Too Near the Dead

by Helen Grant

  To either of them, I repeat to myself as I dodge puddles, hurrying past windows decked out with red and green Christmas displays. Maybe Jean Murray has told me something after all. Those words imply they aren’t together now. Maybe they sold because they were splitting up – that’s the simplest explanation. We don’t have their addresses, but their full names are on the house sale contract. I might be able to track them down somehow. There are a lot of things I’d like to ask.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I have an email from work. It’s chirpy and cajoling and full of little phrases like it would be absolutely super if and I’m sure you must have but underneath the sugar-coating I can read the real message loud and clear: why haven’t you finished the manuscript yet? It’s like looking into a pram lined with pink satin and lace and frills and seeing a toad in it.

  It’s terribly tempting to ignore it, the way I have been pushing work to the back of my mind over the last few days. It is just one voice in a chorus shouting at me: the dreams, the row with James, the impossibility of selling the house. And I’m tired, because although in all the months we’ve lived at Barr Dubh House I’ve had the dreams fewer than half a dozen times, the fear that it will happen again hangs over me every time I put my head on the pillow.

  But I can’t ignore the email. I’m supposed to be super efficient, a mistress of every tiny detail. And this book is important, after all, even if it’s 90,000 words of crude action and mangled prose. The last book sold an unimaginable number of copies. If I let this one slide, it will probably be the last job they give me and I can’t afford for that to happen. We have James’s debt to clear, a wedding to pay for and – perhaps – a house to sell at a loss.

  I compose an email in reply, and even though I’m not an author myself, I manage to confect something any creative writer ought to be proud of: reassuring, dedicated, confident. Then I press send, make myself an enormous mug of tea and get straight down to work. I open the file and scroll down through thickets of red comments, until I find the place where I last left off: a toe-curlingly cocky monologue from the book’s action hero. It’s something of a mystery that the villain of the piece, who appears to be bristling with every kind of weaponry known to man, has the patience to stand there and listen to the whole thing without opening fire. In spite of myself, I’m soon engrossed in the task. My fingers fly over the keyboard as comments and amendments sprout all over the page.

  I keep going until I find myself having to read sentences twice to make sense of them; then I know it’s time for a break. I save the file and click onto the web browser instead.

  The names of the people who sold us Barr Dubh are Craig and Susan Loughty. I try Craig first and get an entry on a directory of businesses: Craig Loughty Building Services. The address given is Barr Dubh House. The entry is out of date. There’s a mobile number and I try that, but get a “number not recognised” message. There’s a profile on a social media site too – luckily, Loughty isn’t a common name, otherwise it would be hopeless trying to find him. I click onto it and there are all his photos. There are dozens of Barr Dubh.

  It’s fascinating, because the Loughtys built the house. The most recent photo is of Craig Loughty in the middle of putting up the fence that separates the future garden from the fields. He’s posing heroically. Fencing champion, it says above the image. Underneath that one, there are a lot of snaps of Barr Dubh immediately after the house was finished. There’s one of Craig and Susan raising glasses of champagne, with the house in the background, and others showing the building from every conceivable angle. You can see it’s a new build, because there are piles of rich brown earth visible in some of them, or stacks of leftover materials.

  I keep scrolling down, going further back in time, and there are pictures of the house when it was half built, when there were only foundations, and finally, when there was nothing but the bare plot. There’s nothing much to see on that bare plot. No sinister-looking ruins from the old house, just scrubland with a few tumbled stones that might be anything. Before that, there are no photos of Barr Dubh. It’s all personal pics and the occasional post about a sports result or a local appeal.

  I feel like a stalker, looking at the personal photos, but I’m curious about Craig and Susan Loughty. We never met them when we came to look at the house. They’d already moved out and all queries were directed through the solicitor. I can’t think why we never asked the agent who showed us round about their reasons for selling. I suppose I assumed they’d built it as an investment and never really intended to stay there themselves. It’s funny, though; the house has never felt like a commercial project. It’s designed so carefully, with so many charming features – it really feels like someone’s dream home. That’s why we bought it, after all. Now I wonder whether the Loughtys knew they were selling something other than a beautiful dream.

