Silent Saturday Page 32

  He has taken two steps towards Veerle when the air catches fire below them, with a flash that lights up the dusty interior like a lightning strike. A split second later the liquid petrol on the tiled floor ignites with a sound like something infinitely vast settling upon the castle, smothering it. By that time De Jager is halfway down the first-floor landing, driving his prey before him. Behind him, bright flame fills the air, dazzling and rapacious, sucking in oxygen, seizing upon the dry wood, the ancient castle’s desiccated parts. Against the backdrop of yellow fire the man Veerle knows as Joren Sterckx appears as a dark silhouette, grim and hulking. A troll. He brandishes the knife.

  55

  VEERLE FLEES, DROPPING the useless box of matches on the floor. Her heart is racing, her breathing is ragged with panic, juddering in and out like an engine misfiring. She sprints down the long corridor that runs the length of the first floor, and already she thinks the air is becoming thicker up here. How long before the boards start to blacken under her feet? How long before the smoke billowing up from the ground floor coalesces into a solid grip about her throat, squeezing shut her airways?

  There is no time to think about how it has all gone wrong: the bluff that Joren Sterckx believed all too well, the threat that she could not at last carry out. No time to consider the all-consuming question of how a dead man can be hunting her down. No time even to worry about Kris, to pray that he has managed to crawl or drag himself away from the castle, from the greedy suck of the flames. There is no room left in her mind for anything other than the urgent question, How do I get out?

  She glances back, and Joren Sterckx is close behind her, too close. The blade in his hand carves chunks out of the air. A handspan closer and he would be able to take one out of her shoulder, her arm, her cheek. Fear ratchets up the adrenalin kick another notch, and if her cardiovascular system were a motor it would be smoking now, it would be a few revolutions per minute away from exploding. Veerle feints left and the knife slices through the air to her right. The big window at the end of the first-floor landing is fast approaching. She is running out of space to run. Her head turns from side to side, the dark hair flipping back and forth, but when she looks at the doorways on either side of the corridor she can see only traps. Dead ends.

  There is no way out.

  De Jager is trapped too but he doesn’t realize it yet; he still thinks she is heading for some secret escape route of her own. He is not worrying about saving himself; he is only thinking about catching Veerle before she slips away from him, out of his reach. Veerle is hampered because she doesn’t have that confidence; she knows it is the fire or the knife, and she doesn’t even have a split second in which to decide which she would rather face. It is her body that has control now, not her mind; her body does not know that there is no escape – it simply wants to stay out of reach of the searing flames and the slicing blade.

  For a moment Veerle looks at the window ahead of her, the panes reflecting leaping flames and the dark shape pursuing her, and she almost keeps running at it, straight at the brittle glass and the long drop on the other side of it.

  Then she sees it – the narrow doorway leading to the tower room, the heavy door standing open. She doesn’t think about it, there is no time to debate anyway; she feints right, then darts to the left and through the doorway, ducking her head just in time.

  Shut the door shut the door shut the door . . .

  Veerle fights with the door, shoving it closed just as De Jager begins to apply pressure on the other side. There is a bolt and she slides it across but she can see it isn’t going to hold for very long. The metal is rusted, flaking off in places. A few hard kicks and he will be in the room with her.

  Veerle backs away from the door. A strange calm descends on her. When there is only one option open to you, there is no need to panic about whether you are doing the right thing. In every meaningful way Veerle is dead already, she knows that. She has one chance to climb back out of Hades, back towards the light, and she may as well take it, tenuous though that chance may be.

  She takes the rucksack off her shoulders and drops it on the dusty floor. Her rock shoes are inside it; she has been carrying them around for weeks in case she ever has to do this, has to climb up or down something unexpectedly, but now she doesn’t have time to put them on. Joren Sterckx would be through the door before she had finished tying the laces on the first shoe. So she leaves them there for the flames.

  As Veerle opens the tower window she hears the first mighty kick shake the wooden door. The evening air feels cool on her face; it is getting warm inside the castle, even up here. She hears distant shouts, the bleat of a car horn from the road. Someone has seen that the castle is on fire. She hopes that Kris has managed to get away, that he has crawled out of reach of the conflagration, but she doesn’t look for him. There is nothing she can do for him now. She climbs onto the window ledge.

  There is another titanic blow on the door, as though a giant fist were slamming into it. Veerle turns her back to the sinking sun, to the great empty expanse of open air, to the unkempt grass stretching away to the trees and the roadside and the few faces that have already gathered there, staring at the leaping flames. She climbs out of the window.

  She clings to the window ledge, the toes of her Converse trainers braced against the brickwork, and looks back into the room she has vacated. It looks unnaturally empty; she should be in there, not out here, clinging precariously to the wall. Her rucksack is lying on its side in the middle of the floor. Veerle looks at the door and sees it jump in the frame with the force of another blow. She lets go of the window ledge with her left hand, instantly feeling the strain on her right, and grasps the edge of the windowframe. She has to lean back, ducking her head, to close the window, and even then she can’t fasten it because the latch is on the inside, but she thinks perhaps it may fool him for a few moments. It might buy her time to get further down the wall – if she doesn’t fall off first.

