by Sarah Rayne
Selina said, ‘Yes, but I can’t wait for it to do that. Because of Christy. If they shut the door on her she wouldn’t be able to get out of the tower. And the walls are so thick they wouldn’t hear her if she called out. They mightn’t know about any of that.’ She looked up at the doctor. ‘You must tell them to go back. Please, you must.’
The doctor had warm strong hands that closed round Selina’s. He did not smell of soap and cocoa; he smelt of clean shirts and the stuff Selina’s father sometimes put on his hair.
Father…Another tiny shard of memory flicked into place. Something bad had happened to father…Part of the nightmare. Part of the screaming and the iron stair that clanged when you went up it…
‘Selina, listen to me,’ said the doctor. ‘You and your friends were taken prisoner by some very bad men—’
‘Yes. They had guns. But Christy and I hid in the tower.’
‘That’s right.’ He paused, as if he was thinking what to say next. ‘My dear,’ he said, very gently, ‘by the time you were rescued, all the other children were dead. It was very quick and they wouldn’t have felt a thing, I promise you. But the tower was searched very thoroughly, Selina, and there was no one else in there.’
The firelight burned up, with a dry crackling noise. It sounded exactly like the greedy rustling of the ogre-birds’ wings.
Christy was dead. All of them were dead.
Selina said, in a whisper, ‘Then who was holding my hand in the tower?’
She had not been able to understand it for quite a long time. She had said, ‘But she was there. Christy was there–she talked to me. She held my hand.’
They had h’rmphed a bit at that, in the way that grown-ups did when they were not sure what to say to you. Selina got fed up with them and burrowed back into the bed, because it felt safe being under the clothes. That night, she heard a nurse saying that it had been a long time before anyone could get near to the bodies at the foot of the tower, because the birds had been so fierce. When they had finally managed to shoot the birds, the children’s bodies had been so badly mutilated that it had not been possible to identify anyone with any certainty.
‘Some were almost completely eaten,’ said the nurse to her colleague, shuddering, not realising that Selina was listening. ‘The vultures swallow bones whole, you know. Even the large leg bones. And the skulls were broken in the scramble to beat the birds off, so that it was impossible to know if all the children were there or not. In the end they decided to bury what was there in one grave, and to put up a stone with all their names on it.’
‘Oh, the poor mites,’ said the other nurse, horrified.
So Christy must have been killed after all. But when Selina asked if it had been a ghost who was with her in the tower, the nurses said, oh well, it was easy to become muddled in all the panic and confusion, which was no answer at all.
It had not been until a long time afterwards–when Selina had managed to pick up most of the mind-pieces and sort them into a pattern–that she remembered what had happened to her mother.
She tried very hard not to wonder whether at the very end mother had realised where she was, and that she was falling to her death.
Great-aunt Flora had realised it. It was easy to persuade her to look through one of the slit-like windows near the Round Tower’s top: to say, Goodness, what a marvellous view, you can see Teind House and as far as the rectory, and there the meddlesome sheep-faced creature was, breathlessly eager.
In the falling dusklight of the autumn afternoon the view from the Round Tower’s highest window was not very different from that of Alwar’s Tower of Silence. As Selina stared out over the countryside, she remembered how, when she first came to Teind House, she had looked out across the gardens and seen this tower, and how the garden and the tower had suddenly shivered and blurred, so that she had not been sure whether she was at Teind House at all, or whether she was being pulled back to Alwar.
And today the smoky dusk was beginning to dissolve, exactly as it had done that first night; it was melting, shred by shred, and the twilight that was usually so friendly was filling up with menace–it was crawling with evil-faced men who wanted to shoot children, and the sky was smeary with ogre-birds who liked to grind men’s bones for their bread…
‘You need to lean just a bit further out,’ said Selina to Aunt Flora. Her voice seemed to come from a long way away, but that was because her mind was stretching to span the two worlds, and because she could smell the blood and fear again. She could feel Christy crouching next to her inside the tower, and she could feel Christy’s hand in hers all over again, and Christy’s voice whispering that it was all right, Selina, they were together, and they would find a way to escape.
Taking a deep breath, tensing her muscles, the faraway Selina said, ‘It’s perfectly safe, Aunt Flora. You won’t fall–I’ve got hold of you. But do look–it’d be such a pity for you to miss this wonderful view.’
The stonework around the old narrow window held surprisingly firmly, which was a pity in one way. It meant that Selina had to shove very hard indeed before stupid, snooping Aunt Flora tumbled sufficiently far forward to be toppled out. She screeched as she fell, flailing her arms and legs wildly. Selina watched until she hit the ground with exactly the same squelching thud that mother had made five years earlier when she fell from the Tower of Silence.
It was easy to poke out some of the stones around the Round Tower’s narrow window, so that people would think Aunt Flora had leaned on them too heavily and dislodged them. Several of the larger ones went smashing down on the silly old creature’s head.
