by Sarah Rayne
A faint spill of light was visible ahead of him, which must mean he was reaching the halfway point and one of the narrow windows. Yes, the stairs widened briefly into a tiny stone room, five or six feet square, with a narrow window set into the stone walls. A resting place, probably; a tower this high would probably have several. Krzystof paused, and turned to shine the torch back down the stairs.
His heart leapt in the most complete terror he had ever known. Standing just below him was a woman whose hair hung in rain-sodden tangles over her face, and whose eyes were mad and glaring, and empty of all sanity. It was the woman he had interviewed three days earlier at Moy.
Mary Maskelyne.
And in her right hand she was holding a glinting knife.
For a brief, bizarre moment, the two of them were enclosed in the cold blue triangle of light from Krzystof’s torch, as if they were standing on a lit stage. Krzystof had no idea how Mary came to be there, or what she wanted, but all that mattered was getting away from her and raising the alarm. How? demanded his mind. Because in case you hadn’t noticed, she’s standing between you and the stair leading down and to get to the ground you’ve got to go past her—
He stared into the mad eyes, aware that he was seeing the real person who lived behind the demure, polite woman he had met at Moy. This was the girl who had butchered her parents when she was fourteen, and who had gone on to kill two people in prison years afterwards.
And in a minute she’s going to kill me, he thought. I’m in her way–I’ve seen that she’s got out of Moy, and she’ll need to get rid of me. It’ll be a question of survival for her. He took a firmer grip on the torch, which could be used as a weapon, but his mind was darting ahead, flinching from the crunch of bone as he smashed it down on her skull. Yes, but if it’s her or me…
But Mary did not move, although Krzystof had the impression of tightly coiled nerves and muscles that would spring into action at the smallest touch. He forced himself not to look at the knife, and he tried not to look at the wild eyes. But once you had looked at them–really looked–it was very hard to look away. Panic-stricken half-memories of primitive beliefs–of how the evil eye of a murderer could hypnotise–tumbled through his mind, and to dispel these he said, ‘Mary? It is Mary, isn’t it?’ By this time he was so wrought up that he would not really have been surprised to discover that he was seeing a chimaera or a ghost, or even just some weird thought-projection of the creature still locked inside Moy.
She said, in a voice so laden with madness that Krzystof’s skin crawled, ‘Yes, of course it’s Mary.’
‘I thought it was. We met a couple of days ago. I’m Krzystof Kent. Do you remember?’
‘Oh, I remember, Krzystof.’
‘Why are you here?’ said Krzystof. ‘What do you want?’ And what will you do if she says, in that wet gloating voice, I want you, my dear…? Oh, for pity’s sake.
‘I want her,’ said the mad voice. ‘The one who lives at Teind House.’
‘Selina March?’ said Krzystof, uncomprehendingly, and then thought: damn and blast, I shouldn’t have said her name, because if this mad creature didn’t know it before, she does now.
‘Selina March,’ said Mary softly, making it sound like an obscenity. ‘Yes, that’s the one. The one who should have died all those years ago in India. But she didn’t die; she escaped and my sister died instead.’
‘Your–I didn’t know you had a sister.’ First I’m asking if she remembers meeting me, and now I’m enquiring politely about her relations as if we’re at a social gathering, for heaven’s sake! Yes, but if I can keep her talking like this I might manage to lull her into a false sense of security. And then what? You’ve still got to get past her. And she’s mad. Not just disturbed or eccentric, she’s really mad.
‘Yes, I had a sister,’ said the terrible thing on the stair. ‘Only she died before I was born, and my parents never got over it. They never loved me because there wasn’t room for me in their minds. She was perfect, you see, my dead sister. Perfect and unspoiled. She never grew up, so she couldn’t ever be anything but perfect and unspoiled, and that’s why they were able to turn her into a saint.’
