Thieving Fear Part 15

'I thought he'd been, I suppose we'd have to call it interfering a bit over my book. I hope he didn't annoy you. I didn't tell him to, say anything, I mean.'

'He was just being Rory. We all know how he can be. He didn't do any harm. Your book's just between us,' Charlotte said, then had to append 'And the publishers, of course.'

'All right, no more Rory.' After at least a second's silence, which Charlotte found close to ritualistic, Ellen said in her original tone 'What about them?'

'We just need a little more from you.'

'I can send some more chapters over the weekend. That's all I'm doing now, the work you asked me to.'

'Well, I hope that's not your entire life.' Charlotte had the oppressive notion that in order to live her image of a writer Ellen had become a literary hermit locked away with her book. Another silence made her add 'We're waiting for an outline of your next one, and we think . . .'

'Go on. Whatever it is, you'll help me deal with it, won't you?'

Ellen's voice dwindled as Charlotte glanced over her shoulder again. Of course the slanting ma.s.s of shadow in the corner hadn't grown, and it was even less likely to have become more solid. It was certainly incapable of concealing a watcher. n.o.body was spying on her from where the corner met the floor, and she needn't glare at the dark niche to convince herself. Once she began to feel she was putting off answering Ellen she turned back to the phone in a rage at her irrationality. 'All it is,' she said, 'the place you told me you wanted to use, we'd like there to be a reason for using it.'

'Thurstaston.'

Why did people keep saying the name? It was beginning to resemble some kind of invocation. 'I know you chose it because we were all there,' Charlotte said, 'but that won't be enough for your book.'

'I'd like to talk to you about that night.'

'Not now.' As she hastened to say this Charlotte had to wonder which of them was more on edge. She wasn't going to look behind her, but the view ahead was bad enough. She'd never realised how much the office brought to mind an underground bunker or an air-raid shelter that might collapse with a direct hit, the walls caving in beneath the weight of countless tons of earth. She tried to fend off these fancies by adding 'Unless it's for your book.'

'I don't know if it is.'

'Better leave it for now, then.' Charlotte wished it felt like more of a relief to ask 'Have you thought of anything that could be?'

'Hugh may have.'

'Sorry, what's this to do with him?'

'He wants to help. Between ourselves I think he's a bit sweet on me. Mind you, he hasn't seen me since we all met, and I'm sure a' Ellen trailed off or interrupted herself with a surge of determination. 'I do appreciate you all rallying around my book,' she said.

Perhaps Charlotte felt as if Rory and now Hugh were threatening her professional relationship with Ellen, although why should that work on her nerves so much? Somehow Ellen's remark seemed to aggravate the sense of earth pressing against the walls, staining the lights dim, creeping closer and livelier at Charlotte's back. 'So what's Hugh's contribution?' Charlotte had to ask.

'He says where we slept out that night, it's where someone used to live.'

'And how does that fit in?'

'I think he must have told me because it sounds like a magical name.' After a breath that Charlotte found unnecessarily hard to take, Ellen said 'Arthur Pendemon.'

It appeared to have power. Charlotte saw three of her colleagues stand up and retreat at once. In a moment she realised they were vacating their desks for the weekend. Rather than lending the bas.e.m.e.nt a little more s.p.a.ce, the exodus made her feel abandoned in a cell that was far too airless and not nearly light enough. She was absolutely not about to look behind her, even when two more people left their desks. Her job required her to stay on the phone and ask 'What do we know about him?'

'That's all Hugh did, I think. I haven't looked yet.'

Charlotte could perfectly well search for the name while talking to Ellen, and she made to transfer the receiver to her left hand. It had to be the shadow of her movement that fell across the computer screen; n.o.body had reared up out of the darkness at her back. Her colleagues would have noticed, however few of them remained. She raised the phone again as Ellen said 'Do you remember seeing anything?'

Charlotte found she had no great wish to learn 'Such as what?'

'Maybe we all slept where his house was, except I didn't notice any bits of it, did you?'

'That's my dream.'

'I don't understand. Why would you want that?'

'I didn't. Anything but. I mean it was a Glen, oh thanks.'

