Christine draws her knees up under her chin and doesn’t take her eyes from her chalk pattern.
The thing is beside the tree now. It glowers down at her, curious. The chainsaws and loudspeakers blare below.
It’s still better than the house. “I want to help stop the road,” she says.
“It’s fantastic that you’re so passionate, but you know you can’t stay here overnight all by yourself.”
“I’m not all by myself.”
“Your parents must be worried sick. Where do you live?”
Christine shrugs again, gestures vaguely, coughs a monosyllable. She knows that pretending she doesn’t know the answer to questions she doesn’t like isn’t a very good strategy, but it’s all she has.
“You can come back tomorrow,” offers Amber, relenting.
“Yes! Give us a call tomorrow,” Rachel soothes. She takes out a mobile phone, and a little notepad and pencil from her utility belt. Christine looks up, slightly interested. (The thing is still staring, but isn’t doing anything to hurt her). No one she knows has a mobile phone apart from George. His is more modern, a little bit smaller and it has a cover at the bottom you can flip open. He takes transparent pride in flipping it open.
“Need it for organising,” says Rachel.
Then a voice bulls its way through the mess of sounds. It’s hard to gauge whether it’s really as loud as it seems to Christine, but to her it’s already the grind of the chainsaws. It’s shouting her real name.
She freezes, panicked,
George has grabbed one of the loudspeakers and her name blasts up at the tree as if flung from a flamethrower.
“QUENTIN!” George bellows. “Quentin, get down from there at once.”
It’s physically painful. She feels the blush seeping across her skin like a spilled acid. She shrinks on herself, helplessly. Rachel and Amber are, inevitably, looking at her, baffled, reassessing her face, her flat chest, her jaw-length hair.
“Is he talking to you?” asks Amber, as Rachel says “What did he call you?”
“Quentin, am I going to have to come up there and boot you down?” George roars up at the tree, a trace of angry laughter in his voice now. She knows without looking there’s a little crowd now, of police, cutters, stewards and even some of the protesters. “I will if I have to.”
She can’t answer Amber and Rachel, she can hardly even breathe. She stares into the bright eyes of the Thing and thinks for an instant of hurling herself down from the treehouse; maybe the drop would be enough to kill her, maybe the dark thing would catch her.
Instead she reaches in silence with damp and shaking hands for the harness, slides into it with her eyes half-shut, and someone lowers her down into the grimy heat of the onlookers’ attention. Once on the ground, she lurches, her legs won’t stop shaking.
George grasps her shoulder. Her brother is only nineteen, but somehow the image of himself at forty: hearty and pink with immunity to doubt, his chestnut hair as solid as his firmly-packed flesh.
She sees his eyes go to the slide she’d been too dizzy with horror to remove. “What the fuck is this?” he demands, yanking it out along with a clump of hair.
“...playing,” whispers the child.
“Playing at being a poof,” says George, resoundingly, flinging the slide into the undergrowth without noticing what it is. “Come on, for God’s sake, you’ve made enough of a spectacle of yourself.”
He doesn’t let go of her arm, even though it must be obvious she’s not going to run away; sinking to the ground is more of a risk. He reaches into his pocket with his free hand and pulls out his mobile.
“Hello, mother,” he says into it. “I’ve found him.”
GEORGE DRAGS HER, shaking and sobbing, to the pitted track that is for now the only road through Wylmere Woods, packs her into the ancient Range Rover, and drives her home.
“Father’s talking to the BBC,” says George. “They’ll be sorry they missed your performance. Why don’t you give them an encore?”
Quentin stares at silvery trails of rain on the windscreen and says nothing.
“Go on, Queenie, give us a turn.”
Queenie is his favourite name for her, though he has others – Fifi, Lulu – always names that carry a vaguely dated impression of jutting bosoms and frills and high-kicks. She can see those things in the names although she doesn’t know why they are there.
Somehow George has always known, even when she didn’t herself.
