Dark Companions (19 page)

As always when he emerged from his room, the height of the ceiling made him glance up. Above the stairs, another new crack had etched the plaster. Suppose the house fell on him while he was asleep? Hardly likely—the place looked far too solid.

He hesitated, staring at the door that stood ajar. Should he give in to curiosity? It wasn’t as simple as that: he’d come here to recuperate; he could scarcely do so if curiosity kept him awake. Last night he’d lain awake for hours wondering. Feeling rather like a small boy who’d crept into this deserted house for a dare, he pushed open the door.

The room was smaller than his, and darker—though perhaps all that was because of the cabinets, high as the ceiling and black as drowned timber, that occupied all the walls. The cabinets were padlocked shut, save one whose broken padlock dangled from the half-open door. Beyond the door was darkness, dimly crowded. Speculations on the nature of that crowding had troubled his sleep.

He ventured forward. Again, as the cabinet loured over him, he felt like a small boy. Ignoring doubts, he tugged the door wide. The padlock fell, loud in the echoing room—and from high in the cabinet, dislodged objects toppled. Some opened as they fell, and their contents scuttled over him.

The containers rattled on the parquet as he flinched back. They resembled pillboxes of transparent plastic. They were inscribed in a spidery handwriting, which seemed entirely appropriate, for each had contained a spider. A couple of dark furry blotches clung with long legs to his sleeve. He picked them off, shuddering. He couldn’t rid himself of an insidious suspicion that some of the creatures were not quite dead.

He peered reluctantly at them. Bright pinheads of eyes peered back, dead as metal; beside them; palpi bristled. The lifeless fur felt unpleasantly cold on his palm. Eventually he’d filled all the containers, God only knew how correctly. If he were an audience watching himself, this would be an enjoyable farce. As he replaced the boxes on the high shelf, he noticed a padlocked container, large as a hatbox, lurking at the back of the cabinet. Let it stay there. He’d had enough surprises for one day.

Besides, he must report the cracks. Eventually the bus arrived, laden with climbers. Some of their rucksacks occupied almost as much space as they did. Camps smoked below the hills.

Outside the estate agent’s office, cows plodded to market. The agent listened to the tale of the cracks. “You surprise me. I’ll look in tomorrow.” His fingertips brushed his grey hair gently, abstractedly. He glanced up as Thorpe hesitated. “Something else?”

“The owner of the house—what line is he in?”

“Anarach—narach—” The agent shook his head irritably to clear it of the blockage.
“
An
arachnologist,” he pronounced at last.

“I thought it must be something of the kind. I looked in one of the cabinets—the one with the broken lock.”

“Ah, yes, his bloodsuckers. That’s what he likes to call them. All these writers are eccentric in some way, I suppose. I should have asked you not to touch anything,” he said reprovingly.

Thorpe had been glad to confess, but felt embarrassed now. “Well, perhaps no harm’s done,” the agent said. “He went to Eastern Europe six months ago, in search of some rarity—having fixed the amount of the rent.”

Was that comment a kind of reproof? It sounded wistful. But the agent stood up smiling. “Anyway, you look better for the country,” he said. “You’ve much more colour now.”

And indeed Thorpe felt better. He was at his ease in the narrow streets; he was able to make his way between cars without flinching—without feeling jagged metal bite into him, the windscreen shatter into his face. The scars of his stitches no longer plucked at his cheeks. He walked part of the way back to the house, until weakness overtook him.

He sat gazing into the lake. Fragmented reflections of pines wavered delicately. When mist began to descend the hills he headed back, in time to glimpse a group of hikers admiring the house. Pleased, he scanned it himself. Mist had settled on the chimney stacks. The five squat horned blurs looked as though they were playing a secret game, trying to hide behind one another. One, the odd man out, lacked horns.

After dinner Thorpe strolled through the house, sipping malt whisky. Rooms resounded around him. They sounded like an empty stage, where he was playing owner of the house. He strode up the wide stairs, beneath the long straight crack, and halted outside the door next to his.

He wouldn’t be able to sleep unless he looked. Besides, he had found the agent’s disapproval faintly annoying. If Thorpe wasn’t meant to look in the cabinets, why hadn’t he been told? Why had one been left ajar?

