Tower of Silence

by Sarah Rayne

  The prospect of the talk by this Joanna Savile started Mary wondering about writing a book: the story of her life it would be, telling about the years in the Young Offenders’ Hostel, and then, later, in Broadacre. (And Ingrid? said her mind. Would you tell what really happened between you and Ingrid in Broadacre? How Ingrid seduced you…? How you let Ingrid do all those things to you…?) She might not tell everything about Ingrid, but she would tell how her parents’ murder had been the fault of the child in Alwar who had escaped instead of Christabel.

  Dr Irvine would be pleased if Mary said she wanted to write a book. She would not tell them it was to be a sensational book, an exposé, in case they forbade her to write it; she would say it was a confession–what Roman Catholics called an absolving. Yes, she would use that very word; it was a good one. Dr Irvine would think she was repenting or finding Jesus or something, and she might even be allowed to use a computer–Moy had quite good education facilities. There was a computer room here where you could learn about word-processing.

  Broadacre and the Young Offenders’ Hostel had had neither word-processing classes nor a computer room. Mary had had to attend lessons at the Young Offenders place, because she was still not quite fifteen, and they said that schooling was important. So there had been English and history and maths; later there had been current affairs and social economics. Most of it had been useless, and nearly all of it had been boring, except occasionally the English lessons. But she had learned how to compose letters and talk politely on the telephone, and how to operate a typewriter and prepare a CV. All these things would be necessary when she went back into the world.

  And then in the end the bastards had not let her go; when she was eighteen she had been reassessed and even though she had been confidently expecting to be released, she was not. She was talked to by a great many doctors, and in the end they told her that they were transferring her to Broadacre. They pretended to be sad about it, but Mary had known they were not sad at all, only triumphant because their stupid tests and their childish traps had caught her. The matron at the YOH had folded her lips like a drawstring purse and looked pleased at the decision.

  That was when Mary had screamed at them: not just a single angry scream, but long, furious screechings that went on and on, bouncing off the walls of her room, letting all of the pent-up agony and bitterness stream out, because it was not fair, it was not fair that they should do this to her, not when she had allowed them to shut her away for all these years, not when killing her parents had been the logical culmination of years and years of neglect and disinterest.

  After a while one of the doctors had come, and there had been the jabbing needle of a hypodermic, and she had sunk, spinning and helpless, into a stupor that might have lasted for an hour or for days, she had never known which.

  When she came out of the stupor she felt sick and blurry, and for a while her mind felt as if it was wrapped in cotton wool, so that when she tried to think–really, properly think–the thoughts all went skittering away from her. Her sight did not seem to be working in step with her mind, either; it was as if she was seeing things a second after they happened. That had been when she had known that there was a conspiracy to keep her locked away, and that she would have to be very clever and very cunning, and never trust anybody.

  Once or twice she had tried screaming again, banging her fists against the harsh rough stone of the infirmary walls with frustration, because it was not to be borne that she should be shut away like this–‘At Her Majesty’s pleasure’, as if Her Majesty bloody gave a farthing fuck what happened to Mary! But as soon as she started screaming, they came running with the needles or the pills. You could spit out pills, but you could not spit out the hypodermic.

  Leila had screamed in the dank wash-house all those years ago. She had screamed until her throat was bleeding and raw, and Mary had finally had to stop up her mouth to prevent people from finding her. Anyone would have agreed that this had been the action of a sensible, logical person.

  Leila had taken several hours to come round from the large dose of sleeping stuff Mary had tipped into her tea–Mary could still remember how her wristwatch had ticked those hours away–and during those hours William’s body had begun to grow stiff and doll-like. Rigor mortis. It had been rather strange to find out that the school biology lessons and the whodunnit novels had been right about rigor mortis. Mary had watched the process for herself, sitting on a blanket in the corner of the wash-house, a torch at her hand to switch on if she needed it, and a sharply-honed bread knife to hand as well, in case Leila did manage to break free.

  As dawn started to lighten the skies, Mary saw that her father’s face was taking on a mask-look, and setting down the knife she approached him and cautiously put out a hand to touch his skin. It felt exactly like a lump of dead meat. Revolting. But rigor was unmistakably happening. It was five hours after he had died, and the smaller muscles in his face and jaw were perceptibly stiffening.

