Path of Needles

by Alison Littlewood

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Quercus

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2013 Alison Littlewood

  The moral right of Alison Littlewood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78087 146 2 (PB)

  ISBN 978 1 78087 147 9 (EBOOK)

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  and

  www.jofletcherbooks.com

  Alison Littlewood’s first novel, inspired by her winter commute to snowy Saddleworth, was A Cold Season. Her short stories have been selected for the anthologies The Best Horror of the Year, The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime, Best British Fantasy and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, as well as featuring in genre magazines Black Static, Crimewave and Dark Horizons. Other publication credits include the anthologies Magic: an Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, Resurrection Engines and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women. She lives in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, with her partner Fergus.

  You can visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk.

  For those we lost: Marjorie and Miriam, Nev and Mark

  PROLOGUE

  When Alice Hyland woke, she knew that a new year had begun. No matter that it was April instead of January; to her mind a new year meant new life, and she knew that daffodils would be pushing green shoots up through the cold dark earth and the sun would be shining over the top of Newmillerdam Wood. She knew this because her bedroom was full of birdsong, so clear and insistent she couldn’t bring herself to resent the fact that it had awakened her. She stretched as she crossed the room, her footsteps silent on the soft grey carpet, and pulled back the curtains, revealing bright morning light.

  Alice closed her eyes and pictured the bird, singing so hard its heart might burst. She smiled at herself and opened her eyes again, and as she did, her smile widened: she had expected something nondescript, a grey-brown little thing, feathers fluffed against the early-morning cold. Instead, the bird sitting on a branch of the just-budding apple tree in the centre of Alice’s garden was so bright as to be almost iridescent, its head pale turquoise, its body darkening to the colour of the sky in summertime Greece.

  It was impossible.

  Its beak was open and the notes came tumbling through the air towards Alice, a song of joy and life and irrepressible thereness.

  She blinked. It didn’t look like a budgerigar escaped from some cage, or a blue jay or anything else she’d ever heard of. She’d seen a kingfisher once, remembered the brilliant blue flash as it half flew, half fell towards the water – Alice had thought it was falling, but the bird had brushed the surface of the river and fluttered upwards onto a branch, revealing its rust-orange breast. This bird had no such colouring; it was much smaller than a jay, even smaller than a kingfisher, and it was blue from head to foot: stridently, undeniably blue.

  The Blue Bird. It was like something brought to life from a fairy tale singing out its heart in her garden, like a good omen. She’d not covered ‘L’Oiseau Bleu’ in her lectures for some time, had been concentrating on the basics: ‘Snow White’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Little Red’, stories her students were familiar with. Maybe it should be back on the syllabus. As Alice pushed open the window she saw the bird was truly beautiful. Cool air came in and Alice thought she smelled springtime in it.

  ‘L’Oiseau Bleu’ was a fairy tale from the turn of the seventeenth century, and the bird was Prince Charming in disguise. ‘Sing on, sweet prince,’ she whispered under her breath, and wondered what her students would think if they could see her now, just roused from sleep, leaning out of a window and talking to a bird, her pale hair tangled about her face. She should go inside … and yet the blue bird was looking at her, its tiny water-bright eyes fixed and staring. She almost didn’t like it. Birds didn’t stare like that, did they? A bird of prey perhaps, spying its next meal, not this small, timid thing.

  Chrr-chrr-chrr. The shrill rhythm repeated over and over, evolving as Alice listened; now sounding almost like words, then whistles that rose to an unpleasant squeak, and then a series of pulses like an insect might make: ch-ch-chrr-chrr.

  Alice broke her gaze and caught hold of the window catch. She should take a shower, get dressed, start all the normal, everyday things. Maybe she’d rummage through her source texts, find the tale about the blue bird who transforms into a man. And she looked up to see the bird coming at her in a flurry of feathers and beak and claws—

  She gasped, started back and slammed the window closed in time to see the bird pull up short on the other side. For a moment she saw each individual wing-feather spread wide, the finer, darker feathers delineated on its breast, and she braced herself for the dull sound of fragile bones breaking against glass.

  It did not come; there was only silence, the room strangely empty without that high, relentless birdsong.

  Alice straightened, brushing strands of hair from her face, peering through the window. She couldn’t see the bird anywhere. As she bent closer the top of her head met the glass and the sound, though small, made her jump. There was nothing in the tree, nothing on the ground, and now the bird had gone it felt like it could not have been, that she had never seen it at all. Then she saw it had left something for her, a little piece of blue, lying on the windowsill.

  She opened the window again and looked about in case the bird should return, but this time there was no movement, only the soft sough of the wind playing through the branches in the woodland beyond. The breeze didn’t penetrate her garden; the leaves of the apple tree did not stir. Alice reached out and picked up the feather. It was small but fully and beautifully formed, and the blue was a little paler, from somewhere high on the bird’s body. Holding it carefully by the quill, she examined it. It felt like a gift, a benediction, a glimpse of something at once impossible and undeniably real, and as blue as the sky in springtime.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Angie Farrell knew the photograph was hidden beneath her handbag, the black clutch with the silver studs which was still sitting where she had abandoned it the night before, on the table. She set down her bowl of cereal next to it, slopping a little skimmed milk over the side, and started spooning cornflakes into her mouth. The crispness was too loud, hard against her teeth, jarring in her skull. She’d had a drink when she got in, and then another – she hadn’t meant to, but she’d been torn between going straight to bed or waiting up for Chrissie, and instead she’d found herself standing alone in the lounge, staring at her reflection in the mirror. The house had been silent, and cold: the heating had long since clicked off and winter hadn’t quite given up its grip.

