The House on the Lake

by Nuala Ellwood

  But then as I got closer I saw him. Steve. He was sitting on an old tree stump, smoking a cigarette. From this angle I could see him clearly. He had long dark hair that fell into his eyes. Unkempt, as Sarge would have described it. He looked up when he heard me coming and jumped to his feet. That was when I got a good look at his face. He had dark eyes and a wide nose. His mouth was curled into a kind of sneer. He seemed to dislike me as much as I did him.

  ‘Grace,’ cried Isobel, noticing me. ‘You made it.’

  She ran towards me and then, seeing the gun, her face fell.

  ‘What … what have you brought that for? I said we were –’

  ‘Excuse me, Isobel,’ I said, gently moving her aside. ‘I just need to talk to Steve.’

  I walked towards him and pointed the gun.

  His eyes widened as I approached and he stepped backwards. I could almost smell the fear coming off him. Good. That was what I wanted.

  ‘Now,’ I said, standing so close to him I could hear his shallow breathing. ‘I’m going to ask you nicely. Leave Isobel alone, do you understand?’

  ‘Grace, what are you doing? This is crazy.’

  I heard Isobel’s voice behind me, but I ignored it.

  ‘I said do you understand?’

  He tried to look defiant, but I could see his hands were trembling.

  ‘I want you to leave Isobel alone,’ I repeated, moving the tip of the gun closer so it was almost touching his chest. ‘Go away from here, far away, and don’t come back. Do you hear me?’

  He stared at me then smiled and shook his head.

  ‘You’re insane,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows that. Come on, Isobel. Let’s get out of here.’

  But before she could respond I thrust the gun into his face.

  ‘You touch her and I’ll blow your brains out,’ I said, almost whispering. ‘Do you understand?’

  He gulped then threw a side glance at Isobel. My plan was working. He was going to leave. Isobel was safe. She was still mine.

  But then I heard a voice. And it was calling my name.

  As the figure emerged from the trees I instinctively backed away, placing my body between it and Isobel. I had to protect her at all costs. But then, as it drew closer, I saw who it was.

  It looked like he hadn’t shaved in days. Clumps of snow stuck to his thick dark beard and his eyes were wild and blazing. Isobel screamed when she saw him and went running to Steve. I stayed still and watched as he approached. That was the best course of action when it came to him: stay still and observe.

  ‘Grace! What the hell do you think you’re doing, girl?’

  His voice was menacing enough to make me nervous. But I quickly made an observation: he had no gun. My pulse slowed down a bit then. Unarmed, he posed less of a threat. Though, as always with him, I would need to stay vigilant. There was no knowing what he would do next.

  ‘That’s none of your business,’ I said, glancing across at Isobel, who now had her arms wrapped round Steve, her head resting on his shoulder. ‘You don’t have the right to order me about any more.’

  ‘What did you say?’ he muttered, staggering slowly towards me. ‘You’re my daughter and you’re out here in the middle of the night waving a gun around. Get home now, Grace. I mean it.’

  I told him it was impossible, that I couldn’t go home cos I didn’t trust him any more.

  ‘Don’t trust me?’ he cried, throwing his hands in the air. ‘What are you talking about? I’m the only person you can trust. You think this lot are to be trusted, the religious criminals?’

  He gestured to Isobel and Steve. I heard Isobel give a snort. It was probably the first and only time she’d ever been called a criminal. They both looked nervous though. I was still holding the gun and Sarge was a menacing sight.

  ‘Just come back to the house, pet,’ he repeated, holding his hand out towards me. ‘Please. You shouldn’t be out here.’

  I didn’t reply, just stood there staring him down. I’d never done that before, never held his gaze like that, and it seemed to scare him because he quickly looked away.

  After a few moments I found my voice. I told him that I’d taken his book and read it and that I’d discovered what he’d done all those years ago, that he’d lied to me about my mother, that she never died in the desert but had lived. That he had snatched me from her when I was just a few months old and brought me to the house on the lake. I told him that I’d seen the letters she’d written begging him to return me to her and that he had kept those letters tucked inside that book, hidden from me, with all the other secrets. And for that, I cried, I could never ever forgive him.

