Hearthstone Cottage

by Frazer Lee

  And kept falling.

  —into a dark place, the darkest of all, black and empty as a void. He felt weightless and powerless to stop his ceaseless descent into the nothingness. He clawed at the air, or rather the lack of it, and felt something hideously slimy brush past his fingertips. Turning his head, he glimpsed the edge of the open cavity in Oscar’s body, teeming with maggots. Mike tried to scream, but his teeth were locked together in a deathlike grimace. He was falling into the pit of Oscar’s stomach, and through it into something – or somewhere – else. His body pitched over until he was in freefall, facedown now. He saw the dark eye of the dying stag, an impossibly huge version of the black scrying mirror, rushing up toward him. Mike braced himself for impact as he plummeted into the eye. He felt it yield, opening up to him in the way that a flower might welcome a honeybee. The viscous jelly of the stag’s eye warped around him, coating him, and he rolled into it with his hands making spasmodic paddling movements through the noxious waters of the great eye. Then Mike became aware that he was swimming. The watery eye had given way to the dark depths of the loch beside the cottage. He could see two little lights blazing on the bed of the loch, far beneath him. He swam deeper, searching them out. Silt from the bottom of the loch erupted around him as he coursed his body into the deep. Clouds of the stuff fogged his vision for a few moments. Looking around fearfully, he saw a dark shape through the detritus floating all around him. It was wide and looked like a ridge of some kind, as though the mountains had slid beneath the water to encircle him. As the silt cleared, he saw the source of the two little lights.

  They were the white orbs of Meggie’s dead eyes looking up at him from the bottom of the loch. The skin of her face was pallid and pockmarked from the hungry kisses of the fish that had been feasting on her cold flesh. Her dead body undulated slightly beneath the wet, floating shroud of her clothing, which revealed her shape. No arousal came at the sight of her body this time; the only sensation awakening within him was a powerful and unfathomable dread.

  His own body had turned to ice, and he wanted nothing more than to swim for the surface of the water, to clamber out and crawl back to the fire beside which he hoped he had fallen asleep to dream this most unwelcome of dreams. But something in his heart told him this particular nightmare was not over yet. Those two dead eyes still had a hold over him, and he knew even before it happened that Meggie’s right hand would spring to life, grabbing on to his wrist and pulling him down to the bottom of the loch. He thrashed against her grip, trying to twist himself free of it, but his efforts were for nothing. His screams and protestations only forced more water down into his lungs. He was drowning, and even though he tried to fight it, he knew he had lost the battle. He felt Meggie’s cold and slimy body cleave to his in the depths as he gave himself over to the blackness of death. As oblivion took him, he heard a faint sound from high above the water.

  It was a child’s laughter.

  Mike opened his eyes and rolled over onto his side on the sofa. He threw up onto the living room floor, his vomit as cold and silty as the waters of the loch. Icy sweat coated every inch of his body. When his vomiting subsided, he wiped a dribble of fluid from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand and groaned.

  Just then, he heard the little laugh again, followed by the footfalls of tiny, bare feet.

  He wheeled around into a half-seated position, holding on to his stomach, and glimpsed the shadow of a small child as it ran through the open doorway toward the stairs. Goose bumps gathered at a cold spot below the nape of Mike’s neck. He wiped away the sweat, then realized his hand was still coated with the gross contents of his stomach. He willed himself to stand up and walk the few meters it would take to reach the kitchen sink. He desperately wanted to wash his mouth, face and hands, and to draw a cool drink of water from the tap. But his limbs clearly didn’t share his desperation. Unable to find the energy to stand, he slumped back onto the sofa, praying he would regain the equilibrium necessary for him to clean up before anyone else awoke.

  * * *

  Mike didn’t manage to wake up before anyone else, of course.

  And whoever was up and about before him clearly had something of an appetite. The smell of frying bacon dragged him deliciously from his sleep. His belly churned, the acid aftereffects of his overindulgence still lingering there, eating away at his stomach lining. His mouth was as dry as wood rot, and his head pounded as soon as he tried to sit up.