Selina stayed where she was for a while, looking down at Aunt Flora’s body, and at the stones scattered on the ground. Most of them had broken up when they fell, but some of the larger ones were still intact. She thought the stones looked exactly as you would expect them to look if they really had given way under Aunt Flora’s weight. She kicked out one or two more to be sure, and waited for them to go tumbling and smashing onto the ground. Only when she was satisfied with everything did she go back down the stairs. She carefully moved the shrine-things into a corner where they would not be seen if people came to take Aunt Flora’s body, and after this she went home along the little old road and through the orchard to Teind House, deliberately running as hard and as fast as she could so that she would be breathless and dishevelled when she got there and everyone would think it was from the shock of seeing Aunt Flora tumble to her messy splattery death.
It all worked exactly as she had thought it would; everyone was appalled and Selina was made to go to bed with a hot-water bottle, and given aspirin crushed in hot milk with a half-tablespoon of brandy, and everyone said, Oh, what a terrible experience for the poor child.
There was a funeral service for Aunt Flora, of course, with the same mournful music there had been for Aunt Rosa, and everyone wearing black again. The vicar spoke for a long time about the work Aunt Flora had done for the church and for the parish of Inchcape and everybody looked solemn. Selina wore her school uniform for the service, and Great-uncle Matthew sulked because of having to pay for ham sandwiches and sherry a second time.
Afterwards, life went on and the only difference was that Jeannie came up from the village every day now, to prepare Great-uncle Matthew’s lunch and to leave a meal that Selina could heat up for supper when she got home from school. Teind House became even quieter than it had been in the aunts’ day.
Selina remade the shrine properly again a month after Aunt Flora’s funeral. It was important not to risk its being found a second time. There were not many places to choose because the tower had been built as a watchtower and it was really only a flight of stairs enclosed in a brick and stone shell, but there were two or three little half-rooms opening off the stairway, which Selina thought might have been where the monks would have rested. You would certainly need a bit of a rest if you were stomping up and down those stairs all the time.
She chose the half-room nearest the top. It
was not very likely that anyone would come all the way up here, but even if anyone did, there was nothing wrong in having set out photographs of her parents, and some of their belongings. It might look a bit peculiar, but it was not anything you could go to prison for.
Remaking the shrine took quite a long time because the little room had to be properly swept and dusted and then everything had to be carried up the stairs. But when she had finished it all, Selina was pleased. The place was better as well: it was more secret than when it had been just inside the door. So you could almost say Aunt Flora had done Selina a favour in showing her how vulnerable the shrine was down there on the ground.
Later on, she managed to smuggle more things out to add to the shrine. Great-uncle Matthew did not notice that the silver candlesticks were not in their usual place, or that the little Victorian silver matchbox which had belonged to his father had gone.
As the weeks went by Selina began to feel safe again. Both the snooping aunts were dead, and it was much easier to go out to the Round Tower and keep the shrine clean and fresh. It was easier, too, to take little posies of flowers or sprays of lavender, which would all help father and mother on their journey.
It was not very likely that Great-uncle Matthew would realise what Selina was doing, but even if he did he would not meddle. In any case, if she had to, Selina could deal with Great-uncle Matthew.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Emily Frost woke to a grey, leaden sky and the insistent clamour of her alarm clock, and to the realisation that she had a dull headache and a vague feeling of apprehension. Something unpleasant in the day ahead? Or something regretted in the night gone before?
She stayed where she was. Dad had probably gone up to Moy ages ago–he was on an early shift this week–and her alarm had a snooze button which meant she could have an extra ten minutes before getting up.
The headache would be the result of too many drinks in the wine bar at Stornforth last night: Emily considered last night in case it was the cause of the vague apprehension. But she thought it was not. She thought she had behaved perfectly well, and she had managed to politely avoid the groping hands and gleeful suggestions of a leather-jacketed biker who had had too much to drink and who seemed to think Emily was anybody’s.
Today was the day she was due to visit Pippa again at Moy, so that could not be the reason for the vague feeling of menace. Today was one of the days that if you were still at school you would have marked with a gold star, because Moy meant Patrick Irvine. Emily smiled and burrowed back into the pillow.
Patrick.
If she had been with Patrick last night they would not have spent the evening in a scrubby wine bar with people gusting cheese-and-onion-crisp breath into your face every time they spoke, and the prospect of going to bed with a lager-sodden biker after closing time. Emily tried to direct the lingering fragments of sleep into a dream about Patrick. You could sometimes do that with dreams, usually when you were drifting in the half-asleep, half-awake stage.
An evening with Patrick would have started with an elegant dinner in some lush, plush country-house hotel, after which they would have gone to bed together in a bed with silk sheets, and spent a mind-blowingly sensual night. They would have made love several times during the night, each time better than the last, and although Patrick might eventually have slept, Emily would not have slept at all, because she would have stayed wide awake so that she could watch him sleeping.
