Castle Of Bone (3 page)

“Oh come off it, Penn. It was real all right. Anyway four people don’t have the same hallucination all at once.”

“Okay. Let’s say it was real then.” Penn bent down, picked up a birch twig, folded back his body and with it his right arm, and hurled with perfect ease and rhythm. They saw the twig arc, collide with other trees, pass among their branches with uneven percussive sounds, then fall, losing momentum, to meet ground at last. The flickering leaves of birch, like Penn’s flickering red gold hair, gave an illusion of light, though the sun had disappeared.

Anna, Hugh noticed, intently watched Penn throw. When he had finished Penn glanced at her, but by then, hastily, she had looked away.

Anna’s face took on an odd misshapen look as they were walking towards home again. Penn, noticing, told her sharply to stop chewing her tongue. It made her look even more hideous than usual, he said.

Jean said, “Oh that’s what she’s doing, is it? I’ve often wondered.”

“She’s always doing it. It makes Mum wild, you can see why.”

“It helps me think, that’s all,” Anna said. She dropped behind them and walked along the path alone. Hugh could not forget her at his back, she felt a weight on his heels, a load, almost oppressing him. He thought that was because he felt sorry for her, Penn having been so fierce, and at last he too held back to let her catch him up. Penn and Jean went on a little ahead of them, Penn flicking neatly at grasses with a stick.

“What were you thinking, Anna?” Hugh asked.

Anna did not reply.

“Anything might help. Anything you thought of – however unlikely. Everything seems unlikely now.”

“Your wallet, the one I put in the cupboard. What was it made of?”

“Why did you put it in the cupboard, Anna? – a wallet? Of all things . . .”

“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t I put something in. It was empty, the cupboard,” Anna said. When Hugh looked at her he could not see her face at all. Her head was bent. Her dark hair swung down.

His wallet was so old and familiar he had scarcely looked at it for years. To remember it properly he had to think quite hard. Inside and out it had been a pale, pinkish colour, darkened in some places more than others by both age and dirt. Its edges had been whipped with a narrow thong.

“Leather,” he said.

“And leather is . . .”

“Skin, of course,” Penn turned, overhearing them.

“Anna wondered what my wallet was.”

“What sort of skin?” Anna asked.

“Horse skin, cow skin, sheep skin,” Penn said.

“Deer skin,” Hugh said. They had left the park by now and were passing a pub called The Roebuck. A roedeer leapt across the faded sign.

“What about your wallet anyway?” asked Jean.

“Well, Anna put in the cupboard and the next thing was the pig came out.”

“That doesn’t mean your wallet had anything to do with it.”

“What sort of leather was it?” insisted Anna, obstinately.

“I don’t know,” Hugh said. “It’s so old. It was Dad’s first, then mine.”

“We’ll have a look when we get back,” said Penn. “But I don’t suppose it’s relevant.”

But the cupboard was empty. They thought the pig in its rush must have knocked the wallet out. They hunted everywhere for it, peering under chairs, under the bed, crawling on hands and knees. But they could not find it.

“It would be easier, Hugh, if your room was tidier,” Jean said. “Now you’ve got the cupboard why don’t you put your clothes away?”

“I don’t suppose it’s relevant, anyway,” said Penn.

They went their separate ways. Hugh had a contented, solitary afternoon. Until the evening he almost forgot about the cupboard. Certainly, though he was painting, his easel set up next to it, he did not feel the presence of it at all.

In the evening he sat on the edge of his bed wearing his slippers and his pyjamas. His knees jutted uncomfortably – the bed was low and his legs of late seemed to have grown inconveniently long. He had raised his hand and put it to the lamp, the image of which hung infinitesimally behind his eyes, after he had extinguished it. He did not at once take his hand from the switch.

For in the darkness, he felt again what he had felt on the stairs that morning; the pulling forward and dragging back, attraction, repulsion, simultaneously. But now both impulses seemed to be inside his head and they drew him to, drew him from – what?

Hugh remembered last night; the image of his Coca-cola glass displaced by the alder grove. Tonight was different though, because he realized he had been expecting something similar to happen, whereas last night he had been expecting nothing. He also had the feeling that he ought to be able to control it, at least to decide whether it happened or not. But he could only control anything to the extent that he could control himself – or rather his own mind – and how could he do that, he thought, rather resentfully, when he did not even know what his area of decision was. He let his will go anyway, with scarcely a struggle; opened his mind, grabbed a picture out of air, to have it displaced at once by trees, maddening trees, that melted from light to dark, from visibility to invisibility; birch trees, naturally.

He stood at the edge of a wood, at night, with above a silver moon and stars, and on the ground a scattering of snow. The leaf mould beneath the snow had a film of frost on it. Layers cracked lightly when he moved his feet – it was a sensation rather than a sound which made him glad he wore slippers as well as his pyjamas, though both seemed inadequate, not to say ridiculous, for such a time and place. Fortunately Jean had yesterday sewn his buttons on, so he was able at least to do the jacket up.

He was quite alone this time. He looked back almost hopefully into the birch wood in case the girl was there. But he saw only moon-made lights and shadows that looked as bright and as dark, alternately, as the trunks of the trees themselves.

Ahead was a bare and empty country; oddly magnified, in sweeps and hollows, with what might have been a track but masked by snow. In the distance as he expected stood the castle, and he stepped out towards it knowing that he must. But stopped almost at once, abruptly; first startled, then, for a moment, terrified.

There was something black lying in the snow. He had noticed it but not taken in what it was since it lay motionless, well to the right of the direction he had to take. But now from the corner of an eye he saw it move, and as he swung round towards it, heard an uncanny cry that left him tight with fear. The black thing divided. Part wheeled up and rode away, calling, on the air – a crow, Hugh thought. It made other cruel and unearthly sounds. But at least he recognized what it was.

