The Influence (19 page)

Rowan was lost. If all this was about the binoculars, she was beginning to feel they were more trouble than they were worth. “I thought you wanted to be there forever,” Vicky said.

That made Rowan even sadder than she had been on the hill. “I did before,” she whispered, not wanting to be heard.

“Before what, Rowan?”

Rowan felt as if she weren’t being allowed to hide something she was ashamed of. “Before I heard mummy and daddy talking. They never wanted me.”

“They had you because they were careless, you mean.”

“I suppose so,” Rowan said, but Vicky’s eyes were telling her to go on. “I feel as if I’m making everything that’s going wrong for them worse, and I think they think so too.”

Vicky beckoned her off the path, over the uncertain rim of the glow beneath the streetlamp. “Suppose you could always be with them and yet never be a problem?”

Rowan felt betrayed. Vicky shouldn’t make her imagine such things, especially when Rowan had shared her worst secret with her. “I expect that’s what they’d like.”

“Wouldn’t you? Suppose you could always stay the age you are now and never have to leave your house? Suppose you could always watch over your mother and father, be there waiting when they came home and never cost them a penny?”

“Suppose we were in fairyland and dreams came true.”

Rowan meant to be sarcastic, but Vicky’s eyes brightened. “That’s it exactly. It would be like dreaming your best dream, the one you always wanted to dream, except it would be real and never end.”

Her eyes were so bright that Rowan felt as if, should she look away, she would see only darkness. It was like being unable to take the binoculars away from her eyes, this being surrounded by darkness with a single light ahead, except that the binoculars were on her chest, in her hands as she groped for something to hold on to. “That’s the ticket,” Vicky murmured. “Let’s go back where we were.”

She was speaking so low that the words might have seeped into Rowan’s mind before she was aware of hearing them, if she hadn’t sensed how Vicky was concealing her impatience. Why should it be so urgently important to Vicky that they go up the hill? Rowan squeezed her eyes shut and kept them shut as long as she dared before she opened them. She was under the streetlamp on the empty road, along which a wind roared like an invisible bus. She was there, however flattened it seemed. “I want to go to Hermione,” she said.

“Then you’ll get what you’re asking for, my dear.”

Vicky turned her back on her at once, to head uphill. “She said she was going to the hotel,” Rowan protested.

“That’s as may be. You still don’t trust me, but you will.”

Rowan felt as if she had rejected something Vicky valued deeply, though she had no idea what it might be. If so, she had realised too late. Vicky was striding uphill like a parent daring a child not to follow—like the adult she increasingly resembled. Rowan followed, because if her aunt hadn’t told the truth she was even more anxious to see where Hermione was.

She had to trot and sometimes to run, though even then she couldn’t quite catch up with Vicky. Shadows roamed the deserted road, and she promised herself that if Vicky led her much farther into the dark she would refuse to go on until she knew where they were bound for. She panted up the sloping pavement, and felt safer as she saw the church below. She felt safe until Vicky halted, one hand on the churchyard gate.

She would have hoped her aunt was in the church, except that the church was dark. Even the church was less reassuring when she remembered the last time she’d seen her aunt in there, lurching at the coffin. Vicky put her finger to her expressionless lips, and then her mouth grew even thinner as she unlatched the gate.

Rowan couldn’t hear the latch. Only her sight seemed to work. The willow stirred among the graves like a spider sensing its prey, and then it grew so motionless that it might have been petrified by the stillness of the stones. Rowan felt frozen too, for she’d glimpsed movement through the branches. A wide flat head on a thin neck had wavered out of the ground and lain down with a soft thump on the earth. It was a snake, she thought, a huge snake that had slithered out of a grave and might come writhing through the grass in search of her. Yet that seemed comfortingly unreal when she realised what she had actually seen: a spade. Someone had been digging a grave in the dark.

Surely it wasn’t Hermione. She would rather Vicky were tricking her because Rowan had turned down whatever she was offering. But when at last she managed to turn away from straining her eyes, Vicky looked both pitying and accusing. “You asked me to bring you,” she said tonelessly, and opened the gate wider.

