Nyctophobia (23 page)

I felt on the verge of understanding it all – the key, the stars, the house, the Condemaines, everything – but still the last part eluded me. If only I had realised then and stopped. But of course, it was already too late to stop what had been set in motion so long ago.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Artist

‘W
ELL, HELLO STRANGER
!’ said Celestia, folding away her copy of The Times. ‘My dear, do pull up a chair. We haven’t seen you in weeks.’

The square was all but deserted now. Even though the temperatures were still fairly high, the season had ended and the last tourists had gone home, leaving the former artists’ agent by herself outside the café. ‘Lola told me they’re planning to shut this place next month for the whole of the winter,’ she confided. ‘Apparently there aren’t enough of us left to warrant keeping it open anymore. I think that old bastard Eduardo wants to skip off to his winter bolt-hole with his ugly little mistress. What are we poor ex-pats expected to do in the meantime? Cook for ourselves?’ She donned the glasses she kept hooked on a chain around her neck and peered at me. ‘My dear, you look absolutely awful. What on earth have you done to yourself?’

‘I had a go at trimming my hair,’ I said apologetically, touching the ends. ‘I didn’t like the cut I had here, and don’t want to go all the way into Marbella. But it didn’t take very well.’

‘You look very tired.’

‘I haven’t been sleeping –’

‘But everything’s all right? I mean, you and Mateo, you’re getting along? In my experience couples always lose weight just before they announce they’re getting divorced, and you’ve shed loads, not that there was much of you to begin with.’

‘No, we’re fine. It’s just – Rosita’s meals are too big and they put me off eating. But really, we’ve never been happier. Bobbie’s studying hard, getting ready for her move to boarding school. Mateo’s going to spend less time travelling so that he can be at home with me more often.’

‘I heard you lost Julieta. That’s a shame. She’s having to look after her ghastly old mother. How’s Rosita?’

‘She’s – well, exactly the same.’

‘Then whatever could be wrong?’ Celestia poured a hefty measure of wine into a clean glass and slid it across the table to me. ‘And don’t say there’s nothing because I can see it. You look positively drawn with worry.’

‘There are some things –’ I dropped my head, trying to work out how much I could reveal. ‘Mateo wants us to try for a baby.’

‘That’s wonderful.’

‘No, it’s not. I underwent a very difficult termination when I was seventeen. It’s doubtful I’ll ever be able to go full term.’

‘That’s not the end of the world these days.’

‘He’s passionately against abortion. I never told him.’

‘Oh. Now that
can
be a bit of a stumbling block when it comes to the older Spanish male. He’ll just have to understand that times have changed. We’re not living in the dark ages anymore.’

‘I don’t want to fight with him. He’s away so much, I get frightened he’ll stop caring for me.’

‘You need to have more confidence.’ Celestia looked shrewdly at me. ‘What happened to you?’ she asked. ‘When you arrived here you were so feisty and emancipated and full of beans. It’s like something has knocked all the stuffing out of you.’

‘I’ve had trouble adjusting to life here. The house –’

‘Ah, the
house
.’ She lit a fresh cigarillo. ‘I wondered if that was the problem. I was talking to Jordi the other day and he said you’d had trouble finding out anything more about its rather chequered history.’

‘Yes, there were some missing pages in the only reference volume, and nobody here was able to help me. I don’t think I’ll be able to finish the book without more information. It crossed my mind that perhaps some of Francesco Condemaine’s more important private papers never left the house, although I’ve searched everywhere and found nothing. And there’s something else.’

Celestia jetted smoke into the air, and waited for me to form my thoughts.

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ I said finally, realising how stupid the G word sounded when spoken aloud.

‘That rather depends on what you mean by ghosts. If you’re talking about hidden things that resurface, then there are phantoms here, certainly. Ghosts of old treacheries, ghosts of dead family members, ghosts of the Civil War. They leave long shadows. There was an old man in this village, a Nationalist who raped his daughter for years and beat his sons half to death. Now his penniless great-grandchildren are fighting not to let that awful past return. There are those who say his spirit is trying to break through once more, into the next generation. There’s such a thing as ghosts in the blood.’

