‘Enough talk … too much time wasted … waited … long time … find it … do what … should have been done … ready … find it and get rid of it … not safe for it to still be there … one day someone … might know who …’
Ginny’s voice, crisp and carrying: ‘No need to worry. Poor Daniel is already dead and done for. He just doesn’t know it yet.’
And then the door opened.
From the crack behind the hinges of the darkened bathroom Alice saw the flowering of light across the stair carpet, saw the three figures cross the lighted stretch, saw shapes: a wedge of light on an upturned cheekbone, a flare of red and purple from the braiding on someone’s coat, a cold spark from the chain on a motorcycle boot … then the light snapped off abruptly, and their steps were only subtle shiftings in the darkness, their whispering the sound of dust against dust.
‘Mustn’t wake her … door latched … simple enough … sleeps like the dead …’ (Laughter, light as cobwebs.) ‘… Back before light … child’s play …’
‘Suspects … remember … picture … find it and get rid …’
Down the stairs … Shh … Shh … Shh … Shh … as the skirts of a long greatcoat brushed the carpet. Alice opened the door of the bathroom a crack wider. There was no light. Somewhere a little beyond the stairwell she detected, or thought she detected, the tiny gleam of a street-lamp through drawn curtains. The door opened wider. Her feet made tiny sounds against the floor, but she took careful steps, avoiding the squeaky board, holding on to the banister to stabilize her own descent into the well. A ripple of sound pushed its way into the blackness towards her; she heard the click of the latch. A bar of light extended into the dark house, probed, flickered and finally withdrew.
Alice was alone again.
Her steps were light; she ran downstairs in the darkness, parted the curtains an inch … they were already half-way down the street, figures long as shadows, steps even and purposeful. Alice’s foot bumped into her shoes as she moved back from the window. Without thinking anything, she slipped them on. The latch almost drew itself.
Click.
The door closed behind Alice and she set off after them into the orange-lit silence.
She kept well hidden; her shoes were soft, her clothes, accidentally chosen, were dark. She knew the streets and kept to the shadows; alleys and archways were plentiful. The night air was still and cold; here and there the pavements twinkled with a light frost; Alice’s breath spiralled away behind her … her steps were easy and elastic. She crossed the town; deserted streets, the colleges blank carnival masks with the occasional winking eye at a late-night student’s window. Gradually she left the town behind. The road grew narrower and darker, the buildings few. They crossed the river, twice, crossed a road, waded through a field of green corn. Alice waited until the others had crossed the field before she began to make her own way across it; the delay left them far ahead of her, but she was virtually certain of where they were going; this was the short road across the fields to Grantchester. She knew this way by day; by night the path was loaded with signs and portents, the sky was bright with hidden moonlight, the clouds huge. In darkness it dwarfed the ground more efficiently than it ever did by day. Alice felt unease, but accepted it, dreamlike, and broke into a half-run to catch up with the three shadows, the ground flying beneath her like a magic carpet. She did not feel tired or impatient, only thrilled with the chase, the hairs on her arms electric with cold and anticipation. The snatch of song still played inside her, matching the rhythm of her padding feet:
Strange little girl, where are you going?
Strange little girl, where are you going?
Do you know where you could be going?
Grantchester crouched at the end of the road, the squat little tower of the church with its stubby spire black against the luminous sky. The three figures were almost upon it. Then, at the gate, they slackened their pace. A voice, clear and almost careless, reached Alice from further down the road. Its message was inaudible, but the speaker was unexcited, unafraid.
There was only a tiny spark of sound, metal against metal, as he leaped up on to the spiked gate, then down to the other side. A second figure followed suit, then the third, with equal ease. A languid word spoken; laughter. The figures were at one with the dark; the church swallowed them up. By now Alice was trembling. This was no student prank, no joke; this they had done before, maybe many times. The thought of black magic did not seem so laughable now. But still she followed them, fascinated and appalled, her mind spinning its own mandala of fear and foreboding, until she stood in front of the gate. She surveyed the church for a moment, somehow disliking its cold face, its mean little windows. The gate was not too high; not higher than the college gate which Alice used to climb on sly Cambridge nights. But it was locked.
