Snake Ropes

by Jess Richards

  Bill.’

  Valmarie says, ‘You’re talking as if we named the four men.’ She clatters on a board with a knife. ‘But we didn’t. If we were acting on our own feelings, no other men would have been put in there. Just Bill and Clorey.’

  Kelmar speaks slow, ‘Maybe the Thrashing House wanted that tall man. Him went in without a fight. You know, I think it really were calling him. Perhaps him needed to be punished.’ She comes nearer the window, reaches up and gets a jar from a shelf. She goes back to the table and says, ‘If it were down to just me, I couldn’t have taken any one man there on my own, shut them in. It’d be like having blood on my hands.’

  ‘But there isn’t any blood.’ Valmarie turns to face Kelmar and touches her cheek. ‘So, stop. We wanted justice for our boys. You’re just carrying guilt, and can’t put it down. It’s not serving you well. Come on. Get the bark in and help me strain. We’ve got to get on.’

  I crawl back under the bush by the door and listen to the sound of pouring water.

  Kelmar’s white boots step outside and Valmarie closes the door. I peek through the willow twigs. Kelmar has a bag over her shoulder and a bowl in her hands and Valmarie carries three candles in glass jars. Them walk up the hill towards the circle of boulderstones, Kelmar’s white boots gleam like two moons walking across a night sky.

  I crawl out and watch till Valmarie and Kelmar are hunched over getting things out of the bag, thems faces lit up by the candles.

  Valmarie’s kitchen smells of some bitter plant. There’s herbs hanging upside down from the beams of the ceiling. Jars stacked along the shelves. One of them is labelled ‘Mad Honey – Rhododendron Bees’, another has straggly leaves and white flowers tangled inside it and the label says ‘Hemlock’. Another says ‘Valerian, high concentrate’. I step back and bump into the table where a candle flickers. A root lies on a chopping board, sliced in half. The top half is like a screaming baby’s head, but the bottom is the stump of a wizened old man’s body.

  I go into the room with the fireplace, it’s lit by three candles. There’s a wall full of shelves stacked with wooden boxes, all different sizes, from the floor up to the ceiling. The boxes all have drawings on them burned dark into the wood. There’s a picture of a heart on one, an eye on another. Some of the boxes have words as well as pictures. A flute and the word sad, a footprint and the word float. A pot of honey named revenge, a map called nonsense, a cup named company, a cracked jug called pointlessness. All the things in these boxes must be what she’s burglared from people’s homes. A noose, a comb, a bat called colony, a mirror with the word land.

  I pick the one with the bat and the word colony on it and open it a crack. A tiny bat sits in the corner, quivering, eyes glinting. It flits out quick. I step back, my feet bang on the floorboards.

  Sitting on a box high on the wall the bat rattles the tips of its scratchy wings against the wood. It’s got a picture of a key on the side. I drag over a stool, stand on it and reach up to get the box. It’s jammed in between all the others so I ease it out. It’s heavy and I near drop it. I shake it but there’s no sound.

  The bat sits on the key box, blinks up at me as I climb down. I brush it off and it flits around the room. I open the key box, but it’s empty. The bat lands on my bag and crawls in.

  Valmarie’s fireplace is a strangeness. She’s stuck shells all over it, then gone over them with a hammer and smashed them all up. On the mantelpiece is the Thrashing House key. I pick it up and it sings a high metal sound, and when I blink Mam’s face is there, on the back of my eyelids.

  The key starts Mam’s voice over again:

  I want this child I’m heavy with to come out. Too heavy for my back. It’s funny to think of me being someone’s Mam. Ned as someone’s Da. Him will tell this child stories of the sea …

  I want to hear her again, but I put the key in my bag and look out through the uneven windowpanes, and the ripples make Valmarie and Kelmar look like them are underwater. The candles burn bright in the jars in the grass. Valmarie scatters something from the bowl. She puts the bowl down and faces Kelmar. Them raise thems hands up to the sky. Them’re dancing, spinning around in the circle. Them look like them’re swimming in air.

  I close the back door, quiet, crawl up the hill and hide in the shadows between two boulderstones to watch.