He strode in, among the crowd of dark high doors. This time, as he opened the cabinet he made sure the padlock didn’t slip from its hold. Piled shelves loomed above him as he stooped into the dimness, to peer at the hatbox or whatever it was.

It wasn’t locked. It had been, but its fastening was split: a broken padlock lay on top. On the lid, wisps of handwriting spelled
Carps: Trans: C. D.
The obscure inscription was dated three months ago.

Thorpe frowned. Then, standing back, he poked gingerly at the lid with his foot. As he did so, he heard a shifting. It was the padlock, which landed with a thud on the bottom of the cabinet. Unburdened, the lid sprang up at once. Within was nothing but a crack in the metal of the container. He closed the cabinet and then the room, wondering why the metal box appeared to have been forced open.

And why was the date on the lid so recent? Was the man so eccentric that he could make such a mistake? Thorpe lay pondering that and the inscription. Half dozing, he heard movement in one of the rooms: a trapped bird scrabbling in a chimney? It troubled him almost enough to make him search. But the whisky crept up on him, and he drifted with his thoughts.

How did the arachnologist bring his prizes home—in his pocket, or stowed away with the rest of the livestock on the voyage? Thorpe stood on a dockside, awaiting a package that was being lowered on a rope. Or was it a rope? No, for as it swung close the package unclenched and grabbed him. As its jaws closed on his face he awoke gasping.

In the morning he searched the house, but the bird seemed to have managed to fly. The cracks had multiplied; there was at least one in every room, and two now above the stairs. The scattering of plaster on the staircase looked oddly like earth.

When he heard the agent’s car he buttoned his jacket and gave his hair a rapid severe brushing. Damn it, the bird was still trapped; he heard it stir behind him, though there was no hint of it in the mirror. It must be in the chimney, for it sounded far too large to be otherwise invisible.

The agent scrutinised the rooms. Was he looking only for cracks, or for evidence that Thorpe had been peeking? “This is most unexpected,” he said as though Thorpe might be responsible. “I don’t see how it can be subsidence. I’ll have it looked at, though I don’t think it’s anything serious.”

He was dawdling in Thorpe’s room, perhaps to reassure himself that Thorpe had done it no injury. “Ah, here he is,” he said without warning, and stooped to grope beneath the bed. Who had been skulking there while Thorpe was asleep? The owner of the house, it seemed—or at least a photograph of him, which the agent propped curtly on the bedside table, to supervise the room.

When the agent had left, Thorpe peered up the chimneys. Their furred throats looked empty, but were very dark. The flickering beam of the flashlight he’d found groped upwards. A soft dark mass plummeted towards him. It missed him, and proved to be a fall of soot, but was discouraging enough. In any case, if the bird was still up there, it was silent now.

He confronted the photograph. So that was what an arachnologist looked like: a clump of hair, a glazed expression, an attempt at a beard—the man seemed hypnotised, but no doubt was preoccupied. Thorpe found his dusty presence disconcerting.

Why stand here challenging the photograph? He felt healthy enough to make a circuit of the lake. As he strolled, the inverted landscape drifted with him. He could feel his strength returning, as though he were absorbing it from the hills. For the first time since he’d left the hospital, his hands looked enlivened by blood.

From the far end of the lake he admired the house. Its inverted chimneys swayed, rooted deep in the water. Suddenly he frowned and squinted. It must be an effect of the distance, that was all—but he kept glancing at the house as he returned along the lakeside. Once he was past the lake he had no chance to doubt. There were only four chimney stacks.

It must have been yesterday’s mist that had produced the appearance of a fifth stack, lurking. Nevertheless it was odd. Doubts clung to his mind as he climbed the stairs, until his start of surprise demolished his thoughts. The glass of the photograph was cracked from top to bottom.

He refused to be blamed for that. The agent ought to have left it alone. He laid it carefully on its back on the bedside table. Its crack had made him obsessively aware of the others; some, he was sure, were new—including one in a downstairs window, a crack which, curiously, failed to pass right through the thickness of the pane. The staircase was sprinkled again; the scattering not only looked like, but seemed to smell like, earth. That night, as he lay in bed, he thought he heard dust whispering down from the cracks.

