Broken Voices (Kindle Single) Page 6

  Mordred disgraced himself again. He brought in another mouse, which he played with, despite our attempts to stop him, and then allowed to escape for the time being into the relatively safe haven of the floor beneath the piano. During the struggle he scratched my hand, drawing blood. Finally he went to sleep on the hearthrug with the air of a job well done.

  ‘I’m so sorry he injured you again,’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘He’s quite unteachable, I’m afraid, and I suspect he doesn’t have a very nice nature to begin with.’

  ‘Why do you keep him then, sir?’ Faraday asked.

  ‘One must try to make the best of animals, don’t you think? And of people, for that matter. He’s a farm cat by breeding, you see. Mrs Thing’s sister is married to a farmer, and I believe he came from there… But farm cats never truly adjust to living in houses. They never quite lose their wildness.’

  At last it was time for bed. The sky was still cloudy but the rain had gone, and most of the wind. It was colder.

  ‘We’ll have snow before long, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Mr Ratcliffe said.

  Faraday nudged me behind Mr Ratcliffe’s back. This time I kicked him. I was growing tired of his nudges.

  Mordred rose and stretched. He stalked out of the sitting room and sat by the front door, where he miaowed like a rusty hinge.

  ‘Let him out, would you?’ Mr Ratcliffe said.

  I opened the door. Mordred slunk outside and disappeared into the darkness.

  ‘Where does he go at night, sir?’ I asked.

  ‘Mordred? Heaven knows. Better not to enquire.’

  ‘He can’t stay outside all night, can he? Not in this weather.’

  ‘I’m sure he manages quite well.’ Mr Ratcliffe locked up and hung the key on the hook beside the front door. ‘He’s not an animal to go without his creature comforts.’

  In our bedroom, I began to undress.

  ‘Don’t take too much off,’ Faraday hissed. ‘There’s no point. It’ll probably be freezing.’

  ‘I’m tired. Let’s do it tomorrow.’

  ‘No, it’s got to be tonight. We need to get the key back tomorrow. Besides, it’s going to snow. If we wait till after that we’ll leave tracks.’

  I shrugged. ‘This is stupid.’

  ‘I know what it is,’ Faraday said. ‘You’re yellow.’

  ‘I’m not yellow.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  We glared at each other across the room.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s easy enough to prove it, isn’t it?’

  I said nothing. But I put on my pyjamas over my underclothes.

  He was still watching me. His face was flushed. ‘We’ll have to wait until Ratty’s in bed and fast asleep.’

  ‘It’ll be hours.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’ll stay awake.’

  We got into bed. I didn’t bother reading. I turned on my side, away from Faraday, and closed my eyes. I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I was too angry. Too afraid. So I sent up a prayer to my provisional God, promising to believe in Him for the rest of my life if He made Faraday fall asleep at once and stay asleep until morning.

  11

  Later, much later, I was wrenched from a deep sleep. Faraday was standing over me. He hadn’t lit the gas but a candle was burning on the mantelpiece, sending the shadows flickering across the room.

  ‘Go away,’ I said and shut my eyes again.

  ‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘It’s time.’

  He pulled back the covers and cold air washed over me. I sat up abruptly and pushed him away.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘Mad as a coot.’ I tried to pull the covers back over me.

  ‘You’re yellow,’ he said. ‘Yellow.’

  I swore at him and swung my legs out of bed. The bed creaked.

  ‘Don’t make a noise,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up, you ape. Bloody Rabbit. Go to hell.’

  I pulled on the rest of my clothes, fumbling interminably with the buttons. Faraday opened the door. Carrying our shoes, we tiptoed out of the room and down the stairs. At every step we paused to listen for sounds from Mr Ratcliffe’s bedroom.

  We reached the hall without mishap and put on our shoes, hats and coats. We took it in turns to shield the candle flame, for light can betray you as much as noise.

