The Echoing Stones (15 page)

I like things to be easy, she thought. I like everything to be well within my power. I don’t want to be stretched. I don’t want to be specially good at anything. When we first married, I thought Arnold was like that too, with his safe and unexciting job with a pension at the end of it. I went on thinking he was like that for more than twenty years.

But I was wrong, wasn’t I? It’s not fair, she mused dreamily, when people suddenly start acting out of
character.
Like Arnold. Like Val dressing-up like that for Gordon’s visit after all her talk about not putting yourself out to please a man. That sort of thing. It made one wonder what sort of surprises Gordon might yet spring on her, from somewhere underneath his scholarly and imperturbable exterior?

An unsettling thought. An un-relaxing one. Why spoil the peaceful present moment with it?

“Someone who studies crystals!” she cried triumphantly, just ahead of Val, in answer to the question about the meaning of the word “Crystallographer”. She felt fulfilled, enriched, by this miniscule success. How easy it is to do easy things! Why can’t there be more of them?

Escaping as quickly as he could from this hideously embarrassing encounter with his wife and her new friend, Arnold fled to the dungeon, with the muttered excuse that he had to lock it up early. For three Sundays in a row he had been elaborately avoiding contact with Mildred – a task rendered easier by the fact that she was likewise elaborately avoiding contact with him. All the same, it was a nuisance. Why did she keep visiting the place like this? To come on the one occasion to collect her belongings – fair enough. Fair enough, too, to have found someone with a car to help her with transporting them. But to come again the next Sunday, and the Sunday after that – it was too much! And the thing was further complicated by the fact that her escort turned out to be an expert on sixteenth-century Italian tapestries, a man after Arnold’s own heart. He would have liked to get to know this Gordon Belfort a bit better; to invite him down, perhaps, for a special private tour of the place at a time when the public weren’t admitted. Such an occasion might prove especially rewarding since it seemed that this new acquaintance had been one of Sir Humphrey’s students many years ago; had had first-hand contact with the great historian at the height of his powers. Ever since Arnold had come here, it had been a source of abiding sadness to him that his only contact with that once brilliant mind was with its wreckage; with the shattered ruin of what it had once been. So the chance now to share the
first-hand memories of one who had known the great days of Sir Humphrey Penrose would be poignantly welcome.

But it was not to be. He’d been on the very point of issuing his tentative invitation, when he was silenced in mid-sentence by the sight of his wife stumbling towards them, clutching her handbag to her ribs as she always did when nervous. It was impossible to cultivate this new acquaintance if Mildred was to be forever at their elbows, her lamentable ignorance hanging like a dead weight over any interesting conversation. Right now, this very minute, she had succeeded in bringing a fascinating discourse to a dead stop simply by standing there, a yard or two away, clutching her handbag and not saying anything.

How restful, how peaceful, the dungeon seemed after that awkward encounter! Even the torture implements – the rack, the thumbscrew and the Scavenger’s Daughter seemed like old friends, so quiet were they, so
undemanding
, and by now so familiar.

They could do with a good rub-up, actually, the metal parts in particular which could so easily rust if left neglected for too long. Cleaning rag in hand, he visited the appliances one after another, rubbing at any trace of rust or dirt, and here and there checking the mechanisms. The school parties – little ghouls that they were – loved to see the sinister cogs and wheels stirred into slow, menacing action. “Oo-Ooh” they would breathe, awed, and giggling defensively. Sometimes one or two would cover their eyes in mock – or perhaps genuine? – horror; but whichever it was. fingers would be spread a little to allow a peep. Arnold wondered, sometimes, what the fascination was; was it really just straightforward and regrettable sadism? Or was there, perhaps, in growing children an actual physical need for experiences of shock and horror in order that the adrenal glands might develop properly? Perhaps without such early experiences the flow
of adrenalin would tend to be sluggish and inadequate throughout life, a state of affairs conducive to lethargy and depression? A good and sufficient reason if true, for the breathless eagerness with which the youngsters flocked around these grim relics.

