The Plague Stones

by James Brogden

  ‘No, it’s not like that—’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m just fucking with you. So my father puts in a request to the Trust to come fix it and some maintenance guy comes and dicks around for like, ten minutes and then says it’s fixed and fucks off, and it is fixed – for about a month. Then it dies again. So we complain and nothing happens, we complain and nothing happens, we complain and by now you see there’s a pattern here, yeah? Eventually we pay for an engineer to come out and he takes a look at it and he just laughs, man. Fucking laughs. Says it should have been scrapped around the time JFK was shot. Tells us how much a new boiler will cost, but there’s no way we can afford that, and why the fuck should we?’ Suddenly he was angry again, spitting at Toby: ‘It’s your mother’s people who are responsible, for fuck’s sake! Eighteen months, and no central heating, and Mrs Griffith fucking dies because they can’t afford to run their fire.’

  Toby suspected that the reality of the situation was somewhat more complicated than that, but Raj didn’t strike him as a person who had much patience with complications. The older boy finished his cigarette, stubbed it out on the banister and flicked the butt contemptuously down the stairwell, then turned to him. ‘Now, you want to know about the fire escapes and smoke alarms?’

  ‘No, I think I know what you’re getting at.’

  ‘Do you? Do you have any fucking clue what I’m getting at, little landlord?’

  Toby watched him light another cigarette. ‘Give us a go on that, then,’ he said.

  The corner of Rajko’s mouth twitched upwards in a smirk, and he held up the cigarette. ‘What, this? You want to be one of the big boys?’ The idea seemed to amuse him. ‘All right then. Try not to be sick all over yourself.’

  He passed the cigarette over and Toby took a drag. It wasn’t the first time he’d smoked, though he’d never made a habit of it, and he was able to hold it down without coughing and humiliating himself.

  ‘You think I’m posh because I can use long words and live in a big house that I have nothing to do with,’ he said. ‘Fine. Whatever. I could have gone to the grammar but I didn’t, not that I expect you to give a shit about that.’ He took another drag. It was easier the second time. ‘Before here I was living in a block of flats, and a while back we got broken into. I was the only one at home. Bloke knocked me around a bit. Yeah, I know, boo fucking hoo. They made me go to the school counsellor in case I was “traumatised” by the event, but the only thing traumatic was when the other kids found out why I was being taken out of lessons. Like the sessions couldn’t have been arranged after school or on the weekend, I don’t know. So there was this kid in the fifth form, George Cox, who kept following me around making spaz noises and shit jokes about bedwetting. Then one day I just had enough of it and put his head through a classroom window. George nearly lost an ear.’ This was a slight exaggeration, but it had the intended effect of making Raj look at him with something other than contempt. Toby took a third and final drag on the cigarette and passed it back to Rajko, who was listening very closely. ‘I’ll talk to my mum. All you had to do was ask.’

  In his head, Green Skull’s mocking voice laughed Oh you’re such a badass motherfucker! but he ignored it and went back indoors to work on his probability.

  * * *

  The walk home was only about half an hour, and he set off in plenty of time to get home for dinner. Mrs Gorić had wrapped the rest of the pogacˇa in a tea towel that she said he could send back with Maya from school, and he munched it while walking. The shadows of late afternoon were lengthening, and a pall of dark rain cloud hung overhead except at the margins of the horizon, so that the light of the setting sun streamed in underneath and caused the shadows to fall at peculiar angles, as if the world had been turned sideways.

  He tried to pretend that he couldn’t see pale, bare feet pacing silently just behind his, and of course when he turned to look nobody was there.

  18

  HESTER

  MAY 1349

  HENRY DID NOT RETURN.

  Over the following week, work in the fields faltered as those few villagers who remained spent most of their time digging graves and collecting as much spring blossom as they could, burning it in their homes to keep the plague out. It was too early in the year for any useful herbs to have matured, so when the blossom was stripped from the nearby trees they started collecting dung from the farm animals and burning that outside their doors.

