The Uninvited Guests (24 page)

‘We can’t keep them here!’ cried Ernest.

‘But what can we do?’ Patience asked, her slippered feet feeling blindly backwards up the polished steps.

Emerald turned to Clovis. ‘Clo,’ she said, grasping both his hands, as Torrington eyes met Torrington eyes. ‘We must open up the Old House, and put them in it, all of them!’

Clovis, with no understanding why it should be, was instantly convinced of the rightness of her proposal; it was as solid as a well-oiled bolt sliding home. ‘Of course,’ he agreed, fortified, ‘the Old House will take them.’

Florence was alone in the scullery. She had chased Myrtle away when, returning to the kitchen from the dining room in an impotent rage, wanting only to suppress her misery and regain control, the girl had dared to ask her what was the matter. Myrtle, elbows deep in washing-up, had withdrawn hastily into a corner as Florence, maddened, flew at her with a long-handled ladle.

‘Get out!
Get out! God!
’ Florence screamed, and Myrtle, frankly terrified, had rushed up the scullery stairs, and up again, to the top of the little attic stairs and the safety of her room, where she lay weeping with rage and exhaustion.

‘I’ll not go down there again tonight,’ she promised. ‘She’s a devil and I hate her.’ She had been awake and working for eighteen hours, and in a very short time she fell into a deep sleep, as the suds dried on her arms.

So Florence was alone, viciously upright in her caked dress as she trudged back and forth, trying to regain order, with only her two wiry hands and aching, bony back to do it. She was trying to ignore the muffled commotion from beyond the service passage, but when Emerald and Clovis came flying through the baize door and into her kitchen she turned.

‘You’re all right, then?’ asked Clovis, wild-eyed.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ said Florence bitterly, wiping her hands on a dishcloth.

‘We need to open up the Old House, Mrs Trieves, for the passengers. We can’t let them run all over the house any longer.’

‘Open up the Old House?’ Florence was aghast. ‘It’s nothing but dark in there!’

But they were adamant. Clovis looked about for a candle and, finding a stub on a lower shelf, lit it.

Emerald went to the big door at the end of the scullery, and her white hands gripped the cast-iron bolt and heaved.

‘Here, let me,’ said Florence, coming to her aid. Together they eased it back.

And upstairs, the scene: the swagged curtains at Charlotte’s bed and window; the buttery, glancing intimacy of her boudoir; her travelling dress and bursting cases; the amused scoundrel, lounging on the bed. He was not quite as immaculate as he had been, somewhat tattered; as large as life, if not quite as vibrant, but oh – he was relentless. Charlotte, despite herself, worn down, began to sob wretchedly.

‘You have ruined me,’ she said.

‘You did that before you ever met me.’

‘You have distressed my children.’

‘They’re old enough to know the truth.’

‘I’m to lose this house anyway.’

‘Why is that? Your husband throw you out when he hears about you, will he?’ He yawned then, as if he cared not a sprat, as if he were most awfully tired by it all.

‘Most likely, but that’s not it; we’re stony broke. Runaway, wife – it’s all the same. I’m dispossessed and impoverished—’

‘As you deserve to be.’

‘I have loved this house. My children will lose their home.’

‘Do I weep for you? I do not.’

‘I’m leaving. The cart will be back soon. Robert and Stanley—’ She rose and turned to the window.

‘I sent them away, Charlotte.’

‘
You?
’ she said, facing him.

‘Of course.’

‘What can you mean?’

He was contemptuous. ‘Who do you think got rid of them? And left you defenceless. The
Railway
?’

‘Yes. Of course,’ she asserted. ‘They spoke to Emerald. They told us to expect more passengers.’

‘Do you imagine the venerable institution of the Great Central Railway telephoned
you
?’ He stopped and sighed, and then he did a strange thing.

A very strange thing indeed.

He began to make a sound that came, as it were, from the small gaping mouth of a telephone. His mouth opened and the crackling, confident, booming voice of Mr William Flockhart of the Great Central Railway issued forth into the room.

‘
We have some more passengers for you!
’ he shouted in a telephonic rattle, then abruptly changed, as a feeble, far-away childlike voice came from him. ‘
I have the Great Central Railway for you
,’ he simpered, then again, without any human breath, the voice of Elsie Goodwin at the Post Office: ‘
Exchange! Miss Torrington at Sterne!
’ he screeched.

