Thieving Fear (27 page)

Hugh levered himself onto it with the spade and leaned on the handle as he took out his mobile again. He jabbed the redial key, and in just a few seconds he had his answer, somewhere ahead. The crescendo and its conclusion weren't as distant as they'd seemed; up here they were more obviously muffled. He advanced a tentative step, and another faltering one, and then he was hurrying across the common, almost blind with the light on the grass and with panic that his shadow mimed by brandishing its spade. Ellen's phone wasn't in the distance. It was under the earth.

Charlotte thought she had nodded off for only a moment again, but this time it wasn't a jerk of her head that roused her. Her eyes wavered open to see that Rory's were still dormant. Though the whole of him was as inert as his flaccid hand in her determined grasp, she was sure there had been movement. She glanced across the aisle at Annie, who leaned sideways on her chair while keeping hold of her husband's fingers. 'Is he back?' she whispered.

Hairs stirred at the nape of Charlotte's neck, and she was hardly reassured by recognising that a breath had troubled them. It must be a breeze through the window under which she was sitting, which let her feel marginally less enclosed whenever she remembered it was ajar, but she couldn't help peering over her shoulder to make certain the gap was unoccupied. 'Who?' Annie had left her anxious to know, or at any rate anxious.

Annie's laugh wasn't quite as sure of itself as she wanted it to sound. 'Why, who do you think?'

'I've no idea,' Charlotte said, hoping she hadn't. 'That's why I'm asking.'

'Who else could it be but your Rory?' Having issued the rebuke, Annie said 'It's all right, you've just woke up.'

Charlotte felt as if she hadn't entirely once she realised she should ask 'Why were you saying he's back?'

'I was only asking. It looked like he woke you. I couldn't see what else would.'

Charlotte thought the conversation had grown uncontrolled as a dream – perhaps not a nightmare, but little more bearable. 'Do you mean you saw him move?'

'No, I saw you.'

'It wasn't just me.'

As Charlotte finished speaking, the truth caught up with her. She laid Rory's hand down and took out her mobile to see that she had indeed missed a call. 'It's never that devil of a thing again,' Annie said.

'It is.' Charlotte stayed polite while adding 'Would you mind if I step out and deal with it?'

'It's not up to me to mind.'

'If you mean Rory, I don't think he will.'

'We can't say, can we? Nobody's really sure if they know we're here, our men. Maybe we're all that's keeping them here.'

Charlotte squeezed Rory's unresponsive hand for encouragement – his or her own – and stood up. 'I definitely need to take this call,' she said. 'I won't be any longer than I have to be.'

'I expect he'll understand. You've still got a job.'

Charlotte let the misunderstanding explain her haste in making for the corridor. Her anxiety for her cousins was almost enough to blot out any other. She hurried to the lifts, where a nurse beside a patient on a trolley stopped a pair of doors from closing. Charlotte immediately regretted sidling in, because the trolley seemed to take up far more space than was reasonable. She tried to breathe evenly as the doors crawled together and the occupant of the trolley raised his sketchily grey-haired head to speak. 'Who's in here?'

'Just a lady who's having a ride with us, Jonah.'

'I know there's a girl.' The man's loose wrinkled face worked as if his dissatisfaction were a weight he was unable to dislodge from it. 'Aren't we moving?' he complained.

'Just as fast as we can.'

Charlotte was afraid this might mean not at all. The man's head fell back, and his watery eyes rolled in their sockets as if searching for an intruder or some assurance that the lift wasn't stuck. Perhaps he was sensing her nervousness, but his unease was aggravating hers, so that she imagined their fears nourishing each other while the lift stayed buried between floors and the air grew unbreathably stale. Since the trolley blocked her access to the controls, she was on the point of asking the nurse to give the button another push when the lift shuddered like a troubled sleeper and settled into place before, with a considerable show of reluctance, it set about parting its doors. As Charlotte hauled them wide and launched herself between them, she heard the man protest 'Who's in here?'

