Possession (17 page)

T
HE RAIN HAD
stopped, and plump, wild clouds were swinging across the night sky behind the cube of blackness that was the Redmaynes’ block of flats. I paid the taxi, and watched it glide off round the deserted corner into the main road: then, alone in the empty street, I scrutinised the great walls of building in front of me, where humans were sleeping, tier on tier, like gulls upon a cliff face.

All was in darkness. All, that is, except a single pair of windows, high up, nearly at the top. In this flat alone there must be someone awake, someone moving about, or reading, or talking. Someone who for once hadn’t drawn the thick, expensive curtains, gliding on smooth rails, to shut out the darkness and the sound of the wild, warm, December wind. Even down here, in the sheltered canyon of the street, the wind was pushing at me, tweaking at my hair and at my skirt; up there it must be roaring like the sea, breaking itself against the sturdy, expensive glass, retreating, and hurling itself yet again out of the darkness against those intrepid squares of light.

Was
it the Redmayne flat? It was the right floor, and—yes—it was the right side of the building. This was the street you looked down at from the sitting-room … and while I stood speculating, the moon burst from behind one of those flying clouds, and all the black surfaces became grey, the grey ones silver; the speed of the moon was like an express train, and for a moment the whole street seemed to be flying, with me aboard, into a dream of silvery light.

I knew, really, that it was only the clouds that were moving; that the great block of flats was still standing foursquare before me, inert and solid, and that it was I who must make the decision to move. I pushed the great entrance
door open, and my footfalls at once became hushed on the deep carpet. If there was a caretaker, he was off-duty, or asleep—after all it
was
two o’clock in the morning—for the entrance hall was silent and deserted.

There is something strangely unnerving about shutting yourself into a lift at two o’clock in the morning. You feel that at this hour the mechanism—whatever it is—will be at its lowest ebb, just as is the human body. At such an hour the pulse rate is slowed, the breathing shallow, and the mind wanders feebly, at the mercy of fears, and worries, and strange fancies, which by day would be just laughable. Are lifts the same? Absurdly, I hesitated before pressing the button for the ninth floor, with the uneasy feeling that the lift would bungle it somehow; it would be only half awake, dreaming muddled dreams of non-existent floors; of attics far beyond the heights of human architecture; of basements deep, deep, near the fiery centre of the earth; and while I stood there, scolding myself for entertaining such ridiculous fancies, I really did feel as if the lift was beginning to move. I seemed to feel it quiver, to stretch itself, yawning after it’s long sleep, and—My God, it
was
moving! Downwards! Down into the basement … down, down…. Was this a
nightmare
, or was it really happening?

With a soft little sigh and a faint whisper of metal, the lift came to a rest, and the doors slid open.

Did I imagine it, or was there a tiny flutter of movement in the dank, stone corridor on which the doors were opening? Was there a light scutter of fleeing footsteps, or was it the machinery of the lift settling into immobility after it’s brief exercise?

I took my mind, as it were, by the scruff of its neck, and shook it into rational behaviour. Floating, fairy-tale fantasies about animated lifts with wills of their own are all very well if you are telling stories to tots: the lift would be called Lifty, and it would have some pathetic little grievance about its monotonous life of going up and down, up and down, which would be resolved by some kind-hearted five-year-old and
his Mummy, whom Lifty would thereafter carry up and down with special friendliness.

But I wasn’t a five-year-old, and this lift (to the best of my knowledge) wasn’t Lifty: and this that was happening wasn’t a story. Nor a dream. I was wide awake. There must, then, be some rational explanation. Plainly, someone in the basement must have pressed the button to summon the lift at just the time when I was standing in it, hesitating about pressing the button to carry me upwards. Whoever it was hadn’t—naturally—expected me to be within; as soon as the opening doors began to reveal an occupant, this mysterious person—or persons—had fled away, either because they really didn’t want to be seen, or just from the shock of the unexpected. If it was the latter, they would soon recover their courage and return: and so I waited for what seemed like more than a minute, staring out into the
damp-smelling
stone passage, illumined faintly for a few yards in each direction by the light inside the lift, and beyond that merging into utter blackness.

