Submersion (25 page)

At last, a question that provoked a change in his demeanour. He placed his mug back on the table and looked to his lap.

‘Yes,’ he eventually said, this singular sound a struggle to unleash.

Something had truly
got his tongue,
a phrase my mother would have used. I forced a natural, warm smile on my face.

‘You’ll need to say a little more than that,’ I told him, sensing the tables had turned on this occasion – I was the counsellor to his patient. ‘If I’m to understand, to help,’ I added, hoping to coax just a little more.

‘Okay,’ he responded, another solo expulsion that I hoped would be succeeded with a few more syllables this time. It was. ‘There’s something I feel I’ve not been quite honest about.’

‘Oh?’ I asked, feeling fingers of alarm clutch at my throat. What was he going to say? I’d shared quite a lot with him, after all. Entrusted him with dangerous information that could so very easily be used against me, and Tristan for that.

‘I don’t think either of us has been entirely honest,’ he continued, finally looking up, his earnest eyes burning deep into me, so intensely that I physically felt their heat, felt their impact.

‘I don’t know what you are talking about, Reuben,’ I protested, as softly as I could. I didn’t want to sound defensive, despite the fact that was exactly what I was doing. Defending myself from what he might say or assume next.

This isn’t what we do. This isn’t how we play this out. These aren’t the rules.

‘I think you-.’ Reuben responded, but a noise below cut him dead. The shutting of the front door. Someone else had been in the house.

I went to the window that looked out on the front and saw a small boat rowing away.

‘Tristan,’ I muttered, loud enough for Reuben to hear.

‘I’m sorry if-.’ This time I cut him short.

‘You need to go.’

‘You don’t mean that. We need to talk more. We need to-.’

‘No. I just want you to leave. I’m not interested in talking any more today. Please just go.
You’ve made me feel uncomfortable in my own home.’

You’ve broken the rules. I don’t know how, but somehow you’ve broken the rules.

Something about my final accusation –
you’ve made me feel uncomfortable in my own home
- struck a chord with Reuben, as if the accusation of ill manners was a crime he associated with great shame.

This is better. This is how we play it out. Much, much better.

‘May I come back?’ he asked, turning back at the front door. I hung back on the stairs, halfway down. I didn’t reply, letting him leave under a grey cloud of silence and doubt.

But I did let him come back. You see, he wasn’t wrong. There was something between us, something unspoken that maybe needed to come out and sit on the table with the mugs we drank our tea from. But I just couldn’t do it yet. Once out in the open, I wasn’t exactly sure where it would lead us. I’d made progress on a lot of things lately, but I wasn’t quite ready for
that.

When Tristan came home that evening, he didn’t say a word about his unexpected return to the house. So, if he saw or heard anything, it wasn’t significant enough for him to mention it.

The remaining days leading up to my return to work left me with spare time to fill with thoughts. With Tristan absent most days and no visits from Reuben, I could have donned my old rubber gloves – once yellow, now faded grey through years of use – and set to work, cleaning the house from top to bottom.

But I wasn’t my sister.

Instead, I made plans. Mulled over what I knew so far – the details of Elinor’s disappearance, who was where at the time she was taken, what we had found so far, and what I should be looking for once I was back within the government fold. One particular question –
what we had found so far
– took me in a particular direction. And, on the night before I returned to work, I made my first ever visit to the Cadley residence.

Whilst I had heard stories from both Elinor and Billy about their visits to the Cadley place, I wasn’t quite prepared for the labyrinthine mess that greeted me when the old man opened the door. Refreshing as it was to enter a house that had a dry ground floor, it might as well have been flooded for the wash of chaos that drowned his floor space. An endless carpet of screws, nails, wires, leads, tubing and other scattered nik-naks caught my footing, as I ventured further in - past a room that appeared crammed with rusting kitchen appliances, through another that looked like the television showrooms I recalled as a child, and into a smaller room at the back, that was a cross between a laboratory and a kitchen.

