Crooked Daylight

by Helen Slavin

  “I think my colleague took your orders for your main courses…” Anna knew that Casey had taken the order, but something compelled her to speak.

  “I’d like to change mine…” the woman in red spoke, “I don’t want the quiche anymore… I feel more in the mood for the chicken and tarragon burger.”

  Anna nodded, and a little look seemed to ripple across the group before one of the others, a woman in cheap-looking metal glasses and a beige fleece, piped up,

  “Could I change my order of fries to new potatoes?”

  “And we’d like another bottle of wine…” The scruffy haired one lifted the empty bottle to illustrate her point.

  Anna fulfilled the orders. Each one was sent back with some complaint, too hot, too peppery, too cold, too hot, too winey, too chickeny, too tarragony. Each time Anna wandered back into the dining room there was some fresh challenge. Anna felt the thin light inside her start to fade.

  “There are only ten prawns in this salad…” This woman was effortlessly elegant, dressed head to toe in black. Anna, who had struggled along for the last hour and ten minutes, now felt a prickling at her neck.

  “Yes, it’s our calorie counted ‘light’ option,” Anna lied. The elegant woman gave her a look that Anna couldn’t quite read, at the very least she looked peeved, that was Anna’s pleased take on it. Then she looked away from Anna to the woman with the white hair as if for back up or perhaps validation.

  “How many prawns constitute a salad?” the woman with white hair and red clothing said, “I mean, is this value for money?”

  “If you want value for money I’m sure Tilly’s Snack Van will do you a lovely bacon sandwich.” Anna heard the snap in her voice and wanted, instantly, to retrieve it.

  “What did you just say?” The woman with the scruffy hair that looked as if it ought to be condemned by Environmental Health seemed to sit up straighter, her hand reached into the horrible hair to toy with a grubby looking hairpin. Anna felt herself bristle but she fought it off, smiled and stood up straighter.

  “This is the Castle Inn. We pride ourselves on local produce and paying our suppliers a fair price. They aren’t prawns by the way, if you check the menu they are in fact crayfish and they’re the destructive non-native American kind which we source from the local river where the lovely father and son fishing team of Wilson and Mac Taylor catch them for us as part of the ongoing wildlife protection project.” Her words seemed too loud and the women looked taken aback. The woman with the beige fleece spoke to her friend.

  “I think that told you, Alizon.”

  The woman, Alizon, with the white hair and red outfit, turned her gaze on the little fleece woman, and her eyes were stones. It was all Anna could do not to gasp. What a horrible woman. As she thought this Alizon’s gaze began to turn her way, there was a self-satisfied smile starting to work its way across her thin cheeks. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Anna felt her mind open up and shove against this woman. She could bully her friends if she liked, she could not bully Anna. Enough.

  “Would you care to look at the dessert menu?” Anna asked, “or shall we just busk it…” She smiled broadly. Bring it on. Whatever they asked for she felt inclined to cook, even if it turned out to be a four-hour fruit cake, let them wait. Before they had responded she handed out the dessert menu.

  They sat for a long moment looking first at the menu and then at each other.

  “I can recommend the cheesecake.” There was no cheesecake on the menu, but the women didn’t seem to notice the dig, they were staring at the menu as if it was an examination paper. After a few moments the blackly elegant woman put the menu down.

  Anna was absolutely certain now that she knew these women, not just from around town itself but connected to something particular. Anna was aware, out of the corner of her eye, that someone was sitting at another table. She was about to excuse herself and serve this new customer while the ladies took their moment with the menu, when she glanced around. There was no new customer, the table was not occupied, it was empty, cleared of cutlery and crockery, nothing on it save for a small tea stain and the vase of flowers. The flowers were dried up and desiccated looking and encircled by a ragged tangle of ivy. Anna felt laughter sparkle through her and was uneasy because the laughter, while familiar, was not her own. Grandma?

  Then it struck her, where she knew the women from, her grandmother’s funeral, the ones her mother referred to, with no affection, as the WI.

  “Ah. I remember where I’ve seen you…” Anna made herself sound very formal now and her smile was aching her face. “I am really terribly sorry… you were at my grandmother’s funeral. Hettie Way? …I do apologise… I didn’t recognise you all at first.” Anna smiled, feeling a little triumphant, that she had, somehow, got one over on them. It was an odd, out of kilter feeling and at the edge of her vision her grandmother’s ghostly black waxed raincoat creaked a little into their silence.

  “You are the Woodcastle WI aren’t you?” Anna continued. All eyes were upon her, none of them blinked and they looked caught out, shamed. She wanted them to leave. Now. Instantly. Go. There was a cool sharpness to the air and Anna’s mind glinted with an image of a freshly whetted kitchen knife. She held herself inside the blade of it, steely and edged. The small beigey woman seated nearest to Anna reached to her throat with a slightly shaky hand.

  “We’ve never been formally introduced.” The woman in the red dress spoke up but the effortlessly elegant one reached for her arm and stopped her.

  “Time to go,” said Elegant, and she grabbed up her bag from the floor.

  “We should go now,” the one with the terrible hair almost whispered as she stood up from the table. Within a very few seconds they were all hurrying towards Lella at the bar, scrabbling in bags and pockets for cash to settle the bill.