  Valmarie and Kelmar spin like them can’t see anything outside themselves. The dark clouds shift so fast, the night sky is spinning with them. Valmarie stops, leans over, like she’s letting out all the sighs in her at once.

  Kelmar stops, holds her hands up to the sky.

  Valmarie calls, ‘Come to us, tell us what is hidden.’

  Them’re trying to call up Sishee.

  But Grandmam said that Sishee couldn’t understand words no matter how them are said, so I dun know what them expect from someone in a story what can only understand pictures, not words.

  Valmarie calls again, ‘Come to us!’

  Kelmar drops her arms and shouts at Valmarie, ‘It’s not working! You’ve missed something out!’

  There’s a glint of metal in Valmarie’s hand. She raises a knife and dashes out of the circle. I hunch in close to the boulderstone, shut myself away in the shadows.

  Kelmar flies out of the circle and grapples with Valmarie, twists the knife from her hand.

  Valmarie makes a sound like a dog, howling.

  Kelmar stands firm, her chin out. ‘Dun break the circle, come on, if you forgot to do the knife bit, we’ve got to start it again!’

  ‘No point!’ shrieks Valmarie. ‘If we don’t believe she’s going to come, she won’t – just like I haven’t believed I’m going to find what I want, for years – not for years!’ she sobs.

  Kelmar walks her back into the circle, talking low and quiet.

  Something moves on the top of my bag, crawls out and up my shoulder. The bat called colony. It flits off me, so fast it looks like hundreds of bats – peeling shadows off itself into the dark sky. It flies round Valmarie and Kelmar.

  I crouch down.

  Kelmar stares up at it and says, ‘Try again. Something’s shifted.’

  Valmarie shouts, ‘It’s only a bat!’ She slumps down on the grass and leans forwards, her fingers over her face.

  I stand up and walk backwards, away from them.

  Valmarie, still hunched over, moves her fingers. Her dark eyes stare at me. She screeches out, ‘Mary Jared!’ and jumps to her feet.

  Running down the hill, my heart thud thud thuds down the valley and up to the graveyard hill. The blackthorn bushes along the edge of the graveyard fill it with shadows. I push through a thick cluster of twigs and thorns. I can’t see where my feet are falling.

  I trip on something,

  a sharp biting pain in my shin flashes red.

  I fall

  into a hidden place, buried under the bushes

  where them won’t find me.

  My eyes close.

  I fall back into the fever place that is the blank dark.

  Morgan

  My small bed has an elaborate birdcage carved into the headboard, an empty cage, with no bird inside it, and no door. I kneel on my blue quilted bedspread and pick out a book from the shelf, sit on my bed and open it on my lap. The Direction of Currents and a Discussion of the Contents of Glass Bottles. I stroke the cover. Inside it has pictures of all the glass bottles that have been found with messages inside them, washed up on shores all over the world. Photographs of faded messages on parchment, paper, papyrus, tissue, cardboard, sealed in bottles and sent out to sea.

  I flick the pages and open the book to see a photograph of a drawing on white tissue, found in a glass bottle washed up by a coastal town. A picture of a tree, drawn in black, in a child’s hand. Below the branches – feet planted firm on the earth and roots growing from their shoes into the soil to join the roots of the tree – are two small girls, drawn simply, holding hands, identical, with a tear on each cheek.

  Where was I when my parents de
cided on the twins’ names? Probably in the kitchen. I imagine Mum and Dad discussing names, swapping each crying baby girl backwards and forwards between them. Naming them after trees, something so far away, something they knew from so long ago, far from where we have all landed. They must miss those trees, to have chosen the names Hazel and Ash for their daughters.

  I close the book of washed-up messages. I’ve never been near the shores here to send out my message. But I’ve written my messages over and over again in my mind.

