Seven Strange Stories

by Rebecca Lloyd

  ‘How do you know where she is right this minute, Ma?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘How do you know she’s not with Daddy Hinds?’

  I could feel my throat tightening again. ‘Maybe he’s in the iron monger’s shop as well, Earl.’

  ‘I’ll bet he is,’ my son whispered.

  ‘So where is Christy now?’ I asked quickly.

  ‘You said I could have three goes Ma. Who does Mrs Miller love most, our daddy or her one?’

  ‘Both the same I expect.’ He was looking at me, and I stared straight back at him. I’d heard what he had been trying to tell me, but I didn’t care about that one bit. ‘Where’s Christy now, Earl?’ I repeated.

  ‘He’s behind the wall, where the wood is.’

  ‘The wainscoting?’ I laughed, and the sound of it was hard and weird.

  ‘Down at the bottom.’

  ‘The skirting board?’ Earl nodded, and then looked at me in a sharp sort of way and I knew he’d sensed my wild tension. ‘That’s just silly, Earl, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s my turn Ma, not yours.’

  ‘Right here in this house, Earl?’

  ‘My turn!’

  ‘Which room?’

  ‘Shut up, Ma!’

  By now, I could barely speak to him. ‘Okay,’ I whispered.

  ‘If your best friend asked you to go and live with her would you go?’

  ‘I’d have to think about it.’

  ‘That’s not a real answer, Ma. If I was you, I’d definitely go!’

  ‘If I did, I’d have to take you with me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t let you.’

  ‘Oh, why not? You like Dulcie a little bit don’t you?’

  ‘She’s all right, but I want to live with my own best friend.’

  I watched Earl scraping the tiny pile of dirt together with the side of the knife. ‘You want to live with Christy, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has he asked you to?’

  ‘Every single time I find him he asks me.’ He reached out for his sparkplug and clenched it in his fist.

  ‘Meet him you mean?’

  ‘Not meet because he comes out of nowhere like a surprise.’

  ‘You mean he’s hiding, so you find him?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ma, but this is real boring, Ma, I’m going out back.’

  ***

  I’d always wanted a child who had imagination. It wasn’t something I’d ever talked about with anyone around here because they’re scared of imagination. They say there’s enough in the way of unknown things moving through the woods to worry about without having stuff in their heads of the same type.

  ‘What is the use of imagining things, Yola?’ Dulcie asked, ‘it just makes other people suspicious of you if they find out about it.’

  ‘It’s so you can pretend things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Dulcie laughed. ‘Like your dead child lives behind the skirting boards? Sorry, that was nasty.’

  ‘Like you live somewhere else, or you’re rich, or you have a kind husband. All those sweet things that you’d like too, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Things you should keep to yourself around here,’ she whispered.

  ‘You’re the only one I tell.’

  Dulcie glared at me. ‘I don’t want to hear queer talk from you anymore, Yola. You just make me scared,’ she said.

  I remember exactly when I first found out where in the house Christy was. I’d been trying to get Earl to go outside; it was a damned hot day. The others had gone to the swimming hole, and he was upstairs in the room with the dirt-coloured door where we kept broken things, old rope, fishing lines, torn jackets, single shoes, keys that didn’t do anything, hunting knives and old boxes of cartridges. Earl and I were the only ones who spent any time in that room, me because that’s where the linen cupboard is, and Earl, at least I’d always thought so, because he could hide away from his brothers there and not be made to run their errands, getting them soda or cigarettes from Martin’s Store on the black-top road that leads to town. Or, worse—on dead hot days, they’d send him onto that road to roll up balls of melting tar, so they could chew it like gum.

  ‘Play out front, Earl,’ I told him. ‘The others won’t be back till night; they took food down to the swimming hole. No one will bother you.’

  ‘I have to stay here, Ma,’ he said, fiddling with his sparkplug.

  ‘Well help me with this sheet, then. Take the ends.’