  As fragments of the night before came back to him, Mike suddenly remembered his accident. Bracing himself, he peered over the side of the sofa with one eye open against the daylight streaming into the room from the conservatory. An old newspaper, the kind that only sells advertising, lay open and facedown over the spot where he had vomited. He could see the shameful stain seeping through the front-page headline, which screamed in block capitals about ‘HUNDREDS OF LOCAL JOBS’ at a new hydroelectric plant. Mike fell back onto the sofa and groaned. He had hoped to dispose of the evidence before anyone woke up. Through the haze of his hangover, he tried to listen so he could hear who was in the kitchen. After a short while, he heard Alex’s voice.

  “If you’re still alive in there, mate, be warned. There’s only a few rashers of bacon left.”

  Mike crawled off the sofa, avoiding the vomit-stained newspaper. He had to lean on the furniture in order to walk the short distance into the kitchen. Swaying a little, he peered through half-closed eyes to see Alex busily preparing breakfast.

  “There’s only three eggs, too. I’m having two, just so you know.”

  “I’m not sure I can eat anything.”

  “Not surprised. Did you really finish off the whole bottle? Mad bastard. That’s a bottle of single malt you owe me.”

  “Please, don’t even mention booze,” Mike groaned.

  “Not feeling so sharp myself,” Alex said with a chuckle, “but it needed done, didn’t it?”

  “I suppose. I can’t really remember.…” Mike swallowed at a dry taste at the back of his throat. It tasted like soil. And salt water. The image of a looming black shape troubled him, somewhere deep in the fathoms of his memories. He blinked the image away. “Sorry about the floor. I’ll clean it up.”

  “Aye, you bloody well will.”

  “Are the girls up yet?”

  “What you really mean is, did your pregnant girlfriend come down here and find you comatose on the sofa with an empty bottle of whisky next to you, only to discover that it’s you who has the morning sickness?”

  All Mike could do to reply was nod, and even that nearly finished him.

  “’Fraid so, Mikey, my lad,” Alex said.

  “Oh, fuck no.”

  “Oh, fuck yes.” Alex chuckled again, then flipped over the bacon in the pan, making the cooking oil sizzle all the more. “You eating or what, soft lad? I’m going to smash all of this if you don’t.”

  “I’ll try a little bit.”

  “Good man,” Alex said, cracking the third egg before dropping it into the frying pan where it began to turn white with a triumphant sizzle.

  Mike frowned at the steam rising from the frying pan. He was experiencing a vague, yet uncomfortable memory of trying to shatter the conservatory window using a garden shovel. He glanced at the glass windowpane. It was intact, apart from a small, spidery shadow at the top left-hand side. Clutching the backs of the dining table chairs as he went, he shambled over to take a closer look. The pane was chipped, looking like a car windscreen might after being hit by a chunk of gravel. Could he have broken it during his sleepwalking incident? Then he remembered the injured bird. It must have cracked the glass with its beak when it collided with the window. Mike felt a pang of something like regret as he remembered how distraught Meggie had been to find that the creature was dead.

  “You ruin everything you touch,” she had said.

  Mike’s head throbbed harder, making his knees buckle. He
placed both hands on the back of the chair nearest to him. Icy little beads of cold sweat gathered at his brow.

  “On second thought, I’ll skip breakfast. I’ll only want to throw up again if I eat. Got any rubber gloves? I’ll sort out the mess in the living room.”

  “Suit yourself, but there’s ’nae any more to be had.” Alex turned his attention from cooking breakfast to look Mike in the eye. The expression on his friend’s face told Mike how awful he must look – and Alex himself appeared pretty rough around the edges from their late-night session.

  “You look like death warmed up. Here.” Alex passed him a pair of rubber gloves, along with a roll of kitchen towel and some cleaning solution. “Well, not even warmed up, just…served as is.”

