Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller (30 page)

“Don’t you believe me?” Desperation was building up in her. “
Don’t you believe me?
”

“Calm down, Ruby, please, it’s no good for you. Please don’t get excited…”

She turned away, her arms flailing. “You stupid bastard!” she growled. “You stupid, stupid bastard! Will you never change? What is it with you?”

I could see her getting more and more worked up, and wondered whether or not to call for Max or Helen. I looked to the door with this desperate thought in mind, but she caught me by the arms and stared me full in the face. “Listen to me, Collie, if I don’t get you off this island you’re dead, understand? Dead. Max will kill you.”

I backed away, fighting her grip, flashing a glance at the door again, but the next second her face was there, white and bobbing before me like a full Moon. “Ruby, be reasonable, why on earth should – ”

“Come with me,” she said, cutting me short.

“I don’t think…”

“That’s right, you never did. Come with me.”

She tugged fiercely at my arm and yanked me to the door. Once outside my room I planned to get help. I didn’t like the look of this one bit. I grabbed my dressing gown on the way out and threaded my arms into it as she pulled me onto the landing. All was quiet, and save for the sounds of our breathing and the heavy ticking of an unseen clock the silence and the night lay over everything like a padded quilt. And any notion I harboured of giving the alarm melted away. The feel of her hand. It had been so long. I followed meekly like a lapdog.

We padded silently down the stairs, her head snapping this way and that, bobbing up and down, searching energetically as we descended. Her fingers tightened, and her nails dug into my hand. “Ruby…” I began.

She turned suddenly, holding her finger straight and rigid at her lips, her eyes fierce. “He might be anywhere.”

“Max?”

“No. You’ve seen him. You know.”

“The security guard?”

“He’s as regular as clockwork, shouldn’t come around here until another hour or so. But you never know. They’ve been told to watch out for me.”

“Oh really! They’re there just to keep an eye out for… ”

She dug her nails in deeper, and I saw the white ribbon of her teeth lustrous in the gloom. “For what, Philip?” she snarled. “Ram-raiders?” Her eyes rolled in their sockets like two snooker balls.

At that moment I was convinced she was indeed mad. And I guess I was too; standing there at God only knew what time of night or morning, on the stairs in my dressing gown clutching the hand of my ex-wife in a castle on an island. I nodded to her sheepishly and her grip lessened. “Where are you taking me?”

“Just keep quiet.”

We moved on at a pace, all the way to the foot of the grand staircase, through many doors and into many darkened rooms, eventually entering a part of the place that I’d never seen before. Ruby opened a door and a cold draught whipped out from what was obviously a corridor beyond, except that it was a black, fathomless pit; the air carried with it the stench of age and corruption, of damp and mould, and I was reminded of Connie’s mausoleum. She fumbled around in the dark and the next moment flicked on a torch, which lit up an old bedside cabinet that had obviously housed it.

I supposed we were at the back of the building, once the servants’ quarters, because the torch revealed a corridor that was windowless, lacking entirely in decoration with only coarse wooden boards at our feet. At irregular intervals down the corridor’s length was the discarded junk of generations; packing crates, old leather suitcases, a cast iron bed in pieces, a rocking horse whose enamel eye seemed to blink suspiciously in the passing light of the torch, and a pile of books stacked against a wall and resembling some ancient crumbling tower. And all coated in a uniform grey skin of dust and powdered plaster.

She closed the door behind us, sealing us in. “We can talk here,” her voice coming out in soft spurts. “They don’t come here often. No one does. It’s been forgotten, like me.”

I looked down the corridor to where her torch beam stroked a chest of drawers on top of which stood a glass case; an owl stared back at us from its wooden perch, immobile, fixed forever in a triumphant, wide-winged pose, and pinned beneath it’s painted talons was a helpless mouse. I shuddered at the crude taxidermy. “I’m not surprised,” I said. “Who’d want to come here? More to the point, why have
we
come here?”

“They think the tablets work,” she said, suddenly excited. “They never did. Not once. I pretended to sleep. They think I’m asleep now. Helpless, docile. Remember how sleeping tablets never used to work for me? Remember that?”

“What are we doing here?”

“I want to show you something. Then you’ll believe me.”

“Of course I believe you!” I said.

“Don’t do that, Philip. Don’t patronise me. You’re in danger here. He won’t let you leave.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Did he tell you I was mad?”

I closed my mouth, my straight lips revealing more than I’d care to reveal. “He said you had an illness, yes…”

“Bastard!” she hissed. And then she was off again, flitting ahead with me trying to keep up, slaloming around obstacles, once or twice crashing my shin against something unseen and letting out strangled gasps of pain. She opened a door at the corridor’s end and we were faced with a flight of stairs that appeared to extend into the blackness of the night sky itself. “Careful of the boards, they’re rotten,” she warned. “Everything here’s rotten.”

