‘I’m not angry,’ said Deirdre’s grandmother. But something about the way she said it made Deirdre’s stomach give with a sudden, sickening lurch. ‘Not – angry,’ she repeated. ‘I’m disappointed. Disappointed.’ She swayed a little as she stood and for a moment Deirdre thought she was going to fall. ‘Not in him,’ she went on. ‘I wouldn’t have expected any better. I’m disappointed in you, Deirdre.’ And she stared at her and Deirdre lowered her eyes, trying helplessly to escape the deep, searing reproach, but not succeeding. She felt utterly guilty, utterly condemned. ‘He will have to go. I cannot harbour such a child. His influence will ruin you.’
‘Please . . .’ Deirdre tried to say, but she had no voice.
Her grandmother turned to Gal.
And Deirdre, in her despair, had a strange and wild series of thoughts. She is the biggest thing! There is nothing bigger! There is no one bigger to ask mercy from! she thought. And then, in a kind of final hopelessness, She is God!
‘Because you have dared to come into this place without my permission, and because you looked inside my box – my private box! – you have lost my protection forever, and you will never set foot in Corbenic again. And you will never speak to Deirdre again, either. Your friendship ends now. You will stay the night here, but tomorrow morning I will take you back to the farm and you can move in with whoever will have you. You’ve had your chance. Now you’re no concern of mine.’
She looked at him for a moment, waiting for his face to crumble, but it didn’t. He just stared back at her, never lowering his eyes, his expression unfathomable. She turned suddenly to Deirdre, as if to stop the power draining from her before it was too late, and Deirdre kept shaking her head in grief and terror and trying to say no, no, but still her grandmother said, ‘Because you brought him here and showed him what is in the box I will take him away from you and you will never leave Corbenic. You will be the guardian of this room, and what is in it, for the rest of your life. And although you will long for it, you will never have my total love again. Neither will you win the love of anyone else. Some things are unforgivable, Deirdre. This is one of them. You are unforgiven, and love is denied you, for the rest of your life.
‘Now get out of my sight. Both of you.’
And although it had taken so long for them to find the room, the way back to the flat was so short it had the speed of an evil thing in a nightmare. They remembered nothing of the way out of the room, or the way down the steps, or the way back down the corridor. They seemed only to begin the journey before they found themselves in bed, alone, in disgrace, at opposite ends of the flat, with all their lives an impossible burden before them.
Gal never had a real home again. Nobody ever knew what happened to his father, but he never came back. So the little boy went back to a life of kindly neglect by aunts and uncles and older cousins, this relative or that relative – one person or another who cared about him vaguely, but didn’t have the resources to look after him permanently. And nobody in that branch of the family ever imagined that he wasn’t all right, because he always seemed cheerful, and his face was never other than calm and impenetrable.
But underneath there were three emotions that never left him, three emotions so powerful that at times they dizzied him. Love for Deirdre – who shone in his memory – the only person he had ever really mattered to, the only person who had ever really needed him. Hatred for her grandmother, who had separated them. And anger, deep, ever-present anger that was like a subterranean river flowing through the vast empty caverns within him, always threatening to flood his entire being.
From then on, controlling that anger was an exhausting hourly struggle.
The day he left Corbenic, he swore that, when he was grown up, he would come back and rescue Deirdre.
But every night he lay awake, the pain in his chest almost tearing him apart.
‘You see?’ said Deirdre. ‘You see?’ She had gone stiff with panic, staring up at that hideous word, NO, as the building thumped and shuddered around them. Her whole mind was consumed with a longing to be put out of this misery. She had no more hope; she just wanted it to be over, at last. ‘God have mercy,’ she said, and as always she couldn’t separate God in her mind from her grandmother. ‘God forgive me!’ she muttered, but there was no mercy, no forgiveness. ‘You have to go,’ she said, trying to push Gal towards the door. ‘You have to go, now, before it’s too late –’
But Gal barely moved. He was still standing, staring at the ceiling. He wasn’t scared; he was angry.
It was as if the word had reached in and made contact with the deepest level of his being, and had found, not fear, but anger. And yet his anger was calm – it was the deep-seated, patient anger of one who was used to controlling it, who had been controlling it since he was five years old. It was as if he was accepting a challenge and felt equal to it.
A duel, he thought. To the death. At last.
And the moment he thought it, he found another feeling, a feeling even stronger than the anger.
He was not looking at Deirdre; he was still standing, rigid, staring at the ceiling. But he wasn’t thinking about it anymore. He knew exactly where Deirdre was in the room, he knew exactly how far she was standing from him, exactly what the distance was.
And the distance, only an arm’s length, seemed intolerable, seemed like torment. He longed to put his arms around her, just as he had when they had found the dead rabbit. But now he longed to put his arms around her so badly, he would have given up his life to do it. The longing was exhausting. He noticed he was trembling.
But he couldn’t act on it. It was forbidden.
Deirdre stopped trying to make him go. She did not have the will. She stood swaying in the warmth that radiated from him. She was so cold, so cold; it was all she could do to stop herself moving closer.
