by C M Muller
It mewls, sobs. That sad human baby cry gets into your head, knocks around the inside of your skull. You pace, not eating, only smoking. You’ll smoke until the last coffin nail is gone. Then, when you’re evicted and living out there, you’ll raid the public ashtrays, even pick the remains of butts off the dirty sidewalk, wrap your lips around filters already smoked by other mouths and suck down the dregs like you’ve seen some of the homeless do on your rare ventures downtown.
The cat trapped behind the walls howls. It sounds near, really close now. Behind your walls—yours, until the sheriff shows up and removes you from the premises. Maybe it got into the basement, skipped up those sinister stairs in the darkness in its search for escape, found a gap in the bricks, a dumbwaiter or secret passage to nowhere. You wonder how many other doomed souls are lost inside these walls.
You track the mewls, the sobs, to the bathroom. The stray cat’s back there, behind the paneling. If you peel open a corner, you might free it. The wall behind the sink. The mirror.
A shimmer of movement draws your eyes up to your reflection, and terror results at the image gazing back. In the mirror is the face of a feral creature, a stray, surrounded by walls that have absorbed decades of ash and suffering.
You open your mouth, and the sound that emerges is crazy with fear, that of a scared, sobbing child.
In His Grandmother’s Coat
Charles Wilkinson
When there was still no sign of him by nine o’clock, and not a creak on the floorboards above, Angela went up the narrow wooden staircase to her son’s bedroom and knocked on the door. He was at the age when boys become insistent on their territorial rights. There was no sound, not even a barely audible, blanket-muffled groan or the surf-like sigh of someone rolling over. She pushed down on the handle and peered in. The white triangle of a turned-back sheet was visible in the half-light; then with a shock she registered the dark shape at the foot of his bed.
“Wyll?” she said, even though it was far too small to be human. She could make out a small head attached to a long body with a sinuous snake of a tail. For a second, she considered calling her husband, who was coppicing somewhere in the grounds.
But it would not do to make a fool of herself again. Could it be an otter? That hardly seemed likely, even though they lived near a river. At least it wasn’t moving, slithering towards her across the floor. With great caution, she stepped into the room and, hugging the wall, edged her way round to the nearest window and drew the curtains. On the floor was a pair of his trousers, the black ones he wore on schooldays; they had rucked up at the waist line, the curl of the belt trailing behind. She gave a chug of exasperation, picked them up and draped them haphazardly over a chair. Most women had teenagers who lolled around the house for hours, but Wyll must have crept out at dawn. Otherwise she would have heard him moving about.
She stooped down to rescue an abandoned blazer and shirt. A pile of text books was under a table rather than on top of it. Admittedly it wasn’t an easy room to keep tidy. No one had got round to attaching purpose-built shelves to the uneven half-timbered walls, and the floor sloped so dramatically that there was only one place where a chest of drawers had a chance of staying upright.
Given the chance to view it, she would never have consented to live in such a house.
Wyll went into his grandmother’s room and took off all of his clothes. So far it had been a good Saturday. He had avoided speaking to his mother by getting up very early and then spending the morning in the forest. At last he had found the courage to dispense with the footpaths and follow the course of the river until he came to a spot where it would be possible to swim naked when the weather warmed up. By the time he returned, the car and the truck were no longer in the drive. Although it was irritating to discover his mother had tidied his room, he decided that nothing would deflect him from his purpose.
He had never met his grandmother, but her room, which his parents had not got round to redecorating, reflected the tastes of an older generation. The Victorian samplers in gilt frames and stiff still lives of fruit and flowers held no appeal for him, but he liked the full-length mirror, which was freestanding and could be wheeled away from the wall so as to reflect a better grade of light. He inspected himself, starting with the auburn hair that his class-mates at his primary school in the city had so disliked, along with his brown freckled nose and sharp green eyes. In contrast to the color in his face, his body was luminously white; his limbs well-proportioned but not muscular. Since his move to the country, he was stronger and healthier. Yet there was something vulnerable about his body, as if it had only just hatched in the cold Welsh winter: an animal without a pelt or a shell. He needed protecting.
A month ago, he had discovered the writing beneath the carpet. It was not in any language he recognized, certainly not English, French or Welsh. It was carved rather than scratched onto the black polish of the uneven floorboards beneath the loose carpet in the farthest corner of the room. As it was carefully lineated, he suspected it was a poem of some sort, perhaps in the form of a blessing, a prayer or a curse.
He went over to the wardrobe, took out his grandmother’s mink coat and put it on. The satin lining was agreeably cool on his shoulders and back. Beneath the scent of moth balls was a hint of French cigarette smoke and gin. He returned to the mirror. The reddish brown fur reached his ankles and, like his hair, had the colors of fallen leaves darkened by rain. Light rippled across the coat as he wriggled his arms down sleeves that were far too long for him. She must have been a very tall woman; he crouched down for a moment, hiding himself in the coat.
His grandmother had spent most of the middle of her life abroad. He imagined one beautifully shaped leg in high heels protruding from the half-open door of a low slung sports car. But towards the end of her days she spent most of the year in Wales. Wyll wondered if she was watching from the shadows as he stood up, still wrapped in the coat’s opulent warmth. Her ashes were in the pale blue Wedgewood urn on the mantelpiece.
