A Dark Dividing, page 17
I wish I knew why she wants to do this, thought Simone, and I wish I dare ask how she really gets to know all this stuff. I think I’d better help her with the well-cover, but then I’ll make an excuse and go. I’ll say I’m expected home—that’s true anyway. There was a faint, far-off reassurance about remembering Mother waiting for her in the cottage. Tomorrow was Saturday, and they quite often went out for the day somewhere on Saturday. They were exploring the villages and the little market towns, and it was pretty good.
‘We have to pull the cover towards us,’ said Sonia. ‘It isn’t bolted down, and it doesn’t hinge, or anything like that: it just slides. All right?’
‘Um, yes.’
Sonia was already half-kneeling down, grasping the rim of the well-cover. She looked a bit grotesque crouching down like that because of the lopsided shoulders but Simone tried not to notice. She unslung the leather camera-case and put it on top of Sonia’s sweater, then she knelt down and reached for the edge of the cover. It was cold and hard and over the years the iron had become pitted so that it felt scaly, like a dead snake. But once it was moved she could say about having to go home.
Sonia had been right about the cover being heavy. At first Simone thought they were not going to manage it, but at the second try it gave way a bit, making the kind of screechy rasping that scraped all the nerves in your teeth. A rim of blackness showed at the far end, and Sonia said, ‘Again!’ and they pulled harder. The blackness widened, and a faint sighing sound came from within the well’s depths. A dank, unwholesome stench gusted into their faces; Simone thought it was almost as if the well had breathed out.
Sonia said, ‘One more tug!’ and this time the ancient cover slid back and crashed on to the ground with a deafening clatter of wood and iron. Clouds of dust rose up making them both cough, and Simone’s heart performed several somersaults because the sound was so massive in this silent old place that surely it would disturb someone or something… But the echoes were already dying away and the dust was settling, and although the stove behind them creaked nastily from its corner as if it were considering coming to life, Simone knew that really it was only that the well-cover had jarred the rusting mechanism.
They both stared at the open well-shaft, while all round them Mortmain sank gradually back into its brooding quiet. Neither of them spoke, and Simone, glancing covertly at Sonia, thought Sonia had not been expecting the well to be quite so creepy. The opening was lined with black bricks and it was not very large—it might be about seven feet across—but everything about it was so extremely old and so dreadfully sinister.
Sonia was still kneeling down, peering into the well’s depths. The cold dank light from the bricks made hollows in her face so that there were black pits where her eyes were. Simone had moved back from the well, but even from where she was standing she could see the remains of an old rope looped across the well’s mouth. That would be where people had lowered a bucket to bring up water.
‘It smells disgusting,’ said Sonia, looking up at Simone. ‘And it looks as if it’s an awfully long way down.’ Her words made faint hissing echoes inside the well. An awfully long way down-down-down… An awfully long way, said the well in a black, evil-smelling whisper.
Sonia did not seem worried by this. She said, ‘I think I can see water at the bottom. Like a black glint. Wait a bit, and I’ll throw something down. A bit of broken floorstone or something—’
The stone dropped silently into the blackness, and after what seemed to Simone a very long time, there was a faint sound that might have been a dull splash or that might simply have been the floorstone hitting a solid floor. Sonia stood up, brushing the dust off her skirt. ‘It is deep, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Anyone who fell down there would never be able to get out again, would they?’
She regarded Simone consideringly, and Simone, horrified, thought, so that’s it. She’s got me out here to kill me. She’s going to throw me down the well, like something out of a stupid nursery rhyme, and then leave me. Except she won’t, because I won’t let her. She got up off her knees and began to move stealthily across to the door. Because I’m a whole lot stronger than she is, and if I can get to the door I’ll run away from her as fast as ever I can—
Sonia laughed, and the laugh was picked up by the well, so that for a moment it spun and shivered eerily all round Simone’s head. ‘Silly,’ she said. ‘I’m not intending to kill you. You didn’t really think that, did you?
‘Um, well, what are we going to do?’