Suddenly Gal shut his eyes with the pain of it.
‘What if she is God, Gal?’
‘She can’t be God. She’s dead,’ said Gal.
‘But witches are more powerful after they’re dead!’
Gal had a sudden, incongruous vision of the neat, undisturbed lawns at the local cemetery. He wondered how anyone could imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
‘Not all-powerful, though,’ he said.
And as Deirdre stood there in his delicious warmth she began to find the thumping in the building oddly comforting, like the rocking of a cradle. It’s different, she thought, it’s not the same thing as my grandmother and the collapsing of the building. I don’t know what it is, but I recognise it, and it’s not scary, and it doesn’t wish me harm. Then she had a thought, a strange thought, almost the strangest thought she could have had, because it seemed completely at odds with her beliefs.
What if, after all, Gal is more powerful than my grandmother?
But that could not be true. Could it?
It was like wondering whether life was more powerful than death.
‘It’s just a word, Deedee,’ Gal said. ‘It’s a word every two year old knows. I know a word, too.’ And he looked up at the ceiling, at the word and the crack, and said, ‘Yes.’
Deirdre cowered, staring upwards. But nothing happened.
He knew it wouldn’t.
‘She’s a bully,’ he murmured to himself. ‘She always was.’
She turned her head to look at him. He looked back at her, with a look of such naked vulnerable honesty it was as if she had, for a moment, seen right into his soul.
And then she had one of those odd flashes of memory. There had been a time, not so long ago, when she had felt his warm, warm skin against hers, when there had been nothing, no space at all, between them, when they had not even been two people, but for brief, ecstatic moments, one. But when could that have been? How could it have been? He had always been forbidden to her.
‘There’s something strange about my memory,’ she muttered, almost as if she was talking to herself. ‘It scares me. I think it must be something to do with Gran
dmother dying. It must be the shock. I feel so confused. Especially about you – and the story of my life. I’m so – muddled – about what happened, and when. It’s like I can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality – what I wish had happened, and what really did. And some memories scare me so much I can’t even let myself remember them –’
Gal gazed at her sadly.
‘There’s not as much difference as you think,’ he said. ‘Between dreams and reality, I mean.’ Then, ‘Look,’ he added quickly, because he was afraid she would get too scared to act, ‘you think this is the end. But it’s not. It’s the beginning. This is the showdown, the last battle. The confrontation. Our whole lives have been leading to this.
‘All this time we’ve been running from her. And she’s been winning. She had us at her mercy. She had us in her power. Now we have to turn around; now we have to go looking for her. And we have to take the power from her – for ourselves.
‘I am not giving up, Deirdre. I don’t care what she does. I don’t care if she brings the building down on top of us. I don’t care if this is our last night on earth. She is not going to win. I came back for a reason. I’m going to free you from this place if it’s the last thing I do. And the only way I can think of to do it is to fight her, to wrestle her for this thing we’ve lost – this thing she’s so determined to hide from us – to find it, to remember it, to look at it and know it and take it back, no matter what she does to stop us. There’s no other way. Do you believe me?’
Deirdre gazed at him. It was hard for her to say, but she said, ‘Yes.’
Of course she believed him. Of course it was true. She knew, simply because confronting her grandmother – and remembering what she had forgotten – was the most frightening thing she could think of to do.
‘Here’s what we have to do,’ said Gal. ‘We don’t think. We don’t try to remember. We just start exploring, like we used to, like we’ve got all the time in the world. If we do, we won’t find it – it’ll find us. I believe that. You know what I mean?’
Deirdre stared at him. She thought it was the most hopeful idea she had ever heard.
‘How do we start?’ she said.
‘Open the door,’ said Gal, ‘and step out onto the landing.’
And so they did.
Deirdre shut the door behind them.
It was lucky they did not see what happened in the flat after they left. For if they had seen, they might not have had the courage to go on.
As soon as the door closed, the photographs in the flat began to murmur among themselves, arguing, contradicting, pleading for each to hear the other’s story. The murmurs grew more and more frenzied and insistent, until first one, then another, then a third of the photographs began to dance in their frames, trembling along the surfaces they were displayed upon as if the earth were quaking beneath them. They grew more and more agitated, jumping and muttering, until finally one after another moved too close to the edge, fell and shattered to the floor.
The last to fall was the photograph of Mrs Dark alone as a child. As it teetered on the edge of the mantelpiece, and then overbalanced, there was a charge in the air, a snapping, crackling, as if the flat were full of live electricity. When it smashed on the floor there was a peculiar sigh, a kind of disembodied relief, as if something confined had at last been released.
The moment they shut the door behind them they saw her. She was walking away from them, quite slowly, but as light as a fairy, a little girl of about five in a long white nightgown, holding a candle. She had long, straight hair – silvery fair. She walked down the hall to the left of the staircase, turned the corner, and disappeared from view.
They both stared after her. Gal collected himself. There was a memory, a picture in his mind he could not quite retrieve – he felt as if he had just relived a scene from his past. But he was too distracted to make sense of it.
