The Golden Key

by Marian Womack

  ‘How long have you been a lady detective?’ asked Eliza.

  ‘I am not any lady, Eliza,’ Helena replied.

  ‘Well, a detective then—’

  ‘Tell me about this bit of land, please,’ Helena cut her off.

  ‘Well, it is not as deadly as the Broomsway; you know, the one that the papers call “the Doomway”. But you can get disoriented here, I assure you.’

  ‘Has that happened to you often?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say often, for I try not to come this way if I can help it. But in rainy weather anyone could lose their way—Look!’

  A green light shone from the island.

  They climbed down from the pony and cart into a reed swamp. On the other side of the water stood the ruins. There were a crumbling heap of derelict constructions that looked as if they had been washed ashore by the tide. They did not look as if they had ever been standing in any way or form. The island resembled a nowhere place, neither land nor sea, and it had probably been like that for centuries for the church to end up like it was now, a collection of stones scattered by the hand of God over that mound. It had happened, eventually: a gale that lasted several days, which submerged this bit of countryside entirely, cracking the stone walls forever, breaking the windows, collapsing the little tower as if it had been made of gingerbread. And then the church had fallen, and the bell had stopped tolling forever.

  ‘The factory is ahead, down the coast. We may need to cross while the water is down. I am not sure of how to get into it from the forest. What do you think is happening here, Helena?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ she conceded. ‘But the ruins are significant somehow, obviously.’

  ‘And the sleep illness?’

  Helena looked quizzically at the young woman. ‘Is that what you think it is?’

  ‘Well, it has to be something like it. They are in a sort of suspended state, as if—’ She didn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘As if their souls are somewhere else, caught up in some limbo, and only their bodies remain here,’ Helena ventured. ‘Down the rabbit hole we go—’

  Eliza didn’t reply. She feared Helena remained sceptical about it all.

  ‘Do you believe in that?’

  Helena didn’t reply immediately.

  ‘I am beginning to understand,’ Helena offered, ‘that the particulars surrounding this case ask for more open-mindedness than usual. Especially after seeing the children’s nursery.’

  Eliza shivered.

  ‘Look! There is something, someone, moving on the edge of the island.’

  Helena took out her binoculars from her pocket, had a long look, and sighed heavily. The list of names that Lady Matthews had provided her with felt heavy in her pocket. She had problems swallowing before she said:

  ‘It’s Rosie, Old John’s granddaughter.’

  ‘Rosie? What is she doing here?’

  Helena remembered the scene by the estuary, the two-faced beggar man, the uncanny light, and the dead boy. She did not feel that she could offer a reply.

  ‘How long till we can cross?’ she asked, kneeling down next to the gurgling mudflat.

  ‘It’s frankly hard to know. We are going to be able to do a crossing fairly soon; but mind you, the path would be hardly visible, and still very dangerous. It would be almost impossible to spot steady ground.’

  Helena considered the salty water, slowly receding, leaving the muddied bed behind.

  ‘Any quicksand?’

  ‘Here? I don’t think so.’

  That seemed to make her decide.

  ‘Then we ought to go now.’

  ‘You could drown anyway!’

  Helena sighed deeply and looked cross.

  ‘Look, this will not do. Not knowing the terrain as well as I should could put Rosie in danger. I’m going, Eliza.’

  ‘And I’m coming with you.’

  ‘No. You are staying here!’

  ‘What? I’ve brought you this far!’

  ‘And I am very thankful, but this could be dangerous—’

  ‘I’m not staying behind!’

  ‘Suit yourself, then.’

  They started walking over the wet sand, incapable of seeing the little gradients under their feet, formed by the ferns and liverworts, the little rocks, the bits of damp wood, the fallen reeds. It was hard work, and Helena had to fight against her boots being at least a little sucked by the damp ground to make steady advancement impossible. When she thought they had been walking for a long time she stopped; her spirits sank when she saw that they had covered less than half the distance.

