A Dark Dividing (6 page)

Joe reacted exactly as Mel had expected.

At first he turned red-faced with annoyance, and then he went off to ring a number of people up—mostly business associates or fellow Town Councillors whose wives or sisters had had children fairly recently. He returned from the phone armed with several names, and said it was just a question of finding a proper specialist to deal with the matter. Mel should have found that out at the consultation, but of course she would have been upset. He understood that. His tone said he was allowing for her being upset. There were times when Mel thought he did not live in the twentieth century.

Harley Street figured in several of the names on Joe’s list. Mel managed not to ask how Joe thought they would pay for Harley Street specialists, or even how they would pay for private healthcare at all, when people were not really queuing up to buy the dolls-house homes that Joe’s company built: two-and-a-half bedrooms, £1,500 deposit for first-time buyers and a twenty-five-year mortgage.

But he seemed pleased that the twins were girls. Very nice indeed, he said indulgently. And all this nonsense about them being joined up would be sorted out; Melissa would soon see, and then there would be two little girls. Two pretty little dolls that he could spoil and cosset, said Joe. (Two pretty little accessories who would look good on newspaper photographs of Councillor Anderson attending civic events and local charitable functions…? That was a dreadful way to think!)

Mel wondered how Joe could think the babies would be pretty, when she was very far from pretty herself, and Joe was no oil-painting either. It did not, in fact, matter if the twins were pretty or not: Mel would rather they had character and kindness, and happy and interesting lives.

The truth was that she should never have married Joe in the first place. Isobel, who had known Mel longer than anyone, had been right when she said Mel was out of her tree to do so. The trouble was that Mel had been fed up with being on her own and being broke and being in a dead-end job, and she had been fed up with being nearly thirty and never having had a proper long-term relationship—It was a lot of fed-ups, and they had added up to her falling into the trap of any marriage being better than no marriage, which very likely went to show that she was not really living in the twentieth century either.

Mel was trying not to acknowledge how much she had come to dislike Joe, because dislike should not have any place in marriage. She was trying even harder not to acknowledge that the dislike was sliding into something even more worrying.

Fear. It was a bad thing to discover you disliked your husband, but it was much worse to discover that you were frightened of him.

For a lot of the time now, Simone was quite frightened of the little girl.

The problem was that she was hating, more and more, the glimpses she got of the little girl’s world—the world with the black stone house. Simone did not like that place, she did not like the feeling that the little girl was trying to pull her deeper and deeper into the world where the house was. Or did she? A tiny, rather horrid voice, whispered that wouldn’t it be exciting to know more about that world?—that not-quite-real place where the little girl lived…? To even step into it, just for a little while, like people in books stepped into other worlds…?

The little girl said that one day they would be able to share all their secrets; she was looking forward to that because it would be an extra-specially good thing to do. But Simone did not think it would be extra-specially good at all, and she did not have many secrets anyway. She thought she would try not to listen to the little girl’s secrets, although this might be difficult because the little girl seemed to be getting stronger all the time. Once or twice Simone had had the feeling that she was being made to look down into the little girl’s mind, which seemed rude, like snooping on somebody’s conversation. Simone always saw thoughts and feelings in pictures, and seeing down into the little girl’s mind was like peering over the rim of a deep old well that did not smell very nice, and glimpsing the memories and the secrets lying at the bottom. It might be better not to look too closely at some of those secrets.

Shortly after Simone was ten Mother began to get the anxious look in her eyes, and after a little while she said they would be moving again.

‘You mentioned the Welsh Marches just recently, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘You did a project on it at school, and you seemed quite keen. Would you like us to live there?’

This was unexpected. Simone had not thought that she might be able to choose something so important as where they lived, and she was a bit worried by the thought of being so near to the little girl. ‘Is it a place where we could live?’

‘We can live anywhere we like,’ said Mother, and Simone heard that although her voice was bright, underneath she was anxious. ‘We’re secretly gypsies, didn’t you know that? We probably had a great-great-grandmother or something who danced to a tambourine and lived in a painted wagon.’

‘Not really?’

‘No, but I’d sometimes like to know how you can be so fey.’

‘What’s fey?’

‘It means you might know what other people are thinking.’ She smiled at Simone, but Simone saw that when Mother drew the curtains that evening, she stood at the window for a long time looking out into the street.

Mother found a house in the Welsh Marches quite soon afterwards, in a place called Weston Fferna.

‘Nearly but not quite Wales,’ she said as they drove along the roads, with the car piled high with suitcases and records and china, and things Mother said the removal van could not be trusted with. ‘It’s lovely countryside, isn’t it? This was a good idea of yours, Sim; I think we’ll like it here.’

