Perhaps she oughtn’t to have seemed so eager. When he held up the keys in front of his face she thought he was taunting her with them until she realised each key bore a number. He identified the one he needed and inserted it in the door which had briefly belonged to the Roscommons, and Amy heard a faint clawing sound which she told herself was being emitted by the lock. He pushed the door inward and withdrew the key with a swift harsh scrape. ‘In you go,’ he said.
It struck Amy that the reluctant illumination of the corridor didn’t reach as far along the hall as it should. ‘You aren’t going to…’
‘I said I wouldn’t. Hop to it before I change my mind.’ He glanced into the apartment and sighed, and knuckled the light-switch before returning the fistful of keys to his pocket. ‘Now you can see. I pray that’s the end of any foolishness.’
Amy gazed along the hall, which was maintaining its resemblance to a panelled corridor in a country house. All five doors, two in each wall and the kitchen door at the end, were shut, and she was beginning to appreciate how much effort and nerve it would take her to open any of them. At least she wouldn’t be alone. She made herself step over the threshold, and shivered, at which he uttered a harsh terse breath. ‘Have you begun?’
He was close behind her, already in the hall. There was no use telling him what she’d sensed too late—that the apartment had been waiting for them, and now it had them. Its mockingly unchanged appearance made her want to cry out, to batter at the walls until the panels cracked, but all she said was the least of the truth. ‘It’s too cold in here.’
‘The chap from Housall must have turned the heating down while the floor is empty. Quick march and you won’t notice it so much.’
She heard the rattle of a chain at her back, and whirled round. He was closing the door to the corridor. ‘Leave it open,’ she pleaded. ‘Let some of the heat in.’
He grasped the latch and held the door where it was, more than half closed. ‘I’ll leave it if you open one of those.’
Amy made herself turn to the hall. Neither her hands nor her feet were eager to function, and their cold stiffness seemed to have infected her mind. On one side of her lay the main bedroom, on the other the room that was the equivalent of hers, but she’d lost the ability to judge which would be which. The prospect of opening the door to the windowless room and having to reach in to switch on the light dismayed her so much she couldn’t think. At least the main bedroom shouldn’t be entirely dark, or had the curtains been shut when her father had driven up? She reached for the left-hand door, then stretched her other hand towards the door opposite, only to be brought to a standstill. ‘What ceremony’s that?’ her father said roughly. ‘Are you supposed to be on a cross?’
‘Can’t you hear that?’ Amy said, jerking her fingers, as much to move them as to indicate. ‘What is it?’
‘Good God, child, we won’t get far if you kick off like this. Of course I can hear it. In my day it was called rain.’
She screwed her torso round and stared at him. ‘How can we be hearing it? I couldn’t even hear the tree being cut down.’
‘Because, because it’s…’ He waved a hand at the outer corridor, and she saw him grow aware that the slow hollow dripping was somewhere within the apartment. ‘Keep that look to yourself,’ he said, and shoved himself away from the door. ‘If it isn’t rain it must be a tap.’
Amy grabbed at the door, which the force of his movement was closing, and having pushed it wide, propped her canvas bag against it. He’d brushed past her to stride to the end of the hall, where he flung the kitchen door open and slapped the light-switch. The colourless glow of a double fluorescent tube snatched at the surfaces of the fitted kitchen before gathering itself to fasten on them, by which time Amy’s father had arrived at the sink beneath the silently inundated window and turned away. He tramped back into the hall and held up his hands, miming uncertainty as to which side of him the bathroom was. He lurched leftward to seize the doorknob and disappeared into the room, where Amy heard a light-cord being tugged almost simultaneously with the cessation of the dripping of liquid. As she tried to find some reason in that to relax at least a little, he rushed into the hall. ‘Happier now, are we?’
To an extent she was, since she knew the bathroom had to be next to the other windowless room. She made herself step to the door of the main bedroom and grasp the chill brass handful of the knob. She needed to add her other, equally unwieldy, hand before the knob would turn. Then it did, and she could only push the door away.