‘We’ve already done it,’ said Sonia. ‘We’ve started the secret. You’ve helped me take the cover off and so the secret’s beginning. The pact’s being forged.’
I’m missing something, thought Simone. There’s something behind all this—I can practically hear her thinking it. It’s something to do with a plan she’s had for years and years, only she couldn’t carry out the plan on her own. She needed help with it—she needed me… For the well-cover? Yes, I think so. I think that’s why she got me here.
Sonia was smiling at Simone. ‘Once you’ve made a secret together, you’re bound to one another for ever,’ she said. ‘That’s what my—’ She stopped abruptly. She was about to tell me something about her home, thought Simone. But she stopped again because she doesn’t want me to know where she lives, or who her family are. Well, OK, I don’t want her to know where I live or who my family are.
She said, ‘But Sonia—um—if we leave the cover off someone might fall into the well.’
‘Yes,’ said Sonia, her eyes still on Simone. ‘That’s the whole point.’
‘But—but we can’t do that! We can’t possibly do that!’ Simone was already kneeling down again, grasping the well-cover and trying to push it back into place, but without Sonia to help her she could not do it.
‘You won’t do that on your own,’ said Sonia watching her. ‘It’s silly even to try. I couldn’t do it by myself, even though I have to do special exercises for my back, so my arms are probably a lot stronger than yours.’ Again the pleased, I’m-better-than-you, I’m-different-to-you tone.
Simone said, ‘Sonia, you must help me! We must put it back!’
‘No, we musn’t. I told you, this is the start of being blood-sisters. We’ll each know what we’ve done, but we’ll never be able to tell anyone else. Because if one gets into trouble for it, the other will as well.’
‘But it’d be murder!’ said Simone desperately. ‘If somebody falls in there and dies it’d be murder!’
‘Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?’ said Sonia very softly, and Simone understood properly then that this was Sonia’s plan, this was what she had wanted to do all along. She stared at Sonia in horror, and felt the familiar ruffling of her mind that meant Sonia’s thoughts were brushing against her own. She blinked, and for a moment, on the inside of her eyelids, there was the darting image of a woman with a rather plain face and straggly brown hair and worried hands. She felt Sonia’s hard cold dislike of the woman, as clearly as if she had put her hands inside a freezer and held them there.
That’s who she wants to kill, thought Simone in horror. She’s been planning it and working it out for years and years. It’s someone she hates—so much that it’s eating away at her. She tried to see the woman’s image more clearly: it was a bit blurry, a bit transparent at the edges, but she could see that the woman looked rather old-fashioned.
And then Sonia said, ‘Oh, if anyone falls in it’ll only be some smelly old tramp. They come in here or in the Paupers’ Dormitory, on account of this is the back of the house and if they make a fire on the stone floors the light can’t be seen from the road. If one of them comes in here in the dark he won’t see that this is a well; he’ll just think it’s a patch of shadow.’
Sonia was lying, of course. Simone could feel the lie in Sonia’s mind as if she was touching it. It was like touching a hangnail or a blister. She said, ‘Sonia, it doesn’t matter who it is! It’ll still be killing!’
‘I know it will.’ She moved closer and her hand curled around Simone’s again. ‘It’s going to be a brilliant secret for us to share, isn’t it?’
‘No—’
‘We’ll be able to talk about it—the private, thought-talking, I mean. I’ll keep coming out here—I told you, I’m supposed to cycle every afternoon—and I’ll tell you when we’ve caught someone.’
Simone said, ‘It’s the woman with brown hair you want to murder, isn’t it?’ and Sonia’s face twisted with fury.
‘How did you know about her?’
‘I saw her in your mind just now.’ This was the most peculiar conversation to be having, but Simone was not going to be put off. She said, ‘You can see into my mind, so why shouldn’t I be able to see into yours? I can’t do it often, but I can do it sometimes. You don’t like her, that woman, do you? Who is she? Is she your mother?’
