Ancient Images (26 page)

    The thought stiffened her body, held her still and breathless, straining to hear that there was a wind after all. She was wide awake now, her nerves buzzing. She lifted her head from the pillow, wishing that she hadn't drawn the curtains so closely that no light could reach the room, and then her neck grew rigid as she realized what she was hearing. The sound of pacing wasn't beneath her window, it was in the corridor outside her room.

    She kicked off the quilt, grabbed the light cord and hauled at it so fiercely she thought it would snap. The small cosy room sprang into view, and it felt like a cell. Some part of her mind had hoped that the light would drive away the sound, but it was still there beyond her door, a rapid clicking like claws on the linoleum. "So now you know I'm in here," Sandy cried, "let's see what you look like," and flung herself off the bed, ran to the door, grappled with the lock and snapped the bolt back. Seizing the doorknob with both hands, she threw the door open and stalked into the corridor.

    It was deserted. A moment before she had looked out she'd heard the pacing just outside, but the corridor was deserted. The doors of the empty rooms paraded away to the stairs, reminding her how alone she was up here. Nobody could have got to the nearest room, let alone the fire exit that led to the car park, in the time it had taken Sandy to look; an animal, which was what the noises had suggested to her was prowling the corridor, couldn't even have opened a door. She tried to think that the staff quarters were on the floor above, that the noise had been coming from there, but the trouble was that the corridor wasn't quite empty, after all. A faint smell lingered in it-a smell she fancied she had met before.

    She stared along the corridor and thought of heading for the stairs, but then where would she go? She backed into her room and secured the door. She could ring the switchboard and raise the staff from wherever they were sleeping, but what would she tell them? Deep down she was nervous of calling unless she absolutely had to, in case nobody responded. She leaned her cheek against the door and listened, and eventually crept to the bed and pulled the quilt over herself. She couldn't quite bring herself to turn off the light; why should it matter if the light showed where she was? As she closed her eyes she had the unpleasant notion that she would be just as easy to find in the dark, if not easier. It took her some time to doze off, even when she had managed to suppress that idea. Not only was she listening nervously, but she was trying not to recall while it was still dark where she had first encountered the faint decaying smell.

    

    

    In the morning it was gone. A smell of toast drifted upstairs. Sandy found she had slept late again, and ran to the bathroom with hardly a glance along the corridor. She'd meant to call Roger as soon as she awoke, so early that if he hadn't left London he was bound to be in his flat, assuming that he wasn't sleeping somewhere else. She went back to her room and dialed, and galloped her fingers on the bedside table while she listened to the ringing, ringing, ringing. At last she dropped the receiver daintily into its cradle. Whatever he was playing at, she wasn't prepared to wait any longer. Today would be her last day in Redfield, she promised herself.

    She dressed in a T-shirt and denim overalls, and went downstairs. The receptionist greeted her warmly, if slowly. "The breakfast's ready when you are," she said, and Sandy hadn't the heart to leave without eating, since they would be cooking it only for her. It would have done for two people: the slabs of fried bread under the bacon and eggs were as thick as the slices of toast in the rack. Since this would be her last taste of the Redfield special, she indulged herself, and almost gave in when the waitress asked if she wanted more toast. "Do you all sleep in the hotel?" she said instead.

    "Aye, downstairs."

    Perhaps the noises had been coming from down there or even somewhere else entirely. Perhaps they'd been caused by a fault in the plumbing; that would explain the smell. They hardly mattered, since Sandy was leaving, though not straight away. When she plodded upstairs to brush her teeth she felt too full to begin driving at once. She needed a walk, especially since she would be spending most of the day in the car.

    She couldn't move fast enough to elude the receptionist, asking the question the waitress had already asked. "Will you be having the lunch?"

    "I shouldn't think so," Sandy said, and received a look of polite skepticism as she left the hotel. All right, yesterday she'd said she wouldn't be here for dinner, but today was the end. "You'll see," she muttered, low enough not to be heard by the women who were gossiping outside the nearest shop. "Good morning," they said as if they were inviting her to join them. She couldn't imagine being content just to gossip and shop.