The windows were uncurtained. The Roscommons had taken the curtains with them, of course. Except for the abstract indentations left in the carpet by the furniture, there was no sign that the large square room had ever been occupied. Yet she faltered on the threshold, because the walls on either side of her appeared to be streaming with damp.
She ducked her head just far enough into the room to locate the switch, and fumbled the light on. The walls, which were papered in a discreet leafy pattern, betrayed no movement at all. She must have been seeing shadows of the rain, she told herself, even if the glimpse she had driven away could have been of bare wet bricks. She managed not to start as her father’s breath stirred the hairs on the back of her neck. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Show me anything in there that could frighten a child half your age, let alone a big girl such as you’re supposed to be.’
Amy switched out the light. The walls began to shift at once, shadows appearing to soak the paper off, though not yet exposing the brick. ‘Are you going to show me?’ her father said, crowding her into the room.
It felt colder than she liked—as cold as a room composed of bare wet bricks would feel. ‘I can’t,’ she blurted.
‘Of course you can’t. I could have predicted as much. Have you seen enough?’
‘Yes, oh yes.’
‘Come along, then.’ When he stepped back she felt liberated until she saw that he was heading not for the outer corridor but for the main room. He must have thought she was dawdling as she trailed after him, because he threw open the door with some impatience as she arrived beside him. ‘Well?’ he said.
The chill of the crawling walls reached for her. Since the room was larger, it felt colder than the bedroom had, and was darker. ‘Same thing,’ she told him.
‘Put on the light so you’re sure.’
Amy clenched her fists and forced herself across the threshold. She punched the switch, and the light seemed to inch the walls back as well as renewing their paper. For the instant between her finding the switch and the blaze of illumination the space in front of her had felt constricted, as if it had been divided into more than one room. Her father was staring into it with a pained expression, eyebrows high. ‘Satisfied?’ he said.
‘Nothing to see.’
‘That’s satisfactory, isn’t it? Or were you hoping for the reverse?’ When she didn’t answer he sidled past her and switched out the light in the room. ‘Please don’t turn destructive because you can’t win me over. You might have broken that switch. Next time use a little restraint, if you don’t mind.’
Amy might have pointed out that she was restraining herself more than a little, except that arguing would delay her escape from the apartment. She retreated along the hall while he shut the three doors he’d opened. ‘That’s it, go on,’ he said.
She’d passed the door to the windowless room when he called ‘Not out. Don’t try on your cleverness. It’s time it was your turn again, otherwise I shall be bound to doubt you’re cured.’
He wanted her to open the last door. Amy halted closer to it than to the corridor. It was almost within her arm’s length, which was why she pressed her arms against her sides. As she’d come to a stop, arrested less by her father’s words than by her sense of how unreasonable they were, she’d heard movement inside the windowless room.
Not long before they’d taken up residence in Nazarill, she’d encountered a mouse in their old kitchen. She’d heard it in the dark and had switched on the light in time
to glimpse it scurrying into the wall. Now she’d overheard a noise like the one in the kitchen—the sound of something which had been discovered in the dark and which was preparing itself—but its source was audibly much bigger. She dragged her gaze away from the door to see how her father had reacted, and found he was squeezing his lips together, turning them the colour of the exterior of Nazarill. He opened them only to say ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘Didn’t you hear?’
‘I heard nothing. There is nothing, you keep saying so.’ Without warning he stalked at her, so violently that she shrank back. ‘Don’t you dare leave this apartment,’ he said. ‘Stand here.’
He’d halted opposite the unopened room, and looked ready to shove past her so as to slam the outer door. At least while she could see the corridor she was able to remind herself that someone might come home at any moment, when she wouldn’t be alone with her father and his single-mindedness. She went reluctantly to stand beside him, but that was the most she could do. When he jabbed a hand at the doorknob she dug the knuckles of her fists into her hips. ‘Deal with it for the Lord’s sake,’ he said. ‘It’s only a door.’
‘Then you open it.’
