The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps Read online

  ‘Come on, you!’ she muttered, as she laboured to unfasten, millimetre by millimetre, the page she already knew from the page she hadn’t read yet. ‘Explain yourself.’ There must surely be a reason behind Thomas Peirson’s actions, a better reason than mere evil. Decent, godfearing 18th-century men were not psychopaths, plotting their motiveless murders for the future delectation of Hollywood.

  But with every word that came to light, Thomas Peirson’s soul emerged darker and more disturbing. Sentence by sentence, he painted himself to be exactly the remorseless monster she’d seen reflected in Mack’s excited eyes.

  When the deed was done, I was in a frenzy of haste. Mary’s body I swaddled in waxed sailcloth and hid in a chest; then I washed clean of blood my self, the copper, the knife, and the floor; whereupon I took my place at table downstairs, affecting to be busy with accounts.

  The remainder of that day, and the next day after it, were a torture greater than any I expect to suffer in the Time-To-Come, even if it should please God to banish me from his mercy and cast me to the Devil. While Mary’s carcase lay stiffening in my sea-chest, I joined my worried wife and daughter, all throughout the streets of Whitby, searching for our lost lamb. We questioned folk on the East side and the West side; we walked till we were weary.

  She has run away with that William Agar, my wife says. He has taken her, the blackguard.

  So, we visited William’s mother & axed her what she knew, and she replied with such a skriking as set our ears ringing. My boy is gone up to London, she says, and you are deceived if you think he would dream of taking your daft daughter with him. My boy has been fair driven away, to get peace from all her fond stories & her lies – I have had the poor lad beating his brow, saying, Mother, are all girls so cack-brained, to see love where none was ever offered? Now he is free of her mischief at last, and if she means to follow him to London, I pray her wiles get her no farther than a whorehouse in York!

  After this exchange, I took Catherine home in a terrible anger, and indeed this gave her a certain courage for a while, but then we fell again to waiting for Mary to come home. Hour upon hour, all three of us strained our ears for the footsteps I knew would not sound. She has come to harm! my dear wife wept, wringing her hands. She has come to harm, I know it! Nonsense, woman, I said, inventing a dozen comforting stories with happy embraces for endings.

  On the third night, my family at last took to their beds and slept deep, and I carried my beloved Mary out into the night – being newly in the oil trade then, I had the strength of a whaler yet, & bore her in my arms as easy as a thief bears a sack of candlesticks. Under cover of darkness I ran down the ghaut to the riverside, and there I discharged her poor body into the restless waters.

  Next morning, she is found, and fetched up on Fish Pier. The cry of MURDER! spreads throughout the town, from mouth to mouth, until it reaches my door. Still I dissembled – You are mistaken, It cannot be, &c. But then they brought her carcase to me, and the streets of Whitby did echo with the clamour of my weeping.

  Siân staggered among the gravestones on the East Cliff at midnight, drunk as a skunk. An immense full moon worthy of Dracula’s demon lovers lit her way – that, and a dinky plastic torch with faltering batteries.

  ‘Where are you, you sick bastard …’ she muttered, sweeping the feeble ray of torchlight over the headstones.

  Her mission, as far as she could have explained it if someone had collared her on her way out of the White Horse and Griffin, was revenge. Revenge on a man who would murder his own daughter for falling short of some hateful religious ideal. Revenge on Mack for being so sickeningly right about everything, for seeking out the soft underbelly of her own faith in human nature and injecting it with a lethal dose of cynicism. Revenge on Saint Hilda and all her kind for being so pathetically impotent to stop anything tragic happening to anyone ever. Revenge on the eternal, unfathomable badness of human beings. Revenge on the whole damn Godless universe for deciding she must die when, really, if it was all the same to whatever damn random cellular roulette decided these things, she would rather live.

  Revenge on THOMAS PEIRSON, WHALER AND OIL MERCHANT, whose headstone tilted before her now. Husband of Catherine, father of Anne and Illegible. Poor illegible Mary: given the cold shoulder by her lover, butchered by her father, erased from her pathetic few inches of memorial stone by two centuries of North Sea winds. Siân knelt on the ground and attacked the grave-plot with a trowel.

