‘Come away from here now,’ she whispered. ‘Put your things in your car and drive it over to the track by that fell-gate and leave it there until morning. I’ll walk back with you to collect it tomorrow.’
‘And have it broken into by kids with no faces? No.’
‘There ain’t no kids. Least I ain’t advised of it.’
‘Betty said there was.’
‘She may have said it, but it ain’t true. It were to put you off.’
I cut the conversation short and Marina went to pack her bag so that she could get away before the afternoon gathering of heavy clouds and rain. I listened hard as she climbed the stairs, thinking I would hear her cry out when she reached the two steps, but I heard nothing except the plaintive wailing of a band of curlews flying across the vast expanse of nothingness outside. Within a short while, Marina was back downstairs and wanting to be on her way.
‘Did you come across the wet steps?’ I asked her.
She shook her head. ‘You’d have heard me if I did do; I’d have shrecked, I would.’
I was relieved to some extent, although I sensed already that my nervousness at being left alone had begun to manifest itself in the tightness of my throat and the alertness of my gaze. I walked to the front door with her. ‘I don’t know why you couldn’t have just talked to your uncle and explained about renting out the house,’ I murmured.
‘Talk, Miss Wood, talk?’ she repeated. She looked at me directly and although her gaze was level, her expression was bewildering; it was sour and cunning and full of sorrow, then fleetingly something pleading entered her face, and mockery followed that, but all this resolved finally into resignation and withdrawal. She left the house without looking back and I stood in the doorway watching her for a while and thinking hard about Jack Werrett, the cause of all this trouble, and I did not know if he was man, myth or water, or all three. He could be anything.
When Marina finally disappeared from sight, I returned to the grey interior, the rooms, the stairs, and the narrow corridors. The light, as it so often did in that house, had changed meanwhile, and even deeper gloominess seemed all about me. Then, as I lingered, a monstrous idea came to me about Jack Werrett—for not only had I understood suddenly Marina’s last look and her urgency to be away—but I knew also that she couldn’t bring herself to tell me in plain words for fear of my derision.
I don’t know if my knowledge made me more or less alarmed at spending a night alone, as I was already so agitated by all that had gone on with the Werrett sisters. But my realisation shifted the weight of my thoughts and on one level the understanding was a relief and to my advantage, for I had never been a believer in such matters as those—revenants, ghosts, visitants.
***
The act of a simpleton perhaps, but I went slowly through all the rooms downstairs and put the lights on, and likewise on the three floors upstairs, halting at the two wooden steps that had unhinged me. They were dry, as Marina had reported.
I found myself mentally calculating the number of hours that must pass before I could leave this forlorn place and return to all the garish comforting brightness of town and city with noise and lights and ugly shop signs—and most of all, throngs of ordinary people. I decided that I would put my papers in order and pack my belongings so that I was ready to abandon the house first thing. I would have breakfast in Stabman’s Reach, so as not to have to linger longer than necessary. The thought of that was comforting.
By some means, I passed the evening, but my fear took on a myriad of different expressions over which I had no control. Sometimes, I felt a powerful sense that something was stirring in the atmosphere; the air became damp, heavy and pungent and I would gladly have bolted at those moments and slept in my car overnight had it not been so very cold outside. Finally, I concluded the best place for me was in bed with my back against the headboard and my blankets pulled up close around, and so, half propped up, I must have fallen asleep that way.
On waking, I was not cold and there was no noise and I knew it was no longer night; there was light enough to see, but what I could see was senseless in the extreme, for I was looking in detail at the ornate ceiling rose above my bed, its Acanthus leaves, bulky and overlaid, some half-unfurled. I stretched my fingers up, captured as I was in a state of innocent puzzlement, and felt the deep contours of the thing. And it was true that some of the objects that floated by me looked curiously unsurprising in the small span of time before I understood what had happened. There were sheets of white paper lapping together and forming a mass, my sweater moved past me, its grey arms undulating as it progressed. There were my shoes, but not close to each other. I could see my towel below me just lifting from the bed, and the thing that touched my thigh was my open rucksack with books and my work papers departing from it in a leisurely stream and sinking downwards slowly. The bedside lamp bobbed somewhere to my left close to the window, tangled in its cord. Two linen antimacassars with crocheted boarders moved past me like strange sea creatures.
