"Not unbearably. If you can be here at least half an hour before the bank closes, that will be appreciated."
"I"ll do my best."
"Then that must suffice." As soon as he had told her how to find him he broke the connection, presumably to start her on her way. The weeks-old comments in the Daily Daily Friend Friend must have made him nervous about the film, she ------------------------------------266 must have made him nervous about the film, she ------------------------------------266 thought, but there was no longer any reason for them to trouble her.
She drove northwest to Lincoln. The cathedral rose over the horizon like a stone crown for the fields of wheat. Soon she saw a ruined Norman castle above steep streets the color of the fields. There were Roman ruins too, and the sight of them beyond the wheat reminded her uncomfortably of the Roman account of the history of Redfield. She would be there ahead of Roger, she vowed, and just now she was here on his behalf as much as on her own.
She drove across a bridge above clattering trains and turned toward the river. A side street almost choked with students slowed her down. The river flashed in her mirror, and ahead of her she saw the insurance broker"s she was looking for. As she parked, her tires b.u.mping the curb, a tall potbellied man with a long face whose mouth drooped toward his pointed chin darted out of the broker"s. "You mustn"t park there," he announced.
"I"m picking someone up from your office."
"Miss Allan? In that case, ignore the line." He called "I"ll be an hour or less" to a colleague, and sidled into the pa.s.senger seat. "Please, drive. I"ll tell you where."
He directed her through Lincoln, past cobbled streets of houses that looked old as the Redfield chapel. "I was sorry to hear about your father," Sandy said.
"Ah, well. He"d about run his course. He still had his imagination, but not the use of his hands. The industry had put him out to pasture in favor of younger technicians such as yourself. I haven"t inherited his imagination, and I won"t pretend I wish I had."
"That"s obvious."
"Turn left here. I wouldn"t care to die as he did."
Another cobbled street drifted by like a steep shadow full of houses carved with symbols secretive with age. "How was that?" Sandy said, wishing that he wouldn"t make her ask while she was driving. ------------------------------------267 "Of his nerves. I can only conclude he felt guilty about possessing this film but couldn"t bring himself to destroy what might be the sole surviving copy. Once he"d gone I considered destroying it myself. I would have if it hadn"t been for his express wish that you should be told."
"I"m sorry I couldn"t have taken the film away sooner."
"So am I," he said, so coldly he seemed to be blaming her rather than himself. "He spent his last days in a panic convinced he was being watched. Here, park here."
Sandy drove into the car park and backed into a s.p.a.ce, her hands nervous on the wheel. "Watched by whom, do you know?"
"By his own doubts, I imagine. Possibly by his memories. He claimed he"d felt spied on while he was helping edit the film, though I don"t know how much credence that warrants. My wife had to ask him to keep his fears to himself, because he was upsetting our small daughter. Toward the end he wouldn"t have her pet dog anywhere near him. We had to stop the child from going in his room, because he started saying that a dog or some such thing came into the room at night and watched him, stood at the foot of the bed all night with its paws on the rail. I"m afraid his imagination was quite out of control. During the last week, for some reason, he wouldn"t even have flowers in the room. This is the bank."
The interior of the building was so much newer than the exterior that it felt intrusive and unreal. Ross marched to an information window and thumbed a b.u.t.ton while Sandy followed him, trailing questions which she could hardly ask him in the bank and which made her uneasy about framing them at all. An official came to the window and recognized Ross and the key in his hand. When the official opened a security door Sandy started forward, but Ross frowned curtly at her. "We won"t be long."
Sandy sat on a straight chair at a table with a blotter, on which someone had doodled a rudimentary face almost ------------------------------------268 buried in a tangle of scribbling. A queue shuffled forward as tellers lit up their signs, a typewriter clacked like impatient claws. Sooner than she expected, Ross appeared beyond the thick gla.s.s door, his arms laden with a cardboard carton. As she stood up, his companion glanced toward her. For a moment she thought he was looking behind her, or at something she had dropped under the table, but all she could see there was a deep rectangular shadow. She hurried forward as the door buzzed open. "We"ll go straight to your car," Ross muttered.
He mustn"t want to be seen with the film. His secretiveness made her peer warily about the car park. He trudged to the rear of the car and waited truculently for her to unlock the boot. As soon as he"d dumped the carton into it he wiped his hands on a handkerchief. His palms must be damp with exertion, of course.
Sandy gazed at the squat square carton sealed with heavy tape. It was big enough to contain two cans of film, but she had a sudden grotesque thought: what if after all her searching the carton proved to be empty, or full of something else entirely? She would have opened it there and then if Ross hadn"t been drumming one heel nervously on the concrete. She slammed the lid of the boot and climbed into her seat and eased the car forward, anxious not to run over the stray animal which had just dodged behind the vehicles next to hers. "I"ll drop you at your office, shall I?" she said.
