Black Rock Page 2
The rain was coming, but it might not fall for another hour or so. The quicker she got inside Black Rock, the quicker she would be out.
So how do I get in? she asked herself, then yelped when a voice from behind her spoke.
The getting in is easy. It’s the getting out again you have to worry about.’
During the few seconds it took her to realize that the voice belonged to Mr Winter, several scattered thoughts bounced across Snowy’s mind. The most important of these were that not only had Mr Winter opened that huge door without making any sound whatsoever, but that he had apparently read her mind.
Snowy quickly told herself that she must have spoken the words aloud.
‘Sorry, did I frighten you?’ Mr Winter asked with what sounded like childlike amusement, then, without waiting for a reply, said, ‘And you must be the lovely Mizz S. Dresden. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.’
Mr Winter looked just as he had in Snowy’s fantasy, but a little older perhaps. Tall, early forties, handsome, ice-blue eyes and a smile that almost certainly saw to it that when Mr Winter wanted company in his bed Mr Winter got it.
During her travels Snowy had noticed that money seemed to rub off on people. Many of those who had serious amounts of it also had a certain aura. At first she had thought that it was simply due to their expensive clothes and jewellery, but you often saw them dressed in jeans and tee-shirts and could still tell. Whatever it was, Mr Winter had it in spades.
I think I might enjoy this one, Snowy told herself, put out her hand and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Winter. Call me Snowy.’
Mr Winter’s hand was warm, dry and firm, just the way Snowy liked. If you got a wet-fish job, or the one where they just squeezed your fingers, you were in for trouble. If you got one that left you worrying about broken bones, you weren’t going to make a sale. This was good. Mr Winter gently let her know he had strong hands and she equalled his pressure, letting him know she was no mug.
‘What a charming name,’ he said, holding her gaze just as he had in her fantasy. ‘After Snow White, I presume?’
Snowdrop shook her head, but even then his eyes didn’t let her go. Butterflies flitted across her insides and vanished. ‘No, it’s Snowdrop,’ she said, ‘after the flower.’
‘Snowy Dresden,’ Mr Winter said quietly. ‘You were named after a beautiful sight - Dresden in the snow.’
When she tore her eyes away from his, she remembered the door. It was behind him, and it was still closed. Perhaps he had simply materialized this side of it.
‘What did you mean,’ she asked, ‘about getting out again being the problem?’
Mr Winter smiled. ‘Just a little joke. And for your information, the bell-pull is set in the wall, on your right, as you walk into the porch. It’s one of those old-fashioned rod-and-wire ones that jingles a little bell in the kitchen. It came with the house. Most people go right to it, so I haven’t considered fitting an electric one.’
Snowdrop went and looked. Yep, there it is, Dropsy, you just missed it!
Out across the valley between Black Rock and the hill behind which Tintagel hid, she saw the farm building again and the old trailer. The black dog was still on it, still pointing at her. It looked like a statue.
‘I’m sorry,’ Snowy said, feeling very silly indeed. If it was there now, it must have been there when she arrived. She wouldn’t be getting her Observer badge from Akela this weekend, that was for certain.
‘Never mind,’ Mr Winter said, ‘I saw your car outside, and here we are. Would you like to come in?’
Snowy nodded. ‘I couldn’t understand the door,’ she said. ‘How does it work?’
For a moment she thought she might be in for trouble because Mr Winter completely ignored her question and her nod and asked again, ‘Would you like to come in?’
In the seconds that followed, Snowy seriously considered turning around and high-tailing it out of Black Rock before it was too late. She realized she was seeing what she wanted to see, and not what was really there. That was what the odd deja-vu sensation had been about. Suddenly she didn’t like any of this, not the silly haunted house, its cut-off location, the impenetrable and silent front door.
Don’t be stupid, she told herself. You’re just having an attack of the screaming-meemies because for the first time since you threw Martin out you’ve seen someone you fancy.
‘Yes, I do want to come in,’ she said, ignoring the warning bells that rang in her head. ‘But what about the door?’
‘Good, because I have no control over Diamond. He’s not mine.’
‘Whose is he?’ was not the question Snowy wanted to ask, but she asked it anyway. What she really wanted to ask was, Does he bite?, or more particularly, Is he going to bite me?
‘He’s a stray,’ Mr Winter said. ‘Comes and goes as he pleases. He can get into the house whenever he wants. I put food down for him and he eats it and that’s about as far as it goes. I’ve called him Diamond after Isaac Newton’s dog who destroyed several years’ worth of his master’s work when he upset a lighted candle. This merchant has recently pulled off a similar trick with my computer, which is why you’re here.’
