The room beyond the terse word was deserted too. Above the sinks a mirror multiplied the white tiles of the walls, so that Rory felt surrounded by a relentless absence of colour. He was suddenly afraid of not seeing his reflection. He made himself step forwards, and in a moment saw a ridiculously costumed apparition with his face. He took refuge in the nearest cubicle, where he planted his clothes on top of the low cistern before fumbling to undo the gown and tear off the degrading pad. In no time he was dressed, socks and shoes too. He stuffed the pad into a bin and left the gown hanging in the cubicle as he returned to the corridor.
Nobody could see the escaped patient now. He was just another visitor. He hurried to the lifts, the nearest of which opened at once to his summons as if it were as impatient as he was. It certainly seemed eager to box him in with its dull flat grey doors and walls and floor and ceiling. The greyness struck him as less a colour than a substitute for one, and as much of a threat to close his senses down as the white tiles had been. He stared at the numbers above the doors and tried to grasp what colour the illuminated digits were. Perhaps the attempt to determine it helped him retain his senses, but he hadn't identified the tint of the lacklustre 1 by the time the doors released him.
The lobby was scattered with visitors and staff, who presumably saw as little of him as he did of them. As he emerged from the building his mind appeared to lighten to match the sky. So long as it didn't grow as blank, he thought, and switched his mobile on. He took several unnecessary moments to decide on calling Charlotte. Wherever she was, he assumed it must be out of reach, because she was represented by an automatic message. As he listened for Hugh and then for Ellen, his concentration felt dangerously close to blotting out his surroundings. Worse still, it seemed to have blotted out his family. All three were as silent as packed earth.
THIRTY-FIVE
As Charlotte stepped on the escalator at Liverpool Lime Street she became afraid that she would miss a call. Retrieving the mobile from her handbag, she triggered the display. While the stairs bore her downwards she was able to watch the signal dwindling as if, like her, it were being dragged into the earth. It vanished as the stair beneath her feet, sending her off the escalator. She had yet to hear from Hugh or Ellen in response to her increasingly terse messages. The destination boards at either end of the underground platform promised a train to West Kirby in two minutes, which meant that for at least another ten she would have no chance to hear.
She dropped the mobile in her bag, where it nestled against the flashlight she'd bought in an Indian store near the station. Whichever way she looked along the sparsely populated platform she was confronted by a tunnel shrunk around darkness, but for hours she'd been unable to distinguish her claustrophobia from her anxiety about her cousins, if indeed that hadn't overwhelmed any other feelings. In the taxi from the hospital, and then on the train out of Leeds, she'd kept hoping that a call from Hugh or Ellen would let her go back to watch over Rory. She ought to contact the police; she couldn't contact the police. The two imperatives persisted in switching back and forth inside her skull, even more insistently now that she was unable to make a call.
Before long a train with west kirby luminously emblazoned on its brow rose out of the left-hand tunnel. More people than Charlotte had time to identify boarded as she did. Her section of the carriage was unoccupied but flanked by onrushing blackness. She seemed to be able to live with this; perhaps she was growing resigned to her condition. She was more troubled to be met by darkness when the train emerged from the tunnel on the far side of the river.
Her phone showed that nobody had tried to call while she was underground. She hoped Hugh or Ellen had thought to bring a flashlight, although would they have expected their task to take so long? Of course she didn't know that it had. Attempting to raise her cousins yet again wouldn't help them or her nerves. Streetlamps alongside the railway drove back the dark, which only made her worry how much light her cousins had and what it might be illuminating. Houses flocked by, curtained windows glowing, and she thought of families at dinner or in front of televisions while her cousins were caught up in their secret task. At least the darkness should conceal them from observers, unless the flashlight attracted attention. This was one more oscillation of alternatives to add to the clamour inside her skull.