  ‘Please,’ he said, his eyes filling with tears. ‘Please, pet. Just come home and we can talk about this. But not here, eh? Not here.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ I said defiantly. ‘You’ve lost me. Do you understand? You’re nothing to me now. Nothing.’

  I looked up at him once I’d finished my rant and his whole body seemed to crumple. He staggered backwards, his hand clutched to his chest.

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No, no, pet. You’ve got it all wrong.’

  I told him that I’d read my mother’s letters and that it was clear what had happened. There was no mistaking it. He had taken me from her in the summer of 1991 and removed me to Rowan Isle House where he has kept me captive ever since.

  He lurched towards me when I said this, shouting that the letters were a load of nonsense, that they weren’t even written by my mother but by her sister, a good-for-nothing woman who was after a pay-out.

  I knew then that he was desperate, clutching at straws, because in all the letters I’d read there had been no mention of money. There had just been a searing sadness pouring out of my mother. She wanted her child back. It was as simple as that.

  ‘She never died in the desert, did she?’ I said, keeping my eyes fixed on his. ‘You just took me from her. How did you manage it? Didn’t she try to stop you?’

  ‘She was sleeping,’ he said, looking down at his boots. ‘It was early morning. You were wide awake, lying in your crib, gurgling away. I looked in at you and you smiled up at me and I knew in that moment that I had to get you away from there. For your own sake. I found your birth certificate and some fresh clothes then took you back to the base, where I organized a flight back to the UK.’

  ‘And they let you take a baby?’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘They knew you were my daughter,’ he said, looking up at me, his eyes watering. ‘But I told them … I told them your mother was dead.’

  A shiver went right through me when he said those words. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hurt him the way he had hurt me. Hurt us.

  ‘All my life I had a mother,’ I cried. ‘A mother who loved and wanted me, and you took me away from her and brought me to that hellhole.’

  His eyes blazed then and he raised his fists at me.

  ‘Hellhole?’ he screamed. ‘You think you know about hellholes? You think you know what it is to live like they were living? Snipers on every corner. Car bombs. Kidnappings. And I was meant to leave you there? My own flesh and blood. My child.’

  ‘It was my home,’ I cried, tears clouding my eyes.

  ‘It was a fucking war zone,’ he yelled. ‘If I’d left you there I would have been signing your death warrant. I might as well have dug your grave myself.’

  ‘You did that anyway,’ I said, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. ‘I’ve never had a proper life. You made sure of that. I’ve lived like an animal, like the fox in that bloody trap.’

  ‘I gave you freedom,’ he said. ‘I took you away from all the wretchedness, all the dangers of the world.’

  ‘You made me scared of everything and everyone. Made me believe not only that my mother was dead but that I could never make a friend, never have a normal life, never trust anyone. And then you locked me up.’

  ‘I made a soldier out of you,’ he said, his voice low and ominous. ‘A survivor. Yo
u have to break someone to build them up again and when you do they come back stronger. Look at you, girl. You’re better than this.’

  He gestured to Isobel and Steve, his face contorted with disgust.

  ‘These people aren’t your friends,’ he said. ‘They’re liars and criminals.’

  ‘You’re the criminal,’ I cried. ‘You kidnapped me. You broke the law. Isobel would never betray me or hurt me. She’d do anything for me.’

  ‘Is that so?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Thing is, girl, you don’t seem to understand what a true battle feels like. You don’t seem to understand that I saved your life.’

  ‘You destroyed it,’ I cried. ‘You might as well have just left me there to die. In fact, I wish you had.’

  He rushed at me then with such force that I was nearly knocked off my feet.

  ‘Do you know what it feels like to die, girl?’ he yelled. ‘You think it’s noble or peaceful, eh? No, dying’s not like that. It’s noisy and dirty and it takes a long time for the end to come. I know that cos I’ve killed people. I’ve watched them writhe around in agony with their insides hanging out.’