Snowy looked at the dog and the dog looked back at her with those glassy white eyes. Its lip wasn’t curled and it wasn’t growling, but it wasn’t exactly wagging its tail and it wasn’t pointing at her for nothing, either.
‘Is he going to bite me?’ Snowy finally managed.
‘Oh, of course not. He’s pointing at you because he likes you. Call him, he may come, although it can’t be guaranteed.’
Snowy wasn’t sure she wanted the dog anywhere near her, but she called him anyway.
The dog remained rock solid.
‘Use his full name. It’s Diamond Ambrose Anstey.’
You must be joking, kiddo, get on your horse and ride outta here! Snowy thought, and did it anyway.
The dog sat down. Its tail wagged. Once.
Snowy tried again. It was a mouthful to call in a happy voice, and if it wasn’t even Mr Winter’s dog, why had he bothered to name it so elaborately?
This time the dog stood up and padded towards her. When it reached her, it turned around, sat down on her feet and looked at her over its shoulder with such a pained expression that Snowy could have cried for it. It looked like a dog that had seen hell itself.
Snowy put her hand on its head. Diamond shuffled and leaned against her legs, looking up at her with soulful eyes.
‘See, he likes you,’ Mr Winter said. ‘Now, if you would like to step across the threshold, I’ll close the door.’
Feeling slightly uneasy about committing herself to going right inside, and not knowing why, Snowy nevertheless pushed Diamond off her feet.
The dog leaned back against her, a little harder. It looked up at her with a pleading expression.
‘I don’t think he wants me to come inside,’ Snowy said lightly.
‘Get away, Diamond Amb
rose Anstey!’ Mr Winter ordered in a voice which wouldn’t have sounded out of place if he had been casting out demons.
The dog looked at him disapprovingly, then got up and trotted back down the hall.
There was no excuse now, but still Snowy hesitated. The little girl inside her felt very strongly that Mr Winter might not be Mr Right at all, but the evil queen dressed up, and ready to feed little Snowy a very rotten apple indeed.
She thought about this for a few seconds, then rejected it. This was an ordinary working day, and there was work to be done.
As Snowdrop J. Dresden was later going to discover, she had just spent the last twenty minutes setting herself up to make the mistake of her life. Perhaps, if she had allowed herself to believe in ghosts, she might have saved herself a great deal of trouble and agony. But Snowdrop did not believe in ghosts.
If she had listened to the voice of her intuition, or to what Mr Winter had said about the door, or to the message the dog was trying to pass to her, she might have refused to enter the house and things would have turned out very differently. But Snowdrop refused to listen.
Later, she would replay the whole scene over and over to herself and would wish she had believed in ghosts and that she had taken notice of her intuitive voice, but most of all she would wish that she had swung the car round and backed it up closer to the front door as she had originally intended.
Because if she had done this she would have seen the house in the car’s mirrors. And that would have been enough to save her because you could only see the real Black Rock when it was reflected. What you saw when you looked with your eyes, was what was, or what might be.
What you saw when you looked in a mirror would have been enough to make you leave immediately, prevent you from ever getting within ten miles of the place for as long as you lived and shocked you so deeply you would probably never get rid of the nightmares.
But, as Snowy would later discover, a lifetime’s worth of nightmares would have been a cake-walk in comparison.
Now, standing on the threshold of Black Rock, she made her decision.
She took a deep breath and swept past Mr Winter into the hallway.
But like the man said, it wasn’t the getting in you had to worry about, it was the getting out again…
2 - Peter Perfect’s Ghosts
The real Sarah-Jane Dresden, the one who had not been christened Snowdrop, sat in her red Ford Sierra looking at Black Rock and feeling confused and unsettled.
But she wasn’t parked upon its shingle forecourt, watching the dark sea-sky roiling behind the house, she was sitting in a car park in Falmouth with a Coke beside her, a half-eaten Cornish pasty in her left hand and twenty-four manuscript pages of an unpublished novel in her lap. Sarah-Jane was reading Black Rock. Again.
Since she had discovered the rough, pencilled-over manuscript in her flat, she had surely read through it once for each of the twenty-four pages and now she was reading it again.
