She turned and left without looking out of the window, and Hart had to hurry to keep up with her. She strode determinedly down the passage, pushed open the next door and walked into the Winter room. Thirteen years passed in a moment, and her hair grew out again in a sudden rush, spilling down to her shoulders. The tension in the room was almost unbearable, the pressure so strong Hart could feel it throughout his body. It was like facing into a howling wind, or struggling against the rising tide that bears you remorselessly back out to sea no matter how hard you swim.
“I almost made it, this last time. I didn’t care any more. I thought nothing could be worse than living like this. I was wrong, again. I stood in this room all through the morning and late into the afternoon, and couldn’t bring myself to do the one thing that might have freed me. Such a simple thing, just to go into the next room… I hated myself because I was so weak, so scared, but hate wasn’t enough. In the end I went back downstairs again, leaving another part of me behind. This is as far as I ever got. I can’t do any more, not on my own. Help me, Jimmy. Please.”
Her hand was limp in his, as though all the strength had gone out of her. Her shoulders were slumped and her head was bowed, like the horse at the end of a race it’s just lost.
“Polly! Come here. I need you.“
The voice was louder now, right there in the next room. Hart tried to read some kind of meaning or context in the voice, if not the words, but it remained stubbornly ambiguous. Polly stood before him, calm and relaxed and completely still, come finally to a state where anger couldn’t move her and fear couldn’t touch her. Whatever happened next, it was up to him.
I don’t want this kind of responsibility! I don’t know what to do!
“She’s gone as far as she can,” said Friend quietly, pooled around his feet. “You have to decide, James. Do we go on, or do we go back?”
“I don’t know! I thought I did, but… look at her. If just the thought of the next room can do this to her, what effect will the room itself have? She’s already had one breakdown; I don’t want to be responsible for another.”
“She came this far because she believed you when you said you’d stand by her. Are you going to let her down now?”
Hart shook his head, almost angrily. “What the hell is in that next room, that it can do this to her? What did her father do to her?”
“I wondered that,” said Polly, in a slow, sleepy voice. “I spent years wondering what there could be in that room that could be so frightening. For a long time I wondered if it might have been some kind of sexual abuse. You hear a lot about that, these days. But I can’t believe that of my father. I loved him and he loved me. So why does just the thought of seeing him again scare me so much I can scarcely breathe?”
“Only one way to find out,” said Hart. “Let’s do it.”
He took a firm hold on her hand and headed for the door, Polly going with him like a small child. Out in the passage, night had fallen. The only light shone from under the door to the fifth room. The steady breathing sounded louder, harsher, as though roused by anticipation. Hart walked slowly forward, Polly at his side. The passage stretched away before them, impossibly long. Hart didn’t know what to think any more. He’d been so sure sexual abuse had been at the root of everything, but Polly had already thought of that and dismissed it. So what was in that room, breathing so loudly? They walked on through the darkness, and the door drew nearer very slowly, as though something was drawing the moment out to savour it. But finally they stood before the door, and Hart hesitated, unsure what to do for the best. Polly reached out a steady hand, turned the handle and pushed the door open, and she and Hart went into the room together to face what was there. The door slammed shut behind them.
The room was brightly lit, and smelt of sickness and medicines. A man lay in the bed, gaunt and withered from the strain of long suffering. His eyes were closed, his breathing laboured, as though every inhalation was an effort. Polly looked at him silently. Hart looked around him, baffled. There was nothing else in the room, just one extremely sick man who didn’t even know they were there.
“I remember,” said Polly. “My father had cancer. There was nothing the doctors could do, back then, so they sent him home to die. He took a long time dying. I was scared of him. Scared of losing him, of him going away for ever. Death is hard enough to understand when you’re only eight years old, but when it’s your father… For a long time I couldn’t believe it would actually happen, and then I wouldn’t believe it. But finally he took to his bed and stayed there, and I realized he wasn’t ever going to leave it again. Then I believed.
