The Sin Eater (2 page)

‘I'll sit by you and hold your hand if it'll help,' said Nina.

‘I don't want anyone to hold my hand. I'll be all right,' said Benedict. After they went out, he tried on the black tie which Aunt Lyn had given him and which was what people wore to funerals. He put it on and stared at it in the mirror. The tie looked horrible and Benedict hated it. He hated everything and he wished he could do what Alice had done, and step through the mirror into another world. Alice only had to say, ‘Let's pretend,' and her mirror had dissolved. The world in the looking glass sounded pretty scary, but Benedict thought any world, no matter how scary it was, would be better than this one.

He was about to turn away when something moved in the mirror's depths. Benedict looked back and his heart skipped a beat. Looking out of the mirror, straight at him, was a strange man. As he stared, the man smiled and Benedict glanced over his shoulder into the room, thinking someone had come in without him hearing. There had been people coming and going all day, vague relatives Benedict hardly knew, and friends of his parents. Some of them had come upstairs to tell him how sorry they were; this man must be another of them.

But the bedroom was empty and the door was closed. Benedict looked back at the mirror and this time his heart did more than skip a beat, it lurched and thumped hard against his ribs. The man was still there, standing very still, watching him.

Benedict was not exactly frightened, but he was confused. His mind felt as if it was opening up and as if thousands of brilliant lights were pouring into it. He could see the man clearly – he could see that he was about his father's age, and for a marvellous moment he thought it actually was his father. Supposing dad had come back, just to say goodbye? But even as he was thinking it, he knew it was not his father. It was someone who had very vivid blue eyes, and dark hair. Benedict could not see the whole of the man's face because he was standing slightly sideways, but he could see the remarkable eyes and he could see the man was wearing a dark coat with the collar partly turned up. Behind him was this bedroom, looking exactly as it did here, except for being the other way round.

But people did not live inside mirrors, not unless they were people in books. Might it be a dream? He took a tentative step closer to the mirror and he thought the man put out a hand to him. Benedict hesitated, wanting to put out his own hand, but fearful that he might feel the stranger's cold fingers close around it.

Then from downstairs came Aunt Lyn's voice, calling something about closing the bathroom window, and the man lifted a finger to his lips in a ‘hush' gesture. Benedict glanced over his shoulder to the door, and when he looked back at the mirror, the man had vanished.

He did not know if he was relieved or upset, but he did not think he would tell anyone about the man. Aunt Lyn and Nina might think he was going mad – he might actually be going mad. In any case, it had probably not happened or, if it had, it was something to do with his beloved Alice from his book. He had never heard of people being able to call up the worlds that lived inside books, but that did not mean it could not be done. For all Benedict knew, it might be something people did quite often, but that nobody ever talked about. This was such a comforting thought that he felt better for the first time since the car crash.

Benedict had never been to a funeral before and he did not know what to expect. It was dreadful. His grandmother cried all through the service, and clung to his hand, and one of the aunts fainted halfway through and had to be taken outside and given brandy from somebody's flask. The three coffins stood in front of everyone – Benedict managed not to look at them because he was afraid the lids would not be on and he would see his parents' bodies all dead and mangled up from the crash.

The vicar read a piece from the Bible that said the dead did not die, only went to sleep. The thought of his parents sleeping inside a coffin deep in the ground was so terrifying Benedict was not sure if he could bear it. He bit his lip and stared at the ground and thought about all the worlds in books that he might escape to when this was over, and wondered if the man who had looked out of the mirror at him had been real or just part of the nightmare of his parents dying in a dreadful tangle of metal and glass on the Victoria Dock Road.

He thought he could go back to Aunt Lyn's house after the service, but it seemed everyone was going to his grandfather's old house, and Benedict had to go with them.

Aunt Lyn came with him in one of the big black cars. She was surprised he had never been to Holly Lodge. ‘It was your grandfather's house,' she said. ‘Are you sure your father never took you there?'

‘No, never.' Benedict did not say his mother had suggested it once, but that his father had said, quickly, ‘Benedict mustn't ever go to that house.'

‘Why not?'

‘You know why not.'

‘Oh Lord, you don't think it's still there, do you? Not after all this time?'

Benedict, listening, only just caught his father's reply. ‘Yes, it's still there,' he said. ‘You've never really believed it, I know, but I promise you, it's still there.'

As the big black car slid through the streets Benedict looked through the windows, waiting for the moment when he would see the house, which his father had never wanted him to enter. I'm very sorry, he said silently to his father's memory. You didn't want me to go inside this house, but I'll have to.

Aunt Lyn was saying something about an inheritance. ‘When you're twenty-one, Holly Lodge will be yours.'

It sounded as if she was promising him a huge treat, so Benedict said, ‘Yes, I see,' even though he did not see at all. He was trying to pretend that the rain sliding down the car's windows was actually a thin silver curtain that he could draw aside and see sunshine beyond and his parents still alive and everything ordinary again.

But it was real rain, of course – a ceaseless grey downpour. When the cars drew up outside Holly Lodge it dripped from the dark gloomy trees surrounding the house and lay in black puddles on the gravel drive.

Benedict had not known what to expect from this house, but his father had talked about something being in there that he, Benedict, must never meet. Clearly it was something really bad, so it would not be surprising to find Holly Lodge looked like the terrible castles in
Jack the Giant Killer
, although he supposed you did not get many castles in East London and you certainly did not get any giants, or, if you did, people kept very quiet about them.

