Thieving Fear Page 20

  'They haven't fired you yet, though,' Charlotte said.

  'They will, for misconduct. No point arguing. You know how that goes, Ellen.'

  'Even if she does you should at least –'

  Charlotte couldn't help starting as her mobile went off. She silenced it, wishing that she hadn't used the We Go Frugo jingle as her new ringtone for a joke, only for the displayed number to aggravate her tension. 'Yes, Glen.'

  'Is this a bad time?'

  'I've had better.'

  'Gee, I'm sorry. Should I leave this till you want to call me back?'

  'If we need to talk it may as well be now.'

  'We aren't likely to be cut off, are we? You sound shut in.'

  She yearned to deny it as another bridge engulfed the carriage and was swept away by sunlight that emphasised the thickness of the muddy window. 'Say what you have to say, Glen,' she urged.

  'How's your cousin?'

  'Not conscious yet, the last we heard. We're on our way to see him.'

  'Ellen's with you, right? The reason I'm calling is mainly for her. Maybe I should speak to her in person.'

  As Charlotte held out the phone Ellen said 'Doesn't it work so we can both hear?'

  'Do you want me to go away?' Hugh said, though he seemed to be pleading for the reverse.

  'I meant you as well,' Ellen said without taking the mobile. 'You're involved too.'

  Charlotte looked away from his colourful reaction and poked the hands-free button. 'Glen? Can you hear me?'

  'Pretty well,' he said a little fuzzily but loud enough to be comprehensible above the muffled thunder of the wheels. 'Are we in a meeting?'

  'Ellen would prefer it if you don't mind.'

  'Whatever's best for our author. Good to speak to you at last, Ellen. Let's hope we'll have a reason to get together and celebrate soon.'

  She seemed not to know where to put her hands – nowhere near her face and not in her lap. Splaying her fingers on the upholstery on either side of her, she leaned forwards. 'You weren't calling to say we have.'

  'Working on it. How's the new book coming?'

  'I'm a bit distracted at the moment,' Ellen said, and her lips worked as if searching for a shape.

  'I figured you might be. That's why I thought I'd help. I had some spare time, so I looked into the place you came up with. Thurstaston.'

  Ellen pressed her lips fat and then sucked them inwards, so that Charlotte might have felt compelled to speak if Hugh hadn't. 'What did you find?'

  Glen's voice grew louder but less clear. 'Who's that?'

  'Only Hugh,' Hugh said. 'Their cousin.'

  'Hi, Hugh. Sorry, I thought I heard someone else. I guess they were up on the street. Couldn't have been down here.'

  Charlotte didn't care to be reminded that his apartment was below street level. 'So you said you looked where again?'

  'The net. That's my Saturday night, a man and his computer.' Was he listening for her reaction? He paused before adding 'I found a bunch of stuff about a guy who lived there that maybe you could work up somehow, Ellen. Thurstaston Mound, he lived at. Well, more than lived.'

  The carriage shook. The train was braking for a station, but the shudder or Glen's last remark was enough to send Ellen's hands towards her face. Perhaps they were intended to suppress a question. Charlotte wasn't eager to ask it, however much their muteness felt like an unacknowledged presence. She could have imagined this was why Hugh blurted 'You mean Pendemon.'

  Darkness engulfed the carriage. It was the shadow of the station, and the door alarm began to shrill. Nobody visible was boarding – nobody at all – but Glen said 'What did somebody set off?'

  'It's just the doors,' Charlotte told him.

  'You're getting out of what is it, a train?'

  'Not getting out,' she had to say.

  The beeping addressed her a second time, and then the train crept forwards. As sunlight and a ghost of mud coated the window afresh Glen said 'Sounds like you know about him.'

  'I looked him up,' Ellen said. 'I didn't read it all.'

  'What did you read?'

  'Wouldn't it be easier to email her the link?' Charlotte said as Ellen failed to speak.

  'I could do that, except when's it going to reach her?'

  'Not till I get home. I don't know when that'll be.'

  'I'm the same,' said Charlotte. 'I mean, I've got no access here.'

  'Hey, don't sound so pleased about it. How about the guy who isn't speaking?'