I followed like a moth to the flame of her torch. We spiralled upwards. And as we reached the upper parts of the building the sound of the wind became stronger as if the attic rooms above us housed the wailing beast itself. “Why did you marry him, Ruby?” I asked. She stopped dead. “Did you love him?”

Her breathing was deep, rhythmical. “Once, yes.”

“Did you love him as much as you once…”

“As much as I once loved you?” She put a hand to her temple, rubbing the skin. “No. Never that much.”

I hesitated and she sensed my agitation, coming back down the stairs to me, her finger touching my cheek. “And when we were together, did you love him then?” My tone was frosty. “Did you regret marrying me, wanting him all along, is that it?”

“No! Never that!” She sighed, her head shaking. “I married him because he was so much
like
you, like the Philip I used to know. He seemed to be everything you had been. He fooled me. And I fooled myself. There were things I should have seen, even back then, even when we were nothing but kids, yet my own selfish need to be happy made me blind to them. But we’ve no time for this, Philip,” she groaned, pointing the torch at the top of the stairs and lighting up a grey door that looked as if it hadn’t had a lick of paint for generations. “Later. I’ll tell you later. I have to show you something, and then you can call me mad all you like. Please, Philip! Hurry!”

She paused at the door, signalling me to be silent, and she pressed her ear to the scarred wood, finally trying the handle and gingerly pushing the door open a fraction. “This is one of the doors through which the servants serviced the upper rooms. There are others, but most of them have been sealed or padlocked. What I want to show you is just along this corridor. I discovered it quite by accident. Max didn’t want me coming into this part of the building at all. In fact he stationed men here occasionally to make sure I kept away. Politely, of course. Said it was dangerous, walls likely to come crashing down, that kind of thing. I believed them all at first, until I stumbled on this back route to the upper chambers. See for yourself, everything looks perfectly sound.”

And so it did. The torch lit up carpeted boards, bright wallpaper, recently applied paint, and even the odd-picture or two. “So what’s the big deal? Why keep you away?” She clearly knew I was still more than a little sceptical, and something of the old Ruby flashed into her eyes and flagged her frustration of me. I wanted to take her and kiss her, to tell her I still loved her, had never ceased to love her; but the moment sped by and was lost.

“Max always envied you, do you know that?” she said quietly.

I shook my head. “Never. It was always the other way around. Max had everything. Correction, Max has
got
everything, including my wife. It was always the same.”

“You’ve got it all wrong, Philip. Let me show you…” We padded down the corridor, stopping before yet another door, and she reached into her slipper and produced a small key which she’d stuffed into the toe. “Max keeps it locked, but most of the doors up here are opened with just a single key, and this one, along with a bunch of others, I found hanging from a peg on a wall in the old servants’ quarters where it’s probably been for the best part of a century. All the rooms along this stretch are empty except for a few pieces of junk. I know because I’ve tried every one out of curiosity. They’re all empty except for this one. This is Max’s room. Only it’s not his room…”

“You’re talking in riddles, Ruby…”

She pushed open the door and held her hand out for me to take the lead. Warily, I glanced at her as I passed. “Take this,” she said, handing me the torch.

At first I didn’t notice anything unusual. The thin torch beam lit up a neatly made bed, a wardrobe, curtains hanging at a window. Then I was drawn to a pair of slippers at the foot of the bed, and I let the beam linger on them for a while, something disquieting seeping into my brain. “Jesus!” I gasped when it hit me, almost making me drop the torch. I ran the beam across the room again, this way and that, and it became evident, to my horror, that here was
my
own
bedroom.

The very same room that I’d occupied as a child and as a young adult.

In fact I might have been at home, and mother might have just finished making the bed, so perfect was the resemblance. Even down to the slippers.
My
slippers. Placed how
I’d
always placed them. There was even a
Slade
poster on the wall, very much like my own. And the wallpaper…

“Christ!” I said. “What’s going on?” But I didn’t wait for an answer. Instead I went to the wardrobe and tugged at the door. It squeaked open.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I didn’t answer, but instead I fumbled around in the dark at the bottom of the wardrobe till my fingers rapped against something. I pulled it out slowly, into the beam of the torch that now lay on the carpet.

“What is it?” Ruby said, bending down to me.

I laughed, but it held no humour. “It’s a shoebox,” I replied. “A bloody shoebox.”

I lifted off the lid and tentatively reached in and lifted out a plastic bag, holding it for Ruby to see. She backed away as if she knew the contents. But that was impossible, because only Max and I knew what it was.

“It’s a dead rat,” I said.

And I knew then that Max was indeed insane.

*  *  *  *

They gave him a wristwatch and a tin of biscuits when he retired, which was appropriate, he thought, given his renowned punctuality and his love of a biscuit dipped in tea. He liked to think they put a lot of thought into the gifts, but he‘d contributed to just the same a couple of years previously when old Baker retired, and that cantankerous old pedant had been neither punctual nor partial to biscuits.

