She didn’t smell too good, though. Not unwashed, but musky—an almost-sulphuric scent that wasn’t completely pleasant.
Harriet’s mouth curled into a smile, displaying inhumanly sharp canines. Her black eyes flicked towards us, then up at the ceiling, and its lack of light bulbs. ‘No electrics, huh? Ow!’
The flame disappeared, the lighter clicked, and it reappeared.
Harriet stared around at the shelter with undisguised curiosity. It was one of the old Andersen ones left over from the war—not much more than some corrugated steel panels bent into a half tube, half-buried then covered with earth to make a space just big enough for six adults to huddle inside. Red stains made V shapes on the walls, and earth bulged through in pockets where the steel had rusted away. New tin sheets covered some of the rust at intervals around the shelter. Pine beams propped up a reinforced roof.
Shelves of dust-covered mystery jars—my stepfather’s attempts at pickling—stood against the far wall. Sprigs of lavender were nailed to the curved sides: an attempt by Stanley to make the place smell a little better. A thick layer of pine needles covered the floor, as did a generous sprinkling of rock salt. The rest of the space was bare.
‘How long do you normally have to stay down here?’ Harriet asked.
‘Depends,’ I whispered. ‘Maybe a few hours.’
‘Ssh,’ Sigrid said. Two years older, she was less intrigued by the weasel-woman than I was.
‘Maybe a few days,’ I said.
‘Why doesn’t she just rough in an electric cable? Stanley’s pretty handy. He could do it in a couple of hours.’
Because she thinks electricity is the devil. I kept quiet. I’d said too much to the weasel already. I’d be in enough trouble if Desma found out about those. I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if I started jabbering. The weasels always wanted to talk.
What was out there? What was so dangerous that an ancient creature like my mother was scared of it? Why did it want weasels?
I was done speculating. The respective answers were: nothing, nothing and it didn’t, because there was nothing there but my mother’s contagious paranoia.
My sister shifted against me, and changed position. Her knees clicked as she stretched them out in front of her. She’d grown six inches in a year, and her bones creaked with the strain. I still hoped for my own huge growth spurt, even if I knew it wasn’t going to come. Sigrid was tall and slim and blonde and already starting to fill out. She hadn’t received our mother’s hag genes.
I had. I was going to be sharp-faced and bony. I’d only pass for human if someone weren’t paying attention. Sigrid would never have to worry about that.
‘I can’t stay down here for days,’ Harriet said. ‘I’ve got a job, which I’m already at risk of losing.’ She peered at her watch and grimaced. ‘You know what, girls? Treasure these days—the ones before you have to go out and work. Trust me on this.’
Sigrid and I both nodded as if we agreed. We didn’t. I’d spent hours with Sigrid in bed at night, huddled together under the covers while we made our plans. Sigrid was going to join the police and be a detective. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I thought it would involve animals. We were going to share a flat and we would each have our own TV in our bedrooms.
Harriet shifted from foot to foot then peered at her watch again. ‘Okay, I can’t do this. I have to go.’
‘Mum says you have to stay here.’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, she’s not my mother, and I have to get to work,’ and then she added, ‘If I see anything nasty, I promise to run for it.’
And with that, Harriet took two steps towards the door and shifted her weight into it. Light spilled in, followed by a gust of cool air that smelled like rain, and then she shut the door behind her, leaving us in darkness.
Sigrid stretched her legs again. Her knees clicked. She smelt like warm shampoo and the spoonful of mustard our mother made us eat every morning to stop our souls escaping. In our flat, there would never be any mustard. Not even for guests.
‘Did you hear that?’ Sigrid whispered.
‘What?’ I cocked my head to one side, listening, and heard nothing but the soft sounds of the rain. And then I caught it—a hiss, followed by a succession of sharp barks and shrieks. ‘Is that a fox?’
There were plenty around. They came into the house sometimes through the cat flap, after the cat’s food bowl. Once we’d had a pair of them come in, and they’d mated in the kitchen, screaming until Stanley chased them out with his cane.