‘That’s immensely sad. But—’
‘There was a group of children who were taken hostage in a village in India,’ she said, as if he had not spoken. ‘Alwar. Years and years ago. Before I was born. Another world. Except it’s lived on, that world. It’s here with us now–can’t you feel that it’s here now? They all died, those children. All except one.’ She was edging up the steps towards him, and Krzystof could very nearly smell the madness. Like stale sweat. Like old, dried blood. And I’m trapped on this narrow stair with her.
‘My parents used to say, If one child had to escape that night, why was it not our child?’ said Mary. ‘Why was it that other one? they said. They hated her, that other child,’ said Mary. ‘I hated her too.’ She tightened her hold on the knife; Krzystof saw it glitter. ‘I always knew that if I found her I’d kill her,’ she said. ‘And now I have found her. Selina March. Prissy little Miss March, never going anywhere or doing anything. Living here all her life, going to church, helping local charities. I’ve listened to them talking about her inside Moy. And that writer woman–she’s your wife, isn’t she?–she knew who Selina was as well.’
Joanna! Krzystof’s mind snapped to attention. But Joanna had not known about Alwar and the fifty-year-old tragedy. Or had she? How about those notes on the laptop? There were parts of the past that had been sealed away…she had written. Dark forbidden chasms which must never be approached, and for a child to have stumbled on that small, largely incomprehensible fragment of the story was at best unfortunate, at worst, damaging. The trouble was that there was no one who could be asked for the truth…
Krzystof suddenly saw that he might have been looking at those notes from the wrong angle. Was it possible that Joanna had not been setting out a fictional plot at all, but writing of her own childhood? But how could Joanna, born nearly a quarter of a century later, be involved in something that happened in the late 1940s? Look at that one later, Krzystof. Focus on the immediate danger. He said, ‘And so you–escaped from Moy? In order to find Selina–is that right?’
‘It’s easy to escape from a place like Moy,’ she said. ‘They’re all so stupid in there; I fooled them easily.’ A glint of something artful and pleased with itself showed, and Krzystof felt a fresh jab of fear. She’s clever and cunning and devious, Patrick Irvine had said. And when she appears sane, that’s when she’s at her most mad and her most dangerous.
‘I went to Teind House first,’ she said. ‘It took me a little while to find it, but in the end I did. It’s signposted from the road, isn’t it? Easy. But when I got there it was empty, and I couldn’t get in because all the doors were locked. So I was going to wait in the outhouse until she came home, so that I could kill her. I cut the phone wires while I waited–it’s very easy to do that, did you know? Snip-snip, and it’s done, and the person in the house is completely isolated from the world. I didn’t want Selina to be able to get help, you see. I wanted her to myself. Isolated from the world.’
‘Alone and in the sea of life enisl’d,’ said Krzystof, softly.
‘Yes. Yes. That’s poetry, isn’t it? You’d know about poetry, wouldn’t you? Your wife–Joanna–knew as well. She knew about being alone and enisl’d.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean,’ said Mary. ‘Of course you do. I didn’t know, not at first, but later on I worked it out.’
And barely understood secrets become woven into childhood nightmares and childhood fears, and sometimes they call the poor mangled ghosts out of their uneasy resting places…
‘I saw you drive up to Teind House,’ she said, ‘and I waited until you unlocked the door and went back to your car. That’s when I went into the house and took the knife from the kitchen drawer. You knew I was there all along, didn’t you? I hid behind the kitchen door and watched you. I watched y
ou go upstairs, and when you came down again, I followed you here. I took a jacket from the hall stand–I knew I needed to be wearing something dark and anonymous so that no one would see me–and then I crept through the orchard. I followed you all the way, Krzystof, and you didn’t know that, did you?’
But he had known it, of course. He had felt the watching eyes, and he had felt the trickling menace as he went between the trees.
‘Why did you follow me?’ he said. But he knew already. She was simply removing everyone who came between her and Selina March. The thought: then she hasn’t yet got to Selina, formed briefly.