No sound. No movement. I began to think. Could I conceivably have pressed the button for the basement myself, absent-mindedly? Anyway, I couldn’t go on waiting and speculating any longer. I had come rushing here in a taxi in order to counteract as quickly as possible the effects of whatever spiteful trick it might be that Sonja had played on Mrs Redmayne; I must go up to her flat at once, and see what I could do. Without hesitating this time, I pressed the button for the ninth floor. The doors closed with soft precision, and now I was gliding smoothly upwards.

With the same soft, obedient murmur of metal as before, the lift came to rest on the ninth floor. The doors slid open, and as I stepped out into the carpeted corridor, I saw at once that it
had
been the Redmaynes’ flat which had
displayed
those lighted windows. Through the half-open front door the light was still pouring, illuminating the dim corridor. Mrs Redmayne must be there, then, awake and
perhaps
terrified. I ran along the intervening yards of carpeting.
“Mrs Redmayne!” I called, so that my running footsteps should not frighten her. “Mrs Redmayne, it’s me!”

I don’t know why I was so sure it must be she who was cowering in the middle of that blaze of lighted rooms. It could just as well have been Mervyn: or indeed both of them. Perhaps I was assuming that after tonight’s revelations, Mervyn would be nursing his terror and discomfiture
somewhere
other than at home; or perhaps I felt sure that Sonja had chosen tonight for a special reason: had known,
somehow
, that Mrs Redmayne would be on her own, so that the “trick”, whatever it was, might cause maximum alarm. Anyway, whatever the reason, I
did
assume that it was she who was there, and that she was alone.

“Mrs Redmayne!” I called again, as I reached the front door: but there was no answer. I knocked, and then rang—even with the door half open as it was, it seemed a bit high-handed just to walk in. Thus it was that, as I stood waiting, my eyes fell on the lock of the door in front of me, and I realised that it had been picked. And in no very skilful manner, either—not that I am any expert in the matter—to judge by the damage and splintering that the surrounding wood had suffered. Just like Tony! I thought scornfully; trust him to bungle any job he undertook, just as he had already bungled his education and his love-life. He had probably represented himself to Sonja as a skilled and experienced housebreaker (this was the sort of thing that he would expect a girl-friend of his to admire), and she had doubtless taken him along as an expert technician, as well as to share with her the “fun” whatever it was.

I soon knew what it was. After my second ring was still unanswered, I ventured to push the front door right open and walk into the hall; and there I saw Sonja’s “fun” staring me in the face.

The door from the hall into the sitting-room was wide open. Along the top of the door-frame had been hammered several large, powerful builders’ nails, and from two of them, hanging by their necks, were suspended two dolls.
Large, expensive, brand-new dolls. They swung very gently in the light stir of air in the warm flat, while outside the wind howled, and beat, moaning and powerless, against the reinforced concrete walls.

S
O THIS WAS
the joke. This was the amusing trick that Sonja and Tony had been laughing about so heartily as they set out in the car this evening. Late at night, they must have calculated, Mrs Redmayne would come home to her flat, and see the dolls swinging in front of her. It would be an absolute scream: the old cow would think that her precious son had hung them there, that the aberrations of his teens had suddenly returned. A real giggle, it would be.

I recalled Susan’s offer to
kill
Sonja if I liked, and I wondered why I hadn’t settled for it then and there.

How
could
they? They knew—they must have known—the terror their heartless trick would arouse. Admittedly Sonja didn’t (so far as I had gathered) know that Mervyn had murdered Avril: but she knew—probably Avril herself had gossipped about it at school—about the morbid games with the dolls, and she knew, or at least could have guessed, how desperately worried his mother must have been. She undoubtedly knew the manner of the late Mr Redmayne’s death, and even that alone would have made this “trick” of hers an unforgiveably cruel one.

