The Uncanny, page 23
Sophia stood behind him, looking down into his sandy hair.
“Stop doing that,” she said finally.
“What?” he said. “I’m eating. This is the way we do it.”
“I mean stop thinking that. What you’re thinking.”
He set the knife and fork down. Scratched his head.
“My mother was a … sweet, liberal, charitable woman. Everyone says so. Everyone. I’m sure she didn’t have anything to do with any of your friend’s imaginary villains, or with anything. And to go out to Belham Grange and interrogate my father over a twenty-year-old tragedy … Maybe he hasn’t been perfect. Maybe he was once involved in some dubious business. I don’t even know that for sure …”
“Yeah, well, that’s the thing,” said Storm. He shifted in his seat to look up at her—to gaze up at her. Chewing his food, choosing his words, “You don’t know. You see?”
Sophia was turning away from him when he caught her hand. He held it, stroked the back of it.
“You don’t know, and it’s eating you all up,” he said. “You can’t think about it and you can’t think about anything else, so you can’t think about anything. You don’t know, so you can’t forget about it—you can’t forget about what you don’t know. See? That’s why I think you ought to do it. Because it’s got you all … bunged up and frozen.”
She drew her hand away, hugged herself with it. “That’s just … You’re just … talking about sex. It’s just not that important to me.”
He balled his napkin in his fist, set it on the table. Stood up, stood beside her, stood close. “I’m talking about you being depressed all the time. And having black patches. And being crazy, doing crazy things.”
She faced him and his power occurred to her again, more clearly, more frightening this time.
“I don’t want to do it, Richard.” She could not believe it: she was pleading with him now. “Asking my father about this, confronting him. It would be … too painful.”
“Painful?” He touched her hair gently. “Excuse me, but aren’t you the girl I saw throwing herself off a balcony? How painful was that?”
“I meant painful for my father,” she said up into his eyes. “He’s an old man. He’s not as strong as he looks, as he thinks he is. He’s not as independent. He lives …” In my good opinion, she was about to say. But she stopped when the thought came to her that she now lived in Storm’s, that she had allowed herself to live in Storm’s. And she was scared of what was going to happen, what he was going to make her do. “Stirring things up,” was what she said when she went on. “Making trouble over all this old business. What’s the point?”
He had his fingers deep in her hair now, combing them through, holding her arm with his other hand.
“The point is for you to have a life,” he said.
“I have a life.”
“Have a big life. Have a real life, Sophie. With, like, musical numbers and chariot races. Even just inside, even just a Fred and Ginger dancing around in your head. It’s important. Trust me on this, kid. I know about this.” He seemed about to say something else, something more. His eyes had grown deep and hot—and mournful; they were so sad. “ ’Cause it’s short,” he said after a moment. “It really is. We don’t stay long. You gotta do it big-time.”
She lifted her chin curtly. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
His lips pulled back, his teeth bared, as he seemed to look about the room for the words he wanted. His glance rested finally on the table.
“Look …”he said. He let her go, picked up the salt shaker. Unscrewed the metal top. He licked the tip of his index finger and dipped it in, brought it out with a circle of white crystals clinging to the tip. He set the shaker down and returned to her. “Here,” he said. He moved his finger towards her lips.
Sophia blinked, recoiled. “What …?”
“Shh,” he said. He took her elbow. “Here.”
He brought his finger closer. Closer until it touched her lips. He moved it gently through, gently into her mouth until her lips encircled it, until the salt was on her tongue. Instinctively, Sophia sucked on his finger, unable to break the hold of his gaze. Frightened by the sudden intensity of it.
Then his finger drew away. She licked her lips, the flavor still spreading over her palate. Storm’s face stayed close to hers. His eyes stayed on her eyes.
“What,” she said helplessly. “It’s salt.”
