‘Now!’ shouted the man with the watch, and Bessie’s owner dropped her into the pit.
How fast she was, that bristle-faced little dog! It was a game. She darted, and cornered a rat, and bit down on its soft middle, and shook it, and moved on. Pounce. Grab. Shake. Another brown shape on the sawdust like a tiny sack of flour.
Faith’s eyes deadened, but she kept watching. It was the same as it had been on the dreadful night when she could not take her gaze off the body on the rug.
She wanted there to be more blood and screeching. She wanted each death to detonate before her like a little black firework. She wanted it to matter. There was bellowing all around her, but the killing itself was soft and quiet and matter of fact. Life to death, life to death, with no more drama than turning over a counterpane.
‘Thirty seconds left!’ came the shout.
How sweet the terrier was! How businesslike! But Faith could only see its teeth now. It was only teeth.
‘Only teeth,’ she said, and laughed. The sound was lost in the cacophony around her. Everybody was shouting, calling. Bellowing meat, laughing meat. Meat with only a tiny, brief wink of life. And what was life? Teeth. Teeth and a stomach and a blind, idiot impulse behind the eyes, telling the meat to kill and eat other meat.
And the bones fell to the ground, and other bones fell on top of them, and yet more bones, until there were whole hills and cliffs made of them. Death upon death upon death upon death. And two-legged animals dug up the old bones and wondered at them. And then they died as well and lay there, like a rat in the sawdust, waiting to become old bones.
‘Fourteen dead! Time!’
Bessie was scooped up, and now men were leaning over the wooden barricades, poking the dead rats with sticks to see if there was a tremor of life.
Something was tugging at Faith’s sleeve. There was a voice in her ear.
‘Come away.’ It was Paul. Paul Clay.
‘No,’ said Faith. ‘I want to see this. This is funny. Let me watch.’ She felt light-headed. She thought of her vision, and the Megalosaurus biting and biting, and the well-dressed headless corpses toppling to the ground.
Paul Clay was pulling on her arm now, and she let him lead her out of the hut, because how could it matter? She could still see it, she could still watch, it was happening in the darkness when she closed her eyes.
It was freeing to know that nothing mattered. There was a sense of space, as though the sky had lifted away and she had found out that the land and sea were made of smoke. Only smoke. She was smoke. Her body felt hot and light and airy.
‘Sit down,’ said Paul.
‘There is no need,’ said Faith. If she wanted, she could fly.
‘Just sit down,’ said Paul. And she did, because otherwise he would keep saying and saying it, and what did it matter? ‘If you need to be sick—’
‘Sick? I’m not sick!’
‘You’re pale as paper, and there’s something wrong with your eyes.’
‘I have my father’s eyes,’ said Faith. It was hard not to laugh. Paul Clay did not know how funny it was, and that made it all the funnier.
‘Why did you come here?’ Paul asked again, his voice edged with frustration and a hint of despair.
‘I need you to do something for me,’ Faith admitted. ‘Your father changed a photograph by gluing a little boy’s head on to a picture of you. Could you do something like that?’
‘And make it look natural?’ Paul frowned, regarding her warily. ‘Only if the parties were the right size, and looking the same way.’
Faith fished out her notebook, and took out her precious only photograph of her father. She looked at it with a pang, then held it out towards Paul.
‘Cut out my father’s head,’ she said. ‘Glue it on to somebody in one of the excavation photos. Make it look as if my father is standing right there at the dig – haunting them all.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to frighten a murderer.’
‘No,’ said Paul flatly.
‘Why not?’
‘Are you mad? The photographs might look like parlour games to you, but we need the money! My father pretends that we don’t, but we do. If we get a reputation for making prank pictures with dead customer’s faces, who will come to us?’
‘You took a dare to cut off my father’s hair!’ snapped Faith. ‘Well, now I am daring you to cut out his face!’
‘Oh, why not dare me to jump off a cliff?’ Paul retorted. ‘There are dares you would not take.’
‘Are there?’ Faith rose to her feet again. ‘Dare me. Dare me to do anything. And if I do it, you must make the photograph.’
