House of the Lost

CHAPTER NINE

‘Your friend Mara would be very disappointed if you didn’t help us.’ The words kept repeating themselves in Matthew’s head and the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to do what the men had asked: to search the study and find something that would prove his father’s innocence. If he could do that everyone would be safe and Mara would come home.

He waited until his father went into the nearby town – he had suggested Matthew go with him, but Matthew, hating himself, said he had horrid homework. By three o’clock the house was quiet, but at least it was its own ordinary quiet, not the frozen frightened stillness that meant the men were around. Wilma was snoozing in the kitchen at this hour, and his father was not likely to be home until at least five.

Trying not to shake with fear, Matthew walked across the hall, not tiptoeing or creeping which would look suspicious if Wilma woke up and came out, but walking naturally and ordinarily. The study was locked as it usually was, but a key was kept inside the big ginger jar on the hall table. Matthew took the lid off, and reached inside for the key. So far so good. Hardly daring to breathe he slid the key into the lock, turned it, and went inside, shutting the door after him.

The familiar scents of old leather from the bindings of the books on the shelves closed round him. The desk stood near the window so Matthew’s father could look at the garden when he was working. On one side of the desk was a photograph of Matthew’s mother in a silver frame. Matthew could not remember her, but he liked the photo. He liked the dark hair, which was slightly untidy, a bit like smoke, and he liked the way she looked as if she was about to laugh at whoever was taking the photo. Her name had been Elisabeth, and looking at the photograph, the enormity of what he was doing almost overpowered Matthew, but he remembered about proving his father’s innocence and about saving Mara.

The desk’s surface was covered with sheaves of typed manuscript and notebooks filled with notes for plots and ideas and characters, all in his father’s squiggly writing. The men had talked about articles and diaries, although Matthew did not think his father kept a diary, except for the kitchen calendar, on which they wrote down dates that had to be remembered. He began to search, opening desk drawers, trying not to catch the eyes of the photograph.

His father kept typed copies of the books he wrote: smudgy carbon sheets which he stored inside large envelopes or cardboard folders, burning them when the book was published, but Matthew did not know if he kept copies of his newspaper articles. He did not know if there would be lists of train times or addresses, although presumably his father would stay somewhere when he went away. Matthew had never thought much about that. He knew there were places called hotels where people could book a room with a bed. It was said to cost a great deal of money, though.

The clock on the mantel ticked away a whole thirty minutes while he searched, but although he looked in all the drawers and cupboards, and crawled behind the desk, there did not seem to be any articles or any details about the journeys. There were some letters, but they were mostly to his father’s bank arranging for money to be put into a savings account or asking for a quarterly statement. Matthew was not very sure about the value of money; he wondered if the amounts were large and if his father was well off. Not many people were well off these days, everyone said that. It was something to do with communism.

There was one small cupboard by the side of the window, half built into the wall, that he had not tried. Matthew eyed it doubtfully, but it was important to look everywhere, so he climbed carefully onto a chair and reached up. The cupboard was locked. Matthew looked worriedly at the clock because it could not be long before his father got home. Where would the cupboard key be?

He found it taped to the back of his mother’s photograph, under a square of thick brown paper. It was only lightly stuck down – it would easily re-stick. With trembling fingers he unlocked the door and it swung open with a little creaking sigh that seemed to say, secrets…

There was not much inside: a cheque book and a small box of cash and in one corner was a large envelope, and when Matthew opened it he found several sheets covered in his father’s writing. His heart racing, he drew them out still standing on the chair, with his mother’s eyes on him.

His father’s writing was not very clear, but he managed to make out most of it. At the top of the page, in block capitals, it said, PRISONS WITHOUT NAMES: PRISONERS WITHOUT IDENTITIES. This did not make very much sense, but Matthew began to read.

