House of Bells (29 page)

Here comes nothing
, she thought. And almost waved at her unseen baby, almost waited.

Almost.

Instead, she turned and plunged into the black of the passageway. Fear behind her, puzzlement and uncertainty and fear ahead; right here there was only pain, the throbbing in her arm, the pulse of wet blood drawn out by that endless bell. She thought her baby was drawn to her blood, perhaps. That ought to make some kind of sense, somewhere. Somehow.

It was like a march of inevitability, a single string of purpose: from the bell to her, from her to her baby.

She was almost not sure now, which one of them was the ghost. She could feel herself fading; she thought she must look translucent inside these pale clothes. Unreal.

She went on, feeling her way along the rough brick of the tunnel wall, drawn as much as anything by the rich smell of the dungheap at the end. For a moment, emerging at last into what seemed the almost brilliant light of the stars, she only stood and breathed, drawing that smell deep in, something to hold on to.

She wouldn't look back again, no. Just keep heading onward.

Cool thick grass beneath her feet now and the garden wall to follow, down to the wood. The wood would be the worst of it, she knew that. No starlight under the trees, and the path difficult to find and harder to follow, thorns and low branches tangling with her ankles and lashing for her eyes. And that was . . . assuming nothing worse. Assuming no bells, no blood, no nothing.

No bodiless baby in the path, no nothing.

He was behind her now, but . . . Well. She wasn't running away, she was forging ahead. He might forge faster; she had no way to tell. It was up to him. Or the house, perhaps. The house gave him presence, she thought; away from here, he existed only in her head and in a hole in the ground, on paper, in memory, in despair.

Here he was actual, in the way that a whirlpool is actual: nothing solid, just a constant sucking void, deadly and inimical and there.

There behind her, she thought as she ploughed on. There in front of her, perhaps: what she ploughed towards. The bell and the baby were the same thing, almost, in her head. Intricately linked, intimately threatening. One cut her and cut her; the other would drain her and drain her until there was nothing left, nothing of her either.

To drink and drink and not be satisfied: it was like a curse from ancient times, a legendary doom. For her, another source of guilt. She had killed her baby inside herself; she had cursed him to this cruel half-life, afterlife, being and not being.

Really, she thought he ought to catch up with her. Track her down and suck her up. Or lie in wait ahead, lurk within the sound of a striking bell, catch her as she bled out.

Either way. On she went. What else could she do? She couldn't outrun it, or him. If she fled this place, she'd still know they were waiting here. Her baby, proclaimed by every striking clock, up and down the valley: caught in every shadow, trapped by the house, because she came here. Given something that was almost shape, but never substance. In a house of bells, dust draining into sand: eternal loss, form without purpose, a worse fate than before.

She couldn't do that to him, no.

Let him drink her, then; let them cancel each other out.

But he would need to catch her first. Grace wasn't going to stand still and take it, not for anyone. Maybe she was just showing off for Georgie, one last lesson.
You don't have to let them take you. Kick and scream, fight back. March on. Run away, if you have to.

Not that she was running away. He might be behind her still; he might be ahead. She didn't know and wasn't pausing to find out.

The one arm still cradled close, pulsing blood, pulsing pain. The other hooked across her face, against the slashing branches that she couldn't see. Her feet found the path more than her eyes did, better than her memory. The way of least resistance: it was the way she'd always gone.

Here was a fork where she'd turn off to go to Cookie's cottage, to ask for company, for help. Or rather, where she wouldn't. Where she could do, if she chose to.

She chose to go the other way, alone.

Soon enough she could smell smoke in the air, alongside all the damp wood night smells. She was oddly short of breath herself, tight-chested already, before she began to cough.

Well, there'd never been any question of sneaking up on him. She was making way too much noise just getting there, city girl out in the country in the dark, no idea how to go placidly amid the trees and the haste and that relentless rumour of a bell.

Coughing and gasping, then, she came out into the clearing.

