Black Rock Page 7
‘What is it to do with then?’ he challenged.
Janie thought about it. And realized why she was an editor instead of a writer. Lies didn’t come easily to her. She sighed. ‘Billy,’ she said.
Martin frowned, peering at her screen. ‘Billy, as in your Billy-Joe?’
She nodded.
‘You’re gonna kill him?’
She nodded again, resignedly.
Martin’s lips flickered into the closest approximation of a smile she’d seen since he’d learned that Drezy had called. ‘Fallen out?’ he asked.
‘Of an aeroplane,’ she replied. ‘At least I hope he has.’
Martin nodded. ‘Men,’ he said, and stood there, swaying slightly and brimming with booze.
At least he doesn’t smell of Tennent’s, Janie thought, hoping he wouldn’t ask any more questions about her private life.
‘Did you get hold of Drezy yet?’ Janie asked, changing the subject.
‘Phone’s in a dead spot.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t understand her. It’s almost as if she didn’t want me to publish her damned book,’ he added in a wounded tone.
‘Perhaps she doesn’t,’ Janie replied.
‘Because it’s me, I s’pose,’ Martin reasoned.
Janie shrugged. ‘I’d take the book off your hands if that
was going to be a problem,’ she ventured.
When Martin finally spoke it was with the dangerous tone of a sheriff telling you you had until sundown to get out of town. I’ found Black Rock, I get to publish it,’ he warned.
Janie shrugged
‘But she doesn’t seem to want that.’
‘I wonder why,’ Janie said, innocently.
Martin ignored this. ‘She can’t be holding out for more money because we haven’t offered her any yet. But if she didn’t want it published, why did she leave the damned thing where I’d find it?’
‘Maybe she just did it to prove something,’ Janie said. ‘What if she wanted to show you that she wasn’t as dumb as you thought? That would be the best way of doing it, wouldn’t it? You find an unsolicited manuscript, you read it, you rate it. Voila! One happy Drezy.’
Martin shook his head. ‘I didn’t think she was dumb,’ he said. ‘She knew that.’
I doubt it very much, Janie thought. That isn’t the impression I got from her. ‘Well, perhaps she felt insecure,’ she said, biting her tongue before she could add, Because you probably treated her the way you seem to treat all women. As inferior beings. She could have gone on to illustrate that by referring to his list of authors which, as yet, did not include a single female.
Martin sighed. ‘Maybe she did,’ he said with that infuriating expression which said: women, huh, they ain’t just a different sex, they’re a different species.
Janie sighed too. She could no longer be bothered with the mystery of Drezy’s book and why she didn’t want it published.
‘She wants it published,’ Martin said. ‘She must or she wouldn’t have shown it to me.’
‘You’re certain it was her work, are you?’ Janie asked.
Martin nodded. ‘Positive. Look, I’m going to try ringing her again.’ He went back to his desk.
Janie suddenly felt very weary. None of this is necessary, she thought. Not the trouble between Martin and Drezy or the trouble between me and the uncrowned king of the rock guitarists Billy McAllister. All this heartache could be avoided if men would just loosen up a little and treat women how they’d like to be treated themselves. We’re not a different species, inferior, inscrutable or genetically inclined to servitude, we’re just like men except for the variance in sexual equipment. And the aggression, of course…
She touched her loose teeth with her tongue and made a decision. As from tonight Billy was history. She would go home, pick up a few things and leave the house - and him in it. She could get him to leave later. She would tell Jill, the Editorial Director, she was going to be working from her mother’s for a few days.
‘Damn!’ Martin shouted and slammed the phone back into its cradle. ‘I’ve…’ he tailed off, shaking his head. Janie waited.
‘I’ve got this odd sensation,’ Martin finally confided. ‘A horrible feeling that Essenjay is in trouble. Big trouble.’ He looked ashamed. ‘It’s not like it’s my imagination working overtime, just because the phone won’t work,’ he said. ‘It’s more than that. It’s like a piece of my brain has turned into a kind of rectangular box made of bright crystal,’ he said, looking at her carefully to gauge her reaction.
Janie had never seen Martin embarrassed before, but he was blushing like Bashful from the seven dwarfs.
‘I can’t explain it any better than that,’ he said, continuing in spite of himself. ‘It’s like this bright rectangle in the centre of my brain and in it, I can see this big house.’
‘Looks like a haunted house,’ Janie said. ‘Made of grey stone. Two storeys high, grey slate roof. Seven windows and a door. There’s sea all around it. It’s Black Rock, isn’t it?’