‘Tea or coffee?’ he offered me, filling a kettle and setting it to boil next to a rack of glass tubes that were filled with murky water. ‘Just experimenting,’ he said, catching my wandering eyes. ‘Testing the water. To see if there really
is
something in it.’ He followed this with a hearty laugh and I found myself joining in. Okay, there was definitely a sense of insanity about the man and his house, but he was harmless. He was no threat.
He’s my friend,
as Elinor described him, when I had initially objected to her spending time with a strange old man I knew so very little about.

‘Always coffee,’ I eventually said, finally answering his question, relaxing a little.

‘A little gift from our mutual friend,’ he added, referencing Jessie.

He set about making the coffee in a pot, with a plunging mechanism, the like of which I hadn’t seen in as long as I could remember. A memory of my grandmother’s breakfast table flashed in my mind.

‘You know, I don’t actually know your name,’ I continued, taking a mug of thick, dark, steaming coffee, refusing the offer of milk. I like to taste my coffee pure. Plus, I didn’t quite trust the old man’s judgement on what constituted
fresh
– he’d taken the milk carton from the side, adjacent to his test tubes of road water.

He smiled a subtle, amused smile in response to my question.

‘You can call me Mr Cadley, if you like,’ he responded, heading back through the way I had come in. ‘Or Merlin – people seem to like that.’

‘So, is that your name?’ I asked. Oddly, he didn’t answer the question direct.

‘Follow me,’ he said instead, indicating a steel, spiral staircase that appeared to twist up through the centre of his multistoried house. And, distracted by what lay ahead, I didn’t pursue my question any further.

What he hadn’t mentioned, as we twirled upwards, our steps in tandem, was that he had a guest. On the first floor, as we whirled past, I glimpsed a room of toys and a small library; there was a third door, just slightly ajar, from which a whirring noise emitted.

‘Young Billy,’ the old man explained. ‘Playing with the trains. It’s okay,’ he annexed, pausing between floors, as something occurred to him, ‘his mother knows. Doesn’t like it, his being here, but tolerates it.’

I nodded a reply; his being here was a little odd. Not his presence in itself – I knew he came here, with and without Elinor – but it was strange he hadn’t popped by to see us. To see Tristan, his story-teller hero. Being a Sunday, Billy was almost guaranteed to find Tris at home.

‘Ah, in here,’ the old man announced, drawing me back from my musing. ‘This is what the kids call my
music room
and I guess it is, really. Haven’t given all these rooms names,’ he said, pointing around, randomly, indicating the multitude of rooms, I guessed. ‘But they appear to have. Take a seat, Agnes.’

I plunged into one of two fat, soft chairs that effectively swallowed me up. The comfort it gave up was pure luxury, but, unsteadied, I nearly spilled my coffee. I could finally see the appeal of coming here.

‘Billy likes it in here in particular. Young Elinor preferred the games and the dressing up,’ he continued, facing away from me, fiddling with equipment that was housed in one of two cabinets in front of him. ‘He likes to come up and read and play the golden oldies, as my mother used to call them. Likes the Beatles in particular. I’ve got it all on an old hard-drive Jessie sourced for me.’

He looked back at me, to check my understanding and my reaction, I guess, to the mention of my daughter. I nodded: I understood, and it was refreshing to hear Elinor mentioned without either caution, drama or apology.
I’m so sorry
slipped from lips far too easily and thoughtlessly, in my view. Esther, Aunt Penny, even Ronan and Papa H – all too eager to apologise for Elinor’s disappearance. Like they had a hand in it.

‘Buggers used to slip up to the top floor and poke through my personal belongings,’ he said, laughing that throaty laugh again, a sentence that suggested that somehow the rest of the house wasn’t his, at least not exclusively. ‘Think I didn’t notice, but I have eyes in the back of my head,’ he added, nodding to the corner to the left of us – a small camera was spying down on us. ‘Just a bit of fun,’ he explained. ‘This old hoarder likes his gadgets – that was another find from Jessie. A security system he unearthed from the Atrium in the city centre – still boxed and only slightly water-damaged. Right, here we go. What you came for!’