When the train came to the end of its stations the mobile was still playing dumb. Despite a belated impression that she hadn't been the last passenger, Charlotte was alone in stepping onto the platform. There was nobody to collect her ticket, and not a single taxi outside the small station. She was retreating in search of some advertisement for a local firm when blackness swelled out of the night as a taxi pulled away from a more or less Mediterranean restaurant. She had to mime desperation, not that it involved any pretence, before the driver swerved across the road and jettisoned the sluggish firework of a cigarette. 'How far are you going?' he said.
Perhaps he was ready to go home. Certainly his large roundish mottled face looked as if a lie-down might return more of its shape. 'Thurstaston,' she told him.
'What's there?'
'I will be.'
'Shake a leg, then.'
From the frown that swelled the ridges of his brows she could have taken him to be advising her to walk to Thurstaston. As she ducked under the low roof, to be greeted by a dim bulb that illuminated a No Smoking sign, he said 'By yourself?'
She couldn't help slamming the door as if to keep out a pursuer. 'As you see,' she said, though she'd renewed the darkness.
He emitted a snort that might have been derisive or an attempt to unblock his nostrils. 'Meeting someone,' he said.
It sounded ominously unlike a question. The taxi had left the station behind by the time she grasped that he was explaining what he'd previously asked. 'I hope so,' she said, which seemed wilfully pessimistic. 'I'm sure I will.'
The taxi sped out of reach of the lights along the main road and accelerated uphill between banks of rock that shored up the black sky. They blinkered Charlotte's vision, so that she was striving to concentrate on the lit patch of road the night was paying out when the driver enquired 'Which way?'
She was wondering nervously what could have stolen his sense of the unquestionable direction when she realised that he was anticipating the crossroads. 'Down to the cliff,' she said.
'Night walker.'
She assumed he meant her rather than anyone he glimpsed as the taxi emerged from the cutting and swung right at the junction. The side road unbent to reveal the distant Welsh coast, an elongated fallen constellation dying to the orange of a mass of embers. It was pinched progressively smaller by the hedges bordering the road, and sank into the dark before the taxi veered into a lane beside the unlit hulk of a café. 'This you?' the driver said.
'It's fine, thanks.'
Two stumpy tubes of amber light in metal cages guarded the entrances to paths off the lane. Otherwise it and the car park to which it led were deserted. As Charlotte took out her purse the driver flashed his headlamps several times and then blared his horn at length before leaving the beams raised high. 'Where are they?' he was determined to learn.
'I'll find them.'
'They ought to be finding you.' All at once he sounded so paternal that Charlotte was afraid he might lock her in for her own supposed safety. She'd caught hold of the door handle when he slid his window down to shout 'Anybody there?'
This provoked a response – a protracted clattering giggle as dry as a skull. Before it trailed off Charlotte identified it as the complaint of a restless magpie. 'They won't be here,' she said, as angry with her own nerves as with the driver. 'I have to walk.'
'You ought to be met when it's dark like this.'
She heard a threat instead of the rebuke he intended. If she tarried much longer, the metal cell might start to seem like a refuge. She peeled a note off the stained scrawny wad in her purse and handed it to the driver. 'All yours,' she said when he made to give her change as she clambered out of the taxi.
&
nbsp; 'Just take a bit of care. You never know who's about at night,' he said and lingered until she ventured onto a lit stretch of path. 'Hope they're waiting for you,' he said and executed a U-turn so leisurely that he might have been deciding to halt again. Instead he drove to the road and, with a last red-eyed glare of the brakes, was gone.
The glow of the caged light fell short of the track onto which the path led. The murmur of the taxi dwindled beyond hearing as Charlotte stepped onto the track, and then there was only the wind in the hedges. They scraped thorns together as she turned right towards a bridge, on the far side of which the track continued to resemble the floor of a tunnel narrowing into invisibility. Its walls were trees growing close together and embedded like vines in the roof of the sky. Her footsteps grew shrill and encountered company under the bridge, but only hers emerged, unless the others had become so thin that they were less than whispers. Of course nobody was at her back. She managed not to glance over her shoulder more than twice and to derive some slight comfort from the raw lamps on a road alongside a caravan park behind the trees to her left, although the place was so silent that any tenants might have been holding their collective breath. Soon the lamps ended and the trees gave way to bushes, opening out the sky. It felt as if the walls had thickened while lowering the roof, and left the track just as dimly indistinct. The need to strain her eyes distracted her from feeling too closed in, and she wanted to conserve the flashlight beam. She almost wandered past the entrance to the common in the dark.
