The Sin Eater (3 page)

The mirror on the dressing table was reflecting the photograph of Declan. It was odd how reflections changed things. Even this room looked different in the mirror – it was smaller and the walls were darker. If you narrowed your eyes, you could even think you were seeing a fire burning in a small grate. Benedict quite liked seeing this, because people did not have fires like that any more. He kept his eyes half-shut for a while, then he opened them, expecting to see this bedroom reflected in the glass. But it was not. He could still see the fire-lit room. There was a bright red rug in front of the fire and a small table and two chairs. Standing by the fireplace, its leaping light behind him, was the man from the photograph. Declan.

Benedict shrank back against the window pane. He would not be frightened. He could not be hurt by somebody who was inside a mirror. But he ached with the pain of wanting Mum, because she would have put her arms round him and told him he was safe from everything bad in the world. Dad would have said, in his quiet way, that all you had to do with things that tried to frighten you was make a rude face at them and they ran away like the cowards they were.

Was that fire-lit room where Declan had lived? Aunt Lyn had said Declan was Irish – would the cottage be in Ireland?

At once a soft silvery whisper seemed to hiss into the room.

‘
Yes, it's in Ireland, Benedict, it's on the very edge of Ireland's west coast, near the Cliffs of Moher . . . They're wild and dark, those cliffs, and the Atlantic Ocean lashes against them forever and there's the cold music of the
sidhe
inside the ocean, and the sound of screeching gulls, like wailing banshees, or souls shut out of heaven
. . .'

Benedict looked round the room in fear, but there was no one there.

‘
And there's an ancient watchtower built by one of Ireland's High Kings, and they say the devil himself prowls that stretch of the cliffs . . . That's where it began, Benedict, inside that dark tower, reeking of evil . . . One hundred and twenty years ago, near enough
. . .

‘
We'd make up stories about that watchtower, Benedict – wouldn't any child do that? We'd say to one another, “Let's pretend
. . .” '

Let's pretend . . .
There it was, the spell that had taken Alice to that other world.

‘
We'd pretend it was the ruinous halls of the High Kings, the last magical stones from the ancient kingdom of Tara . . . Or a giant's castle – you know about giants, Benedict, you know how they have to be killed . . . And wouldn't any child with half an ounce of spirit or adventure want to go up there, to find out what was really inside that old tower? I did, Benedict, I and a good friend I had, a boy I grew up with
.'

The voice had a way of pronouncing things Benedict had never heard, and the words were broken-up like a crackly old radio, or as if they were coming from a long way off.

Greatly daring and having no idea if his own words could be heard, he said, ‘Did you do it? Go up to the tower?'

‘
I did. Oh, I did, Benedict. I and my friend went up there. We thought we might find giants and ghosts, or princesses that had to be rescued from evil sorcerers and black enchantments. I'd have hacked my way through brambles and thick-thorn hedges for a princess even at that age. Wouldn't anyone?
'

‘Did you find those things? The giants and the kings and the princesses?'

‘
No
,' said the soft voice. ‘
We found something far worse
.'

Declan Doyle and Colm Rourke had always known they would one day brave the ancient watchtower on the Moher Cliffs. From the time they were very small, growing up in the tiny village of Kilglenn, they had agreed it was a mystery that must one day be solved. And then wouldn't they be the toast of the entire village and half the villages around! Wouldn't they have made their fortunes and have enough money to be off to London town, where it was said that you might almost dig up gold in the streets.

‘We'll be out of here as soon as we're properly grown-up,' said Colm, and Declan, who followed Colm in most things, said they would, for sure, and they'd take Romilly with them.

Romilly. Colm's cousin, a year younger, the most beautiful creature either of them had ever seen, although, as Declan pointed out, they had not in fact seen so very many girls, because anyone who was even half good-looking usually left Kilglenn for wider worlds.

‘We'll leave as well, but not until we've managed to get inside the watchtower and see if we can make our fortunes from it,' said Colm, grinning.

