That didn't make a hat full of sense, did it now? There could be no connection.

But there is, Johnny boy. There is a connection. You know there is.

You know that because you ignored the demand for chocolate: that's why Elizabeth fell from her bike and tore open her chin, anda He blocked the thoughts.

The thunder died to nothing. Rain tapped at the roof and windows; it was the sound of fleshless fingers rapping maddeningly. Not just wanting to enter the house but to get into his head, too.

Christ.

Suddenly he felt hot. There was no air in the room. He slipped out of bed, crossed to the door by touch alone in the darkness, then went down to the lounge.

A little cooler downstairs, he felt the air caress his naked body. After switching on a table lamp he went to the window. Peering through his reflected face as if it belonged to a ghost, he looked outside. There was nothing but absolute darkness. All he could see beyond the gla.s.s were rolling beads of rainwater.

h.e.l.l, he felt so wide-awake he could have been shot full of cocaine. Restless, he prowled the big room, looking at the blocks of stone that formed the wall. Not one was the same size or shape. Some looked like the heads of statues from which the faces had been slashed. Lowering his gaze from the stone wall, he looked down into the millrace.

The gla.s.s lay there, just a step away from his bare feet. Now he felt the vibration of those subterranean waters running up through the stone. He sensed the tremendous power there. A surging, gushing elemental force. The gla.s.s screened out the sound. Nor could he see anything. The observation chamber existed only as a black, fathomless pit.

After all this rain the stream was in spate. It rushed down from the lake, then under the house. He'd never felt the vibration as strong as this before.

As much to distract himself from his own troubled thoughts he switched on the spotlights under the millrace gla.s.s. At first the light dazzled him. All he could see was a block of white light beneath the gla.s.s set there in the floor. Soon, however, his eyes adjusted to the brilliant glare.

It was quite a sight. Certainly enough to take his mind away from the mystery letters.

Water swirled in a boiling vortex, surging, whirling, exploding upwards, spattering the gla.s.s. The sense of power there was breathtaking. How many thousands of gallons a minute were coursing through the channel? He couldn't even begin to guess a figure. But the volume must be tremendous. The sight of it was nothing less than awe inspiring.

To the house the millrace must be like a main artery in the body. A conduit for liquid under pressure. He felt its beat through the soles of his feet. He pictured Elizabeth sitting here cross-legged to watch TV. Dear G.o.da if the gla.s.s should break when the millrace was in flood? He tried to stop his imagination forming pictures, but the force of his thoughts was too great.

Screaming, hair streaming out, eyes terrified. "Dad!" Then vanishing down into the pit of swirling water. She becomes the piston in a cylinder driven by brutal forcea rammed through the tunnel beneath; grating against stone walls; stripping skin from muscle, then muscle from bone before being spat out the other side in a froth of blooda No. The gla.s.s would not break. Strong enough for an elephant the vendor had said. Even so, the images lingered.

John stood there, watching water cascade along its course. Every so often it erupted in a blaze of white froth as if creatures writhed beneath its surface. He knew that long ago men and women would stare for hours on end into fast flowing streams. It was a way of inducing hypnotic trances. Then they might commune with dead ancestors or hear the commands of their G.o.ds. The stream thrashing its way across the bottom of the pit held his attention in the same way. He felt his self detach from his body.

And at that moment he found himself in the Necropolis again, walking through the maze of crypts that formed the Vale Of Tears. It was night. The darkness near absolute. The doors of the vaults were closed tight on their sleeping occupants. He walked up the ramp to the top of the cliff. A few yards away lay the grief stowne (grief-stowne? Yeah, why not.)a the grief stowne of Jess Bowen.

There a man did something by the grave. Tears ran down his face. He was working at an object with a knife.

In his dream, John stood at the man's side. He looked down. Blood ran down the face of the little sobbing statue, just as the beer had yesterday. John turned to the man. It was the landlord of The Swan. He was cutting the throat of a rabbit that belonged to his young son, and he was crying as he did so, sick with fright and self-disgust, and he let the dying rabbit kick and scream and bleed over the tomb.