    She walked to Staff o' Life and called the receptionist there to her window. "Nobody's asked for you, Miss Allan," the young woman with the horsey smile said. Half of the waiting was her own fault, Sandy thought, for assuming she meant more to Roger than in fact she did. Serve her right for making so much of a one-night stand- for not realizing she needed to. At least she was learning a few truths about herself.

    The walk had made her feel lighter, if not exactly energetic. She came out of the visitors' entrance and saw the graveyard, reaching alongside the factory toward the fields. It ought to be a good place for a last stroll and for her to be alone with her thoughts. She walked out of the factory grounds and around to the churchyard gate.

    The church was early English: austere walls, windows full of tracery that led up to pointed arches. Given the extent of the graveyard, she concluded that the church must have been raised on the site of an older building. Feeling nostalgic, she strolled among the graves.

    The youths she'd seen working here yesterday had gone, having finished what appeared to be a thorough job.

    The grass was neat, the plots were weeded. There were no trees, only shrubs whose shadows the sunlight was tucking under them. Flowers in vases decorated mounds, wreaths that looked freshly plucked lay against headstones. As Sandy followed the gravel paths she read inscriptions: "Dust to dust," "Called home," "As ye sow so shall ye reap." Many of the epitaphs referred to harvesting, predictably enough. Most of the graves were family plots, but she saw very few inscriptions for children or young people: another tribute to the local diet, she supposed.

    She was in the eighteenth century now, and nowhere near the limit of the churchyard. She stepped off the path to glance at stones that weren't readily visible. There were more images of harvesting; the tops of some of the headstones were carved into sheaves. "Thou hast made us like sheep for slaughter," an epitaph said.

    Toward the field the blackened stones grew greener. Weeds spilled over the rim of a cracked urn on a pillar; an angel so weathered it was almost faceless had lumps of moss for eyes. Beyond the angel the graves were marked by horizontal slabs. Sandy strolled among them, musing over the inscription carved on the angel's pedestal: "Nor shall the beasts of the land devour them." She was treading on the seventeenth century, where some of the inscriptions were decidedly savage. "He slashes open my kidneys and does not spare," for heaven's sake! Admittedly this would have been in the time of the bubonic plague; perhaps the inscription, or the treatment it referred to, had been intended as a deterrent to the townsfolk, though she couldn't quite see how. She stepped over several mossy decades. "A wild beast has devoured him," said a stone she almost trod on. The angel hadn't helped him, then, but of course the angel had been erected later-most of three hundred years later, she assumed. She stooped to the date, which was more overgrown than the epitaph. Fifteen-something: 1588, comfortingly distant. A couple of strides took her back another few decades, to an inscription that made her shiver: "He led me off my way and tore me to pieces." She wasn't even nearly at the hedge that enclosed the far side of the graveyard. There must be markers as old as any she had ever seen, but she wasn't sure that she would bother exploring that far, especially when another epitaph caught her eye: "One who goes out of them shall be torn in pieces." She could just distinguish that it dated from the fifteenth century, 1483 to be precise. The date wasn't as reassuring as she felt it should be; the past no longer seemed quite dead enough. She turned toward the church, the town, her car, and then stopped short. She peered fiercely at the slab, and bit her lip. The final digit had been partly obscured. The date wasn't 1483 but 1488-exactly one hundred years before the last date she had deciphered.

    The inscriptions were disturbingly similar, but couldn't that be a coincidence? She hurried toward the path, and saw another epitaph. It was for a woman, yet the text read, "And his nails were like birds' claws." Its blurred date might be 1433, except that the last two digits weren't quite the same: the final one was incomplete. Beyond it another slab proclaimed "Their land shall be soaked with blood." The thought of going any further made Sandy's mouth taste stale and sour. She picked her way back over the slabs, looking for the ones she'd read, praying that she would be proved wrong.

