Tower of Silence (5 page)

It was curious and rather unexpected of the crimson-haired child, Emily Frost, to have asked about the Round Tower. As far as Selina could remember people in Inchcape hardly ever talked about it. But Emily, being new to Inchcape, had probably found it interesting.

Great-uncle Matthew had not thought the Round Tower interesting. He had thought it an eyesore, and a danger to inquisitive people. It would be an honourable thing to get it demolished, he said, and after he had failed to buy the piece of land with the disused road he had begun writing letters to local newspapers and church commissions and parish councils, most of which were not answered.

Honour was an odd thing. It meant different things to different people. To Great-uncle Matthew, honour meant doing good, and talking loudly about it, so that
people knew how much good you were doing. To the aunts it meant being polite and obedient. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother,’ Great-aunt Rosa often said.

In India, honour had been all mixed up with dead people, and with the respect you had to give to them. The ayah who had looked after Selina had said that if you did not honour the dead properly, they would not be able to rest, and that was very bad indeed. When Selina’s parents died she said Selina would have to honour their memories always, especially since the poor master and his lady had not been able to pronounce the
patet
, the repentance-prayer, at the end of their lives. That meant they might still be
tanu-peretha
–sinful–said the ayah, her dark-liquid eyes inward-looking and solemn. To honour their memories might help them to rest; it might help them take the first of the three steps of Humata, Hukhta, and Hvarshta, and then cross the old and holy Bridge that would lead them into paradise. Selina must promise to always remember and revere her father and mother, and honour their memories, or their ghosts would not be able to rest or reach paradise, said the ayah.

Selina had promised because by that time she was frightened to do anything that might make people angry with her. When she was sent to live with Great-uncle Matthew and the aunts she had been afraid to go to sleep in the strange bedroom because that was where her parents came to her. She had not dared to tell the aunts, because they might think it was all her fault. ‘There was nothing like that here before
you
came to live in the house,’ Aunt Rosa would say. Aunt Flora would be at
a loss to understand about Selina’s parents’ needing to be helped across to paradise, because once you died you went straight to heaven. Both of them would say that of course people did not come back after they died, the very idea.

But Selina’s parents came back; they came back almost every night, right into her bedroom in Teind House. They hid in the corners–usually they crouched down in the lumpy shadows at the side of the washstand, drawing their knees up to their chests and hugging their legs so that they could not easily be seen, so that you might start to believe they were not there after all. But Selina always knew they were there. She watched them for hours and hours, forcing herself to stay awake. And gradually she saw that what looked like bars of moonlight were their hands, and what looked like the rubbed silvery bits of the looking glass reflecting the light were their faces…

They always waited until the house was dark and quiet, and then they moved out of hiding: they unfolded their hunched-over bodies until they were standing upright, and then they came creeping and fumbling across the floor, their hands outstretched. They no longer looked as they had looked when they were alive: they were no longer happy and smiling–mother wearing pretty clothes and with her hair shiny; father smart and neat. They looked as they had done when they died.

So the ayah had been right, and a way would have to be found to honour them and send them on their way across the old and holy Bridge. Selina had no idea how this could be done until the day Great-uncle Matthew
started to talk about the tower, using the word
honourable
. That had been when she had suddenly seen how she could stop her parents coming into her bedroom every night, their flesh hanging in red tatters from their bodies, their hands reaching out beseechingly to her…

‘Help us, Selina…Help us…’

They needed her to help them because they could not see any longer, because their eyes were hanging out on their cheeks.

Even on a bright late-October day, the Round Tower was frightening. Selina walked determinedly through the orchard and scrambled through the gap in the bramble hedge, being careful not to tear her frock so as not to annoy the aunts.

The little old road that wound along to the tower was not a road you would want to drive a car over because it was horridly rutted and bouncy and you had to be careful not to turn your ankle in the ruts. Great-uncle Matthew said it was scandalous neglect and a good cartload of gravel ought to be put down. But hardly anyone ever used the road, so the authorities who owned it had never bothered.

