Candlenight, page 9
"Who's Mr. Goronwy Davies?"
"The lawyer in Pontmeurig. The chap who won't give us a key until probate's complete."
"Ah, right."
And from then on they'd been like two school kids on an adventure. The goddamn Hardy Boys strike again.
"You did like it. though?"
"Oh. yeah. Sure. It looked in pretty good condition. All things considered."
"That's not what I meant."
"We still on the right road. Giles? It looks different."
"Just getting dark. Bound to look different. You seem a bit nervy tonight. Berry."
"Me? Naw, tired is all. Been a long day."
"I'm not tired. I'm exhilarated. It always seems to renew me, going back there. I feel it's my place. Becoming more like my place all the time. And Claire's of course. I mean—"
"Sure." Berry said.
No, he thought. It's not your place at all. It's somebody else's place. Always be somebody else's place.
Chapter XVI
He'd dropped to the floor and found himself standing next to a sink. An old-fashioned sink of white porcelain sticking out of the wall. No cupboards underneath, just a metal bucket. It was gloomy in here, but there was no smell of damp. Two spiders raced each other along the rim of the sink. Spiders didn't like damp either—where had he read that?
It had been quite a squeeze getting through the window, which was only a quarter pane. It seemed unlikely that Giles would be able to manage it.
"Listen," he'd shouted through the open window, "why don't I come round, open the back door?"
"Good thinking," said Giles. "Only, don't shout, all right? We don't want to advertise ourselves."
Berry threw the screwdriver out to Giles and carefully closed the window.
"Always knew I could've made it in the CIA," he said aloud, and was surprised at how firm his voice sounded in here. You expected an echo in an empty house, but this was acoustically very tight, like a recording studio. He looked up, saw heavy oak beams and more beams sunk into the walls. That was it: timber-framing, low ceilings. A vacuum
for sound.
Also, it wasn't an empty house. Much of the furniture, it appeared, was still here.
He looked around. The kitchen, right? It was quite small. Probably all cottage kitchens were small when this place was built back in the—when, 1800s, 1700s . . . earlier?
Whenever, no dinner parties in those days. Was there going to be room here for the dishwasher, the freezer, the microwave oven and all the other sophisticated stuff he was
pretty sure Giles and Claire must possess?
Berry chuckled, which was a very intimate sound in here. He stifled it.
In one corner he could see a big Aga-type stove, the only substantial piece of the twentieth century, if you didn't count the faucets and the electric light, which was just a bulb with a white porcelain shade shaped like a plant pot.
There were two doors. He opened one and found some kind of storeroom or scullery. He hit his knee against a stack of shelves, still loaded with provisions. A packet fell off and he caught it. Paxo sage and onion stuffing. Judge Rhys's concession to haute cuisine?
The other door led him into a dim hallway, low ceiling, beams black and sagging. He could have used some light in here, but the power wouldn't be connected. The passage led straight through to the front of the house and ended at the front door and some narrow stairs. So which way was the back entrance? There were more doors on either side of him. so he tried one and found himself in a room where the light was rationed by drawn curtains. The judge's study.
"Christ." Berry said.
It could have been a homely room: fireplace, book-lined walls, low ceiling with beams. Place where you could come and put your feet up. have a TV dinner, glass or two of beer. Warm your ass by the fire.
Except the fireplace was Victorian, an ugly iron thing, cold and dead, and the black beams seemed to press down like the fingers of a gloved hand.
And the books. Well, as Berry saw it, there were basically two kinds of books. There were warm, friendly books with bright dust-jackets that gave you the come-on, brought a
room alive.
And there were books like these.
Thousands of them. The shelves ran floor-to-ceiling, taking up most of two walls, dark oak shelves of dark old books, heavy, black-spined books. The kind of books you felt it would be a breach of protocol to take down without you were wearing a tie.
It was a coldly austere room, this study, like . . . what? Some old-fashioned classroom? Air of discipline. Severity.
