Thieving Fear (30 page)

The room was almost as bare as its neighbour. A single item occupied the carpetless floor in front of the secretively curtained window. Until she succeeded in steadying the flashlight Charlotte took it for a cage; it had bars on all sides and across the top. As their shadowy antics subsided she began to distinguish what the bars enclosed: a pillow, a small tangled blanket incongruously printed with fairies emerging from flowers, a contorted shape under the blanket. Just the upper portion of the withered head was visible, which was more than enough. The eyes peering at her across the pillow were far too large. Even if they were empty sockets they were twice the size they ought to be in proportion with the small head, and wasn't there movement in their depths? Perhaps only the light was troubling their shrunken contents; perhaps shadows were making the shrivelled form appear to be struggling feebly to raise its head and writhe out from under the blanket. All the same, Charlotte backed out of that room faster still and ensured the door was shut tight, however unlikely it seemed that anything could escape the cage that was a cot.

Had its tenant been bred for some arcane purpose? Its deformity seemed too extreme to be accidental. She refrained from thinking how it might have been used or intended to be; there was enough to dread in the prospect of exploring further. 'Ellen,' she appealed. Any sound from her cousin might have helped her feel less alone, but she heard none.

She was retrieving her handbag from beside the ladder when she realised that she didn't want to be encumbered on the stairs, the corner of which was entirely too blind. Her anger at having to leave the bag lent her the courage to venture downwards. As she reached the bend she lifted the spade like an axe, but below her were only more stairs. They or the carpet brown as clay yielded underfoot as she paced down to the middle floor.

It contained another four rooms. Those that would have faced the river and Wales were open. Clay appeared to press itself more heavily against the window of the first room as the flashlight beam glared on the panes. Otherwise the room was walled with bookshelves, and piles of old books squatted on the floor, while a fat tome sprawled open on a reading stand in front of a leathery chair at the window. Charlotte might have fancied that the reader was about to return, and neither the impression nor the illustration on the left-hand page – a diabolically gleeful face whose eyes weren't opening so much as forming out of the pallid flesh – encouraged her to linger once she'd seen that Ellen could be nowhere in the room.

There was more sense of a presence in the adjoining room. A desk that looked too bulky to have been carried upstairs stood in front of the window. Another black chair, its leather sagging like senile flesh, was turned half to the doorway as if its occupant had heard Charlotte and leaped to ambush her. She made herself step forwards to check that Ellen wasn't hiding out of sight from the doorway. There were only shelves as tall as the ceiling. They and the ones on the other walls were heaped with papers inscribed, she guessed from the one that was pricking up its corners on the desk, in a spidery introverted hand. Even more than its neighbour, the room smelled of old paper as well as damp earth, so thickly that she choked. The clay at the window was reminding her how much deeper she was buried. 'Ellen,' she called, which didn't save her from having to open the door opposite. At once she was blinded by the light shone into her eyes by the figure in the room.

Instinctively she raised the flashlight and her weapon, and so did the imitator. She had to let the beam sink to be mimicked, by which time she'd identified her own reflection. What about the crowds of dimmer silhouettes brandishing feebler lights on either side? They were Charlotte too. All four walls of the room were mirrors, and she suspected that the back of the door was one, which would turn the entire room into a mirror once it was shut. She had the sudden terrible notion that Ellen was cowering in a corner, trapped by her aversion to seeing herself. Charlotte had to take several increasingly reluctant paces forwards to be certain Ellen wasn't there. It wasn't just that the multiplied dazzle made it hard to see; her first step had revealed that the floor and ceiling were also mirrors. Advancing into the room felt like setting out across a void peopled with a multitude of reproductions of herself, and she thought the inventor might have imagined he was creating a universe in his own image. Or was there more to it? Although she'd halted, she seemed to glimpse movement that couldn't be wholly ascribed to the nervous swaying of the countless lights. In the black distance beyond her most minuscule images, had something grown restless? She could imagine that it was attracted by the light or by her arrival. It appeared to be taking vast dark shape in the process of closing around her from every side, as if she were already in its mouth or paw or some monstrously unidentifiable part of it. All at once she was terrified that the door was about to shut behind her, rendering the void complete. Wasn't it inching towards its frame? Even if this was an illusion produced by the wavering of all the lights, she headed for the doorway so fast that she almost slipped on the glass floor and fell into the arms of her inverted self. The swollen carpet gave her back some equilibrium, and she slammed the door with such force that she might have hoped to hear the mirrors shatter. Before the episode could discourage her from proceeding, she hurried to the next room and shoved the door wide.

