The Sin Eater Read online

  Benedict had not known what to expect from this house, but his father had talked about something being in there that he, Benedict, must never meet. Clearly it was something really bad, so it would not be surprising to find Holly Lodge looked like the terrible castles in Jack the Giant Killer, although he supposed you did not get many castles in East London and you certainly did not get any giants, or, if you did, people kept very quiet about them.

  When they got to it, he saw it was an ordinary house in an ordinary street. But as they went inside, he had the feeling it had never been a happy house; he thought quite bad things might have happened here, or – what was worse – might be waiting to happen in the future. It was quite a big house, though, which was good because a lot of people were here. Aunt Lyn had arranged for tea or coffee and sherry to be offered, and people wandered around sipping their drinks, eyeing the furniture and the pictures and ornaments. It appeared that hardly anyone had been to the house before; aunts murmured that it was all in better condition than they would have expected; uncles peered dubiously at paintings, and a bookish cousin, with whom Nina tried unsuccessfully to flirt, discovered a collection of works on Irish folklore, and was seated on a window sill reading about creatures with unpronounceable names and sinister traditions, who had apparently haunted Ireland’s west coast.

  There were a few framed photographs on the walls which must be pretty old, because they were all black and white and some were even a kind of dusty brown like the faded bodies of dead flies on a hot window-sill. The older aunts inspected these photos with curiosity.

  ‘None of Declan Doyle,’ said the one who had fainted in the church. ‘Pity. I’d be interested to see what he looked like.’

  ‘I think there are some of him upstairs,’ said someone else.

  ‘Are there? Then I might have a look presently. My grandmother said he was one of the handsomest men she ever met.’

  ‘Handsome’s all very well,’ said one of the uncles. ‘I heard you couldn’t trust him from here to that door.’

  ‘Declan Doyle was your great-grandfather,’ said Aunt Lyn to Benedict. She was handing round sandwiches and she looked flustered. Benedict wondered if he was supposed to help her.

  He felt a bit lost. Everyone seemed to be huddled in little groups, all talking very seriously. He still did not like the house, but he was curious about it, mostly because of what his father had said that time.

  ‘It’s still there . . .’

  Whatever ‘it’ was, his father had seemed to find it frightening, but his mother had not believed in it.

  Benedict slipped out of the room, wondering if he dare explore. But if it would be his house one day, surely he was allowed to see the rest of it.

  But to begin with, the rooms were not especially interesting. Benedict looked into what must be a dining room and into a big stone-floored kitchen. The nicest room was on the other side of the hall: there was a view over the gardens and bookshelves lining the walls. A big leather-topped desk stood under the window. It could have been his grandfather’s study; people who had big houses like this did have studies. Benedict tried to picture his grandfather sitting in one of the deep armchairs reading, or writing letters at the desk. Old people often wrote letters. They did not text like Benedict and his friends did, or email, because there had not been texting or computers in their day. Benedict thought it must have been pretty fascinating to have lived in that long-ago world, although he would miss texting and computers.

  There was a calendar in a brass frame on the desk and a big desk diary with a page for each day of the week. On both of these the 18th January was marked in red and a time – three p.m. – was underlined. Whoever had done it had not just drawn a circle round the day, but had made an elaborate shape like a little sketched figure. Benedict stared at the marks, feeling cold and a bit sick, because the 18th was the day of the crash and three o’clock was the time it had happened. Aunt Lyn had said so. Benedict could not bear thinking about that, so he went out of the study, closing the door firmly, and hoping no one would see him.

  He paused for a moment in the hall to listen to the sounds from the long room where everyone was eating and talking. One of the aunts was trying to find out where Benedict’s parents had been going in the middle of an icy blizzard, insisting there was something peculiar about it.

  ‘Because I can’t imagine what was so important as to send them on a car journey in the depths of winter. Half of London had ground to a halt and all the television news programmes were warning people not to travel unless absolutely necessary.’

