Deadlight-Hall(39)

Sch?nbrunn called out again, and the figure seemed to listen intently. And then it vanished. One minute it was there, the next it had gone. It was as if it had been made of a cluster of spiders’ webs, and as if something had blown chill breath on it, causing the webs to shrivel. The reality, of course, would simply be that whoever was there had darted silently away.

I said, in a determinedly practical voice, ‘Whoever that was has gone.’

‘It was calling for the children. And,’ said Sch?nbrunn, ‘who were we told does that? Still calls for them, weeks after they vanished? Who is it who constantly walks the lanes around here, trying to find them?’

‘Battersby,’ I said, eagerly. ‘Of course. Except …’ I looked back uneasily, remembering the broken lock on the main doors. ‘That figure was misshapen,’ I said.

‘Yes, but Mrs Battersby told us that walking any distance was a trial to her husband, because he had been shot in the last war. There’s no one else it could be.’

‘Of course there isn’t.’ I felt a surge of gratitude. ‘You,’ I said to Sch?nbrunn, ‘are probably the sanest, most logical person I’ve ever known.’

‘Logical? I hope so. Sane? I sometimes wonder.’ But the edge of the torchlight caught his face, and he was smiling. ‘We’ll leave Mr Battersby to his sad search, and we’ll see what else Deadlight Hall can tell us.’

The passage was dark and dank, but opening off it was a series of small, separate rooms. I went into the first of them, and that was when I knew we were not in Gehenna at all – that we had never been in Gehenna, for Gehenna, if it ever did, or ever will, exist, will be blisteringly, soul-shrivellingly hot. Those rooms were cold: a deadly coldness that would seep into your bones if you were in them too long and destroy you. I went into each one, and in every one I felt the misery and the loneliness soak down into my bones. I thought: people lived here, slept here, despaired here. So strong were the feelings that in the last room, I swayed, and had to put out a hand to the wall for support. It was with real gratitude that I felt Sch?nbrunn’s hand close around my arm.

‘It’s all right, you know,’ he said, very quietly. ‘There’s no one here.’

I wanted to say, Oh, but there is. There are fragments of people still here – tiny splinters of lost, forgotten people, and although I have no idea who they were, I know they experienced terrible things – unhappiness, fear, deep aching loneliness – and I know it because those emotions still live.

I did not say any of it. Indeed, I surprise myself to see I am writing it now, even to you, my oldest friend. I shall leave it as I have written it, though, and no doubt when you read it, you will think once again, ‘Ah yes, poor old Maurice Bensimon, he is certainly growing fanciful as he gets older.’

‘One more room,’ said Sch?nbrunn, leading the way to the very end of the corridor. I wanted to say we should not bother, that we should go back to our lodgings, but of course I followed him.

At the end of the short passage, facing us square on, was a black door, bound with thick iron strips. Set into the upper half was a round window, like a single unblinking eye. I had the feeling it was trying to stare at us, that lidless eye, but that it could not quite see us because its surface was smeared and filmed with grime, as a man’s eye can become smeared and filmed with a cataract. I stared at this dead, blind eye, and thought, So this is the ‘dead light’ of this house. But Sch?nbrunn had taken the torch and he was shining it on to the door, and I forced myself to stand next to him.

‘It’s a furnace room,’ he said. ‘If you stand close to the glass you can make out the furnace itself.’

He lifted up the torch and I wanted to tell him not to wipe the eye clear of its cobwebby film, to leave it in its semi-blind state so that nothing could look through at us, but instead I peered through the glass. The furnace was there – black and crouching and ugly. Thick pipes snaked away from it and the surface around its door was scarred and pitted with heat. I hated it instantly, but I said, ‘Yes, I see. It doesn’t tell us anything about the twins though, does it?’ I thought: so now, let’s go back upstairs, and get away from this place as fast as possible.

But Sch?nbrunn was already reaching for the heavy handle and if the door was unlocked we should have to go inside. But before he had turned the mechanism his expression changed, and he spun round, directing the torch on to the incomplete stone wall behind us. This time there was no need for him to tell me to listen, for I could hear the sounds clearly.