‘Even if we got in there, all we'd find was Father Sheehan, living there like a hermit. And I don't want to meet him,' said Declan firmly. ‘My father says he's very wicked and the Church excommunicated him because of a woman.'

‘If you listen to them in Fintan's bar of an evening, they'll tell you it was nothing to do with a woman,' said Colm. ‘They say Nick Sheehan met the devil one morning on the cliff tops and traded his soul, and that's the real reason he was excommunicated.'

‘People don't trade their souls, except in books. And what would the devil be doing in Kilglenn anyway?'

‘I don't know, but they say he challenged Nick Sheehan to play chess and Nick Sheehan won, and the devil had to give him the chess set. But he locked it away in the watchtower because it's so evil it'd frizzle your soul if you so much as looked at it. That's why he lives up there – keeping guard over it.'

‘I don't believe any of that,' said Declan firmly.

‘I don't either, not really, but I'd like to meet Nick Sheehan and make up my own mind,' said Colm thoughtfully. ‘And it's a grand story, isn't it? I bet it's told in every house in Kilglenn round the fire every Christmas.'

‘If we stay here long enough, we'll be telling it as well, in about a hundred years' time.'

‘Not us,' said Colm. ‘We're not staying in Kilglenn for a hundred years. We'll be off to London long before that.'

Benedict could still hear the grown-ups talking downstairs, and somebody was calling to know whether there was any more coffee, but the sounds seemed a long way off. What was much nearer and much more real was the small Irish village where two boys had grown up, and where an ancient watchtower looked out over the ocean.

He wanted to ask Declan what he and the other boy – Colm – had really found in the watchtower, but he was starting to feel very frightened, and one of the things that was frightening him most was the way Declan was standing with half of his face turned away. But his father would want him to be brave, so Benedict got down from the window ledge and went towards the mirror, to get a better look at Declan and the fire-lit room. At once, the image seemed to flinch; Declan did not step back exactly, but he turned his face away like a man suddenly faced with a too-bright light.

Why had he done that? Benedict was trying to decide if he dared say Alice's
Let's Pretend
spell after all and see if the mirror let him step through it, when the fire-lit room with the dark figure shivered, then splintered, and all he could see was the reflection of this room with its dusty walls.

It's all right, thought Benedict. He's gone. I don't know what that was, but I don't think those two boys and that village and that stuff about the devil's chess set was real. I'll go downstairs, and I won't ever tell anybody about this. It won't ever happen again. I'm safe.

But he never did feel safe, not through all the years he was growing up in Aunt Lyn's house. He had the feeling that Declan was waiting for him, somewhere just beyond vision and just outside of hearing, waiting for his chance to talk to Benedict again.

Once, when he was eleven, travelling back from staying with relatives of his mother, half asleep because it was late and the journey was a long one, he thought Declan looked at him from beyond the darkened window of the train. He sat bolt upright in the seat, peering through the window in panic. But the outline dissolved and Benedict tried to think that ghost images often did look back at you from a train window in the dark. They usually turned out to be the guard coming to check tickets, or somebody walking along the aisle.

By the time he was twelve, the pain of losing his parents was not as severe, and on his thirteenth birthday he realized he had to concentrate to recall their faces. He felt so guilty about this, he looked out several photographs and asked Aunt Lyn if they could be framed and put on his dressing table. He knew he would never forget how he had felt when they died, but Aunt Lyn was kind and loving and made no difference between Benedict and Nina, and Nina appeared to regard him as a younger brother she could organize.

But if his parents' ghosts receded, the memory of what he had seen in his great-grandfather's house did not.
I'll outgrow you
, he said to Declan's memory.
I'll go away – to university if I can – and leave you behind
.

By the time he got to Reading University at eighteen, he thought he had succeeded. He found law absorbing – and he thought he might even try for a PhD in criminology. He made friends – in his second year he shared a rambling old house with three other students – and there were one or two girlfriends. Life was interesting and full.

