"Don't try any more tricks like that," snaps her mother. "Start walking."
"I can't."
"Start walking!"
*
Rat marches distractedly up and down the kitchen. He reaches into his pocket for his pipe, looks at it and shoves it back "What sort of place is it that just lets them disappear like that? That's what I want to know."
"It's not Dunnock's, Daddy," says Miranda, "it's Bradport Maternity. They're not expecting people to wander off."
"They should never have left her alone, not for a minute. I'll sue them. See if I don't."
"Try not to worry. She can't have got far. The police are looking and McNab and the others, and Simon. Someone is bound to find her soon."
"Bit of a cheek asking Simon," grumbles Veronica.
"He was very concerned," says Miranda. "He said he was going straight out."
"You should have told Michael if you were going to tell anybody. He's the child's father after all."
"You tell him then, I'm not going to. Anyway, he can't do much in Milan, can he?"
"If she's really heading for Railway Gardens," says Rat, "she'd surely be there by now. Why the hell can't that blasted Mrs Wren be on the phone?"
"Of course she's going there," says Veronica. "Where else would she be going?"
"We can't be certain of that, surely?" says Miranda. "Anyway, if she is, Simon will let us know on his mobile phone."
"Can you get him on that thing?" asks Rat. "I mean, from here."
"Yes, but I can't see much point. He'll obviously ring us, as soon as he knows anything."
"Perhaps I ought to go out too," says Rat. "I'm damn-all use hanging about here."
"No, you won't," says Veronica. "I'm not having you driving at night."
"Don't be ridiculous. I'm not senile."
"You can't see properly at night. You've said so yourself."
"I could at least drive up to the village."
"She won't come here. She won't even let us visit her, so she's hardly likely to come here."
"True," agrees Miranda.
Rat sits down at the table, burying his face in his hands. "It's all my fault; I should never have let her leave. It was obvious there was something wrong. Just when she needs me most I've let her down."
"Well there's no point thinking of that now," says Veronica unkindly.
"What I don't understand," persists Miranda, "is why you think she's trying to get to Railway Gardens. She could always have got someone to fetch Jacqui if she wanted her that badly. What makes you so sure that's where she's going?"
"She's mad," says Veronica. "You can't expect her to behave rationally."
"In that case she could be anywhere!"
"Where would she go?" says Rat. He furrows his brow as if trying to force an answer. "Where would she go in that state? What would be in her mind?"
"Back to Dunnock's," suggests Miranda. "It must seem like home by now, much more so than Railway Gardens."
Suddenly Rat jumps up. "What a fool I've been! Where would she go? Where she always goes of course — the Stones!"
"You're right, it's obvious," says Miranda. "Why didn't I think of that?"
"I'll get my jacket," says Rat. "I can be there in ten minutes."
"Nonsense," says Veronica. "Of course she's not going to the Stones. You said yourself she hates them now; and how would she get there in the dark in her condition?"
"She might not make it," says Miranda, "but I bet that's what she's trying to do."
"Go and ring the police," says Rat. "And an ambulance. We may not have much time. You can catch me up."
"No, stop!" snaps Veronica. She manoeuvrers her chair in front of the door, blocking it. "You won't go. I forbid it."
They stare at her in amazement.
"But why?" asks Miranda.
"You know why."
"Oh, Aunty, really!"
"You said you believed me. Don't you believe me?"
"Aunty, this isn't the time!"
"It's the very time. It's our best chance, don't you see? Our chance to see them all dead: the mother, the daughter, the unborn child; our chance to escape this nightmare, to set future generations free. All we have to do is nothing. Nature will do the rest."
"Aunty, without Bella there won't be a future generation."
"You can have them. You can try again. They won't all die."
"I can't," says Miranda. "It isn't possible." Veronica looks at her blankly. "I can't have any more children," says Miranda. "I didn't want anyone to know."
"Oh," says Veronica.
I'm going," says Rat. "I'll go out the other way. Ring the police."