Half-way through her first sentence, Martin’s jaw began to fall. By the time she’d finished, it was almost on his chest. ‘How did you know?’ he asked in wonder.
Janie didn’t know how she knew. All she knew was that it was unsettling. Janie had heard that craziness was infectious and if Martin had it, she didn’t want to wake up in the morning and find she had it too.
‘I thought I was going insane,’ Martin said. ‘But I can’t be if you can picture it in exactly the same way. I can see it there now, hunched like it’s going to pounce. Only I can see Essen jay standing in front of it, looking at something. I can’t see what the thing is, but it’s dangerous. And it’s going to hurt her.’
Janie’s point of view was a little different, but not much. She could picture the house, she could picture Drezy standing in front of it, and she knew there was danger involved, but she didn’t think it was just Drezy who was going to get hurt if this Black Rock thing wasn’t sorted out soon and put to bed. She thought it was going to be all three of them.
‘Can I ask you a question, Martin?’ she said. ‘One to which you will reply truthfully.’
‘Yes.’
‘Scouts honour?’
‘Dib dib dib,’ Martin said grinning and giving her the scout’s two-fingered salute. In that moment he looked quite insane.
‘Did you write Black Rock?’ she asked.
Martin looked absolutely astonished. ‘What?’
‘Answer the question, Martin. This might save us a lot of trouble later.’
‘No, I did not write Black Rock, he said.
Janie nodded. She was tempted to believe him. But only tempted.
‘So why did she promise not to sue you?’
Martin shook his head. ‘I’m as puzzled about that as you are,’ he said.
‘She’s in the book, isn’t she?’ Janie said.
Martin nodded. ‘Yeah, she is. I don’t know how you knew unless she showed
it to you, or told you.’
Janie nodded too. Drezy was in danger, but not from a haunted house. She was in danger from Martin. At some point during the couple of months since they’d split, he had departed from reality in a big way. He’d started writing a ‘haunted house’ book, in which Drezy played a part. She had seen some of it and consequently she had been nonplussed when Martin had phoned her and offered to publish it. It all fitted. You would be nonplussed if an editor you knew wrote a book with you in it and then told you he was going to publish it. And if, when he made that phone call, he treated you not as if you were a character in it, but as if you actually wrote it, you would be dumbstruck. And you might not want to speak to him again.
Janie Sanderson solves another mystery, she told herself.
But for some reason she didn’t feel any better about things. She could still see Black Rock itself etched on her mind’s eye, and she still had the distinct feeling that Drezy was in immediate danger.
6 - Sarah Jane Takes a Tumble
After about thirty seconds of standing in the rain on the forecourt of Black Rock and breathing deeply, some of the wool began to clear from Sarah-Jane’s head, leaving room for the doubts to creep in. She either had to believe she’d been poisoned by the leaky exhaust, or that Black Rock really was different when viewed in a mirror.
While she didn’t feel a bit poisoned, S’n’J thought that Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen, who practised believing two impossible things before breakfast every day, would have had trouble with the other alternative.
There was a part of her that badly wanted to drive away, scattering the pages of the manuscript as she went. She didn’t need to know what happened to Snowy Dresden, or what Black Rock actually was. But another part of her knew a more basic truth. Needing something was a mile away from wanting it.
And S’n’J wanted to know.
She got back inside the car and stared across the valley to where the big black dog still pointed at her.
Where the supernatural was concerned, Sarah-Jane Dresden was not a woman who took fright easily. She could sit through the spookiest of films then happily wander through her flat in the dark without so much as a thought about the vampires or ghouls waiting for her in the shadows. But she also knew that she possessed the potential for becoming a Born Again scaredy-cat; she was by no means fearless now, where dark car parks were concerned, but she wasn’t frightened by the supernatural because it didn’t exist.
But if she looked again, and those windows were frosted and that brilliant light was shining out from upstairs, she was going to be forced to change her views.
S’n’J took a deep breath, held in and looked up at the mirror.
The upper window, which had earlier shone with a blinding light, was now just an ordinary window.
She let her breath out in a long, relieved sigh. One down, six to go, she told herself, moving the mirror so that she could see the window above the front door. This was all fine and dandy too. The chances of seeing something wrong were steadily diminishing. Especially as the right-hand upstairs window - the one that had earlier looked like an empty black rectangle - was present and correct.
Smiling, she angled the mirror so she could run through the rest of the house. Same story. Disappointing even, in a perverse kind of way.
It wasn’t until she’d finished checking and was turning the mirror to its original position that she realized she’d just seen the edge of something she didn’t recall from before. Something that had moved. Skittered, perhaps.