The curtains had lifted and were spread across the surface of the water close to the ceiling, so that I could clearly see out through the window below them. And it was sight of the world outside that brought my situation fully to me, along with a noise that I knew had begun in my head—a kind of rhythmic half-animal pleading; I was going to drown should the water rise higher. I placed the palms of my hands on the ceiling and pulled myself across the room towards the window and the light, and on doing so, I looked back and down and saw that the bedroom door was closed, and I am not so strong a swimmer that I could imagine reaching it and opening it.
I was searching for something heavy. I was now close to the window and directly above the ugly kidney-shaped dressing table, and there I spotted my precious laptop glinting square and silver below me. I was afraid to swim downwards and have my whole face in Jack Werrett’s water, but there was nothing within my reach that I could break the window with, and my fists and feet had no effect at all on the glass panes.
I went down, pushing my body through the water hard with a trembling lung-full of breath barely enough for the task, yet I did reach the dressing table and came upwards clutching my laptop to my chest. I knew the water was getting higher as I surfaced again close to the window; I could scarcely keep my nose and mouth in the air that remained and I was coughing heavily. I know I thrashed at the window pane repeatedly before I managed to break it, and by this time the noise in my head was fully animal and howling. Even so, as I worked, I remembered being in the drawing room with the Werrett sisters looking upwards at the ceiling for damp spots, and the terrible realisation that they had understood all along what could happen here, came to agonise me further as I struggled.
Even with the window well and truly broken so that only jagged shards of glass were left around the perimeter, the water would not flow through. My face was now dangerously close to the ceiling, and with all my might I punched with the soles of my bare feet at the resistant water within the window frame. I had no regard for the distance I would fall should I break through, and curiously in my hysteria, I thought of creatures like pond skaters for whom the surface of water is as solid as land is to humans. When finally I felt the surface tension give way, I was not ready for the force with which my action propelled me through that window. I plummeted downwards within a rushing spout of water and landed wretchedly on frozen ground. The only warm thing I could feel was blood flowing from gashes and cuts on my legs and arms, but I was free. I began to feel the first inklings of elation; I was freely bleeding I knew . . . but I was, at last, also bleeding free. I turned my head slowly and my car was out there beyond the rusty gate where the Werrett sisters had stood and gazed up at me on the day they arrived to protect me from the Flood Man.
I never did go back to Stabman’s Reach to find Marina that day; instead, when my wounds were properly dressed at the little surgery in the local town, I headed straight home, the loss of all my research meaningless to me. I don’t get much of a chance to leave London
these days, but where once I found the city confining and ugly with its noise and traffic and endless glittery shops and would’ve done anything to get some time away, those claustrophobic feelings don’t come to me any longer. I am content where I am and in my new job for the diocese, and should ever I become frustrated, I run the tip of my finger down the scar on my forearm and remember the house at the edge of the marsh, and how, on seeing me all bloody, the nurse in the local town said, ‘My goodness, you have been in the wars, haven’t you, dear?’
CHRISTY
The Fort House is the only place down this way not hemmed in by old cars and trucks with their hoods open and their doors hanging off. But nobody really believes the house belongs to Daddy Hinds by rights; the story was his grandfather, who was even more fearsome than Daddy himself, took it off the owner in payment for a debt. When I first moved in, I hated the place, if only for it being so solid and all-mighty compared to the shacks people live in round here—wooden things, which for the most part, have no windows and have to be whitewashed inside to give light. But the folks who live in them don’t care so much about windows as they do about the big porches those shacks have got, since that way they can work outside and under shelter most of the year. The ones who don’t have shacks, live in trailers. When I first arrived, I lived in a trailer with bright green moss growing over the back of it. I’d come to this area because Mom died suddenly, and I knew I had cousins hereabouts who’d help me out. The Fort House was on the track I walked to get to the bit of a job I’d found selling bait for the Stanton family.