And when finally they did get out of bed, there would have been breakfast with fresh orange juice and smoked salmon with scrambled eggs on silver dishes, and hot croissants. They would have showered or bathed together, and there would be expensive soap and scented bath oils, and thick, thirsty towels. They would probably make love in the shower, as well—
Emily had just reached this luxuriantly soap-scented point in her daydream when the alarm clock went off for the second time, and Emily bashed it crossly with a fist to silence it and crawled irritably out of bed, because before she could join in with the school’s cookery day she had to go down to Teind House to be on breakfast duty. Miss March only had Krzystof Kent staying at the moment and although she could perfectly well manage to prepare a single breakfast by herself and wash up afterwards, she was so clearly terrified of meeting a lone man at the breakfast table that Emily had said she would dash up for half an hour to help out.
Patrick had quite a full day ahead, because one of the larger drug charities was making a semi-ceremonial visit to Moy, which meant he would have to spend some time with them. Moy’s governor always ducked away from actually admitting to the existence of drug-taking inside Moy, but everybody knew it went on. Patrick sometimes waxed eloquent about what ought to be done to drug traffickers, but despite all the care they took drugs still got passed around inside Moy, just as they got passed around inside other institutions like Moy. All you could do was try to deal with it when it surfaced, and hope to keep it out as much as you could.
The various drug charities were quite helpful and practical though, which was why Patrick would spend as much time with them as possible, although it was a pity they had asked to come today, because Monday was one of the days on which he tried to see patients.
He tried to stick as closely as possible to the routine he would follow if Moy were a conventional psychiatric hospital, scheduling a half-hour for each inmate at least once a fortnight, leaving the day-to-day stuff to the junior psychiatrists. Moy was quite a good training ground for newly qualified doctors and therapists, and they had several very good people at the moment. It was important to keep strongly in touch with new techniques and new ideas; Patrick had instigated fortnightly forums, at which seniority went by the board and ideas and opinions were tossed back and forth, and discussion often crossed over into downright argument.
As he showered and dressed, he remembered that Emily Frost was coming in again today, to visit Pippa. It was nice of the child to give up her time; Patrick thought she had a good deal of unsuspected depth and considerable intelligence. The peculiar clothes and the hair were deceptive.
He whistled softly as he poured cereal and made toast, and glanced through the day’s headlines as he usually did over a second cup of coffee. Everything in the world too frightful for words, as usual. He put the paper away.
There was a good hour before he was scheduled to start seeing patients, which meant he could work through some of his outstanding correspondence. Then, when he had seen the charity people, the afternoon would be reasonably free. He might look in on Emily’s session with Pippa.
Emily wore her rainbow combat trousers for the visit to Pippa, along with a magenta waistcoat, because the vivid colours would be bright and cheerful in Moy’s institutionalised bleakness. She could not find a clean T-shirt to go under the waistcoat so she plundered dad’s shirt drawer, and unearthed an old dress shirt that had shrunk in the wash that he had not got round to throwing out. It looked pretty good under the magenta waistcoat. Emily added her black boots, gelled up her hair because it was her day for wearing it in spikes, and set off.
She had remembered the promise about bringing some cakes from the school’s cooking day, and had told the children that she would like to take some of them to give to somebody who was not very well. The children had latched onto this; they had painstakingly traced out ‘P’ for Pippa in sugar or icing on several of the cakes, and then one of the little girls had offered her lunch-box for the transportation, only it must be brought back tomorrow or her mummy would wonder what she had done with it. Emily had gravely promised to bring it safely back, and they had packed the cakes carefully in the lunch-box, and covered them with greaseproof paper. The children’s interest and the slightly uneven icing-letters would make a friendly little story to tell Pippa, even if the cakes turned out to taste as peculiar as Emily thought they very well might.
Alarm bells were dotted all over Moy. They were set into the wall behind little glass boxes like miniature fire alarms. Emily thought they were like single malevolen
t eyes, staring at you. It was to be hoped she never had to punch out one of those horrid red eyes, and she hoped even more that she never heard the sound of Moy’s huge old-fashioned bell tolling inside its stone tower, to warn everyone within hearing that an inmate was on the loose.
Robbie Glennon had told her about the old bell. He had said it was one of the local legends; the bell-tower had been built at the same time as Moy, so that if any of the prisoners escaped the bell could be rung to warn people in the surrounding countryside. The last time it had been used had been in 1920, said Robbie, and added hopefully that, if Emily liked, he would smuggle her along to see it one of the days. It was a huge iron bell with a long dusty rope dangling all the way down to the ground and it hung in a little oblong stone tower by itself. You were not supposed to go into the bell-tower unless you had specific permission, but he would probably manage it, he said confidently.
Emily had no idea whether he was trying to impress her, or whether he really could get into the old tower. He was quite good company, though, that Robbie: Emily was going to take him into Stornforth this weekend. The wine bar had live music on Saturday nights, and he would probably enjoy it. Also, it would be nice to have a proper escort for once and not look as if you were on the catch and therefore prepared to go to bed with anyone who wore a cheap leather biking jacket and bought you a couple of drinks. Emily had not yet decided about the bed thing with Robbie Glennon, and she had not decided if she actually wanted to see Moy’s bell, either, because it might be a bit spooky. Bells were like cats and mirrors; you always felt they had a secret life of their own.
Pippa did not look as if she had ever had any kind of life of her own, secret or otherwise.