And then, a few weeks before his twenty-first birthday, he received the solicitor's letter, saying that under the terms of his parents' will, the ownership of Holly Lodge would shortly pass to him, and that unless he wanted to live in it himself, which they thought he did not, they recommended he sell it. If he decided to do so they could arrange a house clearance, but Benedict must, of course, first go through the house's contents to see what he wanted to keep.

I'll have to go back, thought Benedict, the remembered dread stealing over him. It's been eleven years, but whether I sell it or keep it, I'll have to go back to Declan's house.

N
ell West had been pleased when Nina Doyle asked her to value the contents of a family house near Highbury. It had belonged to an elderly relative, said Nina, showering information on Nell in her customary pelting way, and it had been rented for about ten years, but there were most likely some quite nice things stored away. It was her cousin Benedict's grandfather who had originally owned it; he had died in a car crash along with Benedict's parents years ago. It had all been frightfully tragic, said Nina, because Benedict had only been eight at the time.

Nell said how appalling for an eight-year-old to lose both parents at once.

‘Well, the poor lamb seemed to come out of it unscathed, although in my experience, people are never entirely unscathed, are they? And Benedict can occasionally be a bit introverted. He sometimes seems to retreat mentally, if you know what I mean.'

Nell said she did.

‘I dare say you find that with your Oxford don,' said Nina. ‘Academics often tend to be a bit other-worldly, don't they? Ivory towers and all that.' The words and tone were studiedly casual, but Nell had the feeling of being mentally pounced on.

She said, offhandedly, ‘Michael isn't mine.'

‘Would he like to be, though? Would you like him to be? Because honestly, Nell, I know you were utterly torn to pieces when Brad died, but it's been more than two years.'

Nell was not going to discuss Michael Flint with Nina Doyle; in fact she was not going to discuss him with anyone. Instead, she brought Nina back to the question of when she could see the Highbury house and inventory the contents. It appeared that Benedict had put forward 18th December as a suitable date, and Nell thought it would be worth braving the seething crowds of Christmas shoppers to see what was inside the house.

‘I haven't been there since I was in my teens,' said Nina. ‘I don't think Benedict has, either. But he's twenty-one in a few weeks, so everything can be sold. I don't know what's likely to be there, but I shouldn't expect Dutch masters in the attics or Sèvres in the cellars.'

Nell was not expecting either of these things, but there might be a few nice pieces of furniture which she could display in her shop. Oxford had antique shops every twenty yards, but she was trying to make hers fairly distinctive. The setting helped: it was in Quire Court, near Turl Street, almost in the shadow of Brasenose College. There were several small businesses and shops in the court, but none was in direct competition with Nell's so it had been easy to get planning permission for antiques. Her shop had a deep bow window, and she had recently sold a small Regency desk which she had displayed there, and had taken Beth to London for the day on the proceeds.

Beth, who was nine, had loved the Christmas lights in Oxford Street; there was a Victorian theme this year and she had stared at everything with solemn and silent delight as if she was storing it all up to relive later. She was wearing a brown velvet coat with a hood which had been a birthday present from Michael, and which gave her a slightly old-fashioned look. With tendrils of brown curls escaping from the hood and little fur boots and mittens, she might have been a child from the Victorian age herself. Nell watched her, smiling, and, as if sensing this, Beth looked round at her mother with a grin of happy conspiracy. A pang of sharp loneliness sliced through Nell, because Beth's dead father used to look like that when something delighted him and he wanted to share it with her. For a moment, the pain of loss was so overwhelming, Nell almost started crying in the middle of Selfridges. That was the trouble with ghosts; just when you thought you had got them under reasonable control, they came boiling out of nowhere and reduced you to a jelly. It was not unreasonable of Brad's ghost to still do this, more than two years after his death, but it was annoying that it should choose Selfridges during the Christmas rush.