Selina thought it was the kind of road you read about in story books: a road that might take you into strange lands. The grass all around was overgrown and there was rosebay willowherb everywhere and puffy-headed thistles–the sort you blew on and watched the seeds float away. Father had told her that really the seed-heads were fairies in hiding, and blowing on them made the fairies scurry off
in a hurry, back to their own world. Selina liked this story–she liked remembering how father had looked when he told her about it–but the aunts and Great-uncle Matthew had not seemed to believe in fairies in disguise, and Great-aunt Rosa had said that thistles were nothing but nasty weeds, fit only for pulling up by the roots.

The scents of apples and damsons from Teind House’s orchard lay heavily on the air. Aunt Flora would be making jam quite soon. She liked to serve jam with her home-made scones when the vicar came to tea or the doctor called. Aunt Rosa said Flora made a show of herself with the vicar and it was not dignified, but Aunt Flora still made the jam and the scones.

Selina concentrated on Great-aunt Flora and the jam because it was a homely, ordinary thing, and it took away some of the horror of the looming tower. The trouble was that the nearer you got to it, the taller it looked, and the more it seemed to be leaning forward, as if it might be about to topple over.

Like the tower at Alwar…?
said a sneaky little voice inside Selina’s mind.

Yes. That was the thing. The Round Tower of Inchcape looked exactly like the tower at Alwar.

Walking cautiously through the raggedy grass, sending frequent glances back at Teind House in case anyone saw her, Selina was remembering how, on that first night here, the orchard and the gardens had seemed to get thinner in places, so that you could nearly look through and see other worlds. People said that magic did not exist and only babies believed in it, and Selina
was nearly eight, practically grown-up, and so she knew that there was no magic.

But there might once have been magic. You read about it. People in stories had magic boxes or they fell down enchanted rabbit-holes. So Selina thought it was just possible that there might still be little bits of magic left lying around the world, and that if you stood very still and said the right words–if you knew the right words–you might set the magic working for you. And then you might even find that there were holes in the world, where you could look back into the past.

As she drew nearer to the black tower, she saw several large birds settle on the far-away top, and fold their wings around their bodies, like a man folding a cloak around his shoulders.

The tower at Alwar was where the children had been taken as sunset approached. They had tried not to watch the slow fiery dying of the sun through the horrid mean little windows of the hut, because they were trying not to think about the men shooting them at sunset.

Christabel said it did not matter whether they thought about it or not, because it would not happen. It was absolutely impossible that their parents would let them be shot. They would arrange for those men to be let out of gaol, she said fiercely. Her father would arrange it because he loved her very very much, and he would find a way to do what the kidnappers wanted. She was not quite crying when she said this, but she nearly was.

Douglas said that probably his father was already talking to ambassadors and people about the kidnappers’ friends being let out of prison. He did not think the kidnappers would shoot any of the children, either. People did not shoot children.

It was not sunset when the men came to take them out of the hut, but it was not far off. It was dreadfully frightening to be herded into the cart again, but Christy said that probably they were being taken home. Probably it was all over by now.

But the cart had only jolted a few miles along the road when Douglas said suddenly, ‘This isn’t the way back to Alwar.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked someone, and one of the boys said, a bit uncertainly, that they were still on the mountain road.

‘Well, not absolutely,’ said Douglas. ‘But we’re going north, aren’t we? And Alwar’s south.’

‘Is it?’ But no one was quite sure how you told north from south.

And then Christy said, ‘What’s that?’ and they all looked to where she was pointing.