  VIOLATED! MYSTERY GHOULS STRIKE IN CHURCHYARD, that’s what the Whitby Gazette would say.

  Drunk as she was, it took her almost no time to realise that her grand plan of digging up Peirson and flinging his bones into the sea was a non-starter. The combination of her fury and one small trowel was not sufficient to send voluminous cascades of earth flying skyward; she was barely penetrating the grassy top-soil.

  With a cry of disgust, she abandoned the attempt; she even threw the incriminating trowel away – let the police trace her and arrest her if they had nothing better to do! Bumbling provincials! She lurched back onto the hundred and ninety-nine steps, and promptly fell over, grazing her palms and wrists.

  AMPUTEE BREAKS NECK ON CHURCH STEPS. No, not that; anything but that.

  She forced herself to sit down on a bench and breathe regularly. Ten breaths of sea air were probably equal in sobering power to one sip of coffee; she would inhale lungfuls of salty oxygen until she was capable of walking safely back to the hotel.

  For several minutes she sat on the bench, breathing in and out, trying to brush the sharp grains of grit from her bloodied hands. All the while, she stared down at the stone landing on which generations of coffin-bearers had rested their burden one last time before proceeding to Saint Mary’s churchyard. Her feet – foot – feet, shoes, whatever, damn it – were occupying the same space as hundreds, maybe thousands of Whitby’s long-vanished dead.

  ‘I promised you,’ whispered a male voice at her shoulder. ‘I promised I would carry you up here, didn’t I? And here we are.’

  All the hairs on Siân’s body prickled up, and she turned her face into an eerie brightness that had flowed up the hundred and ninety-nine steps like a car’s headlight on full beam. A man was bending at her side, a man with a translucent white head and torso. Right through his glowing skin, faintly but unmistakably, she could see the dark windows and tiled rooftops of the houses below.

  Instinctively she swung at him with her fist, and he was gone.

  It was midday the following day before Siân even considered attempting anything more ambitious than rinsing her mouth with water. Mostly she just lay in bed, watching the slow progress of a shaft of sunlight through the velux window; it started pale and diffuse, on the skirting boards at the far end of the room, then moved inch by inch along the floorboards, growing in intensity, gradually enveloping the table and the blue plastic bag. Had Siân been upright and praying instead of slumped and groaning, she might have been a Benedictine nun in a prayer cell, aware of nothing outside her cloister but the sun making its stately progress through the unseen heavens.

  Mack and Hadrian would be waiting for her at the Mission soon, but there was no way she was going to be able to keep that appointment. They would have to try again tomorrow, perhaps, when she was back in the land of the living.

  She wondered if she should phone the site supervisor, to explain her non-appearance at the dig. Politeness aside, it seemed a pointless gesture, since her absence was surely obvious to everyone, and what would she say, anyway? I’ve got the ’flu. Or how about, I’m massively hung over. Or, if she was feeling really confessional, she could say, Maybe you should find a replacement for me now. I’m thinking of killing myself while I’m still well enough to manage it. Siân lay very still, imagining herself walking to the callbox at the foot of Caedmon’s Trod and speaking these words into the telephone receiver. Then she remembered it was Saturday. No one was expecting her to be anywhere in particular.

  Except Mack and Hadrian.

  S
he looked at the alarm clock. Half past twelve. Mack surely had better things to do than wait for her: she could sense in him that typically male combination of hunger for female companionship and impatience with women for wasting men’s valuable time. Perhaps he would go so far as to wander up the church steps, hoping to run into her. Perhaps he would even pay £1.70 to look for her at the abbey. Or perhaps, contrary to her instincts, he was head-over-heels in love with her, and would wait in the Mission coffee lounge until it closed and the Christian ladies shooed him out into Haggersgate, a sad young man with only a dog for company.

  All she knew was that she was relieved she’d never told him where she was staying. She needed a sanctum, even if it was a hotel room that smelled of booze.

