by Stephen King
Linzi caught hold of her elbows and gave herself a small hug. Wasn’t it just like him to grumble and pretend he wasn’t doing what she wanted? Not that she wanted to see the horrible old dead thing again … and, in fact, as the car slowed and then stopped when the track ran out, she prayed to whatever powers there might be that J.D. was right, and she’d been scared by an abandoned stolen shop-window mannequin or a crash-test dummy.
‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’
She looked at his proud smile and remembered what the dead man had pushed out of her mind.
‘Come on,’ he said, not waiting for her reply. ‘Let me show you round our new home.’ He hopped out and, with the courtliness that had won her heart, opened her door for her.
She fixed a pleased smile on her face, but he must have picked up a hint of her true feelings because he said, sounding defensive, ‘Of course it doesn’t look like much now, but use your imagination. Think of all the stuff you can plant. Landscape the holy shit out of it. Whatever you like; I’ll pay.’
Tentatively, she tried to explain her unease: ‘I thought we’d have neighbours …’
‘Who the fuck wants neighbours? You said you wanted a house in the country.’
‘Yes, yes, I did; I do. But I didn’t think it would be so far away from everything—’
‘It’s the country. And it’s not far – what, twenty minutes from Norwich? You must have seen the village signposted, two miles that way for post office, pub and primary school.’
At that reminder of the children they’d have someday she melted against him. ‘Oh, honey, I’m not complaining! How could I, when I’ve got you? I was just surprised. I was imagining a new development.’
‘You know I hate those ticky-tacky estates.’ He relaxed in her embrace. ‘Would Madam like the grand tour?’
They walked over land that was rough but not boggy, as the fields had appeared from the car window. She saw the boundary markers – poles sporting fluorescent orange plastic tags – and then came upon a pile of rubble and a concrete slab.
‘What’s this?’
‘What’s left of the house that used to be here. Why’d you think we’ve got planning permission to build a new one?’
‘What happened to the old house?’
‘I think it burnt down, I don’t know, twenty years ago. Before that there were cottages. People have always lived here. You might not think to look at it, but it’s actually on a rise, higher than the marshes out there. And the soil is a different composition, not marshy, so we can plant what we like. And we’re never going to have to worry about other houses going up either side, because who’d build on a bog? We won’t have noisy neighbours, or nosy ones popping over every five minutes, complaining that our leylandii is blocking their view, wanting to borrow the hedge-trimmer, giving you the eye …’
As he worked himself up into a rant she had heard before, staring out at the bleak, blank, featureless plain where the only other life to be seen was in the cars and lorries thundering past, Linzi felt a tremor of doubt. Those things he complained about were leftovers from his past in the suburbs with ‘that cheating bitch’. Did their life have to be defined always in reaction to his first marriage?
‘Are you cold?’ Noticing her sadness, J.D. became tender. He took his coat off and wrapped it around her. ‘That wind has teeth. We’ll have to plant a line of trees over there as a windbreak, and a hedge on that side, to screen us from nosy buggers staring out of their windows as they drive past. Come on, back to the car now.’
Going back, she couldn’t see anything unusual in the ditch. There was nothing in the local news the next day about a body being found, and the next time they drove out east on the A47 she couldn’t even identify the spot where she’d thought she’d seen it.
Building soon got started, and a few weeks later, J.D. stopped by the property one evening and took pictures with his phone, sharing them with Linzi when he got home. She made admiring noises until the final picture, when the sound stuck in her throat.
‘What— What’s that?’
‘A side view—’
‘I mean down in front, the left-hand corner, that thing.’
He peered at the screen. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘It looks like—’ But she found she didn’t want to say it looked like a dead body, a wizened naked man lying on his side, so she just pointed. ‘There.’
‘Oh. Not sure. Pile of sticks and some weeds, maybe. The light was going. Waste of space, that one.’ With the touch of a button, he deleted it.