"I thought you might want to make sure this film is what it"s claimed to be."
He sounded resentful. "I will as soon as I can," Sandy a.s.sured him.
"Then a.s.suming you"ve nothing better to do, it may as well be now. A friend of my late father"s is renovating a cinema and used to let him watch films there. I spoke to him after you called. He"ll put on the film for you."
"I thought n.o.body outside your family knew about it except me." ------------------------------------269 "Apparently my late father let him into the secret, and he"s been hungry for a viewing ever since. Of course he was sworn to secrecy, but I made him renew the vow, on your behalf, you understand. I shan"t be watching. Cross the bridge."
His directions grew more irritable as he maneuvered her toward the far edge of the town, where the architecture entered the twentieth century, and she sensed that his nervousness was increasing. Without warning he fumbled at his safety belt and sent it fleeing into the body of the car. "Slow down. We"re here."
The cinema formed the rounded corner of two streets. With its strip of cataracted windows paralleling the wraparound marquee, the building made her think of a helmet too old to see out of. Beneath the marquee, at the top of three tiled steps, were three gla.s.s doors obscured by torn posters for circuses, concerts, some kind of festival. Ross knocked on the festival poster, in a rhythm that seemed to want to sound like a secret code.
An old clown with dusty hair and an ordinary mouth opened the door into the unlit foyer. "This is Miss Allan," Ross said, already retreating. "I must get back to the office."
The clown rubbed his hands on his baggy suit, through which the elbows of his shirt gleamed like bone, and came out quickly, closing the door on sounds of sc.r.a.ping and dragging. "He didn"t tell me you would be this early. I"ve some work being done just at the moment. I"ll turf them out as soon as I decently can. Would you like to sit in the office if I can get the kettle going?"
"Do you mind if I bring the film in with me?"
"I"d rather they didn"t know about it, in case--well, in case."
His cautiousness was understandable, but his vagueness was as disconcerting as the sight of him had been, even though she could see that he was clownish with plaster dust ------------------------------------270 that emphasized the wrinkles of his face. "I"d better stay in the car, then," she said.
She sat in it for a while and tried to listen to the radio, but some kind of interference made the broadcast voices decay, sink into a ma.s.s of static and then lurch at her. She spent half an hour leaning on the boot lid and watching the street as idly as she could, seeing the first children race out of a nearby school like hares started by the bell before the rest of the pupils crowded after them. Eventually she lost patience. Nothing could happen to the film so long as she kept the car in sight, she told herself. She dug in her handbag for Toby"s new number, which he"d left at Metropolitan for her, and called him from a phone box outside a pet shop where a puppy kept leaping up inside the window. "How are you doing?" she said.
"Getting on with life and being loved." He sounded drowsy, as if she"d just wakened him, but happy. "And yourself?"
"Both of those, I think, and something I wanted you to know but to keep to yourself until I make it public. I"ve found Graham"s film."
"Good for you, Sandy. I knew you would if anyone could. Thanks, love, and I mean that from Graham too."
When her change ran out she paced back and forth past houses and neighborhood shops, several hundred yards each way, feeling as though she were on a leash or in a cage. People were coming home from work and taking dogs for walks. She began to regret having lingered, though she wouldn"t want to arrive at Redfield too far in advance of the convoy. As muddy shadows oozed from under the buildings and spread, two whitened men peered out of the gloom beyond the gla.s.s doors of the cinema. They stood on the steps, dusting themselves and gossiping, until a third livid man emerged from the gloom. All three drove away in a builder"s van, and the man who had opened the door to Ross came out to find her. ------------------------------------271 He"d washed himself as best he could but had overlooked a line of dust at his temples, which made him appear to be wearing a wig. A few traces of plaster had lodged in cracks of his jovial face, which looked as if it had once been even plumper. "I didn"t introduce myself," he said, giving her hand a soft loose shake. "I"m Bill Barclay, which sounds like something you"d say to a bank, doesn"t it? Welcome to the Coliseum."
"Shall I bring the film in now?"
"Oh, please do, yes. The projectors are all set. So have I been, for weeks. I won"t pretend conditions are luxurious, but I hope you"ll be reasonably comfortable. I"ve a few seats I cleaned up for friends until I can open to the public."
"I"ll be on my own, won"t I?"
"Heavens yes, never fear. This is just our secret, as it was poor Norman"s." He stood close to her while she unlocked the boot, and lifted the carton before she could. As he hurried stumbling toward the gla.s.s doors he said rather plaintively, "I hope you"ll come and see my picture house again when it"s done up."
He b.u.mped a door open and leaned on it to let her in. Dusk was spreading down the steps beneath the marquee. She was able to see the foyer almost as soon as she smelled it, plaster dust and the turned-earth smell of old brick. Plaster had been hacked off a yard-high strip of the walls, obviously in preparation for injecting an insulating layer. A mound of broken plaster lay on the bare floorboards near the walls, surrounding a box office so dusty she couldn"t see through the gla.s.s. The mound was interrupted by the double doors that led to the auditorium and by a corridor along which an open door poked a wedge of harsh light. "Come in here for a tick," Barclay said.