The window, quite small, was set uncommonly high in the wall, faded grey curtains pulled across as if for a passing funeral. Opposite the window was a huge old desk, like a
monument; behind it a chair, thronelike, with a tall back and carved spindles. Heavy, dour, forbidding.
No, not a classroom. Berry thought suddenly. A courtroom. It's like a very small courtroom. Is this what happens when old judges retire and have no lowlife scum to send to jail anymore? They have to bring with them that ambience of old-fashioned judicial disdain?
Above the fireplace was a single picture, a framed photograph of what he took, at first, to be a gathering of the Ku Klux Klan, everybody in long white robes. Then underneath he saw the words Eisteddfod Genedlaethol 1963. Ah. the annual Welsh festival of poetry and song and stuff where all the head guys dressed up like Druids. Was Judge Rhys one of the men in white?
Berry stood in the middle of the floor, which was stone-flagged, a single rug beneath his feet, on it a threadbare red dragon spitting faded fire.
He hesitated, then crossed to the shelves and pulled down one obese volume, expecting a small dust storm. It didn't happen. Even the damn books were still being cared for. In
case the judge came back from the grave and had nothing to read?
When that thought— a typically trivial, facetious thought— occurred to Berry Morelli, he felt a chill that came and went, like the door of a freezer opening and closing with a hiss. A cold hiss, like the hiss in ice . . . iiiiiice. Did he hear that, or did he imagine it?
He opened the book, and that hissed too, tissue-thin pages whispering secrets denied to him . . . because every word was Welsh. He quickly pulled down three more fat, black books at random—and they were all in Welsh too. Hard to imagine so many books being published in a language spoken by so few. But then it was, according to Giles, supposed to be the oldest language in Europe. And these were real old books.
As he returned the book to the shelf, he fell suddenly guilty. And furtive, like a kid who'd left sticky fingermarks on the school Bible. He thought, somebody's watching, and he spun around and there was nobody. But in his mind the freezer door opened and closed again. With a hiss . . .iiiiice . . .
It was darker, too, he was sure the air itself had got darker. And yet there was a sunset out there (so why are the damn curtains washed with grey?)
Berry's gaze travelled across the patchy gloom, from the ranked books, to the drab lumps of furniture, to the picture of the procession of men in white. He felt the weight of
something old and hallowed.
He didn't care for it.
In the room, and yet beyond the room, he felt kind of a coiled malice. And the air was too thick. How could the air be thick in a room with no dust?
The air came in shifting shades of black and grey and a poisonous off-white, like dirty milk. And it hissed, short gasps, like bellows. He felt, with an astonishing wrench of panic, that if he stayed in here much longer. Judge Thomas Rhys would materialise, fully robed, in the tall gothic chair, his eyes giving off dull heat, a bony finger pointing, trembling with a focused fury.
"Sice!" he'd breathe, the word coming out in a short, hideous rasp, like a cobra rearing to strike.
And the air hissed, the bellows, the freezer door opening and closing. The air said, "SICE!"
"Fuck this," Berry said, suddenly very scared. He stepped back into the hallway and closed the door of the study firmly behind him. then backed off, afraid to look away in case it should open by itself, releasing the air, the wafting hate.
Chapter XVII
The door hung ajar.
Aled Gruffydd stepped back quickly, as if afraid something would reach out and snatch him inside.
"I will not go in there with you," he said. "You do understand?"
The tall man with white hair only smiled.
"Did not happen immediately, see," Aled said. "Quiet it was, for more than three days after Dai took the Englishman's body away."
It was gloomy on the landing, the day closing down.
"We cleaned out the room and stripped the bed," Aled said. Gwenllian said to bum the sheets, but I said no, isn't as if he had anything contagious."
The tall man looked at the opening and did not move. He was very thin and his greasy suit hung like leaves blackened by a sudden overnight frost.
"So she took off the sheets for washing and brought clean ones and put them on the bed. And as she is tucking in the sheets, it flew off the bedside table. The vase. She had sweet peas in it, to sweeten the air, see."
