Night After Night (10 page)
But for last night’s dream I probably wouldn’t have mentioned them at all. Probably just have told you about the Katherine dreams, but the things from the church are such obvious nightmare material, aren’t they?
Last night it was the usual beginning sequence, which I put down to anxiety. I’m always forgetting where I left the car, which is a pretty crap situation when you have to leave it in a big car park and you’re peering over the roofs of other cars and people start recognizing you and nudging one another, probably telling each other you must have forgotten which of your six cars you came in. I hate that. It makes me wish I was a Muslim woman in a veil.
But last night’s dream wasn’t in a car park, it was on an empty street, I think it was the one that slopes down to the river – is it Vineyard Street? Anyway, I was alone, and I was at the bottom of the street trying to get to the top where the car was parked. It was just going dark but the lights didn’t come on and the top of the street seemed to be getting further away with every step I took, and I felt that I was being watched from all the windows, but nobody came out to help and I knew, the way you always know in dreams, that this was because they were afraid to come out of their houses after dark.
And then (and I knew something was coming before it appeared) I saw this little thin figure coming down the nearly dark street towards me, and when it got close enough it was one of THEM with those horrible round stone eyes with the holes in them and its tongue sticking out and I knew I had to get past it to reach my car.
Actually, when I say it was ‘coming down’ it was actually dancing like an old-fashioned puppet, and it had a full body, a male body, and I saw that it was naked and… you know. I knew exactly what it wanted to do to me.
And that, of course, was when I woke up, and I must have been screaming because Lisa came rushing in and we went downstairs and sat in the kitchen, in front of the stove drinking hot coffee with whisky until morning.
It terrifies me because I know it’s real. It really exists. It’s there on the church, you can see it.
And what happens if one night I don’t wake up?
The first diary – a small but expensive page-a-day diary – arrived eighteen months ago, not long after his second visit. Only six pages were filled – six pages about the Katherine dreams, and they were disturbing enough. She said she’d started a fresh diary, would send it soon. As if she had to get rid of the first as quickly as possible, couldn’t bear to read it back.
And then the call from Poppy Stringer with the worst of news. He walked seven miles that day along the Pembrokeshire coastal path, into the bitter, punishing wind.
He remembers someone – Marcus probably – sending him a copy of the
Echo
, Gloucestershire’s evening paper, with a picture of Knap Hall, grimly shot against the light under the headline
HEARTBREAK HOTEL
. Obvious, but the impact was undeniable, and there was an inset pic of Trinity at her most queenly, astride a handsome chestnut horse that used to live in the stables here and has now, apparently, been sold along with Harry Ansell’s hunter. Her hair was coiled under her riding hat, and she was gazing towards some invisible horizon, her lips parted as if in anticipation of a new beginning.
And now – yesterday, in fact – the second diary has arrived, like a spirit message.
The delay – all his fault. Trinity seemed to have been dissatisfied with what she’d written this time. Didn’t want to take it to her parents’ cottage, perhaps for superstitious reasons, so she parcelled it up, gave it to the trustworthy Poppy Stringer for safekeeping, to put away in her kitchen under lock and key. Weeks after Trinity’s death, Poppy finally unwrapped the diary, finding Cindy’s name on a piece of notepaper inside its cover and telephoning him. He told her he’d pick it up when he was in the area in a few weeks’ time, doing a gig at a comedy club in Gloucester.
And then the club closed down, the way they do, and – unforgivably – he forgot about the diary, phoning Poppy last week in the hope she’d kept it.
Dearest Cindy
,I’m so sorry you haven’t heard from me for some while. I’m doing my best but not finding this at all easy. There are some things it’s so hard to share, even with you. I read some of it back and think it just reads as if I’m mentally ill. Anyway, I’m going to wrap this up because I’m going away.
There’s more, but I don’t feel able to write it yet
,God help me.
With love
T
He’s driven across Wales to see Winchcombe church.
Now, satisfied it all exists as Trinity described, he turns away from the church and goes back to where he’s left the secondhand camper van he’s emptied his bank account to buy. On the way, he notes that there is indeed a Vineyard Street, just as described, dropping steeply from the town in the direction of Sudeley Castle.