‘Stop it!’

She felt her legs give way beneath her at this apparition and sank, liquid with fear, onto the bed, covering her face with her hands – then uncovered it again immediately, terrified by the idea of what he might do unseen, and was horrified afresh to see that he was advancing – and yet …
was it he
?

As she reluctantly watched, he seemed to change; could it be true? One moment sharply outlined against the paleness of her room, it was as if he blurred his edges, wobbling his perimeter like a soap bubble. Smudge, with her child’s eyes, had seen something like it in the charcoal outline around him, but this went further. Charlotte now witnessed the unnatural sight of the man becoming both taller and wider; inexplicably, he seemed to alter the shape of his very skull. His head, once round, as sleek as a seal, became brutish, square like a bull’s head. Was she mad? Was she dreaming?

Charlie Traversham-Beechers was being replaced.

His wine-coloured waistcoat darkened to flint and, as she watched, darkened further, to black. Her eyes fixed, glassily upon his gold watch chain, as it seemed to thicken, it did thicken – not just in the dilating focus of her fearful eye, but actually, from delicate gold cord to coarse brass links. She dragged her gaze up his chest to his face once more; the freakish squareness of his head had – she felt her gorge rise – changed again, to – could it be? His hair, gleamingly oiled, combed back above his evil ears, became stuck-up and clogged with wool or dust, then more so, piling on, lumpishly, until it became not hair at all, but the thick, felt stuff of a hat, a Railway worker’s hat. The peak grew out of his head; at first like a giant fingernail, but then turning black and glossy. The Railway badge, in all its metal solidity, glinted into hard existence. She was transfixed. He came towards her; a porter. A Railway porter. With a kindly wink, he took the cheap watch from his waistcoat with his stubby fingers, and said in a voice thick with local accent and coal-dust, ‘
There’s been a dreadful accident on a branch line, sir.
’ Continuing to advance, he smiled. ‘
You’ll have to get down to the crossroads, sir, to collect them. Take them up to Sterne, if you would. The Railway would be very much obliged to you.
’

Then, in a flash, faster than the disappearance of steam in a room – a great deal faster than the puff of smoke of a stage magician – the porter was gone and Traversham-Beechers was back.

It was as if he had simply sauntered across the room, as if the porter had never been. He was sitting on the bed across from her – too close – idly plucking a cigar from his pocket and panting a little hoarsely from his efforts.

‘Well, here we are again,’ he said, a sheen of sweat on his brow.

The watch alone, though, seemed to have forgotten to change back. It hung heavily, swinging on its brass chain, brushing the paisley of the eiderdown ever so lightly with each diminishing arc.

Charlotte, who might have fainted, or dashed around the room distracted, or begun to cry again, did none of these things; she screamed. She screamed as loudly as he himself had screamed at the cutting of Emerald’s cake, she screamed as loudly – louder – than Ferryman had screamed, at his most resistant to being put into the traces, she screamed so that the halls and doorways and floorboards of Sterne reverberated with her terror.

Smudge, on the roofs, heard the scream and froze, a brittle twig against the slates, all breath taken from her.

‘Mother?’ she whispered.

Lady, at the sound, scrambled, at last, to her feet, ears pricked, nervously.

The clamouring passengers in the hall, and the few that had relented and wandered back to the study; John, holding a stick above his head; Ernest, attempting to speak over the noise; Patience, on the stairs – all were brought to a standstill, as the scream rang out.

Emerald and Clovis stood together facing the yawning blackness of the Old House. Emerald’s first thought was that an animal was being murdered somewhere – rabbits had been known to scream like slaughtered babies as foxes’ jaws closed about their throats. But there was no denying this was – on the briefest of reflections – her mother’s scream.

‘God,’ said Clovis, and ran back towards the sound.

With Florence running behind, Emerald and Clovis joined the others in the hall, communicating horror with not a word uttered between them, they all advanced up the staircase.

The passengers, arrested, stood below like a silent forest of ragged, misty trees, watching them.

‘I’ll go,’ said John, as they reached the landing, and he strode to Charlotte’s door, banging loudly upon it and demanding, ‘Who’s there? Mrs Swift? Open your door!’

There was absolute silence from within.

Emerald, at his shoulder – with Florence at hers – uttered, ‘John … open it.’

But the door was locked.