Sarah-Jane, who was known to her friends, not as Snowy, but as Essenjay, S’n’J, or Drezy (which sounded a little like Dropsy, she supposed), knew that those writers who were considered shining stars were set above the masses of also-rans because of their good characterization. A lot of sins were forgiven in the face of good characterization. As Martin would have said, ‘If you have a crap plot, and great characterization, you’ll sell. If you have a great plot and crap characterization you’ll sell. If you have a great plot and great characterization you’ll sell big, but if you have neither, you may just as well put that revolver to your head and pull the trigger.’
According to Martin, the trick was to get your readers to identify with your heroes. If you made your characters think and say what ‘real’ people did, your readers would warm to them.
And Sarah-Jane Dresden had identified with Snowy Dresden very strongly indeed.
If it was meant as a joke, she told herself for the thousandth time since finding the manuscript, it didn’t work. For one thing, it was too good, too well written, in spite of the fact that Martin had inscribed derogatory remarks in the margins of almost every page like Mr High-and-Mighty editor. For another, he had made it much too obvious that Snowy Dresden, who fell into the hands of ghosts at the end of Chapter One wasn’t just based on S’n’J, it actually was her.
If this was in print, I could sue the bastard! she told herself.
She assumed that towards the end of their stormy relationship, Martin had finally felt threatened enough, and inspired enough (and God knew, he was always promising to swap hats and write a book instead of editing them) to fictionalize her. Presumably he’d felt it was his only way of tipping the balance of power in his direction.
The thing that really made her nervous, was not that the pages in her lap described in quite graphic detail some of Martin’s violent feelings towards her (although this surprised her in such a mild man), but that during the writing Martin seemed to have developed second sight.
He had always been full of tales about how writers could pre-empt, or in his wilder flights of fancy, maybe bring about the future. His science-fiction writers had predicted many developments in technology and political events and one of his horror writers - These books are disgusting, but they sell in cart-loads and bring in the dosh - had written a novel about a man who believed he could become immortal by slaying people, only to find that two years later a real-life psycho was caught attempting the very same thing. And this wasn’t a copy-cat moron who’d read the book - it turned out that the psycho had never heard of the author, let alone the novel.
Those things proved that it was possible for authors to predict events, but they were almost always generalizations. You postulate a man killing to become immortal, and the laws of chance said that sooner or later someone would come along and do just that - and yippee, you predicted it. It was a bit like predicting the arrival of a bus after you’d seen the timetable.
What was spooky about the start of Black Rock (and Sarah-Jane thought that spooky looked like getting to be the word of day on this particular Thursday in October) was that in its twenty-four double-spaced pages Martin had used details of Sarah-Jane’s life about which he could not have known. On one page, for instance, Snowy referred to a morning, years ago, when after a night on the town she’d woken up in bed, naked and entwined with her best friend Ellen. After untangling herself she had spent the rest of the day wondering what, if anything, had happened during those drunken hours.
This had actually happened to Sarah-Jane.
And she’d never told Martin.
In Black Rock, the reader learnt that this encounter had precipitated a brief lesbian affair (more about this later, folks, Martin might as well have written at the end of the paragraph) which was where Martin’s gift of ‘second-sight’ veered off in�
�to sheer sexual fantasy. In real life, what followed had been nothing so exotic. The humdrum conclusion was that both girls had piled into bed drunk and since they were eighteen and insecure about being away from home for the first time, they had cuddled up together for comfort.
Put that in your pipe and choke on it Martin, Sarah-Jane hissed, glaring at the offending page.
The manuscript was laser-printed and had neat page numbers, a header at the top of each fresh sheet with the book name and chapter heading, and a footer at the bottom of each with the author’s name and address. And the fact that the name and address in question wasn’t Martin’s (or hers) had to have been another of Martin’s silly jokes. No one else on earth could have known Sarah-Jane Dresden in such detail, so Martin had to have been the author.
S’n’J didn’t get the joke though. Why would he choose the name ‘Peter Perfect’ as an alias and Black Rock, Tintagel, North Cornwall, as an address?
Scowling, she sipped her Coke. There were other discrepancies with the damn thing too.
Martin, blast his eyes, had done quite a hatchet job on the pages in his customary razor-sharp 2H pencil. From the first page onwards he had written such acid comments as: stretch my credulity a little further, why don’t you? and, horribly convoluted. He had objected to Snowdrop’s entering the house with, you don’t expect me to believe any woman in her right mind would actually go inside this house, do you? To top it all, his final verdict was: a hackneyed idea for a crappy ghost story. Reject.
Which was surely not something any writer would do to their own story. Apparently he’d started a novel about her and then, for some unknown reason, had seen fit to pretend it was the work of someone else.