Spider Light (18 page)

‘Bor-ing,’ said Donna, deliberately drawling out the word.

‘Listen, I don’t care which of you comes, but one of you must, because—’

‘Because you won’t leave us on our own in the cottage in case we leap into bed and start screwing like stoats,’ said Donna. ‘Oh, all right then, but it had better be me. I shouldn’t think anything short of an atomic bomb would budge Don from the garden today. He didn’t so much as speak when I took his food out.’

‘He’s finishing a holiday task,’ said her father reproachfully. ‘A history essay. And Donna, you will not talk to your mother in that way—’

‘She has no shame whatsoever,’ said Maria at once.
‘Oh, let’s get going if we’ve got to,’ said Donna. She glanced out of the window. ‘Don looks as if he’s asleep anyway. We’ll be back before he knows we’ve gone.’

‘I’ll go upstairs to get ready,’ said Maria. ‘I’ll only be five minutes.’

It was, of course, a lot longer than five minutes before Donna’s mother was ready to leave. She had to find the correct shoes–‘No, I want the brown ones, for goodness’ sake. Would I wear navy shoes with this jacket, now
would
I? Well, I don’t care if it is only a mouldy old watermill, I have my standards, you should know by this time that I have my standards, and one of them is not wearing navy shoes with a brown jacket.’

Donna put on jeans and a clean T-shirt in her own room, found a straw sunhat to wear, and stabbed crossly at her hair with a brush as if she could not be bothered to brush it properly. This was to maintain the image of a sulky intractable teenager, in case either of her parents happened to be slyly watching her through the partly open door. She thought she was giving quite a good performance.

She went on giving a good performance on the short drive to Twygrist, slumped in the back of the car (deliberately slumped very low in case any of the locals happened to see the distinctive people-carrier go by with Donna inside), and replying in monosyllables to any remarks made to her.

But once at Twygrist, she livened up a bit, and even agreed to come into the mill. It would be better than frying inside the car on a hot afternoon like this. No, she didn’t know where the memorial tablet about the clock might be. No, she had not thought to ask, because she found the whole thing utterly—Oh wait a minute, though, something had been said about a kiln room. (This was in a slightly more animated tone.) Did you have kiln rooms in mills? Well, anyway, it was somewhere right down below ground–there were some old tunnels that led to the centre, or stone cellars or something.

This had the effect of galvanizing Maria into instant action.

The camera in its leather cover, was slung around her neck, and the small folio case, was tucked under one arm. Jim was to bring the big torch, and Donna could have the smaller one and carry the large notebook and pen so she could make notes from Maria’s dictation as they went.

‘What’ll you do if it’s locked?’ said Donna’s father resignedly, but Maria said it would not be locked. It had not been locked the first time they came, and there was no reason to think it would be any different now.

It was no different at all. The worm-eaten door was still sagging on its frame, and its hinges still shrieked when they pushed it inwards and stepped cautiously inside. The smell was exactly the same as it had been last time as well, and Donna wrinkled her nose fastidiously and said this was a repulsive way to spend an afternoon, she was getting disgusting cobwebs in her hair because she had left her sunhat in the car.

‘Give me the car keys, would you, and I’ll go back for it,’ she said. Mentally she crossed her fingers. If her father refused to give her the keys, or her mother said she would go back for the hat herself, a linchpin of the plan would fall out, and she might have to rethink the whole thing.

But Jim Robards only said, ‘You’re a nuisance, Donna. But here you are.’ He fished in a pocket for the keys. ‘Make sure you lock the doors, won’t you? And check that the alarm re-sets. It’s an absolute magnet for thieves, that car.’

‘No, I’ll leave all the doors open, with a notice on the windscreen saying, “Please steal me so we can claim a whopping great amount on the insurance and buy a better car.” Of course I’ll lock it,’ said Donna, crossly. ‘What d’you take me for? Wait for me here, will you? I don’t want to go wandering around this spooky old place looking for you; it’s a lot bigger in here than it looks.’

‘It’s a lot deeper than it looks,’ said her mother. ‘But we’ll have to find how to get to the lower levels before we can start looking for the tablet.’