They round the turn of the drive and their home emerges from the copper beeches. Quentin has never found Wylmere Hall easy to look at; lacking the blandly even surfaces of brick or cut stone, the untamed flint rubble sparks dangerously at certain angles of light. It is too transparently an assemblage of fragments, on the point of flying apart. Even though, as their father never tires of telling people, it has been here a very long time indeed.
In every season but the depths of winter, it always seems to be colder inside than out.
No one is waiting for them in the kitchen, except the plaster-pale and twitching Thing on the ceiling, so she twists free of George and runs.
The house is dark. They are trying to save money on electricity and gas, and the light bulbs in the Long Gallery are all dead anyway. It’s too dark for her to see the Things, beyond a horrid peripheral impression of shifting and shuffling; clicks and titters that remain, for now, on the edge of hearing.
There’s a slice of light under the door to the library, though, and a rumble of voices from within. It’s not surprising her father has chosen to be interviewed in there, even though they’ve sold all the important books. The stained glass windows with the family’s coat of arms are still there.
“They can’t buy something that isn’t for sale,” Sir Randall Sacheverell-Lytton is saying. “I haven’t touched a penny of their filthy money and I won’t. All these people are trespassing, none of them have the right to be there. Neither the hooligans with the chainsaws nor these hippies with the silly hats; they’re not there out of altruism, you know; what they really want is to be able to wander in and build wigwams and so on whenever they like. But I’ve been here five hundred years.”
He has a way of saying that, as though he has actually lived all that time.
Something slides up her ankle, snags and scratches at her shin under the denim, and she trips, falling headlong on the uneven floorboards, with a crash that echoes through the house.
Her father bursts out of the library into the gallery: George a little scaled up, large and red, giving off a dangerous glow like heated iron. “For God’s sake, what are you doing now?”
Quentin stares past her father at the woman from the local BBC news, hoping her father will remember she’s there. The woman is poised in a shoulder-padded suit, her expression curious, her hair preternaturally shiny. He won’t go too far in front of her, she hopes.
It works, at least for now. Randall growls only, “Idiot boy. If your mother ends up in a mental ward...” and slams back inside.
She hurtles onwards, towards her room. She hopes it’s just possible that the television people will have effectively distracted her family to the point of their forgetting her escape – her mother might be lying in a stupor that will last till morning. She skids to a stop on the landing and stands paralysed, because the grand staircase offers a quicker route, but the darkness hanging in the stairwell is so thick and grimy and she’s afraid to breathe it. She turns at last to the servants’ staircase, where the electric lights are still bright on peeling white paint, but it takes longer, this way, gives the things more time to notice her presence.
It had been very bad, the night before. An hour or so after midnight, she’d run down to the kitchen and returned with a bag of flour. It was an hour and a half before she’d completed the pattern filling the floor of her room, and another hour before she’d charged it with attention enough that the things drew back and quietened a little, enough to buy her a couple of hours of sleep.
Ra
ndall or George would have just thought it was a mess, a stupid game; her mother knows, unfortunately, exactly what it is. She’d hoped for at least a few days, maybe enough time to think of something better, before anyone found it.
Cecily Sacheverell-Lytton is sitting on her bed, straight-backed, swathed in a moth-eaten cardigan and a Liberty scarf, waiting for her. Her eyes are unfocused, her fine cheekbones streaked with trickles of mascara, a chapped bluish stain on her full lower lip. “For all I knew, you’d been taken by paedophiles,” she says.
At some point during the day she’s kicked her foot through the pattern, ruining it, but hasn’t actually cleaned up the flour. A hoover stands beside her.
Quentin does not have anywhere further to shrink inside herself, any deeper recesses of silence.
And now they know; they know she tried to scare them off and then she ran and now she’s back, the whole houseful of things know, she can feel it.
“What happened to you?” Cecily asks. “You were so good. You used to be such a sweet little boy.”
