(1992) Prophecy

by Peter James

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘You look very white,’ Penrose Spode said across the barren gloss of his desk. ‘Are you all right?’

  Frannie nodded.

  ‘Late night?’ The perfect circle of his mouth stretched into a knowing smile.

  ‘Wasn’t like that, Penrose. I’m afraid I didn’t get lucky last night.’ She still didn’t know how well he’d got to know Phoebe, but she wasn’t ready to face telling him about the accident.

  Her reply caused a rather stranded expression to appear on his face, as if he did not know quite how to take it. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, cancelling whatever further observation he had been contemplating.

  As soon as he left his desk to go down the corridor, she looked up the phone number of a florist and ordered some flowers to be sent to Phoebe in hospital, and a note with them, charged to her Access card. Whilst part of her brain did that on autopilot, her active waking consciousness contemplated the coincidence of four people from the same year at university dead or maimed within a short space of time.

  She confronted it with clear logic; with rational thought; with the probability theory that had rubbed off from a few conversations with Oliver Halkin. She could also hear her father’s worried words echoing through her, but everyone sleep-talked when they were worried; and mostly in gibberish.

  Later in the morning Oliver rang to ask how she was, and about her evening. She told him about Phoebe’s accident and he was both horrified and sympathetic. Just as he had been about Meredith’s. She asked him how the première had gone. Even when he said it had not been any fun without her, it only lifted her spirits a little.

  ‘Pick you up at half nine tomorrow?’

  ‘Right.’ She kept it simple, aware of Spode’s ears.

  She held the receiver to her ear for several seconds after he had hung up, scared suddenly that it might be the last link between them; that she might never see him again.

  Scared of the rest of her life.

  Frannie stared at the name of the ward written in grey lettering on a green strip above the double doors: LYTTLETON. She steeled herself.

  Hospitals scared her; they always had done: their smells, their sounds. You walked into a hospital and you took a step too close to death for comfort.

  She pushed open the door and went over to the nursing station. The ward sister told her that Phoebe was down at the end, around the corner; she said her parents had just left, and asked her not to stay too long as Phoebe was sedated and tired, and should go back to sleep soon.

  There was a reek of polish and disinfectant and the bland, lingering smell of mashed potato. A commotion was going on behind the curtains screening one bed. She passed an elderly, almost bald woman whose cheeks were indented, making her mouth look like a belly-button, and a woman in her fifties, knitting busily and holding court to her family.

  The ward opened into an L-shape at the end. Phoebe was in the far corner, lying prostrate with a cage over her midriff. There was a window beyond her with blue curtains that had not yet been drawn against the darkness. Frannie felt a lump in her throat. Phoebe was staring at the ceiling, eyes half closed, her face the colour of chewing gum. Headphones hung from a hook above her; the anglepoise lamp was switched off; a bowl of fruit, a vase of flowers and several cards sat on the table.

  There was a drip stand beside the bed that was not connected. Phoebe’s right hand lay outside the bedclothes; a cannula was taped to the back of it and a yellow plastic bracelet was strapped around her wrist.

  Frannie saw flesh coming out of the other sleeve of the hospital gown and for a brief moment thought that Phoebe was all right, that the surgeon, Mr Gower, had been wrong, had been able to save her arm after all.

  Then she saw where it ended, a thin little stump with the bandage over the end like an outsize thumb-stall. A dwarf, handless arm, like a Thalidomide child’s. Slender and pathetic.

  Her head suddenly felt hot and a swell of giddiness disorientated her. She looked at Phoebe’s face, then at her stump again. For a moment the two became disconnected, belonged to separate people. The stump belonged to someone else. The Phoebe she knew had two arms.

  She stepped closer, then stood still again, struggling to keep her composure. She looked harder, just to make sure Phoebe wasn’t playing a joke on her the way Declan O’Hare had played a joke on her yesterday, and that the arm wasn’t bent back, the way her father used to bend back his pinkie, hold up his hand, show the rest of his fingers and pretend he had bitten the pinkie off.

  On Phoebe’s forehead there was a small Band-aid and a larger strip on her cheek. Her eyes registered Frannie’s presence impassively. Frannie tried to keep a bright face, knowing that she must be strong, must not let Phoebe think losing an arm was a disaster, mustn’t let her think it was any worse than having her tonsils out; needed her to understand that people lost arms and stuff all the time and it was no big deal. No bigger deal than having a cold or missing a bus. Or leaving the fridge door open.