He does not enter the street. The diary gives no clue to which of the macabre stone faces represents the horror that would not let dream-Trinity out of the street and put her in fear of violation.
It was his plan to go on to Knap Hall, see if he could get into the grounds and feel what might be felt there now. But there seems no point until he can make some sense of the grotesques – what they mean and in whose dark mind they were formed, all those centuries ago.
10
Hunter-Gatherer
THIS IS WRONG
. Three times up and down the same hill lane, which the satnav insists is right. Three times, inching the Mini Cooper Countryman along like a ladybird on the spine of a leaf, and still she can’t find the entrance, so it has to be wrong.
Grayle likes to think she knows her way around the Cots-wolds, but today it’s like invisible walls have formed.
It’s still early – early morning and early March – and strands of white mist are snagged in the tops of distant conifers like sheep’s wool in barbed wire. The pale-green fields are swelling under a sickly-pink sky, and there are various communities of trees, some bare, some evergreen, any of which might be hiding houses.
But hotels are hard to hide. They have obvious gateposts and big signs. She didn’t ask Fred, who covered all the Trinity stories, thinking it was going to be obvious.
She gives up, pulls into the drystone wall and, feeling stupid and foreign, calls this Defford on her cellphone.
His London laugh is abrasive.
‘Someone should’ve told you, Grayle – there is a sign.’
Someone should’ve told you
. Not him, obviously. And there is no freaking sign. Be there for eight, if you can, Defford said on the phone. If you can. Jesus.
He says, ‘There’s a sign to a prehistoric monument called Belas Knap?’
‘The burial chamber. Yeah, I saw that sign.’
And drove past it. For personal reasons, Grayle avoids prehistoric burial chambers in isolated spots.
‘And about a mile after that a turning to the right?’
‘I took it. I’m there.’
‘And then another turning that says farm entrance?’
‘Well, yeah, I saw that, too, in fact I can almost see it now, but it—’
‘When a large, expensive house is left empty for long periods, its location isn’t advertised.’
‘Oh. Well…’ Grayle nods to herself like a stupid person. ‘Right. I’ll be with you soon, then, Mr Defford.’
‘Leo. This is television. We don’t even remember last names.’
‘Right.’
Television. A medium well into a second century and so much of it cheap crap now, and they still think you should be excited by it.
She can see the farm sign from here. It’s quite small, on a post planted next to a metal gate in the drystone wall, where an avenue of trees steers what she took to be a rough track into bristly woodland. So the satnav was right. But it still feels wrong. A wrong thing to be doing. Something keeps saying this to her.
Yesterday, she spent ten minutes on the phone to Defford, finding out precisely nothing about the nature of his programme but a whole lot about what he’d be expecting from her.
She thought there’d be some procedure connected with switching from being employed by Three Counties to working freelance for HGTV but it just happens. Calling at a cash point this morning, to draw a couple of hundred, she found three thousand pounds had arrived in her account.
It’s like Defford thinks everybody in the whole world is working for him unless they specifically opt out.
And yet, from the first, she kind of likes him. If only because she’s so relieved she hasn’t run him down.
The uphill drive has been tarmacked, but clearly not for some time, its surface greased with last year’s leaves and over-hung
with the branches of spreading trees, thickening now with catkins and stuff. And then, just around the final bend, there’s a wall of morning mist and this broad back, hunched in a canvas jacket, crowned by curly white hair.
Grayle, wide-eyed, lurches into the brakes, the car stalling maybe five feet from Leo Defford, who doesn’t move at all. An earring twinkles. When he eventually turns it’s in an entirely unhurried way, and she can see he’s lowering a medium-sized video camera to his chest.
He grins, and Grayle sees Knap Hall, revealed for the first time, sprouting out of his wide shoulders like massive, misty, golden angel wings.
She gets out of the car, shaking, as Defford spreads his hands.
‘No worries. Americans always drive slowly over here. Shit themselves on our roads. All these mad Brit bastards going like the clappers on the wrong side. Terrifying.’
‘Um…’ She holds on to the wing mirror. ‘I’ve been living here going on eight years now, Mr Defford.’