Simone hoped so too. She had not seen the house that Mother had found for them to live in, because Mother mostly did the house-hunting by herself, but she had seen photographs and it looked pretty nice.

‘And we’ll be together, Simone… We’ll really be together at last…’

Simone sat very still in the car, because the little girl’s voice in her mind was much stronger and it felt much closer than ever before. It was pretty spooky to think she might get to meet her at last, but it was quite exciting as well. I might find out who she really is, and how she gets inside my head and then I might not be so frightened of her, thought Simone hopefully.

They turned off the main road and went down a windy little lane, and that was when Simone looked across at the fields on their left. There were lots of fields, mostly with sheep in them, and lots of trees, and there were gorgeous smudgy mountains straight ahead. Here and there was a farmhouse or a little group of cottages or a church spire.

And across the fields, set a bit above the road and frowning down at the cars, was an old, old house. Simone glanced up at it, and instantly felt as if somebody had punched her stomach.

The house. The black stone house where the little girl lived. The place of clanging doors that were locked every night at exactly the same time, and of angry despairing screams. The place where you ate your meals at long scrubbed-top tables, and where there were sour smells of despair and loneliness, and where the rooms smelled of sick and dirt and some of the people smelled of sick and dirt as well.

‘Are you all right, Sim?’ This was Mother, not looking at her, concentrating on the unfamiliar road but picking up that there might be something wrong in the way Mother sometimes did pick up other people’s thoughts. ‘You’re not feeling car-sick, are you? We’re almost there now.’

‘I’m, um, OK.’ Simone was not OK, of course. But she said, ‘I’m just looking at the old houses and things on the road.’ She twisted round in the front of the car, trying to see through the rear window, watching the black house get smaller and smaller as they drove away from it. There was no mistake; Simone knew exactly what the house looked like; she knew about the door at the centre like a square grinning mouth, and the straggly little bits at the back which were called sculleries and the underground rooms where people were sometimes shut away.

She even knew about the old trees that grew around the house, because the little girl had told her about them. She had said to Simone that they were bad old trees: if you looked at them for long enough you saw wicked faces in the trunk: horrid evil faces that looked as if they were a thousand years old, and that stared at you out of withered eyes. Wizard oaks, they were called. There was a poem about them; it told how on some nights the evil old wizard woke up and parted the branches, and peered into the room to see if there were any little children he could snatch up and carry away.

Simone stared and stared at the house. It was scary to find it like this, all by itself in the middle of fields, but the really scary part was that even from here—even with Mother’s little car bowling smartly along the road—she could see that the house was a very old crumbly building, with gaping holes where the windows had been and birds’ nests in the chimneys. Worst of all was that she could see that it was empty, and that nobody could possibly have lived in it for years and years, especially not any children.

They reached their new house quite soon afterwards. The furniture van was there already, and things were being unloaded and carried inside. It was a pretty nice house, a bit like a large cottage. There was a pointy roof and flowery things growing up the walls, and a tangly garden that would be great for games. The rooms all had nice scents that made you think of orchards on warm afternoons.

After the furniture van drove away there were about a million things to do, so Simone forgot about the black stone house for a while. There was unpacking and beds to be made up; Simone’s bedroom was right at the top of the house and it had a padded window-seat so you could curl up and look out over the fields if you wanted to. She could not see the old house from her window, which was one good thing. And after she had unpacked her books and cassettes and CDs the room felt really friendly, and then after supper a large ginger cat wandered in from somewhere to investigate them and had to be found a saucer of milk. And what with all this going on Mother did not seem to notice that Simone was being so quiet.

She did not dare to tell Mother about the black old house in case it meant there was something wrong with her. If you heard voices that other people did not hear, and if you knew what places looked like before ever you saw them it might mean you were mad, and mad people were shut away and never let to go out into the world.

T
HE BLACK STONE house was called Mortmain House, and people who lived there were hardly ever let to go out into the world. Sometimes they were shut away inside it for years and years—children as well as grown-ups.

But one of the really bad things about it was not knowing who to trust. The children who lived there could not tell whether the men who came to visit were nice, ordinary men, interested in hearing about lessons and about the food that was served, or whether they were the other ones: the ones with the treacly voices, who were the baddest people in the world. If you had known how to tell the difference, the little girl said to Simone, then you might have been able to do something about it when they came. Hide somewhere or put a chair under the door-handle so they could not get in, that would be one way. But as it was, nobody could tell.