He walked over to the corner and lifted up the edge of the carpet. Ever since he had taken to wearing the coat of the woman who must have written the poem, he believed himself to be on the brink of understanding, not the whole work, but the first lines at least. Clothed in the fur she had once touched, he would come to understand the message left for him.
The unwashed plates in the sink suggested her son had returned for lunch. Yet there was no sign of him, even though his English tutor was now seated at the kitchen table with a mug of tea. In spite of her plentiful apologies, she was not sorry to have the tutor, elegant in a blue jacket and well-cut trousers, to herself. His shoes, polished to a metropolitan gleam, contrasted favorably with the prevailing culture of trainers and muddy wellingtons. And he had a dark, princely appeal quite at odds with his profession. A classicist by training, he helped the special needs department at her son’s comprehensive, a source of income he supplemented with private English tuition. She could hear her husband angrily chopping wood at the end of the garden
“Of course, some of the traits you mention, the forgetfulness, the chronic lack of punctuality, are common indicators of learning difficulties, but there’s no chance of getting him statemented. He’s really very bright. His vocabulary is excellent. It’s simply his spelling and presentation that let him down.”
“Well, I’m so sorry, Mr. Brampton, that you’ve been put to all this trouble. I really feel I should offer you some…” She got up and walked towards her handbag.
“Please no, I insist. Any losses I have incurred are more than compensated by your hospitality”—he waved in the direction of the remaining teacake—“and excellent company. And it’s Miles, please.”
“Are you quite sure? I feel terrible,” she said, holding her leather purse, “I would have reminded him, but he was out so early this morning…”
“Please don’t worry about it. What I’d really like to hear is that you’re feeling better…in yourself. They did tell us what happened.”
She
put the purse back in her bag and turned on the hot water tap in the sink. “Well of course, one never really gets over something like that,” she said quickly, with her back to him. “But I’ve had some…professional help. It’s been beneficial, I think.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it.”
“I just wish we weren’t so isolated. Sometimes I hear strange sounds in the forest. And occasionally you catch a glimpse of them, moving very quickly at the water’s edge.”
“Sorry?” he said, as he picked up a dish cloth and moved alongside her.
“The creatures.”
“What kind of creatures?”
“Mink. You probably haven’t lived here long enough to know that Wyll’s grandmother, who was very far from being the chapel-going kind of Welshwoman, ran a mink farm just a mile or two away from here. Local gossip has it that she was cross-breeding the American mink with something…” Her hands were still in the reassuringly warm water, but she had stopped washing up.
“You were about to say?”
“Something…older. Complete nonsense, of course. It’s true the breeders did experiment. The coats of mink kept in captivity are different to those that live in the wild. I’m afraid Wyll’s grandmother was by all accounts a rather unpleasant woman, and so it suited the locals to make up stories about her. What is certain is that when she lost interest in the farm most of the mink were freed by an animal rights group…or just let loose. Nobody is quite sure which…”
“I’m surprised the environment people…”
“You mustn’t do the drying up. Otherwise I will insist on paying you.”
He looked at his watch: “I should make tracks, I’m afraid. Or I’ll be late for my next pupil.”
They walked down the dark corridor and out onto the drive. It was dusk. And so for a moment Angela did not realize it was her own son who was on the front lawn. The blue-brown mass of the forest at twilight towered above him.
“Wyll,” she said, once he was crunching across the gravel towards them. “You do realize you’ve missed the lesson Mr. Brampton very kindly came here to give you?”
The boy did not reply. With the light behind him, Angela found it hard to read the expression on his face.
“Never mind,” said Miles, taking several paces towards Wyll. “Next time I hope I’ll have a double delight: the company of both of you.”
It appeared Wyll was about to reply when Miles stepped forward, his right hand held out as if to pat the boy companionably on his head or shoulder. Wyll shrank back at once, putting himself well out of reach.
“Oh,” said Miles, “Noli me tangere.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a pity you haven’t had a classical education,” Miles replied, his arm still held out as if he had been frozen in the act of signaling a boundary. “But then practically nobody has these days. ‘Don’t touch me.’ That’s what it means.”
“I do think you owe Mr. Brampton an apology, Wyll.” Her husband was still hammering away somewhere in the undergrowth.
At the very moment Wyll crossed his arms, Mr. Brampton let out a shriek and flapped his hand wildly.
“What...what’s the matter?” Angela cried.
“I’ve been bitten,” he said, taking the handkerchief out of the top pocket of his jacket and staunching the flow of blood. “It must have been a horse fly or something, I suppose.”
They looked around. Not a gnat was in flight.
“It does look quite deep,” continued Mr. Brampton, dabbing at the wound with a handkerchief. “I think I’d better get back and put something on it. Quite a nip in the air this evening,” he added with an effortful smile.
As Mr. Brampton walked towards his car, Angela looked in the direction of her son. The treetops behind him were touched with western fire. She remembered how in the months after his birth, when they insisted she must be reunited with him, she held him in her arms—and then noticed the first auburn curls on his head. “Where on earth did you spring from?” she’d said.
