THIRTY-FOUR.

'I will be.'

'So will I,' Rory said, but only inside his skull. He couldn't judge how long ago he'd last heard Charlotte speak, let alone when somebody else had made the remark to which she'd responded. At some point this person had also said 'He hasn't missed you.' Perhaps he hadn't, but he was doing so now, a.s.suming that Charlotte and Ellen and Hugh were no longer with him. He needed to communicate how he felt, if he was capable of feeling anything any more. Weren't his thoughts a kind of feeling? Wishing that his cousins and his brother hadn't left him was, and surely that ought to bring him to the surface of himself. Only he had no idea where that might be, especially now that he was surrounded by silence, wadded in it like a sculpture packed in a box and just as unable to move. He ought to have struggled towards Charlotte's voice, but now it was too late.

It needn't be. If he'd managed to hear, however increasingly hard it was to distinguish this from the memory of a dream, his senses hadn't entirely deserted him. Were any others waiting to be noticed? Not his vision, since he couldn't even tell whether he was seeing an uncoloured void or an equally featureless dark. He couldn't imagine what there would be to taste, and there seemed to be nothing to smell. As for touch, he appeared to have forgotten how that worked. He had no idea where his hands might be, and that went for the rest of him. He couldn't even identify which part of him was being teased if not taunted by a persistent draught, which also had to mean he was alone, because surely any visitor would have closed the door or window on his behalf.

He had no means of measuring how long he lay inert within the thought before its implications overtook him. He couldn't be wholly senseless if he was feeling a draught. It was on the upper surface of an extension of him somewhere in the middle distance. It was on the back of his hand, beyond an arm that felt dully pierced by a needle at the tip of a tube that rested on it. Could he raise the hand to his eyes or open them to find it? Before he knew it he did both.

He was lying under a white slab almost as wide as his vision. It was the ceiling of a large long room a a hospital ward. To his left a window open at the top was letting in a breeze. To his right was a line of beds, each occupied by a supine sheeted figure. They were matched across an aisle, and directly opposite him was a solitary seated visitor. Now he recalled Charlotte saying she'd received some kind of urgent message, but had Hugh and Ellen also been called away? He was starting to recapture an impression that they had recently been at his bedside. 'Where is everyone?' he wondered aloud.

The loudness of his voice surprised him and startled the woman, who cried 'Oh, he's back.'

For a moment Rory was afraid to learn whom she was addressing. If she meant to alert the staff, it didn't work. Perhaps it was a proclamation to anyone who might be interested, but her entire audience seemed as unimpressed as the patient whose hand she was holding. 'How long was I gone?' Rory said.

'Only a couple of days, dear. I expect my Jack and the rest of them would call it just a nap. How has it left you feeling?'

Rory flexed his limbs, which hadn't lost too much strength. 'Alive,' he said.

'That's all you should expect, I always say. Then anything else is a bonus.'

This struck Rory as less a thought than a subst.i.tute for one, but his renewed senses welcomed even that. 'Weren't my family here?' he said.

'They're one right enough.'

'Yes, but I'm asking when did they go.'

'Your brother and the very thin girl only stayed for a bit, and then they had a'

'Which thin girl?'

'What was her name again?' Presumably the woman wasn't really waiting for her husband to answer, because she told him 'Ellen, that was what.'

'I wouldn't call her thin,' Rory objected.

'You mustn't have seen her for a while.'

He tried to remember how long it had been, but the memory of losing his senses as he drove around the roundabout was in the way. He was disconcerted to realise how careless he'd just been in testing his limbs. Why weren't they broken? He'd ended up no worse than bruised and stiff. Perhaps, as was said to be the case with drunks, his state had protected him from serious injury. For the moment it seemed more important to discover 'What did they have to do?'

'Did you all go to a camp somewhere?'

This made Rory feel as if the past had crept up behind him. 'Not recently, no.'

'Well, that's where they've gone.'

'What for?'

'They weren't telling us, were they, Jack? They went off and you wouldn't know who was looking after which.'

Rory heard his questions growing aggressive but was too uneasy to rein them in. 'How do you mean?'

'Him carrying on like he didn't know which way to turn and her not wanting anybody seeing her, which you can understand.'