  Behind him I heard Isobel gasp and Steve telling her that everything was all right, that they would be out of here soon. I needed Sarge to stop, to shut up. He was tainting everything with his madness, he was letting Isobel think that I was a crazy person and pushing her further towards Steve. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. He had ruined everything by turning up like this. And he wasn’t finished.

  ‘I watched my friends die,’ he continued, his face just inches from mine. ‘Blown to smithereens and for what? An illegal war started by criminals, madmen who cited the bullshit her old man spouts as a reason for mass slaughter.’

  ‘I know what you went through,’ I said, watching as a piece of spittle hung suspended from the corner of his mouth. ‘And I know that’s why you’re like you are, why you hear the voices.’

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ he cried. ‘You’re a child.’

  ‘She’s not a child.’

  Isobel’s voice pierced the air then I heard Steve telling her to be quiet, that she should leave it alone.

  ‘Listen to your boyfriend,’ Sarge whispered, his breath reeking of stale beer. ‘And keep the hell out of this. You’ve done enough damage. Now come on, Grace, put that bloody gun down and come home.’

  I know now that I should have done what he said. I should have kept the peace. But all I could think about was my mother’s letter, her sadness and despair at being kept apart from her child. ‘My precious baba’, that’s what she called me. My precious baba. And the more I focused on those words, the angrier I became. The rage rose inside me like a thick mist. Time slowed down. I could see his face above me but it seemed cracked, like he was falling apart in front of my eyes.

  ‘No. That is not my home. Not any more.’

  The voice that came out of me didn’t sound like my own. It was harder, stronger.

  Then I felt his arms grip mine. He stumbled into me like a sleepwalker. I tried to pull him off but he was too heavy. I heard Isobel shout something then felt a crack on the back of my head and the shock of cold snow on my body as I fell.

  And then. Nothing.

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  40

  Lisa

  I sit in the centre of the room and let the hand holding the book drop to my side. The writing had been so vivid, so beautifully evocative of the woods and the cold and the moonlight that it feels like I’m out there. I can still smell the winter air, still feel the crunch of snow underneath my feet. My head sways slightly and I stumble to my knees, letting the book fall on the floor beside me.

  As I sit here I try to make sense of what I’ve just read. Grace and Isobel had been friends. Very close friends. Yet when I’d mentioned Grace to Isobel at the party earlier she said she barely knew her. Still, there is no mistaking who wrote that account. The adult Grace’s voice was unchanged from the teenager whose words I’ve just read. The intensity, the digression of thought – jumping from present to past and back again via a circuitous route, taking in all sorts of byways and vistas – but at the heart of it an integrity, a sense of right and wrong, good and evil, light and darkness. That was Grace all over and it was that innate goodness that drew me to her, that made me open up to her, tell her things I hadn’t ever told another soul.

  And yet here she was at the age of thirteen planning an act of violence so extreme it called for the inclusion of a gun. Her words were like little explosions scattered across the page. Her hatred of Steve was palpable. But had she killed her father? I shiver as I imagine the deathly silence that must have descended on the woods that night, the fear Grace must have felt.

  It’s the same fear I am feeling now.

  ‘Joe,’ I whisper as I lie down on the floor, curling my knees up to my chest. Please let him be all right. Please let Isobel get my message and come and let me out of here so I can find my baby. Please.

  I take my phone out of my pocket and shine the torch at it, hoping, crazily, that the phone has somehow managed to charge itself in the last few minutes. But the screen is still dark.

  My eyes are sore and heavy from crying and I tell myself that I’ll just close them for a few moments, but soon I’m falling into a heavy darkness that wraps itself round me like a blanket.

  I hear a scream.

  ‘Joe,’ I call out. ‘Joe. It’s okay, Mummy’s coming. I’m going to be right with you. Any moment now I’ll see you and I’m never going away again. I promise.’

  ‘Mummy!’

  His voice is agitated. He’s somewhere out there looking for me and though I can hear him I can’t see him. I try to stand up but something is holding me back, a weight pressing down on my legs.

