Dark Dance Read online

  The light was gone.

  Had she mistaken it—some trick of shadow?

  She reached out slowly and found the matches, the candle on the bedside table. She must strike this primal glow into being, and see.

  Rachaela struck the match.

  A man sat in the chair, black on blackness, pallor on the black.

  Uncle Camillo... Camillo the trickster had broken into her room.

  Her hands numbed, she put the match to the candle and took it up. Its light soaked out and the man was really there.

  It was not Camillo.

  He said, ‘You like storms.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t like finding strangers in my room.’

  ‘Not a stranger, Rachaela.’

  Even seated, he was tall. She could not make out what he wore, dark things. His hair was black, outlining his face, doing no more than that. The face itself was an image of light and shade, clear bones cloaked in skin. He was not old, her age, perhaps. But his eyes were not like the eyes of any of them, black and still as pools of paint.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Rachaela said, steadily, ‘I want you to get out. Now.’

  ‘But I’m looking at you. I’ve had to wait nearly thirty years. I’m interested.’

  His face was devastatingly familiar. It was like her own.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘One of the Scarabae?’

  ‘The last, but for you,’ he said.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ she said, ‘that you are my father.’

  ‘There’s nothing to you of your mother. Did she never reproach you that you looked like me?’

  Unbidden, her mother’s face rose up in her brain, the unliking look, the hostility always there. A mother who did not confide, never consoled, told stories of dark things, the wolf that blew down the piggy’s house...

  ‘You’re much too young to be my father.’

  ‘I look younger than I am. As you do, Rachaela.’

  He said her name as if he tasted it.

  She would not pull up the sheets to cover the nightdress, would not look away.

  ‘You must be mad,’ she said. ‘Mad if you are my father, mad if you aren’t.’

  ‘Where else would I be but here?’ he said.

  The lightning came again then, and the thunder on its wings. Some draught or vibration snuffed the candle as in the most clichéd drama of fiction.

  And in the pitch dark, she heard the chair whisper, the door murmur to itself, opened. Closing.

  Chapter Four

  They were dressed just as she had foreseen, in long coats and boots, scarves about their necks, gloves on their hands. He wore a battered old hat and she a head-square unsuitably brightly coloured. Both wore sunglasses with thick rims. Clad for the Swiss Alps. They poised in attitudes of wonderment.

  Rachaela had cornered them in their kitchen, alerted by Anna the previous evening: ‘Tomorrow Cheta and Carlo will be going to the cottages. Do you have your list? They will leave early.’

  Rather than hand the list to Cheta, Rachaela presented herself in person at eight o’clock in the kitchen, whose whereabouts she had located by watching them head along a narrow passage which led from the hall.

  Carlo she had glimpsed in the garden meanwhile, tugging at the winter weeds. The garden was prolific and unruly, regardless of the time of year. He was a big, muscular old man, like a gypsy—but, too, like all the rest of them. The same face, the fixed and dusty eyes of Michael, Cheta and Maria.

  ‘You’re going to the village. I’ll come with you,’ said Rachaela.

  ‘It’s a long walk, Miss Rachaela.’

  ‘Yes I know. Nine miles, or ten.’

  Cheta glanced at Carlo. How could they refuse her if she insisted.

  For a week she had been training her body, walking long distances each day beside the cliffs, across the heath. She had walked as far as the farther hills, and back, a trek which her watch, now rewound, and set according to her presumed waking time of seven-thirty, informed her had taken three hours. She could cope with Cheta and Carlo’s long walk.

  The kitchen was large, full of sinks, shelves and pans, a black range which was perhaps not used, for to one side there lurked an elderly gas cooker. Gas had come to the house and stayed, but only here and in the Ascots of the bathrooms.

