“I was looking for Joyce Churchill.” Martin had to clap one hand over his nose and draw breath before he went on, “I don’t suppose you know where she is.”
“He took her away, he made her forget about me. I’m not wanted anymore. They’ve left me here by myself. I’ve been alone for days.” One arm wavered up from the blankets and reached blindly toward him. “You’ll stay with me, won’t you? I can’t look after myself. I’m all alone in the world.”
Martin couldn’t answer. He stared in fascinated horror at her hand. The fingers must be squeezed together, but it looked like a single lump of flesh, hardly recognizable as a hand except for the fingernails that were almost buried in its edges. “Don’t leave me,” the voice piped shrilly, “let me see if you’re as kind as you sound,” and the fat of the arms lolled back and forth as both hands groped toward the face.
They were reaching for the eyes. Martin saw that the fat had forced the eyelids shut until they could no longer open by themselves. He stepped forward instinctively to help, I compelled by an appalled pity, but once he was close enough to help he couldn’t bring himself to try. The skin of the face looked thin as paper, ready to split at a touch, burst open. He was struggling to overcome his revulsion when the groping hands managed to pry open the left eye.
Martin stumbled backward, clutching at his mouth, trying to swallow. There was no eye beneath the eyelid, only a swelling of whitish flesh. “Don’t leave me,” the voice piped desperately as he staggered out of the room and held on to the doorframe. “Stuart,” he shouted, “can you come up here right now?”
He tried to keep his gaze on the stairs so as not to look! back into the room. One glance showed him the hands digging at the right eye, the nails trying to lift the eyelid. As he shoved himself away from the doorframe, he thought he glimpsed a flood of white engulfing the pillow and then the bed. “Stuart,” he called from the top of the stairs, his voice cracking.
When at last Stuart came up to him he could only point toward the room. “In there,” he muttered, swallowing. The breathing had ceased as he’d left the doorway. Stuart hurried into the room, and emerged a few moments later looking impatient. “Well, what did you want me to see?’ he said.
60
IT WAS Nell and the man with the oval face who helped Molly upstairs, though helped was hardly the word. The woman of the house had slammed the front door in Danny’s face, but perhaps they wanted to put as much distance between him and Molly as possible, or thought that Molly did. Of course she did, but she wished they wouldn’t hurry her so fast up the stairs, and it seemed they would never stop climbing. They were marching her upward, each holding one of her arms, giving her no time to catch her breath, and she had barely enough energy to wonder how they had managed to slip through into a different building, into this house with so many floors. They were virtually carrying her by the time the man with the oval face said, “This will be far enough.”
They could hardly have gone much further. As far as Molly could see, there was only one floor above, which was dark. He opened a door and switched on the light in the room, a boardinghouse room with heavy curtains over the window, a new green carpet on the floor, a crucifix above the bed with its neatly turned-down sheets. Molly was marched into the room, where they dumped her cases on the floor and lowered her onto the bed. “You must fear nothing now,” the man with the oval face said.
It was all very well for him to say that, even if it was meant to be reassuring. Molly felt as if she’d left her thoughts and feelings behind on the climb, along with her breath. She lay panting on the bed while they watched her solicitously. As soon as she could speak she said accusingly to Nell, “You said there was a nurse.”
Nell looked relieved when the man intervened. “What is it you need?”
“I need to go home.” Reaction overtook her, and she began to tremble. “My God, I don’t know what’s happening. That crazy man you saw just now, he’s been following me for weeks. What in Christ’s name does he want? What has he got against me?”
“We shall deal with him, J give you my word. I imagine you will see that for the time it is best you stay here.”
His calm voice and his deliberate sentences seemed almost hypnotic. At least she would be staying only until Danny was out of the way, she thought; the dumping of the suitcases in the room had seemed ominous. “You’ll send the nurse up, will you?”
“She has not been a nurse for some years. Let me see what I can do.” He laid his hand on her forehead. His touch felt cool, gentle, still. She hardly knew when he began to massage her temples, he was making her feel so restful. All her memories of panic were fading. She felt safe, cared for, home at last.
She was willing him to go on when he took his hand away. She kept- her eyes closed, to hold on to the calm. “I shall come up for you when matters are under control,” he murmured, “but call on me if you should feel you need me. Call me Sage.”
The door closed softly, and she listened to his and Nell’s footsteps descending until she could no longer hear them. She let the silence float her mind away. Though she could hardly believe it after all that had happened, she felt ready to sleep, even to dream. If she could, feel safe to dream anywhere now, it would be here. A dream that would be larger than any she’d experienced was waiting. She breathed deeply and gently, until she was no longer aware of breathing.
She wasn’t sure what jerked her awake from the first split second of dreaming. Surely the impression that something had shifted near her in the room must be part of the dream. She opened her eyes as little as possible, doing her best to cling to sleep. Her eyes were closing as she glanced up at the crucifix.