  He backed away until the sheet was stretched between us and he tried to fold it the same as I was doing at my end. He got it wrong a couple of times because he was only eight, and we laughed about that. Then I heard faint scratching noises and Earl’s head seemed to snap up fast; he was as alert as I’d ever seen him. ‘That’s Christy,’ he said, ‘so I can’t go outside.’

  ‘Those noises? Big old rat I should think,’ I answered, ‘or maybe a crow knocking on the chimney.’

  We had racoons nesting in the attic rooms, but they made a lot more noise than what we were hearing then. ‘It’s mice or rats,’ I said after a while. It was a curious careful scratching sound.

  ‘It’s not rats, Ma; can’t you tell it’s a signal?’

  It was coming from the metal grill above the skirting board by the linen cupboard. I stood there with my son, looking down at that grill, and even if he hadn’t told me it was a signal, I’d have got the feeling it was all by myself—but then the wind can make a branch tap on a window as if someone is trying to get in and in an instant you can believe it’s a person—or a thing that isn’t a person, more likely.

  ‘There’s lots of stuff in life that isn’t what it seems to be, Earl,’ I whispered, and I was struck at that moment in thinking that if ever you were to give your kids just one piece of wisdom, that would be a good one.

  ‘Christy ain’t what he seems either, Ma,’ he answered quickly.

  I laughed, and squeezed his hand. ‘Well, I can tell you, son, it’s a big relief to me that he’s not a real boy or a man. Sweet Jesus am I glad about that!’

  ‘He might have been those things one time.’

  ‘So what is he now, son?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know, Ma. He’s been in this house from when it first got made. Before that he was in the woods out back in a cave or a hole, I’m not sure which.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Don’t say it like that, Ma. He’s not imaginationary you know.’

  I squeezed his hand again. ‘Well, is he going to come out of there?’ I asked.

  ‘Not if you’re still in the room.’

  ‘Oh, is that a fact now? Well, you just come downstairs in a while, Buddy, when you get hungry or need a drink.’

  I’ve thought a lot about the first time I heard the noises Christy makes. I’ve thought about Earl and me standing there holding hands, and how his hand was cold and his beautiful little face so excited and intense. I remember thinking that whatever else was happening in my life, my love for my child made dim all that was cruel and ugly around me.

  ***

  On the morning Earl vanished, I was up at dawn because I had blankets to wash and chickenfeed to get. I was putting the first dirty blanket into the big tub in the yard with the fire going well under it, when I knew by some strange knowing I’d never see Earl again, and as the thought filled my mind, my very bones seemed to cry out in shock—they rang, more like—as if they had a song they were struggling to sing and not being able to find the way of singing, fell back weary and clumsy in their heaviness.

  No one came downstairs until after ten. Daddy had been kind to me the night before, he’d put his arm around me, and meant nothing demanding by it, and I’d fallen asleep that way. He could be kind as long as he thought the rest of the world wasn’t watching him, but of course the rest of the world didn’t even know Daddy Hinds existed—and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be me who told him so.

  These days, he and I liv
e in different parts of the house. I don’t speak to him often, but from time to time I glimpse him lingering outside where the wood begins, or when I go past his resting room as he calls it. The tattoos all over his arms and legs that he used to be so proud of have got him looking more like a grey rag than a living man now; since he’s shrunk and gone flabby like the violent men all do down this way.

  Of my four boys, two have gone to the penitentiary where they can learn about what sorry men call honour and respect, and the other two are out of the state and no word back for a long time since.

  Dulcie’s done what so many women round here are inclined to do, and that is to pass from one man to another over the years, each of them as dangerous and stupid as the next. If only she’d looked inside her own head she could’ve found the sanctuary she was after. But for some women the idea that there’s a ‘right’ man sticks to them all their lives as they sit around wasting it with yet another one exactly the same as the one before. Not that that makes me any better than her, because I’m seventy-six now, my bones are still weary with the bone sickness, and I stayed all this time with Daddy Hinds, the meanest of the lot of them. At least that’s what it must look like from the outside, but it’s the house itself that keeps me here—keeps me close to Earl, who’s forty-eight this year.