Despite all the protestations to the contrary it is a fact that innocent people are still being torn from their homes and carried off to places that are no better than medieval gaols, but that are as cut off from the world as an inland Devil’s Island. Most of these people are guilty of nothing more than following their own religions and their own beliefs – in some cases it is merely the accident of birth that damns them. Their lives were ordinary, unthreatening, unremarkable – everyman’s life and everywoman’s. But for these people, one night came the growl of wheels across the streets, the midnight knock on the door, and they vanished as abruptly and completely as if by sorcery. Their identities and histories vanished too, but there is no enchantment about that. It’s a bureaucratic vanishment, a systematic process of erasing their identities from the world.

The regime inside those prison houses is brutal; many of the inmates are subjected to torture of a cruel and subtle kind: beatings, forced labour for impossibly long hours, their sustenance so meagre it is extraordinary they can remain alive. Not all do remain alive, of course, but those that do become wraiths, living ghosts in a world that will soon have no memory of them.

Or will it? ‘There is no such thing as ultimate forgetting: traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.’ Those are the words of an Englishman – his dreams were sometimes the flickering hag-ridden dreams of opium, but that does not matter so very much because the sentiment is true and sound. The iron grip that is closing so relentlessly round this country will not be able to erase those forgotten ones entirely.

Under a more humane regime, it might be possible to obtain the release of these lost ones and arrange for their return to the world, but there is a massive obstacle to that: a man who already holds too much power and who is poised to sweep his way to even more power. He seems unstoppable. But if these prisoners are not to become lost for ever – if other innocent citizens are to be safe from midnight knocks on their doors by members of Ceausescu’s infamous Politburo – then a way to stop him must be found. Even if it means his death.

The present

Theo sat back, staring at the computer screen, his mind whirling. Nicolae Ceauşescu. Everything was falling into place like the pieces of a child’s kaleidoscope. The actual driving force behind the writing of his book was still a mystery but Matthew’s setting had finally become real. The place Theo was writing about was a dark, dramatic country, a ravaged beautiful land, resonating with violent history that stretched back a thousand years and as close as 1989.

Romania. Sometimes written Roumania or Rumania. Its very name was akin to the word romance. Bordered by the old principalities of Wallachia and Transylvania, the vaguely sinister Carpathian mountains as its spine and dozens of wild legends and rhapsodic fairytales within its soul. A country that for a large part of the twentieth century had virtually been a police state, ruled by a draconian authority. Whose people had endured crippling poverty, deprivation, cruelty, repression and the overweening ambition of two people who ruled with the iron hand of dictators: Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu.

Theo had been eleven in 1989, the year of the Romanian revolution. He supposed that for most children there was probably a single event that caused them to register for the first time the existence of the world’s stage: a presidential assassination, the declaration of a war, sudden menacing hostilities between major powers, an earthquake or famine. For Theo this childhood event had been the execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife on Christmas Day. The accounts and video footage of the courtroom and of how the Ceauşescus had been tied up before being led out to be shot, had made a deep impression on him. ‘Did they have to treat them like that?’ he asked his mother, after the television news report. ‘Shot in that courtyard? They’re old – the man said seventy-five.’

‘Oh yes, they had to kill them,’ Petra said, her eyes on the screen. ‘They were cruel and harsh, those two, and they destroyed a great many lives.’ She stared at the television for a few moments, and then, in a voice Theo had never heard her use before, she said, ‘Switch it off, Theo, I can’t bear seeing this. Or put on something livelier.’

He had done so, realizing the reports of the bleak gaols and the political prisoners locked inside them had upset her. This was unusual; Petra normally allowed life to flow past her. Nancy said Petra was light-minded, but Theo knew it was just that his mother did not allow her emotions to appear on the surface. But that day she had done so and his memory of it was vivid.

It was almost six p.m. and he suddenly realized he was ravenously hungry. He remembered disinterring some chicken from the freezer that morning, but when he tried to remember if he had had lunch he could not. It occurred to him he had been subsisting on soup and the occasional sandwich since he arrived at Fenn House a week ago, and this might be contributing to his current peculiar mental condition, if not actually causing it.