If there had indeed been an intruder she was ashamed to hope she'd left it beyond the doors, but she did. Too much of a crowd surrounded her in the reception area and in the smoky open air for her to look at every face. She was busy retrieving the missed call, which began to address her as she did her best to emerge from an oppressively insubstantial medium composed of the murmur of the loiterers outside the hospital. 'I've lost her,' Hugh confessed, or rather had. 'I've lost Ellen. Call her when you get this. Tell her she's got to call me. Call me if you speak to her. Call me anyway. Somebody call me.'

He sounded reduced to a nightmare. How could Ellen have left him in that state or indeed at all? For the duration of several unnecessarily conscious breaths Charlotte couldn't think which of them she ought to phone first. Replying to Hugh's call would be easier, and only a sense that she ought to have news about Ellen made her key that number instead. Since Ellen was presumably not answering his calls, had the cousins fallen out somehow? Not necessarily, because she didn't respond to Charlotte either. When the pretence of a bell ceased at last, it had only roused the answering service.

'Ellen, why aren't you answering anyone? You've got me worried. Why aren't you with Hugh? We don't want you splitting up. We don't need this on top of everything else. I've had to come out of the hospital again to call you. I'm going to wait here for a few minutes, but I don't want to be away from Rory any longer than I absolutely have to be. Please let me know what's going on. Please call.'

She was beginning to sound far too much like Hugh's message, overwhelmed by an excess of words. Having to speak to someone who wasn't even a version of Ellen or indeed real had brought her close to babbling. Until she shut up, Ellen wouldn't be able to reply, and so Charlotte ended the call. She stood with the inert mobile in her hand while black shapes multiplied next to her – taxis full of visitors to the hospital. The gathering blackness reminded her of nightfall, although that was hours away. Her mobile didn't ring, and didn't ring, and didn't ring. She bore its silence for a little longer than she thought she could, and then she gave in to calling Hugh. His phone rang as long as Ellen's had and spoke to Charlotte in exactly the same automatic voice.

She could have imagined that she was the victim of a trick – that somebody who had answered both her calls was putting on the bright efficient female voice. Perhaps the truth was worse: perhaps Charlotte had missed her chance to speak to Hugh. 'Hugh, I'm sorry,' she said. 'I should have called you back. I was waiting to hear from Ellen. Have you yet? Call me anyway. I'll try and stay out here until you do. Don't leave me worrying. Let's talk and decide what's to be done.'

She was losing control of her words again, as though they were being sucked into a black hole. If they were being swallowed by deadness, why were his and Ellen's phones dead? There must be a signal at Thurstaston for Hugh to have made the call. Ellen might have switched off her mobile so that he couldn't reach her, whyever she was behaving that way, but it made no sense for him to have turned off his. Could the batteries have failed in both? It seemed far too conveniently inconvenient. Charlotte paced back and forth alongside the taxis, only to have to assure the foremost driver that she wasn't looking for a ride. When his replacement made the same assumption Charlotte felt as if they were urging her not to loiter. 'Aren't you there yet? Where are you?' she said uselessly twice to the same artificial voice, and then she knew that wasn't enough.

If she called the police, what could she tell them? Certainly not just that she was unable to raise her cousins, but how could she explain that she was concerned because of their intentions? Suppose she managed to persuade the police to search, what might they catch her cousins doing if they found them? Of course she was presuming that the disinterment was taking place, if it hadn't already happened, whereas she could be sure of nothing of the kind. She only knew that Hugh and Ellen weren't receiving her calls, and she'd had enough of herself and her doubts. What if she and her cousins were being prevented from contacting one another?

As soon as she thought it she knew she had been resisting the notion. However credulous it was, could she dismiss it when that might be at her cousins' expense? She stared at her silent mobile and then at the taxis before marching towards the hospital. She was willing the phone to ring, but as she reached the lobby she had to mute it. She dodged around a queue of visitors at the reception desk and sprinted into a waiting lift. 'Who's in here?' a voice enquired as the doors shut, but surely that was just an echo in her head. Her fears for Hugh and Ellen outweighed any other panic, so that she was able to ignore the lack of windows in the lift and in the corridor.

