The Little Stranger (44 page)

So she moved on through the shadows until she reached the nursery passage, where she found the door to the day-nursery closed like all the others, with the key turned in its lock. It was as she put her hand to the key that she experienced the first touch of real apprehension, conscious again of the heavy Hundreds silence, and suddenly irrationally fearful of what she might find when the door was opened. She felt, almost too vividly, the stir of old emotions; she remembered coming here, quietly like this, to visit her children when they were small. She recalled odd scenes: Roderick running into her arms, clinging to her like a monkey, putting his wet mouth to her gown; Caroline polite, stand-offish, busy with paints, her hair falling forward into the colours … And then, as if from a different, distant era, she saw Susan, in a creaseless dress. She remembered her nurse, Nurse Palmer. Rather sharp, rather stern, always giving the impression that one’s visits were a trouble, as if one wanted to see one’s child more than was really proper or nice … Unlocking the door, Mrs Ayres half expected to hear her voice, half expected to find everything unchanged.
Here’s mummy come up for you again, look, Susan
.
Why, mummy can’t keep away!

But the room in which she found herself could not, after all, have been more anonymous, nor more dismal. It had, as I’ve said, been stripped of its nursery furniture and fittings years before, and it now had the plangent echoing quality of all bare, neglected rooms. Its floorboards were dusty, and the faded paper on its walls was stained with damp. A set of black-out curtains, streaked indigo by the sun, still hung from a wire at the barred sash windows. The old-fashioned hob hearth was swept, but the brass fender was spotted with smuts where rainwater had found its way down the chimney; a corner of the mantelpiece was broken, and showed pale as the exposed enamel on a freshly chipped tooth. But there on the chimney-breast, just as Mrs Ayres remembered, was the speaking-tube: it finished on this floor in a short length of braided pipe, with another tarnished mouthpiece at its end. She went across to it, lifted it, and took out its whistle, and it at once gave off a musty, unpleasant odour—something like bad breath, she said, so that, as she put the cup to her ear, she was uncomfortably aware of all the lips which, over the years, must have pressed and slid against it … As before, she heard nothing save the muffled roar of her own blood. She listened for almost a minute, trying the mouthpiece at different angles against her ear. Then she fitted the whistle back in its socket, let the tube fall, and wiped her hands.

She was disappointed, she realised—quite horribly disappointed. Nothing about the room seemed to want or welcome her: she gazed around, trying to find a trace of the nursery life that had gone on in it, but there was no sign of the sentimental pictures that had used to hang on the walls, or anything like that. There were only grubby echoes of the soldiers’ occupation, rings and scratches and cigarette-burns, scuffs on the skirting-boards; and the window-sills, as she found when she crossed to one of them, were ugly with little grey circles of gum. It was bitterly cold there, before the ill-fitting window sashes, but she stood for a moment, gazing at the view across the park, mildly intrigued by the high, oblique perspective it gave her on the far-off building-work, and able, presently, to pick out the figure of Caroline, who was just beginning her journey back to the house. The sight of her tall, eccentric-looking daughter making her solitary way across the fields made Mrs Ayres feel bleaker than ever, and after a moment of watching she stepped back from the glass. To her left was another door, communicating with the neighbouring room, the old night-nursery. That was the room in which her first daughter had lain sick with diphtheria; the place, in fact, where she had died. The door was ajar. Mrs Ayres found she couldn’t resist the dark temptation to open it properly and go inside.

But again, there was little here that she remembered, nothing but wear and waste and neglect. A couple of panes in the windows were cracked, the sash frame crumbling around them. A corner hand-basin gave off a sour, uriney smell, and the boards beneath were almost rotting where a leaking tap had dripped. She went across to examine the damage; leaning, she put a hand to the wall. The wallpaper had a raised pattern of loops and arabesques that had once, she recalled suddenly, been very colourful. It had been painted over with a drab distemper, which the damp was turning to a sort of curd. She looked at the stains on her fingers with a feeling of distaste, then stood and worked her hands together, trying to brush the distemper from her skin. She was sorry, now, that she’d come in here—sorry that she’d come up to these rooms at all. She went to the basin and ran some frigid, spluttering water over her hands. She wiped her fingers against her skirt, and turned to leave.

