He unplugged it greedily. “I’ll take this. You carry the monitor.” The thought of Azrael’s precious research being lost sent shivers down Tom’s back. Despite himself, he glanced at the wall safe.
Steve saw him. Instantly he dumped the computer and swung his legs over the bench, smashing a crucible and grinding it to powder under his boot. “What’s in there?”
“I don’t know.” Tom stood rigid. Sweat prickled his back.
Steve grabbed the handle and yanked it.
The safe opened.
At once, out in the corridor, a board creaked. Both of them froze, Tom’s heart thudding, a point of pain throbbing in his bruised forehead. In the warm room the planets swung on their invisible wires.
The door moved, a fraction. Terrible darkness widened.
Then, into the thousand glass surfaces in the room a small black cat strolled.
“Bloody thing!” Steve breathed out and turned back to the safe. He flung out papers, a parchment that fragmented as it skittered across the floor. Tom darted over and picked it up. “Be careful! I keep telling you . . .” He stopped. Steve had the glass dome in both hands.
“For God’s sake. Don’t touch that.”
“Why not?” He turned it to the light, and swore. Something moved inside, and then in the glimmer of the lamp they saw it was a small red, scuttling thing, its tail raised to sting, deadly and venomous. “It’s a bloody scorpion!” Steve dropped the jar; Tom made a grab at it, clutching it tight to his chest with sticky hands. “Leave it!” he gasped.
“Too right. What sort of nuthouse is this?”
Tom shoved the jar back into the safe, slammed the door and turned his back on it. He dragged in a deep breath and snapped, “Right. You win. The stuff you want is downstairs. Right down in the cellars. They lock everything up there over the holidays. Cash, jewelry, you name it. All the boarders’ stuff.”
Steve stared at him, incredulous. “And you can get in?”
“It’s just bolts.”
Still wary, Steve approached him. “Changed your tune, haven’t you, Tommy?”
“Maybe I’ve just made my mind up about things.” Tom turned. “Come on.”
He ran. He ran because his whole body was hot with excitement, because if he stopped, it would all go cold on him, all the sudden intent, the wild plan that had come from nowhere. Simon wasn’t coming. He had to sort this mess out himself.
Without looking back he raced down and down, leading Steve’s greedy shadow into the darkest recesses of the house, down to the cold kitchens smelling of school dinners, through the sculleries, down the cellar steps, through the double doors at the bottom where the cider casks of the Treveyans’ vast banquets had once rolled.
It was cold here. Numbingly cold.
At the farthest end of the last vault was an ancient strong-door, studded with nails. Tom unbolted it and dragged it open, and the dank opening stank of rats and stale beer.
Steve pushed past and stopped. Far down in the dark, echoes rumbled.
“What’s that noise?”
“The Darkwater. They say it runs in a chasm under the house.” The reverberation of the water faded, into silence.
After a minute Steve groped around the walls. “Where’s the light?”
“Here.” Tom reached past him. He could do this. He would do it.
“Well, put the bloody thing on!”
It was easy. Tom shoved; Steve gave a yell and pitched forward. There was a clatter of rolling barrels, then Tom had the door slammed shut and was driving the bolts hard across, top and middle and bottom, solid Victorian rods of iron, and all the yelling and beating of hands from inside suddenly muffled to a dull thumping in his head.
Icily calm, he turned and leaned his back against the door, listening. No one else would hear, unless they came down here.
And no one would.
Because it was Christmas.
“Three days,” he said to himself aloud. “That was what you gave me. You never told anyone where I was. You just watched and laughed. Three days in the underworld. Three days in hell.”
Then he went up the stairs slowly, his mind cold and clear. Closing every door after him, he went into every room where Steve had been, wiping fingerprints off, replacing books and papers, closing the lockers, plugging Azrael’s computer back in.
The cat was still there, watching.
“And you can shut up,” he said.
By the time he got down to the hall and out onto the front drive, it was midnight. His breath crisped in the damp, smoky air, and the chimes of the church clock seemed to hang over the village, the woods, and frosty roofs. Everything was silent when they stopped. Except, far along the road, the Waits were coming back, a ghostly whisper of chatter getting louder, the faint crunch of feet on gravel.
He shouldn’t be seen here.
Slipping into the bushes he made a stealthy detour around by the Devil’s Quoits, and to his surprise, as the moonlight lit them Simon was there, standing by the largest, hands in pockets.
“Look at this,” he said as Tom came up.
Steve’s scrawled name, the white painted letters, had gone. And they hadn’t been scrubbed off. They were gone, as completely as if they’d never been there.
“Weird,” Tom said.
Simon looked at him. “Not as weird as you. What on earth are you going to do with him? He’ll kill you!”
“Let him rot,” Tom said fiercely. “Or give him to Azrael.”
Turning his back he pushed through the laurels and out into the straggle of Waits, and as the band wearily struck up “The Holly and the Ivy” he saw the Gray Mare cavorting like a skeletal ghost in the moonlight, and his mother, and Sarah.
She was carrying a lantern. He pushed up behind her. “Listen. Come over to us tomorrow. For Christmas dinner.”
She stared in surprise. “Where have you been?”
He looked flushed, she thought, and different. For a moment she wasn’t sure if it was Tom or Simon, and then she felt a chill of fear. “Tom, you haven’t made any bargains with him, have you?”
“No. I told him I can sort things out for myself.”
She snorted. “I used to think that.”
“Well, I can. Will you come? Christmas?”
Sarah shrugged. She was going to say no, but then her face softened and she laughed. “It’ll be my last. I’d like it to be at the old place.”
twenty-two
She took a sip of Coke and looked around. In what used to be the scullery, Tom was stacking dishes; his mother was gossiping on the telephone in the hall. The passage, Martha would have called it. Martha, she thought fondly, would have loved the phone and would have thought this a palace.
“It’s changed so much.”
“Has it?” Simon was sprawled under the tree, playing with some electronic gadget. Tom’s Christmas present. He looked up absently. “How much?”
She looked at the papered walls, central heating, TV, fridge, and laughed. “You’d never have recognized it. It was cold, dingy, ragged. There was a big range in here with a sea-coal fire. Martha wore herself out black-leading it every week. I slept in that corner.” She nodded at the TV, where a cartoon blathered unnoticed. “It was boarded off. My father’s room was your kitchen.”
Simon pressed a few buttons. She thought he wasn’t listening, but he said, “What happened to him?”
“He went back to being the great squire.” She snuggled up on the sofa, feeling relaxed for the first time in weeks. “When he got back into the Hall he tried to forget places like this ever existed. And Azrael was right about him. He was even more proud. If he saw the Hall now he’d be furious with me.”
Simon was silent. The game bleeped triumphantly.
Tom called out, “You’ll never beat my score.”
“What you said,” Simon muttered. “About that domed jar. You really saw us in there, all that time ago?”