Penwys – sample

One of our key characters, Bronwen, is investigating the biography of a poet, a famous writer of the city of Penwys. She visits a location the poet apparently visited, in secret, centuries before…

…She re-entered the garden, and made for the door in the corner. It opened, and ahead and down she saw the pale pink light on rock; the air was damp and cold. She turned on her phone torch, and walked down the stone steps. She came out on the parapet above the sea, and stared, marvelling. The sea was choppy, the sky overhead a softer black-gray now, the horizon still a harmony of rosefire and the pale yellow of distant sands. It was beautiful, isolated, ancient. She paused, longer than she had intended, and that was all to the good.

Then she looked to the next door, large, surrounded by symbols, at ivy thick and green and rich. It was ajar, she saw, and she opened it, finding a small whitewashed lobby inside, with a row of bare coat hooks.

She paused on the threshold. She had been in that complex anticipatory state, where she was both confidently approaching a supposedly strange place with the light of the sceptic burning in her, but also, somewhere, strongly, rather worried about what she could find. No matter how absurd that could be, she felt it nevertheless. She hesitated at the door, wondering. She saw to her left and right further doors, and she tried to imagine what ghost stories there were about the place – Henry Edgecombe, no doubt. It felt rather uncared for, and the fact it was unused despite being clearly of such beauty was very odd. Perhaps a ghost was behind a door; a murder, a love affair, madness. The usual shtick.

Once, as a child, she had been in a house and seen something, or so she had thought. Now she looked back, she did not know where that house was: she had been with a friend, and they had been exploring. An old town house, in, perhaps, Cambridge, near her grandparents, a few doors down the town-house-terrace, empty; somehow they were inside. She thought. There had been a face, a girl’s, snarling in a doorway… She sometimes still had very odd dreams about Cambridge, where the colleges were set in an abstracted, geometric Elysian garden, all avenues of trees and canals (distinctly not rivers), and this girl stalked the gaps in the angular black-green hedges. But, in the end, it was a learned response: she and her friend had convinced one another that they had seen ghosts; the kernel was still lodged in her brain, a prion of invention.

And yet now she thought of it, and it had power again. Perhaps the face would be behind one of these doors. She shivered, hands deep in pockets, and she said, aloud, ‘the wind is cold’. Then she stepped inside. She chose the right-hand door first, and opened it to find an empty room, other than the tall, dark shelves running along it in lines, empty. She stared around the room, marvelling once more, but also… but also. She withdrew. Something not the girl’s face in the doorway, but behind it, above it, beyond it, something – she paused, and then she quickly headed for the other door. She did not know why she opened it, and there was a thrill of relief when she saw there was nobody there, just dust sheets, old furniture, a damp smell. She pulled the door towards herself, to shut it, and then close to her right, she spotted a painting on the wall. She peered at it, in the dark. It was a woman standing against an indistinct field, calm and smiling. She could only properly see the face in the dim light, but she did not want to turn her torch on it. It was too much, it was awful, something growing, unspeakable – she had not the words, and she did not want to find them. She stared at it, at the woman, and then a moment later she was walking quickly away, back past the sea, up the steps, and into the Fellow’s Garden. She pushed the heavy door closed with a bang, and leaned against it, heart thudding.

She had spooked herself, she said. She had heard the porter’s words and they had snuck inside, and her body had listened to them too well. The girl in the doorway was harder to see, but equally, there, closer to home, just behind that door she had shoved shut, was something else. Somehow the worst thing for her then was if that door was to open again. For a moment she felt as though it would, that someone, something, would come through. There was no sound.

After a time she moved away, walking out of the college, walking home, quickly, head down. As she went she thought again of Plunkett’s story. If it had been Devereaux, what Bronwen had felt there and the words Plunkett had recorded chimed. That there was something underneath, something figurative – the idea of unholy ground… fantastic, self-fulfilling delusions, she knew. But equally, she knew too she would never go near that door again.