And as she did that, she felt the starting up of a breeze—or, anyway, something like a breeze, a cold movement of air, which came suddenly against her, striking her cheek, disarranging her hair, making her shiver; and a second later she was shocked and jolted almost out of her skin by a violent slamming in the neighbouring room. She guessed pretty much at once what had happened—that the door she’d unlocked and left open had been swung to by a draught from the badly fitting windows. But still, the sound was so unexpected, and so sickeningly loud in the stripped, silent room, it took her a moment to recover herself and steady her lurching heart. Trembling slightly, she went back through to the day-nursery and, as she’d expected, its door was closed. She crossed to it, and caught hold of its handle; and couldn’t open it.

She stood still for a second, perplexed. She turned the handle to left and to right, supposing in dismay that the spindle must have broken, thinking that the violence with which the door had blown shut must have jolted the mechanism. But the lock was the old rim kind, fitted to the door and painted over: there was a slight gap between it and its keep, as there usually is, and when she stooped and put her eye to this she could see very clearly that the spindle was working as it should—and that the bolt of the lock had been shot home, just as if the key on the other side had been deliberately turned. Could a breeze have done that? Could a slamming door have locked itself? Surely not. She grew a little uneasy. She went back through to the night-nursery, to try the door there. That was locked, too—but then, there was no reason to expect to find it otherwise. It was locked fast, like all the others on this floor, against the cold.

So she returned to the first door, to try it again—struggling, now, to hold on to her patience and her nerve; reasoning with herself that the wretched thing could
not
be locked, that it must simply be warped, as lots of Hundreds doors were warped, and sticking in its frame. But the door had moved easily enough when she had first opened it, and when she peered again into the gap between the lock and the keep, she again saw the shot bolt, unmistakable even in the gloom. Putting her eye to the keyhole, she could even make out the rounded end of the shaft of the turned key. She tried to see if there were some way she might get at that—perhaps with a hairpin?—and work it back. She still supposed that the door had managed, in some extraordinary way, to lock itself.

Then she heard something. Quite distinct through the silence it rose: the swift, soft patter of footsteps. And in the inch of murky, milky light that showed at the keyhole, she saw a movement. It came, she said, like a flash of darkness, as of someone or something passing very rapidly along the corridor, from left to right—in other words, as if heading along the nursery passage from the back stairs at the north-west corner of the house. Since she supposed, reasonably enough, that the person could only be Mrs Bazeley or Betty, her first response was one of relief. She got to her feet, and tapped on the door. ‘Who’s there?’ she called. ‘Mrs Bazeley? Betty? Betty, is it you? Whoever you are, you’ve locked me in, or someone has!’ She rattled the handle. ‘Hi! Do you hear me?’

Bafflingly, no one answered, no one came; and the footsteps faded. Mrs Ayres lowered herself back down before the keyhole and again looked out, until at last—and again, to her considerable relief—the pattering returned and drew nearer. ‘Betty!’ she called—for she realised now that the footsteps, so rapid and soft, could hardly belong to Mrs Bazeley. ‘Betty! Let me out, child! Can’t you hear me? Can’t you see the key? Come and turn it, can’t you?’ But, much to her bewilderment, there came only another flash of darkness—moving from right to left, this time—and, instead of pausing at the door, the footsteps went on. ‘Betty!’ she called again, more shrilly. A moment of silence; then the footsteps returned. And after that the quick dark figure passed and re-passed the door, again and again: she could see the blur of it as it ran; it moved like a shadow, without face or feature. All she could think, with growing horror, was that the figure must be Betty’s after all, but that the girl had somehow lost her wits and was racing up and down the nursery passage like a lunatic.

But then, the next time it came, the pattering figure seemed to draw closer to the door, seemed to brush against it with an elbow or a hand; and the times after that, the pattering footsteps were accompanied by a light sort of grating sound … Mrs Ayres understood suddenly that, as it ran, the figure was catching at the panels of wood with its fingernails. She had a distinct impression of a small, sharp-fingered hand—a child’s hand, she realised it was; and the thought was such a startling one, she scrambled back from the door in sudden panic, tearing her stockings at the knee. She got to her feet in the centre of the room, chilled and shaking.

