Help!
She fumbled with the matches, lost one, lit another.
A lean man with his back to her, pate shining. He was standing over another body, another child, viciously pumping his arm back and forth, and the rasping of the saw was in her bones. She gulped down bile and left the room.
“Is—is there anyone here?”
The second room she looked in on was blessedly empty. She clasped the doorframe and sighed. The calls for help had been in her head after all. But—what was that? Scratching from the next room over, and a wretched sniveling. She bit her lip and sloshed along, the water deeper here and starting to flood her shoes. The third door had slumped free of its upper hinge, its bottom corner jammed into the floor. She squeezed through the gap and held up the remaining sliver of matchstick. “H-hello?”
A little girl with her back to Anne, clawing at the far wall in an attempt to reach a high-set window. She turned to look at something over Anne’s shoulder, and the sight of whatever she saw there brought on a fresh, frantic attempt at the wall.
The flame reached Anne’s fingers and she yelped with pain. She lit another—her last—and waded toward the girl, but she was gone now, despite having looked and sounded so solid.
The wallpaper where she’d stood was sloughing away in thick, fatty strips. There, on the bare stone beneath . . . White scratch marks, in sets of four and five. Anne placed her own fingers on them, in the grooves.
“No,” she moaned, “it’s not real.”
Not real, not real, real, the echoes replied. Real, real, real.
She dropped the match and fled the cell. Twisted in the dark to find the way out. The staircase was through the wine cellar door on her left; she could see the light on the steps. Out of the depths of the basement to her right, a woman was charging toward her, yanking cord from around her neck. “Get back here, you little bitch!”
She screamed then and dived for the exit, throwing herself up the steps and through the deserted rooms of the east wing with abandon, fear clinging to her like a net of spiders. She yanked open a door to the courtyard, alarming the staff working there—“Miss? Miss, you can’t be here!”—and ran through the sucking mud of the foundations, drawn to the open moor and fresh air beyond.
Something cold grabbed her calf. She looked down: The ground had sprouted a dozen flailing cadaverous arms. One partially buried face, an accusing eye.
She kicked out, too terrified to feel it connect. When her feet finally met hard gray shale, they slid around in her shoes, her socks sodden and the leather stretched; she slipped and fell down the incline, scraping her palms on the rock. She got up, but her side was hurting now and she was fighting the urge to cry. She risked a glance back at Rannings. The girl from the parlor, almost invisible in daylight, was walking toward the house.
A gust of wind, or perhaps the strength of Anne’s gaze, jostled her and she turned. Their eyes met. Anne bit back a sob. She was so young, no more than seventeen. “Don’t!” she yelled at the apparition, for all the good it would do, since she couldn’t be real. “Don’t go in there!”
When the vision faded, Anne put a bloody hand to her forehead and took a deep breath. Stress, her father had said. Overstimulation. It was clear that Rannings was causing exactly that, and the only way to settle her nerves was to put as much distance between herself and that awful building as possible. Anyway, she couldn’t bear the thought of going back; she’d only bring the smell of the cellar with her and taint everything. So she walked on, one hand pressed to the stitch in her side, the other guarding her face from the worst of the lashing wind.
As she tramped through the heather she’d so wanted to see, her spirit unraveled. Penshawe seemed like Eden now, a bucolic paradise as untouchable and as improved by nostalgia as childhood. She’d telephoned her parents from King’s Cross just yesterday morning and already her mind had muddied the exact intonation of her mother’s voice, had softened her father’s outrage as he told his daughter, and then Merritt, exactly what he thought of them. The simplicity of that life suddenly appealed to her as it hadn’t before, the march of time marked by service on Sundays, reliably followed by a joint of beef and potatoes, hot from the oven.
Huxby lay beyond the next dale. Anne made for the church as the sky darkened and booms of thunder vibrated in her chest. The churchyard gate opened with a squeal. The first fat drops of rain hit the nape of her neck and slithered down between her shoulder blades as she heaved the door open and stepped inside where it was dry. The deluge came down behind her like a final curtain at the theater.
