Fireside Gothic

by Andrew Taylor

  Jane left me there – ‘to settle in’ – telling me to come back to the kitchen in half an hour for supper.

  ‘Just a sandwich or something. We don’t have much in the evening – Mother goes to bed early.’

  When she had gone I prowled about the apartment, as one does in a strange place, opening cupboards and drawers. There was a shelf of books – mainly the sort that people buy for holiday reading and then discard – and an elderly TV with a DVD player below. In one drawer I found a heap of children’s drawings, crude crayon sketches. One of them showed a pair of ruined archways with two stick-like figures in front of it. I wondered if it was a child’s view of the ruins in the field beyond the garden.

  I was putting on the boots again to go over to the house when there was a knock on the door. Jane was outside, holding a tray.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Mother’s not feeling well and I’m going to put her to bed.’

  She held out the tray to me and automatically I took it.

  ‘Do you mind having your supper here? It’ll make life easier.’

  ‘Of course not. Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘No, nothing. It’s just old age, I think. There’s a jug of fresh milk there – you found the kettle? Tea and coffee in the cupboard over the sink. Breakfast at eight.’

  I thanked her and she went away. I set down the tray. There were cheese sandwiches, a slice of fruitcake and an apple. There was even a bottle of beer. I realized how ravenous I was. I had had nothing since a bowl of soup in a pub at lunchtime.

  I sat down at the table and wolfed the food. Afterwards, I sat with the beer and flicked through the TV channels. There was nothing I wanted to watch. Mary’s funeral had stirred up memories that were better left in peace. I didn’t allow myself to dwell on them – what would be the point? What’s done is done and you can never go back, can you? But they formed a sort of uncomfortable static in the background of my mind that prevented me from settling to anything else. I had never liked Mary much and it seemed somehow typical that even in death she should have found a way to torment me.

  Gradually there stole over me a sense of disconnectedness. It’s hard to explain. We live such ordered lives, so carefully filled with the things we must do and the things we think we want to do, that we lose the knack of coping with the absence of organization. Mary’s funeral and its tiresome and time-wasting sequel this evening had combined to take away the comfortable structure in which I usually live. It was as if I had been removed from my own life and transplanted into someone else’s, someone I didn’t know.

  The fact that my phone wouldn’t work seemed to sum it up. I couldn’t use it to read the paper or browse the Internet. I couldn’t call anyone or email them or text them. I wondered how people had managed in the past, with all this emptiness, all this silence, all this time on their hands. I was alone with myself and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  I got up. I turned out the light and went to the nearer of the two dormer windows. This one looked out on to the back of the house. I opened the curtain and put my face against the dark glass.

  At first I saw nothing. Then I made out the dense shadow of the house and the pale grey of the sky above. There were no lights visible. Either the Mortons were at the front of the house or they were already asleep.

  I crossed the room to the other window. This one faced the seaward side, though one wouldn’t have known it, even in the daylight, because it was concealed by the trees at the bottom of the garden and by the fold of land beyond.

  It occurred to me that my sister would have liked this place. When we were children she had always wanted us to move to the country. Unlike most children, she’d liked the darkness. I never found out why. It didn’t occur to me to be curious until it was too late.

  I didn’t want to think about Mary. That’s why I opened the window – as a distraction. I stuck my hand outside. The air was cool, but not as cold as I had expected. It seemed to have stopped raining.

  I rested my elbows on the sill and stared into the darkness. The night was full of noises. The trees rustled. My eyes slowly adjusted and I saw the tops of the trees swaying in the wind. Beyond that was another, more menacing noise: the roar of the sea, pulsing in its strange inhuman rhythm against the land.

  The sound had a hypnotic effect – I was growing chilly in front of the open window, but I didn’t move. I stayed there until I heard another sound, so distant and so faint that the other noises of the night almost drowned it: the irregular tolling of a bell.

  6

  Ten minutes later, I went outside.

  Boredom had something to do with it, as did the sense that for a few short hours I had taken an enforced holiday from my ordinary life. I wanted to do something different, to be someone different. I wanted to pretend I was a different sort of person, more adventurous and more curious than I really was. Above all, I wanted to stop thinking about Mary.

  So I put on the raincoat and boots of the absent and presumably dead Mr Morton, picked up my torch and another one which went with the apartment, and opened the door. For a moment I hesitated, held back by an innate sense of caution. I couldn’t hear the bell any more. Perhaps it was mounted on a buoy miles offshore and the movements of the sea accounted for the irregularity of the tolling.

  I went outside and closed the door. The wind tugged at the long skirts of Mr Morton’s raincoat. I listened to the weather and felt it on the skin of my face.

  I followed the torch beam down the steps, moving as quietly as I could to lessen the risk of disturbing the two women. For the same reason, when I reached the bottom of the steps, I avoided the house. Rather than go towards the lawn at the front, in which case the gravel would amplify my footsteps, I went through an archway in the wall just beyond the garages. There was a sort of orchard here, through which a path led to the vegetable garden and then to the trees at the end of the garden.