She frowned at it and then, impatiently, sat up. It didn’t look very conventional, but why should that bother her? It could hardly have turned its head to grin down at her as she lay on the bed. It wasn’t grinning, only smiling widely, though surely that was unusual. If the eyes appeared to be watching her, that was a trick you could find in hundreds of paintings and posters. There was no point in imagining that the eyes looked familiar. If she was going to make herself nervous, perhaps she had better call Sage.
Some instinct restrained her. He’d said that she must fear nothing now. Suddenly that seemed less a reassurance than a suggestion of what might lie ahead.
She jumped up and went to the door. The landing with its new green carpet was deserted, and all the other doors were closed. She went quickly to the stairwell and glanced up at the dark floor above her, then she looked down.
It couldn’t be the house with the yellow front door. There were too many floors—so many that she was afraid even to start counting. No point in speculating, no point in making herself more uneasy. All she knew was that she didn’t mean to be left alone up here, so far from everyone, and she was about to start down when she heard voices. They must be at the bottom of the stairs, they were so minute, but a quirk of the acoustics let her hear every word. “We are not quite ready,” Sage was saying.
He was talking to the landlady, for Molly heard her say, “Are you the one who’s lost her husband?”
“Yes,” came Nell’s voice, “and I don’t want him back.”
“No, that is not why Helen came here. It is no longer a question of that kind of bereavement. But the lost shall be restored, I promise you. You will not be disappointed.” Sage’s voice was moving away. “Now I think we have left Mrs. Churchill by herself for long enough,” he said, and shortly there came the closing of a door.
Molly stared down the impossible distance, then retreated into her room. She couldn’t have heard what she’d thought she’d heard. Churchill was a common name, and Nell sounded very much like Helen; why, they were the same name really. But Joyce Churchill had been a nurse eleven years ago, and why should Nell have concealed her real name?
Something was very wrong here, and she meant to find out what it was: anything rather than stay up here in the room that felt as if nobody had used it before her with the crucified figure that, i
f she let her imagination loose, she could imagine had turned its gleeful head to watch her. She went back onto the landing and winced as the door slammed behind her. She was steeling herself for the descent when a voice spoke to her, whispered to her: “Don’t go down.”
There was someone above her, in the dark. For a moment Molly wanted to run, run and fall if she had to, until she reached the ground floor. But the voice sounded desperate, and almost drained of strength. “Please don’t go,” it said, “please help me, whoever you are,” sounding like a prisoner who had been kept up there for years. Molly couldn’t resist so desperate a plea. She glanced unhappily down the stairs and then she went up.
61
EVEN THOUGH Stuart looked impatient and puzzled, some time passed before Martin could make himself go into the room. One of his fears was that he might see something in there that Stuart wasn’t seeing, and what could that mean? At last he shoved himself away from the banister and went quickly if unsteadily to join Stuart. The bed looked sodden, but it was empty, and so was the room. “There was someone in here,” Martin cried.
“Not recently.”
“Yes, recently. Just now. I saw them in the bed.”
“You saw them?” Stuart was ready to grin, as if that would bring Martin out of it. “How many?”
“Just one, God damn it.” Martin was very close to losing his temper. “I don’t know if it was a man or a woman, but it was there, no question of it. I was near enough to touch it,” he said, and shuddered. “My God, I almost did.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because it didn’t look—because it looked as if—” He didn’t like the ideas that suggested themselves. “Why are you trying to tell me there was nobody? You heard the breathing when we came in.”
“I may have heard something that sounded like breathing. That’s why you expected to see someone, and that’s why you did. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Martin. We can all do it. Just for a moment when I looked in here I thought I saw someone on the bed myself.”
“What did you see?” Martin demanded.
“Nothing that could have been a human being, believe me. Obviously it was the blankets.”
“Then what’s this?” Martin forced himself to go to the bed, and pointed at the pillow. The wetness was seeping into the pillow, disappearing altogether too quickly, but it still glistened in the enormous indentation left by the head. “Explain that, if you can.”
“Do you really want me to? Is it really that important to you, when we’re trying to find your girl friend and the others?” Stuart squeezed his arm as if the ache might bring him back to reality. “We can stand here all night arguing about whether you did or did not see someone, but what on earth can it have to do with what we’re supposed to be doing?”
Until that moment Martin would have seen no connection at all, but now Stuart had made him feel he should. “Molly said something once,” he said almost to himself, “about dreams that were so intense she couldn’t tell they weren’t real.”
“In that case who was dreaming just now? Are you saying we both were?” As Martin glanced at the pillow, Stuart said, “Dreams don’t leave traces in reality, Martin. We both saw what we expected to see, that’s all. Always trust the simplest explanation that fits all the facts unless there’s a damn good reason not to do so.”
Martin made himself stay in the room. The bright light on the marks on the pillow only made them more threatening, for the smell was still in the air. Of course Stuart wouldn’t notice with his cold. The smell had faded, but now Martin had the uneasy notion that it was growing stronger. “You haven’t explained that stuff on the bed,”, he protested nervously. “That’s a fact, if you’ll only look.”
“Leave it, Martin, all right? Don’t you crack up, not now. Enough people have.”