"No!" cries Veronica. Wheeling furiously backwards into the rear porch she grabs the shotgun leaning there. Miranda lunges for it too. There is a struggle which Miranda inevitably wins. Rat has already gone.
"It doesn't work anyway," says Veronica dejectedly.
It is already dawn. Rat has scarcely started out when he sees Bella coming down the heathery slope towards him. She is copiously bloodstained and staggering with exhaustion. In her arms is a purplish-blue baby. Its umbilical cord is still attached, the placenta caught beneath her arm, like a bagpipe.
"I didn't know what to do, Daddy," she says plaintively. "The cats were no help; they just sat there. I couldn't bring myself to bite through it, somehow." She hands the infant over to Rat, who immediately swaddles it in his coat, unsure if it is still alive.
"It doesn't matter anyway," says Bella. "It's no use to me — it's a boy."
*
Bella moves back into her room at Windy Point. A cot is set up beside her bed, but never occupied. She rejects the baby totally, refusing even to hold or look at him. After a family discussion, Miranda bears him away and cares for him at the manor house. Bella neither objects nor agrees to this arrangement. Painfully fulsome, she refuses either to use the breast-pump provided by Miranda or take the tablets prescribed by Dr Snipe.
In the months she has been away there have been changes, particularly among the erstwhile travellers. The twins – wrested, with difficulty, from local authority care – now attend The Firs, an exclusive preparatory school, their fees heavily subsidised by Miranda. They wear little plum-coloured blazers with cream piping and matching socks and tie. Pat, dropping them off daily on her way to work at Wimbleford Library, has become very popular with the other mothers. They all want invitations to coffee in her romantic-seeming mobile home. Their children clamour to visit, or better still, 'sleep over.' Pat is happy to oblige provided it doesn't interfere too much with her sailing. She has joined Bradport Cruising Club and is known as a doughty and reliable crew.
Bluebell, now a very grown-up seventeen, has opted to continue living at the manor house. She is to join the sixth form at Bradport Grammar School and is already talking about university.
After the briefest probationary period, Jason has been made estate manager. He has proven to be wonderfully versatile, equally at home with fencing or paperwork. From being plump and indolent he has become lean, active and hardworking. He is fiercely protective of the estate, his estate, and woe-betide Darren and his friends if he catches them biking on company land. He has given up poaching and bought himself a gun. He is respectable now and can murder his rabbits like a gentleman. He and Sandy now live in the Rooks' old cottage. This has enabled Crystal and Denny to move out of their cramped ambulance and into the more commodious Shangri-la, still minus its nearside track-rod end.
Julius is no longer Vicar of Tenstones, sacked by the Bishop for obscenity with a badger. In vain he protests that it was entirely acquiescent, if only on account of being dead. It is the Twins who tell on him, finding him one afternoon in Finches Coppice, blissfully enjoying the still-warm corpse. For a week it is their favourite topic of conversation. They produce remarkably detailed illustrations in art class. Lucky for them it is a private school; the writ of state terror does not run there.
But these changes are as nothing compared with the
transformation in Prometheus McNab's fortunes. With the need for capital ever more urgent, and reopening the pit no longer an option, Michael has little difficulty in persuading the board to accept a small development of up-market properties. A new design and construction company, Broadmayne, McNab and Partners, is incorporated, and within weeks the first phase of its unique, prefabricated, eco-friendly homes is to be found tucked discreetly among the pines on Long Ridge. Pictures and articles appear in the quality press. There is talk of a design award, and foreign sales. Veronica keeps the cuttings. It would seem that the estate's finances are now secure for the foreseeable future.
The new houses are not quite as autonomous as McNab would wish – they have mains water, electricity and telephone, all brought in by artfully concealed over-ground trunking – but the three storey, south facing conservatories; the home-produced methane heating and cooking; the heavily insulated, foundation-free timber construction and especially the sense of living like a bird among the treetops, all survive from his original plans. With advance sales already in the millions he is set to become not merely prosperous but wealthy.
