Incarnate (56 page)

“Not recently.”

“Yes, recently. Just now. I saw them in the bed.”

“You saw them?” Stuart was ready to grin, as if that would bring Martin out of it. “How many?”

“Just one, God damn it.” Martin was very close to losing his temper. “I don’t know if it was a man or a woman, but it was there, no question of it. I was near enough to touch it,” he said, and shuddered. “My God, I almost did.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because it didn’t look—because it looked as if—” He didn’t like the ideas that suggested themselves. “Why are you trying to tell me there was nobody? You heard the breathing when we came in.”

“I may have heard something that sounded like breathing. That’s why you expected to see someone, and that’s why you did. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Martin. We can all do it. Just for a moment when I looked in here I thought I saw someone on the bed myself.”

“What did you see?” Martin demanded.

“Nothing that could have been a human being, believe me. Obviously it was the blankets.”

“Then what’s this?” Martin forced himself to go to the bed, and pointed at the pillow. The wetness was seeping into the pillow, disappearing altogether too quickly, but it still glistened in the enormous indentation left by the head. “Explain that, if you can.”

“Do you really want me to? Is it really that important to you, when we’re trying to find your girl friend and the others?” Stuart squeezed his arm as if the ache might bring him back to reality. “We can stand here all night arguing about whether you did or did not see someone, but what on earth can it have to do with what we’re supposed to be doing?”

Until that moment Martin would have seen no connection at all, but now Stuart had made him feel he should. “Molly said something once,” he said almost to himself, “about dreams that were so intense she couldn’t tell they weren’t real.”

“In that case who was dreaming just now? Are you saying we both were?” As Martin glanced at the pillow, Stuart said, “Dreams don’t leave traces in reality, Martin. We both saw what we expected to see, that’s all. Always trust the simplest explanation that fits all the facts unless there’s a damn good reason not to do so.”

Martin made himself stay in the room. The bright light on the marks on the pillow only made them more threatening, for the smell was still in the air. Of course Stuart wouldn’t notice with his cold. The smell had faded, but now Martin had the uneasy notion that it was growing stronger. “You haven’t explained that stuff on the bed,”, he protested nervously. “That’s a fact, if you’ll only look.”

“Leave it, Martin, all right? Don’t you crack up, not now. Enough people have.”

He must have seen how close that came to enraging Martin, for he said hastily, “You’ll agree we’ve drawn a blank here. I think the best thing is for me to approach the police. They ought to help me even if they won’t help you. They can trace Mrs. Churchill while we’re contacting the others. Maybe they’ll find Miss Wolfe as well.”

Martin wanted to get out of the room and the house before he panicked, get away from the moribund smell, but suppose they had overlooked something? He went dizzily onto the landing, sucked in a breath from the stairwell, and went into the philatelist’s office. The telephone—a message pad on the desk. He hurried to it. “What about this?” he called, forcing himself not to whisper.

Stuart came to see. It was a scribbled address, surrounded by jagged doodles. “It might be worth checking, if it’s in London,” Stuart admitted. “We need an A to Zed.”

“An A to Zee? I saw one. There it is.” Martin grabbed it from beside the stamp catalogs and leafed through the index, so roughly that a page tore. For a moment he’d thought he heard breathing in the house. “Okay, there’s a street of that name,” he said, and turned hastily to the map, peered wildly at the small print. “It’s off Caledonian Road.”

“You think we should go there, do you?”

“Yes.” Anywhere that was out of this house, where now he thought he could hear movement in the next room.

“All right, we’ll go as soon as I’ve called the police.”

Stuart was reaching for the phone, and Martin was almost sure he heard movement, a creaking of the bed. “Shouldn’t we see if she’s at this address first?”

Stuart peered sharply at him, wondering why he was so nervous. “All right,” Stuart said, “I don’t suppose we want to risk wasting police time.” Martin headed for the stairs at once. When he opened the front door, the night air felt welcome as a cold bath in a heat wave, but he couldn’t breathe properly until Stuart was safely out as well. Martin closed the door and felt the bolt snap into place. He thought of asking Stuart if he’d seen or heard anything as they came downstairs, but Stuart would only deny it, and the question would only make him more dubious about Martin. Perhaps Martin had seen nothing, perhaps it was just a fear. But that was bad enough, for he couldn’t shake it off: the impression of something struggling to take shape again under the mound of blankets.

