The Influence (7 page)

Her aunt was lying face up on the bed. Her eyes were closed, her hands were folded on her chest. Her chin was thrust up so rigidly that Hermione felt certain she was dead. A ship moaned on the horizon, and the murmur of grown-ups downstairs sounded even farther away. Hermione wished so hard it made her head swim that they would miss her and call out to her, because then she could run downstairs. Nobody called her, and she found herself trudging helplessly forward into the room where the furniture looked like the shadows grown more solid, trudging toward the still figure on the bed.

She was close enough to touch her aunt before she noticed the shallow rise and fall of the flat chest beneath the folded hands. She had to swallow before she could speak. “Auntie, are you going to die?” she whispered out of pity, and hoped at once that Queenie hadn’t heard.

Queenie’s eyes opened so slowly they looked gloating. They were the only part of the long pinched face that moved. Their first glint froze Hermione. She could only stand and shiver as her aunt glared at her with icy loathing. At last Queenie’s lips drew back, baring gritted teeth, which parted just enough for her to speak. “So that’s what you’re hoping for, is it, my little shoat?”

There wasn’t so much as a hint of emotion in her gentleness, and Hermione was almost too frightened to speak. “No, Auntie, I only—”

“Shall I tell you something you won’t relish? I’m never going to die. Never, so don’t waste your time looking forward to the day you’ll be rid of me. He should have listened to me,” she added as if a memory was making her forget who she was speaking to. “You needn’t die unless you choose to, and you wouldn’t choose to if you didn’t let yourself grow old. It’s all an illusion, disease and ageing and death. You just need the will to see through it.” Then rage flared in her eyes as she noticed Hermione again. “And you dared ask me if I were dying. You deserve to be shown what that means.”

Surely she wouldn’t if Hermione told her she was sorry, if she pleaded with her not to do whatever was gleaming deep in her eyes. Or if Queenie was beyond being placated, Hermione could scream for her parents; she had only to open her mouth. Then she heard the door close tight behind her.

Perhaps a draught from the window had closed it, but Queenie smiled as though she had closed it herself without moving from the bed. Hermione would have run to the door, except that Queenie’s glare was paralysing her with terror even before she understood why. Then she did, and she would have buried her face in her hands if she had been able to move, so that she wouldn’t see what Queenie was waiting for her to notice.

A stirring in one corner of the room, alongside the window and out of reach of the meagre daylight that lingered above the sea, dragged her head around to look. She tried to tell herself that the grey mass that filled the corner from floor to ceiling was just a shadow, and then it stirred again as a spider that looked as big as her hand scuttled back under the cornice, leaving its meat struggling in the midst of the web. She felt as if her gaze were caught there too, not least by her fear of seeing the rest of the room. It had aged horribly, cracks clawing at the ceiling and the walls, wallpaper bulging rottenly, furniture sagging forward at her, wardrobes opening like bat-wings that would enfold her in darkness. She began to sob dryly, and then Queenie sat up at the edge of her vision, a tall thin pale shape. Hermione felt a scream mounting behind her locked teeth as she turned to look.

But Queenie hadn’t aged, nor had the bed. If anything, she looked younger, enlivened by her power over her niece. She seemed to know all that Hermione was seeing, for she was grinning like a skull. “Look at yourself,” she murmured almost tenderly.

Perhaps she was only mocking Hermione; perhaps she wasn’t telling her to do so literally. All the same, the child would have fled to the window and jumped rather than look at herself in the mirror. Queenie seemed to tire of her; she closed her eyes and waved Hermione away like an annoying fly. Or was that a last cruel trick to make Hermione think she was safe? As the child reached shakily for the doorknob she saw her own hand, a blotchy hand that looked almost fleshless and far too large. It was an old woman’s hand.