Quentin looks at the wreckage, and can’t think of anything to do but offer part of the truth. “It’s the only thing that helps, Mummy,” she says.
Cecily springs up and seizes her by the shoulders with painful force “Help!” she cries. “It helps to bring this filth into our home? You’re going to clean that up.” She’s almost screaming. “You’re going to clear up every grain of it, and then we’re going to pray for you.”
She crushes Quentin close. She smells of stale Chanel No. 5, red wine and sweat. She doesn’t wait for Quentin to clear up the pattern to begin praying.
“Spirit of our God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Most Holy Trinity, descend upon me,” she says. “Purify me, mould me, fill me with yourself, and use me.”
Quentin frees herself with some difficulty and turns on the hoover, but she can still hear Cecily, chanting under its drone.
“Banish from me all spells, witchcraft, black magic, malefice, maledictions and the evil eye; diabolic infestations, oppressions, possessions; all that is evil and sinful.”
“It doesn’t work,” she says mutinously. If anything, the pressure gathered around the room is getting worse. She wonders if it’s evidence of her spiritual sickness that she’s often suspected that praying to St Jude (lost causes) or Monica (abandoned maidens) does sometimes help, only because the saints are really just a different kind of Thing.
She didn’t mean to be heard, but Cecily lunges at her again, dragging the hoover from her hand and knocking it, still whirring, to the ground.
“Because you don’t want it to!” Cecily wails, “You want the darkness. Why are you like this, what are you?”
As if Quentin ever stops thinking about that question.
Cecily whirls out of the room, weeping. “I can’t do this!” And Quentin looks at herself. She’s always both tempted to and afraid to, whenever she’s near a mirror – it’s hard to resist the dread things will be worse than last time she looked, the lunatic hope that somehow they’ll be better. What are you? She feels the urge to strip off her clothes and punish herself with the search for thickening hair, coarsening flesh. But she can barely see her outline in this dim light, under the mirror’s velvet coat of dust.
The dust thickens as she looks at it.
The things in the house are not really ghosts, she is sure. But some of them are mimics. Their thuds and bangs caricature Randall’s heavy-footed stride, they warble in the Long Gallery in parodies of Cecily’s sobbing, and sometimes there are traces of others she hasn’t known, horribly human turns of expression or tones of laughter that she suspects must have belonged to long-dead Sacheverells and their servants, priests, persecutors.
The shape in the mirror is her size, her shape, but the wisps of dust and cobweb stir around it in a mocking suggestion of skirts and floating hair. The face that grins back at her has a child’s proportions, the skin knotted and puckered in on itself under the dust.
“Mould me, fill me with yourself, and use me...” echoes the thing, in a piping, little-girl lisp, as it drifts from the surface of the glass.
“Please, don’t,” she says, though she knows it’s no use.
It crams itself inside her and stays there.
POSSESSIONS, INFESTATIONS. THEY’RE not the way Cecily thinks they are. When you can’t hold them off any longer and they get inside you, things don’t actually make you do anything (she shudders – not yet, anyway). They’re just there, smearing themselves over every thought, burrowing into every crevice you most want hidden. The thing presses dirty hands against her from the inside.
She doesn’t know why the word she slides weightlessly over her skin like silk while he constricts and rubs like hemp rope. She doesn’t know if it has anything to do with the things (the demons, she admits wretchedly in her head, and hears the creature inside giggling approval at her), but she’s certain Cecily would tell her it is. It’s an aspect of infestation, a sign of the ruin of her – his – soul.
She can feel the thing sucking a little filthy nourishment from her, but not enough to kill her. Not fast, anyway. She sleeps, dreams of rotting flesh falling in clumps from her bones, and the boys from school chasing her naked through the mud of Wylmere Woods, while chainsaws roar.
AT BREAKFAST, CECILY isn’t speaking to her, though when Randall grumbles, “When are you going to get that boy’s hair cut?” she does snap, “Soon,” so at least she hasn’t gone as far this time as pretending Quentin doesn’t exist at all.
