Fire and Hemlock (45 page)

“Of course,” said Laurel.

“But Mr Leroy made two attempts to kill me when I was with Tom,” Polly said. “Sam and Ed were there the first time, and Leslie was there the second time, when Tom got quite badly hurt—”

“I can vouch for that,” Sam said. “We all can.”

“And you must know it’s true yourself,” Polly said, “because I saw you with Tom only a month after—”

“Tom dear,” said Laurel. “You told me—”

“It doesn’t matter what he told you,” Ann interrupted. “Only Morton Leroy
could
have hurt him, and you know that even better than I do!”

There was silence. In it Polly heard for the first time a faint rippling whisper from the current bleeding from the pool. Laurel seemed to be considering. “Very logical, Polly dear,” she said, “but please tell your friends not to presume.” Then she looked up, behind Polly and Ann. “Seb dear,” she said, and when Seb had grudgingly moved up near the seat, “Seb dear, I don’t think you were quite honest with me. When we made our plan, you never said a word of your father.” She looked the other way, at Mr Leroy. “Morton, my dear, I think you may have been rather foolish.”

Mr Leroy was shaking. His red-rimmed eyes rolled vengefully to Polly. “It was my life she was stealing,” he said chokily. “But she was the one who stole the portrait from your room. You can get her for that.”

“I’ll take that into consideration. Thank you,” Laurel said. “But I shall have to support Polly’s claim, Morton, you see that. Come here, Seb dear.”

Tom reached out and seized Polly’s hand.

“Who, me? Why?” said Seb.

“Silly.” Laurel smiled and beckoned. “I shall need you if Morton loses.”

Seb walked slowly over to the swinging seat. There was a look of such utter horror on his face that Polly realised that this was what Seb had been afraid of all these years. She would have felt sorry for him if he had not said to her as he passed her, “Laurel’s not the only unfeeling bitch around here.”

“It won’t kill you,” Polly said. “Literally.”

Laurel meanwhile gave Leslie a gentle push. “Up you get, dear. Seb’s young. I may not need you.”

Leslie sprang up, hurt, guilty, and puzzled, and stared at Seb settling into his place. “What’s going on?”

“Hush, dear,” said Laurel. “Now, Morton, this is what I say. I shall give both of you a chance. Tom can use anything which is truly his. You can use the exact equivalent. The one who enters the pool first is the one who goes. Don’t you think that’s fair, Polly?”

“No,” said Ann, and Mr Leroy cried out, “Laurel! I’ve no strength!” and Ann added, “But Tom has. That’s the catch, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” said Laurel. “But that’s what I’ve said, dear.”

Polly looked down at the grass, trying to work out what this meant. Laurel had taken steps to show Tom he could win. But why? Around her, everyone’s feet were crowding as if people were trying to see something, and Seb, for some reason, was churring with laughter. She looked up. Seb was laughing at her, and Tom was no longer beside her. Seeing Seb’s jeering face, it came to her that Seb had always loved her the way most people bear a grudge. He knew what Laurel meant.

Tom and Mr Leroy were standing halfway down the lawn. The sound from the near-invisible current had changed to hoarse rasping. The ripples had reversed and were now bleeding back into the pool. The pool itself was – wrong somehow. It lay above, or beyond, or perhaps below the two standing on the lawn, like an open trench in a different dimension. Polly’s mind kept trying to tell her it was not really there, in spite of the funnel of ripples sucking back into it. Those ripples only showed because they rippled everything they passed in front of. As Polly was turning to look, they spread and ponded like a sea tide to shimmer across the green lawn and cover Tom and Mr Leroy from the knees down. Or had the ripples risen? Neither Tom nor Mr Leroy had moved, yet the funnel of transparent ripples was now somehow up to their waists.

Mr Leroy had his stick grimly planted, undulating like a snake in the current. Tom put out a bleached, shimmering hand. It was a habitual sort of gesture, though it had doubt and experiment in it. His cello swam into being, still propped on its chair, on the rippling green slope above him, and its bow was somehow in his hand. And it seemed as if the ponding funnel of ripples tipped about without moving. Mr Leroy was out of it from the knees upwards, but Tom was under up to his shoulders. Polly saw him realise and stand back from the cello with his arms folded and the bow dangling, rippling under one elbow.

There was polite pattering applause from the elegant people round Polly. A voice cheered Mr Leroy. Several others called jeeringly to Tom to use the cello, since he had made such a point of having it. Without thinking, Polly plunged forward to fetch that cello away.

“No!” shouted Ann. Sam and Ed seized Polly by her arms and held her back. Polly stopped resisting in a hurry. Even this – her attempt to help and the others’ to stop her – had tipped the cone of ripples about again. Mr Leroy’s bent grey figure stood clear against the green grass. Only his feet and the tip of his stick rippled. Tom was right underneath, blanched and wavering, and, in the odd, wrong perspective down there, he was in some way a lot nearer to that coffin-shaped trench into which the current was bleeding. The bright garden and the elegantly excited people smeared round Polly as she understood. Tom on his own could not send Mr Leroy to the pool. Any help sent Tom there instead. Out of the smear, the one clear thing was Laurel, sitting upright in her seat, watching Tom with a small, grave smile. Laurel, with chilly, malicious logic, had made sure that there was only one way Tom could win.