Her first impression was that the room was packed with soil, but the flashlight showed that the darkness wasn't quite so solid, although sufficiently thick to absorb much of the beam. The light grew dimmer as it crossed the threshold and petered out towards the middle of the room. The thought that Ellen could be submerged in the depths of the blackness was so dismaying that Charlotte was hardly aware of leaning through the doorway. 'Ellen,' she shouted as if her voice had to penetrate the medium that filled the room.

In a moment, as she swung the flashlight beam from side to side in an attempt to illuminate the limits of the room, she felt the blackness settle on her face and hands. Even though it was less substantial than cobwebs laden with soot, those were the sensations it resembled, and it was as cold as water too deep for the sun to reach. These weren't the only reasons why Charlotte almost dropped the flashlight and the spade. She'd heard Ellen moan, but not in the room. Otherwise she would have been unable to judge whether Ellen was lost in the blackness, which was absorbing the flashlight beam so fast that it had shrunk to the length of her arm.

The medium seemed greedy to engulf not just the light but her. She slashed at it with the spade while she backed out of the room, and almost let the spade slip out of her grasp as she clutched at the doorknob. Having dragged the door shut, which took more effort than she'd used to open it, she dashed for the stairs. Her retreat was so instinctive that she'd reached the next bend before she remembered why she was descending. 'Ellen, I'm coming,' she promised.

While her cousin didn't answer, perhaps noises did. They were beyond the stairs and the shakily illuminated section of the ground-floor hall the staircase framed. Although they were barely audible, whether by intention or because there was so little to them, they were footsteps. They sounded disconcertingly uncertain of themselves, but they were approaching. In a moment Charlotte felt less sure of this, though she couldn't judge whether they had turned aside or were employing more stealth. 'Ellen?' she hoped aloud.

The footsteps halted, and she imagined someone waiting for her just around the corner in the dark. She was no longer convinced it was Ellen, not least because an aspect of the house had at last become apparent to her: she hadn't seen a single light or even a fitting for one. Who could have lived in so much darkness? Who still could? Ellen was somewhere below, and Charlotte ran down the last flight of stairs to have done with any other confrontation. As she left them she jerked the flashlight up as if the beam rather than the spade were her defence.

The hall was deserted except for shadows that fled in all directions to lurk wherever there was concealment. Of the six doors leading off the hall, the broad front entrance seized her attention first, if only because the thought of opening it to let in a landslide reminded her how thoroughly she was buried. The door under the stairs must belong to a cellar, which she very much hoped she wouldn't have to enter; the whole house felt far too reminiscent of a basement, and smelled like one too. Instead she made for the closer of the open doors, the one at the front of the building. As the light found it she saw that it wasn't simply open; it was held that way by the mass that filled the doorway if not the entire room.

Perhaps the room had been a conservatory, unless some kind of underground growth had broken through the window. The tangle of vegetation was so convoluted that its elements were beyond separating. She could easily imagine that different varieties of withered leaves and shrivelled flowers were sprouting from the same plant. Had the owner of the house tried to create a new species for some purpose? Whatever had grown in the room was dead now, possibly of uncontrolled luxuriance, and no insects were swarming in the mass of sunless pullulation, just shadows. At least she could be certain Ellen wasn't in the room. She wished she could have closed it before crossing the hall to the other open room.

