by Sarah Rayne
It came again, then, a massive rhythmic clanging, iron beating inexorably against iron, a sound that might have been dredged up from the bowels of the earth or that might equally well have been pulled down from the highest of the heavens to assault the senses of men. Iron, its tongue dripping with blood—
And then Patrick’s mind clicked back on track, and he knew what the sound was.
Iron tongue. Moy’s great bell being tolled.
One of the inmates had escaped.
Emily was on the first-floor landing of Teind House, putting freshly ironed pillowcases on the appointed shelf in the linen cupboard while Miss March diligently ticked them off on a list. She had just knelt down to stow away a blanket when she heard the sound.
To begin with she was only puzzled. It was vaguely like the chiming of the church bell on Sundays, except that this was deeper and more menacing and there was an urgency about it. A little pulse of fear started up, and she half turned to look out of the window in the direction of the sound, trying to identify it.
And then memory doubled back, and she was walking through Moy with Robbie Glennon, and he was telling her about Moy’s huge alarm bell in its own tower, and how it had been put there to warn the surrounding countryside if any of Moy’s inmates escaped.
Oh God, thought Emily in horror, someone’s escaped. And they’re sounding the bell to warn us all, and that must mean it’s somebody really dangerous—Oh, for goodness’ sake, they’re all dangerous in Moy. Even Christy? Yes, especially Christy. She remembered how Christy had said there were ogres in the world, disguised as humans, and how, after a bit, you could see the claws and the slavering teeth…You have to kill them, then, she had said. You have to cut off their feet so that they can’t run after you, and then you have to cut off their hands, so that they can’t snatch you up and eat you.
Was Christabel Maskelyne out there now, prowling through the storm-laden afternoon, seeing fantastical nightmare creatures that had to be killed…? She can’t help it, thought Emily. She truly can’t! But would that be any consolation if you were to meet up with her in some lonely place?
Emily looked across to Miss March, and started to say something about locking all the doors and checking where Mr Kent was, but before she could speak Selina said, in a voice so totally unlike her normal one that Emily’s skin crawled, ‘They’re sounding the bell, aren’t they? That means a raid, doesn’t it? It means they’re going to raid the village–my father said they might. He’s always right, my father.’
Emily had no idea what she meant, but she got carefully to her feet because you could not deal properly with crises or hysteria when you were kneeling down at the bottom of a linen cupboard.
She said, ‘Miss March, it isn’t a raid–it’s the alarm bell at Moy. It means one of the prisoners has tried to escape. But we’ll be perfectly all right here, only I think we ought to lock all the doors—’
‘Oh no,’ said Selina at once. ‘Oh no, locking the doors won’t be enough. We mustn’t stay here. They’ll find us if we stay here and they’ve got guns. We’ve got to hide.’
‘Well, maybe just until it’s all over—’ Emily had no idea whether she should go along with any of this.
‘Come with me,’ said Selina, and her hand came out to close round Emily’s wrist. ‘We must hide inside the tower, that’s what we must do.’
Her eyes were wide and unfocused, and Emily was aware of another beat of fear, because just for a moment Selina’s face had worn the exact same look as Christabel’s. She remembered Christy’s difficult voice saying, We were all so frightened…Douglas and Selina and the others. Selina went outside before it was safe and the bad men caught her and shot her, Christy had said.
It can’t be the same Selina, thought Emily. It’s stretching coincidence way beyond credulity. Yes, but she said that about hiding inside the tower, and about hiding from people with guns…
Selina was already pulling Emily across the landing in the direction of the stairs. ‘We must hide,’ she said. ‘We really must.’
‘I truly don’t think it’s necessary—’
‘It is necessary,’ said Selina at once. ‘We must cheat them, those men. Only once we’re inside, we’ll have to be careful,’ she said, and again there was the echo.