  The kitchen floor was stone and the wooden table scrubbed. There were mouse-holes clearly visible. She imagined the forays of the mice by night and the night cat leaping on them. A pantry opened out of the kitchen. The eldritch Scarabae who had not dined would come to raid it in the dark, like the mice. She pictured Uncle Camillo stuffing himself with cold seagull. There were jars of pickled fish and preserves, dark brown and mauve. On the table lay two purple-green cabbages and a great knife. The opaque white windows contained leaves of cabbage-coloured glass, and oil lamps waited ready to light the preparation of food. A weird subaqueous kitchen.

  And here the two venturers stood hesitating in their Alpine garments and black goggles.

  ‘A fine morning,’ said Rachaela, opening the door. Outside was a tiled passage, and a second door, of course. ‘Let’s go, shall we?’

  They followed her like reluctant dogs, slinking out through the second door into the animosity of the pale sunlight.

  After the storm, the weather had been fair all week.

  The storm, anyway, maybe had not happened with the violence she had supposed. The dream had been folded away with the storm. In the morning, waking and remembering it, she had lain a long while, trying it over.

  There could be no doubt it was a dream, the thunderclap and bleach of lightning, the man who sat in her room.

  Later she got up and examined the chair, as if some-psychic impression might have been made on it. But really, she knew it for a dream at once. They had come in waking dreams before, the tall dark man and the meeting in the tempest. Naturally she would have such dreams, here. Naturally too she would create her father from the limbs and body of the house. He was the fantasy monster of her youth, the bad black wolf who blew into her mother’s life the unwanted seed.

  Reason with it as she would, however, the realness of the dream had tinged the days which succeeded it. Lying down at night she had wondered if he would appear again.

  But her dreams were only the usual nonsense things. She dreamed of the bookshop and Mr Gerard inserting biscuits into the shelves, or of the flats bulldozed to the ground and swarms of bats flying up with the debris.

  Outside the house the path ran along the cliff and back into the woods, towards the heath.

  Cheta took the lead along the path.

  Carlo went after her, and Rachaela after Carlo.

  Three daring explorers in the cold bright morning.

  They walked for an hour and a quarter along the half-familiar terrain, then tinned inland, down into scrubby stands of pine and barbed-wire entrenchments of gorse.

  Cheta and Carlo did not speak to each other or to Rachaela. She did not want them to.

  Birds sang in thickets. Gulls wheeled overhead. The landscape was bare and desolate away from the grandeur of the sea. Rocks with gaps in them might conceal strange creatures. It was a place for a knight to come to fight with dragons.

  Half an hour later a road, barely more than a lane, appeared, searing aimlessly across the country. Cheta and Carlo got on to it and walked in the middle of the highway. They feared no sudden traffic, and none came.

  Leafless hedges shielded the road, and strips of wild meadow, once fields, ran occasionally behind them. Trees rose in isolation, bent by winds. Rooks exploded from a barren-looking copse and the gaunt wadis of a gutted farmhouse went by.

  An hour more and the road spilled down into a valley, and there was the village.

  Rachaela was not tired, which was as well, she had the walk back to contend with, almost three hours in itself. Anna had not perhaps lied about the distance.

  The village was disheartening.

  Grey stone houses cluttered both sides of the novice road. Dark winte
r fields stretched up the hills, one with a rusting broken tractor in it. There were groups of abandoned cars, their roofs caved in, and ink-black crows cawing on their bonnets.

  They walked down into the street and passed an umber little pub with a creaky board: The Armitage.

  There was open ground inside the village and there, already drawn up and ready for business, was the large blue van. No one else was out to buy. The denizens of the drear village must have made their purchases already and gone back inside their bleak stone houses. A phone box poked up beyond the van. From some way off, Rachaela saw the receiver depending useless on its cord. Wires sprouted. She felt a start of unsurprised but actual fear. The phone box, out in this remote nowhere, had been vandalized.

  Presumably the houses concealed phones, some of them at least.

  She visualized walking the miles to this stone village and knocking on house after house door, and not one opening, and the crows coughing in the ruined cars.

  They went to the back of the van and a fat man in an anorak rose up, and a skinny woman with a red nose and chilblained knuckles on her bluish hands.