The open door led to his office, where an unshaded bulb glared above a desk onto which he lowered the carton, puffing and smearing his forehead with the back of his hand. He picked up a flashlight from the top of a rusty filing ------------------------------------272 cabinet, and shook it hard. "That should do it," he said. "I"ll show you to your seat whenever you"re ready."
He was already in the corridor, beckoning her with a haste that stopped just short of rudeness. Either he was anxious to see the film or not to leave it unattended, or both. He chased his shadow into the foyer and eased the double doors open. Fallen plaster gnashed beneath them. As Sandy followed him, he swept the flashlight beam around the auditorium.
A red carpet that looked muddily sodden had been rolled back from the walls, and was heaped against the outer ends of the rows of seats. Between the carpet and the exposed bricks of the walls lay another long mound of plaster. Beneath the screen, which was flanked by two pale giants, it formed a dim border to the flashlight beam as Barclay ushered her along the central aisle to a row of seats covered with a whitish plastic sheet, which he folded back for her. He stamped on the carpet and grunted. "Didn"t think the dust would reach this far, but I wasn"t taking any chances. Stay here and light my way back, would you? Enjoy the film."
She spread a carpet of dimness for him as he ran up the slope to the foyer. He was eager to start the film, of course, not afraid the light would fail. The double doors clapped together clumsily, leaving her alone with a trail of grayish footprints, and she swung the flashlight beam around her. Shadows darted from behind the rolled carpet and slithered over the heap of plaster. When Barclay had shone the beam into the auditorium she"d thought at first that he intended to scare away some animal, but surely he would have told her if there were rats.
She sat back in the folding seat, which smelled of metal and dusty cloth, and sent the beam wavering over the walls that framed the blotchy screen. At that distance the light barely diluted the darkness, but she was able to distinguish that the figures on either side of the screen were flourishing ------------------------------------273 sheaves of grain, which must have appealed to the architect as sufficiently Roman to go with the name of the cinema. They made Sandy uneasy--uneasy enough to glance behind her to see who was watching her. Of course it was Barclay, at the projectionist"s window. He gave her a thumbs-up sign, and stepped back. He was about to start the film. ------------------------------------274 So she was to see the film at last. Her mouth went dry, and she found she was unexpectedly close to tears. She wished Roger and especially Graham could be here to share the film with her. The projector came to life with a whir whose echoes seemed to leap behind the mound of plaster, and Sandy switched off the flashlight and placed it between her feet. As she looked up from making sure that she knew where it was, the screen blazed. The Roman statues flexed themselves and raised their sheaves, but that was only the play of the light. For a few seconds the screen remained blank except for stains, and then an image wobbled into focus. It was a painting of a tower.
Though it didn"t look much like the Redfield tower, the sight of it made her heart beat uncomfortably fast. Terse credits solidified out of the mist that loitered in front of the tower: A BRITISH INTERNATIONAL PRODUCTION.
KARLOFF and LUGOSI in TOWER OF FEAR in TOWER OF FEAR She could scarcely believe she was reading this after so much searching. She was dry-mouthed again, breathless. The names of some of the people she had interviewed appeared beneath Giles Spence"s, and without further ado, to ------------------------------------275 the strains of a studio orchestra"s version of a Rachmaninov Dies Dies Irae, Irae, the film began. the film began.
It was the scene Toby had described to her, Karloff gazing emotionlessly from the high tower at a man fleeing across a moonlit field. The man"s flight cut a swath of darkness through the field, and so did whatever was pursuing him, converging on him. He dodged into the tower and fled up the steps; each window showed his white face staring down in panic. No doubt it was the same set of a window each time, Sandy thought, surprised that she needed to rea.s.sure herself that way, though Toby had said he too found the scene disturbing. Even admiring the skill with which the film was edited didn"t let her distance herself from it as the fugitive staggered onto the top of the tower and stretched his hands beseechingly toward Karloff, who shook his head and folded his arms. The man stared in terror down the steps, backed toward the parapet and toppled over, his cry fading.
She knew what it was like to panic in a tower, she thought, and that must be why her palms were sweating. Now here was Lugosi in a coat like Sherlock Holmes"s, stepping down from a train at a lonely station. A taciturn coachman with a left eye white as the moon drove him through the whispering fields to a mansion whose asymmetry made it look half-ruined in the moonlight. Karloff opened the ma.s.sive front door to him, and the two actors set about upstaging each other, Karloff sinisterly unctuous, Lugosi resoundingly polite. Before long they were at the piano and singing "John Peel," surprisingly musically. "It takes more than a critic to shut them up, Leonard Stilwell," Sandy declared, and wished that saying so had made her feel less nervous.
