There was the great sunken bell beneath the lake, but she didn’t think she’d been hearing that. Not this time. She wasn’t swimming, not drowning, no.
Bleeding, though – she thought she might be. Her arm ached beneath its bandage, in that dull dreary way of a wound that wouldn’t heal. She didn’t want to look.
She didn’t want to listen, either. Just in case. She didn’t want to lay temptation in the world’s way, make a ready victim of herself, be opened up to the possibility of bells.
Didn’t want to; couldn’t help herself.
Lay still in the hush of that room, and the world came in to her through the open window; and below the breath of the wind, behind the sough of distant trees . . . Yes. She was sure of it: the low slow murmur of a bell, slightly hesitant and barely there, like the unsteady tick of a great clock running down, almost at its end. Like the beat of a great heart, dying.
Everyone else seemed to be sleeping. Awkwardly, one-handedly, she pulled herself up off her mattress and went to the window.
It was set low, in the slope of the roof; she could lean right out, and her turning head could pinpoint the source. It was so soft and deep, it was hardly even a sound now, only a sense of vibration in the air, but it drew her none the less: her attention and her blood both, reaching for it.
Besides, it wasn’t hard to find. There was the great dark mass of the wood, with the star-glitter sky above it; and there was a single orange spark of light, like a fairy-tale lure, deep among the trees.
She thought she knew already, where that was and how to get there.
There was another light that she could see and then not see and then see again, whiter and cleaner, paler, shifting and irregular. She thought she knew what that was, too. She thought it was coming here. Coming out of the trees and briefly steady then, moving with purpose; and then gone entirely, lost behind the bulk of the house. On its way.
She thought she was mad to go, but going anyway; twice mad to go alone, but still not waking any other of the women.
Fumbling into clothes, glad of their simplicity in the darkness; shuffling in sandals between the narrow pallets and the sleeping forms; feeling her way down the dark of the stairs, until her hand found a light switch below and blessed it, pressed it.
Now she could hurry.
Now she was aware of carrying her bleeding arm crooked against her chest, the way it hurt less; and of a dampness at her breastbone, where a dark patch showed how blood was oozing through the bandage and through the shirt it pressed against.
Hurry, hurry.
Well, she was hurrying. Into trouble, towards that hypnotic murmur; with no idea beyond getting there, being there, learning just how much worse this could be. It might kill her, she did know that. She didn’t care. She’d stopped being afraid of death long since, just as she’d stopped looking for it. She only needed to know what bell and how and why it was rumbling. Except for her: she knew that much already.
She thought she knew one other answer too, what bell it was. There was only one bell in the woods. Surely, only one . . .?
She let herself out of the house as soon as she found a door she could unbolt. Here and there around the courtyard a window was still lit, by electricity or lamp or candle; she could find company if she wanted it. In this irregular household, of course she could. She didn’t have to go alone.
Nevertheless. She knew her route out of the courtyard. Didn’t want to go that way – didn’t, in honesty, want to go at all – but the low drone of the bell was still rolling in her bones, roiling in her belly, beating in her blood.
It was her choice, and she made it.
Her back to the house and those promising lights; her face to the dark. To the stable block, and the narrow passage further, turn right at the dungheap; follow the path around the wall of the kitchen garden, and then into the wood.
None of that would be easy. She wished she had a choice; she wished she had a torch.
No matter. She knew the way, more or less, and there was light at the end. She’d seen it burning.
Light at her back, to see her out of the courtyard. Light overhead, that too, for a while. She hurried through the archway under the clock tower, almost holding her breath for that plunge into absolute black, and then the star-bright sky was back and welcome and enough to show her the way across the stable yard.
Here was the mouth of the passageway, an arch of brick, a tunnel. She didn’t much want to go in; she wasn’t wholly certain she’d come out again. That bell tolled for her, she was sure of that. Somewhere, her child must be waiting. Doing nothing, being nothing. Ready.
Still. She’d come this far; there was nowhere else to go. Except back, of course. To the house and ask for help, for company, like a good colony girl ought to do; or all the way around, down the drive and along the lane to Cookie’s house and through the wood from there. With him if he was awake, showing a light, willing.
That would be ridiculous, but oh, it was tempting. Cookie would understand and not fuss. Stand witness, if she needed that.
But she could as easily find him this way, if she wanted to fetch him out. If she chose to. And she’d come this far, and – no. Not turning back now. She didn’t dare, quite. When she glanced over her shoulder, hoping for one last reassuring glimpse of a light in the great shadow of the house behind her, she saw instead a hint of movement under the clock tower, as though darkness were something physical, a fabric that could tear under pressure and be sucked down in shreds.
Here comes nothing, she thought. And almost waved at her unseen baby, almost waited.
Almost.
Instead, she turned and plunged into the black of the passageway. Fear behind her, puzzlement and uncertainty and fear ahead; right here there was only pain, the throbbing in her arm, the pulse of wet blood drawn out by that endless bell. She thought her baby was drawn to her blood, perhaps. That ought to make some kind of sense, somewhere. Somehow.
It was like a march of inevitability, a single string of purpose: from the bell to her, from her to her baby.
