The Plague Stones

by James Brogden

  ‘Don’t you need to finish that first?’ asked the reverend.

  ‘Finish what?’ she said, all wide-eyed innocence.

  They took Joyce’s car back into the centre of Haleswell. At the heart of it was the green, a small but immaculately maintained park surrounded by narrow-fronted heritage-listed buildings occupied by smart little cafés, gift and jewellery shops, insurance agents, a branch of Lloyds Bank, a holistic therapies clinic and a cake-craft shop. St Sebastian’s and the rectory formed one corner with the Manor House diagonally at the other; this was a half-timbered building three storeys high which dated back to the seventeenth century, and although it had genuinely once been the home of the de Lindesay family, it was now where the Trust had its main offices as well as housing the village hall, children’s library, and Citizens Advice Bureau. At the back of the CAB Joyce showed her to a storeroom piled with cardboard boxes full of assorted tins, packets, bottles and jars.

  ‘These are the donations that come in from all over,’ the reverend said. ‘Some of it comes from parishioners but an awful lot from corner shops and supermarkets. What we need to do is check the expiry dates to make sure it’s all okay and then take it in the van to the big food bank on the Stratford Road.’

  Trish rubbed her hands together. ‘Let’s get started then.’

  As they worked, the reverend asked her, ‘So I hope you and your family are settling in all right?’

  ‘It’s only been three weeks, but I think so, thanks.’

  ‘One of life’s most stressful events, isn’t that what they say? Death, divorce and moving house?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Trish made a show of concentrating on the label of a packet of rice. ‘Do they?’ Happy as she was to help, she had a sinking feeling that the reverend thought she would benefit from baring her soul in a Deep and Meaningful Conversation. For years now her soul had been her own concern.

  ‘Personally I think that’s a load of tosh.’

  Trish snorted a laugh. ‘Did you just use the word tosh?’

  ‘I was trying to protect your sensibilities. You would prefer bollocks?’

  ‘I don’t have any sensibilities. And you might want to rephrase that.’

  The reverend mentally replayed what she’d just said, and burst out laughing. They carried on sorting and repacking.

  * * *

  The food bank itself operated out of an anonymous industrial unit near the busy dual carriageway, in a buffer zone of chain-link fencing, breeze blocks and roll-up doors between the estates of Pestle Road and the Willows. It was staffed by volunteers in green tabards who helped Trish and the reverend unload and told them where to put the boxes. It was what Trish imagined the food store of a nuclear bunker would look like: rows of industrial metal shelving neatly stacked with boxes and pallets of groceries – not just food, but household goods, children’s clothes, sanitary products… anything with a decent shelf-life that a destitute person might need.

  And there were so very many of them.

  Trish was shocked to see them actually queuing outside. Parents, mostly mothers, trying to hush squalling children too young to be in school. Elderly folk standing in quiet dignity. Solitary men and women, some of them with the pinched cheeks of junkies or the raggedness of the homeless, but by no means all; many of them she would have passed in the street and never imagined that their circumstances had reduced them to this.

  They arrived with vouchers provided by doctors, social workers, or other charities, and had them stamped and authenticated by volunteers who would then talk to them about their needs and help them put together a package of supplies to see them through their immediate crisis. She overheard the story of a father who had missed his benefits appointment because his baby was in hospital with bronchitis and whose welfare had been stopped for six weeks as a result; that of an accounts manager who had lost her job when the company had relocated to Portugal and hadn’t been able to make her rent payments; that of a sixty-two-year-old Falklands War veteran who hadn’t eaten for two days and had been forced to come, despite his pride, by his granddaughter. Her blood ran cold at the thought of how close she and Peter could have come to this: one redundancy, one workplace injury was all it took. She thought about going home to her nice new cottage with the laundry basket that she’d been fed up with this morning, and felt sick with guilt.

  That was the point at which Trish first noticed the girl.