Rowan could only step onto the gravel path. If her footsteps were half as heavy as they felt, they ought to be making enough noise to warn Hermione, give her the chance to bolt before Rowan had to see what she was doing—except that Rowan could barely hear her footsteps herself. When the willow was between her and the gaping earth, she stepped off the path onto the grass, and couldn’t hear herself at all. She felt diminished, outcast, hardly even there.

She stole past the willow to a granite cross and hid behind it, clinging to it until her hands felt glued to it by frost. The binoculars stirred with each of her shaky breaths, and she gripped the cross harder in case she was tempted to use them. She could already see too much. She could see her aunt, stooping and straightening laboriously, stooping again in the glowing earth.

She was picking objects from the grave and planting them beside the marble pillar that she’d dressed in her coat, as if for company. Rowan had a nightmarish impression that she was gardening, plucking pests out of the grave. Hermione dropped a last glint by the pillar and took hold of the flashlight that lay there. Its glow sank beneath the earth, and Hermione followed it. There was a silence that stopped Rowan’s breath, and then she heard a large soft thud in the grave, and a faint rain of earth.

It seemed to shrink her until she was nothing but sight and hearing, helplessly aware. The glow of the flashlight hovered like mist in the open grave. As the willow flexed its branches, leggy shadows scuttled towards the grave, so purposefully that Rowan wanted to cry out a warning. Then her aunt straightened up in the trench.

She had been digging for the locket, Rowan realised. She had a sudden dreadful suspicion that if Hermione saw her she would run to her with the chain she’d taken off the corpse and fix it around her neck. She had to flee, or at least hide behind the cross. But she was struggling to make her stony body move when Hermione raised her head and met Rowan’s eyes.

It wasn’t only being seen that paralysed Rowan then, it was that her aunt looked at least as caught out as she felt herself. The embarrassment that flooded through Rowan and made her face blaze was her aunt’s as much as her own. It seemed that neither of them might ever move again, that they would stand there with the other statues while the wind shook the grass. Then Hermione turned her head, and seemed to clutch at the back of her neck with one hand. The next moment she ducked into the grave.

The glow within the heaped earth wavered and steadied. The trench gaped silently under the pillar, where Hermione’s coat flailed its handless arms. Rowan tried to call out to Hermione to stop hiding: it was stupid, and it was frightening her. “Come out, I saw you,” she might croak, but her throat wouldn’t let out even a whisper. Anger and panic made her hands into fists on the cross. She shoved herself away from it and faltered toward the grave.

Vicky was nowhere to be seen. Rowan both resented being left alone like this and was glad if Vicky hadn’t seen what her aunt was doing. She avoided the willow as she crossed the trembling grass and stepped gingerly onto the long thin heap of earth beside the grave. Her shoes sank into the heap as she leaned forward and looked into the trench.

As soon as she saw what was there she felt as if she were falling into the dark. Hermione was lying in the coffin, whose white interior was spattered and stained with earth, a mass of fat white ridges that made Rowan think of the flesh of a grub. The flashlight lay close to Hermione’s face and shone pitilessly on her open eyes and mouth. Rowan willed her to blink, wished and then prayed that she would blink, until she couldn’t avoid seeing how slack and unresponsive Hermione’s face was. Hermione would never lie there if she knew that she was doing so. Her eyes were dead to the light, as she was.

The sight seemed to let the graveyard seize Rowan. Death was everywhere. She was surrounded by death and darkness. She’d said when she had overheard her parents that she didn’t want to live, but she hadn’t understood then what dying meant. Death was the sight of Hermione’s body, empty and ugly and left behind, nothing but an object any more. Rowan glanced up wildly as if she might see where Hermione was now. But it was Vicky who was watching her across the grave.

Rowan straightened up, her feet sinking further into the heap of earth, and tried to speak. When her voice didn’t work, she pointed despairingly into the grave. Vicky continued to gaze at her with an indifference so intense it looked accusing. “I tried to make it easy for you,” Vicky said.

