The Waking That Kills by Stephen Gregory Read Free Book Online Page B

had never been invaded.
    I went out of the room. As I trod down the stairs from the tower, I suddenly realised what he’d said to me. The words came to me so clearly that I stopped in the shadows and listened to them inside my head. ‘I’ll tell my father what you did. When he comes back, I’ll tell him.’

Chapter Seven
     
     
    N EEDING TO GET out of the house and away from the woman and the boy, I went down to the bottom of the garden.
    When I left Lawrence in his tower, I’d first of all gone to my room, thinking to sit and think in my own space, or to lie on my bed and wonder at what she and he had said to me that morning. But it wasn’t my space, it wasn’t my room, it wasn’t my bed, it was a bedroom assigned to me by a couple of strangers in their strange house. I needed to connect myself with something that was really mine, away from this muddle of dusty back-stories and muttered half-secrets.
    So I flung myself out of the room and downstairs. I tiptoed past the kitchen where Juliet was clattering so noisily at the sink that she couldn’t possibly have heard me go by, and outside through the French windows of the lounge.
    Down the garden, to the car. My father’s car.
    Nothing to do with the Lundy family, nothing to do with the otherworld of Chalke House buried in the folds of the Lincolnshire wolds. I needed, for a short while, to touch – yes, physically touch – the reason why I’d come back to England.
    Even in the week or two since I’d arrived, the grasses had grown fast and thick around the wheels of the Daimler. The bodywork, already so matt and dull, a grey-green patina where the paint had long ago been black, was dusted with a fall of bark and twigs from the Scots pine. I passed a hand over the windscreen, where the glass had been smashed by the impact of the claw-hammer, and picked off clumps of needles. The car looked very tired, and oddly disconsolate. The enormous chrome radiator had bloomed a rash of rust, and the orbs of the headlamps were like tearful eyes.
    ‘Hey, what’s up, old girl? Did you think I’d left you here for good? Hey, you got a long way to go yet...’
    But my voice sounded small and unconvincing. There was a quaver of uncertainty. I looked up into the blackened gantry of the pine, through the scaffold of branches which jutted from the towering trunk. I swivelled and stared high into the overwhelming foliage of the beech trees, the mature oak and chestnut which blotted the sky... and all around me, into the suffocating tangle of undergrowth, the dense barricades of nettle and cow-parsley and formidable bramble. The bottom of the garden? No, not a garden, but an acre or three of ancient English woodland, a shut-in world of its own, shutting out the rest of the world. But yes, the bottom. No wonder the car looked so forlorn, so crushed... as I looked up and around me, I remembered the last few miles of our journey, the descent from the clarity of the Lincolnshire farmland and its marvellous sky, down into the shadows of the wooded wolds, and down and down as though we’d stumbled into a hole and it was sucking us deeper...
    At last, my own space. I opened the driver’s door and slid onto the seat, behind the big black steering-wheel. When the door fell shut with a snick of its well-oiled hinges, when I closed my eyes and inhaled the familiar scents of the old car, I had my own space again: thousands of miles from Borneo, and a long way from the puzzles of Juliet and Lawrence Lundy. Everything I touched in the car, the soles of my shoes on his pedals, through the seat of my pants and my spine on his leather upholstery, to my hands on his wheel... it was the touch of my father.
    I could smell him. I could feel him. His son – me – I was sitting exactly in the place in the world he had made and claimed for himself.
    But what was the good of that? I shook myself out of my cosy daydream. I hadn’t flown back so I could sit in a hearse and think about my father. He was