In the village Lugosi found that n.o.body, not even Harry Manners between wiping tankards and drinking out of them, would discuss his brother-in-law"s death except to say, like Karloff and almost in the same words, that it had ------------------------------------276 been an unfortunate accident. Hoddle and Bingo, the village bobbies, reacted to him as if he were Dracula, muttering oo-er and how they hadn"t oughter look at his eyes in case he got up to some sort of foreign tricks. It was his gaze that made them tell him all about the look on his brother-in-law"s face and the evidence of pursuit that had ended at the tower. Sandy knew she was meant to laugh, but the sight of Tommy Hoddle"s eyes frozen wide by hypnosis was too reminiscent of his last stage performance. She remembered that not all the terror in the film was faked.
Graham would have been delighted to know that here was one old film she didn"t feel distanced from, but she would rather not have found that out in the middle of an empty cinema, where whenever a close-up on the screen brightened the auditorium, shadows seemed to crouch beyond the heaps of plaster. She glared at the debris and looked up as the scene changed. Karloff was alone, prowling a baronial hall she hadn"t seen before. His face filled the screen, staring out with sudden unease as if he had seen something behind her. "You silly b.i.t.c.h," she scoffed at herself, and looked over her shoulder. The screen dimmed, shadows ducked behind the dozen or more rows of seats between her and the doors, and she turned back to the film. She wasn"t quite in time to see the details of the carving above the mantelpiece in the baronial hall, but she thought she had seen it before.
The muddy blotches on the screen seemed to swell, wiping out the film, and then the second reel sharpened into focus. If the film was half over, why should that feel like a promise of relief? Nothing she had seen was a reason to feel there was someone behind her--but there was, and he was well on his way down the aisle to her before she heard the doors thump.
The mask that loomed at her shoulder, jerking closer as the light of a close-up seized it, was Bill Barclay"s face, of course. "The film"s a bit longer than I bargained for. I"ll have ------------------------------------277 to nip round the corner for a loaf for the missus when it looks as if nothing"s going to happen. I should be back before the end, but if not, just wait for me in the office."
He scurried up the aisle, and she thought of calling him back. If he didn"t need to be in the projection room throughout the showing, he could sit with her and watch-- but why should she be so anxious to have company? In any case, he seemed to be lingering at the back of the auditorium to watch the next scene, in which Lugosi discovered that someone had fallen from the tower in very similar circ.u.mstances fifty years ago. She shivered, and was glad that she wasn"t alone in the auditorium, except that when she glanced back she found that she was, so far as she could see past the projector beam. "Poor little thing," she mocked herself, and trapped the flashlight between her feet as she made herself turn to the film.
Lugosi was returning through the village to the mansion. Whenever he looked behind him he saw only shadows, but weren"t they becoming increasingly solid, a.s.suming shapes that would be better left in the dark? Graham would have admired this scene, Sandy told herself while shadows raised themselves around her as if they were peering at the film over the heap of plaster which had begun to remind her of an upheaved mound of earth. Here came Hoddle and Bingo, dodging after Lugosi like rabbits trying to be bloodhounds, until they discovered they weren"t only pursuing but also pursued. They fled in opposite directions, and she remembered how Bingo was supposed to have run into something offscreen, something that had come after him.
Lugosi was leafing through a history of the tower and of the Belvedere family. It couldn"t be long to the end now, she thought, and the stale smell of earth was really the smell of exposed brick. She would feel disloyal to Graham if she didn"t see the film through. Lugosi shut the book and strode to find Karloff.
He found him in the baronial hall. In came Lugosi"s ------------------------------------278 sister and her new protector to be present at the final confrontation. Her husband was no coward, Lugosi told her, but this man--Karloff--was doubly one for having sacrificed him in his stead, knowing that someone must die on the tower. Building a tower so high had made it a focus of occult forces "that would climb to heaven," forces that demanded a sacrifice. Once it had been from every generation of the family. Only the death of the surviving member of this generation could lift the curse.
Not much of this made sense to Sandy, perhaps because her attention was held by the image carved above the mantelpiece behind Karloff. She must have known it would be there ever since she had seen it in the Redfield vault and recognized what Charlie Miles had tried to sketch for her: the face overgrown with wheat, or turning into wheat, or composed of it; the hungry face from whose eyes sprouted braids of wheat shaped like the horns of a satyr. It was the reason the Redfields had suppressed the film, but why was it making her so nervous? Every time the film showed it the shadows beyond the mound of plaster seemed to crouch forward. She glanced back, but there was no sign of Barclay in the projection box. She was alone with the film--with the image that had scarcely been seen outside the Redfield vault.