  Dulcie started coming round again lately. She can’t figure out why I’m so content. She keeps glancing around the kitchen to see if the answer is in here since this is where I spend most of my time. I prefer it when she’s quiet, so The Fort House small sounds don’t get lost inside the noise she makes, especially as I have to listen out at certain times of day. Dulcie is one of those women whose laugh is like a mix between a horse whinnying and a chainsaw on full.

  ‘Why d’you keep telling me to shush?’ she asked me this morning. ‘You said he don’t pester you anymore.’

  ‘Daddy doesn’t do much of anything these days. He never rides his bike now. He stays in that room on the second floor at the back of the house. I see him when I pass by to put the linen away. He’s no trouble any longer.’

  ‘Don’t you get lonely, Yola?’

  ‘Lonely from not talking to Daddy? Of course not. I feel free now. I might not be any use to anyone anymore, but I feel good at last.’

  Dulcie stared at me and frowned. ‘You always were strange. I think you should’ve left years ago while you still had some spunk in you and the chance of finding someone new.’

  ‘What do you think would’ve happened to Daddy and the boys then?’ I asked quietly. ‘They’d have found someone else too.’ She had the grace to blush, if only for a second. ‘It’s beginning to look as if Daddy will die before I do,’ I told her, ‘and then it’ll be just me and . . . The Fort House.’

  ‘You won’t want to stay in this dark old place all alone when he does pass over.’

  ‘If I were alone, I wouldn’t be afraid of it anyway, Dulcie.’

  ‘I don’t get you at all. You will be alone. You will be afraid of it.’ I shook my head, and just as I did, I thought I heard my message, my Morse Code. ‘What?’ Dulcie whispered.

  ‘I was listening out.’

  ‘Expecting company?’

  Perhaps in a split second, before I’d even had time to change my mind, I’d made the decision to tell her the God damned truth; to hide it from her no longer. ‘It’s Earl asking me to come to him,’ I told her. I thought I’d seen all Dulcie’s expressions, but the way she looked at me then made me shiver; her mouth dropped open and twisted to the left all at the same time, so that her eye tooth glinted.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘Oh!’

  ‘Don’t look at me so funny, Dulcie. I don’t go every day; just once or twice a week when I’m called.’

  ‘And do what?’ she whispered.

  ‘Speak,’ I said.

  ‘What d’you mean speak?’

  ‘In Morse Code.’

  ‘Speak where?’

  ‘The linen room. That’s where they are.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘He’s not alone. He’s with his friend Christy. They live together in the walls of the linen room. I don’t think I ever told you about Christy, did I?’

  THE PANTUN BURDEN

  Pantun works in my garden now, pulling out weeds and watering plants. Sometimes he picks up my shopping for me from the local store. The marks on his arm have finally begun to fade. He seems content enough as far as I can tell, and there’s only one strange thing he has begun to do.

  I can’t imagine Eric being one of the drinking men down in the village pub when he gets older; the boys here shift to the other side of the road when they see him. He’s going to lead a lonely existence in Lower Seeping, although maybe when his mother dies his life might widen out and become a little richer through her absence. She thinks he can’t do without her, but from what I’ve seen it’s more the other way about. She’s like an ever-growling dog around that boy, anxious, distressed and accusatory. Over the short time I’ve had intimate dealings with the pair of them, there’ve been countless moments when my impulse has been to try to calm Mrs Pantun, but being afraid of her my deeper instinct makes me draw back and wait until her fury has abated in case she goes for me.

  On the day Virginia Pantun first came to me for help, I was working in the dining room with the French windows open so that I could see down to the bottom of the garden. I’d just found the mistake I was looking for in my statistics, so I was feeling good. Virginia was standing with Eric to the left of the back gate, peering over the low beech hedge straight at me.