“It’s salt!” he told her softly, urgently. “Salt! See? It’s like … Close Encounters, you know? When the mother ship comes down out of the sky and it’s the size of, like, a city? Like Die Hard, when the whole building just goes bang, just explodes and the fountain’s all going. It’s salt.”
Sophia shook her head, afraid. Tears swam into her eyes.
“Here. Here,” he said. “Let me taste.”
He took her face in his two hands, drew her to him. Pressed his lips to hers and then slid his tongue into her mouth, over her tongue.
Sophia tasted the salt and the chicken he’d eaten and the warmth and the size of his tongue. She was confused, her thoughts hectic. And, as his tongue went on moving over hers, she realized—realized with a sinking weight of fear and depression—that she was going to do whatever he wanted. They were going to talk about it, on and on, into the night. And then she was going to go out with him to Belham Grange.
Storm drew back, drew his tongue out of her. But he went on holding her face, holding her close to him. His eyes, she saw, were swimming too.
“Salt,” he whispered hoarsely. “Live. Live, Sophia. It’s the only thing I’ll ever ask you to do for me.”
4
Bernard’s Morris Minor, meanwhile, was gunning wildly round the corners of Chelsea’s backstreets. The rain walloped the windscreen, covered it, spit, slippery, out from under the tires on either side. The night was now so dark, the streets so sparsely lit, that it was all but impossible for Bernard to see much ahead. Still, the car darted through the tempest like a minnow as he worked the stick and wheel in the same languid, offhanded way in which he noodled his computer. He checked the rearview mirror frequently. He was trying to make certain there was no one on his trail.
The automobile, like all machines, was a complete mystery to Harper Albright. But she was so used to her factotum’s mastery of such things that she was thoroughly unconcerned. Slicing dodges between other cars, rugby-player dives under amber traffic lights, explosions of speed over abbreviated straightaways rendered invisible by the rain: she took no notice of any of them. Her stick propped on the car’s damp floor, her hands crossed over the stick’s dragon head, her chin resting on the backs of her hands, she cogitated quietly.
“I think,” she murmured after a while, “that we had better discuss arithmetic.”
The Morris skidded out onto the embankment, sped along the river, spangled bridges whipping by.
“It was simple arithmetic,” Harper went on, “which, according to the Belham scribe, led to the death of his two partners in the enterprise of the stone, whereas he himself was saved by the complicity—that was his word—the complicity of one who remained nameless. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”
“Would anyone?” Bernard asked, casting a glance in the rearview as he swept in and out of oncoming traffic to overtake a van.
“It’s the underpinning of the whole business,” Harper insisted. “The very reason the scribe was brought into the conspiracy in the first place was that he had already impregnated the town’s madwoman; she was close to term. You see, in order for the crystal’s properties to be effective, one must apparently dissolve them in a bath of blood and water and then be baptized in the mixture once every six months. Without the constant repetition of the treatment, the fatal reaction sets in, beginning with the lines of discoloration which the Belham monk described. In the case of William and Anselm, such a reaction did set in within five years of the first experiment. Because of arithmetic. You see?”
The Morris flashed under the raised sword of King Alfred, past the twin towers of Westminster Abbey. Shot like a cannonball into the enormous roundabout of Parliament Square. The place was ablaze with racing headlights, loud with horns, streaked and foggy with the angling rain. The car plunged into the melee. The cannonball became a sewing needle: the Morris stitched its way neatly through the chaos, Bernard rapidly steering, rapidly shifting gears. They were through—and speeding away into the broad canyons between the granite monoliths of Whitehall.
“There is a clear inference—so clear that the monk didn’t even think to spell it out: in order for the stone to work, the blood must come from one’s own child,” Harper continued calmly. “That was the mathematical problem Iago was trying to solve when he gathered his cult around him. It takes, as you may have heard, nine months to produce a baby. The amount of blood required for the bath is clearly enough to kill the infant. Given the time of gestation—not to mention the occasional female resistance to any of various stages in the proceeding—how does one produce enough of the priceless stuff to bathe in it every six months?”
