House of the Lost

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Romania, early 1970s

When Zoia caught her outside the room with the caged children, Mara was very frightened indeed. She was afraid Zoia meant to shut her in the room itself – perhaps in one of the cages like Hansel and Gretel. She had always thought Hansel and Gretel was just a story, but now she was not so sure. Supposing it was true? Suppose all the stories her grandmother had told were true and there really were wolves and witches and giants?

But Zoia did not put her in the room with the crying babies. She took Mara back to the long room with the empty beds and the mushroom growths on the ceiling and this time the door was locked. For a while Mara sat on the windowsill and stared outside, trying to see Matthew’s house across the tops of the trees, wondering what to do if he did not tell the secrets and she had to stay here for ever. Eventually she fell into a frightened sleep on one of the beds, waking at intervals to sit up and peer through the darkness in case the black stove was lurching towards her or the mushroomy things had fallen onto the bed. Somewhere before dawn it occurred to her that she might be inside a nightmare and none of this was really happening. This was such a comforting idea she promised herself she would soon wake up in her own bed at home, with grandmother downstairs and her little brother asleep in the next room. For a moment she could see Mikhail’s small curled-up outline under the sheets in his small bed, and she seized on the image and went to sleep with it in her mind.

She woke to find she was still in the dreadful room but it was morning now because daylight showed at the windows which made Mara feel a bit better. Perhaps locking-up for the night had been the punishment. Probably Matthew would already have told them all the secrets, and she would soon be allowed to go home.

Presently a woman she had not seen before came in with a mug of milk and a bowl of some porridge stuff. The milk was a bit watery and the porridge was lumpy and tasted faintly of cabbage, but Mara was hungry so she ate and drank it all. Afterwards the woman took her to the lavatory which was a terrible place with rusty pipes and a huge wooden box encasing the lavatory itself and damp floorboards all round it. When Mara ran water from the tap it came out rusty, but she managed to wash her face and hands.

The woman was waiting for her when she went out; she took Mara’s hand and led her down the stairs. Waiting in the big dim hall, was Zoia. She gave the woman a nod of dismissal and took Mara outside. Bright sunshine flooded the courtyard and the hillside; it was dazzling after the dim rooms and Mara put up her free hand to shield her eyes. A man came out of one of the outbuildings to join them. He was wearing a dark uniform – Mara thought he might be one of the people who drove the jeep – and he had little squinty eyes. They led her down the slope and, just as Mara was starting to think she might be going home after all, they turned off the path and went into the trees.

It was cooler here and everywhere was very still, almost as if they had stepped into a different world or even a different time. Mara remembered her grandmother’s tales again, but if this was a fairytale it was not the kind where a friendly woodcutter or a passing prince in disguise would come along to rescue her.

‘We’re here,’ said Zoia. ‘This is our place of punishment.’ She pointed, and Mara saw with horror that in front of them was a lump of stone thrusting up out of the ground like a giant’s face. There were narrow slitty windows for eyes, and over the door were lumpy pitted stones for a nose.

‘It’s an old well-house,’ said Zoia. There was a note of fear in her voice.

Mara was staring at the stone structure in panic. She did not believe it was a well-house at all. She was dreadfully afraid it was the hacked-off head of a giant, like in one of her grandmother’s stories. She wanted to run as far away from it as she could, but Zoia had a tight hold of her, and the man was opening the door. It stuck for a moment, then gave way, swinging inwards to show a dreadful gaping blackness like a toothless mouth. When Zoia and the man began to pull her forward, Mara struggled, then screamed for help. Her voice echoed through the forest, sending birds flying wildly up from the trees, but no one came running to see what was happening. She screamed again, but this time Zoia smacked her across the cheek to silence her. Mara gasped and began to cry. Tears ran down her face and into her mouth because Zoia and the man were holding her hands and she could not wipe them away.

They had got her to the door when Zoia suddenly half turned to look back towards the track. Mara looked as well, and saw movement within the dappled sunlight of the forest. Her heart gave a thump of hope. Someone heard my screams after all. The guard stood up straighter, and Zoia’s face lit up and in a soft voice, she said, ‘It’s Miss Simonescu.’ And then, with a kind of reverence, ‘It’s Annaleise.’

