Thieving Fear (15 page)

'Sorry,' Charlotte responded, having automatically retreated into a corner, and lurched forwards. She'd said it without thinking, but to whom? She hadn't backed into anyone tall and thin, let alone taller than she was and considerably thinner. The dry jagged sound beneath the nonchalant hum of the lift was too faint to define; it certainly wasn't the clicking of teeth bared in a delighted grimace or already far too bare. Nevertheless she twisted around to see that she was utterly alone, unless someone had sneaked behind her as she moved. The sight of the lift was oppressive enough, the windowless grey cage little wider than her outstretched arms and so indefinitely lit that she couldn't tell how many shadows were sharing the space.

As soon as it lumbered to a halt she dragged the doors apart, bruising her fingers, and ran across the unguarded lobby. The crowd outside on New Oxford Street made her feel hemmed in, particularly at her back. If a smell of earth seemed to linger in her nostrils, it must be as imaginary as it had been in the first place. A bus to Bethnal Green and beyond was approaching, but before she could risk a dash across the road she saw that it was too full to stop. She wanted to be home, up on the roof. Hugging her stuffed bag as if it were an emblem of her ability to function, she struggled through the crowd to Tottenham Court Road.

The stairs to the Underground were so packed with commuters that she took a firmer grip on her bag, though the gesture helped the crowd to pin her arms against her sides. Whoever was immediately above her seemed anxious to travel, but did he really need to press against her back? She could imagine he was eager for his dinner – he felt famished to the bone. He was forcing her downwards step by helpless step, but nobody would notice, since she appeared to be acting just like them. As she reached the circular concourse at the foot of the stairs she opened her mouth to release some kind of noise and swung around. There was nobody in sight who resembled the person she'd sensed behind her. Everyone looked well-fed and entirely unaware of her, and she couldn't be sure that she'd turned to face a loitering smell of earth.

She was heading for the Central Line when she faltered at the ticket barrier. The relentless escalator would carry her down to a platform almost as overloaded as the train was bound to be. All at once she couldn't live with being borne into the subterranean dark amid a press of bodies and increasingly less air. Before she could step aside someone shoved her forwards – a businessman intent on finishing a mobile call. As she fought her way up to street level, against a descent of commuters so implacable it seemed as mindless as earth collapsing into a pit, she kept having to suppress the notion that a hand was about to seize her by the shoulder or the neck.

At last she stumbled out beneath the sky, which was too distant and too overcast to offer much relief from the pressure of the crowd, and battled along Oxford Street to the stop ahead of the one opposite the publishers. She was just in time to catch a bus, although she would have said it was full even before several passengers joined her in the aisle. As it made its ponderous halting journey to Bethnal Green, her view out of the windows was restricted to a parade of shops and bars supporting older architecture on their backs, a spectacle occasionally varied by a glimpse down a side street of a church or some other venerable building. The view made her feel all the more shut in, as though the windows were no better than antique panoramas exhibiting an artificial progress. Once she was off the bus she would breathe more freely. Had somebody behind her been gardening? That might also explain why they were so thin.

As soon as the bus reached Bethnal Green Road she left it, three stops short of hers. It sailed away before she could identify the passenger who'd stood so close. The pavements were crowded with homecomers, and even though the traders were packing up their stalls of clothes and discs and jewellery and groceries, the route still felt constricted. Charlotte took a side street that bordered a park, which accommodated several haphazard games of football and more supine forms of recreation. As she crossed the park she hesitated only once, distracted by the twitching of an elongated shadow beside her. It belonged to a young tree that must have shifted in a breeze she hadn't noticed. The tree was far too slim for anyone to have sidled from behind it or to be using it for cover.

An alley between gentrified four-storey tenements led from a gate in the railings to the pavement opposite her flat. She unlocked the door at the top of the steps and tramped up the stone stairs. Even the passage that enclosed them as they climbed from balcony to balcony felt unappealingly narrow just now. Without pausing to dump her bag in her second-floor flat she continued up to the roof.

She dropped the bag on the faded sunlounger flanked by potted plants – Susie's from the top floor – and leaned on the wall beside the communal barbecue shrouded in plastic. A train whined along the viaduct parallel to Whitechapel Road, beyond which an airliner as bright as a sunlit knife was sinking above the Thames towards Heathrow. Charlotte raised her face to the tattered sky and had taken several increasingly deep breaths when her mobile rang.