The doctors warned his mother not to have another child, but she took no notice. Then it died and she redoubled her interest in him. And so Wyll was forced to take long walks to avoid her grief and organizational prowess. There was also the business of the extra tuition. After it had been discovered he had the mildest form of dyslexia known to mankind, she decided to pay Brampton to give him extra lessons, which was absurd when one considered the school would have provided them for free if he had needed them.
The forest was quite dense now, although he could still catch glimpses of a limpid blue sky through the branches. Beneath the canopy the light was soft brown, turning to dark green where the foliage was at its thickest. He’d been walking for about half an hour when he came to a fork in the path. The path on the left, which was little more than track, sloped downhill and was narrower. He had a good idea where the right-hand path came out. Well today was a day for getting comprehensively lost, he thought, as he broke into a trot and plunged down under the dark arch of overhanging branches. He had only been going for about five minutes when he emerged on a bridle-path that ran beside the banks of the river.
He recognized the spot at once. There was a bend where the river was wider and deeper, its flow more sluggish. It was one of the places he had found for skinny dipping. The path was seldom used and he could always hear the voices of walkers or the hoofs of the horses in time to dive into the black shadows beneath a nearby stone bridge.
But then one day a man emerged from the track through the forest. Wyll had just waded out of the river and was still some distance from his towel. The man looked at him appraisingly for a moment before making his way along the bridle-path and over the bridge. As Wyll dressed hurriedly, he remembered he had seen him somewhere before, but it wasn’t until the next day, as he was walking towards the main school building, that he remembered where.
“Who’s that man?” he’d asked a boy who was about to overtake him on the way to the foyer.
“Go away, Wyll. You’re a notifiable disease.”
“Is he a teacher?”
“Sort of…special needs,” said the boy, before rushing on.
Further research revealed that the intruder was Mr. Brampton. When they inevitably passed each other in one of the long echoing corridors, Mr. Brampton merely nodded and said “Aha, the solitary bather.”
Wyll crossed the bridge. The countryside was sparsely wooded now. There was a stile at the end of the track and beyond an open field in which stood a wire fence that was surrounded by some low wooden buildings with pitched roofs. Although arranged in rows like the makeshift army barracks of the Second World War, they were too small to have served a military purpose. As he drew closer, Wyll realized the place could only be his grandmother’s abandoned mink farm. He stepped through a hole in the fence. The nearest building had exposed rafters and the door was missing. Wyll peered through. The metal cages, streaky with gold-brown rust, were still in place. Three or four of the mink would have been kept in there together. Apparently it took about forty of them to make a coat. His mother had told him that the poor creatures were gassed before being stripped of their fur. Nevertheless, it had been a profitable business for a time.
As he walked back in the direction of the bridge, he recalled the animals were permitted to live for about seven months. Seven merciful months longer than his baby brother, born without drawing a proper breath. He wondered if the mink knew what was happening to them. Could they smell the gas? Or hear the death-whisper as the taps were turned on?
When he had tried to put an arm round his mother, as he felt sure he should do, she pushed him away, without turning or looking in his direction.
Miles Brampton was half an hour early for his lesson with Wyll and so there was time for a cup of tea in the kitchen. She warmed the pot and took three biscuits out of the tin.
“Is that drawing one of your husband’s?”
He was pointing at a picture of the house. The artist’s use of broad charc
oal strokes captured the building’s jumbled timbering, skewed chimney stacks, oddly angled leaded windows—and the great black front door, which was not centrally placed, but appeared to have been inserted as an afterthought into the left wing of the building.
“No, I don’t think so. We had it in the living room of our flat. I didn’t appreciate it was a picture of a real house until we came to live here. I thought it was some Welsh expressionist’s nightmare or an illustration for the Mabinogion.”
“Did you ever meet the old lady?”
“No, my husband didn’t get on with her.”
“But she left him the house.”
“Not exactly. Wyll inherits it when he’s twenty-one.”
Vigorous sawing was succeeded by the sound of timber being split by an axe. She glanced out of the window, but there was no sign of her husband. Although the noise appeared to have come from comparatively close by, it was plain that he was working in the woods.
“I’ve some news. But I’m not quite sure how you’re going to feel about this.”
She looked at him narrowly. He had been visiting them for several months. More recently he had taken to turning up even when no lesson was arranged for Wyll. The spring term would begin in another week.
“I’ve been offered a job at a school in the Midlands. One of the few with a Classics department.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll take it if you…and Wyll…come with me.”
“Well, that’s…”
A chainsaw started up and then rose to a shrill scream, as if her husband was signaling an intention to deal violently with the wood.
“Please…I can tell you don’t like this place.”
“You must understand I can’t leave…while he is still here.”
“I said Wyll can come too. I know he’s not exactly fond of me. But he’ll find more to do when he’s closer to the city.”
“That’s not the point,” she said, turning in the direction of the window. The chainsaw stopped. Nothing stirred on the lawn or the path leading to the back door. The treetops moved very slightly in the breeze. “I think I’d better go and find Wyll. He was in earlier, but it would be just like him to forget again.”