A sign nailed to a post on the overgrown verge had disoriented her, because she couldn't recall having seen it before. She leaned close to it and squinted hard, but still had to use the flashlight. The tip of the wooden pointer had rotted away, leaving a gap like a dead reptile's lichened mouth. Many of the letters had sloughed off where they weren't obscured by moss, so that she was barely able to distinguish even ASTON OUND, which might have been a phrase too occult for her to understand. She swung the flashlight beam away to illuminate the way through the gap in the hedge. As soon as she stepped onto the path across the common she switched off the beam.
She oughtn't to have peered so closely at the lit sign. A blurred pale patch clung to her vision, obscuring the route. A wind hissed through the blackened grass to meet her, and she was also greeted by a muted tolling of bells, which it took her some moments to recognise as the hollow clangour of ropes against the masts of boats. A rise in the faint narrow path showed her the nervously restless lights of Wales, and as she glimpsed a thin shape silhouetted against them on the far side of the common, a mass of blackness clattered up from a clump of bushes at her side. Its cry was louder and harsher than hers. It flew away cawing to add its blackness to a treetop, and Charlotte tried to steady the flashlight beam as she turned it on the silhouette near the edge of the cliff. At first the light seemed too attenuated to define it, especially given her imperfect vision. She had to advance several reluctant paces before she was sure of the object. It was a spade stuck upright in the earth.
She had no doubt who'd left it there. 'Hugh,' she called. 'Ellen.' This appeared to earn her a derisive response, but only from the treetop. She was no longer willing to brave the unlit dark, and followed the unbalanced dance of the flashlight beam along the ragged path. Hundreds of yards away from the spade, she saw that it was guarding a hole in the earth.
Was it a grave? It looked regular enough – and then she remembered her dream. For several breaths the memory – the pebbles that proved to be eyes, the face rising out of the soil that coated it – felt capable of robbing her of movement. She couldn't abandon her cousins, wherever they were, and so she stalked along the shaky path across the dim common and managed to grasp both the spade and her handbag while she poked the flashlight beam into the rectangular darkness. It was far too reminiscent of her dream, yet quite different. Beyond the hole left by a trapdoor that lay open on the grass, an iron ladder scaly with rust led down into a cellar.
It must be all that remained of Pendemon's house. No, there was a further rectangular opening in the bare wooden floor. By leaning forwards she was able to distinguish a ladder that depended from it, and beyond that, stairs leading downwards. Although they were dim, she had a notion that something was wrong with them, and she thought the same about the trapdoor. She trained the flashlight on it until she realised that she could just see the ground through it. At once she felt as if the common had collapsed beneath her, precipitating her into the unknown. Pendemon's house had vanished, but not in the way she'd assumed. The trapdoor was a grimy skylight, and the carpeted stairs led down into the house itself.
THIRTY-SIX
Black and white. Sky, hospital. Black sky, white hospital. Rory was so concerned to ensure his senses were intact, since the silence of the mobile against his ear felt as if his hearing had shut down, that the reason for the colour of the sky didn't immediately occur to him. He almost grabbed a man who was walking away from a taxi. 'What time is it?' he demanded, having realised that his watch must have been destroyed in the crash.
'Nearly eight. Just coming up.'