She recognised the number, though she had only ever used it to say that her train to Vivaldi was delayed. She thought it best to put on a voice as professional as it was amiable. 'Glen?' she said with a hint of surprise.

'Sure. Sorry if I'm calling when it's not appropriate, but I don't know if you need to hear the news.'

Whatever she might have expected of him, it wasn't this, especially his wariness that sounded close to nervous. 'I don't either,' she said.

'I guess that means you haven't. OK. Sorry.' His pause might have been meant to express further sympathy before he added 'I'm afraid it's about your cousin.'

'Oh, Glen, come on. Not more afterthoughts about her book,' Charlotte blurted, and then his silence gave her time to hold her suddenly tense breath.

She had to research Thurstaston, otherwise she would be letting her family down – Charlotte, who believed she was worth publishing, and Hugh, who'd already done some of the work for her, and even Rory, who had tried in his abrasive way to help. She didn't need to think about the mirror in the cliff, even though it must have been stuck among roots in a burrow, not held in the remains of a hand. Or perhaps she could think of it if she rendered it manageable by working it into her next book. After all, the first one seemed to be letting her come to terms with the injustice she'd suffered at the tribunal; indeed, her new chapters were rendering the memory remote. Perhaps Carlotta or Hugo or Roy could find a magic mirror buried on the common or hidden in a cave by a sorcerer, and why not Arthur Pendemon, if he was as wizardly as his name suggested? Each of them would look into the mirror and see the dream they most wished for, although what would Helen visualise? Presumably her old folk in miraculously rude health, except that as Ellen tried to hold onto the idea it was ousted by the thought of confronting an altogether less welcome reflection, not an old woman but somebody who didn't even have age as an excuse for her mass of pallid bloated spongy flesh, which managed to be both puffy and sagging, a feat unworthy of applause. This wasn't a memory, it had just been a glimpse too brief to be trusted. She mustn't let it reach her nerves again. She dismissed from the screen the chapter she'd started to reread to see if any of it was worth preserving. As soon as the jittering cursor lodged on the Frugonet icon she clicked the slippery mouse.

She'd had enough of her blurred reflection. Across the street a girl was baring almost the whole of her slim bronzed self in a minute bikini on a second-floor balcony. Ellen considered stepping onto hers to catch a little of the late-afternoon sun, and imagined herself as one of a pair of figures in an old-fashioned clock; if she emerged the other girl would have to leave her lounger and retreat into her niche. Equally, as long as the slim girl was out there could be no place for – Ellen left her musings at that, because the computer had brought her the Internet. Once it responded to her password – rohtua, which had started making her feel backward when she'd learned she had to rewrite her book but which no longer did – she typed 'Arthur Pendemon' in the search box.

She'd hardly clicked the mouse when the screen filled with pallor. It was displaying a page of search results, the first of which looked promising:
Arthur Pendemon's Dwelling at Thurstaston Mound
. The next listing included a quotation:

. . . Arthur Pendemon, who sounds like he fancied himself as some sort of demonic economist . . .

She must have leaned towards the monitor, because her ill-defined reflection appeared to swell up. She recoiled – sat back, rather – and clenched her clammy fist on the mouse to bring up the site.

It was called Mumbo Jumbjoe, which was also the pseudonym of its apparently solitary writer. A sidebar listed topics:
Flying Sauce
,
Pyramid Selling Ancient Egyptian Style
,
Happy Crappy Mediums
,
Where to Shove a Bent Spoon and Other Useless Tricks
,
Aliens Stole Their Brains
. . . The page on which Ellen had landed was entitled
Vic and Ed's Ectoplasmic Extravaganza
, and she saw why soon enough.

Blame the Victorians and a few Edwardians while you're at
it. Eras of scientific advance my arse. Maybe they were,
but they go to show too many people that ought to know
better can't cope with too much reason and get desperate
to believe in something else, anything you can't prove.
What's changed, eh? You'd think humanity couldn't live
without magic. Back then it was everywhere a lot of people
looked. You couldn't walk down your garden without
tripping over a fairy, and even Conan Doyle ended up
thinking they were real. Pity he didn't have Sherlock
Holmes to sort him out, because he got taken in by the
spiritualists after his wife died. Freud ought to have gone
into why their victims needed to see lots of white stuff
coming out of someone . . .