A nurse was writing on the clipboard at the end of Rory's bed. 'Any change?' Charlotte was more than anxious to discover.

'He hasn't missed you.' That was Annie, and the nurse said 'Nothing yet.'

'I've been called away urgently. Can I leave you my number in case anything happens?'

'Give it in at the desk. We'll do our best to keep you posted.'

Suppose Charlotte became as unreachable as her cousins? Perhaps it wouldn't need to be like that; perhaps she would hear from one or both of them before she ventured too far. She advanced to give Rory's hand a squeeze that felt like leaving him for worse than the unknown. As she turned away Annie met her eyes. She looked as though she had a less than favourable question, but all she said was 'I'll be here.'

Charlotte remembered her saying 'Maybe we're all that's keeping them here.' That might be true, but as she'd meant it or the opposite? Perhaps if Charlotte didn't act he might stay there until he died. That was one more fear to drive her away from him. 'I will be,' she promised and managed not to add 'I hope.'

'I will be.'

'So will I,' Rory said, but only inside his skull. He couldn't judge how long ago he'd last heard Charlotte speak, let alone when somebody else had made the remark to which she'd responded. At some point this person had also said 'He hasn't missed you.' Perhaps he hadn't, but he was doing so now, assuming that Charlotte and Ellen and Hugh were no longer with him. He needed to communicate how he felt, if he was capable of feeling anything any more. Weren't his thoughts a kind of feeling? Wishing that his cousins and his brother hadn't left him was, and surely that ought to bring him to the surface of himself. Only he had no idea where that might be, especially now that he was surrounded by silence, wadded in it like a sculpture packed in a box and just as unable to move. He ought to have struggled towards Charlotte's voice, but now it was too late.

It needn't be. If he'd managed to hear, however increasingly hard it was to distinguish this from the memory of a dream, his senses hadn't entirely deserted him. Were any others waiting to be noticed? Not his vision, since he couldn't even tell whether he was seeing an uncoloured void or an equally featureless dark. He couldn't imagine what there would be to taste, and there seemed to be nothing to smell. As for touch, he appeared to have forgotten how that worked. He had no idea where his hands might be, and that went for the rest of him. He couldn't even identify which part of him was being teased if not taunted by a persistent draught, which also had to mean he was alone, because surely any visitor would have closed the door or window on his behalf.

He had no means of measuring how long he lay inert within the thought before its implications overtook him. He couldn't be wholly senseless if he was feeling a draught. It was on the upper surface of an extension of him somewhere in the middle distance. It was on the back of his hand, beyond an arm that felt dully pierced by a needle at the tip of a tube that rested on it. Could he raise the hand to his eyes or open them to find it? Before he knew it he did both.

He was lying under a white slab almost as wide as his vision. It was the ceiling of a large long room – a hospital ward. To his left a window open at the top was letting in a breeze. To his right was a line of beds, each occupied by a supine sheeted figure. They were matched across an aisle, and directly opposite him was a solitary seated visitor. Now he recalled Charlotte saying she'd received some kind of urgent message, but had Hugh and Ellen also been called away? He was starting to recapture an impression that they had recently been at his bedside. 'Where is everyone?' he wondered aloud.

The loudness of his voice surprised him and startled the woman, who cried 'Oh, he's back.'

For a moment Rory was afraid to learn whom she was addressing. If she meant to alert the staff, it didn't work. Perhaps it was a proclamation to anyone who might be interested, but her entire audience seemed as unimpressed as the patient whose hand she was holding. 'How long was I gone?' Rory said.

'Only a couple of days, dear. I expect my Jack and the rest of them would call it just a nap. How has it left you feeling?'

Rory flexed his limbs, which hadn't lost too much strength. 'Alive,' he said.

'That's all you should expect, I always say. Then anything else is a bonus.'

This struck Rory as less a thought than a substitute for one, but his renewed senses welcomed even that. 'Weren't my family here?' he said.

'They're one right enough.'

'Yes, but I'm asking when did they go.'

'Your brother and the very thin girl only stayed for a bit, and then they had –'

'Which thin girl?'