‘No.’ It came out angrily. ‘She isn’t my mother,’ said Sonia, and this time there was an unexpected bleakness in her voice. ‘But I hate her.’
‘Why? Because she isn’t your mother?’
‘No.’ But Simone thought it came out a bit too loudly. ‘Because she smothers me,’ said Sonia. ‘I don’t mean she puts pillows over my face—’
‘No, I understand what you mean.’
‘She makes me listen to lots of old stories—I don’t mind that, although she goes on about it all the time. On and on. “Isn’t it interesting, Sonia?” she says. “Isn’t it nice that we share all this?” And she never lets me go out and see people—I hate that more than anything.’
When Sonia said all this Simone had another of those moments of awareness, and just for a few seconds there was the glimpse of a stifling home, rather old-fashioned, the brown-haired woman always there, always at Sonia’s side. Never going out anywhere, never seeing anyone else. The woman thought it was enough, though. We don’t need other people, do we? she sometimes said to Sonia. We have all we need here, with just the two of us.
Despite her fear Simone felt a pang of sympathy for Sonia, but she said firmly, ‘Listen, though, I can’t let you—um—kill someone. I’m going to push this thing back into place.’
‘You won’t be able to. It’s too heavy.’
But the wooden staves at one edge of the well-cover had splintered quite badly when it fell, and Simone managed to grip the iron frame itself. This time when she dragged the cover it yielded.
‘Don’t!’ shouted Sonia, and came forward in a lurching half run. She knocked Simone to the ground and they rolled across the dirty floor, locked together. Simone was perfectly at home with rough and tumble games, and playground scuffles, but for some reason the feel of Sonia’s body half on top of her like this felt wrong. Sonia’s eyes, staring down into Simone’s, were frightening. They were like twin black tunnels, and if you looked into them for too long you might see all kinds of terrible things and you might feel all kinds of dreadful emotions—Simone blinked and tried to look away and found she could not.
‘You’re not to stop me doing this,’ said Sonia in a hoarse angry voice. ‘You’re not to—It’s all right to hate people and to punish them! It is! It’s what they used to do—the children in the stories! The children who lived here!’
‘Get off me!’ shouted Simone, hardly hearing any of this. ‘You’re mad, I hate you!’ She struggled to push her off, but Sonia grabbed her throat and began to squeeze.
‘I won’t let you stop me!’ she said in the same furious half-whisper. Her fingers tightened around Simone’s throat: they felt like steel bands and a red mist started to form in front of Simone’s eyes. She’s strangling me! If I can’t get free of her, she’ll kill me! I’ll die! She had the wild thought that she could not possibly die here—she could not risk dying here—because of the ghosts. Once she was dead the ghosts would pounce on her because they hated her, she knew that already. They hated all ordinary children who had parents and homes, and they would take a revenge on Simone if they could. They would force her to be a workhouse child and make her sew shrouds, and they would lock her away behind the black clanging iron doors every night and even if she screamed and screamed for ever nobody would come to help her… On the crest of this thought she made one last huge effort and this time pushed Sonia backwards.
Sonia tumbled away from Simone, and went rolling and slithering across the floor. Simone had pushed very hard indeed and Sonia slid helplessly across the dusty floor in a jumble of arms and legs, trying to stop herself as she went.
But she did not stop herself. She skidded all the way to the edge of the open well, and as Simone shakily picked herself up from the floor Sonia fell over the edge and went straight down into the sour blackness.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE SOUND SHE made as she fell was like a night wind whistling through an ancient cavern, or a train going through a tunnel in the middle of the night. It seemed to Simone’s horrified senses to go on and on for an eternity, but just as she was starting to be afraid that it would never stop it cut off abruptly, and there was a sort of dull squelching thud. And then silence.
Simone had absolutely no idea what to do. She was still feeling a bit wobbly from Sonia’s attack, but although she was not hurt she thought that when she could stop trembling she was going to be very frightened indeed.