She wondered why a churchyard should have to be locked; remembered, or half-remembered, Joe telling her (on the way back from some nocturnal escapade, her hand in the pocket of his overcoat), his voice warm and humorous.
‘Beats me why they lock them. The way I see it, no one wants to get in, and no one’s likely to be wanting to get out!’
The memory was a sad ghost in the still cold night, its warmth evaporated into pale nostalgia. And the joke seemed sinister now; the thought of people trying to escape chilled her. She touched the wooden bars of the gate; rot had bubbled through the paint, grains of it clinging to her fingers. Beyond the gate was the Dark-side, the other side of the looking-glass. She longed to know what lay beyond, but was afraid to leave the safety of the road; yet, dreamlike, she knew that she would cross over whether she wanted to or not. She pulled herself up, the world shifting perspective abruptly as she did so; the darkness made her feel seventy feet high, hovering above a chasm of blackness. She tilted, feeling carefully for the wood beneath her … swung her leg over the top.
She found them under cover of night, and hid behind a monument to see what they were doing; but the wall of the third churchyard shadowed them, and she could see only jumbled shapes, shadowplay without meaning, hear their voices in broken snatches, hear the sound of metal against stone, of metal against earth … of digging.
The red-haired figure was Ginny, she could see that much, could hear her voice, higher and clearer than the others, could occasionally glimpse her dancer’s body moving among the graves. Another figure was tall, had long hair in a pony-tail, metal on the instep of his boots. The third was fair, androgynous; Alice could see no face.
‘… somewhere close by … has to be here … had no time … anywhere else … find it, even if I have to … dig him up … sure … know it …’
She waited there for a long time, listening to the sound of the digging, then the sound of wood against metal, metal against metal. Whatever it was, they seemed to have found it; Alice could tell by their voices. More sounds, a tearing of paper, a sound of metal scraping … footsteps. Alice could feel them in her teeth. She crouched against the monument, the throbbing of her eardrum echoing in the cold stone, as the footsteps passed and died away. After a while she got up.
Her eyes were accustomed to the darkness, and she could see quite well; the hammering fear had left her for the moment, to be replaced by a strange, transparent calm. She took two steps nearer to the patch of shadow she now knew to be an open grave; one step nearer and stopped. There was a hole in front of her, not deep, but magnified by the strange night-time perspective, and in front of it, the slab of carved stone had been shifted, laid neatly by the side of the grave. A thought struck her; she had been here before. She recognized the corner of the churchyard, the yew tree and the hawthorn … caught sight, as she spun round, of the place she had seen earlier, when it was light, the grave with the little gate. (Something inside me remembers …)
The gate was open now, a line of moonlight touching the frame, and for a sudden, panic-stricken moment, Alice thought she could see something on the other side, something waiting to get out. Then it moved, pushed, no doubt by a gust of wi
nd, moved and swung back on its hinges with a little sound of rusty metal, as if some tiny, invisible child were swinging on it. Alice could feel no wind, but the gate swung again, more violently this time, open, shut, open … shut … open … the squeaking voice had three notes, two falling, one rising, like the song of a marsh bird: Ti-ri-weeee … tiriweeeeeee. Alice watched it, eyes wide, mouth wide, stomach falling away within her into a great cauldron of panic, the song of the marsh bird following her, its three sad, limping notes forlorn as snowflakes in a dark well, and throughout, the gate continued its dance, open, closed … open.
She wondered why she did not scream.
Two
ALICE AWOKE WITH a sudden start, the last image of a terrible dream in her mind, and, for a moment, she wondered where she was. She ached all over; her neck was stiff, her legs curled awkwardly underneath her body, her clothes clammy against her skin.
‘Ginny?’
She shook her head to clear it and sat up. What on earth had she been doing? Working? It certainly seemed that way; it had happened to her before to fall asleep in her workroom, but never to wake up with no memory at all of how she had got there. She remembered. What? A dream? She supposed it must have been, a dream of uncommonly vivid detail. She remembered getting up. But there was her painting, propped up on the easel and covered with a piece of muslin so that the dust would not dry on it, where she had, presumably, left it.