  She couldn’t have been much more than eleven, very thin, with lank hair and dressed in the simplest of plain cotton dresses, but what caught Trish’s attention most of all was her bare feet, which were filthy – it was a minor miracle that they weren’t already lacerated. God alone knew what kind of broken glass or bits of metal were underfoot. She was standing a little off to one side, looking at the queue as if unsure whether or not to join it. She didn’t seem to be with anybody; either that or she had lost her parents.

  Trish headed towards her, about to ask if she was missing her mummy or daddy, but the girl chose that moment to look around and saw her approaching. Her eyes widened in alarm and she walked hurriedly away, around the back of the queue.

  ‘Excuse me!’ Trish called out. ‘Wait a minute! I’m not going to hurt you!’

  She rounded the end of the queue and saw the girl disappearing down the narrow alleyway between this unit and the next, a Volkswagen repair specialist. Not running, but still walking briskly, as if with a purpose. If she’d scared the kid and caused her to be hurt she’d never forgive herself.

  ‘It’s okay! I just want to talk to you!’

  The girl looked back again and picked up her pace, disappearing around a corner in the alleyway.

  Trish ran after her. She got to the corner in time to see the girl disappearing around yet another one in the opposite direction.

  ‘Wait!’

  Trish pursued again, concern turning to frustration and annoyance as she started to suspect that the girl wasn’t afraid of her at all, but was playing some kind of silly prank. Those backwards looks hadn’t been glances of fear – more like checking to see if she was being followed. Well, if she wasn’t in sight around this next corner then she could sod off.

  Around the next one, Trish nearly ran into the back of her. She was right there, almost within arm’s reach, bending down to duck through a hole in the chain-link fence, on the other side of which cars and lorries flashed past. She was going out onto the dual carriageway, where she was certain to get hit, and now it didn’t matter whether she was scared or stupid.

  This close, Trish noticed the girl’s smell – it was rank and foul, like the stench of something long dead and rotted in stagnant water – but she didn’t have time to process this fact properly because then the girl slipped through the gap into the stream of traffic, and Trish yelled, ‘NO!’ and ducked through after her, grabbing…

  …and nearly lost her balance on the edge of a yawning pit.

  She flailed behind herself, fingers finding and hooking in the chain-link fence, arresting her forward plunge.

  It was a storm-drain culvert, about a metre across and several deep, into which the drainage under the dual carriageway flowed before being carried away by a much wider pipe. Safety barriers prevented access from the road only on three sides, with the fourth supposedly being the fence that she’d just ducked through. The fall probably wouldn’t have killed her, but she’d definitely have broken something. She shook her head in disbelief. The little bitch had lured her here deliberately.

  ‘Dear God!’ she whispered, aghast. ‘Why?’

  Then movement on the far side of the carriageway caught her attention – it was the girl, standing there, staring back at her. Somehow she’d made it across four lanes of busy traffic, including the central reservation barrier, in a few seconds. There had been no horns or tyres screeching – somebody must have seen her and yet the traffic was moving as smoothly as if nothing had happened at all.

  ‘That’s not possible,’ she whispered.

  As if hearing her, the
girl grinned.

  And changed.

  Her face was a cadaver’s, dead eyes glittering with malice as sores blossomed across her skin and her fingers grew black, while larger swellings erupted at her throat, some bursting to disgorge streams of blood and pus which stained the crude woollen shift which she now wore. Trish screamed, and the dead girl nodded as if pleased by the sound, and then was gone.

  * * *

  Trish had no memory of making her way back to the food bank. She couldn’t have been gone more than five minutes, but when she returned the reverend came running up, her face lined with concern.

  ‘Good heavens, Trish! What have you been doing? You’re white as a sheet!’

  ‘I’m just…’ Trish croaked, only realising then how badly she’d strained her vocal cords with her own screaming. She swallowed, feeling something click. ‘Felt a bit unwell, that’s all. Could I maybe have a glass of water, please?’