  By now I was fully awake. It would be too much to say that I was entering into the spirit of the thing but taking second place to Faraday was beginning to irk me. I pushed him aside when he was about to lift the key from its hook. I was the one who unlocked the door and lifted the heavy latch. It made much less noise than I had expected. We slipped outside and closed the door behind us.

  There were still clouds, though fewer and wispier than before and moving rapidly across the sky. The stars shone down between them.

  We crossed the yard in front of the Sacrist’s Lodging and let ourselves out through the gate in the wall. The lawn that bordered the east end of the Cathedral was covered in frost. Two of the lamps that burned all night stood at this end of the College — one nearby, at the gate leading to the north door, the other on the far side of the lawn. Yellow coronas of moisture hung around their lamps.

  ‘We had better walk across the grass,’ Faraday whispered in my ear. ‘Quieter.’

  We tiptoed across the gravel path and set off across the lawn in the direction of the further light.

  ‘Where the devil are we going?’ I said. ‘How are we going to get inside?’

  He ignored me. He ploughed on, head down against the cold wind. I plodded after him.

  ‘God, it’s freezing,’ I whispered.

  ‘I feel boiling. Come on.’

  Faraday led us right round the east end of the church and down to the flagged path leading to the south door. I glanced back. Our ragged footprints marched across the frosty grass. We were now in the larger, grander part of the College, where the houses of the Dean and Chapter were.

  I looked about us. All the windows I could see were in darkness. But there were more lamps here, stretching down the road leading to the Porta and the Veals’ house.

  Faraday made for the south door.

  I hurried after him. ‘What are you doing? It’ll be locked.’

  He took no notice but led the way into the south porch. This had been formed by an accident of history from the one surviving fragment of the east walk of the mediaeval cloister.

  It was darker here but Faraday did not slacken his place. I blundered after him. He stopped abruptly just before the door into the Cathedral and I bumped into him.

  He didn’t try to open the door. Instead he moved to the left. There was another door here, much smaller, set in a square-headed archway. He reached up, as high as he could, and ran his fingertips along the top of the lintel, palpating the stone. I heard a faint chink. A key turned in the lock. The door scraped open and a current of cool air smelling of candles swept out to meet us.

  Faraday took my arm and drew me after him through the doorway. It was much darker here, an enclosed space. Faraday closed the door behind us.

  ‘Where are we?’ I whispered.

  ‘The choir vestry.’

  ‘But the door for that’s in the nave.’

  He laughed, showing his knowledge. ‘This is the other door. Dr Atkinson uses it when he needs to come in at night, or early in the morning, when the Cathedral’s locked. He sent me to fetch something once. He said it could be useful for the head of choir to know where to find the key.’

  ‘You’re not head of the choir now,’ I said, too scared to be kind. ‘You’re not even in the choir.’

  Faraday lit a match. We were in a long room with the central aisle across which benches faced each other. There was a grand piano at the far end, with a dozen or so music stands huddled together like a herd of skeletal creatures. This was where the choir practised.

  Before the flame had died, Faraday had reached a cupboard and opened its door. He asked me to light and hold up another match.

  ‘We mustn’t risk the gas,’
he said. ‘But there are some candles here.’

  Most of the shelves held books of music. But the top shelf was filled with a jumble of objects, through which Faraday rummaged while I lit match after match. He unearthed three candle stumps, a candle lantern and another box of matches. He lit one of them, put it in the lantern and closed the glass. A faint radiance spread through the vestry. It made me feel better. It made what we were doing seem a little less strange.

  Holding up the lantern, Faraday opened a desk that stood at the far end of the room. In a moment he gave a little cry of triumph and held up a long key.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘The door from the choir vestry to the Cathedral.’

  ‘All these keys without labels,’ I said. ‘Old Veal would have a fit if he knew.’

  We snorted with suppressed laughter, the tension forcing its way out as a bubble of mirth.

  ‘Atky doesn’t let him in here,’ Faraday said. ‘They hate each other.’