You have to be careful…Christabel had said, the sly goblin-eyes peering out through the eyes of the middle-aged woman. But Christabel, poor flawed Christy, had believed that it was the ogres she had to be careful of–she had thought they hid inside ordinary people. When Selina March said they would have to be careful she was surely only referring to the dangers of a prisoner, escaped from Moy.
But who is it who has escaped? said Emily’s mind, chillingly.
Krzystof had drawn a blank in Stornforth. He had spent most of the morning talking to the detective sergeant who had been in charge of investigating Joanna’s disappearance, and had learned precisely nothing. They had followed all the leads, the sergeant had said, and they had discovered nothing at all. There were no signs of violence, no signs that Mrs Kent had been taken anywhere against her will–Krzystof might see the reports if he wished?
‘Yes, I do wish,’ said Krzystof rather grimly, and spent the next hour reading the careful transcripts of interviews conducted with Selina March, Emily Frost, Lorna Laughlin, and–this last was a surprise–Patrick Irvine. He rather grudgingly admitted that the Stornforth police had been thorough; they had talked to everyone who had had any contact at all with Joanna while she was here.
The hire car had been checked for traces of anything that might indicate violence, but the forensic department had reported nothing in the way of blood or fragments of skin or nails. A few stray hairs had been picked up on the driver’s side–chestnut brown, the report said, and Krzystof had remembered Joanna’s habit of thrusting the fingers of her left hand impatiently through her hair when she was concentrating. She would probably have had to concentrate quite hard on the unfamiliar roads between Aberdeen and Inchcape.
After this frustratingly fruitless morning, he had eaten some lunch in an anonymous pub, and then had drifted into the local library, half wondering whether he would meet up with Selina March and her friend. But either he had missed them or they were closeted in some inner sanctum, and so Krzystof had a general look round the shelves for politeness’s sake before leaving. Two of Joanna’s books were in stock; one was her most recent one in which she had allowed Jack Tallent a quite serious love affair, ending with a rather powerful renunciation scene. Did that indicate that even then she had been turning over in her mind the idea of a much darker, more serious book?
…the barely understood secret became woven into childhood nightmares and childhood fears…her notes had said. And in the end, it called the poor mangled ghosts out of their uneasy resting places…At times, the pretence spilled over into ordinary life…
A child, stumbling on a barely understood secret. Something shameful, something criminal, even? Something in Joanna’s own childhood that she had kept a secret, even from Krzystof himself? Something she was intending to draw on for a new book? She always said you drew on snippets of experiences, just as you drew on snippets of people’s personalities. Vampire-stuff again, she had said, grinning.
As he drove back down the road leading to Inchcape, his mind was still gnawing away at those scraps of plot, and the feeling that he was missing something was still strongly with him. Come on, said his mind angrily. If ever you possessed that semi-apocryphal Hungarian sixth sense, this is the time to be using it!
It was getting dark, which meant he must have spent longer than he had intended in Stornforth. He glanced at the dashboard clock, but it was only just on four, so the gathering darkness must be another of the wild thunderstorms in which this part of Scotland seemed to specialise. It was odd and rather disturbing the way that a storm could change the entire landscape. Everywhere became slowly soaked in brooding violet light, and there was a feeling of immense and powerful menace that you could not quite pin down,
so that you found yourself remembering all those old doomsday prophecies. You found yourself wondering about ancient buried secrets that might lie at the heart of your wife’s disappearance—
Rot, said Krzystof’s mind crossly. Yes, but if the fabled twilight of the gods ever did descend on the world it would very likely start with this sick, depressing gloaming, although if Joanna was dead Krzystof did not care if mankind was facing the final apocalypse of all the religions of the world rolled into one.
Halfway home the rain began, lashing down from the heavens and hurling itself against the windscreen so fiercely that the wipers could barely keep up with it. The road was already awash, and with the thickening light all around it Krzystof felt as if he was driving along the bottom of a murky green ocean. Once he thought he had missed the turning, but then he caught sight of the ancient tower stark and black against the storm clouds, and knew he had not. He drove on through the storm, relieved to think he was nearing Teind House.
