Hearthstone Cottage

by Frazer Lee

  Seeing Helen’s sweater hanging over the back of the chair made him think of his own, and he rummaged through his bag to find it. He pulled it over his head, made fists and pushed them through the sleeves. The warmth of the garment was comforting, and it felt a little like armor, somehow. Mike left the door open on his way out, to clear the stale air. It struck him that in a way he was allowing the bedroom to breathe.

  After loping down the stairs, he located his raincoat on a hook above the Wellington boot rack. He shook the tangled, gossamer threads of cobweb from his hood, pulled the coat on over his sweater and set about finding his walking boots. His thick walking socks were still tucked inside the boots and were, thankfully, dry. His boots were still caked with mud from the shooting jaunt across the heathland. Instead of trailing mud through the living room, he carried them through the cottage to the conservatory door. He banged the heels of his boots together over the threshold and managed to get rid of the biggest clumps of dried mud. At least this way, he wouldn’t have to worry about being told to clean up the living room floor all over again.

  Mike grabbed the Ordnance Survey map from the coffee table. It might prove useful. But as he pulled it from beneath Kay’s pile of books, he knocked the mug over, spilling the last of his tea over the folklore book.

  Strange, he could have sworn he had closed the book, but it was open again on the page, showing the illustration of the Spindle Stones and the cowled woman. He cursed under his breath when he saw a dark stain from the spilled tea spreading across the paper. It had partially obscured the image of the little bundle that lay vulnerable to the witch’s incantations on the altar stone. Mike wiped the tea stain with the flat of his hand, making it worse. It looked like a bloodstain. Eager to be away from the image, not to mention the close atmosphere of the cottage, Mike scooped up the map and trudged through the kitchen, toward the back door.

  He glimpsed something dark out of the corner of his eye.

  Blinking, he wondered for a moment if it was just the afterimage of the tea stain that had troubled him so much without him understanding why. A tiny screech alerted him to the fact that the dark shape had not been an afterimage but something altogether real. And the something was moving along the skirting board of the kitchen. He stood still and peered at the place where the wall disappeared behind the fridge. The dark shape reappeared, sniffing the air as he watched it from his vantage point near the dining table.

  It was a rat, and a big one at that. Mike could see the red in its eyes as it sniffed the air, then looked straight at him. Great, they had rodents to contend with now. He supposed they must be common pests out here in the wilderness, but the creature’s mere presence in the kitchen offended him. His stomach frothed with revulsion at the sight of the rat’s slick, black fur and the pale, umbilical-like tail that uncoiled behind its fat body.

  “Fuck off, vile thing!”

  Mike stamped his foot, trying to scare the rat away. The interloper stood its ground, those ruddy, lifeless eyes regarding him with something akin to contempt. That was it for Mike. He dashed across the kitchen floor and swung his boots through the air like a weapon. The rat fled, darting behind the fridge. No way he could get to it now. Just to be sure, Mike sidled up to the other side of the fridge, hearing the faint hum of the cabinet against his ear.

  The rat had disappeared. It was probably hiding underneath the fridge, waiting for him to leave. He shuddered at the thought of it in the kitchen, where they had been eating each day. And with the memory of food came a smell. It was sweet at first, rather like ripening fruit in a bowl. But Mike detected something else beneath the sweetness of the odor, the bitter tang of something rotten. He supposed it was coming from the rat itself, but then it struck him that what he could smell was coming from the fridge. How that could be, he did not know, since the fridge had been all but empty when he’d opened it in search of food earlier.

  He pulled open the fridge door to investigate.

  The smell became more pervasive and intense. The same pathetic vegetables lay inside the salad drawer, but they were not the source of the smell. Mike gagged and stumbled back from the fridge. The ruptured body of the dead bird lay on the glass shelf inside, its body a tumescent, fleshy chaos of maggots. The light inside the fridge flickered, casting a flashbulb glow over the disgusting scene. Maggots began to wriggle and roll at the edge of the glass shelf, as if they sensed freedom. Mike looked on in disgust as a few of the pale things fell onto the stone floor before squirming toward the shadows beneath the fridge. Within seconds, the rat’s wet nose appeared from beneath the fridge door, sniffing. Mike watched as the slimy-furred rodent snapped its jaws, gobbling up a few of the maggots.