A few days later, Linzi accompanied her husband to the building site. She was surprised at how quickly everything had changed, how different the space looked now that there was the frame of a house at the centre of it. She was also a little taken aback by how much clutter there was everywhere. Much of it was equipment and building materials, or the discarded packaging for those things, but there were also food wrappings, plastic bottles, beer cans, even the odd item of clothing – a white T-shirt, a single shoe – suggesting the workers considered the space outside the house a general dumping ground. It was easy to imagine some accumulation of trash appearing in dim light like a body, and she abandoned her plan to search for the object that had created such a disturbing impression in the picture and instead clung to her husband’s arm and listened to his description of how the work was progressing.
At one time Linzi had made good money dancing in a club – it was where she had met J.D. – but he couldn’t stand the thought of other men seeing her naked, so now she worked at Tesco. It wouldn’t be too bad as a part-time job when her kids were in school, she thought, but a year into her marriage she still wasn’t pregnant and she was getting impatient. The doctor said there was no obvious reason why she shouldn’t conceive in due course, but if she wasn’t content to wait and see, the next step would be to check her husband’s sperm count. Well able to imagine how J.D. would respond to that suggestion, Linzi decided to explore other options first.
She’d heard there was a woman in Lowestoft who had studied all the old traditional ways to increase fertility. First, she read your cards, then she’d advise on the most propitious times for conception and would make up a special herbal tea or a list of vitamin and mineral food supplements based on what the cards revealed. So Linzi made an appointment, and drove down there on her next afternoon off.
The address was in one of the rundown terraced houses across the road from the big parking lot on the seafront. The woman’s name was Maeve, and she had a blousy, sun-tanned, gypsyish look: Celtic motif tattoos, hennaed hair, big silver jewellery. She took twenty quid off Linzi before leading her in to a cramped, over-furnished sitting room that smelled of cats and sandalwood incense, where they sat facing each other across a small table.
‘You want a baby,’ Maeve announced. ‘You have been trying and failing to fall pregnant. Your husband … no, don’t tell me, darling … is older than you. You are his second … third … wife. Don’t tell me, I will tell you. You are very keen to start a family, but he, perhaps … no, he is also keen. But his children … no, no, of course, he has no children. I see that. But the reason … Let’s see what the cards have to say.’
She opened a wooden box, removed a velvet bag from it, and a deck of cards from that, which she shuffled. She told Linzi to take three cards from the deck and lay them out face-up.
These were not the brightly coloured tarot cards Linzi had expected. Instead, each one offered a murky black and white image like a bad reproduction of a very old photograph, and it was hard to make any sense of them at first glance.
One card showed a dancer, a man who was naked except for a belt tied loosely around his waist and a close-fitting cap on his head, caught mid-pirouette, balancing on one pointed foot, the other leg bent at the knee, arms folded behind his back. His eyes were closed and he was calmly smiling.
The second card had a picture of a woman with a dog’s body – or a pregnant bitch with a woman’s hea
d. The female face was fixed in a blank, upwards stare, mouth gaping open as if to swallow the object of her gaze, a large silver egg suspended just above her head.
The third card involved a great number of knives and a bleeding body. Before she could make out anything more, Maeve had scooped up all three and returned them to the deck which she cut and shuffled feverishly, muttering, ‘That’s bad. Very bad.’
‘Shall I try again?’ Linzi asked meekly.
The woman shot her a venomous glare. ‘He won’t give you a baby.’
‘You mean J.D.?’
‘Don’t let him trick you.’
‘Are you talking about my husband?’
‘You shouldn’t have married him if you weren’t prepared to be faithful.’
‘I am faithful!’ She stared at the fortune-teller, outraged. ‘I haven’t slept with anyone but J.D., not since our very first date!’
‘“Slept with”. So oral sex doesn’t count.’ The woman sneered at her. ‘You can’t lie to me. You’ve been unfaithful to your man once, and the cards show it happening again.’
She felt the blood drain from her head and saw little starry spots in the darkness. The bad thing. How did she know? ‘I didn’t … I wasn’t … I wasn’t cheating on him. Do the cards tell you why?’