Rory didn't, which left him still more anxious. Hugh had been losing his way when Rory was robbed of his senses, and now or at the same time Ellen had fallen distressingly ill. 'Why would they go all that way if they're like that?' he demanded. 'Forget I spoke. You said you don't know.'

'No, I said they never let on. The other girl did.'

He managed to cling to his patience and ask 'What did she say?'

'Did you leave something there when you were sleeping out?'

'Not that I know of.' That meant no until his words caught up with him. 'Such as what?' he was compelled to add.

'Something you buried by the sound of it.'

'I've never buried anything.'

'Maybe it was one of them that did. I just got the feeling you were mixed up with it somehow.' She appeared to be giving Rory a last chance to explain before she said a shade defiantly 'All I know is they were off to dig it up and it seemed like it was for your sake.'

Rory felt as if she were arousing memories he didn't realise he had. The first time his senses had come close to shutting down, he had been researching Thurstaston. He'd found a reference to someone called Pendemon, and had he overheard Hugh and their cousins discussing the owner of the name? 'They should all have had a bit more faith if you want my opinion,' the woman said.

Rory wasn't sure he did, but heard himself say 'All?'

The woman leaned forwards as if to keep a confidence from her husband. 'I'd lay money the other girl went off there too. Maybe she didn't think they were up to it by themselves, the way they both were. They should have trusted things would come out right, shouldn't they? It's my belief they will if they're meant to. You're the proof.'

While Rory didn't care to be reduced to this, he stayed quiet as the woman said 'Funny that you can't think what they're after if it's supposed to bring you back. Anyway, they're the ones need bringing back now, aren't they?'

At once Rory knew she was right, but not in the way she imagined. Whatever Hugh and their cousins had set out to do for his benefit, it wasn't just unnecessary now; it felt more dangerous than his mind could encompa.s.s. He had to call them back. 'Where are my things?' he said.

'Nurse will have to show you.' His urgency seemed to alarm the old woman, who clutched her husband's hand with both of hers as she called 'Nurse.'

'You'll know where they're keeping people's stuff, won't you? Just tell me where.'

'I don't know where they can have got to.' This apparently referred to the staff, because she added 'They ought to look at you if you're thinking of getting up.'

'I just want my mobile.'

'Are you stuck with one of those as well? You can't use them in here.'

'Then I'll have to outside.' Rory had another thought and slid open the drawer of the bedside table, which was so rudimentary it was colourless. The drawer did indeed contain a key with a blurred number inked on a plastic tag, which he used to indicate the metal lockers at the far end of the ward. 'I won't tell anyone you said,' he a.s.sured her. 'It's all locked up in there, yes?'

'You oughtn't to be walking when there's n.o.body to see to you. You don't know how you'll be.'

'Let's find out.' Rory hoped to encourage her by including her, but it simply made her more nervous. He withdrew the needle from his arm and laid the tube on the bedside table before groping under the sheet, where he found a reason to be grateful that his sensations were still understated. He took some time and care over disenc.u.mbering his p.e.n.i.s from a tube, which he hung over a metal stand, where it emitted a single unstoppable drip. In shuffling his feet one at a time to the edge of the bed he pulled the sheet from beneath the mattress. Planting his hands on the bed, he levered himself more or less steadily into a sitting position, which bunched the sheet in his lap. 'You mightn't want to watch this,' he advised.

'Don't you worry about that, love. You won't be showing me anything I haven't seen on my Jack.'

Rory found this flirtatious and equally uncomfortably maternal. Perhaps she only meant how he was dressed, which was bad enough. He was wearing an abbreviated gown that tied none too closely at the back, so that it would have exposed his b.u.t.tocks if they weren't done up in a plastic pad, all of which left him feeling worse than infantile. He poked his feet over the brink of the mattress and lowered them to the floor, then stared at the woman as he wobbled off the bed. He meant to make her look away, but she gazed at him with additional concern. Resting one hand on the windowsill, he wavered to his feet. Perhaps he'd managed to deflect more than her attention, because she vanished.

