The back of her head is open. What Harry presumes to be brain matter lays festooned with tumours, growths that resemble fungi, and ulcerating punctures dripping dark fluid. This ichor mixes with the pus on the floor.
She turns, a stiff, artificial movement. She is not Tara. The front half of her head, of her entire body is perfect. Skin that glows, features that are so symmetrical, it hurts the eye. Pristine beauty. It is this, and not the horror of her back, that breaks Harry’s silence, and his mind.
He screams, and he screams, and he screams.
20.
THE CHILDREN HEAR a scream from upstairs.
“Daddy!” says Cory.
“Throw the insects out of the window,” says Louise.
“But won’t the girls –”
“Do it now!”
Cory begins to empty his pockets.
21.
ON THE A3, in a darkness cut by two high-beams, Tara and Betty speed northwards. Betty had said there were no speed cameras, but they pass a mobile unit which almost blinds them with a flash.
“Shit,” says Betty.
They have travelled in silence for most of the journey, Tara still shocked by what she experienced.
“You knew?” she asks.
“No. Not really. I never saw what you saw.”
“What did you think? Who did you think they were?”
“Maddy’s a normal girl. Her boyfriend’s a bit of a seer.”
“A seer? He has a warehouse full of... whatever those things were. If I close my eyes I can still see them.”
“You should have left the screen in place. He’s embarrassed about them, and Maddy will probably never talk to me again. Besides, aren’t you focusing on the wrong thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your family’s in danger.”
“He said there’s nothing I can do about it. We won’t get back in time, and nobody is picking up their fucking cell phones.”
“Call the police.”
“And say what? There are ghosts in my house, please help.”
“No. Say you’re in the house, with your children, and someone has just broken in. You fear for your life. Help. Help.”
Tara dials.
22.
HARRY THINKS HE hears Cory’s voice shouting “Daddy” just before the woman disappears. How does he know it’s Cory? The woman seemed to be Tara. Is this another trick? He gags and retches when he remembers the woman’s embrace. Acid bubbles up to the back of his throat, and seems to pool in his chest. He holds a fist to it, which seems to help.
He is exhausted and in a complex web of post-coital feelings. Then he looks around him and finds the walls receding again. The dark people at the corners are back, and they do not waste time. They approach.
“Oh, not you wankers again –”
Harry cannot speak anymore because a club fractures his jaw. He knows it is fractured because of how loose it feels. A second hit sprinkles teeth on the bedspread. He tries to move, but his body does not seem to work properly. Pain is white and red and yellow. More clubs make contact with him, but he feels nothing. He wonders if he is paralysed. He wonders if any of it is real. He is dragged from the bed, and his fingers are crushed under boots. He is amazed that he can hear their laboured breathing, as if they are real.
When they loop a frayed rope around his head and tie a noose he doesn’t even fully register it. When they force open the window, he sees it only as information. One of his eyes is swollen shut. They push his feet out of the window and the cool autumn air chills him. Why do they want his feet outside, he wonders.
They push, and his legs hang out. His torso crosses, then... then freefall... cut rudely short.
23.
TWO OF THE skeletal girls block the staircase. They are joined by five others who open black hoods to reveal themselves fully.
“Get out of the way,” says Louise.
“To lach,” says the nearest one. “Pad offer. Pad legleg harduple.”
Adrienne inhales sharply and begins to cry.
“What’s wrong?” asks Cory.
“She says we’re too late. She says Daddy’s dead.”
“Naam,” says the girl. Yes.
“Maybe she’s lying,” says Cory.
“She’s not,” says Adrienne. “I’d know.”
Then a scream as Madame Welther launches herself from nowhere at the children on the stairs. She reaches behind her and throws... crawling things at the girls. The girls in turn latch onto her and bite.
“Shit, shit, shit,” says Louise. “Bugger this. We’re leaving! Don’t look back!”
But Adrienne does and she sees that the back half of Madame Welther is rotten, like a corpse. Then Louise is dragging her out. Adrienne’s tears distort her vision for a while.
24.
POLICE.
In front of her house, like some wife-beater or drug-dealer lives there.
She sees her children, but for a moment it seems there is a third child between them, a girl. Then she is gone.
Tara is not surprised that Harry is hanging out of the house, naked, with his neck snapped. Sad, heartbroken, despondent, but not surprised. She is not even surprised when they tell her he has been beaten severely ante-mortem. They do not spare her the details, maybe because they know she is a nurse, or maybe they want to see her reaction in case she did it. She wants to shout at them that this does not protect her heart from breaking.
Yet she cannot comfort her children. Betty must do this because Tara herself has work to do. She knows the way forward now. Too late for Harry, but time enough to regret that later.
She gives her statement to the police, which they treat as preliminary, and then she is questioned in the station because the death is considered suspicious. She waits with apparent boredom. This does not interest her.
