness, Rose had liked the place. Dunwich was impending. Anything might happen at any time. The sea was a huge foggy roaring archaeologist, an angel of the Second Coming, when the secrets of all hearts would be revealed. At the moment, Rose would almost have welcomed a Second Coming; if only the secrets of her muddled heart could be revealed!
But in Norfolk, around Cley-next-the-Sea, she found the sea, perversely, was building the land up. The sea, which had always soothed her angry heart, was going away from her, giving up. The village, as if desperate to live up to its name, stretched like a thirsty despairing animal more than a mile from the roofless aisles of its medieval church, and still could no longer reach the sea. Its last gasp was a windmill with white sails and a red pantiled roof. For all its carefully nurtured beauty, it had the forlorn air of a traveller who had missed the last bus. Beyond stretched the grey flat foggy infinity of the salt-marshes. The sea was nowhere to be seen without a long muddy walk, and she had neither the heart nor the energy to go looking for her salty friend. Here, the secrets of no hearts would be revealed. No resurrection, but a muddy burial, layer on layer. Nothing would ever happen here again, except the waves would cease even to be heard, and the fishermen cease to fish.
She despaired, and wanted to go. But the children, like dogs, needed a walk, a sniff around, a nosy, as they called it. Or they would cease to be reasonable, and become unbearable.
So they went to find the sea, down the grey endless path. The children kept finding strange objects and fetching them back, like retrievers. Except the objects today seemed singularly damp and unsavoury. The squashed body of a frog, flat as a pancake, but still with the grimace of death on its face. A small fish, all staring eyes, stripped backbone, and tail. But one mustn’t discourage the children. They had been taught to be curious; expected their questions answered. That, she and Philip had agreed on from the beginning. It was one of the few things they still agreed about.
She wondered how much the children guessed. They had been told it was a holiday, but it was really a flight, a flight from Philip. She had to get away, before the balloon really went up, before she began yelling and he put that irrevocably understanding look on his face. Philip did not like rows; he undermined her with reasonableness, trapped her angry wasp-buzzing with strands of logic, like a patient spider. Till she was unable to say anything; just scream inside.
Her mother said she was a fool. Mother lapped up Philip’s flattery, couldn’t get enough of Philip. Philip was handsome; his designer glasses just made him look even more intelligent than he was. Philip was tall and as fit and lean as a low-cholesterol diet and lots of squash could make him. Philip was successful; they had just relocated to a five-bedroom house; with plastic Ionic columns round the door, and most of the front garden taken up with two tarmaced driveways, one marked ‘In’ and the other ‘Out’. Well, it was logical, wasn’t it? Just as logical as relocating when the housing market was falling. And so easy, relocating. Not like moving when you had to show dozens of interesting people round your house, and had marvellous back-breaking packing-up days, when you found stuff you thought you’d lost years ago. No back-break now. Men came and did everything, while you went for a long lunch at a hotel. Except, without the crises, was it real?
With Philip, was anything real any more? She had had a vague misty dream of Salzburg, brought on by watching Amadeus again. Before she could draw breath, Philip and his secretary had broken it down into flight schedules, business-class airline tickets, bookings into five-star hotels and the best seat-reservations for The Magic Flute.
She and Philip saw everything there was to see, in the right order, and were back home again before she could draw breath or smell an apple-strudel. And then Philip saying, ‘But what else did you want?’ How could she ever explain she just wanted to get lost?
Anyway, she thought wryly to herself, I’m lost enough now. As the mist closed over the windmill behind, through the mist far ahead she heard the sound of gently breaking waves. They must have walked a long way in the mist, moving from crab-claw to lion’s-tail seaweed to shattered fis
hbox marked ‘Smith, Lowestoft.’ As they walked back, they left the sea, and returned to the edge of the salt-marshes, to make sure of finding the path back to the mill.
But there were several paths, and they all looked horribly alike in the mist. And in the end they must have chosen one too far east, because the windmill was slow making its appearance, and when it did it wasn’t a windmill but a low old house that hadn’t been there before.
The house was very Norfolk; flint and dull red brick, except where storms had nibbled the corners, leaving patches of raw bright orange. Gable on the right, two dormer-windows in the roof on the left; all covered with massive red pantiles that made the roof sag comfortably. The hedge had grown into a fat bulging jungle that had knocked planks out of the fence in front of it.
‘We can ask the way back to the mill,’ said Rose.
‘Mu-um!’ said Timothy in a voice of despair, pointing at a small damp black notice that said
to let or for sale apply beach house
The lettering was new, untidy but decisive. No indication of which direction Beach House lay. Obviously aimed at locals; not yuppies in need of a country retreat, like all that stuff within an hour’s drive of Norwich Station. Its total unsuitability for yuppies enchanted Rose; as Jane said, ‘What a funny place to live. You’d never get a car up here.’
Rose looked around. Maybe you could force a Land-Rover through, given half a day . . . No TV-aerial on the chimney. Not an upright pole in sight, that might have carried a telephone wire or a power cable . . .
‘Let’s have a nosy,’ said Timothy.
The mother in Rose found the idea appalling. She was the least pushy of creatures. But her children looked at her, called to the child in her, as they knew they could. And the mist made it into a secret adventure.
She pushed the gate tentatively. It was dug into the ground, hanging on half a hinge. She carefully lifted it and they walked up the old brick path that meandered between clumps of invading vegetation. Long dead plants grew up between the bricks that were visible.
Spectral Shadows Page 21