How, then, could she have brought herself to perpetrate it? And how could Tony have consented to help her? How
could
they? Had they no inkling of the kind of agony they were inflicting on a mother already desperate?

Of course they hadn’t … neither of them had any inkling of any feelings other than their own. Sonja felt like revenging herself on Mrs Redmayne; Tony felt like doing something for kicks in Sonja’s company. Other people’s feelings weren’t real to either of them, except as a sort of game. They knew the rules of the game, vaguely; that is to say, they knew the sort of ways in which other people could be made to scream,
or laugh, or make love, or run away, and sometimes this game of provoking such responses seemed to them worth playing, and sometimes it seemed boring. Tonight, evidently, it had not seemed boring at all. They had gone to quite a lot of trouble and even expense over it: those dolls must have cost several pounds. I saw now that they must be the very same pair that Mrs Redmayne and I had seen behind the water-tank that night. Had Sonja, then, first planned to carry out her trick on that former night, when—as now—Mervyn was out of the flat? And had she been foiled by my unexpected presence? Had she then stuffed the dolls into what she thought was a safe hiding place, and then hung around waiting for me to go? Had she heard Mrs Redmayne’s screams on finding them, and had she laughed to herself, and speculated on how much louder those screams would be when the scene was properly set? I remembered how, the next morning, Sonja had questioned me so uneasily about my evening with Mrs Redmayne. She must have been reassuring herself that I didn’t know that she, Sonja, had been lurking about the building at the time: that I wasn’t connecting her in my mind with anything that had occurred.

Lurking about the building. Was it Sonja, perhaps, down in that basement now? Was she still hanging about, waiting to hear those satisfying screams? Had the trick misfired? Had Mrs Redmayne not come in at all …? At this thought, I began darting about the flat, in and out of the lighted rooms.

No one was there. Her bed had not been slept in. And then, as I came out into the little hall again, I noticed her
handbag
. It had been dropped—flung, rather, as one might at the impact of a sudden, stunning shock—a few feet away from the front door. It was spilling open as it lay … keys, money, cheque-book, all told the same tale. The trick had
not
misfired. Mrs Redmayne
had
come in—she had seen what she had been meant to see: and then—What?

Had she controlled her screams, so as not to bring the neighbours rushing in to see what her son (she supposed)
had done? To save him, she must have choked down her terror; must have flung her handbag away in blind,
unthinking
horror, and rushed away into the night.

Those sounds I had heard in the basement. The
mysterious
summoning of the lift. Was it Mrs Redmayne after all? Failing to recognise me at the first glance as the lift doors opened, had she fled away into the echoing darkness of those underground vaults? Was she cowering there still, in the damp and the darkness, too shocked, too terrified, to move, or even think.

Suddenly, and for no very good reason, I felt sure that this was the case. Certainly, if anyone had asked me
why
Mrs Redmayne should have taken refuge in the basement, I could not have answered. I just felt sure that she had: the irrationality of such behaviour on her part was, if anything, a point in favour of it, for who would behave rationally in a situation such as she imagined she was in? And on top of this there was the undoubted fact that
someone
had been in the basement. Someone had pressed that button. In a moment, I was in the lift, sinking down, down down, towards the very depths of the building.

There was no sound as I stepped out into that chill stone corridor: and I could find no light switch. The light from the open lift sent its rays a little way into the darkness in each direction: after that I had to feel my way.

Doors. Lots of doors. My hand encountered one rough wooden panel after another, and at each one I paused, felt for the handle, turned it, and pushed: but each one was locked. Not surprising, of course. These were probably store rooms containing articles of at least some sort of value. Tools. Light bulbs. Stores of paint. Spare parts for this and that: I could imagine that a big block of flats like this would need all kinds of materials on hand.

At intervals I turned round to make sure that the dim glimmer of light from the lift was still in view: I did not want to find that the lift had been spirited to the top of the block without me; still less did I want to lose myself in some
rabbit-warren of passages, having turned a corner in the darkness without realising I had done so.

