Dark Dance (43 page)

On the landing she paused. All was quiet. The house murmured, muttered to itself. The sea sounded.

In their nests the Scarabae kept close.

Down in the hall all the lamps burned, the ruby lamp, the lights of the drawing room.

Rachaela went into the drawing room, the dining room.

She opened wide the door to the conservatory, and so the door to the garden.

The air was full of scent, roses and jasmine and the salt of the ocean. She experienced a sudden tearing in her, nostalgia for something soon to be past. She had never truly understood what she felt for this house.

The yew was very black. The cat lay beneath, morphing itself into putrescence and bone. And out there, Anna and Dorian and Peter, Alice and Sylvian, rocked in the tide.

And behind her in the tower, Adamus.

Adamus.

Her feet on the lawn, she turned and stared towards the cone of the tower’s roof, and in that second a great chord of sound was struck, as if upon her own body, shivering up from her soles into her spleen, her heart and cranium.

It was like a metaphysical note, like the breaking string in
The Cherry Orchard
. Did it likewise portend some loss, some irreversible cruelty of fate—

Rachaela threw off the cloak of sensation which had settled bat-like upon her.

She ran back into the house, across the rooms, the hall, and quickly climbed the stair.

On the landing she paused again. Again she heard only the silence of faint noises.

She walked to her door and opened it and Ruth was gone.

There was only one place that Ruth would go. Into the tower. To Adamus.

To Ruth it had not counted, his revulsion and his violence. They were irrelevant. Only seeing him mattered.

Rachaela tried to control her galloping pulse, her terror. After all, Ruth would be with him now. What, what would happen, between them?

She had run to the room, now she flew, along the landing, through the annexe, down the stair. Had the door been locked, and Ruth left waiting at the door? But Ruth was not there. And the door—stood ajar.

Rachaela entered. There was light in the room above.

She climbed sluggishly now, as if a boulder were on her back.

She came to the door, and into the doorway, and looked through.

Ruth was crouching in the middle of the room, by a table with a stand of candles that lit her as if purposely. She was quite still, her hands drawn up under her chin, and her black hair falling to the floor. She did not turn to look at Rachaela. All her attention was caught.

From a beam above the piano something dark was hanging, moving slightly to and fro. It seemed to have no form, but as it moved, there was a pale shape, a sort of face, unrecognizable, dangling off the neck from a short black cord.

His feet had struck the piano as the stool went over. That had been the sound Rachaela heard.

He hung there formlessly, like a cocoon, swinging slightly, but all the time more heavily and more slowly.

Ruth moved. She stood up.

Ts he dead?’ she said in a high thin voice.

Rachaela tried to speak. And no words came.

‘I think he’s dead,’ said Ruth.

And she hiccuped loudly, and covered her mouth in fear.

Rachaela tried to go forward, but she could not take a step.

‘Adam,’ said Ruth. She picked up the candle-branch and went closer to the hanging, swinging thing. She lifted the candles up to see. Then she screamed. She screamed continuously, and the horrible spiked soprano bleats went through Rachaela’s brain. She must make Ruth stop screaming. She took a step forward, and Ruth lifted the candles and touched them to the hanged man, and rivulets of light ran over him. He was alive with fire.

‘No
—’ Rachaela floundered in the slough of poisoned air, and Ruth turned to her the face of a demon.

‘We burn our dead,’ said Ruth.

And she flung the candles round the room like flaming flowers.

The curtains went up in a fountain of fire, the chairs beside the hearth began to burn.

Ruth still had one candle. She darted at Rachaela and Rachaela cowered aside.

Ruth burst past her, the burning candle in her hand, pressing it to the doorway and the wall as she went. The door blazed up.

Rachaela stood in a room of fire.

The house was burning.

It was like a forest. Things scuttled underfoot, the fleeing mice. Ceilings broke with a great crack. Wooden objects fell, alight, and broke like blossoms.

There was so much light, like sunlight, scalding.

Rachaela ran down a burning stairway, between walls of flame.

She did not know where she was, she had lost track of direction. The fire ran and sprinted before her. Ruth—Ruth was the fire.

Ruth must be stopped, but Ruth was unstoppable.

The rooms burned. It spread so fast. The house, summer-dry in its mummy dusts, the old curtains catching like pergolas of flame, the floorboards snapping.

Was this the annexe? A huge window, its leading melting. A fissure spread across the glass like a green lightning.

Rachaela ran.

The fire bit at her arms, there were splinters of flame in her hair—she beat them out.

Out of the furnace and on to the landing. She could still recognize the landing although fire hopped along the balustrade, and below the nymph was burning, her dead lamp lit up with fire.

Rachaela turned, she looked about her, but she was no longer herself. She was only terrified. She ran down the stairs over the carpet bobbing with little crackling lights, out on to the chequerboard of the floor, all as reflective now as a lake, a lake of fire.

The drawing room was burning too, the arch was filled by flames and something burst there with a great hiss and sigh.

She saw Scarabae at the dinner table, and the flames on their plates, the flames unstitching them, and their clothes burned off their bodies, which were like medieval paintings of the dead before the flame consumed them.

Rachaela shrieked. She ran across the fiery floor and out of the first and second doors of the lobby, into the night.

She stumbled through the trees of the garden. Her body was blistered, her hair was burning again, she swept it out. Her hands were burned, and her legs had been needled by fire. She coughed and wept, the black water running from her eyes and nose.

She saw Uncle Camillo riding his horse across the flames, waving his sword, as he burned.

She saw them in their boxes of beds, burned up like papers.

Rachaela sank on her knees among the oaks, crying and blind, while the house blazed like a festival, in a coronet of golden light.

Mice ran like a flow of ink from the well of fire into the sheltering darkness.

The house fell in at about three in the morning.

It gave like a well-laid hearth, centre crumbling, the roofs descending with a whoosh of smoke and sparks. Windows exploded like fireworks.

By then the ones who had survived were out on the heath.

Rachaela, from her distance, counted them and named them.

Miriam and Sasha, Miranda and Eric, Michael and Cheta. No others came from the pyre.

No others except, of course, Ruth. But Ruth had come and gone long since, scuttling over the darkness like an imp. No longer with a lighted candle, her work accomplished. She fled towards the heathland, towards the dragon parts, and vanished.

What would she do in those wild places, that demon child, without streets and shops, without Woolworth’s and the graveyard?

Rachaela, seated on the ground, her back against a tree, could only watch, the witness, as now she watched the Scarabae.

Her body was a medley of pains and she wept from pain, but the Scarabae, with half their garments scorched off them, only stood in a little loose group above the house, and watched it flame and watched it fall, as perhaps they had watched other fires and fallings.

Rachaela, in her agonized exhaustion, did not go near them, did not consider them. Did not care.

Yet at her wrist her watch ticked on.

The darkness was on the land like mourning, but in an hour it would be dawn. The sun would rise.

What then?