Ancient Images Part 14

The receptionist had already turned toward the noise, and now she came to the window. As she caught sight of Sandy, her face grew sullenly determined. Behind her Sandy glimpsed the garish hats bobbing as the women craned over the counter to see her. She twisted the key again, and the hats disappeared. The women were coming for her.

The engine coughed, revved, belched fumes that filled ------------------------------------219 the rearview mirror. The car sprang forward so abruptly that the wheels skidded on the mossy stone, and the left-hand headlight barely missed the edge of the entrance arch. The car lurched out of the car park, but she had to brake at the street to let a delivery van coast by. The women piled out of the hotel and ran down the steps like a grim chorus line, each of them with one hand on her hat, the other outstretched toward Sandy. "Hoi!" cried the woman with the reddened hands, and the engine stalled.

It wouldn't start when Sandy twisted the key. The women sprinted the few yards between the hotel steps and the gap in the pavement. They meant to block her way, and they could. With the clarity of desperation, she realized she'd forgotten that she had to switch off the ignition before she could restart the engine. She turned the key back, then forward, and the engine caught. The car swerved past the women onto the road.

She swung it around the delivery van, s.h.i.+fted into second gear to pick up speed. In the mirror she saw the three women on the pavement, performing a kind of impromptu dance of rage, hands on their hats and their fists in the air, and then the van blocked her view. People outside shops and in front gardens glanced at her as she drove past, but n.o.body else moved to detain her. The last houses dwindled behind her, the planted Redfield sign shrank. The road sloped down into the sea of wheat, which flooded around her beneath a pale sky. She shoved in the choke and trod hard on the accelerator, and began to hum to herself, a wordless song of escape--from what, she wasn't sure. But she was still in sight of the tower of Redfield when she stamped on the brake. ------------------------------------220 The road was higher than the fields now. Both the road and the fields were deserted apart from the scarecrows in the wheat. Had there been as many scarecrows when she had last driven along this route? Ahead of her was the Ear of Wheat, and beyond it, where the haze began, the tops of trees in the copse past the bridge at Toonderfield. Beyond the copse there was a choice of roads, and that was why she was hesitating. Once the roads divided, she couldn't be certain of meeting Roger if he happened to be on his way to meet her.

He wouldn't be coming so belatedly, she told herself, but suppose he was? This wasn't much more than a day later than he had said he would join her. Perhaps he had become so engrossed in his work that he had forgotten to call her, or perhaps he'd a.s.sumed she would call him if she was moving on, or perhaps his phone was out of order. She knew she wasn't thinking logically, but she seemed unable to do so while her fears were so vague. What did she imagine would happen to him if he went to Redfield, for heaven's sake? He would head for Staff o' Life and be referred to the Wheat- sheaf, where he would learn that she had already left: what else? But the fear she had been suppressing since she'd encountered the three women at the churchyard gate was finding its voice, chanting "fifty years, fifty years" in her head. If Roger's phone had been out of order, surely it would have been repaired by now, and if he had simply forgotten to call her, she mustn't let it matter. She would feel consider ------------------------------------221 ably happier if she could speak to him before she reached the division of the roads. She peered hard at the rearview mirror to rea.s.sure herself that she wasn't being followed, and then she drove to the Ear of Wheat.

The fields swayed around her, and she had the disconcerting impression that some of the scarecrows were rearing up. She swung the car off the road and parked beneath the pub sign. A wind made the sign cry out, made the car shudder. She locked her suitcase in the boot and strode to the porch.

The wind rattled the latch before she lifted it, and slammed the door behind her. A draft that smelled of earth followed her through the porch and roused the posters on the inside of the gla.s.s, set them reaching toward her as she opened the inner door and stepped into the oak-beamed room. The paunchy landlord was behind the bar, his redheaded wife was padding about in her tigerish slippers and wiping tables. "Here she is," the landlord said without looking up.

He must have seen Sandy crossing the car park--surely they hadn't been told to expect her. The woman stooped to examine the table she was wiping. "Will you be having the lunch?"

"Just a drink," Sandy said, "and may I use your phone?"

The woman hadn't sounded especially welcoming, and now her voice grew brusque. "Ask him."

The landlord was watching Sandy as he polished the beer pumps. His expression seemed just short of hostility, and didn't change as she met his eyes. "May I?" she said.

"You've not said what you'll have to drink."

"A half of lager, please," Sandy said, and went to the phone on the wall at the end of the bar. Perhaps he and his wife had had an argument about Sandy after her first visit, and that was why the woman had grown as curt as he was. From her place by the phone Sandy could see the road to ------------------------------------222 Toonderfield through the window between two prints of hunting scenes. She dug in her purse and found she had almost no coins. "Could you give me some fifty-pence pieces?"