  Hugh's gaze darted about as if he wondered where the person referred to might be, and then he worked on producing a laugh. 'I haven't even got a computer.'

  'You must like living in the past. Maybe I should read some of this in case you want to think about it, Ellen.'

  'That couldn't have been his real name, could it?'

  'Pendemon? I'd say not. The guy who runs this site has some fun with that, well, with the whole thing. Seems like he doesn't believe in any kind of magic.'

  Charlotte sensed that Ellen had been seeking some kind of reassurance, but Hugh had a question for Glen. 'Do you?'

  'If it pays you bet I do.'

  'Is he Mumbo someone,' Ellen said, 'your man with no beliefs?'

  'Jumbjoe, that's his byline. Maybe he's not the sceptic he wants us all to think or he wouldn't write so much about it. You're right, he figures Pendemon's a fake name. Nothing to do with penning demons either.'

  Did Glen mean to lighten the mood? He seemed to have achieved the opposite. The air trapped by the unopenable windows felt heavy with resentment thick as earth, stale as old breath. 'I thought it was trying to sound like Pendragon,' Hugh said.

  'Pen means head, doesn't it?' said Ellen.

  'Head demon, huh? I don't think he got that job. Let's see what you don't know.'

  Charlotte had a thought she was far from relishing. 'We'll be coming to a tunnel soon.'

  'I'd better make this fast, then. Did you see he got into a fight with another magician, Ellen?'

  'Something Grace, wasn't it?'

  'Amazing,' Hugh said and looked painfully out of place.

  'You got it, Ellen. Peter Grace. I don't believe in that name either.'

  Charlotte thought the rush of the train had grown hollow ahead, but the tunnel didn't appear. Perhaps the sound suggestive of the gaping of a pit had been on the loudspeaker, although it didn't affect Glen's voice when he asked 'Did you see what your guy tried to send Grace?'

  'I don't know. I didn't get that far.'

  Ellen's hands began to writhe on either side of her face as if to ward the information off. Charlotte leaned across the phone on the seat to stroke her cousin's arm, but Ellen snatched it out of reach as Charlotte said 'Glen, I think you'd better –'

  'He collected nightmares.'

  Charlotte felt as if a pit were indeed yawning beneath her, even if it had yet to swallow Glen's voice. She straightened up hastily, only to fear that Ellen might think she'd recoiled from her. By this time Hugh seemed to feel nervously driven to ask 'How?'

  'This isn't a site that'll give you his method. It does quote things he's meant to have said.'

  'I saw some of those,' Ellen intervened.

  Charlotte thought she might be trying to hush Glen, but he retorted 'At the core of all men is darkness and terror?'

  'Something like that.'

  'These are what he's supposed to have told his followers, not that he ever had too many of those. They all ran off when he tried to use them,' Glen said. 'The essence of each man is the infant he once was, at the mercy of the dark?'

  'No,' Ellen said forcefully enough to be denying the idea.

  'The hidden child shall serve the adept, and its terror shall become its weapon?'

  'No.'

  'The husk shall return to the world and carry on its mundane mummery, having yielded up its substance to the sorcerer?'

  Ellen's lips were opening yet again, plumply audible before she spoke, when Hugh demanded 'What's all that meant to mean?'

  'Like
I said, he collected people's nightmares. I'm not saying I believe it any more than this site does. You don't have to either, Ellen. Just use it if you can.'

  She'd closed her mouth by now, though her lips were continuing to shift. 'What's kind of interesting,' Glen said, 'is he's supposed to have made a couple of mistakes.'

  'What?' Hugh said with an urgency Charlotte found disconcerting.

  'That last quote I gave you sounds as if he thought he took the nightmares out of people, doesn't it? Or maybe he didn't care. The people he's supposed to have lured to his house, they went away with nightmares some of them didn't even know they had. Of course that could just have been they were scared of the place because they knew his reputation.'

  Hugh's gaze was dodging about so wildly it looked helpless, and Ellen seemed equally uncertain where to rest her wriggling fingers. As for Charlotte, she'd grown too breathless to speak, and so Hugh asked the question. 'What was the other mistake?'

