The Sin Eater(85)

The sewer had obviously long since been abandoned, and it smelled dreadful. After the dampness of the river fog it felt close and hot. It was not as dark as he had expected; light came in from outside, and he could see the blackened bricks, and the crusted grime of years. Rank weeds thrust out from cracks in the wall and grew up from the ground and the curved ceiling, a couple of feet overhead, gleamed with moisture. There was the sound of water dripping somewhere, echoing eerily. This would be a terrible place to die.

The tunnel curved round to the right slightly, and ahead, stretching from the floor of the tunnel to its ceiling, was what must be sluice gates. The centre sections were solid, age-blackened wood; the top and bottom were thick spiked iron. At one side was a mechanism, presumably for opening the gates: an immense wheel was set horizontally into its base. If that wheel could be turned, would the old sluice gates creak into life? Declan shuddered and looked about him. It was then he saw a much smaller, narrower tunnel leading off to the left. When he went towards it, he heard a female voice calling for help.

Nell had not really thought there was any point in calling for help, because she was fairly certain she was inside a particularly horrible dream. And even if this nightmare scenario was somehow real there would not be anyone in earshot. But she called anyway.

Wherever this was, there was a strong river smell, and there was the eerie sound of water dripping nearby. It was very dark and she was lying on hard ground, half against a wall. Other than this, she was not able to focus very well on what had happened. She sat very still, her eyes closed, and memory unrolled a little, showing her Holly Lodge and the things in the various rooms she had been listing. And then she had fallen part way down the stairs – she remembered that, and she remembered she had been partly knocked out. It was when she came round the nightmare had begun. There had been something odd and frightening – something to do with strange sounds – people in the street calling in voices that did not belong to the present. Nell forced herself to concentrate, and saw in her mind the big hall at Holly Lodge, with the man coming down the stairs towards her, stepping into the lamplight so that for a single nightmare second she had seen his face . . .

As this memory opened, she sat up abruptly, then gasped as pain twisted through her foot. But the pain forced the remaining fragments to drop into place. She had been running down the stairs to escape and missed her footing on the stairs and fallen, injuring her ankle. He had bent over her, the remarkable vivid blue of his eyes becoming suffused with black . . .

‘The eyes are always such a betrayal, Nell . . . There are even some eyes that can eat your soul, did you know that . . . ?’

The words were not quite spoken, but Nell heard them, and this time she managed to sit up. He was here, standing at what must be the tunnel entrance, just out of the light. Hiding his face, she thought, and then, with helpless sympathy, now I understand why he does that.

Fear throbbed through her, but she said, ‘Where is this? Who are you?’ and heard how her voice bounced off the tunnel walls and roof and came back at her mockingly.

‘Benedict Doyle would tell you I’m his alter ego – a figment of a flawed mind . . . Except that I’m a real person – at least, I was once.’

‘Declan,’ said Nell, half to herself, and there was a faint ruffle of something that might have been sadness.

‘No, I’m not Declan. I’m Colm. Declan was – ah, at the very end, Declan got away from me . . .’ The words whispered into Nell’s mind. This was all a nightmare, of course, or the results of concussion from falling down the stairs. At any minute she would wake up in a hospital bed, with people saying things like, ‘Drink this,’ and, ‘Try to get some rest.’

She said, ‘Why am I here?’ and thought how absurd this was, because nobody argued with a dream-figure or a phantom conjured up by concussion.

‘A little because you saw me that day with Declan’s descendant, Benedict . . .’

‘But – does that matter? Anyway, no one needs to know. I won’t tell anyone.’

She felt his mental pounce. ‘That’s what the others said. “I won’t tell anyone,” they said. Cerise said it on this very spot all those years ago. “No one needs to know what you did,” she said. “I won’t tell anyone if you pay me enough”.’

‘Who was Cerise?’ I’ll keep him talking, thought Nell. That’s what they say you should do in this situation. It’ll create a connection between us, and he’ll let me go. Except I’m not sure that we are talking in the normal sense.

‘Cerise was a greedy little cat. She thought I had committed a crime and she tried to get money from me to stop her telling people. And I had committed the crime, Nell. So I had to shut her up.’

‘You killed her?’

‘Oh yes. Just as I killed the villains who ruined the girl I loved and brought about her death. There was a man who butchered her to get rid of a baby she was having – I killed him first. He bungled the task, and the child bled out of her, and her life bled out with it. And all the colour and life and hope went out of my life on that night.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Nell, helplessly.

‘Then I killed the man who fathered the baby in the first place. A little plucked fowl in a waistcoat, that’s what he looked like. Strutting around his tiny kingdom in Islington, with his charities and his churches . . . But he had his squalid pleasure with her, with no thought for the consequences, and I couldn’t let him live after that. He had to be punished – you do see that?’