  Hester didn’t recognise her own home as she made her customary trip down to the millstream for water. It was as if her father’s surrender had given the disease licence to ravage the village unchecked. On the white stone on the village green someone had placed a bowl of honey and another of eggs in the hope that the Devil would be sated with it and leave them alone, but both had broken and spilled, and in the sun had festered into a foul-smelling mixture which was crawling with ants and flies. It was impossible to imagine dancing and laughing with her friends here less than a fortnight ago. Many houses were abandoned, with their doors wide open and dark like the eye sockets of skulls and random belongings strewn on the ground outside – either by animals or thieves or just in panic – while from those cottages that were still inhabited came the coughs, moans and pitiable begging of the sick. Veils of black smoke which stung the eyes and stank of burning shit hung in the air like something out of the Revelation, and through them her neighbours wandered like ghosts on whatever errands they thought might make a difference to their dying loved ones. Water from the holy spring at Haleswell might have helped, but Haleswell was still closed off from them, and the bitterness at this betrayal stung worse than the smoke. On the one occasion when a cloth merchant came down the road from the north in a cart, he told of how the villagers there were aggressively patrolling their parish boundary in armed groups, and then hurried on his way, crossing himself.

  When Dick Attlowe died, Hester was given help in digging his grave by her neighbour Janot, who had once carried a calf five miles. There was nobody else, her mother now being sick and bedridden in turn. The day was damp, the ground thickly sodden, and though Hester was accustomed to physical labour she hadn’t eaten properly for days and was weak. With the miller having fled, she was forced to bake with old rye flour which had become rancid and infested with weevils.

  ‘You should stop,’ said Janot. ‘Let me finish this.’ He was pallid and feverish himself, leaning on his shovel and panting.

  ‘No,’ she grunted, heaving at the soil. ‘I will not.’ Her father’s stubbornness was in her still, even though he lay on the ground next to them, stitched into a sheet. The grave was far too shallow, but the prospect of leaving him unburied and at the mercy of whatever scavengers would call this place home after all the people had died was unthinkable.

  She did pause for a moment, though. ‘Why do you suppose I have not yet taken sick?’ she wondered aloud. ‘I saw the stranger first before any of us. It should have been me.’

  ‘Maybe it is because you are the reeve’s daughter,’ replied Janot. ‘The Lord will protect you if nobody else.’

  But she was beginning to wonder about the Lord, too. It seemed much more likely that she was being kept alive as a punishment to see everyone she loved die one by one because she hadn’t told her parents about the sick stranger as soon as she’d known. She looked at the line of fresh graves, nearly two dozen so far but with many more lying dead in their homes even so, and then at the church which now lay empty.

  After they buried her father and Janot went to his own home to rest, she went into the church to see if God was still there.

  It was tiny compared to that of Haleswell, with a few benches and a table for an altar, though its simple plaster was decorated with bright paintings of stories from the saints’ lives. The candles had all been stolen so that what dim light there was came only from the one small louvred window above the altar, for Clegeham was too poor to afford coloured glass. Hester closed her eyes and listened carefully, trying to find that still, calm core of he
rself where she sometimes felt the sense of a comforting presence during Cuthbert’s sermons. But she felt utterly hollow, empty of love or hope. This time the only thing she heard was the growling of her own belly.

  And something skittering in the shadows.

  Onto the altar leapt a rat. It was sleek and glossy, obviously well fed, and it watched her fearlessly with eyes which gathered the meagre light into two hard points. It might have looked like a rat but Hester knew who it really was, and she knelt before it in weary acceptance. ‘He has truly abandoned us, then,’ she said. ‘This place is yours now.’

  The rat tilted its head, listening.

  ‘Please, take me. But spare the life of my mother, I beg you.’ She clasped her hands and held them out in supplication. She was damned, she knew, but if it was the price of her mother’s life and soul then it was no price at all. And if she failed, they would all burn anyway.

  The rat leapt off the altar and reappeared, closer, sniffing at her. Considering.

  ‘I pledge myself to your service if only you will spare my family.’