This startled a laugh out of Ellen, one that felt guilty and surreptitious. She'd begun to dislike the tone of the site so much that she might almost have been sharing someone else's resentment. She propped her chin on her fist, at least one of which yielded more than she appreciated, and scrolled down.

Doyle was just the best-known writer to get into the
occult. William Butler Yeats, horror writers like Stoker and
Machen and Blackwood, Sax Rohmer that thought up Fu
Manchu – they all joined the Order of the Golden Dawn,
Victorian England's cult sensation. So did the Astronomer
Royal (just the Scots one) and the President of the Royal
Academy (no Scot him) and Oscar Wilde's wife (bugger her).
The Order didn't order Baldy Crowley, but he was the
magician that got all the publicity, and maybe he gave away
what it was all about deep down. One thing was having
magical duels. Baldy challenged the founder to one, and a
couple of magic men who'd gone up north had a real old
witchy rumpus. Step forward Arthur Pendemon, who
sounds like he fancied himself as some sort of demonic
economist, and Peter Grace . . .

Ellen pushed herself to her feet and leaned forwards to drag up the sash of the window. Perhaps the cloying smell that reminded her of digging in the earth was outside the building, because her action seemed not to affect it. Of course, someone must be gardening. As the girl on the balcony raised a slim arm to acknowledge her, Ellen retreated behind her desk. She passed a hand over her moist forehead and wiped it on her old baggy trousers before closing her fingers over the mouse.

The story goes Pendemon thought Grace was calling up too
many spirits and devils and the rest of that lot when he
wanted to use them himself. Seems like even demons get tired
and want a night off now and then. You'd think these two
masters of the occult might have learned to share and be
good little boys, but Grace told Pendemon if he wanted any of
the powers Grace was supposed to have made slaves out of he
could fight him for them. He must have thought his were
bigger and nastier, but Pendemon had a trick under his pointy
hat if it wasn't up his robe. 'All flesh incubates the dark,' he's
meant to have said, and 'At the core of every soul horror waits
to gnaw forth' and 'The mass of men are vessels of dread for
the thaumaturge to draw upon.' In English that means he
thought he could use anybody handy to send Grace something
as horrible as horrible gets. Anyone who wandered near
Pendemon's house . . .

What use was this to Ellen's book? She let go of the glistening plastic lump and raised her ponderous hand to dab her infirm forehead. She was lowering her hand to wipe it when it faltered in front of her nose, that pallid excrescence that appeared to have split in half to trouble both inner edges of her vision. With a good deal of reluctance she brought the hand closer. Was it the source of the underlying smell? She wasn't sure, though her hand was certainly as moist as an imperfectly squeezed sponge. She let the flabby appendage flop on the desk, only to wonder which she found less appealing – the hand or the prospect of reading the rest of the text. Couldn't she look at Pendemon's house instead? Even that would involve wielding her fat etiolated sweaty hand. It and the insidious smell, which she was increasingly unable to believe had any source besides her own dank self, had begun to sicken her. She was staring at the hand as if this might render it no longer part of her, except that the rest was at least as bad, when her mobile wriggled against her padded hip before emitting its protracted note.

She saw her hand jerk nervously, and tried not to think that she saw it wobble like a jellyfish stranded on the beach of the desk. She fumbled the mobile out of her pocket and poked a key with a blundering thumb as she lifted her hand almost close enough to touch her pulpy cheek. 'Ellen?' Hugh said.

'I'm afraid so.' She hoped he hadn't caught that – she didn't want to have to explain – and so she added 'Are you checking up on me?'

'Why, do I need to? What's wrong?'

'I meant are you checking to see if I've found out anything about the person you mentioned who used to live where we were talking about.'

What had happened to her language? She was sidling around the subject without understanding why. As she gazed at the screen she was close to fancying that the information below the edge was about to inch into view – that it was determined not to stay buried. Hugh didn't help by mumbling 'Have you?'

Ellen had the odd impression that he would prefer not to know, unless he hoped for a negative answer. A faint tremor rose through the lines on the monitor, as if the text were about to take on more life. As she reached to quell it with a fat hand at the end of an arm that was surely not as plump, she was suddenly afraid that her pudgy clutch would dislodge the lurking words from their den. She closed her eyes while she admitted 'I'm just starting.'

'Leave it alone for a minute, can you?'

Ellen risked slitting her eyes and saw that the upper half of the rest of the sentence had crept into view.