  Can you tell what someone is like as a person from looking at their photograph? I doubt it, but it’s all I’ve got. Craig Loughty looks about forty years old, with a broad, weatherbeaten face and blunt features. He has close-cropped red-brown hair and grey eyes with crow’s feet at the corners, as though he spends a lot of time squinting into the sun. His build is robust, muscular even, as you would expect from someone who’s spent a lot of time heaving building materials around. He looks practical, tough, uncompromising.

  Susan Loughty is younger than he is, with blue eyes and blonde hair and a tan that was definitely not acquired from Perthshire summers. There is no photo in which she is not giving a dazzling smile to the camera and looking the photographer in the eyes. A warm, sociable extrovert. That’s the impression she gives.

  These are the two people who sold us Barr Dubh House. Did they know what they were selling us?

  I think about the length of time they had the house – less than a year before they moved out and put it up for sale. If they’d been perfectly happy here, why didn’t they stay until it was sold?

  On the other hand, perhaps it’s me who has the problem. James has lived at Barr Dubh for months without experiencing anything strange, after all. He has never seen anyone or anything untoward. Maybe the Loughtys didn’t, either.

  I scroll back up to the top and look at the last picture again, the one of Craig Loughty being the fencing champion. The date shows that it was posted nearly three years ago. There’s been nothing since then – not unless he upped the privacy on his account at that point, and hid everything else.

  I click on his profile details. There’s no secrecy here. His birthdate is here, and his age (he’s 42). There’s the name of his secondary school and the name of his business, Craig Loughty Building Services. And there’s his relationship status: don’t ask. It’s a strange option to go for if you’re married. It also means there’s no link to Susan Loughty’s account, if she has one.

  A search for Susan Loughty’s name brings up nothing, on this site or any other. I sit back, drumming my fingers on the worktop. If don’t ask actually means in the middle of an acrimonious divorce, she might have reverted to her maiden name. I have absolutely no idea what that is. I go back to Craig Loughty’s account and look to see if he has any friends called Susan with any other surnames, and he doesn’t. Come to that, he doesn’t have all that many friends. I guess he’s not a heavy social media user. It doesn’t take long to click on a few at random, to see whether anyone is connected to a Susan. There are no Susan Loughtys anywhere, but I find a Sue Gardener, connected through a female friend of Craig’s. There is a rather bad photograph of her, but I honestly can’t tell if it’s Susan Loughty or not – if it is, she’s changed quite a bit, because this Sue is pasty-faced, scowling from under mousy hair with bleached ends.

  The obvious answer to this is that the Loughtys have split up. They’ve sold the house because it’s too lonely for one person or perhaps because they need to split the proceeds. Susan has reverted to her old name and probably posts under that. Craig doesn’t post anything, o
r hides what he posts, on the advice of his lawyer, because too many snaps of the wrong thing might sink his chances of claiming straitened circumstances.

  Fen, I tell myself, your imagination is running away with you. I take a sip of cold tea and grimace.

  There is one obvious course of action here. I decide to message Craig Loughty and ask him about the house. It’s no use being too direct, of course. If I sail straight in with did you ever suspect there was something horribly wrong with Barr Dubh House? he’ll be straight on the defensive. Or he’ll think I’m deluded.

  In the end, I conclude that simplicity is best – and not too much detail. Hi Mr. Loughty, it’s Fen Munro here. We (James and I) bought Barr Dubh House from you! I’m doing some local history research and wondered if I could ask you something?