  The Pantuns are peculiar people. She looks for all the world like a cross between a rat and a crow, and Eric shares a few of her features such as her very black eyes. They’re not just the deepest of browns, they’re startling obsidian black. You can’t see the pupils and so there’s no relief from the depth of them, and that fact alone is probably enough to make the boy and his mother jinxed in Lower Seeping—apart from what I eventually came to understand about Eric.

  They live together in a rusty Nissen hut at the dingy end of the High Street. The thing has been owned by their family since the 1940s, when it was first assembled there. It’s separated from the other buildings by several hundred yards, and it’s always surprising to encounter its dilapidation and fencelessness when so many of the cottages and dwelling places in Lower Seeping are neurotically immaculate and guarded by heavy crouching hedges in yew or berberis or privet.

  Eric and Virginia are the last two living members of the Pantun family, and the woman who sells honey door to door says that once they’ve passed over to the other side, Lower Seeping will flourish and become a lucky place to live in. ‘A place where no shadows fall,’ she says, looking away.

  I watched Eric and Virginia for a while as they gazed at me across the beech hedge that day, and when I saw they weren’t passing by but staying put, I gestured at them to come into the garden, and walked out to meet them. ‘Looking for me?’ I asked.

  Virginia nodded, and glanced up at her son. She had him by the elbow and I could see the force with which she held him. He was breathing heavily, with his tiny slit mouth moist and slightly open. ‘Go on, tell her,’ Virginia said, ‘she’s the only one you can tell here.’ The boy stared at my face and then my shoes, and shook his head. ‘Show her, then,’ his mother whispered.

  ‘Let go my arm, Ma,’ he answered, and pulled himself sharply away from her grip. Then he pushed up his jacket sleeve and put his bare arm so close to my face that I had to step back. ‘See?’ he asked. He had circular indentations on his flesh. ‘You can touch them; they don’t hurt now, Miss Barker.’

  In some cases his skin had been punctured and scabs had formed. I didn’t quite want to believe what I was seeing. Some were very recent and others a lot older. His arm was a mess. The scars looked like a whole load of pinkish-coloured tattoos of miniature horse-shoes sprinkled randomly and overlapping each other.

  ‘What about the other arm, Eric?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. �
�It comes only from one side the same,’ he said. ‘This arm is my helper.’

  I looked at Virginia to interpret for me. ‘Eric means he tries to hide his face,’ she said. ‘Tell her, boy.’

  Instead of saying anything, Eric showed me how he protected his face by hiding it behind his arm. ‘But then she gets my arm instead, you see, and pulls it all to ribbons.’

  ‘Who has done this?’ I asked.

  ‘I won’t shout at you if you tell Miss Barker,’ his mother said. ‘I’m not angry with you now.’

  Eric looked as if he didn’t believe her. He was tall for a thirteen-year-old, and I was wondering why he hadn’t lashed out at his attacker. ‘It isn’t the woman in the post office,’ he whispered.

  ‘Do you want to come inside the house and talk about this a bit more?’ I asked.

  Virginia looked triumphant and nervous at the same time; I wondered if she’d been worried I’d turn them away. She began to talk hurriedly at me. ‘I called him a liar. I got angry with him because we need the money he gets for working on that chicken farm up there, and he’s scared of the place now. It’s his first job and I was thinking if he did it right he might get even more money from that old loony.’

  ‘What’s the woman in the post office got to do with it?’ I asked. ‘Mavis Clore, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mavis,’ Virginia repeated.

  ‘I don’t understand the connection, Mrs Pantun.’

  ‘It’s because of her sister, I expect,’ she answered. ‘They look alike.’

  As we walked into the kitchen, nothing was any clearer. I made tea without saying anything to give them time to get used to the idea that someone in the village had invited them inside a house. I found biscuits and they tucked into them ferociously, Eric holding one in each hand.

  ‘How can I help, though, Mrs Pantun?’ I asked.

  The boy and his mother stared at me as if they hadn’t got as far as figuring that out. ‘Eric wants you to come to the farm and find the chicken,’ Virginia said, eventually.