"You've got what you want," the landlord cried. "You've got what you want! You're not having anymorea"

John threw out his elbowa it struck the cushions that formed the back of the sofa. Light came in a gray wash through the curtains. He hauled himself into a sitting position. How long had he been sleeping there naked on the sofa?

Shivering, he stood up. He couldn't believe how cold he'd become. He felt as if he'd been swimming in the ocean in winter.

Cold to the roots of his bone, he made his way upstairs before slipping into the warm envelope of sheets beside his wife.

2.

Keith Haslem, holed up in a motel three hundred miles from Skelbrooke, couldn't sleep either.

His muscles ached with tension. When he looked at his bare back in the bathroom mirror ridges appeared to twitch, then squirm beneath the skin. f.u.c.k. The muscles in his G.o.dd.a.m.n back were alive-yeah, but not alive in a human biology sense, but alive like a nest of snakes-twisting, writhing, coiling, uncoiling like crazy. They were going into spasm every couple of hours. Just yesterday his leg had gotten the cramp. He'd watched agonized, yet with a terrible kind of fascination, as calf muscle rose against skin. Almost the size of a baby's fist, knots strained against the underside of his skin. It looked like a face straining through from the other side. And trying its darndest to burst out. G.o.d Almighty, it hurt! A sickening hurt that made him want to pound the wall of the motel, yelling at the top of his voice.

Now his wife and daughters were sleeping in the bedroom. And Keith Haslem felt like a caged animal. Maybe he should have stayed home? He could have confronted the demands in the letter head-on rather than running away like that. s.h.i.t, his back hurt. He looked again at the skin with its covering of black hairs. Then he looked back at his eyes-they were tired, yet they had a burning look to them. Tired, frightened eyes. h.e.l.l, he wanted to go home.

But he knew that he daren't. Not yet. There might be another letter waiting for him. Just like the last one. Lying under a shard of tombstone outside the back door.

Rubbing his sore back, he looked at the shower. It might ease the ache. And in the absence of acupuncturists, or ma.s.seurs or even f.u.c.king morphine he might as well give it a go. He turned the shower full on hot. There was a trick to these motel showers. You had to twist the lever as deep into the hot mark as it would go. Once it came through boiling hot you gradually nudged the shower control over toward cold until it was just right.

He stood watching the shower. Soon steam billowed as the water temperature soared.

Groaning, tired to the bone, he rolled his shoulders. His neck muscles had stiffened, and he felt the makings of a headache in the back of his head. He rested his face against the gla.s.s shower door, watching the water as, not far from boiling, it blasted down into the ceramic trough. Jesus. This stress was really getting him down. He ached; dizzy spells turned his brain a.s.s over tip. Maybe this was the makings of flu.

The water looked hot enough now. He opened he door, then carefully leaned in, his arm snaking around outside the flow of water. Even tiny droplets. .h.i.tting his arm stung like fury.

His fingers had almost reached the shower control lever when something popped inside his head. I heard that, he thought, surprised.

The artery running through the segment of brain that controlled motor function within his body had ruptured. Blood flowed out into the brain, crushing delicate tissues, destroying whole bundles of nerves.

Keith Haslem felt nothing of this. He simply froze there. A naked man reaching into the shower. Something was happening to him, but he didn't know what. Only he couldn't move his limbs anymore. He was conscious. Completely conscious. He saw the jets of boiling water. He saw the tiles beyond through the stream. He saw the kid's shampoo bottle on the shelf in the shower.

Another thousand or so neurons died inside his brain.

Keith Haslem slowly collapsed forward into the shower. He turned as he slipped downward, his one good hand clutching the edge of the door. A moment later the top half of his body lay in the ceramic trough. He looked up at the jets of water driving down into his face. The water also struck his throat and chest and genitals.

He'd never known such pain. The water was only a few degrees short of boiling. His flesh turned red, skin began to peel.

He couldn't bear the agony. Yet he could not move.

With all his heart he wanted to scream for help. For someone to save him from this living h.e.l.l-fire.