This final exclamation made me question the old man’s ability to mind read. Up to that point, I hadn’t given any clear indication regarding my motive for visiting. And yet, when he pressed a button on the machine before him and a sound filled the room – the speakers were hidden somewhere in the ceiling – it was clear he understood.

The sound that filled the room was Elinor’s voice.

It was the tape Tristan had found at the old train graveyard. The tape he’d kept a secret from me – with good intentions – until the old man had popped round one night with a video tape and Tristan had confessed it wasn’t the only recording he’d asked him to check over.

‘Tell me a story. A dark one, a bit scary! I want to have nightmares!’

Those fifteen words pricked my skin with pimples and my eyes with tears. That voice – suddenly so distant, suddenly just a ghost, suddenly filling up the room and pushing out all hope. Hearing her again simply highlighted how lost she was to me, what little chance I had of getting her back.

The old man paused the sound.

‘Want me to continue? I haven’t a lot more to play. The tape Tristan found is very damaged and I’ve not repaired much so far. I know it’s important, but I’m being careful. Taking my time with it so I can extract as much of the recording as I can. Shall I play on?’

‘Yes.’ I managed just a single word.

‘Have I told you about the Chamber of Doors?’

‘The Chamber of Doors?’

‘Yes, the worst form of torture you can imagine.’

‘No, no you haven’t.’

‘The chamber of doors is the place that drains you of all hope, sucks out your very soul. And it’s a cruel, clever, slow torture. Are you sure you want to hear?’

‘Yes.’

It was Elinor and Tristan. I couldn’t help but smile, and taste the salty tears as they tumbled over my curved lips. Tristan and his terrifying, dark tales that thrilled and petrified my beautiful daughter in equal measure. Where fact ceased and fiction began, that was anyone’s guess.

‘This is all I have so far,’ the old man explained when the voices stopped. ‘It sounds like she was recording people. Interviewing, maybe. Hard to tell yet. There’s quite a bit recorded, forty odd minutes, but this is the only section I’ve cleaned up to a decent level so far. I’ll keep going, I promise, and when I have more, I’ll let you know.’

‘Can I take her with me?’ I asked, hearing a desperate pleading in my own voice.

‘I thought you might want to, need to even, so I’d thought ahead,’ he answered, nodding. ‘I’ve got a little machine sorted, which you can take home.’

With that, he headed out of the room again and I followed as he spiraled back down the twisting staircase.

As I descended, I paused on the first floor, with one step off the corkscrew flight.

‘I’m sure he’d love to see you,’ a voice called up from below, reading my mind again. How did he do that?

With that, I stepped off entirely and gave the door to the room where Billy played a light tap and a gentle push. But Billy didn’t look up at me with his usual smile. Maybe it was because my appearance was so sudden – though surely he’d heard my voice and was aware of my arrival? Maybe it was just that this was
his
territory, not mine and my presence was an unwanted intrusion upon his privacy. Whatever it was, it dulled my nephew’s features, took the light out of his youthful skin.

‘Hello Aunt Agnes,’ he said, his tone bland, the greeting automatic, but not welcoming.

I didn’t allow it to put me off and moved into the room, determined to show enthusiasm and take an interest in what he was doing. The room was wholly dedicated to a miniature train track that took up an entire table, which, in turn, consumed most of the space the room had available. Whilst it was a fascinating creation, I was less interested in the trains as they rattled along the tracks, weaving in and out of a hand-painted landscape, and more captivated by Billy’s sullen face. At times, it really did flush with those
Morton
features. Like me, Jessie had been one of a twin, only his other half – Joe – was still alive.
Not that I’ve any idea where he is these days,
Jessie would curse, cussing the fact his brother had simply sailed out on his family one night. Looking at Billy, I saw Joe and Jessie all over his face – the nose, the jawline, in his movements; boy, he was going to grow up a looker.