  The storybooks have always been my favourites, even now I’m an adult. I’ve learned from these that: locked-up daughters always escape captivity if they bide their time. That mothers are meant to be good, but good mothers often die young. And fathers are tired or poor or hard-working or generally weatherworn. That beauty in young women is described using images of snow, rose petals, blood and pure hearts, but snow melts, petals dry and curl, blood turns brown, and hearts are easily punctured or removed by all kinds of sharp implements – thorns or scalpels, axes or claws. Princes arrive at the end of the stories – but princes are only ever described as handsome, which could really mean anything. In my imagination, these princes are shadowy men who bestow kisses or happy futures. Neither of these events are ever fully described, and then the story just ends. The arrival of the prince seems at best suspicious, and at worst sinister.

  Mum’s footsteps are outside in the hall. They stop at my door.

  Silence.

  Mum’s listening to my thoughts. The handle turns.

  Her silence skulks in around the edges of the door. She’s in her purple dressing gown. ‘You’re awake. Been crying but all right now?’

  I say, ‘Thanks for trying.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She frowns. ‘You forgot to sweep the kitchen floor. Your father’s asleep. I don’t want the twins woken.’

  ‘I’ll do it, soon.’

  She nods, once, and walks away. Along the hallway a door creaks open and clicks shut.

  I open the ruffled lilac curtains. The tall house on the hill seems to look back at me through the dark. Tonight, it looks a different shape. Almost … the shape of a hand, with turrets for fingers. It doesn’t look like that in the daytime.

  Or at night.

  It’s never looked like a hand before.

  One of the fingers flickers in a ripple on the windowpane.

  Come here.

  I’ve dropped the broom on the kitchen floor. I can’t move, can’t believe what I have in my hand, can’t look away from it, in case it disappears.

  Such a small thing, this black clunky key. And yet it unlocks the outside world. I turn it over and over in the palm of my hand. Pinch it to make sure it’s real.

  The key to the padlock in the pink fence.

  It’s fallen from Mum’s charm bracelet.

  This chance will never come again. When she notices she’s lost it, she’ll collapse into pieces and then break everything else apart to find it.

  I knew I just had to bide my time. I didn’t have to hack my way out. Didn’t have to barter for my escape. Didn’t have to cause pain.

  I just needed something to happen.

  The house on the hill beckoned. Come here.

  And Mum has dropped the key.

  So something has happened.

  Now is the time to begin the story of my return to the mainland. Of returning to a place called home. Turn back to the first page. Can’t take anything I love with me and perhaps it’s best to take nothing at all, because in so many of my storybooks, the first page is blank.

  Mary

  In the blank dark, blue eyes open with a sound like the scrape of metal.

  A tunnel of eyes, watching me. Each eye leads to another, the lids joined like fish scales, stretching further than the sky and deeper than the earth.

  I’ve been here before. In a fever place. These eyes belong to someone. These eyes are from some other time, long before now. Pain right through me, ice all around me, and through the dark, blue eyes stare. I’m floating in this tunnel of eyes, my shin stings, two marks on it, red raised lumps. No light apart from the glints in the eyes.

  Eyes filled with sky

  sky filled with eyes

  only the night sky.

  I’m lying in a hollow, in thick grass. I’m hid in the graveyard, ivy tangled over a blackthorn bush what keeps me from view. Headstones I can’t see must be all around me. Names and names and names. My shin stings like it’s aflame.

  A rope lies coiled in the grass like a sleeping snake.

  The deadtaker said to Da when Mam died, ‘If she’d been able to get the venom out she might have survived.’ I cut one of the handles off my bag, tie it round my leg just above the bite.

  I grip my knife. My hand shakes. I make a cut. Only a scratch, islands of blood. I clench my teeth and plunge the blade in deep, cut right through the two raised tooth marks. The venom seeps out, runs thick pale yellow down my leg, streaked through with blood. I press down around the cut, squeeze as much poison out as I can. My legs shake like them’ll never stop. Pain shoots all through me, my heart thuds my ribs, the thud spreads all over me, thudding my head, my hands, my legs, my back. The strength goes out of my hands. The blackthorn bushes and ivy move in the wind, the dark sky spins and blurs. The ground wallops against my back.

  I open my eyes. Clouds scrunch up in the dark sky, like a giant hand has pinched and squeezed them into shapes.

  My blood feels solid. Pins and needles jangle over the skin of my face. The only part of my body I can move is my eyes, and the night sky is thick with thorns.