  Mike set the cleaning items down and then tugged the yellow gloves onto his cold, sweaty hands. It was tough going, and they smelled strongly of bleach, which did nothing to quell the churning going on in the pit of his stomach. He watched Alex loading up a plate with fried rashers and slices of hot, buttered toast. It did look good, though.

  “If we’ve run out, maybe we can head into the village and stock up?” Mike said.

  Alex sat down at the far end of the table, keeping his plate of hot food away from Mike’s cleaning gear.

  “About that, mate,” Alex said through a mouthful of fried egg.

  Mike couldn’t read the expression on Alex’s face, but he knew something was up.

  “Helen took Meggie’s car, headed into Drinton this morning.”

  “Oh, so she’s getting us some more food? Great,” Mike replied.

  “Don’t know about that; she just headed out and took the car.”

  “Your sister went with her, though?”

  “No.” Alex sighed and put down his knife and fork.

  “Kay?”

  “She went out alone.”

  “Is she even insured? On the car, I mean?”

  “I don’t think she had car insurance on her mind, Mikey,” Alex said impatiently. “She was in a bloody fierce mood.”

  Mike’s stomach groaned with that sinking feeling. He watched Alex pick up the salt cellar and sprinkle more onto his already salty-looking meal.

  “Helen tried to wake you this morning. Said she shook you about a bit but you were – now, how did she put it? – fucking unresponsive, that was it.”

  “Oh, shit,” Mike said.

  “Quite,” Alex replied. “Then she realized she was standing in a puddle of your vomit, and that was it. She was the one who put the newspaper over your technicolor yawn. Soon after, she asked Meggie if she could borrow the car.”

  “Why did Meggie let her go? On her own, I mean.”

  “This is Helen we’re talking about,” Alex reminded him, picking up his fork and spearing a piece of bacon. “Would you get in her way?”

  Alex did have a point. Mike was crestfallen. “Did she at least say when she was coming back?”

  Alex shook his head, and washed down his mouthful with a gulp of tea. He belched, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Better clean up before she does come back, though. You look like shite, man. And you stink like it too. Now fuck off, you’re putting me off my breakfast.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Mike said. “Don’t look so hot yourself.”

  “At least I had the sense to call it a night at some point, rather than drinking myself into a stupor. You need to slow down, man. You always take it too far. You don’t know when to stop.”

  “I just needed to cut loose, that’s all,” Mike said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Alex muttered, sounding like he’d heard this before. Which he had, Mike had to admit. “Just bloody well cut loose with some of that disinfectant, will you?”

  Mike grimaced and picked up the cleaning kit before trudging back into the living room. He sighed and dropped to his knees to begin clearing up the mess he had made. As he did so, he caught a glimmer of broken glass in the soot-black dark of the fireplace. He couldn’t fathom why, but it made him feel cold to his bones.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was almost lunchtime, and Helen had not returned. Mike was beginning to worry, cursing himself for overdoing it with the drink and for oversleeping. No one in the cottage had mobile reception, and the lack of a landline left Mike without any alternatives to try to contact Helen via the village stores, or the pub – not that he thought she would go there anyway—

  In her condition.

  —on her own in a million years. Mike rolled himself a cigarette, hating how his hands trembled so. He had the shakes, and a gnawing hunger had taken hold of him. He was beginning to regret skipping breakfast, but still, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have been fit to keep it down anyhow.

  After a fitful smoke outside the conservatory, Mike ambled back into the kitchen in search of something bland to eat. Something he could keep down. Alex, good to his word, had polished off the last of the bacon and eggs earlier that morning along with the remainder of the bread. Mike stood in front of the open fridge, as though some food might appear if he willed it to do so. Only a pathetic lump of butter poked from out of its foiled wrapper, and some vegetables lurked in the salad drawer, looking forlorn.