"Take the strangers who threaten this house," Karloff cried, his exhortations growing wilder as the shadows came not for Lugosi or the others but for him. He fled to the tower, his unseen pursuers tracking darkness through the field, and climbed to the parapet. With a glance down the stairway and a groan of despair, he fell--or rather, Sandy thought, Leslie Tomlinson did, injuring himself because of something that had disturbed him. The tower itself crumbled as Lugosi and the others watched.
The next shot found Lugosi on the train, wishing his sister and her beau good luck, and it felt to Sandy as if Spence had wanted to get the film over with, though that left ------------------------------------279 various issues still restless. Had he been as nervous as she was now? The train steamed away, merging with the blotches of the screen as the shot faded out. The film rattled clear of the gate of the projector. The screen glared dirty white, a pack of shadows raised their heads around her, and at once the screen went dark.
Bill Barclay hadn"t switched off the projector. n.o.body was in the projection room, crouched down where she couldn"t see them through the small windows. She grasped the flashlight with both hands and turned toward the window, the glare from which served only to dazzle her. She pressed the b.u.t.ton, and then she shook the flashlight as hard as she could. It still didn"t work.
She shouldn"t have wasted her time with it, she was making herself feel as though something she"d relied on had left her alone in the dark. Even if she couldn"t see the exit doors, she knew they were there, to the left of the lit windows. She had only to ignore the smell of earth that was actually the smell of brick, the shapes beyond the heap of plaster that was just visible as a low grayness near the dim walls. In fact, since the screen was dark, it couldn"t be creating shadows, and so the shapes she thought she was glimpsing couldn"t be there at all, couldn"t be peering over the gray mound, ready to pounce if she moved. The restlessness on both sides of her was only an effect of the way her eyes couldn"t grasp the dimness. The creaking she could hear behind her and around her as she made herself let go of the back of the seat and tiptoe up the aisle, over carpet which felt threadbare enough to trip her up, was nothing but vibration she was causing, evidence that she wasn"t moving as softly as she would like. She mustn"t be tempted to go faster, she might fall headlong. She felt as if the dark around her were waiting for her to break, to run for the doors so that it could leap on her. The lit windows blinded her left eye, the dark gathered itself on her right; plaster dust settled on her, ------------------------------------280 making her feel as if she were being stealthily buried. She stuck out her hands and the dead flashlight, and shoved at the doors.
The left-hand door balked as if someone were holding it closed from outside, and then she felt the chunk of plaster that had lodged beneath it give way. She heard a sound like teeth grinding together. She flung the doors open and hurried into the foyer, past the box office like an upended casket, its window coated with earth. The doors thumped behind her, so irregularly that she peered through the darkness to rea.s.sure herself that nothing had followed her between them.
The projection room was at the far end of the corridor, past the deserted office. As she reached the room, she heard a sound like claws on metal. It was the cooling of one of a pair of projectors that occupied much of the s.p.a.ce in the room. She smelled hot metal, and told herself hastily that it smelled nothing like blood. She hurried to the carton Barclay had brought in. She clattered open the round can that lay uppermost in it, lifted the spool off the projector, lowered it carefully into the can. She fitted the lid onto the can and closed the cardboard flaps, and straightened up, her arms laden with the carton. A blurred face rose up in the auditorium and peered at her through a window.
It was her own face, reflected in the gla.s.s. She clutched the carton to herself and stumbled into the corridor, feeling as if her burden were dragging her forward, forcing her almost to run so as not to drop it. The dark foyer swallowed her shadow, and she staggered past the double doors, one of which was propped ajar by a fragment of plaster. She leaned on the box office sill for a moment while she took a firmer grip on the carton, and then she launched herself toward the gla.s.s doors. A shadow half as tall again as she was came to meet her, towering among the shredded posters stuck to the outside of the doors.
It shrank to fit its head and hands around the face and ------------------------------------281 hands that pressed themselves against the gla.s.s. "I can"t open the door," Sandy called.
Barclay opened it for her and insisted on carrying the film to her car. "I didn"t mean you to have to deal with this all by yourself. The shop was shut and I had to go further. Was it good? Did I miss much?"
"Nothing you should regret missing."
He frowned rather wistfully at her; he must think she was trying to cheer him up. "Will you keep me in mind when it"s going to surface? Maybe an invite?" he suggested, miming writing, and looked disappointed by her noncommittal murmur. As she drove away she saw him on the steps of his cinema, waving tentatively, and she was taken aback to find herself envying him. She was beginning to realize that managing to make her way safely out of the darkened cinema didn"t feel at all like an escape. ------------------------------------282 She was driving around the outskirts of Lincoln, and debating whether to head back into the town for dinner, when she switched on the radio in search of company. Among the interchangeable rock stations, whose drums always emerged from the static ahead of any melody, she found a Lincolnshire voice reading the news. Seamen were on strike, and a lorry had overturned on Erskine Street, the Roman road north out of Lincoln. Enoch"s Army would be traveling all night and would arrive at Redfield early tomorrow morning.
