Crooked Daylight

by Helen Slavin

  He’d wanted a drink and there was a new bar at the marina that he wanted to go to and Charlie thought of the inside of his car as they had travelled there, its deep heavy seats set so far down into the bodywork that she could barely see through the windows. It smelt of leather and Aron was, as usual, cloaked in aftershave.

  But then a few drinks later he kissed her and when he did that she was seventeen again and everything that was broken and scary right now fell away and Aron was her place of safety.

  Except. Except. She was looking out onto the marina and in the shiny white light everything felt broken and scary once more. It was a box, this flat of his, harsh and angled and echoey.

  She thought of all the times she had sat in the kitchen at Cob Cottage. Her grandmother, turning from the range, a tray of cinnamon buns clattering hot on to the scrubbed table.

  “Charlie.” Her grandmother’s voice, clear as a bell beside her. She turned. Her shoes were on the floor, she just had to step into them.

  * * *

  “She was skinny dipping?”

  It was breakfast time and Charlie had not slept very well last night. She’d ended up dropping off on the sofa in the living room and woken up with a stiff neck. In that mood she’d then had to listen to all the news from her sisters and she was feeling left out, especially hurt by the idea that they had played Cry Wolf without her.

  “Is that all you got from what we just told you?” Anna laughed. Charlie was beginning to prefer the other grieving Anna, the one who hardly spoke anymore.

  “I’m just saying. You told her not to swim in the lake. Anyway…” She was trying not to show the hurt. “What do you want to do about this perv?”

  “We might already have frightened him off.” Emz suggested. She had one eye on the clock, there was an in-service day at the school and so she had promised Winn she’d come over to Prickles.

  Charlie shook her head.

  “Not if he’s keen you won’t. We should definitely go and see if we can find his stash of stuff. If he comes back and that’s gone then that might add to the fear factor or at least piss him off enough to send him packing. Other than that…” She sipped at her orange juice. It was sour.

  “Other than that what?” Anna pushed.

  “He’s a perv. Pervs are persistent.”

  “In your experience.” Anna turned away to the sink and did not see the glare that Charlie shot across the room to her. Charlie chose not to react to the jibe.

  “We could head over there on the way to work.” She was already shifting from her mother’s ridiculous kitchen stool, longing to hide in the hot water of the shower.

  * * *

  “We could just knock on the door and tell her what’s been going on.” Charlie and Anna were trudging back through Havoc Woods. They had found nothing, the man had beaten them to the stash and his hiding place was bare, the leaves scraped over as if to hide the evidence. Anna did not feel uneasy and took this as a sign that he was not in the wood but still, she and Charlie were careful not to be seen.

  “We could. But I think that would just scare her.”

  “And him just rocking up on the doorstep stark naked wouldn’t?” Charlie’s reasoning was blunt. Anna considered.

  “Okay. I take your point. But I wanted to soften the blow.”

  They took the basket of buns from the back of Charlie’s car and approached the door. The cottage looked quiet. They waited for a minute or so before knocking the second time. Charlie sat down on the battered chair that sat by the back door. It felt comfortable. If she could just rest here for the rest of the day, if she could…

  “Have you got the key?” she asked Anna who was peering in through the door.

  “Yes. But that’s an intrusion isn’t it?” She knocked again, slightly louder.

  “And Mr Perv popping his penis through the letterbox isn’t?” Charlie pinched one of the buns from the basket and looked out across the garden. The blackberry bushes were heavy laden, the berries like dark garnets. She was certain she could smell them even above the lush scent of cinnamon from Anna’s baking.

  “She might have gone for a walk I suppose…” Anna stepped closer to the door, pressed her face against the dimpled glass. She was thinking how beautiful the green of the glass was, remembering the day they had all put the panes in, spending weeks collecting the oddments of glass from all over Woodcastle. Skip diving had been fun with Grandma Hettie. “I could pop back later…”

  “We could wait a few minutes…” Charlie could hear the breeze rustling through the blackberries.

