The Dark Read online

  Thereafter another family, the pragmatic Jordans, lived there for a number of decades. It was they who had boarded up the clock entirely, but also they swore they did not credit ghosts and experienced nothing unusual during their tenure.

  And after the Jordans, though the book didn’t mention her, came my aunt.

  PERCHED ON THE hillock in the bed, I put the pages down, all this information meticulously copied (or invented?—it didn’t seem likely) by my own aunt.

  That she was trying to frighten me, however, was pretty obvious. It was evidently all of a piece with her design for me here. To humiliate me and make me her unpaid servant—a curious reversal of Sabia and Eugenia Trente—wasn’t sufficient. No, she wanted to give me nightmares, too.

  Why did she have it in for me? I thought back, cautious. All I could recall was a dim, much younger version of Jennifer, making snide remarks about my mother’s behavior, Jennifer’s nagging voice gnawing away at my father, and more sharply at child-me: “Don’t do that, Laura. That grass will get your skirt dirty, and heaven knows, your mother won’t have anything ready for you to change into.” Oh, and Dad’s funeral. When she stood there, dabbing her bright, dry, hard eyes, and I hadn’t made time to talk to her, all wrapped up in my own misery, and not wanting anyone else to see. As if to grieve was a humiliation.

  Was that enough to make her want to get at me so much? Maybe. She was slightly crazy.

  More to the point, was her scheme working? I mean, was I scared?

  I switched on the torch, then switched off the overhead light. I left the torch burning by my bed. I lay down, listening, and heard only the vague sounds of wood and plaster settling toward the cool of earliest morning.

  Yes, I was, if not nervous, unnerved.

  I didn’t think I could sleep. Then I did. I dreamed, of course. Not about the Woman in Yellow. I was meeting Eden at Heathrow to fly to the United States with him, and I was very happy about this, and then I found my passport had vanished, but there was my father, gray and old, saying, “I’ve got it here, Laura. It’s all right.” But we looked through the window of the caravan that was suddenly there and in which (in the dream) he’d been living, and it was full of things—live things—not really mice, more like ghastly little gingerbread figures—and they were eating the furniture—

  And I woke up with my heart in my mouth, and it was light, 6:00 A.M., and the clock was striking ten.

  III

  I LEFT THE next morning.

  Let me rephrase that. I tried to leave.

  Having got up and dressed and herded my bags together, I bundled everything down the main stair to the hall.

  It was by then only 6:20, and there was no sign of Jennifer. Though I suspected she was an early riser, it seemed not this early.

  My plan was to use the phone I’d noted yesterday in the drawing room, and call the remembered number of the cab firm that had brought me here.

  When I walked into the room, the sunlight was cutting through it from the east-facing windows, and I could see the ocean glittering away below, never now to be reached. But when I lifted the old-fashioned receiver of the telephone, there was no dial tone. I tried various things, nothing worked. I thought perhaps Jennifer unplugged the phone at night, and traced the wire around to its socket in the wall. But it was attached, and although I took it out and reconnected it, still the phone was dead.

  Probably the machine itself had gone wrong and she frugally hadn’t bothered to get it mended. Where then in the house would I find another phone that worked?

  I searched the downstairs rooms, cursing myself now that I, abnormality among millions, had never invested in one of those mobiles I’d previously cursed on the train. Of course the one I’d used from the company had been recalled.

  The rooms were all spacious, gracious, full of grand furniture and silk curtains, and all soiled and dusty and lit by sun. And phoneless.

  I went to the kitchen then and made myself some of the foul coffee, double strength. Suddenly I thought I knew where the one operational phone would be. It would be in Jennifer’s bedroom.

  As I stood there in that dampish, still, shadowy, stone-floored vault, my body finally was prickling all over with a kind of fear. I knew I couldn’t say to her, “I am leaving now. Let me use the phone to call a cab.”

  She would somehow (how?) prevent it.

  She wanted me here, she really did. To play with, to get back at for imagined trespasses. And did she hope for me something worse than humiliation and housework?

  Jennifer and Eugenia—just how much, by now, did the two of them have in common?