  The rat darted in and sank its teeth into the soft flesh at the side of her right palm just underneath her littlest finger. Hester screamed and tried to pull back, but the creature held on for a moment, its yellow teeth locked in her flesh, its glittering eyes locked just as mercilessly on hers.

  Then it let go and disappeared into the shadows.

  Hester clutched her bleeding hand, gasping at the pain and staring after where the rat had gone.

  ‘Thy will be done,’ she whispered.

  * * *

  She bound her hand with moss and a scrap of linen, and when she returned home she found her mother seated in a chair by the hearth in the centre of the main room, filling a small clay jar with old needles and rusted nails. It also looked like she’d thrown her household broom onto the fire; the birch twigs of its brush end were crackling brightly.

  ‘Mama?’ she asked carefully, fearing that her mother had taken leave of her senses. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I am making a witch bottle,’ her mother replied, dropping in another nail. Then she looked up at Hester. ‘The gwrach clefyd is here.’

  ‘The… goo-rack…?’

  ‘She is from my mother’s country to the west. She is a hag that brings winter and pestilence. The Church has failed us, but the older remedies will not. Sharp iron will repel Her.’ Her mother took up a pitcher of the house ale and topped off the jar with it, then began to seal the lid with a wooden plug and some waxed thread. ‘Ale from my hearth marks this as protection for my family. My only regret is that I feared your father’s anger and did not do this sooner.’

  ‘But why are you burning your besom?’

  ‘The gwrach clefyd carries either a broom or a rake with which to strike us down – if a rake, you may be lucky that you will pass between its teeth and survive. If a broom, She will sweep all before Her, and none will live.’ Her mother smiled grimly as she worked. ‘I do not intend to give Her any more help than necessary.’

  19

  THE FOX AND THE RAT

  IT WAS A FLICKER OF MOVEMENT – JUST A FLASH OF tawny fur in Trish’s peripheral vision, too fast to be sure it was there at all – which caught her attention.

  She was in the ground-floor study overlooking the side of the house, surrounded by box files and folders, her head full of the household finances. It was ridiculous that they should still be finding themselves in tight circumstances, but there it was. Peter’s income, which as a freelancer had always been a bit erratic, was more reliable now that he’d taken on work for the Clegg Farm development, but that was offset by her quitting her job at the distribution warehouse and the higher rates of household insurance, council tax, and the blizzard of other unexpected costs. All of this would have been enough of a headache now that she was a homeowner rather than a tenant, but even more so since the home in question was a place like Stone Cottage. Put simply, Haleswell was a bloody expensive part of the city to live.

  Then there had been the nightmare of sorting out utilities providers, transferring the TV licence, setting up the broadband…

  Nothing more than a flash, left to right, of something furry and orange coming in from the front garden, scooting right under her window and towards the back.

  She rose and peered out through the glass, seeing only the dark glossy leaves of the rhododendron bushes guarding the fence a couple of metres away on that side. Whatever it was, it was gone. A stray cat, most likely. Then a new idea hit her, of another cost which she hadn’t considered because in the flat it hadn’t been allowed, but which nobody in the family would begrudge: they could finally get a pet! They could visit the nearest animal shelter and find a rescue cat. Or a dog. Toby would love a dog. Having something to look after and be responsible for might help to stop him sliding into the pit he seemed to be digging for himself lately, the deepest part of which so far had been him coming home reeking of cigarettes, though Lord knew how deep it might go. It was a shame that he’d never been able to enjoy one of the simplest of childhood experiences, that of playing with his own puppy; it would at least have been some companionship in the absence of any younger brothers or sisters.

  And just like that, a small voice spoke up in the back of her skull: Well we all know whose fault that is, don’t we?

