House of Bells (28 page)

Perhaps the doctor did want a word. She wasn't sure, once they got there. He asked questions, and she answered them. But they were back in the room of her utter guilt, with the object of her great offence laid out there, stark and unremitting: Kathie pale and empty on her mattress, barely living. Swallowed.

Not to be rescued, even by the so-clever doctor. He knew that, she thought, as well as she did. He might not know the truth –
I fed her to my terror, to save myself; I gave her up to nothingness
– but he did know the house, that was clear. He knew what kind of things could happen to people here. Things had happened in the past that were nothing to do with her. Grace might have found that a comfort, might have offered it up as an excuse. Georgie couldn't do that.

It was odd, that the invented girl should prove to be the honest one between them. She thought she liked Georgie, a lot better than she did Grace.

She thought Georgie didn't stand a chance, though, here in the house or out there in the world. Grace at least was a survivor.

The doctor was really only going through the motions now. She knew, if no one else did. If he saw more deeply into her than anyone else did – if he saw her guilt, her distress just at being here – he said nothing about it. Showed no sign of it, made no accusations.

Let her go at last, wearily, like a confession of failure.

Georgie hesitated, like a nice girl would: ‘Please, what will happen to Kathie now?'

‘We'll order up a private ambulance and take her down to London. We have a clinic there.' He and his wife, apparently: a shared enterprise, an unexpected concession of equality. ‘We can look after her, try some new drugs, other treatments just coming through . . .'

He didn't expect any of them to work. Nor did she. She nodded and left the room, like a confession of guilt that no one but herself could hear.

Time still marches slowly, even without a ticking clock to keep it regular. The evening closed in, and dinner came. She found her way to the great kitchen and asked how she could help; she found shelter among a troop of women carrying bowls of salad, jugs of water. The doctor and his wife sat with the captain, of course, and Mother Mary. No need to go near them. Tom was present too, but he could only be on one side of the hall; she could sit on the other when she stopped to sit at all, with her back turned to him. Out of sight, out of mind – or almost. She had no idea what to do about Tom, no real idea what to do about anything.

She thought the house was big enough and full enough to avoid him, at least for the moment, while she thought. She thought there were people enough that she could avoid anyone, everyone. It's what she'd been doing, more or less. Years now. Even at parties: shrieking people's names, air-kissing them, getting stoned with them, going to bed with them. Avoiding them.

But here she was washing up, scrubbing pots – and suddenly here was Tom, beaming at her, bouncing at her like a puppy, nothing like a magician.

Except that that was what he wanted to talk about, exclusively; except that he wouldn't call it magic, he wouldn't call it anything, he wouldn't even say what it was. Just, this fabulously exciting thing had happened this evening, it was like a test only it had gone extraordinarily better than he ever would have expected, he wasn't allowed to talk about it yet and that was such a shame because it was just so cool, but it was like the scales had fallen from his eyes and he'd realized just how powerful the rational language could be, how it really truly was going to change the world and save the world, just as Webb had always said it would, and he'd been looking for her everywhere ever since and where on earth had she
been
. . .?

I was right there, Tom. Watching you change the world. Nearly dying first, and being left terrified after; and I suppose that was Webb with you, was it? Webb who set up your little demonstration? That makes better sense . . .

It was easier to see Webb as the true magician, setting his candles in place like he set his people, his network, all around the world. Setting them on guard, perhaps, like a snare for the unwary, her. What he'd been holding against her, guarding against, and why it was worth her life to him – or Kathie's life before her – she couldn't guess. She hadn't been his enemy, till now.

Now, though . . . Now she'd seen the power and felt the terror . . . Now she could be his enemy, oh yes.

Tom's too, perhaps. If Tom was knowingly standing with Webb, learning his magic. Understanding what it meant.

She didn't answer Tom's question directly. Instead, she just shrugged and gestured with the dish mop.
I've been right here, doing my share. Doing woman-things, cooking and cleaning.
It was an alibi, of sorts. She didn't think he was going to start interrogating anyone to find out how long she'd been there, when she turned up, where she might have been before that or what she might have been doing.