The landlord stared discouragingly at her ten-pound note, and then at her. "Long distance, is it?"

"I'm afraid so," Sandy said, telling herself that he didn't intend to sound menacing.

He took the note from her, set down her gla.s.s of lager, rang the till open. He peered into the drawer and slapped a five-pound note on the counter, and then four pound coins, which the phone wouldn't accept, and the change from a pound. She was about to argue when he took back a pound and replaced it with two fifty-pence coins. "That's all I can do for you."

"If it is, then thank you," Sandy said, and dialed Roger's number. She knew it by heart, and the sound of his phone ringing, deceptively close to her. She gazed out at the empty road beyond the prints of English countryside and imminent bloodshed, and the ringing ceased. "h.e.l.lo, yes?"

She'd become so used to receiving no reply that she almost dropped the coin. She shoved it into the slot and waited until she heard it drop. "Guess who this is," she said, "and guess where I am."

"I'm sorry, I don't know. Who is this?"

"You don't know? Well, that's wonderful. Thanks so much." She was tempted to cut him off without even warning him to stay away from Redfield. "You've forgotten my voice already, have you? It's a good thing I remember yours."

"Excuse me, I think you're making--was "d.a.m.n right I've made a mistake. I made it a few nights ago, twice if you remember, or has that slipped your mind too? Who helped you forget, Roger?"

"I told you you were mistaken, miss. This isn't Roger."

"Oh, you aren't Roger?" Sandy cried, and sensed the ------------------------------------223 landlord and his wife listening behind her. "You just happen to be in his flat and sound exactly like him, do you?" "We would sound alike. I'm his father." Sandy opened her mouth and shut it again as her face blazed. The pips began, and she thrust in the second coin, grateful for the interruption. "G.o.d, I'm so sorry. I'm a friend of Roger's. We were planning to meet, but of course he wasn't expecting you to visit. I see that must have put our arrangement out of his mind."

"Well, no, it isn't quite like that, Miss ... 88 "Sandy. Sandy Allan." She was suddenly breathless, his voice had turned so grave. "What is it?"

"Roger is in the hospital. That's why I flew over. He's been in there since the day before yesterday. He hasn't been able to say much." Roger's father coughed and said, "All I know so far is he was attacked by someone wearing a mask or with something wrong with their face." ------------------------------------224 Sandy wrote down the name of the hospital, and apologized again for her tirade. "Let it go," Roger's father said. "He wanted me to make a call, but I couldn't get the name he was saying. Now I've heard yours I'm sure it was you." He promised to tell Roger she was on her way, and wished her a safe journey, and then the phone began to chirp, hungry for change. Before she could say any more to him he'd gone, presumably a.s.suming she had been cut off.

She held on to the receiver for a few moments, though it felt like a handle that had come off in her hand. She mustn't start blaming herself for having suspected Roger when in fact he was lying in the hospital. She mustn't start wondering how badly hurt he was. His inability to speak or to make himself understood might be the effect of painkillers, but then how much pain would he be suffering otherwise? She couldn't help him by brooding. She hooked the receiver onto its rest and fished her keys out of her handbag. Snapping the bag shut, she turned toward the door to the porch.

She saw the redhaired woman exchange glances with the landlord and step into her path. They had been biding their time, she thought numbly: they must have been instructed not to allow her to leave. Then the woman pointed beyond Sandy, her face heavy with regret. "You're not leaving your drink?"

"I'll have to. I only bought it to get change," Sandy said, and was so afraid she would burst out laughing at her ------------------------------------225 panic and appear unforgiveably rude that she was almost running by the time she reached the porch.

She sat in her car and laughed at herself until she had to gasp for breath and wipe her eyes, and then she set off. As she drove onto the road, the tower rose in her rearview mirror. Scarecrows flapped and swayed on both sides of the road. One seemed to stoop beneath the wheat as she pa.s.sed, but she wouldn't let that or the tower distract her. The tower would be out of sight as soon as she was past the bridge at Toonderfield.

The tower seemed not to be shrinking as quickly as it should. "Freud knows why," she scoffed at herself, but it made her feel as if the car wasn't moving as fast as the speedometer claimed. She mustn't let her fears tempt her to drive faster, or she might go off the road as Giles Spence had. At last the yellow distance between her and the bridge telescoped, the ca.n.a.l gleamed like teeth in a thin mouth. She sprayed her windscreen with almost the last of the washer fluid, and the wipers sc.r.a.ped an arc relatively clear of mud as she braked at the narrow bridge and accelerated down into the copse.

