‘Did you paint this?’ Alison asked, evidently impressed.
‘All the paintings in this house are mine.’
‘Cool. So where is this?’
Still carrying the teapot, the Woman came over to stand beside Alison and look more closely at the canvas. Despite everything, my gaze was drawn towards it too. Now that I looked at it properly I could see that it showed a bleak swathe of moorland, beneath a stormy and cloud-covered sky rendered in such brutal strokes that it appeared at first to be a mere chaos of grey and black shades.
‘North Yorkshire,’ said the Woman. ‘You see this house?’
She laid her finger upon a patch of canvas. Perched almost on the crest of a vast, forbidding ridge, overlooking a large expanse of dismal and featureless water, was a gaunt mansion rendered in the blackest of blacks. It took up very little of the painting, but somehow seemed to dominate it: a mad conglomeration of gothic, neo-gothic, sub-gothic and pseudo-gothic towers which collectively resembled nothing so much as a giant hand, snatching at the clouds as if in the conviction that, despite their vaporous insubstantiality, they could be pilfered from the sky itself.
In the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, two words had been written: ‘Winshaw Towers’. They were followed by the initials ‘P. B.’ and the date ‘1991’.
‘That’s a real house,’ the Woman continued, ‘where I used to work for a while. As a nurse. Until one night, twelve years ago …’
She fell silent, lost in a memory; and not a very pleasant one, by the sound of it.
‘Twelve years ago …?’ Alison prompted.
‘Something bad happened.’
We waited, but clearly no further explanation was forthcoming. Not wishing to talk or even think about it any more, the Woman went back to the table and the tea tray. ‘Milk and two sugars, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘Is that the same for both of you?’
‘Yes please,’ I answered; and then — aghast at my own courage — I began to set the plot in motion. ‘Can I use your toilet?’
She threw me a look full of mistrust, but after weighing the request briefly she seemed to relent. Turning away from me to concentrate on pouring the milk, she muttered: ‘All right then. There are three doors at the end of the hallway. It’s the one on the left. Don’t touch either of the others. And come straight back.’
‘I will. Thank you.’
I began to back out of the room, slowly and unwillingly. Now that the deed had to be done, I was still not sure that I was capable of it. Alison glanced at me, her eyes eloquent with the command to hurry up and get on with it. But still I lingered, gripped by some sort of absurd inertia. In desperation, Alison turned back towards the Woman and began to babble at her about the other painting.
‘Can I ask you something about this?’ she said. ‘I just wondered what you were trying to do when you painted it. I mean — this is a football, right? And this is a tennis racket …’
Upon hearing these words, the Woman made a noise we had not heard before — something akin to a growl — put down the milk jug and came storming over towards the picture. This was my cue, at last, to beat a final retreat, and this time I actually managed to slip out through the door and back into the hallway, staying within earshot just long enough to hear the disgruntled artist say:
‘Why does everybody get this painting wrong? It’s Orpheus, for God’s sake! It’s the lyre of Orpheus and his disembodied head being carried along by the waters of the Hebrus. How many times do I have to explain this …?’
I left her to her rant, and stole quickly through the shadow-filled hallway, past a steep and thinly carpeted staircase ascending to the first floor on my right, until I had reached the three doors at the corridor’s very end.
The first door, to the left, opened on to a small bathroom containing toilet and hand-basin. The second door, in the middle, was solidly locked. The third door, which led under the staircase, was obviously the one that would take me down to the cellar. Before putting my hand to the doorknob, I prayed that this one would be locked as well. Then all I would have to do would be to go back to Alison and report failure. I would have done my duty, at least. Please God, I prayed silently, let this be what happens. Don’t make me go down there. Don’t make me go down into the darkness.
Then I grasped the doorknob, turned it … and the door swung creakily open.
The first thing that hit me was a strange, damp, stale smell wafting from somewhere in the depths. It had elements of dry rot, rotting fruit and fried onions — or fried food of some sort, at any rate. It was not quite as off-putting as I had expected.
What was off-putting, certainly, was the profundity of the darkness that greeted me as I stepped forward and peered down the stairs towards the cellar. It was almost impossible to make out anything at all. With my left hand I reached out and found that there was some sort of rail or bannister to hold on to. The steps beneath my feet were concrete. I took one more glance towards the room where the Mad Bird Woman had served us tea — half expecting her to be looking out through the doorway, checking on me — and then started my descent.
As I got closer to the foot of the stairs, the silence became heavier and the smell grew stronger. Surprisingly, too, it became slightly easier to see ahead of me. This, I realized, was because the staircase ended in a closed door, and from behind this door, visible around its edges, a soft yellow glow was emanating. And so, whether the cellar was occupied or not, there was certainly a light on in there. Just like we’d seen yesterday, through the window.
I stopped outside the door. In the silence I could hear my heart beating, my breath coming and going, the blood ringing in my ears. Nothing else. Not another sound.
I laid a hand upon the door, and pushed. It began to swing open.
Again, it creaked: much louder than the door at the top of the stairs. But the noise was still not loud enough to disturb the figure sitting at the table in the centre of the room.
From where I was standing, it was evidently the dead body of an elderly lady. Her back was towards me, illuminated by the harsh glare of a light bulb hanging directly above her. I could see straggles of thin grey hair hanging off the skull, down as far as the prominent shoulder blades. She wore a blouse which was torn, decaying, almost in tatters; what was left of the yellowing flesh peeped through in patches underneath. I took a few reluctant, appalled steps towards her, my head swimming, my stomach tightening with nausea, and even though I knew that she was dead, stupidly, irrationally, I could not help myself saying, in a tiny voice:
‘Mrs Bates? Mrs Bates?’
But the corpse remained quite motionless. I came closer, and realized that she was sitting — or had been placed, rather — in front of a table. A green baize card table. Laid out on the table was a game of Pelmanism. The cards featured those by now familiar crude, slightly sickening pictures of animals, and had all been paired off, one with another: fish with fish, tigers with tigers, snakes with snakes. There was only one that was lacking its partner: the card showing a single, giant spider, standing upright on two of its legs, raising the others fiercely in the air as if challenging someone to a fight, the pale green of its underbelly shining out with queasy clarity. It was waiting to be paired off with the missing card, the one we had come here to return.
Tearing my eyes away from this horrid but compelling image, which I could see from behind the dead body by peering over one bony shoulder, I raised my hand slowly, wondering if I actually dared to touch the thing. Would it crumble and decay the moment I laid my hand on it, however careful I tried to be? Would an arm fall off in a cloud of powder and dust, the bones clattering to the floor? How long had she been here? What sort of state was she in?