  Who the hell needed two arms?

  She breathed in hard, stood by the bed and numbly took Phoebe’s right hand. There was a faint hint of a squeeze back.

  ‘Hello, Phoebe,’ she said.

  There was a delay of several seconds before Phoebe responded, in a weak and slurred voice. ‘Frnne.’

  Frannie sat down on the chair beside the bed and looked at a large humorous card with nurses whizzing across a ward on skateboards. She squeezed Phoebe’s hand again. ‘You poor thing.’

  Phoebe’s eyes moved slowly to Frannie’s face. The lids closed, then opened again as she struggled against sleep. Frannie again felt a light pressure reciprocated on her hand. She felt she had better not waste time.

  ‘You were going to tell me something last night, Phoebe, that was very important. Can you remember?’

  After a few seconds, the girl in the bed gave a single nod. Then there was confusion in her eyes. ‘Made me ride out in front of she lorry. Made me shink I could beat she lorry.’

  ‘Who made you?’

  There was a long silence. Phoebe’s eyes closed and Frannie waited, praying they would open again, that she wasn’t going to drift into sleep. She looked around, saw that there were no nurses looking, and shook Phoebe’s good arm gently. ‘Who made you ride in front of the lorry, Phoebe?’

  Phoebe’s eyes opened and she looked at Frannie in confusion and surprise. ‘Ouija,’ she said.

  ‘Ouija?’ Frannie repeated.

  Phoebe reached out suddenly, tugging feebly, pulling Frannie towards her, pleading with her eyes. Her lips parted. Her eyes were trying to communicate something; she spoke but it was too faint. Frannie leaned further forward, laying her cheek close to Phoebe’s own.

  ‘The Ouija. Warn them, Frannie.’

  Frannie was confused. ‘Ouija? Can you explain? Please.’

  Then suddenly she realized what Phoebe was talking about; and a small bomb of fear exploded inside her.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  March 1988

  As the dilapidated Volkswagen, crammed with eight other third-year students from London University, pulled into the kerb, Frannie Monsanto slipped her fingers inside her T-shirt and felt comforted by the touch of her crucifix. She knew that what they were doing was wrong. An hour ago it had seemed a great idea, but now the booze was wearing off, and the courage it had given her was replaced with a deepening disquiet, and the knowledge of what had happened the last time she had been down there.

  ‘Just over on the left, past the garbage bags,’ she said.

  The camper halted with a lurch and the thump of music died with the engine. They piled out and stood on the pavement, an incongruous gaggle with wild hair and beat-up clothes, blinking in the fine rain and the orange sodium twilight of the street lamps as if they had been deposited in an alien land by a spacecraft. Above them on either side rose the dark, silent windows of banks and insurance companies. In the square mile of the City of London, the streets that teemed with people in th
e daytime were quiet every night; on Saturday they were dead.

  A solitary car drove past, its tyres cutting crisply through the puddles, the reflections of its tail-lights following like a ghost across the varnished tarmac. Seb Holland locked the camper’s doors. Flecks of drizzle tickled Frannie’s cheeks as she led the way around the corner, past the John Templar Employment Bureau with its cards in the window: SECRETARY FOR MD. SALES – COMMISSION ONLY. PART-TIME 2-DAY BOOK KPR. SHIPPING CLERK. And into a narrow alley that was much darker. She walked past a barber, a newsagent, a heel bar and a tailor, then stopped and rummaged in her bag for her keys. Water seeped through the cork soles of her canvas shoes.

  ‘Hey, wow!’ Seb said. ‘This your dad’s place?’

  Frannie nodded.

  ‘Great!’ said someone else.

  Above the small shop-window was a row of twelve-inch-high dayglo letters, two of which were missing: SANDW CH S LUIGI CAFE.

  Four small suction cups held a white plastic menu against the inside of the window. EAT IN OR TAKE AWAY was printed along the bottom. A cracked plastic sign suspended across the window on a thin chain proclaimed: BREAKFAST SPECIAL! Salamis and sausages hung from butcher’s hooks; an ultraviolet fly-trap above the counter filled the dark interior of the café with a purple sheen.