Mary seemed to catch this. ‘I haven’t killed Selina yet,’ she said. ‘I’m still waiting for her. But I’ll have to kill you; you do understand that, don’t you? I knew I’d have to kill you when I realised that you knew someone had got into Teind House. You saw the footprints–I hadn’t thought about leaving footprints. Careless, that. I’m not usually so careless. So I knew I’d have to get rid of you.’ She held up the knife again. ‘This is what I’ll be using. I took it from the kitchen drawer. It’s a good knife, isn’t it? It’s sharp.’
She moved up two more steps as she said this, so that she was almost level with him. Krzystof glanced over his shoulder, to where the stair wound the rest of the way up. Could he make a quick sprint up there? Yes, but to what? said his mind. It’s a one-way street, this tower. It’s just a stairway and a half-landing. Several half-landings, probably. And if you reached the top you’d be trapped there. He remembered that people in the grip of genuine mania were supposed to possess the strength of at least three. And if she kills me, I’ll never find Joanna, he thought, and there was a renewed jab of bleak and bitter despair, and then a wild surge of anger. I won’t let this evil, inhuman creature kill me, he thought. I’ll get away somehow.
‘I didn’t plan on killing you,’ said Mary regretfully. ‘And in some ways it’s a nuisance. But you do see that I can’t let you go free, don’t you? And I’ve been quite clever about it all–I’ve closed the door downstairs so that we shan’t be interrupted. You propped it open, didn’t you, but I closed it when I followed you in. You didn’t hear me do that, did you?’
‘Mary, you need help. Dr Irvine—’
‘Oh, fuck Dr Irvine,’ she said, and Krzystof stared, because just for a moment it was as if a nice, middle-aged lady had used the word. ‘He’s no use at all,’ said Mary. ‘None of them are any use, because none of them understand.’
‘Do you think I might understand?’
‘Oh no,’ she said at once.
‘You could try. We could talk—’
‘No, I couldn’t try and no, we couldn’t talk.’
‘But if you kill Selina and if you kill me, they’ll catch you eventually,’ said Krzystof. ‘And you’ll be—’ He broke off.
‘Punished?’ she said, and incredibly there was amusement now. ‘What else can they do to me that hasn’t already been done? They don’t hang people any longer. And in this country they don’t give them a lethal injection or send them to the electric chair. In any case I might get away with it. I might be able to get out of Inchcape and find somewhere to live where I won’t be recognised. There are shelters, hostels for homeless, these days, aren’t there? Places where questions aren’t asked. I might even find work and earn some money.’
‘You’d never do it,’ said Krzystof at once. ‘You’ve been away from the world almost all your life.’
For the first time he saw hesitation in her face. ‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘And I’d forgotten how huge the world is, and how the sky stretches on and on and how it sometimes seems to press down on you when it gets dark—’
She broke off, and Krzystof said cautiously, ‘It’s a huge place, the world, Mary. Frightening. Would you really cope, after all these years?’
‘I coped with getting out of Moy,’ she said, and the hesitation vanished at once. ‘I coped with finding Teind House.’ The mad face suddenly swam nearer. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ she said in the thick treacly whisper. And the hand clutching the knife was suddenly raised, and then brought swooping down.
Krzystof half fell backwards in an attempt to avoid that evilly sharp blade, hitting out with the heavy torch, no longer caring where the blow fell, intent only on defending himself. But the torch flailed uselessly on the air, and she was already half sprawling on top of him. There was a nightmare moment when he felt the feminine crush of breasts against his chest, and the softness of feminine thighs straddling his body–dreadful! Her breath, dry and slightly sour, gusted into his face, and he turned his head to one side, struggling to bring the torch up once more, because if he could smash it into her cheekbone—He made a grab for her hand, but she snatched it back, and lifted the knife a second time, grinning horridly down at him. A snail-trail of saliva trickled from the corner of her mouth. Disgusting! Revolting beyond bearing! Damn you, thought Krzystof furiously, I won’t let you kill me before I’ve found Joanna, I won’t—
He was just managing to raise the heavy torch high enough to swing it into Mary’s face when two things happened almost simultaneously.