Not that the adults were all that behindhand in their (slightly shamefaced) enthusiasm for archaic horror.
Interest
in the dungeon and its grisly contents had been redoubled since the Magic and Witchcraft people had been filling-in for him when he couldn’t manage one or other of the afternoon tours. The dungeon was haunted, they proclaimed, by the ghost of an old woman who had died there three hundred years ago, accused of witchcraft. She had died bravely, not pleading for mercy, but rather proclaiming her defiance to the last. “Against my will, gentlemen, ye have brought me to this place to encompass my death; and verily I tell you, against
your
will shall I stay here. My corporeal body ye may destroy, but my soul being deathless will live on to encompass your destruction, each and every one of you.”

Had
the destruction of each and every one of these unnamed gentlemen been encompassed? Well, each and every one of them had died in the end, that was for sure; but beyond that, nothing at all was known of any of them. Not that this lacuna in the historical evidence had deterred or disheartened the Magic and Witchcraft people in any way; evidence of their own was forthcoming in plenty. One of their number would bring with her a contraption that looked like two cocoa-tins connected by a tangle of electric wire. It was called (so the demonstrator proclaimed) a Phantometer, and it was designed to emit a low regular clicking sound if a ghost passed by within a few feet. Holding one cocoa-tin in each hand, the demonstrator would close her eyes, call for silence, and then, after the appropriate number of seconds for bringing the tension to fever-pitch, lo and behold, the clicking sound would begin:
at first so soft as to be barely audible, and then becoming louder … louder … louder as the ghost emerged out of the East wall and neared the centre of the vault, where the apparatus was located, and then softer … softer … softer as it proceeded on its way and finally made its ghostly exit through the West Wall.

Well, it brought in the crowds: an extra ticket for the dungeon would seem to be called for. It would bring in a most welcome addition to the afternoon’s takings; though of course on the days when Arnold took the tour himself, the customers would be sadly short-changed in respect of ghosts and other mysterious phenomena.

No way – not for any amount of extra money – would Arnold have any truck with such nonsense. Apart from the ludicrous Phantometer apparatus, the whole story was implausible in all sorts of ways. A woman accused of being a witch in the seventeenth century would have met her death at the stake, with huge crowds watching, not in the secrecy of a dungeon. The whole point of putting witches to death was to make a public spectacle of it; a dramatic warning to any other woman whose native intelligence and intuitive skills might tempt her into being too clever by half.

*

Flora, of course, disagreed with this analysis; and when Arnold finally ventured back to the flat that afternoon – making sure first that Mildred and her escort were safely away – the argument started up all over again.

“How do you
know
that the Phantometer thing is all nonsense?” she demanded. “All you mean is that
you
don’t see how it could work. Well,
I
don’t
understand
how a laser beam works, operating on eyes and things, but I don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that it’s all nonsense, and that these operations must always fail.”

True enough. Arnold didn’t understand how laser
beams worked either. He tried to explain to his
daughter
that, faced with some bit of technology you don’t understand (and there are more and more such, with every passing year, for even the most knowledgable of laymen) you simply have to accept the judgement of the experts in the field. That’s what experts are
for
– to present to the layman conclusions that have been arrived at through immensely complex precedures and trains of reasoning.

“And how do you know that the conclusions of Phantometry haven’t been arrived at through immensely complex procedures and trains of reasoning? Who are the experts on ghosts and magic? You, who’ve never
condescended
to study the subjects at all, and never will? Or these members of the Magic and Witchcraft Association who’ve concentrated on these subjects, and studied them in depth, for years and years? Have you seen their library? Shelves and shelves, from floor to ceiling, all filled with books on these sort of things: Ghosts; Parapsychology; Extra-Sensory Perception; Near-Death experiences;
Telekinesis
. What right have
you,
who haven’t read even one of these books, to dismiss it all as nonsense?”

Arnold shrugged, beginning to be bored. Probably these silly women hadn’t read any of the books either. And anyway, Flora was only arguing, as she so often did, for the sake of arguing.

“Oh, well, Flora, if you
want
to believe in this sort of nonsense, I’m not going to waste my time on …”

“I did
not
say I believed it. I just don’t
dis
believe it. I haven’t enough evidence either way. And you haven’t either. In a case like this, it’s just as irrational to be certain that a thing
isn’t
true as to be certain that it
is.

“But I’ll tell you one thing. Sir Humphrey thinks there’s something strange lurking in that dungeon. He’s seen things. Heard things. That door in the East Wall that’s supposed to be always locked because of the staircase
behind it being dangerous – well, it’s
not
always locked, whatever you may think. He’s seen it slowly opening, more than once. He’s seen things coming out of it, at dead of night. He
knows,
you see, the things that once happened here … the things that were once brought down that winding staircase. He
knows.
He’s an expert about this sort of thing.”

