all.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘You told me about them. At the City Toy Museum.’
‘I was wishing people ill – iller. I was wishing people dead.’
‘I know. And I was planning to rape and murder you. And bring you back to life so I could rape and murder you all over again.’ Without warning, I began retching, and finally was sick on her best rug. I must say she was very kind; she didn’t nag; she held my head and wiped me down afterwards. I felt very cold and shivery, and she put the gas fire on.
‘What was it, Morgan? Are we both going mad?’
‘We’re sane enough now,’ I said bitterly. ‘I’d be sane enough now, even if I’d murdered you. And I was just waiting to do it. Once you were down the cellar. If Mossy hadn’t tooted his horn, if Dickie hadn’t hauled us out, you’d be dead now . . .’
‘I didn’t reckon you for that kind of man . . .’
‘As the feminists say: all men are rapists . . .’ I had this need to grovel, to sick it up, to cleanse myself. My father always said confession was good for the soul.
‘I knew you fancied me. But . . . rape? Murder? Really?’
‘I wanted to lay you – take you down a peg.’
‘That’s hardly murder, Morgan!’
‘No,’ I said wretchedly.
‘I’d had some nasty thoughts about people at the Museum. But I’d never have done anything about it. Not in a month of Sundays.’
‘I suppose that’s what keeps us on the rails. Timidity. Respectability. Fear of consequences. But somehow, tonight, I didn’t feel there would be any consequences. I felt invincible. Full of power. It seems so . . . pathetic, now.’
‘That’s how J. Montague Wheeler must have felt. Full of power.’
‘A rag-and-bone man, who suddenly made a lot of money . . . What’s inside that house, Hermione?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s down in the cellar. I could feel it.’
‘Offering unlimited power? To do evil?’
‘The name . . . Abbeywalk. Was there ever an abbey round here. A medieval abbey? Or is the name just a romantic fantasy?’
‘Oh, there was a medieval Abbey of Wheatstone. Its coat of arms is still the coat of arms of the Borough. They boast about it in their handbook. All gone now. Except some reckon the Wheatstone Pond was their fish-ponds . . .’
‘Suppose the monks . . . no, that’s just silly.’
‘Go on. It’s all ridiculous anyway, in this day and age.’
‘Suppose the monks . . . were exorcists? Medieval priests practised exorcism. Suppose they were called upon to deal with something dreadful. And they couldn’t destroy it or cast it out. Suppose all they could do was bring it back with them and keep it under lock and key, safe . . . with a binding prayer or spell or something. Maybe they kept it alive to investigate it, muck about with it. Then, when the Abbey was dissolved by Henry the Eighth, they had to go, and leave it behind.
‘Nobody came; nobody built on the site. Houses go up all round in the nineteenth century, but nobody wants to build on the actual site. And then this rag-and-bone man comes along, mooching around for things to steal . . . and he rents the waste land . . . with a few old buildings on it . . . and quite soon he has all the money in the world . . . to buy the land and build the house. And then he vanishes. But it remains behind in the house. And people come to live there. And people vanish . . .’
I said stupidly, like you always do, ‘For God’s sake, Hermione, this is the twentieth century.’
‘Maybe we’ve found a gap in the twentieth century. A black hole that people fall into. And there’s no reason in the world why people shouldn’t go on falling into it. Poor people who don’t have anybody who cares about them . . . people at the end of their tether. There’s always somebody wanting a cheap bed-sitter . . .’
‘Stop it. I want to sleep tonight. This is pure speculation!’
‘That thing nearly killed me tonight, Morgan. And what would it have done to you? Don’t you want to know what nearly destroyed you? What destroyed Tony Tanner and Margie Duff?
‘And the Wheatstone Pond, Morgan! It’s downhill from that house. Stuff must be draining down into it, all the time. Stuff that set those two firemen fighting each other,