A Dark Dividing (21 page)

The verdict of the coroner was the only one possible, given the evidence. Accidental death. The coroner extended sympathy to Mel all over again, and added a rider to the effect that the local authority should make Marsh Flats less accessible to the public. No one expected Mrs Anderson to stay on at the little cottage, and no one was surprised when she and the friend who had come to support her went back to her North London home the day after the inquest, taking the little ones with them.

Mel supposed that when the twins were older she would tell them that their father had drowned in a seaside accident when they were very tiny. Yes, there was enough of the truth in that to be acceptable.

She would never be able to tell Simone and Sonia that Joe had tried to kill her. She would never be able to tell anyone what had happened.

S
IMONE KNEW SHE could never tell anyone what had happened. She had made a promise not to do so, but the promise was not really needed because she would always be too frightened to say anything anyway.

It had been the year they went to live in Weston Fferna; the summer of her eleventh birthday. Mother had kept the promise about buying a camera as a birthday present; she had said Simone was old enough to understand about looking after expensive things. The camera was a really good one, and Simone had taken about a zillion photographs all through that summer. Mother thought they were very good indeed; she thought Simone showed real talent.

And all the time, lying quietly at the back of her mind, was the image of Mortmain House and the plan for photographing it—not just the outside but the inside as well. The thought of even walking up to Mortmain’s door was the scariest thing in the world, but Simone knew there were stories of people who had taken ordinary photographs, and had found things on the developed print that had not been there at the time they took the shots. There was a word—spectral—which meant not-quite-in-the-world and sort of meant ghosts, and Mortmain was surely a place where you would expect to find ghosts.

Ghosts. The pig-men who carried the children off. The little girl with the sly, sooty eyes who whispered inside Simone’s mind.

How difficult would it be to get inside Mortmain? Simone and Mother had driven past the place quite a lot of times now and even from the road you could see the gaping holes where the windows had been, and Simone thought getting inside would not be very difficult at all. Even Mother had said, Goodness, what a dreadful place, and never mind about who owned it or did not own it; it was high time it was pulled down before it became dangerous.

Simone waited until a Friday morning near the end of term, and then at breakfast said, as if she had only just remembered, that there was a rehearsal for the end-of-term concert that afternoon.

‘I was meant to tell you yesterday, but I forgot. I’m s’posed to stay on if that’s all right. Only for about an hour.’ It was horrid to lie to Mother—other people seemed to lie to their parents all the time and not care, but Simone hated doing it.

Because she hardly ever told a lie Mother was not suspicious. She said, ‘Oh, are you? It sounds as if it’s going to be a good concert, doesn’t it? I’m looking forward to it. But if you’re going to be a bit later than usual I’d better pick you up.’

‘Um, well, I was going to cycle home like an ordinary day. Everyone else is. And it won’t be dark then, will it? Half past four?’

‘No, it’ll still be light, although I bet it’ll be more like ten to five when you finish. All right. But stay with the others, won’t you? And come straight home.’

This was what Mother always said if Simone was doing something after school, like going to somebody’s house for tea and homework and then cycling home later. It was not very far to school, and Weston Fferna was so tiny you could practically see everyone else’s house from the main street, which meant you all went along to school together in a gang. Mother was pretty OK with that. It was only if Simone was going somewhere by herself that Mother insisted on taking her in the car and fetching her afterwards.

But she always said, Come straight home, and she almost always added, ‘And be sure not to talk to anyone on the way.’

Simone said, ‘I’ll come straight home.’

After the last bell had gone at school, Simone got her camera out of her locker, where she had hidden it that morning. She tucked it carefully in her school bag, between her homework books. There were some arithmetic problems to be done—arithmetic homework was
septic
—but there was also a poem to be learned, which was pretty good on account of you could fit pictures to the words in your mind.

She waited until most people had gone ahead, so that nobody would cycle or walk along with her, and then she pedalled as hard and as fast as she could out to Mortmain House.

Even from the road she felt Mortmain’s darkness. She stood at the foot of the track and stared up at the black stone walls for a long time. Can I do this? Can I go up there and photograph this horrid, ugly old house? Up the twisty path with the trees on both sides, and up to the front door, and inside the rooms…? Was she in there now, the little girl who seemed to live in the past, and who knew about the pig-eyed men and the game about the dance of the hangman? No matter where she lived or when, how was it that she could slide inside Simone’s mind and tell her all these things? I don’t understand any of it, thought Simone. I think I’m quite frightened, but it’s an excited kind of frightened. I want to know what this is about.

She pushed her bicycle into the undergrowth so that it could not be seen, but locked the little padlock on to the wheels, so that even if it was seen, it could not be stolen. She left her schoolbag where it was because it was not very likely that anyone would steal arithmetic books although if they did they were welcome to them, but she took the camera out because that was the whole point of being here.