Trees leaned over her, nodding their dense heads of leaves. A greenish tinge crept into the mud that coated the windscreen beyond the sweep of the wipers, as if moss had grown there, unnoticed until now. Trees linked branches above her as the road began to curve. She didn't remember the copse as being so extensive or so dim, but on her way into Redfield she'd had no reason to notice. At least she was past Toonderfield, she thought, and immediately wondered if she was. If Giles Spence had run his car into a tree, it had to be down here. Toonderfield must end on the far side of the copse.

The road zigzagged, and she braked reluctantly. She was about to see the sky beyond the copse, she promised herself. What did it matter to her if Spence had died here all that time ago--just fifty years ago? At least she was out of ------------------------------------226 sight of the tower. There had been nothing about the tower in the graveyard, she thought: only about the land--the land that "shall be soaked with blood." She couldn't help peering through the dimness and the mud that edged her windscreen at the trees, to see if she could identify which one had been marked by Spence's crash. But it wasn't the sight of any tree that made her foot jerk on the accelerator, nearly stalling the car.

It was only a scarecrow. Someone must have dumped it among the trees rather than cart it away when it ceased to be of use. It must have been abandoned quite some time ago for its head to have grown into such a mess, though admittedly more than one of the scarecrows she'd glanced at as she pa.s.sed the fields hadn't had much of a face. A wind scuttled through the undergrowth, and the scarecrow swayed out from the tree in whose shadow it was propped. The looming of the fattened greenish blob that might be more like a face than she cared to see made her press the accelerator hard, slewing the car across the curve. The road turned sharply back on itself, and she saw the sky a few hundred yards ahead, at the end of the next straight run. She was so dazzled by the daylight, and by the relief it made her feel, that she almost didn't notice the scarecrow.

The copse must be used as a dumping ground for the figures. It couldn't be the same one, since it was behind a different tree, between her and the open road. This tree, a stout oak, looked as if it had been damaged at some time in the past; perhaps it was the tree she had been searching for earlier. She'd no time and no wish to look closely at it, nor at the ragged famished shape that was silhouetted behind it, poking its spiky greenish head forward. She came abreast of the tree, and as it blocked her view of the figure she felt compelled to accelerate. The oak tree pa.s.sed out of her vision and reappeared in her side mirror, and she saw the scarecrow lurch after her and vanish on all fours in the heaving undergrowth. ------------------------------------227 She cried out, grappled with the wheel as her hands jerked nervously, fought the urge to look over her shoulder. She was almost out of the copse, out of Toonderfield. The wind had overbalanced the scarecrow, that was all. What looked like a blotchy face darting after her through the ferns and gra.s.s must be the shadows of leaves.

She sped between the last trees. A sudden panicky notion that she hadn't made it after all felt like a hook in her stomach. Then the sky opened overhead, and she raced into the wide landscape. The copse shrank in the mirror as if it were returning to its seeds, and then there was nothing around her but fields, nothing behind her and ahead of her except the road. Soon the landscape would calm her, she tried to rea.s.sure herself. Soon she wouldn't feel as if she was still being followed and watched. ------------------------------------228 When she reached the motorway it was a relief to have to concentrate on driving. All she could see following her was the occasional car rus.h.i.+ng up the outer lane, determined to scare anything slower out of its way; all she could see watching her were lorry drivers, gazing down at her legs from their cabs. In Nottinghams.h.i.+re a vanload of miners whistled at her, in Warwicks.h.i.+re a truckful of muddy bare-kneed men sang her a rugby song. Homing planes gleamed in the sky over Luton. The pa.s.sengers must be able to see London, she thought, and felt as if she was finally home.

She came off the motorway during the rush hour. If she headed straight for the hospital, she might well find nowhere to park. She swung toward the North Circular, through the roaring tangle of overpa.s.ses, and made for Highgate Station. She'd forgotten there were so many traffic lights, nearly all of which turned red when they saw her coming. At last she was able to edge out of the shuffling procession and drive down the slope to the station car park.

Less than five minutes later she was on the train. At Warren Street she dashed across the zebra carpet of a crossing to the hospital. The tiled lobby made her think of a cave carved out of an iceberg, except for its mugginess. She knew which ward to head for, and the nurse who was regulating visits let her in.

She had a view of all the beds in the ward as soon as she was past the double doors. Dressed heads chatted from their ------------------------------------229 pillows, wrapped plastered arms with gloves of bandages were stretched out on sheets, but she couldn't see Roger. If he'd been moved out of the ward, shouldn't that mean he was recovering? Surely the occupant of the furthest bed, a man wearing a Balaclava of bandages and with one leg hoisted in the air, couldn't be Roger. His bandaged arm stirred on the sheet, and the man sitting at the bedside turned to her.

