Everything Is Lies

by Helen Callaghan

  At some point I was going to have to explain to him everything I had learned about my mum and the cult.

  The thought made me feel a little nauseous.

  I’d tried Tess three times and had no response. I told myself she was doubtless a very busy woman, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

  I couldn’t stand feeling so useless, so I decided to tinker with the SH project this morning while I waited for my dad to be free. I clicked open my VPN, my link with Amity.

  It looked very crowded in there.

  I sat still for a long moment, hardly breathing.

  All of my missing files had been returned. Clicking on their details, it was clear I hadn’t simply mistaken their location – they had all been created, or rather recreated, from new sometime late yesterday evening. It was definitely my work, back from some electronic sojourn that no amount of squinting at the file details would reveal anything about.

  Perhaps it had all been a simple IT glitch. Though I couldn’t shake the feeling that they had been returned to me in order to head off any complaint I might make about them going missing.

  Olympia had been very nice on the phone that morning.

  I buried my head in my arms.

  Suddenly I remembered my conversation with Tess the night before: ‘All you need to be is manipulated into a position where you surrender your control.’

  I could appreciate that Amity were disappointed in my continued patchy attendance and unscheduled absences, but it wasn’t a situation I had chosen or could fix instantly, and we were all just going to have to live with it.

  One thing was for sure – I was so fucking done with surrendering my control to them.

  I opened my browser again and, as if by magic, I was watching six different still views of Eden Gardens. Nothing much was happening in any of them. I could see no people.

  I clicked on CAM 1. This appeared to activate the feed for the camera – this must be the camera I’d seen last night, mounted on the top of the gate. It showed me grainy footage of tarmac, the sweep of the drive up to the gardens, a tiny fraction of the café with its grubby picnic benches under the awning. They were empty. Suddenly Rowan was there in the truck, heading towards the camera, and I could even make out his face for a few seconds in the windscreen – he looked distracted and drawn, as though something was on his mind. The back of the truck was full of broken old equipment he’d been talking about taking to the dump yesterday.

  Then he drove away into the bottom of the frame and was gone.

  Everything was working as it should. I should relax more, I supposed.

  I clicked on CAM 2 and, true to Rowan’s word, it showed the café, the building’s single door in the centre of the screen. I was about to try another camera when the door opened and Monica appeared.

  Perhaps she had just come out to feel the sunshine on her face, but I lingered, intrigued. Her figure was too faraway at this angle to make out her expression with the blurry quality of the video stream, but her head seemed to be moving, as though looking for someone.

  I realized something – there was a secret power in this, in watching people who don’t know they’re being watched, and it was a thrill with a dirty, disreputable edge. I wasn’t sure I liked it, or what it said about me.

  I was about to click CAM 3 when I stopped.

  Monica had turned and shut the café doors; she was bent over the handle, her arms moving. Near her hands, a bright pixel flashed, something metallic catching the sun, then it was gone.

  She was locking the café doors. With a final gesture she turned the sign on the door over from OPEN to CLOSED.

  It was only an hour until lunchtime, our busiest period.

  She straightened and quickly walked away to the left of the camera’s view, then vanished.

  What the hell?

  CAM 3 showed the interior of the café, empty and lifeless, a full pot of coffee visible on the hotplate. CAM 4 was the back of the house, with birds sporting back and forth over the hedge in dark blurs. Nothing else.

  CAM 5 was the gold.

  It was the front of my parents’ house, and I could tell that the camera was mounted on top of my dad’s garden shed, not far from where my mum had hung herself. There was the long narrow drag of vegetable patches and the tiny square of lawn, but the focus was zoomed in on the front door.

  Monica entered the screen from the side, using the garden gate, through the door I knew was marked PRIVATE. Though the image was still grainy, I saw her hand go to her pocket, and realized, with a little flush of indignant disbelief, that somehow she had obtained a copy of the key.

  Only my parents and I have the key to that gate.

  Well, no. I’d given Rowan my mum’s key while he was helping out after her death.

  Why would Rowan give that key to Monica?

  She crossed the lawn quickly and I waited to see what she would do – did she also have his key to the house?

  She didn’t approach the house, though. Instead she turned, and with a thudding heart I realized she was heading towards my dad’s shed, her walk a swift, jerky gait. In the screen, she grew bigger, and her face was visible – it was nothing like the open, friendly expression I saw whenever I dropped by the café. Her mouth was a taut white line, her head constantly turning nervously, to see if she was being observed.

  There was something terrifying about this, as if, even though I was two miles down the road, she was somehow walking straight up to me as I loitered above the threshold of the shed, the tree that had been my mum’s gallows shading us both with its branches. My mouth was dry, my heart pounding. I didn’t know this person.

  When she suddenly stopped, her mouth contorted into a shocked snarl and I jumped in my chair. It was as if she had seen me.

  Her lips moved and she spat out something, a curse perhaps, though I couldn’t hear the words as there was no sound on the camera. She stood, not moving, as though stunned. I realized, with a little burst of insight, that she’d spotted the camera. She must not have known they’d been installed.