It’s hard to picture a place as peculiar as The Fort House. Every time I went past it, I’d stare ’til my neck hurt. Each floor has its own front door and apart from the giant stone chimney down one side, those doors are the maddest thing about it—since you’d have to be a flying witch to get to the top doors from the outside. The walls of the first floor where the big old kitchen is, and the gun room, are made of stone and then above that it’s all gigantic logs and mud. There are six big windows looking out the front towards the river and each has eight panes in it of wildish glass in different thicknesses and some with little air bubbles trapped in them so they’re hard to see through. Hard or not, Daddy Hinds must have put his eyes on me often enough from inside The Fort House before he came chasing.
People round here tell me how lucky I am that all but one of my five boys with Daddy Hinds are straight-limbed. Some of them don’t know I had a little girl once that got the rickets. She died when she was an arm baby. We buried her out back in what we call the water thicket. I don’t go there for the snakes. My four oldest boys do what I ask them up to a point if it comes to lifting or digging or moving stuff about, so in that way you could picture me as lucky—yet, they don’t spend a moment of their time talking to me anymore than Daddy Hinds does.
The only one I was close to in my family was my youngest son, Earl, so even though he got the rickets and wasn’t much use in a lot of ways, I feel like I’m blessed to have had him because we could talk up a storm together. I know that round here they think I loved him too mightily. Some of them think I loved him so much that it laid an upside down curse on him and that’s why he disappeared. The way we were together made Daddy Hinds angry. He said we spent all our time talking and laughing when there was plenty to be doing in The Fort House like bottling, and mending and cleaning and cooking. We used to listen out for the sound of his Harley, and you could hear it a good half mile away if you were paying attention, then by the time he’d come in through the front door, we’d be as busy as anything on some task or other.
Then, one day Earl found a book up on the top road when the others had sent him out to bring them back some soft tar. At first it looked crazy, all lines and dots and letters, ’til we saw it was Morse Code. We set to learning how to talk that tap-tap language and got pretty good at it. We’d practise when Earl came home from school. We could even say the sounds to each other like: dot-dash-dotdot, dashdashdash, dotdotdot-dash, dot, dash-dot-dashdash, and we’d know what it meant. Earl used to code me on the kitchen table using his sparkplug and I’d answer him using the end of a metal spoon, drawing it along the table a bit to make the dashes. There were times when Daddy would suddenly swing the door open, his face red with bewilderment and rage, and find nothing at all by the time he’d laid eyes on me and Earl—and when that happened it was a little surge of triumph for me that at least in something I’d got the better of the man.
Then, in June 1975, when Earl was eight, he vanished—in the months after that I was alone in The Fort House much of the time. Daddy and the boys were always out, I don’t know where; maybe skulking in the woods killing things, or down town in the bars. When they were home, they stared at me puzzle-headed because they could see the hole Earl’s going caused in me, and it frightened them. They say I howled. They say I wandered off for hours—they don’t know where. They say I forgot how to cook, or clean, or sew, or keep The Fort House stove going. I can’t remember any of it.
The funny thing about men getting frightened is they can give themselves over to it completely. But women have to keep a tiny calm place in their heads so they can get their kids to safety if they have to. Even if they don’t have kids, my belief is they’ve still got that calculating place.
I became a stranger to Daddy Hinds and his sons back in 1975, and I know now it wasn’t my craziness that frightened them, but the idea they could no longer rely on me to make their lives easy with food served, and clean clothing always there like I’d done before. They called it drifting—they said I was drifting away from them. They said if I really loved them, I’d stop thinking about Earl.