Don’t look back! her Girl Guide voice suddenly ordered. Don’t look back because if you do something will go wrong. If you do, it’ll be too late to stop!
Ignoring this advice in much the same way as Lot’s wife had ignored it before her, and for the same reasons, S’n’J turned the mirror back.
And felt that odd sensation of reality changing again. It was almost as if the very air had split, swept the rent in itself over her, then knitted together behind her, so that she was on the wrong side of the old reality. Or in an entirely new one. It was not a pleasant sensation, and if she’d been the screaming type, she would have screamed then. Not a long throat-tearing screech of terror, but a short, sharp yelp of surprise. As it was, she just said, ‘Oh my!’
Because the impossible had just happened again.
Her brain, obviously not used to such quick changes in the world about her, first interpreted what she saw lying on the wet shingles as a very large black bird, crashed to earth and dying, its wings twitching their last. Then she decided it was the black dog, bigger than it should be, and broken beyond repair.
The truth was just as surreal.
It was a man sprawled there as if he’d just fallen. He was on his back, his limbs at crazy angles, and he was dressed like Fred Astaire: top hat, white tie and tails. And white spats on patent leather shoes. Except that the hat, crushed beyond redemption, lay nearby, and one of the shoes was half off his foot.
S’n’J couldn’t see his face, and couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead, but she knew exactly who he was.
Mr Winter.
A ghost from a bygone age.
None of this can be happening! she complained, frightened to look any more and yet frightened to take her eyes off the mirror in case the view changed again when she looked directly at the scene.
Steeling herself, she tore her eyes away from the mirror and looked over her shoulder out of the car’s rear window.
The man was neither ghost nor optical illusion. He still lay there, one of his coat tails flapping lazily in the breeze.
Oh Jesus, God and little fishies! she thought, He was on the roof watching me and he fell off.
She climbed out of the car, her body no longer waiting for her mind to tell it what to do; it was responding to an emergency and acting of its own accord. If there was anything she could do to help the man on the ground, she would do it.
S’n’J went round to the far side of him, because his face was pointing at the house and because she didn’t want to start pulling him about in case his back was broken. She spotted the blood dripping from his mouth and swore. There was so much of it that he’d either bitten his tongue half off or he had internal injuries. It wasn’t lung blood, though, which was good. It wasn’t bright enough for that.
S’n’J squatted down beside him, entertaining a brief fantasy that he was going to jump up and grab her (like an ugly jack-in-the-box) which would be par for the course if this had been contained between the pages of a horror story. A quick visual check-over confirmed that this man was too badly broken to do that. One of his thighs had a thirty-degree kink in it, his right femur was surely snapped in several places, both his thumbs and his right shoulder appeared to be dislocated and his knuckles were badly lacerated. In short, he looked like someone who had fallen off a roof and landed badly. Even his clothes were ripped and smeared with the green moss from the roofing tiles. He was
not going to be jumping up at anything for a good long time, certainly not up at her.
But it was Mr Winter. There was no detailed physical description of him in the pages of Black Rock, only the way Snowy had visualized him, but he fitted the picture that had formed in S’n’J’s imagination, right down to the last detail.
She laid her fingers on the side of his throat, feeling for his carotid. His skin was cool and moist with the rain, but his heart was beating. And he was breathing quite regularly. This wasn’t a man about to pop his socks.
S’n’J pulled open one of his eyelids. His eye was rolled up. She could just see the edge of his smoky grey iris. She let the lid drop again, then prised his mouth open and felt inside. His tongue wasn’t bitten off and none of his teeth were loose, but there was plenty of blood about in there. She wasn’t sure where it was coming from unless it was from the back of his nose - he was breathing through his mouth, so it could be. He wasn’t inhaling it, either, so it was unlikely to be coming up from his stomach, unless he’d puked this lot. S’n’J wanted to roll him on his side and put him in the coma position so the blood ran out, but she was worried that his back might be broken and didn’t want to make it worse if it was. If he was conscious she could get an idea as to its state, but he was still out cold. The best thing she could do, she decided, was to call for an ambulance.
She looked at him for a few seconds, frowning. Then she gently slapped his cheek in a kind of patting motion. He didn’t stir. She hit him a little harder and when this didn’t work she went back towards the car to call for help. She could keep her eye on him while she waited for the ambulance to come. She wouldn’t let him choke.
Ignoring all the questions queuing up in her head that badly wanted answers, S’n’J snatched the phone out of the car, dropped it, retrieved it, distantly reminded herself about being a Vaudeville act looking for somewhere to perform, turned it on and punched three nines.