She hadn’t said three words before she wished she hadn’t even thought them. Her father glowered at her, then he jerked forward. She was afraid he meant to capture one of her hands and use it to turn the doorknob, but instead he grabbed that himself. There was silence beyond the tall wooden slab—a waiting silence. As he twisted the knob and thrust the door inward a dead smell crept out of the room, and Amy flinched against a panel of the hall. Then she gasped, and her father swung around to glare at her. ‘What the devil is it now?’
She couldn’t speak—couldn’t move. The back of her right hand had touched the wall, and felt not wood but cold bare brick. That was why she had gasped and stumbled away from the wall, but it wasn’t why she was paralysed now. The dim walls of the windowless room were peeling and patchy with moisture, and so was the face of the figure which had reared up beneath the unlit bulb.
It was taller than her father, and thinner than anything except bones could be. Through a gap in the rags which might be the remains of its skin she glimpsed a shrivelled slit which meant it had been a woman. A mass that looked composed as much of cobwebs as of hair dangled from its brownish piebald scalp. Its left eye glittered, or at least the contents of the socket did before flying round the head to the other eye. Even if the figure couldn’t see Amy, she could tell it was aware of her, because its right arm wavered up to gesture at its face.
The arm was appallingly long. One finger wagged at the cracked brow, where it might have been describing a cross or some less angular sign. Perhaps Amy would know when it spoke, because a blackened object was starting to protrude between the lipless teeth. Then the jaw fell open against the stringy throat, miming a laugh or else a scream as soundless and as desperate, and the object tumbled out to crawl between two exposed ribs.
Amy’s father was scrutinising her face and muttering with dissatisfaction. All at once he raised his voice as though to penetrate some barrier between them. ‘Don’t put yourself out. Don’t say a word if it’s too much of an effort to speak to your own father.’ He sucked in air, and she thought he’d become conscious of the smell from the room behind him until she saw he was replenishing his breath. She was struggling to utter a sound, even if it was only a cry, when he turned away from her and poked a hand into the room.
He was leaning through the doorway when the light came on. Amy saw the eyeless figure with the yawning withered mouth fling up its impossibly long arm. It was more than one arm, she realised as the other brandished the torn stump of its elbow. The hand at the end of the composite limb collided with the light-bulb, and the light vanished amid a muffled tinkling of glass. Darkness filled the room as if the glistening walls had exuded it, and the figure scuttled to the corner farthest from the door. The next moment it had gone through the wall which the apartment shared with its neighbour—gone through a door where no door should be.
Amy’s father was still confronting the room. His shoulders had writhed and hunched themselves up, but otherwise he hadn’t moved. She couldn’t see his face. She was wondering whether to touch him or otherwise remind him of her presence—wondering how hysterically he might react if she did—when he spoke. ‘I trust you aren’t proposing to make anything of that.’
Amy thrust her lips, which felt stiff and swollen, open with her tongue, but even when she’d moistened them and rubbed them together she was able to produce only one word. ‘Of…’
‘Of the damned light going pop. Shuffle in if you think there’s anything you haven’t seen. I’ll even come in with you if you wish it.’
Amy could think of no response. He’d looked straight into the room while the light was on and had seen no figure, no hand with half an arm in it, no partial yet animated face. She felt as though his inability to see had settled on her mind to crush her thoughts. When he leaned further through the doorway she shrank into herself, but he was only flipping the switch preparatory to closing the door. He turned to her, and determination took over his face. ‘Let’s be shaking a leg,’ he said, and dug in his pocket. ‘We’re going to look in every room down here.’
14 - Seen from the outside
Sheffield Central Library was the grey of a wide expanse of sunlit fog. As Oswald came up from the subway under Arundel Gate, several dozen little girls in uniforms of almost that grey had been drawn up outside the library by two nuns to be lectured by the bulkier of them. Buses of various colours and sizes went rumbling over the subway, which lent them its hollow amplification, so that Oswald wondered how the soft Irish voice was making itself heard. She had the respect of the children, of course, a respect founded on faith in God. As the two foremost girls held open the doors for their classmates to file into the library in pairs while the nuns stamped their feet in unison to control the pace of the march, he strolled towards the Housall office, thinking and deciding. He’d taken only a few paces when a voice detained him.
