Freda kept glancing back at the closed door of her room until they reached Molly’s floor, then she began to peer nervously down the stairwell. Molly kept her own gaze away from there. She needed all her energy to avoid making a noise on the stairs. At least Freda seemed to weigh almost nothing.
The floors were trooping past, bright and bare and featureless except for their closed doors. The smell of new carpet was so overpowering it was beginning to make her feel sick. She wondered if she ought to count the floors, to give herself something to do. The idea came too late, for she’d forgotten how many floors they had already passed.
Perhaps counting the floors would only have made them more real. If the floors and the stairs weren’t real, what was she walking on? But if they were real, how could they be in the house with the yellow front door? By now, dismayingly, she knew she hadn’t been taken into another building. She mustn’t speculate, mustn’t think about the stairs at all, just walk. Yet it troubled her deeply that the stairs seemed somehow generalized, as if they were an idea that wasn’t yet fully expressed. Worst of all was their utter meaninglessness.
The dream she’d shared with Freda and the others was coming true at last. She couldn’t help suspecting that if she was afraid of it, that added to its power. Hadn’t Sage told her she must fear nothing? But controlling her fear wasn’t taking them downstairs any sooner: on the contrary, the stairs and the floors seemed to be growing more real, more specific; she stumbled on a tack that had bent instead of penetrating the stair, and there was a landing where the carpet didn’t quite reach the far wall. She was holding tight to Freda’s bony arm, since Freda and her laborious descent had to be most real, when she heard a door open and close.
Freda clutched her so violently that Molly almost lost her balance. “Where was that?” Freda cried.
“Down there.” Molly put her finger to her lips. She’d remembered how sounds carried on the staircase. Below them, stairs were creaking. Someone trying to be stealthy was coming up from the downstairs hall.
Molly risked a glance over the banister and almost cried out—not because she saw anyone, but because she and Freda were only a few floors up. Just a couple of minutes more and they could have been out of the house. Now she could see a hand on the banister, two floors below. She hurried Freda up to the nearest floor, the nearest room. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered urgently. “We’ll hide in here.”
When Freda stared nervously at the door, Molly reached past her and turned the handle. She switched on the light in the room, which looked very much like the one she had been taken into, and quickly led Freda forward. For a moment, to her dismay, she found herself wishing her parents would come for her, wishing that she wouldn’t be alone with all this any longer, that they would be in the room. She remembered imagining that they were in her flat. All at once she knew that if they had ever appeared there, they would have had the same eyes as Sage—for those eyes were watching her across the empty room.
They were the eyes of the crucifix. She saw the end of the movement as its head turned to watch. She felt Freda stiffening. She couldn’t have forced her into the room, weak as Freda was, even if she had wanted to. They backed out and Molly fumbled the door shut just as the man on the stairs reached the landing. It was Danny.
Before Molly could move, he was between her and the stairs. The triumph and the hatred in his eyes looked crazier, more dangerous: he wasn’t going to be tricked twice. As he stretched out his arms on both sides of him, the light gleamed through his nails. Perhaps he’d kept them long and cruel especially for her.
Her heart was pounding violently, her dry throat was closing up, but she had to make him see he’d been tricked. “Listen, Danny, we’ve all been lured here. Wait, let me finish,” she cried, for he was still advancing as if he were determined not to hear, eyes narrowing, hands like claws, and she could only back away to give herself time to finish. “You remember what we dreamed in Oxford, don’t you? It’s here now. This is where it begins. We’re all needed to make it happen. Someone let you in, didn’t they? That’s why. If we can get out of here and stay away from one another, perhaps it won’t be able to.”
She was nearly at the wall opposite the stairs, and then there would be nowhere to go. Freda plucked at his arm as he stalked past her, ignoring her. “She’s telling the truth,” Freda said. “Don’t you recognize me? He needs me too. If you’ll only—”
He threw her off with such force that she thudded against the wall and slumped there, looking stunned, yet it seemed almost casual, something he’d done without thinking to get rid of the hindrance on his way to Molly. “Don’t try and use your eyes on me,” he hissed at Molly, saliva spraying from his mouth. “Your friend Guilda tried, and you know what happened to her. You won’t have them to ruin people’s minds with for much longer.”
