Thieving Fear (10 page)

As Charlotte made to send the longest email she'd ever had to write, Glen came back from lunch with an author. 'Might be good news,' he said.

'I'm glad,' she felt required to say, though she had no idea for whom.

'How have you been spending this sunny afternoon?'

His breath betrayed how he'd spent much of his. She didn't need reminding how she was buried away from the sun. 'Just being an editor,' she said.

'Hey, me too,' he said and squinted at her email to Sextus Sexta Sexagesima, lead singer with Ban This and now author of
Praying is the Piss
, in which a rock group called Shag the Pigs used magic to become the most successful band of all time. 'Did you send this?'

'I'm about to.'

He reached around her shoulders and scrolled with the mouse, a gesture she found more presumptuously intimate than touching her might have been. 'OK, don't,' he said soon enough.

'Is he another author we've had second thoughts about?'

'I was talking to the big man upstairs and he thinks you shouldn't edit this at all. Some books need to breathe, he said. If you try to fit them into how you think all books are meant to be you could end up suffocating them.' He continued to expose her email as he said 'I guess some of the spelling may need fixing if it's not intentional. Maybe some of the punctuation, though I don't believe they changed a comma of John Lennon's books. Leave all the words he's made up, but the title could use work.'

'I won't argue with that.'

'One word should do it.'

'
Praying is the Pits
, you mean? It might still offend some people.'

'We're going to offend plenty. Let's use it, not pretend we can avoid it. I'm saying we should call it
Praying is Piss
.'

Charlotte might have laughed, if only to discover how amused she was. 'Have I heard the good news?' she wondered instead.

'Maybe you can make this work for your cousin. Don't tell me you weren't hoping it might be about her.'

Charlotte was recalling that he'd also drunk a good deal the last time he'd been enthusiastic about Ellen. 'I won't,' she said, 'but how?'

'Hey, where did your imagination go? While they're sold on magic upstairs you ought to make your move. How are her books looking?'

'I thought she was supposed to be working on the first one.'

'Better make it both. Right now they're saying they like two-book contracts for first-timers or they don't think it's worth the risk. She should give you a pitch you can wow them with, then as long as her new chapters shape up I'd say she's sold. They're hot for her upstairs.'

'You mean you've been talking about her?'

'Don't worry, I said she was your author and I didn't say she was your cousin. Maybe we should keep that between us for a while.'

He'd leaned closer to say so, and Charlotte felt oppressed – by his nearness, by the partitions around them, perhaps most of all by his inconsistency. 'Why don't you ask her how she feels about working on both books,' he said.

'I don't think many authors work on more than one at once.'

'A great reason for new ones to learn to, I'd say. The more ways they can compete in today's market the better it'll be for all of us. It's not like she's on her own, is it? She'll have her cousin if she needs help.' He straightened up with a comical wobble that might have been intentional. 'I'll leave you to call her,' he said but lingered to frown at the screen. 'Don't send that by mistake.'

'I'll see if I need to say any of it.'

While it seemed disagreeably likely that she wouldn't, the delay gave her the illusion of control. As Glen gave up playing overseer she freed the desk phone and typed Ellen's number. He was rearranging papers in his cubicle by the time Ellen said 'Hello?'

'Me.'

'Charlotte. I know you're waiting for my chapters. They're coming soon, I promise.'

'Do you think you might be able to let me have a synopsis of your next book as well?'

Ellen hesitated and then sounded oddly wary. 'Can I do a bit of research first?'

'Certainly you can, only how long do you think it'll take?'

'I've thought where I can set it. It's near enough for me to go and have a look.'

Charlotte wasn't sure if she heard or otherwise sensed movement beneath her. The muffled subterranean activity had to be that of a train, and of course she hadn't felt the floor shift like a lid. 'Have I guessed where?' she said.

'I wouldn't be surprised.' Ellen paused for some kind of effect and said 'Thurstaston.'