  'I guess he thought nobody could get at his own nightmares. You could say he did it to himself by being so obsessed with other people's, or maybe it makes for a better story if Grace turns Pendemon's own nightmare on him after one of his followers joined up with Grace and told him what it was. Or it could just have been a coincidence, but that's not the kind of book your cousin's writing.'

  Again it was Hugh's question that broke the stale constricted breathless silence. 'What was?'

  'He was scared of being buried alive,' Glen said before a rush of blackness engulfed his voice. The train had entered the tunnel at last. For an instant Charlotte was glad that it had quieted him, and then she seemed to taste the dark that clogged her mouth and stole her breath.

  TWENTY-THREE

  As Ellen saw blackness racing towards her she had time to hope that it would blot her out. Extinguishing the lights would do, but it only closed around the train, displaying her on either side. Even if she stared resolutely ahead she was still aware of the loathsome bloated pallid shapes that flanked her like guards conducting her to some inevitable fate. She saw Charlotte grab the mobile and switch off the silenced call before shutting her eyes tight, while Hugh made it plain that he had no idea where to look. It had been kind of them to pretend they could bear the sight of Ellen, and she couldn't blame them for giving up. Charlotte ought to be proud of Ellen's developing vocabulary, of the number of words she had found for herself: bulky, bulging, puffy, inflated, pasty, revolting, disgusting, foul, fetid, noisome, emetic, vomitive . . . She was going down the list that filled her head when Hugh spoke, barely audible above the hollow uproar of the train. 'Is it him?'

  Charlotte raised her head as if to search but kept her eyes shut, presumably for fear of glimpsing Ellen. 'Is who what?'

  'Pendemon,' Hugh mumbled and turned his gaze away from the window beside her, only to find the view across the aisle as unwelcome. 'Has he done something?'

  Ellen's fingers writhed, not just because she could scarcely bear how they felt whenever they rubbed flabbily together. She was remembering the buried object that she'd taken for a bunch of twisted roots until it had seemed to grope for her hand. 'Can we leave him alone for now?'

  'You think he has,' Hugh said with a kind of dismayed eagerness.

  'I didn't say that and I'm not thinking it either. What are you trying to prove, Hugh?'

  'Maybe just that I'm worth listening to.'

  'You know you are. When has anybody ever said you weren't?'

  'Let's talk, then,' Charlotte muttered. 'We need to.'

  The train clattered at length through the dark before Hugh said 'Do you remember what we talked about last time we were there?'

  By leaving Thurstaston unnamed he rendered the memory of the twisted object that had stirred under the earth more ominous, and Charlotte didn't help by saying 'Remind us.'

  'We were saying what we dreamed the night we slept there.'

  Ellen hadn't mentioned her dream, and didn't want to recall it now, even if it was no worse than her present state. 'I don't see anything unusual about that,' Charlotte said, shutting her eyes tighter. 'Everyone dreams.'

  'Yes, but how many dreams do you remember all these years later? Was it just that one?'

  'It still is.'

  'Then mustn't that mean it wasn't an ordinary dream?'

  'It was pretty ordinary,' Charlotte said, and Ellen wondered if this was meant to fend off the memory. 'I wouldn't make any great claims for it.'

  'What was it, though?'

  'Just some kind of cellar. I was going to be pulled down into it if I hadn't woken up.'

  'Anything else you remember? Where –'

  'I'd rather not discuss it here.' Charlotte's eyelids trembled as though she were equally nervous of keeping them closed or opening them. 'Or maybe anywhere,' she admitted, mostly to herself.

  'Sorry, I should've realised.' Hugh's gaze dodged about so wildly that it might have been searching for an intruder before fastening on Ellen. 'What about you?'

  Did his scrutiny explain why she felt spied upon, her every word analysed in case it went too far? She couldn't resist glancing around, but nobody appeared to be lurking behind any of the seats; the darkness had brought nothing dreadful into the carriage except her reflections. She understood Hugh's question all too well, which was why she retreated from giving the answer. 'I should have,' she tried telling him instead.

  'No, I mean did you dream something? What did you dream?'

  'I'm going to be like Charlotte,' Ellen said, wishing that she were. For an instant she'd glimpsed an underground room that surrounded her with her hideous self. 'I want to save it,' she said, only to find this didn't reassure her at all.