'What was her name again?' Presumably the woman wasn't really waiting for her husband to answer, because she told him 'Ellen, that was what.'

'I wouldn't call her thin,' Rory objected.

'You mustn't have seen her for a while.'

He tried to remember how long it had been, but the memory of losing his senses as he drove around the roundabout was in the way. He was disconcerted to realise how careless he'd just been in testing his limbs. Why weren't they broken? He'd ended up no worse than bruised and stiff. Perhaps, as was said to be the case with drunks, his state had protected him from serious injury. For the moment it seemed more important to discover 'What did they have to do?'

'Did you all go to a camp somewhere?'

This made Rory feel as if the past had crept up behind him. 'Not recently, no.'

'Well, that's where they've gone.'

'What for?'

'They weren't telling us, were they, Jack? They went off and you wouldn't know who was looking after which.'

Rory heard his questions growing aggressive but was too uneasy to rein them in. 'How do you mean?'

'Him carrying on like he didn't know which way to turn and her not wanting anybody seeing her, which you can understand.'

Rory didn't, which left him still more anxious. Hugh had been losing his way when Rory was robbed of his senses, and now or at the same time Ellen had fallen distressingly ill. 'Why would they go all that way if they're like that?' he demanded. 'Forget I spoke. You said you don't know.'

'No, I said they never let on. The other girl did.'

He managed to cling to his patience and ask 'What did she say?'

'Did you leave something there when you were sleeping out?'

'Not that I know of.' That meant no until his words caught up with him. 'Such as what?' he was compelled to add.

'Something you buried by the sound of it.'

'I've never buried anything.'

'Maybe it was one of them that did. I just got the feeling you were mixed up with it somehow.' She appeared to be giving Rory a last chance to explain before she said a shade defiantly 'All I know is they were off to dig it up and it seemed like it was for your sake.'

Rory felt as if she were arousing memories he didn't realise he had. The first time his senses had come close to shutting down, he had been researching Thurstaston. He'd found a reference to someone called Pendemon, and had he overheard Hugh and their cousins discussing the owner of the name? 'They should all have had a bit more faith if you want my opinion,' the woman said.

Rory wasn't sure he did, but heard himself say 'All?'

The woman leaned forwards as if to keep a confidence from her husband. 'I'd lay money the other girl went off there too. Maybe she didn't think they were up to it by themselves, the way they both were. They should have trusted things would come out right, shouldn't they? It's my belief they will if they're meant to. You're the proof.'

While Rory didn't care to be reduced to this, he stayed quiet as the woman said 'Funny that you can't think what they're after if it's supposed to bring you back. Anyway, they're the ones need bringing back now, aren't they?'

At once Rory knew she was right, but not in the way she imagined. Whatever Hugh and their cousins had set out to do for his benefit, it wasn't just unnecessary now; it felt more dangerous than his mind could encompass. He had to call them back. 'Where are my things?' he said.

'Nurse will have to show you.' His urgency seemed to alarm the old woman, who clutched her husband's hand with both of hers as she called 'Nurse.'

'You'll know where they're keeping people's stuff, won't you? Just tell me where.'

'I don't know where they can have got to.' This apparently referred to the staff, because she added 'They ought to look at you if you're thinking of getting up.'

'I just want my mobile.'

'Are you stuck with one of those as well? You can't use them in here.'

'Then I'll have to outside.' Rory had another thought and slid open the drawer of the bedside table, which was so rudimentary it was colourless. The drawer did indeed contain a key with a blurred number inked on a plastic tag, which he used to indicate the metal lockers at the far end of the ward. 'I won't tell anyone you said,' he assured her. 'It's all locked up in there, yes?'

'You oughtn't to be walking when there's nobody to see to you. You don't know how you'll be.'