Her night-blind eyes were dazzled by the flare of light, despite the smoke that swirled and pooled and rose in stinging clouds. That was the charcoal heap, she'd figured that: something – or someone, whoever it was that she'd seen coming back to the house by torchlight – had broken the crown of it like an eggshell, shattering the baked turfs and letting in the air. Now the dry wood inside was blazing, flame leaping out of that hole at the top and searing upward like a beacon, like a searchlight, like a finger probing for the sky.

Like an echo in contrasts of the tower that it illuminated, all shape and shadow against the determined dark of the wood.

Where was Frank? He should have been here, busy to save his charcoal, blocking out the air with frantic mud. Too late now, she guessed, but still . . . He ought to be here and was not.

Perhaps he'd been the one with the torch. Perhaps he'd done all this himself: sabotaged his own craft to send some crazy signal to the stars, left it burning, headed off . . .

Headed where? Frank didn't like to come to the house even in daylight. He thought it was haunted.

Not wrong there.

Maybe he was still here. Maybe the fire in his charcoal hadn't been enough. Someone had been ringing the bell, she was sure. Someone still was, perhaps, a little. She could feel the throb of it in the air, in her aching wrist.

She could walk through the open doorway into the hollow of the ruined tower to find out.

Of course she could. It was what she'd come for.

Wasn't it . . .?

The fierce light made the stones of the tower glare almost white at her; it made the doorway and the higher windows and traceries, the ruder holes and breaks where stones had fallen, all the many openings look worse, black and threatening.

If she thought she saw movement inside – well, perhaps that was only the light shifting the shadows as the flame guttered and roared.

She took a few slow paces forward, and that shifting spear of light tossed her own shadow forward from her feet, all the way to the tower's mouth, so that she walked a path of darkness.

Hesitated on that path, and more than once, but walked it none the less.

All the way: across rough and broken ground, bare rock and thick tussocks and the half-laid stones around Frank's subterranean home. Pausing briefly, wondering whether to call down, to check that he wasn't sleeping.

Feeling the thrum of the bell in her bones, the damp sticky warmth of her blood against her own skin.

He wasn't sleeping. Not through this.

Keeping on, then, all the way.

Standing just for a moment on the threshold, in the doorway, in the dark: her own body cutting out the light that might otherwise have shown her what waited inside.

Stepping in, then.

Shifting sideways, to allow that fall of light: not much, it seemed in here. Barely enough.

Enough, though.

She couldn't see Frank, or anyone. He wasn't there; no one was.

Nor her baby, either. Not that kind of no one.

Something moved in the darkness, none the less.

Nothing much: just a line without body, a swaying presence, a rope.

Overhead, the bell droned on, as if its clapper grated against the rim, grated and grated, never properly striking, never properly still.

She reached out a hand, her good hand, to grip the rope and make it still, make that dreadful sound just stop.

The rope swung with more weight than she could readily control, one-handed. She let her body hang against it for a moment, hauling down, wondering if the bell at the top were really that heavy; and then she let her eyes drift upward.

Couldn't see the bell, of course. It would have been too far, too high in any case, in the dark; but there was something in the way, between her and the bell.

Something else on the rope.

Something heavy and hanging, swinging, making the bell sound lowly.

Oh.

That was Frank, she saw, when her eyes at last worked through the foreshortening and the moving shadows and the moving corpse.

Frank with his eyes a-glitter when they caught the firelight coming through the tracery, but yes, very thoroughly a corpse.

Frank staring down, or seeming to, because the rope was looped around his neck, strangling-tight.

He might have hanged himself by accident, but she didn't see how. He was too high up that rope, halfway to the bell; and besides, he didn't ring it any more.

He might have hanged himself deliberately, but – well, he would have needed to climb that high up the rope, with the bell all a-clamour above him as he went, and she didn't quite see why he would. He was mad, yes, but even so . . .

