Ancient Images (29 page)

    Sandy gazed at him from the foot of the bed, and winced. Both his arms were bandaged, and most of his torso. He smiled at her with a wryness which she could tell was caused partly by the pain of smiling, and glanced meaningfully at his hoisted leg in plaster. "Hard-boiled eggs and nuts," he intoned.

    His father unbent, massaging the base of his spine. "I'm forgetting my manners. Please, Sandy, have this seat here."

    She went around to the head of the bed. She wanted to hold Roger, but she was afraid that if she even laid a finger on him it would hurt him. At least his face was unmarked; in the bandages it looked like an unshaven nun's face. She knelt and kissed him, and the tip of his tongue met hers. Sensing that his father was discreetly averting his eyes, she sat on the chair and slipped her hand beneath Roger's fingers. "Well, this is a fine mess."

    "Ouch."

    She couldn't keep up the bantering. "What sort of animal did this to you?"

    "Don't work yourself up on my account, Sandy. I near as damn it did it to myself."

    "Your father said-was

    "He wasn't so clear then," his father interrupted. "They had him pretty well doped up. It's good they already feel they can reduce the medication, isn't it?"

    "Sure," Roger said, just as Sandy said, "Of course."

    His fingers stroked her palm, a secret thanks. "So all right, how did you get yourself into this state?" she demanded.

    "Not looking where I was going."

    "You forgot which side of the road we drive on."

    "No, I stepped into a hole in the road, just around the corner from me. I guess some kids must have thought it would be a good gag to dump the warning sign in there, and the fence that should have been around the hole. Still, I'm the only damn fool I know of who found out how far it was to fall and how much stuff there was to fall on."

    Sandy felt queasy, furious, helplessly affectionate. "But what's all this got to do with someone wearing a mask?"

    "Oh, my father told you about that," Roger said, a rebuke that was obviously aimed more at himself. "That's the most foolish part. I don't even remember it too well. I saw this guy who must have been on his way to a masquerade coming after me. It was getting dark, and that must have made him look worse than he really could have, I guess. Anyway, he was why I didn't look where I was going, and you see where I ended up."

    "Can't you remember what he looked like?"

    Roger grimaced. "Does it matter?"

    Not that much just now, she thought: not if it made him feel worse. "Let's talk about something more interesting," he said, "like how you fared."

    His father cleared his throat. "If neither of you needs me for anything I'll head back to the flat and sleep off some of my jet lag. But call me any time, Sandy, if you need to. I'll see you tomorrow, son, and make sure you've been mending."

    He lingered at the doors for an anxious backward glance, and left the doors swinging, trying to meet. "You're glad he came, aren't you?" Sandy said.

    "Sure. Not everyone would have flown across. But I'm gladder to see you." His fingers moved in her loose grasp. "I'm sorry if I kept you waiting where we were supposed to meet. Until he told me that you'd phoned I couldn't think how to let you know. They'd closed my brain down for the day."

    His apology made her want to thump him. "You," she said, and had to apologize for squeezing his hand too hard.

    "So tell me what's been happening and let me rest my jaw."

    "You haven't broken that too?"

    "No, I just want to hear how you wouldn't have needed me anyway."

    "Seriously? I think I did." She held his hand gently in both of hers, feeling his warmth through the linen. "Redfield's a strange place, so perfect you feel it just has to be suppressing something. I think I imagined some things I wouldn't have imagined if I hadn't been alone, but don't you dare start blaming yourself, because that wasn't all. Every fifty years there's been some kind of violent death."

    "Exactly every fifty years?"

    "That's what it looked like," she said, hearing skepticism where perhaps there wasn't any. "At least, I found half a dozen inscriptions in the graveyard that were dated either thirty-eight or eighty-eight, and all of them had to do with being savaged by some sort of beast."

    "There weren't inscriptions like that for any other dates?"

    "I don't know. Not that I saw."

    "Mightn't there have been wildcats or some such dangerous creatures roaming that part of the country if you go back, say, a hundred and fifty years? All I'm saying is that kind of death mightn't have been so unusual."

    "I suppose not."

    "But you found there'd been that kind of death every fifty years for what, three hundred?"

    "Not every fifty. There were some gaps." She was taken aback by how annoyed she felt, not so much with Roger, lying there like a bedridden detective, as with the way what had seemed mysterious and frightening was being explained away. "If it was all a coincidence," she protested, "I can't see why the Redfields objected to the film in the first place."

    "Did you meet them?"

    "I met the man whose grandfather objected to the film. As we suspected, it was the family that bought the rights. They destroyed the negative."

    "Bloody vandals," Roger said, and winced at having breathed too hard. "You're right, they must have had a reason to go that far."

    "I found out the reason. Spence included part of their coat of arms in one of the set designs to get his own back for the way they were making things difficult for him." She remembered feeling she would never be out of the copse at Toonderfield, and wished she could hold Roger's hand tighter. "Apparently that didn't satisfy him. He went up to Redfield as soon as he'd completed the film, because he thought the Redfields were somehow responsible for problems he'd been having on the set, and his car went off the road. He died on Redfield land, in 1938."

    "Which you think means…"

    "Lord knows," she said, suddenly tired of herself and of speculating. "Less than it seemed to while I was there."

    "Well, okay. So will you go on looking?"

    "For the film."

    "Right. Give me something to get out of bed for," he said, and pushed his lower lip forward in a grimace at himself. "Besides you, I mean."

    "Out of this bed and into another, you mean."

    He grinned, then moaned. "You just reminded me of another bruise."

    "Oh no. Think of Karloff and Lugosi if that doesn't turn you on," she said, thinking how the film seemed unimportant, almost irrelevant to her now. "I'll go on looking when I can, if only for Graham's sake, but I have to go back to work."