Reluctantly he altered his path a little and went towards the black thing that remained behind.

It was another crow, but dead. Black feathers lay on the white snow and drops of fresh blood. Red blood, thought Hugh, though the moonlight had bleached the colour out. He thought of the black-haired girl in the red dress with a strange nostalgic kind of ache, feeling suddenly lonelier than in all his life before.

He shook himself. He went on, alone, towards the castle. It looked almost transparent tonight, it might have been made of glass or ice. In places the walls were so white, so staring, they were like mirrors reflecting moonlight, while elsewhere they were so black it was as if Hugh looked right through them to the night sky itself. There were even little points of light upon the black, that could have been the stars.

He seemed to see patterns spiralling up the turrets nearest him; or they could have been staircases mounting within transparent walls, but no matter how much he strained his eyes he could not have said for certain which.

The moon had come to seem particular, like a lamp to guide a traveller to the castle.

On went Hugh, stumbling over rough ground, with tufts of grass which tipped and emptied snow into his bedroom slippers, having to pick his way so carefully that he took his eyes from the castle ahead of him. Meanwhile clouds crept up, unnoticed, to engulf the moon. It rode among them visibly at first, though dimmed. Then it was altogether gone. When Hugh looked up again he could not see the castle any more.

He could not see anything. Not only the castle had gone but the wood behind him. The wind had risen – winds drove around Hugh, needled and bit him, rent and buffeted. Snow seemed to whirl at him from all the corners of the world. Then he shut his eyes and there was only dark. He felt his knees humped up, his feet jammed hard against the floor. They were icy and his slippers sopping wet. He took his hand from the electric switch, toppled into bed, dragged his blankets round him and slept all night, exhausted, and with wet slippers on.

CHAPTER FIVE

Hugh and Penn were in some ways the most unlikely friends; their living next door to each other mere chance, so irrelevant to the fact that they were friends. They did not even go to the same school, and out of school their interests were entirely different. Hugh read, dreamed, gazed out of the window and drew continually, when he was not actually painting. Penn chiefly played games. He belonged to most school teams and played in scratch teams during the holidays. The rest of the time he and Hugh were inseparable, more or less.

He went to the local grammar school, Hugh to a private school, but both were in continual trouble for doing little there other than what they liked doing anyway. Thus they kept each other company at the bottom of their mediocre classes (at Hugh’s school, politely, his was called Remove) though Penn did maintain even this position rather more easily, while Hugh was threatened periodically with still further demotion to a class whose master he disliked heartily, and so had to undertake furious, if short-lived, bouts of formal work.

Hugh envied mildly Penn’s not needing to do the same. He was irritated occasionally by Penn’s admonitions to him to buck up, pull his socks up, stir his stumps and the like. Mostly, though, he scarcely even noticed them, let the bossiness float away, evaporate.

For, much more, Hugh liked Penn’s certainties. Things got started and done without his bothering to have to make up his own mind; which did not stop him exploring mentally his own rather different plans and ideas, only meant he need not risk spoiling them by putting them into action too soon or in the wrong way, so destroying patterns that he felt himself on the verge of discovering. Moreover it suited him to be left alone so much to paint while Penn was occupied with playing games.

He did not feel either superior or inferior to Penn, except in respects he did not care about. He just felt different, that was all. And he enjoyed sitting in the light of the sun that Penn represented to the world, because then people, dazzled, did not notice him. He could have done with having Penn to protect him at school, too.

What Penn saw in Hugh was much less obvious.

That morning, Monday, Penn came round after breakfast; after his breakfast, that is. (Being the holidays Hugh and Jean’s mother got theirs in what she called her own time, which meant late, unless they came down and got it first.) He clattered down the stairs to the basement looking too tall for the ceiling, though he was not – Hugh was taller, and even he did not have to bend his head. Anna trailed after, looking tired and pale, in a rather short black cotton dress. She tended to wear clothes like that, which her mother chose and liked and which suited her, but which eclipsed Anna.

“Coffee, Penn?” Hugh’s mother asked vaguely, from behind a newspaper, nibbling as if accidentally, at her third slice of toast.

“I don’t like coffee much.”

“Milk? Help yourself. Or toast.”

“No thanks, I won’t.” Penn looked at Hugh very pointedly. “Are you nearly ready, Hugh? We’ve got an awful lot to talk about.”

The arguments, however, had not altered since the day before, so that Jean left downstairs for a while to help wash up did not miss anything. Anna protested magic twice in a small voice, then stood by the window, gazing out, existing on the fringes of the room and of the argument. Penn was, if anything, more insistent than ever on some logical ordinary explanation for what had happened, and Hugh himself would have preferred to believe Penn today. For he had picked up one of his slippers to find it not only damp still but water-stained and with a small, dead birch leaf stuck to the crinkled rubber sole. As he could not for the life of him remember how or why this could be so, the implications both puzzled and disturbed him.

August had asserted itself after the greyness of the day before. The sun poured into Hugh’s room generously, openly, and by its light the cupboard could not have appeared more commonplace and shoddy. It had been so thickly varnished that even the natural grain of the wood appeared artificial, with one door at least as golden and shiny as syrup. The other was only a little darker. “It must have had a mirror on it once,” said Penn. “You can see the screw holes.”

“And the glue,” Hugh added; there was a trace of glue in the moulding at the top.

Inside the cupboard was no less ordinary, though less objectionable to look at, even pleasant. The wood, unvarnished, actually looked like wood, paler, pinker, and without a gloss. On the left was a row of shelves and on the right three curly brass hooks jutted above their heads. A thin brass rail ran across the top of the cupboard. There was another, thinner rail on the door for ties.

“What is it? What’s it made of?” Penn asked.