  ‘Like in the war,’ said an elderly man, who was wandering around with a bottle of brandy. ‘“Is your journey really necessary?”’

  ‘Yes, and I don’t see how that journey could have been, do you? They were very insistent that it couldn’t be put off, and they were very secretive about it as well.’

  Benedict went up the stairs. There would not be much to see up here, but anything was better than hearing people say horrid things about his mother and father.

  There seemed to be a lot of bedrooms, with ceilings spotted with damp and faded wallpaper, and furniture draped in sheets so you imagined people crouching under them. Had his grandfather lived here on his own, with all these rooms and dusty windows and the drifting cobwebs that reached down to brush against Benedict’s face like thin fingers?

  At the end of this landing was a second flight of stairs. Benedict hesitated, but he could still hear people talking and no one seemed to have missed him, so he went up the stairs, which creaked as if the house was groaning. There was another landing at the top; it was very dark and, as he looked doubtfully about him, a door on his right swung slowly open. Benedict froze. Was someone in there? He took a deep breath and went up to the door, but the room was empty except for an old dressing table and a desk pushed against one wall. Or was it empty? As he stood uncertainly in the doorway, the long curtains billowed out as if someone was standing behind them, and something seemed to dart across his vision. He gasped and was about to run back downstairs when he realized that what he had seen was only the glint of a silver photograph frame on the dressing table. There were several photos, but this one must have caught the light when he opened the door. He let out a whooshing breath of relief, then went up to see the photo. It was one of the faded brown ones, but Benedict could see the man in it had dark hair. He was wearing old-fashioned clothes and he was only partly looking at the camera so that half of his face was hidden.

  Benedict stared at the man, his mind whirling and panic gripping him in huge wrenching waves.

  The man in the photograph was the man who had looked at him from his bedroom mirror four days earlier.

  TWO

  After a long time Benedict picked up the photograph and turned it over. Photographs often had things written on the back to tell who the people in them were. His hands were shaking so badly he almost dropped the frame, but eventually he managed to peel off the sticky tape on the backing and take out the photo.

  There was nothing. The back of the photo had splodgy brown marks, but no one had written on it to say who this was or when or where the photo had been taken. Benedict sat down on the window sill to think. This was his great-grandfather’s house and the aunts had said there were photographs of him up here. So there was only one person this could be. Declan Doyle, his great-grandfather.

  Benedict put the photograph back in its frame and replaced it on the dressing table. He wanted to run out of the room, but he did not want any of the people downstairs to see him shaking and on the verge of tears. He would stay here a little longer until he felt better.

  The mirror on the dressing table was reflecting the photograph of Declan. It was odd how reflections changed things. Even this room looked different in the mirror – it was smaller and the walls were darker. If you narrowed your eyes, you could even think you were seeing a fire burning in a small grate. Benedict quite liked seeing this, because people did not have fires like that any more. He kept his e
yes half-shut for a while, then he opened them, expecting to see this bedroom reflected in the glass. But it was not. He could still see the fire-lit room. There was a bright red rug in front of the fire and a small table and two chairs. Standing by the fireplace, its leaping light behind him, was the man from the photograph. Declan.

  Benedict shrank back against the window pane. He would not be frightened. He could not be hurt by somebody who was inside a mirror. But he ached with the pain of wanting Mum, because she would have put her arms round him and told him he was safe from everything bad in the world. Dad would have said, in his quiet way, that all you had to do with things that tried to frighten you was make a rude face at them and they ran away like the cowards they were.

  Was that fire-lit room where Declan had lived? Aunt Lyn had said Declan was Irish – would the cottage be in Ireland?

  At once a soft silvery whisper seemed to hiss into the room.

  ‘Yes, it’s in Ireland, Benedict, it’s on the very edge of Ireland’s west coast, near the Cliffs of Moher . . . They’re wild and dark, those cliffs, and the Atlantic Ocean lashes against them forever and there’s the cold music of the sidhe inside the ocean, and the sound of screeching gulls, like wailing banshees, or souls shut out of heaven . . .’

