Personal Darkness (5 page)

A booklet in a calfskin cover referred to the hotel library, and what tapes and books were also available.

Eric, Sasha, and Miranda perhaps discovered television at the hotel. Certainly they would turn on the big perfect screens in their rooms, and sit watching them, usually alone.

Rachaela played music. She walked in the grounds. She met no one at all in the rose garden or among the topiary snipped to resemble peacocks and pyramids. No one out among the trees.

On some fine mornings, from an upland path among rhododendrons, she found she could see away across miles of country, distantly yellow with crops, turquoise with farness, otherwise featureless, flowing into a dream.

She did not know where they were. They were not near the sea.

Rachaela did not ask the Scarabae any more questions. She was not even restless. She read the books and sent for others. She slept later, and sometimes again after lunch. At night she might sit by her window, watching the moon ride over the park.

At dawn, pigeons cooed in the monkey puzzle. Once a fox ran through the chestnuts. Then she thought of Ruth. But it was better not to think of Ruth. Rachaela pushed the thought away.

/
am a Scarabae
.

She did not truly believe it. Yet she could not wholly reject it, either.

Summer deepened into autumn.

Rachaela wondered if the Scarabae were now settled. She considered her departure, but to what? What had happened to her flat in London… ? It was too complicated. Days like falling leaves. The leaves began to parch and fall.

Being at the hotel was almost being out of time. And yet the mansion was subtly modern. There were radiators in the rooms against the coming of the frost.

Frost came.

Then came driving winds and the trees lost their leaves. The monkey puzzle now was more than ever like a spider, its legs wrapped tight. Grass blue with cold, matching the azure sitting room. Rachaela said to Sasha: "You'll spend the winter here."

"Oh, yes." Sasha added, "The house isn't ready yet."

The house. Had they rebuilt it? Rachaela could not bring herself to ask anything else.

Every Scarabae in a solitary room, TV and music and books. Rachaela felt like a child. There was no other way she could explain it to herself. Melancholy, and safe. Held fast in nostalgia.

At Christmas, literally, Michael and Cheta decked the walls with boughs of holly. There was even a tree the management must have sent, tall and resinous, hung with golden filigree balls and tied by scarlet ribbon.

The dinner was served in the evening. The main course was not a turkey but a huge roast joint presented with hot fruit and creamy, spicy side dishes, cabbage with raisins, whipped potato, and a type of black sausage. Afterward there was a pudding, sweet as an ache. They drank a somber wine that came in two bottles with dust upon them and two matted seals.

When the meal was over, Eric led them in a prayer. At least Rachaela thought it must be a prayer. It was in another language—Russian, Romanian, God knew. Michael and Cheta stood by. They too murmured the responses. Rachaela sat in silence.

When this was over, Sasha, Miranda, and Eric gave each other little gifts. These were tiny curious things, an embroidered handkerchief, a porcelain thimble; some were concealed, especially by Miranda, and Rachaela did not see. Cheta and Michael were also passed small tokens, wrapped, which they did not open. To Rachaela came a package, in due course. She held it, defiantly. She had not realized there would be presents, and had contrived none.

"You know I don't deserve this."

"Oh yes," said Miranda.

"No, I don't. I'm your failure. I let you down."

"Don't speak of it," said Sasha. "Not tonight."

Eric said, "Undo the paper."

They were not the same as they had been. They had taken on characteristics, sloughed from their entity. Sasha abrupt, Eric commanding, perhaps secretly fierce, and Miranda kind.

Rachaela peeled off the shiny white paper. She found a band of silver in which was caught a polished ruby heart. The ruby was antique, and conceivably priceless.

"You can't give me this."

Miranda's face puckered as if she would cry.

Rachaela's heart clenched within her.

Sasha frowned.

Eric said, "It was Anna's. Miriam brought it from the house."

Rachaela felt no pressure from them anymore. They were not forcing her to anything. The dark spearhead of their lust, Adamus, continuance and seed, was gone. It was only a gift.

She slipped it on to her little finger—it would not fit any of the others. Perhaps, when she was older, then.

"It's very beautiful."

Ruth would have loved the ring. The hard, cold silver, the ruby, for blood.

Eric got up. Michael and Cheta began to clear the table, leaving only the wine. The Scarabae perched on chairs about the room, and the TV was not switched on.

Something else, then, something more to come.

As he had led them in the prayer or chant, Eric conducted them to a round table by one of the curtained windows.

Michael helped them into the four chairs, Eric, Sasha, Miranda, Rachaela. Then Cheta laid out around the table's rim a circle of cards. They were made of thin wood, and on each was a painted symbol. After a moment, Rachaela realized that these were the letters of an alphabet, but not her own.

Michael put down on the table, at its center, a cut-glass goblet, upside down.

He stood back.

He and Cheta began to turn out the gracious side lamps of the sitting room.

Dark entered, on cue.

It was to be a seance.

Rachaela said, "You can't include me in
this
."

"We must," said Sasha. And then, "Anna would want it."

Anna. Adamus's mother—perhaps. Therefore Rachaela's grandmother. Ruth's. Anna: stabbed through the heart by the heartless knitting needle.

"But I can't—" said Rachaela.

They waited.

When she did not go on, did not get up, Eric put the forefinger of his right hand onto the glass, and Sasha and Miranda followed him. The rings of the Scarabae crackled in the half-dark and the last lamp went out.

A chair creaked, as Michael sat down by Cheta in a corner.

Rachaela put her finger on the glass among the fingers of Eric, Sasha, Miranda.

There was a stasis, a
cessation
.

It won't work. Why should it?

The glass trembled, and began to move.

They are moving it.

In the blackness of the room perhaps they could see, but Rachaela could not very well. Somehow she saw the glass, running like a white surge across the polished table.

