Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

Copyright © 1999 by Peter Dickinson

All rights reserved.

WARNER BOOKS

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

First eBook Edition: April 2009

ISBN: 978-0-446-56109-9

Contents

Copyright Page

RACHEL

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

JENNY

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

DILYS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

JENNY

RACHEL

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

JENNY

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

RACHEL

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

JENNY

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

RACHEL

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

DILYS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

RACHEL

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

JENNY

Also by Peter Dickinson

The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest

The Old English Peep Show

The Sinful Stones

Sleep and His Brother

The Lizard in the Cup

The Green Gene

The Poison Oracle

The Lively Dead

King and Joker

Walking Dead

One Foot in the Grave

A Summer in the Twenties

The Last House-Party

Hindsight

Death of a Unicorn

Tefuga

Perfect Gallows

Skeleton-in-Waiting

Play Dead

The yellow Room Conspiracy

For my mother,

Who suggested that I

Write about rooks

RACHEL

1

Cleaned, changed, propped inert on her pillows and now waiting for her breakfast, Rachel studied the rooks.

First she counted the nests. Ten, still, but the two new ones had grown appreciably since last evening. She had known that serious building had been going on, from the particular type of racket the birds had been making almost from first light, beyond the closed curtains. Indeed, she was disappointed to find that an eleventh nest had not been started. It was in the earliest stages, when the half-completed nest didn’t already conceal the process, that she had most chance of seeing how it was done.

It was strangely frustrating. Last spring she had lain here, watching until the young leaves hid the almost completed nests—fourteen of them. Her long sight was remarkably good. She could make out the individual twigs as they were carried in. But she still hadn’t been able to see how the birds had achieved structures firm enough not just to endure rearing boisterous young but, all bar one, to stay put through the winter. Then, in early spring, with a lot of yelping and squawking and what looked like real fights, four had been destroyed and rebuilt while the rest had been merely refurbished.

How did they do it? Rachel was far from sure that, if one of the nest sites had been at ground level and she had been given a supply of twigs, she could with two deft-fingered hands have woven a nest to withstand twelve months’ weather. Yet the birds did it with no more than a beak. She had seldom seen one use a foot for anything other than to grip the tree. And they worked to some kind of plan. She remembered, years ago, watching one wrestle a twig off a bush down by the churchyard gate, a good two hundred yards from the copper beech where the nests were. Apparently no other twig in the garden would do. It was like Jocelyn embarking on a bit of carpentry by going to the timber store and sorting through a stack of apparently identical planks for the three that suited him.

And only some nest sites were acceptable. Thirty-two years ago Jocelyn had decided that the big beech behind the stables had to come down. It had developed an extremely handsome bracket fungus, over a yard across by the time of the first frosts, then collapsing into slimy pulp. Rachel had taken a truly satisfying series of photographs of it over several years, until Jocelyn had got a tree expert in to take a look at it. Merulius giganteus it had turned out to be, a relative of dry rot, and the tree had better come down before the next northeasterly toppled it onto the stables.

“What about the rooks?” Rachel had asked.

“There’s plenty of other trees,” Jocelyn had answered.

But there hadn’t been, not in the rooks’ eyes. The copper beech had looked entirely suitable, and indeed in some years an outcast pair had built a solitary nest on a particular side branch, but only three more moved in the first spring after the old beech was felled, and another couple the spring after that. Rachel had paid less attention to them in those days, and in many years didn’t bother to count the nests, but her impression was that it had taken a surprising time for the numbers to build up to the dozen plus that they had been since she was first confined here, with time to study the nests and wonder how they were made.

No, “wonder” was too feeble a word for the serious effort and attention she put into it, a tactic in her long and steadfast campaign to keep hold of her mind. Almost everything else was gone, the provinces of her body lost for good. Four years ago she had first been aware of the invaders as an awkwardness in standing and walking, with a tendency to stumble—messages received at the centre of government but then for a while just pigeonholed. It had taken her nearly two months to decide that what was happening to her wasn’t fairly normal in the elderly, and that she should go to Dr. Cherry about it. A fortnight later she had learned, from a London specialist, the barbarous name of the invaders, and that they were irresistible.

The illness followed its expected course, with the head the last to go. By now parties of the invaders were inside the undefended walls. Though taste still functioned, thank goodness, swallowing was starting to be difficult, as was speech—both varyingly, on some days almost normal, on others a willed effort, extremely tiring. Meanwhile signals persisted in arriving from the abandoned provinces—a bit of the bureaucracy still pigheadedly trying to function, but to no purpose because without muscular control, Rachel’s sense of her own body was haphazard. If, while her eyes were shut, something touched her hand, she would be aware of the touch, and that it came from her hand, but not which one, nor how it was disposed on the bed. When her lungs went, she would die. (A ventilator? What was the point?) So a few months more, at most.

But until then her mind was hers, untouchable, holy to her, hagia sophia . She was determined to die knowing what was happening to her, and aware and confident of the reality of anything in the field of her remaining perceptions.

This was a decision she had come to while she could still walk with two sticks, play bridge, set the shutter speeds on her cameras, be reasonably amusing company. She had made it on what turned out to be her last visit to her elder sister, then in a home. Tabby had not been felled by anything as specific as Rachel’s illness, but, it seemed, by something in her own nature. She had kept a good deal of physical control—more, Rachel suspected, than she admitted, preferring to be helpless—but she had given in. That afternoon she had seemed delighted by her visitors at first, but within ten minutes had returned to her TV, switching channels every few minutes but seeming to regard all she saw—soaps, advertisements, news bulletins, horse races—as a single series of events in which she herself was taking part, and all of it somehow continuous with the dream from which they had woken her when they arrived.

“She can’t be bothered to distinguish,” Rachel had said as Flora drove her home. She had heard the distress and disgust in her own voice. Different though they were, Tabby had always mattered to her.

“Oh, Ma, why should she?” Flora had protested. “What’s really happening to her is pretty bloody boring. She has much more fun making it up.”