She was almost not sure now, which one of them was the ghost. She could feel herself fading; she thought she must look translucent inside these pale clothes. Unreal.
She went on, feeling her way along the rough brick of the tunnel wall, drawn as much as anything by the rich smell of the dungheap at the end. For a moment, emerging at last into what seemed the almost brilliant light of the stars, she only stood and breathed, drawing that smell deep in, something to hold on to.
She wouldn’t look back again, no. Just keep heading onward.
Cool thick grass beneath her feet now and the garden wall to follow, down to the wood. The wood would be the worst of it, she knew that. No starlight under the trees, and the path difficult to find and harder to follow, thorns and low branches tangling with her ankles and lashing for her eyes. And that was . . . assuming nothing worse. Assuming no bells, no blood, no nothing.
No bodiless baby in the path, no nothing.
He was behind her now, but . . . Well. She wasn’t running away, she was forging ahead. He might forge faster; she had no way to tell. It was up to him. Or the house, perhaps. The house gave him presence, she thought; away from here, he existed only in her head and in a hole in the ground, on paper, in memory, in despair.
Here he was actual, in the way that a whirlpool is actual: nothing solid, just a constant sucking void, deadly and inimical and there.
There behind her, she thought as she ploughed on. There in front of her, perhaps: what she ploughed towards. The bell and the baby were the same thing, almost, in her head. Intricately linked, intimately threatening. One cut her and cut her; the other would drain her and drain her until there was nothing left, nothing of her either.
To drink and drink and not be satisfied: it was like a curse from ancient times, a legendary doom. For her, another source of guilt. She had killed her baby inside herself; she had cursed him to this cruel half-life, afterlife, being and not being.
Really, she thought he ought to catch up with her. Track her down and suck her up. Or lie in wait ahead, lurk within the sound of a striking bell, catch her as she bled out.
Either way. On she went. What else could she do? She couldn’t outrun it, or him. If she fled this place, she’d still know they were waiting here. Her baby, proclaimed by every striking clock, up and down the valley: caught in every shadow, trapped by the house, because she came here. Given something that was almost shape, but never substance. In a house of bells, dust draining into sand: eternal loss, form without purpose, a worse fate than before.
She couldn’t do that to him, no.
Let him drink her, then; let them cancel each other out.
But he would need to catch her first. Grace wasn’t going to stand still and take it, not for anyone. Maybe she was just showing off for Georgie, one last lesson. You don’t have to let them take you. Kick and scream, fight back. March on. Run away, if you have to.
Not that she was running away. He might be behind her still; he might be ahead. She didn’t know and wasn’t pausing to find out.
The one arm still cradled close, pulsing blood, pulsing pain. The other hooked across her face, against the slashing branches that she couldn’t see. Her feet found the path more than her eyes did, better than her memory. The way of least resistance: it was the way she’d always gone.
Here was a fork where she’d turn off to go to Cookie’s cottage, to ask for company, for help. Or rather, where she wouldn’t. Where she could do, if she chose to.
She chose to go the other way, alone.
Soon enough she could smell smoke in the air, alongside all the damp wood night smells. She was oddly short of breath herself, tight-chested already, before she began to cough.
Well, there’d never been any question of sneaking up on him. She was making way too much noise just getting there, city girl out in the country in the dark, no idea how to go placidly amid the trees and the haste and that relentless rumour of a bell.
Coughing and gasping, then, she came out into the clearing.
Her night-blind eyes were dazzled by the flare of light, despite the smoke that swirled and pooled and rose in stinging clouds. That was the charcoal heap, she’d figured that: something – or someone, whoever it was that she’d seen coming back to the house by torchlight – had broken the crown of it like an eggshell, shattering the baked turfs and letting in the air. Now the dry wood inside was blazing, flame leaping out of that hole at the top and searing upward like a beacon, like a searchlight, like a finger probing for the sky.
Like an echo in contrasts of the tower that it illuminated, all shape and shadow against the determined dark of the wood.
Where was Frank? He should have been here, busy to save his charcoal, blocking out the air with frantic mud. Too late now, she guessed, but still . . . He ought to be here and was not.
Perhaps he’d been the one with the torch. Perhaps he’d done all this himself: sabotaged his own craft to send some crazy signal to the stars, left it burning, headed off . . .
Headed where? Frank didn’t like to come to the house even in daylight. He thought it was haunted.
Not wrong there.
Maybe he was still here. Maybe the fire in his charcoal hadn’t been enough. Someone had been ringing the bell, she was sure. Someone still was, perhaps, a little. She could feel the throb of it in the air, in her aching wrist.
She could walk through the open doorway into the hollow of the ruined tower to find out.
Of course she could. It was what she’d come for.
Wasn’t it . . .?
The fierce light made the stones of the tower glare almost white at her; it made the doorway and the higher windows and traceries, the ruder holes and breaks where stones had fallen, all the many openings look worse, black and threatening.
If she thought she saw movement inside – well, perhaps that was only the light shifting the shadows as the flame guttered and roared.
She took a few slow paces forward, and that shifting spear of light tossed her own shadow forward from her feet, all the way to the tower’s mouth, so that she walked a path of darkness.