  Water was fetched, as well as a chair, and when she felt steady enough the reverend drove her back to Haleswell. On the journey she was aware of Joyce’s speculative sidelong looks directed at her, and the reverend’s expressive hands were restless on the steering wheel.

  ‘Don’t think me rude,’ said Trish, ‘but you might want to keep your eyes on the road instead of me?’

  The reverend didn’t say anything at first, just kept looking at her. She seemed to be weighing up the pros and cons of some internal debate. It must have been resolved one way or another because finally she said, ‘What did you see?’ in a tone so utterly sober, so lacking in the usual chumminess of her public demeanour, that for a second Trish thought it was the voice of a different person.

  ‘What do you mean, what did I see?’

  ‘Experience, then. Listen, Patricia, I’m sure you see me as some sort of well-meaning but basically quite ineffectual Little England village vicar, but I know the difference between sickness and fear, and you, my dear, have had the willies put up you by something.’

  Trish laughed despite herself. ‘Willies.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve had… I’ve had a bit of a funny turn, that’s all.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ The reverend faced straight ahead and said nothing for a while as she continued to drive, and Trish knew that somehow she’d disappointed her. Well, tough. She wasn’t about to go spilling a story which was bound to sound insane just to satisfy the reverend’s need to be sticking her holy nose into everybody’s business. ‘As long as it is just yourself, of course,’ Dobson continued. ‘And not your loved ones too.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Now it was the reverend’s turn to laugh, but she sounded far from amused. ‘It means that if you ever need to talk to me about anything – you, or Peter or Toby – there is literally nothing I am not prepared to listen to. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  Trish thought she did, and the idea was far from reassuring – if the reverend was suggesting, however obliquely, that she might be prepared to take such a story seriously, it meant that she was just as deranged. Because it couldn’t be true. It absolutely could not.

  * * *

  Even though they didn’t have enough stuff to be living out of cardboard boxes after the move, one of the upstairs spare bedrooms had been designated a box room for the various bits and pieces which couldn’t be found an immediate home. It still took Trish a while to find what she was looking for; it was one of those things that had been scooped straight from the back of the wardrobe and into a packing crate without looking, as if she’d been subconsciously trying to ignore it even then. After all, she’d been successfully ignoring it for the past twelve years.

  It was an ordinary Clarks shoe box, tied up with a piece of tartan ribbon from some long-forgotten Christmas. The contents shifted and slid as she lifted it with sweating hands. This was a different kind of fear to this afternoon’s terror – less sharp, but bone deep.

  Even though nobody else was at home, she shut the door and drew the curtains. Some things were to be kept from the casual gaze of the outside world, even if the world didn’t care anymore.

  Taking a deep breath, she unknotted the ribbon and lifted the lid.

  Envelopes, mostly. A lot of them contained doctors’ notes. One was full of printouts of ultrasound scans. A book of baby names. But alongside these were other relics, these ones of her faith that had died at the same time: her first rosary and the little book of psalms for children that she’d received at her First Communion when she was seven. The veil she’d worn at her Confirmation when she’d been Toby’s age (and dear Lord hadn’t she been so proud of herself!). A large crucifix – gilded Christ on a rosewood cross.

  She lifted out this last item and closed the box quickly before the tears could escape.

  ‘Well then,’ she murmured, regarding Him. ‘Let’s see what you’re good for, shall we?’

  After some deliberation about where to hang it – not in the living room, where it would be in their faces all the time, and definitely not in their bedroom, since Peter had made it clear a long time ago that he wasn’t sharing it with another man, even though he’d tried to make it sound like a joke – she settled on the main hallway just inside the front door.

  She was in the process of hammering a picture hook into the plaster when Toby came home from school.

  ‘What’s that for?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine, thanks!’ she replied brightly, ignoring the question. How would she answer it anyway? Today I had what can only be described as a paranormal experience and nearly got hospitalised by a little girl who I’m pretty sure wasn’t alive and it’s making me second-guess everything I disbelieve in, but other than that just peachy, darling. ‘How was school?’

