Tower of Silence (8 page)

Mary would quite have liked to carry out the tongue-cutting threat, but that might end in killing Leila before
Mary wanted her dead. Loss of blood. Shock. And Leila must die slowly, in her husband’s rigid embrace. That was what the plan was, and that was what Mary wanted. There was also the strong likelihood that if Mary tried to mutilate her mother’s mouth, Leila would seize the opportunity of fighting back and would bite. No, that idea would not work at all. What, then? Gag her? Stop up her mouth?

Stop up her mouth. With what?

By now it was a good twelve hours since William had died, and his entire body was rock-hard. Mary walked round the two grotesque captives, considering. From time to time the bubbling laugh came out, because this was all so very pleasing, it was appropriate, it was vindication and justification for all those years of listening to the whining about Christabel. She had thought that Christabel was with her earlier on, but she was no longer sure about that. Anyhow, it was better to be alone. There was no one you could trust as absolutely as you could trust yourself.

In the end, she sawed off two of her father’s fingers to use. It took quite a long time, and she had to fetch two more knives because the knuckle-bones gave her a lot of trouble. But at last it was done, and after several experiments she managed to thrust the two fingers into her mother’s mouth, like a plug. At the first attempt she pushed them too far back and Leila gagged and retched, but at the second attempt she managed to prop her mother’s mouth open quite neatly.

Safe in the knowledge that Leila could not scream
again, she went back to finish her sandwich and to make a cup of coffee to drink with it.

The curious thing was that after they told her she was to go to Broadacre–after the screaming incident and the injections–Mary began to think about her dead sister more and more.

Every 8 June Mary remembered that this was Christabel’s birthday: that today Christabel would have been twenty-eight, twenty-nine…Almost certainly Christabel would have been married by now, perhaps with children. Mary would have been an aunt to those children. She thought Christabel would have had a boy and a girl.

As the sun set on 12 September each year, she counted the years, and thought, ‘Today Christabel has been dead for twenty-one years. For twenty-two, for twenty-three years.’

But most of all, Mary remembered how she had sensed Christabel’s presence that morning in the squalid wash-house–
Set me free
…Christabel had whispered–and although Christabel had vanished immediately afterwards, Mary began to realise that she was returning. She did not come as a ghost like something out of a horror story–something that stood at the foot of your bed and stared at you with hollow eyes, or crept out of the shadows to lay icy fingers on your face–she came much more gently and much more subtly than that.

Inside Mary’s mind. Ah yes, that was clever of Christabel, dead and enshrined and practically canonised by those two fools, her parents. It was what you would expect of
Christabel, who was for ever young, for ever beautiful and unspoiled.

Little by little, strand by cobweb strand, Christabel’s thoughts slid deep into Mary’s mind, until at times Mary could almost see her sister. To begin with it was all very puzzling, but then, quite suddenly, Mary understood. Christabel had been weighed down with all that sickly devotion and it had been a burden to her, just as Mary had found it a burden being unwanted and ignored, and having her own small achievements and aspirations belittled. Of course Christabel would be grateful to the little sister who had never met her but had lifted the burden of those clogging memories. Out of gratitude, Christabel would probably stay with Mary for most of her life now, and help her when she needed help.

It was rather comforting.

The Round Tower was beginning to get to Emily. She was starting to experience churning sensations in her stomach when she had to ride her motorbike past it, and quite often she dreamed about it and woke with her heart going at about ten times its normal rate.

People in Inchcape said it was a sad, neglected old place, and somebody ought to do something about it before it fell down where it stood. Turn it into a tourist centre, they said, or a museum. It could even become a kind of outpost of Stornforth Bird Sanctuary–enough of their charges came to it. Miss March told Emily that Great-uncle Matthew used to say much the same things. When she was a girl he had always been writing to people about getting something done, and about resurfacing the old road, but Selina did not think he had ever had any replies. Still, he had enjoyed writing the letters. He had
been fond of writing to people in authority and pointing out their shortcomings, Great-uncle Matthew.

Emily did not think the tower was sad. She thought it was a sneery, sly place, and every time she growled the motorbike past it she had the eeriest feeling that somewhere within its depths there might be watchers. The trouble was that they would not be ordinary and unmenacing human watchers–tramps or winos or New Age travellers–they would be feathered and clawed, with hooded eyes and cruel talons and beaks—Here they were, back in the Hitchcock film again.

She mentioned the tower to Dr Irvine when he came to supper, not making a big deal of it, just dropping it into the conversation. Dad and Dr Irvine were cronies and they wanted to talk informally about some of Moy’s people, so Emily had offered to cook supper for them. Mum used to do a mean chicken curry and Emily had found her recipe. She had not been able to look at any of mum’s recipes for months, but when she did look it was surprisingly comforting. It made her feel near to mum to be measuring out the spices and seeing the little splosh of yellow on the corner of the page where mum spilt the turmeric that time.