62

M
OLLY
was almost at the top before she saw the woman who had called to her, a tall stooped woman who was supporting herself on the banister. She looked starved and old, but Molly could tell that she was younger than she looked. Molly ran up the last few stairs because the woman seemed in danger of falling headlong. But as soon as the woman saw her face she began to back away along the landing, shaking her head as if it would never stop.

Molly halted three stairs down. Dismay had frozen her.

The woman peered at Molly’s face as if ,she hoped she didn’t know her, shaking her head as if that would grant her wish. At last she said, “Tell me quickly, what’s your name?”

She must have recognized her from the newspaper, Molly tried to tell herself, and yet she thought she knew the stooped woman. “Molly Wolfe,” she said.

The woman put her hand over her mouth. “Weren’t you at Oxford?”

“At the university, you mean?” It was Molly’s last pathetic hope.

“No, at the research place. Where they were doing research into dreams.” She looked as hopeless as Molly felt. “You do remember me, don’t you? Freda Beeching.”

Now that her half-defined fears were confirmed, Molly felt oddly resigned. “My God, we aren’t the only ones here, are we?”

“That’s right. He tricked me into bringing Joyce Churchill here.”

So Joyce Churchill was the ex-nurse, and everything was coming true. “Helen Verney brought me here, and Danny Swain followed us,” Molly said, and then what Freda had said caught up with her. “You say someone tricked you ? You know who’s behind all this?”

“Sage.”

“Who is he?” Molly whispered.

“I don’t know. I try not to wonder.”

Perhaps Freda had good reason to be fearful, but it infuriated Molly. “Why should he want to bring us all together?”

“Don’t you remember?”

All at once Molly was as near to panic as Freda sounded. “Remember what?”

“The dream.”

“I’m not sure I want to,” Molly said.

“Remembering doesn’t matter now,” Freda said. “It’s grown too strong to be stopped. I started dreaming.it again last night and I haven’t dared sleep since. You do remember how it was, don’t you? You must remember.” But she looked terrified that Molly would say she did. “How nobody will be sure what’s behind a door until they open it, and how you’ll never know where any street leads, and the worst thing you can do will be to ask someone the way… .” Her hands were digging at her cheeks.

“You need to sit down,” Molly said, struggling to quiet the memories Freda had revived. “Let’s go in your room where we can talk properly.”

“We mustn’t go in there,” Freda whispered shrilly. “We mustn’t wake him.”

Molly didn’t want to know why Freda was afraid. “All right, we won’t go in your room,” she said, and suddenly was grateful to have been diverted. “Do you think you can walk down?”

Freda glanced unhappily down the stairwell. “Can you?”

“If I came up I can go down,” Molly said, not looking. “Listen, Freda, I think we still have a chance. If we’ve been brought here for the reason you think, then Sage must need all of us. We have to get out before Danny Swain gets in.”

Freda stumbled as she ventured on the first stair and would have plunged headlong if Molly hadn’t grabbed her. “I’ll be all right,” Freda murmured, “as long as I take it slowly.” Molly suppressed the thought that slowly was the last way she wanted to go down.

Freda kept glancing back at the closed door of her room until they reached Molly’s floor, then she began to peer nervously down the stairwell. Molly kept her own gaze away from there. She needed all her energy to avoid making a noise on the stairs. At least Freda seemed to weigh almost nothing.

The floors were trooping past, bright and bare and featureless except for their closed doors. The smell of new carpet was so overpowering it was beginning to make her feel sick. She wondered if she ought to count the floors, to give herself something to do. The idea came too late, for she’d forgotten how many floors they had already passed.

Perhaps counting the floors would only have made them more real. If the floors and the stairs weren’t real, what was she walking on? But if they were real, how could they be in the house with the yellow front door? By now, dismayingly, she knew she hadn’t been taken into another building. She mustn’t speculate, mustn’t think about the stairs at all, just walk. Yet it troubled her deeply that the stairs seemed somehow generalized, as if they were an idea that wasn’t yet fully expressed. Worst of all was their utter meaninglessness.

