Candlenight (14 page)

   
"Listen," he'd shouted
through the open window, "why don't I come round, open the back
door?"

   
"Good thinking," said
Giles. "Only, don't shout, all right? We don't want to advertise
ourselves."

   
Berry threw the screwdriver out
to Giles and carefully closed the window.

   
"Always knew I could've
made it in the CIA," he said aloud, and was surprised at how firm his
voice sounded in here. You expected an echo in an empty house, but this was acoustically
very tight, like a recording studio. He looked up, saw heavy oak beams and more
beams sunk into the walls. That was it: timber-framing, low ceilings. A vacuum
for sound.

   
Also, it wasn't an empty house.
Much of the furniture, it appeared, was still here.

   
He looked around. The kitchen,
right? It was quite small. Probably all cottage kitchens were small when this
place was built back in the—when, 1800s, 1700s . . . earlier?
Whenever, no dinner parties in those days. Was there going to be room here for
the dishwasher, the freezer, the microwave oven and all the other sophisticated
stuff he was
pretty sure Giles and Claire must possess?

   
Berry chuckled, which was a
very intimate sound in here. He stifled it.

   
In one corner he could see a
big Aga-type stove, the only substantial piece of the twentieth century, if you
didn't count the faucets and the electric light, which was just a bulb with a
white porcelain shade shaped like a plant pot.

   
There were two doors. He opened
one and found some kind of storeroom or scullery. He hit his knee against a
stack of shelves, still loaded with provisions. A packet fell off and he caught
it. Paxo sage and onion stuffing. Judge Rhys's concession to haute cuisine?

   
The other door led him into a
dim hallway, low ceiling, beams black and sagging. He could have used some
light in here, but the power wouldn't be connected. The passage led straight
through to the front of the house and ended at the front door and some narrow
stairs. So which way was the back entrance? There were more doors on either
side of him. so he tried one and found himself in a room where the light was
rationed by drawn curtains. The judge's study.

   
"Christ." Berry said.

   
It could have been a homely
room: fireplace, book-lined walls, low ceiling with beams. Place where you
could come and put your feet up. have a TV dinner, glass or two of beer. Warm
your ass by the fire.

   
Except the fireplace was
Victorian, an ugly iron thing, cold and dead, and the black beams seemed to
press down like the fingers of a gloved hand.

   
And the books. Well, as Berry
saw it, there were basically two kinds of books. There were warm, friendly
books with bright dust-jackets that gave you the come-on, brought a
room alive.

   
And there were books like
these.

   
Thousands of them. The shelves
ran floor-to-ceiling, taking up most of two walls, dark oak shelves of dark old
books, heavy, black-spined books. The kind of books you felt it would be a
breach of protocol to take down without you were wearing a tie.

   
It was a coldly austere room,
this study, like . . . what? Some old-fashioned classroom? Air of discipline.
Severity.

   
The window, quite small, was
set uncommonly high in the wall, faded grey curtains pulled across as if for a
passing funeral. Opposite the window was a huge old desk, like a
monument; behind it a chair, thronelike, with a tall back and carved spindles.
Heavy, dour, forbidding.

   
No, not a classroom. Berry
thought suddenly. A courtroom. It's like a very small courtroom. Is this what
happens when old judges retire and have no lowlife scum to send to jail anymore?
They have to bring with them that ambience of old-fashioned judicial disdain?

   
Above the fireplace was a
single picture, a framed photograph of what he took, at first, to be a
gathering of the Ku Klux Klan, everybody in long white robes. Then underneath
he saw the words
Eisteddfod Genedlaethol 1963
.
Ah. the annual Welsh festival of poetry and song and stuff where all the head guys
dressed up like Druids. Was Judge Rhys one of the men in white?

   
Berry stood in the middle of
the floor, which was stone-flagged, a single rug beneath his feet, on it a
threadbare red dragon spitting faded fire.

   
He hesitated, then crossed to
the shelves and pulled down one obese volume, expecting a small dust storm. It
didn't happen. Even the damn books were still being cared for. In
case the judge came back from the grave and had nothing to read?

   
When that thought— a typically
trivial, facetious thought— occurred to Berry Morelli, he felt a chill that
came and went, like the door of a freezer opening and closing with a hiss. A cold
hiss, like the hiss in ice . . .
iiiiiice
.
Did he hear that, or did he imagine it?

   
He opened the book, and that
hissed too, tissue-thin pages whispering secrets denied to him . . . because
every word was Welsh. He quickly pulled down three more fat, black books at
random—and they were all in Welsh too. Hard to imagine so many books being
published in a language spoken by so few. But then it was, according to Giles, supposed
to be the oldest language in Europe. And these were real old books.

   
As he returned the book to the
shelf, he fell suddenly guilty. And furtive, like a kid who'd left sticky
fingermarks on the school Bible. He thought, somebody's watching, and he spun
around and there was nobody. But in his mind the freezer door opened and closed
again. With a hiss . .
.iiiiice
. . .

   
It was darker, too, he was sure
the air itself had got darker. And yet there was a sunset out there (so why are
the damn curtains washed with grey?)

   
Berry's gaze travelled across
the patchy gloom, from the ranked books, to the drab lumps of furniture, to the
picture of the procession of men in white. He felt the weight of
something old and hallowed.

   
He didn't care for it.

