Spider Light(106)
It gave her a deep pleasure to think of the agonies Antonia would be enduring–of how finding Greg’s body with the knife sticking out of his chest and the Caprice music lying alongside it, would have taken her another step nearer to the mental disintegration that Donna was aiming for. Might she even now be questioning her own sanity? At the very least, she would know that the peace of Amberwood and the anonymity she had sought had been destroyed, and that would be agony in itself.
It was all working out exactly as Donna had intended. For the next few hours she would have to be very alert indeed in case the police searched the cottage, but there would be no signs that anyone had got up through the trapdoor, and even if they did get up here, they would probably only take a cursory look. In that situation Donna would have plenty of warning and she would huddle under the travelling rug. She was fairly confident she would not be seen.
It would be all right. Every detail was worked out; she had covered every eventuality, and she was prepared for the unexpected.
She had not been prepared for the unexpected on the day, five years ago, when she had first driven out to Twygrist. Weston had just started her prison sentence and Donna’s plan had still been in its early, tentative stage.
Her mind had already focused on the dark squat silhouette of the old Amberwood mill where her parents had died. Twygrist. There would be a certain justice if Twygrist could play a part in Antonia Weston’s final downfall. Donna thought she could at least drive up and take a look round. There was no one to wonder where she was going, or ask questions, not any longer.
Twygrist, seen by a dull autumn light, was as forbidding and as secret as she remembered. She parked her car at a distance so as not to draw attention to her presence, and walked up the slope to the derelict oak door. It creaked as she pushed it inwards. The stench of the place hit her like a solid wall, but Donna knew at once that this was where Antonia Weston must eventually die. The kiln room again? There were at least eight years to wait before Weston was freed, and Maria and Jim Robards’ death would surely be forgotten by then. In any case, everyone had believed their deaths to have been a tragic accident. She would see if the steel doors were still in place; she had brought a torch with her.
But first she walked round the main floor, liking the way the machinery seemed to watch her, liking the feeling of its latent energy. Into her mind slid a new thought, like a questing serpent, How easy would it be to open the sluice gates, and to force Twygrist into life again?
An immense stillness seemed to fall over everything, as if the dark core of the old mill had heard and was listening. It’s alive, thought Donna. It’s been decaying and idle for years–decades–but there’s still something here that’s living. And that something has heard my thoughts, and it’s waiting to see what I’ll do.
How did the sluice gates work? Donna had a distant memory of her father saying something about a pivot wheel that would have to be turned with a splined key. The same principle you used when you opened a tin of sardines or corned beef, he said, and Donna’s mother had instantly said that if he was going to use analogies, please would he use ones they could understand, because she had never opened a tin of corned beef in her life. Donna’s father had laughed, and said, all right, then, a horizontal wheel, with a grooved shaft at the centre; you slotted the key down into that shaft, and then turned the key.
Donna saw the wheel almost at once. It had black spokes and jutted up about a foot from the floor. It was quite near the door leading underground. What looked like the spline key was lying nearby.
She walked slowly forwards, her eyes fixed on it. It would not work, of course: the mechanism would long since have seized up. And even if, by some slight chance, it did work, the culvert would have rotted away years ago. She glanced overhead. Yes, there was the culvert, just as she remembered from that last summer here. The clay had broken away from most of it, but it might be still be watertight.
She picked up the spline. It felt cold against her fingers and the surface was pitted with age. Presumably you slotted it down into the wheel’s centre, as her father had said, and then turned it using the t-shaped handle. The splines would force the wheel’s mechanism to rotate. It really did look as if it worked on the corned-beef-tin principle.
The wheel was about two feet across. Donna leaned down and tried the key in the centre. It slid home obediently, and she grasped the t-handle. Just a tiny pressure, just to see if the wheel was still capable of rotating. She turned it slightly to the right, encountered resistance, and then tried it the other way. This time the whole shaft of the key seemed to engage, and the wheel moved to the left. Only a little–barely the distance of one of the spokes–but Donna instantly felt an answering tremor. Like thunder growling far away. And had the oak floor shivered briefly at the same time, or had that been her imagination?
Her hand was still on the key. She was not going to take this much further, but if she could just know how workable the mechanism was…
The wheel turned a little further, and this time there was no doubt about it; an unmistakeable tremor went through the floor, like the accounts you read of the start of an earthquake. At the same time a breath of something stagnant and cold seemed to brush against Donna’s skin.
If the sluice gates were raised, hundreds of tons of water would tumble down into Twygrist from the reservoir, and the waterwheels would begin to turn.
The light shifted suddenly, and there was a new sound behind her–a sound that had nothing to do with the struggling old mechanism. Donna spun round, and in the centre of the floor, watching her with puzzled eyes, was a woman of thirty or so, with shoulder-length fair hair.