Another train must be worming under the office, but Charlotte was more aware of having mouthed the name as Ellen spoke it, as if it were a prayer or some other kind of invocation. 'I'll finish this chapter and then I'll send them to you,' Ellen said. 'I was working on it when you rang.'

'Don't let me interrupt any more. I'll look forward to whatever's coming.'

At that moment the computer screen turned black. It had simply grown dormant, though it put Charlotte in mind of a window overwhelmed by a sudden fall of earth. She wasn't going to let it remind her of the earth that must be pressing against all the walls. She nudged the mouse to restore her words on the monitor. 'Enjoy your research,' she said as a farewell.

Ellen was about to ask the children what they were doing on the swings when she saw that the house was for sale. A family must be viewing it, since a man was staring down at her from the attic bedroom that she and her cousins had shared until their aunt and uncle had begun to worry they were too mature. He seemed to take Ellen for an intruder, spying over the hedge with crime in mind. She could assure him that she'd spent several of the best weeks in her life here, except that it didn't quite live up to her memory: the trees and bushes that had turned the garden into a maze full of dens had been cut back, and where were the vines that had elaborated the adventure? The elder relatives must think this was the way to sell it, and at least the will donated the proceeds to a children's home. Ellen blinked her eyes more or less dry for a last sight of the house, and turned away as the man at the top told the children not to swing too high. None of this would help her with her book.

The row of houses overlooked a gravel track for walkers and cyclists alongside a bridle-path, beyond which fields and woodland stretched to the brink of the cliff. Ellen might have found the gap in the hedge and made straight for the field where she and her cousins had pitched camp, but after almost two hours on a pair of trains preceded and succeeded by buses, she needed a walk. The low unbroken cloud stained grey and black had none of the stale heat she'd brought with her. As she tramped a mile to the visitor centre she felt coated with humidity, which gave her little chance to think about her book.

The occasional cyclist overtook her so discreetly that they made her feel followed by someone she couldn't hear, and the odd head peered down at her – riders, of course. On this weekday afternoon the visitor centre was almost deserted. Ellen plodded along the corridor decorated with children's essays about nature to the Ladies', where she splashed her face with handfuls of cold water. She managed to splash the mirror above the sink, distorting her reflection, which appeared to sag and spread. She hurried out of the building rather than waste time wiping the glass.

Ought she to walk along the beach or the top of the cliff? It might be cooler near the water, and perhaps one of her characters could find something magical left by the waves. She crossed a field where a woman in a singlet and equally enormous shorts was competing at inertia with her breathless dog. A shady path led alongside a caravan park where the immobilised vehicles were as white and silent as monuments. At the end of the path an uneven series of steps cut out of the earth and ribbed with sticks descended to the beach.

The river had withdrawn, baring an expanse of sand several hundred yards wide. Yachts crept across the estuary, beyond which the sea bristled with the crosses of a wind farm. Down here the piebald mass of clouds seemed even lower, capable of resting on the edge of the cliff as it had settled on the darkened mountains across the river. Perhaps it was the reason why the beach was unpopulated, which she ought to welcome. She didn't want anyone interrupting her thoughts.

She headed downriver. This would take her below the area where she and her cousins had camped, and perhaps where her characters would do the same. What might they see? Perhaps million-selling novelist Carlotta might think that the pebbles strewn alongside the foot of the cliff and at the water's edge resembled fairy treasure, jewels turned to stone. She would observe the green crewcuts of tussocks protruding from mud exposed by the tide and wonder what species of heads was buried there. Ellen found the notion disconcerting, and tried to concentrate on how Roy, an artist garlanded with awards, saw the beach. Besides noticing that the sand retained the forms of waves, he might well reflect that the countless scattered shells were tomorrow's sand, along with those patches of cliff that weren't protected by foliage. Indeed, a breeze was troubling the bushes in their sleep, and Ellen thought she glimpsed windblown sand catching on shells ahead. Could care-home owner Helen spot an object glistening, no, glittering among the pebbles? It might have fallen out of an eroded section of the cliff, but Ellen found that she preferred to locate it by the water, where a wave could rearrange the delicate chain of some unfamiliar and unusually luminous metal into a shape like a magical symbol. By rescuing it Helen would discover that a pebble was attached to it, or rather that a perfectly globular stone was – a stone so uncommon that you could gaze into its depths and never name the visions it brought to mind. 'Have that to show your children,' Helen might say to Hugo, British Headmaster of the Year, as she passed him the charm.