Rory found the additional phrase redundant, not to mention unwelcome in some way he hadn't time to grasp. The thought that Hugh and their cousins were out somewhere in the night on his behalf with no means of communication dismayed him. Why couldn't he have regained consciousness before any of them left? They weren't even all together. His lurch after the vacated taxi only seemed to send it faster onto the main road. No other taxis were in sight, and he saw that he oughtn't to leave people wondering what had become of him. He turned almost fast enough to leave his vision behind and hurried back into the hospital.
While visitors were loitering in the reception area, they didn't appear to be queuing. Rory dodged around them and waited for the receptionist to notice him – waited several heartbeats before blurting 'Excuse me.'
She still didn't look at him. 'Which ward do you want?'
'None of them. I've been.'
Even when she peered at him she seemed hardly to be seeing him. 'Aren't you visiting? Didn't you just come in?'
'I had an accident. I'm discharging myself.'
'From where?'
'Whichever your ward is where you stick tubes in folk.'
'Intensive Care?'
He'd snagged her attention at last, rather more of it than he needed. 'That'll be it,' he said as if he were unconscious of her frown. 'Can you tell them I'm fine and I've gone?'
'You mustn't leave your bed till someone's seen you.'
'I can, look. I've got to be somewhere else.'
Her expression had vanished as though it had never existed, and he hoped her objections had too. 'What's your name?' she said.
'Lucas. Rory Lucas.'
She hadn't reacted when he heard a murmur at his back. 'Isn't he the feller that was in the smash-up?'
'The one built a hill out of rubbish, you mean.'
'It wasn't a hill,' Rory muttered.
'Right enough, a mound.'
'Not one of those either,' Rory said louder and turned to confront the man, but no face owned up to having spoken. He swung around again to find that the receptionist had changed sex – at least, had moved aside for a broader-shouldered colleague. 'What seems to be the trouble, Mr Lucas?' the replacement said.
'None that I know of. You can see I'm fit to leave.'
'Better let a doctor be the judge.'
'Look, I know how I feel. If there's any problem I'll be back.'
As Rory took a sidelong pace towards the exit the man mirrored him. 'I can see myself out,' Rory said, turning to the doors.
He must have moved too hastily. At once he was surrounded by nothing, not even colour. He felt as though he were floating inert in the midst of a void. He couldn't let anyone observe his condition, and so he stumbled forwards in the hope this would lend him balance. He was just aware of blundering inside a segment of the revolving doors, which someone must be pushing. Suppose he tottered all the way around only to flounder blindly
back into the hospital? As soon as he felt a shift of the air on his face he staggered towards it. He must be in the open, because he could smell cigarette smoke. As if the detail had returned all his senses to him, the blindness set about seeping towards the edge of his vision. There were no taxis on the forecourt of the hospital, and so he headed for the main road.
He was wary of moving too fast now. He could imagine that senselessness was lying in wait for him. He was yards short of the road when a taxi swung onto the forecourt and coasted towards the hospital entrance. He had to retrace practically all the steps he'd taken outside to be in a position to board once the passenger made way for him. He couldn't help peering into the lobby to make sure nobody had pursued him, and perhaps this was why the driver said 'Have they let you out, then?'
'Can we go to the station?' Rory slammed the door and, having sat back, clipped the seat belt into its slot. When the driver only squinted in the mirror Rory had to demand 'How do you mean?'
'You got your release.'
Rory fancied he was being asked to produce some kind of document until he saw that the driver was being facetious. 'I was visiting,' he said.
'Is that a fact.'
Insisting that it was might make Rory sound too determined to convince his questioner. 'Can we get going now?' he urged instead.
'When they've got this woman and her chair in unless you want us running them down.'
Rory was dismayed to realise that he hadn't noticed the large car ahead, into which a man was helping an invalid while a second man stowed a folded wheelchair in the boot. Surely Rory's senses weren't deserting him again; surely he was just preoccupied with leaving the hospital behind. He stared at the entrance to reassure himself that none of the emerging crowd was after him, and so he failed to observe the departure of the other car. He was sagging with relief as the taxi left the forecourt when the driver said 'How are they getting on?'
Thieving Fear Page 29