Webb, she thought, would ask such questions, maybe. Webb might have noticed the candles knocked aside, out of his careful flight-path; he might know that something – someone – had triggered his snare. Someone more than the colony's cat.

He might even know who. He might—

He might do anything, and there might be nothing she could do about it. He'd said nothing, done nothing over dinner; that meant nothing, of course. He wouldn't want to show his hand. Reveal himself to the whole commune for what he was:
magician
. Only to his favourites, his special people, like Tom . . .

Kathie had been one of his. She wondered what the girl had done, to have him turn against her so thoroughly. So viciously.

She didn't need to be vicious herself to get rid of Tom tonight. Only a little cold, a little distant, a little unkind. Just enough to suggest that she had better things to do than talk to him. Better things, like scrubbing out these pots and chatting over her shoulder with the other women, handing drying cloths around but not handing one to him. Not inviting him to be one of the women.

Poor boy. There he was all full of himself and his own achievement, only wanting to share – and maybe wanting to share everything tonight, thinking he had a chance: her body and his in a bed for two, behind a door that closed, the crowning triumph of his perfect day – and here she was bursting his bubble with a casual pinprick, a cruel lack of interest.

It took a little while to penetrate, but he did get the message in the end. She saw all the effervescence leak out of him, she saw him deflate, and at last she saw him creep away to – presumably – a solitary bed in a crowded dormitory. She hoped his disappointment wouldn't fester, but if it did, well. Again, there was nothing she could do.

Herself, she kept to what shelter these new companions could provide. When the kitchen work was done, she drank a companionable mug of barleycup with them and shared a companionable joint; when it was time, she went upstairs with them to her own solitary bed in her own crowded dormitory.

At first, she never thought she'd sleep.

It was like Grace's fantasy of a girls' dormitory at boarding school. No doubt Georgie would know the reality of that, but this seemed close enough, all whispers and giggles from one end to the other, muttered complaints and hisses from the sleepy, the constant shift of restless bodies in the dark.

Once her eyes adjusted, it wasn't that dark. Windows were open, uncurtained; starlight was light enough for a sleepless girl to see figures move between the beds, to understand that actually not all of them were as solitary as her own.

She saw one couple slip off towards the stairs and away. Hand in hand, she thought they went. She hadn't checked from one end to the other, but she did think that there were only women in this long dorm, that they divided for sleeping in a way they didn't for the bathrooms. Well. She'd lived a Soho party life for a while now, with prison before that and the country-house circuit before that; nothing was new to her any more, and she really didn't care so long as no one came to trouble her, to try to share her bed.

Honestly, between Grace and Georgie, her own bed wasn't that solitary anyway. Sometimes she really did think she was two different women; there really wouldn't be room for a third.

At first she thought she'd never sleep. Then she thought she must have done.

It was later, darker, quiet.

No, not quiet. Quieter, yes. No more voices now.

Something, though: something hung in the air, the memory of sound. Something had woken her.

In her head – in her dream, if she'd been sleeping, if she'd been dreaming – it had been the sound of bells.

Which was why she thought she must have slept and dreamed it. There weren't any bells now. Tom had silenced them, or taken them away.

There was the great sunken bell beneath the lake, but she didn't think she'd been hearing that. Not this time. She wasn't swimming, not drowning, no.

Bleeding, though – she thought she might be. Her arm ached beneath its bandage, in that dull dreary way of a wound that wouldn't heal. She didn't want to look.

She didn't want to listen, either. Just in case. She didn't want to lay temptation in the world's way, make a ready victim of herself, be opened up to the possibility of bells.

Didn't want to; couldn't help herself.

Lay still in the hush of that room, and the world came in to her through the open window; and below the breath of the wind, behind the sough of distant trees . . . Yes. She was sure of it: the low slow murmur of a bell, slightly hesitant and barely there, like the unsteady tick of a great clock running down, almost at its end. Like the beat of a great heart, dying.