In the back of her mind, another picture was forming. Another kind of madness altogether, her own: a vision of two hands, hands of smoke, rising out of the charcoal heap because someone had broken the skin of it and let them loose. Hands that only strengthened as the flame caught, as the fire roared.

Hands that gripped Frank by the throat – coolly, smoke not flame – and lifted him, strangled him even before they twisted the rope around his throat to let his own body-weight finish the work if they hadn't done it already.

Left him swinging, sounding the bell and swinging, sounding his own funeral knell as he swung, as he died.

Sounding hers too, perhaps, almost, as she stood there swaying beneath him, as she bled.

G
eorgie would have done that, perhaps. She would have let it happen: would have stood there and bled and waited for a rescue that would not come. The bell was barely speaking now, to call them; the fire had flared up, but what were the odds that anyone else would see it? See it and come, two things, one unlikely and one effortful?

Tom said someone usually came out, in the middle of the night, to sit with Frank . . .

It was true, he had said that. But someone had been already, and done more than sit; and perhaps that had been Tom by torchlight, making his way back, leaving Frank hanging?

He's a magician. Candles go out at a word from him. He wouldn't need a torch.

Perhaps not – but perhaps he'd have to carry a candle. He might not be able to make a flame dance from nothing. And if he had to carry a candle, why not carry a torch?

And he was a magician. He could have put Frank up there, had the rope strangle him and dangle him at a word.

If there was a word for that. If the language allowed it.

Yes. If. Neither Grace nor Georgie knew. She didn't know if she were making excuses for Tom or accusing him, or both.

What she did know – what Grace knew, beyond question – was that she wasn't just going to stand here and bleed until she fell over, until she passed out. Wait and hope for rescue. No.

So, then. She had done what she could, to still Frank's swinging and the appalling grinding of that bell. Now she set her teeth, clutched her bleeding wrist against her chest because it couldn't hold itself there any longer, and set off walking.

Without a free hand to fend off stray branches and groping thorns, she couldn't save her face, let alone her hair. With leaves dense above and the light soon lost behind her, she couldn't see the danger before she'd walked straight into it, again and again and again.

Bleeding, then, from a dozen scratches or worse – and from two fresh cuts that were far, far worse – she tripped and stumbled and swore her way down one path and up another, and so came after all to Cookie's cottage.

And was not at all surprised to find his lights still on; and hammered on his door with her fist, because she couldn't stop now to find the knocker, everything was suddenly urgent; and her one hand was clumsy while the other one was dead, except she didn't think the dead should hurt so badly. She hoped not. And she thought she should probably not have come here, because she was fairly sure her baby was following her, but it was too late now; the door was opening, and oh!

That wasn't Cookie; that was the doctor's wife. Ruth. And there was the doctor behind her in the little sitting-room, smoking a cigar, looking on with interest; and she didn't know where Cookie was, but here was she, falling over the threshold, going down—

—and coming up on Cookie's settee, with the air full of smoke – that cigar, and Cookie's rollies, and Ruth too was having a cigarette – and that set her coughing, which reminded her.

She told them about Frank, not coughing now, in his blazing charcoal smoke. She thought she got it all out, all the important stuff, and then she was gone again.

She came back again in a room she hadn't seen before, low beams and an angled ceiling, far too cramped for D'Espérance. She must still be in Cookie's cottage: a little bedroom up in the eaves. A lamp burned in one corner, shaded by a silk scarf so that it cast a dim reddish light. For a while she just lay there, looking. She was conscious of another presence in the room, though: the sounds of movement, soft and subtle and controlled. Someone else's breathing, that too. She supposed that was movement too, the movement of air and muscles. It was oddly reassuring, that whoever watched this night with her did at least need to breathe.

No woman should be glad, not to find her child with her; but still. Here she was. Still breathing.

Not bleeding, not now. Her one hand checked the other, below the covers: freshly bandaged, and quite dry.