“You know, I think I had that problem on my last maths exam.”
Harper, with rigid dignity, ignored this. Went on, “But what if mad Annies’s child was not the scribe’s first? What if he also had a child already grown? It might be possible to take the necessary amount of blood from an adult without killing him—often enough, at least, to fill in the gap between new births.”
Bernard pondered these matters in silence as two huge double-decker buses converged on either side of him, threatening to crush the Morris to cinders. He downshifted nimbly, causing his car to spurt forward. The buses lumbered after him like two elephants in the slipstream of a jet.
“Which brings us back to that word—complicity,” Harper said. “It would require complicity on the part of the adult offspring. No reasonable scenario can be imagined in which the blood is continually taken by force. Even if you locked your victim away, you would be hard pressed to keep him alive for very long. And in Iago’s case, for all his powers, his own nature would work against him. Because any offspring of his would likely inherit at least a measure of his strength of will. Such a captive would almost certainly commit suicide rather than be a toad and live upon the vapor of a dungeon.”
“Iago has obviously managed to produce all the offspring he needed this last quarter-century,” Bernard said.
“Perhaps,” said Harper. “But perhaps only just. Who knows how many times he’s come close to the limit? And all the while leaving no child behind who could grow to adulthood, who could offer him a steady supply of what he needs.”
Bernard gave a slight shake of his head. “Well, why didn’t he think of that before?”
“I believe he has been thinking about it these last twenty-five years.”
“Tell me something, darling,” said Bernard suddenly—and speaking suddenly with peculiar sincerity. “We enjoy our little subtleties, you and I, but—”
“Stop the car!”
They had reached Lonsdale Square.
They had reached Lonsdale Square—and Harper had noticed something peculiar about the house on the corner. This was in spite of the fact that Bernard, at her command, had hit the brakes so hard that the Morris had gone into an hellacious skid. They were corkscrewing insanely through the narrow strip between parked cars. Bernard was wrestling desperately with the steering wheel. Harper was craning her neck to keep the house in sight.
“Interesting,” she said.
There was a gap at the curb beside the garden. The Morris slid into it, bumped up onto the pavement, headed for the garden’s iron gate—then stopped, as Bernard, downshifting, braking, used the concussion to bring the machine under control. It came to rest with two tires up on the curb, two in the street. He gave his companion a glance of mild exasperation.
“Look,” she said to him. “Turn off the headlamps and look.”
Bernard sighed. Killed the lights. Bent his head to peer up through the windscreen at the narrow, gabled building in front of them.
The square was quiet, dark. A claustrophobic crunch of buildings round a tangled winter garden. The narrow façades of the townhouses lanced the sky, irregular, looming, Gothic. The sharp points of their gables seemed to close like teeth on the purple clouds above.
The rain was softening again, a thin fog drifting in over the garden’s branches. A streetlamp threw a halo of pink light into the weather, but the façade of the corner house seemed to shrink back from it into the folds of night. Every window was shuttered. No light shone through the gaps, no sign of light or life at all.
“What …?”
“Wait for it,” said Harper.
Then there it was. As the two watched through the windscreen, through the broad, clear arcs left by the ticking wipers. A white spot appeared through the slats of an upstairs shutter. It lengthened to a white line, angled off. It was gone. Then it appeared again, moving. Glaring for an instant at the point where the shutters joined. Then it vanished.
“A torch,” said Bernard.
“Yes,” Harper said.
A few moments later, it went on again—on and off at a window lower down. Whoever held the flashlight was descending through the house.
“Why would he be using a torch?” said Bernard.
“Exactly my point,” said Harper Albright.
She had her Borsalino resting on her lap. She lifted it now, put it on, pulled it low on her brow. She clutched her stick, her eyes alive behind her spectacles. She watched, her nerves electric. She did not stir.
The light flickered again; the outer edge of its nimbus touched the slats of a shutter on the ground floor.