But it was all right; the light was still there, faint but comforting; and now, at last, here was a handle which turned to some purpose. The door opened.

After the darkness in which I had been for so many minutes, the room seemed quite bright, in a grey, dreamlike sort of way. Moonlight poured in through a grating high up in the wall, and bands of brightness lay like glittering bars of steel across the stone floor. There was a smell of dust, of oldness, of sacking; I could make out piles of rotting canvas deckchairs in one corner, coils of old rope in another; and now, in the silence, I became aware of a distant pattering of feet.

I stiffened: I braced myself against the impact of total, incapacitating fear. Suppose it
wasn’t
Mrs Redmayne, then who, or what, mad or sane, purposeless or with intent, was scuttling about in these hollowed-out spaces under the earth? Would the footsteps stop here, at this very door? Who—or what—would look in at me? What sort of face would it be? What sort of eyes, glinting with what madness under the barred light of the moon, would any moment be peering up into mine?

Yes, peering
up.
Those pattering steps were the steps of someone or something tiny; someone small, and swift, and light. Or else of someone agile, and desperate, cunning and skilful as a rat in these burrows under the ground.

And then, to my boundless relief, I realised that the sounds had not been coming in this direction at all: they had all the time been going away; already they were almost out of hearing.

My courage returned. It
must
have been Mrs Redmayne? I should have called out to her—what a coward I was! I must run after her at once—reassure her—tell her that her worst fears were unfounded, and the whole thing had just been a cruel joke by two reckless and insensitive young people.

I was only afraid now that I would not catch her in time. She was probably running towards the lift. She would reach it before I did, she would sweep up to the ninth floor, and would confront once again the awful spectacle in her flat, still not knowing the truth of how it had got there. I cursed myself for not having cut the wretched dolls down the moment I had seen them—this would at least have saved her a second confrontation. As quickly as I could in the
darkness
, I hurried out of the room and along the black passage. Thank goodness the light of the lift was still visible—I might still catch her before she pressed the button.

“Mrs Redmayne!” I called softly—somehow one
could
not call loudly in that awesome, echoing darkness—“Mrs Redmayne, wait for me….”

There was no answer. I reached the lift, and she wasn’t there. No one was there. The lighted lift stood quietly where I had left it, awaiting impassively the next call that might be made on it.

Where was she, then? Had she gone on, along the passage past the lift, and into the darkness in the other direction? It seemed the only possibility, and I followed it, feeling my way along the walls; past door after locked door, just as I had before in the opposite direction.

“Mrs Redmayne!” I called softly at intervals, and with decreasing conviction. “Mrs Redmayne? Where are you?”

At last the passage came to an end: a coke cellar, or something: I felt the knobs crunching under my feet, and a faint shaft of moonlight through a grating gleamed on the grey piles like a landscape in a dead world. There was nowhere further to go.

So I turned back. I felt my way along the lefthand side of the passage this time, again trying all the doors, and again without success, till at last I came once more to the lift, bright and uninformative as ever, quietly waiting and ready to do my bidding.

Back to the ninth floor again: there seemed nothing else to do. And indeed there wasn’t: for already it was too late.
Mrs Redmayne was already there. I had not thought of the nine flights of stairs. Yes, she was already there, she had beaten me to it, but she gave me no greeting as I came in. For three figures were hanging there now, in that awful doorway. “Ma-ma, Ma-ma!” squeaked two of them as I plunged in among them, as I fought and wrestled with the knotted rope. The third said nothing. Its head hung
sideways
, and its silence was a silence such as I have never known or dreamed of; the silence that lies on the other side of despair.

*

The verdict was suicide: and goodness knows the poor woman had had reason enough for wanting to do away with herself. The evidence all pointed that way; among other things, it was shown that the rope had been taken that very night from that moonlit basement store room.

As for me, I am not querying the verdict. What good would it do? As the coroner said, the shock of seeing those hanging figures must have been terrible, and must have re-awakened ghastly memories from fourteen years ago. The coroner, of course, was thinking of
her
ghastly memories.