‘Because anyway, what use was he when he was alive?’
‘It was Earl who helped me make sense of the world, Vinton.’
‘Yeah, like how?’
‘Talking, thinking, laughing and imagining—all those things, son.’
‘Well now look here, Ma, it’s not your job to make sense of the world. What about me and Woody, Cleavon and Beau—and Daddy? It’s your job to take care of us.’
I had no answer for him.
***
It was only after Earl vanished that I got to know The Fort House properly, and to hear noises in it other than shouting and swearing and the hacking up of tobacco spit and those three heavy dogs that barked at nothing. I mean noises like the gurgling things and the creaking stairs, the snaps and whirrs and the wind through the top rooms against the broken shutters. Even little noises caught my attention like the cricket that sings under the window-ledge in the evenings and the snortle and clank of the stove when the wood is getting low. I got to love this house finally, and that by itself is a miracle when I remember the number of times I’d have run from it and from Daddy Hinds and those black-toothed sons of his who grew badder and badder as the years passed.
After Earl had gone, Dulcie Miller, who lives down the road a piece, started coming round here a lot. Of all my cousins, she was the one I talked to most, although we’d had some mighty big fights when we were younger. I guessed what was on her mind, because she was one of the few women who knew what happened to my baby girl.
First off, she talked a lot about God, and I’d grind my teeth and pretend to be doing something at the sink when she came over godly. One time she said maybe God thought I was greedy for babies, so he stole one back. I was baking bread and she was shelling peas for me. I reminded her about my little girl, and she said, ‘That’s what I mean, greedy for babies, so you had more than one taken back. God especially loves lame kiddies,’ she explained, ‘which is why he chose your two. He’s got a cosy place, all nice and soft, where he keeps them with cushions and blankets and everything.’
‘Do they have squeaky toys there, Dulcie?’
She laughed. ‘Hey! I don’t know; maybe they do.’
‘You mean he keeps their souls, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Yola. Their souls are in a special place in Heaven and Jesus is their playmate.’
I
could’ve slapped her soggy-looking mouth for that kind of talk. I should’ve thrown her out of The Fort House right then and there, but she always came with eggs or soda and I was thankful for it because Daddy never did give me enough money to cover everything.
So, even though she drove me crazy, I was glad to see her when she came back two weeks later with a bottle of whiskey and some potatoes. Daddy was out on one of his missions, so we were free for a good long while. ‘So you really think Earl’s dead?’ I asked her. ‘He might have run away finally because of how the other boys hurt him or used him as a slave; I know he’d made a friend he was mighty interested in. He could be alive and with him right now, right at this very moment. Sometimes cats leave home, don’t they, and take up with a different family? It could have been like that with Earl.’
‘You told me you’d visited all the families who had kids for miles around and nobody had seen him. Police did the same thing too, as far as I remember.’
‘I don’t think his friend was a kid,’ I told her.
‘No? Did you tell the cops that?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know what I said to them, I was too howling crazy.’
‘What did Earl say about this friend, Yola?’
‘Ah, nothing too much.’ I didn’t want to let her know what he’d said about Christy, because they were the last conversations I’d had with my boy and they were precious to me; I didn’t want Dulcie trashing them with her thoughts and in particular her god ones. ‘Earl said he was called Christy, but maybe he was just a made up friend,’ I said, to put her off asking more.
Right after Earl vanished, everyone round here reckoned Daddy Hinds had killed him. No one would ever say so directly because they were afraid Daddy would find out and fix his cold and seeping eyes upon them and that was enough to make them very a-feared. Dulcie was no different from the rest of them in that regard except back then she was hoping it was me who’d done it and not Daddy, because being in love with him she didn’t want to know him as cruel. ‘One of the last times I saw Earl, he had blisters on his face like someone tried to burn him,’ she announced one day.
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