  They touched the elusive shore eventually, but she was feeling exhausted. They climbed the little headland, looking for places to put their feet, almost touching some of the fallen stones of the ruin. They were damp and clammy, with extensive lichen and fungi covering them in many vibrant colours.

  ‘There she is!’

  ‘Yes, that’s Rosie.’

  Something wasn’t right in that scene, Helena thought. She couldn’t get the estuary to the south of London out of her mind. On that occasion, a huge bearded man had appeared seemingly out of nowhere. And now Helena realised, weeks later, what she had actually seen.

  His movements had been all wrong; he had been walking as if he were doing it behind a mirror, every single one of his actions suggesting some parallel natural movement which was nowhere there, the slow motion an uncanny, demonic dance.

  And now here, in Wicken Fen island, as far away from London as she could imagine, she was seeing a repetition of this. How was that possible? The fact was that the shadow of a gigantic man had moved into the moonlight. Helena swallowed a gasp: it was the same man.

  ‘We need to get to Rosie now,’ Helena muttered. A green light was shining from the fallen stones of the church, from the scattered rocks, and it moved, solidifying itself into a quiet pool of darkness: a mirror of sorts. On the other side, it was almost possible to distinguish a cloudy, crooked landscape.

  The man walked in front of the light; and, indeed there was a reflection there, smiling demonically at them. But the reflection was a ‘version’ of the man, not how they were seeing him. In that image, the beggar-looking giant was an expensively dressed gentleman holding a cane, with long sleek black hair. But, for all his glamour, he looked like the horrible beggar’s twin. The demonic figure had now crossed the light, and Rosie started to move towards him.

  ‘Eliza, we need to go now!’ All Helena was thinking of was that other boy in London, falling dead in her arms. She and Eliza grabbed Rosie and forced her into the marshes.

  The journey back was slow, exhausting, and by the time they had reached the pony and cart Helena was sure that the scenes in both cases were mirrors of each other. Did that mean that both cases were interconnected somehow? She knew that Bévcar’s acolytes had been responsible for abducting the children in London. Were they also involved in the Norfolk mystery?

  They were panting, lying on the ground, their clothes completely ruined. Rosie had fallen on the grass and seemed to be sleeping peacefully. At least that was something.

  ‘Look!’

  The green light seemed to have moved, and now it shone from further along the coast.

  ‘I know what is there: the old factory… Helena. What is the matter?’

  ‘This scene, everything about it. I have seen this before.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In London, not so long ago. I fear the two issues may connect.’

  ‘What does that mean? In practical terms?’

  ‘I am not sure yet, Eliza. But I suspect we will know very soon.’

  * * *

  At Old John’s daughter’s cottage, Rosie lay on a bed made up by the fire. She had fainted on the way back, but that was good, as it meant that she had been responsive at some point. Eliza had feared that she would be somehow catatonic. Helena had managed the reins, a dark expression clouding her face, and had not spoken all the way back. But their fears seemed to have been misplaced, for
Rosie had awoken eventually, miraculously; she was tired, but otherwise looked unharmed in any way.

  ‘She is going to be fine. How is it possible?’ Eliza asked Helena discreetly, as they prepared to leave.

  ‘Eliza, think: what is different from Dot? From the girl you found in the marshes? What does she have that they didn’t?’ Helena said.

  Have? Eliza thought. What could Helena possibly mean? These people had nothing, nothing at all.

  And then it hit her; she looked in the child’s direction once again. Around her neck, the fairy stone with the hole in the middle shone her green, uncanny hue.

  They made their goodbyes, and Helena left her card for Old John’s daughter, with instructions to write to her in London immediately were any developments to occur.

  * * *

  Eliza invited Helena to freshen up in her room. She guided her upstairs, and opened the door.

  ‘Please, let me know if you need anything,’ she asked. Helena went silent, looking around her at the many dolls, then to Eliza, who was already at the door.

