Property of a Lady(42)

‘In here,’ said the granite-coloured woman, opening a door and standing back to let us go inside. I hung back, but Father said, quite gently, ‘Come along, Harriet, it’s all right,’ and I had to go in.

The sad, drowning-in-the-dark smell was much stronger, and there was a horrid smeary darkness in the room. I had the feeling that things might be hiding inside that darkness – things that never went outside, things that had become covered with layers and layers of cobwebs until the cobwebs had formed thick ropes that tangled in hair and coiled around ankles and wrists . . .

But I stood obediently inside the door and waited to see what came next. At first I thought the room was empty, but then from the darkest corner came a voice – an ugly voice that made me think of a fingernail scraping across a slate surface.

‘You are Anstey?’

‘I am Frederick Anstey.’

There was a blur of movement, as if the cobwebs gathered themselves together. I flinched and glanced behind me, but the door was firmly shut.

‘You have brought the child?’

‘Harriet. Yes. She’s here with me.’

Father glanced down at me, and I managed to say, ‘How do you do,’ directing the words towards the dark corner.

‘They wrote to you?’ said the voice, as if I had not spoken. ‘They wrote asking you to come here?’

‘Yes. The solicitor—’

‘The details have no interest for me.’ The movement came again. ‘Tell the child to speak to me.’

Father bent down. ‘Harriet, tell this lady how old you are and how you are good at lessons.’ He gave me the smile that meant: everything is perfectly all right. It wasn’t all right, of course, but I saw he wanted me to pretend.

So I said, as politely as I could, ‘I’m seven. I like reading books.’

‘She is well-mannered.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Her mother?’

‘She is at our home in Cheshire.’


‘Harriet Anstey,’ said the terrible voice, suddenly addressing me directly, ‘one day somewhere in the future, after I am dead, you will own a house – my house. If your father is still alive then it will be his first, but he is older than I am so he will most likely die before me. You may not understand all this now, but you will do so in time.’ A pause. ‘When you finally own that house, if you go to live in it, he will come looking for you. That’s what I want to warn you of, in case there is no one to protect you by then. You must never – never – let him find you. You understand that? For if he finds you—’ The voice stopped, and then went on again. ‘You may lose your sanity, as I did. At times it still deserts me. At those times I am mad.’ There was a movement within the darkness – the impression of something shrivelled and brittle unfolding itself. ‘It may desert me at any moment, that sanity, so I must know quickly that you understand.’

I said, ‘I will make sure he doesn’t find me.’

The sounds came again – like the dry rustling of some ancient winged insect – and a figure walked slowly into the dim light at the centre of the room.

I cried out, and at my side I heard Father gasp. A tall, thin woman, wearing – I don’t know what she was wearing exactly, but it was some sort of grey, shapeless garment that hung from her bony frame. Her hair was grey as well, but it did not look like hair, it looked like thick cobwebs.

Where her eyes should have been were two deep, dark pits, which was fearsome enough in itself. But what was so much worse, what had made me cry out and Father gasp, was that both eye sockets were faintly crusted over with grey. As if spiders had spun webs over them, and as if she had not known or felt it happen.

As she moved, her hands reached out in front of her, feeling her way towards me. I gasped again, and her head turned towards me. This time I thrust my clenched fist into my mouth to stop myself from making a sound. If she heard me she would know exactly where I was standing. If she touched me I would not be able to bear it.

She did not touch me. She had taken four steps when she stopped and lifted her head as if listening.

‘Hear him,’ she said, and her voice was different – younger, almost a child’s voice. ‘Hear him singing. He’s coming along the passageway outside – here he comes. Tappety-tap, feeling his way . . . If you listen, you’ll hear his singing. You oughtn’t to hear it, for there are some things human ears were never meant to hear. But I hear it – oh God, I hear it every night, just as I heard it the night he found me . . .’

In a cracked voice, she began to sing:

‘Open lock to the dead man’s knock . . .

Fly bolt, and bar, and band . . .

Nor move, nor swerve, joint, muscle or nerve,

At the spell of the dead man’s hand.

And now with care, the five locks of hair,

From the skull of the murderer dangling there,

With the grease and the fat of a black tom cat . . .’

She stopped, and when she spoke, her voice had returned to the scratchy, ugly tone.

‘That’s not the real spell, of course,’ she said. ‘The real spell is far more ancient, far darker – it comes from the black marrow of the world’s history – and the world has many such blacknesses. He learned the spell when his own mind touched one of those black cores.’