The chicken had thawed and he put it into a casserole dish along with stock made from a cube and a couple of diced potatoes. There were mushrooms in the fridge which he had bought on the way here. They would be a week old but they looked all right so Theo added them to the dish, then put the whole thing in the oven. He went back to re-read the day’s work, polishing where it was necessary, until he reached the close of the chapter where Matthew had found the article referring to Ceauşescu.

By this time he had decided that if the book ever got finished, anyone reading it would probably say, ‘Oh dear, poor Theo Kendal, this is the thing he wrote when he was a bit dotty. Sad, isn’t it? He was such a promising writer until then.’

This was all so depressing that Theo poured himself a glass of wine which he drank while eating some of the chicken casserole which had been bubbling invitingly in the oven. He left the dish on the kitchen table to cool, pleased to think the rest of it would re-heat for tomorrow’s supper. Then he returned to his story, thankful that at least he finally knew where he was writing about. What he did not know was why he was plugging into this particular section of recent history.

Romania, early 1970s

As Matthew finished reading the article his father had written, sick horror swept over him. There were several words on the page he did not know and there were a few he thought he might not have read right because of the squiggly writing. But even allowing for a few mistakes, the images his father’s words conjured up were terrible ones: poor helpless prisoners shut away in dark gaols, in cold stone cells with barred windows, no one knowing they were there – only small traces of them remaining in people’s memories. The forgotten ones.

And I know about them, he thought suddenly, and the untidy familiar study blurred. I know about those stone cells – I know there are women there as well as men, and I know some of them are quite young. They’re all miserable and hungry, but some of them are angry and the angry ones force the others to keep alive and keep trying to escape. How do I know that?

He managed to push these pictures away and, locking the cupboard, he returned the key to its hiding place. It’s all right, he said to his mother’s photograph as he climbed down from the chair. I know what I’ve got to do. I know no one must see this paper because it tells about things that aren’t supposed to happen – things the cold-eyed men want to keep secret. But somehow my father’s found out the secrets and written about them, so they want to stop him.

He took matches from his father’s drawer – his father occasionally smoked a pipe which Wilma said stank the house out, but which Matthew quite liked. He was not supposed to use matches, but he would only need one and he would return the box afterwards.

He had the feeling that eyes watched him as he went along the garden path, the dreadful piece of paper folded in his pocket. The sheet of paper caught fire at once and Matthew scattered the crispy black shreds over the garden. He returned the matches to the study, careful to put them in the exact same place he had found them.

He had saved his father, but there was still Mara. Matthew tried to think she would soon come home and everything would be all right, but the days went by and she did not. In the end, he knew he would have to tell his father everything. This made him feel instantly better, because his father would know what to do.

His father listened carefully, not saying anything until Matthew had finished, but seeming to listen not just with his ears but with his eyes and his mind as well. He always did this; it was one of the really good things about him.

Matthew explained how the men had wanted to know where his father went two or three times a year, and how they had wanted papers or diaries or writings that might tell them his father was a traitor. He stumbled a bit over this word because it was a shameful thing to be saying, but his father made an impatient gesture as if to say, Never mind about that, and Matthew went on. He had thought he would say how he had found the writing his father had done about the prison houses and the people whose names were lost, but he could not. He told him everything else though, and when he came to the end he felt weak and a bit trembly but better, like being sick which was horrid while it was happening but which made you feel better afterwards.

‘And so,’ he said, ‘it’s my fault she’s been taken away, and we must find her and bring her home.’ He waited confidently for his father to say they would do so at once, even that he knew people who would help. He’ll make everything all right, thought Matthew confidently.

But his father did not make everything all right. His face took on the white strained look he always had when the men came to the house and when he came back from his mystery absences.

‘Matthew, if I could help Mara, I would. But I can’t. And you must promise me very solemnly that you won’t try to find out what’s happened to her. Not ever.’