  Later, Lella sat at the kitchen island as they nursed a pot of coffee. The dining room and bar were both empty and had been for a few hours. Even their own bed and breakfast guests had dined elsewhere.

  “All courtesy of that bloody ‘Booze and a Bite’ two-for-one offer at the leisure park. Well… we might as well close up a little early.” She was despondent.

  “We’ve been doing well this month…” Anna tried to cheer her boss, it was always a hard task, Lella had a dark outlook on the world.

  “Hey… whatever… I can always take my brother up on his offer of that kebab van…” Lella gave her brightest smile.

  In her current mood Anna was prepared to start a kebab van right now just to put off the moment of heading home. There would be no one in. Emz had gone to a party and Anna was not sure what plans Charlie might have made. She knew that she was not, at the moment, capable of heading home to spend the evening alone. She had felt unsettled all evening and hoped it had not leeched into the food she’d prepared. In an ideal world she might have gone up to Cob Cottage, lit the fire and sat out on the porch. She could, before their grandmother’s pagan funeral, have walked along the jetty and taken the boat out. She liked to be on the water at night, with the soft white of her grandmother’s lantern. In the light of recent events Anna thought she might just drive over to the cottage anyway and check that everything was okay. She didn’t have to disturb Seren Lake at all. In fact, if she left the car she could take the walk that she’d suggested for Seren, she had a key for the gate. Decision made, she felt better. She would just need to collect the torch from the back of her car.

  When she had arrived at work that morning the car park had been overcrowded and so Anna had once again parked outside her own house at 3 Keep Rows. She had no intention of going into the house this time, had put in place her usual protocol, looked away at the jogger chugging by, but the parking space was useful.

  As she walked up through town she felt the Hallowe’en anniversary of her husband and son’s deaths looming like a dark gate. It was twisted inside her, the idea of her grief that seemed everlasting twined with the notion that once a year had passed then something would alter, there woul
d be a shift. The grief she felt was not going to be the black hole that it had been. The idea of that made her sadder and yet part of her reached for the necessary relief of that moment.

  She ought to decide what to do with the house. She knew for an absolute fact that she did not want, indeed she’d proved this week that she could not, live there any longer. She’d thought about selling but had not had the energy to pursue that, nor, if she was honest, the will to part with it. Now, as she walked up the hill, she wondered about renting the house out as they were doing with Cob Cottage. She would retain the link to it but someone would be living there, which is what the house needed. What had happened was not the house’s fault. As she approached she saw how unloved it looked, a far cry from the cosy warmth that it was capable of.

  She made the decision there and then as she reached for the torch in the back of her car, tomorrow she would head over and see the estate agent.

  Armed with the torch, Anna walked back along Keep Rows towards the main road and turned up the hill towards Old Castle Road. Her route was taking her past the Chapel. Once again, her mind rattled about, picking out a memory of the last time she had been inside the chapel. Raised voices. A memory that deserved to be burned.

  * * *

  “Buy it?” Calum spat the words out. “What are you talking about?”

  He had talked about moving out of Keep Rows, of finding somewhere bigger now that their family was increasing. Anna had argued that a baby did not take up very much room. Calum had put forward the idea of moving out of Woodcastle, they had driven past the new housing estate at the Castle Hill side of Castlebury, a relocation, Anna discovered, suggested by his parents. The marketing suite made it seem desirable, the portfolio of plans and pictures idealising everything, the lovely life you could lead if only you lived at Mill Rush. It had seemed like a bleak Lego town to Anna.

  “You starting a religion or something?” He was being wilfully obtuse about it.

  “No. You know what I mean. It’s got… possibilities, potential…”

  “Woodworm.” He picked a crust of fallen plaster from the nearby table. Anna ignored him.

  “Buy it. Convert it.” Anna offered the idea of the chapel up. “There’s planning permission… or it would be easy to get it… apparently…”

  The chapel was very beautiful inside despite the water damage. It smelled of the damp but rather than lend to an idea of mouldering plaster it smelt different, more elemental. Was it soil after rain? Fresh and earthy? Anna found herself breathing the scent in deep. Inside her the as yet unborn Ethan had wriggled and kicked, comfortably.

  A series of slightly battered lantern lights hung from the ceiling. Anna took a few steps back along the aisle to the rear pew, her hand reached to smooth over the oak and there was a scent of beeswax.

  “You’ve planned this out then…” Calum hardly took another step, his nose wrinkling at the building.

  “I just thought… we should look at all the options… we could stay in Woodcastle… it’s an easy move.”

  Calum gave a short, barking laugh that bit into Anna.

  “Anna. It’s a pit. We’re not buying a pit.”

  “We could make it ours.”

  Calum gave a further scornful laugh, picked his way back the very few steps he had ventured inside.

  “We could. Yes. It’s a church, I’m sure there’s a miracle around here somewhere…” He kicked some fallen plaster out of his way and gave a nasty smile. “We could. But we’re not going to.” He pulled at the door. Where before it had squeaked open, now it remained closed. Calum turned and glared at her.