  Strangely, despite feeling that there were toxic fumes rising from her body and that she must breathe very shallowly to give the pain in her head all the skull-room it demanded, she was a lot less miserable than she’d expected to be today. She hadn’t had any nightmares, for a start, unless you counted the hallucination on the summit of the hundred and ninety-nine steps. For the first time since her accident, she’d survived a night’s sleep without being pursued or mutilated. The notion of a few hours of benign unconsciousness, so taken for granted by other humans when they laid their heads on a pillow, was a novelty for Siân, and she hoped it might happen to her again sometime.

  The despair she’d felt last night, the extremity of disgust and disillusionment with human nature, seemed to have faded too. She felt purged, hollow and airy inside, as if everything she’d ever known was no longer stored there. Like an infant, she knew nothing much about anything, and must wait for some clues from the universe before she could make any judgement of what sort of world she was in.

  It was the strangest feeling, but not unpleasant.

  As the afternoon progressed, Siân got herself ready for going out. She washed her hair, dressed nicely, applied Band-Aids to the abrasions on her palms and wrists, even though she knew they’d peel away in no time. Setting off from the White Horse and Griffin at three-ish, she thought she might go to the East Cliff and throw herself off the edge, hopefully dying instantly on the Scaur below, but instead, she crossed the bridge to the West Side, walked to Springvale Medical Centre and asked to see a doctor.

  ‘I thought you’d decided you never wanted to see me again,’ said Mack, when he found her waiting for him in the Whitby Mission & Seafarer’s Centre on Monday, forty-eight hours after their original appointment.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ she said, choosing her words with care. ‘It was bad of me not to show up on Friday. I really wasn’t well enough, though.’

  He scrutinised her face, clearly unable to decide whether he should respond as a doctor or a lover, torn as he was between voicing professional concern, and praising her feminine charms regardless of how ghastly she looked.

  ‘You look very tired,’ he said, after some deliberation. He himself was in the usual fine shape, though so immaculately groomed and blow-dried today that he reminded her of a male model. She pictured him doing the rounds of hospital wards, accompanied by more nurses than strictly required. Or what about when he graduated to private practice? Female patients would discover hitherto unsuspected talents for hypochondria, no doubt. ‘And I have to say …’ he told Siân hesitantly, ‘your face is rather flushed.’

  ‘Oh, I really am sick,’ she assured him, dabbing at her cheeks with the cool back of one hand. ‘It’s under control, though. Nothing for you to worry about.’

  They were sitting in the Mission’s alternative coffee lounge, the one with the sign above the door saying, ‘Customers wishing to smoke or accompanied by a pet please use this room’. Hadrian was snuffling and whining under the table, doing his best not to bark, beating his tail loudly against the floor and the table-legs, and laying his head repeatedly in Siân’s lap, for her to pat. Despite the animal-friendly sign above the door, he was the only dog in the room just now, and flirting shamelessly. Mack seemed nervous, rolling a cigarette from a crackling plastic pouch of amber tobacco.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ said Siân.

  ‘I don’t – much,’ he replied, indicating, with a shrug of his eyebrows, the slightly hazy atmosphere created by the folk at the other tables. ‘I just get the occasional urge, when there’s a lot of it in the air.’ A sly, disarming grin spread slowly on his face, as though he were the town’s most respectable schoolboy caught puffing on a fag behind a rubbish bin. ‘Not a very good example for a doctor to set, eh? But at least I don’t smoke the mass-produced kind.’

  ‘Your big moral stand,’ she remarked drily.

  The sparring between them was beginning again, only a few minutes after their reunion. Magnus relaxed visibly, perhaps taking heart from this – or perhaps it was the nicotine.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said.

  She licked her lips, opened her mouth to reply.

  ‘Hush!’ said Hadrian, his skull clunking against the underside of the table.

  Mack lifted the tablecloth and peered underneath, half-amused, half-annoyed. ‘Hadrian disgraced himself here on Saturday, you know that?’ he said, grabbing at the animal’s tail to force him to turn around. ‘Whimpered the place down, didn’tcha, eh, boy? That’s the last time I take you anywhere.’

  ‘Rough!’ retorted Hadrian, as softly as his canine vocal cords allowed.

  Mack allowed the tablecloth to drop, and Hadrian returned to Siân, only his tail showing, a thick plume of white plush sweeping the smoky air. The other diners, mainly elderly couples, were smiling and nudging each other; this dog was better than the telly.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ said Mack.