So did the room and his body into utter nothingness. Only the realisation that it contained some kind of light prevented it from extinguishing his mind as well. He was about to devote any strength to producing a nightmare cry when he became aware of his hand on the windowsill. He hadn't reverted to insensibility after all. He'd just stood up too quickly, and the insight seemed to restore his senses. The blankness retreated to the limit of his vision and beyond, exposing the sight of the ward full of beds and the woman watching him more solicitously than ever. 'You aren't well, are you?' she seemed almost to hope.

'Never better,' Rory declared and took several increasingly confident steps to the end of the bed.

She looked as if she weren't entirely convinced he was walking. Her husband and the occupants of the other beds were demonstrating how out of the common it was. Rory wasn't about to let anyone steal his confidence, not least because he had a sudden unappealing notion that someone would be glad to. As he padded down the aisle between the sheeted bodies he had to fend off the idea that their insensibility was capable of drawing him in. He hurried to the farthest of the lockers opposite an unoccupied desk and slid his key into the lock.

His mobile was resting on top of a pile of his clothes. The thought of venturing outside in his present outfit to phone resembled a bad dream. He grabbed the mobile and his clothes and shut the locker before shouldering the doors aside and dodging into the corridor. It was deserted, which only made him feel more like an escaping prisoner. n.o.body could stop him, or was there someone who could? Was he forgetting a name it was dangerous to forget or else to remember? Hugging his belongings, he followed the overhead signs to the nearest Men.

The room beyond the terse word was deserted too. Above the sinks a mirror multiplied the white tiles of the walls, so that Rory felt surrounded by a relentless absence of colour. He was suddenly afraid of not seeing his reflection. He made himself step forwards, and in a moment saw a ridiculously costumed apparition with his face. He took refuge in the nearest cubicle, where he planted his clothes on top of the low cistern before fumbling to undo the gown and tear off the degrading pad. In no time he was dressed, socks and shoes too. He stuffed the pad into a bin and left the gown hanging in the cubicle as he returned to the corridor.

n.o.body could see the escaped patient now. He was just another visitor. He hurried to the lifts, the nearest of which opened at once to his summons as if it were as impatient as he was. It certainly seemed eager to box him in with its dull flat grey doors and walls and floor and ceiling. The greyness struck him as less a colour than a subst.i.tute for one, and as much of a threat to close his senses down as the white tiles had been. He stared at the numbers above the doors and tried to grasp what colour the illuminated digits were. Perhaps the attempt to determine it helped him retain his senses, but he hadn't identified the tint of the lackl.u.s.tre 1 by the time the doors released him.

The lobby was scattered with visitors and staff, who presumably saw as little of him as he did of them. As he emerged from the building his mind appeared to lighten to match the sky. So long as it didn't grow as blank, he thought, and switched his mobile on. He took several unnecessary moments to decide on calling Charlotte. Wherever she was, he a.s.sumed it must be out of reach, because she was represented by an automatic message. As he listened for Hugh and then for Ellen, his concentration felt dangerously close to blotting out his surroundings. Worse still, it seemed to have blotted out his family. All three were as silent as packed earth.

THIRTY-FIVE.

As Charlotte stepped on the escalator at Liverpool Lime Street she became afraid that she would miss a call. Retrieving the mobile from her handbag, she triggered the display. While the stairs bore her downwards she was able to watch the signal dwindling as if, like her, it were being dragged into the earth. It vanished as the stair beneath her feet, sending her off the escalator. She had yet to hear from Hugh or Ellen in response to her increasingly terse messages. The destination boards at either end of the underground platform promised a train to West Kirby in two minutes, which meant that for at least another ten she would have no chance to hear.

She dropped the mobile in her bag, where it nestled against the flashlight she'd bought in an Indian store near the station. Whichever way she looked along the spa.r.s.ely populated platform she was confronted by a tunnel shrunk around darkness, but for hours she'd been unable to distinguish her claustrophobia from her anxiety about her cousins, if indeed that hadn't overwhelmed any other feelings. In the taxi from the hospital, and then on the train out of Leeds, she'd kept hoping that a call from Hugh or Ellen would let her go back to watch over Rory. She ought to contact the police; she couldn't contact the police. The two imperatives persisted in switching back and forth inside her skull, even more insistently now that she was unable to make a call.