  I was using the Mortons’ torch, which was larger and had a much more powerful beam than mine. I stood beside the fence beyond the trees and sent its light swooping over the field. It was much noisier here. Though the rain had slackened off, the wind was whipping up the sea to a frenzy.

  The beam’s reach stopped far short of the cottage by the ruins. It was only then that I decided to walk in that direction. Up to this point I had had no goal beyond the idea of going outside. Now it seemed logical that I should give myself a goal: I would walk over to the cottage and back. That would give a shape to my little adventure in the dark, and the exercise would help me sleep better.

  I went through the gate and walked slowly along the line of the fence until I reached the opening to the lane. From here I could see the cottage or, rather, a faint light that must come from there.

  I set off towards it. I made slower progress now because I was walking into the wind. The grass – some sort of pasture, I assumed – was rough and uneven, slippery with the rain. Mr Morton’s wellingtons were too big for me and my feet slithered in their cold interior.

  I admit: there was another reason for me to go towards the cottage. I was curious about the woman I had seen there. There was nothing sexual in my interest. I didn’t want to play the peeping Tom. I just wanted to know why she – and perhaps someone else? – had chosen to live in such an isolated place. I wanted to know where she came from and what she did. I wanted to see her properly. I wanted to find out if that mark on her face was a birthmark or a bruise.

  It’s odd how the mind works. The mark had lodged in my memory without my being aware of it. Remembering it now, I found it reminded me of something else, something vaguely unsettling though quite different, that was just beyond my grasp.

  All this time I was moving slowly towards the sea, my head bent into the wind. A more forceful gust than usual made me stagger and almost fall. As I steadied myself, I discovered that the distraction had unclogged the blockage in my memory.

  The woman’s blemish reminded me of another: the scar on my sister’s forehead. Rationally, o
f course, there was no connection between them whatsoever. But some part of my mind insisted that somehow there was.

  The three arches of the ruin loomed up. The torch beam played over them. Part of the church, I decided, definitely not a house. I approached the cottage as quietly as I could. I didn’t imagine that the woman had many nocturnal visitors and I didn’t want to scare her.

  The front of the cottage came into sight. The light was coming not from the window, as before, but from the doorway. The door itself was open and the glow of a lamp splashed on to the brick path outside.

  That was odd – after all, no one would want to leave an outside door open in this weather. Perhaps she had gone out to fetch more logs – from my glimpse earlier in the evening, the house had struck me as the sort of place that would have a wood-burning stove as standard equipment – and the door had blown open.

  At that point I almost walked away – back to the Mortons’ house, back to the apartment over the garage with its television and its electric kettle and its shelf of holiday paperbacks. It was none of my business what the woman was up to and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t want me intruding in whatever it was.

  But I didn’t walk away. When Mary had fallen off the shed I had walked away, leaving her crying her heart out with pain and shock on the path. There had been spots of blood on the concrete. Colour-coded accusations. She and I had both known that I was as guilty as hell, and that soon our parents would know it too. (I realized, years later, that this was precisely what Mary had wanted from the start.)

  I walked softly along the front of the cottage. I called out, in the absurd way we do, ‘Excuse me?’ when what I really meant to say was, ‘Hello? Anyone there? Are you OK? I don’t want to frighten you.’

  No one answered. The words lingered, foolish and empty in my ears. I walked forward until the light from the door spilled on to my glistening wellingtons, then my legs and then enveloped me entirely.

  ‘Hello?’ I called, much more quietly now because I had seen what lay within.

  The door opened directly into a living room. Although it was lit only by a single hurricane lamp, it was obvious it was in a mess. The storm seemed to have passed through it rather than above and over it.

  In the far corner was a table scattered with papers and books, some of which had ended up on the floor. There were a couple of old kitchen chairs, one of which had been knocked over. The dominant feature of the room was an enormous sofa, which looked as if it had been thrown out of someone’s drawing room about half a century ago and spent the intervening years sliding down the social scale. It was almost six feet long and had a sagging seat enclosed by a high back and sides. The arms were faced with panels of mahogany that gleamed, dull and red, in the lamplight. There was a blanket on it and another blanket on the floor.

  The sofa stood almost on top of a blackened stove set in a large inglenook fireplace that filled most of the wall to the right of the doorway. I took a step towards it and stumbled on a book lying on the floor. Automatically I stooped and picked it up. It was an old hardback written in German, a language I don’t know. But I read the title, Zeit und Wahrheit, and I knew what Zeit meant, at least: time.

  I put the book on the table and looked around. I was uneasy, of course – quite apart from the abandoned state of the place, I had the unpleasant sensation you get when you enter someone else’s empty home: as if you are an interloper, an invader of privacy; it’s even worse when you enter uninvited and as a complete stranger.

  The hurricane lamp didn’t throw out much light. I panned the torch around the room, which was low-ceilinged and little more than twelve feet square. The beam picked out more details in its harsh light. The brick floor. An ashtray overflowing with cigarette ends. A glass on the windowsill. And a long curtain – no, a blanket – that stretched from floor to ceiling in the middle of the wall opposite the stove.