They locked gazes, and again Faith felt their conversation tipping towards a precipice of craziness and rashness, the way it always did.
‘Take a rat out of that, bare-handed,’ Paul said, pointing to a bag on the ground with a tightly tied neck. Before Faith’s eyes it stirred, three rounded shapes shifting and wriggling within. As soon as the words were out, Paul looked frightened.
‘Wait!’ he said as Faith crouched beside the bag and slightly loosened the stout cord around the neck. She made eye contact with him again, and plunged one hand inside.
There was rough fur against her fingers, and a spasm of movement that made her flinch. A furtive tickle of whiskers, a tiny claw-graze. She snatched towards the motion, and closed her hand about a rounded, hairy something. It was soft and frantic, twisting in her grip, while she fought every instinct and kept hold of it.
There was a sharp pain near the base of her thumb, as unseen teeth fixed themselves in her flesh. Faith’s arm jerked, but she kept her grip. She could not help smiling at Paul’s expression of fascinated horror.
‘Stop it!’ Paul dropped to his knees beside her and dragged her hand out of the bag. The rat escaped her grip and fled into the darkened undergrowth. Its fellow inmates followed suit as the bag fell open.
‘Why did you stop me?’ Faith was furious. ‘I had the rat! You cannot say I failed!’
‘Did it bite you?’ Paul turned over her hand. There were two deep red tooth-marks at the base of her thumb.
‘What does it matter?’ shouted Faith. ‘You wanted me to suffer, or you would not have given me the dare!’
‘I wanted to see you back down!’ exploded Paul. ‘Just once!’
‘Get me another bag of rats!’ demanded Faith.
‘No!’ Paul gripped his own hair, closed his eyes for a moment and let out a breath. ‘You win. You can have your photograph. Just . . . no more rats.’ He gave the empty bag on the ground a despairing look. ‘We should go,’ he said, in something closer to his usual tone, ‘before the rat catcher comes back and finds his wares gone.’
He walked with her as far as the road, where she made him stop. She did not want him to see the opening to the Lie Tree’s cave network.
‘I never meant . . .’ he began, then trailed off and shook his head. ‘Wash the wound,’ he said instead. ‘People die from rat bites.’
Faith walked on, without looking back. She could not explain herself to him. The rat bite had hurt, but that had not bothered her. In a strange way the pain had been a relief, like talking to this boy who hated her.
CHAPTER 27:
SILENCE LIKE A KNIFE
After Faith had been walking for five minutes or so, she heard the gravelly crunch of a footstep some distance behind. Her first thought was that Paul had followed her. When she snatched a glance over her shoulder, she saw two figures, but neither of them was Paul. They were his friends, the two older boys she had seen at the hut door.
‘Slow down there!’ called the taller, ginger-haired boy. ‘Don’t be frightened!’
There was something about being told not to be frightened in that bare, moonlit scene that made Faith want to run. The boys would be faster though, for they had no skirts to tangle their legs.
The pair caught up, so that they were walking on either side of her, at about two yards’ distance.
‘You shoul
dn’t be walking out here alone,’ said the ginger-haired boy. ‘Why don’t we come along with you, see you home? We’re friends of Paul. You’ll be safe with us.’
It was a natural enough offer, and perhaps even charitably meant. The ginger-haired boy’s smile was broad, but there was a cold curiosity in his eyes. Faith knew he was not being kind even before she caught him flicking a conspiratorial glance at his friend.
She tried walking more briskly, but they accelerated and kept up easily, and after a little while she slowed back to a normal pace.
‘We can’t leave you alone, miss,’ insisted the other boy, a tallow-haired youth with a broad nose and watchful eyes. ‘Chivalry don’t permit.’
‘We only want to talk to you,’ said the ginger-haired boy.
Faith slid one hand into her pocket and secretly levered open her father’s folding knife. She was one rat between two dogs, but she could bite. They outnumber me, she thought with an odd calm, and they are certainly bigger and stronger. But if I were to stab one of them, I think the other would be badly frightened.
‘You can tell us things,’ Ginger went on, ‘just like you would tell our friend Paul. We’re all friends here, aren’t we?’