She squeezed her eyes shut until they blazed and throbbed, and grabbed the doorknob, tugging until the door lurched at her. It felt as if it had been released, though the frame wasn’t warped. She fled along the corridor and fell down the first flight of stairs, bruising her legs. She crawled sobbing down to the next floor as her father ran to her, demanding to know what was wrong. When she realised that he saw nothing odd about her, she was able to look at her hands, her small, familiar pink hands. She clambered desperately up her father to hide her face against his chest. “A spider, a spider,” she babbled. “I couldn’t get out of the room.”

She didn’t think he ever realised she meant Queenie’s room. She wouldn’t go to bed until he promised to sit with her all night. When at last she dozed off she awoke to find he wasn’t there, and wakened Alison with her screams before he came back. When they went home to Liverpool a nightmare followed her and lurked in her sleep for years. It was a nightmare about waking up—about wakening to find she was as old as she had seemed in Queenie’s room.

She plucked a weed out of the earth and scoffed at herself, somewhat tentatively. What was so odd about dreaming you’d be older when you woke up, since in fact you would be? Queenie had made her believe the room had aged, that was all—no great feat when her victim had been just a child. She’d kept her childish for the rest of Queenie’s life. She seemed even to have got the better of her afterwards, at the funeral the other day, when Hermione had made such a fuss about the locket. Queenie must have been wearing it the night she died, and someone had decided she should wear it to the grave. She was letting this view take root in her mind when the phone rang.

It was her mother calling from Waterloo. “We’ll be here two days and then at home if you need us.”

“I’m sure I won’t, mother. Tell Alison Lance was calling, will you? I told him she might be in touch, but I didn’t commit her to.”

“What was he after?”

“He wanted to talk to her about Rowan, and something about the will.”

“He’d better stay away from Rowan. I don’t care who says he’s cured. And God help him if he tries to make difficulties for Alison now. He’d have been the last person Queenie would have left anything, him and his father, and Richard wouldn’t accept anything even if she had.”

Hermione said goodbye to her mother and went outside for her tools: it was growing too dark for gardening. She washed her earthy hands and strolled down to her shop. The shopping streets of Holywell were short and haphazard, as if they’d tumbled down the hill into this disarray. There was no clear view along most of them, which was why she stood the sign that pointed to AUNTIE HERMIONE’S on the street corner when the shop was open. As she let herself in, the streetlamp outside flickered on against the swarthy sky.

She pulled the tasseled cord inside the doorway, and the shop lit up, the racks of children’s clothes, the crafted toys. When she’d first thought of moving to Wales, to somewhere near her favourite childhood haunts, she’d meant to teach, but while she’d enjoyed her years at training college, teaching practice in a viciously Catholic school near Liverpool had almost given her a breakdown. She would never have expected the children’s clothes she made as therapy to prove so popular—popular enough to let her rent the cottage and the shop. Each year she added a few more lines, though never enough to satisfy Rowan, she thought wryly. It had been Rowan’s idea to order a carton of Halloween masks.

When Hermione parted the lid of the carton and folded back the leaves, a witch’s face sneered up at her. It was grey and deeply wrinkled, and looked as if it would feel like clay. She picked it up by its long sharp chin and hung it in the window, and then she peeled off more layers of the onion of eyeless faces in the carton, green faces with one eye twice the size of the other, skulls with reassuringly artificial teeth. She was sorting out a representative display when a little girl looked in the window.

Hermione gave her a quick smile without really seeing her. The child oughtn’t to be out so late, particularly in just a white dress when the mists were already seeping down the mountains. She selected three masks and picked them up by their elastic, and realised that the little girl hadn’t moved. She turned to call out that the shop was closed, and her fists clenched so violently that the elastic tore free of one mask.

For a moment she thought that the figure outside wasn’t a child but a dwarf with an old woman’s long-chinned face. It was just that the reflection of the witch mask was blotting out the child’s face, and yet the sight made Hermione shrink back, for the child seemed to be peering through the reflected empty sockets. Then the child skipped aside, into the dark beyond the streetlamp.