'Let's find out.' Rory hoped to encourage her by including her, but it simply made her more nervous. He withdrew the needle from his arm and laid the tube on the bedside table before groping under the sheet, where he found a reason to be grateful that his sensations were still understated. He took some time and care over disencumbering his penis from a tube, which he hung over a metal stand, where it emitted a single unstoppable drip. In shuffling his feet one at a time to the edge of the bed he pulled the sheet from beneath the mattress. Planting his hands on the bed, he levered himself more or less steadily into a sitting position, which bunched the sheet in his lap. 'You mightn't want to watch this,' he advised.

'Don't you worry about that, love. You won't be showing me anything I haven't seen on my Jack.'

Rory found this flirtatious and equally uncomfortably maternal. Perhaps she only meant how he was dressed, which was bad enough. He was wearing an abbreviated gown that tied none too closely at the back, so that it would have exposed his buttocks if they weren't done up in a plastic pad, all of which left him feeling worse than infantile. He poked his feet over the brink of the mattress and lowered them to the floor, then stared at the woman as he wobbled off the bed. He meant to make her look away, but she gazed at him with additional concern. Resting one hand on the windowsill, he wavered to his feet. Perhaps he'd managed to deflect more than her attention, because she vanished.

So did the room and his body into utter nothingness. Only the realisation that it contained some kind of light prevented it from extinguishing his mind as well. He was about to devote any strength to producing a nightmare cry when he became aware of his hand on the windowsill. He hadn't reverted to insensibility after all. He'd just stood up too quickly, and the insight seemed to restore his senses. The blankness retreated to the limit of his vision and beyond, exposing the sight of the ward full of beds and the woman watching him more solicitously than ever. 'You aren't well, are you?' she seemed almost to hope.

'Never better,' Rory declared and took several increasingly confident steps to the end of the bed.

She looked as if she weren't entirely convinced he was walking. Her husband and the occupants of the other beds were demonstrating how out of the common it was. Rory wasn't about to let anyone steal his confidence, not least because he had a sudden unappealing notion that someone would be glad to. As he padded down the aisle between the sheeted bodies he had to fend off the idea that their insensibility was capable of drawing him in. He hurried to the farthest of the lockers opposite an unoccupied desk and slid his key into the lock.

His mobile was resting on top of a pile of his clothes. The thought of venturing outside in his present outfit to phone resembled a bad dream. He grabbed the mobile and his clothes and shut the locker before shouldering the doors aside and dodging into the corridor. It was deserted, which only made him feel more like an escaping prisoner. Nobody could stop him, or was there someone who could? Was he forgetting a name it was dangerous to forget or else to remember? Hugging his belongings, he followed the overhead signs to the nearest Men.

The room beyond the terse word was deserted too. Above the sinks a mirror multiplied the white tiles of the walls, so that Rory felt surrounded by a relentless absence of colour. He was suddenly afraid of not seeing his reflection. He made himself step forwards, and in a moment saw a ridiculously costumed apparition with his face. He took refuge in the nearest cubicle, where he planted his clothes on top of the low cistern before fumbling to undo the gown and tear off the degrading pad. In no time he was dressed, socks and shoes too. He stuffed the pad into a bin and left the gown hanging in the cubicle as he returned to the corridor.

Nobody could see the escaped patient now. He was just another visitor. He hurried to the lifts, the nearest of which opened at once to his summons as if it were as impatient as he was. It certainly seemed eager to box him in with its dull flat grey doors and walls and floor and ceiling. The greyness struck him as less a colour than a substitute for one, and as much of a threat to close his senses down as the white tiles had been. He stared at the numbers above the doors and tried to grasp what colour the illuminated digits were. Perhaps the attempt to determine it helped him retain his senses, but he hadn't identified the tint of the lacklustre 1 by the time the doors released him.

The lobby was scattered with visitors and staff, who presumably saw as little of him as he did of them. As he emerged from the building his mind appeared to lighten to match the sky. So long as it didn't grow as blank, he thought, and switched his mobile on. He took several unnecessary moments to decide on calling Charlotte. Wherever she was, he assumed it must be out of reach, because she was represented by an automatic message. As he listened for Hugh and then for Ellen, his concentration felt dangerously close to blotting out his surroundings. Worse still, it seemed to have blotted out his family. All three were as silent as packed earth.