Whatever its history might be, it made a good landmark, the Round Tower.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Moy’s huge bell was still sounding as Emily and Selina crossed the gardens. Emily thought it was a terrible thing to hear, a huge muffled booming sound that made you think of all those massive tons of solid iron and bronze, clanging to and fro within the depths of the belfry. Beware! the iron tongue was saying. There’s a murderer on the prowl! Beware the murderer!
As they went towards the small orchard behind the house, Emily wondered what Patrick would be doing. Would he be dashing to and fro at Moy, organising search parties and things? Everyone would jump to his command, of course, because they always did. Emily would have jumped to it as well if she had had the chance. No, she was not going to think like that. She would not jump to anyone’s command. She was a free spirit and a staunch feminist, and if she cried into her pillow for the next five years over Patrick it was nobody’s affair but her own.
She glanced a bit uneasily at Selina March who could never have cried into her pillow for a man, or wanted to be made love to, shamelessly and rapturously in front of a fire, in the way Emily had wanted to make love with Patrick.
‘Miss March–where are we going?’
The words came out a bit more abruptly than Emily had intended, but Selina looked round in surprise. As if it ought to have been obvious, she said, ‘To the tower, of course. I’ve already told you that. The tower’s the one place they might not look for us. It’s where I hid last time, and they didn’t find me. They won’t find me again. So we’ll be quite all right. We’ve gone back, you see–surely you know that by now. We’ve been given a second chance, and this time we’re all going to escape. You don’t need to be afraid.’
Emily was uneasy, but she was not really very much afraid, because it was impossible to equate Miss March–prim, twittery little Selina–with anything violent or harmful. But as they walked through the already darkening afternoon, a little voice in her mind whispered, But supposing Selina was the child who hid with Christy in the bone-pit? Well, so what if she was? It doesn’t make her an outcast. No, but it might have made her mad, said the voice, warningly. Oh, shut up.
Whoever Selina was, or was not, it would clearly be kinder to fall in with what she wanted, and if she really had been there on that horrific night Christy had described, it was small wonder that she had spent the rest of her life sheltering in the boring, peaceful safety of Inchcape.
She was still clutching Emily’s wrist and her fingers were unexpectedly and rather worryingly strong. As an errant spear of lightning flickered somewhere over to the east, heralding one of Inchcape’s fierce storms, Emily saw that Selina’s eyes were too wide open, and that there was a rather horrid stary look to them.
But I’d better go along with her, thought Emily. It won’t be very nice, hiding out in the tower, but I don’t suppose it’ll be for very long. Most likely it’ll just be a question of staying there until the bell stops tolling and she comes out of her panic, poor old Selina. She wished she had not lit on the word toll, which was a bit too reminiscent of all those snippets of poetry you picked up about death knells. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, because it tolls for thee…That had been John Donne, hadn’t it? writing about the universality of death. There was some gorgeous sexily romantic passion among his work. People did not quote poetry much these days; in Emily’s experience they just wanted to get you into bed, and afterwards they were more inclined to send out for a pizza than to quote beautiful poetry to you. Patrick might quote poetry in bed though—Except that she had stopped thinking about Patrick in any guise whatsoever, and most of all she had stopped thinking about being in bed with him.
As they went through Teind House’s little orchard she could feel the thrumming vibrations of the great bell disturbing the air and making the trees shiver, and it brought back the mad, confused fantasies that Christabel Maskelyne had poured out the day before. There are ogres in the world, Christy had said, her poor, cracked mind no longer able to distinguish dark fairy tale from reality; her perceptions clouded and distorted by the memories.
Ogres. Ever since that appalling experience in India Christy had seen ogres everywhere–she had believed they hid behind masks of human flesh and human bone and skin, and she had been continually on the watch for them. Ogres, thought Emily, feeling round the word. Giants, who might come pounding across the landscape when you least expected it, shaking the earth with their huge, fee-fi-fo-fum tread, slyly timing their movements to coincide with the booming clamour of a tolling bell so that you would not hear their approach; all you would feel would be the shuddering of the bell’s brazen clanging…
The thought: I hope Christy can’t hear Moy’s bell from her room! formed in Emily’s mind, and then she remembered that it might be Christy who had escaped anyway.