  As quickly as she had come, she turned on her heel and walked back up the garden, letting herself out through the gate. I tracked her progress back through the cameras to the café; noticing how she fumbled, dropping her keys and quickly picking them up again as she let herself back into the building, forgetting to turn the sign around again from CLOSED to OPEN, or perhaps deliberately choosing not to.

  I clicked CAM 3.

  I was inside the café with her now. She walked quickly round to the back of the counter and pulled on her apron, tying it tightly, her fingers snagging in the ties, and then retreated to the back of the kitchen. Then I saw her no more.

  What the hell?

  Within moments I was calling Rowan.

  ‘Heya, can’t answer the phone right now.’ (I swore quietly to myself – I had come to know his answerphone message like the back of my hand in these last few weeks; he’d be driving) ‘but leave a message and I’ll get back to you. Peace.’

  ‘Rowan, it’s me. I just saw something really weird on the CCTV. Please call me the minute you get this, and don’t talk to anyone else about it first. Especially not Monica, OK? Speak to you soon.’

  I hung up.

  It was a half-hour drive to the recycling, and even then he might have not heard his phone or muted it.

  I watched the screen. Monica reappeared now, carrying one of her cakes. She cut it carefully into slices before lifting it on to the cake stand and putting the glass lid over it.

  I should call the police, shouldn’t I? But what would I say? Rowan might have given her the key, for all I knew.

  But why would he do that?

  Even then, after what I’d seen, my mind still sought some reasonable explanation. But it just wouldn’t do.

  Perhaps I should go over there.

  Once the idea entered my head, I couldn’t shake it. I had been shadowed by death and darkness for the past few weeks, and I had had enough – more than enough.
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br />   It was madness to go over there and accuse her on my own – but that wasn’t my intention. I could go over there on some pretext, and sit in the café. I’d say it was a beautiful day and I just wanted to do a little work before I set off for the hospital to see my dad. I could make sure she made no other forays into places she didn’t belong, at least until Rowan got there and we could, together, decide what to do. Confront her together, if necessary.

  It was quarter past eleven now. The café would start to fill with visitors before too long – it would be a public place.

  Safer, perhaps, than this house.

  I snatched up my car keys and was out the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  When I drove up to the gates I was already having second thoughts about my hasty plan. Monica’s sprightly red Toyota Yaris was parked up against the fence at Eden Gardens, with its Baby on Board sticker and collection of cuddly toys gathered on the parcel shelf.

  Perhaps I had imagined the whole thing.

  She had gone into my parents’ garden, with a key she had no business possessing, and approached the shed, before spotting the newly installed camera and turning back.

  The most she was guilty of was trespassing, if that.

  But in my heart I knew. The bald account of her actions was one thing – innocuous; dishonest but not sinister, easily explained away. That wasn’t the problem. It was her face, her true face, the one I had seen when she’d spotted the camera. There had been something almost feral, unhinged, in it.

  Monica was not who she seemed.

  Sitting in the car, I burst into tears. I had liked her. My sense of betrayal billowed about me like a stormy sea. Not just betrayal, but fear.

  Who was she, really? What did she want?

  What did they all want?

  You know what she wants. She’s one of them. She’s after the notebooks.

  Pull yourself together, Sophia. The police have the first two notebooks now. You’re going to go in there, keep an eye on her and wait for Rowan. She doesn’t know you’ve been watching her – she probably thinks you’re at work. Everything is going to be all right. And you and Rowan can confront her together, or call the police.

  Come on.

  * * *

  ‘Hi, Sophia,’ Monica said as I walked into the café, trying to aspire to a dishevelled nonchalance I absolutely did not feel.

  You would never, in a million years, have imagined there was anything wrong. Everyone keeps telling me I’m under too much stress, after all, and maybe I was imagining things. Her pretty blonde hair was tied up on top of her head, her apron sprinkled with a pattern of tiny yellow primroses.

  The only strange thing had been the sign – the one on the door, that still read CLOSED. I turned it round to OPEN as I passed it. I left the door propped wide, letting the sunlight in, though my mum had always disapproved of this, saying, ‘It lets the flies in.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

  ‘Better,’ I said. ‘Slept for the first time in ages.’ I gazed around the café, at its order and cleanliness and, more saliently, its emptiness.

  My heart sank.

  ‘Dead again, I see.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s still only half eleven.’ In terms of nonchalance, she had me absolutely beat. ‘It’ll pick up soon.’ She turned back to the kitchen. ‘Can I get you something to eat?’ she called over her shoulder.

  ‘No thanks, I had a big breakfast this morning.’ I sat down at the table by the door, pulled out my laptop. ‘I was just going to get a cup of coffee and do some work.’

  ‘Oh, let me get that.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘No, I insist. It’s why I’m here, right?’ Her smile was huge, brilliant, but still … there was something about it. It was too wide, too high, and in its shadow I saw that feral snarl I had seen in the camera.

  I realized I wasn’t the only one who was rattled.

  I smiled back, both of us exchanging rictus grins across the floor of this building where my mother had spent the last twenty-seven years of her life.