Sandy had expected them to rest somewhere overnight, and her informant at the AA must have. Either the police were keeping them on the move or Enoch and his folk were anxious to arrive where they believed they would be welcome. Did that mean Roger had failed to convince them of the danger? He still had more than half the night, he could be biding his time. All Sandy knew was that she had to be at Toonderfield before dawn.
She wouldn"t be much use unless she ate. The first two pubs she pa.s.sed on the increasingly lonely road had stopped serving dinner, but several miles further on she found one that hadn"t quite, the Poacher. She ate jugged hare and gazed at polished oak and bra.s.ses. A hunting horn shone dully on a beam above her head. The strong beer she was drinking, and the respite from driving, loosened her thoughts and let them wander, but not far. Had there ever been poachers at Redfield? Once upon a time, wouldn"t they have been shot ------------------------------------283 on sight? That kind of bloodshed used to be taken for granted. If it had happened at Redfield during one of the fiftieth years, would it have satisfied the land?
She made her pint of beer last until shortly before closing time, and was on her way out through an ungainly pa.s.sage of fat bricks when she noticed that the worn stone stairs beside her led to guest rooms. The idea of resting on a bed in a warm room for a few hours was almost irresistible, but in order to be certain of reaching Toonderfield ahead of the convoy she would need to be up earlier than the staff of the pub. Besides, how could she even dream of taking a room when Roger was out there on her behalf? She marched herself out of the pub and breathed in the chill of the night, as if its sting would keep her more awake.
Other cars were departing, fanning out across the landscape. One followed her northeastward for a few miles, then its lights turned aside into a dip where they were extinguished so quickly that she thought there had been a crash until they reappeared in her mirror. They shrank like a spent match, and then there was nothing behind her except darkness and the cans of film.
The beams of her headlights nudged the dark, touching hedges, signs striped with arrows where the road curved, infrequent trees. Very occasionally she pa.s.sed a handful of cottages, always unlit. At first she could hardly distinguish the flat land from the sky, except for the faint blur of mist where they met. Close to midnight a lopsided moon edged above the mist. It looked like a flaw appearing in a sky of black ice that weighed down the landscape. It turned the fields into a monochrome patchwork that made her feel surrounded by the black and white of the film. Her headlights seemed almost as valuable now for the glimpses of color they s.n.a.t.c.hed from the dimness as for lighting her way. She would have preferred the road behind her to be completely dark; she wasn"t enjoying the way trees and hedges in her mirror were barely visible. Too often they ------------------------------------284 looked as if part of them was threatening to reveal another shape.
She trod on the brake, and a hedge flared red behind her. "There"s nothing there, all right?" she cried in a rage, and flung herself out of the car to stare about. The silent empty land seemed paralyzed by the weight of the sky, except for the part of the hedge which the brakelights had stained, the shrub which had then appeared to sneak aside into the dark. She couldn"t identify which thin shrub it was; she might almost have thought it was no longer there. She slammed her door defiantly loud and wound the windows as tight as they would go before she drove off. "Don"t you dare start looking in the mirror," she snarled at herself.
However much she concentrated on the road, it left her alone with her thoughts. Now and then a b.u.mp in the tarmac rattled the cans of film. They were safest with her, she told herself, and where else could she have hidden them? Even if she had arranged for them to be locked away at her bank she would have had to take them there personally. She wouldn"t have had time. n.o.body who was likely to betray her knew she had them, and the boot of her car was the last place the Redfields would think of looking for them. Why did that thought make her feel suddenly more vulnerable? She felt as if she might prefer not to know until she was somewhere less lonely, less dark.
The horizon was rising. There must be a main road to the uplands, but she had missed it somehow. The road she was on wound back and forth as if it didn"t want to arrive where it was heading. At least she had plenty of fuel, and several hours in which to drive to Redfield. She still had several hours out here before the dawn.
At last the road looped upward, so gradually that she was hardly aware of climbing. The land spread out below her in the moonlight like an icebound sea, patchily misted as if areas were melting. There wasn"t a headlight other than hers in the entire landscape. From a crest of the uplands she ------------------------------------285 saw an even wider loneliness, and found she was shivering. Of course it would be cold up here, and the smell of earth came from the fields or from the ditches that bordered the road. She couldn"t close the windows any tighter to keep the smell out of the car.
A b.u.mp in the road shook the cans of film. The sound made her glance in the mirror. The road glistened emptily in the wake of the car. There was nothing behind her to be afraid of, nothing but the film. Even if it had disturbed her while she was watching it, it was locked away. It was nothing but two spools of celluloid packed into cans, it was just a series of images deadened by the dark. Without light and machinery to give them life, they were no threat at all.