  Frannie unlocked the front door and went inside, into the familiar smells of the spiced meats and olive oil, coffee beans and cleaning fluid. She pressed one of the light switches; a fluorescent threw a stark pool of light over the rear of the sandwich bar, emitting a steady buzz that joined the hum of the fridges.

  The shelves inside the glass counter were bare. A solitary wicker basket containing packets of crisps sat on top. There was an electronic cash register, a row of bar stools in front of a formica-topped shelf along the far wall, and a cluster of tiny tables with banquette seats and plastic chairs. A creased poster of Naples and one of Amalfi adorned the back wall. Both posters were old, their colours faded, their corners uneven, with bits missing where they had many times in the past torn away from the crude strips of Sellotape that held them up.

  The posters were as much a part of the place as her father’s cheery greeting to each customer, whether he knew them or not: ‘Hi, how y’doin? What y’gonna ’ave today?’ Together with her mother’s silent concentration, preparing sandwiches, making hot drinks, pushing earthenware bowls of pasta into the microwave. People mistook this silence for sullenness, but it was only that in the twenty-eight years since they had left the backstreets of Naples to come to England in search of prosperity, her mother had never succeeded in mastering enough of the language even to hold the most basic conversation.

  A moth fizzed and crackled on the mesh of the flytrap. The place was old, unchanged since her parents had taken the lease in 1957, and spotlessly clean, the way they left it every evening, Mondays to Fridays, at around six, when they closed. Frannie had spent more time in here as a child than she had at their flat in Bethnal Green. Almost every day of her school holidays she had worked in here, and she still came in and helped during vacations now she was at university, although less than before.

  ‘I’ll have a pastrami and dill on rye,’ Max Gabriel said, staring across the blank counter, shaking his tousled blond hair away from his eyes.

  ‘Hey, Luigi, one alligator sandwich – and make it snappy!’ Seb Holland boomed, towering over the counter, then looking round and grinning. ‘Hey, Luigi! Service, hey!’

  There was a sharp crackle as the moth’s wing burnt and the creature fell to the floor of the trap where it lay twitching among the carcasses of the flies and wasps. Frannie locked the front door. The sign SORRY CLOSED swung gently against the glass, and she made sure it was still facing outwards; she felt a lump in her throat and was not sure whether it was fear or guilt, or the realization that she had made a mistake in having brought all her friends in, in having suggested the place, in having gone along with the idea at all.

  The trapdoor to the cellar was in the tiny passage that separated the front of the café from the kitchenette and toilets. As a child Frannie had been fascinated by the cellar and at the same time terrified by it. Paolo, her eldest brother, said the bogeyman lived down there, and Frannie had believed him; it was big enough, and dark enough. The bogeyman could have lived there for ever, scraping water off the damp walls, nibbling at the stores her father kept. The bogeyman stayed out of sight, lurking somewhere in the shadows (watching her, Paolo said) whenever she went down with her father to open one of the crates of cheeses, meats and olives that were regularly delivered from Palermo when she was a child; the bogeyman was afraid of her father. But not of her.

  She had seen the bogeyman once: the last time she had been down there.

  At least, she had seen his shadow. It was five years ago, maybe longer. They didn’t use the cellar any more, hadn’t really used it for a good ten years; a wholesaler started stocking all the items her father needed and he found it easier and more profitable to pick up his requirements on a weekly basis than to have goods shipped in bulk from Italy.

  ‘We need some paper,’ Susie Verbeeten was saying bossily. Her black hair was cropped short around the sides then spread vertically above her scalp as if it had sprung from a jack-in-the-box. Her mother was supposed to be a white witch, which was how Susie Verbeeten knew about the occult. ‘And a thick marker pen.’

  Jonathan Mountjoy stood as he usually did with his hands in his pockets, staring vacantly upwards, his brain focused on a different spectrum. Lynn Frickers, small and bird-like, looked nervously at Frannie. ‘I’m just wondering whether I ought to get back. I have a lot of reading to get done by Monday.’

  Bob Castle, whose face muscles rose and sagged between the fronds of his flimsy ginger beard, nodded. ‘Yes, I –’ His eyes darted around the room. ‘I have to be up early – I think I – ought …’

  Frannie went into the tiny alcove behind the fridges, to the cabinet where the stationery was kept. ‘How much paper?’ she called out, and was startled by how edgy her voice sounded.

