‘Now?’
She shook her head as her eyes filled with horror. And yet her mouth displayed a horrible grin, the visible teeth both yellow and grey in the torch’s light. ‘Thin Len. They hanged him. A long time ago. A thief who was once dismissed by the lady of this house. He worked here. While her husband was away the lady sent him packing . . . But Len came back. Crept back inside this house and he throttled all of the little children in the nursery. The maid, she helped him. She loved him. They were both hanged in Plymouth. Then Len came back again, and he crept inside here like an old dog. He never left that second time . . .’ Joyce’s eyes moved to the white door. ‘He showed us the story while we slept.’ She winced. ‘Oh, and so many times, you can’t imagine.’
Thin Len. The face in the trees. The whining dog in your home. The crawling of it outside your window.
Seb felt giddy at what had been recounted: a preposterous folk tale to anyone not suffering his predicament. He barely found the strength to speak. ‘And Hazzard . . . He has some control of it? Can direct . . .’
Joyce’s grin grew wider, as if she were proud of her peripheral association with such a vile pact. ‘But with you it can be different, Sebastian. Don’t you see? Now that you are here you do not need to be sought. Ewan brought us together for a reason. We know that now. We’re all confident that you’re far better equipped to assist his legacy. A great literary legacy. We couldn’t be more excited.’
Talking to the desperate living dregs of what Hazzard had founded and then lost was making Seb feel about as unstable as they clearly were.
This woman must have been here as a teenager, and perhaps in the early eighties as Hazzard was dying. She’d never left him either, or been allowed to. Maybe she would return after her own first death too.
Seb turned about and walked to the stairs.
‘Seb! Seb!’ Joyce whispered insistently, and she kept on calling after him until her voice was lost in the lightless depths of the old hall.
Outside the Tor, Seb could see Mark engaged in an animated discussion with Veronica. Or, at least, Mark seemed agitated and that accounted for the wild gesticulations that he was making with the one hand that he kept thrusting into the air, as if pointing at the sky. Veronica regarded him with what amounted to a contemptuous indifference.
Seb walked over.
‘No. No. Not again. I can’t get any more . . .’ Mark stopped talking when he became aware of Seb’s approach.
Veronica redirected her thin smile towards Seb. ‘I hope you have found a room to your liking.’
‘Shut up!’ Seb barked into Veronica’s face. She did nothing but blink and resume a display of her mottled grin; an expression still filled with an unaccountable loathing for him from the first time they met.
Seb seized Mark by the elbow and forced him away from the woman. ‘What the fuck? Mark, what the fuck?’ He looked into the eyes of a man with whom he’d spent the last three days, realizing that he hadn’t a clue who Mark Fry really was. The man’s face was pebbled with droplets of perspiration. He also looked about as guilty as anyone could manage.
Mark shrugged his arm free of Seb’s hand and glanced at the top floor of Tor Hall. ‘I was on notice. Ever since I wrote that bloody book. They made me buy the whole print run, except for a few review copies that I couldn’t get back. Shit, I hadn’t heard from them in years. I thought I was off the hook.’
‘You bastard.’
‘I had no choice. You know what they can do, you know their reach . . . And you got me involved again. Don’t forget that. So thanks, mate.’
‘Fuck yourself. Those women on your tapes, what about them?’
Mark swallowed and shook his head. ‘This place reached out one final time when my book was published.’
‘Webster and Buchanan?’
‘Unfortunate enough to have been friends with Hazzard. I don’t know much more about them. I think he had plans for them too, but it didn’t work out. Or for me . . . but I managed to persuade them that I was no good. They didn’t need much convincing. They hated Mutations. Doesn’t appear that Ewan was up to the task either.’
‘To hell with Mutations! And it didn’t work out for those others, is that so? Funny way of putting it! You know what happened to them.’
‘I hope it works out for you, Seb. I really do.’
‘You could have warned me.’
‘What good would that have done? Once . . . once you are part of the image forming. Like I am. Like Ewan was. That’s all it takes. If that thing up there . . . if he is made aware of us. If he has a sense of us . . . and has an image of us. I think that’s how it works. And it can’t be undone. I’ve tried. And no one will ever believe you. No one sane. They’ll think you’re mad. They’ll think you’re seeing things. They commit perfect crimes here, Seb. Don’t you get it? And they’re so bloody greedy. They made me take out loans. I’m bankrupt.’