'Never use the name of God in sight of that thing again, you understand me, boy?'
Warren lay there, felt like his face was afire and his brains were loose. 'You mad ole… you got no right…'
His grandad put out a hand and helped him to his feet.
'Sorry, boy. Nerves is all shot, see, what with Jonathon and now this.'
Warren backed off. Stood with a hand over his blazing cheek.
'Warren, you and me got to talk.'
'That's what you calls it, is it?'
His grandad look his cap off, scratched his head, replaced the cap.
'Jonathon dyin', see, that changes things. With Jonathon around, didn't matter if you went through your life without knowin' nothin'. Your dad, 'e's the first Preece 'ad less than three children. Weren't 'is fault your mam left 'im, but that's besides the point. I only 'ad two sisters, but if anythin'd 'appened to me, they'd have done it, no arguments.'
'What you on about?'
'The bell, Warren.'
'Oh, that ole thing. Stuff that.'
'You what, boy?'
'Stuff it. I done some thinkin' about that. You can all get bloody stuffed, you think I'm ever gonna take over that bell from Dad. Jonathon might've been mug enough, but I couldn't give a fucking shit, you wanna know the truth, Grandad. My future's not round yere, see. I'm a musician.'
'Music?' The old feller spat hard, once. Gobbed right there on the grass. 'Music? Pah!'
Warren backed off, fell his face contorting. His finger was out and pointing at the old bastard's sucked-in face.
'You know nothin',' Warren snarled. 'You wanner know about my music, you ask Max Goff. 'E's gonner sign me, see. 'E's gonner sign the band. So you can do what you like. You can fuckin' disinherit me. .. you can keep your run-down farm. And you can take your bell and you can shove it, grandad. I couldn't care less.'
His grandad went quiet, standing there, face as grey as the stone.
'I shouldn't worry,' Warren sneered. 'One o' them newcomers'll take it on. That Colonel Croston, 'e's keen on bells.'
'No! The Preeces done it through plague and droughts and wartime when ringing bells was an offence. But we done it, boy, 'cause it's got to be done, see. Got to be.'
The old feller near desperation. Touch of the pleading there now. Stuff him.
'I don't wanner talk to you no more. Grandad. You're not all bloody there, you ask me.'
'Warren, there's things…'
'Oh yeah, there's things I don't know! Always, ever since I was so 'igh, people been tellin' me there's things I don't know, maybe I don't wanner know, maybe… What's up with you now?'
His grandad was looking past him at something that caused his mouth to open a crack, bit of dribble out the side, false teeth jiggling about. Disgusting.
He turned and began to walk back towards the road, towards the town. Warren slinking half a dozen paces behind. When the gap between them was wide enough, Warren turned and saw what looked like the sunset reflected in one of the top windows of the old house, just below the roof-line.
Except there wasn't any sun, so it couldn't be a sunset.
Warren shrugged.
CHAPTER X
The smell happened first.
It happened quite suddenly, as if in the cracking of a rotten egg. The smell and with it the light. Elements of the same change.
The smell was filthy. Sulphur, and something cess-pit putrid.
The light came in oily yellows, the yellow of candles made of animal fat and the yellow of pus from a wound gone bad. The light came from no particular direction but glistened on the stone walls like lard.
Rachel shrank from the walls, but she couldn't get away from the stairs. Where she crouched, it was no longer dry and dusty but wet, warm and slick, like phlegm. She touched a stone step just once, and something unpleasant came off on her fingers. She tried to wipe them on the oak door, but that also was coated with a thick, cheesy grease, gritty here and there with what felt like fly corpses.
Rachel pulled the hand away in disgust, wiped it on her Barbour, knowing she could no longer bring herself to beat on this door. Her fists were sore and peeling, anyway, and if there was anyone out there they weren't going to help her. Perhaps they were waiting for the cool, superior, professional woman to break down, to shriek and sob and plead.
'I can't stand this,' she said aloud. 'I shall be sick.'
Which couldn't make the atmosphere any more foetid.
But if I was a woman with any imagination, she thought, I would be very, very frightened.
For the Court, always so drab and dusty and derelict – gloomy, but no more menacing than an empty warehouse – had swollen into a basic sort of life.
Ludicrous. A grotesque self-delusion. But that was what it felt like. Flickerings of things. Presences in the shadows. The smell itself was like the house's own foul breath.
She began to breathe hard herself. Broke out in a coughing fit. Then tried to breathe slowly and selectively, keeping her mouth closed, because the air was so rancid that when she took it in, there gathered at the back of her throat a richly cloying, raw-meat taste like sweating, sweet salami. Rachel – suffocating, closing her mouth, closing her eyes, trying to close down all her senses; trying, above all, not to hear – thought, I need air. I need light. I need to walk up these few steps.
I need the prospect chamber.
Soft, fresh evening air. Gentle evening light.
The prospect chamber. Eight, ten steps away.
But I can't move from here. I can't move because of…
… those taunting sounds from the darkness above.
Sometimes soft, rustling like satin. Sometimes loud as a foundry overhead. And then stopping for a period of tense, luminous quiet – until it begins again, louder and closer. Then distant again. I am here. I am there, I can be anywhere I choose in an instant because I'm not hu…
Shut up! Shut up!
It's what he wants you to think.
Creaks. Thrustings. What might have been hollow footsteps on wood, flat footsteps on stone. On stone steps.
He's coming down!
Stopping just before the bend, not six feet away from where he crouched, holding her arms around herself, beginning to shiver.
Pull yourself together Someone is trying to terrify you. It's only another person. You can handle people; you always could, you are cool and controlled; you can be remote, haughty, offhand, intimidating. You are flexible. You can be dominant, or compliant, at will.
All you have to do is stride up there and face whoever it is.
Yes, but that's what he wants.
And what if you go up there and there's…
Nothing.
Nothing but the dark.
'Help me!' Rachel was screaming out seconds later, her voice, always so calm and deep, now parched and bitter with anger and despair. 'Hum… ble! Andy! Anybody! Please!'
Then, in a soft and aching whisper, she said, 'J.M.?'
And her eyes filled uncontrollably with tears. When I get out of here, I'm going to get us both away. Tonight. That's a promise.
If I get out of here. If I ever get to breathe the sweet night air.
God help me, Rachel thought, but I'm not going to scream any more. When she'd screamed, the scream had come up from her stomach, like bile.
When she looked down at herself she saw that her Barbour's waxy surface gleamed sickly yellow like the walls. She wanted to take it off, but she didn't like the cold. She'd never liked the cold.
She wanted to remove her shoes, so as to move more quietly up the stairs towards the prospect chamber, but the thought of that ooze between her toes.
She closed her eyes. Closed her eyes and opened them, and rose, picking up the cardboard box containing the dead cat guardian.
'Come on, Tiddles,' Rachel said, wiping the tears away.
She wished the appalling sounds would begin again, if only to muffle her footsteps.