  ‘Here you are,’ said the man, with fake cheeriness to Carlo and Cheta, obviously accustomed to them. ‘What can we do you for today?’

  He had an accent of London, the city Rachaela had left.

  Cheta handed him up a list.

  ‘Just the usual,’ said the man.

  ‘The lady will want some things,’ said Cheta.

  The van man looked at Rachaela, cunning, and she felt the familiar old shame of childhood at having to ask him for intimate items, but there the jolly boxes of Tampax were, blatantly displayed among the soap and bread.

  The woman began to pack flour and butter, sugar and toilet paper into the canvas bags Cheta had produced out of her coat and handed up. The man hauled out two huge cans of oil and set them by for Carlo.

  Rachaela had believed she would have to carry her own items and had been discreet. But Carlo took up the plastic carrier. He was the servant of the Scarabae.

  Cheta said, ‘Can you bring some of the brandy next time? Two bottles.’

  ‘If they can get it, I will.’ The man totted up the load of goods and read off a price.

  Cheta paid from a roll of brown notes.

  From where, oh from where, did the Scarabae take their money?

  Rachaela was not invited to pay. She was relieved, but not astonished.

  At once Cheta and Carlo, now burdened like RSPCA posters of cruelty to donkeys, turned from the van.

  There was to be no respite, no pause. Let alone any social chat.

  The fat man and the chilblained woman drew away as they walked back over the road.

  Rachaela could guess their conversation. ‘Well that was a turn-up.’ ‘Who was she?’ ‘A young one.’ ‘No sunglasses.’

  The adventure of the village of the vandalized phone was over. Now there was only the three-hour walk to the house.

  A wave of exhaustion overcame Rachaela.

  What would they do if she lagged behind, sat down on a rock.

  Why, wait patiently for her under their loads.

  She was not sorry to leave the village.

  It was depressing and a disappointment.

  The crows laughed among the dead cars.

  Defeated by abstract random things, Rachaela found herself disgorged by the heath, back at the house of the Scarabae, dog-tired, her stamina used up.

  In her absence her bed had been scrupulously made, as she herself never troubled to make it, only tossing it together, straightening the pillows for the Devil’s face to reflect on.

  She ran a bath and lay there, listening to Mozart on her radio for which batteries were now assured. The piece was a piano concerto. It seemed to her she had dreamed of piano music in this house...

  Her watch, assiduously wound, showed her it was three-thirty.

  At four-thirty she left the bath and went into her room. She changed her clothes and lay on the bed, now only in a bath of music. She thought seriously about the house.

  She had left it alone during her week of external walking, only trying the iron-bound door of the tower from time to time, indolently, knowing it would be locked.

  In the passage from her room she had noticed the paintings more, how in places a top layer of paint had flaked off from them to reveal other scenes beneath. She recalled the goat’s head thrust from the woman’s belly.

  And she had found the kitchen with the gas cooker and mouse-holes.

  She thought of the storm, and the dream of the man.

  She had begun to imagine, very often, that something followed her through the house. On the heath she had been free of this feeling. It was a sort of hysteria, she now believed; for the very mad, very old, old man had not pursued her, not popped out or been abruptly encountered. Perhaps he had lost interest in her.

  Rachaela began to go to sleep. Well, she could rest until the dinner with Anna and Stephan. She did not mean to miss that. She wanted now to speak to them, to Anna.

  It would be simple just to doze and walk and idle the time away here, as if this were all that was asked of her. But she knew it was not. Something was expected. It must be. She was like the sacrificial lamb, kept and fattened against the day of its ritual death. Was it so far-fetched to think the purpose of the Scarabae any different? It was easy to credit them with it, the keeping of her, her ritual slaughter at some preordained phase of the moon. Dragging her screaming at midnight across the heath, strong Carlo and Cheta, their grip merciless; Sylvian with the huge knife from the cabbages held daintily as the ebony ruler. One more word to erase: Rachaela.