She reads Adam Welther’s document again, the one Harry compiled, paying more attention to the spells this time. It has shrunk, and Tara thinks it will become blank over time from losing words.
The next day, still wearing the same clothes, she visits the architectural firm of Dale and Wright in Canary Wharf. She does not remember taking the DLR, but she must have since she did not drive. She just remembers being too early and waiting at the door. The architect sees Tara, recognises her with some alarm. She notes the wobble of his coffee-holding hand.
“Mrs Newton, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I need something from you.”
In twenty minutes Tara is on the train clutching the model of Irongrove Lodge to herself. If anybody notices they don’t indicate. She makes one more stop before going home.
The attic is lit by dormer windows, and at some point in the Lodge’s history servants would have lived here. Tara has heard that these windows would have been exempt from Window Tax, but she isn’t sure. The attic is empty. Neither Madame Welther nor those abominable children attempt to stop Tara from reaching it.
She places the model on the floor. It is amazingly accurate. Block shape, panelled door in the middle, symmetrical window arrangements, two chimneys on each side of the roof, hipped roof, elegant cornices. She strokes it... Harry’s Georgian castle.
She takes a bit of red chalk and draws an unbroken circle around the model, careful to do this in a single stroke. Then she reaches into a cage for the pigeon she bought from the pet shop. It struggles, but it will not get away.
“Sorry about this,” she says. “But fuck you, my family is more important.”
She stabs it in the neck and dribbles the blood all over the model, making sure the drops all fall within the chalk circle. While she does this she recites the words she read from Adam Welther’s journal.
She puts the corpse of the bird in a garbage bag, and wipes her hands off.
Then she waits.
Nothing happens. She does not know if it has worked or not. She waits for an hour until the blood is dry and caked.
“Silly little girl,” says a voice.
Tara l
ooks up and sees Madame Welther, beautiful as a tsunami, dripping suppuration in her wake.
“Run away, girl. You have no business here. You’re still young. You’ll find another husband to look after your urchins. But if you stay I will kill you all and eat your souls for a snack.”
Tara ignores her. What has she done wrong?
The children appear, and they speak in that abominable language of theirs. They repeat the same phrase, in chorus, from all directions. Although she does not understand, the meaning is clear: get out.
It is too much for Tara and she is no longer sure why she is fighting them.
Fuck them, they can have the poxy house.
When she breaches the front door there is a girl waiting just at the entrance. She is holding the handlebars of a bicycle. Tara knows the girl, the bike, and the Newcastle T-shirt.
“Hi,” says the girl.
“You’re from me, aren’t you? You’re my spirit,” says Tara. “Louise?”
“Yes. I broke away from you when you had that accident.”
She does not look like the person Tara used to see in the mirror, but Tara knows that despite this, Louise is her. It’s like when you dream you’re at home and the building looks nothing like home, but it still is. Tara recognises her own body language, though, the way the girl scuffs her left foot absently, the eyebrows raised because her mother had said she would get wrinkles if she didn’t. It’s uncanny looking at Louise. Overwhelming déjà vu.
“You were with my children the night Harry died.”
“I’ve always been with them, Tara. From when they were born. I’ve never been far. I tried to help. I loved Harry too, you know.”
“Yes,” says Tara. “Yes, I suppose you would.”
“What are you going to do?” asks Louise.
“I’m leaving.” She looks back at the house. “I was thinking of setting it on fire again, cleansing the evil once and for all. I can’t get the containment ritual to work and I don’t know why.”
Louise smiles, moves closer to Tara, gets on tiptoes, and whispers in her left ear, “Portico.”
Louise gets on the bike, waves, and cycles out of the property.
THIS IS MUCH better.
The children and the Madame all threaten with much more desperation. Them working together makes Tara sure that they are afraid. Which means she got it right this time.
She constructs the model portico by cutting up the cardboard cylinder from a toilet roll and fashioning the pieces into columns. She cuts a cereal packet into a roof and seals them together with sticky tape. It’s not perfect. In fact, it is wobbly and lopsided, but it is clearly a part of the structure. If you squint.
She draws a new circle and draws the knife across her own wrist and sheds her own lifeblood for the ritual. She knows she will not die from the cut. It only takes a few drops to silence the spirits. There is no fanfare, just quiet.
She kneels and leans forward, looking into the windows of the model. She sees nothing, but she imagines she can hear some kind of activity.
Tara takes a saw to the floorboards.
BETTY PLIES TARA with Valerian Root and St John’s Wort, but she declines.
“I’m not depressed, Betty. I’m just sad. My husband died. It’s appropriate for me to be sad.”
“Just humour me, you dozy cow,” says Betty.
Tara waves her away and watches Adrienne help Cory with his suit. Their first funeral. She wishes she could tell them that it was their last.
“You never told me what you did with it,” says Betty.
“With what?”
“The model.”