His large dark eyes needn't mean he was Roger's father, but he stood up and held out his hands as if he were apologizing for what she was about to see. At once all the anxiety she had been suppressing in order to drive came at her like a wave, and for a moment she thought she was going to faint with the mugginess of the hospital. The sight of Roger, almost unrecognizable with bandages, made her realize how much worse his injuries might have been, and how unbearable it would have been for her to lose him. Just the thought of doing so felt like the threat of a wound not much smaller than her life.

She hurried forward between the beds, trying to swallow, and Roger's father met her halfway. Beneath his lined forehead and graying eyebrows his face looked tired and sad. "You're Miss Allan," he said, in a voice that didn't sound nearly as much like Roger's as it had over the phone.

"Please call me Sandy, won't you?"

"Be glad to. Since I spoke to you I've been hearing from Roger how much you mean to him. From the way you talked at first I guess the feeling is reciprocated." He'd taken her hands and was holding them firmly; his plea made his eyes waver. "I mean," he added hastily, "when I have to go back I can tell his mother that our boy's being looked after."

"I think you can."

"Well, that's good. That's fine. And when he's better I hope that you, well, ah ..." His directness had deserted him now that it had achieved its aim. He let go of her hands and rubbed his forehead with his knuckles. "Time for me to ------------------------------------230 step aside. Do you mind if I hang around, or would you rather be alone?"

She was touched by his concern. "Whichever you'd rather."

He went quickly to the bed and leaned on Roger's pillow. "Can you see who's here, son? Someone you were asking for. Can you see?"

"Sure, dad," Roger said, and gave him a determined smile. "Nothing wrong with my eyes. They're some of the bits of myself I missed injuring."

Sandy gazed at him from the foot of the bed, and winced. Both his arms were bandaged, and most of his torso. He smiled at her with a wryness which she could tell was caused partly by the pain of smiling, and glanced meaningfully at his hoisted leg in plaster. "Hard-boiled eggs and nuts," he intoned.

His father unbent, ma.s.saging the base of his spine. "I'm forgetting my manners. Please, Sandy, have this seat here."

She went around to the head of the bed. She wanted to hold Roger, but she was afraid that if she even laid a finger on him it would hurt him. At least his face was unmarked; in the bandages it looked like an unshaven nun's face. She knelt and kissed him, and the tip of his tongue met hers. Sensing that his father was discreetly averting his eyes, she sat on the chair and slipped her hand beneath Roger's fingers. "Well, this is a fine mess."

"Ouch."

She couldn't keep up the bantering. "What sort of animal did this to you?"

"Don't work yourself up on my account, Sandy. I near as d.a.m.n it did it to myself."

"Your father said--was "He wasn't so clear then," his father interrupted. "They had him pretty well doped up. It's good they already feel they can reduce the medication, isn't it?"

"Sure," Roger said, just as Sandy said, "Of course." ------------------------------------231 His fingers stroked her palm, a secret thanks. "So all right, how did you get yourself into this state?" she demanded.

"Not looking where I was going."

"You forgot which side of the road we drive on."

"No, I stepped into a hole in the road, just around the corner from me. I guess some kids must have thought it would be a good gag to dump the warning sign in there, and the fence that should have been around the hole. Still, I'm the only d.a.m.n fool I know of who found out how far it was to fall and how much stuff there was to fall on."

Sandy felt queasy, furious, helplessly affectionate. "But what's all this got to do with someone wearing a mask?"

"Oh, my father told you about that," Roger said, a rebuke that was obviously aimed more at himself. "That's the most foolish part. I don't even remember it too well. I saw this guy who must have been on his way to a masquerade coming after me. It was getting dark, and that must have made him look worse than he really could have, I guess. Anyway, he was why I didn't look where I was going, and you see where I ended up."

"Can't you remember what he looked like?"

Roger grimaced. "Does it matter?"

Not that much just now, she thought: not if it made him feel worse. "Let's talk about something more interesting," he said, "like how you fared."

His father cleared his throat. "If neither of you needs me for anything I'll head back to the flat and sleep off some of my jet lag. But call me any time, Sandy, if you need to. I'll see you tomorrow, son, and make sure you've been mending."

He lingered at the doors for an anxious backward glance, and left the doors swinging, trying to meet. "You're glad he came, aren't you?" Sandy said.

"Sure. Not everyone would have flown across. But I'm gladder to see you." His fingers moved in her loose grasp. "I'm sorry if I kept you waiting where we were supposed to ------------------------------------232 meet. Until he told me that you'd phoned I couldn't think how to let you know. They'd closed my brain down for the day."