He'd veered to her desk on his way to the lift to return Ellen's chapters, dog-eared now. 'Monday,' he mouthed and left Charlotte with a brief squeeze of her upheld wrist, so that for a second she thought he meant to take the phone. She couldn't help wishing he had. The conversation had begun to feel like a trap into which she and Ellen were leading each other with no sense of its limits, let alone of a way to escape. 'What are you saying about him?' Ellen urged.

'Nothing. I'm saying I dreamed I had to go down under where there used to be a house.'

She felt as if the nightmare were poised to continue. The cellars might consist of rooms barely large enough for her to stand upright or move her arms away from her sides. The one to which she was led down unlit steps treacherous with soil, and then narrow sloping pa.s.sages so lightless that her eyes felt caked with earth, would press her head and shoulders low with its cold stone roof. Even before the cell shut with a dull thick slam that resounded into the underground distance, she would feel like a crippled child. For an endless moment she scarcely knew she was hearing a voice. 'Anyone there?' it said or finished by saying.

Charlotte glared around the office, which was almost deserted. 'I still am.'

'No,' Ellen said and seemed to wish she could leave it at that. 'I asked was there anyone with you in your dream.'

Why had Charlotte thought the room was only almost deserted? n.o.body was visible in front of her. Everyone else had sufficient intelligence to leave while there was air to breathe, before the walls collapsed inwards as their age proved unequal to the weight of earth. Meanwhile Ellen's question had revived the sight of eyes no longer buried, blinking away earth to peer gleefully up at Charlotte. 'This isn't getting us anywhere,' she said more sharply than Ellen deserved. 'We'll have to cut it short. They're locking up.'

Having felt desperate enough to invent this as a reason, she was irrationally afraid that it might prove to be true a that she could somehow be imprisoned in the subterranean room all weekend. 'See what you can find out,' she said and struggled to believe that her next breath didn't taste of earth. 'The sooner we've got your synopsis the better, all right? And if you need to call me don't hesitate.'

She would never have expected to be so briskly professional with Ellen. Perhaps her tone was why Ellen didn't answer, instead giving way to a silence that felt not just deep but dark until Charlotte cut it off. She shut down the computer before leaning left to retrieve her bag. A dark shape, vague but eager, swelled out of the corner in response a her own shadow. She grabbed the canvas bag and shoved Ellen's chapters into it, followed by three sets of bound proofs. She was already on her feet, and didn't spare the restlessly shadowy area behind her desk another glance. All the movements that she was unable to avoid glimpsing under desks as she hurried out of the bas.e.m.e.nt room had to be her shadows. No wonder they seemed to be imitating her as they kept pace.

She wasn't anxious to use the lift, even if she would have such s.p.a.ce as it offered all to herself. She almost ran along the corridor narrowed by lockers to the stairs. Such was her haste to reach the street that the door was creeping shut on its inexorable metal arm before she was fully aware that the staircase was unlit. Someone must be working on the lights; she heard activity above her a it couldn't be below her a in the dark. Shouldn't the electrician be using a flashlight? Presumably the sc.r.a.ping, like nails on the concrete, showed that he was applying some tool to the problem. She thought of asking how long it would take to fix, and had opened her mouth when she realised that the clawlike sound was approaching out of the dark as the wedge of light around her dwindled to nothingness. Barely in time she blocked the door and dodged into the corridor. She would use a lift after all.

One was waiting behind its doors. It hadn't finished opening when she darted in and jabbed the b.u.t.ton to send it upwards. As the doors faltered and set about meeting again, a Ram editor emerged from the Women's and sprinted for the lift. She'd shoved her handbag between the doors when a fellow editor called for her to wait. 'Sorry,' she said to Charlotte and withdrew.

'Sorry,' Charlotte responded, having automatically retreated into a corner, and lurched forwards. She'd said it without thinking, but to whom? She hadn't backed into anyone tall and thin, let alone taller than she was and considerably thinner. The dry jagged sound beneath the nonchalant hum of the lift was too faint to define; it certainly wasn't the clicking of teeth bared in a delighted grimace or already far too bare. Nevertheless she twisted around to see that she was utterly alone, unless someone had sneaked behind her as she moved. The sight of the lift was oppressive enough, the windowless grey cage little wider than her outstretched arms and so indefinitely lit that she couldn't tell how many shadows were sharing the s.p.a.ce.