. . .
would have the worst

she couldn't avoid glimpsing before she clicked the mouse to close the page. She wanted to blame Hugh for her nervousness, and wished she didn't have to ask 'Why?'

'It wasn't what I rang about. It's Rory.'

'Has he got you acting as his secretary now? Go on then, put him on.'

She was so concerned to shut down the computer, if only since it was a distraction, that she didn't immediately notice Hugh's pause. 'I can't,' he said.

'Don't tell me he wants you to do his talking for him as well.' As the screen turned black, exhibiting her pale blob of a face, Ellen raised her voice in case she could be overheard. 'He's good enough at talking to my editors about me when I didn't ask him to. Is he sorry now he did? He ought to tell me to, well, he can't to my face, but he ought to tell me himself.'

'It isn't that,' Hugh protested in something like anguish. 'I said I'd tell you about him.'

'When did you say that?'

'When I spoke to Charlotte.'

Ellen couldn't help growing resentful, however prematurely. 'You were speaking to her about . . .'

'What've we been talking about? My brother. Why are you making this harder for me?'

'I'm sure I wasn't aware that I was.'

'Ellen, I'm sorry. It's not your fault, it's mine.' Hugh swallowed hard enough to be audible and said 'I phoned him when he was coming to see me and he was in a crash.'

Hugh couldn't feel guiltier than Ellen immediately did for having assumed the subject was her book. She stared in renewed loathing at her blurred pallid swollen face and wondered how much it was puffed up with self-absorption. She saw a hole open in it as she set about asking 'How bad?'

'Bad.'

The hole closed, and she felt her thickened lips quiver like gelatin as they rubbed together. They parted with an unpleasant sticky sound as a preamble to saying 'Just tell me, Hugh.'

'He's not dead.'

Eventually she had to ask 'What is he?'

'Unconscious. Maybe in a coma.'

Ellen unstuck her lips again, and so did the oversized blob. 'Apart from that . . .'

'I don't know. I haven't been yet. I've only just rung the hospital.'

'When will you be going?'

'Soon as I can. Charlotte's coming tomorrow.'

From his tone Ellen could have assumed the events were directly connected. 'She's staying over,' he added on the way to blurting 'You can too if you like.'

Why should a family reunion make Ellen apprehensive? She could only blame Hugh's feelings about her, but she would have to cope with those for Rory's sake. 'I'll see you then,' she said. 'I'll ring to say what time. Are you meeting people at the station?'

'I might have to stay here. Get a cab if you don't fancy walking up.'

'Which way is it? How far?'

Hugh was silent long enough that she thought he was preparing to say more than 'You're best getting a cab.'

How could he have experienced a vision of her plodding uphill to his house, the noisome sweaty mass of her quaking from head to foot with every step? As she struggled to expel it from her mind she managed to say 'Try not to blame yourself, all right? Rory needn't have answered while he was driving. He ought to have switched his phone off.'

'I shouldn't have asked him to come.'

'Don't brood, Hugh. We'll all be together again soon,' Ellen said, which ended the call, or silence did.

Staring at her undefinable reflection didn't help her take her own advice, but she wasn't anxious to return to Mumbo Jumbjoe or visit any of the other sites. She pushed her chair back and stood up, and the girl on the balcony turned her head. She'd donned sunglasses, which obscured whether she was gazing at Ellen with sympathy far too close to dismay if not bordering on revulsion. All at once Ellen felt sick and headed for the bathroom.

Rory's portraits flanked her as she hurried down the hall. She could have thought her own painted eyes were foreseeing her present state and concealing their distress. She shoved the bathroom door open, and then she recoiled. One glimpse in the mirror, not even of her entire shape, was enough. She grabbed her portrait from its hook and carried it in front of her face to the mirror. It was almost exactly as wide as the protruding plastic frame, and so tall that she couldn't see her reflection over it once she slammed it into place. She hadn't glimpsed herself again, let alone anybody else. Nobody a good deal more than sufficiently thin to hide behind her had dodged out of sight, as she confirmed by twisting her head around so hard her neck ached. Perhaps she wasn't going to be sick after all, though she felt worse than queasy as her distended hands splashed cold water on her clammy face. She might have to deal with worse than nausea. When she recalled the veiled gaze of the girl on the balcony, she wondered how she would be able to bear stepping outside the door.