Had Ellen said the line of dialogue aloud? She had to glance over her shoulder to confirm she couldn't have been overheard, but she ought to be concerned about the way her book was reshaping itself. The characters hardly sounded like people who would camp out on a cliff. They would have to be friends who met at weekends for a bracing walk of the kind she could do with taking more often. Roy and Carlotta would need to handle the magic stone before Hugo accepted it on his pupils' behalf. What effect did it have on the friends? Perhaps it granted each of them their deepest wish – so deep that none of them had ever put theirs into words. Or might they not be wishes, the unadmitted feelings that became altogether too real? She was driven to tramp faster, as much as the soft sand allowed, but she couldn't outdistance the idea. She felt as if her imagination were in danger of lifting a lid on it, calling it up from the dark.

What might her characters wish for? Hugo would be anxious for his pupils to behave, which meant he might secretly dream that they did exactly as they were told. Roy's dream could be that any work he imagined, no matter how impossible it seemed, would become real in every smallest detail. As for Carlotta, what would a writer dream other than to write the most successful book of all time? Helen's dream had to be that all the old folk in her care would stay healthy for the rest of their considerable lives. So much for the wishes, but how would they go wrong?

Hugo's pupils might grow absolutely obedient, unable to act without his direction, inside or outside the school. How unremittingly responsible for them would that make him? Carlotta's book would be so successful that everyone she met insisted on questioning her about it, until her home and her phone and her computer were so besieged that she hadn't a moment of her own. The unnatural health of Helen's residents might suggest to their offspring that they were refusing to die, and Ellen fancied that some of the children would take matters into their own homicidal hands. As for Roy, anything he visualised would become real, including whatever he feared. How would he stop this, if indeed he could? How could any of them control elements buried so deep in their minds that they might not even be able to identify the material until it was too late?

This was certainly an unnerving notion. It even made its author uneasy, down here alone on the beach. Perhaps she should save working on it until she was home; she had more than enough to take back to her desk. She could walk faster now that she didn't have to think. If she'd had enough of the beach, the nearest escape route was up the path where Charlotte had walked in her sleep.

This put her in mind of her own dream that night, of being trapped in a house that had smelled stuffed with clay – a house as dark as the inside of a skull and yet not dark enough for her. In the dream she'd thought any of the windows would be as bad as a mirror, but she was distracted from the memory by the creaking of the cliff beside her, or rather of the shrubs that covered it. A trickle of sand emerged, presumably dislodged by the same imperceptible wind, and she veered away from the cliff. She ought to be able to walk faster on the pebbles than on the sand.

The stony trail bordered the mud at the edge of the water. The mud was as gloomily brown as the exposed clay of the cliff, and scored with ruts that she could take for scratches gouged by giant fingernails as their owner had sunk into it. Rocks of the same increasingly omnipresent colour protruded from it, some wearing wigs of moss or seaweed, some warty with barnacles. The tops of a few had been hollowed out by waves and held water as if, Ellen thought, they were fonts for a primitive baptism or a more mysterious ritual. Did she need to quell her imagination until it was safely home? The calls of seabirds had begun to sound like the cries of children in a panic if not worse. They seemed oddly muffled, so that she wondered if any mischievous children were lying low in the rusty hull of a boat at the foot of the cliff, but it was full of clay and rocks. Ahead of it she saw the rounded bulge up which the trail snaked towards the dark stained lid of the sky, and she was making for the path so hastily that she almost failed to notice a movement within the cliff.

There was a hole in the clay, about the size of her head and slightly lower. She had the unwelcome notion that a face had peered out of it before withdrawing like a worm. It could have belonged to an animal, since the hole went deep into the cliff. It could hardly have grinned at her, displaying a mouthful of clay. She tramped towards it, holding her shaky breath, to quash the impression. Something moved as she did, back there in the dark.