Maeve put the cards away. ‘I don’t care why. That’s your problem. But I see what’s coming, and it’s not good. It would be very bad for you to cheat on your husband, especially with that one.’
‘I’m not going to cheat on J.D. – I love him! I came here because I thought you were going to help us have a baby. Can’t you make me some tea, prescribe some herbs and vitamins?’
Maeve stood up and began to move towards the door. ‘I won’t help you with fertility until you sort out this problem with your husband. You’ll have to decide what you want: this marriage, or something else.’
Linzi remained stubbornly in her seat, twisting around to face the other woman. ‘I want this marriage. And a baby. Are you saying I can’t? Not have J.D.’s baby? That he’s sterile? Please, you have to tell me. I have a right to know.’
Maeve sighed and stopped in the doorway, playing with one of the heavy silver chains hanging from her neck. ‘Your husband won’t give you a baby. And the other one can’t.’
‘What “other one”? There is no man in my life but J.D. I swear.’
The woman responded with a hard, contemptuous stare. ‘You have to leave now.’
Linzi’s feeling of shock had faded, and now she just felt indignant. Twenty quid for that! Not a proper reading, one little incident, taken out of context, misunderstood … it was an insult. Maeve might have some kind of psychic talent, to have picked up something, but she’d got it completely wrong.
The bad thing. She thought about it again as she waited for a gap in the traffic that would allow her to cross the street. They never talked about it, but it had cast a shadow over their relationship, and it haunted J.D., a ghost roused every time he had a flash of jealousy over some harmless incident.
But he had no right to feel jealous. Maeve had misunderstood, but J.D. knew perfectly well she hadn’t been cheating on him – she’d only sucked that cop’s dick so J.D. wouldn’t lose his licence.
She’d felt his desperation; she knew as well as he what it would mean. So, a quick, wordless transaction: I’ll do you, and you won’t do him.
He could have stopped it with a word or a look, but he hadn’t. And he had been grateful, at least until his gratitude had soured into resentment. She didn’t expect thanks – she would have preferred they pretend it never happened – but why couldn’t he understand that when you loved someone as she loved him, no sacrifice was too great?
In her dream Linzi plaited narrow strips of leather into a strong, flexible cord, which became a noose around the tanned and weathered neck of a man who wore nothing else except a soft cap made of animal hide and a flat leather belt loose around his middle. She woke up with the image vivid in her mind, understanding that the ‘dancer’ she’d seen on the fortune-teller’s card was the hanged man.
As the house drew closer to completion, Linzi felt more and more unhappy about the prospect of moving into it. Although the house itself was not the problem – that was turning out to be even better than she’d dared to imagine; you’d have to be crazy to prefer any of the flats she’d ever occupied, or the small end-of-terrace ex-council house that she’d grown up in. She didn’t think she was crazy. She hadn’t seen anything that looked like a dead body for months, but the creepy black and white picture on the fortune teller’s card had merged in her memory with the body she’d seen in the ditch and become an ominous presence that she sensed lying in wait for her, just out of sight, every time they took the turning off the A47 and headed for what J.D. already called their home.
It was impossible to tell him she didn’t want to live there, especially not when he was looking forward to it so much, and had put so much money and effort into it. So they moved in, and she told herself she would soon get used to it.
The first week in the new house was something like a second honeymoon. J.D. took a week off work so they could take their time settling in. They hardly went anywhere, except to the village for supplies, or meals in the pub; the days passed in a pleasurable round of companionable work as they sanded and painted and moved things around, and their nights were filled with sex both vigorous and tender. Linzi had never seen her husband so completely happy. He thought she was nervy only because pregnancy still eluded her, and kept encouraging her to relax.
Mostly, as long as J.D. was around, Linzi did manage to relax. She felt safe enough in their new house, looking inwards, happiest when the curtains shut out any sight of the featureless marshes that surrounded them, and she left all the outdoor chores to her husband, having found that no matter what direction she was facing, she was plagued by the uncomfortable sensation that someone was creeping up on her from behind.