  ‘This is a bit unnerving—’

  ‘My mother bought them for me. They come from many different countries. She was a great traveller, an explorer of unknown places.’ It was the story she repeated, to whoever cared to ask. Although in truth how she hated the dolls. Those dozens of eyes looked intently at her, black eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, all glassy and dead, little synthetic things, guarding over her dreams. The dolls made her think of little girls. The little girls made her think of big girls. Of being taken, used up, put in places where one doesn’t belong.

  ‘Anita Waltraud? The famous traveller? That was your mother?’ asked Helena.

  ‘Well, yes. I didn’t know her, really. She died giving birth to me.’

  Helena frowned, deeply. ‘But then, how—’ She waved a hand around the room.

  ‘Oh! No, she started collecting the dolls before I was born. I guess they were hers, really, came to me when—’

  ‘Come on, we have a lot to do,’ Helena cut in. It was obvious that Eliza did not enjoy talking about her family.

  Downstairs, Eliza showed Helena her scientific tools, and she was sure they would be enough to run some simple tests. The fungi present in the ruins, and presumably in the disused factory could, when breathed, cause alterations in perception, confuse the mind.

  ‘This,’ she said, ‘could explain the disorientation, the sense of loss, the feeling of dread. This could conceivably cause hallucinations, visions, dreams, nightmares. It doesn’t kill you, but it alters your perception.’

  ‘Of what is real?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Are these conclusive results?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. It is quite possible,’ Eliza continued, ‘that the children breathed too much of the fungi, so perhaps got lost, disoriented, wandered too far away from the house, fell into a ditch, or got into trouble. Perhaps the intoxication was so deep that they could not remember their names, or how to go back home. This is an explanation that fits all the facts.’

  ‘Does it? In that case, please, tell me, where has the fungi come from in the first place? And what about the light?’ Helena was thinking again of the recent scene in the estuary by the Thames marshes, of the similarities in the scene they had just witnessed. There was much that they did not understand. The factory had meddled with the seabed and the rhyolite, that was a fact, but it was almost as if those actions had awoken something more sinister in the landscape. ‘The problem with this scientific solution is that it is all too neat; and it does not answer all the questions.’

  ‘Perhaps we will never answer all the questions, Helena.’

  ‘But, these oddities of nature and place we have seen—’

  ‘Are there oddities of nature?’

  ‘Of course there are! There must be. Otherwise, please, tell me, why do you look over your shoulder when we are out in the marshes? What are you expecting to find?’

  Things had rarely been this horrific: the beggar woman, found in the place where a child’s bed had been, which according to the servants had been Maud’s, holding a ragged doll in her hands, the implications of that narrative simply too horrid to contemplate; Old John’s corpse, disfigured by a strange fungus, or by something even scarier; the ruined little Tudor house, tainted by some strange connection with the shadows, as was the nursery; that evil creature, both horrid beggar while in this world, pointed-teeth gentleman while in the other…

  ‘I am finding it very challenging to understand this place,’ Helena burst out in frustration. ‘As impossible as it would be to understand a landscape in the middle of the moon! I can’t reconcile my idea of the coast, of the sea—for wasn’t it little more than an idea after all?—with this bogland, the black bits of peat, the gurgling holes, ready to suck a human being into their sinking muddy embrace. And all that continuously moving water, endlessly coming and going, and never ceasing to speak and speak and speak; and what is it saying? It’s like a dead thing, galvanised into unnatural life.’

  Eliza understood what she meant. The marshes of the olden days may have been a beautiful landscape, as her father had explained. But this wasn’t all true; there was darkness underneath, a wilder nature that needed to be tamed, day after day, and there was death, and there was disease. She knew well what the fetid waters could do when allowed to stagnate. In Lincoln, in the slums, she had seen children with the life sucked out of them, ravaged by cholera. Here, after the floods, there were always fevers, and the sky filled up with fat swarms of black flies, on account of the rotting animals, of the dead fish. The bad air, and the black, unmoving waters meant ‘marsh miasma’: malaria. And the wetlands had been full of it.