  ‘The ladies are making some warm milk for me,’ said Siân. ‘They’re going to bring it when it’s ready.’

  He stood up and walked to the main coffee lounge to study the menu. Siân knew perfectly well that nothing would be to his liking. He would, she predicted, come closest to considering the slabs of quiche, but then reject them because the choice of ‘flavours’ was described, in the Mission’s bluff un-Londonesque fashion, as ‘cheese & onion’ and ‘bacon & egg’.

  While waiting for him to return, she alternated between stroking Hadrian and flipping the pages of Streonshalh, the Whitby Parish magazine. The hot news was the latest ecclesiastical Synod – not the one Saint Hilda hosted in 664, obviously, but a forthcoming one. There were advertisements for videos and colour laser copies, but also long articles about the merits of the alder tree and the willow-herb. Since last month, a startling number of parishioners had died – more females than males, too, despite the supposedly superior life expectancies of women. Four different funeral directors offered Siân their services.

  On a positive note, a mixed-voice choir called the Sleights Singers, founded in 1909, serenaded her thus: ‘New lady-and-gentleman members always made welcome’. Sure it was quaint, but behind the quaintness she sensed the genuine tug of human welcome, a reminder that if she were to show up at a particular house in Sleights on a particular night, she could have new friends instantly, and start singing with them. Siân committed the address to memory. If she was still alive next Thursday between 7.15 and 9, maybe she’d drop in.

  Mack ambled back to the table and sat down.

  ‘Nothing for Magnuses?’ said Siân, deadpan.

  ‘Nothing for Magnuses,’ he agreed. ‘Look, I know you’ve been ill and everything, but have you had a chance to … ah …’

  She pulled her Star Wars notebook out of her jacket and held it up to her mouth, enjoying the loudness of this silent action. Indeed, she was thinking that all the words they’d spoken up to now had been superfluous, an elaborate verbal game, and could have been replaced with a few decorous hand gestures.

  ‘I’ve got the whole thing now,’ she said. ‘It’s all done.’

  A matronly woman came to the table and set a tall glass of warm milk in front of Siân. She also laid down a cold pasty wrapped in a paper napkin.

  ‘Wow,’ murm
ured Mack when she’d walked back to the kitchen. ‘If you pay extra, do you get a plate?’

  ‘I told her the customer wouldn’t need one,’ said Siân, immediately conveying the pasty under the table, where Hadrian scoffed it noisily.

  Mack squinted at her in bemusement. ‘Were you so sure we’d come?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ she said, and took a careful sip of her milk while, at her feet, the dog went gronff, snuffle, flupp and so forth. ‘But I liked the idea of giving Hadrian this treat so much, that I bought it for him and hoped it would happen. And it has.’

  He frowned, as if her rationale were a mystic riddle too thorny – or too stickily sentimental – for him to wish to grasp.

  ‘OK: read,’ he said, motioning towards the notebook. ‘Please.’

  She leaned forward, and he did too, so their faces were close together, causing a murmur of gossip behind them. Siân delivered the testament of Thomas Peirson in a soft voice, softer still during the more sensational bits, pausing every few sentences for a sip of milk. When she reached the part where Mary’s body had been fished out of the River Esk, and her father was weeping for all he was worth, Magnus shook his head in admiration.

  ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Thomas Peirson, take a bow. Hollywood awaits.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Siân. ‘There’s more. I did the final page and a half last night. It’s going to disappoint you, Mack.’

  She cleared her throat, and continued reading, in the same soft tone as before. But these were new words, words she had uncovered in the wee small hours, when her sober hand had wielded the knife for the final time and she had wept tears of pity onto the frail old paper.

  Of the events that followed, I have not the time to write. This Confession must be hid in the earth while I have yet strength to bury it. I will say only, that our Mary’s funeral was one of the grandest this town has ever seen. She had a coach, drawn by six coal-black horses, and a long train of mourners bearing torches, for in those days burials were done after dark. When we carried her up the Steps, she had servers all dressed in white, carrying a maiden’s garland afore her coffin, with ribbons held by all her friends. The Vicar spoke with full sureness of her place in Heaven.