  Then I visualized lugging my bags through the winding, twisty lanes, getting lost among fields and hedges, always glimpsing the sea and the way I should go, and not able to figure out physically how to get there. I thought of surly countryfolk who would detest me and refuse me use of their phones, of snarling dogs, bulls—the perfect layman’s picture of the English Wild. Whatever else, it would be a long walk. It had taken the cab nearly an hour … .

  So I thought of a cunning plot. I’m sort of a survivalist. Up to a point, I’ll do what I have to, to escape, evade, get by.

  SHE CAME DOWN at eight. By then I was cleaning the French windows of the drawing room. The rest of the room was dusted and hoovered, though not polished. You don’t, even if on an economy drive, polish wood like that with Busy Bee, which was all she had.

  I heard her stop in the doorway. Was she thrilled? Triumphant? Or at all startled that I’d actually given in?

  “Hi,” I said airily, only half turning. “Beautiful morning.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said grudgingly.

  “I’ve almost done in here. I thought you’d like this room sorted out first.”

  “Yes.” Then she said, “So you decided you’d do it.”

  “Oh, why not?” I said. “For a while, anyway. It’s a great house, it’s good to tidy it up.” Then I turned round properly. There she was, in a rather grubby white wrap, with her dyed hair in curlers and a scarf. I said, “Just one thing, I’m really sorry. When I was hoovering, I knocked into that table and the phone fell off. When I picked it up, I couldn’t get the tone. I must have broken it. Of course I’ll pay for the repair.”

  She blinked. That was all. Then her dire little smile came out like a hiding slug. “That’s all right, Laura. It doesn’t work anyway. I don’t use the telephone much.”

  I gawped, astonished, and anxiously said, “But miles up here, and you live alone—do you keep another phone, for emergencies at least?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  That was all. I turned back as if completely satisfied. Whistling, I went on sparkling up the windows with newspaper. I was satisfied. She did have another phone. Just a matter of finding it.

  Then, as I gave the last burnish to the panes, I saw in the glass that Jennifer was now advancing through the room toward me, and … well, this frightened me. Was she violent? For a second, I pretended to go on obliviously rubbing the newspaper about, but keeping my eyes on her reflection. The image was virtually divided between outside and in, and she seemed to be passing through the cedar tree in sections, her stupid red scarf, wound over curlers, very vivid in the glass and in contrast, her wrapper looking rather like a long dress, and more yellow than white—

  And then I knew what I was seeing.

  It wasn’t my Aunt Jennifer.

  I whirled round, burning cold, in a terror the like of which I’d never ever felt—a sort of vertigo of fear. As if a hole had opened in the world and I was about to plunge through.

  Nothing was in the room.

  Not Jennifer. Nothing … else.

  I made a noise, a silly noise.

  After quite some time, I looked back at the window, and there was only the vague reflection of furniture held there among the branches of the cedar.

  WHAT DO YOU do after something like that? If you’re me, and you don’t believe in ghosts, fairly quickly you put it down to hallucination caused by stress.
And then you feel slightly better.

  However, I was all the more keen to get out of the house.

  She wanted breakfast, of course. Toast, cornflakes, marmalade—and tea, not coffee. I prepared that and she had it in the drawing room, taking the opportunity as she did so to write down on a notepad anything she thought I’d missed in my cleaning.

  After all that, I explained I was just popping up to the loo. I guessed I’d get some comment about weak bladders or irregular bowels, but no.

  Upstairs I went, but obviously not to the bathroom. I walked along the main upper hallway and looked into the rooms until I found hers.

  Her room was disgusting.

  I have lived, I’ve said, in tips, but she really had no excuse. The bed was tightly made. Otherwise, there was mess and junk everywhere—old newspapers in stacks, magazines, boxes of sticky old orange powder and makeup dried in tubes. And worse than this, half-eaten packets of biscuits, sweets that seemed half-eaten, then taken out and wrapped up again in their paper for future use. Another defunct banana lay rotting in a turpentine reek on the windowsill, to the glee of several flies. The room stank of that, of many saccharine things going off. Of her.

