Black Rock Page 13
So what do you do now, Drezy? she asked herself ten minutes later when she had walked all round the block. She was standing on the pavement on the far side of the road, looking up at her lounge window.
She could go indoors again and try to force herself to enter the lounge. She could phone the police and tell them she thought she’d been burgled and that the culprit was still in her house, or she could visit Dave and Janet and maybe get Dave to have a look inside her house for her. She found none of these plans particularly appealing.
‘Excuse me,’ a voice said.
S’n’J looked away from her window at a woman with a dog whose path she was blocking. The dog was not big and black and it didn’t point at her.
‘Sorry,’ S’n’J said and moved aside, finally realizing that the woman was looking at her askance because she still had the rolling-pin against her shoulder like a sentry on duty.
As she began to summon up the courage to go back inside, she reviewed today’s conversations with Martin about Black Rock. At first it sounded as if he’d gone crazy, but she now understood there was another explanation. A simpler one. And the beauty of it was, it fitted like a jigsaw with the two totally different styles of handwriting that were on the manuscript.
Now she knew the truth. Martin was not suffering from a multiple personality disorder that made him write the manuscript as one person, then made him edit it as another. The manuscript was written by someone else. And S’n’J suddenly knew who he thought it was.
Martin thought she’d written it.
Which was why he’d said he was sorry about the book. He wasn’t saying sorry because he’d written it about her, but sorry about the hatchet job he’d done on it. He’d found the manuscript and believed she’d left it there for him to find. Which was why he’d taken it to pieces when he knew it was good. Because he was upset with her. And during their conversation - when she’d pictured him in his ‘doing deals’ mode with that smug expression on his face - he was actually trying to do a deal. With her. That was why he’d expected her to be delighted, and been so miffed when she’d told him to go whistle.
And that also meant that whoever had left the second envelope in her flat (the mysterious Peter Perfect, presumably) hadn’t left it there for her to read, but for Martin, not knowing that he was long gone.
Which meant it was safe for her to go home.
In spite of the fact that Peter Perfect, whoever and wherever he might he, seems to know all about you in fine detail?
This was something that wouldn’t be easily rationalized away. It might be pure coincidence. Martin was always full of stories about litigation by people with strange names finding accurate versions of themselves in books written by people who couldn’t have known of their existence. It did happen.
Or perhaps it was someone she’d known in her college days. S’n’J didn’t recall any of her ex-boyfriends having literary pretensions, but one of them might have developed some by now. And everyone had certain things in common. There were many people who didn’t believe in ghosts and who were a little bit clumsy, for example. There weren’t many people who had woken up in bed naked and entwined with their best friend Ellen, of course, but this could be explained away too. Ellen knew about it and she might have a guy who was a wannabe writer.
S’n’J looked up at the window once more. Shimmering light reflected on the ceiling - presumably from the big mirror which stood in front of the fireplace during the summer months - and gave a rippling effect which reminded her of the reflections you saw when the sun caught a lake.
Never noticed that before, she told herself. But this wasn’t strictly true, she had never noticed it from outside before, but she had noticed that very pattern reflected on the ceiling. The last time she’d noticed it, she was on her back on the lounge floor, lying still while Martin pleasured himself inside her.
On your bike, Martini she told the mental image that tried to form in her mind, wondering for the nth time how and why she’d put up with him. If she could have done it all over again, she wouldn’t have done it all over again. Not with Martin anyhow.
S’n’J took another deep breath and crossed the road. She was now cool, calm and collected.
She expected the envelope to have vanished when she got back inside the flat, just as the vision of the injured Mr Winter had done.
This time she was disappointed. The offending item was still where she’d left it, face down on the telephone table.
‘Get to you later,’ she told it, steeling herself to enter the lounge.
It’s your own home, she reminded herself. You don’t have to be scared.
She reached out, took the door handle, pulled it down and took a step forward as she pushed the door open.
And in the teetering moment while she fought to keep her balance and stop herself from falling, S’n’J saw what had been causing the shimmering reflections on the lounge ceiling.
It was a glimmering October sun shining on the Atlantic.
And the Atlantic was in her lounge.
S’n’J swayed and wind milled her arms, realizing dimly that even this wasn’t true: her lounge had ceased to exist. The door now opened on to thin air about a hundred feet above the sea. Somewhere near Black Rock, judging from the scenery.