A car drove past the tower, on the private, little-used road below, its engine snarling through the quiet darkness.
And Mary dug the knife into him.
The pain was instant and intense, but incredibly there was a spiral of surprise. She’s done it! thought Krzystof. The bitch really has stabbed me!
For several nightmare moments his senses were so confused that he could not tell where the pain came from. The torch had rolled out of his hand and into a corner, and the light had gone out. Krzystof was dimly aware of Mary, straightening up, the knife still in her hand–dripping blood? Yes, and it’s your blood, it’s your blood—He felt as if he was being sucked down into a dizzying black whirling tunnel–down and down and down–only he dare not let himself reach the bottom of the tunnel because if he did that he would die—
There was the sound of a moan that he did not at first realise was his own, and he managed to claw back up the spinning darkness, and back into the dimly lit stone tower, and it was then that he realised that the knife had gone in not to his body, which presumably she had aimed for, but to the upper part of his thigh. There was a jumble of panic, interspersed with fragments of half-knowledge about severed arteries and tourniquets, and then his senses righted themselves, and he thought that if he could manage to get something–his handkerchief?–tightly enough over the wound at least he would not bleed to death here in the darkness.
His whole leg was a mass of wet, grinding agony, but by dint of exerting every shred of will-power he managed to fold his handkerchief into a thick pad, which he pressed over the wound. He thought the bleeding slowed a little, although it was difficult to tell in the darkness. Could he put on a tourniquet? What could he use for it? He was not wearing a tie, only a sweater with an open-necked shirt under it. Could he use a sock? One for you there, Joanna–‘My dears, there he was, bleeding like a pig the poor darling, and he managed to tie a woolly sock round his leg to stop it.’ Krzystof would happily have given five years of his life if he could have believed that he and Joanna would be sharing the joke of that one in the future.
He had no idea who had driven along the disused road, except that clearly it was not the Fifth Cavalry riding to the rescue, but there had been a swift, nightmare image of Mary going back down the steps, her shadow falling eerily on the stone walls, the hand that still held the knife raised over her head.
Following her was clearly impossible. Krzystof tried to stand and found he could not. He might have dragged himself across the small landing, but in his present condition the stairs would have taken about a year to negotiate. How about the window? If he could get onto the ledge, he might manage to shout a warning to whoever was below. Everything was still spinning sickeningly around him but he was managing to hang on to consciousness by a thread. He set his teeth, and by half crawling, half dragging himself across the floor, he made it. He was drenched in
sweat by this time, and the pain from the stab wound was sheer bloody torture, but he managed to grasp the ledge surrounding the window, and haul himself up until he could see out. The narrow slit was open to the elements, and the cold night air blew into his face, drying the sweat on his face. He drew in several deep lungfuls of it, and felt his head clear slightly.
Leaning forward as far as he dared, he looked down, and there, far below him, was Mary’s figure emerging from the tower. Even from up here, Krzystof could see that she had smoothed her hair back, and turned up the collar of the jacket she wore. She looked a bit dishevelled, but she looked normal. Yes, but her right hand is thrust deep into the jacket pocket, said his mind. She’s still got the knife.
The car was moving slowly, clearly trying to avoid the deep ruts in the road’s surface. Krzystof did not recognise the car, but it was a small one and he thought there was only the driver inside. He saw Mary pause and look about her, as if unable to get her bearings beyond the tower’s confines, and he remembered that curious moment when she had seemed afraid, and talked about the world’s vastness. And then she ran along behind the car, waving, and the car’s brake lights came on, as if the driver had seen the figure in the mirror. Mary went to the driver’s side, and appeared to speak for a moment. And then, to Krzystof’s horror, she went round to the passenger side and got in.