  Benedict looked round the room in fear, but there was no one there.

  ‘And there’s an ancient watchtower built by one of Ireland’s High Kings, and they say the devil himself prowls that stretch of the cliffs . . . That’s where it began, Benedict, inside that dark tower, reeking of evil . . . One hundred and twenty years ago, near enough . . .

  ‘We’d make up stories about that watchtower, Benedict – wouldn’t any child do that? We’d say to one another, “Let’s pretend . . .” ’

  Let’s pretend . . . There it was, the spell that had taken Alice to that other world.

  ‘We’d pretend it was the ruinous halls of the High Kings, the last magical stones from the ancient kingdom of Tara . . . Or a giant’s castle – you know about giants, Benedict, you know how they have to be killed . . . And wouldn’t any child with half an ounce of spirit or adventure want to go up there, to find out what was really inside that old tower? I did, Benedict, I and a good friend I had, a boy I grew up with.’

  The voice had a way of pronouncing things Benedict had never heard, and the words were broken-up like a crackly old radio, or as if they were coming from a long way off.

  Greatly daring and having no idea if his own words could be heard, he said, ‘Did you do it? Go up to the tower?’

  ‘I did. Oh, I did, Benedict. I and my friend went up there. We thought we might find giants and ghosts, or princesses that had to be rescued from evil sorcerers and black enchantments. I’d have hacked my way through brambles and thick-thorn hedges for a princess even at that age. Wouldn’t anyone?’

  ‘Did you find those things? The giants and the kings and the princesses?’

  ‘No,’ said the soft voice. ‘We found something far worse.’

  Ireland 1890s

  Declan Doyle and Colm Rourke had always known they would one day brave the ancient watchtower on the Moher Cliffs. From the time they were very small, growing up in the tiny village of Kilglenn, they had agreed it was a mystery that must one day be solved. And then wouldn’t they be the toast of the entire village and half the villages around! Wouldn’t they have made their fortunes and have enough money to be off to London town, where it was said that you might almost dig up gold in the streets.

  ‘We’ll be out of here as soon as we’re properly grown-up,’ said Colm, and Declan, who followed Colm in most things, said they would, for sure, and they’d take Romilly with them.

  Romilly. Colm’s cousin, a year younger, the most beautiful creature either of them had ever seen, although, as Declan pointed out, they had not in fact seen so very many girls, because anyone who was even half good-looking usually left Kilglenn for wider worlds.

  ‘We’ll leave as well, but not until we’ve managed to get inside the watchtower and see if we can make our fortunes from it,’ said Colm, grinning.

  ‘Even if we got in there, all we’d find was Father Sheehan, living there like a hermit. And I don’t want to meet him,’ said Declan firmly. ‘My father says he’s very wicked and the Church excommunicated him because of a woman.’

  ‘If you listen to them in Fintan’s bar of an evening, they’ll tell you it was nothing to do with a woman,’ said Colm. ‘They say Nick Sheehan met the devil one morning on the cliff tops and traded his soul, and that’s the real reason he was excommunicated.’

  ‘People don’t trade their souls, except in books. And what would the devil be doing in Kilglenn anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know, but they say he challenged Nick Sheehan to play chess and Nick Sheehan won, and the devil had to give him the chess set. But he locked it away in the watchtower because it’s so evil it’d frizzle your soul if you so much as looked at it. That’s why he lives up there – keeping guard over it.’

  ‘I don’t believe any of that,’ said Declan firmly.

  ‘I don’t either, not really, but I’d like to meet Nick Sheehan and make up my own mind,’ said Colm thoughtfully. ‘And it’s a grand story, isn’t it? I bet it’s told in every house in Kilglenn round the fire every Christmas.’