  I think for a bit and then I send the message, just as it is. I hope it’s struck the right note of being friendly and non-accusing. Of course, he may not reply, so I decide to send one to Sue Gardener too. It’s difficult to know what to say to her, because if there has been an acrimonious divorce, she won’t be pleased to be asked if she’s Susan Loughty. In the end I go for, Hi – is it you we bought the house from? Sorry if not. Hoping to ask a question!

  After that, I make more tea and get back to work.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I’ll never forget the first time I saw Barr Dubh House. It was in the springtime, though actual spring comes late in Perthshire; there were daffodils out in London when we left, but we arrived to bare trees with tight buds like tiny fists.

  I was glad to get away from London for a few days. The atmosphere in the office had become – well, not exactly strained but a little less cosy than it had been, ever since word had got around that I was engaged to James. When we first started seeing each other, I didn’t say anything about it at work. I wanted to hug the information to myself without handing it around for everyone else to cluck over, plus I thought it would be grisly if it didn’t work out. Delia would be intolerable. Then we got engaged, which was different, and which we couldn’t have concealed anyway, because all those eagle eyes would undoubtedly have spotted the ring. So I announced it in the office and was deluged with shrieks and hugs and congratulations, until I began to feel like one of the guests at the feast of Heliogabalus, who were suffocated with a ton of rose petals. Even Delia joined in, though I could see the expression in her eyes and the eyes of half a dozen other people: jammy cow, they were thinking. On the whole, it was a relief to take a break.

  We were still deciding what we wanted to do; it takes time to shed the skin of an old life. So we made up our minds we’d go up to Scotland for a week and look, as though we were measuring the distance before making a leap. I booked us into what turned out to be the shabbiest hotel in the area. We spent the nights rolling towards each other in the saggiest double bed I’d ever slept on, and the days driving around trying to imagine ourselves living here. For the first two days it rained heavily, and it was difficult to see much of the landscape through the incessant grey drizzle. We looked at an oldish house on the outskirts of a village; it had views over the countryside (so far as we could tell through the downpour) but it smelled the same as my parents’ house had, of furniture polish and disapproval. I hardly wanted to finish looking round it. Then on the third day, the sun came out, and we went to see Barr Dubh.

  James talked to the woman who showed us over the house and I walked on ahead of them, through rooms which echoed to my footsteps and revealed nothing of the previous owners’ lives except the colours they had chosen as a backdrop. It was a cold day, but clear and dry, and the sunshine streamed in. I went into the living room and looked out through the huge plate glass windows, at the expanse of rough grass and the distant trees, and beyond them the hill. A bird of prey was hovering high above the trees, but otherwise in all of that view I could see nothing moving. There was no wind; even the grass and the weeds were still. It was quiet here, too; the only sounds I could hear were the muffled voices of James chatting to the agent two rooms away.

  I knew then that this was the place I wanted to be. This perfect peace was the lake I wanted to swim out into, leaving the fractious ghosts of the past ranting on the shore. I thought that here, their voices would fade away altogether.

  When James came into the room, he saw immediately from my face that I had decided. He came up and put an arm around my shoulders, squeezing me gently. We didn’t rave about the house to each other, not then, not in front of the agent, because it was more than we had wanted to pay; it had simply sounded interesting, and worth looking at. In the event, we didn’t have to bargain very hard. The price was dropped. We didn’t ask why. It was the lawyer’s job to check that there were no land disputes, no plans to build a road through the site. The house was already empty, so of course it was in everyone’s interests for new occupants to move in as soon as possible.

  If someone had said to me then: Barr Dubh House is haunted, I wouldn’t have believed them; it would have sounded laughable.

  Now I think: What does she want?

  I have to know. I can’t go on, never knowing whether I’ll wake up inside that coffin again, or whether I’ll wander in my sleep through the rooms and corridors of a house that no longer exists. I’ll break down under the strain of it, or else one night I will go outside to wait for someone who is never going to return and James won’t wake up and find me.

