Hearthstone Cottage

by Frazer Lee

  “She means ‘tap’,” Alex said as he leaned across the armchair to take a better look at Mike’s wound too.

  “I know what I mean, thanks all the same,” Kay said, “and so does he.”

  Alex’s nose wrinkled. “Bloody hell, Mikey, I can smell it from here. That’s nasty.”

  Mike went into the kitchen and peeled back the bandage. He saw a shock of purple around the wound site. Rinsing it under running water gave rise to fresh agonies, and he retreated to the living room. He unscrewed the cap of the tube of cream and applied some to the wound. It stung a little, and the angry buildup of fluid beneath the skin prickled like pins and needles. The cream smelled faintly of root beer, only slightly masking the offensive smell that was coming from his damaged hand. He hadn’t noticed it until Alex had said something about it.

  “I think we should take them both to the hospital tomorrow, don’t you?” Kay suggested to Alex, as if Mike wasn’t even there in the room with them.

  “Aye, not a bad idea,” Alex sighed. He gave Mike a pitying look before wandering off into the kitchen. “Come on, Kay, let’s have a cup of tea and get some air.”

  Kay nodded, asking Mike, “Would you like a cup?”

  Mike just shook his head and waited for them to go out. He gazed into the dead ashes in the fireplace, then glanced at his hand. The wound was turning from purple to a dark shade of gray – almost blackening – like the contents of the hearth.

  * * *

  Alex worked his magic on the dried goods, turning them into a passable risotto. They ate by the fire, with their bowls in their laps. Earlier, Kay had tried to encourage Helen to eat something, but she would only take a couple of mouthfuls before curling up to sleep again under the duvet.

  “Is it safe for her to sleep so much?” Mike asked, wiping food from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. Even his wound felt a little better, no doubt due to Kay’s quick thinking with the antiseptic. Seeing the question in Kay’s eyes, he continued, “I’m just concerned she might have a concussion, after the crash.”

  “I don’t think so,” Kay said. “Me and Meggie checked her out pretty thoroughly. No sign of any head wound, but she’s clearly exhausted from loss of blood. Thank goodness she was wearing a safety belt in the car. We’ll keep a close eye on her and, as soon as the Land Rover comes in the morning, get the both of you to the hospital.”

  Mike polished off the last of his meal, watching the flames dance in the hearth. He still didn’t like the fact that they were relying on favors from the two old men. The way they had looked at Kay, and their sly murmurs about him on the day of the hunt, they couldn’t be trusted, those two. Mike felt a burning sensation at the back of his throat and coughed. He reached for the glass of water that Kay had poured for him. Gulping it down, he thought maybe he had coughed due to a grain of rice that had gone down the wrong way. But as he breathed again, he realized something else was the cause.

  “Is it just me, or is it smoky in here?”

  Alex glanced up from his bowl and looked to Mike and then the fire. His face fell. Mike followed the line of his gaze and saw it too. A backdraft was pushing smoke back down the chimney. It puffed out, then curled out and over the mantelpiece. Mike watched as dark gray wisps of smoke snaked over the polished surface of the black scrying mirror.

  “Blimey, must be windy out there,” Mike mused.

  He saw Kay’s eyes widen as another plume of smoke erupted from the fireplace. This one was much larger, billowing up the full height of the wall above the hearth before spreading blackly over the ceiling.

  Alex and Kay put their supper bowls down onto the coffee table. They both stood and took a few steps back from the fire, which was now churning out so much smoke that it was becoming an indoor fog, filling the room. The smoke was so thick, and so acrid, that it made Mike’s eyes water. The smell and taste of it reminded him of his sleepwalking nightmare—

  Events seem to be replaying themselves, don’t you think?

  —and he dashed into the kitchen without pausing to speak another word. Seeing the risotto pan on the hob, he quickly searched out the next biggest one he could find. He crossed to the sink, filled it two-thirds full from the cold water tap and carried it back with him into the living room. The water sloshed from side to side in the pan, spilling over the edge a couple of times and wetting his feet. He slowed his pace as he neared the armchair, intent on not spilling any more of the water.