Dr Irvine seemed interested in the Round Tower and in Emily’s reactions to it. She said, deliberately vaguely, that it reminded her of a nightmare, and Dr Irvine looked at her thoughtfully for quite a long time so that Emily began to feel as if she had said something utterly stupid. He had nice eyes, Dr Irvine; very dark blue, with black lashes. You felt as if he could see
straight into your thoughts, but as if he might like what he was seeing. And he had dark hair with just a few tiny flecks of grey in it, like the cloth of an expensive overcoat. Emily reminded herself that he was nearly twenty years older, and therefore obviously out of bounds as far as sexiness went, never mind what the girls in Moy’s offices said about older men often turning out to be absolute dynamite in bed. Actually Dr Irvine probably was dynamite in bed if you considered it. Emily did consider it, and then was abruptly so embarrassed that she bent over the pot of curry, spooning out helpings.

Dr Irvine took his plate, and added rice and mango chutney. He said, ‘A nightmare place, is it? D’you know the best thing to do with nightmares, Emily?’

‘What?’

‘Spike their guns. Confront them head on.’

Emily looked at him. ‘You mean go right up to the tower?’

‘Go right up to it,’ said Patrick Irvine. ‘Squash the nightmare, Emily. Lay the ghost.’

Lay the ghost. It sounded like a joke, the kind of thing a gang of lads might say down at the pub. Hey fellas, I’m laying a ghost tonight.

But Dr Irvine dealt with all those wild murderers and rapists–Mary Maskelyne had just come to Moy for heaven’s sake!–and he had those eyes that walked in and out of your mind, and what he did not know about nightmares and phobias was probably not worth knowing.

Emily waited until Miss March went into Stornforth. It was a blustery afternoon, and Selina wore a mackintosh that buttoned up to the neck, with a headsquare tied over her hair in case it rained. Lorna Laughlin was driving her in: it was half-term and they were going to do some shopping together.

Once she had gone Teind House sank gratefully into its afternoon silence. Joanna Savile was in her room working. She played classical music while she worked–just very softly, but Emily had sometimes heard it, and she could hear it now. She had told Emily she was preparing a talk to give to a group of the inmates at Moy. Emily hoped the group would not include Flasher Logan.

Great-uncle Matthew’s clock was on guard duty in the hall, but she stuck her tongue out at the horrid ticking thing as she went past it, jammed dad’s mobile phone into the pocket of her leather biking jacket because you never knew, and zipped the jacket up to the neck.

She went out through the side door, which Miss March called the garden door, locking it carefully so that nothing spooky could sneak in and hide inside Great-uncle Matthew’s clock, and set off through the orchard.

It was a sharp cold afternoon–the kind of late-October afternoon that Emily liked. The cold pricked tears in your eyes so that you kept seeing things through a little blurry mist until you blinked the tears away, and there was a scent on the air that was a mixture of bonfires and wet leaves and woollen scarves that got into your mouth.
The little orchard smelt of apples and the leaves felt dry and crackly as you walked across them. Nice. The disused road was nice as well. You had the feeling that you were walking backwards in time, or even into a different world altogether. Cowardly lions and white rabbits, thought Emily. Still, it’s easier than Alice’s rabbit-hole.

She thought, at first, that she would not be able to go up to the tower, even like this, even in the middle of the afternoon for God’s sake, with people around, and a mobile phone in her pocket. But Dr Irvine’s off-hand remark–which Emily knew had not really been off-hand at all–had lodged in her memory, and Emily touched it in her mind for reassurance. Spike the nightmare’s guns. Confront the ghosts.

Seen from right down on the ground, the old tower was as horrid as she had thought. It was dark and menacing and it was
old
, so old that you could almost smell the oldness breathing out from it, and you had the feeling that if you stretched out your hands you would be able to plunge them, wrist-deep, into the swirling miasma of the long-ago. As well as that, it seemed to lean over, as if it might be threatening to topple down onto her–Emily could just imagine that sudden tumble of blackened crumbling bricks cascading around her head, and the centuries of dust, and the dozens of bird skeletons, light and fragile and unbearably pitiful, in the way that bird skeletons were if you found them in a chimney. The absolute last thing she wanted to do was push open the deep-set little door and go inside. The door would probably be locked, anyhow.

But it was not locked, wouldn’t you just know it? It swung gently inwards at her touch, and the hinges did not even creak. So it wasn’t a Hitchcock film after all, because a Hitchcock film would definitely have a creaking-hinge door. Emily hesitated, and then remembered that once she had looked properly inside, and
seen
that there was nothing to be afraid of, she would feel better. It would be nice to be able to ride past the tower without her heart hammering in panic every time.

She had been prepared for a really bad smell the minute the door moved inwards–she had, in fact, been half holding her breath so that she would not get a faceful of wet-leaves, bird-droppings smell–but there was only a faint mustiness, and overlaying it the atmosphere of extreme age. But Emily received a strong impression of immense unhappiness, almost as if, once upon a time, someone had come here to deal with a huge sadness that could not be admitted to the world. It was as if that someone had spent hours and hours here, and as if all the sadness and all the brooding and the despair had eventually leaked into the crumbling black stones…

That was completely absurd, of course. This was just a beaten-up old ruin, vaguely eerie, in the way beaten-up old ruins were eerie, and the sooner Emily came to grips with it, the better.

