Ancient Images (24 page)

    He still hadn't arrived. When the receptionist asked her again if she would be having the dinner, Sandy was politely noncommittal. She thought of resting upstairs, and then she strode out of the hotel. She could walk off her lunch while she was waiting for Roger, and perhaps she might learn what she was disregarding in "The Lofty Place." She would go up the tower.

    

    

    Clouds were bustling across the sun as Sandy walked out of the town. Whenever the sun cleared, the colors of wheat and rusty soil blazed up, a silent leap all around her. The shadow of the tower welled up through the grass, sank muddily into the earth, reached out again toward the road along which she was walking. The voices of the children at the school shrank and were swept away by the rustle of the landscape, and then that was the only sound except for the small dull sounds of her shoes on the tarmac. When she stepped off the road onto the broad strip of mown grass that led from the tower to the palace, her tread was muffled by the earth.

    The sun bloomed through a gap in the clouds, and the shadow of the tower seemed to swerve toward her. She walked along the shadow to the doorway. There was no door, just a frame with a thick lintel, a shape that made her think of standing stones. As she glanced up the rough gray shaft whose only features were glassless windows as thin as her waist, the tower stooped toward her out of the rushing sky. She closed her eyes for a moment to steady herself, and then paced into the tower.

    The stone tube closed around her, chill and gray as fog. She zipped her jacket and started up the steps, each of which was uncomfortably tall. She kept grasping her right knee to help herself climb, and running her left hand over the outer wall to make sure that she didn't lose her footing. She climbed one complete turn of the spiral and could barely see her way; another turn, and the wall began to glimmer with the light from the first window-slit; another, and she was level with the window, overlooking a pinched vista of the fields. The light fell behind as she clambered upward; dimness filled the next turn of the spiral and made her eyes feel swollen until she came in sight of a further horizon beyond the next window. She stopped at the fifth window to rest her aching legs, and at the seventh and ninth, wishing she had counted the slits so that she knew how much higher she had to climb. She rubbed her legs hard, and then she climbed beyond the light of the ninth window, into a dimness that seemed to be thickening and lasting for more than a turn of the spiral, more than two turns, no longer dimness but darkness that smelled faintly rotten. She pressed her hand against the wall and made herself step up, her legs trembling and aching dully, and something cold touched her scalp.

    She flinched and peered upward, and saw a line of daylight narrow as a knife-edge. It was the outline of a trapdoor, from which hung the iron ring that had touched her. She shoved at the trapdoor with her left hand, then with both hands, until her neck felt as if a weight were threatening to sprain it and her body was a mass of prickling. The trapdoor didn't even creak.

    She braced herself on the next higher step, legs wide apart, and tried to throw her whole weight upward. The trapdoor stirred, rose, tottered and fell open with a hollow thud beneath the sky, and Sandy heaved herself onto the crown of the tower, onto stone that felt unexpectedly warm. She sat there, eyes closed, to recover from her climb and her struggle with the trapdoor. After a while she crawled to the parapet and used it to help herself to her feet.

    The landscape rose with her, flexing its fields of wheat. She grasped the parapet with both hands, feeling as if the sky might sweep her from her perch. If the wind hadn't already snatched her breath, the view would have. Fields that the afternoon had polished yellow as honey stretched to the rim of the world, where the land and the sky turned pale. At the eastern limit she saw the sea, the edge of an enormous scythe-blade. A flight of birds swooped glittering from above the bunched town on her right toward the palace on her left. There was a chapel beyond it, she saw, a squat gray building that looked older than the palace, old as the tower. The birds flew up from the chapel like scraps of a fire and wheeled toward the distant sea, but Sandy's attention was still on the chapel. Redfield had said that every one of his forefathers had a place there, and he'd told her to go wherever she liked. She could see nothing about the tower to suggest why the Redfields had objected to the story she'd read earlier, but there might be some explanation at the chapel.