The shrieking increased, became a long screech, and then stopped. ‘I’m sure it’s a fox.’ I said, but my voice wavered.
We sat in silence, our ears pricked, but we heard nothing further, beyond the gentle drumming of the rain against the door.
After a while, I fell asleep, and when the door finally opened, it was to a clear sky filled with brilliant, tiny stars.
I stretched and shivered as I followed Sigrid and Desma out into the fresh air. The rain had stopped, but the downpour had turned the grass sodden, and our feet made slushing sounds as they met the mud below. The white light of the moon highlighted the garden, neat and tidy, except for the space where Harriet’s tent and camping equipment spilled untidily onto the grass.
‘Where’s Harriet?’ Sigrid asked.
Desma stopped. Black was in that year, and she had dressed head to toe in black silk. Along with the sharp boniness of her nose and chin, it made her look like a predatory bird. ‘Gone.’
‘Gone where?’ Sigrid asked.
Desma shook her head, her green eyes hard and a little too intense. ‘It got her, of course. Stupid creature. Should have stayed where it was safe.’
Sigrid and I exchanged glances. We were old enough that we weren’t quite sure if we believed her. Desma’s brow furrowed. She grabbed my shoulder with one hand and Sigrid’s with the other. Her grip tightened painfully, and her long fingernails dug into my skin. ‘Just you remember what happens when you don’t listen to me.’
She herded us into the kitchen then turned her back. As she walked out, she said, ‘Eat something, then straight to bed. I don’t want to see you anywhere other than the kitchen or your bedroom. The rest of the house is off-limits until I tell you otherwise.’
Sigrid grimaced. ‘Do you think she meant the bathroom too? I really need to wee.’
‘No. That would be silly,’ I said, but Desma didn’t trust the toilet. It’s not natural to crap where you live, girls. Go outside. She always used the ancient outhouse at the end of the garden. ‘It’s just a wee. Go outside on the grass. Just in case.’
‘Ugh, that’s so gross.’
‘Then go to the bathroom.’
Sigrid looked from me to the door to the rest of the house, then evidently decided not to risk it because she disappeared out into the garden and came back looking miserable. ‘When we have our own place, we’re not even going to have grass.’
‘Yes, we will, and we’ll grow it extra long so that if Stanley ever comes past, he’ll automatically go into a rage,’ I opened the kitchen cabinet. ‘What do you want to eat?’
We settled on tinned spaghetti with toast. Stanley came in while we were eating, and went straight out back. We watched him dismantle Harriet’s tent while we ate. All her belongings went into paper bags, which he carried around to the front for the bin men to take away.
In the morning, if it weren’t for the yellowed circle of grass under the old oak, there would have been nothing to indicate she had ever been. Stanley watered and fed the grass, and after a few weeks even that was gone. I asked Desma about her again, but all my mother would say on the subject was a repeated, ‘Just you remember what happens when you don’t listen to me.’
2
In the underworld, the night sky churned with yellow smoke. It had been perfectly black under a thick layer of cloud: moonless and starless, on a street with every window blacked out and every street lamp dead and still.
Then the wail of
air raid sirens filled the air, punctuated with the thump thump of incendiary bombs. Golden light from dozens of fires brightened the night. The smoke stank of burning fabric, wood, and a horrible meaty smell my mind shied away from.
In the living world, the scars of the Blitz were mostly gone, with just a scrape on a building or a neat plaque remaining to remind the world of what had been. In the underworld, it was different. No matter how much Londoners might have put on a jolly face against death and destruction during the Blitz, their souls still knew and hadn’t forgotten.
Scenes like this were familiar. I’d spent much of my childhood and most of my adolescence exploring the underworld, and everywhere a bomb hit, everywhere someone died, a scar was left on the world of the dead. The underworld was shaped by the psyche of the dead, and the Blitz had left a scar on the underworld’s version of London as thick and permanent as any of the battles and wars that had come before it.
