The Uncanny, page 28
Then Iago spoke again: “All right.”
Panting, Bernard forced himself to stop coughing. Swallowed a hot gout of his own vomit. Gasped, gagged. Tried to listen.
He heard a sound that caused a tremendous solid sphere of icy cold to form itself in his abdomen. He tensed, swallowed again, held his breath. Listened.
Footsteps on stone. Moving away. Fading away.
Bernard started screaming. “No! Don’t leave! Don’t leave me here! Don’t leave me! Please!” Babbling in a high, wild, raggedy voice that hardly seemed to belong to him. “Come back! Please! Please!”
He stopped. Lay shivering, his face contorted as he willed the speaker to return, as he strained and strained to hear.
He heard.
Clank, rattle, creak, thud. The door opening, closing.
And then silence.
“Don’t leave me,” he murmured. “Father.”
And he lay weeping in the dark alone.
10
At that moment, Richard Storm suddenly realized he had arrived.
He was standing in the shadow of the abbey wall, the clouds lowering. He was standing amidst slanting headstones worn faceless with weather and time. The afternoon was roiling, black. The wind was damp and biting. Lightning dashed fiery from the meridian to the vanishing point, and thunder followed hard on, loud, enormous. Around him, broken steles lay crushed upon the grass. A single crypt sat crumbling. The streaking shadows on the ruined wedge of wall made it seem animate, wraith-washed.
He had come upon the living soundstage of his imagination.
He remembered a ghost story he had heard once. A woman dreams she’s standing outside a house. Every night, in her sleep, she’s there, staring at this same house. She becomes so troubled by the dream she decides to take a vacation. Driving into the countryside, she comes upon the very house of her dreams. Unable to resist, she gets out of her car and approaches. The front door opens. A butler stands in her way.
“This house,” the woman says. “I have to see inside this house.”
“Of course, madam,” says the butler. “But I should warn you: the house is haunted.”
“Haunted?” says the woman. “Haunted by whom?”
And the butler replies, “By you.”
Storm looked around him at the ruins of Belham Abbey.
How often, he wondered, had he had put this place on film? Some place like this. He couldn’t count how many times he had dreamed it up as if new, filled it with fresh vampires and ghouls and monsters. Spectre featured a ruined church like this one. So had Castle Misery. So had Hellfire. But it wasn’t until he had come to stand here that he fully understood that they had all been this, this very site.
Because this was the setting of “Black Annie,” which he had read when he was ten years old. Which had made him what he was.
He could remember—not which day, but the way the day felt—when he had read the story first. The palmy Santa Monica breezes, smelling of oranges and the sea. The lush greenery at his window, and the white-washed wall of his neighbor’s house, the ruddy slate of its roof. Birds were twittering. Bees were humming among the oversized flowers whose names he didn’t know. He could hear the plash of someone swimming in his backyard pool. His mother. And he lay alone, in his room, on his bed. Little California Rick in shorts and T-shirt. With the Aurora monster models on their shelves above him staring benignly down. Frankenstein, Godzilla, the Creature from the Black Lagoon with genuine green scales. Dracula, on whose black plastic chin he had hand-painted a line of red. And he held the book of ghost stories on his stomach. Spooks and Phantoms. The book his father had given him, resigned to the fact that the boy would read it with more pleasure than his gifts of westerns, Jack Schaefer, Louis L’amour. Young Richard had lain in the whitewashed California springtime, and his mind had gone off into the autumn of Victorian England. Off into the haunted house with Neville and Quentin. Off to the abbey ruin, this very ruin, here. He had loved that story, loved it.
And it had never really occurred to him to wonder why. What was it about himself that was so willing to connect with a setting and a situation that were different from everything he actually knew? He had never produced a picture that wasn’t full of the Gothic, the Victorian, the whole “Black Annie” aura. And why? He couldn’t help but wonder about it now, now that he was standing here.
Because the rising medieval stone of wall, the leaning graves—even the threatening weather—the whole classic ghost story scene—were truly as familiar to him as if he had been here a million times. They were as familiar to him as a celebrity’s face, as if they slotted in—thock—to some archetypal jigsaw emptiness in his mind. They were that familiar—and, at the same time, he had never felt like such an alien, like such a stranger in a strange land.
What the hell was he doing here anyway, so far from home? Who were these people around him? Harper, Bernard, Sir Michael. Sophia. What the hell was he doing involved in all their lives? Making such a mess of them? He was dying, for Christ’s sake. He should be with people he knew. With pals who would cluck over his predicament, and doctors who would tell him things that seemed to make sense. In a world he knew, really knew. Not like this one, which he’d only appropriated as a child, which he’d only spent his life reinventing.
He remembered this same strange feeling, this sense of being alien and apart—he remembered how it had overtaken him just before his attack of convulsions the month before. He felt a drifty, cold wisp of fear travel down from his chest to his groin. And he thought: Not now. Not yet. Not again.