    She gripped the parapet and walked around the tower for a last view. She felt as if her senses were raising the top of her head to let it all in. Clouds poured by above the tower, and she sensed the turning of the world; for a dizzy moment she felt herself clinging to the tip of the tower protruding from the world, racing through the sky. The thought of climbing higher made her throat tighten. She let go of the parapet and crossed to the trapdoor.

    A faint stale smell rose to meet her. Rain must have seeped around the trapdoor and watered some growth on the steps. If she didn't close the trap behind her on her way down, the steps wouldn't be safe for anyone who came up after her. She climbed down as far as the dark, to see if there were any patches of vegetation she would need to avoid. Having found none, she went back to shut the trapdoor.

    She closed both hands around the scaly ring and hauled at it. When the door ignored her, she took a step down and threw all her weight backward. The ring shifted in its socket, and she lost her footing and swung into space. Her weight on the ring heaved the door up. She had barely time to duck, pressing her chin against her collarbone so hard she couldn't breathe, when the door crashed into place, blotting out the light like a fall of earth.

    Her feet scrabbled at the dark that smelled of rot, her wrists aching from the slam of the trapdoor. At last she found a foothold. She let herself down onto the step and crouched there trembling and hugging her knees, cursing the Redfields for building their tower exclusively for men, with a trapdoor no woman could manage without endangering herself. The steps were male too. She gathered herself, breathing as deeply as she could bear with the stale smell, and stood up.

    This section of the steps would be the longest stretch of darkness before she reached a window. She pressed her hands against the cold close walls and stretched one leg out, groping downward. She stepped down, steadied herself, groped again. Perhaps it wouldn't be such a task; her body was establishing a rhythm. But she had climbed down fewer than ten steps when she faltered and held her breath.

    She had to go down, there was no other way. The sound like hollow irregular breathing below her must be wind through the first of the slits in the wall, a wind that was intensifying the stale smell. All the time she had been at the top she had seen nobody within a mile of the tower. She mustn't imagine that someone was waiting for her just beyond the turn. She thrust her hands against the walls as if the stone might lend her a little of its strength, and made herself go down.

    Ten steps, eleven, twelve. Each one felt like the absence of a step just before she found her footing. It didn't feel as if someone unseen were waiting below her to grab her foot and jerk her off balance, she told herself fiercely. Another step, and her eyes began to flicker with glimpses of the curve of the outer wall. She hopped down, almost losing her hold on the walls. The steps ahead were deserted. She climbed down into the light, as far as the highest window.

    She rested and peered out of the tower. She would have liked to see someone in the fields, not to call out to them but simply to know they were near. She mustn't linger, or she might lose the will to keep descending. She pushed herself away from the window, and was stepping into her own shadow shen she froze. She'd heard a rattle of metal above her. It was the iron ring.

    The trapdoor hadn't been quite closed, she reassured herself. It must have fallen belatedly into place. There couldn't be anyone above her, but just the idea of it brought the darkness below her alive as well. A stale sour taste of fear grew in her mouth. She felt sick, and then furious. She thumped the walls and let herself down onto the next step.

    When she could no longer see where she was going, she began to kick out before stepping downward. The thin irregular breaths of the wind, only the wind, were both above her and below her now, as the rotten smell seemed to be. She would have dug the whistle out of her handbag, but then she wouldn't be able to hold on to the wall. She controlled the urge to lash out with her feet, for fear of overbalancing, but she was climbing down so determinedly that more than once she almost fell.

    She made herself climb past the next window without stopping, so as not to be dazzled, nor to be tempted to stay in the light. There were only another six windows to go, almost twenty turns of the spiral which led into darkness that felt poised to leap or just to let her walk into its arms. Each stretch seemed a little darker than the last, and in each the hollow windy sounds above her seemed to be strengthening. Wouldn't they, since there were more and more windows above her? The steps felt as if they were growing taller, especially where it was dark, but that simply meant her legs were tiring. By the time she had counted five more windows her palms were throbbing from the roughness of the walls, her legs felt scarcely capable of holding her up.