Hesitated on that path, and more than once, but walked it none the less.
All the way: across rough and broken ground, bare rock and thick tussocks and the half-laid stones around Frank’s subterranean home. Pausing briefly, wondering whether to call down, to check that he wasn’t sleeping.
Feeling the thrum of the bell in her bones, the damp sticky warmth of her blood against her own skin.
He wasn’t sleeping. Not through this.
Keeping on, then, all the way.
Standing just for a moment on the threshold, in the doorway, in the dark: her own body cutting out the light that might otherwise have shown her what waited inside.
Stepping in, then.
Shifting sideways, to allow that fall of light: not much, it seemed in here. Barely enough.
Enough, though.
She couldn’t see Frank, or anyone. He wasn’t there; no one was.
Nor her baby, either. Not that kind of no one.
Something moved in the darkness, none the less.
Nothing much: just a line without body, a swaying presence, a rope.
Overhead, the bell droned on, as if its clapper grated against the rim, grated and grated, never properly striking, never properly still.
She reached out a hand, her good hand, to grip the rope and make it still, make that dreadful sound just stop.
The rope swung with more weight than she could readily control, one-handed. She let her body hang against it for a moment, hauling down, wondering if the bell at the top were really that heavy; and then she let her eyes drift upward.
Couldn’t see the bell, of course. It would have been too far, too high in any case, in the dark; but there was something in the way, between her and the bell.
Something else on the rope.
Something heavy and hanging, swinging, making the bell sound lowly.
Oh.
That was Frank, she saw, when her eyes at last worked through the foreshortening and the moving shadows and the moving corpse.
Frank with his eyes a-glitter when they caught the firelight coming through the tracery, but yes, very thoroughly a corpse.
Frank staring down, or seeming to, because the rope was looped around his neck, strangling-tight.
He might have hanged himself by accident, but she didn’t see how. He was too high up that rope, halfway to the bell; and besides, he didn’t ring it any more.
He might have hanged himself deliberately, but – well, he would have needed to climb that high up the rope, with the bell all a-clamour above him as he went, and she didn’t quite see why he would. He was mad, yes, but even so . . .
In the back of her mind, another picture was forming. Another kind of madness altogether, her own: a vision of two hands, hands of smoke, rising out of the charcoal heap because someone had broken the skin of it and let them loose. Hands that only strengthened as the flame caught, as the fire roared.
Hands that gripped Frank by the throat – coolly, smoke not flame – and lifted him, strangled him even before they twisted the rope around his throat to let his own body-weight finish the work if they hadn’t done it already.
Left him swinging, sounding the bell and swinging, sounding his own funeral knell as he swung, as he died.
Sounding hers too, perhaps, almost, as she stood there swaying beneath him, as she bled.
ELEVEN
Georgie would have done that, perhaps. She would have let it happen: would have stood there and bled and waited for a rescue that would not come. The bell was barely speaking now, to call them; the fire had flared up, but what were the odds that anyone else would see it? See it and come, two things, one unlikely and one effortful?
Tom said someone usually came out, in the middle of the night, to sit with Frank . . .
It was true, he had said that. But someone had been already, and don
e more than sit; and perhaps that had been Tom by torchlight, making his way back, leaving Frank hanging?
He’s a magician. Candles go out at a word from him. He wouldn’t need a torch.
Perhaps not – but perhaps he’d have to carry a candle. He might not be able to make a flame dance from nothing. And if he had to carry a candle, why not carry a torch?
And he was a magician. He could have put Frank up there, had the rope strangle him and dangle him at a word.
If there was a word for that. If the language allowed it.
Yes. If. Neither Grace nor Georgie knew. She didn’t know if she were making excuses for Tom or accusing him, or both.
What she did know – what Grace knew, beyond question – was that she wasn’t just going to stand here and bleed until she fell over, until she passed out. Wait and hope for rescue. No.
So, then. She had done what she could, to still Frank’s swinging and the appalling grinding of that bell. Now she set her teeth, clutched her bleeding wrist against her chest because it couldn’t hold itself there any longer, and set off walking.
Without a free hand to fend off stray branches and groping thorns, she couldn’t save her face, let alone her hair. With leaves dense above and the light soon lost behind her, she couldn’t see the danger before she’d walked straight into it, again and again and again.
Bleeding, then, from a dozen scratches or worse – and from two fresh cuts that were far, far worse – she tripped and stumbled and swore her way down one path and up another, and so came after all to Cookie’s cottage.
And was not at all surprised to find his lights still on; and hammered on his door with her fist, because she couldn’t stop now to find the knocker, everything was suddenly urgent; and her one hand was clumsy while the other one was dead, except she didn’t think the dead should hurt so badly. She hoped not. And she thought she should probably not have come here, because she was fairly sure her baby was following her, but it was too late now; the door was opening, and oh!
That wasn’t Cookie; that was the doctor’s wife. Ruth. And there was the doctor behind her in the little sitting-room, smoking a cigar, looking on with interest; and she didn’t know where Cookie was, but here was she, falling over the threshold, going down—
House of Bells Page 22