When they got to it, he saw it was an ordinary house in an ordinary street. But as they went inside, he had the feeling it had never been a happy house; he thought quite bad things might have happened here, or – what was worse – might be waiting to happen in the future. It was quite a big house, though, which was good because a lot of people were here. Aunt Lyn had arranged for tea or coffee and sherry to be offered, and people wandered around sipping their drinks, eyeing the furniture and the pictures and ornaments. It appeared that hardly anyone had been to the house before; aunts murmured that it was all in better condition than they would have expected; uncles peered dubiously at paintings, and a bookish cousin, with whom Nina tried unsuccessfully to flirt, discovered a collection of works on Irish folklore, and was seated on a window sill reading about creatures with unpronounceable names and sinister traditions, who had apparently haunted Ireland's west coast.

There were a few framed photographs on the walls which must be pretty old, because they were all black and white and some were even a kind of dusty brown like the faded bodies of dead flies on a hot window-sill. The older aunts inspected these photos with curiosity.

‘None of Declan Doyle,' said the one who had fainted in the church. ‘Pity. I'd be interested to see what he looked like.'

‘I think there are some of him upstairs,' said someone else.

‘Are there? Then I might have a look presently. My grandmother said he was one of the handsomest men she ever met.'

‘Handsome's all very well,' said one of the uncles. ‘
I
heard you couldn't trust him from here to that door.'

‘Declan Doyle was your great-grandfather,' said Aunt Lyn to Benedict. She was handing round sandwiches and she looked flustered. Benedict wondered if he was supposed to help her.

He felt a bit lost. Everyone seemed to be huddled in little groups, all talking very seriously. He still did not like the house, but he was curious about it, mostly because of what his father had said that time.

‘
It's still there . . .
'

Whatever ‘it' was, his father had seemed to find it frightening, but his mother had not believed in it.

Benedict slipped out of the room, wondering if he dare explore. But if it would be his house one day, surely he was allowed to see the rest of it.

But to begin with, the rooms were not especially interesting. Benedict looked into what must be a dining room and into a big stone-floored kitchen. The nicest room was on the other side of the hall: there was a view over the gardens and bookshelves lining the walls. A big leather-topped desk stood under the window. It could have been his grandfather's study; people who had big houses like this did have studies. Benedict tried to picture his grandfather sitting in one of the deep armchairs reading, or writing letters at the desk. Old people often wrote letters. They did not text like Benedict and his friends did, or email, because there had not been texting or computers in their day. Benedict thought it must have been pretty fascinating to have lived in that long-ago world, although he would miss texting and computers.

There was a calendar in a brass frame on the desk and a big desk diary with a page for each day of the week. On both of these the 18th January was marked in red and a time – three p.m. – was underlined. Whoever had done it had not just drawn a circle round the day, but had made an elaborate shape like a little sketched figure. Benedict stared at the marks, feeling cold and a bit sick, because the 18th was the day of the crash and three o'clock was the time it had happened. Aunt Lyn had said so. Benedict could not bear thinking about that, so he went out of the study, closing the door firmly, and hoping no one would see him.

He paused for a moment in the hall to listen to the sounds from the long room where everyone was eating and talking. One of the aunts was trying to find out where Benedict's parents had been going in the middle of an icy blizzard, insisting there was something peculiar about it.

‘Because I can't imagine what was so important as to send them on a car journey in the depths of winter. Half of London had ground to a halt and all the television news programmes were warning people not to travel unless absolutely necessary.'

‘Like in the war,' said an elderly man, who was wandering around with a bottle of brandy. ‘“Is your journey really necessary?”'

‘Yes, and I don't see how that journey could have been, do you? They were very insistent that it couldn't be put off, and they were very secretive about it as well.'

Benedict went up the stairs. There would not be much to see up here, but anything was better than hearing people say horrid things about his mother and father.

There seemed to be a lot of bedrooms, with ceilings spotted with damp and faded wallpaper, and furniture draped in sheets so you imagined people crouching under them. Had his grandfather lived here on his own, with all these rooms and dusty windows and the drifting cobwebs that reached down to brush against Benedict's face like thin fingers?

At the end of this landing was a second flight of stairs. Benedict hesitated, but he could still hear people talking and no one seemed to have missed him, so he went up the stairs, which creaked as if the house was groaning. There was another landing at the top; it was very dark and, as he looked doubtfully about him, a door on his right swung slowly open. Benedict froze. Was someone in there? He took a deep breath and went up to the door, but the room was empty except for an old dressing table and a desk pushed against one wall. Or was it empty? As he stood uncertainly in the doorway, the long curtains billowed out as if someone was standing behind them, and something seemed to dart across his vision. He gasped and was about to run back downstairs when he realized that what he had seen was only the glint of a silver photograph frame on the dressing table. There were several photos, but this one must have caught the light when he opened the door. He let out a whooshing breath of relief, then went up to see the photo. It was one of the faded brown ones, but Benedict could see the man in it had dark hair. He was wearing old-fashioned clothes and he was only partly looking at the camera so that half of his face was hidden.

Benedict stared at the man, his mind whirling and panic gripping him in huge wrenching waves.

The man in the photograph was the man who had looked at him from his bedroom mirror four days earlier.

A
fter a long time Benedict picked up the photograph and turned it over. Photographs often had things written on the back to tell who the people in them were. His hands were shaking so badly he almost dropped the frame, but eventually he managed to peel off the sticky tape on the backing and take out the photo.

There was nothing. The back of the photo had splodgy brown marks, but no one had written on it to say who this was or when or where the photo had been taken. Benedict sat down on the window sill to think. This was his great-grandfather's house and the aunts had said there were photographs of him up here. So there was only one person this could be. Declan Doyle, his great-grandfather.

Benedict put the photograph back in its frame and replaced it on the dressing table. He wanted to run out of the room, but he did not want any of the people downstairs to see him shaking and on the verge of tears. He would stay here a little longer until he felt better.