Even the sudden terror at finding herself not in her lounge at all but gazing out of her hall and down into the sea was made insignificant by the single massive survival response which jolted through her like an electric shock:
DON’T FALL!
This instruction was easier for her mind to issue than it was for her body to follow. She was already in the attitude of a woman on a high board preparing to make a dive, leaning forward at an angle of fifteen degrees or so from the vertical. Her centre of gravity was over her toes and being steadily sucked further away from the point of recovery, and towards the point of no return. The door had vanished as it opened over the sea and there was nothing to hang on to with her wind milling arms.
The two seconds it took from opening the door to realizing that she wasn’t going to be able to get back to terra firma again, seemed to last an age. It was long enough for S’n’J to question her swimming ability, long enough for her to wish she’d learned to dive and long enough to curse whoever or whatever had caused this to happen.
She swayed and frantically grasped behind her while she felt her centre of gravity moving inexorably forward, millimetre by millimetre. And knew that she was going to die.
The warm Atlantic breeze tousled her hair. The smell and taste of the ocean filled her nose and mouth. The power of its huge gravitational force was too great to overcome. It was going to suck her in. She was now leaning forward at twenty degrees and there was nothing she could do to recover her balance. She was going to fall.
Her hands fr
oze in the air before her face and S’n’J saw the broken nails that she would never get to grow now. A small, still part of her mind told them goodbye and shut up shop. She knew she was beaten and felt the fight go out of her.
The transition from leaning forward to falling seemed to happen in slow motion. Then she was falling headlong towards the sea and the doorway was above her, a small, rapidly receding rectangle which hung in mid air showing the interior of her hallway.
S’n’J lost consciousness before she hit the water.
10 - Black Rock, Chapter Two, Bluebeard
Snowy woke up scared.
It was dark in the room and for a few moments she didn’t know where she was or what had happened. Only that she had enjoyed it a little more than she ought to have done.
When she finally realized that she was not at home, but in the master bedroom of Black Rock - and alone in the huge bed - the fear began to fade and she relaxed.
You are no longer innocent little Snow White, she told herself, grinning. You know now. You know just what it’s all about and you’re a part of it, just like you always wanted to be. You wanted excitement and you got it. Boy did you get it!
It had been a dream, of course and now she was awake she could barely remember it. Only that it - like all the other dreams she’d had since she moved in - had filled her with the perverse kind of sexual ecstasy she would only expect to encounter if Count Dracula paid her a midnight visit.
If Philip had been here beside her on the bed now, she would have made him hard again and fucked him till doomsday. But Philip wasn’t here. He had put her to bed earlier (and Martin had certainly never put her to bed that way), and after she had been reduced to something akin to a trembling jelly, had left her and gone across the corridor to his work-room, just as he did every night. Where he was, even now, hard at it, writing his book with the computer gear she’d sold him before she jacked her job to come here and be a kept woman.
His woman.
Just as she had done on other nights when she’d woken up from one of her jungle steamy dreams, she listened. For the sound of keys clattering as he worked. And just as it had on those other nights, her imagination provided the sound her ears were unable to hear. That of Philip, her very own Mr Winter, hard at work.
Snowy wanted him. Something had happened to her since she moved in three weeks ago. Something in the core of her had woken up. Philip called it her female soul, the essence of her femininity, but this didn’t seem to fit. It seemed too flimsy - a little like calling a bulldozer a big shovel. Her ‘female soul’ was a massive, ravening thing. It was as if a huge power source had suddenly revealed itself, cranked itself up and gone to work like the world’s biggest dynamo. Snowy, who had previously enjoyed her sex life as well as the next woman, now had a sex-drive that was so ferocious it would have left a nymphomaniac standing in the starting blocks.
She lay there aching for him but she didn’t move.
Philip, whose own libido would have kept any woman in a state of permanent tremble-legged astonishment, would not be pleased. He didn’t like to be disturbed when he was working. Under any circumstances.
Snowy had learned during the early part of her life that however good things were, however perfect, there was always a caveat. Always a condition that had to be observed.
Here, there were only three rules which had to be obeyed and she’d thought about them long and hard before she’d finally moved in. Two of them had been easy enough to accept, but it was the third that had given her something to think about. And even that had seemed unimportant after one of their blistering love-making sessions.