And there it was, straight ahead of them. A great rearing tower, at least fifty feet high, jutting up into the blood-splashed, dying-sun sky like a huge decaying tooth or a monstrous chimney. It was round and windowless and it looked as if it might be doorless as well, and it was
old
, it was so old that it might have been here for a thousand years, and as Selina stared up at it she felt cold and sick inside, and she thought:
now
I’m frightened. I
was frightened quite a lot before, but now I’m
really
frightened. Looking at the tower gave you the same sickening pain you got if you wrenched your ankle while running fast, or the wincing feeling you got in your teeth if someone drew a nail across a slaty surface.

After what felt like a long time, Christy said in a whisper, ‘It’s like something out of a nightmare,’ and Selina instantly thought–yes,
of course
! That’s why it’s so familiar! It’s the giant’s tower from the nightmares and the fairy tales. It’s the place where the ogre lives–where he eats children for breakfast. It’s the castle where the floors are strewn with the bones of dead men, and with their hearts and livers as well, because the ogre likes human hearts, he eats them with pepper and vinegar for tea…

And if the ogre sees us or hears us approach, thought Selina in panic, he’ll come stomping down the thousand stairs inside the tower, and he’ll catch us and eat us up.

One of the boys said fearfully, ‘What is it?’

‘I think it’s a Tower of Silence,’ said Douglas, still staring up at the black tower. ‘It’s a place where the people of India bring their dead.’

‘To bury them?’

‘No. They put them on the ledge near the top,’ said Douglas. ‘The–um–the dead bodies, I mean.’ In the livid glare from the dying sky, his face was pinched and scared and he looked much younger than he had done before. This upset Selina quite a lot, because Douglas had been very brave until now.

‘I can see the ledge,’ said Christy, after a moment, shading her eyes and staring upwards.

Selina could see it as well. It was like a thick lip, near the very top of the tower. After a few moments, during which her eyes were adjusting to the brilliance of the sunset, she was able to make out other things on the ledge. Black shapes with beating wings against the sky.

‘Birds,’ said one of the smaller children, with a shiver. ‘Large birds.’

‘Birds of prey,’ said Douglas, half to himself, and then Selina understood what happened to the dead people who were brought out here.

They were left on the ledge near the tower’s top so that the birds of prey could eat them. It was the ogre’s castle after all, and the birds were really ogres.

And inside the tower were the tattered remains of all the humans that the birds had torn apart with their beaks and claws in order to eat them.

The birds gathering on the Round Tower at Inchcape were not the same as the birds in Alwar, of course. Selina knew that. She knew that this was not a tower where dead people were brought so that they could be eaten.

But there was the feeling here that there had been in Alwar: the feeling that inside the tower there might be an ogre who liked the taste of humans, and who chanted the rhyme that went Fee-fi-fo-fum, I-smell-the-blood-of-an-Englishman, and the part about grinding people’s bones to make bread.

When Selina came to Teind House, the aunts had
looked out some of their own childhood story books for Poor Elspeth’s girl, and among these had been the fairy tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Hans Andersen, most of them illustrated with the brilliant grisly perception of Arthur Rackham, or Doré. As Selina walked towards the tower on that autumn afternoon, she was remembering the books so vividly that she could feel the thick linen of the old paper and smell the mustiness of the pages…

Selina was allowed to look at the books on Sundays as a special treat after tea. They had to be treated very carefully because they were old and valuable, and Selina had to say thank you, and pretend to enjoy them. She did say thank you, and she took the books into the dining room which still smelt of Sunday dinner. The dining room was not very comfortable, but at least the aunts could not see how slowly Selina turned the pages when she was coming to the story about the giant and Jack who killed him, because she hated seeing the picture of the castle which looked exactly like the tower at Alwar, and reading the rhyme about fee-fi-fo-fum. In Great-aunt Rosa’s book the giant added a bit about having liver and lights for supper tonight. It was difficult to know if it would be worse to have your bones ground up for bread, or to have your liver eaten for supper.

But stories about ogres and giants were for babies; it was important to remember they did not really exist, and so Selina, her heart beating uncomfortably fast, went across the grass and right up to the tower.