Spider Light(110)

Some semblance of reasoning was starting to come back. She thought she could not be blind because the blackness was too absolute; blind people almost always had at least a slight perception of light and shade.

She sat up cautiously, but when she tried to stand a fresh jab of pain skewered through her skull. An injury then. But no bandages from the feel of it. She put up a careful hand to explore and found a lump on one side under her hair.

Memory was starting to return with agonizing slowness, and in snatches, like a jerky, badly cranked old film. Being in the cottage after that boy’s death. Locking all the doors against the murderer. Only the murderer had already been in there–hiding, waiting to creep out. Antonia remembered those hate-filled words: ‘This is for Don, you bitch. All this is to punish you for killing Don.’

A woman’s voice. ‘This is for Don.’ And then that crunching blow on her head. Had it been a girlfriend of Don’s? Family that he had not admitted to? Whoever it was, was she going to come back?

Antonia was not going to sit here meekly, hands folded, waiting for her captor to come back. She made another attempt to stand up and, although it made her head throb, this time she managed it. It was horribly disorienting to stand in absolute darkness like this, but it would have to be endured. She would find a wall so she could feel her way along it. It would be something definite to do, and concentrating on it might help her to ignore the darkness and the silence.

But with this thought came the realization that it was not absolutely silent. Antonia had half consciously been aware of a pounding against her mind, which she had ascribed to the blow to her head. But it was not inside her head at all. It was outside it: a slow regular sound that made her think of machinery. Something beating along a prescribed course. Something thudding against metal or wood…Maddening, inexorable.

Something beating, over and over, like a distant sledgehammer in a far-off forge–No! Not beating. Ticking. The ticking of a huge, unseen clock.

Memory clicked into place, and Antonia saw the road that led down to Quire House and the building that skulked at its side. A building whose wheels and sluices and grinding stones had long since ceased to work, but a building that had, set into one of its walls, an immense clock.

She was inside Twygrist. And from the feel of it, she was somewhere below ground. The stifling sense of darkness, the sour stale air…But let’s not think about how much air there might be down here.

Had Twygrist underground rooms? Yes, it had: there was that display in Quire House, complete with the sketches of the machinery and the layout–Antonia remembered studying it on her first visit. There had been a room well below ground level–something to do with drying the grain, she thought. A furnace room with a brick oven, and what had been some sort of perforated floor directly above. Did that get her any nearer to escaping? She could not see that it did, and on balance she would have preferred not to know about the crouching bulk of the old mill directly over her head.

She inched her way to the right, both hands outstretched, and without warning came smack up against a wall. Its surface felt dry and harsh, but Antonia began to feel her way along it, praying not to encounter anything that moved or scuttled. Or had a thin boneless tail and tiny sharp teeth, because goodness knew what lurking creatures might have their homes down here. She shut this thought off, and concentrated on the image of a doorway, because doorway there must certainly be.

And here it was! Oh thank you, thank you. Quite a big door as well, not timber, some kind of metal, and possibly steel. Well, of course it would have to be metal; if there were ovens down here it had presumably been necessary to seal the place off when the fires were lit. Antonia felt all round the door’s outline. It was fairly solid and there were scratches on the surface. Pitted with age? She could feel the marks quite plainly, but what she could not feel was a handle or a latch, or any means of opening the door.

This was not acceptable. This simply could not be happening. She felt all round the door again. Be careful not to panic, Antonia, because panic’s the very last thing you can allow yourself. The door was as smooth as an egg. It was very nearly seamless.

She was shut into the underground room of the old mill, and somewhere above her was a clock banging the minutes away, and beyond all this, perhaps getting ready to stalk Antonia through this sour-smelling darkness, was a murderer.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE




During the comfortable years spent in Toft House, George Lincoln had got into set habits. There was nothing wrong with that; it was what people did.

At ten o’clock each evening, Mrs Plumtree always brought in a tray of tea and sandwiches for his supper, and then went off to bed. George drank his tea, ate his sandwiches, and by eleven o’clock, almost to the tick, he was on his way upstairs to bed.

It was a routine that suited him very nicely, although since Maud had been in Latchkill it was no longer a comfortable one. Every time he thought about Maud, George could still scarcely believe what he had done, but in the days following the discovery of the two bodies in the mill, he was aware of a certain relief. The police had questioned everyone about Thomasina and Simon Forrester’s deaths–who had seen them, and when and where, and why they might have been in Twygrist in the first place–and George was thankful that Maud was safely out of their reach. He thought the sergeant asking the various questions had barely even realized that George had a daughter.