  Standing over the fireplace, with the smoke searing his eyes and clogging his airways, he emptied the water onto the fire. The flames hissed and died as he doused them. The veil of smoke hung heavy in the room, but at least the fire was out. Kay opened a window to the night, and Alex picked up a throw cushion and started wafting the smoke toward the open window. Within a few minutes, the worst of it had cleared. Mike dropped to his knees and placed the flat of his good hand into the aperture of the chimney. He couldn’t feel any draught there at all.

  “There’s no ventilation at all. Something’s blocking it,” he said.

  “I don’t see how,” Alex said. “It’s been fine until now.”

  “Put your hand there,” Mike said. “You’ll see. Or rather, feel.”

  With a puzzled look, Alex joined him next to the fireplace and tried as Mike had suggested.

  “You’re right,” Alex said after a short while. “It’s weird, though, the fire has been drawing so well up until now.”

  The interior of the chimney was still warm, but no longer hot now that Mike had put the fire out. He stood up and took the length of broken antler from the mantelpiece. He caught the pale maggot-like reflection of the antler in the black mirror as he did so.

  He dropped to a crouching position and shuffled closer to the fireplace until he could reach up and into the chimney aperture with the antler. Using it in the way that an archaeologist might use a trowel, he began scraping away at the chimney opening, working his way around until he felt something heavy shift beneath the pointy end of his makeshift tool.

  “Careful, you guys,” Kay said. “I’ve heard about chimney fires in old places like this. Just be careful that whatever it is blocking the stack isn’t alight or we’ll need to get you to the hospital way before morning comes.”

  “Right you are,” Mike said as matter-of-factly as he could.

  Kay’s words had increased his anxiety about what he might find blocking the chimney, but his curiosity was too great. There was something lodged up in there, all right, and he just had to work it loose if he could. He adjusted the angle of the antler bone and thrust it into the tight space between the chimney and the heavy object. Then he twisted the antler with both hands, rocking it back and forth. This brought more smoke and black soot raining down on his arm from above, but he persisted, feeling certain that he was almost there.

  “Mike—” Alex began, then quickly covered his mouth and nose with his arm as, with a snapping sound, the antler and everything else above it gave way.

  The thick, black soot of ages came thundering down into the fireplace, billowing up in a great cloud that choked Mike and sent Kay retreating all the way to the open window. Mike coughed and waved his hands around in front of the cloud of soot, tossing the antler aside. He saw that the end of it had snapped off, and for a few seconds he thought his efforts had been in vain. But then, as the soot settled in a dark carpet across the hearthstone and the surrounding floor, Mike saw that an object had fallen from the chimney and was now lying on the grate.

  He had succeeded in unblocking the chimney, that was for sure, and he brushed aside the soot to find that the mystery object was a dirty cloth bundle. The fabric looked years old, worn through to mere strands in several places. A collection of irregularly shaped objects was contained inside the bundle, and Mike wasted no time in setting about untying and unraveling the ancient wrappings to take a look at what they were.

  It was a tigh
t tangle, and he had a hard job loosening the final part of the bundle. He pulled at both ends, then shook the bundle out over the fireplace. The objects rattled onto the blackened hearth, free at last, and Mike waved away the soot they had kicked up so he could get a better look at what they were.

  “What is it?” Kay asked, and Mike sensed some fear and trepidation in her voice.

  He felt those same emotions too as he reached out to pick up the object nearest to him.

  It was a human skull.

  He blew the soot from its hollow eye sockets and felt his jaw drop. The skull was tiny. It must have belonged to a child, no older than an infant. He held it up to the light from the table lamp and tilted it this way and that, not quite believing what he was seeing.

  Alex took the skull from him, and Mike heard his friend whistle through his teeth at the dreadful sight of it. Rooting through the other contents of the bundle, Mike began to piece together what he now knew to be the rest of the child’s skeleton. All the pieces were there – rib bones, femurs, a curved spinal column – a grim anatomical model of a life that had been snuffed out all too soon. A little jawbone glinted with its row of tiny teeth.