  Toby mumbled something and started upstairs. She finished hanging the crucifix and turned to ask him again just as he was rounding the landing halfway up. He had his hand up to the side of his face, and she knew instantly that something was wrong.

  ‘Stop right there, young man!’ she ordered, and he froze like a dog jerked on a leash. She looked closer. ‘Toby, what’s happened to your face?!’

  13

  TITS ON A FISH

  ‘HE SAID HE WAS HAVING A KICKABOUT WITH HIS friends on the way back from school, and he fell over,’ said Trish. They were in the living room, the remains of a Chinese takeaway and several empty posh lager bottles on the coffee table between them. They should probably have been developing a taste for something more exotic like Thai food and starting to drink wine, but that was never going to happen. Neither of them had felt like cooking. Something was bothering Trish, and Peter knew that the thing with Toby was only part of it. Their son had taken himself up to his room the second dinner was over, as if wanting to give them a clear space to talk about him.

  ‘And do you believe him?’

  She snorted a laugh. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘What makes you think he’s lying?’

  ‘Because when I asked if he’d hurt himself anywhere else he said no, and I know that when you fall you go over hands first, don’t you? So I was looking at his hands when he was eating dinner and there wasn’t a mark on them. Nor on his uniform, either – no scuffed knees, nothing.’

  ‘Blimey,’ he laughed. ‘Sherlock Holmes or what? Good thing I’ve never tried to cheat on you.’

  ‘I hope that’s not supposed to be funny.’

  Peter’s smile vanished. ‘Not really.’ He’d just given her an open goal to tease him, and she’d refused it. If their usual banter wasn’t working, whatever was on her mind must be serious.

  ‘Plus,’ she continued, ‘it’s not like he’s never been in a fight before, is it?’

  Peter sighed. ‘No, it isn’t.’ He took a long swig from his bottle and grimaced. ‘Shit – I really thought we’d put that behind us. I thought maybe this new place, new school…’ He shook his head.

  ‘What if he gets suspended again? I knew that comprehensive was a bad idea.’

  Peter felt his temper surging in response to the I-t
oldyou-so, but forced it back. If she wanted a rise from him she was going to have to work harder than that. ‘Trish, he’s only been there a week – he’s finding where he fits into the pecking order. Give the poor little sod a chance, yeah?’

  ‘So are you going to talk to him about it?’

  ‘I’ll try.’ He shrugged. ‘But I’ll be honest with you, I can’t see it being any more successful than before.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Peter! Can’t you at least try to summon up some sense of urgency about this? Pecking order! He’s not a zoo animal! You sound like you’ve given up already!’

  ‘Well what can I do? If he won’t talk to me, he won’t talk to me! I can’t force it out of him with red-hot irons and bamboo splinters under the bloody fingernails, can I? He’s a teenage boy! He’ll talk when he’s ready.’

  ‘It’s been six months! When is he going to be ready? You’re his father! You should be able to… I don’t know—’

  ‘Wait, now it’s my fault?’ he snapped.

  And there it was. He just about managed to keep his voice below shouting so that their son wouldn’t hear.

  ‘That’s not what I meant—’

  ‘No, you never mean to blame me, do you? It just sort of happens. Is that why we’ve got the big man himself staring down at us again? Bringing out the captain of Team Guilt Trip for reinforcements?’

  ‘What? No!’ She blinked and frowned, trying to make sense of that. ‘What’s that got to do with anything? I told you, I put it up for good luck, that’s all.’ Her fingers were playing with the front of her t-shirt collar – back in the day it had been a crucifix around her neck that she’d fiddled with when she was nervous or lying, and he didn’t think she was even aware she was doing it. He wanted to call her out on it but he knew from past experience that this would just escalate things to a point which frankly he didn’t have the energy for.

  ‘Okay. Fine. I’ll talk to him. Happy?’