The Influence (20 page)

Had he been pretending otherwise so that he could believe he was protecting her? “Maybe I was by myself for so long I don’t notice when I’m not,” he said.

She held his arm tight with both hands. “You’re right, we shouldn’t quarrel. We’ll be giving our Rowan a bad example.”

“When she gets home.”

“Tomorrow.”

“I’ll pick her up about five, shall I? We’ll tell Hermione not to make dinner and then we can have ours with Rowan. I like the three of us eating together, specially now she’s growing up.”

“So do I,” Alison said, and shivered. “The house seems so empty tonight without her.”

“We’ve no call to worry really, though, have we? Hermione wouldn’t let anything happen to her.”

“She’d die first.” She led him to the sofa, where she sat and gazed at the obsolete wallpaper. She breathed slowly a few times and then said “When you keep ringing, could her phone be out of order?”

“I can always hear it, love.”

“They must be late coming back from somewhere. I’ll be having a word with her about not letting us know they were going. What time is it now?”

“Almost ten.”

“Let’s give it another ten minutes. Fifteen, say. She’s bound to call as soon as they get in.”

She snuggled against him and he put his arms around her, laid his cheek against hers. Once, in her room at the nurses’ hostel, they’d fallen asleep like this and wakened when it was dark. He’d had to clamber out of her window and flee in a crouch round the building, expecting any moment to be mistaken for the burglar who’d broken into the adjacent hostel earlier that week. Now he and Alison could lie in each other’s arms and dream for as long as they liked, no matter what the hour, and he was reflecting sleepily that they always had this when Alison stiffened. “It’s no use, I can feel something’s wrong.”

The room seemed to darken, the shadows in the highest corners staining the walls. “Like what?” he demanded.

“I don’t know, but that doesn’t matter. Don’t you dare say this is craziness or I’ll never forgive you.”

“I wouldn’t, Ali. But what can be wrong? If anything had happened to your sister, Rowan would have called us, or gone to the police and they would have. You know she’d be sensible.”

Alison gazed at him so dully that at first he didn’t realise she was agreeing with him. “Do you want to call the police?” he said.

“Give it another few minutes.” But she was on the phone to Hermione almost at once. She hung on longer than Derek had, and his head felt brittle with thoughts that chased one another unstoppably: Hermione should have called, if they were going to be home late she ought to have phoned on the way, she would have if she could… “I don’t think there’s even a police station in Holywell,” Alison said unevenly. “They’d have to come from I don’t know where.”

“When they mightn’t need to. Why don’t we go ourselves?”

“We can’t both go. One of us has to stay by the phone.”

He could imagine her doing so literally, for hours. “I’ll go then, shall I? I’ll call you as soon as I get there.”

“All right, you go,” she said as if she were humoring him, though they both knew that was a pretence to keep their spirits up. “I hope you have a wasted journey,” she added, and kissed him hard, clung to him, pushed him away. “I hope I’m being as irrational as you must think I am.”

During the last few minutes he’d ceased to think so, but he thought better of telling her. He gripped her hand until he was out the front door, and then she watched him from the lit hall. Beyond the dunes the lights of Wales quivered. At least he wouldn’t be waiting helplessly, at least he would be doing what he could, yet the thought of the roundabout route he would have to take, when Wales was close enough to see, dismayed him. He started the engine and turned the car, and Alison held up one hand as if she couldn’t wave. Then the house swallowed her and the light as she closed the front door.

Chapter Twenty-Four

There was a reason why Rowan didn’t want to waken, if she could only think. Trying to think might waken her before she knew what it was. Better just to lie here in the dark and drift back to sleep until it was daylight and safe to start remembering—better to stay as deep in the dark as she could and ignore her discomfort, whatever it was. Some part of her felt like a threat of unpleasantness, but perhaps she could rearrange herself gradually enough not to waken. She moved her limbs gingerly, just enough to feel them and the bed.