Annaleise. The last shreds of hope dropped away from Mara and she knew there was no longer any point in trying to escape because she would be caught and carried back. Annaleise was no longer a dark wraith, a fearful whisper in the playground, a prowling ghost waiting to pounce on children, she was a real person. She wore a long dark coat with the hem trailing on the ground and the deep collar was turned up to frame her face. Her skin was pale and smooth as if she had been carved out of ivory, and she had black hair looped up into a kind of coil on top of her head. Little tendrils had escaped from this coil; they curled over her neck like crawly spiders’ legs.

‘Miss Simonescu likes to oversee punishments whenever possible,’ said Zoia, and Annaleise said, ‘Sadly, punishments are sometimes necessary, especially for children who see things they shouldn’t.’ Her voice made Mara think of cold lumps of granite in the depths of winter.

‘The cages,’ whispered Mara, staring at her. ‘The babies in cages, that’s what you mean, isn’t it? But I wouldn’t talk about them, not to anyone. I really wouldn’t.’

‘But we have to make sure of that,’ said Annaleise – Mara could not think of her as Miss Simonescu; in the stories she was always just Annaleise. ‘We have to show you what happens to silly little girls who might tell their friends and families about secrets they shouldn’t have seen.’ She took a step nearer and Mara cowered back. ‘Secrets,’ she said softly. ‘I hear your friend Matthew hasn’t shared his secrets with us, Mara.’ Her eyes, which Mara had expected to be dark, were pale, like pebbles.

‘Matthew doesn’t know any secrets. It’s no good keeping me here. He can’t tell you anything.’

‘Not even when he knows you’re shut away in the place of punishment?’ said Annaleise, and Mara sent a scared glance at the dreadful well-house.

‘How long will I be here?’ she said.

‘Until we know all we need to know about Andrei Valk,’ said Annaleise.

‘We don’t mind what we have to do to find out,’ said Zoia.

Mara saw that although they wanted to make sure she did not tell people about the cages, Matthew’s father was of far greater interest.

Before she could screw up her courage to run away and hide in the trees, Zoia and the guard had picked her up and carried her through the open door. Great swathes of pale cobwebs hung down over the opening as if they were strings of saliva inside the mouth. Zoia pushed them impatiently aside, but they still brushed against Mara’s hair and her face. The bad-smelling darkness closed about her. It was smothering and confusing, and before she could gather her senses, she had been set down on the brick floor and Zoia and the guard were outside, closing the door. It scraped into place and the light was shut off altogether. She could just hear Annaleise and Zoia going away through the forest. She could hear their voices getting fainter and fainter.

She was inside the stone face, and panic swept over her. It wasn’t a real stone face, of course, Mara knew that, deep down. Or was it? Supposing these weren’t stones and bricks but bones and skin. Supposing those trickles of moisture weren’t rain, but blood or the stuff that came out of people’s eyes when they had colds. She reminded herself she was not locked in; there was no lock on the door. That meant all she had to do was find the door and she could be out in the forest, then she could run down the track and be home.

It was not absolutely pitch dark because of the eyeholes, but for the first few moments it nearly was. Mara’s eyes adjusted slowly to the dimness, and she could eventually see the bricks of the walls and the floor. The floor… At the centre was a black yawning hole. That’s the well itself, she thought, staring at it. It was like a massive lipless mouth and round it was a tiny wall, only as high as Mara’s ankles. She stared at it in horror. It would be a long deep tunnel, going down and down, and all kinds of things would live there. Worms and spiders and blind crawling things that did not like the light. If you fell down it you would never climb back up. The thing to do was not look at the well at all but to stay close to the wall, find the door and get out. Mara said this to herself several times.

The door was not easy to see, but it was situated between the eyes, so she stood up and began to feel her way cautiously along the wall until the eyes were on each side of her. Here was the door: she could feel the break in the stones. She moved her hands all the way up and down, expecting to find a handle or a latch. But there was nothing. The door was old and its hinges had shrieked like a screaming animal when Zoia opened it, but it was a thick heavy door, and once shut it fitted absolutely flat and smooth into the stone walls.

