Forty-Six

It was almost five o’clock in the afternoon when the emergency number was dialled from Pennystone Road.

The call came from the row of shops opposite the house.

‘You’d better send someone to 3a,’ they said.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Come and hear for yourself,’ the caller said.

By the time that the police arrived five minutes later, a small handful of people were on the pavement outside. Two uniformed constables got out of the car. A man immediately grabbed the nearest officer’s arm. ‘Been going on twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Hear that? Hear it?’

They could.

From somewhere deep inside the house, came several voices. Two were plainly female. Another was male. And another … well, it was hard to tell what the other was.

‘Bloody well murdering some animal,’ one woman said.

The rain teemed on the small crowd, bouncing off the pavement. The man who had called them was hunched against the wind, his coat collar pulled up about his face.

‘Have you been in?’ the officer asked him.

‘Have I hell as like,’ he retorted.

‘Has anyone come out?’

‘No one.’

The officers ran up the drive, through the overhanging shadows of the trees. They found the front door barred, the boarding still in place. Each window was similarly obscured. But the side gate was open.

The blackberry trailers clung to the gate as they pushed on it, and, once inside, they slipped on the moss-grown path. Yet someone had plainly been through here. There was no boarding on the back door, and it hung open on a slant, wrenched from the top hinges.

They went in, following the noise through to the dark hall. There, in the thread of light from the back rooms, they could see that the floor was littered with rubble—plaster, brick, wood. The understairs cupboard door lay on the top. The noise was coming from inside.

The first officer leaned down. What had evidently been a partition had been pulled down, along with its plastered surface. The bricks that had been pulled away had been filling what had originally been the top of the stairs to the cellar. Now there was a gap, wide enough for a man to crawl through, and the first few treads of the steps leading down were visible. From below, the unearthly screaming rolled upwards and out of the torn-through entry. There was light down there, too. The small and wavering light of candles.

‘Who’s down there?’ the first man called.

He was not heard. The screaming continued: wailing, begging. Then, quite suddenly, it stopped, and they could make out a man’s voice, gasping and stumbling over swiftly spoken words. He was half crying, half whispering. Somewhere further back still, another dark voice stuttered over indistinguishable syllables. Both voices sounded like prayers. Or incantations. Or curses.

The officer tried to wriggle through the gap. ‘Get on the radio and ask for back-up,’ he told the other man. ‘I’m going to see what we’ve got here.’

He edged through the hole between the remaining bricks, and put his foot uneasily on the stair. He could hear the women again now. He bent down and tried to see into the cellar. The stair ran steeply to the bottom, some fifteen or twenty feet down, where it met a wall. The light and the voices came from the left.

‘Police,’ the officer called. He felt a draught of air running up the stairs. The back of his neck tingled. He went down the stairs, feeling his way over rough concrete. There was soot in here—he could feel it on his fingertips. There was smoke.

‘Police,’ he repeated.

The woman’s voice ricocheted around him. ‘Don’t!’ she cried.

The man reached the bottom of the stairs. There, he saw that the cellar stretched away in front of him for perhaps thirty feet or more, descending into pitch black, so that the farthest walls could not be seen. In the centre of the earth floor was a hole deeper than a grave. All that the officer could make out was two women kneeling at the edge. Neither was looking down. They crouched at the edge of the pit, looking up as if they could see through the limewashed roof five or six feet over their heads.

The policeman stumbled forward.

‘What’s happening?’ called the other man from the top of the stairs.

‘Don’t let him do it,’ one woman said.

The first man couldn’t understand, for the life of him, what the other noise was. It was like nothing he had ever heard before, a strange mixture. It was like a small child, little more than a baby, caught in a storm of frustration, gutturally choking over its own forced tears. It was like the succumbing slump of some kind of animal, hitting the floor in a slaughterhouse, the breath pushed out of its heavy body. The two notes alternated in terrible harmony.

‘Peter …’ the girl cried.

The candle flame guttered.

‘What’s going on?’ the officer said.

The light went out.

Something came up from the floor. It didn’t feel as if it were from the direction of the grave. Something came up from the very ground under his feet. He thought for a moment that he had somehow stepped into water, and lurched backwards. But the sensation remained with him in the dark, swarming rapidly up his body. A broad, heavy blast of pressure pushed his body against the wall and knocked his head against the stone.