  A sound. Someone breathing. In and out, low and heavy, the breathing of a man.

  Movement of grass behind my head, hims hand swishes the grass. Him is hid here with me, letting me lie here. I clench my throat and try to make a sound. It dun work. A smell of dust. The moon is lost in clouds.

  ‘You’re awake,’ says hims low voice.

  Hims hand appears.

  A pale white hand, long and thin.

  Him puts it over my mouth.

  Can’t get my mouth wide enough to bite.

  Him leans in close to my ear.

  It’s hims eyes.

  My brother’s eyes in a tall man’s face.

  Langward.

  Him hisses in my ear, ‘You look so like your mother.’

  Hims hand over my mouth. A scream, trapped in my throat, a pincushion with pins sticking outwards. Hims eyes crawl down my body and back to my face.

  I strain as hard as I can, nothing moves.

  Him slides hims cheek against mine, breathes in my ear, ‘They’ve been searching for you. But you’re not found. So here we are. In a hiding place, as if we’re children. And you … can’t speak, can you?’ Him takes hims hand off my mouth.

  I open my eyes wide, think get away get away get away, but hims cheek presses against mine and him hisses in my ear, ‘Beatrice should never have ended the brief, I have to say, unsatisfying, us. Dying is so selfish.’ Him sits up and stares at my chest.

  ‘You’ve forgotten. Should I remind you, or would it be cruel? Should I remind you that … for her, it was always about trade. We agreed that I’d leave her alone, but, she said I could have you. And aren’t you … grown-up.’

  Hims face blurs like him is above the surface of the sea and I’m looking up from the seabed. Freezing cold, white cracks in my blood where it should be warm. This is a lie to break me open, so him can smash me up.

  Him taps a finger along my eyebrow. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ him says.

  I’m thinking: Dun say Mam traded me, for I’ve got a head full of blanks in my memory and I might believe you.

  Him says, ‘You’re thinking, how did I escape from your Thrashing House, when the others couldn’t?’ Him waits. Hims pale face shines like polished stone. ‘A door opened. They didn’t believe they could get out. So they couldn’t. Panic renders people dumb. A bit like you are now, if you think about it.’ Him strokes my cheek with one finger. Him
strokes, strokes, mutters, ‘Belief is a powerful thing. Seeing what you believe, rather than what’s there … believing there are no doors, when a door is open.’ Him leans hims face over mine.

  Him puts the palms of hims hands on both sides of my face. Hims eyes look at my hair, my lips, my cheeks, like him is hunting for something in my face. Him says, ‘Beatrice. Of course I would meet you again, in a graveyard.’ Him presses my cheeks together, makes my lips pucker.

  Him shakes hims head, lets go of my cheeks and snarls in my ear, ‘What shall we trade?’

  I want the blank dark. Anywhere that isn’t here, anywhere that isn’t now.

  Langward leans over my lips full of pins and needles. I think of the broideries I make. How sharp the needle is. How I jab it through the linen when I’m doing a picture I dun like. Broiderie needles coming out of my lips. Bloody hims face up with scratches …

  I’m too young to be here, under hims hands. Too young for whatever this is.

  Him moves down so him is kneeling next to my thighs. I can just see hims head and shoulders. Hims shoulders move. Him unbuttons my coat. The fabric of my dress rips. Him leans forwards, frowns at my bandaged breasts.

  My head jerks.

  I smash it back as hard as I can on the ground.

  I’m back in the blank dark, blue eyes all around me and I’m not even scared.

  Langward kneels next to me. Him puts hims finger on my cheek.

  ‘You’re awake. Stop crying,’ him says, sharp.

  My face is wet.

  ‘You’re a mess.’ Him leans over me and lifts my shoulders.

  A red flash. I’m sat up. The scream in my throat shrinks and hides.

  I’ve room in there to speak.

  ‘I’m fine,’ my voice is hoarse.

  Him takes hims hands off me and says, ‘Tell me you’re fine again.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Tell me nothing happened. I’m not here.’

  ‘Never saw you. Let me alone now.’

  ‘And …’

  ‘Nothing happened.’ Him feels further away.