  Angie hadn’t switched on the lamp, but the sidelong glare of the fluorescent light in the kitchen had illuminated the lines settling deeper across her forehead and around her lips. She hadn’t moved, and she hadn’t looked at the photograph again. She had seen it already; she didn’t need to look at it twice. She had checked the clock, though, and seen th
at the dance was over, and that was when she had decided to open a bottle of wine, no matter that it was just her. Maurice left years ago, bought a cheap bar on one of the more unfashionable stretches of Spanish coastline with his bit of fluff. He’d not even lingered long enough to ask for a divorce; it was Angie who’d had to do that, Angie who’d had to organise everything, as if Maurice was suddenly the younger one, his new woman’s youth rubbing off on him. It was Angie who’d had to tell Chrissie she was now a child of a broken home, and she’d tried not to relish those words, even though she was fizzing and spitting with spite. It was Angie who had to drink alone.

  She stirred, leaned across the table and dragged the bag towards her, bringing the photograph with it. She pulled it from underneath the bag and turned it over and for a moment she was dazzled by her daughter’s smile.

  No, not dazzled: she winced.

  Chrissie was framed by a chain of giant daffodils and daisies, their stalks spun of green twine, the white petals narrow strips of paper, the yellow ones fragile tissue, almost transparent where spotlights shone through them. The lights cast a warm glow across her daughter’s skin and picked out bright points on the crown she wore – just a cheap plastic thing covered in glue-spotted sequins, but in that moment her daughter had made it look like something magnificent. It was in her eyes too, the knowledge of her own blithe beauty. The photograph had been taken at the spring dance. Chrissie was surrounded by her classmates, though she wasn’t looking at any of them; it was they who looked at her; that was their job. She was Christina, crowned before them all, queen of the dance, queen of the springtime in her coral dress and her cheap crown. Everyone else smiled up at Chrissie, her adoring courtiers.

  Angie was in the picture too. Angie hadn’t been smiling.

  She dropped her head as her eyes filled with tears. She ran a finger over the picture but found no smooth skin or satin dress, only a cold surface she couldn’t penetrate. She was full of the things she wanted to say, but didn’t know what they were; she only knew she was so proud of Chrissie, her beautiful little girl – and at the same time she wanted to tear the picture in two with her teeth.

  It had started with Mr Cosgrove. There weren’t many teachers at the dance; the parent-helpers covered it, mums like Angie, those who weren’t forbidden to be there by their kids for fear of embarrassment. But Mr Cosgrove had been there, and he looked like one of the cool teachers, the kind who tell their pupils to call them by their first name. Angie didn’t know his first name but she had crossed the dance floor and sidled up to him as he ladled fruit punch into a paper cup. He grinned and passed it to her. The DJ was playing some throbbing beat.

  ‘Good tune,’ he said. He pronounced it ‘choon’, and that was when Angie knew he was one of the cool teachers. She didn’t know the name of the band, but she recognised the sound from the CDs Chrissie liked to blast from her room and she nodded along to the rhythm. She took a sip of the punch and pulled a face.

  ‘I know,’ said Mr Cosgrove, ‘it could use something.’

  She turned and gave him her smile, the full beam, and nodded. She was still moving to the music. She had a good body for dancing, worked out at the gym four times a week, five when she could manage it. Her hair swung around her face, a shade darker than Chrissie’s pale blonde. Mr Cosgrove was probably in his late thirties. He was regular of feature and untidy of hair, unshaven. Angie liked untidy hair in a man, imagined for a moment what her daughter would say if she put out a hand and ran her fingers through it, right there in front of everybody; she smiled, imagining the scandalised shrieks. Chrissie was somewhere behind her, no doubt at the centre of a huddle of her friends. They’d all be covering their mouths with their hands while yelling their gossip over the music. No doubt they were wondering why no one had yet sneaked vodka into the punch. Angie was beginning to wonder too.

  ‘You must be Chrissie’s mum,’ Mr Cosgrove was saying. He put out a hand and she shook it, catching it only by the fingers. She could feel the bones beneath the skin.

  ‘Angie,’ she said. ‘My name’s Angie.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Angie. I’m Matt.’

  Angie felt the muscles in her face relax and she took a deep breath. ‘It is a good tune,’ she said, and he held up his paper cup and touched it to hers before taking a deep draught. An impulse took her and she opened her mouth and started to form the words that would take the two of them somewhere else, put a real drink in their hands, if only for a little while, then he was speaking and the impulse curled and died. She could taste it, already a stale, dead thing.

  ‘Here we go,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘The big moment.’