“I prayed for a miracle. Prayer after prayer, promising God I’d do anything, anything he wanted. I even said I’d be a nun if he would just save my Daddy. And all the time the cancer ate away at my father, leaving less and less of him in the bed. I couldn’t look at his hands on the covers without seeing the bones, couldn’t see his face without seeing the skull. It was as though he was becoming death. And I stopped going in to see him, because it scared me so much. Even when he asked for me, I wouldn’t go.
“And then one day my mother had to go out, and I was left alone in the house. Alone with my father. I lost myself in my jigsaw. That at least was a puzzle I could solve, if I just tried hard enough. It was just after midday when he called out to me. I wouldn’t go. I was scared. He called again and again and finally I got up and went out into the hall. I stood at the bottom of the stairs for a long time, and then I went up, very slowly, step by step. I hid in the room opposite, and he called to me again. I stood outside his door, listening to him fight for every breath. And then the breathing stopped.
“I went in, and he was dead. He didn’t look like my father at all, not the way I remembered him. It was as though this dead cancer thing had come and taken my father’s place. And all I could think was, if I’d gone to him when he called, he might still be alive. Maybe I could have done something, said something, and he wouldn’t have died. But I hadn’t…
“So I ran out of the room and told myself I’d never been in there. Kept saying it over and over, till I believed it. But the guilt wouldn’t let me forget, not completely. Not all that long afterwards, I started hearing him call me again. My guilt and fear had built something in this room and given it power over me. To punish me as I should be punished. That isn’t my father there. It’s something else, something awful. I think once it might have been a part of me, but that isn’t true any more. It belongs to itself now. And it hates me.”
Hart looked at the dying man on the bed, and then back at Polly. The expression on her face worried him. Her words had the sound and power of an incantation, as though she was calling up something. And then the man in the bed sat up. Polly fell back a step, and grabbed at Hart’s arm. The man on the bed smiled at them both, and there was something horribly hungry in his gaze. Cancers suddenly bulged out of his skin like bunches of black grapes, boiling up out of his flesh as though driven by some internal pressure that couldn’t be denied. His face grew swollen and misshapen as blood-engorged tissues turned his features into a demon’s mask. He was still smiling.
“Hello, Polly,” he whispered. “You finally came to see me. Come and kiss your Daddy, and I’ll share what I’ve got with you. You know you deserve it. And then you and I can stay here together in the dark, growing strange and different, and we’ll never die. Never die…”
Polly looked at him silently, tears spilling down her cheeks. The cancer figure giggled.
“Come to me, Polly. You look so good I could just eat you up.”
“That’s enough of that,” said Friend, and threw itself at the cancer figure. He fell back, startled, and Friend billowed out into a vast black shape, with massive fangs and claws. It dropped on its victim, and the cancer figure disappeared in the darkness. For a moment there was silence, and then Friend screamed. It burst apart, shrieking horribly at the cancer man as he effortlessly tore the shadowstuff apart. Friend spilled down the sides of the bed like
dirty water, and fled across the floor to gather at Hart’s feet again, whimpering like a hurt child.
“Sweet,” said the cancer figure, “but a little light and frothy for my taste. Polly’s the one I want. I’ve waited for this for so long, my dear. The house tried to protect you, by giving you chances to escape, but you never took them, so you’re mine now, body and soul. Especially body. I’ll enjoy your flesh in so many ways, and when I’m done with you, you won’t know yourself.”
“Go to hell,” said Hart, and stepped forward to put himself between Polly and the cancer man. He looked at Hart thoughtfully, light glistening wetly on his bulging skin. The air was thick with the stench of rotting meat.
“You have no place here,” said the cancer man. “You don’t belong here. She made me and she belongs to me. This is what she wants, even if she won’t admit it. Leave now, or I’ll kill you. And you don’t want to know what I’ll do to your poor defenceless body afterwards.”
“She was only a child,” said Hart. “She didn’t understand. She was afraid.”