  I opened windows, and then I looked for the phone. And it wasn’t there. Which was insane, for it was nowhere else and I truly didn’t believe even crazy Jennifer wouldn’t have one. She must have concealed it cleverly. Where?

  Perhaps I was chicken, I didn’t want to start rummaging around yet. I’d have to tell her I would do her room this afternoon, make it nice for her, some crap like that.

  Then I went down to get on with the drudgery, and unlike me, she had found something—my bags, thrust in the hall cupboard.

  “Whatever are these doing here? I said take them up.”

  “Oh, I will, when I sort them out later. They take up too much space in my room like this.”

  I can sometimes think on my feet.

  But perhaps I wasn’t fooling her. Had she been looking?

  A CURIOUS DAY. I labored like her slave. My arms began to ache, and my back hurt from bending and stretching. With the mirrors and the windows, I whistled and sang Mozart and XTC extra loud, and saw nothing beyond what usually reflects in glass.

  I made lunch, (canned meatballs) and ate some with her. The meatballs seemed to give her a high. She started rambling on at me. I scarcely listened to her reminiscences. Everything had been much better then—maybe for her, it had been. And diatribes against men in general, lesbians in particular, the French, the Germans, the Americans, the Scottish, and those she chose to call “Negroes” (!). Also workmen, all of them, and the money-grabbing, work-shy, ne’er-do-wells who had ruined the British economy, and perhaps included, unspoken, me.

  I wanted to kill her. It’s a fact. I felt I, too, was going mental. Didn’t care what I might come to do.

  Acting Oscar-earning well, I smarmily told her I’d decided to clean her bedroom.

  “No, Laura, that can wait. There’s still plenty to see to on this floor.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Sod her. She wasn’t going to stop me now.

  The old witch routinely had a rest after lunch, so she had told me—not in her bedroom but in one of the downstairs rooms. To this stroke of luck, I replied I’d clean up in the kitchen while she slept, so as not to disturb her.

  “Oh, I don’t sleep, Laura. I never sleep well.”

  “Just in case,” Laura cheerily declared.

  As I cleared the lunch things and went out, she was smiling to herself, a crafty slug smile. But this had gone far enough, and I meant to be out of this appalling house before nightfall. Even if I did have to walk all the way with my bags gripped in my teeth, and sleep on the beach when I got there.

  Accordingly, all that afternoon I searched, mainly on the upper floor. I even got up into the attics by another narrow backstair—but they were such a shambles and draped so thickly with cobwebs, I thought perhaps she herself hadn’t gone up there in a decade. I didn’t find a phone. I began to feel she had lied when she said she had another, just to get me running in circles. (Somehow, during all this circle-running, I’d managed to avoid going anywhere near the clock. I’d even used the other bathroom.)

  The hot afternoon light was abruptly slanting. It was nearly five.

  There she was, standing in the lower hall, glaring up at me.

  “Why ever are you up there? I expected tea an hour ago.”

  “Sorry, I’ll get it now,” I heard myself say, still with vague self-amazement.

  “I told you not to clean upstairs yet.”

  “I haven’t. Sorry,” I said again. “I took a nap.” Firmly I added, “I didn’t have a great night.”

  She shrugged—placated? “Very well. We’ll let it go. See to the tea now.”

  So I saw to the tea.

  Inside me at last was a mindless—almost bestial—rising panic. I couldn’t seem to pull myself around. I couldn’t seem to confront her anymore, or make up my mind what it was best for me to do. And in about three hours, the sun was going down, down into the land, leaving behind a darkness that would smother even that coal-blue sea, which looked as if it belonged in Africa, but had somehow washed up here. As had I, who might also … . be smothered?

  IN THE END, what I did was drag all my bags down to the kitchen, (having found another way onto the backstair from the ground floor; I wouldn’t return to my “room”—or wouldn’t go by the clock.) In the kitchen, I sorted through the bags in the mode of lifeboat intendees in movies. I was going to have to leave a lot behind; it would be too heavy to carry all that way.