But she couldn"t help reflecting that the image she had seen in the Redfield vault was locked in the boot of her car--the only faithful reproduction of that image which had ever been seen outside Redfield. If the carving had been incorporated into the vault, did that matter? It might be as old as it looked, centuries older than the vault; it might have been carved in the days when the land was first fed with blood, but why should that make her nervous of the cans of film?
The road dipped, putting out the moon. The cans rattled as though the sudden shadow had wakened them, though of course it was the fault of the irregular surface of the road. Spence must have entered the vault in search of secrets he could use against the Redfields, or to find names to include in his film as a petty revenge. He"d seen the carving and had had Charlie Miles design an extra set in which it figured--and after that, more fear had attended the filming than could be accounted for.
Later Spence had been killed at Redfield, by natural causes or otherwise. Natural causes could scarcely account for all the violence she had read about in the graveyard; those responsible for the inscriptions clearly hadn"t thought so. That wasn"t to say that over the centuries there wouldn"t ------------------------------------286 have been bloodshed in the ordinary course of things, and some of this might well have coincided with the cycle she"d identified. Perhaps it was only in those years when human nature didn"t feed it that the Redfield land sent out its servants to shed blood.
She wished she hadn"t thought that now. It made her feel hunted--more hunted than she had been trying not to admit to herself she already felt. If she imagined that the land was able to send something to hunt victims on its behalf, she might wonder if the inclusion of the image in the film had brought the guardians of Redfield past the boundaries of the land, to ensure that the secret of Redfield wasn"t betrayed. She might imagine that whoever saw the image in the film was in danger, or even anyone who helped revive the film. Suppose Graham had fallen because he was fleeing in terror from what he"d found he had chased? Suppose it hadn"t been her cats that had torn up his notes?
"Shut up, don"t be so stupid!" The night was thinking for her, she tried to tell herself. These were the kinds of thoughts you had when you wakened at the low point of the night and couldn"t get back to sleep, but being unable to stop thinking them out here was worse. The more they raced the more convincing they seemed. The dark on either side of the lit patch of road and of the wake of her taillights was so thick that she could imagine parts of it were solid, pacing her on both sides of the road.
The road dipped toward the flat lands, and she let out a shaky sigh. A few hundred yards ahead it curved out of the oppressive shadow of the higher ground. If she couldn"t hold her breath until she reached the sloping field of moonlight, surely she could hold her thoughts still. She pressed the accelerator, wishing that she didn"t feel as if she were trying to outrun the dark.
She shivered as a smell of earth and staleness seeped into the car. The dark that flanked the vehicle was restless; she ------------------------------------287 glimpsed movement at both edges of her vision. There must be a chill wind that was forcing the smell into the car. The moonlight was less than two hundred yards ahead. She sucked in a breath which she vowed she wouldn"t release until she was in the light. How faint it was, and yet how rea.s.suring it promised to be! She trod harder on the pedal as her breath built up in her throat; she felt as if she couldn"t swallow. Here was the fringe of the light, and now it spilled like diluted milk over the bonnet of the car. The vehicle raced out into the moonlight, and so did the two figures that had been pacing it in the dark.
Though they were on all fours, they weren"t animals. That much she saw as her hands wrenched at the wheel, as her leg jerked and shoved the accelerator to the floor. Their heads looked swollen, too large for their naked scarecrow bodies. Grayish manes that might be hair or vegetation streamed back over their sticklike necks, over their ribs where gaps were encrusted with shadows or earth. As she floored the pedal the two figures raced past the car, their muscles flexing like windblown branches, and turned their faces to her as they ran. She saw how their grayish manes grew out of ragged eye sockets, from one of which a clenched flower dangled as if it had been gouged. The sight made her forget to breathe, shrank her mind around her panic, shrank it too small for thoughts. When a long curved sign appeared at the limit of her headlights, she didn"t immediately recognize the danger.
She stamped on the brake as the beams of her headlights plunged over the drop beyond the sharp bend. The car skidded, its rear wheels screeching toward the drop, and zigzagged out of control along the winding road. Somehow she managed to keep the wheels out of the ditch. She must have cried out in rage and terror, for she was breathing again. The car juddered to a standstill before she thought to change gears. She gripped the steering wheel and pressed ------------------------------------288 herself back in her seat, her body shaking, her breaths huge and helpless. She was struggling to regain enough control of herself to be able to drive when a figure padded in front of the car and reared up in the glare of the headlights.
Its mottled limbs looked both lithe and horribly thin. Its torso had shrunk around its ribs, its greenish p.e.n.i.s had withered like a dead root. Almost worse than all this, she recognized the face. Perhaps she was recognizing that the eyes, when it had had eyes, had been set so wide as to make the forehead seem lower than it was, but the vegetation that patched the skull had grown into a misshapen parody of the face that had once been there--the Redfield face.
