Go back to bed, forget it. Don’t think about tomorrow night either, or how you’re going to organize it; if it’s meant to happen, it will; if it isn’t, let it go, let the original decision stand, no Wil Williams in the church, thank you. Thank you and, if necessary, goodbye. She pulled the bathroom door closed behind her.
Something rushed at her from the blackness. In a vivid instant, she had the clear impression of a hard nucleus of bitter cold, rolling along the lightless passage like a soiled, grey snowball, rapidly gathering momentum, frigidity.
She shrank away, flattened herself against the bathroom door, turned her head into the wall.
The cold hit her. It stank of misery. It wrapped itself around her, a frigid winding sheet. She couldn’t breathe.
She squirmed.
At the end of the passage, a light hung over the stairs.
The light was a lean, vertical smear. It wasn’t much, promised no warmth, but she reached out for it, her hands groping for the stair-rail on the landing.
Should she try to run downstairs? She looked down. She tried to call down to Lol, who might not even be there. There was no easier name to say, but she couldn’t say it. ‘L ... L ...’ Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and all that emerged was a sound like an owl-hoot, weak and lonely, and looking down the stairs was like looking down an endless, cold, black well.
The only way was up.
She looked up, just as the light flared over the stairs, like a small, contained area of sheet lightning behind cloud and she was briefly caught in its periphery, which sent a jagged shock into her still-tightened chest, and she stumbled in panic, fell forward on to the stairs into a clinging, damp vapour, dense with particles of fleeing light, and the wooden stairs under her were very rough and the air around her cold. Cold for January, desperately cold for May. She pulled herself up and was nearly pulled down again because her heart was so packed with pain.
Despair. A worm of liquid despair wriggling inside her. The light flared again for a moment, and she felt a penetrating agony in her chest as she toppled into the attic.
There was no sound but the whine of the night wind in the exposed roof timbers and her own breathing.
As she pulled herself up, the tightness fell away and she breathed odourless air. Stood, panting on the top floor of the vicarage, a place of dreams, where there were no doors. No bedroom, no sitting room/study.
No Jane.
Only a long empty space, with a sloping roof, where something cold and naked, wretchedly embracing an unending misery, metamorphosed for a wild, defiant instant into a spinning, swirling, silken vortex of silver-grey and then was gone.
39
Levels
DOWNSTAIRS IN THE drawing room of the vicarage, the lights were on. There were brown, smoking embers in the grate. She was wearing a shapeless, green polo-neck jumper over a white nightdress. It was still night. She’d lost a sandal. She felt cold and drained and heartbroken.
And didn’t know why.
‘She’s sleeping,’ Lol said. ‘I went back and stuck my head around the door. She’s fine. Everything’s normal.’
‘Except me.’ Merrily threw coal on the fire. She would never be warm again.
Lol contemplated her seriously through his glasses, round and brass-rimmed like some old, nautical telescope.
She said, ‘Where was I?’
‘At the top of the stairs. Swaying about. I thought you were going to fall’
‘What did you see? What was it like? Was it a kind of big, open space? Rough joists. Damp ...’ Her voice faded. She knew what he was going to say.
‘It was normal. Just like now.’
‘You didn’t go to the right place,’ she said.
‘Maybe not.’ He sat her down on the sofa and positioned himself at the other end, his back against the arm. Ethel jumped into his lap. ‘Maybe not, no.’
Seconds passed. He was thinking.
She said, ‘You’re still wearing your vicar’s gear.’
Absurd reversal of roles.
‘Mm.’ He was calmer than she’d seen him, or maybe that was merely relative to her own condition.
‘Time is it, Lol?’
‘About twenty past one.’
‘You been back long?’ His sleeping bag was on the rug in front of the fire, still rolled up.
‘Hour or so. I was wandering around the garden for a while. Thinking things out.’ He looked down at his black chest. ‘Scared to take these off, I suppose. This guy looks at things objectively.’
‘Let’s put some more coal on the fire,’ Merrily said.
She told him about all the times it had happened before, from that first night when she thought she’d followed Jane and she’d kept opening doors and wound up at the foot of the stairs, looking up to the third floor.
She shut her eyes and rolled her head slowly around, small bones creaking at the back of her neck.
‘And then Sean.’
‘Your husband?’
‘My dead husband. I know it wasn’t a dream, because ...’
She told him about the door handle which fell out again, proving she’d been in the empty bedroom when she saw him and not in her own bed, dreaming.
In the fireplace, cool yellow flames were swarming over the new coal. Lol pushed in the poker.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I did wake up in bed, and it was morning, and I thought it had been a dream. It was a hallucination, I suppose. I went into that room and I hallucinated Sean. A source of guilt, because I didn’t help him when he needed help. But he didn’t want me to. He had another woman.’
‘You’re the kind of person always feels responsible.’
‘Jane tell you that?’
‘No. I’ve actually started figuring things out for myself.’ He prodded at a cob of coal until it developed fissures and opened up and let more flames through.
‘If it’s not the house,’ Merrily said, ‘it has to be me.’
‘Could it be a combination of both? You and the house setting something off in each other? Or you and the house ... and Jane?’
‘Yeah, I know. Like adolescents cause poltergeist phenomena. I’ve heard all that. But this doesn’t happen to Jane. Nothing happens to Jane here.’
‘Only in the orchard.’
He looked into the fire for a while and then he said, ‘This question of different floors. When you’ve read lots of books on psychology like me ... That’s what I used to read in hospital. They had a library, for the doctors and the staff, with a resident librarian, and I got to know her, and that’s where I used to spend ... days. Whole days, I suppose. Reading books on psychology and psychiatric syndromes. Some of it made more sense than the patronizing crap I was getting from most of the staff.’
‘How did you stand it?’
‘Time passes,’ Lol said. ‘You don’t notice. But, anyway ... levels. The floor where you’re sleeping, that’s