  I lifted the side of the blanket. It was acting as a draught excluder over a door. I knocked on it, waited a moment, then called out: ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’

  A rustling made me spin round. The draught from outside had caught one of the sheets of paper on the floor and sent it skittering across the room.

  I raised the latch on the door, pushed it open and let the light of the torch go before me.

  ‘Anyone there?’

  Immediately on the right was an alcove which was obviously used as a sort of kitchen. There was a stone sink, with shelves and cupboards above, and a primus stove. On the left was another, smaller alcove with a pile of firewood below a row of hooks for coats. In front of me was a wall with another blanket hanging on it.

  ‘Hello?’

  I pulled the blanket aside. There was no door behind it, only a room a little smaller than the one with the sofa. The air was even colder here and smelled strongly of mould. Much of the space was taken up with an unmade double bed with a dark wooden headboard. There was another inglenook fireplace, this one with a grate designed for logs and a pile of ash spreading out on to the hearth. The torch picked out a bookcase, a vase on the windowsill containing two very dead roses that had lost most of their petals, another ashtray by the bed on top of a pile of books, an old chair strewn with clothes and—

  A white face appeared, above a dazzling light. I almost dropped the torch. I realized soon enough what it was: my reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall. But the knowledge didn’t stop my heart racing.

  I went back to the living room. Whoever lived here had left in a hurry. No one leaves their front door open at night, even in darkest Suffolk, and especially not on a night like this. The place was in chaos. It was beyond squalor.

  Who were these people? Hippies going back to nature? Artists with souls far above their creature comforts? Squatters? Illegal immigrants?

  I remembered the woman I had met in the evening, how her voice had shaken, how she had heard a bell, how she had wanted to get rid of me. I had known even then that something was wrong, but I had been too trapped in my own predicament to take much notice.

  I crossed the living room to the front door. The sound of the wind and the sea was much louder here.

  What was I going to do? I couldn’t call the police. It was no use my waking the Mortons, as their car was out of service. I could walk back to my own car and drive on a flat tyre until I found myself somewhere that had a phone signal or some sign of human life. But I would have to go back to the Mortons’ apartment first, because I had left my useless phone in the pocket of my suit jacket, together with the car keys and my wallet.

  Underneath it all was the thought that I might well be raising the alarm for nothing – that there might be a perfectly innocent explanation for this, if only I knew what it was. I had found nothing sinister. All I had found was an empty cottage, admittedly in a mess and with an open door, but those aren’t evidence of a crime in themselves. There was no sign that someone had been injured. No sign of theft.

  I heard footsteps.

  I swung round. The sudden movement made me dizzy. I clung to the jamb of the door for support. For an instant, everything went dark, as if my sight had been snatched away from me.

  The dizziness passed and my sight returned. In fact, there wasn’t much to see beyond the oblong of light from the doorway. But I could hear all right – the sea and the wind and – only just audible above the racket that nature was making – the dragging footsteps.

  They were coming not from the ruins but from further down the path along the front of the cottage towards the place where the invisible sea was grumbling and roaring.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  It was the voice of the woman I had met earlier. Very clipped and with an intonation that wasn’t quite English.

  ‘For God’s sake – who’s there?’

  ‘It’s me,’ I said. My torch had picked out a pair of wellingtons and the skirts of a long oilskin coat. I didn’t want to shine it on her face for fear of dazzling her eyes. Instead, I stepped on to the path and shone the beam on my own face. ‘
I came earlier, do you remember? You sent me up to the Mortons.’

  ‘But what are you doing here now?’

  I lowered the torch. She had stopped a few yards away. She had a torch, too, and its beam slid towards me and caught me in its light. There was a grating sound as she put down the metal bucket on the brick path. The lid was back on, but there was still a trace of that foul smell in the air.

  ‘The Mortons’ phone wasn’t working,’ I said. ‘They offered me a bed for the night.’

  ‘But why are you here?’

  ‘It’s quite early still.’ I was beginning to get a little annoyed with this interrogation. ‘I’ve had a hell of a day, so I thought I’d take a walk to clear the cobwebs away. Then I saw your light and the door was open and the mess inside. I was wondering if I should call the police or—’

  ‘No!’ Her voice had risen almost to a shout. She said, more quietly, ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m perfectly all right, thank you. Except the damn pig escaped. I’ve been looking for it.’

  I goggled at her. ‘The pig?’

  ‘The pig. We’ve got a pig in the sty at the back. Well, it’s not ours, actually, it’s the Mortons’. The wind blew part of the fence down. I went to feed her and she wasn’t there. I hope she hasn’t fallen over the cliff somewhere.’

  That explained the bucket. Scraps for the pig.

  I said, ‘Where’s your friend? Still looking?’

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ she said.

  The words said one thing, but her voice said another: it dropped almost to a whisper and acquired a sort of wobble to it, like Mary’s used to do when she was a kid and about to burst into tears, usually because of something I had done.