Incarnate (55 page)

She obviously didn’t recognize Nell, who seemed at a loss what to do. “Can I help you?” the woman said. That spurred Nell, who grabbed both cases and marched into the house, followed by Susan. Both of them turned to wait for Molly.

Molly was as bewildered as the woman looked. The woman turned sharply to Nell as someone came out of a room at the. end of the hall, beyond the stairs. He was dressed in black, his pale oval face was calm as a mask. “All right, Doreen,” he said. “They are expected.”

All at once Molly was breathless with panic. She felt as if she had been here before and forgotten, as if it were more than life was worth to step over the threshold. Susan and the man in black were watching her, and she had a sudden nightmare impression that they were watching her with the same eyes. She turned to hurry down to the pavement—and then she froze. Lurching at her up the steps, his face distorted by hatred and triumph, was Danny Swain.

59

A
S SOON
as they were in the house and had closed the door, Stuart called, “Is anyone there? ‘ It seemed odd to Martin, since someone audibly was. Perhaps Stuart’s cold had made him deaf, or perhaps he didn’t think the slow thick sound upstairs was breathing. But it couldn’t be anything else, though it made Martin think of waves—the waves of a sea that was thicker than water. He followed Stuart toward the nearest room, a living room with paintings of children and cats on the walls. “You could check upstairs while I look around down here,” Stuart said.

Did he think Martin was used to prying, or was he secretly uneasy about the breathing? Still, if they split up it might take less time to find something that would help them. Perhaps whoever was sleeping upstairs might be able to tell them where Molly was. Martin started up the stairs, calling “Hello.”

The breathing didn’t falter. It made him feel suffocated, and so, as he climbed, did the growing smell. Something smelled unhealthily old. He made as much noise on the stairs as he could, for fear that the sleeper would wake at the last moment and start screaming. “Hello there,” he shouted.

All of the doors on the landing were open but one. There was a bathroom, a bedroom with an unmade double bed, an office with a desk and a safe and a shelf of philatelic catalogs. All three rooms were deserted. Now there was only the closed door, and he felt less enthusiastic about waking the sleeper; the smell up here was overpowering, as if something had been left for too long. He went to the top of the stairs and called to Stuart, but his voice was swallowed up by the breathing. He felt as if it were swallowing him. “Stuart.” he called more loudly, and the breathing ceased.

So did Martin’s. He stood staring at the closed door with one hand pressed over his mouth and nose, and couldn’t think what to do. All they needed was for the sleeper to start screaming burglars, screaming for the police. His head was beginning to throb when he heard whoever was beyond the door suck in a breath, and a voice piped nervously, “Is that you, Joyce?”

So it wasn’t Joyce in the room, and certainly not Molly. It was nobody who could help. “No,” Martin called, cursing himself.

“Who then? Is it Geoffrey?” The sexless piping voice was trembling, and sounded near to hysteria. “It can’t be Geoffrey. Come in so I know who you are.”

Martin wanted nothing so much as to steal away. Everything—the breathing that had turned irregular and laborious, the threat of hysteria in the voice, the festering smell—made him unwilling to go into the room. But he couldn’t leave the person in such a state when he had been the cause of it. He listened in the hope that Stuart had heard him and was coming up to join him, but could hear no sound downstairs. He stepped forward quickly and opened the door.

The room was dark. The smell was considerably worse. The light from the landing fell short, so that all he could make out was a pale shape that looked as if it were overflowing the double bed. At least he must be visible, which allowed him to hope he could explain without going into the room that he’d been looking for Joyce and had found the front door ajar. Then the voice came out of the dark. “Who is it?” it piped, nearer still to hysteria, and there was nothing to be done except switch on the light in the room.

When he reached in and found the switch, the light came on so brightly that he wasn’t immediately sure of what he was seeing. Some of the mound that was overflowing the bed was blankets, but he could see that the form under the blankets was very large. He had to stare to convince himself that the two whitish objects near the top of the bed were arms, lying on the blankets, for they looked soft and shapeless as enormous ropes of dough. They had to be arms, for above them on the pillow was the head they belonged to.