He’d backed her into a corner, his hands reaching for her face with an accuracy and skill that she could see must be the product of days of insane anticipation and planning— and suddenly she felt calm. Perhaps that was the most terrible thing of all. She was safe, because she knew what was going to happen; she had seen what would happen to Danny eleven years ago, in the dream. She gazed at Danny as his nails reached for her eyes. The stillness of her imagination was a wall that nobody and nothing could breach.
At first Danny didn’t realize what was happening. He was stretching his hands out for her eyes, he was stepping closer, yet they didn’t reach. Even when his hands withdrew beyond his cuffs, even when he thrust the flapping ends of his sleeves toward her face, he still seemed unaware of how he was changing. It was the sudden appalled look that appeared on his face a moment before he looked down at himself that proved too much for her. She dodged around him and went to Freda, and tried not to watch.
But she couldn’t look away. The sleeves where his forearms should be were empty now, and there was only a wormlike writhing in the upper sleeves. In a moment that shrank, and his sleeves hung flat by his sides. He gazed down at them, then he began to scream.
Molly couldn’t bear it. She thought of restoring him, wished wildly that she could, in the hope that he would be too shocked to think of harming her, but she knew that was a trap: it would give even more strength to the dream. Perhaps it was already too strong for her, perhaps it had been ever since Rankin’s, where it had no longer needed her to be asleep. She mustn’t think, in case that trapped her too. She must get Freda out of the house.
Freda winced when Molly helped her up by her bruised shoulders, but seemed otherwise unhurt. She stared back at Danny as if she couldn’t take in the sight as Molly hurried her to the stairs. He was staggering back and forth, moaning as if he were choking on his horror. His empty sleeves flapped as he smashed his incomplete body against the walls. At least he wasn’t screaming now, but was it possible that his screams hadn’t been heard downstairs? She could only pray that it was as she hurried Freda down. One flight of stairs, two, and she heard soft footsteps coming down from the top of the house.
Freda hadn’t heard them. “Not too fast,” she protested weakly, “or I’ll fall.” Molly touched her lips for silence and held on to Freda more tightly as she quickened her pace. She wanted to be out of the house and the dream; she didn’t want to see who Freda had been afraid to waken. Six more flights to the downstairs hall now, five, and someone knocked loudly at the front door.
What must she do? Run down with Freda so that they would be there when the door was opened, or stay out of sight of whoever went to the door? Of course they must go down, but Freda was shrinking against the wall, refusing to move, tugging Molly back out of sight. When they heard footsteps hurrying to the door, Freda ventured to look. “Doreen,” she whispered.
“Is Joyce Churchill here?” a man said. When the landlady nodded he stepped into the house, into view. In a moment Molly would have recognized him, stout face and clipped red beard, but another voice said, “And Molly Wolfe.”
Martin had found her. At once she remembered the nightmar
es she’d had about him, and realized at last that she’d dreamed of him eleven years ago—dreamed how the dream would change him. It served him right for the way he’d attacked her, she thought, even though it made her shudder; it had a horrible kind of justice. She made herself remember how he’d injured her, how he’d seemed capable of killing her, so that she wouldn’t care what happened now, since it was beyond being stopped. Then, too late, she realized what had been wrong with him the night he’d attacked her: his eyes.
It hadn’t been Martin. It had been the thing that had fastened on all of them, on Freda and Helen and presumably the others. Too late she realized why she had experienced panic the first time she’d seen him. She hadn’t been frightened of him but for him. “Martin,” she cried, “don’t come in whatever you do, please don’t come into this house, you mustn’t come in,” and then she cried out helplessly, for the sound of her voice had made him step into the house.
