Spider Light(70)
She lit the lamp in the music room. It was warm and there was a comforting crackle from the logs in the hearth. The tapping seemed to have stopped for a while. Maud relaxed, and began to drift into a half sleep. It was nice to sit here and know she would not be forced to do ‘It’ with Thomasina or Simon ever again. Nice…
But it was not nice after all, because Thomasina and Simon were waiting for her, just on the other side of sleep, reproachful and threatening. Their faces were already fading to a sick whiteness because of being shut away from the light. They had crawled across to the steel doors–it had taken them most of last night and all of today because they were getting weak with not having eaten, and because it was pitchy black in the kiln room–but they had managed it and now they were hammering against the doors. Simon said they would keep on hammering until someone heard. He lifted his hands up to show Maud how his fingers and knuckles were already starting to protrude through the skin. That was good, he said, because bones made effective hammers.
Maud managed to climb up out of the nightmare at this point, but even awake she could still hear the hammering of Simon’s knucklebones against the kiln room doors. Dreadful dull knockings, over and over, like someone beating against a bruise in your mind…
That had been when she thought of blotting out the sounds with music, and had sat down at the piano and begun to play her beloved Caprice as loudly as she could. Part of Paganini’s legend was supposed to be that he had sold his soul to the devil, and that this was a devil-inspired composition. Maud found this believable. She did not care if the music conjured up the composer’s devils in this very room, if it meant they would keep her safe from Thomasina and Simon.
It was Cormac who banged the brass door knocker of Quire’s main door. It echoed through the house like the crack of doom, and George could not believe it could not be heard inside. But even though Sullivan plied the heavy knocker several times, there was no response.
‘Nothing,’ he said, at last. ‘We’ll go around to the back and see what we can find there. Mrs Minching, you wait here, if you would.’
Without waiting for an answer he set off, and George followed, blundering into bushes in the dark, torn between annoyance at the way Sullivan seemed to have taken over, and relief at having decisions made for him.
‘Nothing to be seen,’ said Cormac, having peered in through all the windows. ‘No sign of your girl anywhere. That’s the music room, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, whatever she might have been doing earlier on, she isn’t there now,’ said Cormac, having peered through the partly open curtains. ‘There’s no one there. Nothing else for it, Lincoln, we’ll have to break in.’
‘Oh, we can’t do that,’ said George, shocked. ‘Whatever will Miss Thomasina say?’
‘Thomasina Forrester isn’t here to say anything. If you want my opinion, she’s sloped off to London on one of her jaunts. She has a liking for the ladies in Seven Dials, so it’s said.’ He glanced at George. ‘You didn’t know that?’
This was clearly nothing more than extremely distasteful gossip, but George could not think of a suitable answer so he mumbled something vague.
‘But,’ said Cormac, surveying the house, ‘all things being equal, I think we’d be within our rights to smash a window. Will I do the deed, or will you? No? I didn’t think you would.’
He found a heavy stone from the path, and smashed it against the windowpane. The glass splintered, and he reached inside to unlatch the frame.
‘This house is empty,’ he said, as soon as they had stepped through the French windows, avoiding the broken glass. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how you can tell?’
George, who did not see how you could tell if a house was empty or full of people, said they should make a thorough search. Maud might be ill–she might have tripped and fallen and be lying helpless somewhere.
‘So she might. Although if she was playing the piano half an hour ago…But we’ll take a look.’
They let Mrs Minching in through the front door, and set off.
‘It’s a curious thing about Quire,’ said Cormac as they went up the main staircase. ‘There’s all this orderly Georgian elegance’–he waved an expressive hand–‘all the smooth walls and pale ceilings–but there are pockets of deep unhappiness in some of the rooms.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said George. ‘Unless you mean damp or dry rot. There’s always a smell with that, of course.’ There had been dry rot in the roof at Toft House a year or so ago; it had cost a shocking sum of money to get rid of it.
‘I don’t mean damp or dry rot,’ said Cormac. ‘I know all about those. This is like–it’s like stepping without warning into a black icy puddle when you thought it was a warm summer afternoon. Like falling into a well. There’s a bad one in the music room, did you not feel it? There’s another in the bedroom that I think is your daughter’s.’ He glanced at George as he said this, but George had never heard such fanciful rubbish as pockets of unhappiness inside houses, and he set off up to the second floor without bothering to respond.
He had just paused on the upper landing to look out of a window–there was a clear view of Toft House’s chimneys over to the east–when he caught a darting movement down on the ground. Leaning forward he saw a shadow detach itself from the darkness and go purposefully along the carriageway.