The dream she’d shared with Freda and the others was coming true at last. She couldn’t help suspecting that if she was afraid of it, that added to its power. Hadn’t Sage told her she must fear nothing? But controlling her fear wasn’t taking them downstairs any sooner: on the contrary, the stairs and the floors seemed to be growing more real, more specific; she stumbled on a tack that had bent instead of penetrating the stair, and there was a landing where the carpet didn’t quite reach the far wall. She was holding tight to Freda’s bony arm, since Freda and her laborious descent had to be most real, when she heard a door open and close.

Freda clutched her so violently that Molly almost lost her balance. “Where was that?” Freda cried.

“Down there.” Molly put her finger to her lips. She’d remembered how sounds carried on the staircase. Below them, stairs were creaking. Someone trying to be stealthy was coming up from the downstairs hall.

Molly risked a glance over the banister and almost cried out—not because she saw anyone, but because she and Freda were only a few floors up. Just a couple of minutes more and they could have been out of the house. Now she could see a hand on the banister, two floors below. She hurried Freda up to the nearest floor, the nearest room. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered urgently. “We’ll hide in here.”

When Freda stared nervously at the door, Molly reached past her and turned the handle. She switched on the light in the room, which looked very much like the one she had been taken into, and quickly led Freda forward. For a moment, to her dismay, she found herself wishing her parents would come for her, wishing that she wouldn’t be alone with all this any longer, that they would be in the room. She remembered imagining that they were in her flat. All at once she knew that if they had ever appeared there, they would have had the same eyes as Sage—for those eyes were watching her across the empty room.

They were the eyes of the crucifix. She saw the end of the movement as its head turned to watch. She felt Freda stiffening. She couldn’t have forced her into the room, weak as Freda was, even if she had wanted to. They backed out and Molly fumbled the door shut just as the man on the stairs reached the landing. It was Danny.

Before Molly could move, he was between her and the stairs. The triumph and the hatred in his eyes looked crazier, more dangerous: he wasn’t going to be tricked twice. As he stretched out his arms on both sides of him, the light gleamed through his nails. Perhaps he’d kept them long and cruel especially for her.

Her heart was pounding violently, her dry throat was closing up, but she had to make him see he’d been tricked. “Listen, Danny, we’ve all been lured here. Wait, let me finish,” she cried, for he was still advancing as if he were determined not to hear, eyes narrowing, hands like claws, and she could only back away to give herself time to finish. “You remember what we dreamed in Oxford, don’t you? It’s here now. This is where it begins. We’re all needed to make it happen. Someone let you in, didn’t they? That’s why. If we can get out of here and stay away from one another, perhaps it won’t be able to.”

She was nearly at the wall opposite the stairs, and then there would be nowhere to go. Freda plucked at his arm as he stalked past her, ignoring her. “She’s telling the truth,” Freda said. “Don’t you recognize me? He needs me too. If you’ll only—”

He threw her off with such force that she thudded against the wall and slumped there, looking stunned, yet it seemed almost casual, something he’d done without thinking to get rid of the hindrance on his way to Molly. “Don’t try and use your eyes on me,” he hissed at Molly, saliva spraying from his mouth. “Your friend Guilda tried, and you know what happened to her. You won’t have them to ruin people’s minds with for much longer.”

He’d backed her into a corner, his hands reaching for her face with an accuracy and skill that she could see must be the product of days of insane anticipation and planning— and suddenly she felt calm. Perhaps that was the most terrible thing of all. She was safe, because she knew what was going to happen; she had seen what would happen to Danny eleven years ago, in the dream. She gazed at Danny as his nails reached for her eyes. The stillness of her imagination was a wall that nobody and nothing could breach.

At first Danny didn’t realize what was happening. He was stretching his hands out for her eyes, he was stepping closer, yet they didn’t reach. Even when his hands withdrew beyond his cuffs, even when he thrust the flapping ends of his sleeves toward her face, he still seemed unaware of how he was changing. It was the sudden appalled look that appeared on his face a moment before he looked down at himself that proved too much for her. She dodged around him and went to Freda, and tried not to watch.