He must have seen how close that came to enraging Martin, for he said hastily, “You’ll agree we’ve drawn a blank here. I think the best thing is for me to approach the police. They ought to help me even if they won’t help you. They can trace Mrs. Churchill while we’re contacting the others. Maybe they’ll find Miss Wolfe as well.”
Martin wanted to get out of the room and the house before he panicked, get away from the moribund smell, but suppose they had overlooked something? He went dizzily onto the landing, sucked in a breath from the stairwell, and went into the philatelist’s office. The telephone—a message pad on the desk. He hurried to it. “What about this?” he called, forcing himself not to whisper.
Stuart came to see. It was a scribbled address, surrounded by jagged doodles. “It might be worth checking, if it’s in London,” Stuart admitted. “We need an A to Zed.”
“An A to Zee? I saw one. There it is.” Martin grabbed it from beside the stamp catalogs and leafed through the index, so roughly that a page tore. For a moment he’d thought he heard breathing in the house. “Okay, there’s a street of that name,” he said, and turned hastily to the map, peered wildly at the small print. “It’s off Caledonian Road.”
“You think we should go there, do you?”
“Yes.” Anywhere that was out of this house, where now he thought he could hear movement in the next room.
“All right, we’ll go as soon as I’ve called the police.”
Stuart was reaching for the phone, and Martin was almost sure he heard movement, a creaking of the bed. “Shouldn’t we see if she’s at this address first?”
Stuart peered sharply at him, wondering why he was so nervous. “All right,” Stuart said, “I don’t suppose we want to risk wasting police time.” Martin headed for the stairs at once. When he opened the front door, the night air felt welcome as a cold bath in a heat wave, but he couldn’t breathe properly until Stuart was safely out as well. Martin closed the door and felt the bolt snap into place. He thought of asking Stuart if he’d seen or heard anything as they came downstairs, but Stuart would only deny it, and the question would only make him more dubious about Martin. Perhaps Martin had seen nothing, perhaps it was just a fear. But that was bad enough, for he couldn’t shake it off: the impression of something struggling to take shape again under the mound of blankets.
62
MOLLY was almost at the top before she saw the woman who had called to her, a tall stooped woman who was supporting herself on the banister. She looked starved and old, but Molly could tell that she was younger than she looked. Molly ran up the last few stairs because the woman seemed in danger of falling headlong. But as soon as the woman saw her face she began to back away along the landing, shaking her head as if it would never stop.
Molly halted three stairs down. Dismay had frozen her.
The woman peered at Molly’s face as if ,she hoped she didn’t know her, shaking her head as if that would grant her wish. At last she said, “Tell me quickly, what’s your name?”
She must have recognized her from the newspaper, Molly tried to tell herself, and yet she thought she knew the stooped woman. “Molly Wolfe,” she said.
The woman put her hand over her mouth. “Weren’t you at Oxford?”
“At the university, you mean?” It was Molly’s last pathetic hope.
“No, at the research place. Where they were doing research into dreams.” She looked as hopeless as Molly felt. “You do remember me, don’t you? Freda Beeching.”
Now that her half-defined fears were confirmed, Molly felt oddly resigned. “My God, we aren’t the only ones here, are we?”
“That’s right. He tricked me into bringing Joyce Churchill here.”
So Joyce Churchill was the ex-nurse, and everything was coming true. “Helen Verney brought me here, and Danny Swain followed us,” Molly said, and then what Freda had said caught up with her. “You say someone tricked you ? You know who’s behind all this?”
“Sage.”
“Who is he?” Molly whispered.
“I don’t know. I try not to wonder.”
Perhaps Freda had good reason to be fearful, but it infuriated Molly. “Why should he want to br
ing us all together?”
“Don’t you remember?”
All at once Molly was as near to panic as Freda sounded. “Remember what?”
“The dream.”
“I’m not sure I want to,” Molly said.
“Remembering doesn’t matter now,” Freda said. “It’s grown too strong to be stopped. I started dreaming.it again last night and I haven’t dared sleep since. You do remember how it was, don’t you? You must remember.” But she looked terrified that Molly would say she did. “How nobody will be sure what’s behind a door until they open it, and how you’ll never know where any street leads, and the worst thing you can do will be to ask someone the way… .” Her hands were digging at her cheeks.
“You need to sit down,” Molly said, struggling to quiet the memories Freda had revived. “Let’s go in your room where we can talk properly.”
“We mustn’t go in there,” Freda whispered shrilly. “We mustn’t wake him.”
Molly didn’t want to know why Freda was afraid. “All right, we won’t go in your room,” she said, and suddenly was grateful to have been diverted. “Do you think you can walk down?”
Freda glanced unhappily down the stairwell. “Can you?”
“If I came up I can go down,” Molly said, not looking. “Listen, Freda, I think we still have a chance. If we’ve been brought here for the reason you think, then Sage must need all of us. We have to get out before Danny Swain gets in.”
Freda stumbled as she ventured on the first stair and would have plunged headlong if Molly hadn’t grabbed her. “I’ll be all right,” Freda murmured, “as long as I take it slowly.” Molly suppressed the thought that slowly was the last way she wanted to go down.
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