All right, Polly thought. So the only way to win is to lose. I’ll have to lose.

There was a sort of conference going on among the other three, mainly in mutters and jerks of the head, in case this would be construed as help to Tom. “Try it,” said Ann. “It’s all I can think of.”

Ed picked up his violin off the grass where he had dropped it in order to grab Polly, put it under his chin, and played, not his usual sweet notes, but a rapid downwards squalling. A whinny. Below, the bleached, shimmering shape of Tom tilted his head. He said something. Polly knew he was asking her what she thought, but his voice belled into a thousand echoes in the ripples and all she could hear was, “Think-ink-ink?”

She could see the way the others were thinking. Tom had changed the horse for a car, but since Tom was Laurel’s man with Laurel’s gift, that horse was still truly his. It was all the wild strength he had summoned up to get loose from Laurel. They were asking him to summon it again to defeat Mr Leroy, hoping to use Laurel’s unlucky gift against her. But Polly knew it would only turn against Tom.

“Don’t expect any help from me!” she shouted. It was all the hint she dared give.

But a voice did not cut through the current like Ed’s violin. Tom must have thought she agreed. He nodded. The ripples sped over him faster and faster as he leaned forward and tried to get his bow to the strings of the cello. It seemed to have drifted upwards from him and he could barely reach it.

Polly set off down the lawn again before he could do it. She was sure the others would not dare try to stop her a second time. She passed the elegant people crowding and clapping like spectators at a contest. They laughed and called out at her. She came to Mr Leroy. He was leaning on his stick watching Tom sarcastically over his shoulder. He broke into his loud, fatal laugh as he saw Polly. But the laugh stopped as she walked past him into the miasmic ripples, and he looked at her uneasily.

Polly kept her eyes on the greyed, uncertain shape of Tom below. He was definitely below now, in the wrong perspective of that current, deep beneath her. Around her, everything became grey-green ripples, but she did not feel the ripples, or anything else particularly. She had meant to harden her mind and be as stony as Ivy, but she seemed stony already. Kind feeling seemed to bleed away from her as she went downwards. Love, companionship, even Nowhere meant less and less. All she felt was a numb kind of sadness. The truth between two people always cuts two ways, she thought. And she had to go on.

As you do in water, she saw Mr Leroy floating above her, and the blurred soles of his shoes. Tom was floating below, fighting the current to get near his cello. Neither had gone up or down. By which Polly knew she had to go on and lose.

She was quite near to Tom when he succeeded in drawing the bow across the cello. It made a thundering rasp, which was taken up by the echoes of the current and prolonged to a chugging sort of snarl. Tom receded downwards instantly. Ah, well, Polly thought. It wouldn’t have worked. She passed the cello, with echoes ebbing out of it, and the bow, floating, and found Tom in front of her.

He was hanging, swaying, with both arms spread out for balance on the very edge of the trench. It was open like a door behind him. And it was nothingness. There were no ripples here, just nothingness. Truly the dead end of nowhere, Polly thought.

“That was a mistake,” he said to her. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Polly. The horse was coming. She could feel its hoofbeats in the dying din of the cello, cutting across the rhythm of the ripples above her. She wondered whether to say any more. She could have got it horribly wrong. But the only way to turn that wild strength of the horse to Tom’s advantage was to deprive him of it completely. To take everything away, and do it now, because the horse had arrived. When she craned her head in the impossible direction of the garden, back and above, she could see a huge, bent, golden shape racing across the green there. “And it was an even worse mistake,” she said, “the way you used me. You took me over as a child to save your own skin.”

The golden shape surged above. Polly could feel the beast panic as the current dragged it in. “You’re not doing that again,” she said.

Tom stared at her incredulously. She could see his eyes behind his glasses, as wide and grey with shock as they were when he first saw the horse. He had been completely sure of her. Polly could hardly blame him. But she had to go on. The horse was on its way down, screaming, lashing, fighting the current, belling echoes against the trench of nothingness, and the large grey shape of Mr Leroy was tumbling downwards before it.

“Now you know how I felt,” Polly said. “Taste of your own medicine. We’ve nothing in common anyway, and I’ve got a career to come too.”

Then the horse came. It stood above them like a tower of golden flesh and bone, beating the current with its iron hooves and screaming, screaming. Polly saw a big eye tangled in pale horse-hair, and huge, square teeth.

“I never want to see you again!” she screamed at Tom through its screams. The grey lump of Mr Leroy slid past her into nothingness. Polly turned away as the horse hit them.

There was an interval of jarring pain, scourging cold and numbing heat. Ages long. After that, the world hardened in jolting stages to pale whiteness. And with it came sadness, such sadness. Polly found herself, shivering and for some reason dripping wet, sitting on the edge of the concrete trough. The grass round it was greyed with the first frost of winter, and greyed further by the rising sun. The grey was as bitter as Polly felt. Water pattered from her clothes and hair. More pattering came from Tom’s clothes. Polly could see him in the growing white light, sitting on the opposite edge of the trough, folded up and shivering under the clinging wreck of his suit, trying uselessly to dry his glasses with his soaking jacket.