Faith hesitated, then nodded, keeping her face blank and stupefied. Paul had told them she was ‘touched’, and that was a part she could play. If she seemed dopey, any sudden moves on her part would take them by surprise.
‘We were all very sad to hear about your father,’ Ginger remarked, without bothering to drop his smile, ‘and we were wondering . . .’
‘. . . what he did with his share of the treasure,’ finished Tallow.
Ginger gave a small, reproving hiss, and Faith caught him giving the other boy a pointed look.
‘Ignore my friend,’ he said quickly. ‘Cartwheel went over his head yesterday, still a bit soft in the skull. We were just wondering . . . if the treasure was somewhere safe. Or . . . if you need us to move it to a better place.’
‘They never gave him treasure,’ said Faith, in a dreamy, childlike voice. She turned to the ginger-haired boy and stared intensely at his left ear. ‘Is that why he was angry?’
‘Your father was angry?’ Ginger looked unnerved but tantalized, and Faith realized that he would snap up any scrap she threw him.
‘I . . . I think so,’ she said. ‘I . . . can’t remember.’
‘So what happened to the treasure?’ asked Tallow, who appeared to have only a weak grasp on subtlety. ‘You been at the dig – the big hole in the ground. Did you see anybody with coins? Maybe in a bag?’
‘No,’ murmured Faith. ‘Only the box.’ She saw both boys’ faces sharpen with painful interest. She was almost starting to enjoy herself. ‘I don’t know anything about the box!’ she added for good measure, shaking her head vigorously. ‘I never saw it – I never saw anything! I never saw him give anyone the box.’
‘Who? Who was it that gave somebody the box?’ asked Ginger.
‘Mr Lambent?’ suggested Tallow in a none-too-quiet undertone.
Faith looked down at her own hem and did not deny it. She was watching her lie grow, nourished by nothing but hints and silences, and taking a new shape before her eyes. Silence itself could be used as deftly and cruelly as a knife.
‘We already know about Mr Lambent’s box,’ Ginger assured her swiftly and unconvincingly. ‘You can tell us all about that. Who did he give it to?’ He watched her face carefully. ‘Mr Clay? Mr Crock?’ There was a pause, and his eyes glittered with inspiration. ‘Or was it a lady? A lady with black hair?’
‘Do you mean Miss Hunter?’ asked Faith, taken by surprise. She could think of nobody else who would fit the description.
‘We know she goes to the dig,’ said Tallow, and sniggered slightly, ‘and we know why.’
‘Why?’ Faith was genuinely curious. Miss Hunter’s visit to the dig had perplexed her. The postmistress was friends with Mrs Lambent, but it would surely have been more comfortable to have visited her at the Paints.
‘Well, we shouldn’t be talking about that sort of thing in front of a respectable lady like you,’ declared Ginger. ‘Unless . . . you want to make a bargain. We tell you about Miss Hunter, you tell us about the box. Well?’
Faith slowly nodded.
‘It’s a secret everybody knows,’ said Ginger, with malicious relish. ‘Miss Hunter has a hidden sweetheart. She won’t eat candied violets, but she orders them on every mailboat. She goes out riding alone in her trap at all times of the day and night, and she takes the north road, away from town. That road don’t run to many places.’
It was true. It led only to Bull Cove, the excavation and the Paints.
‘And sometimes,’ said Tallow with relish, ‘they see a signal from the telegraph tower. A wink of light in the sun.’ He held up an imaginary something and swivelled it in the air. ‘Mirror,’ he said.
‘They say Mrs Lambent comes to the dig because she knows Miss Hunter drops by,’ added Ginger, with a wink. ‘Keeping an eye on the chicken coop, in case the fox gets in.’
‘Miss Hunter turned down Dr Jacklers a dozen times,’ added Tallow. ‘Got her eye on a better bargain. Mrs Lambent won’t last forever, they say.’
Faith remembered Lambent, who could not sit still for a minute, breaking off his striding and palaeontology to sit and drink tea when Miss Hunter visited. It was hard to imagine anybody having a passionate affair with such a plump, snide, moorhen-like woman, but it made sense of both Miss Hunter and Mrs Lambent’s visits to the dig.