   
In the room, and yet beyond the
room, he felt kind of a coiled malice. And the air was too thick. How could the
air be thick in a room with no dust?

   
The air came in shifting shades
of black and grey and a poisonous off-white, like dirty milk. And it hissed,
short gasps, like bellows. He felt, with an astonishing wrench of panic, that
if he stayed in here much longer. Judge Thomas Rhys would materialise, fully robed,
in the tall gothic chair, his eyes giving off dull heat, a bony finger
pointing, trembling with a focused fury.

   
"
Sice!"
he'd breathe, the word coming out in a short, hideous rasp,
like a cobra rearing to strike.

   
And the air hissed, the bellows,
the freezer door opening and closing. The air said, "
SICE!"

   
"Fuck this," Berry
said, suddenly very scared. He stepped back into the hallway and closed the
door of the study firmly behind him. then backed off, afraid to look away in case
it should open by itself, releasing the air, the wafting hate.

Chapter XVII

The door hung ajar.

   
Aled Gruffydd stepped back
quickly, as if afraid something would reach out and snatch him inside.

   
"I will not go in there
with you," he said. "You do understand?"

   
The tall man with white hair
only smiled.

   
"Did not happen immediately,
see," Aled said. "Quiet it was, for more than three days after Dai
took the Englishman's body away."

   
It was gloomy on the landing,
the day closing down.

   
"We cleaned out the room
and stripped the bed," Aled said. Gwenllian said to bum the sheets, but I
said no, isn't as if he had anything contagious."

   
The tall man looked at the
opening and did not move. He was very thin and his greasy suit hung like leaves
blackened by a sudden overnight frost.

   
"So she took off the sheets
for washing and brought clean ones and put them on the bed. And as she is tucking
in the sheets, it flew off the bedside table. The vase. She had sweet peas in
it, to sweeten the air, see."

   
The white-haired man silently
put out a forefinger to the door but did not quite touch it.

   
"Flew off the table, flew
within an inch of Gwenllian's head. Smashed into the wall. Gwen came tearing
down the stairs, almost falling over herself."

   
Aled looked over his shoulder,
down the stairs. His companion said, "And then?"

   
"I came back with her and
we picked up the pieces of the vase and the flowers. All quiet. No disturbance.
I would not doubt her, though. I shut the door and locked it, and we came
downstairs and did not go in again until this morning."

   
With a small coughing sound,
the bedroom door moved inwards, revealing a slice of while wall. Aled recoiled.
   
"There—can you smell it?"

   
The Reverend Elias ap Siencyn
remained motionless. His pale eyes did not blink. His long nose did not twitch
at the stench, which included, among other odours, the smell of hot decay.

   
"We have not been in
since." Aled said. "We've left it the way we found it this
morning."

   
"Only this room? He has not
come to you in the night? Or to Gwenllian?"

   
Aled gripped the banister.
"Oh, good God." He was shaking at the thought. "No. Nothing like
that."

   
"I doubt if he knows, you
see." the rector said. He had a surprisingly high voice, though with a
penetrating pitch, like organ pipes. "Sometimes it takes quite some while
before
they can fully accept their condition."

   
"I don't want him,
Reverend. I don't want him here." Aled tried to make a joke of it.
"Not as if he's paying me now, is it?"

   
The rector had not taken his
eyes from the door. "Tell me again. What you found."

   
"Oh Christ—sorry Reverend.
But can't you smell it?"
   
"Bodily fluids?"

   
"Shit, Reverend. And the
other stuff. Slime. Mucus. All over the sheets. Soaked-in, dried stiff. And
splattered on the walls. Like those prisoners in Ireland did to their
cells."

   
"All right, Aled. It's
clear this spirit is disturbed and angry and frustrated. The English think they
have a right to know everything; lngley is dead and still knows
nothing
. His spirit is unsatisfied and
so it wants, pathetically, to register a protest. But it's frightened, too—more
frightened. perhaps, than when it died. It's a week, you say. since he left us?"

   
"A week ago tonight.
Exactly."

   
"Very well. I may need
assistance. Perhaps you could fetch Mrs. Dafis. Or Buddug Morgan from the
farm."

   
"Yes indeed." Aled
said, clearly glad to have an excuse to go outside. He went downstairs very
rapidly, but at the bottom he turned and shouted back. "I swear to God, I locked
the door! I put the key in the glass with the others. In the bar, see. I swear
to God, nobody could get in."
   
"Aled, I
believe
you."

   
"So how can it be? He's
dead,
Rector. Dead and gone. I know
there are things the dead can do, but this . . . How can it be?"

   
"Because," said the
Reverend Elias ap Siencyn, "he cannot adjust. And he cannot contain his
fear and his—I don't know, there is something else."

   
With a single finger he pushed
open the door.

   
"Also," he said quietly,
when Aled had gone, "like others of his race, he is vermin. Vermin make a
mess."

   
The rector walked into the
bedroom and looked around.

   
The sheets and the walls were
spotless. Whatever Aled had seen was gone. But the stink remained. The stink
was obnoxious, and carried a sense of fear and pain and suffering. As well as
deep frustration, a helpless rage and a terrible confusion.

   
"Alien contaminant,"
he muttered to himself, a fragment of an old verse, "a foul disease now
chokes the oakwood."

   
He stood at the foot of the bed
and spoke, with the clarity and resonance of the First words in a sermon.