All the same, he loved the watch and wore it every day, the same watch that silently informed him he might as well pack in his gardening and fix himself something to eat, because it was getting dark and dropping cooler and his knees would suffer for it if he didn’t.

As he stowed away his gardening gloves and trowel he thought back to his days in the classroom, and though he didn’t miss them as much as he thought he would, he missed having something to pad out his days. There were times lately he woke up early in the morning – because he’d found it difficult to break the rising habits of a lifetime – and lay there on his back contemplating a row of tedious hours waiting to be occupied. They’d always planned to fill the hours together, Jean and he, had all sorts of schemes lined up for the time when work didn’t soak up their days and energies; they were going to join a ramblers’ club, take in the Yorkshire Dales or tramp over Derbyshire. The sad thing was the only time he really got out and did any real walking was to visit the shops or Jean’s grave.

He slipped his feet out of his old mud-caked shoes and banged the aged Hush Puppies against the wall to free them of dirt. Perhaps the action was more violent than it needed to be. But that was only a sign of his frustration.

Early retirement. Their suggestion, not his. Losing it, that’s what he’d overheard, that’s what they implied. Not good for the school. These were different days; you know, couldn’t go around hitting kids like in the old times, even if they deserved it. Time to call it a day. They understood what it must have been like, losing Jean, how it affects a person, having to let go of someone that close. You’ve done a good job at the school all these years so quit while you’re ahead, that’s what they were saying. Quit before you do something else stupid.

The affair with the Stone kid had finally done it, and he knew he’d been lucky not to have the police dragged into it. What a mess. It was in the local papers though, and what they wrote didn’t paint a very good picture of him. Bad reflection on the school, too, if the headmaster and the board of governors were to be believed. They knew what the Stone kid was like, and his mother, but that didn’t matter one bit, not when it came to the crunch, and he was well aware that there were some in the staff room who’d be glad to see the back of him. He wouldn’t mind betting they were quick off the blocks to offer their ten-penneth to the whole proceedings.

So they gave him his watch and a tin of Jacobs creams and breathed a unified sigh of relief. Another piece of dead wood hacked away.

The house was in darkness, and the sixty-watt bulbs did little to hold it back, but it did have the effect of making the butter on his bread look yellowier, more appetising. Two hours later he turned off all the lights and made his way up the stairs to bed, but not before throwing a couple of sleeping tablets down his throat in what had become a nightly ritual. Even the nights were getting longer, he thought, as if they were trying to compete with the days. Soon he’d not sleep at all, day and night joining and he’d have yet more hours to try and fill, his entire life eventually becoming one protracted and wearisome hour.

He sat in bed, the room in darkness, and he lit one cigarette after another till the effects of the tablets were felt and his eyelids began to grow heavy. He stubbed out the last cigarette half smoked on the ashtray at the side of his bed, and lay there looking up at the black expanse that was the ceiling, his thoughts melding till they were a pleasant but absurd stew of ideas and imaginings.

And in between the bubblings of a brain slipping into unconsciousness he heard the creak of the bedroom door, and he forced open an eyelid to search out the lighter oblong of the doorway and the shadow that flitted in and out of his vision. It became fused with the picture of Jean and he as they walked on top of Mam Tor in Derbyshire, as if it was the replaying of a vivid memory that couldn’t possibly be a memory, because they’d never been there, she smiling from beside the pile of rocks that marked the summit. She was waving, and he waved back, or at least he did in his mind, for his arms were lying motionless and useless on the sheets. He ran to her and held her around her slim waist, for she was twenty years old again, and so was he, and he kissed her on her cold lips. She pulled away, held out a packet of cigarettes for him and he took one out and put it in his mouth. She then produced a box of matches, from where he didn’t know, and she struck one.

His eyelids heaved open for a moment. The sound had not been in the dream but there beside him. Yet Jean was calling him and his eyes closed in spite of a sense of urgency rapping at his fogged mind, and he ran to join her again. There was the smell of the struck match strong and sharp in his nostrils, and for another instant he was awake yet again and staring at the shadow that hovered over him and the dancing sphere of light – a flame – that floated in the dark. But Jean called and this time he didn’t fight sleep and the dream of his wife; he wanted to wallow in its warmth.

But another familiar smell reached him. That of burning, and suddenly all around him the heather and grass was on fire, the flames licking around Jean’s ankles. She caught fire as easily as if she’d been a bundle of dry tinder. She stood there like a human torch. He coughed in his dream, choking on the rolling pall of smoke, and knew also that he coughed in real life, because the pain he was feeling was forcing his mind to the surface of consciousness. But the tablets held him there, just under, like a hand covered in a glove of soft kid leather, and the thought flickered through his mind that he would never wake again and so he lay on his back contemplating the endless hours that stretched out behind him and the thought that there wouldn’t be any more in front. It wasn’t a terrifying thought, as one might suppose, he mused. In a way he was glad there would be no more hours. He’d had enough of them.

*  *  *  *