The rules were:
1) On no account must she enter Philip’s work-room or disturb him while he was in there,
2) On no account must she pass through any locked door on the ground floor.
3) On no account must she leave the house without Philip’s permission.
It was the third rule which for a while had caught in Snowy’s craw. She had spent a long weekend thinking about it.
The other rules were straightforward enough - writers didn’t like to be disturbed by even their nearest and dearest, and the locked door thing was of no concern to her at all. The door in question was the one which led down to the basement or cellar or whatever it was called. Philip just referred to it as ‘downstairs’ but the only downstairs it could be was a cellar. There certainly wasn’t another lower level carved out of the solid rock on which the house stood. She had told him that if he wanted to play Bluebeard he was welcome, and had enquired as to the welfare of his six other wives. The locked door held no fascination for her whatsoever. She already knew where the key was - hanging up by the big mirror in the hall. But if he expected her to get herself into trouble by playing the curious woman, he was going to have a long wait.
But the third rule was a horse of another colour indeed. It was the kind of rule a woman might expect to come up against in the Middle East, but not one which a female living in modern England often had to consider. It reeked of total submission.
And Snowy hadn’t thought very highly of that idea.
Her resistance to it had lasted a week, until the love-making session that had awoken the dynamo lurking deep inside her.
Afterwards, he’d asked her to make these solemn promises and had refused point blank to argue about them.
‘Those are the conditions,’ he’d said, ‘and they’re not up for discussion. Accept them or reject them. It’s entirely up to you.’
He was testing her intentions. She had suddenly understood this. It was a kind of modern equivalent to having to go out and slay a dragon to prove herself worthy of the prince’s hand.
So Snowy had said, ‘OK, I’ve read the contract, I’ve cooled off during the cooling-off period and having given it due consideration, I hereby accept the conditions.’
And even that wasn’t enough. ‘You have to promise on your honour to observe the rules at all times,’ Philip had said.
‘I promise,’ Snowy had answered.
And that was that.
And each time it occurred to her that she had promised away her independence, she reminded herself that rules were made to be broken and - as Philip often said before a writing session - that ‘lies were there to be told’.
Which, she supposed had been the beginning of the end of her innocence. And since Philip had more strata than a million-year-old rock face, that was probably exactly what he had been aiming at. He wanted her to lie. She didn’t know why. Not yet. But she had the feeling she was going to find out. Sooner or later.
Snowy turned over, snuggled down in the warm bed and rejected the idea of breaking rule number one. Let him work in peace, she thought. If he’d rather tell lies than make love, then that’s up to him.
She lay there in the darkness, not knowing what time it was and not carin
g two hoots. She was warm, cared for, happy and more relaxed than since she’d been a tiny tot.
She closed her eyes, listened for computer keys rattling under deft fingers and tried to piece together the dream she’d been having.
She couldn’t recall. It had probably been another dream about the basement. The dreams she’d had about Ellen had been set in the basement. Ellen, whom she had once loved, not just as a sister, but in the full, passionate sense of the word, had been present in several of those dreams which she could remember. All of them had been set in the forbidden basement.
See, you don’t have to ban me from there, she thought, I already know exactly what it looks like - and some of what happens there.
The basement of her dreams was a box-shaped chamber perhaps fifteen feet along each wall and ten feet high. The walls were unfaced, but perfectly flat granite. Except the granite wasn’t grey, it was black.
And it was kitted out rather like a dungeon, or an interrogation cell. It was lit by a single vandal-proof light fitting and there was a wooden work bench along one wall, upon which sat an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder and microphone. Each wall had set into it two sets of manacles which dangled on chains, and there was an assortment of instruments of torture lying here and there. Bull-whips, thumbscrews, daggers and various small items of machinery whose purpose was not suggested by their shape.
In each of Snowy’s dreams of Ellen, Ellen had been naked and manacled to the wall. She had been horribly tortured and was writhing in agony, pleading for death to end her misery. And in each dream Snowy had turned on the tape recorder, knowing she wanted to preserve these cries for posterity. She felt no sympathy for Ellen, just a strange kind of warm joy at the sounds she was making and the state she was in. She didn’t know if she had caused Ellen the pain she was suffering, but she did know that there was a part of her that badly wanted to increase that pain and subsequently increase the level of pleasure she felt. And she also knew that there was a valid purpose for the torture. But whenever she awoke, that knowledge disappeared and was instantly replaced by guilt.