The Influence (18 page)

Trees brushed the steep pavements with shadow and brought darkness lurching out of gardens as she climbed the winding road, and yet a stillness seemed to pace her beneath the gusty trees, an icy stillness that felt like the absence of the mocking whisper she’d once heard. A car sped up the hill, and she shrank away from the kerb. Lance must have fallen under the train because he had been taken unawares, she told herself.

She toiled to the crest of the hill and hastened downward. The lights of Gronant were cut off by the hill, isolating her with a lone streetlamp. Nevertheless the sight of the churchyard was almost a relief. Surely nothing more substantial than fear could threaten her in there.

Beyond the gate the grey path led to the stocky unlit chapel which, she tried to think, would be watchful on her behalf. She unlatched the gate and closed it behind her. Clutching the spade to her chest, she ventured onto the grass. Headstones gleamed and dimmed, flowers in vases shivered on graves. The robe of an angel stirred with shadow, as if a small figure might be peering out of the stone folds. The willow seemed less peaceful now than secretive, its tent of branches parting to give glimpses of darkness within. She was beside it before she was able to see the family grave. That meant that she wouldn’t be visible from the road, she reminded herself, and stumbled forward, turning the spade head down.

The grave was in the shadow of the willow. Light from the streetlamp flashed between the branches, picking out words low down on the marble pillar: VICTORIA…HER…ARMS… The turf on the mound was still distinguishable as squares. Hermione inserted the edge of the spade under the nearest and leaned her heel on the metal, and then all her limbs locked. Her resolution had brought her this far, but she could no longer avoid realising how much she dreaded what she planned to do.

It was for Rowan. She had to do it while Rowan was still herself. But perhaps doubt was even harder to deal with than fear: was she really planning to dig up the family grave because she thought that Rowan was being made to seem like Queenie so that nobody would notice if Queenie took her place? Put that way, here at the graveside with the night surging at her like a cold impalpable sea, the notion seemed almost too grotesque to contemplate, the delusion of a lonely woman too eager to find someone else to care for now that her little sister had made a life for herself—except that she had seen Rowan’s companion face to face. She was right about Vicky, she was the only person who had seen through her, and surely that must mean she was the only person capable of guessing her scheme. She willed her body to relax. The spade dug under the square of turf and peeled it back.

She lifted the rest of the turf and laid the squares where they would be out of reach of her digging, then she sidled round the marble pillar to the side of the grave from which she could glimpse the road. She took a deep breath, heartfelt as a prayer, and drove the spade into the mound.

It went in so far she almost lost her balance. She remembered the pulpy chair into which her hands had sunk, as if the failure of Queenie’s will to live had spread rot through the upper rooms. She gritted her teeth and heaped the spadeful beside the grave, dug again and trod hard on the spade, reassuring herself that it couldn’t sink all the way down to the coffin. In any case, there was a lid; she mustn’t imagine how the spade might cut straight through Queenie, severing her body like a worm. She stamped on the metal with a fierceness that bruised her heel but couldn’t quite stun her thoughts.

The next layer of earth was packed harder. Despite the chill wind, she was soon so hot that she had to drape her coat over the marble pillar. It waved the empty sockets of its arms while she stooped over the grave, more and more precariously. She was putting off the moment when she would have to step into the hole she’d dug. At last she had no choice. She clung to the spade with one hand and the pillar with the other, and let herself down into the dark that smelled of moist earth.

It yielded beneath her weight, but not far. There was still earth between her and what lay face up beneath her. She reached for her coat and managed to pull the flashlight out of her pocket. She propped the flashlight against the pillar, facing the unevenly quadrangular pit. Yellow light fastened on black glistening lumps of earth at her feet. She glanced warily towards the road, where there hadn’t been a car since she had left the pavement, and moved to the foot of the grave.