The white-haired man silently put out a forefinger to the door but did not quite touch it.
"Flew off the table, flew within an inch of Gwenllian's head. Smashed into the wall. Gwen came tearing down the stairs, almost falling over herself."
Aled looked over his shoulder, down the stairs. His companion said, "And then?"
"I came back with her and we picked up the pieces of the vase and the flowers. All quiet. No disturbance. I would not doubt her, though. I shut the door and locked it, and we came downstairs and did not go in again until this morning."
With a small coughing sound, the bedroom door moved inwards, revealing a slice of while wall. Aled recoiled.
"There—can you smell it?"
The Reverend Elias ap Siencyn remained motionless. His pale eyes did not blink. His long nose did not twitch at the stench, which included, among other odours, the smell of hot decay.
"We have not been in since." Aled said. "We've left it the way we found it this morning."
"Only this room? He has not come to you in the night? Or to Gwenllian?"
Aled gripped the banister. "Oh, good God." He was shaking at the thought. "No. Nothing like that."
"I doubt if he knows, you see." the rector said. He had a surprisingly high voice, though with a penetrating pitch, like organ pipes. "Sometimes it takes quite some while before
they can fully accept their condition."
"I don't want him, Reverend. I don't want him here." Aled tried to make a joke of it. "Not as if he's paying me now, is it?"
The rector had not taken his eyes from the door. "Tell me again. What you found."
"Oh Christ—sorry Reverend. But can't you smell it?"
"Bodily fluids?"
"Shit, Reverend. And the other stuff. Slime. Mucus. All over the sheets. Soaked-in, dried stiff. And splattered on the walls. Like those prisoners in Ireland did to their cells."
"All right, Aled. It's clear this spirit is disturbed and angry and frustrated. The English think they have a right to know everything; lngley is dead and still knows nothing. His spirit is unsatisfied and so it wants, pathetically, to register a protest. But it's frightened, too—more frightened. perhaps, than when it died. It's a week, you say. since he left us?"
"A week ago tonight. Exactly."
"Very well. I may need assistance. Perhaps you could fetch Mrs. Dafis. Or Buddug Morgan from the farm."
"Yes indeed." Aled said, clearly glad to have an excuse to go outside. He went downstairs very rapidly, but at the bottom he turned and shouted back. "I swear to God, I locked the door! I put the key in the glass with the others. In the bar, see. I swear to God, nobody could get in."
"Aled, I believe you."
"So how can it be? He's dead, Rector. Dead and gone. I know there are things the dead can do, but this . . . How can it be?"
"Because," said the Reverend Elias ap Siencyn, "he cannot adjust. And he cannot contain his fear and his—I don't know, there is something else."
With a single finger he pushed open the door.
"Also," he said quietly, when Aled had gone, "like others of his race, he is vermin. Vermin make a mess."
The rector walked into the bedroom and looked around.
The sheets and the walls were spotless. Whatever Aled had seen was gone. But the stink remained. The stink was obnoxious, and carried a sense of fear and pain and suffering. As well as deep frustration, a helpless rage and a terrible confusion.
"Alien contaminant," he muttered to himself, a fragment of an old verse, "a foul disease now chokes the oakwood."
He stood at the foot of the bed and spoke, with the clarity and resonance of the First words in a sermon.
"You expect my pity?"
He smiled coldly, putting down a scuffed attache case. Then he straightened up and looked at the bed, at a spot just above the pillow.
"You can't stay here," he said. "You are over. The air's too strong for you, the light's too bright."
Chapter XVIII
When they drove at last into Aberystwyth, the coloured lights were on at the entrance to the pier. Green and yellow lights, rippling up and down in a sequence. It wasn't Coney Island, but it made Berry feel a little happier.
"Giles, I— You ever talk to anybody about the house? Anybody local?"
"How d'you mean?"
"—'bout its history. Anything."
"No, not really. We didn't like to go round asking questions. Nosey newcomers. Why?"