As soon as it lumbered to a halt she dragged the doors apart, bruising her fingers, and ran across the unguarded lobby. The crowd outside on New Oxford Street made her feel hemmed in, particularly at her back. If a smell of earth seemed to linger in her nostrils, it must be as imaginary as it had been in the first place. A bus to Bethnal Green and beyond was approaching, but before she could risk a dash across the road she saw that it was too full to stop. She wanted to be home, up on the roof. Hugging her stuffed bag as if it were an emblem of her ability to function, she struggled through the crowd to Tottenham Court Road.

The stairs to the Underground were so packed with commuters that she took a firmer grip on her bag, though the gesture helped the crowd to pin her arms against her sides. Whoever was immediately above her seemed anxious to travel, but did he really need to press against her back? She could imagine he was eager for his dinner a he felt famished to the bone. He was forcing her downwards step by helpless step, but n.o.body would notice, since she appeared to be acting just like them. As she reached the circular concourse at the foot of the stairs she opened her mouth to release some kind of noise and swung around. There was n.o.body in sight who resembled the person she'd sensed behind her. Everyone looked well-fed and entirely unaware of her, and she couldn't be sure that she'd turned to face a loitering smell of earth.

She was heading for the Central Line when she faltered at the ticket barrier. The relentless escalator would carry her down to a platform almost as overloaded as the train was bound to be. All at once she couldn't live with being borne into the subterranean dark amid a press of bodies and increasingly less air. Before she could step aside someone shoved her forwards a a businessman intent on finishing a mobile call. As she fought her way up to street level, against a descent of commuters so implacable it seemed as mindless as earth collapsing into a pit, she kept having to suppress the notion that a hand was about to seize her by the shoulder or the neck.

At last she stumbled out beneath the sky, which was too distant and too overcast to offer much relief from the pressure of the crowd, and battled along Oxford Street to the stop ahead of the one opposite the publishers. She was just in time to catch a bus, although she would have said it was full even before several pa.s.sengers joined her in the aisle. As it made its ponderous halting journey to Bethnal Green, her view out of the windows was restricted to a parade of shops and bars supporting older architecture on their backs, a spectacle occasionally varied by a glimpse down a side street of a church or some other venerable building. The view made her feel all the more shut in, as though the windows were no better than antique panoramas exhibiting an artificial progress. Once she was off the bus she would breathe more freely. Had somebody behind her been gardening? That might also explain why they were so thin.

As soon as the bus reached Bethnal Green Road she left it, three stops short of hers. It sailed away before she could identify the pa.s.senger who'd stood so close. The pavements were crowded with homecomers, and even though the traders were packing up their stalls of clothes and discs and jewellery and groceries, the route still felt constricted. Charlotte took a side street that bordered a park, which accommodated several haphazard games of football and more supine forms of recreation. As she crossed the park she hesitated only once, distracted by the twitching of an elongated shadow beside her. It belonged to a young tree that must have shifted in a breeze she hadn't noticed. The tree was far too slim for anyone to have sidled from behind it or to be using it for cover.

An alley between gentrified four-storey tenements led from a gate in the railings to the pavement opposite her flat. She unlocked the door at the top of the steps and tramped up the stone stairs. Even the pa.s.sage that enclosed them as they climbed from balcony to balcony felt unappealingly narrow just now. Without pausing to dump her bag in her second-floor flat she continued up to the roof.

She dropped the bag on the faded sunlounger flanked by potted plants a Susie's from the top floor a and leaned on the wall beside the communal barbecue shrouded in plastic. A train whined along the viaduct parallel to Whitechapel Road, beyond which an airliner as bright as a sunlit knife was sinking above the Thames towards Heathrow. Charlotte raised her face to the tattered sky and had taken several increasingly deep breaths when her mobile rang.

She recognised the number, though she had only ever used it to say that her train to Vivaldi was delayed. She thought it best to put on a voice as professional as it was amiable. 'Glen?' she said with a hint of surprise.