    "I'll take up the search as soon as they let me out of my wrappings."

    He'd already helped her search, and this was where it had brought him. The idea was so fleeting and irrational that she ignored it. "Whatever it takes to get you up," she said, and was rewarded with a wink and a wince.

    She stayed after the bell, until a nurse tapped her on the shoulder. At the station she waited fifteen minutes on the platform, listening to distant trains that sounded like breaths and restlessness deep in the mossy dark. At Highgate she bought a pizza to slip in the microwave, and drove home. When she opened the door of her flat she couldn't help bracing herself, though there were no cats to leap out of the darkness, only a pack of bills to greet her. She opened windows to let out a faint stale smell. While she ate the pizza she thought of nothing in particular; being home and pleasantly tired was enough for now. She went to bed, leaving the bedroom window ajar. There must be a breeze, even though it didn't stir the curtains, for the stealthy creaking of the tree outside the window lulled her to sleep.

    

    

    In the morning she called Boswell. "I'm back."

    "Improved?"

    "I hope so."

    "As you used to be will do. Your friend Lezli has been impressing everyone she's worked with, but you're missed."

    Her absence had done Lezli some good, then. "While you were gone I had a word with the appropriate people," Boswell said. "You'll be getting sick pay for this time off and still be entitled to a holiday."

    "That's really kind. I appreciate it. When do you want me back?"

    "Any chance of right now?"

    "I'm on my way," Sandy said.

    Five minutes later she was at the flower bed where the cats were buried. The earth around the flagstone hadn't been disturbed, except by the green shoot of some flower, a sight she found heartening. It stayed with her as she made her way through the park. Once she thought someone wanted to catch up with her, but she could see nobody behind her on the paths.

    She had to stand all the way to Marble Arch, faces looming over both her shoulders. She ran across the lobby at Metropolitan, into a lift that was closing. She poked the button to hold the doors open, but nobody was following her after all. As she walked into the editing room she was greeted by cheers, and Lezli gave her a hug. Footage of a train crash was just coming in, so much of it that it took her and Lezli all their time to have it in shape for the one o'clock news. Sandy had almost forgotten how much she enjoyed the challenge of editing.

    She had lunch with Lezli in the pub around the corner, and heard about Lezli's new boyfriend, who was playing Doctor Seward in the new stage musical of
Dracula.
Eventually Sandy remembered something that had slipped her mind. "Were you trying to get in touch with me while I was away?

    "No, why?"

    "Toby said someone from Metro was." It might have been Boswell, wanting to tell her about her sick leave-and then she realized who she hadn't contacted. "Of course, Piers Falconer."

    After lunch she found him in his office. His onscreen frown of concern appeared on his bland face as he saw her. "I tried to let you know about your cat food," he said.

    "I've been running about so much I forgot to call you back."

    "I wanted to put your mind at rest. I had the food you gave me tested, and it came out clean."

    "I don't understand," Sandy said.

    "No poison, nothing that shouldn't have been there. Whatever made your cats run away, it didn't come out of that tin."

    She wondered why he should expect that to ease her mind: presumably because she needn't blame herself for having fed them the cause. Might the food have contained some additive against which they'd reacted? Why hadn't the allergy shown up before? She put the problem out of her mind in order to concentrate on editing, but it returned to bother her as she walked to the hospital. It made her feel pursued by something she couldn't quite define or didn't want to.

    Roger was able to hold her hand, indeed anxious to demonstrate his grip. When his father, who looked better for a night's sleep, made to leave them alone, Sandy insisted that he stay and left early herself, so as to ponder issues she didn't want to trouble Roger with while he was hospitalized. She ought to look into the history of Redfield, though she wasn't sure what she would prefer to find: a pattern, or none? She ought to find out whether the circumstances of Giles Spence's death had been reported anywhere in detail. The question of what could have sent the cats fleeing made her rooms feel colder and lonelier and more like a series of hiding places than she liked. "Get well soon, Roger," she wished, and repeated it inside her head as she lay waiting for sleep.

    Near dawn she drifted awake. She rolled sleepily onto her back and let her arms stretch out on either side of her, inviting the soft weight of the cats to land on the bed. "Come on if you're coming," she murmured blurrily, and then she wakened enough to remember that they never would. No doubt her conversation with Piers Falconer had brought them prowling into her dreams-but she still felt as if something was roaming beyond the foot of the bed and about to leap onto the quilt.

    She shoved herself back and up, the headboard scraping her shoulders, and tugged the light cord. Only the room sprang at her, jerked by the light. She couldn't tell if there was a stale smell in the room; perhaps it was the taste of panic in her mouth. It had gone by the time she returned to bed, having searched the rooms to prove they were deserted.

    She showered, and ate breakfast as the sun came up. She found she couldn't eat much; the bread tasted so flat she checked that it was the loaf she'd bought yesterday, not one left over from before her travels in search for the film. At least she had plenty of time for a stroll through the wood.

    The sunlight hadn't reached the paths yet; it was cold and dim beneath the trees. The activity on both sides of the paths, the shadows dodging between the trunks and through the undergrowth, must be of birds, but she wished they would identify themselves by singing.

    Commuters ran after her down to the Highgate platform. She managed to find a seat on the train, where faces nodded above her. At Metropolitan the lift opened on the way to her floor, though there was nobody in sight beyond the doors. She worked all day in the editing room to keep herself occupied, and made do with a sandwich for lunch. That bread tasted stale too. Now and then she was left alone in the room, and kept thinking that someone had come in behind her to watch. Once she thought a dog had managed to stray upstairs.

    She had a drink with Lezli after work to help herself relax, then she walked to visit Roger. They had lowered his leg and unbandaged his head and arms, and he was sitting up. "They're showing me the door tomorrow," he said.

    She felt brighter and clearer at once. "You're that much better?"