Before long a train with west kirby luminously emblazoned on its brow rose out of the left-hand tunnel. More people than Charlotte had time to identify boarded as she did. Her section of the carriage was unoccupied but flanked by onrushing blackness. She seemed to be able to live with this; perhaps she was growing resigned to her condition. She was more troubled to be met by darkness when the train emerged from the tunnel on the far side of the river.

Her phone showed that n.o.body had tried to call while she was underground. She hoped Hugh or Ellen had thought to bring a flashlight, although would they have expected their task to take so long? Of course she didn't know that it had. Attempting to raise her cousins yet again wouldn't help them or her nerves. Streetlamps alongside the railway drove back the dark, which only made her worry how much light her cousins had and what it might be illuminating. Houses flocked by, curtained windows glowing, and she thought of families at dinner or in front of televisions while her cousins were caught up in their secret task. At least the darkness should conceal them from observers, unless the flashlight attracted attention. This was one more oscillation of alternatives to add to the clamour inside her skull.

When the train came to the end of its stations the mobile was still playing dumb. Despite a belated impression that she hadn't been the last pa.s.senger, Charlotte was alone in stepping onto the platform. There was n.o.body to collect her ticket, and not a single taxi outside the small station. She was retreating in search of some advertis.e.m.e.nt for a local firm when blackness swelled out of the night as a taxi pulled away from a more or less Mediterranean restaurant. She had to mime desperation, not that it involved any pretence, before the driver swerved across the road and jettisoned the sluggish firework of a cigarette. 'How far are you going?' he said.

Perhaps he was ready to go home. Certainly his large roundish mottled face looked as if a lie-down might return more of its shape. 'Thurstaston,' she told him.

'What's there?'

'I will be.'

'Shake a leg, then.'

From the frown that swelled the ridges of his brows she could have taken him to be advising her to walk to Thurstaston. As she ducked under the low roof, to be greeted by a dim bulb that illuminated a No Smoking sign, he said 'By yourself?'

She couldn't help slamming the door as if to keep out a pursuer. 'As you see,' she said, though she'd renewed the darkness.

He emitted a snort that might have been derisive or an attempt to unblock his nostrils. 'Meeting someone,' he said.

It sounded ominously unlike a question. The taxi had left the station behind by the time she grasped that he was explaining what he'd previously asked. 'I hope so,' she said, which seemed wilfully pessimistic. 'I'm sure I will.'

The taxi sped out of reach of the lights along the main road and accelerated uphill between banks of rock that sh.o.r.ed up the black sky. They blinkered Charlotte's vision, so that she was striving to concentrate on the lit patch of road the night was paying out when the driver enquired 'Which way?'

She was wondering nervously what could have stolen his sense of the unquestionable direction when she realised that he was antic.i.p.ating the crossroads. 'Down to the cliff,' she said.

'Night walker.'

She a.s.sumed he meant her rather than anyone he glimpsed as the taxi emerged from the cutting and swung right at the junction. The side road unbent to reveal the distant Welsh coast, an elongated fallen constellation dying to the orange of a ma.s.s of embers. It was pinched progressively smaller by the hedges bordering the road, and sank into the dark before the taxi veered into a lane beside the unlit hulk of a cafe. 'This you?' the driver said.

'It's fine, thanks.'

Two stumpy tubes of amber light in metal cages guarded the entrances to paths off the lane. Otherwise it and the car park to which it led were deserted. As Charlotte took out her purse the driver flashed his headlamps several times and then blared his horn at length before leaving the beams raised high. 'Where are they?' he was determined to learn.

'I'll find them.'

'They ought to be finding you.' All at once he sounded so paternal that Charlotte was afraid he might lock her in for her own supposed safety. She'd caught hold of the door handle when he slid his window down to shout 'Anybody there?'

This provoked a response a a protracted clattering giggle as dry as a skull. Before it trailed off Charlotte identified it as the complaint of a restless magpie. 'They won't be here,' she said, as angry with her own nerves as with the driver. 'I have to walk.'

'You ought to be met when it's dark like this.'

She heard a threat instead of the rebuke he intended. If she tarried much longer, the metal cell might start to seem like a refuge. She peeled a note off the stained scrawny wad in her purse and handed it to the driver. 'All yours,' she said when he made to give her change as she clambered out of the taxi.