Was it a rabbit? As she stooped with some reluctance to peer into the burrow, its denizen advanced to meet her. It was no wild animal, and Ellen recoiled, almost sprawling on her back. The tenant of the burrow shrank away just as vigorously, and when Ellen risked ducking for another look she was able to distinguish that the face was her own.

The reflection wasn't flattering. Surely it was blurred by the dimness or by the surface that was acting as a mirror. Had erosion exposed some uncommon species of rock? Ellen crouched, gripping handfuls of thigh, until she was certain what she was seeing. A mirror was buried at arm's length inside the cliff.

She was able to discern most of the oval frame and some of the handle, which was propped among the subterranean roots of a tree or bush, but her image in the smudged glass remained puffily shapeless. She couldn't really look like that. To prove it she planted one knee on the yielding sand, which made her feel yielding too, and reached into the burrow.

She hadn't fully grasped the implications of an arm's length. She had to grope blindly inside the narrow tunnel, catching earth under her fingernails, until she could almost have imagined that someone was inching the mirror out of reach. Her cheek was inches from the cliff, which filled her nostrils with a heavy smell of clay. She wobbled on her knee, and as her shoulder bumped against the cliff, her fingertips nudged a flat surface – the glass of the mirror. By stretching her arm as straight as it would go she was able to touch the handle among the bony roots. She strained her thumb and forefinger to dislodge it, and the bunch of scrawny objects shifted in response.

Ellen sucked in a breath that tasted of clay. The next moment she lost her balance, and the side of her face slammed against the cliff. Beyond the impact she thought she could feel the thing she'd mistaken for roots flexing itself, rediscovering liveliness. Perhaps it was preparing to seize her by the hand. It took her a dismaying effort to remember that she had another one – that she could use it to fling herself backwards. She barely saved herself from falling as her arm emerged from the passage. She wasn't certain that she saw the five discoloured twigs move, but the mirror did. It tilted just enough to trap her face, displaying how deformed it was, not only by terror, if indeed that could be blamed at all.

She didn't quite scream. She released an ill-defined cry that made her lips feel as unhealthily swollen as her entire face looked. It failed to rescue her from her nightmare, because she wasn't asleep. The mirror tilted further, turning her reflection into clay, and for a crazed moment she was tempted to reach for it again, to examine her face until she was sure of her appearance. Or might the remnants of a hand adjust the mirror? When she realised she was waiting for this – waiting like an animal pinned by headlight beams – she floundered away along the beach.

She couldn't use the path up to the field. It passed directly above the burrow, from which she could imagine an arm thinner than flesh sprouting to clutch at her feet the instant she strayed close. As she fled towards a road that descended to the shore, the sand kept slipping aside, twisting her ankles, until she had to hobble like an old woman. Eventually the beach grew firmer, but it was a trick: when she trod on it her feet sank deep into packed sand that was well on the way to becoming mud. She felt as if it were dragging her weight into her legs, swelling them out of proportion, except that they were no heavier or more unmanageable than the rest of her. Surely only her toil and the heat as thick as the low clouds were weighing her down. When she held out her hands as if beseeching an invisible companion, she was almost certain they were more or less the size and shape they ought to be.

Nevertheless when she finally arrived at the road up the cliff she was wary of encountering someone at the top – anyone at all. She didn't want to be near people while she couldn't tell the difference between humidity and her own sweat or as long as a thick smell of clay seemed to cling to her. The road was deserted, and she put on speed once it flattened out alongside the field where she'd slept. A hedge blocked her view, but the occasional gap let her see that the field was unoccupied. If anyone was hiding, so they should, given how their hand had looked. While Ellen wished she hadn't had that thought, she gave in to whispering the rest of it. 'Worse than me.'

Perhaps she imagined the muffled distant voice – if it was both, how could she hear it? – but she couldn't doubt its message, which felt buried in her skull. 'No,' it said.