  He had seen enough.

  He slammed the fridge door against the horrid sight, and the even more awful smell, and beat a quick retreat to the conservatory door.

  With his thick socks and boots now firmly on his feet, Mike stomped around to the rear of the cottage. Only one person could have put the disgusting dead bird inside the fridge for him to find. He saw Meggie through the window of her little studio. She had her back to him, and was painting at her easel. He was halfway across the courtyard leading to the outbuilding when he faltered. He heard laughter and decided to follow the sound, which was so full of childish mirth that it already infuriated him. Maybe Meggie wasn’t the only one with a funny bone today.

  As he made his way across the grass toward the path that led along the lochside, he saw Alex and Kay sitting on the jetty overlooking the water. Mike felt a pang of something like déjà vu and realized that his friends had reminded him of Helen. He had been sitting in almost exactly the same spot with her when she had told him she was pregnant. It felt like weeks ago, despite only being a couple of days ago. Hearing Alex’s deep laugh, he wondered if they were in on the fridge joke, the two of them. He recalled how they had openly laughed at him from out of their bedroom window the night before, when he had walked in his sleep.

  Mike was considering giving Alex and Kay a piece of his mind when he heard yet more laughter and saw Kay leaning into Alex’s shoulder. They were kissing. He resented their closeness almost as much as he did their laughter at his expense. Deciding to leave them be, he cut a wider path around the side of the cottage. The tree cover there would conceal him until he was out of their line of sight.

  * * *

  It took a little over an hour before Mike cut through the trees and joined the single-track road that led to the village. The map had proven useful, showing him the quickest way across the hills. Without it, he felt sure he would have become lost. Or, even worse, that he might have ended up back at the Spindle Stones again.

  He trudged down the sloping lane, grateful to see the first of the gray stone houses at the outskirts of the village. Patting his jacket to reassure himself that his wallet was still there, he couldn’t help but think of a welcome pint at the pub.

  First things first, he thought, before thirst, and pressed on toward the general store.

  As he rounded the corner, he felt sure he would see Meggie’s car parked up there, but the street was devoid of any traffic, parked or otherwise. And as he crossed the road and neared the shop itself, he saw that it was deserted. The glass door at the front was hanging open. The window – usually housing its lackluster display of tinned goods, lotto posters and a couple of decades-old classified ads – was completely bare and the glass was smeared with dust and grime. It looked to Mike like no one had set foot inside the shop for years, and yet he had only shopped there two days ago. He walked up to the door gingerly, calling out an uncertain hello into the dusty darkness.

  There was no response.

  Pushing the door open wider so he could step through, he almost cried out at the sudden, piercing sound of the shop bell clanging above his head. He regained his composure and stepped into the shop.

  “Hello?” he said, a little louder and more confidently this time. “A
nyone home?”

  His voice echoed off the empty shelves. They were covered in a layer of dust a few millimeters thick. Dumbfounded, he strolled to the back of the shop, to the shelves where he had perused the bottles of booze. They too were empty, and decorated with dust and cobwebs. A spindly spider, its body almost translucent white, scuttled out across its web – no doubt attracted by Mike’s breath against the strands – before retreating back into the shadows. Mike felt uneasy standing there in the empty shop, and turned to leave.

  As he made this way back to the door, he glimpsed movement in the street outside. Was it Helen? Perhaps she had driven to the village after all. He badly needed her to see the shop with him, to tell him she saw that it was empty and derelict too. Then he would know that he wasn’t losing his mind. He dashed out onto the pavement in search of her. The movement – a person or an animal, he couldn’t be sure which – repeated at the very corner of the street, and was gone. He followed it, his pace quickening to a jog.

  “Hey! Helen? That you?” he cried out.