It wasn’t her bed. It was lumpy and prickly, and far too cold: she seemed to have thrown off all the bedclothes. She was going to waken in a bed that wasn’t hers, she thought apprehensively—she wouldn’t be able to run to her parents for comfort—but then it must be her bed at Hermione’s, and she could go to her aunt while she remembered the nightmare that was troubling her. The thought of Hermione made the nightmare loom at her, and she jerked away from it, wakening at once.

And then she tried to cower back into the dark, but it wouldn’t let her hide from all that she was seeing. She wasn’t in bed, she was lying on frosty grass. A few yards away, a willow drooped. A streetlamp glinted through its branches from a pavement beyond railings. Thin stripes of light stretched across the grass; here and there they climbed crosses and rectangular stones, which seemed to be emitting the grey light. She was in the graveyard. The nightmare was real.

She wanted desperately to hide, though she hadn’t yet remembered what she would be hiding from, but she felt frozen to the earth. She managed to raise her head, and caught sight of the granite cross beside her—the cross on which she’d knocked herself unconscious. The memory allowed her to reach up and touch her head, which wasn’t as bruised as she feared. Then she remembered what she had been fleeing, and she jerked back in panic, crouched in the shadow of the cross.

The open grave ahead of her was no longer glowing. Long thin shapes stirred on the ridge of earth at the foot of the trench. She flinched before she realised that she wasn’t seeing fingers groping over the edge of the grave, only snatches of streetlight through the restless branches of the willow. But something had been moving in there earlier. Suppose it had crawled out while she was unconscious and now was closer to her than she knew?

She fumbled for the cross behind her as if holding onto it might keep her safe. Her hands sank into earth instead, earth beneath which there must be something like the shrivelled body she’d seen writhing. She flung herself forward, away from the greedy earth, towards the open grave. She had to see what was there; she felt as if she couldn’t stop herself. She wavered to a halt before she could trip over the ridge of dug earth, and stared in.

The flashlight was nearly spent. Rowan had to lean over the trench, her fingers shrinking from the upheaved earth, before she was sure what she was seeing. She prayed she was wrong even when she made out Hermione’s vacated face, staring at the flashlight as if she were waiting for it to fail entirely. Please don’t be dead, Rowan pleaded, please God don’t let her be dead, and then she realised what her grief had delayed her from realising. Hermione’s was the only body in the coffin. Terrified that she was about to scream and betray that she was there, she fled towards the gate.

As she dodged the willow and the gravestones she peered fearfully behind them, and then she remembered she should be afraid of Vicky too. At the very least Vicky had known what would happen, had brought Rowan here to see it and had looked triumphant when she had. Whoever Vicky was, Hermione had been right about her, and now Hermione was dead.

The streetlamp was no refuge. The light felt lifeless, one with the graveyard it was keeping unnaturally bright, the neon gravestones, the petrified grass. She ran out of the gate and up the hill towards the houses. She felt as if she weighed less than she should, perhaps because she no longer had the binoculars. Vicky must have taken them. Vicky had said she had tried to make it easy for her, which presumably meant she was no longer going to. At the top of the slope, trees bent toward her as if they would flail her into the mouth of darkness whose crooked tongue was the road. But there were houses down beyond the next streetlamp. As she fled towards that light, she felt so numb she could hardly believe she was running at all.

When she reached the houses she felt more alone than ever. Porch lights made the gardens into moats of shadow, isolated the houses on islands of light and warned her not to trespass. A dog whined and snarled as Rowan raced downhill, though she hadn’t realised she was making any noise to speak of. She knew she mustn’t go to strangers, even to ask to call her parents as she yearned to do, but she did know Gwen and Elspeth, a little. They must be wondering where she was. The thought filled her with unexpected guilt that spurred her faster down the hill.

But the French car wasn’t outside Gwen’s and Elspeth’s. They must be searching for her. She was dismayed to find that she felt easier now that she didn’t have to tell them about Hermione, for she couldn’t help suspecting that if she had heeded her warnings about Vicky, Hermione might still be alive. Surely Rowan’s parents wouldn’t need to be told about Hermione right away, surely they were worrying about Rowan by now and would just be glad to hear from her. They were somewhere in the frayed thread of light that was glittering at her across the bay, and she could call them from the Gronant phone box.