  “I’ll just pop round to the front… see if I can see her… you coming?” Anna asked.

  “In a sec…” Charlie stepped towards the blackberry bushes.

  She had a carrier bag rolled up in her jacket pocket and she began to pack it with berries. By the time she had taken leave of Anna and the basket of buns, with a promise that Anna would pop up to Cob Cottage again in her break, Charlie had several pounds of berries in plastic bags and, finally, the basket that Anna had packed with buns.

  “What are you going to do with them?” Anna asked.

  “Ferment them.” Charlie drove, her mood lifting with every breath she took of the blackberries from Cob Cottage.

  * * *

  Inside Cob Cottage, Seren Lake came out of her hiding place in the bedroom and wondered what the Way sisters had wanted.

  14

  Velvet Night

  The deer, it appeared, had leapt the fence in the night. Emz had gone to the recovery pens to check it out and feed it and it was gone. Vanished.

  “Must be feeling better then,” was all Winn said and, when Emz telephoned Lucie at the surgery, she agreed.

  “Wouldn’t worry about it. You know how high a deer can leap, Emz. And the stitches will dissolve.”

  Emz felt stupidly sentimental about the deer, found herself standing at the fence looking out into the wood beyond and wondering where the animal might have run to. She didn’t usually get so fluffy bunny about the creatures, so she knew her period must be headed her way. She could already sense the way that the volume was turning up on everything. Like this morning with Charlie and Anna, the sparks that flickered from Charlie and the black butterflies that fluttered around Anna.

  Emz cleared the pen before heading inside to make their first mug of tea of the day. As she waited for the kettle to boil she put her hands into her fleece pockets to warm them up. It was distinctly chilly today. She’d thought about the Cob Cottage woman, Seren, skinny dipping in Pike Lake. They were never to swim in the lake, Grandma Hettie had always been very strict on that point. They had always taken that as a fact, Grandma Hettie had been the kind of grown up that you believed in. She had never once, for instance, said “just because I say so” as an answer to why they couldn’t do something. Plus, there was the fact that she let them do all manner of other things that their mother thought dangerous. They had all learnt how to kill, skin and butcher a rabbit for instance. Grandma Hettie had a reason for everything. Emz recalled the phrase black-deep, blue-cold and as she said the words in her head there was a sense of floating, of slowing, of sinking, so intense that she quickly shifted her thoughts.

  If she was being honest she did not like the fact that someone else lived at Cob Cottage, even for a week. She felt twisted by it. Little bubbles of memory of confetti and flowers, of her nephew Ethan’s scrunched and new-born face surfaced and rippled across her. Everything had changed since last October and Emz felt exposed, as if there was nowhere to find shelter. As her left hand dug deeper into her pocket she felt something metal. She pulled it out. It was the shard they had taken out of the deer. She ran her fingertips over the edges of it, careful of its sharpness. She was lucky it hadn’t cut a hole in her pocket. The metal had a lustrous grey sheen to it, as if light was shining on it, quite pretty, for something so imbued with violence. She zipped it back into her pocket.

  “Tea,” Emz announced, putting Winn’s mug on the end of the table. Winn looked u
p from her task, her face pinched and hard. Emz was about to take a sip of her own drink.

  “You haven’t time to drink that. There’s a bird trapped in the High Hide. Go and deal with it.”

  * * *

  It was no small task to remove the blackbird from the hide. Emz opened all the shutters and stood by the door waving her arms to try and push the bird through to the daylight. It flapped wildly into each corner and crack of the hide, blackberry-stained shit splattered on the benches, smeared down the walls and Emz had not thought to bring the bucket and the mop. The bird was panicked. Emz stood still for a few moments as the bird huddled itself into the cobwebbed rafters. There was no one around this morning, she could stay here for a while, until the bird stopped panicking, found its own way out. She looked at the windows, the view out across Cooper’s Pond. She thought of taking the bird in her hand, setting it gently free, imagined her fingers around its delicate skeleton, the feathers, sheened and black, that bright eye. As she thought of the bright eye of the bird it seemed to turn its head towards her… this way… and, as the thought formed, the bird opened its wings to the air and skittered out through the farthest shutter. Emz took a moment, wondered how that might feel, to burst out into the sky like that.