Harpies cluttered the pavement and the tops of the houses, their tongues extended from disturbingly humanlike faces as they sucked in the pain and anguish from the air. Water lapped at the end of the street as the tarmac became the Styx.
This part of the underworld had been Eighteen Cooper Street, when a bomb had seared a snapshot of time onto the underworld. In the living world, the entire row of houses was now gone, demolished and replaced by an anonymous office block. The houses still stood here in the world of the dead, leaning morbidly against each other.
I tried to summon the courage to step off of the pavement and up the stone steps. The last time I had stood in this same spot I’d been a child. I’d never expected to go back.
But then I’d never expected to be bitten by a zombie, either. I couldn’t go back to the land of the living. My body had turned, and the moment I returned I would no longer be myself. I’d be just another rotting and ravenous automaton.
Time flowed differently in the underworld, and I had no idea how long had passed in the world of the living, but it had been too long. I wanted back. Being dead wasn’t new. I’d been doing it all my life. Staying dead, however, was a complete pain in the rear.
The answer was in front of me. In 1942, five hags died in this house when it was hit by a German bomb, slicing a population already teetering on the brink of extinction down to two—my mother Desma, and her daughter Ana.
The hags who died were all refugees from the Continent who had fled to the relative safety of England only to die while they slept. Hags may have been creatures capable of dying at will and returning to life, but they hadn't. The damage to their bodies was too much. They were dead dead. For women who were technically immortal, we died easily enough.
By the time I was born, the house had become a magnet for long-dead hags. They had flocked to it from all over the underworld to join their sisters, where they spent their time drinking tea, gossiping, and peeping out of the net curtains to spy on the unaware dead.
The hags inside had died multiple times over their long lifetimes. One of them had to know how I could get back.
I shifted from foot to foot. Somehow just willing myself up the steps wasn’t enough to make my overly heavy feet take that single step forward. Stop being such a wuss, Vivia. They’re only hags. They’ll know how to do it. Just ask nicely.
Whether I would have chickened out again I’ll never know, because the decision was made for me. The front door flung open, and a small figure scuttled out. ‘Vivia! It’s Vivia, ladies.’
And just like that, I was surrounded by crones pinching at my skin and clothing. Mouths that had never known a toothbrush kissed my mouth, my cheeks. I kept my mouth closed, but put a smile on it.
A posse of old ladies swept me inside and into a Victorian-style parlour the size of a small ballroom. The edges of my vision shimmered as the underworld shifted to accommodate its inhabitants. My behind hit a hard chair with a painful thump.
‘Tea?’
I couldn’t see who had asked. Yeeargh. No, thanks. ‘Yes, please.’
I had been deposited in the central chair—guest of honour, so to speak—with the hags spread out in front of me in a half-moon shape. There were around fifty: all olive skinned with beak-like noses. Hags weren’t identical, but we were all very similar. Only just past thirty, I didn’t have as many warts or as much facial hair, but it was only a matter of time. I did have the hag nose.
I scanned their faces, but the one I was looking for wasn’t there. Wherever my mother had disappeared to, she wasn’t there. I allowed myself a sliver of hope that maybe she had passed over to whatever came next.
The squeak of the tea trolley announced its arrival, pushed by a sallow-skinned hag I knew as Auntie Tilde.
Tilde had been one of those who had died in the house when the bomb hit. Her name was seared into my brain, along with the four others who had died, because sometime after their deaths—and after Desma had moved to the house I’d grown up in—Ana had carved their names onto the doorframe of what was to be my bedroom door. I’d traced their names with my fingers a thousand times over the course of my childhood.
Tilde had been more than six hundred years old when she’d died, and had worked for most of her long life as a midwife. While she’d always been pleased to see me and took an interest whenever Desma and I visited, it was a morbid interest that gave me nightmares.