Hedges stirred on either side of her as she fled downhill, dodging marshy shadows. The next curve gave her the sight of the red box, between the post office, whose window was full of pet foods and washing powders, and the Gronant Inn. She was already hearing her mother’s voice. It wouldn’t matter if it was angry or relieved or both: she and daddy must be missing Rowan by now, despite what they’d said when they hadn’t realised she was listening. But she lurched to a halt yards short of the box. Someone was in there.

The dozens of small windows were whitened by frost or by the streetlamp, but she could see that whoever was inside was very tall. She mustn’t run away just because when the door opened she would be alone on the deserted road with them, or even because she felt she was being watched through the glass. She retreated across the road. The long thin dark blotch that must be the head followed her movement. Now she saw that the figure was almost as tall as the box. She imagined how the box would look if it were laid on the pavement, the tall thin shape lying in it, ready to sit up and show her its face, and then she sobbed in terror and flew down the slope.

The road grew steeper, the bends sharper. It twisted between high rough garden walls that held back the lights of their houses from her. She glanced back, terrified of seeing the shadow of a figure stretching round a bend, but she had seen no movement when she reached the coast road at the foot of the hill.

The road stretched both ways into the dark, between the hills behind her that rose to mountains and the fields ahead that stretched to the water. The lights across the bay had begun to drown in mist. A night wind passed through her like a shiver that felt as if it would never end. She stared miserably at the signpost on the far side of the road. Fflint was toward the distant lights, but she had to go away from them, to Prestatyn. That was where the nearest railway station was.

She looked back at the lights of Gronant, afraid both to leave them behind and to see a shadow creeping down the hill or rushing down at her. She made herself proceed onto the coast road. If only she still had the binoculars she would be able to see her destination as she left it behind. She imagined gliding home across the bay, and for a moment she felt as if she could, even without the binoculars. She shrank from the thought and set off into the dark.

Before long, hedges rose on both sides of her, blotting out the blurry glimmer of the hills and fields. Soon they towered above her, blotches of foliage overhanging the road as though the black sky had sagged like an old ceiling. Whenever the leaves stirred they sounded to her like a withered object shifting in a box. She would have run along the middle of the dim tarmac, but mummy had said you should never walk in the road.

At last the hedges gave way to trees in the grounds of a hotel. The hotel was dark. If the doors had been open and lit, she would have asked to phone. She had realised belatedly that Gwen might have stayed at the house while Elspeth searched. Wouldn’t it still be quicker to go back than onwards to Prestatyn? She was wavering, afraid to make the wrong choice, when she heard a car.

She mustn’t try to hitch a lift. If the car stopped, she mustn’t get in or even go near. She was almost relieved when she saw that it was coming from Prestatyn. She dodged into the mouth of the hotel drive as the car slowed. The driver hadn’t noticed her: he was slowing for the junction opposite the hotel. As the car swung away from the coast, the headlight beams stretched back toward Gronant. In the moment before they were snatched away, Rowan saw movement on the road.

It was only a glimpse, but it seemed to leap at her. A figure was crawling toward her at the limit of the headlights. It appeared to be using one hand to drag itself along the tarmac while it held something grey to its scalp with the other, like a wig. All the same, it was coming dismayingly fast. With a scream that her fear seemed to deafen her to, Rowan flung herself away from the hotel, where she couldn’t believe there was any refuge, and fled into the dark.

She thought she fled for hours toward the false dawn over Prestatyn, and she lost count of the number of times she looked back. Hedges clawed at the air as if they had missed seizing her, but she could make out nothing on the road. She seemed hardly to move past the hills and the fields; she felt as if the vast deserted night were holding her back. If anything, the night seemed even deeper when the glow of the town began to tint the fields. At last the road turned toward a bridge over the railway. She leapt desperately up the bridge and glanced back. The tarry gleam of the road was still bare as far as she could see, yet the lights of the town weren’t nearly reassuring enough.