He had just passed a house with a doorway whose arch resembled rays of flame turned stony and with windows surmounted by symbols altogether too occult for his taste, not least a sun with eight spidery rays. He’d thought someone had left a sack of rubbish outside to be carted away, but now he saw it wasn’t the chill darting wind that had made the bundle stir. The bundle raised a head capped with a black woollen lump and produced a face which looked resigned to its straggles of discoloured hair and its sagging yellowish porous skin. ‘Care in the community,’ she repeated in a voice that was Oswald’s only reason to assume her to be female, and gave a nod which shook her cheeks at the plastic cup beside the blanket he’d taken for a sack.
His hand went to his pocket, where one fingertip poked through the ring which bore the keys to the ground floor of Nazarill. By the time he’d shaken off the ring he’d had a chance to reflect. ‘That’s an organisation for which you’re collecting, is it?’
She nodded energetically three times and then shook her head thrice with just as much vigour. That done, she lowered her hairy chin onto the blanket, from which she disentangled one fat-veined hand to point across the windswept flagstones. ‘I went there.’
The last schoolgirls were being shepherded through the doors by the hinder nun, and Oswald couldn’t tell if the woman was referring to the library or the school. ‘Threw us out, they did,’ she said, apparently not about either.
‘I wasn’t refusing to help you,’ said Oswald, finding some change in his pocket. ‘Just because one organisation has let you down doesn’t mean you can’t see if another may do you some good, don’t you think?’
She crossed her hands over her chest to clutch at the edges of the blanket as if she’d begun to suspect he might try to snatch it. ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’
‘I’m nothing to do with it. I mean, what I am isn’t, what I do. I was just thinking you might see if one of the churches could sort you out somethin
g.’
The woman turned her eyes down until the pupils were almost hidden by the lower lids, and appeared to be addressing some concealed part of herself. ‘He’s one all right. If it’s not nurses trying to dig in your head it’s the God lot, and the worst kind are both.’
‘Excuse me, madam, but I sell insurance.’
She jerked her head up, slamming it against the house wall with a thud whose softness Oswald fervently hoped belonged to her cap, and began to shout with her eyes shut. ‘He wants to sell me a policy. Can I get some home insurance on my blanket? This on top of my nut, does it count as a roof?’
‘I didn’t mean to say, I didn’t say— Please, madam, for your own good. You’ll be getting someone called if you carry on like that.’ As his attempts to calm her only provoked her to grow louder and more incoherent, Oswald started to panic. He dragged his hand out of his pocket and dropped the contents in the cup—three pound coins, much more than he’d thought he was donating. He stepped back before he could be tempted to retrieve them while her eyes were shut, and waited until she had to pause for breath. ‘I pray I’ve been some use to you,’ he said, and hurried away as she protruded one carpet-slippered foot to hook the cup.
He didn’t think he had been—not in the right way. ‘Charity begins at home,’ he reminded himself, and wasn’t aware of having spoken aloud until a woman wheeling a toddler protected from the world by a plastic shield on the front of the push-chair glanced sharply at him. He dodged around several corners, beyond each of which the wind renewed its chill, and past a cathedral some centuries less mediaeval than it appeared at first sight. By then the rumble of traffic behind had made way for its twin ahead on Fargate.
The Housall office was there, beneath a gargoyle whose grimace appeared to be propped open with a rusty pipe. Silver letters spelled HOUSALL—PROPERTIES FOR SALE along the wide plate-glass window, through which he saw, amid the photographs strung up to catch the passing eye, the front of Nazarill. He remembered the shadowy afternoon when Dominic Metcalf had taken the picture of Nazarill and all its tenants. Now the lawn was deserted even by the oak, and for a moment Oswald felt disoriented, unable to imagine when the building could have been photographed. Arkwright must have snapped it during his last visit, he thought as he let himself into the office.
The House On Nazareth Hill Page 23