  He sighed, longing for carbohydrates, and turned his attention to the cupboards. Rifling through them, he found some out-of-date spaghetti and other dried goods, including risotto rice and a suspect-looking pack of dried porcini mushrooms. A risotto wouldn’t be a bad meal, he supposed, but he didn’t feel he had the energy or the wherewithal to cook it. Alex and Kay were out walking and he had no idea when they would return. Maybe they would be hungry when they got back, so he might be able to muscle in on their meal plans later. He hadn’t seen Meggie since she’d gone out to work in her studio, and he was okay with that. At least it would save him the embarrassment of facing her after he’d been shouting her name into the dark the night before. Or, for that matter, facing any further accusations about the dead bird.

  Putting such thoughts away, he opened the last of the cupboards and resigned himself to a lackluster meal of the dry water crackers he found inside. There wasn’t even any cheese to be had with them. He boiled the kettle and brewed himself a cup of tea. At least tea and coffee supplies were still ample. But the milk was on the turn and threatening to take his stomach with it, so he drank the tea black.

  Some holiday, he thought, sloshing down a mouthful of bone-dry cracker with a gulp of searing hot tea. He wished he could hear the engine of Meggie’s car heralding Helen’s triumphant return, laden with goodies from the village stores. But no sound came, and he retreated to the empty living room to sit down and drink the rest of his brew.

  Kay had left her book of local folklore open on the coffee table. He picked it up and cast his eyes over the open pages. Evidently she had been reading up on the legend of the witch again. A sketch of the stone circle accompanied the lurid tale of how the witch had sacrificed local children there. The artist had been allowed some poetic license, depicting the stones as impossibly tall. Surely they would have rivaled Stonehenge if they had really been that big. The artist’s rendition had them casting their long, black shadows over an imagined scene depicting the cowled witch standing over her tiny, sacrificial victim. The defenseless bundle was clearly an infant, and the witch’s eyes glaring from beneath her cowl showed her murderous intent. The tip of a sharply curved dagger seemed almost to glint on the page, making Mike blink. He winced at the unpleasant memory of the whimpering puppies he had seen in Oscar’s open belly up at the site of the Spindle Stones. Mike closed the book and dropped it back onto the coffee table, facedown this time, as if to further deny what he had seen there – and what it reminded him of.

  He didn’t feel like finishing his mug of tea, and left it on the coffee table next to the book. He rose from the sofa and ambled out of the living room, avoiding the black gaze of the scrying mirror looming from atop the mantelpiece
as he went. The cottage felt bigger, and colder, in the daytime somehow. Climbing the stairs, he heard a couple of them creak. The high-pitched sound could be mistaken for the shrill laughter of a child, he supposed. Perhaps that was all he had heard before he had come downstairs the last couple of times his nightmares had gotten the better of him. Floorboards settling as the heat from the fire diminished would be sure to make a bit of a racket. Mike wondered if he really believed that. Maybe he was just trying to comfort himself with something explainable, something tangible.

  He walked the narrow passage to his and Helen’s room, opened the door and stepped inside. The air in the room was stale. It smelled of sleep and felt foggy, like the haze of unfinished dreams. Mike saw that the bed was unmade, his pillow clinging to the side of the mattress as if for fear of toppling to the floor. The crumpled mattress was bunched up at the foot of the bed, forming the peaks and furrows of an alien landscape.

  He leaned his back against the door until it clicked shut. He noticed that Helen’s sweater was still where she had left it, on the back of the chair that sat beside the chest of drawers. As he circled the end of the bed, Mike could see her suitcase poking out from beneath the divan. At least Helen hadn’t packed her things and taken them with her. He strolled over to the window and took pause to look out over the loch and at the majestic mountains beyond.

  The stillness outside began to bother him, though. He was still listening for a car engine to break the imposing silence. But none came, and he sat down on the edge of the bed, defeated. His hangover was making the sides of his head pulse in time with his beating heart. The growl of his stomach reminded him that the meager meal of dry crackers had done nothing to assuage his hunger. He pushed his body up and off the bed once more and stood at the window. It was a clear day, if a little murky over the mountains. Looking at the empty lane leading away into the distance, he realized he was done waiting for the sound of Meggie’s car on his lonesome in this stifling cottage.