It was bald and white and puffy. It looked as if it would quiver like jelly from its scalp to its chin if it wobbled up on its neck. If its toothless mouth hadn’t been opening and closing he might not have realized it was a head, for the features were almost lost in fat. But the whitish tongue was fluttering sluggishly about the mouth as the voice piped. “What do you want? Who are you?”

“I was looking for Joyce Churchill.” Martin had to clap one hand over his nose and draw breath before he went on, “I don’t suppose you know where she is.”

“He took her away, he made her forget about me. I’m not wanted anymore. They’ve left me here by myself. I’ve been alone for days.” One arm wavered up from the blankets and reached blindly toward him. “You’ll stay with me, won’t you? I can’t look after myself. I’m all alone in the world.”

Martin couldn’t answer. He stared in fascinated horror at her hand. The fingers must be squeezed together, but it looked like a single lump of flesh, hardly recognizable as a hand except for the fingernails that were almost buried in its edges. “Don’t leave me,” the voice piped shrilly, “let me see if you’re as kind as you sound,” and the fat of the arms lolled back and forth as both hands groped toward the face.

They were reaching for the eyes. Martin saw that the fat had forced the eyelids shut until they could no longer open by themselves. He stepped forward instinctively to help, I compelled by an appalled pity, but once he was close enough to help he couldn’t bring himself to try. The skin of the face looked thin as paper, ready to split at a touch, burst open. He was struggling to overcome his revulsion when the groping hands managed to pry open the left eye.

Martin stumbled backward, clutching at his mouth, trying to swallow. There was no eye beneath the eyelid, only a swelling of whitish flesh. “Don’t leave me,” the voice piped desperately as he staggered out of the room and held on to the doorframe. “Stuart,” he shouted, “can you come up here right now?”

He tried to keep his gaze on the stairs so as not to look! back into the room. One glance showed him the hands digging at the right eye, the nails trying to lift the eyelid. As he shoved himself away from the doorframe, he thought he glimpsed a flood of white engulfing the pillow and then the bed. “Stuart,” he called from the top of the stairs, his voice cracking.

When at last Stuart came up to him he could only point toward the room. “In there,” he muttered, swallowing. The breathing had ceased as he’d left the doorway. Stuart hurried into the room, and emerged a few moments later looking impatient. “Well, what did you want me to see?’ he said.

60

I
T WAS
Nell and the man with the oval face who helped Molly upstairs, though helped was hardly the word. The woman of the house had slammed the front door in Danny’s face, but perhaps they wanted to put as much distance between him and Molly as possible, or thought that Molly did. Of course she did, but she wished they wouldn’t hurry her so fast up the stairs, and it seemed they would never stop climbing. They were marching her upward, each holding one of her arms, giving her no time to catch her breath, and she had barely enough energy to wonder how they had managed to slip through into a different building, into this house with so many floors. They were virtually carrying her by the time the man with the oval face said, “This will be far enough.”

They could hardly have gone much further. As far as Molly could see, there was only one floor above, which was dark. He opened a door and switched on the light in the room, a boardinghouse room with heavy curtains over the window, a new green carpet on the floor, a crucifix above the bed with its neatly turned-down sheets. Molly was marched into the room, where they dumped her cases on the floor and lowered her onto the bed. “You must fear nothing now,” the man with the oval face said.

It was all very well for him to say that, even if it was meant to be reassuring. Molly felt as if she’d left her thoughts and feelings behind on the climb, along with her breath. She lay panting on the bed while they watched her solicitously. As soon as she could speak she said accusingly to Nell, “You said there was a nurse.”

Nell looked relieved when the man intervened. “What is it you need?”

“I need to go home.” Reaction overtook her, and she began to tremble. “My God, I don’t know what’s happening. That crazy man you saw just now, he’s been following me for weeks. What in Christ’s name does he want? What has he got against me?”

“We shall deal with him, J give you my word. I imagine you will see that for the time it is best you stay here.”

His calm voice and his deliberate sentences seemed almost hypnotic. At least she would be staying only until Danny was out of the way, she thought; the dumping of the suitcases in the room had seemed ominous. “You’ll send the nurse up, will you?”