In the murky light from the diamond-grid windows, Anne saw empty pews knocked slightly askew. A dark pulpit. Quite different from the church in Penshawe, where the secretary took great pains to refresh the flowers and notices, and there was always someone, if not the vicar, tending the vestry and lighting candles in the chapel. Still, the door had been unlocked and she had seen the vicar just yesterday.
Anne’s hands were chalk-white, her nails lilac with cold. She stuffed them into her armpits and walked stiffly up the nave, leaving muddy footprints on the memorial slabs. Somewhere in the rotting beams above, a pigeon cooed and defecated, a falling white smear joining the many others splattering the chancel steps. She skirted the mess and wandered along the north transept, knocking on a discreet little door to what she assumed must be the vestry. Each rap echoed, reminding her horribly of the wine cellar, so she opened the door with an apology on her lips only to find it empty apart from a few chests. They were filled with blankets. She shook out a tartan one and wrapped herself in it, coughing and sneezing at the dust. Returning to the nave, she picked a seat far from the pigeon and clumsily removed her saturated socks and shoes. Tucking her feet up under her, she fell into a lethargic, shivering stupor.
Rain shimmered on the windows. The roof had a leak, an insistent drip coming from the south transept. The pew was hard enough to numb her back and behind. And yet she did sleep, fitfully, for a few hours, while the storm battered the moor and drowned the graves in the churchyard.
Until she sensed movement. Her eyelids fluttered open, her chapped lips peeled apart. The angle of the sun, the shadows, had changed. The vicar squinted at her from the end of the pew, bent almost double with his hands clasped behind him. He beamed at the sight of her stirring.
“Reverend.” Anne licked her lips and rubbed her eyes. The blanket fell from her shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said, tugging it back. “I couldn’t find you, and I was so cold. I took this. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Nay, ’tis nowt.” His ears were so overgrown with age, so soft and cartilaginous, that they waggled when he shook his head. He sucked at his own lips in such a way as to imply several missing teeth. “It’s good to have company. It’s been twenty year since anyone new’s come by.”
“You waved to me yesterday. I was standing by the memorial.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding blandly. He didn’t remember her in the slightest. “Well, you can stay as long as you like. What’s your name?”
“It’s . . . Keene,” replied Anne. “Missus Keene.”
He worked his gums, wet bottom lip protruding thoughtfully. “You don’t sound right sure. Newly married, eh?”
“Yes. The day before yesterday.” Anne sighed, buried herself deeper into the blanket. “I’m afraid we’ve made a terrible mess of things.”
“Oh?” The vicar chuckled. “What’s troubling you, then, Missus Keene?”
Anne looked at her wedding band. For the first time since she’d put it on, she’d completely forgotten about it. “He’s a drunk. The war’s left him with some sort of shell shock. And I—I—”
“Go on, lass, spit it out.”
“Well, I see things, people, that aren’t there.”
The vicar raised his brows at this. His eyes emerged from the crumpled folds of his face, startlingly blue.
“I didn’t want to tell him, but I don’t see how it can be avoided now I’ve made such a spectacle of myself.
” Anne showed him her palms, grazed during her fall. He tutted sympathetically. “My God, he’ll be so ashamed of me,” she whispered, the details of her flight coming back to her: the mad scramble through the mud, the shrieking, the bewildered staff. Her heart thumped against her ribs. “What will I do? I can’t go home.”
“You’re seeing apparitions?” He came closer, turning one waxy ear her way. “Tell the good reverend all about it, lass.”
So she told him about the hanging men in the orchards of Penshawe, the shadows that drifted formlessly in the churchyard, the bleeding woman she’d sometimes seen slumped on the bench outside the greengrocer’s. And then in London, where her madness became difficult to hide: the crawling man in the alleyway, his fingertips blackened with plague. The one who stepped off the Embankment into the Thames. The burnt child. And then the man caught beneath the train, the cries for help that had tricked her into investigating the bowels of Rannings, and what she’d found there.
