Black Rock Page 14
You’re probably just trying to exorcize Ellen from your system, she told herself sleepily. You aren’t lesbian and you weren’t then and your subconscious feels guilty about what happened with her. Or something.
Then there were the dreams about ghosts. She had made love with ghosts, both male and female - and sometimes both at once - and she had loved their cool and silky touch, the chill of their bodies enveloping her, seeping into her.
It was like being on holiday, in a way, she supposed. When you went on holiday and got away from it all and began to relax, all the nasty stuff that had been building up inside your head came out in dreams and was then filed neatly away in the right storage compartments.
And since she’d finally moved in with Philip, it had been just like being on holiday in other ways, too. For the first time since she’d left college and found employment there was no daily grind to look forward to, just an endless succession of days in which all she had to do was please herself.
He wrote and played, and she played and slept. And there seemed to be a lot of sleeping to be caught up on.
And now, lying in a big brass bed which had to be straight out of a fairy tale because it was warmer and cosier than any bed she’d ever slept in previously, she decided to catch up on a little more of that valuable commodity of which she previously seemed to have been so deprived.
Snowy Dresden curled up and went back to sleep to chase all her fears away.
Everything was just about as fine as fine could be.
Until one day, barely a week later, she woke up late in the morning, still alone in the bed.
This was not usual. Philip’s work sessions always started at midnight and lasted until three or four in the morning when he would climb in beside her, kiss her gently, sigh and fall asleep like a contented cat. Snowy seemed to have become attuned to his presence because now, each night when he came to bed, she rose close enough to the surface of sleep to become aware of him.
But apparently the converse did not apply: his failure to come to bed at the proper time hadn’t disturbed her at all.
Snowy was not a morning person - one of that bright and cheerful breed who snap awake at six or seven each day already on full power and ready to rock. To the best of her knowledge she had never woken unaided and of her own accord before ten. And when she did wake up, either because of the alarm or because she had simply finished being asleep, her mind took almost another hour to crank itself up. Consequently her first thoughts today were somewhat muddy.
It’s twenty past ten, she told herself. Late.
It didn’t feel late, it felt positively early. In the half-light of the bedroom she squinted at her watch, certain she’d read it wrongly.
Philip didn’t come to bed last night, she registered. The feeling that things were not as they ought to be was steadily infiltrating its way into her brain and Snowy began to feel a certain amount of concern. She was, however, quite certain that Philip was neither dead nor vanished, as her mind was trying to suggest.
He’s still working, she willed herself to believe, pushing the covers back and sitting up. He’s on a roll and didn’t want to stop.
Unconvinced, her mind proceeded directly to fantasy mode without passing Go or collecting two hundred quid. And not all Snowy’s fantasies were pleasant ones. In this one she found herself standing outside Philip’s work-room wondering whether she should break rule number one and enter. He was not elsewhere in the house because she’d checked, so he must be in there. But he hadn’t answered when she’d knocked and she couldn’t hear him inside. Which meant that he’d fallen asleep at his keyboard or that he was slumped in front of it dead, or dying, of a stroke or heart attack. While she was outside, hesitating because of rule number one.
Snowy broke herself out of the fantasy and got out of bed, now far more alert than was good for her this short distance away from sleep. She was going to pay with a headache for sure.
I shall break that rule and go inside, she told herself.
One of Philip’s expensive cotton shirts lay on the floor at her feet. She snatched it up, fastened two of the middle buttons and hurried downstairs.
Black Rock was bisected by the wide hall which ran from the front door to the back of the house where the back door would have been if Haunted House Designs Inc. had thought such a detail necessary. The lounge, which was practically large enough for a hockey match, took up the whole left-hand side of the house and had two entrances. Snowy chose the nearest door, and hurried through checking everywhere. It didn’t take very long. She then tried the kitchen. He wasn’t there either. Or in the overgrown back garden visible through the windows. She went back into the hall, passed the forbidden locked door to the cellar and hurried towards the library, cursing the lack of doors that meant she couldn’t get from A to B without walking what seemed like a mile.
For example, the library butted up against the dining room, but there was no access from one to the other. To get there, she had to walk what seemed like half-way around the world.