‘I can’t promise that,’ said Matthew. ‘We must rescue her. You can do it, can’t you? You can do anything.’

‘I can’t do this. If I so much as try, something far worse will happen.’

‘What? What will happen? Nothing could be worse than this,’ cried Matthew desperately. ‘Nothing…’

‘Oh Matthew, yes it could,’ said his father, his eyes like dark pits. ‘It really could.’

For the first time ever, Matthew saw that his father was frightened.

Mara was trying not to show how very frightened she was.

She had always known deep down that one day the men would come and she thought her grandmother had known it as well, but she always imagined it happening in the middle of the night. The midnight knock, people called it, telling how you were jerked out of sleep, too befuddled to put up any kind of resistance or think how to outwit the men.

But when they finally came to Three Lanes Cottage it was the middle of the evening. Mara and her brother had been playing a game by the fire. She liked this hour before bedtime with him; she liked watching his small absorbed face and seeing how his eyes lit up when he scored a point in the game.

The knock on the door made Mara jump, spilling the counters on the board. She looked across at her grandmother and saw her face had a dreadful pinched look. Then she saw the dimmed headlights of the jeep shining through the curtains and heard the thick growl of its engine. Her heart began to beat fast as if she had been running very hard and she remembered they had planned she would snatch up her brother and run to hide him in the shed outside. But there was only the one door leading outside and the men were already there, and there was no time to hide.

Or was there? Her grandmother was pointing to the latched door that led to the stairs and Mara nodded. She grabbed her brother’s hand – he did not entirely understand what was happening but he sensed the fear – and half carried, half pulled him up the narrow stairs to the two tiny bedrooms. In the one Mara shared with her grandmother was a flap opening into the loft, and by standing on the bed on the tips of her toes, she could just reach it. She pushed it back, and lifted her brother up, scrambling after him, then closing the flap, laying a finger on her lips to indicate they must be quiet.

They crouched in the dark, cramped space under the roof and waited. The men were inside the cottage. Their voices came up through the floor, rapping out orders, telling Mara’s grandmother to stay where she was and not interfere. Doors were opened and closed loudly. Mara’s heart was pounding so furiously she was afraid they might hear it all the way downstairs.

She put her arms round her brother to make him feel safe. He was shivering with fear and smelt of soap and clean hair. He was the most precious thing in her whole life. If she lost him tonight, these clean-hair, clean-skin scents would be part of the memories she would have of him. She was very frightened indeed, but there was a good chance the men would not see the little hatch in the bedroom ceiling.

But they did see it because they knew what to look for; they knew all about hiding places – cupboards and lofts into which people crammed themselves to avoid being taken away. They pushed the hatch open, crashing it back so that dust clouds rose up and the old timbers groaned. A man’s head came up into the loft and Mara pressed back into the dark corner, hoping he would not see them. But even in the dim light she saw him smile. He reached out, and his hands closed round her wrists, and although she struggled, he held her firmly. As he pulled her down through the open flap she risked a quick look back and saw her brother still crammed in the corner, thrusting knuckled fists into his eyes which was what he always did to stop himself crying. Mara wanted to call out not to be afraid and to say she would be back very soon, but it was just possible the man had not seen the small huddled figure so she did not.

As they carried her out to the waiting jeep, she managed to look across at her grandmother who was standing by the fireplace, one hand clutching the brick mantel, the other pressed over her heart. Would she be all right? There was no time even to call out that she would come back very soon, because they were already through the door and outside. A thin cold rain was falling. In the jeep’s headlights it looked like little shards of broken glass pelting down from the skies; there was a hot oily smell from the growling engine. Mara struggled again, this time managing to kick the man who was carrying her. He swore and said she was a vixen and they knew how to deal with creatures like that inside the Black House.

It was not until he said this that Mara stopped telling herself she would be returning to the cottage soon, and knew there was no point in struggling any longer.