Spider Light(94)
‘I don’t like that place,’ she once said. ‘We have to look through horrid black gates–for hours and hours we have to do that. And mamma looks all funny, and she talks about spider light and how things hide inside it.’
George had attempted to reassure Maud; he said there was nothing in the world she need be frightened of, and there was no such thing as spider light, it was only one of mamma’s stories. (Is it, though? his mind had said. Because you know, perfectly well, what once happened in the spider light, all those years ago…)
He had tried to put a stop to the walks. Why not go in a different direction? he had said–but he suspected Louisa continued to walk along Scraptoft Lane to Latchkill. It had only been later–when Maud was growing up–that Louisa had stopped going out altogether, staying in her room with the curtains closed. It was safer like that, she had said; the curtains kept the spider light at bay. George had not known how to coax her outside.
If he had known it would turn out like that, would he have married Louisa all those years ago? But he thought he would, because Louisa had been a way of achieving a dream he had always cherished–a dream that centred on his living in a big house with servants and large grounds. In the dream people referred to him as Mr Lincoln of Something-or-Other House, and treated him with that particular respect you saw given to the rich and the aristocrat. Pipe dreams he had thought them in those days; castles in the air. Or were they? Mr Forrester was pleased with his work at Twygrist, and if George continued to prove himself and work hard, who knew what might lie ahead? Mr Lincoln of Something-House. It might happen.
Most of it had happened, and considerably sooner than he could have expected. He had become Mr Lincoln of Toft House (Toft House, that beautiful mellow red-brick house he had always admired so much!), known and respected. And when old man Rosen died, there had been the Rosen money as well. He had got almost everything he wanted, but he also got Louisa, and it could not be denied that at the end, Louisa, poor soul, had unquestionably been mad.
George managed to hush up Louisa’s dreadful death, as much for Maud’s sake as for all the other reasons, but when he looked back over the last eighteen years, it seemed to him almost everything he had done and every decision he had made had been for Maud’s sake. Everything–all the way back to that night in Twygrist…
He had been walking home from a church meeting in Amberwood Magna–his uncle had been vicar at St Michael’s for several years, and encouraged the young George to be part of the various church activities. George had gone to the meeting in his uncle’s place because his uncle had been unwell.
It was late October, and just starting to grow dark–that time of the day which was not quite evening but which was no longer really day. George walked part of the way home with several people who had been at the meeting–it was barely two miles, and he thought he would enjoy the exercise. He bade farewell to the others at the crossroads on Amberwood’s outskirts and prepared to walk the rest of the way by himself.
This last part of the journey took him along what he thought of as the Twygrist Road. The mill stood by itself, fringed by trees and surrounded by pasturelands, with the reservoir a little way up the hillside behind it. George had a deep affection for the mill. He liked his work, and loved the way the place hummed with life when the farmers came to have their corn ground. He enjoyed overseeing the raising of the sluice gates, and feeling the mill shiver as the water came rushing down into the culverts and the immense waterwheels clanked into life. People sometimes said it would shake itself to pieces one day, old Twygrist, but George knew it would not; it was rooted too firmly and too deeply in the ground.
Here was the curve in the road, and a little way ahead was the crouching outline of the mill itself. It was strange to see it like this, silent and wreathed in the thickening shadows, its doors shut against the world.
Except that Twygrist’s doors were not shut against the world at all. They were standing open.
George slowed his footsteps, and then stopped, uncertain whether he needed to do anything about this. It might be that Mr Josiah was in there, attending to some unexpected task, although there were no lights showing anywhere. The door’s lock was not a very strong one–Mr Josiah was always intending to have it replaced, but no one was very likely to break into the place because there was nothing that could be removed. But it was unusual to see the door standing open like this, and George thought he had better look inside to make sure nothing was wrong. At least he could close the door to stop animals getting in.
He reached the threshhold, but then paused; it was rather forbiddingly dark inside, and perhaps after all this was not such a good idea. It was then that the sounds reached him, and he glanced uneasily over his shoulder. The wind in the trees, was it? But there was hardly any wind, and whatever he was hearing came from inside the mill itself. He waited, and presently it came again: a thin keening sound, it was, rising and falling, as if the bones of the mill were moaning in pain. George felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. There had always been rumours about Twygrist, just as there were rumours about any really old building. In Twygrist’s case they hinted that the women who came to sort and husk the corn–most of them local farmers’ wives or daughters–dabbled in witchcraft. It was absurd, but understandable: the women always wore black because of the constant dust, and were not allowed lighted candles or oil lamps in the husking room. It could not be denied that as they sat bent over their work, at the long wooden table, they had the uncanny look of a group of witches mumbling and mowing over incantations.