“
Was
an expert,” Arnold corrected her. “You really must remember, Flora, that he’s a very old man now, his mind is confused, and full of fancies. You’re not doing him any good, you know, by encouraging these delusions …”

“They are
not
delusions! And how do
you
know what is doing him good and what isn’t?” Flora was growing really angry. “Talk about experts! Who is the expert on Sir Humphrey’s mental state?
You,
who’ve never exchanged three words with him? Or
me
, who’s talked with him and listened to his ideas for hours and hours; who’s really interested in them, and has given them lots of thought? You know, Arnold, there’s no one in the world quite as illogical as you logical people. You assume you know everything, and so anything you
don’t
know is by definition nonsense.”

One way and another, it was quite a relief when Flora took herself off immediately after supper. Joyce had been invited to a party to celebrate a friend’s sixtieth birthday, and for the first time in years she had felt able to accept such an invitation. “I may be back really quite late,” she’d warned Flora, in tones of excitement mixed with pride at her own unprecedented daring; and Flora, imperturbable as usual, had assured her it was O.K. Any time. As late as you like.

Arnold suspected, though he was taking pains not to find out for certain, that Joyce had taken to paying Flora for her sitting-in sessions. How much, and whether it approached the going rate, he didn’t know and didn’t
want to know. To know all may or may not to be to forgive all, but it certainly exposes you to the probability of being blamed if something goes wrong.

As often happened when he had a quiet evening on his own, Arnold found himself getting sleepy earlier than usual. In a leisurely way he prepared for bed, treating himself to a long, hot bath in which to relax. Well, he deserved some relaxation. It had been a trying day, what with the Sunday crowds, followed by that awkward encounter with Mildred; and then, to top it all, the wearisome argument with his daughter. Most of their conversations, he reflected, looking back over the past few weeks, had consisted of arguments: mostly quite pointless ones, from which no conclusion was ever going to be reached. To Flora, he felt sure, it was a sort of game; one which she couldn’t fail to win, for the simple reason that she was young and could thus effortlessly discount his opinions as being out of date and typical of his generation. Or perhaps, on a deeper level, it was a game she played with him because she really didn’t know how to relate to him in any other way. Or he with her, come to that?

Musing thus, he felt the water cooling around him, and when he turned on the tap to remedy this, he found to his annoyance that it ran tepid. Reluctant and shivering, he climbed out and got himself dried and into pyjamas at top speed. He wasn’t going to wait up for Flora – goodness knows when she’d be back, and she now had her own key to the flat. Not, of course, the Estate keys, these he kept always with him. He’d even taken them with him into the bathroom, just in case.

By eleven o’clock he was in bed, and asleep before midnight. He was vaguely aware, just as he was dropping off, of the sound of the front door being softly opened, and then closed.

Good, Flora was safe back. Joyce would have rung by now if there had been any problems.

*

They say that dreaming does not occur randomly at any hour of the night. It comes in cycles, every hour-and-
a-half,
and if you are wakened in the middle of one of these dreaming periods, you will recall your dream vividly and be able to describe it in detail. Otherwise, it will fade away during your subsequent sleep, and by morning you will remember nothing.

By this calculation, it must have been about half-past one when Arnold had his frightening dream. And he did indeed wake from it with the feeling that something had woken him: and, yes, in accordance with the theory he remembered it with awful vividness, and could describe it in exact detail, though of course he had no intention of doing so. Who wants to listen to someone else’s dreams? Also, in this particular case, it would be impossible to convey to another person the nature of the terror with which the dream had been imbued as it galloped inexorably towards nightmare.

He’d dreamed he was back in the dungeon. Well,
nothing
surprising about that, he’d been working down there only the previous afternoon. But in the dream the dungeon had been darker than usual; this was the only thing, at first, that bothered him. He sought to turn on the strip-lighting, but somehow he could not find the switches. Which was absurd, even in a dream, because he knew perfectly well where the switches were located, conveniently hand-high alongside the heavy oak door. Yet somehow they weren’t there. Up and down the rough stone wall his dream-hand wandered; but there was nothing.