‘Blimey.’ Defford’s pale eyes wobble. ‘I had a lucky escape, then.’
Grayle nods dumbly.
‘Would’ve been less than auspicious, a broken hip.’ Defford offers her his stubby right hand. It’s warm but doesn’t linger. ‘So. What d’you reckon then, Grayle?’
He steps aside to uncover all of the frontage of Knap Hall in its shallow bowl, its mossy hollow below the pine-topped hill. The house, with its two distinct wings, is like heavy jewellery, made more interesting by verdigris. Its age is indeterminate, it’s just old. Its windows are sunken and its stonework is the dirty blonde of Grayle’s hair.
Defford looks lit up with pride.
‘All ours.’
Well, lucky us. Grayle shivers in the mist. Defford’s looking down into the camera, replaying some shots, nodding, evidently satisfied. She waits for him to look up.
‘Um, forgive me, Mr Defford… Leo… You’re saying you actually purchased Knap Hall?’
‘Leased it. For ten months. Place’s been on sale since last August. No interest. Not even a derisory offer. Amazing how quickly a house goes downhill when it’s been abandoned.’
Certainly true of this one. You wouldn’t immediately identify it as the house pictured in that copy of
Cotsworld
, where it’s floodlit at night, romantic and sparkling. It looks dull and unhappy, as if it’s pulling the mist around itself like a widow’s veil. Some of the trees don’t help. Too many larches. Nothing looks deader in winter than a deciduous conifer.
Defford says, ‘Even Ansell can’t afford to have a derelict pile on his hands until either the property market looks up or enough people forget about its… sorrowful history.’
He lifts the camera.
‘Been collecting some moody shots while I was waiting. There could be lots of ground mist when we’re all here in the autumn, but maybe not. Grab it while it’s there, I always say.’
‘Couldn’t you… you know… simulate mist?’
‘Wash your mouth out, Miss Underhill. Nothing about this production is gonna be simulated. No filters, no computer effects, no creepy music. That appeal to you?’
‘Um… yeah. I guess.’
‘The house itself, the exterior, we won’t see that – except maybe in silhouette, a few lit windows at night – till the closing moments of the final show. Can’t have it recognized. Last thing we need is crowds of teenage goths and bleedin’ pentecostal Christians with placards.’
She doesn’t understand, peers at him. The white hair is confusing, he could be anywhere between forty-five and sixty. His accent is the one she’s come to recognize as Bloke – upper middle-class English given a faux-Cockney edge by a man who wants to get along with everybody.
‘Um, is the plan that I just carry out research for you without ever finding out the nature of the project? Because if—’
‘Let’s go in the house.’
He turns and walks briskly back, shouldering into the mist which makes it look like he’s giving off a steaming energy.
She’s Googled him, of course. He used to work for the BBC in current affairs, a producer on
Newsnight
. Quitting to become the editor of a proposed Channel 5 nightly magazine programme which never actually happened. Defford emerged as a private producer, with a Channel 4 documentary deal. Wikipedia says he made a pile of money with a series of indiscreet films about the Royal Family for US cable TV, which financed his production company, HGTV.
Hunter-Gatherer. It’s a term for the nomadic, foraging society in which sustenance comes from wild plants and animals, as distinct from agriculture. It suggests a chancer’s life, but evidently it’s paid off. According to Fred Potter, Defford and his partner have a very classy weekend cottage in several acres down towards Stow-on-the-Wold and attend the cool parties – at one of which he seems to have heard the first whispers about Knap Hall.
With the windows down, Grayle starts the motor, crawls the Mini after him, feeling ridiculous. The track forks away to the left of the house. She parks and follows Defford round the side. Close up, you can see where the original Cotswold stone, the colours of an old teddy bear, meets the much more recent roughcast. Defford’s pointing out details as he walks.
‘Ansell wanted to demolish this wing, replace it with something more Elizabethan. Listed Buildings guys refused outright. Seems blending the authentic with the fake is verboten. Different stages of building must be apparent. How that’s interpreted is up to the individual, but some of these bastards are power-drunk.’