The willow was behind her now. Whenever shadows scuttled over the heaps of earth that hemmed her in, she thought someone had peered out between the dangling branches, but she could never catch sight of a watcher. Being watched should mean there was no danger beneath her, for how could it be in two places at once? Before long she was hardly aware of the movements: she must be almost on the coffin—close enough to dread what she was stepping on as she edged along the trench to point the flashlight downwards more sharply. At the end by the willow the fan of light grew wide as the grave, but so dim that it was able only to make the earth glisten sluglike. She retreated there, her jaw aching until she managed to unclench her teeth.

As she poked the spade into the earth, gingerly in case it was about to strike wood, she felt both sick and, grotesquely, famished. Nothing like hard work to give you an appetite, she thought helplessly, and leaned all her weight on the spade. It sank in a few inches and stood there. It had reached a surface more solid than earth.

The halting of the spade seemed to spread through her body, freezing even her thoughts. The willow lurched towards her, hissing and rattling its branches; shadows swarmed over the heaps of earth that walled her in the trench. For Rowan, she thought, and swayed forward as if she were starting awake. For a moment she thought the lid had shifted beneath her, but the spade had slipped on the wood. Between fury and panic, she began to fling earth out of the trench.

It didn’t take long to uncover the lid. She glanced about at the shifty night, the headless scarecrow of her coat, the streetlamp peering through the willow, and then she set about scraping the last of the earth from the glimmering lid. Every so often the spade would clank. She stared at the scraped wood displayed in earth like sodden plush, and made for the brighter end, poising her spade to use as a screwdriver. Then a chill seeped through her from the soil to the roots of her hair, for she’d realised why the spade had kept clanking. All the screws were half out of the lid.

She grabbed the flashlight as if it were a lifeline on which she could haul herself out of the grave, and made herself train the beam on the screws. They poked out of the coffin, dripping earth, daring her to turn them further and lift the lid. She thought distantly of Rowan, and then of herself, of the way Queenie had terrorised her when she was Rowan’s age. Wasn’t she still doing so, confronting Hermione with the screws so as to make her incapable of lifting the lid? “I can see through your tricks,” Hermione whispered, and reached shakily for the nearest screw.

It was gritty with moist soil. As soon as she had extracted it and dropped it near the foot of the pillar she rubbed her fingers together, shuddering. She did that automatically each time she removed another screw. She was beginning to wish she’d dug a wider trench: though there was just enough room on the left-hand side of the coffin for her to perch on the earth in the grave, she was nervous of slipping onto the lid now that it was held by so few screws. She paced along the yielding strip of earth and stooped to lift out a screw, another, a third. Now there was only the one closest to the pillar, and if she sprawled onto the coffin the lid might swing away from her on the pivot of the screw, dumping her into Queenie’s lair. That was what Queenie would want her to think, she told herself, and snatched out the last screw and shied it toward the pillar. Before another wave of apprehension could inhibit her, she squatted on the strip of earth, gripping the flashlight between her shaky knees, and poked her fingers under the lid.

One heave and it came up, so easily that she almost overbalanced. It thumped against the far side of the grave, spilling earth into the coffin. Hermione stood up as quickly as she dared, grasping the flashlight with both hands. She longed to clamber out of the trench to recover from the shock of having almost lost her balance, but then she might not be able to force herself back in. She swayed against the wall of the trench to steady herself and gazed down, eyes twitching, at the long pale shape that lay beneath her in the coffin, beyond the reach of the flashlight beam. For Rowan, she thought fiercely, and let the beam sink into the coffin, past the fat white ridges of the lining, until it settled on the object in the box.

Her grip tightened until the flashlight began to shiver. Her throat closed around her held breath. She’d expected Queenie to have worsened, but not like this. The long face had withered to the bone around the shrivelled eyes, which were almost black, and the mouth, exposing all the teeth and the blackened gums. The hair was spread out around the skull. The face was almost all grin, a dead grin with tiny eyes, staring up out of a nest of grey hair.