63
MARTIN strode along the hall toward the stairs. Nothing and nobody would stop him from going to Molly: not the landlady nor Stuart, whom Molly’s cries seemed to have made nervous, and least of all Molly herself. It didn’t matter what she said. She sounded terrified, and he meant to find out what was wrong.
At least nobody seemed prepared to get in his way. A tall man in black with an oval face had come out of a room at the end of the hall, but he folded his arms and stood watching Martin, smiling faintly. Martin ignored him, for now he was at the foot of the stairs and could see Molly on a landing two floors up. She was helping a frail woman who looked hardly able to stand. “Molly, I’m here with Stuart Hay,” he called. “If you won’t talk to me, talk to him.”
She looked down and saw him. Her expression halted him as he made to step on the first stair—he had never seen such terror on anyone’s face. “I’m all right, Martin,” she cried in a voice that said the opposite. “You’re the one who’s in danger. For God’s sake leave while you can.”
He suddenly had the impression that above her the floors went up and up. It was impossible—and beside the point anyway. He was on the first stairs when someone grabbed his left shoulder.
That was how it felt. Someone had grabbed him to try to stop him, so fiercely that the seam of his coat tore as he refused to be hindered. But nobody was- near enough to have touched him. Molly was clutching her temples as if she wished she could shut out what she was seeing. Now he knew. From her look and the growing, ache in his shoulder he deduced that someone had shot him or thrown a weapon at him.
Who? The man with the oval face hadn’t moved, neither his folded arms nor his faint calm smile, and there was nobody else but the landlady and Stuart, who would certainly have come to him if he had been attacked. Martin seized the banister and was starting determinedly upstairs when the cloth at his shoulder tore again and something touched his left cheek.
It was soft and cold and heavy. When he swung round furiously, nothing was there. Molly’s cry of horror twisted him back again, so hurriedly that he almost lost his footing on the stair, but nothing had seized her except horror at what she was seeing. She was gazing at him, at his shoulder. He was turning his head painfully to look when something pale lolled against his face.
It must be a bird of some kind. That explained the ache where its claws had fastened on his shoulder through the torn cloth, and the weight, which he had been confusing with the ache. What kind of bird was as large as his head, what kind of bird felt like cold puffy flesh? It was too close for him to make out any of its features, and he was reaching gingerly to touch it when its mouth opened. It was not a bird: no bird could mimic terror so intensely, even if it were somehow able to imitate his father’s voice. “Where am I?” it cried.
For a moment Martin felt he’d gone mad. His head felt thin as shell and cracking with horror. At least being mad would mean this wasn’t really happening—and then the object on his shoulder lolled against his cheek again, as if it had hardly anything to support it. It wasn’t perched on his shoulder, it was growing there. “I don’t know where I am,” his father’s voice cried. “Help me.”
Perhaps he’d sounded like that on his deathbed. There was a moment, or however long it was, during which Martin was insane, convinced he was at his father’s bedside and reaching to touch his father’s face. His hands recoiled just in time. He wanted to tear at the thing on his shoulder, shred it into tiny pieces—it felt soft enough—but how could he when it might be in some sense his father? “Help me, for God’s sake do something,” it cried, and at last Martin had his secret wish: he was hearing his father own up to weakness, to fear.
He didn’t want it now. He didn’t want it to come true, above all not in this nightmare way. Nightmare—yes, it was like Molly’s idea of dreams that were indistinguishable from reality. By God, that must be what was happening, and his rage at whoever was causing it blazed through him, all the fiercer because he couldn’t tell where it should be directed. It was blinding him; he no longer knew where he was. He was stumbling off the stairs in his rage, reaching for the pleading object on his shoulder and failing to touch it, stumbling wildly as if he could outrun the nightmare. But that wasn’t the way, he knew suddenly. He’d been too late to be with his father at the last, he couldn’t dream him up to give himself a second chance, and he’d known that all the time; perhaps his rejection of the dream come true had caused his father to appear in such a hideous form. He had to live with the knowledge that he’d been too late, there was no other way for him— certainly not the parody of his father that was slumping helplessly against his cheek. His rage was beyond control now, his rage at the dream that had fastened on his shoulder, at the very idea of it. He reached to tear it off his shoulder, and all at once it wasn’t there.