  He unlocked the door into the Cathedral. This was nine feet tall beneath a pointed archway; I had often seen the choir marching through it, two by two, processing into the Cathedral in their cassocks and surplices.

  We passed into the south aisle. Faraday pulled the door to behind us but did not latch it.

  For a moment we stood still, shocked by the immense, cold darkness around us. We were in the belly of a huge and unimaginably heavy stone beast. I had been scared before — but what I felt now was something different — terror, yes, but there was an element of awe mixed in with it. At night the Cathedral lost its familiarity and became strange.

  ‘Oh God.’ Faraday sounded close to tears. ‘It’s horrible.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s just dark, that’s all. You’re not scared, are you?’

  It was bravado that made me say that, together with the desire to contradict and needle Faraday. The more signs of fear he showed, the more my bravado increased.

  ‘Come on, Rabbit. We haven’t got all night.’

  We set off down to the south aisle, which would take us the length of the nave to the west tower. At first we walked slowly and then more quickly. I tried to suppress the idea that there might be someone behind us.

  I glanced upward. I could not even see the vault of the aisle. On our right were the massive pillars of the nave, looming palely like a line of great grey oak trees. The lantern cast a puddle of light on the grounds, enough to see where we were going, but little else.

  Faraday touched my arm. ‘We had better stay together.’ I felt his hand sliding around my elbow and gripping it. ‘If - if we hold onto each other, we can’t get lost.’

  He spoke in a whisper. All the time we were in the Cathedral that night, we spoke in whispers — except, of course, at the end. I felt there was a danger that we might be overheard: that someone or something was listening.

  12

  For me, the worst thing at that point was not the darkness but the sound of our footsteps on the flagstones. Try as we might, we could not walk quietly. Our steps sounded louder than usual, but muffled and dead, as if sinking into cotton wool.

  At the end of the aisle we came to the south-west transept and the west tower. Our footsteps changed as they entered these wider, taller spaces. They sharpened and acquired an echo.

  Faraday’s grip tightened. ‘Did you hear that? Someone’s behind us.’

  ‘Don’t talk rot. You’re getting windy. Let’s go and look for your beastly anthem.’

  Clinging to each other, we crossed to the door leading to the tower stairs. Faraday let go of me while he fumbled for the key he had borrowed from Mr Veal. I had privately cherished the hope that it would turn out to be the wrong key. But it turned sweetly in the lock.

  The door opened outwards. We pulled it to its full extent, so it grated against the wall. The light from the lantern showed only the first two or three steps, spiralling in a clockwise direction into the utter blackness above.

  We climbed, side-by-side, for the staircase at the lower level was wide enough for this. The air became colder and colder. After the vastness of the nave, the enclosed space pressed in on us. I was soon out of breath — from the climb and from fear. So was Faraday. Our laboured breathing was deafening. I wanted to put my hands over my ears.

  At first I tried to count the steps as a distraction. We had been told that the west tower had nearly three hundred of them. But I lost my concentration somewhere in the forties. Then it was just us with no distractions: our footsteps, our breathing and the light from our lantern sliding ahead into the darkness.

  Faraday’s breathing became irregular. He sniffed. Once or twice he gave an audible sob which he tried to disguise with a cough. He was crying. I pretended to ignore it.

  I felt dizzy. I kept staggering against the outer wall of the staircase. It felt increasingly unnatural to be turning only in one direction and my body was making futile attempts to correct the situation.

  We came at last to a small landing with a door set in the wall. There was no lock, only a latch. I lifted it and pulled the door open. I felt a current of air on my face.

  ‘What’s that?’ Faraday said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought I saw something. Over there.’ He pointed over my shoulder, through the archway. ‘A — sort of shadow.’

  ‘That’s just what it was,’ I said. ‘Stop being so jumpy.’

  I stepped through the archway. We were on the walkway that ran behind the arcade across the west wall. Faraday held up the lantern. The arcading stretched away from us to the right; a miniature, almost domesticated version of the great pillars and arches that marched up either side of the nave.