  She was halfway up the path, on her way back to reception to grab the mop and bucket, when she saw the movement from the corner of her eye. Something dark, shifting through the trees where he shouldn’t be. A man.

  Emz didn’t know why she wasn’t afraid. Instead she felt wired, like a cat about to catch itself a mouse. She moved carefully through the trees keeping herself downwind of him. He was heading down to the far edge of Cooper’s Pond to where the fire road cut in. Emz followed.

  He’d made himself a makeshift camp in the old backpacker hut. Emz watched him as he clicked through the display on his camera, a heavy object with a massive lens. Once again, she’d left her binoculars behind, but she could tell what he was looking at by his expression and the way he was laughing to himself, his tongue just greedily visible at his lips. His hair was shaved to military perfection and once again the scent of his bitter aftershave wafted to her.

  She headed back to reception. She could text Anna and Charlie although she was not sure what they could do about the man.

  There was a strong smell of cat food in the workroom. There had been a number of hedgehogs brought in over the last couple of days and Winn was busy dishing out meaty chunks. Winn handled the hedgehogs, they were her favourite, almost, Emz thought, her obsession.

  “Can you report someone to the police for being a peeping Tom?” Emz asked as she tapped at her phone. Winn looked over at her.

  “Is he still there?” Winn sounded angry.

  “Is who still where?” Emz looked at her boss.

  “The Milk Tray Man? Well… I hope he gets gnawed by rats in that backpacker hut. Serve him right the bloody nuisance.” Winn was getting a spitty mouth, she always did when she was livid.

  “Milk Tray Man?”

  “Yes. All dressed in black, skinhead, one of those idiotic monster truck cars… Had to tow him out of the mud yesterday. What an arse.”

  “You knew he was in the woods?”

  “Of course. There’s always some sad sack lurking in the hut when it’s a full moon.”

  Emz was confused. Her mind had been full of the perv and, it seemed, Winn knew about him, but she wasn’t sure where Winn was going with this conversation.

  “I don’t know what you mean… who’s lurking? What about the full moon?” But Emz’s words fell on deaf ears, Winn was heading into a rant. Her favourite kind of conversation.

  “As for the police… well why waste your time? What a pair of jokers they are… Plus…” Winn scraped out the last of the cat food into the very last bowl “…I think if you and your friends want to get your tits out in the moonlight…”

  Emz was bewildered by this.

  “Me? My friends? What?” But Winn was in full flow, the cat food spoon waving around now to emphasise her point, sending little dribbles of gravy across the floor.

  “… Then you can’t really complain if some sex-starved wanker wants to take a look? Hmm? I mean, there’s a public footpath up to the Sisters.”

  Emz was struggling to sort all the information.

  “The Sisters?”

  Winn was loading her vast tin tray ready to do the rounds in the infirmary. She looked impatient.

  “The Sisters… the stone circle up by Horse Hill. Oh, for Christ’s sake Emily Way you do go round with a bag on your head. We’ll sort this and then I’ll show you.”

  * * *

  It took Winn and Emz just over half an hour to walk from the pens at Prickles up through the plantation to the bottom of Horse Hill. For a woman in her late seventies Winn walked with considerable confidence. She had her staff with her to aid her balance but the way in which she bounded and strode, jumped and stretched made Emz out of breath. A stile was nothing to Winn, her tweed skirt, her preferred outfit, in no way holding her back.

  “Oh, bloody hiking pants… bugger hiking pants, they climbed Everest in bloody tweed Emz, I think I can get to Horse Hill and back.”

  The trees here thinned out, the plantation ending in a firebreak and then there were elms and oaks and in a clearing at the base of Horse Hill stood the ring of stones.