Rowan felt bewildered and abandoned and, worst of all, guilty. Could she have somehow helped cause what had happened to Hermione? The thought was so dreadful that it paralysed her mind. Then something like hope allowed her to look away from Vicky, and down. She’d glimpsed movement below her.

Hermione was moving: her face turned towards Rowan. It was slacker than ever. The flashlight displayed how soil had fallen in the open mouth. Hermione’s head was moving only because something beneath her was.

Rowan tried to drag her feet out of the heap of slippery earth as a head appeared beneath, straining up from the shadow of Hermione’s. It was a bald head whose scalp looked patched with mould. Beneath its shrunken eyes and the string of gristle between them, its mouth yawned like a trap. Hands that were almost all bone and blackened skin clutched at the near edge of the coffin to heave its crushed body from under Hermione’s corpse. Rowan knew it was death, fleshless and grinning, that was hauling itself inch by creaking inch toward her, to seize her and pull her down into the grave.

She flung herself backwards, too violently. Her feet lost their grip on the loose earth. She staggered toward the cross, so hastily that she fell. The granite crossbeam struck her head like a hammer. The last thing she saw as the world drained away into the dark was Vicky, watching her in triumph.

Chapter Twenty-Three

At half past nine Derek tried to find a television show to watch, less for himself than for Alison. It would be his fault if she was worrying—his fault for attacking her family and making her nervous. He never would have if he’d known they were about to have so much trouble in contacting Hermione. She and Rowan must be visiting, or perhaps they were down at the shop, where there wasn’t a phone: in any case, what harm could come to them in Holywell? They’d be home next time he phoned, he assured himself, once the television show was over.

But the television hadn’t much to offer: three hours of golf on one channel, the end of a kidnapping film on another, a politician and a gerontologist disagreeing about ways to help the aged, a lull in a cricket match. Unexpectedly he found
Shane
, a film he hadn’t seen since he was Rowan’s age, but as he prepared to watch until the next commercial break he realised it was dubbed in Welsh. He was about to change the channel when Alison said irritably “Settle on something, for heaven’s sake. I might have liked to watch the programme about old age.”

He hadn’t been sure she was watching, crouched as she was over the last book Rowan had been reading. Her face seemed longer than ever, weighed down by thoughts, closed against him. He sat on the arm of her chair, though it protested. “Listen, I’m sorry I said those things about your sister and all.”

She moved almost imperceptibly away from him. “All who, Derek?”

“You know who I mean. I meant who I said. Don’t let’s argue any more. All I’m saying is I’m sorry I upset you.”

It wasn’t all he felt: he was afraid that their marriage could lose its balance, its way of letting one of them be calm when the other needed it, not that he had any reason to suppose they were going to need it now. “I’m sorry if I spoiled anything for you,” he said awkwardly.

“All right, I hear you. Now I’d like to watch that programme.”

He changed channels and sat in his chair. The politician and the doctor were still arguing. He couldn’t take in what they were saying; their disagreement felt like an extension of his argument with Alison, and made his forehead ache. Alison’s hands were clenched on Rowan’s book, her thumbs stroking the cover as if that might grant her a wish. He closed his eyes and willed Hermione to call, and then he heard the plastic cover crack in Alison’s grasp. As unobtrusively as he could, he sidled out of the room.

He wouldn’t lose his temper with Hermione. He might pass a remark about her not letting them know that she was taking Rowan somewhere, but he would make it sound like a joke. He counted twenty pairs of rings and dialled again. This time he lost count of the sounds. They sounded monotonous and distant and meaningless, empty as the cottage must be. Why did he have to feel so worried now, when life had been going right at last? Appalled by his own selfishness, he replaced the receiver clumsily and stormed into the living-room. “I don’t care if she is your sister, she ought to have let us know where they were going.”

Alison jumped up and switched off the television, then swung to face him. “Don’t you think I feel that way too?”