His apology made her want to thump him. "You," she said, and had to apologize for squeezing his hand too hard.

"So tell me what's been happening and let me rest my jaw."

"You haven't broken that too?"

"No, I just want to hear how you wouldn't have needed me anyway."

"Seriously? I think I did." She held his hand gently in both of hers, feeling his warmth through the linen. "Redfield's a strange place, so perfect you feel it just has to be suppressing something. I think I imagined some things I wouldn't have imagined if I hadn't been alone, but don't you dare start blaming yourself, because that wasn't all. Every fifty years there's been some kind of violent death."

"Exactly every fifty years?"

"That's what it looked like," she said, hearing skepticism where perhaps there wasn't any. "At least, I found half a dozen inscriptions in the graveyard that were dated either thirty-eight or eighty-eight, and all of them had to do with being savaged by some sort of beast."

"There weren't inscriptions like that for any other dates?"

"I don't know. Not that I saw."

"Mightn't there have been wildcats or some such dangerous creatures roaming that part of the country if you go back, say, a hundred and fifty years? All I'm saying is that kind of death mightn't have been so unusual."

"I suppose not."

"But you found there'd been that kind of death every fifty years for what, three hundred?"

"Not every fifty. There were some gaps." She was taken aback by how annoyed she felt, not so much with ------------------------------------233 Roger, lying there like a bedridden detective, as with the way what had seemed mysterious and frightening was being explained away. "If it was all a coincidence," she protested, "I can't see why the Redfields objected to the film in the first place."

"Did you meet them?"

"I met the man whose grandfather objected to the film. As we suspected, it was the family that bought the rights. They destroyed the negative."

"b.l.o.o.d.y vandals," Roger said, and winced at having breathed too hard. "You're right, they must have had a reason to go that far."

"I found out the reason. Spence included part of their coat of arms in one of the set designs to get his own back for the way they were making things difficult for him." She remembered feeling she would never be out of the copse at Toonderfield, and wished she could hold Roger's hand tighter. "Apparently that didn't satisfy him. He went up to Redfield as soon as he'd completed the film, because he thought the Redfields were somehow responsible for problems he'd been having on the set, and his car went off the road. He died on Redfield land, in 1938."

"Which you think means ... 88 "Lord knows," she said, suddenly tired of herself and of speculating. "Less than it seemed to while I was there."

"Well, okay. So will you go on looking?"

"For the film."

"Right. Give me something to get out of bed for," he said, and pushed his lower lip forward in a grimace at himself. "Besides you, I mean."

"Out of this bed and into another, you mean."

He grinned, then moaned. "You just reminded me of another bruise."

"Oh no. Think of Karloff and Lugosi if that doesn't turn you on," she said, thinking how the film seemed ------------------------------------234 unimportant, almost irrelevant to her now. "I'll go on looking when I can, if only for Graham's sake, but I have to go back to work."

"I'll take up the search as soon as they let me out of my wrappings."

He'd already helped her search, and this was where it had brought him. The idea was so fleeting and irrational that she ignored it. "Whatever it takes to get you up," she said, and was rewarded with a wink and a wince.

She stayed after the bell, until a nurse tapped her on the shoulder. At the station she waited fifteen minutes on the platform, listening to distant trains that sounded like breaths and restlessness deep in the mossy dark. At Highgate she bought a pizza to slip in the microwave, and drove home. When she opened the door of her flat she couldn't help bracing herself, though there were no cats to leap out of the darkness, only a pack of bills to greet her. She opened windows to let out a faint stale smell. While she ate the pizza she thought of nothing in particular; being home and pleasantly tired was enough for now. She went to bed, leaving the bedroom window ajar. There must be a breeze, even though it didn't stir the curtains, for the stealthy creaking of the tree outside the window lulled her to sleep. ------------------------------------235 In the morning she called Boswell. "I'm back." "Improved?"

"I hope so."

"As you used to be will do. Your friend Lezli has been impressing everyone she's worked with, but you're missed."

Her absence had done Lezli some good, then. "While you were gone I had a word with the appropriate people," Boswell said. "You'll be getting sick pay for this time off and still be ent.i.tled to a holiday."

"That's really kind. I appreciate it. When do you want me back?"

"Any chance of right now?"

"I'm on my way," Sandy said.

Five minutes later she was at the flower bed where the cats were buried. The earth around the flagstone hadn't been disturbed, except by the green shoot of some flower, a sight she found heartening. It stayed with her as she made her way through the park. Once she thought someone wanted to catch up with her, but she could see n.o.body behind her on the paths.