'Just take a bit of care. You never know who's about at night,' he said and lingered until she ventured onto a lit stretch of path. 'Hope they're waiting for you,' he said and executed a U-turn so leisurely that he might have been deciding to halt again. Instead he drove to the road and, with a last red-eyed glare of the brakes, was gone.

The glow of the caged light fell short of the track onto which the path led. The murmur of the taxi dwindled beyond hearing as Charlotte stepped onto the track, and then there was only the wind in the hedges. They sc.r.a.ped thorns together as she turned right towards a bridge, on the far side of which the track continued to resemble the floor of a tunnel narrowing into invisibility. Its walls were trees growing close together and embedded like vines in the roof of the sky. Her footsteps grew shrill and encountered company under the bridge, but only hers emerged, unless the others had become so thin that they were less than whispers. Of course n.o.body was at her back. She managed not to glance over her shoulder more than twice and to derive some slight comfort from the raw lamps on a road alongside a caravan park behind the trees to her left, although the place was so silent that any tenants might have been holding their collective breath. Soon the lamps ended and the trees gave way to bushes, opening out the sky. It felt as if the walls had thickened while lowering the roof, and left the track just as dimly indistinct. The need to strain her eyes distracted her from feeling too closed in, and she wanted to conserve the flashlight beam. She almost wandered past the entrance to the common in the dark.

A sign nailed to a post on the overgrown verge had disoriented her, because she couldn't recall having seen it before. She leaned close to it and squinted hard, but still had to use the flashlight. The tip of the wooden pointer had rotted away, leaving a gap like a dead reptile's lichened mouth. Many of the letters had sloughed off where they weren't obscured by moss, so that she was barely able to distinguish even ASTON OUND, which might have been a phrase too occult for her to understand. She swung the flashlight beam away to illuminate the way through the gap in the hedge. As soon as she stepped onto the path across the common she switched off the beam.

She oughtn't to have peered so closely at the lit sign. A blurred pale patch clung to her vision, obscuring the route. A wind hissed through the blackened gra.s.s to meet her, and she was also greeted by a muted tolling of bells, which it took her some moments to recognise as the hollow clangour of ropes against the masts of boats. A rise in the faint narrow path showed her the nervously restless lights of Wales, and as she glimpsed a thin shape silhouetted against them on the far side of the common, a ma.s.s of blackness clattered up from a clump of bushes at her side. Its cry was louder and harsher than hers. It flew away cawing to add its blackness to a treetop, and Charlotte tried to steady the flashlight beam as she turned it on the silhouette near the edge of the cliff. At first the light seemed too attenuated to define it, especially given her imperfect vision. She had to advance several reluctant paces before she was sure of the object. It was a spade stuck upright in the earth.

She had no doubt who'd left it there. 'Hugh,' she called. 'Ellen.' This appeared to earn her a derisive response, but only from the treetop. She was no longer willing to brave the unlit dark, and followed the unbalanced dance of the flashlight beam along the ragged path. Hundreds of yards away from the spade, she saw that it was guarding a hole in the earth.

Was it a grave? It looked regular enough a and then she remembered her dream. For several breaths the memory a the pebbles that proved to be eyes, the face rising out of the soil that coated it a felt capable of robbing her of movement. She couldn't abandon her cousins, wherever they were, and so she stalked along the shaky path across the dim common and managed to grasp both the spade and her handbag while she poked the flashlight beam into the rectangular darkness. It was far too reminiscent of her dream, yet quite different. Beyond the hole left by a trapdoor that lay open on the gra.s.s, an iron ladder scaly with rust led down into a cellar.

It must be all that remained of Pendemon's house. No, there was a further rectangular opening in the bare wooden floor. By leaning forwards she was able to distinguish a ladder that depended from it, and beyond that, stairs leading downwards. Although they were dim, she had a notion that something was wrong with them, and she thought the same about the trapdoor. She trained the flashlight on it until she realised that she could just see the ground through it. At once she felt as if the common had collapsed beneath her, precipitating her into the unknown. Pendemon's house had vanished, but not in the way she'd a.s.sumed. The trapdoor was a grimy skylight, and the carpeted stairs led down into the house itself.

THIRTY-SIX.