But he couldn't utter so much as a groan. All he could do was lay there, his mind clear, his senses acute, his nerves raw, his skin nearer purple than red. And all the time the near-boiling water blazed down upon his naked body.

3.

That Sunday afternoon Val took Paul and Elizabeth on a duty visit to their old neighbors in Leeds. John said he needed to work on the first chapter of the book. Val had smiled understandingly. "In that case I'll stretch the visit out to a couple of hours."

As he suspected he couldn't settle to work on the book. Instead he found himself taking the two letters from the envelope and brooding over them, looking for some clue hidden, perhaps, in the handwriting. He held them up to the gla.s.s again, looking for words that had been erased or some faint mark that would point to the ident.i.ty of the writer. Both pieces of paper bore the watermark that could just be made out when held to the light. An ugly face in profile that was little more than smoky marks in the fabric of the paper. He tried tearing a corner of it. It was tough, but did tear when he applied greater pressure.

He was still examining it when he heard Sam bark. In a blur of black the dog sped round the house and onto the driveway. John looked down to see an old lady walk through the gate, then breeze up the path. She was looking the Water Mill over with interest. He watched with a sinking sensation. Dear G.o.d, the dog would bark furiously at the woman and probably frighten her silly. Sam did stand there with his front paws splayed, his eyes on her, obviously ready to deliver a series of machine gun-rapid barks.

The old lady, however, crisply gestured for Sam to come to her.

To John's surprise the dog obeyed, tail wagging, his head down as if shy to meet the stranger. She made a fuss of the dog. He lapped it up, sniffing her hand, and swishing his tail so hard it swept gravel from the driveway.

John didn't recognize the visitor. Tall, with no sign of a stoop despite her age, her long gray hair was tied back, and she wore a summer dress of pale pink, with a set of pearls around her neck. Even from this distance she cut a distinguished figure. Dropping the letters onto the table, he went down to her.

"h.e.l.lo," he said, exiting by the front door as the old lady walked up the path with Sam following.

"Good afternoon."

John noticed the way her bright blue eyes looked him over, a.s.sessing him from his shoes to his hair. She held out her hand.

As he shook it she said, "I'm Dianne Kelly." She looked up at the house. "I used to live here. My bedroom was the one over the front door."

"Oh?"

"Now. Let me explain why I am here. I had a telephone call from an old friend last night. Stan Price, I understand you've met him?"

"Yes, just a couple of days ago."

"Good. I suspect you went to his house to ask him some questions. As you will have seen, Stan is little far gone to be able to answer them as coherently as one would wish." She looked John in the eye. "Perhaps tea is in order, because we've a long conversation ahead of us, Mr. Newton."

CHAPTER 19.

1.

This is where I found out everything. The words went through John's head as he showed Dianne Kelly into the living room. The letters, the Bowen grave-everything.

He saw her sharp eyes absorb every detail. She took a particular interest in the observation window that exposed the millrace. Still in flood, it surged through the stone tunnel beneath the house in a white fury.

"That's new," she said. "When I lived here the stone floor was covered with an a.s.sortment of rugs. We didn't have central heating, either." She smiled. "Or television. We did have a wireless in a big brown Bakelite case over there beneath the window. My father used to love to listen to opera from Vienna. At night it came through on long wave with such beautiful clarity. My father always used to say that Germany had the most beautiful music but the most diabolical politics." She smiled again. "You must forgive me if I wander. We oldies are inclined to do that, you know, Mr. Newton."

"John, please. Take a seat, Mrs. Kelly."

"Ah, thank you. It is Miss Kelly, I never married." She chose the sofa then sat down. "I carry too much personal baggage to make an agreeable wife for a man. Besides, I became too wrapped up in my career. I trained as a doctor and ended up serving thirty years here in Skelbrooke as a general pract.i.tioner. Oh, what a lovely view of the garden. I'm pleased you haven't torn down the orcharda you don't plan to do away with it, do you?"

"No, not at all, Dr. Kelly. I've always wanted to live in a house with an orchard."

"Then you have your wish. And please dispense with that fussy t.i.tle. Call me Dianne."