    She stumbled past one more window. She groped down through darkness that felt as if it were turning sluggishly and 194

    sneaking the steps away from her reaching feet. Something was wrong; the light from the doorway should be visible by now. The breathing darkness seemed to lurch toward her. She floundered downward and saw light, too faint, too narrow. Even the sight of the window that was its source wasn't reassuring. She had miscounted, she told herself: this had to be the last one, she couldn't go on laboring downward past window after window; that could happen only in a nightmare. She scraped her palms on the walls as she ventured down toward a darkness that seemed suddenly to be holding its breath. When she saw the edge of the daylight that lay within the doorway, her relief was so great that she almost missed the next step.

    Once she reached the bottom of the steps she sat on them, ignoring the darkness at her back, and gazed at the sky until her legs ceased shivering. At last she pushed herself to her feet and limped outside. The road was still empty, and so were the fields as far as she could see, except for a scarecrow in the wheat near the grass. Its ragged head was a dark blotch against the sunlight that glowed through holes in its torso and gleamed dully through the bunches, which looked disconcertingly sharp, at the ends of its arms.

    She was halfway to the town before it occurred to her how odd it was to place a scarecrow so near the edge of a field. She had to assume that someone inexpert had put it there, for when she glanced over her shoulder it was no longer to be seen. It must have fallen and be lying low in the wheat. She headed for the houses as fast as she could limp, not looking back.

    

    

    "Will you be-"

    "I'm still not sure," Sandy said. "Are you quite certain there's no message?"

    "I've been here ever since you went out, Miss Allan," the receptionist said with a hint of testiness.

    "And nobody new has come in?"

    "They couldn't have, or I'd have seen them."

    "Thanks anyway," Sandy said, and made for the bar to check, in case there was another entrance. There wasn't, and in any case the bar was locked. She hurried upstairs, feeling as if she were dodging another repetition of the question about dinner. Dodging it infuriated her, and so did the receptionist's maternal interest in her welfare, if only because it made Sandy feel childish-childish enough to have panicked in the tower. Her behavior there enraged her most of all. It was one reason why she wished Roger were here, so that he could scoff at her.

    She slammed her bedroom door and phoned Staff o' Life. Nobody had been looking for her there or left a message for her. She called Roger's flat, and cut off the ringing when she'd had enough. His book must have delayed him, but why couldn't it have delayed him long enough for her to reach him now? At least his absence gave her time to visit the Redfield chapel.

    She made herself comfortable and went out of the hotel, half-expecting to see Roger or to hear him call to her. The children were quiet now, home from school. The next crowd would be of workers from Staff o' Life. As Sandy walked she heard the scrape of a spade in a garden, the rising shriek of a kettle, the voice of a children's television host, proposing a game with unctuous heartiness.

    The tower stepped back like a master of ceremonies, opening the fields to her. There was no sign of the scarecrow, no movements higher than the swaying wheat. Several hundred yards short of the palace she moved onto the grass, toward the shadow of wheat that lay like a seepage of mud along the border of the fields. She thought of skirting the palace widely, but why need she be surreptitious? She walked straight to the chapel.

    Curtains that looked too heavy to shift blinded the multiple eyes of the bays that swelled out from the palace, and she told herself that it was only her imagination that made her feel watched, a lone figure in the midst of the flat landscape. She resisted the urge to place the chapel between herself and the palace, and strolled to the entrance.

    The chapel was an early Norman building, squat and gray. The windows in the thick walls were narrow and arched, the stout oak door, studded and hinged with iron, was set in an arch bulging with rough pillars. She reached out to push the door, and glanced up at the palace. A naked woman with her legs spread wide and her fingers digging deep into herself was staring down from the corner of the chapel with eyes gouged out of the stone.