The side hall, which served only the library, ended in a blank wall, which would have been the obvious place to have had a door to the outside. Snowy resolved that if she stayed here very long she would talk Philip into having some alterations done - then she thought she’d better make sure that Philip was still alive and well before she did any more planning for him.
One thing that constantly amazed her was the way Black Rock conformed to the stereotypical haunted house, right down to the fact that the library came complete with cases full of leather-bound books, a roll-top desk with a quill pen, ornate brass light fittings that looked as if they ought to contain gas mantles rather than electric lamps, and a genuine musty odour.
There was no Philip in there though.
Which only left the other two upstairs bedrooms, the bathroom and his work-room. Snowy hurried back upstairs and checked. And in less than a minute found herself acting out her fantasy in real life, by lingering in front of his workroom door, unable to make herself go in.
So much for breaking the rules, she scorned herself.
She put her ear to the door and listened. Inside that room was the four thousand pounds worth of computing equipment she had sold to Philip on her first visit - the very same visit during which all her fantasies about Mr Winter being Mr Right had come true on that sheepskin rug in front of the open fire.
And although you didn’t pay all that money for equipment which would be noisy when it worked, she was certain she ought to have been able to hear something. There was not the tiniest noise from inside.
Which doesn’t mean a thing, she told herself. The doors in this house are all very heavy. The room is probably carpeted with something that has a pile as deep as the Marianas Trench and, for all you know, could be soundproofed so that outside
noises don’t distract him when he’s working.
Snowy knocked on the door. It felt exceptionally solid under her knuckles and she suddenly decided that, like the front door, this one might respond only to the voice of its owner. It might not let her in even if she decided to break rule number one.
Don’t be so silly, she told herself, but the fact remained that the front door was not her friend. There was a trick involved - a trick she hadn’t yet worked out and which Philip had refused to show her. She had been here three weeks and she had not once opened the front door unaided.
‘Philip?’ she called, knocking again. ‘Philip, please! philip!’
Perhaps he just went out, she told herself. It hadn’t happened before, and he hadn’t left a note to say where he’d gone, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Snowy suddenly couldn’t remember if she’d seen his car outside or not. Black Rock had no garage, so he just left the car on the forecourt. It was a new Porsche 911 twin-turbo convertible and it was worth a lot of money, but Philip didn’t worry about locking it. It was safe while it was within the grounds, he said.
She rushed back into the master bedroom, drew back the curtains and looked down at the forecourt. The Porsche was there, its rag-top down. And the feeling of things being wrong increased.
He wasn’t in the attic, that was a certainty. The attic was another of the house’s mysteries, along with the vexing question of where the stuff you flushed down the loo went to. The house appeared to possess no drainage system at all. There were no inspection covers on the property. The stuff just went down the pipe and vanished - probably straight into the sea. The attic question was just as mysterious. There had to be a water tank up there somewhere, since water came out of the taps, but there was no way up into the attic to find out for certain.
Snowy rushed back upstairs, tripped on the top step, sprawled across the landing, cursing herself. Got up, inspected her knees which now shone red with two lovely carpet burns - as did her right hip - hurried to the door of Philip’s work-room, twisted the handle and pushed.
Opening doors inside Black Rock was an entirely different process from opening doors in a normal house. In a normal house you twisted the handle, pushed and the door opened to let you into the room. Those in Black Rock would sometimes open quickly and smoothly, and other times you had to put all your weight against them to make them move at all.
And on this occasion, as soon as the handle was turned, the door began to open of its own accord. It moved smoothly and slowly as if someone on the other side of it was drawing it open. Snowy let go of the handle and took a breath, half expecting Philip to be there.
And as the door opened, she froze.
For a moment she saw nothing inside. Nothing. No light, no shade, no colour. Just a pale nothingness.
Then, way below her, she saw the sea, as if the door of the room had opened into the air above the Atlantic Ocean.
Snowy screamed as her balance deserted her and frantically wheeled her arms trying to remain upright and searching for something solid to hang on to.
There was nothing there.
Screaming at the top of her voice, she began to fall.