  Mike had to stop looking through the bones when he found the fingers. They were so small and so delicate. He left them where they lay, starkly yellow white against the black soot on the hearth. As the last fragments of soot rained down from the unblocked chimney like black snow, Mike retreated from the hearth and rose on his trembling legs.

  “Is that…? Are they a child’s bones?” he heard Helen say.

  He turned and saw her standing in the doorway. Kay gasped at the sight of her standing there in her nightdress. None of them had heard her coming down the stairs. They had each been too intently focused on the matter of what had been blocking the chimney to notice.

  “Helen, it’s maybe best if you—” Mike started his sentence but didn’t finish.

  Helen screamed. Her eyes were wide open to the horror of what she was seeing. And, as she screamed her throat raw, her nose started to bleed. She automatically swabbed at her nose with her hand and then, pulling her hand away, saw the blood there. The dark red trickle dripped into her mouth, making her all the more terrified. Mike saw a few droplets of blood fall onto her white nightdress, an image of her bleeding at the stone circle coming back to haunt him.

  Kay sprang into action, putting her arm around Helen and turning her away from the fireplace. But it was too late. Helen had seen everything; Mike listened to Helen’s frantic cries as Kay walked her back upstairs.

  As Helen’s anguished wails rang out from the upper floor of the cottage, Mike looked at the disjointed space between the child’s skull and its jawbone. Then he couldn’t help but stare into the hollows where bright little eyes once must have shone.

  The skull, too, looked as though it were screaming.

  Chapter Twenty

  Mike tossed and turned on the sofa, falling into, and lurching out of, sleep—

  And in his dream, which he knew was a dream even as he dreamed it, he and Helen were on the doorstep of his parents’ house. They had left Hearthstone Cottage, with its dark fireplace full of secrets, far behind them. Mike reached for Helen’s hand and took it in his. Her fingers felt icy cold. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed each digit, as though attempting to bring her fingers back to life. She looked at him blankly, and her thin lips curled into a wan smile. It will be okay, her eyes seemed to say. He pushed the doorbell, and they waited, icy hand in hand until the door opened, all by itself, like magic. Mike led Helen over the threshold, and they were all of a sudden standing in the living room next to the fireplace—

  Don’t remember my folks having an open fire, how strange.

  —and the fire was raging. My, my, it’s drawing so very well, Mike mused as he watched the angry flames licking at the dark insides of the chimney. He heard his mother’s cry of delighted astonishment to find Mike and Helen in her living room. Behind her, a shadow loomed, as long and as tall as a stag’s in the dying light of a midwinter sun. Mike knew it was his father. He could smell the pungent musk of his sweat. He could feel his simmering disapproval from across the room.

  “What’s wrong?” he heard Helen ask.

  Then he realized it was his mother.

  “What’s wrong what’s wrong what’s wrong what’s—”

  He felt Helen’s cold fingers tighten around his, crushing his hand. The old wound in his thumb seeped pus and ruin, and there was the dreadful stench of something dying. Mike stepped away from Helen as the fire raged behind her. She was bleeding again, the profusion of the blood flow rivaling the fury of the flames in the hearth. Something twitched beneath, and he saw a little cloth bundle crawling across the hearth.

  “Mum, Dad – we were having a baby, but now it’s dead and I don’t know what to do, there was so much blood – so much blood – so much – and I think she’s in pain and—”

  The dark shape of his father stretched itself in the shadows.

  SO PROUD OF YOU, SON. MORE DEAD MOUTHS TO FEED.

  His mother started to laugh, tears of mirth falling from black eyes. Helen’s nose was bleeding too. He looked down to see the hearthstone had become a grave marker—

  HERE LIES MICHAEL CARTER, SO MUCH BLOOD, MORE IS NEEDED.

  —and the crawling, shuffling thing on the hearth started to wail through its cloth.

  Mike felt its dead touch.

  “What’s wrong what’s wrong what’s WRONG—”

  Mike shocked awake again, his hand clamped around the sofa cushion.