  ‘Mummy!’

  His voice is getting closer, so close I can almost smell his milky scent. My beautiful Joe. As soon as I get to him I’m going to hold him in my arms and never let him go. I shouldn’t have run away. I know that now. I should have stayed and faced up to what I’d done, but I didn’t and this is my punishment.

  Joe’s voice is growing fainter and I’m no longer sure which direction it’s coming from. Then a loud bang penetrates the air and a noise like a siren starts up, its wail so loud I have to cover my ears. But as I do so I feel something crack me on the back of the head. Pain like nothing I’ve ever experienced before spreads across my skull. The siren gets louder and louder in tandem with the pain, so loud that it drowns out Joe’s voice completely and the white world turns black.

  When I open my eyes I’m in the room again. It was just a dream. A horrible dream. My back hurts and as I slowly come to I see that I am still slumped against the door. Panic engulfs me then and I jump to my feet.

  I can hear a faint noise outside, a clumping sound that could be footsteps but could just be a tree creaking in the wind.

  ‘Please,’ I cry, pounding my fists against the door. ‘Can you hear me? Mark, please just let me see him, let me know that he’s okay.’

  41

  I stop pounding the door and listen. It’s silent now. Outside I hear the muffled sound of birdsong. I turn round. The room is full of pale-honey light. The morning has come. I see the blanket lying on the floor where Joe dropped it. I pick it up and drape it over my shoulders. It’s freezing in here. I sink to my knees and pull the blanket tight around me. I have no idea what to do. I could try calling out of the window again but the silence out there is ominous. There is nobody left here. I’ve been abandoned.

  As the warmth of the blanket envelops my skin I look across and see Grace’s journal on the other side of the room where I dropped it. Easing myself across the floor I take it and open up where I left off.

  … When I opened my eyes I was lying on my back in the clearing. Every part of me was aching: my head, my legs, my arms. Looking down, I saw the shape of a gun imprinted in the snow and smelt the familiar smell of gunpowder drifting on the air. But the gun was nowhere to be seen. Aft
er a few moments I got to my feet and looked about for Isobel, but there was no sign of her either. I tried calling her name, but the wood returned my voice as fresh snow began to fall. I followed the line of flakes as they fell from the sky and settled on the ground and that’s when I saw it: a patch, the size of a small animal, of deep red blood, staining the snow at the exact spot where I’d been lying. I quickly examined myself for cuts or wounds but I was untouched.

  No. No, it couldn’t be. I called out for Isobel again as I stumbled through the snow and tried to remember what had happened. I remembered her coming to me as I lay under my doss bag. I remembered her asking me to help. Then I remembered the plan, the plan I’d spent hours perfecting, and I remembered that name, the name of the animal she was planning to run away with, the one she said she couldn’t live without.

  Steve Markham. She loved him but when I saw him sitting there on the tree stump puffing away on his cigarette I could tell that he wasn’t fit to lick her boots. He was a beast, a sneaky-looking fool who had no business being around my Isobel. She couldn’t see that though. She couldn’t understand that he had violated her. But I knew. I knew from the moment I saw him with his dirty hands wrapped round her. I knew that I wanted to kill him. That had been my plan: to get Isobel to lead me to him, then I’d put a bullet in his head. But all I could remember was approaching the crag, seeing them together. Then nothing. Why couldn’t I remember?

  As I reached the end of the wood I saw something lying in the snow. It was Isobel’s red ribbon. I picked it up and placed it in the palm of my hand. Then I brought it to my face and sniffed it. It smelt of shampoo and flowers, it smelt of goodness. It smelt of Isobel. What had happened to her? Why hadn’t I been able to protect her? I was a failure, an idiot, I told myself as I put the ribbon in my pocket and staggered across the road towards the village. It must have been about four in the morning as the sky had that strange silvery sheen to it that only comes in a mid-winter dawn. I knew those things because me and Sarge had spent our life together observing the seasons and the sky, we’d lived in peace, and now I’d brought an outsider into our lives and all hell had broken loose.