But no, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t as easy as that. It was this place. This abbey. This ruined churchyard. This stately country house. This England. What had any of them to do with him? With the son of a cowboy star from the golden coast? They didn’t want him here. He could feel that. They rejected him. They wanted him to go away and leave them alone. Hell, they’d murdered guys like him in this place once upon a time. Irritating, intrusive Jew-boys. They’d locked them up in the infirmary and just barbecued them. Yippee-aye-oh-kye-ay, babe. This place was not his place at all.
And if he didn’t belong here, where did he belong? Who the hell was he anyway?
He snorted. It was a little goddamned late to ask.
The lightning flickered above him, crackled. And in seconds, the thunder boomed. The black clouds rolled and turned, and the wind walked among the graves. And Storm walked among them, his sad eyes moving on the speechless, haunted stones.
Who the hell was he? That was the question. Who the hell was he to come here and torture Sophia about her past? Make her unhappy for his own selfish sake. She didn’t want him here either. He was as alien to her as he was to this place. He only loused things up for her. Asking her to do this thing that was foreign to her nature. Because he was foreign to her nature. Because he didn’t belong with her, in her world.
He had failed her, hadn’t he? He would’ve killed to be her hero and he’d failed her, dead to rights.
He came to stand before the decaying crypt. A waist-high temple with pilasters worn to beaded strips, an iron door worn thin, broken through. He shook his head.
Haunted by whom? he thought.
Haunted by you, pal.
It was the scariest ghost story ever told. You just had to be there.
The rain began slowly. He felt a drop blown onto his cheek. He glanced up into a sky that seemed to hang not six feet above him. Another droplet fell, and more. He heard them patter on the tombstones. Tip-tip. Tip-tip.
Yeah. He smiled with one side of his mouth. Tick-tick. That’s right. Time’s running out on you, Jackson.
And then his smile faded. He looked down again at the crypt before him. At the rough crescent-shaped hole worn in the iron door. It went down into nothingness, down and down forever, for all he knew. And he raised his eyes to Belham Grange, to the wing of the house that extended beyond the double row of trees.
There were often, I knew, in abbeys and the neighbouring houses, secret chambers and hideaways … underground passages …
He remembered Sophia’s story, the story she had told him about the noise in the house, about the night she had seen her father standing over her mother with a bloody knife. He had known at the time she told it to him that something had been left out of that story, that something had been missing. Now, as the rain grew steadier, stronger, he realized what it was.
The wind rose, cold, and the rain started slanting down. There was another snarl of thunder that seemed to come from deep in the belly of the sky.
Richard Storm turned up the collar of his trench coat. He turned away from the ruin, and headed back across the field to the house.
11
By the time Sophia reached the door, her father had withdrawn. The door stood open and she went in, closing it behind her.
“Daddy?”
“In the sitting room,” he answered her.
But she stood in the foyer another moment, at the foot of the stairs.
“Right,” she said in an undertone. She made a gesture with both hands. Held them open in front of her and pushed them down against the air: a calming gesture. She wanted to compose herself. She was agitated after her conversation with Storm. She was jittery, confused. Apprehensive. They were all feelings she disliked intensely. “Right,” she said again.
She stripped off her overcoat, hung it on a peg by the door. Smoothed down her jumper as if to smooth down her inner self as well. She went along the corridor to the dining room, consciously trying to work her expression into one of cool irony. She did not feel she was succeeding very well at all—and then she was at the sitting-room doorway.
She stepped across the threshold. It was a long room, from the cold stone fireplace to the tall windows. And it was dark: the walls hung with dark, misty paintings, the windows with dark, heavy green drapes. Her father was at the far end, by the window that looked out across the field to the abbey. He faced her when she entered. He stood with the black clouds behind him. She saw the lightning flash down from the clouds, heard the thunder.
“Come in, come in, Sophia. We’d better talk,” Sir Michael said.
She hesitated where she was. And it struck her for a moment: she was afraid; she was afraid of him. But she shook the thought off. It was ridiculous. He was her father. She approached slowly.
Much of the furniture was gathered in one half of the room, the near half. The sofa, table and chairs were arrayed together around the fireplace. She came around them, but then she paused again. She stood by the sofa, with her hand on the back of it. That left an open space of some distance—the length of the Persian carpet—between her and her father. She did not cross that distance, but confronted him from where she was. Landscapes of brown crags and fog covered the wall to her left.
“Yes, what is it?” she said.
She couldn’t hold his gaze. Her eyes shifted away from him. To the window. Out to the abbey ruin. She could see Storm out there, afar off. He was moving beside the broken wall, walking among the gravestones. His coat was stirred by the wind. His hair was stirred by it. She wished he was here, in here, with her. What had he been about to tell her? Why was she so upset? She hated it.
Her father took a step towards her. Sophia felt her hand close more tightly on the wooden rail of the sofa back. Her father looked large, towering. His great head seemed hung bizarrely with loose flesh. His eyes were strange and quick and dangerous. With the black clouds rushing forward behind him, it seemed as if he himself were rushing at her.
“Why did you bring him here?” he asked her.
Sophia shook her head, confused. Tried to think of an answer.
“I don’t like him,” said Sir Michael. “I don’t trust him. What is he here for?”