  ‘We need to make twenty-eight squares about three inches by three inches,’ Susie Verbeeten replied.

  Frannie took out several sheets, some scissors and a black marker pen. Lynn Frickers, with Bob Castle standing like a faithful dog behind her, was trying to open the front door. Frannie unlocked it and let them both out, then locked it again behind them, secretly wishing she could follow. The back of her scalp felt tight and her throat was dry.

  ‘Dunno why they bothered coming in the first place,’ Meredith Minns said. ‘They’re no bloody use to anybody!’

  Frannie tossed her long brown hair away from her face and grinned, the cheery normality of Meredith’s voice allaying her fears for a moment. She handed the paper to Susie, then went into the back of the shop, knelt on the old linoleum beside the trapdoor, slid her fingers under the metal hoops and lifted hard. The heavy door came free with a crackling sound, and a cobweb rose up with it. An angry spider scuttled out of sight. Cold, musty air that smelled of damp stone and rotting wood poured out, enveloping her, seeped through her wet clothes into her skin, and she stared at the wooden steps that descended almost vertically, their bottom rungs swallowed by the blackness, with a sudden sickening feeling of dread.

  Five years ago she had scrambled, whimpering, up those steps. Chased by the bogeyman. She had been looking for the entrance to a secret passage that was supposed to lead down to the Thames and that had been bricked in centuries ago. Then a shadow had moved behind her, and with it had come a sharp scrape. As she had turned her torch towards it, the bulb had failed.

  It might have been her imagination, she knew. Or a tramp or a wino. The cellars interconnected. You could crawl under the arches, working your way beneath half the City of London. This part of London was riddled with secret passages dating back to the Middle Ages and which were used by prisoners escaping from the Tower, by Royalists during the Civil War, by smugglers.

  For five years she had wanted to go back down
to that cellar and prove to herself that the shadow had been nothing, just a trick of light. Each time she had plucked up courage she had chickened out because there had been no one else to accompany her. But tonight in the downstairs room of the pizzeria they had been fooling around, joking, a little drunk, telling ghost stories and trying to scare each other. So when Seb Holland had suggested a Ouija board session, or maybe it had been Meredith Minns, and Susie Verbeeten had said it needed total darkness, Frannie told them she knew the ideal place.

  ‘Seb, do you have a torch in your van?’ she said, remembering now that there was no light in the cellar.

  ‘Yes, I’ll get it.’

  Meredith Minns wandered over and stood beside her, staring down. ‘Yeeech! God, what’s down there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Frannie said. ‘Empty boxes and stuff.’

  ‘Perfect,’ Susie said, peering over her shoulder.

  ‘Looks horrible,’ Max said. ‘Why don’t we do it up here?’

  ‘Because you need somewhere where there isn’t anyone else around, and total darkness,’ Susie said.

  ‘Why total darkness?’ Meredith asked.

  ‘Because, daaahlink,’ Seb said, his voice turning Slavic, and running his fingers up her back, ‘ve are going to summon up ze Prince of Darkness. Yee ha hahhh!’

  Meredith shivered and grinned. ‘Stopppit!’

  Seb unlocked the front door and went to get his torch. Susie cut twenty-eight squares of paper, wrote in capitals a single letter of the alphabet on each one in turn and on the final two the single word Yes and the single word No.

  ‘We need a glass,’ Susie said, ‘and a flat surface, and a candle.’

  ‘There’s probably a crate down there that’s suitable, otherwise we can bring down a table,’ Frannie said, resting the trapdoor back against its hinges.

  Max stared around the café. ‘Should think this place is a gold-mine – right in the middle of the City – perfect.’

  ‘The rent’s very high,’ Frannie said, and thought for a moment about her parents: up at five every morning making the sandwiches; always struggling to pay the bills, struggling to gain a few more years on the lease the landlords wanted to terminate for redevelopment; always dreaming of returning to Naples laden with riches. But the reality was that they would never return, not now. Their family and friends had died, or moved or changed; the past they had left behind them in Italy was as threadbare as the future that lay before them in England. In a couple of years the lease ran out, this time for good, and the whole building would be coming down. Her parents would have to move on, start again elsewhere; tired, ageing people, their hope beaten flat like old metal.