  We could leave – eventually, if we can find someone to take the house off our hands. But I fell in love with Barr Dubh, the very first time we visited it. It’s rare to know what you want that much, that quickly. I’m not prepared to give it up without a fight.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I am in that room again, the one papered in a design of intertwined vegetation in shades of green and brown. There is that same musty odour; there are the same motes of dust drifting lazily in the sunlight that slants through the windows. Opposite me is the white marble fireplace with the tiled grate. There is no fire burning. Above the fireplace is the mirror in its ornate gilded frame, the glass freckled with dark spots. I see the armchairs, their overstuffed upholstery studded with buttons, and the spindle-legged side table. I can see the bottom part of the oil painting in its heavy gilded frame, but I am destined never to know what the whole picture shows, because just as before, I cannot lift my head nor raise my eyes.

  Inside, I scream. Outside, I sit, motionless. Time stretches out with deadly slowness. The sun sinks outside, and darkness creeps in. I hear the soft bump of the moth on the outside of the window. My thoughts seem to congeal in a sickly mass of horror and tedium.

  The hours seem interminably long, but at last the dawn breaks, grey and dismal. The contours of the room become visible again. The servant girl comes in to sweep out the grate and fails to notice me at first, sitting silent and rigid in the chair. When she does, she drops the dustpan and there is a soft whump as the ashes spill out. She screams at what she sees propped here with fixed eyes and gaping mouth. She runs from the room and a distant door bangs. Two of them come back to look at me, the young girl and the older woman. The older one sends the girl off to fetch a mirror; she takes the green glass laudanum bottle from my hand and hides it in her pocket, telling me that there is no need for anyone else to see it. Hiding the stigma of suicide.

  The girl returns with the silver-backed mirror and they hold it to my lips, trying to see whether the slightest breath will mist the glass. They tilt it this way and that, and for a moment they hold it so that I can see myself in it.

  I see, not the older woman I saw before, with her finely-lined faced and grey-streaked hair, but myself, Fen Munro, my skin still smooth, my hair dark, my eyes staring. Myself, starkly dead.

  The terror that explodes in me has nowhere to go. My dead heart won’t race; my dead lungs won’t inflate. I cannot force the slightest sound from my frozen lips, nor turn my eyes in their sockets. My hands are cold lumps of meat in
my lap, the fingers held a little apart where the laudanum bottle was prised from between them. Inside this dead shell, my consciousness, the inner Fen, is rampaging.

  Wake up! Wake up!

  If I don’t, I know what will happen. They will dress me up in wedding finery like a great doll; they will lift me all unresisting into an oak coffin; the men will come and peer into the coffin, noting with curiosity my unclosed eyes, and then they will nail the lid down. Perhaps I will hear the first spadefuls of earth rattling onto the wood. Then I will lie there in the dark, silently screaming.

  I burst back into wakefulness like a swimmer erupting from deep black water into the blessed air – coughing, sobbing, shivering. I touch my face, my hair. I hug myself, feeling the goosebumps on my bare arms. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I find that I am crouching in the wing-backed chair in the spare room again. The furniture, the boxes, are outlined by the pale moonlight seeping in. My limbs are cramped, as though I have been here for some time. When I unfold myself and try to stand up, I stagger a little and have to grasp the back of the chair to steady myself. The sensation of the brocade upholstery under my fingers is marvellously real. I cry a little, from sheer relief.

  I make my way to the door, stretching out my arms in the dark for fear of running into something. At the threshold I pause for a moment, listening. The house is dead quiet. James has not woken up and noticed that I have gone, or I would hear him looking for me; there would be lights on. Please God, he would have found me and shaken me awake.

  My throat is painfully dry. I fumble my way into the tiny downstairs bathroom one door down, thinking that I will drink straight from the cold tap. There is no window in here, so the darkness is absolute. I feel for the switch and turn the light on, narrowing my eyes against the sudden brilliance. Then I turn on the tap and bend low over it, greedily scooping up water in my cupped hands. I drink, then run a little more and drink again, thankfully.