  The music died away and Angie could feel her heartbeat again rather than the steady duh-duh-duh of the music. She was vaguely disappointed; she wondered if she would ever again feel the fluttering inside that meant a new man, wondered if her husband still got that with his bit of fluff. She scowled as an older teacher stepped onto the stage and up to the microphone.

  He cleared his throat and the room hushed. He had a bald patch that shone damply under the spotlights and he touched his hand to it before bringing it to the microphone. Angie wrinkled her nose, thinking of someone else coming along and taking hold of the damp, cold metal.

  Two smiling girls in low-cut dresses stepped onto the stage and flanked the teacher. Their waists were tiny, tight, never stretched by fat before being punished by hours in the gym. They were smiling. One of them held an envelope and the other held a velvet cushion that appeared deeply purple in the dim light. On the cushion was a crown.

  Angie already knew what was going to happen; it was potent in the air, latent in Chrissie’s clenched hands. Her daughter stood at the front of the crowd, her posture loose and effortless, smiling a casual smile that belied the tension in her fists.

  The teacher flicked the microphone, ignoring the dead sound that echoed around the room, and cleared his throat again. He muttered something, how delightful it was they could all be there, how beautiful everyone looked, but how there could be only one queen of the spring dance.

  One smiling girl passed him the envelope. The other glanced at the crown.

  He opened the envelope, the paper sticking to his clammy hands, and gave another cough-cough of embarrassment. ‘A popular choice,’ he said, looking around. ‘Our new queen is Chrissie Farrell.’

  Applause erupted, and there were shouts, the occasional low jeer drowned out by the rest. Angie smiled, or thought she did, but there was sorrow in it too: so long ago. She felt a hand on her arm: the teacher, and he was smiling at her. She couldn’t remember his name.

  He nodded up towards the stage and his eyes remained there as he spoke. ‘Isn’t that your daughter? Come on, you can go closer.’

  And of course that was what Angie wanted; what mother would not? She looked up and saw that Chrissie was beautiful, and pride came at last. Her eyes stung. Was she crying? She allowed herself to be led to the edge of the stage and stood there clapping as Chrissie received her crown, displaying her even white teeth. Her skin was smooth as buttercream.

  ‘She’s a lovely girl,’ the teacher said, clapping, still at Angie’s shoulder, easy in his louche posture and his untidy hair.

  Angie frowned, and that was when everything turned to white. She winced, then the dark rushed back. She looked at Chrissie and saw yellow afterimages dancing about her daughter’s face and when they cleared she saw Chrissie hadn’t flinched at all, had taken the camera flash as her due. Mr— What was his name? He was still clapping, and as he did, his eyes flicked up and down her daughter’s body.

  Later, when the photographs were printed and Chrissie thrust the picture into her hands, Angie saw what it had caught: the crease between her eyes accentuated by her expression, the dry-looking skin, her narrowed eyes appearing almost sly. All she could think was: I thought I had been smiling. In the picture she wasn’t smiling, wasn’t the image of the proud, happy parent that she should have been. She looked envious; she looked unhappy. S
he looked old.

  Angie turned to the teacher, meaning to ask him for that drink after all – not for tonight, Chrissie might want her around, but another time maybe – and found an empty space at her side. The teacher was standing by a group of girls, bending so that one of them could whisper in his ear. He was smiling.

  ‘Mum.’

  It was Chrissie. Her daughter looked shorter than she had on the stage, and not merely because of the platform: she seemed somehow diminished, just Chrissie, her daughter, once more, the crown on her head a cheap plastic thing. Angie smiled back – a real smile – and reached out to put her arms around her.

  Chrissie took a step away, wobbling on her heels, and held something up to ward off her mother: the photograph. ‘There’s a bunch of people going to Kirsty’s after,’ she said. ‘I might be late.’

  ‘Chrissie, we spoke about this.’

  ‘Mum, don’t start.’

  Angie shut her mouth so abruptly she heard her lips snap together, and the smile turned to a scowl. ‘Chrissie, I came here tonight because of you – and now you want to go off and—’

  Chrissie rolled her eyes and pushed the photograph at Angie; she had to take it or let it fall to the floor.

  ‘I have to, Mum. Everyone is. Stop treating me like a kid, okay? Take the picture home, will you?’ Chrissie leaned forward, kissed her mother lightly on the cheek and was gone, with only a flash of vibrant coral dress as she vanished among the others.

  Angie held the photograph tight against her breasts. It was a long time before she held it out and looked at it properly, and she didn’t like what she saw, not at all. She glanced around her. The DJ was playing another tune she didn’t know and the dance floor was becoming crowded. A couple filed past her, so close the girl’s dress swept Angie’s legs. The teacher with the untidy hair seemed to have gone.

  She wound her way back to the refreshments table, the picture tucked under her arm, and poured another cup of punch. She couldn’t see her daughter but the photographer was still there, in one corner, and girls were lining up for him, giggling. She could hear a printer whirring beneath the interminable thud of the music. Angie headed over there. There would be other pictures of Chrissie among the rest – and of you, a voice whispered in her mind; another picture to show she wasn’t the way she appeared in the image she held.