  Turning the corner of the street, he saw a sheet of bedraggled paper fluttering on the wind. What he had thought to be a person was just another of Meggie’s bloody posters. He slowed his pace until he was walking again and stooped to pick up the poster as it fell with a drop in the wind.

  ‘MISSING’, it read. Then Mike recoiled as he saw a horrific depiction of Oscar’s dead body on the poster. The dog’s furry stomach lay ripped open with a trio of puppy heads hanging out, their pink tongues slick with blood. Behind them, a shadow loomed. It looked like a woman wearing a cowl and with her arms outstretched. Mike tore the poster in half, and then in half again, scattering the pieces to the wind. As they fluttered away, Mike heard whispers. They sounded like a warning. And, although he had rid himself of the shadowy thing on the poster, a much darker one now loomed over him.

  Mike looked up and over his shoulder.

  The source of the shadow revealed itself to be a line of thick, dark clouds gathering and rolling above the rooftops. Mike could smell and almost taste the coming storm. He turned on his heel and beat a retreat from the clouds, focusing on the clearer skies above the road that led back out of the deserted village.

  He followed the road and heard a rusty, metallic squeak. He winced, reminded of the rat that he had disturbed in the kitchen back at the cottage. The wind blew and the sound came again. It was the metal pub sign, swinging in the breeze – or, rather, just the frame. The sign itself had gone, and only the metal housing remained, tarnished and bent as though it had been battered by decades of storms like the one that was now broiling in the sky over the village.

  Mike made a quick detour and found the pub was in the same sorry state as the general store. What little furniture remained in the bar was overturned or broken, making the pub look like it had played host to a brawl. But how could that be? He and Alex had only recently played pool there, and drank with Jamie and Edward.

  He pressed his face closer to the window and saw spots of mildew on the lining of the curtains. The green spots reminded Mike of cancerous cells, magnified. It was as though the interior of the pub was being eaten from within by decay.

  A broken cue lay against the base of the pool table, and Mike strained to get a better look at it. He saw that the green baize had been torn, and the balls scattered on the floor to gather dust. Among them, sharp fragments of broken glass gleamed. Several bottles and pint glasses had been smashed against the floorboards. The debris lay in a drift against the foot of the bar, as though an invisible wave had washed it up there. It was too much to take in, and Mike backed away from the pub window, not wanting to see more.

  The sky rumbled over his head, and he walked, like an automaton now, down the road that led away from the village. Within moments, heavy, freezing cold droplets started to fall from the sky. It wasn’t rain, but sleet, and Mike pulled his collar tighter around him as it splashed against the back of his neck, numbing his skin on impact.

  He had only passed a few of the houses when he saw the first twitch of a curtain. Perhaps the village wasn’t as deserted as he’d been led to believe by the abandoned shop and the derelict pub. He slowed his progress to take a backward glance at the window where he’d seen the curtain move, only to catch it falling back into place and obscuring whoever had been peeking out from behind it.

  Mike started walking again and saw another movement, this time a dark shape behind the frosted glass of a front door. The opalescent glass distorted the shape of whoever was standing there, watching him, making antler shapes at the person’s head. Mike whistled between his teeth, remembering his pursuers during the shoot and the fear he had experienced as they bore down on him in the fog.

  Turning the corner of the road, where the pub stood empty, and onto the main street out of the village, Mike heard the first door slam. He ignored it, but then he heard another, and another. He took a breath, choking his growing nervousness down with it, turned around and said, “Hello?”

  The word died in his mouth.

  Standing in the street, no more than a hundred feet away from him, was a line of people. The lashing sleet made it difficult to see their features, but Mike took them to be villagers. Something about the way they stood there, regarding him quietly through the tumultuous sleet made his flesh creep with cold terror. Mike watched as more figures emerged from the houses, and the gaps between the houses, to join the throng. With the new arrivals, the crowd stood at least three deep from pavement to pavement across the road. What did they want? Mike felt an encroaching sense of guilt, though he didn’t know why. All he had done was look around the village. And yet, the dark shapes that had gathered were surely glowering at him as though he was guilty of the most terrible trespass.