In the meantime he has his own new home (also acting as a show-house), built on the site of the original prototype and differing from its neighbours only in its attached studio-workshop. Here he potters happily, while Carol (now re-skinned in sturdy cotton drill and dressed in a smart business suit) entertains would-be buyers in her lofty, glass and pine drawing room.
All summer long the weather continues hot and dust-dry; week after week of bleached blue skies with scarcely a passing cloud to give relief. Crops shrivel in the fields, and rivers throughout the region disappear into the ground, upsetting the fish and the ducks. Even the clay-ponds on the heath begin to shrink alarmingly and a rescue operation is mounted to save the spotty frogs. Water is tankered in and a picture appears in the Bugle. Veronica keeps the cutting. People begin to talk of global warming, of a Mediterranean climate for Dorset. Soon there will be street cafes in Bradport, open-air cinemas, malaria. Where now there are draughty pedestrian precincts with broken saplings and rubbish-filled concrete planters there will be sunbaked plazas with exotic palms and scented bougainvilleas. The passeggiata will become an evening ritual, supplanting the fights outside the Seven Bells. Rain will be a distant memory.
Bella obtains a pick and shovel and working alone, attempts to demolish the Stones. She chooses Chokmah to begin with because it is relatively small. She finds it is set deep into the earth, like the root of an old molar. Nevertheless she knows it must end somewhere, resting on the bones of a child sacrifice. She soon realises that total destruction is unrealistic – it would require a crane to remove it – but she reasons that even a slight change in the angle or orientation of one stone may be enough to destroy the unique geometry which is the basis of the circle's power.
Hour after hour, day after day, she works, mining out the iron-hard soil, until she is labouring waist-deep in a considerable excavation. She is accompanied by Jason's terrier, Patch, whom she has borrowed to keep away the cats. For a while he is an enthusiastic helper, scrabbling away beside her, but when he realises there are no rabbits to be had he loses interest and simply sits and watches, his head quizzically on one side.
One blazing afternoon, when the entire heath seems to shimmer like a mirage, she stops for a smoke, exhausted by her efforts. Leaning a little dizzily against the tall and narrow stone she could almost fancy it is vibrating. It is vibrating! There is a definite tingling against her cheek and finger tips. She starts to tremble, feeling it amplified through her body. The world begins distinctly to shift out of focus and she flees the circle in alarm. Who knows where, or even when, she might have found herself had she stayed? She calls urgently to Patch, but he has disappeared entirely and only comes home a week later, filthy, disorientated and inclined to snap. If only dogs could talk, what tales might he be able to tell?
Dinner these days is usually taken in strained silence. On an impulse, Bella tells her aunt what she is doing, expecting her to be pleased. Perhaps she will love her again for trying to destroy the source of all their troubles.
"I don't want you going up there," says Veronica crossly. "You promised me you wouldn't. I don't want you going anywhere by yourself, you're not responsible."
In one of those blinding flashes of insight vouchsafed only to the true adept, Bella suddenly realises that her aunt, her sister and even her uncle are not, as she had imagined, helplessly in thrall to the cats, but are voluntarily aiding them. The conversations on which she eavesdropped were nothing but an elaborate charade to fool her. These are not the victims but the exploiters! She is the victim, she and her mother and all those who came before, so beguiled by the prospect of eternal life that they failed to see how they were being manipulated. Has not her mother denied any connection with the cats? She simply knows they exist. It is her aunt who knows they are evil, by her own admission; who knows, but doesn't care! What dreadful Faustian pact has she made with them? Will she, too, live forever, passing on her soul to Miranda? Of course, that must be it! And now they are afraid of her, afraid that she, Bella, will somehow put a stop to it. They are biding their time, all of them, waiting for female issue, for a new, more pliant Priestess; then they will kill her, or put her away, back in Dunnock's, where she can do them no harm. Michael will no doubt come and make her have sex with him until she produces a girl-child, just as her father-uncle must have forced himself upon her struggling, pleading mother, while her aunt sat below and listened, gloating, enjoying her pain and humiliation. Bella stops eating. She sits there staring at them, feeling oddly unafraid, just filled with a cold anger.