“It’s too late now for pleas and excuses. I’m going to take this woman and stir my sticky fingers in her flesh, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
The figure swept aside the bedclothes with a swollen hand and swung his elephantine legs over the side of the bed. He swayed to his feet, the cancers bulging in his flesh like diseased fruit. He started forward, a malignant nightmare given shape and form, and Hart raised a hand to stop him. Something stirred within him then that he had no name for. It was a power, or a potential, like nothing else he’d ever known, and it answered him when he called on it. Not for his own sake, but for Polly, who’d been hurt too much already. He beckoned brusquely to the cancer figure, and his voice was short and sharp.
“You. Come out. Come out of him now.“
Black streams of living cancers burst out of Polly’s father, to fall in coils around his feet. Dark shapes split the skin and running foulness seeped out of every pore as his body convulsed, helpless in the grip of a greater power. And finally Polly’s father stood before them, pale and trembling but unmarked, and on the floor around him the cancer lay steaming and twitching, like something newborn in the darkest part of the night. As Hart and Polly watched, the cancer slowly grew still and lifeless, and the last of the life Polly had given it went out of it for ever. She turned and looked at her father, started to move forward, and then stopped herself.
“Daddy?”
“Hello, Princess. Look at my lovely little girl, grown up so fine and tall. It’s been a long time, honey, but I’m back now. I’m back.”
Polly threw herself into his arms, and they hugged each other tightly like they’d never let go. There were tears on both their faces, and neither of them gave a damn. Hart turned away to give them some privacy, and looked at the shapeless darkness around his feet.
“Are you all right, Friend?”
“I’ve felt better. Ask me again when I’ve had a chance to recover, in a year or two. How the hell did you do that? I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Neither did I,” said Hart.
He looked at Polly and her father. They’d finally released their hold on each other, but they were still standing as close as it was possible for two people to get. Polly sniffed away the last of her tears.
“Daddy; this is Jimmy Hart. He saved you. He brought me here and believed in me, even when I wasn’t sure myself.”
“Jimmy Hart?” The man looked at him strangely. “You look at lot like your father, Jimmy. Thank you, for what you did for my daughter.”
“Oh Daddy, I’m so sorry. I know I should have come to you long before this, but I was so scared…”
“Hush, Princess, I know. I understand. You were just a kid.”
“And you don’t blame me for…”
“I don’t blame you for anything.” He looked at Hart again. “Eventually, I hope someone is going to explain exactly what happened, but for the moment I’m just glad to be here and happy to be alive. Part of me has been here for years, held by that… thing, but I don’t remember much of it. It was more like a fever dream, a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.”
“It’s all over now,” said Polly. “You’re alive, and everything’s going to be fine.” Her face fell suddenly. “Oh Daddy, you don’t know. Mother’s dead.”
“I know. I felt her go, a long time back, but there was nothing I could do, then. It’s all right, Polly. If she were here, I’m sure she’d be just as proud of you as I am.”
“But I treated her so badly…”
“She understands,” said her father. “Wherever she is, I’m sure she understands.”
Polly smiled at Hart. “Thank you, James. Thank you for… everything. I never dreamed… I had no idea you had such power.”
“Neither did I,” said Hart. “It seems there are a lot of things about myself I don’t know. I’m going to have to do something about that.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Something Bad Is Coming
Suzanne Dubois woke slowly to the sound of music, and lay in bed for some time without opening her eyes. The clock radio turned itself on automatically every morning at nine o’clock, set carefully just out of reach so that she’d have to get up to turn it off. She lay still with her eyes closed, letting the quiet music wash over her without actually listening to it. Waking up was always a slow process for her, and it wasn’t as if she had to rush to get anywhere.
