by L. G. Vey
*
Inside the shed, he crouched, his back against the old tea chest, the traps hanging above him.
He hadn’t realised how much he had come to rely on its jars and tools, dusty corners and scrap wood, to keep him safe. He picked two pieces of wood from the pile, then took down a hammer and a nail, and put his mind entirely to the task of making something. It didn’t matter what. Maybe it was a boat. It looked like a boat, to him.
After a time – he had no idea how much time – there was a knock on the door. He jumped, held up the hammer in front of him, but she didn’t come in.
‘Sorry dear, I know you’re busy in there, but I just wanted to say – your old clothes, I noticed at breakfast – they’re getting a bit small for you, aren’t they? I’ve sorted out some bits and pieces you can wear instead. I’ll leave them just outside the door here. And we’ll have that sherry later, won’t we?’
So no time had passed at all.
He watched from the window as she left. Once he was certain she was back in the house, Ray opened the door, just enough to see what she had placed there, at the end of the path.
A white shirt. Braces. Corduroy trousers.
Brown leather slippers: old, creased, lived in. But good for a few years yet, no doubt Gwen would say. Good for a few years yet.
Chapter Four
At the end of the day, after a shepherd’s pie eaten in silence, Ray admitted defeat. The jeans were too uncomfortable to wear any longer. He went upstairs and changed into the clothes Gwen had given him.
Without a mirror, it was difficult to tell whether he had been transformed entirely into one of her men, but he was glad of having no means to check. His hands, his stomach, the bits of himself he could see, were changed: he had to admit that. But maybe his face remained his own. As long as he believed that, he thought maybe he had a chance to escape back to his own time.
There had to be a way to break this spell.
He pulled out the coat of otter fur, and Fred’s abandoned journal and the book on trapping, from under the bed. Then he retrieved his own notebook from under the pillow and wrote a final message.
I’m caught between the woods and the witch.
If I don’t make it out of here, back to where I belong, and you find this book then I’m so sorry, Jimmy. I didn’t mean to call you here. We’re all caught up in traps we don’t understand.
Where to hide it? Eventually he shifted the single bed and found a loose edge to the carpet; he placed the books flat against the floorboards, and then replaced the carpet and returned the bed to its original position so that nothing looked out of place.
The otter coat, he put over his arm, smoothing the thick pelts, feeling the rough, ugly edges of the stitching. Then he started down the stairs to Gwen.
*
The parlour had been stripped of dust sheets and opened up for the special occasion.
She had already poured two schooners of cream sherry, and placed them on the low glass-topped table in front of the unlit fireplace, logs arranged in an orderly stack. The lamp with the damask pink shade, standing in the corner, had been switched on to give a soft, subdued light. In it Gwen looked younger: her cheeks were rouged, her dress seemed a little more shapely. She had made an effort for him.
This was the first time Ray had seen the rose-pattern of vibrant red blooms on the cream three and two, unfaded, with scrolled oak arms. He sat next to her on the smaller sofa, and placed the otter coat across his lap.
When she saw it, her eyes rolled and her lips pulled back from her teeth in a grimace; then she collected herself, pulled her expression straight, and said, ‘Raymond, where did you find that old thing?’
‘In the shed. Under the remains of the wardrobe. You know, the wardrobe that used to stand in my room.’
She nodded. ‘I always did wonder what he did with it. I asked him to destroy it, you know.’
‘I know. I read his diary. That was in the pile under the wardrobe, too.’
She cocked her head. ‘The diary, yes! So that’s where he put it. I remember him writing in it when we were first married. After he came back – from trying to leave me, you know – he dragged that wardrobe down to the shed and broke it into pieces, and hid his guilty secrets underneath it. He was a funny one, in lots of ways. I don’t think I ever understood him. I don’t understand any of you.’
‘Men, do you mean?’ asked Ray.
‘I wonder if you wouldn’t mind putting the coat down, perhaps by the door there, so I can get rid of it later. I do so hate having it in the house.’
He obliged. It had done the trick. She had been caught off guard by the coat, and had revealed something of her real self. He felt he had a chance to break her spell, having a better idea of who she really was. So she didn’t understand men – perhaps that could be used to his advantage. He put the coat by the parlour door and returned to his seat.
The sherry spread a warmth through him; the night was cooler than he had been expecting. Autumn was on its way, he would have said, once, back when he understood how time worked.
‘How do you do it?’ he asked.
‘Do what, dear?’
‘Trap us. Keep us. Turn us old.’
‘Oh Raymond. You never do learn, do you? None of you. It’s not me.’
‘It’s some kind of spell. It’s…’ The thought dawned on him: what if she was telling the truth? He no longer knew what to believe – could Fred have been mistaken, in his journal? ‘So tell me what you think keeps us here. Is it the house?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s just a house on the edge of a wood I never cared for, and what a fuss you’ve all made of that over the years. You think I want the wood gone, all the creatures in it dead. Not at all. I love nature. I even love animals, in their rightful place. But what the wood brought out in you all, yes, I wanted that gone, of course. That wildness in you.’
‘You mean the men who had lived here with you,’ he said, feeling heat in his cheeks from the alcohol. ‘We’re not all the same man. I’ll be the last of it. I’m bringing an end to it. Tonight.’