"You killed Mummy," she says, pointing her spoon at her aunt. She found out about your pact with the cats so you went to the Stones and you shot her. And you." She turns to her uncle. "You raped her. She wouldn't have you, so you raped her."
She is gratified to see her aunt turn ashen with the horror of being discovered and Rat chokes so violently on his soup that he has to be thumped on the back. Thereafter he tends to take his meals alone and is, in fact, seldom seen, no doubt wracked with shame for what he has done.
Lying awake at night Bella continues to hear quite distinctly the terrible yowling of the cats and the sound of McNab's fiddle as he plays for them. It would seem that despite her best efforts the power of the Stones remains undiminished. Perhaps, she reasons, they are themselves only a symbol of something outside our own reality. After all, do not the cats travel in space and time? No doubt to do so they need to pass into another dimension. But why do they need McNab? Does his playing somehow amplify their own obscene song? What, if anything, is in it for him? Just who is this strange little man she thought she knew so well?
"You know what you have to do now?" says her mother.
"Yes," says Bella.
"Better get on with it then."
*
Bella gazes up the slope at McNab's new eco-home. She hasn't seen it since it was finished and is impressed. She hasn't time, however, to look around it now, and there is, in any case, no-one at home but Carol. Turning, she follows a little path through the furze to what appears to be a large summerhouse. It is, in fact, a tank, artfully concealed, where the house's waste is processed and its methane fuel extracted. Letting herself into the control room she pauses to marvel at the sophisticated array of colour-coded pipes and gauges. Then, identifying the outlet valve (yellow), she disconnects the pipe that leads back to the house and fits in its place a length of plastic hose, compensating for the difference in bore by wrapping duct tape round the join. Poo! One thing certainly hasn't changed, the smell!
The hose was a nuisance to get here. It is very heavy, being approximately a hundred and fifty yards long, normally used for conveying water to the end of the jetty. It would not be much use for that now, as she has painstakingly punched holes at twelve inch intervals along the last thirty yards of it. Holding her breath against the smell, she unrolls the hose across the floor and out thr
ough the door. Then checking the direction of the wind, a gratifyingly fresh north-easterly, she continues in as near as possible a straight line, crossing the narrow track from Windy Point as she does so.
She has realised that the answer is fire. Advancing on broad front it will be unstoppable. She knows the cats are all around her even at this moment, silently watching, suspecting nothing. Running before the flames she will lead them to the Stones, no great distance ahead, and leave them to die in agony. There will be nothing to show they ever existed but little piles of ash. She, of course, will not die; her fate is water.
Suddenly she stiffens, then drops swiftly to her haunches. It is McNab! Why is he back so soon? He should still be at the Point, rehearsing for a ceilidh dance with Denny and the others. Fortunately he hasn't seen her. He is stepping out jauntily along the track, a clinking Tesco bag in one hand and his fiddle case in the other, clearly returning home. Damn and blast! She must warn him off, but how?
"I can't do it now," says Bella. "I'll have to wait."
"Don't be a fool," hisses Hester. "You've got them all now, the cats and McNab too! There'll never be a better chance."
Bella is horrified. "I can't do that! I can't burn McNab! He may be helping them but he's still my friend."
"Helping!" cries her mother incredulously. "Helping! He's the Devil, Bella, and the cats are his imps. Didn't you realize that? This is your chance to destroy not just the cats but the Devil himself. You can rid the world of evil forever."
McNab the Devil! This strange little man with his sinister red aura, his rebarbative features and his outsize extremities. Suddenly it all makes sense. That, of course, is why her mother died shooting among the Stones; it was her own desperate attempt to kill the cats, an attempt that ended her corporeal life. "Why didn't you tell me this before, she says accusingly. You said they were harmless."
Isabella: A sort of romance Page 55