“Oh, I cut the floor around it, took it to the Thames, attached weights and dropped it in. I’ve also sealed off the attic just in case.”
In the west corner of the room, naked, bruised, with a deformed neck, Harry nods and smiles. Tara smiles back.
“Mummy,” says Adrienne. “It’s time. Let’s go.”
Tara takes the car keys, puts on her hat, and walks out. The children grasp each of her hands, squeezing tight.
She squeezes back.
NOTES ON IRONGROVE LODGE
THEY HAVE FINALLY given me my own place. It’s not much – a poky little studio flat – but it’s clean and there’s a lock on the front door.
The day after I moved in, I awoke to find the manuscript on the kitchen table. I phoned my Housing Officer, but she claimed not to have put it there. Perhaps, she suggested, the previous tenant had left it behind. That wasn’t possible. The manuscript hadn’t been there the day before. Someone had been in my flat.
A first, I couldn’t make head or tail of the story; it read like the witterings of a madman, though one eloquent in insanity and blessed with a poet’s touch. I persisted despite my reservations and it became clear what the story was actually about – the house in the void.
The only person I could think of who may have delivered the manuscript, who knew of the depth of my interest in Irongrove Lodge, was Tom, and he had died two days after telling me his story. He had been found by an outreach worker, lying beneath a bush, still shrouded in his sleeping bag and many layers of clothes. I had heard the authorities say that, from the state of his corpse, he must have been there for weeks, but of course that was another of those impossible things.
When I finished reading the manuscript, the phone rang. For a moment I was too afraid to answer, unsure of what I would hear. When I relented, it was not a phantom that spoke, but it was one who had long been dead to me – or I to them.
We hadn’t spoken since my incarceration. I hadn’t received any visitors while in prison. As this person had been there the night that had changed all of our lives, I hadn’t expected to ever hear from them again.
They were, they said, reaching out to me. They said they had never expected to find forgiveness in their heart, but realised that without it, the pain and anger would utterly destroy them. They could not profess to understand what had happened, or why, but they thought that if we saw each other again, a new start could be made, and understanding could be worked towards. They had heard I’d been homeless for a time, and offered me a room in their house.
The issue remained, however, that it would not be the right house. And the fact of the matters is that if I am going to persuade Irongrove Lodge to reveal itself, I have to deny utterly who I once was. As hard as it is – on others, on myself – I must reject ownership of the pain, grief and horror that once defined me. I need to come to the house a blank. No, not a blank; a negative – the void contained.
So, I listened to them and once they had finished speaking, I hung up.
I picked up the manuscript and read it again, looking for the right door.
THE BEST STORY I CAN MANAGE UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES
ROBERT SHEARMAN
I.
The Freak
ALL RIGHT. HERE’S another haunted house story for you.
Pay attention. There will be questions later. Maybe even a written exam!
Long ago – or, at least, before you were born, which is the same thing to you kids, isn’t it? Long ago – or, at least, long enough that most of the characters are now dead.
There lived a man, and there lived a woman, and they loved each other very much. They were well suited because the man was very smart, and the woman was very pretty. The woman thought the man was the smartest person in the whole world. And the man thought his pretty wife was a bit dense, and when she needed to think she’d have to tilt her head to one side to get her brain working. They would laugh a lot at that.
So, they were in love, and the woman was soon with child.
The man was very proud. He bought cigars for everyone at work. He liked the idea of becoming a father, it made him feel like an adult at last, just like his Daddy was, just like his Grandaddy. Now he would be as old and as wise as they were. There was something gestating inside his wife’s stomach, she was getting fatter by the day, and he had done that, he had put it in there, he was responsible for
the abdominal pains and the night sweats and the bouts of morning nausea. And he’d done it pretty much all by himself too, no one had lent a helping hand! He need never be called ‘boy’ again.
The woman was proud too, in her own way, but she was so full and heavy and swollen she felt like some old sack.
Every evening when the man came home from work he would go straight to see his baby – and the woman whose belly was housing it, of course; he would stoop down towards the distended stomach, and he would press his ear against it, and he’d nuzzle it, and kiss it, and he’d tell his brave big boy how one day soon they would watch the footie together, they’d go to the pub, he would sit him on his knee and tell him haunted house stories – oh, he just couldn’t wait until his fat wife’s waters broke and his son was unleashed upon the world.
And every day, when the woman left the house, to do some shopping, maybe, or get some fresh air, or just to escape the sense that the same four bloody walls were squeezing in on her and would crush her to death – every day, strangers would stop her on the street and ask her how her baby was, whether she’d picked a name for it yet, or a school, or a career, whether she knew which gender it was. Whether they could touch it, whether they could prod at her belly with their sharp naked fingers and feel the child kick. She didn’t think she ought to say no. She knew she mustn’t be selfish. A baby isn’t just a mother’s, a baby is for everyone.
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