  I was aware of the coffee being placed in front of me as I opened my laptop. ‘Sure you don’t want some cake to go with it?’ she asked. ‘I can recommend the lemon drizzle.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I need to cut down. I’m gaining so much weight …’

  ‘Nonsense, if anything you’re wasting away. Just a little piece?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and the vehemence in my voice was like a gun going off.

  She went still, her face blank, confused. I had gone too far.

  ‘Sorry, Monica, I didn’t mean to … you know what, cake would be lovely.’ I offered a wan smile. ‘The diet can start tomorrow.’

  She smiled back. ‘It’s always a day away, right?’

  As she vanished, I rubbed my face with my hands. In the background I could hear a vague buzzing – the electrical fly killer.

  That noise had haunted my childhood. It had always made me anxious. I thought about them – those flies being lured in by food, then the pretty lights, then the zap of electricity. Everything about it seemed an offence against hospitality. My mum hated it.

  Fucking hell, when is someone else going to come into this café? What if they don’t? I tapped in my password quickly to unlock my laptop, aware of her approaching behind me with the cake. I didn’t want her to see it, to learn what the word was.

  My lock screen vanished, and we were both greeted with the sight of www.goldstarsurveillance.co.uk’s website, complete with six views of the business and the gardens.

  I’d forgotten to close it when I’d rushed out of the house.

  As if to mock me, the café’s tired wireless signal tore into vigorous life, with CAM 3 resolving almost immediately into a little cameo; the café, with me at the table with the laptop and her at my shoulder, gazing down at the screen, plate of cake in hand. An infinitely recursive loop of both of us watching ourselves on a computer screen.

  My body froze, and I was aware of her behind me, gently, slowly, setting the cake on the table next to the coffee.

  Panicking, I quickly shut the browser, but too late, far too late, and when I turned to thank her for the cake, she didn’t even reply, instead drifting back towards the kitchen.

  I was trembling.

  I could attempt to act as though the incident with the screen meant nothing – after all, she knew that we’d installed cameras now, that was the whole point. I’d seen her react to them. I could just bluff it out.

  Or, and this was the option that was winning out as I heard her moving about in the kitchen, I could pick up my bag, phone and keys and run. Run and not stop until I reached my car.

  To my left was the café door, and the sunlight was a golden path across the worn flagstone floor. A mere five steps away, if that.

  My car keys were on the cheap Formica table. My phone was in my handbag. I just had to curl my hand around the keys, making no noise, slide the strap of my bag up my shoulder, and vanish out of that open door.

  ‘It was an accident.’

  She was at my shoulder again. I hadn’t heard her approach.

  ‘What was?’ I turned around, trying to keep my voice neutral.

  And that was going to be harder to do than you might expect, because she was holding a knife.

  It was the big chef’s knife from the kitchen, my mum’s favourite, the one she had always used to slice the vegetables for salads and soups, with the bone handle and rusting rivets that always seemed to be impossible to clean – and yet she could never bear to throw it away or replace it.

  Monica’s fingers were wrapped around that bone handle, and her knuckles were white.

  I swallowed hard. Everything was rapidly becoming unreal, as though I was seeing the world through gauze.

  She wasn’t smiling any more.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said, and the words seemed to growl out of her, through the barrier of her gritted teeth. ‘You don’t
know how to let go. You don’t know how to really exist in the world, to feel the Creative Spark. You just skate along the surface, just like the rest of the human dross. You betray your heritage.’

  In the silence that followed I could hear the anodyne noises of the café at rest – the coffee pot burbling, the buzz of the fly-killing unit.

  She loomed over me, trapping me in my seat against the wall and the table. She was growing increasingly agitated.

  I gazed up at her.

  She couldn’t stand over me like this. That had to change. If she went for me now with that knife I would have no way to escape.

  And that was what she was building up to. Her trembling was growing more intense, her knuckles more white.

  ‘What was an accident?’ I asked sharply.

  This seemed to derail some private train of thought. She blinked, as though recalled to herself, and for a second she was hollowed out, pale, as if at some awful memory.

  ‘You need to give them to me, Sophia. You need to give them to me, or, even though I don’t want to, even though it is forbidden, I will hurt you. Do you understand?’

  I offered her a quick tight nod.

  ‘I’ll give them to you, I promise,’ I said. My mouth was dry, it was hard to speak. ‘Don’t hurt me … I have them right here …’

  She must mean the Morningstar notebooks, my mum’s book – what else could she mean? – but when I picked up my laptop there was a flash of something between puzzlement and rage in her face, as though she had expected something else.

  ‘They’re digitized, they’re in here.’

  She reached out to snatch the laptop, and the knife dropped down, just momentarily.

  I smashed the sharp edge of the laptop into her face. I had aimed for her temple, but missed, glancing it, cutting her across the brow. The bright line of blood was instant, shocking in its scarlet immediacy.

  I shoved her backwards, hard.

  I scrambled for the door, over the table, but she did not fall over. Instantly she was after me, and I felt the whoosh of the knife at the back of my head against my hair.

  I fell over the table, tumbling to the flags, barely feeling it, as she darted around it, the knife clutched wickedly ahead of her.