There was a double crash from above and the sound of glass shattering.
'What the hell…?'
Rachel bounded angrily up the next spiral. Didn't they know how easily they could kill themselves up there, or bring half the ceiling down? Had nobody warned them about the state of the floor?
The heavy door to the attics was ajar. They'd been given keys, then. That bastard Max must have had another set made without even telling her. She thrust through the arched doorway, past the alcove concealing the entrance to the prospect chamber. Up towards the attics.
It was only when she was halfway up the steps that it occurred to her that among the bangs and the crashes there'd been no laughter, none of the usual banter of men working together, no shouted directions, no oaths, no…
No voices at all.
And now she was standing here, on the last stairway, far above her blades of light through broken slates, and it was absolutely silent.
'What,' Rachel demanded, 'is going on?'
What was more disquieting than this sudden inexplicable cessation of bangs and crashes was the hairline crack she detected in her own voice. She cleared her throat and gave it more vehemence.
'Come on, I haven't got all night. Where are you?'
Rachel did not remember ever being superstitious. She did not believe in good luck, bad luck, heaven, hell, psychic forces or the secret power of ley-lines. She found the whole New Age concept not only essentially unsound but, for the most part, very tedious indeed.
Yet – and for the first time – she found the place not just gloomy in a sad, uncared-for kind of way, but in the sense of being oppressive. And yes, OK, eerie. She admitted to herself that she didn't want to go so far into the attic that she might see the rope hanging from the ceiling, even though she knew it could not be a very old rope.
But this was a side issue. Something to be acknowledged and perhaps examined later with a raising of eyebrows and glass of whisky beside the Jotul stove in J.M. Powys's riverside retreat.
For here and for now, there was only one serious, legitimate fear: a fear of the kind of men who, on hearing a woman calling out to them and coming up the stairs, would stop what they were doing, slide into the shadows and keep very, very quiet.
Until this woman appeared at the top of the steps, with nothing to defend her except a dead cat in a shoe-box.
So no way was she going all the way to the top.
Rachel steadied her breathing, set her lips in a firm line, tossed back her hair and began to descend the spiral stairway. If the men in the attic were unaware of the instability of the floor and the danger to themselves, that was their business. They were presumably well-insured.
If they fell, they fell. She hadn't been hired as caretaker of Britain's least-stately home, and she wasn't prepared to tolerate being pissed around any longer. Tomorrow – perhaps even tonight – she would phone Max in London and inform him that she had quit. As of now.
As she descended the twisted stairway it began to grow darker. When she reached the bottom, she found out why. The door sealing off the prospect chamber and the attics must have swung closed behind her, cutting off the light from the first-floor living-hall.
She pushed it with the flat of her hand.
It didn't move.
She put the shoe-box on the stairs and pushed hard with both hands.
It was an oak door, four inches thick and it did not move.
Well, it might have jammed.
'Look, would somebody mind helping me with this door?'
No response.
Or – oh, God, can I really credit this? – the bastards might have locked her in.
It was important to hold on to her anger.
'When I get out of here,' Rachel said suddenly, icily, without thinking, 'you can consider yourselves officially fired.'
Which, on reflection, was a pretty stupid thing to say. They'd never let her out. She tried again.
'Now look, don't be stupid. It's very dangerous up here. The floor's full of holes, you know that. And I haven't got a torch.'
She threw her weight against the door, half-expecting somebody to have quietly unlocked it so that it opened suddenly and she went tumbling down the stairs. Such was the mentality people like this.
But all that happened was she hurt her shoulder.
'Look, would you mind letting me out?'
She stopped suddenly and leaned back against a wall, breathing hard, an awful thought occurring to her.
What if Humble was behind this?
Suppose, as she would normally have expected, the workmen had actually cleared off hours ago. Who, after all, really worked until 8 p.m. on a Sunday evening? Certainly not the kind of unskilled vandals who'd been let loose in here.
What, then, if it had been Humble who had come up here and made a lot of noise to lure her inside? He'd never liked her, and he knew she didn't like him. He might think she was putting the knife in for him with Max. Maybe Max had found out what Humble had done to J.M. that night. Maybe Humble's job was on the line, and he thought she was responsible.
But if Humble was behind this he would have needed an accomplice. One of them up here to make all the racket, one to lock the door after she'd gone through.
Which still meant that someone was up here with her now, on this side of the locked door. Keeping very, very quiet.
Rachel spun round.
It was so dark with the door closed that she could hardly see as far as the twist in the staircase which took it to the attic. Anything could be around that bend, not six feet away.
'Humble!'
Not much authority left in her voice, nor much anger. She was a woman alone in the darkness of a decaying old house, with a man who intended her harm.
Humble, listen… whichever side of the door you are… I don't know why you're doing this. I wish you'd tell me, so we can have it out. But if it's anything to do with what happened the other night with J. M. Powys, I want you to know that I haven't said anything to Max and I don't intend to. A mistake is a mistake. Humble, can you hear me?'
The door didn't have a handle, only a lock. She bent down and tried to look into the keyhole, to see if there was a key in the other side.
She couldn't tell one way or the other; it was too dark. Her own keys were in her bag, on the kitchen table.
'Humble, look, if you've heard what I said, just unlock the door and I'll give you time to get out of the building. I don't want any unpleasantness because…'
Oh, what the hell did it matter now?
'… because I'm handing in my notice tomorrow. I've got another job. In London. You won't have to deal with me again. Did you hear that? Do you understand what I'm saying? Humble!'
Rachel beat her fists on the oak door until she felt the skin break.
She had grown cold. She wrapped her Barbour around her and sat down on a stone stair next to the cardboard coffin and listened hard.
Nothing. She couldn't even hear the birds singing outside, where there was light.
But from the attic, clearly not far beyond the top of the spiral stairway came a single, sharp, triumphant bump.
CHAPTER IX
He remembered… TWELVE… spiralling down out of the sky, seeing the stone thickening and quivering and throbbing, the haze around it like a dense, toxic cloud. At which point Memory went into negative, the fields turned purple, the river black. Everything went black.
He didn't remember the scramble of feet, all four of them rushing the new author, J.M. Powys, picking him up, carrying him to the so-called fairy mound and dumping him face-down on its grassy funk with shrieks of laughter.
He was only able to construct this scene from what Ben Corby had told him years later.