    She snapped a twig off a shrub and poked the moss out of the date beneath "He led me off my way," and sucked in a shaky breath. The year of the inscription was 1538. She stumbled to her feet and went from grave to grave, willing there to be a date that didn't fit, that would show her she was imagining a pattern where none existed. But she already knew that "A wild beast has devoured him" referred to 1588, and now she remembered the date of the inscription about kidneys: 1688. The gap between those wasn't even slightly comforting; after all, there were many stones she hadn't read. The last date on the angel's pedestal was 1888, and "Thou hast made us like sheep for slaughter" was dated 1838. Worse than any of this was the thought that Giles Spence had died violently at Redfield in 1938-fifty years ago.

    She mustn't think about that now, mustn't make herself nervous when she was about to drive, to escape. There would be time for reflection when she was well on her way. She hurried past the church, forcing herself to breathe slowly and regularly, and then she faltered. Three women were waiting for her just outside the churchyard gate.

    

    

    She should have been able to find them absurd. They reminded her of rose-growers converging on a judge who had given someone else the prizes they coveted, or diners cornering a waiter to complain about afternoon tea, or members of a townswomen's guild confronting a civic blight. All three wore hats like garish lacy coral, pinned with imitation pearls. One carried a basket of vegetables, one held a long loaf under her arm like a club; the third, whose hands were even larger and stronger than those of her companions, carried nothing. "Had enough?" she said.

    Taken singly none of them would seem threatening, Sandy told herself, and the three of them seemed so only because they were between her and her car. "Enough of what?" she said as calmly as she could.

    "Of us. Of our town."

    How could they know she was leaving? She saw their broad unsmiling faces, their stout bodies blocking her way; she felt the graveyard at her back. "Why do you say that?"

    "Why do we say that?" The woman turned to her companions. "Why do we say it, she says, when we saw her running through the churchyard like a hare with the hounds on her tail."

    "Like a scared rabbit," the woman with the basket said.

    "A scalded cat, "said the one with the loaf.

    Their deliberateness felt like thunder, like a threat of violence underlying the docility of the town. The way they blocked the gate like three sacks of potatoes made Sandy want to lash out at them. Her impatience quickened her mind instead, and gave a cold edge to her voice. "I dropped something, that's all. It blew away."

    "A notebook, was it?" the empty-handed woman said.

    "All the notes she's been writing about us," said the woman with the vegetables.

    "A handkerchief."

    The three women stared at Sandy as if she had spoken out of turn. "She'll be telling us next she was having a weep," the woman with the loaf said. "She'll be saying she's got someone buried there."

    "Of course I haven't," Sandy said, and told herself she wouldn't shiver, even though the women had started to smirk as if she had betrayed herself. "What's the problem?" she demanded.

    "She wants to know-was the woman with the vegetables began, but the empty-handed woman interrupted her. "We haven't much time for reporters," she said.

    The third woman tucked the loaf more snugly under her arm, so hard that the crust crunched like a bone. "There was one came looking for trouble the other year."

    "Aye, came looking for folk who wanted to be in a union," the vegetable woman said. "And when he couldn't find any he made up stories to put in his paper. Made out we were afraid to say we weren't content because he couldn't believe what he saw. And you know what? He did us a kindness. Kept outsiders from coming sniffing round for jobs."

    "We've a paper of our own," the empty-handed woman said. "We don't need his kind."

    The woman with the loaf stared hard at Sandy. "We don't need strangers poking round, trying to stir things up."

    "I believe Lord Redfield invited him to look for discontent," Sandy said, and realized what she ought to have told the women in the first place. "It was Lord Redfield who invited me here."

    The three faces grew sullen, almost accusing. "We'd like to be sure he's glad he did," the empty-handed woman said.

    Sandy might have told them she wasn't a reporter-the hotel receptionist must have let them know she was from television-except that saying so might raise more dangerous questions. "I don't lie," she said, holding her voice steady. "Excuse me now, please."