At that, at their loudest point, the footsteps abruptly ceased. She knew now that the figure must be standing on the other side of the door; she even saw the door move a little in its frame, as if just nudged or pressed or tested. She looked at the lock, expecting to hear the turning of the key and see the twisting of the handle, and nerving herself for what would be revealed when the door was opened. But after a long moment of suspense the door relaxed back on its hinges. She held her breath, until all she could hear, as if on the surface of the silence, was the rapid thumping of her own heartbeats.

Then, from over her shoulder, there came a sudden piercing blast from the whistle of the speaking-tube.

So completely had she been bracing herself for some quite different shock that she started away from the ivory mouthpiece, crying out and almost stumbling. The tube fell silent, then whistled again; the whistle, after that, came regularly, a series of shrill, prolonged blasts. It was impossible, she said, to suppose that the sound might be the product of a breeze or a freak of acoustics: the whistle was purposeful, demanding—something like the wail of a siren, or the cry of a hungry baby. It was so deliberate a signal, in fact, that the thought at last broke through her panic that there might, after all, be a simple enough explanation; for wasn’t it possible that Mrs Bazeley, anxious for her safety but still unwilling to follow her upstairs, had returned to the kitchen and was trying to communicate with her? The tube, anyway, was at least a part of the ordinary human Hundreds world—nothing like that inexplicable pattering figure out in the passage. So, again screwing up her courage, Mrs Ayres went to the chimney-breast and picked the shrieking thing up. With clumsy, shaking fingers she drew the ivory whistle from it—and was plunged back, of course, into silence.

But the thing in her hand was not quite silent, after all. As she raised the cup to her ear she could hear, coming from it, a faint, moist susurration—as if wet silk, or something fine like that, were being slowly and haltingly drawn through the tube. The sound, she realised with a shock, was that of a laboured breath, which kept catching and bubbling as if in a narrow, constricted throat. In an instant she was transported back, twenty-eight years, to her first child’s sickbed. She whispered her daughter’s name—‘Susan?’—and the breathing quickened and grew more liquid. A voice began to emerge from the bubbling mess of sound: a child’s voice, she took it to be, high and pitiful, attempting, as if with tremendous effort, to form words.

And Mrs Ayres let the speaking-tube drop, in absolute horror. She ran to the door. She didn’t care what might be on the other side of it now: she hammered on the panels, calling wildly for Mrs Bazeley, and when no answer came she darted unsteadily back across the room to one of the barred nursery windows, and plucked at its catch. She had, by this time, begun to weep tears of fright, which almost blinded her. They, and her panic, must have stripped her of sense and strength, for the catch was a simple one, and quite loose, but somehow it cut into her fingers and would not give.

But there, below her, was Caroline, just making her brisk way up from the lawn to the south-west corner of the terrace; and at the sight of her, Mrs Ayres abandoned the catch and starting banging on the window. She saw her daughter pause and raise her head, looking about, hearing the sound but unable to place it; a second later, to Mrs Ayres’s unutterable relief, she saw her lift up her hand in a gesture of recognition. But then she made out more clearly the direction of Caroline’s gaze. She realised that she was looking, not up at the nursery window, but straight ahead, across the terrace. Pressing closer to the glass, she caught sight of a stoutish female figure running across the gravel, and recognised Mrs Bazeley. She saw her meet Caroline at the top of the terrace steps, and begin making quick, frightened gestures back to the Hall. They were joined, after a moment, by Betty, who also ran across the terrace, beckoning them agitatedly on … All this time, the unstoppered mouthpiece had been sending out its pitiful whisper. Now, seeing the three women below, Mrs Ayres realised that she and the feeble, clamourous presence at the other end of the tube were alone together in that vast house.

This was the moment when her panic tipped over into hysteria. She raised her fists and pummelled on the window—and two of the fine old panes gave way beneath her hands. Caroline, Mrs Bazeley, and Betty, hearing the sound of the breaking glass, looked up in amazement. They saw Mrs Ayres shrieking from between the nursery bars—shrieking like a child, Mrs Bazeley said—and beating her hands against the edges of broken window.