At the sound of John’s fist upon the door, Smudge, lodged against the slippery roof, began to hurry, weakly, towards Charlotte’s balcony. Her boots slithered on the tiles and only narrowly did she escape tripping and falling, helter-skelter, down the slates and off, into space and the hard ground below. Steadied by danger, more slowly, she resumed her inching journey along the roof.

Seconds earlier, in the bedroom, Charlotte, having screamed, had leapt from the stool to take refuge in the corner, by the armoir, but Traversham-Beechers, not suffering her to go that far, shot across the bed and grasped her wrist firmly.

‘Charlotte,’ he said, his eyes growing hugely in his head, like spreading ink stains. ‘Charlotte, why did you leave me?’

She felt his breath on her face. He had always had bad breath, she remembered, but was surprised at its increased rancidness; it was like a rotting pigeon in a drain. She glanced down at his now slightly peeling and weakened fingers.

‘Whatever is the matter with your hands?’

‘It’s …’ He looked himself, but before he could go on, John banged on the door with his shout of,
Who’s there
?

Charlotte extracted her wrist from the villain’s grip slowly, and leaving him, sickening, it seemed, as he contemplated his crumbling nails and softening digits, she crossed feebly to the door and opened it.

John, Clovis, Emerald, Ernest, Patience and Florence surged into the room. Charlotte flew straight into Clovis’s arms.

Traversham-Beechers turned to the lot of them and gave a little smile.

‘You came,’ he said with sad surprise.

Whatever feat of unnatural energy his vile transformational display had been, it appeared to have tired him. He was certainly not bristling with vibrancy as he had only hours earlier.

‘How dare you come to my mother’s room?’ blazed Emerald. ‘Leave this instant.’

All stared at Traversham-Beechers, who had not moved from the end of the bed.

‘You would come to her aid?’ he uttered, slightly wanly. ‘This
creature
?’

But there was no need to answer this, as all present had very clearly done just that, and were now approaching, with familial, righteous rage, the villain standing by the bedpost. But still he was bold.

‘You can’t contain me,’ he said, ‘not like those other pathetic victims. They had the idea that I hung on
their
coattails; they hung on
mine
!’

‘What can you mean?’ asked Emerald, despite herself, intrigued.

‘Do you think they
wanted
to come here?’ he answered, filled with scorn. ‘They know nothing of
you
, nothing of
her
—’ he flung at Charlotte, recovering herself still by the open door. ‘– poor wretches, they would have slipped quietly away from their broken necks and crushed little corpses, had it not been for
my
need,
my
hunger,
my
desire that pulled them here, that gave us all this—’

‘This?’ echoed Ernest.

‘This?’ asked Patience.

‘—this
opportunity.
Our bodies. And see how they’ve relished it? For all their complaining, have they not sated themselves? One doesn’t appreciate fully the functions of the flesh, be they ever so basic, until they are—’ he gazed at his crumpled fingers, sadly, pulled a little flake away, dropped a useless nail onto the flowered carpet, ‘finished.’ He glanced up, keen as a rat. ‘Nearly finished, but not quite. I’ve force enough in me yet. I won’t be sent away.’

‘Well, you’re not staying up here,’ said Clovis stoutly.

‘I won’t be sent away, I tell you.’

‘Won’t you?’ said Emerald.

‘No!’ cried Charlie Traversham-Beechers, but his face, like the fellow travellers’, from whom he sought to distance himself, had taken on a deathly pallor, a sallow, yellowing quality.

He tugged his evening gloves from his pocket and began to put them on. He appeared to be having difficulty, as if one or two of his fingers weren’t strong enough to force themselves into the snug, white crevices. He started to push a finger of one hand into the glove with the fingers of the other, but it buckled. It was like trying to put gloves onto the collapsed joints of a boiled fowl.

Just then, Emerald barked.

The others turned to her, briefly taken aback. Then Clovis, too, barked. He was quickly followed by Ernest, with the booming bark of a bloodhound, and Patience’s high-pitched yap, like a Yorkshire terrier. Soon the whole group, united, were breaking out in a cascade of barks. Even Charlotte, let loose a variety of rabid growls and snaps. Charlie Traversham-Beechers opened his eyes wide, pupils springing nervously from one to the other, and, after a moment, assaulted by the noise, he began slowly to back away as if despite himself, and still fumbling with the evening gloves. He dropped one. The barks grew louder, more frenzied.