  “Stop it.” His voice was a hard snarl.

  “What?” Anna felt fluttered inside, not just the baby, something else, nearer her heart, as elemental as the earth and water scent. Truth. Certainty. Knowing. Calum’s face, the door as immoveable as a stone. Calum stepped back. Anna recalled how the sky rolled grey past the high windows where now there was the waning moon shining a cold spotlight. “What?” She watched herself repeating the question and knowing the answer. Lying into the answer.

  “Just stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Doing it. The thing. Your thing. Your angry thing.” Calum’s voice was snipping the phrases. “Your Rosemary’s Baby thing that you are doing.”

  There was a moment between them. Then the door opened with a groan.

  Real Time Here and Now Anna took in a dusty gasp of air at the recollection. Her mind flickered into long forgotten places and she felt a low tide of unease. Anna thought of the sky darkening on the day of her grandmother’s funeral, she thought of just now, of the odd exchanges in the Castle Inn with the WI ladies and she knew, absolutely and utterly knew that she had done something, had pulled some power from inside herself. The thing. Your thing.

  That was when she recalled her grandmother, years ago, she had talked not of power, but of strengths, she had been keen to stress to them that they all three had strengths and must use them. The unease was not coming from that recollection. The unease was from another source.

  As she looked into the body of the abandoned chapel the shadows moved, creaky with black waxed raincoat, a familiar splash of grey hair. The unease grew and along with the ghost of her grandmother came the stab of an image, the man in the woods. The same moon reflected on the lake water. A warning. The chapel door squeaked.

  As Anna walked down the path through the gravestones it was as if all the bones beneath turned to face her, to see her safely to the gate, and they knew where she was going.

  Havoc Wood.

  19

  Wait

  Seren Lake had scratched herself to pieces on the race back to Pike Lake from the encounter with the man in the suit. She fled, there was no other word to describe how she had run from the castle, her jacket snagging on the barrier so that she felt the seam tear at the sleeve.

  On through the town she ran, dodging into the road to avoid the other market goers who cluttered her path. Horns blared panic. Brakes screeched at her distress. Her heart drumming, her lungs scouring every last puff of breath from themselves, powering her towards the hill, towards the gate and still she did not stop.

  She had sense enough to lock the gate behind her and then she continued to run, through the shrubs and bushes and beneath the trees, through the nettles and brambles which tore at her clothes, scratched at her skin so that, by the time she had run to the edge of the lake, she was spotted with blood, her clothes ripped and ruined, her feet sliding out of her shoes, her shoulders shrugging off her jacket, her dress, and she was naked and sliding into the black-deep blue-cold of the water and swimming, swimming, swimming. Cob Cottage was ahead of her, resting on the rise above the water and with each stroke she felt stronger, the water soothing her, sluicing off the panic and fear.

  Striking out, she let the movement roll her over in the water, droplets fell like tears across her face and the sun and sky were distorted beyond them, prismatic and beautiful. Her place. This was her place. Her hand dipped down through the depths and pushed her forwards, her feet kicking against the cold clamour of liquid. Every stroke, every splash drew her further away from her fear. Her place. This place was hers.

  At the shore by Cob Cottage Seren Lake pulled herself onto the pebbles and lay there, drying in the chill September sun. She could feel the surface of each pebble, some smoothed, some roughened and new, others nibbled and chipped, and they felt as comfortable as skin, as precious as jewels.

  After a while she sat up. Her head was clear, and she could revisit and analyse the encounter with the man in the castle.

  He would not have been sent to search for her. He was not an emissary. This much she felt assured of. He was, she could guess, nothing at all to do with her. It was just that her fears had skewed her sense. He’d been a stranger, disconnected and only her mind had forged a link. She was waiting to be hunted. He would not have been sent, she understood that Tighe would come for her himself. Yes. She was certain of that too.r />
  She thought about the man in the castle, his stiff manner and his strange speech. He’d only managed to freak her out because of her current mental state. Sitting on the shore, cooled by the water, she laughed to herself. He was going to tell her something about the castle, that was all, probably lonely, or bonkers about history, or the castle, or both. Her mind was starting to rattle so she took in a deep breath of lake air.

  She considered her own actions of late. She had let her guard down by wandering into town. She wasn’t on holiday after all and she ought to remember that she needed to still be vigilant, although she could not imagine how Tighe would ever find her here. She had no links or ties to Woodcastle. It was very far away from where she had set out. She had abandoned her phone and she’d used only cash. She’d cleared her computer.

  She moved inside the cottage. She was hungry now and thought about the bag filled with market goodies that she’d dropped on her flight from the castle. If she rummaged she could salvage some of the welcome basket bread and cake that she’d shoved into the fridge. She listened to the kettle boil as she munched cake.

  Calmed and feeling safer, Seren felt that the only edge to her fresh feelings was that she considered the fact that she might not be able to stay at Cob Cottage indefinitely. She had already checked her savings and wondered if the Way sisters had a booking for the following week or, if possible, weeks, and as she pottered around the cottage she wondered if they might consider a longer let. It was unlikely that the winter months would bring them lots of business. Perhaps she could put it to them that way. She could find a job locally.