Her bed was pushed right up against the wall, so that she could reach out a hand and feel its strength and presence without having to get up. The wall was a comfort to her, solid and real and unchanging. Ever since she’d come home to find Lucas’s dead body lying on her floor, she’d felt the need for constant little reassurances that her home was still strong and intact. The unexpected presence of death still haunted her, and her little shack was no longer the safe haven it had been. It took her a long time before she could sleep at nights without having to leave the light on. During the day she could distract herself with people and routine, but the night found her as weak and vulnerable as a small child. She lay in her bed stiff as a board, ears straining for the slightest sound until her eyes adjusted to the gloom, and then she watched the dark shadows around her till finally she fell asleep through sheer exhaustion. The door was locked and bolted, the only window secured, but it was still going to be a long time before she felt really safe again.
Suzanne lay bonelessly in her bed, listening to the morning, putting together a picture of her world through the sounds around her. The radio murmured quietly to itself, and above that she could hear the soft creaking sounds her bed made as she stretched lazily. She’d had the bed more than twenty years now, and they’d adjusted to each other in all the ways that mattered. The mattress supported where it should, and gave where necessary. The years had formed a long hollow down the middle that she fell into naturally, fitting her perfectly from head to heel. The wooden shack made brief, sharp noises around her as it settled its weight, the wood swelling appreciatively under the morning’s warmth after the cold of the night. Outside, she could hear a barge chugging slowly down the river Tawn, the brisk cheerful sound full of places to go and things to do. Suzanne sighed, sat up in bed, and opened her eyes.
She hugged her knees to her, rested her chin on them and looked around her. Her one-room shack was a mess, but then, it always was. She liked it that way. Clothes lay scattered casually here and there, and all three chairs were buried under piles of old magazines and newspapers. Fast-food cartons from yesterday’s dinner and late supper still lay where she’d dropped them. That last thought moved her mind vaguely in the direction of breakfast, but she wasn’t awake enough for that yet. Preparing breakfast was too complicated a task to be considered until her body had woken up enough to listen to her mind. Or was it the other way round? Suzanne shrugged. She was used to not making much sense in the mornings. It was that kind of blithe casualness that had infuriated her last lover, a tall bony guitarist
from some heavy metal band she’d never heard of. He’d been pleasant enough company, and almost as good at the horizontal bop as he’d thought he was, but he used to positively leap out of bed in the mornings, ready to attack the day and grab great handfuls of whatever it had to offer. Of course, he was fifteen years younger than her thirty-five, and in the mornings she felt every one of those extra years. Which was at least partly why she hadn’t been too devastated when he left her.
She pushed back the sheets, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and sat there quietly, ruminating. She had a strong feeling she should be up and about today, but she couldn’t quite place why. No doubt it would come to her, eventually. She scratched at her ribs, more for the pleasure of it than anything else. Suzanne slept in the nude, except in the coldest of winters, when she reluctantly swathed herself in thick pyjamas. She’d never taken to nightclothes; they always seemed to wrap themselves around her in the night, till she woke up wrapped in what felt uncomfortably like a straitjacket.
She got up, looked vaguely about her, and got through the business of getting dressed without having to wake up any further. A leisurely visit to the outside toilet took care of that. She returned, still yawning, and stood in the middle of the room. It seemed to her that something important was due to happen today, but she was damned if she could think what. It didn’t bother her. She often felt that way. She moved unhurriedly over to study the broad mirror balanced precariously on her dresser. Curling photographs of old beaux stared back at her, and a single lipsticked message from herself.
Company’s coming.
Suzanne stared blankly at the mirror, and her reflection looked doubtfully back. A tall, leggy blonde who dressed in odd assortments of this and that because she could never bring herself to throw anything out. Suzanne felt about fashion the way she felt about religion; all right for those who believed in it, but too much of a bother for her. The only thing she believed in was getting enough sleep. She often formed sentimental attachments to odd bits of clothing, and clung on to them long after they’d outlived their purpose. This blouse was lucky, that scarf was the one she’d worn when Grant first asked her out, those shoes were just too pretty to throw away… And so on and so on.