Panic rose in her all over again, but she fought it down and tried to prise the door open with her fingernails. It would not budge. All that happened was that Mara tore several of her fingernails, which was just about the most painful thing in the world. She sank to the floor again, huddled against the door in the terrible darkness, putting her raw fingertips into her mouth to suck them clean of the blood. After a little while she tried again, trying to forget the spiky pain in her fingers. But it did not move, so she went to stand on tiptoe under one of the eyeholes, shouting to be let out. She shouted until her throat hurt, but she did not think anyone could hear. The eyehole was too high up for her to reach, and her voice bounced back on the brick walls, sounding muffled in the enclosed space.

She sat down again. The floor was hard and cold and there was a gritty feeling to it, but there was nowhere else to sit, and she could not stand up for hours and hours. Once she put her hand down by her side and felt a crackly little heap of something light and sad. A bird skeleton, thought Mara, snatching her hand back and shuddering.

The truth had better be faced – Sister Teresa said it was always better to face things head on, so you knew the whole truth. The whole truth here was that Mara was not going to get out until Zoia and Annaleise came back to let her out. They were leaving her inside the stone face until Matthew told them what they wanted to know about his father.

But Matthew did not know anything. Mara remembered this in a terrible rush of fear. He did not know. ‘There are secrets about your father,’ she had once said to him on one of their walks to school, curious to see what he would say, but it had not worked. He had stopped and stared at her, and said, ‘What secrets? What do you mean?’

Remembering this, she felt as if a huge clenched fist had come smacking out of the darkness and punched her in the throat.

When they asked Matthew about the secrets, even if he wanted to tell, he could not. He knew nothing.

Then how long would they leave her here?

The present

Theo had been typing at top speed, but when Mara realized she was imprisoned in the macabre old well-house indefinitely, he could not go on. He always identified closely with his characters, but this was far more than that. It was as if he was living through the whole thing with them. He could smell the sour darkness inside the well-house and if he half closed his eyes he could see the shadowy outline of the well cover. He could feel Mara’s terror as if it was his own.

Had this woman, Zoia, actually existed? Annaleise had certainly existed – she was mentioned in Guff’s book as being a close associate of Elena Ceauşescu, and according to the book had met an untimely death. Matthew had existed as well – he might still exist – and at some time in his life he had been to Melbray. If he really had done that sketch of Charmery – if he had been the one to make her look like that – then there must have been a strong link between them. Perhaps a love affair. If Matthew was still alive, he would only be in his late forties now – fifty at the most.

He took the sketch down from the wall and examined it yet again, deciding he needed to be sure that the hand who had created it had been the same hand that had drawn the convent pictures. He thought for a moment, then replaced the portrait, found his mobile and called the number of Lesley’s studio flat in Earl’s Court. It was a quarter to seven, a time when she might reasonably be expected to be at home. After she left the Slade, she had gone to work for a small auction house specializing in fine art, mostly helping with the restoring of paintings. According to Guff, who liked to send bulletins round the family, and who was Lesley’s godfather, she was enjoying herself very much.

The phone rang for a long time and Theo was about to hang up when Lesley answered, sounding breathless.

‘You sound as if you’ve just run upstairs,’ said Theo.

‘I have just run upstairs. In fact I’ve just run almost the entire length of the street because it’s pelting down with rain – and then I heard the phone ringing two flights down, so I ran all the way up because there’s no lift here.’

‘Shall I call back in ten minutes?’

‘No, I’m fine,’ said Lesley. ‘I’m just ferreting for a towel to dry my hair… Wait a minute…’

Theo waited, smiling at the endearing image of Lesley’s short feathery hair with rain clinging to it. When she emerged from the towelling, he said, ‘I’m at Fenn House for a couple of months. I don’t know if you knew that?’

‘Everyone knows it,’ said Lesley. ‘Guff was quite worried that you’d lapse into melancholy out there. He thought you might start communing with ghosts or something and he was planning on coming to see you.’

‘By himself?’ Guff was a gregarious soul who liked company when he travelled, and his journeys were always planned well in advance and with an attention to detail that would not have shamed a Victorian explorer bound for remote Tibetan peaks or the deserts of Araby.

‘Nancy said she would drive him. It’s all right though,’ she said quickly as Theo drew in breath to swear, ‘I headed them off. I said you had gone to Fenn to work and you wouldn’t take kindly to interruptions. You did go there to work, didn’t you?’