  ‘If we stay here long enough, we’ll be telling it as well, in about a hundred years’ time.’

  ‘Not us,’ said Colm. ‘We’re not staying in Kilglenn for a hundred years. We’ll be off to London long before that.’

  London, late 1990s

  Benedict could still hear the grown-ups talking downstairs, and somebody was calling to know whether there was any more coffee, but the sounds seemed a long way off. What was much nearer and much more real was the small Irish village where two boys had grown up, and where an ancient watchtower looked out over the ocean.

  He wanted to ask Declan what he and the other boy – Colm – had really found in the watchtower, but he was starting to feel very frightened, and one of the things that was frightening him most was the way Declan was standing with half of his face turned away. But his father would want him to be brave, so Benedict got down from the window ledge and went towards the mirror, to get a better look at Declan and the fire-lit room. At once, the image seemed to flinch; Declan did not step back exactly, but he turned his face away like a man suddenly faced with a too-bright light.

  Why had he done that? Benedict was trying to decide if he dared say Alice’s Let’s Pretend spell after all and see if the mirror let him step through it, when the fire-lit room with the dark figure shivered, then splintered, and all he could see was the reflection of this room with its dusty walls.

  It’s all right, thought Benedict. He’s gone. I don’t know what that was, but I don’t think those two boys and that village and that stuff about the devil’s chess set was real. I’ll go downstairs, and I won’t ever tell anybody about this. It won’t ever happen again. I’m safe.

  But he never did feel safe, not through all the years he was growing up in Aunt Lyn’s house. He had the feeling that Declan was waiting for him, somewhere just beyond vision and just outside of hearing, waiting for his chance to talk to Benedict again.

  Once, when he was eleven, travelling back from staying with relatives of his mother, half asleep because it was late and the journey was a long one, he thought Declan looked at him from beyond the darkened window of the train. He sat bolt upright in the seat, peering through the window in panic. But the outline dissolved and Benedict tried to think that ghost images often did look back at you from a train window in the dark. They usually turned out to be the guard coming to check tickets, or somebody walking along the aisle.

  By the time he was twelve, the pain of losing his parents was not as severe, and on his thirteenth birthday he realized he had to concentrate to recall their faces. He felt so guilty about this, he looked out several photographs and asked Aunt Lyn if they could be framed and put on his dressing table. He knew he would never forget ho
w he had felt when they died, but Aunt Lyn was kind and loving and made no difference between Benedict and Nina, and Nina appeared to regard him as a younger brother she could organize.

  But if his parents’ ghosts receded, the memory of what he had seen in his great-grandfather’s house did not. I’ll outgrow you, he said to Declan’s memory. I’ll go away – to university if I can – and leave you behind.

  By the time he got to Reading University at eighteen, he thought he had succeeded. He found law absorbing – and he thought he might even try for a PhD in criminology. He made friends – in his second year he shared a rambling old house with three other students – and there were one or two girlfriends. Life was interesting and full.

  And then, a few weeks before his twenty-first birthday, he received the solicitor’s letter, saying that under the terms of his parents’ will, the ownership of Holly Lodge would shortly pass to him, and that unless he wanted to live in it himself, which they thought he did not, they recommended he sell it. If he decided to do so they could arrange a house clearance, but Benedict must, of course, first go through the house’s contents to see what he wanted to keep.

  I’ll have to go back, thought Benedict, the remembered dread stealing over him. It’s been eleven years, but whether I sell it or keep it, I’ll have to go back to Declan’s house.

  THREE

  Nell West had been pleased when Nina Doyle asked her to value the contents of a family house near Highbury. It had belonged to an elderly relative, said Nina, showering information on Nell in her customary pelting way, and it had been rented for about ten years, but there were most likely some quite nice things stored away. It was her cousin Benedict’s grandfather who had originally owned it; he had died in a car crash along with Benedict’s parents years ago. It had all been frightfully tragic, said Nina, because Benedict had only been eight at the time.