Berry took the first left after the pier and found a parking space in a side street, a block or two away from the hotel. He could see its sign and an illuminated advert for Welsh Bitter. He switched off the engine and lay back in his seat and let out a sharp breath.
"Look, what's up. Berry? You're behaving pretty bloody strangely tonight."
"Giles, you're gonna think I'm crazy—'*
"I always have."
"Listen," Berry said. "You remember old Winstone Thorpe—?"
"Oh no!" Giles snapped. "We're not going into that again."
Berry had come out the way he'd got in, landing this time less easily, on a gravel path, ripping a hole in his jeans and grazing a knee.
Giles had found him on the lawn. He must have looked like hell, but Giles didn't seem to notice.
"Berry, you cretin," he'd said when Berry told him he hadn't been able to open either the front door or the back door. "Why didn't you shout? There's a back door key in the
bottom of an old vase in the scullery. I remember seeing the solicitor put it there when he was showing us round. You'll just have to get back in through the window."
Berry was already shaking his head. Uh huh. No way. No time now. Gonna be dark soon. Anyway, had plenty time to look around. Let's go, OK ... ?
"Well, go on." Giles snapped, "Say it. Say what you've got to say."
His lean, freckled face, lit up by the headlights of a passing car, looked aggressive, affronted and defiant, all at once.
A girl with luminous green hair and a man in a light silver jacket, as worn on the Starship Enterprise, walked past the car, laughing at each other, but probably not because of the jacket and the hair. They went into the hotel.
"C'mon. let's go in." said Berry. "Get a drink."
The hotel bar was quite crowded, but they managed to find a table, one people had avoided because it was next to the men's room. Giles went to get the drinks and Berry leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, letting the voices wash over him, soporific, like surf. He could hear people speaking in English and in Welsh and even, he was sure, in Japanese. University town. Kind of a cosmopolitan town. He liked that. Made him feel secure. Like New York, except if you closed your eyes in a New York bar you'd open them half a minute later to find you'd lost your wallet or your watch or, where applicable, your virginity.
There was a crush of people around the bar; it took Giles a while to get served. Berry sat quietly, half-listening to the multilingual voices and half-hearing his own voice talking to him, saying all the real obvious things.
. . . you dreamt it, it was your imagination, you're making it up . . .
No way.
Something had been in there, something heavier than the desk, harder than the oak beams, blacker than the books.
"Here we are," said Giles. He put down two beers. "I know how you like to try local brews, so this is . . . dammit, I've forgotten the name, but it was in a bottle with a yellow label with a red dragon on it."
Thanks, pal." He hated local brews. "I was just thinking, I could quite get to like this town. Good mix of people here, you know?"
"Yes." said Giles. "But what about Y Groes? What about my cottage?"
"Hell of a place," said Berry. "Hell of a place."
So, OK. he thought, let's work this out rationally, bearing in mind that at the end of the day. this is not your problem. Tomorrow you drive out of here and you don't come back. Let Giles find out for himself. It is his problem.
So you didn't like the cottage. No, get it right, there was nothing so wrong with the cottage, it was the room you didn't like. You didn't like the furniture. You couldn't understand the books. You were inexplicably disturbed by a photograph which, in other circumstances, might have seemed faintly comic, bunch of old men in christening robes.
So how come you were squeezing out that window like some guy breaking jail. Grown man, smooth-talking wiseass reporter, scampering away like a puppy, oh, Jesus, this
can't be happening, too bewildered to crank up the mental machinery to attempt to analyse it.
"Berry, are you going to come on like the rest of them. Like Winstone Thorpe— 'But you're an Englishman, old boy, you don't belong there.'"
"No," Berry said uncertainly. "That's not how I—"
"Fuck 'em all, that's what I say." Giles stared into his beer. "I've had it with all these smug London bastards. They're the ones who're out of touch, you know. Had it with Westminster too. And newspapers that try to tell the public what's important in life, what they should be concerned about. This is a place where you can't bargain on London terms. Listen to this—I wasn't going to say anything about this, I thought you'd snigger—"