  “I get the message, I’m leaving,” he muttered and then in quiet desperation added, “I was only looking for my girlfriend.”

  Mike regretted speaking the words as soon as they spilled from his mouth. The sound of his voice, muffled by the lashing sleet, seemed to act as a trigger to the dark throng gathered in the street before him. First one, then two, then all of them started walking toward him. There was something altogether unnatural about their ambling gait. Something strangely inhuman. They each walked as though wounded, but with a gracefulness that also made them seem weightless and ghostlike.

  Fear shot through his veins, and Mike almost tripped over his own boots as he made an abrupt about-turn and set off at a run away from the advancing line of dark figures. He heard disquieting whispers from their ranks and told himself that it was only the wind and the sleet in his ears. Then he heard heavier footfalls and knew without even looking—

  Don’t look, just keep running.

  —that they were running after him. A strange and disturbing sound came with them. It was rhythmic and soft, like a bolt of cloth being unraveled and then dropped onto the wet street. The beating drum of doom descending on him as, even now, he struggled to get away.

  Mike risked a glance over his shoulder and saw gray skin and wet, black hair. He smelled the rot and ruin of decaying fish, its permeating odor heavy as the depths of a bottomless lake. He heard the chafing of dead skin against rough cloth and the microscopic sounds of it rubbing away to reveal soggy bone beneath. All the sounds, and all the smells, combined into a hideous concert that sought to take control of Mike’s senses. If he didn’t get away, he felt he would drown in them. A bleakly terrifying vision of the darkly padding figures closing in around him as he lay on the wet ground propelled him on.

  He ran past the little sign welcoming visitors to the village and up onto the slope that led into the trees. He might be able to lose them in the tree cover, or at least slow them down.

  If only he knew what they wanted. If only he could reason with them.

  Mike darted up the slope, fighting for more air to help him do the job. When he reached the top and the ground began to level out, he weaved his way
between the trees. Crashing through the undergrowth, he chanced another look over his shoulder. His eyes wide with panic, all he could see was the lashing sleet and dark columns of tree trunks stretching into the distance. He stopped and gasped for air. Just moments ago, there had been dozens of villagers pursuing him. Now he was standing alone in the forest. Mike knew he should feel relieved, but in his heart he felt only the deep disturbance that had almost taken hold of his senses. Putting the hideous sound of the wet footfalls far behind him, Mike started walking again. He focused on the reality of his own footsteps as twigs snapped and soil squelched beneath his feet. If the silent people from Drinton had wanted to frighten him, they had bloody well and truly succeeded. Dark thoughts began brewing in his fevered brain. What if Helen had been at the village all along? Had he allowed himself to be frightened away, leaving her hidden there somewhere, a captive? But once again, the old woman’s whispered words came back to him—

  More are needed.

  —spurring him on, away from the village. Mike needed the strength of numbers. He needed to get back to Alex and Kay and Meggie. They would help him find Helen. Maybe she was already back at the cottage, waiting for him with some food and a warming fire.

  Maybe.

  He had walked for over a mile when he realized that he had neglected to retrace his path across the heathland, and had instead emerged from the trees and onto the same winding track road they had used to drive to the cottage on their arrival. He was cursing his mistake and considering if it would be worth turning around and taking the heathland route when he saw a white glimmer from the deep curve of the valley ahead.

  Hearthstone Cottage. At last.

  Judging his walking distance to be about the same if he opted for either route, Mike decided to stay on the road. If any of the freaky villagers were out for his blood, they would have caught up to him by now. Not only that, but the ground had quickly become a quagmire under the heavy and constant sleet. At least the road made it easier for Mike underfoot, even if he was deprived of the tree cover. Freezing cold and wet through, for his jacket had sprung several leaks beneath the constant barrage of heavy weather, Mike mustered up what little energy he had left. He pushed on toward the tiny beacon of the distant white cottage, holding it in his mind like a totem.