Quentin stirs cereal, trying to kindle up the energy to lift the spoon to her mouth. There’s a constant taste of rot and dust in the back of her throat.
THEY ARE GOING to be installing the World Wide Web at Wylmere Hall today. “The Information Superhighway,” says Cecily reverently, whenever she mentions it. A man from the village is going to help her build a thing called a site or a page for Wylmere Hall. And this will bring in the money to repair the roof and heat the rooms and send Quentin to Ampleforth instead of the local comp.
“But how does it make money?” asks Randall.
“People will be looking for ideas for days out,” says Cecily. “We’re going to take them on a virtual tour of the house.”
“And then they’ll come charging here up that road. That’s the plan, is it?”
“Yes,” says Cecily. She stares fiercely at her bowl for a moment. “If you would only take that money...!”
“It’s all a fantasy, you know,” Randall says. He looks around the table, as if for agreement, as if expecting more people than are actually seated there.
Cecily says nothing.
“First prize, a day at Wylmere Hall!”says Randall darkly. “Second prize, two days at Wylmere Hall.”
Cecily lays down her spoon with a sharp little clink. “You constantly undermine me.”
“There’s a lot of people making money in dot-coms,” says George.
Cecily talks much more about dot-coms and much less about malefices or the evil eye in front of Randall or George. There’s an awful intimacy in the fact she only really shows that side of herself to Quentin.
Quentin dreams vaguely about the Information Superhighway, imagines climbing inside the computer in her mother’s study and blazing away down a road made of light.
THE HOLIDAYS WILL be over soon. She wonders if the thing will accompany her, whether it’ll let her go each day at the gates and wait to greet her when she returns home. She’ll have to let Cecily get her hair cut soon, or things at school will be even worse.
She says nothing, she acts as much like everyone else as she can, but so many of the boys are like George; they seem to know.
Five more years, she thinks. In five years, it’ll be over, she’ll be able to go wherever she wants.
In five years it will be 2003 and the world may very well have ended.
In five years she might look like George.
She sprawls listlessly in the drawing room, staring at The Round Table, but turning the pages is so h
ard and it makes no difference to anything when it’s done. The chainsaws screech in the distance. “It’ll be like that all the bloody time when that road’s built,” says Randall, stomping through. For a moment he looks desolate. He’s not supposed to admit it’s going to happen.
She heaves herself up and picks up the phone. There’s a weird trilling full of clicks and whistles, which unnerves her before she realises it must be to do with the Information Superhighway. Evidently it stops the phone working.
IN THE SAME moment she sees George’s mobile lying abandoned on the sofa, and on impulse grabs it and runs back to her room and dials.
“What?” says Rachel. “Who is this? You’re breaking up.”
You’re breaking up, agrees the thing.
But at last Rachel works out who she is and what she wants, and Amber’s voice comes on the line. “Is that... Quentin?”
She manages an affirmative cough. There’s a long, oppressive pause.
“So, you’re actually a boy?”
She steels herself. Makes herself breathe, “Yes.”
“Wow. I mean, wow. I really thought you were a girl,” Amber marvels. “Do you... often do that? Pretend?”
“Kind of.”
“So, is it like a gay thing, or something? I mean, that’s fine, if you are, but the pretending to be a girl thing’s a bit weird.”
“I know,” she breathes. “I wanted to say sorry.”
“Look,” says Amber, awkwardly. “You can come back, if you want. It’s okay. Just, be normal, you know?”
Her voice warps oddly, static sings and roars on the line.
“All right,” agrees Quentin, without knowing why. Because she can’t go back. There’s no question of that. She presses the little red button to end the call.
Something comes boiling out of the phone. Quentin drops it, but it’s too late, the thing seethes it way through, gathering into black vastness, filling the room like a gas, two white-hot eyes in the midst of it. It condenses into something perhaps nine feet high, something all black blade-edged bones and claws and teeth.
End of the Road Page 17