Though he ridiculed thoughts that the house was unsafe, he felt vulnerable. The shifting shadow of a branch looked like a new crack, digging into the wall. In turn, that made the entire room appear to shift. Whenever he woke from fitful dozing, he seemed to glimpse a stealthy movement of the substance of the room. It must be an optical effect, but it reminded him of the way a quivering of ornaments might betray the presence of an intruder.

Once he awoke, shocked by an image of a tufted face that peered upside down through the window. It infuriated him to have to sit up to make sure the window was blank. Its shutter of night was not reassuring. His subconscious must have borrowed the image of inversion from the lake, that was all. But the room seemed to be trembling, as he was.

Next day he waited impatiently for the surveyor, or whoever the agent was sending. He rapidly grew irritable. Though it could be nothing but a hangover from his insomnia, to stay in the house made him nervous. Whenever he glanced in a mirror, he felt he was being invisibly watched. The dark fireplaces looked ominous, prosceniums awaiting a cue. At intervals he heard a pattering in other rooms: not of tiny feet, but of the fall of debris from new cracks.

Why was he waiting? He hadn’t felt so nervously aimless since the infancy of his career, when he’d loitered, clinging to a single line, in the wings of a provincial theatre. The agent should have given his man a key to let himself in; if he hadn’t, that was his problem. Thorpe strode over the slopes that surrounded the lake. He enjoyed the intricately true reflections in the still water, and felt a great deal healthier.

Had the man let himself in? Thorpe seemed to glimpse a face, groping into view at a twilit upper window. But the only sound in the house was a feeble scraping, which he was unable to locate. The face must have been a fragment of his dream, tangled in his lingering insomnia. His imagination, robbed of sleep, was everywhere now. As he climbed the stairs, he thought a face was spying on him from a dark corner of the ceiling.

When he descended, fallen debris crunched underfoot. During his meal he drank a bottle of wine, as much for distraction as for pleasure. Afterwards he surveyed the house. Yes, the cracks were more numerous; there was one in every surface now, except the floors. Had the older cracks deepened? Somehow he was most disturbed by the dust beneath the cracked windows. It looked like earth, not like pulverised glass at all.

He wished he’d gone into town to stay the night. It was too late now—indeed, the last bus had gone by the time he’d returned to the house. He was too tired to walk. He certainly couldn’t sit outside all night with the mists. It was absurd to think of any other course than going to bed, to try and sleep. But he drained the bottle of whisky before doing so.

He lay listening. Yes, the trapped bird was still there. It sounded even feebler now; it must be dying. If he searched for it he would lose his chance of sleep. Besides, he knew already that he couldn’t locate it. Its sounds were so weak that they seemed to shift impossibly, to be fumbling within the fabric of the walls.

He was determined to keep his eyes closed, for the dim room appeared to be jerking. Perhaps this was a delayed effect of his accident. He let his mind drift him out of the room, into memories: the wavering of trees and of their reflections, the comedy sketch of his encounter with the piled cabinet, Carps, Trans.

Darkness gathered like soot on his eyes. A dark mass sank towards him, or he was sinking into dark. He was underground. Around him, unlit corridors dripped sharply. The beam of his flashlight explored the figure that lay before him on dank stone. The figure was pale as a spider’s cocoon. As the light fastened on it, it scuttled apart.

When he awoke, he was crying out not at the dream but at his stealthy realisation. He’d solved the inscription in his sleep, at least in part. Eastern Europe was the key. Carps meant Carpathians, Trans was Transylvania. But C. D.—no, what he was thinking was just a bad joke. He refused to take it seriously.

Nevertheless it had settled heavily on his mind. Good God, he’d once had to keep a straight face throughout a version of the play, squashed into a provincial stage: the walls of Castle Dracula had quaked whenever anyone had opened a door, the rubber bat had plummeted into the stalls. C. D. could mean anything—anything except that. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if that was
what the bemused old spider-man had meant? But in the dark it seemed less than hilarious, for near him in the room, something was stirring.

He groped for the cord of the bedside lamp. It was long and furry, and seemed unexpectedly fat. When he pulled it the light went on, and he saw at once that the cracks were deeper; he had been hearing the fall of debris. Whether the walls had begun to jerk rhythmically, or whether that was a delayed symptom of his accident, he had no time to judge. He must get out while he had the chance. He swung his feet to the floor, and knocked the photograph from the table.