Nor was the house. At some point in his blind rage, he’d stumbled into the open night. He staggered out of an alley into a street full of small shops and their customers, and it wasn’t until he found a sign that he identified it as Caledonian Road. The night air chilled his shoulder where his coat was torn. He must have torn it on something in the alley; any other explanation was already out of reach. His rage had let him fight his way out of the dream, too well. He had no idea where he had been, nor where he had been going.
64
MOLLY saw him fumble at the latch and drag open the front door and stagger out into the night, the thing with the hint of a face flopping on his shoulder. She could only pray that he’d got out in time, that he had fought off the dream. Praying wasn’t enough. She had to know that she hadn’t changed him irrevocably into her nightmare, she had to find him. While Stuart Hay was here, surely she had a chance to get out of the house.
He was staring bewildered after Martin. The landlady gave Molly a smile that said everything was all right now. There was no sign of anyone else. She had to go down now, while Sage was out of the way, and take Freda with her—but she was so appalled by what had happened to Martin that she couldn’t move.
She heard the soft tread still coming down from the top of the house, and then she could move, if only to save Freda from whatever she feared up there. Molly took her arm and hurried unsteadily downstairs, wishing she could hold on to the banister herself. A minute later they were in the hall.
“Stuart, we have to leave at once,” she said, trying to hold her voice steady. “This is Freda Beeching, and you know who I am. You bring Joyce Churchill. She has to leave too.”
The landlady moved between them and the door. “You can’t take Freddy, she’s ill.”
“It’s being here that’s made her ill,” Molly said, desperately willing Stuart to help.
“It’s all right, Doreen.” Freda managed to stand up straight by clinging to Molly’s arm. “I want to leave. I have to.”
“That’s settled, then,” Molly said, but staring at Doreen didn’t move her out of the way. “Where’s Joyce?”
Doreen folded her arms. “Sage is fetching her.”
Freda’s hand tightened on Molly’s arm, and Molly covere
d the hand with her own, to communicate a reassurance she was very far from feeling. “Don’t let him talk you round, Stuart. Don’t let him stop you from taking Joyce. He’s behind everything that’s happening.”
Stuart had been frowning at her; now his frown deepened. “What is?”
She didn’t want to go into it while they were in the house—she feared that doing so might give power to the dream—but she had to convince him. She had a sudden intuition that otherwise he might refuse to leave until he’d questioned Sage. “You saw what happened to Martin,” she said.
“I saw him get out when you told him to. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Unbelievably, he looked secretly amused. If he hadn’t seen Martin’s transformation it must be because he hadn’t wanted to see it. She wanted to tell him so, she felt like screaming it, but what use would that be? She wished she hadn’t mentioned Sage; she must have roused Stuart’s interest. She had to make him promise to take Joyce out of the house—surely Joyce would want to leave, she’d said she was finished with dreaming—and she was about to demand it of him when he started. He was gazing up the stairs.
She was afraid to look. When she made herself follow his gaze, her stomach flinched. Danny had lurched into view on the fourth landing up. He came swaying down the stairs, thumping himself against the wall at every step as if that was the only way he could keep his balance. At each step his empty sleeves flapped. Molly turned to Stuart, away from the sight of Danny’s fixed eyes and drooling mouth. “That’s what I mean. You can see that, can’t you?”
“I’m not with you.” Incomprehension made Stuart’s face look heavy and sluggish and dull. “You mean someone did that to him?”
How could she say that she had? Even if she managed to admit it, she could see he would never believe her. A door opened at the end of the hall and Sage came out with Nell, who was Helen, and Joyce.
Incarnate Page 45