And, most terrifying of all, it was not completely silent in here after all. As she began to walk warily towards the well she was aware of little sighings and creakings all round her. She thought that if she listened hard enough she might hear voices inside those sighings. The ghosts, murmuring to one another like gossipy old women, or like children giggling and telling secrets in a corner of a playground? Shall we take this one…? Yes, she’d do very nicely, wouldn’t she…? Let’s take her, and we’ll make her sew shrouds and scrub floors alongside the rest of us… She looks pampered and properly-fed and nicely-clothed—let’s show her what it’s like to be a pauper, nobody’s child, unwanted, unloved…
Yes, if she was hearing anything she would be hearing the ghosts. But I won’t listen, thought Simone firmly. In any case ghosts can’t hurt you, not really.
Oh, can’t we? said the whisperings. Are you sure about that, Simone…?
I’m not listening, said Simone in her mind to the ghosts. I’ll try to see what’s happened to Sonia, and then I’ll think what to do next.
What she actually wanted to do was run out of Mortmain as fast as her feet would carry her, and burst into tears in her own house and hear Mother say everything was all right. She was dreadfully afraid that Sonia was dead, but if she was only injured and if an ambulance came out here at top speed—Simone knew about calling for an ambulance; she knew about dialling 999 in an emergency. She tried to remember if there was a phone box anywhere along the road, and could not.
She leaned over the edge of the well-shaft. ‘Sonia?’ she said cautiously, and then a bit louder, ‘Sonia? Can you hear me? Can you speak?’
The well seized on the words and sent them spinning back at her.
Sonia, Sonia… Speak, Sonia, speak, speak…
And what will you do, said Simone’s mind, if Sonia does speak? What will you do if a dead, echoing voice comes whispering up out of the darkness, and says, ‘Yes, I’m dead, and I’m dead because you murdered me, Simone’…?
It felt like a very long time before Simone finally managed to crawl back from the well and scramble across the room and out into the corridor beyond. Gasping with fear and panic she ran through Mortmain’s empty darkness, and as she ran it seemed that all the ghosts reared up from the dark corners and ran alongside her.
It’s no use trying to escape, Simone… We know what you did… We saw everything… We know what is and what has been, Simone… And wherever you run to, we’ll catch you… You’re a murderess, Simone… A murderess…
Along the narrow corridors with the watching iron stoves in their corners, and through the refectory with its sad echoes—I’m almost there now, I’m almost at the front of Mortmain, and the door that leads outside…
Don’t go, Simone… Stay here with us…
The shadows were very dark now; they were like black bony goblin-fingers and at any minute they might reach out to snatch at her ankles… Simone ran on, praying that she was going in the right direction. Once she did take a wrong turning, and found herself going down a passage that did not seem to lead anywhere. Thick swathes of cobwebs dripped from the low ceiling and stirred in the gust of air made by her frantic running; they floated outwards like thin ghost-fingers, brushing her face. She shuddered and pushed them away, and then retraced her steps, this time choosing a passage more or less at random, but then seeing with thankfulness the familiar outline of the central hall, with the decayed stairs, and the cracked floor.
And the half-open door leading out to the hill.
Mother was in the kitchen, stirring a huge pot of what smelt like chili con carne, which was Simone’s absolute favourite Friday-night supper, on account of they always had wedges of French bread with it to mop up the delicious sauce.
She looked up to smile when Simone came in, and started to ask how the rehearsal had gone, and then she stopped. Simone supposed she must look pretty awful; she was dirty and cobwebby, and she had torn her school skirt, and she was still shaking so hard she thought she might break into little pieces.
Mother said in her all-time best voice—the voice that shut out all the bad things in the world and made Simone feel safe—‘Sim darling, what’s wrong?’
And Simone, who had been trying very hard indeed not to cry, sat down on the kitchen chair and put her head on the kitchen table that smelt of chopped tomatoes and spices and home, and burst into tears, and said, ‘I’ve killed somebody.’
It took a long time to explain, and it was quite difficult to tell Mother about knowing Sonia and about talking to her all these years. But she did the best she could, and she talked quickly because of getting help to Sonia who might still be alive.