  'I thought we wanted to talk.'

  'Nobody's preventing you,' Charlotte said, how encouragingly Ellen couldn't judge.

  'You already know what I dreamed.'

  Charlotte's mouth opened and closed as if she were struggling to breathe, unless she was reluctant to speak. With her eyes closed she might almost have been trying to talk in her sleep. Eventually she said 'Tell us again.'

  'I couldn't find my way, and now I can't.' More resentfully than Ellen had ever heard him sound he added 'I said once.'

  'You don't need a nightmare to explain that,' Charlotte protested. 'Life's enough of one too much of the time.'

  'Not this much.'

  Charlotte lowered her head and folded her arms hard. If she hadn't spoken Ellen might have had to ask 'What do you mean?'

  'Not this much of a nightmare.' Hugh faltered, and Ellen tried not to think he was letting the darkness or something in it creep closer. 'All right, I didn't tell you everything,' he mumbled. 'I can't find my way anywhere at all.'

  'Oh, Hugh.' With a visible effort Charlotte opened her eyes to peer at him. 'There's no need to go looking for a nightmare to explain it, surely,' she said. 'Didn't it start with all your stress at work?'

  'Maybe that was part of it.'

  Ellen felt dismayingly unable to help, as incompetent as the tribunal's verdict had made her feel. 'You need to see a doctor,' she urged.

  'I couldn't find my way there either.'

  His attempt at a laugh was too perfunctory to invite an echo, but Ellen imagined she'd heard one, muffled by the buried thunder of the train. 'We –' she began and then was afraid to promise. 'Someone will take you,' she said.

  'You're forgetting about Rory.'

  'I mean after we've visited. Or no, I'm being stupid. You could see a doctor at the hospital.'

  'No, I'm saying you're forgetting what he dreamed.'

  Charlotte closed her eyes as though to exclude the remark. 'What has that to do with anything?'

  'It was about not being able to see, wasn't it? And now he can't. Don't you think an artist's nightmare has to be losing all his senses?'

  Charlotte turned her face to him without opening her eyes. 'I'm sorry, Hugh, but I think Ellen was spot on.'

  Ellen didn't understand this any more than Hugh appeared to. 'What are you saying I did?'

 
; 'You said he was trying to prove something. This isn't the time or the place, Hugh. We never said you had no imagination, so don't work so hard at convincing us you have. It's getting out of hand and not in the best of taste.'

  'You're just upset about Rory, aren't you?' Ellen told him in the hope that would stop his gaze from jerking back and forth. 'You want to find something to blame besides yourself. Don't blame yourself and then you won't need to do this.'

  Had she embarrassed him into silence? She was looking away from him, which showed her the door at the end of the aisle twitching as if someone hidden in the dark between the carriages were about to put in an appearance, when he said 'What's wrong with her?'

  Ellen didn't know if she was being referred to or addressed. A sidelong glance at Charlotte offered her no clue, nor did Hugh's agitated gaze, even when he raised his hands on either side of it like blinkers. Charlotte took it on herself to answer, almost inaudibly. 'I'm claustrophobic.'

  Hugh kept his hands up to direct his gaze at her, although the pose was beginning to put Ellen in mind of someone under threat. 'Since when?' he said.

  'Hugh,' Ellen objected. 'Now you're going too far in the other direction.'

  His fingers bent clawlike towards his eyes. 'How am I?'

  'We aren't saying don't use your imagination at all.' She nodded at Charlotte, which made her face feel even more repulsively unstable, and leaned towards him to whisper 'Since we've been in here, of course.'

  She sensed that he was struggling not to recoil from her, and so she straightened up before she'd finished speaking. His gaze left her at once, darting along the aisle. 'I didn't get that,' he complained and shut his eyes.

  Ellen didn't need to be reminded yet again how unbearable he and Charlotte must find the sight of her. Perhaps he also disliked the restive jerking of the door as much as she did. She couldn't touch him to persuade him to look at her, she could only speak up. 'Since we came in the tunnel.'

  'How long have we been in it?'

  'I'm not looking,' Charlotte breathed. 'I can't say.'

  'How long have we been talking? It feels like, I don't know –'