They had reached the edge of Teind’s gardens, and Selina was drawing her through a small gate at the bottom of the orchard. When Emily had gone out to the tower last time she had not come this way, she had used the uneven road that branched off the highway. She had not known about this gate: it was so overgrown on both sides by bramble hedge that if you did not know it was there you would have walked past it. The storm was gathering momentum, and there was the feeling of pressure from overhead, as if the sick twilight was pouring downwards, smothering the puny humans who walked their little world…Oh, don’t be so ridiculous!
And then there ahead of them, rearing up against the lowering skies, with the scudding storm clouds as its backdrop, was the tower, and no matter how confidently Emily had thought she had banished her own private ghosts by going inside the place that day, approaching it now, with the sound of Moy’s bell shivering on the air and a storm blowing in from the east, it was still the windowless tower of the nightmares.
As they crossed the uneven ground, Miss March’s hand still looped tightly around Emily’s wrist, Emily said, as calmly as she could manage, ‘You know, I think we could go back to the house now. I think they’ve stopped sounding the bell, don’t you? Let’s go back and I’ll make a cup of tea.’
But even as Emily was speaking Selina was pulling her forward, and as they moved into the shadow of the tower she gave a mad ladylike little chuckle that was the most horrid thing yet.
‘Oh, we can’t stop,’ she said. ‘We must hide. If we don’t, they’ll drag us out and shoot us. I watched it all, you see. I saw them all shot. Douglas and the little ones–and Christy. Dear brave Christy, she was the best of them all, you know. I thought she got away–I thought she hid with me in the tower–I heard her speaking and I felt her hold my hand. But she was dead by then, so after all it was a ghost.’
The lowering skies splintered into shards that spun crazily around Emily’s head. She thought: so I was right! She really is the child who escaped–the one who called the birds ogre-birds. Selina March and Christabel Maskelyne were together in that place–that place in India whose name I can’t remember—It all fits and what’s happening now fits as well.
They hid in that tower with the bodies and the vultures, and now Selina’s going to hide in this tower where the birds from the Stornforth sanctuary sometimes come. She’s confusing the two places; she’s gone back–she said something about being given a second chance to escape. Oh, poor Miss March, thought Emily in dreadful compassion, and as the storm closed down in earnest she allowed herself to be taken forward towards the tower’s small door.
Emily flinched as the first major crackle of lightning sizzled across the skies, and then thought that if you had to be entering nightmare places you might as well do so with the full complement of sound effects and atmospheric lighting. I won’t mind about any of it, she thought determinedly. I certainly won’t mind about the thunder, and now that I understand what’s behind Miss March’s peculiarness, I won’t mind that either. I’ll be perfectly able to cope and I needn’t even be frightened.
It was not until Selina opened the door and pushed Emily inside the tower, stepping in after her and slamming the door shut, that Emily finally saw that the Selina March she had known–the Selina March that probably everyone in Inchcape had known–was no longer there. It was as if her face was dissolving and bits were peeling off and falling onto the ground, so that you kept getting brief, horrifying glimpses of the real person beneath.
It was exactly as poor, crazed Christabel Maskelyne had said: there were people in the world who could put on disguises–not velvet or fabric or paper disguises, but ones made out of human flesh and skin and eyes and lips. And they were good, Christy had said. The disguises were so good you would never know the truth. Until the mask fell away…
Selina March was not one of poor Christy’s ogres in disguise, but she had been wearing a mask, Emily could see that now. She could see that under the persona of an old-fashioned spinsterish lady, Selina March was in fact very, very insane and very, very dangerous.
It was at this point that Emily finally admitted that she was very frightened indeed.