‘Peter!’ the woman screamed.

An implosion sucked the room in, down. There was nothing at all for a moment: no sound, no air, no light—just a dropping vacancy, as if the entire house had hurtled downwards, as if the earth had given way and all of them—house, voices, grave, steps, everything, the dark hallway, the shattered doors and bricks, the tangled mass of the garden, the grimy dark glass windows, had plunged into a hole that had opened in space.

At the top of the stairs, the second police officer was also pushed back by the pressure from inside the cellar. He lost his footing, and fell against the wall. He pressed his radio almost by reflex.

‘Fire Service,’ he said, without any preamble.

‘Tony—what is it?’

‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Explosion. Don’t know.’

He realized that he was slumped on the floor. He couldn’t remember falling. He looked at the ground around him, and saw with a kind of objective interest that it was littered with glass. He picked a piece up. It was green and gold. There was a piece of lead attached to one side.

‘Is it still Pennystone Road, Tony?’ the voice asked on his radio.

With a frustratingly slow effort, he depressed the switch for the second time. ‘Pennystone Road,’ he repeated.

He looked up.

Rain was coming in. Rain was falling hard on the thousands of pieces of glass that were scattered between him and the stairs. The enormous stained-glass window had gone, and the overgrown trees of the garden lashed against the empty frame. He stared at the living picture, which looked as if the window had come to life. Leaves flew in on the rain and fell among the glass, and he looked down at the steps and saw the little veins in the leaves pricking an iridescent pattern against the green. Each leaf moved. Each step moved. The colours in the glass heaved with life; they threaded together like a loosely woven carpet, until every inch of space on the dusty floor was obliterated, and replaced with a writhing mass.

‘Tony!’ someone shouted.

He tried to get up.

It was hard. Hard because the violent life under his feet clung to his hands as he tried to lever himself from the floor. The house was filling with a fast-forward three-dimensional portrait of life, plunged into overdrive—gestating, blooming, climbing, ripening, decaying and dying in the space of seconds. He walked a pace or two, steps clouded by the green tide at his feet.

‘Tony!’

It was coming from the cellar.

He waded towards it, over the remains of the partition and door, dipping his head into the darkness. To his utter astonishment, he saw water. Water coming up the cellar steps. Water swirling closer to the mouth of the hallway door.

‘Jesus,’ he muttered. He kneeled down and saw the other officer half-way up the steps. In front of the man was a woman. Behind him, another had her arms around his neck. And, somehow between them, they were carrying a second man, whose unconscious head rolled back into the water. He was white, his lips beginning to turn blue.

‘Catch hold of him,’ the officer said. ‘For God’s sake!’

The first woman reached the top of the stairs. Here, she stopped, and, between them, they hauled the other woman forward. She thrashed in the water only once before circling the two men. Then, she held up the unconscious man’s head.

‘Pull,’ muttered the officer in the water.

They did. The body shifted up and forward; they snatched at Peter York’s arms and hauled, dragging him to the first step, and through the gap.

‘Get out of there!’ the policeman yelled.

The second woman crawled out; the officer followed. Water seethed behind them.

‘Get out, get out, get out,’ the first man said between gritted teeth. They went along the hall towards the garden, half dragging and half carrying York, slung between them like a dead weight. As they reached the back door and fell out into the rain, the officer who had been in the hall felt a tug from behind him.

He turned around.

It was nothing like horror. It was not even fear. It was something supple and clinging, there in the dark. An imperative, a demand. He felt a soft wet hand pass over his face, and settle on his mouth, prising his lips with narrow fingers.

He let out a cry, and sprang back, stumbling down into the knee-high grass of the old lawn, where the others were grouped. Peter York lay on the ground. The two girls held hands, wet to the skin, their clothes plastered to them. The rain hammered on them all. They heard, as if from a great distance, the sirens of the fire engines, howling along the road. They heard the screeching of brakes, the raised voices at the front of the house.

The second police officer wiped his face. Then wiped his hand on his coat, to take away the feel of his own wet skin.

‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘What the bloody hell happened?’