  Veerle is used to heights – the mere fact of empty space behind and below her doesn’t worry her – but still she has to steel herself to let go of the window ledge. Once she is below the window there are few decent holds; she has to rely on the worn spaces between the bricks and the slight slope to the tower walls. She wishes she had her rock shoes on. She wishes she had her chalk bag; her hands are perspiring. She steps down with her right foot and feels the toe slip; a chill wave of vertigo sweeps over her. Veerle rests her forehead against the brick. She is pinned to the wall like a butterfly in a museum case. She wishes she could stay here until the emergency services come with a ladder to rescue her, but she knows that if she doesn’t keep moving she won’t last that long. She has heard the crash inside the room as the door gave way; now something is raging about in there like a bull, bellowing with incoherent rage. She steps down with her left foot now. Her fingers roam the bricks like spiders, looking for crannies in which to wedge themselves.

  Down below her, to her right, a window blows out. Smoke and flames billow out into the evening air. Suddenly glass is pattering down around her and at first she is confused, thinking, How can it be falling on me when the window is below? but then she realizes that it isn’t coming from the downstairs window. Joren Sterckx has thrown open the tower window with such force that one of the panes has shattered. When she’s sure no more glass is falling she risks a glance upwards, and through the drifting smoke she sees him leaning out, a bulky shape that fills the windowframe completely, proving (as if she needed showing) that there is no turning back now: the only way is down, either slowly or, if she is unlucky, in one swift dive.

  Has he reloaded the crossbow? If he has, he will be able to shoot her at point-blank range from there. Veerle moves down again, putting a few more centimetres between herself and the open window. It’s not enough. She tries to speed up, almost loses her footing again. Her breath is coming in great whoops now. She draws in smoke and begins to cough. Her body spasms; her grip on the brickwork is weakening. She forces herself to
take another step down, but the ground is still too far away. If she falls from here she will break something for sure, and then he can shoot her at his leisure.

  Veerle tries hard to control the coughing. She tries to breathe through her nose, hoping to filter out some of the smoke. Her fingers are in agony. She is clutching the tiny holds between the bricks so hard that it hurts. A storm is building in her arms, a dull ache like thunder rolling through them, muscle spasms like lightning strikes. She moves down again. Each time it is getting harder to make her limbs, her digits, do what she wants them to do. When her right hand lets go of the bricks the relief is so enormous that it doesn’t want to clamp down again on a lower hold; it rebels, the fingers numb and useless. Now the strain is on her left hand and her legs are beginning to shake uncontrollably, as though she were a novice climber, for God’s sake.

  Dimly she wonders whether Joren Sterckx is going to shoot her or not. She glances upwards again, but she can see nothing through the strands of smoke that unfurl above her, blotting out the open window with its broken pane. Then she hears something so shocking that she almost lets go of the wall altogether. A scream bursts out of the tower room above her, a scream so raw and savage that it is barely human – the sound of a soul ripped brutally from the bloody rags of its body. It goes on and on, rising and falling raggedly, a symphony of pain, building to a crescendo and then suddenly – horribly – ending in a guttural choke.

  The fire has Joren Sterckx, thinks Veerle. She moves down the wall again, but she can hardly feel the bricks beneath her fingers and toes any more; she thinks perhaps she is floating close to the wall, borne up on the wings of the smoke. She inhales, begins to cough again, and then she peels slowly off the wall and drops into the dark.

  56

  VEERLE PASSED THROUGH a vague and confusing period of time in which strange, grim faces hung over her, washed with blue light that pulsed rhythmically like blood pumping out of a beating heart. There were voices, and she could hear them but she couldn’t seem to listen to them, she couldn’t grasp a single word or phrase and draw it into her. She was dimly aware that there was someone else, that the activity buzzing about her had a second focus. It was important to look at this other person, but Veerle could not remember why. She thought about turning her head but the effort was too great; if she thought about doing it for a century she might at last summon up the energy, but for now she could do nothing more than consider the idea in some abstract way, as she might consider trying to flap her arms and fly away. The pulsing blue was soothing; it was like waves lapping over her. She tried to concentrate on keeping her head above the water but her body was not responding; its weight was dragging her down. In the end it was easier to give up the struggle. Veerle closed her eyes and let the water close over her head.

  When she opened her eyes again the soothing waters had withdrawn like the ebb of a tide, leaving her broken on the jagged rocks. Veerle tried to move, and the pain was sharp and brittle and all over, as though her body were a sack of diamonds, glittering and sharp, scraping viciously against each other. She gave up and let her eyes explore instead, taking in pale green walls and a cream ceiling and Venetian blinds, thin shafts of brilliant sunshine stabbing through them. At the corner of her vision was a grey metal arm but she couldn’t see what it was attached to. There was a second bed in the room, a couple of metres from the one in which Veerle lay, but it was empty. Someone had made it up with such savage efficiency that you could have bounced a twentycent piece on the tightly stretched covers.

  Veerle looked at the empty bed and felt a cold stab of foreboding.

  Kris, she thought. Kris . . .