  In all her walks through Leap Woods, Emz had never encountered the ring of stones. She was shocked now as she walked round. She’d lived all her life in Woodcastle and never known about them. How? Her grandmother had taken her and her sisters to every place that was special or important or interesting.

  “Not real of course.” Winn tapped at one with her stick. “My father put them in in the twenties, when he was excavating for the bathing pond at Hartfield Hall. He chiselled them out of the old grotto and he needed to get rid of course… genius idea this… brought a few tourists in over the years, ‘mysterious ancient stone circle’ and all that. And then of course it drew the bloody Wiccan lot.”

  Emz walked the circle with Winn.

  “Lovely spot though… have to admit…” Winn halted to look up at Horse Hill and breathed in deep.

  * * *

  Anna had been caught up in thoughts of Seren and the lake and the cottage. It had been hard for her to drag herself away when she’d gone up there with Charlie and the chocolate muffins left over from the afternoon teas had just seemed too good an excuse not to use. The real draw, she understood very clearly, was the cottage itself. The simple fact was that she breathed more easily the second she hit the dirt track that led there.

  So, armed with another batch of baked goods, this time the chocolate muffins, Anna tried once more to contact their guest.

  And failed.

  As she turned down the side of Cob Cottage to head to the lake, Anna knew absolutely that Seren Lake was inside the house. It was almost as though she could see her inside Cob Cottage, hiding. She had known it on her visit this morning with Charlie, she had felt Seren Lake standing in the bedroom, had seen the way the sunlight shafted through the curtain, how Seren Lake had focused all her attention upon that.

  And yet. She couldn’t know that. Could she?

  She should be able to answer that question with a simple no, but the problem for Anna of late was that the answers were no longer simple. She had seen Seren inside the house, pictured clearly. An informative image. It was a fact, not a fancy.

  Ever since this Lake woman had arrived it had felt to Anna as if her mind was coming loose. No. She could take it back further than that, this process had begun last October, and it was Grandma Hettie’s death that had really sealed matters. She was unsettled because there was something about the openness of her mind, the lack of boundaries it seemed to have sometimes, that was familiar. Despite the lingering black cloud of her grief there were other times when she felt that her head was clear, that she was thinking more sharply than she ever had, as if something had been crushing her before and now it lifted its weight from her and she�
�d taken in a proper breath.

  She walked to the Lake and stood at the very edge, the water almost licking at her boots. Almost. She thought of their Grandmother’s taboo on swimming here. She had said something else a long time ago, a story she had told that was folded into Anna’s head somewhere. She would remember eventually. She watched the water, felt the coldness and wondered at how at home Seren Lake seemed to be in its icy hands. She took a step nearer, the pebbles shifting and rolling under her feet as if they were trying to push her back. She halted. The feeling was definite, grouped in with those instincts that had been bursting and frothing to her surface lately.

  Grandma Hettie had a reason. Something Grandma Hettie knew. Anna settled on a rock and took off her boots, peeled off her socks. The breeze was instantly cold against her skin and she knew it was warning her, but she pushed on, rolled up her work trousers and took a step into the water. If it had ever held any summer warmth it had vanished, and the water was indeed, black-deep, blue-cold.

  Anna took careful steps, moving ankle deeper to where the stones were bigger and smoother. It seemed for a moment as if all she could hear was the lapping water, the sound increasing around her until in a terrible breathless moment she felt submerged. As she looked out across the landscape the sky flooded with black water, the trees were no longer trees but weed scrabbling for her, clawing at her like fingers and the stones were skulls mapped by cracks, eels slithered from eye sockets and then a siren wailed out and broke the spell of the lake at once.

  Anna was soaked by the time she had rushed the few careless steps back to dry land. There were blue lights moving like satellites along the road, little starbursts visible through the furthest line of trees and the sirens took a gasping breath as they negotiated the roundabout and turned towards Castlebury. The sound scraped at her, sent her memory spooling and she needed to sit down, on the flat rock but Anna knew if she did she would never get up again. She needed to get to work.