She had to look away from the face to find the locket. She forced her gaze and the light away, though her arms trembled. The beam swung farther than she meant it to, jerking at the folded hands on Queenie’s chest. There was barely enough left of them to be called hands, and they were spattered with earth that the lid had dislodged. Hermione dragged the light back to the neck.

It was gnarled and peeling as a dead branch, and dismayingly thin. She strained her eyes until they stung, and then she held onto the edge of the grave and lowered herself to one knee on the narrow ridge beside the coffin. Still grasping the crumbling edge, she leaned precariously toward the coffin and lowered the flashlight until the lens was almost touching the circle of bright light on cracked dead ropy flesh. Nothing gleamed. There was no chain around Queenie’s neck.

Hermione got down on both knees, her right knee resting on the rim of the coffin. With the casing of the flashlight she probed at the chest above the hands in case the chain had broken, leaving the locket concealed. When she was sure that the locket wasn’t there she continued to prod the corpse, more viciously now, to show that she knew she was being watched and didn’t care. She’d faced the worst, and it couldn’t harm her, it was only loathsome. She could even make out the watcher at the edge of her vision, a small pale shape beyond a grave to her left. She let her face take on all the contempt she was feeling, an unexpected rush of it that she could scarcely cope with, and then she raised her head and looked straight at the watcher.

Her hand clenched on the wall of the grave, tearing loose a fistful of earth. The small figure who was watching her, and clinging to a granite cross as though it could barely support her, was Rowan.

She looked ready to turn and flee if Hermione even spoke. Hermione was overwhelmed with shame and panic. She might have ducked out of sight if she’d thought Rowan hadn’t recognised her. Queenie had tricked them both, she realised with a fury that made her head swim: Queenie, who was Vicky, and who must be the shape that was moving at the edge of Hermione’s vision. But Vicky had miscalculated, she thought as she swung toward the movement, trying to focus on it. She’d strayed where Hermione could confront her in front of Rowan, and that might even show Rowan the truth.

But the moving shape wasn’t Vicky, nor was it beside Rowan. It was much closer to Hermione, which was why she hadn’t been able to focus at once. It was a hand, a shrivelled hand piebald with earth. Though it was jerky as a puppet’s hand, it was able to close around the back of Hermione’s neck.

She flinched convulsively away from its touch, and tried to scream as if that would help her twist out of reach. But a pain deep in her innards had sucked breath into her, pain that bowed her over herself and sent her sideways into the coffin. She was still gripping the flashlight, which thumped the lining of the coffin and showed her Queenie’s grinning head. The head was rising from its nest of hair.

The hair stuck to the lining. It tore free of the grey scalp as the corpse sat up stiffly, a bald grinning doll with no eyes worth the name. Perhaps it was mindless as a puppet, but its fleshless grin fell open in what might have been a soundless scream of triumph as it clasped its arms around Hermione’s neck and pressed its face against hers.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Rowan didn’t ask the question until she was back at the main road. She followed Vicky down the flinty path between the trees that hid the lights. Vicky waited for her next to the splash of a streetlamp, but Rowan lingered just inside the gap between the hedges of the lit houses. “How do you know where my aunt is?” she said.

Vicky put her hands on her hips and gazed expressionlessly at her. “I thought you trusted me.”

“I do, but I still want to know things. You always seem to be where I am whenever I’d like you to be.”

“Then you should be grateful, shouldn’t you?”

“I’ve said I’ll be your friend, but I don’t like you knowing more than I do.”

Vicky glared at her so harshly that Rowan almost retreated between the shivering hedges. For a moment she thought Vicky was about to say “How dare you speak to me like that?” or even “Don’t you know who I am?” She held her breath until her ears throbbed, and then Vicky’s face softened, her voice turned almost wheedling. “You could know everything I know if you’d trust me.”

“I’ve told you, I do.”

“You didn’t just now when we were on the hill. You were nearly home, you could feel you were. It would have been so easy to go on, I should have made sure it was, but instead you had to come back.”