11 - Waiting for James
The real, live, walking and talking (and currently scared shitless) Sarah-Jane Dresden spun the top off the bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label and tipped the bottle towards the glass. Because the glass had mysteriously emptied itself again. So far the whisky had achieved the old vanishing trick three times. S’n’J didn’t recall drinking it, because you tended to lose track of what you were doing when you were engrossed to the point of being mesmerized by what you were reading.
But, she concluded, the whisky must have somehow found its way down her throat because she was beginning to feel warm inside.
Not secure. Not safe. And certainly not stable. But perhaps those things would follow hot on the heels of the warmth.
S’n’J hoped so because she didn’t much like the sensation of numb dread that was building in her. Soon - if it wasn’t stopped - it would peak, and she didn’t want to be there when that happened.
She held the bottle over the glass for a count of five glugs, then gulped down as much of the Black Label as she could manage in one mouthful. It burned. Which was something real, something she could understand.
Unlike the rest of what seemed to be happening to her.
There were some things, S’n’J knew, that you could attribute to having inhaled a great deal of carbon monoxide. But there were some other things that you could not. One that seemed to belong to this latter variety - this week’s enthralling episode of Black Rock - lay on the coffee table next to the Black Label bottle, now safely back in its envelope where it could do no further harm.
And that’s quite a joke, too, S’n’J thought. It doesn’t have to do any more harm. It’s already done everything it set out to do.
Black Rock, by Peter Perfect, mightn’t have been the best horror story she’d ever read, but it was certainly the most effective. If horror stories were meant to throw a scare into you, this one deserved a gold medal. She wasn’t just scared, she was terrified.
No one but S’n’J knew her lounge door had opened on to the Atlantic an hour earlier (unless you counted God and she thought He’d given up on that sort of trick after Job), so it was impossible that she had just read all about it in the pages of a manuscript which had been written earlier.
Had she read the new Black Rock chapter first, she could have blamed what had happened to her on the story. She could have argued that it had somehow caused her to hallucinate the long drop to the sea. But she hadn’t read anything until after she’d regained consciousness and, as far as she knew, stories didn’t seep out of sealed envelopes and into your mind.
After what’s happened to you today, you didn’t ought to be surprised if that was exactly what happened, she told herself.
The fall through her lounge door and the subsequent plunge towards the sea, still seemed just as real in her memory as it had when it happened.
Or when it didn’t happen, as the case may be, she told herself.
And it hadn’t happened. S’n’J had woken up on her lounge floor, a few minutes after plunging through the door into the empty air. The lounge floor had been there all the time. What she’d seen had not been there.
And she could have stomached this, if that was all she’d been asked to stomach. But when she’d awoken, dazed and feeling a relief so intense she thought she ought to be able to touch it with her hands, she’d made the mistake of thinking it was all over.
She’d got the whisky bottle and the glass and set to work. And when the dazed feeling left her, S’n’J had found she felt strong enough to open the envelope which had been left in her home.
Now, looking back on that moment it seemed as if she had been compelled. She was certain that she hadn’t decided to open t
he envelope but that the decision had been taken for her. Perhaps by the story itself. It was crazy, she knew, but the story seemed to possess a life of its own.
On reaching that last section, which she had read with mouth agape and mind aghast, S’n’J had begun to feel as if she was being mentally raped. As if someone, somewhere, had a direct line to the inside of her head, and wasn’t using what he found there to construct a book, but was busily pumping in his own material to replace what was there already. She didn’t feel as if Peter Perfect, whoever he was, was raiding her mind in order to change Snowy Dresden into her, but rather as if he was trying to change her into Snowy Dresden.
She came to the conclusion that she couldn’t trust anything she’d seen, heard or felt since arriving at the King Arthur Hotel in Tintagel that afternoon. From then onwards, she had no idea what was reality and what wasn’t.
But she hoped that her arrangement with James at Cars Inc. turned out to be real because she didn’t think she could stand to be alone for very much longer. Even if it wasn’t going to be the sexual event of the year, right now she just needed someone there who would hold her if she wanted to be held.
And she did want to be held. Very badly indeed.
She fished around in her handbag, found the book of matches James had given her, with his home number written in, took it to the phone and dialled the number.