  The process was more advanced by the time Mary’s mother started to wake from the drugged slumber: it was beginning to lock most of William’s body into hard rigidity. But just as Mary had hoped, the first thing Leila saw when she opened her eyes was her husband’s dead face, inches from her own. That had been when Mary had known that everything was all going to happen as she had planned it. She could still remember how she had felt at that moment, how she had sat forward eagerly, her hands tightly clasped, not wanting to miss a second of anything.

  Leila had gasped in horror and had instinctively tried to pull back, only to come up against the thin strong rope that held her in place and the unyielding embrace of William’s arms. Mary saw her blink and shake her head as if denying what she was seeing or trying to shake off an unpleasant dream, and then look blurrily about her, bewildered and confused. And then realisation slowly dawned in her face, and with it had come panic and revulsion, and that had been the best moment of all. Mary had laughed once again to see those emotions on her mother’s face, although she had instantly put her hand over her mouth to push the laughter back down. But it had been a moment to store away and remember, and she could still recall it even now, even after so many years.

  When Leila Maskelyne had realised that she was tightly bound to the body of her dead husband she had called out for help, managing to twist her head round until she saw Mary, seated quietly in the corner.

  ‘Please–help me…’

  ‘No,’ said Mary, very quietly. ‘There’s no help to be had.’

  ‘But–he’s dead. William–your father—He’s dead.’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ said Mary, and in case Leila should be in any doubt, she said, ‘He’s been dead for several hours. I killed him last night. There’s a hole through the base of his skull into his brains.’

  ‘But I don’t understand—Mary what are you doing?’

  ‘Killing both of you,’ said Mary, and despite her control another of the little laughs bubbled out. She waited for it to die away, and then said, ‘I’m killing you for all the years you ignored me and didn’t love me. And for all the years you fucked together to get my sister back.’ She pushed her face closer to Leila’s. ‘I used to hear you,’ she said. ‘All those nights–I heard everything you did. You put Christabel above me all those years, and you tried to get her reborn. And all the time you had me, and I could have been just as good as she was.’

  ‘This is mad,’ said Leila helplessly, and this time the laugh that broke out from Mary’s mouth had been not so much a laugh as a scream of anger.

  ‘Don’t say I’m mad! I’m not mad! You’re the mad ones! You’re the stupid mad things who have to die!’ She had paused then, surprised to find that she was breathing hard, as if she had been running very fast.

  ‘Mary, untie me. We’ll go into the house and talk about this—My dear, of course your father and I loved you—Of course we didn’t put Christabel above you—’

  ‘Oh, yes you did,’ said Mary. ‘And you aren’t going to be untied until you’re de
ad as well. You’re going to die, you selfish bitch, and you’re going to die here, with him. Tied to him. It’s good, isn’t it? It’ll be like the widows in India who threw themselves onto their husbands’ funeral pyres. You’d know about that, wouldn’t you? Because you never really left India, did you? I don’t know how long it’s going to take for you to die–it might be three or four days. But you will die, and I’m going to watch it happen.’ The laughing came up by itself again, like vomiting, and Mary saw a look of the utmost horror in her mother’s eyes.

  That had been when Leila began to scream, throwing her head back, the muscles of her neck standing out like cords with the screaming. The sounds bounced off the stone walls and repeated themselves over and over, spinning around Mary’s head, piercing and shrill. Dreadful. Not to be borne. Mary got up and stood over Leila, holding up the knife. ‘If you don’t shut up I’ll have to make you,’ she said. ‘I’ll cut your tongue out if you scream again. I’ll really do it.’

  ‘I won’t scream,’ said Leila at once, subsiding to a frightened whisper. Her face was smeary with tears and sweat and her eyes were huge with terror. ‘I promise I won’t scream again, Mary.’

  But the bitch did scream again. She was cunning, that sly-faced Leila. She waited until Mary went into the house to get herself something to eat and use the bathroom, and until the outside world might be judged to be awake and about its lawful occasions. Postmen and newspaper boys, and people walking their dogs or taking their children to school. She screamed at the top of her lungs, and when Mary dropped the sandwich she had made herself and ran at top speed back to the wash-house she was still screaming, her head flung back, her lips flecked with blood and spittle. Her eyes were bolting from her head. She looked ridiculous and ugly, but someone might hear her, so she would have to be silenced, which was a nuisance.

  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.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  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 ye
ars 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.