“He’s coming out,” Bernard said softly.
Thirty seconds went by like an hour. They watched. The wipers ticked.
Then the door to the corner house came open, closed. There was an obscure movement in the recessed entryway. Harper could hear her pulse in her ears, could hear Bernard breathing beside her.
A hunched, stocky figure emerged from the recess, stepped out onto the pavement. He stood. Looked left and right along the deserted street. The rain dampened the slash of his tawny hair. The lamplight glinted in his pink, piggy eyes; it drew his features out of the shadows.
It was the scarred man.
“Turn off the wipers,” Harper hissed. “Quickly.”
Bernard did, and the windscreen misted over. The Morris’s engine popped and hummed.
The scarred man stepped to a hulking black car parked at the curb. He pulled the door open, ducked inside.
“He’ll see us if he comes this way,” Bernard said.
“Shh. No. Maybe not. He’s in a hurry.”
The black car started up, moved out into the street, came towards them. Harper heard Bernard’s breathing stop. Her own breathing stopped. They sat absolutely still.
The black car roared, accelerated swiftly. Swiftly, it was past them. Out of the square.
Harper threw open her door. She was in the street in a second, heading for the house.
“I’ll go after him,” Bernard shouted, and he threw the car into gear.
Harper took another step before she realized what he’d said. She stopped dead, turned in the fog and rain, her eyes widening with fear.
“No, no!” she shouted.
But it was too late. The Morris was already twisting off the pavement, spinning in the road. Its headlamps flashed on as it swiped by her, caught her with one hand outstretched, her mouth open on her cry.
But Bernard either didn’t see this or ignored it. The Morris kept spinning. The engine gave a hoarse rumble. The Morris darted forward—and then was gone after the black car. A moment later, and the noise of both their motors faded away, leaving the square humming softly with city noises, pattering with rain.
Harper’s hand sank back to her side. She stood, gazing at the place where the cars had gone out of sight, her heart thumping heavily.
Then a wrenching, tormented scream sounded above her.
Startled—frightened—she lifted her eyes just in time to see an enormous black shape launch itself from the corner house’s gable top. A raven—its wingspan enormous—soared off above her head. A vast, outreaching blot against the sky. Then it was past her, over the dead garden trees. Out of sight. Another shriek, fading into the distance. And the street was quiet around her once again.
Harper let out a breath, raised a hand to her thundering chest. She looked at the dark door of the house, from the house back to the corner where the cars had gone. She knew an evil omen when she saw one, and she felt dread in her belly like a weight of stone.
Her shouders slumped, her steps weary, she headed towards the house.
5
She did not ring. She pushed the door. It came open—she expected that—but it made her swallow hard just the same.
She stepped across the threshold. The foyer was dark, but there was a light on somewhere in the back of the house. In the misty fluorescent glow of it, she could make out the objects strewn about her feet. An overturned umbrella stand. A flimsy lowboy under a mirror to her right, pulled open, emptied. Umbrellas, drawers, papers scattered everywhere. She stepped gingerly through the mess into the sitting room.
The light was brighter here, filtering in directly through an open doorway. Harper could see the upended sofa. A standing lamp lying lengthwise. The peaks of books that had been cast from their shelves to the carpet. The carpet was slashed into strips. The entire place had been ransacked.
Her breath came out unsteadily. She shifted her grip on her stick. She hobbled forward, kicking the books aside. She reached the lighted door. Her eyes, behind the thick spectacles, peered into the kitchen.
In the purplish glare of the fluorescents, she saw at once the cook’s knife gleaming on the kitchen tiles. There was a small puddle beside it. Harper moved to the puddle. Her knees cracked as she knelt down over it. She sniffed. Wrinkled her nose. Urine. The weight of dread inside her grew heavier still. Poor old Jervis, she thought. He must have been very scared when they came for him. And no doubt, he had good reason.