  At the finish, I had it all down to one single very heavy bag. This I then picked up and walked upstairs again, as I hadn’t been able to open the kitchen door to the outside; it was stuck—or locked.

  In the lower hall once more, I met her. She’d known, she must have done, all of it, even to my breaking point.

  But, “What are you doing, Laura?” she asked. She had put on lipstick, as if for a celebration.

  I moved across and paused, facing her at the foot of the main stair. She was between me and the front door. I put down my bag. I felt reckless.

  “Sorry,” I said again. “I just remembered I left the kettle on in London.”

  “You’re leaving after all,” she brilliantly fathomed.

  “Sure am. I don’t suppose you’ll allow me to use the secret telephone to call a cab?”

  “Certainly not at this time of night.” (It was about seven). “They wouldn’t come out. Not all the way up here. If you really insist on going, then you must do it in the morning.”

  “No. I’m not spending another night here. Not with you, or your specialty ghosts.”

  She smiled. What a giveaway.

  “Don’t tell me a grown-up woman, even you, is frightened by a ghost story.”

  “I don’t give a toss about ghost stories. I just don’t like you, Aunt Jennifer, or your behavior.”

  “It’s mutual then,” she said. We stood there in the cup of the brown hall, dusted by me, and the tiled floor wiped to a gleam as sunlight speared by in its death throes. “Oh, don’t think I ever could forget the way you used to behave to me. You, a child. I used to think she put you up to it, that slut of a mother of yours. But I don’t think she would have bothered. She’d got him where she wanted him. And she was busy making a fool of him. She killed him with her goings-on.”

  “Shut up,” I said, but almost listlessly, because I half agreed at least on that. She didn’t take any notice anyway.

  “But you were a dreadful little girl. I always saw you sneering at me behind my back, laughing at me. Always trying to get me to buy you things—”

  “For God’s sake, I was a child—”

  “She’d told you I was well-off, I suppose. And so it was ‘Can I have an ice cream, can I go to the pictures, can I have that book on tigers—”

  “Well, I didn’t get them off you, did I? Oh, excuse me, I did get half an ice cream once.”


  She shamed me. Had I been a whining, gift-grabbing kid? We hadn’t had much, and Jennifer, then, used to flash her money. And she used to promise me things, too, presents, and at first I’d believed her, but I never got them. Inside me now, the panic was boiling into rage. The hall was stifling and turning red with it. Like her furious self-righteous face.

  “Then the funeral,” she announced. “My own brother, and your father, and there you were, and you couldn’t say a word to me, just ‘Hallo, Aunt.’ And later I think you said good-bye. Both of us standing there over his grave, and you wouldn’t say a word. You couldn’t even spare me a drop of kindness.”

  “My father was dead,” I said bitterly.

  “My brother was dead,” she cried. Her eyes flamed like slices of razor, and then they went up over my head, up to the top of the stairs, and she let out—not a scream—a sort of yelp.

  At once the blood-red light in the hall seemed to darken. Something out there had got hold of the sun. Instantly, the nature of my turmoil changed. My back, my neck, my scalp, were covered by freezing ants.

  I stared at her. “What is it?”

  She didn’t speak. She simply went on gazing up the stairway, and still gazing, she began to back away, back through the door of the drawing room, and now her lipsticked mouth was hanging open.

  I’ve no notion how, but I understood this was not part of the game.

  As for me, for a moment I didn’t think I could move. Then I knew I had to, because otherwise, if I just stayed there at the foot of the stairs, whatever—whatever was on them, coming down them, whatever that was—would soon be right where I was—and I didn‘t—no, I didn’t—want that … .

  So I somehow moved forward, to run after Jennifer through the drawing-room door, and at the same time, like Lot’s misguided wife, I looked behind me …

  And was turned, as she was, to an immovable pillar of volcanic salt.

  Because what was standing still at the head of the stairs was the wooden clock, and what was coming down the stairs was Sabia Trente, not still at all, the skirts of her gown blowing round her, and her arms held up from the elbows, and her hands pointing with their grown-long fingernails.