“She has not been a nurse for some years. Let me see what I can do.” He laid his hand on her forehead. His touch felt cool, gentle, still. She hardly knew when he began to massage her temples, he was making her feel so restful. All her memories of panic were fading. She felt safe, cared for, home at last.

She was willing him to go on when he took his hand away. She kept- her eyes closed, to hold on to the calm. “I shall come up for you when matters are under control,” he murmured, “but call on me if you should feel you need me. Call me Sage.”

The door closed softly, and she listened to his and Nell’s footsteps descending until she could no longer hear them. She let the silence float her mind away. Though she could hardly believe it after all that had happened, she felt ready to sleep, even to dream. If she could, feel safe to dream anywhere now, it would be here. A dream that would be larger than any she’d experienced was waiting. She breathed deeply and gently, until she was no longer aware of breathing.

She wasn’t sure what jerked her awake from the first split second of dreaming. Surely the impression that something had shifted near her in the room must be part of the dream. She opened her eyes as little as possible, doing her best to cling to sleep. Her eyes were closing as she glanced up at the crucifix.

She frowned at it and then, impatiently, sat up. It didn’t look very conventional, but why should that bother her? It could hardly have turned its head to grin down at her as she lay on the bed. It wasn’t grinning, only smiling widely, though surely that was unusual. If the eyes appeared to be watching her, that was a trick you could find in hundreds of paintings and posters. There was no point in imagining that the eyes looked familiar. If she was going to make herself nervous, perhaps she had better call Sage.

Some instinct restrained her. He’d said that she must fear nothing now. Suddenly that seemed less a reassurance than a suggestion of what might lie ahead.

She jumped up and went to the door. The landing with its new green carpet was deserted, and all the other doors were closed. She went quickly to the stairwell and glanced up at the dark floor above her, then she looked down.

It couldn’t be the house with the yellow front door. There were too many floors—so many that she was afraid even to start counting. No point in speculating, no point in making herself more uneasy. All she knew was that she didn’t mean to be left alone up here, so far from everyone, and she was about to start down when she heard voices. They must be at the bottom of the stairs, they were so minute, but a quirk of the acoustics let her hear every word. “We are not quite ready,” Sage was saying.

He was talking to the landlady, for Molly heard her say, “Are you the one who’s lost her husband?”

“Yes,” came Nell’s voice, “and I don’t want him back.”

“No, that is not why Helen came here. It is no longer a question of that kind of bereavement. But the lost shall be restored, I promise you. You will not be disappointed.” Sage’s voice was moving away. “Now I think we have left Mrs. Churchill by herself for long enough,” he said, and shortly there came the closing of a door.

Molly stared down the impossible distance, then retreated into her room. She couldn’t have heard what she’d thought she’d heard. Churchill was a common name, and Nell sounded very much like Helen; why, they were the same name really. But Joyce Churchill had been a nurse eleven years ago, and why should Nell have concealed her real name?

Something was very wrong here, and she meant to find out what it was: anything rather than stay up here in the room that felt as if nobody had used it before her with the crucified figure that, if she let her imagination loose, she could imagine had turned its gleeful head to watch her. She went back onto the landing and winced as the door slammed behind her. She was steeling herself for the descent when a voice spoke to her, whispered to her: “Don’t go down.”

There was someone above her, in the dark. For a moment Molly wanted to run, run and fall if she had to, until she reached the ground floor. But the voice sounded desperate, and almost drained of strength. “Please don’t go,” it said, “please help me, whoever you are,” sounding like a prisoner who had been kept up there for years. Molly couldn’t resist so desperate a plea. She glanced unhappily down the stairs and then she went up.

61

E
VEN THOUGH
Stuart looked impatient and puzzled, some time passed before Martin could make himself go into the room. One of his fears was that he might see something in there that Stuart wasn’t seeing, and what could that mean? At last he shoved himself away from the banister and went quickly if unsteadily to join Stuart. The bed looked sodden, but it was empty, and so was the room. “There was someone in here,” Martin cried.