  She hadn’t heard that voice in a very, very long time. Or if she had, she’d learned to ignore its sly insinuations. All through the years after Toby’s birth it had taunted her, whispering with hope at the start of each new pregnancy and then sneering at the barrenness of its end, through the arguments with Peter, the series of humiliating doctors’ examinations and tests to determine what was wrong with her – as if anything was wrong with her and not the bastard who had stolen her unborn babies. He has gathered them to His bosom and you will be reunited with them in His kingdom, that voice told her. Be strong in your faith and your love for your husband and the Lord. Try again. And she had, until she’d realised that the problem wasn’t that her faith lacked strength, it was simply that nobody was listening anymore. Try again wasn’t a reassurance but a goad, to see how much she could take before she broke. So she broke, and went on the pill, and for a while that was gasoline on the flame of the voice of guilt that screamed inside her, burning, but with each month that passed it became a bit less shrill, and every time she and Peter made love it was just about the two of them, nobody else, until eventually it was silent altogether. Or at least bearable.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said to the voice, the silent house around it, and the indifferent heavens above. ‘My little boy’s getting a puppy, so fuck you.’

  She found some ham in the fridge, cut it up with the kitchen scissors onto a small plate and carried it outside to the back garden to see if there was a stray animal she could befriend. When she saw it, she was simultaneously delighted and dismayed, because it was so unexpected and yet she knew that it could never be house-trained.

  There was a fox in her garden. Not exactly what she had in mind as far as dogs went.

  It was right at the very back, where the fence was screened by thick shrubbery and trees, looking back towards her though not directly at her – past her, at something in the direction from which it had come running.

  There was something very wrong here. It should have run off at the first scent of her, but it didn’t even seem aware that she existed. If it had been disturbed in its den and was being chased, what was chasing it, and why hadn’t it continued straight through, over the fence and into next door? Why was it just standing there, rigid and panting hard, one paw poised as if paralysed in mid-stride? Now she saw that its eyes were wide, ears flat back against its head, serrated white teeth bared against its pink tongue. What could be scaring it so badly that it would ignore a human being?

  Then she saw the dead girl standing in the bushes blocking the fox’s escape, and she knew.

  Trish wasn’t aware of Her appearing; it was more like one of those hidden picture puzzles where
an image which had been there all along suddenly became visible out of the jumble of supposedly chaotic background elements. There were no shadows to hide the girl’s condition, nothing to provide the comforting illusion that She could be alive, however catastrophically ill. Trish took in the lank hair, the corpse-white flesh abloom with festering sores, some so deep that bone showed, the primitive shift dress and the bare feet, and she fell back a step towards the door, clutching the frame for support. The crucifix hanging by the front door seemed laughably inadequate protection now, or maybe she’d made it so with her doubt.

  ‘I’m sorry…’ she whispered. ‘Please, make Her go away…’

  From underneath the stained and ragged hem of the dead girl’s dress, the rats came, tumbling over and between Her feet, and also from the passageways down both sides of the house where they had driven the fox – because She was certain now that the animal had been herded here, and there was only one reason why that could be.

  ‘Oh God no…’

  The fox attempted to make a dash for the back fence but the rats were on it in moments. The sound of the attack was like nothing Trish had ever heard: the fox’s cries sounded distressingly like a child’s high-pitched screaming over the chorus of the rats’ high, looping squeals, which themselves had a texture like hundreds of nails being dragged repeatedly down blackboards. They swarmed all over the fox as it spun and snapped at them, grey bodies against the red, and then a glossier red still as they bit, tore, and fell away with shreds of flesh in their teeth.

  ‘No…’ Trish said louder, becoming angry now. This was monstrous. Mindless butchery. But the dead girl continued to watch Her sport, grinning.

  The fox’s head rose up, thrashing in an attempt to dislodge two rats which had their jaws fastened in its throat, and for a split second Trish thought that its rolling white eyes met her horrified gaze. Then it was brought to the ground by the sheer weight of its enemies, and they were attacking its belly, ripping it open to get at the soft internal organs, and suddenly there was a shriek from the fox that tore at her ears like claws and a lot more blood as coils of purple-grey viscera unspooled. Her own stomach lurched as she saw that there were rats burrowing inside the dying creature; she could see it bulging with the press of their invasion like some obscene parody of birth, and that was too much for her.