Thieving Fear

THIRTY-FIVE

As Charlotte stepped on the escalator at Liverpool Lime Street she became afraid that she would miss a call. Retrieving the mobile from her handbag, she triggered the display. While the stairs bore her downwards she was able to watch the signal dwindling as if, like her, it were being dragged into the earth. It vanished as the stair beneath her feet, sending her off the escalator. She had yet to hear from Hugh or Ellen in response to her increasingly terse messages. The destination boards at either end of the underground platform promised a train to West Kirby in two minutes, which meant that for at least another ten she would have no chance to hear.

She dropped the mobile in her bag, where it nestled against the flashlight she'd bought in an Indian store near the station. Whichever way she looked along the sparsely populated platform she was confronted by a tunnel shrunk around darkness, but for hours she'd been unable to distinguish her claustrophobia from her anxiety about her cousins, if indeed that hadn't overwhelmed any other feelings. In the taxi from the hospital, and then on the train out of Leeds, she'd kept hoping that a call from Hugh or Ellen would let her go back to watch over Rory. She ought to contact the police; she couldn't contact the police. The two imperatives persisted in switching back and forth inside her skull, even more insistently now that she was unable to make a call.

Before long a train with west kirby luminously emblazoned on its brow rose out of the left-hand tunnel. More people than Charlotte had time to identify boarded as she did. Her section of the carriage was unoccupied but flanked by onrushing blackness. She seemed to be able to live with this; perhaps she was growing resigned to her condition. She was more troubled to be met by darkness when the train emerged from the tunnel on the far side of the river.

Her phone showed that nobody had tried to call while she was underground. She hoped Hugh or Ellen had thought to bring a flashlight, although would they have expected their task to take so long? Of course she didn't know that it had. Attempting to raise her cousins yet again wouldn't help them or her nerves. Streetlamps alongside the railway drove back the dark, which only made her worry how much light her cousins had and what it might be illuminating. Houses flocked by, curtained windows glowing, and she thought of families at dinner or in front of televisions while her cousins were caught up in their secret task. At least the darkness should conceal them from observers, unless the flashlight attracted attention. This was one more oscillation of alternatives to add to the clamour inside her skull.

When the train came to the end of its stations the mobile was still playing dumb. Despite a belated impression that she hadn't been the last passenger, Charlotte was alone in stepping onto the platform. There was nobody to collect her ticket, and not a single taxi outside the small station. She was retreating in search of some advertisement for a local firm when blackness swelled out of the night as a taxi pulled away from a more or less Mediterranean restaurant. She had to mime desperation, not that it involved any pretence, before the driver swerved across the road and jettisoned the sluggish firework of a cigarette. 'How far are you going?' he said.

Perhaps he was ready to go home. Certainly his large roundish mottled face looked as if a lie-down might return more of its shape. 'Thurstaston,' she told him.

'What's there?'

'I will be.'

'Shake a leg, then.'

From the frown that swelled the ridges of his brows she could have taken him to be advising her to walk to Thurstaston. As she ducked under the low roof, to be greeted by a dim bulb that illuminated a No Smoking sign, he said 'By yourself?'

She couldn't help slamming the door as if to keep out a pursuer. 'As you see,' she said, though she'd renewed the darkness.

He emitted a snort that might have been derisive or an attempt to unblock his nostrils. 'Meeting someone,' he said.

It sounded ominously unlike a question. The taxi had left the station behind by the time she grasped that he was explaining what he'd previously asked. 'I hope so,' she said, which seemed wilfully pessimistic. 'I'm sure I will.'

The taxi sped out of reach of the lights along the main road and accelerated uphill between banks of rock that shored up the black sky. They blinkered Charlotte's vision, so that she was striving to concentrate on the lit patch of road the night was paying out when the driver enquired 'Which way?'

She was wondering nervously what could have stolen his sense of the unquestionable direction when she realised that he was anticipating the crossroads. 'Down to the cliff,' she said.

'Night walker.'

She assumed he meant her rather than anyone he glimpsed as the taxi emerged from the cutting and swung right at the junction. The side road unbent to reveal the distant Welsh coast, an elongated fallen constellation dying to the orange of a mass of embers. It was pinched progressively smaller by the hedges bordering the road, and sank into the dark before the taxi veered into a lane beside the unlit hulk of a café. 'This you?' the driver said.

'It's fine, thanks.'

Two stumpy tubes of amber light in metal cages guarded the entrances to paths off the lane. Otherwise it and the car park to which it led were deserted. As Charlotte took out her purse the driver flashed his headlamps several times and then blared his horn at length before leaving the beams raised high. 'Where are they?' he was determined to learn.

'I'll find them.'