“Trust him …?” said Sophia. She could not bring her thoughts to order. Why was she so afraid?
“Doesn’t it even occur to you to ask yourself what he keeps hanging around for?”
And Sophia heard herself begin to answer as if she were listening to another person: “Well, doesn’t it even occur to you that …?” She pressed her lips together.
“What?” he said. “Go on.”
“Well, he might be hanging around because, he likes me? It might not have anything to do with you and this … anything to do with you.”
Her father made an exasperated, dismissive noise. The clouds behind him flickered with unsteady light. The following thunder was loud.
“No,” said Sophia, uncertainly. “I mean it. I don’t know what the problem is …”
“For God’s sake, Sophia, don’t be childish.”
“Am I supposed to run my friends by you for approval?”
At that, he took another step towards her. Large, unfamiliar. “Friends like that, yes. There are plenty of suitable men around.”
Her hand moved nervously on the sofa back. She felt very small in front of him. And her knees were beginning to feel weak and shaky. “I don’t know what you mean by suitable. Richard is perfectly suitable …”
And again: that dimissive noise, like a whiplash. “He’s ridiculous, if nothing else. And he’s old enough … He must be forty, at least.”
Sophia licked her lips. “Is that what’s bothering you?”
“Are you playing some kind of game with me?”
“Well, what is all this? He says you threatened him.”
“I’ll do more than threaten him …” He came closer. She could see him more clearly. The quivering, pasty folds of skin, the skeletal outlines of his cheeks, the too-bright eyes. The sight made her faintly nauseous.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand what’s wrong. Why are you acting this way?”
“Sophia,” he said. This was gentler, a tone she remembered, a voice she remembered. Her father’s tone, his voice. The gesture he made with his hand was one she knew. But he seemed a different person. “I’m sure there are dozens of men who are interested in you,” he went on, “who want to be with you. Half our clients are in love with you. That’s not the point. The sad fact is, this … person is using you.”
“Using me?”
“To get at me.”
“Why on earth …?”
“All right, if you’re going to be purposely obtuse: to get at the Rhinehart.”
“But you don’t have the Rhinehart.”
“Now you are being purposely obtuse.”
“I’m not. I simply don’t understand.”
He shook his head at her sternly.
Sophia let go of the sofa back. She rubbed her hands fretfully together. Her mouth was dry and her stomach fluttery. “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy, don’t talk in riddles anymore. Tell me what’s happening.”
“What do you mean? I just don’t like my daughter being taken advantage of …”
“I mean all this about the Rhinehart,” she said. “Why are you so upset about the Rhinehart? Whatever it is, if you explain it to me …”
Sir Michael eyed her as from a height. Through the window, under the gathering clouds, distant, she saw Storm pause before a low crypt. She wished he would come in.
“Did he tell you to ask me that?” Sir Michael said.
“What? Well … No. No, of course not, I—”
“What makes you think I’m upset?”
She laughed unhappily. “Look at you. You look awful.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“You look positively ill. What is going on? Why are you acting all paranoid? What’s frightening you?”
He reared—and Sophia quailed. There was another rumble from the rushing clouds. And then a soft patter on the tall pane between the drapes. It was beginning to rain. In another moment the water was washing hard against the glass. Sophia could see Storm moving away from the ruin, moving across the field out of sight, towards the house. She was desperate for him to come to her.
“Are you cross-questioning me?” Sir Michael said.
“Me?” Sophia’s hand went to her middle. She was really beginning to feel sick. “Me, cross-questioning you? You called me in here—”
“I called you in here because you’ve allowed this unsavory matt—”
“Oh, Daddy.”
“—to push and wheedle his way into our house, to seduce you—he has seduced you, hasn’t he?”
“What are you talking about? Seduced … That’s insane. I’m a grown—”
“You’ve allowed him to seduce you and push his way into this house for the sole purpose of getting his hands on that triptych. If you’re such a grown-up woman then you should’ve known better. You should’ve exercised a little judgement.”
Sophia, practically cowering beside the sofa, practically cried out, “You’re not making any sense. Why would Richard want to do something like that?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not—”
“Because he’s a criminal.”
“He is not.”
“He’s a sneaking, murdering—”
“Murdering?”
“—filthy bastard who doesn’t care a damn about you.”
“He does! Stop it! You’re talking utter shit! Stop it!”
Quickly, Sophia pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. The wind blew the rain up hard against the window. A fork of lightning stabbed down into the hills, hurling the shadow of the abbey wall across the headstones. The sudden upsurge of rage had taken her completely by surprise, had left her feeling shaken and ill. She could not remember the last time she had spoken like that—had raised her voice at all—against her father.
He turned his shoulder to her. Lifted his chin. Frowned down across the room at her with his eyes hot and foreign and terrifying.
“I’m sorry, Sophia,” he said. “I didn’t realize he had got so far with you.”
And, sick as she felt, she was angry again on the instant. Helplessly, she felt her eyes fill with tears. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that to me. How dare you? I think Richard may be the single most decent and straight-forward person I’ve ever met. What would he want with the Rhinehart triptych?”