  Automatically my hand felt for the iron railing that ran between the pillars of the arcade. There was no other barrier between us and a drop of ninety-odd feet to the floor of the tower. It was a thin iron rod, cold and rough to the touch.

  ‘It’s too narrow,’ Faraday wailed. ‘We can’t go side by side.’

  ‘Give me the lantern. Hold on to the belt of my coat.’

  In the daytime, when we had been taken up the tower, this passage had been exciting, with its views into the tower and the body of the church right up to the huge east window beyond the choir. We had laughed at the squashed figures moving below and made jokes about dropping things on them.

  By night the passage was terrifying. I was standing on the edge of the world and the slightest misstep could send me tumbling away into the darkness.

  I made myself let go of the rail. I focused my eyes on the light on the floor of the walkway, on the line on the left where it met the tower wall. I marched forward at a slow but steady pace, towing Faraday behind me.

  On the far side, there was an archway. I passed beneath it and slumped against the wall. I felt the cold, rough stone against my cheek. I was trembling. I felt sick. I felt triumphant.

  We were at the foot of another flight of steps, narrower than the first.

  ‘Nearly there,’ I said. My voice sounded like a stranger’s.

  We began to climb. Faraday stayed behind me, holding my belt. I reassured myself with the thought of all the people who must have climbed the stairs and walked across the arcade above the tower — the bell-ringers, the workmen, the tourists: hundreds of them, at least, if not thousands over the eight centuries this tower had stood here. It hadn’t harmed them, and they had all come safely back to the ground. So why should it harm us?

  But something had harmed Mr Goldsworthy.

  This staircase was much shorter than the first, for the arcade was not far below the tower’s painted ceiling. We came to another little landing, this one with a door. There was also a third, even narrower spiral staircase that continued the ascent of the tower. But we were going no higher.

  I opened the door. As I did so, something touched my ankles. I glanced down but nothing was there. I thought I would have heard a rat on these hard surfaces. And would a rat climb this high without the lure of food? The touch h
ad been so light it could have been a draught of air.

  ‘Is this it?’ Faraday said. ‘Are we here?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This is what you wanted, the place where they used to ring the bells.’

  ‘Where Mr Goldsworthy fell from.’

  ‘I tell you one thing, Rabbit: I’m not going any higher.’

  ‘All right. It’s here somewhere. I’m sure.’

  ‘For God’s sake be careful.’

  We advanced slowly into the ringing chamber. In daylight, it was bright enough — there were great windows on all four sides. It occupied the entire internal area of the tower. I looked up, remembering from my last visit a floor of huge, roughly trimmed planks on the network of beams. I couldn’t see anything at all above our heads. A sense of futility washed over me.

  ‘You won’t find anything here,’ I said. ‘This is stupid. It would have been better to come in daytime, if you had to come at all.’

  ‘It’s not stupid. Anyway we agreed — we’d have been seen if we’d come in the day.’

  ‘Well, you’re here now. Hurry up and find it.’

  ‘We can search with the lantern. Maybe... maybe there’s a loose stone or a board that lifts up or—’

  ‘And maybe pigs fly,’ I interrupted. ‘You can look if you want. I’m staying here. But don’t take long or I’ll leave without you. And I’ll leave you in the dark.’

  Faraday took the lantern from me and held it up. All it did was emphasize how much darkness there was. He looked so forlorn, holding up the lantern, so pathetic, like one of those sentimental engravings my aunt had in her drawing room with titles like ‘His Father’s Son’ or ‘The Light of the World’.

  He went down on his hands and knees and crawled slowly across the room, examining each board. He was such a ridiculous sight, a black blob on all fours, an enormous nocturnal insect. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. Most of all, I wanted to escape from the Cathedral, go back to the Sacrist’s Lodging, crawl into my bed and pull the covers over my head.