Well, let them play at it. If it could comfort them.

The glass was spelling out words, of course, but—of course—she could not tell what they were. Eric exclaimed in another tongue—not that, she thought, which had been used in the prayer. And then Miranda murmured something. A name?
Stephan
?

The glass darted.

There was a vibration in it, a thrumming, as if from thunder miles away.

Don't imagine things.

Adamus had drunk her blood, in the dark, lying over her, flesh on flesh, so long ago. Adamus…

A pressure mounted in Rachaela's throat, like tears, or the prologue to orgasm.

She would not be coerced. Not even now.

The glass was skidding on the table, squealing.

She lifted her finger—and the glass was gone, seeming to pull the pulse out of her finger's end.

Irresistibly, she let her finger drop back on to the surface of the goblet.

The Scarabae were quiet now, only breathing, concentrating.

There was a light in the room. Someone had lit a lamp. But it was not the lamp. It was too low down.

Keeping her hand in contact with the goblet, Rachaela looked. A powerpoint was glowing fierily against the wall. And there another, slowly blooming up like a gas flame. The light switches had begun to shine. At the room's center, the overhead lamps abruptly fractured with a dull dense crack. Glass showered the carpet.

The Scarabae took no notice.

Suddenly there came the hiss of water and a loud knocking from beyond the room, a bathroom along the corridor also apparently reacting. There were faint noises of stress from every corner. Thumpings, patterings. The hotel sitting room had come alive. The carpet was shifting. Pictures tilted on the walls.

That doesn't make it real. Psychic electricity, a poltergeist.

One of the chairs was rent as if by a blade and stuffing jetted up in a cloud, coming gradually down again, like dandelion fluff.

The glass had stopped.

Rachaela was shaking. It was not fear or nerves. Something had been leached from her.

She took her hand away from the goblet, and getting up, she went to the dinner table. Michael was there before her, pouring her a glass of wine. She took it. Not meaning to, she laughed. To her surprise, she heard Sasha laugh, just as sharply, randomly. Then they were silent.

Rachaela stood by the cleared table where the old wine remained alone. She watched the Scarabae file out of the room.

Cheta switched on a lamp. Slowly, slowly, the powerpoints were losing their radiance.

"Quite a lot of damage," Rachaela said to Michael. "I believe the hotel will clear everything up, no questions asked."

"Yes, Miss Rachaela."

No questions.

The bronze clock had lost its hands, they had flown off and landed on the floor. Its face was empty. Rachaela remembered all the broken clocks of the Scarabae house, the clocks which had gone too fast, or run backward.

When she reached her room, she found the pictures had crashed from the walls, the mirror had shattered making a rain carpet on the ground.

In the bathroom, judging by the mess, the wonderful shampoos and gels must have exploded. The tops had come off the taps and water had erupted at the ceiling, next, just as irrationally, miraculously losing force and falling back, now only trickling like weeping in the bath and basin. The toothpaste had made long white snakes, looping crazily, decoratively.

She investigated without panic or surprise.

In the drawer of the bureau the paper and stamps were torn into confetti. She opened the little sewing kit. The two needles had sewn through and through, then curled up like springs or the shells of snails.

On the table by her bed, the flowers were straight and dewy. The buds had opened wide as wings, giving off a rich pure scent.

RUTH HAD NOT SLEPT IN THE T-SHIRT. She had not slept at all.

The Millses' operational spare room was done in coffee and milk, with hint-of-pink walls. There were a coffee washbasin with milk towel, a milky reading lamp beside the coffee bed, magazines, a cupboard for (nonexistent) clothes. On the chocolate and rose rug, Ruth's white and red feet lay still as she watched them.

She sat on the bed, motionless, until all the human sounds of the house had ceased. Then she turned out the lamp and allowed her eyes to get used to the dark. This was easy. She was a Scarabae.

In the dark, she moved out of the room, and along the passage, slim and agile as a ferret. She went downstairs.

A faint unearthly glow shone into the hall from the glass window in the front door, the streetlight over the road.

Ruth did not need this beacon to find the kitchen.

The tiled floor was cold, the gadgets and fitments rose apparently impervious.

Ruth reached across the stainless-steel coffee grinder and selected, from the conveniently laid-out panel on the wall, the sharpest, longest knife.

Across the table, the girl wore a low-necked black dress. Her hair was piled up on her head, and clipped by a
diamante
buckle. As the waiter put down the veal in front of Clive, the girl pointed at it and said coldly, "You can't expect my husband to eat that, it's rubbery."

At that moment the door opened. It was not a door in the restaurant, but the bedroom door. Clive thought it was Amanda, returning from the bathroom, she always made sure she woke him. But no, Amanda was snoring gently on the far side of the bed. For a second Clive had the idea that Tim had come in, as he used to do in childhood, seeking reassurance after a nightmare. It had been a hell of a nuisance, always. Sometimes he had insisted on climbing in with them.

But obviously it could not be Tim.

Clive raised himself to one elbow and leaned toward the bedside lamp, and as he did so, he saw the girl, Tim's girl, right in front of him, a shadow with hair.

"What—" said Clive. And the girl said softly, "No." So Clive did not finish his question. And then the girl swayed forward, her arm waved, and she had cut his throat.

Clive made terrible noises but he was choked by blood; they were not very loud. In fact they were very like noises he often made when snoring in slumber. This was probably why Amanda did not wake, only gave an irritated little muttering in her sleep.

As Clive flopped down, his head and arm and blood pouring off over the bed, Ruth went quickly around to the farther side. She raised Amanda's chin, and sliced accurately. The knife was sharp enough to cut meat and raw vegetables and it made short work of Amanda. Possibly Amanda woke up before she died, but if so it was much too late.