December (78 page)

      
'You nearly gave me a heart attack. How long have you been in
here?' Beginning to be angry with Vanessa; you could get more sense out of the
sheep on the hills.

      
Anger, however, would get her nowhere. With a sigh, Meryl took
off her navy-blue dressing-gown, put it around the girl's shoulders.

      
'Let me help you. Please.'

      
Vanessa carried on looking out of the window. She'd said so little
to Meryl all the time she'd been here. Had eaten just enough food, with no
great, relish - not much of a compliment to Meryl's flair for whipping up
mouth-watering sundaes.

      
She
had
said a small
thank-you for the new clothes and left most of them on in the shop ... while
clinging determinedly to her school blazer, which she insisted on wearing
whenever she went out, especially yesterday afternoon, shivering on the slopes
of the Skirrid.

      
And yet she seemed content to be
here
. As if she was waiting for something to happen.

      
Why do you have to wear
your dirty blazer? Why not your new quilted jacket?

      
So my guardian angel mil
know me
, Vanessa had replied scornfully, like a good Catholic.

      
Meryl said now, 'I'm going to phone Shelley. Just to put her
mind at rest. She must be terribly worried about you.'

      
The changeling turned round fast enough at that. 'No!'

      
'Why not? You tell me why not, or I'm going to phone her right
now!'

      
What else could she do? Yesterday, within sight of the summit
of the Skirrid, she'd knelt in the grass, holding Vanessa's hand, and prayed
for guidance, the first time she'd done such a thing since childhood. She'd
felt there was guidance to be had here, but no clear direction was signposted. She
interpreted this as an indication that she should do nothing for the present. Stay
where she was, learn patience.

      
She'd turned round to find Vanessa white-faced and shaking, her
gaze fixed on the smaller of the two humps, almost below them now. Meryl had
felt flecks of light snow on her face, but could see nothing.

      
Meryl said sharply, 'Do you hear me, miss?'

      
Vanessa shrugged, looked back out of the window, stiffened and
instantly became animated. She turned, picked up the phone and, smiling, held
it out towards Meryl.

      
'Why, thank you,' Meryl said, surprised.

      
But while she was reaching out for the receiver, Vanessa suddenly
snatched it back, jumped down from the desk and dodged past Meryl out of the
room, still clutching the receiver, dragging the phone to the floor and the
wire from the wall.

      
Meryl shrieked and pursued the phone as it bumped along the
carpet but, by the time she'd gathered it up, Vanessa was out of the front door
and rushing across the road into the path of an electric wheelchair containing
a young woman who looked as if she would be only too pleased to run the child
down.

As Moira turned the spiral,
wooden sandals clip-clopping on the stone steps, there was another sharp scream
of rage and pain, and she stopped, afraid, for the scream had an animal
quality.
      
A howling.

      
In the Abbey, it was unwise ever to relax.
      
In the Abbey, God help you, it was
not necessarily in your best interests to heed a scream.

      
It was freezing on the uneven stone stairs. She'd stopped
alongside a slit window with old glass in it, opaque with grime. Knowing that
even if she could see out, there would only be mist upon mist. As Simon had
said last night, vapours gathered here, always had, always would.

      
She moved on, went up seven more steps, bare toes numb with
cold, poking out of the open sandals.

      
Until, at last, she stood at the very summit of the spiral, outside
the recess concealing Simon's bedroom door, above her a rough beamed ceiling.
Above that, presumably, the tower's conical roof.

      
She looked down at herself. Bart Simpson wore an evil grin. In
this situation, Bart Simpson would not be scared. Bart Simpson was the devil
incarnate.

      
What we gonna do, Bart?

      
'Piss off, kid, what would you know.'

      
Just to hear her own voice.

      
And then, 'Nooooooo.'' A hideous, twisted yelp.

      
'Simon!'

      
'Don't come in! Whoever you are, for God's sake go away!'
      
'Simon, it's me. Moira.'
      
'Go away! Leave me alone!'

      
She heard his cough, and it turned into a dreadful gasping
retch. Simon puking his guts up. As if poisoned. She was thinking about Prof and
the medieval red wine in the twelfth-century baluster jar which materialised in
the night on the floor by the bed.

      
She moved into the door recess, stood very still with her ear
to the door - wooden, white-painted, peeling, rotting at the bottom with the
damp. Moira breathed in and out twice to calm herself. Some hope.

      
'Simon, listen to me. Are you ... ?'

      
Bloated, strangled noises, the creaking of the bed. She
rattled the handle. 'No!' he screeched. 'Jesus Christ, you bitch, will you go away!'

      
'I will not!'

      
'Pleeeeeeeease!'

      
She backed off and shouted for help, a desperate cry down a
well. But a spiral stairway was not a well, there were only five steps to the
next corkscrew twist and two thick, ancient ceilings between her and anything
else human.

      
And then Simon, stifling a scream, produced such an agonised,
pitiful squeal, like a kitten, that Moira leapt back up and threw herself at
the door.

      
'It's locked!' he wailed. 'You can't.'

      
But it wasn't, of course. When she twisted the handle, the
door almost creaked off its rusting hinges and Moira fell forwards into the
room, landing on her knees at the foot of the bed. The curtains drawn across
the window recess.