So why was it that she had no recollection of any picture, any picture at all? There was nothing but that damned dream in her aching head, nothing but that and a half-dispelled foreboding, spinning its mandala of fear into her mind. She wondered, with a now-familiar paranoia, whether Ginny had drugged her. She stood up, shaking the pins and needles out of her legs, fumbled an aspirin out of a brown bottle, swallowed it with a crunch and a grimace, shook out two more.
She remembered the outing with Joe, remembered going to bed, remembered, was that the dream? She could not seem to remember going to the workroom, could not remember the painting.
The painting!
Surely if she saw it again, it would trigger some memory, some fragment of that lost time; surely. She paused, hand poised over the sheet; through the thin cloth she could see green, grey, the palette, still smeared with acrylics, a half-filled water pot containing green water … Suddenly, she was not at all sure she wanted to see what was behind the muslin cloth. But the compulsion was too great … that, and perhaps she still could not quite believe in that familiar easel, laden with unfamiliar memories, the paint hardly dry.
She lifted the cloth. A blaze of chaotic colour met her eyes, colour which merged form and motion, symmetry and abandon in a composition of perfect completeness. It was her work, all right, her style, and yet the memory eluded her. Her signature in the corner; there. Her pointed calligraphy at the edge of the work, indicating the name of the picture. And what a picture! A river, a water’s-edge spiral of grass and wildflowers, roots trailing surrealistically down into the limpid grey water, the willow tree, seen dizzyingly from above, a half-reflection mirrored shakily in the river; green, a tunnel of green with a white figure at the end of it, a white lady dimly glimpsed in the green and the water … Alice drew nearer. The perspective shifted, and she realized that she was looking at the figure from above, from above the surface of the water, while the white lady lay below. The water and the partial reflection from the tree obscured her image; only the face, by some trick of refracted light, was clearly visible: a pale oval, greenish in the shade of the leaves, open eyes and mouth dark beneath the water, red hair darkened to almost-black under the surface, while above the surface it regained its brightness in patches, like floating weed, lurid against the still grey river. The features were clear, still not clear enough for Alice to be sure, and yet, she was sure; they were Ginny’s. And name of the painting was:
Repentance: The Drowning of Ophelia
Alice stared at it for a long time, this troubling thing from the country of dreams; for it was both like and unlike any work she had ever done. The colours were hers – there was paint on her hands, ingrained into her fingernails – the detail was hers, the tricks of the light. It was the same size as her work of the preceding evening, the impression of space and clarity was the same, the details swiftly and surely etched in acrylics over the luminous tints of the inks, God, it must have taken her hours! She had never in her life worked so swiftly. The suspicion of drugs came back, more plausibly this time, frightening yet reassuring. Easier to believe that she had been fed some hallucinogen than to accept the dreams, the blank in her memory – the picture itself. Unable to keep away, she looked more closely. Yes, there was something else there, behind the light, something more disturbing still than the fact that Alice did not remember the slightest detail of how or when she had painted it; an impression of – she could not quite put a name to it, but it haunted her. Something in the strange perspective, deceiving the spectator into thinking that it was she who was underwater, she who was drowning, the roots of the willow tree reaching down towards her, the figure of the woman some above-world fancy, split into a million facets of refracted light, face smiling down in to the water, hair trailing towards her …
Alice pulled away, fascinated. The illusion of movement was intense. Even as she looked, she seemed to feel the pull of the undertow, the circular movement of the composition dragging her down and around … Had she really done that? Looking again, the unease changing slowly to awe and delight, she realized that it was the best thing she had ever done, even better than the other Ophelia. And Alice, looking into her canvas, seemed to see the vortex of her subconscious spinning further and further downwards, and each level was like a new and undiscovered world, turning its own axis, kaleidoscope-changing in a continuous loop of shadow and counter-shadow; and as she watched, the movement caught her and drew her closer and closer, and without even knowing it, she began to laugh.