‘Who was that?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t know,’ Deirdre whispered back.
‘We have to follow her,’ said Gal. But Deirdre hesitated. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘We don’t think?’ she repeated. ‘We don’t try to remember? We just start exploring?’
Gal nodded.
‘It’s going to be horrible,’ she said.
Gal nodded again.
‘My grandmother – my grandmother will show us things . . .’
‘I know.’
‘She’ll show us her life, Gal. She’ll show us her memories.’
‘I know. I know. But we can’t let her use them to stop us. We have to face them, and push through to what’s ours. Don’t you see?’
But Deirdre didn’t seem to hear him. ‘You know,’ she said softly, ‘Corbenic isn’t just a block of flats.’ She paused for a moment, searching for words. ‘Corbenic,’ she said, ‘is my grandmother’s mind.’
Gal stared at her.
What she had said reminded him of something, although at first he could not work out what. Then he saw the castle of his nightmare, ruined, infinite, with the keening little girl trapped inside it.
It came to him suddenly that if Corbenic was her grandmother’s mind, Deirdre was trapped inside of it.
Then he began to wonder if he was too.
Deirdre gazed at him silently. Then, reluctantly, she turned and started walking up the hall. There was no choice. Gal followed.
They had expected to catch up with the little girl in the white nightgown. At the pace she was walking, in the confined space, it shouldn’t have been hard. But when they turned the corner as she had, she was nowhere to be seen. Instead they came upon something so shocking, and so uncanny, they both stumbled backwards as if pushed.
They had been in the original part of Corbenic; they should have turned into one of the old halls they knew so well. The extension Deirdre’s grandmother had still been building when she died had been constructed around the core of the old building. They should have had to cross through it – the original Corbenic – to get to those new, unfamiliar halls; those new rooms; those new stairs and cupboards and storerooms, in which they had no interest. But instead, all at once, that’s where they were.
It felt as if the extension had somehow been thrust in their path.
It felt as if Mrs Dark was somehow using the new part of the building to prevent them from gaining access to the old.
‘It’s not possible . . .’ whispered Gal.
But at the same time he realised that they had entered a dimension where anything was possible.
They were unfamiliar with the new part of the building, never having explored it as children. And the incongruity of the extensions being where they should not have been was strangely menacing – even more menacing than the letters, NO, in the ceiling.
Frozen, confused, they stared around them. They were standing at the far end of one of the new halls. Although it had been designed to tone with the old building it was very different: immediately recognisable as something that had been tacked on years later. The ceilings were lower and without the ornate plasterwork; the painting was lighter and newer – in fact, the scent of new paint was still discernible. Even the wood was lighter, less sturdy – it seemed like plastic or some synthetic material constructed to look like wood.
And it was unfinished. The doors had no handles on them, the hall was uncarpeted, the light fittings had loose wires and were unconnected. There were even traces of the builders – a box of nails on the floor, a tray with a paint roller left in it and the paint dried up, some canvas folded roughly nearby.
But more than this, unlike the original building, it seemed artificial, fake. It had the air of something built without the builder having any intention of using it for an honest purpose. It had the air of something built to hide something else.
And there was another difference. Gal had never come upon a hall in Corbenic in which all of the doors were not shut. But each door along the length of this hall was ajar, and each had a separate light spilling out of it. These triangl
es of light were each slightly different in colour and strength. The variation gave Gal a peculiar feeling. He knew it meant something, but he didn’t know what.
Later, he understood that he had been looking, simultaneously, at light from different times.
But there was also a sound. It was the sound of weeping.
At first it was difficult to divide the sound into its separate parts. There was a baby crying. But there was also a woman, terrified, agitated, pleading. Then they realised that they weren’t hearing just one baby. There were several, four or five maybe, it was difficult to tell. And there were several women too, their voices rising and falling in a gabble of anguish. And yet there was a sense in which they all sounded like the one baby, the one woman.
Gal stared down the hallway. It was horrible already, just as Deirdre promised. It would have been easy to give up right there, despite his fine intentions. Only –
Gal was still angry. He was so angry that fear could not really touch him; and the more he felt Deirdre’s grandmother trying to frighten him, the angrier he became.
‘She’s a despot,’ he muttered. ‘But I won’t be crushed by her. I won’t. Come on,’ he said to Deirdre.
And so they approached the first doorway.
Just when they thought they knew the score – however impossible, however incongruous – just when they thought they were not in the old building as they should have been, but in the new one, they found themselves in a room that should not have been there. Not a new room, not a room that belonged in the extensions, but an old one – older, even, than Corbenic itself.
It was a bedroom with a young woman laid up, feverish, in the large, ornamental bed, and a cradle beside her. Her hair was damp with perspiration and sitting back hectically from her forehead. She was holding a very new baby, perhaps only hours old, while another woman, who had her back turned to them, was trying to coax it from her.
‘Please don’t take my baby!’ she kept saying. ‘Please don’t take my baby! Please don’t take my baby!’
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