  The room faded. She was standing at a crossroads on the heath, naked but for her blowing hair. She waited, and no one came but the blue van and the fat man, who pulled up and called cheerily, ‘Want a lift? Hop in.’

  Stephan did not come to ‘dine’, only Anna came, in her long charcoal frock, her embroidery in one hand.

  Michael served her her thimble of garnet and Rachaela her glass of white wine.

  It was another rabbit-pie. Rachaela recalled the rabbits she had seen feeding on the heath. There were countless numbers of them, a larder to the Scarabae. Probably it was Carlo who took them. Yet she had never heard the crack of a gun.

  They sat before the drawing-room fire.

  On the walls were mirrors obscura, paintings upon other paintings, drawn curtains behind which jostled stained glass images. The figures on the chessboard were in disarray, someone had lost their temper at them; the queen lay on her face. The candles burned and the yellow lamps. Was it cosy by the fire or macabre?

  ‘Anna, I really must talk to you. I mean, I should like answers.’

  ‘Whatever I can do, Rachaela.’ Anna was, as always, gracious.

  ‘I went to the village with Cheta and Carlo.’

  ‘You’re very brave. But I can see the walk tired you.’

  The village looked quite dead. And the public telephone was vandalized.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Anna, embroidering placidly.

  ‘Suppose,’ said Rachaela, ‘that you needed the phone. Is it sensible not to have one?’

  ‘All that bother of having a telephone installed,’ said Anna. ‘I’m afraid we’re set in our ways. We hate intrusion.’

  ‘But I have intruded.’

  ‘You? Rachaela, you’re one of our own.’

  ‘Suppose,’ Rachaela tried again, ‘one of you fell ill.’

  ‘We are never ill,’ said Anna. ‘Only old.’

  ‘Then that alone—’

  ‘No, Rachaela. The case would never arise. We care for ourselves.’

  ‘And me,’ said Rachaela, ‘if I wanted to phone anyone.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Anna. But she looked up. Her sharp eyes said, You are alone. You have no one.

  Rachaela said, ‘It disconcerts me. The way you live here. And if I stay, the way I must live with you.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Anna, ‘but we know someth
ing about you, Rachaela. Your lack of social contacts, your own way of living. Rather like a hermitess.’

  ‘I had a choice.’

  ‘Did you? Haven’t you besides made a choice now to be with us?’

  ‘No,’ said Rachaela. ‘I’ll be honest. The choice of coming here was forced on me. And you hunted me, didn’t you.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Anna, ‘we will admit to that.’

  ‘I asked you before, and I must ask you again. Why?’

  ‘You belong here, with us.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ Rachaela lied. Anna smiled a little. To lie was useless. ‘I have no responsibilities. No autonomy here. I’m some kind of puppet. I sense this. That I’m being kept for something.’

  ‘For yourself,’ said Anna. ‘Don’t you understand your worth? We prize tradition. We value the ideal of the family. And you are the last of us. The very last flower on our tree.’

  Rachaela thought of his words, in the dream: The last, but for you.

  She felt a constriction in her throat and spoke through it, crisply.

  ‘And the last before me was my father.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why,’ said Rachaela, ‘isn’t he with you?’

  Anna said, ‘But Rachaela, he is. Of course he is.’

  Rachaela thought of the old men of the house. Something sank inside her. Her mother had spoken of him as young.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Then I’ve met him.’

  ‘Your father is a hermit, Rachaela. As you are a hermitess. He lives here, but not readily among us.’ Anna let her embroidery lie. ‘When he was younger, your age, he ran away. He ran out into the world, and we let him go. It was the time for it. He made you, out in the world. Then he came back to us.’

  ‘Willingly?’

  ‘No, not willingly, but with resignation. There was nowhere else for him to go. You chafe at the confines of the house, the two of you. Yet you hate the open places of the outer world, the cities, the people. They offend you. Life offends you. You are Scarabae. Here, you’re safe.’

  ‘Where,’ said Rachaela, and her hands had clasped one another, ‘where is he?’