Hermione made herself stumble to the door and drag it open. The street was deserted as far as she could see. When she ran to the bend, there was no sign of the little girl. She retreated to the shop and locked herself in. She couldn’t have seen what she thought she’d seen, she told herself, fighting to be calm so that she could venture out before it grew much darker. She knew that children liked to make faces, but the child couldn’t really have looked like that. In the moment before the child had dodged out of sight, the eyes staring through the reflection that clung to the window had seemed to have turned outward, staring past either side of the mask.

Chapter Eight

The train from Prestatyn to Chester was crowded, and at first Lance had to stand. People crowded in, shuffling him farther down the car, until he was clinging to a strap above two girls about ten years old. As the swaying of the train swung him towards them, their mother told one to stand up and sat the other on her lap, and stared at Lance until he took the seat. He was clammy and breathless, and now the two girls made him feel as if there were a blaze on either side of him. The doctors were supposed to have shocked those feelings out of him, but even if he no longer wanted to imagine touching little girls, he still felt as if everyone around him thought he did. He closed his eyes and tried not to know where he was, but once the hem of the standing girl’s skirt brushed the back of his hand, and once her bare thigh touched him.

In Chester he sat hunched together until the car emptied, then he trudged out of the station, looking at nobody. He crossed the road into the old town, passed through the gate in the city wall and strolled along the Rows, the shopping walks boxed in by overhanging Tudor storeys. Strolling was no use: he couldn’t recall what he’d realised at the funeral.

His memory often let him down since he’d come out of the hospital. Sometimes he wondered how much of himself was lost, though it seemed not to matter. But he was sure this did, for he’d told himself so. Something that he’d seen or overheard at Queenie’s funeral had lit up like a flashbulb in his mind. He dawdled home beside the river, but the sight of lamps kindling on the bridge while their reflections trawled the water didn’t help. When he reached home at last, his father was waiting for him.

As soon as Lance let himself into the small flat that almost overlooked the river, his father levered himself to his feet, his arthritic hands gripping the arms of his chair that was turned to the window from which he’d been watching for Lance. He bumped the chair around toward the room and lowered himself carefully onto the seat, then he scrutinised Lance, his compact face expressionless but for the hint of a frown among the lines on his forehead. “You can get yourself some dinner if you haven’t eaten,” he said eventually. “I don’t feel like eating.”

He was making Lance feel as if he’d done something wrong and forgotten what it was. Lance found himself an apple in the fruit bowl next to the historeys of Chester between the Roman soldiers on the sideboard, and crunched it while his father wrote a letter to the museum he’d retired from. His father stared at his pen as the nib rested on a gathering blot, and then his head jerked up, flinging back his grey hair. “Well, how were my brother and his wife? What were they saying about me?”

Lance was expecting to be blamed for the torments of anxiety his father suffered whenever Lance was out of his sight. By the time he framed an answer his father was staring at him as if he were making it up. “Keith said he was sorry you weren’t there,” Lance told him doggedly, “and Edith was hoping the family could get together now.”

“Did you remember to say I was ill?”

Lance’s hand closed over his mouth, squeezing his beard. “Oh no, I forgot.”

“Hurrah, something else for them to lay at my door. My brother even denounced me for leaving home until he realised he could follow. I don’t know why you went at all. You couldn’t have believed any of them would be glad to see you.”

Lance could tell he was attacking himself under the guise of attacking Lance. “I wanted to see Auntie Queenie laid to rest,” he said.

“I can imagine how she must have bothered you. If we’d seen more of her you mightn’t have turned out the way you did.”

“Dad, can’t we just talk? I had something to ask you.”

His father let the writing pad slip to the floor and stared blankly at him. “Don’t you think I wish we could talk as we used to? I thought we’d have more time to share our lives when I retired. I was looking forward to strolling with you by the river on evenings like this. Perhaps you don’t appreciate how finding that filth in your room turned everything you’d said to me into lies. Thank God your mother was dead by then and never knew what you’d been hiding.”