Faith’s vision had hinted at two murderers. Now that she thought of it, they might be more than allies. They might be lovers. Behind Lambent’s tempestuous impulses, there might be a pair of neat, plump female hands pulling his strings.
At the same time, Faith was realizing something new. The sly, sharp Miss Hunter was a force to be reckoned with on the island, but she was not liked. There was no mistaking the gleeful malice in the boys’ tones. Miss Hunter had poisoned the islanders’ minds against the Sunderly family. Now Faith had the chance to return the favour.
‘I never meant to see anything,’ she said in the same numb tone. ‘It was only an old box. And then Miss Hunter went away quickly in her trap.’
The boys exchanged excited glances.
The ground was becoming more hummocky now, and dotted with small bushes. Not far away, Faith recognized the one that hid the entrance to the cavern. She slowed, slowed, stopped, then turned and stared blank-eyed back down the road.
‘Who is that following us?’ she asked, raising an arm to point.
Both boys started, and peered back into the darkness. At that moment a hazy clot of cloud drifted across the moon, briefly darkening the headland.
Faith ran.
She had cleared the nearest hummock and hidden herself among the low bushes before the confused shouting began. She heard feet pounding the turf this way and that. There were calls and entreaties. At last the footsteps stopped and she could hear two people panting for breath.
‘I think she ran off the cliff!’
‘Should we go down and look?’
‘What good would that do? If she jumped, we can’t nail her back together! We need to go!’
After the boys had left, Faith emerged, slipped over the quivering grass and pulled back the bushes that concealed the aperture leading back into the cave network. The light from her lantern was still glimmering below. Guided by its radiance, she slid down inclines and squeezed through crevasses until she found herself again in the great cavern of the Tree.
The Lie Tree was waiting for her.
It had grown even in the few hours since her last visit; Faith was sure of it. She felt drained now, but as if she had come home.
A trailing loop of vines reminded her of a flowery swing she had seen in a painting. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to sit down on it. It creaked, but accepted her weight. Faith reached out to either side, stroking the backs of her hands against cool, black foliage, then leaned back against t
he mesh of vines and closed her eyes.
The echoes of the sea were deafening. She could hear many sounds in them: the roaring of the Megalosaurus in her dream, the bellowing in the hut and the hostile whispering in the church. Sometimes she thought she heard her own name, lisped and mangled, as if an untried tongue was practising it.
She had already chosen her lie.
‘The smugglers’ treasure is no longer at the excavation site,’ she told the plant. ‘Mr Lambent gave it to his lover, Miss Hunter.’
People were animals, and animals were nothing but teeth. You bit first, and you bit often. That was the only way to survive.
CHAPTER 28:
WHITE EYES AND A SHIVERED SKIN
Faith woke in, or rather on, her own bed. She was still dressed in her funeral clothes, and once again she felt sick and exhausted. Groggily she recalled rowing back from the cave, tottering up the stairs in the dark and falling on to her bed.
The memory of her night’s adventures slowly unrolled itself, like some macabre tapestry. It seemed a phantasmagoria. Riding dinosaurs, being attacked by a Pterodactyl, attending a ratting, plunging her hand into a bag of rats . . .
Her attention was drawn by a pain in her hand. At the base of her thumb she found two deep, ominously purple gouges, the skin around them a startled yellow-white. Staring at it, she remembered the pain of the rat’s bite and the sting of washing it in salt water later.
Faith really had gone to the ratting. She had been seen there, a lone girl in a crowd of men. She had felt so sure and clear-headed under the stars, but now her stomach churned at the thought of the risks she had taken. Gossip would surely be spreading. Her treasured invisibility would be in tatters. Again Faith’s mind was darting, rat-like, looking for corners and escapes. She would have to deny everything outright, or say that she had gone for a walk and become lost.
She was parched. She was just draining the water from her bottle, when a terrible thought occurred to her. Suddenly she could not remember when she had last refilled the snake’s water bowl.
Hastily she pulled the cloth from the cage. The snake was coiled among the rags as usual, but the gold and white flashes on its ebony scales looked dull and waxy.