And at night, she dreamed about the hanged man.
Sometimes she was plaiting the noose; sometimes she fitted it around his unresisting neck, before or after bestowing a kiss upon his motionless mouth. At other times she was not so immediately involved but stood huddled at the back of a solemn crowd and watched him die, his legs kicking, feet dancing on air, semen spurting a final blessing on the barren ground below.
After J.D. had gone back to work, Linzi invited her mother over for lunch. It was her first visit to the new house.
‘So much light in this room,’ said her mother, approvingly. ‘In all the rooms, in fact. I love the big windows. What a great view.’
Standing slightly behind her mother, Linzi peeked over her shoulder at the long, flat treeless expanse stretching away beneath the blue sky. Although more attractive now in summer colours, she still found it a sinister sight. ‘You think so?’
‘You don’t?’ Her mother turned to give her a searching look. ‘Is something wrong, Linz?’
She shrugged. ‘I just think it’s sort of bleak. Come outside,’ she added quickly, ‘into the garden. Not that it is anything like a garden yet, but … I’d like to know what you think.’
Her mother took the request seriously and examined the land from every side. She even got down on her knees and dug into the soil with her hands. Linzi, meanwhile, put her back against a wall of the house and watched her mother closely for any signs that she felt an invasive, invisible presence, but if she did nothing showed.
They went back inside and ate quiche and salad while Linzi’s mother made a list of plants her daughter might want to consider and sketched out two possible plans for landscaping. ‘It won’t look so bleak once you’ve planted a few shrubs. Maybe, while you’re waiting for things to take hold, you could put out a few pots, and some garden furniture, just things for your eye to rest on.’ She put her pencil down. ‘Now why don’t you tell me what you really wanted to talk to me about.’
‘Did you feel anything … anything wrong … out there?’
‘No, I to
ld you, the soil looks very rich and good; not boggy as I’d expected. Whoever lived here in the past must have tended it well.’
‘I don’t mean that.’ Linzi drew a deep breath. ‘Do you remember, when I was really little, you were going to leave me and Tilda with a child-minder, and we went to her house – and then walked straight out again? You said there was no way … you felt something wrong in the place, and weren’t surprised at all when we heard a few months later that her boyfriend was arrested for being a paedo?’
‘Of course I remember.’
‘You sensed something wrong in her house. Something bad, dangerous, even though there was nothing to see. I want to know if you sense anything here.’
Alarm flickered in her mother’s eyes. ‘Linzi, honey, you can come home with me now, stay as long as you like, if you decide—’
‘What? No!’ Tears sprang to her eyes and she stared, open-mouthed. ‘Why would you think—? You want me to leave J.D., don’t you? I knew it! You never liked him.’
Her mother threw up her hands. ‘I didn’t say anything! You’re the one who brought up that horrible—’
‘I was talking about the way you sensed something wrong. That’s what you said, that as soon as you walked through the door, you just knew. So I wondered—’
‘—if I sensed something here? No. But why should you expect me to, if everything’s rosy?’
‘I’ve felt something – not about J.D. This place is haunted. The land.’ It all came tumbling out: the dead man in the ditch, the deleted photograph, her feelings, her dreams … ‘I think – no, I’m sure – a man was killed here a long time ago, hanged and then buried as some kind of sacrifice. I think it’s his spirit I sense.’
Her mother sighed, shifted in her chair, shot a glance at the clock on the oven. ‘Why ask me about it? I’ve never seen a ghost in my life.’
‘But you’re sensitive to atmospheres. You knew Tilda and I wouldn’t be safe with that woman – you sensed evil – you even said so, later!’
‘Yes, I did. She seemed all right on the phone, and she had good references, but the moment I walked into her house—’ She stopped. ‘There was just something about her. But she was a person; alive. How can a dead man hurt you? Whether he was good or evil in his life, after he’s dead, he can’t do anything.’