'Sure. Sorry if I'm calling when it's not appropriate, but I don't know if you need to hear the news.'

Whatever she might have expected of him, it wasn't this, especially his wariness that sounded close to nervous. 'I don't either,' she said.

'I guess that means you haven't. OK. Sorry.' His pause might have been meant to express further sympathy before he added 'I'm afraid it's about your cousin.'

'Oh, Glen, come on. Not more afterthoughts about her book,' Charlotte blurted, and then his silence gave her time to hold her suddenly tense breath.

EIGHTEEN.

She had to research Thurstaston, otherwise she would be letting her family down a Charlotte, who believed she was worth publishing, and Hugh, who'd already done some of the work for her, and even Rory, who had tried in his abrasive way to help. She didn't need to think about the mirror in the cliff, even though it must have been stuck among roots in a burrow, not held in the remains of a hand. Or perhaps she could think of it if she rendered it manageable by working it into her next book. After all, the first one seemed to be letting her come to terms with the injustice she'd suffered at the tribunal; indeed, her new chapters were rendering the memory remote. Perhaps Carlotta or Hugo or Roy could find a magic mirror buried on the common or hidden in a cave by a sorcerer, and why not Arthur Pendemon, if he was as wizardly as his name suggested? Each of them would look into the mirror and see the dream they most wished for, although what would Helen visualise? Presumably her old folk in miraculously rude health, except that as Ellen tried to hold onto the idea it was ousted by the thought of confronting an altogether less welcome reflection, not an old woman but somebody who didn't even have age as an excuse for her ma.s.s of pallid bloated spongy flesh, which managed to be both puffy and sagging, a feat unworthy of applause. This wasn't a memory, it had just been a glimpse too brief to be trusted. She mustn't let it reach her nerves again. She dismissed from the screen the chapter she'd started to reread to see if any of it was worth preserving. As soon as the jittering cursor lodged on the Frugonet icon she clicked the slippery mouse.

She'd had enough of her blurred reflection. Across the street a girl was baring almost the whole of her slim bronzed self in a minute bikini on a second-floor balcony. Ellen considered stepping onto hers to catch a little of the late-afternoon sun, and imagined herself as one of a pair of figures in an old-fashioned clock; if she emerged the other girl would have to leave her lounger and retreat into her niche. Equally, as long as the slim girl was out there could be no place for a Ellen left her musings at that, because the computer had brought her the Internet. Once it responded to her pa.s.sword a rohtua, which had started making her feel backward when she'd learned she had to rewrite her book but which no longer did a she typed 'Arthur Pendemon' in the search box.

She'd hardly clicked the mouse when the screen filled with pallor. It was displaying a page of search results, the first of which looked promising: Arthur Pendemon's Dwelling at Thurstaston Mound. The next listing included a quotation: . . . Arthur Pendemon, who sounds like he fancied himself as some sort of demonic economist . . .

She must have leaned towards the monitor, because her ill-defined reflection appeared to swell up. She recoiled a sat back, rather a and clenched her clammy fist on the mouse to bring up the site.

It was called Mumbo Jumbjoe, which was also the pseudonym of its apparently solitary writer. A sidebar listed topics: Flying Sauce, Pyramid Selling Ancient Egyptian Style, Happy c.r.a.ppy Mediums, Where to Shove a Bent Spoon and Other Useless Tricks, Aliens Stole Their Brains . . . The page on which Ellen had landed was ent.i.tled Vic and Ed's Ectoplasmic Extravaganza, and she saw why soon enough.

Blame the Victorians and a few Edwardians while you're at

it. Eras of scientific advance my a.r.s.e. Maybe they were,

but they go to show too many people that ought to know

better can't cope with too much reason and get desperate

to believe in something else, anything you can't prove.

What's changed, eh? You'd think humanity couldn't live

without magic. Back then it was everywhere a lot of people

looked. You couldn't walk down your garden without

tripping over a fairy, and even Conan Doyle ended up

thinking they were real. Pity he didn't have Sherlock

Holmes to sort him out, because he got taken in by the

spiritualists after his wife died. Freud ought to have gone

into why their victims needed to see lots of white stuff