  She wanted to call out, to attract someone’s attention, but her throat was horribly sore, or perhaps she had called out and nobody had heard her, or perhaps she thought she had called out but she had dreamed it. She glanced at the empty bed again and the light had changed. There was no more sunshine slanting through the blinds, only the yellow of artificial lights.

  Veerle managed to turn her head on the pillow, though her neck felt like a hinge that has almost rusted into place and she felt hot sparks of pain. There were two people by the bed – a woman perched on a plastic hospital chair and a man standing behind her, with a hand on her shoulder.

  The woman was in her thirties, with blonde hair pulled back into a knot at the back of her head, a thin nose and rather small grey eyes. The skin of her face was a little reddened, as though she spent a lot of time outdoors. She was wearing a cardigan over a blue dress with a fine white print on it, flowers or trefoils, and she had folded her hands protectively over her stomach.

  The man was older, in his early fifties perhaps, well-built though not actually fat. A lumbering bear of a man. He had heavy, sleepy-looking features and a thick shock of hair in which there was still much more light brown than white.

  Veerle did not recognize either of them. She lay there and looked at them, feeling the sharp diamond edges of pain prickling up and down her body.

  ‘She’s awake,’ said the woman.

  ‘Veerle?’ said the man. He leaned forward, bending over her, and Veerle felt him take her hand. When he touched it, she felt sparkles of pain scamper up her arm to the shoulder. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Who are you?’ said Veerle, or at least that was what she intended to say. Her throat felt horribly dry; the words crept out of it like dying things crawling across a desert. She saw non-comprehension on the two faces and she tried again. ‘Who are you?’ she managed.

  ‘I’m Geert,’ said the man, surprise in his voice. ‘I’m your father.’

  My father. Veerle stared at him. She remembered Geert as taller, thinner. His hair had been darker, or perhaps it was simply that there had been no grey in it before.

  ‘This is Anneke,’ said Geert, patting the blonde woman’s shoulder.

  ‘Hello, Veerle,’ said Anneke, and she smiled, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. Her gaze remained cool and steady, her hands neatly folded over her abdomen.

  Veerle said nothing. She lay in the bed and she could feel reality solidifying around her.

  I’m not dreaming. My father is here.

  She remembered the empty bed across the room.

  ‘Kris,’ she said.

  Her father frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘Kris. Where’s Kris?’

  ‘Kris? Is that the young man they brought in with you?’

  Veerle nodded, feeling screams of protest from her neck as she did so.

  ‘I think he’s on another floor.’

  ‘He’s all right?’

  ‘All right? He had a crossbow bolt through his shoulder. A crossbow bolt!’ Geert shook his head. ‘What in God’s name were you mixed up in, Veerle?’

  ‘Geert,’ said Anneke in a warning tone. To Veerle she said, ‘He’s OK. I’ll try to find out exactly how he is, if you want.’

  ‘He’s not . . .?’

  Veerle felt a cool hand on the side of her face. Anneke had reached out to touch her.

  ‘He’s not dead, if that’s what you’re worrying about.’

  Thank God. Veerle would have liked to let go then, to hug her relief to her and slide back into the welcome oblivion of sleep, but something was nagging at her. A sense of something wrong.

  My father is here. My father is here from Ghent.

  Seeing him standing by the bed, when she hadn’t seen him for ten years, not since she was a little girl, felt faintly unreal. He had changed so much, and that was odd too, and he had a girlfriend with him; she had known about Anneke ever since she called Geert at home, had actually spoken to her, but that was different from seeing her. It felt strange.

  It was more than strange, though; it made her feel uneasy.

  They shouldn’t be here, thought Veerle. She closed her eyes, frowning, trying to recollect. They shouldn’t be here in my room because . . .

  That feeling was growing, that feeling that something was really very wrong.

  They shouldn’t be in my ro
om, because Mum will go mad if she finds them here.

  Veerle opened her eyes. She looked at Geert, at the harried expression on his face. He looked drawn. Anxious. Shocked.

  She looked at Anneke, and saw a cool smile that concealed something else, something being held back. Reluctance.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ she croaked.

  ‘Veerle . . .’ began her father.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ she demanded again. ‘Claudine. Where is she?’

  Silence. Veerle stared at her father as the seconds trickled past. She waited for him to speak, until at last she realized that she did not want to hear what it was that he had to say. She squeezed her eyes shut then, cutting off the sight of him trying to think how to frame it.

  She heard Anneke begin to say, ‘I’m sorry—’ and she had to cut her off, because when people said they were sorry to you in that particular way, in that pitying tone, it only meant one thing; it meant that someone was—

  ‘Go away,’ she said, and finally she had her real voice back; it sounded strong and angry.

  ‘Veerle,’ said her father again.

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘Veerle—’ That was Anneke chiming in.

  ‘Go away!’ She screamed the words out so loudly that her throat began to hurt again; the sound seemed to have torn off bloody strips of flesh with it.

  Veerle lay with her eyes closed and listened to Anneke getting up from the plastic chair, the legs scraping on the hospital linoleum, the two sets of footsteps moving towards the door, the muttered scraps of words drifting like smoke on the air. She heard the door open and close, movement in the corridor outside.