  * * *

  There was also the matter of the papers and books collected from the nursery for them to reckon with. The books had all been heavily underlined with pencil, for it seemed that the children had studied them thoroughly. One of the underlined sentences caught their attention: Some little girls would have been afraid to find themselves thus alone in the middle of the night, but Irene was a princess.

  ‘This will not do. We are going to have to read the whole thing!’

  The Princess and the Goblin wasn’t really about a princess and a goblin, but about a princess and a miner boy called Curdie she liked. The goblins were creatures who lived inside the mountain, depicted horridly. Their plan was of course to kidnap the princess, and marry her off to their own heir.

  The princess displayed a lot of ingenuity, even saving Curdie at some point from inside the mountain, which made Helena understand what the three little girls saw in the book. There was a discourse about perception running through the book, about believing without seeing, or choosing not to do so.

  Phantastes was a very wordy book for such little children, she thought. A youth enters Fairy Land on his twenty-first birthday, where he lives many adventures, even killing a giant and becoming a sort of knight. All the characters in the children’s drawings were there: Sir Percival the knight; another knight on a horse, dragging the dead body of a dragon; the White Lady; the Maid of the Alder Tree, and the spirit of the Ash Tree, whom Eliza gathered were evil. What Anodos, the hero, had to do was to go beyond reality, leave behind its limitations, believe… in what, exactly? Eliza feared that that was precisely the question that eluded her; she was not a literary critic. The dream-reality at some point overlapped the reality, becoming the new reality. The book was so boring, so utterly dull; it didn’t read like a work of fancy, but like a real travelogue, where one cannot truly leave out the most boring parts.

  No… it cannot be.

  A youth enters Fairy Land on his twenty-first birthday, where he lives many adventures, even killing a giant and becoming a sort of knight. What had Helena explained about Samuel Moncrieff?

  Samuel Moncrieff will turn twenty-one this year.

  There were no coincidences.

  Eliza shivered, set the book aside.

  ‘Helena, Mr Moncrieff.’

>   ‘What about him?’

  ‘A youth enters Fairy Land on his twenty-first birthday… but in many ways he is returning back home…’

  ‘Blimey,’ Helena replied. She seemed to consider something. Eventually she asked, ‘Where did you say that the catatonic girl had been sent?’

  ‘A sanatorium up in Yorkshire. In a village called Grewelthorpe.’

  She rummaged and found the report from the canal and tinker network.

  Mr Moncrieff didn’t stop in the city, but, almost at once after setting foot off the train, he moved on to the village of Grewelthorpe.

  Helena sighed, showed the report to Eliza. Meanwhile, she added to her case notes:

  New and Revised Facts:

  At the time when the Matthews children disappeared, other children were being abducted. Why this was not followed up by the police is irrelevant now. At the time, a poacher known as Old John claims to have seen ‘the devil’. The children liked playing in ruins. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was one of their favourite books. They had a play companion; she did not disappear, but lost the capacity of speech, perhaps thinking, on that same fateful day.

  Points needing clarification:

  The connection between the ruins and the disappearances; who truly is the beggar woman—is she Maud; the exact cause of Dot’s affliction and others; why some people go catatonic and some simply vanish; supposed protective ‘powers’ of rhyolite; Mr Samuel Moncrieff’s true origins; is what happened to Mr Jim Woodhouse’s cousin similar to what happened here? And, in that case, is Samuel Moncrieff its cause; how can a house built twenty-five years previously get so decrepit so soon; where does this sticky substance come from; connection of all this to the Alice books, to George MacDonald; implications of a further place—Wonderland? Fairy Land?

  She read the new notes to Eliza. The younger woman had something in her hand: the list given to Helena by Lady Matthews:

  Michael Farrow, fourteen years

  Benedict Hobbs, nine years

  James Proctor, twelve years

  Rosalind Proctor, six years

  Maud Matthews, twelve years