Everyone else seemed to be sleeping. Awkwardly, one-handedly, she pulled herself up off her mattress and went to the window.

It was set low, in the slope of the roof; she could lean right out, and her turning head could pinpoint the source. It was so soft and deep, it was hardly even a sound now, only a sense of vibration in the air, but it drew her none the less: her attention and her blood both, reaching for it.

Besides, it wasn't hard to find. There was the great dark mass of the wood, with the star-glitter sky above it; and there was a single orange spark of light, like a fairy-tale lure, deep among the trees.

She thought she knew already, where that was and how to get there.

There was another light that she could see and then not see and then see again, whiter and cleaner, paler, shifting and irregular. She thought she knew what that was, too. She thought it was coming here. Coming out of the trees and briefly steady then, moving with purpose; and then gone entirely, lost behind the bulk of the house. On its way.

She thought she was mad to go, but going anyway; twice mad to go alone, but still not waking any other of the women.

Fumbling into clothes, glad of their simplicity in the darkness; shuffling in sandals between the narrow pallets and the sleeping forms; feeling her way down the dark of the stairs, until her hand found a light switch below and blessed it, pressed it.

Now she could hurry.

Now she was aware of carrying her bleeding arm crooked against her chest, the way it hurt less; and of a dampness at her breastbone, where a dark patch showed how blood was oozing through the bandage and through the shirt it pressed against.

Hurry, hurry.

Well, she was hurrying. Into trouble, towards that hypnotic murmur; with no idea beyond getting there, being there, learning just how much worse this could be. It might kill her, she did know that. She didn't care. She'd stopped being afraid of death long since, just as she'd stopped looking for it. She only needed to know what bell and how and why it was rumbling. Except
for her
: she knew that much already.

She thought she knew one other answer too, what bell it was. There was only one bell in the woods. Surely, only one . . .?

She let herself out of the house as soon as she found a door she could unbolt. Here and there around the courtyard a window was still lit, by electricity or lamp or candle; she could find company if she wanted it. In this irregular household, of course she could. She didn't have to go alone.

Nevertheless. She knew her route out of the courtyard. Didn't want to go that way – didn't, in honesty,
want
to go at all – but the low drone of the bell was still rolling in her bones, roiling in her belly, beating in her blood.

It was her choice, and she made it.

Her back to the house and those promising lights; her face to the dark. To the stable block, and the narrow passage further, turn right at the dungheap; follow the path around the wall of the kitchen garden, and then into the wood.

None of that would be easy. She wished she had a choice; she wished she had a torch.

No matter. She knew the way, more or less, and there was light at the end. She'd seen it burning.

Light at her back, to see her out of the courtyard. Light overhead, that too, for a while. She hurried through the archway under the clock tower, almost holding her breath for that plunge into absolute black, and then the star-bright sky was back and welcome and enough to show her the way across the stable yard.

Here was the mouth of the passageway, an arch of brick, a tunnel. She didn't much want to go in; she wasn't wholly certain she'd come out again. That bell tolled for her, she was sure of that. Somewhere, her child must be waiting. Doing nothing, being nothing. Ready.

Still. She'd come this far; there was nowhere else to go. Except back, of course. To the house and ask for help, for company, like a good colony girl ought to do; or all the way around, down the drive and along the lane to Cookie's house and through the wood from there. With him if he was awake, showing a light, willing.

That would be ridiculous, but oh, it was tempting. Cookie would understand and not fuss. Stand witness, if she needed that.

But she could as easily find him this way, if she wanted to fetch him out. If she chose to. And she'd come this far, and – no. Not turning back now. She didn't dare, quite. When she glanced over her shoulder, hoping for one last reassuring glimpse of a light in the great shadow of the house behind her, she saw instead a hint of movement under the clock tower, as though darkness were something physical, a fabric that could tear under pressure and be sucked down in shreds.