The vicar made an inquisitive audience. Unlike the numerous doctors to whom she’d described her visions, he pushed for more detail, more description, and yet his questions never felt prying. By the time she finished, he’d taken a seat beside her, brooding like a particularly ugly gargoyle. “I’ve heard of the doctor afore but it’s worse than I thought. Summat must be done for them poor souls.” He cocked his fluffy head. “Tell me, when was you born?”
Anne groped for a reply. The question had caught her off guard. “The third of F—”
“The time, lass, the time.”
She frowned. “Oh, I don’t know. My father always says he delivered me on the dinner table. Supper, I suppose you’d call it. Why?”
“Vespers,” the vicar said to himself. His eyes popped out again like blue winkles emerging from their shells. He leaned in conspiratorially, his bulbous, arthritic hands clasping his knees. “Nah then, have you ever heard of chime children?”
Anne gave him a tired, indulgent smile. “No, I haven’t.”
“Chime children are what’s born when the bells toll. They can do owt—commune with God’s creations, heal the sick, even pierce the veil of Heaven. Folk up here say they’re born at midnight, and folk down your way might say morning or evening, but it’s the bells what matter.” He pointed up to the tower where the transept and nave intersected, where presumably a bell now hung, silent. “I’ll bet the bells was ringing out when you came into this world. Powerful thing, bell-metal . . . You still with me, lass? You look right flayt.”
Anne was on her feet, hugging the blanket tight. “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Reverend,” she said coldly. “My delusions are caused by stress, and in the last two days I have estranged myself from my only family and married a man I barely know. Our minds are extremely susceptible to suggestion. We all learned about the Black Death and the Great Fire of London in school. I was told of Rannings’ history, the asylum. I’ve read anatomy books. I’ve heard my father perform amputations. All I had to do was fill in the blanks.”
“What about the scratches in the wall? You said they felt real.”
“Everything I see feels real, Reverend, but there must be a rational explanation.”
The vicar smiled at her as if she were a marvel and spread his arms. “If you wanted rational, why seek shelter in a church?”
She had no answer to that. “But this bell nonsense—it sounds so pagan. It's hardly appropriate for a vicar.”
“The Bible tells us God created the world, so I say chime children are His work. Nowt can exist that He did not intend, Missus Keene.”
Anne buried her face into the musk of the scratchy blanket and exhaled. Her tongue pulsed against her bottom teeth. A part of her willed it to be true: It explained so much about where and in what state her visions appeared. She had never been a morbid child, had suffered no early grief, so there seemed no reason for her illness to fixate on churchyards, on pain and terror.
She lifted her head and gazed at the ceiling, the roosting pigeon. How could she be sure this wasn’t simply another delusion? But then the vicar was here, wasn’t he? She wasn’t alone?
“Can it be true?” She gazed at him. “I’m not mad?”
“You’ve no control over what you see or when.” He lifted a finger. “Intrusions is still intrusions, sane or no. You must find a way to bear them.”
“But I’ve seen others, other people who aren’t suffering. The girl I saw today, she looked fine. Does that mean even she’s . . . dead?”
“Maybe, maybe not.” The vicar shrugged, resting his hands on his gut. “Some folk leave impressions, not just where they died, but where they made a difference.” He looked around his church with such serene pride that Anne found herself looking as well. At the crooked pews, the broken memorial slabs. A candelabrum knocked to the floor, draped in cobwebs, and a bare altar. A leaking roof. A pigeon and its excrement. A vicar who, despite his unwashed appearance and gummy mouth, was strangely odorless.
Anne felt sick. She went to the front door and pushed it open, but the rain was thick and driving sideways, pulping the shrubs. The path to the churchyard gate was underwater, and she could barely make out the war memorial twenty feet away. She would easily get turned around in this, without the sight of Rannings to guide her back. Thunder growled, and between the dark clouds, lightning flickered.
The vicar walked through her and out into the storm, unaffected by the rain. He stooped especially low to read one gravestone and then another, until he found what he was looking for. “Aye, here’s me.”
Anne’s skin tingled. “Please don’t walk through me again, Reverend.” But she held the blanket over her head, trusting the stiff weave to keep out the worst of the rain, and plunged barefoot into the churchyard to read the stone.