‘But real ones,’ I said. ‘Physical manifestations that look and feel like real people?’

‘Spain has a great many ghosts,’ she said evasively, waving away smoke. ‘Some are real, some imagined. Of course, people have seen phantom versions of the dead in every age. The phenomenon isn’t always associated with the illiterate and ignorant. And they’re not always ghosts as you or I would imagine them. They’ve been called other things:
larvae, umbrae mortuorum, lemures
.’

‘So what are they?’

‘I tend to think of them as shadow people. They’re a mirror, an inverse of the living, that’s all. They don’t necessarily want to hurt anyone, just to be left alone. You can think of them as animals that scratch because they don’t like to be touched. And perhaps your house really is haunted. You say there are clocks everywhere. A clock is a familiar
memento mori
, symbolising the flight of time, a funerary motif. You said you heard breathing, another common phenomenon. These days all sorts of personal items are pronounced haunted in order to shove up their resale value on eBay.’

‘Am I supposed to take that seriously?’

‘Darling, you’re the one who raised the subject. But you know, the oddest thing is that there are no
actual
haunted houses, by which I mean there are no apparitional buildings, just ghostly projections inside them. Perhaps you have the only one in the world. Wouldn’t that be something? Then the sightseers would really come!’

‘You seem to know an awful lot about it.’

‘I do, so it’s just as well you came to me. Why, have you seen an actual ghost?’

‘Not one – several. They live in what I thought were the servants’ quarters. I’ve seen them. I’ve felt them.’ I held up the underside of my arm, which was spotted with black bruises.

She was taken aback. ‘What the hell are those?’

‘Sometimes I go into the other half and look for them,’ I explained quietly. ‘I have to be sure that what I’m seeing is real, that it’s not just me. I went in again last night and one of them grabbed me and threw me across the room.’

‘But that’s a hand print,’ said Celestia, examining my arm with care. She took my right hand and placed it over the bruises. The shape of my thumb and fingers matched perfectly. ‘Are you sure you didn’t do this to yourself? In your sleep, perhaps?’

‘That’s what I thought at first, that I was imagining them, but now Bobbie sees them too. Yet she seems utterly unperturbed, as if it’s to be expected. She’s a child of course and is quite happy believing in such things. But I’m frightened for her safety.’

‘You really believe what you’re telling me?’

‘I’ve seen Elena Condemaine. I know she’s real, and that she’s responsible for everything I’ve seen happening. I saw my husband die, and I think she’ll try to take him from me because she lost her own husband so tragically.’

‘Have you told anyone else about this?’

‘I tried to tell Rosita, but you know how she is. She puts the house before everything.’

‘Oh dear.’ For once Celestia seemed at a loss for words, and I was wondering if she was trying to find a way to humour me.

‘What is it?’

‘There are people here who could tell you stories, but I didn’t want them to upset you. Certain people in the village envy your husband’s wealth. They resent the intrusion of outsiders. So far, Maria and I have managed to keep them away from you. Perhaps there’s someone you should meet. Alfonse may not be able to tell you what you want to hear, but he might just help. He’s an artist, he’s been here longer than any of us. Let me make a call.’ She dug out her ancient mobile.

A few minutes later, Celestia took my arm and led me across the square to the higher reaches of the village, where the last remaining streets overlooked the green plains and the glittering ocean far below. The end house we reached was, by Gaucia’s standards at least, grand and old.

Celestia knocked on the door and stood back. ‘I’d watch yourself around him,’ she warned. ‘He’s a randy old goat.’

The door was opened by a sun-wizened old man in a straw hat and shorts who stood not much more than four and a half feet high. ‘So this is the girl,’ he said, openly staring at my bare legs. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’

He set out sherry and trays of almonds on the veranda. We sat facing the distant band of silver sea. ‘I knew them all except the first – Francesco was before even my time – but I knew them from Marcos Condemaine to Amancio Lueches. They weren’t like Francesco at all.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘They were weak,’ said Alfonse. ‘Marcos was a mechanic who failed at everything he touched. Amancio – who even knows what he was? I don’t think he ever held down a proper job in his life. But Francesco, by all accounts he was a man of vision, a genius. And despite what you may have read he was more astrologer than astronomer. He built the house for her, to make sure she would always be happy. And she was.’