Her eyes were adjusting to the dimness now, and she could see a flight of stone steps twisting their way up. They looked pretty steep, as steps went; those monks or whoever had lived here must have been very fit, although
you would expect that of monks, what with all that fasting and stuff.

Emily considered the steps, chewing her lower lip. She could hear, very faintly, the occasional beating of wings from the birds who flew across from the Stornforth sanctuary and perched on the tower, or sometimes came in through the narrow windows. But she did not think she was going up into all that twisting darkness, never mind if the view from the windows was the most extravagantly marvellous thing in the entire western hemisphere, and never mind if the birds were the long lost representatives of the great auk or the dodo. The steps were probably unsafe, anyhow, so that if you did manage to bring yourself to start climbing, you would probably end up beneath a pile of collapsed rubble. Scared? jeered an inner voice. You’re meant to be laying a ghost, remember? You might have known you’d duck out when it came to going all the way to the top. You’re a stooge and a coward, Emily Frost. But if it was being a stooge to stay safely on the ground floor, Emily would rather be a stooge than break her neck falling through crumbling stones.

It was very quiet in here. There was nothing to be seen, but Emily was beginning to feel a bit spooked. She went outside, closing the door carefully, and walked back along the little rutted road that did not really lead anywhere except to Teind House.

She was just in sight of the gap leading through to the orchard when a car drew up alongside, and Dr Irvine’s voice said, ‘Exorcising the ghosts, Emily?’

He was just about the last person Emily had been expecting to see, and he looked so wildly attractive seated at the wheel of his car, so fiercely masculine without Moy’s background of filing cabinets and locked doors, that for a moment she simply stared at him and could not think of anything to say.

But he made it all right; he said, ‘I hoped I might meet you–I called at the cottage, but Don said you were at Teind House this morning.’ His eyes went to the grim outline of the Round Tower. ‘You really were exorcising the ghosts, weren’t you?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Are you going back to Teind? Well, get in just for a minute, would you?’ He leaned over to open the passenger door. ‘I’ve got a proposition for you.’ When she was in the car, he said, ‘Don was telling me that you were looking round for things to occupy your time.’

‘Well, yes, although I’ve got two days at the school, and now Teind House—’

‘Could you fit something else in? Because I wondered if you might like to help me by visiting one or two of the inmates at Moy.’

Emily regarded him. ‘Is this for real, or is it a made-up thing just to give me something to do?’

‘No, it’s real, I promise. And it’d be very low-key. I had the idea that you might try visiting one or two of the women–just to talk to them for half an hour or so. Quite ordinary conversation: current events or last night’s TV, or hairstyles or clothes.’

‘Would I visit them in their rooms?’

‘No, we’d probably set it up for you to be in one of the common rooms,’ said Patrick. ‘Easier from the security angle.’

‘You mean so that there’d be staff within reach?’

He smiled. His eyes creased at the corners when he smiled like that. ‘Yes, you’d have to be within reach of the alarm bells,’ he said. ‘And there would be a few subjects to avoid, but I’d prime you on those beforehand. You’d be perfectly safe.’

‘I think I’d quite like to do it,’ said Emily after a moment, hoping he had not sensed that the comment about having to be within reach of alarm bells had sent a slight chill across the back of her neck. ‘I mean–if you think I could be of some help. It might be a bit awkward at first–a bit false and forced, until I get used to it. But it’d be quite a worthwhile thing to do, wouldn’t it?’

He did not seem to have picked up the momentary chill. He smiled again, and said, ‘Good girl. I’ll set it up and phone you, shall I?’

So that meant that now Emily would find her heart jumping with anticipation every time the phone rang. This would not do, it simply would
not
.

‘And listen, Emily, you’ll find it easier if you can think of these people as just unwell, or crippled.’

‘Cracked minds and damaged emotion-circuits. Battered souls who once stained the world with blood.’

‘Yes.
Yes
.’ He glanced at her, but this time he did not smile, he looked at her more thoughtfully. ‘That’s rather a good way of putting it,’ he said. ‘People flinch from mental illness–especially this kind of violent
mental illness–but they wouldn’t dream of flinching from someone with a broken leg or a furred-up set of arteries, or from a man in a wheelchair. And most of the people inside Moy have–patches of immense despair. Times when they know that what they’ve done and what they are makes them outcasts. That’s a terrible thing for any human being. It’s why I want you to visit some of them.’

‘Just as if I’m a friend.’

‘Yes.’ He had not restarted the car; he was turned towards her, his eyes alight with enthusiasm. ‘It’s quite tiring to talk to them, in fact it’s bloody exhausting,’ he said. ‘They draw on you–you can feel it happening sometimes. As if they’re trying to suck out your own sanity and absorb it. And at times you get glimpses of the–the aching loneliness, and the
darkness
in their minds—’ He stopped. ‘Sorry. I get carried away sometimes.’

‘I like hearing about it. In fact,’ said Emily, hoping this did not sound arrogant, ‘the more I know, the more I’ll understand and be able to help.’

‘Good girl,’ said Patrick again, and started the car.

Emily, hearing the note of discussion-closure in his voice, felt unreasonably depressed.