It was ten to four now, and Mother expected her home a bit before five, which meant she had about three-quarters of an hour. She took a deep breath and began to walk up the slope towards the house, the camera in its leather case slung over her shoulder.

The bright, late-summer sunshine felt peculiar. Simone had always thought of Mortmain as a place of darkness and of spooky shadows, like the shadows you got in nightmares. She had always seen it in shades of black and grey in her mind like an old photograph, so it was a bit odd to be seeing it like this, in fact she was almost starting to wonder if she had tumbled into one of the bad dreams without noticing.

By the time she was halfway up the track and the trees were thinning out she could see the house very clearly indeed. It had a lopsided look: the left-hand side was all right but the other side sagged as if something had given it a vicious tweak, and the roof was bumpy so that from this angle the house looked like a hunchbacked giant crawling across the hillside on all fours. Simone eyed it doubtfully, and then unfastened the camera case and removed the lens cover. Focusing the camera made her feel better: it made her feel as if she was controlling Mortmain instead of the other way round. She tried several angles, and then took quite a lot of shots of the house.

So much for the outside. Was she really going to go inside, and try to get photographs of the little girl? Now that she was here she was not sure if she could do it after all. Anything might be in there. Scuttly little animals with scrabbly claw feet and long thin tails. Horrid old tramps—yes, Mother had said tramps came out here. Or gypsies, or even—

Or even ghosts.

Ghosts.

With the framing of the word there was a darting movement at the top of the track, and a blurry whisk of bright colour—something cherry red against the dull stones of Mortmain’s walls. Simone blinked and glanced up at the sun, which was the kind of low-lying, late summer sun that sometimes turned quite ordinary things glowing scarlet when it was setting. Then she looked back at Mortmain; at the scrubby grass and the thick old trees behind it. But nothing moved anywhere. Imagination. Or maybe an animal had been in there, and her approach had disturbed it so that it had scampered away. But she did not think it had been an animal: it had been too big. She looked about her again. Was there someone hiding nearby, watching her? A gypsy? But gypsies went around in crowds, and they had dogs and children and brightly-painted caravans and they made a lot of noise. A tramp, then? But tramps did not run in that quick, whizzing kind of way.

And then it came again, the sudden whisk of movement, and the impression of someone—something?—going around the other side of the building and vanishing out of sight. Whatever it was it had moved so quickly that its shape had been blurry, but this time Simone had received a half-formed image of someone running in a sort of half-crouch, running a bit lopsidedly, and throwing up one hand.

Throwing up a hand to hide its face? Or—and this was the scary thing—or beckoning to Simone to come up the last few yards of the track?

She’s here, thought Simone, her heart starting to thump. The little girl. She’s somewhere inside Mortmain, I can feel that she is. She’s closer to me now than she’s ever been, and I’m as sure as I can be that she was the one who was running around the walls just now. And if I can just see her and ask her to explain all this, and ask her to stop coming into my mind—This sounded stupid. It sounded like something out of a ghost story. But I’ll have to do it, thought Simone. This is the best chance I’ll ever have of meeting her properly and if I don’t go inside now I’ll regret it like mad.

But first she sat down on the grass verge to fit the flash attachment on to the camera. She had not yet taken photographs with flash, but she had studied the instructions very carefully before coming out and she thought she had got it right. The little bulbs were in a side pocket; they just screwed in. She saw she had used almost the entire roll of film on Mortmain already, but she had brought a second one with her, so she wound the film carefully back, took it out, and then fitted the new one. So far so good.

She took a deep breath and went up the last few yards of the track, keeping careful hold of the camera so as not to dislodge the flashbulb. She hesitated as Mortmain’s bulk came into view again, and then focused the camera to take a couple of shots pointing upwards. They might not come out, not as close as this, but if they did, it would look as if the house was just on the brink of toppling forward. That would be a really interesting view to get.

The huge old door was sagging off its hinges, and it was much heavier than Simone had expected it to be. But she managed to force it open a bit more and slip through the gap. This is it. I’m inside.

There was more darkness beyond the door than she had expected, so that at first it was necessary to grope her way forward with both hands held out in front of her. And what would I do, if a hand suddenly came reaching out of the darkness to touch me? thought Simone and her heart skipped several beats. Because if that really did happen, it might not be a hand belonging to anyone from today: it might be a hand coming out of the past. A dead person’s hand. Dead man’s hands, like the house’s name. Or I might have got into the past myself, without noticing. Don’t be stupid, people can’t really travel back to the past, not like they do in films! But her heart was performing somersaults and she had the feeling that absolutely anything might happen to her in here.