‘Alfonse, we all know what happened to Elena,’ said Celestia impatiently. ‘She went mad trying to keep her children alive without a father. She couldn’t have been that bloody happy.’

‘She wrote letters to her family,’ I said. ‘She told them that she could manage by herself and that she was fine, but she wasn’t.’

‘My grandfather adored her,’ said Alfonse. ‘But nobody would help her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Have you heard of the Hyperion Society?’

‘Yes – but I couldn’t find out what it was.’

‘Francesco Condemaine was an occultist. There was a crippled boy who worked on the building of the house, and it was said that in order to consecrate Hyperion he carved the pattern of the sun into the lad’s back with a razor. Oh, don’t look so shocked. He and the Society were rumoured to have done far worse than that. The upper classes treated the uneducated with terrible cruelty in those days. Many so-called intellectuals thought themselves occultists back then. For a time it was fashionable among a certain class. It was an era of table rappers and séances, and reading fortunes from the stars, a time of seers and spiritualists. Every small town had a crazy old woman who mixed love potions for lonely girls and then dispensed herbal remedies when they got themselves pregnant. And they’re still around. It’s just their methods that have changed. Look at Maria Gonzales and her shop full of shit. A hundred years ago she’d have been branded a witch. Amancio told me that Francesco was on a higher plane. He trusted in the sun, the moon and the stars. He worshipped Hyperion. And he knew that the heavens governed the actions of man. That’s why he built the house.’

‘Alfonse, Callie thinks she’s seen Elena Condemaine and her husband in the house,’ Celestia explained.

The old man spluttered out a chuckle. ‘She’s long dead and gone. I imagine her ashes are buried in your garden with the rest of them.’

‘But I saw her for myself, living in the rooms we don’t use.’

‘There are no ghosts,’ said the old man adamantly. ‘There’s only guilt, which lasts longer than memory itself, and evil, which always overcomes goodness. But you’re far too young and pretty to know about things like that. The Condemaines were too high-born for us. They kept to themselves, and there was resentment. After news reached us that Francesco had been killed fighting on the side of the English, while Spain maintained its neutrality, the villagers demanded that his house be given up to the state. The people here were simple folk. Most of them had hardly ever even been to the coast. They heard about the architect and his belief in astrology, and probably misread something more exotic into that. They took a vote to refuse Elena help, and punished anyone who tried to break ranks. Elena killed her children to stop them from starving to death. In the process, she went mad.’

I could suddenly imagine it all, the wealthy Condemaines who never visited the village, the stupid gossip about secret cabals and strange rites, a workman who had seen the stone lettering and planet-studded friezes, the patterns of the heavens cut into the doors, the story of a boy tortured by the cruel builder, all of it feeding into their fearful ignorance. A vow of silence against Elena Condemaine, even when she desperately needed their help.

‘So they shut her out and left her to die.’

‘Oh, I don’t suppose it was as dramatic as that. They turned a blind eye and got on with their own lives. By all accounts she was too proud a woman to persist in asking the villagers for aid.’

‘But they must have known that her children were suffering.’

Alfonse sighed and sipped his sherry. ‘A lot of people went through terrible hardships back then. It was all a long time ago. Who knows what really happened? Stories get embellished with the retelling. Everyone likes to write themselves into a tragedy.’

‘Well, now they’re trying to get out,’ I said miserably. ‘They’re in terrible pain. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Perhaps you read something, heard about them, and it played on your imagination. You fell asleep,’ said Celestia kindly.

‘No, what I saw – what I can see – is very real. There’s not just one of them anymore. I can see the whole family. And it keeps happening. Every time I go into the dark.’

‘You may really think you can see these people, my dear, but you know what I think?’ said Alfonse. ‘It’s a trick. And if it isn’t, what could such trapped souls possibly want?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I said. ‘They want me to take their place. So that they can have the lives they were promised. Don’t ghosts always need something?’