"All right, Dianne." He smiled. "Do you have milk in your tea?"

"Just a drop, please."

He found himself rushing to make the drink. Once more he found himself eager to hear what she had to tell him. When he set the cups down on the table by the sofa he expected more small talk. But Dianne got straight to the point.

"John. You have received an anonymous letter."

"It's two letters now."

"I see. Will you show them to me?"

He returned with the letters. She didn't take them from him but touched the tabletopa leave them there. His heart was beating hard. This is what it feels like when you break down the doors of a tomb to see what lies inside, he told himself. As much as curiosity he felt a hefty dose of trepidation. He was leaving the familiar to venture into unknown territory.

Choosing the armchair facing the sofa, he sat down, then leaned forward so he could see the letters. He watched her study them. Her blue eyes burned. The color went from her high-cheekboned face. This wasn't a pleasant experience for her. Hand trembling, she raised the cup to sip the liquid.

When she spoke she didn't mention the letters. Sitting back in the sofa she said, "Stan Price telephoned me last night. As soon as I heard what he had to say I knew I had to come here. Because the rest of the Skelbrooke sheep won't so much as bleat."

Skelbrooke sheep? He figured she wasn't being complimentary about his fellow villagers. But then in the pub last night they did look like a bunch of sheep. Frightened sheep at that.

He said, "What did Stan tell you exactly?"

"Not much. An awful and freakish thing happened. As he was speaking to me the telephone line was struck by lightning."

John's skin crawled. "Is he badly hurt?"

"Fortunately, no. Most of the charge earthed through the telephone cable, although he was knocked to the floor, and he has a burn to the fleshy part of his ear."

"You've seen him today?"

"Oh yes. I've just come from the house, in fact. He still looks shaken but the most distressing aspect is that he's as confused as ever. Senile Dementia is a wicked thing, isn't it? It's a cancer of the personality rather than the body. And Stan Price was such a perfect gentleman. Honest, hardworking, generous, compa.s.sionate. He was a very good friend to me for years and years." She sighed. "I spoke to Cynthia, his daughter, you know? As painfully shy as ever. She does genuinely care for her father, but I have to say I'm not taken with the son-in-law, Robert." Then she added surprisingly. "To me, he looks a b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

John felt himself warm to Dianne Kelly. So she got the same vibes from Robert Gregory, too? John nodded. "I can't say I was taken with Robert either. He seemed a bit too full of himself."

"Of course, he's only looking after Stan so he can get his hands on the money once Stan goes. He's probably dipping into Stan's accounts even now. After all, I don't see an idler like Gregory being able to afford handmade Italian shoes, do you?"

"I see your point." Dianne Kelly would have made a formidable detective with that attention to detail.

"Which is very sad, John, but it's not why I am here." She clasped her hands together on her lap. Once more he thought she'd begin to talk about the letters. But she didn't. Not at first anyway. She said, "I'm going to relate certain events that happened here in Skelbrooke. It was a long time ago now. More than seventy years, in fact. The place was a lot different then. Roads quieter. You'd see horse drawn carts. The Necropolis up there on the hill was still a working cemetery. Special funeral trains brought mourners and their dear departed in black carriages. Sometimes there would be a dozen funerals a day, especially after a cold snap. And of course whole families would arrive by the same trains to visit graves. It was a bustling place in those days. As well as a full timetable of funerals there were teams of gardeners keeping the place trim. You'd be surprised to see the cemetery in those days, John. There was a tearoom staffed by girls in black uniforms with black lace pinnies. There were even black lace tablecloths on the tables. Stan Price was a real joker as a child; he told me that there was even black sugar in the bowls, and milk dyed a funereal purple." She smiled. "Children actually believed him, too. The Necropolis brought prosperity to the village-it employed dozens of people. Of course, it was a hangover from the Victorians-they were death obsessed. They saw funerals as being glamorous, romantic rituals that had all the pomp and display of a society wedding." She looked up at John, her eyes wise but sad. "See how easy it is for us old folk to wander off the subject?" Her eyes rested on the letters. "Now, John. I have things to tell youa"

2.