‘More or less,’ said Theo, knowing that by communing with ghosts, Guff meant Charmery. ‘Lesley, on the subject of interruptions, are you by any remote chance free for a couple of days fairly soon? Say this weekend? I want you to help me with something.’

‘What is it?’

Theo hesitated, then said, ‘There’s a sketch here of Charmery and I’d like your opinion on it.’

‘I don’t think I’m qualified to give opinions yet,’ said Lesley doubtfully. ‘And I don’t remember ever seeing any sketch of Charmery at Fenn.’

‘Nor do I. But there’s one here now, and I’d like to find out a bit more about it. Just quietly and off the record.’

‘Off the family’s record, d’you mean?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘I’d have to jiggle a couple of things – the twins were coming up for the morning, but I can jiggle the twins,’ she said.

‘Would they mind being jiggled?’

‘No, I can see them next weekend just as easily. I could probably take Monday as a day’s holiday.’

‘Could you? That direct train from Liverpool Street is probably still running,’ he said.

‘High noon on Saturday,’ she said, and Theo heard the smile in her voice and knew she was remembering how Charmery had named it the High Noon Saturday train, and how she and Lesley – later Lesley’s brothers – had made a small ritual about always travelling on it.

‘I’ll meet you in Norwich,’ said Theo.

After he rang off he returned to the computer. It was starting to look as if he might have to read up on Romania’s grim prison system from those years, and he contemplated this prospect with mixed feelings because it would be the darkest kind of research. It had better be done, though. He could try the library in Norwich when he drove out there to meet Lesley on Saturday, but although he could probably get the basics on Ceauşescu and the revolution, he wanted first-hand accounts of places, lists of names and dates, archived newspapers, communist-slanted articles as well as objective ones. The internet would provide some useful leads, of course, but there was nothing quite like handling and reading the real thing. Still, the worldwide web would be a good start. It was quarter past seven – was that too late to phone BT? He only needed to know how soon they could reinstate the landline to Fenn House so he could link up to the internet. Surely they had 24-hour call centres.

The call was not very satisfactory. The phone line to that address could certainly be reinstalled, said the BT operator. But since the connection had lapsed more than three months ago there would be a small delay.

‘How small?’ said Theo, suspiciously.

‘About ten days. Perhaps two weeks.’

‘Damn,’ said Theo. ‘Can’t you make it any sooner?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Well, all right. Will you set it up, please?’

He rang off, then on a sudden thought, hunted out the local phone directory and called St Luke’s. The Bursar answered, sounding exactly as Theo remembered her, practical and down to earth. She expressed herself pleased to hear from him – they were still discussing his visit and the excellent talk he had given, she said. They hoped he would visit them again while he was in Melbray.

No plotter ever had a better opening. ‘As a matter of fact, I would like to do that very much, but there’d be an ulterior motive, Bursar.’

‘Quid pro quo,’ she said. ‘What can we do for you, Mr Kendal?’

Theo said, ‘Do you suppose I could have a brief session on your computer? Say an hour or so?’

‘I don’t see why not. Has your own broken?’

He remembered her saying none of them were very well versed in modern technology, and smiled at the choice of words. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I need a connection to the internet for some research, and I can’t get one set up here for a couple of weeks.’

‘I’d need to clear it with Reverend Mother,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure it will be all right. Sister Catherine’s the one who really knows about the computer so you’d probably need to have her around when you come in.’

Catherine, thought Theo, and found he was smiling at the memory of that cool irony and those direct eyes, and the hint that there might be a rebel held in check beneath the surface. He said, ‘Well, if she could spare the time…’

‘We’ve got a visit from several nuns from our sister house in Poland over the weekend so she’ll be a bit caught up with that. What about Monday?’

‘Monday would be fine,’ said Theo. Then, as if suddenly remembering, he said, ‘Oh, wait, I’ll have a cousin staying here until Monday evening.’ Lesley had phoned back to say she would come to Melbray early on Saturday morning and would not need to return until Tuesday if Theo could put up with her until then.

‘Bring him with you,’ said the Bursar.

‘It’s a her,’ said Theo.

‘All the better. Would you like to come along about twelve, and we’ll give you both lunch before your computer session.’

‘I’d love to. I’m sure my cousin would as well.’

‘Don’t get too enthusiastic, Mr Kendal, Monday is shepherd’s pie day,’ said the Bursar caustically.