      
Simon lay half-sprawled across it, on his back, naked, one leg
straight on the bed, the other buckled on the floor, both hands over his
genitals.

      
'Moira ... please ... go ... You ... don't want to see this.'

      
His face puckered in misery, pain and shame under a hard film
of sweat. Simon St John, classically trained, the laid-back one.

      
'Arrogance.' The word thrust through teeth so tightly gritted they
seemed likely to splinter.

      
'Huh?' She moved hesitantly to the bed, prised a hand from his
groin and held it tightly. 'Nobody's gonna hurt you, Simon.'

      
'You'd think a fucking vicar would know ... uhhhh ... the
futility of arrogance.'

      
'You did what you thought was best,' Moira whispered. 'You
made a stand.' He's gonna die, she thought in horror. He's gonna die here in
this filthy attic.

      
She saw that his shoulders and upper back were on the bed, his
lower back and his ass held in space by the other leg bent crablike on the
floor.

      
'Oh, dear God, Simon, love, you better turn over on your stomach.'

      
'I can't move. Whichever way I ... move it's ... bloody … ag-'

      
'Hold on.' She knelt down, pushed her hands under the middle
of his back, through the rivers of sweat. This was like one of those awful
funny stories that firemen told, unless it ended in death and then it maybe
wasn't quite so funny.

      
When she tipped him over, his serrated shriek made her reel back
into the wall.

      
He lay spread-eagled on the bed, weeping, impaled.

      
'Jesus God,' Moira said. 'What is it?'

      
'You know what ... Christ, it hurts when I breathe. I can't breathe.'

      
'Simon, we have to get a doctor. Do you understand?'

      
'No! Pull ... pull the bastard out. Can you do that? Can you
bring yourself... uhhhh.' His hands clawed, nails piercing the mattress.

      
'I don't... I don't know how deep it goes, Simon.'
      
'Feels like it's half-way to my ...
throat. Oh
Jes ... listen,
a doctor
would tell the cops, and we'd all be out of here so fast, questions, questions,
questions.'

      
'That's such a bad thing, to get out?'

      
'Don't be f... foolish ... We've got to finish it.'

      
'Sure. And what if this finishes you first?

      
Oh God, calm yourself, hen. Have to think about this. There could
be internal bleeding.
      
'What's it made of?'

      
'If it's like the others it's a ... a kind of tallow. Fat.
Lard.'
      
It looked hard as bone. Dark brown,
near-black. Thick and knobbly, like an old, rustic walking-suck, and God knows
how long.

      
How could something penetrate your mind so deep it could make
you do this to yourself?

      
She climbed up on to the bed, balanced there on the mattress
in her Bart Simpson night wear, a foot either side of him. She thought, I
can't. I just can't. I'm bound to be sick or something.
      
'Please.'

      
She touched the end of the candle, protruding about three inches.
It felt just so disgusting.
      
'How did you, I mean, get it in?'
      
Simon squirmed.

      
'Listen to me. Just listen. I've never ... seen an object appear.
I don't think anybody has. Matthew Manning, Uri Geller, all these people it's
happened to, they've never ... uhhhh ... seen it. It ... must've started while
I was asleep. What I'm saying ...'

      
She looked at the repellent brown smears on her fingertips.
      
'It grew ... formed ... inside?'
      
Simon grunted, tried to nod.
      
What
are we dealing with here?
      
And, oh God, ma poor mammy ...

      
And she felt so angry. As angry as Simon had been in the studio,
'correcting history'.

      
'Simon,' she said, 'I want you to grab a big wedge of the pillowcase
in your teeth and bite down on it hard as you can. Do it. OK.'

      
She wiped her sweating hands on Bart Simpson. It didn't wipe
away his evil grin.

      
Moira said, 'I'm not gonna dress this up, Simon. It is gonna hurt
like every kind of hell, and if there's a lot of blood I don't care what
questions we have to answer, you're away to hospital, right.'

      
'Yes,' he said and took the pillow in his mouth.

XII

Darker Underneath

Meryl thought Simon St John
must be terribly paranoid or something because, as far as she was concerned, Eddie
Edwards was a delightful little man.

      
'I shouldn't really, see,' he said, fingers poised over
Meryl's fruitcake. 'But it looks so good and I've had no breakfast. And, anyway,
if our calculations are anything to go by, tonight looks like the first night
of the end of the bloody world.'

      
'Eddie ...' The woman in the wheelchair, Isabel, gave him a menacing
glare. She looked to Meryl as if she could be quite an awkward customer, but
there was only so much trouble someone could cause, surely, from a wheelchair.

      
'No need to crush my shins again,' said Eddie. 'I take your point,
but this lady might be able to help us.'

      
Meryl watched Vanessa carrying over a fluffy pouffe thing to
perch on next to Isabel's chair in the vicarage living-room. The girl kept
looking at the woman in the wheelchair, big-eyed, even allowing for the
glasses.

      
Why was Vanessa so drawn to this woman? What had the child
felt, catching sight of the wheelchair from the study window? What connection
had she made to make her go berserk like that? Meryl would have given anything
to know, because there was no doubt, from Isabel's impatience when Vanessa had run
out in front of her chair, that the two had never met before.