‘Still alive?’ she’d say. ‘Oh, I am so pleased. You’re…what…five now? That’s good. Five’s a good age to get to. What about your sister? She still alive? Good, good. The humans die so fast, especially the littles. Now, you just need to make it to ten. You’ll have a good chance once you get there. All the nasty stuff—consumption, the scarlet fever, the poxes—they carry off the little ones like you quick-quick. You grow up. Make it to ten, you hear? Tell your sister, too. Ten’s the magic number.’
I half expected her to say it again now. ‘You made it to how old before you got zombie-bit? Good, good. You made it past ten. And your sister? Really? All the way to fourteen? Well done.’
But Tilde didn’t. Instead, she lifted the teapot with a saggy arm and trickled hot liquid into doll-sized china cups. The discoloured copper teapot gave off a sour aroma. I swallowed back the urge to gag and took the proffered cup with a smile.
When every hag had her cup, drinking was allowed. Despite their near identical looks, each drank differently. Auntie Tilde threw hers back like a shot of hot tequila. I touched the rim of the teacup to my lips, careful not to let the liquid touch my skin, then set the cup, still full, back on the tea trolley. Auntie Tilde glanced at it, and then at me.
The tea ritual was important, but I knew the story of Persephone and the pomegranate seeds. I wasn’t going to get stuck in the underworld for the price of a rank cup of tea.
‘You think we’d trick you like that, girl?’ The corners of Auntie Tilde’s mouth turned up in a smirk.
I shrugged. The room had turned quiet, all eyes on me. ‘Perhaps.’ I don’t trust a single one of you.
Auntie Tilde’s eyes narrowed. ‘Drink the tea.’
‘No.’
‘You are the youngest. Do as you are told.’
‘Times have moved on, Auntie,’ I said. The rest of the hags might have come from a time when junior members of the family were expected to show absolute obedience. I hadn’t.
‘Desma was too soft with you.’
I let out an involuntary bark of laughter. ‘Not quite.’
‘You won’t drink the tea. You sit there like Little Miss Priss looking as though the sight of us makes you sick. What do you want?’
‘I don’t want to be dead anymore.’ The words came out sounding more plaintive than I’d intended. ‘I’m not properly dead. It was a zombie bite. I want to go back.’
To my surprise, she roared with laughter. ‘Who doesn’t? Being dead not good enough for you?’
‘No.’
‘You have tried going back to the living world? That should rewind your clock. Or did you just get bit and come crying to us?’
‘I died and went back. I was still a zombie. It didn’t work. ’ I had. The irony was that I’d died so many times while I’d been alive. The hag part of me made returning to life easy. Somehow it had never occurred to me to worry about the day when death would be permanent.
She gave me an up-down look. ‘Must be because you’re too young. Power comes with age. You’re still a tadpole.’
‘I’m not going to get any older if I stay dead.’
She grinned, displaying a mouth of rotten teeth. ‘All right, then. I may be able to help, but first, come with me. I want to show you something.’
The other hags melted away.
We were back on the street in front of the house. The air raid siren still wailed in that peculiar up-and-down manner that meant no matter where I was in the underworld, I could never mistake it for anything else.
A dead man, his face blackened with smoke, scuttled past me. A dead woman—some kind of shifter, to judge by the way the fire flashed yellow in her eyes—ran past him towards the public bomb shelter at the end of the street, a not-real child in her arms. Another small not-real child trotted behind her, holding the edge of the dead woman’s nightgown with one hand, thumb of the other firmly stuck in its mouth. My eyes followed the woman. Over the half century that had passed since she’d died, how many times had her spirit run down this road to safety, playing the same old scene over and over again? I deliberately put her out of my mind. There was nothing I could do to help her. She had to work through it on her own.
The whump whump of the landing bombs couldn’t be heard over the siren, but the ground jolted with each impact.
Tilde took my hand in her gnarled one, and mouthed something at me. ‘Come.’
The unlocked front door opened onto an unfamiliar hallway, and the sound of the siren diminished. The house stank—the death stink of the hag I’d been so sensitive about while alive, but multiplied by seven, along with the distinctive odour of a group of people who’d been born in a time when bathing was considered optional. I held my nose.
The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) Page 31