Donna was only a minute getting the hat which she had deliberately left behind. She locked the car and checked the alarm, because her father would ask if she had done so. She put the keys in the pocket of her jeans–the keys were crucial to the plan–and glanced at her watch. Five past two.

She took a deep breath and went back into Twygrist’s ancient darkness.

As the three of them walked across the old floor, little creakings and groanings seemed to come from deep within the old mill. Donna’s mother said she had not thought to look for the kiln room when they came before. Presumably there must be stairs leading down. What did they both think?

‘What’s over there?’ said Donna, pointing towards the waterwheel. ‘Where’s the torch–no, shine it over
there
. No, behind the actual wheel.’

Maria Robards said excitedly, ‘It’s a door.’

‘And it’s propped open,’ said Donna, moving the torch again. Her heart beat faster. There had been the possibility that the vague village talk she had heard had been wrong or misleading, and that Twygrist did not have any underground levels at all. Or the kiln room might no longer be accessible. But it was all right, and her plan was unfolding with almost mathematical precision. Her heartbeat increased; it was no longer fear but excitement that drove her.

‘There are steps leading down,’ said Donna’s father. ‘Shine the torch a bit more to the right. That’s better. Maria, if you’re definitely going down there, we’ll have to be careful. It might be dangerous.’

‘Nonsense, if one of us stays at the top of the stairs…’

Really, thought Donna, her mother might almost have been reading from the script. She said, ‘I’ll stay. Going into filthy underground rooms isn’t my idea of fun.’

‘We’ll leave you the smaller torch,’ said Maria. ‘You’ll want some light. And we’ll keep calling out so you know we’re all right.’

Donna did not care if they recited the entire works of Shakespeare or sang hymns. She did not care if they left her in the pitch dark or with enough light to illuminate the whole of Cheshire. She just wanted them to go down the bloody steps and towards the kiln room. In a don’t-care voice, she said, ‘OK.’

‘Ready, Jim?’

‘If we must, we must,’ he said. ‘I’d better go first, to test the weight of the stairs, though. The wood’s probably rotten.’

‘They’re stone steps,’ said Donna’s mother. ‘Stone doesn’t rot.’

‘No, but it crumbles.’

Donna sat cross-legged at the head of the stairs, leaning her back against the stone wall, rather unpleasantly aware of the silent waterwheel directly behind and above her and of the chasm beneath it. She flicked the torch’s beam beneath the wheel, pointing it straight down, and caught the black glint of water, with patches of grease lying on the surface and amorphous shapes within. Horrid. She brought the torch hurriedly back up.

Now that she was on her own on this floor, she could hear the rhythmic beating of the memorial clock. She glanced round, trying to work out where the clock was. That wall to the left? So the clock was actually quite near. It was somehow very eerie to think of the clock in this lonely darkness, steadily ticking its way through the hours and the months and the years.

It sounded as if her parents had reached the foot of the stone steps. Maria’s voice floated up to Donna, calling out that they had reached the bottom without mishap, and there were some brick-lined tunnels in front of them. Imagine not finding all this on those other trips, she said. They were setting off into the tunnels now–was Donna all right?

Donna shouted back that she was all right. Had they expected the ghost of the old miller to come lurching in and smother her with a flour bag?

‘Your voices are getting a bit faint, so I’ll come part way down the steps, so I can hear you better,’ she said.

‘Well, be careful. They’re very worn at the centre, and there isn’t anything to hold on to. Don’t slip and break your ankle.’

‘I wish you’d stop fussing,’ said Donna, and directing the torch onto the ground, she began to descend the steps to Twygrist’s subterrenean rooms.

The tunnels were wider than she had expected, in fact they were more like small rooms leading out of one another. She tried to fix the position of the walls in her mind so she would not crash into them or trip over the bits of discarded machinery and alert her parents, then she switched off her torch. At once the darkness reared up, like a solid black wall, but it would have to be coped with. Her mother and father must not suspect she was creeping along the tunnels towards them. After a moment her eyes began to adjust, and she saw that it was not pitch dark; a trickle of light from her mother’s torch came back along the tunnels.

Donna hesitated. Am I really going to do this? Don came strongly into her mind, and she knew it had to be done.

