'Rory Lucas?' Presumably the sister was questioning a nurse, but the audible reply came from Annie, who called 'He's not moved since she left him.'
'Nothing yet, I'm afraid. We've got your number, haven't we?'
'You have, thanks,' Charlotte said, already envisaging a situation where she might prefer it not to ring. She ended the call, and her finger wavered over the keys until she became furiously impatient with herself. She jabbed the key to display the list of names and selected Hugh's. A breathless silence followed, and a heartbeat, and then an imitation bell began to shrill in her ear. Her heart had time to thump again before the call belatedly triggered the theme from Sesame Street. While it was muffled, she couldn't doubt that it was somewhere beneath her.
She felt as if she wouldn't be able to move until it was answered, and quite possibly not then. It might depend who spoke. As the jolly theme jingled on, it sounded increasingly like a mockery of childhood. The melody fell silent halfway through a jaunty rising phrase, and a voice spoke in Charlotte's ear.
She had to take a disoriented moment to recognise why it wasn't audible beyond the skylight as well. It was the automated message, responding from somewhere that seemed hardly to exist. 'Hugh, are you there?' Charlotte pleaded. 'Can you hear me? Answer me, Hugh.'
Nobody did. She terminated the call and managed not to yield to the temptation to repeat some or all of the words at the top of her voice. She brought up the list again and thumbed Ellen's number. 'Be somewhere up here,' she prayed under her breath. She hadn't finished whispering when the title song from Oklahoma commenced its crescendo in the depths of the house.
Like Hugh's tune, it sounded several floors deep. The protracted cry suggested an attempt to rise above a nightmare. When it arrived at the rest of the verse, Charlotte was assailed by an image of Ellen prancing helplessly at the behest of the music in the dark. Ellen might be too frail or too distressed to offer much resistance. The unwelcome fancy made Charlotte shout her cousin's name before the song was cut off by the familiar message. 'What are you both doing down there?' she could hardly wait to plead. 'Can't either of you answer?'
The question seemed to grow more ominous as it left her mouth. 'Someone speak to me,' she called loud enough to be heard without the phone, an appeal that raised nobody as far as she could tell. She dropped the mobile in her bag and clenched her fist on the handle of the spade. She knew where she had to go now if she could.
The mouth of the house worked, eager to swallow her, as the grass around the hole trembled in the wind while the flashlight beam magnified her nervousness. She did her best to lose her temper with that and to hold onto her anger as she followed the shivering beam to the hole, which was far too reminiscent of an open grave. The resemblance wasn't entirely dispelled when the beam plunged into the dark.
It crept across the floorboards and spilled over the brink of the trapdoor to grow dimmer on the stairs. 'Hugh,' Charlotte called down. 'Ellen.' She didn't know whether she was more afraid to find out why they didn't answer or to descend into the house. She succeeded in recapturing some of her anger as she clung to the spade, which she wasn't about to leave behind when it was the nearest thing she had to a weapon. She lowered it through the skylight at arm's length and let it fall with a thud that resounded through more levels of the house than she could judge. Without going after it she wouldn't have a weapon. She slipped the strap of her bag over her shoulder and nestled the bag under her arm, and turned to set foot on the ladder.
Beyond the cliff and the foreshortened river the Welsh coast glittered as if to communicate a message she had neither the time nor the ability to decipher. Perhaps it was simply reminding her how much light she was leaving behind. Under her foot the topmost rung felt treacherous with rust. She mustn't take these as excuses not to proceed, and a flare of anger was enough to send her onto the next crumbling rung and the ones beneath, taking her up to her waist in the lightless house. The flashlight beam shrank from the edge of the cliff as she groped for the next rung with a foot, and she was aware of the gaping space beneath her and closing in at her back. She gripped the highest rung with her free hand, and as scales of rust scraped together under her fingers she brought the flashlight to waist level. Darkness flooded across the common, blotching her vision, so that when the flashlight beam jerked downwards with her uncertain descent she wasn't sure how many shadows were fluttering around her among the rafters. She planted both feet on a rung and closed her fist on another while she aimed the light at the floor. The beam wobbled across the boards until it encountered a shape that had been lying low. The light seemed to rouse the thin twisted limbs as the object glared at her with its solitary orb.
It was a telescope. Either its stand had collapsed or, to judge by its position, it had been toppled from blocking the trapdoor. Suppose it had been dislodged from beneath? Charlotte clutched at the ladder and swung the light around the space under the roof. Shadows started out of the corners and sank back, but apart from the telescope and the spade and a scattering of earth, the attic was bare. Nevertheless she was feeling more than reluctant to step down into it, never mind the rest of the house, when she heard a noise beyond the trapdoor.
Despite its faintness, she couldn't mistake it. It was a groan, and although it was muffled by distance or some other cause, she recognised the voice. 'Ellen,' she called, scrambling so hastily down the ladder that the shadows of the rafters appeared to collapse the roof. She must be too concerned for Ellen to have time for claustrophobia, but she retrieved the spade in a bid to feel less vulnerable on her way to the trapdoor. 'Ellen,' she called down into the house.
There was no reply, and no movement apart from the uncontrollable roving of the flashlight beam, which had found the second ladder. It was wedged between the frame of the trapdoor and the verge of the stairs, and looked all the more precarious for the unstable light. Other than the stairs that led down from a landing to an enclosed windowless bend, nothing else met her eye. How many of her burdens was she going to cart through the house? She transferred the mobile to a hip pocket and dropped her handbag through the opening, followed by the spade. She was certainly announcing her presence, but what might it sound like? 'Ellen, it's me,' she felt forced to call as she turned to descend the ladder.
It wasn't just the sight of the telescope that halted her, although for a moment she thought it was crawling with insects. They were symbols etched on the barrel. The wavering beam had lent them movement, and she shouldn't linger to examine them. She was more concerned with the tracks that led from the trapdoor, tracing how the heavy telescope had been dragged or shoved across the loft to clear the way down. Ellen must have shifted it, but if she'd managed that in her condition, how desperate had she been to hide? The thought sent Charlotte downwards as fast as she dared clamber, into the house that smelled oppressively of earth.
The wooden ladder wasn't staggering towards the edge of the stairs. She couldn't really feel the movement – at least, not as much as the antics of the flashlight beam encouraged her to see. All the same, the vibrations came close to paralysing her until she sprinted down the last few rungs to sidle none too confidently onto the floor. She was glad to let go of the ladder, which had felt surreptitiously moist, but the carpet yielded like soft earth, as if the floor it covered were no more solid. That wasn't as unsettling as the sight ahead.
She was facing a bedroom. The door was wide open, framing the dim bulk of a capacious four-poster bed. She grabbed the spade before she sent the flashlight beam into the room. A dark ill-defined shape scrambled backwards across the discoloured quilt and obese greyish pillows to its lair beneath the sagging canopy, but it was just the shadow of the humped bedclothes. Although they were rumpled enough to be outlining worse than uneasy sleep, the bed was empty. None of this was why she found it hard to breathe. With the heavy velvet curtains open, as they were now, the occupant of the bed would have seen a panorama of the Welsh coast and mountains beyond the large window, but the view consisted of brownish clay packed against the glass.