Whatever the spell was, the phone broke it, its clear trill startling in the empty house, and Alice jumped nervously. A sudden, dream-memory returned (darkness, a smell of age and earth, figures leaping and dancing around an open grave), then faded as she rose to her feet. When she reached the phone, however, it had already stopped ringing. Alice looked at her watch. It was already past ten.
Ginny!
Still shaking off the memories of the previous night Alice made her way slowly into the kitchen and put on the kettle. Davy Crockett was sitting on the fridge, and he jumped down as soon as he saw Alice, yowling and winding his long furry body round her legs.
‘Just a minute, Dave …’ murmured Alice. ‘Just let me see if Ginny’s awake.’
She ran quietly up the stairs, paused to open the window on the landing, then went to knock softly on Ginny’s door.
‘Ginny? Are you up?’ she called gently.
No answer.
‘Ginny?’ Louder, this time.
Still no answer. Alice, glancing at the clock on the landing, saw that it was nearly ten fifteen.
‘Ginny, are you awake?’ She tried the handle experimentally; the door opened, and Alice peered into the bedroom.
The window was open, the curtains pulled back, allowing the fresh morning air and a faint scent of wallflowers into the pretty room. The bed was made, the pillows plump and cool, the primrose coverlet in place; Alice found herself admiring her guest’s neatness. Suddenly, she felt suspicious. She tweaked the coverlet away to examine the sheet … it was as she had thought.
The bed had not been slept in at all. The nightdress on the bedside table had not even been unfolded. She yanked open the wardrobe. A few dresses hung there, a pullover was neatly folded over two blouses … shoes at the bottom. And right at the back, scrunched up in a bundle, she found those torn jeans, the T-shirt, the purple boots Ginny had been wearing, spattered with mud. Feeling somehow guilty, Alice pulled the things out. With them came a few other odds and ends: some muddy trainers; a shiny raincoat; black leather bike jacket; another T-shirt; some cheap jewellery; a
heavy belt with a grinning face for a buckle; earrings in the shape of skulls; an upside-down cross on a chain. The kind of lurid, harmless clothes Alice associated with the bands of kids who prowled the shopping centre at night, pushed as far into the back of the wardrobe as they would go. And underneath the lot, a plastic bag containing two syringes, one almost new, the other so worn that the tip had begun to take on a frayed and feathered look. So that was it, Alice thought. The syringes explained everything.
But Alice was concerned for Joe, Joe who was so trusting and so naive. Joe who had no idea that the little girl he had fallen for in such a big way had gone off as soon as he had been out of the house (in the company of someone she seemed to be fairly intimate with, despite her lack of friends), and had stayed out all night.
It all made sense to Alice now, even the meeting with the ‘friends’… Ginny had gone out because she wanted to find someone to score from, that was all. And the dreams? Just dreams, she told herself. Just dreams.
Alice felt oddly reassured. That was something she could understand, a weakness in Ginny which was wholly explicable, and which revealed the girl’s real insecurity. Alice began to feel herself warming again towards the girl, so lovely in her borrowed clothes. She felt she had been insensitive, had seen calculation where there was only uncertainty, had shown hostility where she should have offered comfort and understanding. And now Ginny had gone.
Putting the anger aside, Alice went downstairs and stroked the tortoiseshell cat, which was sitting on the fridge, poured milk for the others, cut herself some bread and put it under the grill to toast. The cat jumped on to the side of the cooker, meowed and sniffed the toast with interest.
Alice picked the cat up and cuddled her, feeling cat-fur in her nostrils and cat-whiskers in her face. Through the window the sky looked grey; not a day for going out of doors, she thought, and she went to the door, picked up the paper which was still lying on the doormat, and settled down to read it while the bread toasted. She usually only read the Cambridge News for the cinema programme and the plays, and would in normal circumstances not even have noticed the first page, if she had not recognized the picture. Under a picture of a middle-aged man, and the headline LECTURER DIES IN RENTED ROOM SEX SCANDAL, a photograph caught her eye. At first, she did not realize where she knew the place from. The photograph was dark and rather blurry; the short paragraph had obviously been a hasty addition, but she did recognize the picture.