It was just a room, she did her best to think as the light ranged around it, but its very emptiness seemed ominous. It was so bare that it didn't even have a window, let alone a carpet, and she was unable to determine the colour of the walls. She only had to lean through the doorway in case Ellen was hiding just inside, and she didn't know why she should hope so fervently that Ellen wasn't. 'Ellen,' she called, though it felt more like a prayer. Having heard no answer, she ducked into the room.

The shapeless hulk that lurched at her was yet more darkness, brought down from the ceiling by the movement of the light. That wasn't why she gasped with all her breath. She saw at once that Ellen was elsewhere, but the instant gave whatever was in the room the chance to touch her. Her skin began to crawl as if insects were hatching under her clothes, or perhaps not even as if, since she felt the twitching of feelers and the fumbling of many legs. Instinctively she knew that these were the least of the delights the room had in store. Now that she'd been seized she could only stumble forwards to discover what else was waiting, and she wasn't surprised to hear Ellen groaning on her behalf.

But it wasn't on her behalf, because it was in another room. Ellen was still alone and in distress. The thought jerked Charlotte's head up, back into the hall. If the sensation of being infested didn't entirely vanish, at least it felt like someone else's nightmare that was trying to invade her. It had to be less important than her cousin, and she managed to leave it behind as she hurried to the room beyond the entrance to the cellar. Surely Ellen needn't be down there. Surely Charlotte would find her by opening the next door.

It led to a dining-room. Paintings that she preferred not to examine, having glimpsed that they were portraits or self-portraits of a gaunt man with unpleasantly prominent eyes, watched over both sides of a long black wooden table, at the far end of which stood a solitary chair. Someone was sitting on it or, more accurately, perched. Charlotte sucked in a breath that emerged as a word while the flashlight beam steadied. 'Ellen.'

She was lying face down at the table, arms outstretched, hands splayed on the wood. She didn't stir in response to Charlotte's voice, and only a feeble movement of her blouse proved she was breathing. None of the portraits widened their eyes to watch Charlotte venture along the room; that was just an effect of the light, which caught the unnaturally rounded eyes and made them glisten like ice. 'It's me, Ellen. I'm here now,' Charlotte said and, having propped the spade against the table well within reach, took her cousin's right hand.

At least, she tried. It was pressed flat against the wood. If anything, Ellen flattened it harder, and Charlotte was afraid that her cousin was doing the same to her face, as if she wanted to erase it and all sense of herself. Charlotte opened her mouth, but the sound she uttered was wordless and by no means comforting. A portrait had thrust its head forwards to peer at them.

All of its companions on the left-hand wall appeared to widen their bulging whitish eyes in glee as Charlotte swung the beam towards them, so wildly that the flashlight almost flew out of her hand. She'd grabbed the spade before she realised that the frame out of which the face had peered was lower on the wall than the portraits to either side. In another moment she saw it was a service hatch. Beyond it were a kitchen and a revival of the footsteps she'd heard from the stairs. As she made herself advance around the table and past Ellen to look through the hatch, a dark bulk crept out of hiding behind a massive iron kitchen range while the light glared back from a window walled up with clay. A figure was wandering around another table attended by a single chair. He was dodging back and forth as if led by his frantic shadow. 'Hugh,' Charlotte said.

He didn't react, and she had to wait until he strayed towards the hatch again before she could see his face. It looked pinched around a desperate obsession. His eyes were fixed beyond recognising her, perhaps even beyond sensing anyone was there. Perhaps he was conscious only of the light that was showing him his way or rather demonstrating that he couldn't find it – and then another thought appalled Charlotte. How had he and Ellen found their way down the lightless house? There was no sign of a flashlight except for hers.

They must have been shown the route or led through it, and she couldn't doubt who their guide had been. 'Where is he?' she blurted.

Hugh might not have heard. He didn't falter in his wandering, which had begun to remind her of the kind of mechanical toy that recoiled whenever it encountered an obstacle. She repeated the question to Ellen, hardly expecting an answer. When her cousin stayed prone and mute Charlotte saw she was as locked into her obsession as Hugh. They were out of her reach, and she'd spoken in a last pitiful attempt to make contact. She already knew the answer.