  His wound was throbbing like crazy, the skin surrounding it livid once again. The antiseptic cream seemed to have made it feel worse rather than better, and he began to resent Kay for insisting he apply it in the first place.

  As he lay there, sleep deprived, Mike wondered if he should have asked Meggie about one of her herbal remedies, like the scented bath she had prepared for Helen. Then he began to wonder if Helen was sleeping okay and if he should have gone to bed upstairs after all. Kay, still playing matron, had suggested that Helen might sleep better if he crashed out on the sofa. Well, suggesting was putting it mildly – she had pretty much ordered him to sleep downstairs. Easy enough for her to say. She was, after all, shacked up in a cozy, soft bed with Alex.

  Yawning and turning over with his butt hanging uncomfortably over the side of the sofa, Mike pulled the blanket over his shoulders, but in doing so exposed his feet. Ever since he had doused the fire, the room had grown increasingly cold, and he was beginning to feel a chill in his bones. The sensation of something brushing past his feet came just a few seconds later.

  Mike sat bolt upright, startled. Blinking as his eyes adjusted to the scant moonlight from the windows, he glanced around and caught the vague, inky shadow of someone – or something – moving—

  Or was it shuffling?

  —past the fireplace and into the stairwell.

  “Helen? That you?” He knew in his rapidly beating heart that it was not Helen.

  The shrill sound of a child’s laughter seemed to underline the fact for him. Whatever had brushed past his feet was not human, nor was it even a living thing. Mike’s eyes were drawn to the little cloth bundle where it still lay on the hearthstone.

  “We need to lay you to rest if I’m bloody well going to get any,” he muttered.

  Another childlike laugh; then footfalls on the stairs provoked him into action. Mike tossed the crumpled blanket aside and followed the sound up the narrow stairs and onto the landing. Again, he saw the shadow flicker across the wall farthest from him. It looked like someone was standing there, in the doorway to his and Helen’s room. But it wasn’t small enough to be a child. It looked to be an adult, standing slightly hunched over the door handle. The door was ajar, and Mike felt an urgent pang of concern for Helen. She was sleeping alone in there. What if someone had sneaked into th
e cottage? His blood pumped at the thought that Helen might get another scare after all she had been through. He narrowed his eyes to try to make out who the figure was, and for one horrible moment he imagined it to be one of the old men from the village, skulking around in the dark and intent on another stolen glimpse of young flesh.

  “Hey!” Mike growled. “I see you.”

  The figure halted and turned to face him.

  She stepped into the light, and Mike realized his mistake. It was Helen, after all. And she was naked. Her hair fell across her shoulders in tousled rivulets. The cold had turned her skin to gooseflesh. Seeing him, she smiled, and Mike’s heart thumped harder. She looked like she had the first time he had met her – completely gorgeous, healthy and happy to see him. Helen laughed, a high-pitched giggle that sounded like pure joy, and ducked into their room. Mike followed.

  He found her lying on their bed. She held her hand out to him, beckoning for him to join her. He climbed onto the bed and crawled to her like a child. Her fingers found his shoulders, then his waist, and then began unfastening his trousers. She kissed his neck and nuzzled her nose beneath his chin. She felt warm and vital against him, and her hair smelled of earth and rain, the tantalizing after-scent of whatever it was Meggie had added to her bath. She chuckled as she took him warm in her hand, coaxing him fully out of his clothes and into a heightened state of arousal.

  “We can try again,” she whispered into his ear as she pulled him inside of her.

  Mike gasped. It had never felt quite as tactile as this. His every nerve ending was alert to her softness and her warmth. As they began to fuck, Mike felt Helen push harder against him, grinding with her hips. She moaned, then laughed again. The sound startled him since her lips were still so close to his left ear. She felt so wet – too wet – and he tried to pull away from her slightly but couldn’t. She had her legs locked around the small of his back. He felt a wave of nausea as he craned his head down as far as his chest would allow and saw scarlet between them. She was bleeding again, this time profusely, and they were both slicked in the stuff from the waist down.