‘Raymond, that’s a lovely thought. But I already know you’re not the last, and you do too, don’t you? Little Jimmy, coming to visit, and there are others after him, I’ve already seen them.’
‘Seen them?’
‘They don’t leave, do they? Ones from the past, ones from the future. It’s all the same thing in this house. The dates make no difference. You saw that, outside. What did you see? A funny world, isn’t it, the future? It looks like a desperate place, with the people all thrown out to make way for that wood, and signs saying they can’t be hunted, can’t be eaten. That it’s better if people go naked and starve. Well, that’s not your future, anyway, is it? You’ll be just like one of them, soon enough, just standing around on my lawn.’ Gwen sipped her sherry, sitting up straight, prim. How she loved giving him these answers, piecemeal, telling him whatever she chose to. It wasn’t right for a woman to have that kind of power over a man. ‘Perhaps it’s the price you have to pay, for what you are.’
‘What are we?’
‘Killers,’ she said. ‘You’re a killer, Raymond. You killed your wife.’
‘I didn’t,’ he told her. ‘She left me.’
She lifted her schooner of sherry, now half-emptied from her sipping; it slopped in the glass and he realised she was already a little tipsy. ‘Fred was a killer too, but at least he had the war as an excuse. The rest of you took it out on your wives, those poor ladies. I suppose the only good thing is that they got to escape you. I’m stuck with you.’
‘I never killed her,’ he said, his voice rising – he couldn’t help it, didn’t know how to stop himself from shouting.
‘You’re wild animals. Ernie killed his own children too, when he found his wife had taken up with another man. Imagine that. He blocked it out, of course, pretended it hadn’t happened, and I can’t blame him, or you, for that. It must be so much easier to be able to say she left me, or I don�
�t remember. But you’ll remember, before the end. They always do.’
But Trish had left him. Trish had left him, he had woken and found her gone, he was sure of it, and the wood – the Holtwood had seemed like the only place where he could hide. Until it turned against him. ‘The Holtwood,’ he whispered. ‘That’s what causes this. That’s what traps me here.’
‘No, no, no,’ Gwen snapped. ‘You’re always so ready to blame someone else, anything else. But it’s you. You’re making this happen.’
‘I didn’t – I never…’ He smashed down his glass on the table, and stood up.
‘You want to leave.’
‘Yes, but–’
‘You want to leave, but you’re afraid. Afraid of what you are outside. An old man, alone, and you can’t be alone, can you? That’s why you killed her. Because she wanted to leave you.’
The arguments. His insistence that she should not leave the house. You belong here. You can’t leave. But women leave; they find one way or another, like his mother. Like Trish, with her bags packed and pushed under the bed, and he had found them. The things we all hide, under the bed, down in the shed. I can’t live like this any more, she says and that, that is what pushes him over the edge, she knows it, she knows what she’s doing when she needles him like this, and his hands find her throat.
Yes that’s right, says a voice from far away, and he squeezes, and squeezes.
This is how it is. This is who he is. He surrenders to his strength, the screams, to the bite of the trap.
He kills her. He kills her all over again.
*
The grandfather clock had stopped ticking.
Ray came to, looked around himself.
He was still in the parlour. His back was against the wall by the door, and the otter coat was next to him. The rose-hued light from the lamp shone down.
Gwen’s hand was poking out over the arm of the sofa. Her wrist faced the ceiling, and her fingers were curled into a tight bud of a fist.
He stood up, and looked at her face. The bloodshot eyes, the dark red mouth, the black tongue protruding. The thick mottled marks where he had put his hands. She looked, in this pose, much as Trish had looked.
Women had so much in common.
He heard birdsong outside and wandered into the kitchen to stand by the sink, looking out over the dawn. The others were there, together, on the perfect green expanse of the lawn, facing the fence. They all looked so similar in the same clothes – the clothes he was wearing. Some of them were only suggestions of men, flickering, as if waiting to be brought into being. The possibilities of men to come.
There were more than five of them. They filled the lawn, standing shoulder to shoulder. There were too many to count.
He went outside, and they turned their empty expressions to him and moved aside to let him pass. The dew of the lawn soaked into his brown slippers, then through the knees of his trousers as he reached the fence, and knelt, and put his eye to the hole. Beyond, the wood was white, alive with movement, branches dancing in snowfall, time moving differently. Who knew what year it was, out there? All he could see was that it was winter. He put his finger through, and felt the icy cold penetrate it. He pulled it back to the sunshine.
‘Help me,’ he whispered through the hole, hating himself, but he couldn’t stop it. Gwen was right about him. He had no control over his actions. He was an animal. ‘Please God. Please. Don’t leave me here, alone. Make her stay. Make her stay.’
‘Raymond!’
He swivelled at the sound of her voice, lost his balance, sat back on the grass.
‘Breakfast, dear,’ she said, from the porch, looking the same as ever, unchanged in every way. She returned to the house.
Gratitude flooded over him; she had not left him. She was not like the other women. She had stayed. How had she managed that? It had been a prayer. A prayer answered. His heart hurt with the thought of it.
He walked through the ghosts of the other animals and returned to the house.
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