A movement in the mirror dragged her gaze away. The other figure was behind the car; its Redfield mask with the dangling eye looked raw in the glow of the taillights. She was trapped. If she tried to run them down they would easily dodge the car, and she already knew that she couldn"t drive faster than they could run. They must be capable of anything their land needed them to do. She could feel her body preparing to get it over with, to step into the cold and the darkness so that they could finish her off with their long jagged nails. At least, unlike Graham, she would know why she was dying. Like him, she would be dying for the film.
The overgrown faces lifted blindly toward her, as if they sensed her despair, and she let out a hiss of rage that made her teeth ache. She hadn"t come so far to die alone out here. What would she be allowing to happen at Redfield, to Roger and the others, if she didn"t go on? "f.u.c.k you," she cried at the weedy faces, "and f.u.c.k your film! 8 Shaking with fury and terror, weeping at the thought of giving up all that she had achieved on Graham"s behalf, she groped under the dashboard for the boot release. If she gave them what they had come for, mightn"t they leave her alone?
She tugged the handle, and the lid of the boot sprang up. The figure in the headlight beams poked its patchy face at her and crouched forward as if it meant to leap, and the car ------------------------------------289 shook as something struck it from behind. She heard the cans of film begin to rattle violently, but the lid of the boot blocked her view. She reached stealthily for the ignition key, praying that however they were able to sense her, they couldn"t hear her thoughts.
Suddenly the cans of film were flung onto the road behind the car. The echoing crash made her draw a painful breath which she seemed unable to expel while the scarecrow figure blocked her way, its head turning slightly from side to side, its gra.s.sy mane waving in the wind, greenish blotches trembling on its cheeks and in one eye. It leaped, and she shrank back, even when she realized it was darting past the car.
As she clutched the ignition key she saw the figures begin to worry the cans of film, scrabbling at the lids with their claws, nudging them with their swollen faces. One lid clattered away into the ditch, and the two figures converged on the opened can as if it were a plate of dog food. Sandy thought they might be about to fight doglike over it, and giggled uncontrollably. She twisted the key in the ignition, and the faces lifted toward her from the can of film.
The engine spluttered, caught, coughed fumes at the two figures, obscuring her view of them. The fumes drifted away as the car jerked forward. The figures were still at the can. As the glow of the taillights gave them back to the dark she saw them clawing the film onto the tarmac and beginning to tear it to shreds.
The other can would delay them for a few minutes, but then would they follow her? They mightn"t hunt her down just for knowing the secret of Redfield, but wouldn"t they for seeking to prevent bloodshed there? She drove down onto the flat land, trying to keep her mind blank in case it betrayed her, forcing herself to concentrate on the route. More than once she missed her way on the lonely roads. She felt like a puppet able only to drive, capable of flying apart in panic if she let her thoughts even momentarily loose. She ------------------------------------290 was afraid to glance in the mirror or out of the windows beside her, a fear that seemed to grip her tighter and tighter by the scruff of the neck.
The edges of the landscape turned grayer as the approach of dawn raised mist from the fields. The dawn itself was m.u.f.fled, but at least it allowed her to dare to glance around her. As far as she could see, she wasn"t being followed, though there was no telling with the fields of wheat around her. Her head throbbed with reaction to all that she"d been through, a throbbing that spread through her body, threatening worse if she relaxed. She couldn"t, she hadn"t time. The sun rose through the mist, turning the fields red, and she was nearly in sight of Toonderfield, surely she was. She prayed that the convoy was approaching on another road, still safe over the horizon behind her. Then the road she was following sloped up to a crest that showed her Toonderfield, among fields that looked bathed in blood, and she saw that she was too late. ------------------------------------291 The convoy was halted at Toonderfield. The line of vehicles wound back out of the small wood to the police car, the caution on the tail. She could see no vehicles on the far side of the trees. The sight of the convoy, lying still as a snake whose head had been cut off, made her desperate to find out what had happened. Perhaps it didn"t resemble a beheaded reptile so much as a creature whose skull had been supplanted by the copse, a new green head that was too large. She managed to take slow regular breaths which just about kept her calm, and drove along the deserted open road as fast as she dared, toward the green clump that was darkened by the reddening of the landscape.
She braked hard at the last curve, before she came in sight of the police car. She mustn"t risk being detained for speeding. She swung the car onto the verge and climbed out onto the slippery gra.s.s. By now she was so anxious she almost neglected to lock the door. She ran down the sloping curve, and saw that the police car and the vehicles ahead of it were unattended.
The sight of so much desertion made her heartbeat falter. She ran past the police car, past muddied sunbursts, painted smiles that looked as if someone had hurled mud at them. The vehicles seemed to smell of exhaustion. By the time she reached the outer edge of Toonderfield she was panting and half suffocated. She didn"t want to lean on any of those trees; she gripped her knees to steady herself while she caught her breath, and then sent herself forward. There ------------------------------------292 had to be people not far ahead, close enough to rea.s.sure her. She mustn"t be afraid of the wood.