'They ought to be finding you.' All at once he sounded so paternal that Charlotte was afraid he might lock her in for her own supposed safety. She'd caught hold of the door handle when he slid his window down to shout 'Anybody there?'

This provoked a response – a protracted clattering giggle as dry as a skull. Before it trailed off Charlotte identified it as the complaint of a restless magpie. 'They won't be here,' she said, as angry with her own nerves as with the driver. 'I have to walk.'

'You ought to be met when it's dark like this.'

She heard a threat instead of the rebuke he intended. If she tarried much longer, the metal cell might start to seem like a refuge. She peeled a note off the stained scrawny wad in her purse and handed it to the driver. 'All yours,' she said when he made to give her change as she clambered out of the taxi.

'Just take a bit of care. You never know who's about at night,' he said and lingered until she ventured onto a lit stretch of path. 'Hope they're waiting for you,' he said and executed a U-turn so leisurely that he might have been deciding to halt again. Instead he drove to the road and, with a last red-eyed glare of the brakes, was gone.

The glow of the caged light fell short of the track onto which the path led. The murmur of the taxi dwindled beyond hearing as Charlotte stepped onto the track, and then there was only the wind in the hedges. They scraped thorns together as she turned right towards a bridge, on the far side of which the track continued to resemble the floor of a tunnel narrowing into invisibility. Its walls were trees growing close together and embedded like vines in the roof of the sky. Her footsteps grew shrill and encountered company under the bridge, but only hers emerged, unless the others had become so thin that they were less than whispers. Of course nobody was at her back. She managed not to glance over her shoulder more than twice and to derive some slight comfort from the raw lamps on a road alongside a caravan park behind the trees to her left, although the place was so silent that any tenants might have been holding their collective breath. Soon the lamps ended and the trees gave way to bushes, opening out the sky. It felt as if the walls had thickened while lowering the roof, and left the track just as dimly indistinct. The need to strain her eyes distracted her from feeling too closed in, and she wanted to conserve the flashlight beam. She almost wandered past the entrance to the common in the dark.

A sign nailed to a post on the overgrown verge had disoriented her, because she couldn't recall having seen it before. She leaned close to it and squinted hard, but still had to use the flashlight. The tip of the wooden pointer had rotted away, leaving a gap like a dead reptile's lichened mouth. Many of the letters had sloughed off where they weren't obscured by moss, so that she was barely able to distinguish even ASTON OUND, which might have been a phrase too occult for her to understand. She swung the flashlight beam away to illuminate the way through the gap in the hedge. As soon as she stepped onto the path across the common she switched off the beam.

She oughtn't to have peered so closely at the lit sign. A blurred pale patch clung to her vision, obscuring the route. A wind hissed through the blackened grass to meet her, and she was also greeted by a muted tolling of bells, which it took her some moments to recognise as the hollow clangour of ropes against the masts of boats. A rise in the faint narrow path showed her the nervously restless lights of Wales, and as she glimpsed a thin shape silhouetted against them on the far side of the common, a mass of blackness clattered up from a clump of bushes at her side. Its cry was louder and harsher than hers. It flew away cawing to add its blackness to a treetop, and Charlotte tried to steady the flashlight beam as she turned it on the silhouette near the edge of the cliff. At first the light seemed too attenuated to define it, especially given her imperfect vision. She had to advance several reluctant paces before she was sure of the object. It was a spade stuck upright in the earth.

She had no doubt who'd left it there. 'Hugh,' she called. 'Ellen.' This appeared to earn her a derisive response, but only from the treetop. She was no longer willing to brave the unlit dark, and followed the unbalanced dance of the flashlight beam along the ragged path. Hundreds of yards away from the spade, she saw that it was guarding a hole in the earth.

Was it a grave? It looked regular enough – and then she remembered her dream. For several breaths the memory – the pebbles that proved to be eyes, the face rising out of the soil that coated it – felt capable of robbing her of movement. She couldn't abandon her cousins, wherever they were, and so she stalked along the shaky path across the dim common and managed to grasp both the spade and her handbag while she poked the flashlight beam into the rectangular darkness. It was far too reminiscent of her dream, yet quite different. Beyond the hole left by a trapdoor that lay open on the grass, an iron ladder scaly with rust led down into a cellar.

It must be all that remained of Pendemon's house. No, there was a further rectangular opening in the bare wooden floor. By leaning forwards she was able to distinguish a ladder that depended from it, and beyond that, stairs leading downwards. Although they were dim, she had a notion that something was wrong with them, and she thought the same about the trapdoor. She trained the flashlight on it until she realised that she could just see the ground through it. At once she felt as if the common had collapsed beneath her, precipitating her into the unknown. Pendemon's house had vanished, but not in the way she'd assumed. The trapdoor was a grimy skylight, and the carpeted stairs led down into the house itself.