Rev. Jonah Rolfe
28 June 1771—5 December 1855
“Fifty year,” the vicar said. “I poured my heart and soul into this parish for fifty year. I were happy here, lass, right happy I were. You should’ve seen it in its prime.” A frown, a return to the present moment. “I remember you now. Yesterday means nowt to me, but I do remember you.” His voice was fading. Anne stepped closer, protecting him from rain he could not feel. “Help them poor souls up at the house, if you can. They’ll want to talk—that’s why they come to you. Our bell will make it easier. Purest bell-metal an earl can buy.
“Good luck, lass.”
And then he was gone.
• • • •
“Who’re you talking to?” asks Martha.
“A ghost,” I say—a ghost who’s already gone, her eyes the last of her to fade. I can’t be sure she even heard me.
Martha moves behind the wall. I imagine her pressing her ear to the hole. “What?”
“Never mind.” I rub the back of my head where the matron struck me and my fingers come away wet and dark. A headache forms there, as if a gentle press was all it needed. I ease back down beside the hole and we link fingers again.
“Can you find things, too?” she whispers. “Is that why you’re here?”
“I seem to be much better at losing them. . . Why, what can you find?”
“Owt,” Martha replies, and there’s a note of quiet pride in her voice. “When I were little, folk used to say I must’ve stolen things, to know where to find ’em. They chased us out of town. Where we live now is better. Now folk pay me, sometimes, to help find stuff.”
I smile, understanding her pride. As children, any coins Benjamin and I could contribute to our families were precious, whether they’d been earned honestly or lifted out of a loose purse. Every coin meant our mothers could afford to put one less neighbor’s shirt through the back-breaking mangle, make one less matchbox when we’d all gone to bed. Our fathers could come home from the docks one hour earlier, live one more day before their bodies gave out. It’s why the damage to Benjamin’s leg was such a blow. But I also smile because her gift gives me hope.
“Listen, Martha, does it work for people, what you can do?”
She
’s quiet for a moment. Perhaps the doctor’s asked her the same thing, and now she regrets saying as much to me. “Sometimes.”
I give her finger a little squeeze. “You see, I came to find my friend. He’s here somewhere, locked up, just like us. Have you heard anyone crying out?”
“I think so,” she whispers back. “They’re somewhere dark, somewhere . . . down there.” I can barely hear her as she draws away from the wall, a dowsing rod for Benjamin. Then she yanks on my finger and says, her voice pitched high with sudden panic, “Please don’t leave me here! I know you didn’t come for me, but I wanna go home, too.”
I soothe her as best I can, pressing her poor exposed nail beds to my lips. Guilt stings my eyes. I came for Benjamin and Benjamin alone, but I don’t have the heart to abandon this child. I’m not a monster. Will Missus Walchop ever forgive me, if I’m forced to choose? This girl can die and Benjamin cannot—is that what I must tell his mother, what I must tell myself, in leaving Benjamin to his torture?
The peal of a faraway bell ripples through me. I look up to the window. Fog slithers in like water. “What’s that?”
“It’s coming from the church at Huxby,” says Martha. “It must be midnight.”
“Chime hours,” I breathe.
Every clang strikes me like a smith’s hammer. White dots blister my vision, expanding and joining together until I can’t see, and everything—the chill bleeding through my skirts, the vise of my stays; even Martha, noticing something’s wrong—comes to me as if from a great distance. I turn obligingly inward like I was taught, into the light.
An old bell appears above me, scabbed with turquoise verdigris. Below, pulling the rope, is the ghost. I watch the bell’s clapper connect with the rim. As the vibration stretches impossibly long, pinning us in a moment, our eyes meet. Her left eyelid distorts when she smiles.
“It’s you,” she says.
Suddenly she’s right here, or I’m there—space has ceased to matter—and she’s all loud, chromatic flesh. Blood springs from the fissures of her chapped lips, coloring them a shocking red and infusing her breath with iron. She’s reaching gently for my hand. Hers are as soft as a gentlewoman’s, until I turn them over and find her palms flecked with cuts. I close my callused fingers over hers.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 35