She could hear her parents–her mother was saying surely they must be nearly at the kiln room by now. Her sharp heels clacked loudly in the enclosed space, and Donna, who was wearing trainers, thought only her mother would come into a place like this wearing shoes with two-inch heels.

As she went silently forwards, she had the feeling that Twygrist was coming alive all round her, and that its dark and ancient heart was beating in exact synchronization with the unseen clock overhead. She began to time her footsteps to match the ticking so that the sound would be smothered.

The tunnel-rooms were not as labyrinthine as they had seemed, and were exactly as Donna had hoped: a series of stone and brick rooms opening out of one another, protecting the rest of the mill from the kiln-room fires.

She heard her mother’s heels halt, and Maria said, ‘This must be the kiln room. D’you see, Jim, those are iron doors.’

Another wave of thankfulness engulfed Donna, and she edged nearer.

‘Steel,’ her father was saying. ‘Good God, they’re heavy. For goodness’ sake stay clear of them–they’re pretty antiquated, but the hinges are still in place. They’d swing shut and trap you before you knew what was happening. Stay here–just shine the torch inside.’ His tone said, let’s see what it is you want to see, and then let’s for Christ’s sake get out of this dismal place.

‘That’s the fireplace,’ said Donna’s mother after a moment, and Donna tensed her muscles. In another two seconds she would move. ‘It’s quite big, isn’t it? And there’s the chimney breast going upwards.’

‘The drying floor must be directly over that chimney,’ said Donna’s father, sounding interested despite himself. ‘They’d spread the damp grain over it, and the heat of the fire would have dried it before it was milled.’

‘I don’t remember seeing that.’

‘I noticed it last time we were here,’ said Donna’s father. ‘On the side of the mill. It looked as if it had been concreted over, though. That’s probably why the air’s so stale down here.’

‘I don’t see the stone Donna talked about, do you? Unless it’s set into that wall—’

The unsuitable heels clattered across the floor, and there was a sigh of exasperation from Donna’s father–the enclosed rooms picked the sigh up quite clearly and sent it hissing back to where Donna was standing. Was this the moment? She tiptoed a couple of steps further along, hardly daring to breathe, placing her feet down slowly and carefully so that there would be no sound. If either of her parents heard her–if they turned round and saw her there–the plan would fail.

But they did not turn round and they did not hear her. They were examining the walls flanking the ancient kiln, shining the torch with ridiculous solemnity. Donna could have laughed aloud to see how pedantic they were being, trying to find a stupid, non-existent memorial stone.

She waited until they were at the furthest point from the door, and then set her own torch on the ground, making sure it would not roll away. OK, now for it.

Taking a deep breath, she ran forward, grabbed the edges of the thick steel door with both hands and threw her whole weight behind it. For the space of three heartbeats she thought it was not going to budge and panic threatened to engulf her, but then the massive door gave a teeth-scraping moan of protest, and moved away from the wall, gathering momentum as it did so.

The two people inside the room swung round at the sound, the torch fell from Maria Robards’ hands and rolled into a corner. Incredibly it did not shatter, and its triangle of brilliance lit up the scene like a stage set. Donna had a final sight of her parents’ faces, white with shock, their eyes suddenly huge with horror, their mouths forming round Os of fear. They both cried out, and then the door slammed home, cutting off all sound.

For several minutes Donna shook so badly she could not move. She knew she must get away from this place, but she sank to the floor, hugging her knees, her heart pounding as if she had been running hard.

After a while she managed to shine her torch onto her wristwatch. She felt as if she had lived through several hours, but incredibly it was only just on half past two. She must drive back to Charity Cottage, hoping not to be seen, and slip up to her bedroom. She had no exact idea how long it would take her mother and father to die, but if the room was airtight they could not last very long. Say two days. That meant she would have to delay the inevitable police search for at least that time. Could she lay false trails by saying they might have driven over to the other side of Amberwood? Yes, she could.

The shaking had stopped, and she stood up and placed the flat of her hands against the steel doors, pressing her ear to the surface. The doors remained immoveable, and there was no sound whatsoever from beyond them. I’m not sorry for what I’ve just done, said Donna silently to the two people imprisoned in the kiln room. You deserved this for trying to separate me from Don.