by Adam Nevill
Old tastes and habits had been sated at number 82, where she had determined to winter.
‘It’s in a folk song, Josh, and on some broken pots from a long time ago. It’s all Peter can find. All we know. But she’s old. Black Mag is very old.’ The message time came to an end with another long bleep.
Perhaps it was not hard for old, unseen others to detect this propensity for the bestial in a species of animal that claimed Amber among its multitudes; the potential was everywhere, smouldering black and red behind every face. Easy to find in the Bennets, in Fergal. Maybe she was a challenge, and a greater reward.
From wars and holocausts to seedy murders in suburban houses, and ordinary wives smashed in banal kitchens, there always appeared to be so many takers for the darkness, the clever and patient darkness. And for those that strangled and buried its maids and maidens there were rewards: vast, bountiful, fertile, whispering rewards.
A terrible gravity of inhumanity now oppressed Amber’s thoughts as she lay upon the bed, as if some barely defined but incalculably vast history of burnings and torture and murder and war and violence, of despair and hopelessness, had gathered around the bed to expose itself; to extinguish any momentary and futile urge to resist the great momentum of indifferent darkness.
The one we will all reach in death.
She called Josh a fifth time. He didn’t pick up. ‘What’s the point, to anything? The darkness was always there anyway. Was there first. It will always be there. We love but those we love die, like Mum, Dad …
‘I’ve seen such beauty in the world, mate. From the decks of the grandest ships. But it didn’t care about me. Beauty doesn’t care about any of us. Only darkness wants us.’
Exhausted by her bleakest thoughts, Amber looked at the window. She could almost hear the distant rustling of the maize.
Her tired eyes closed.
EIGHTY-FIVE
The figure walked through the dark crop. Head bowed purposefully to watch the progress of its feet, obscured by the fronds and shadows of the furrows that ran between the long, restless rows of broad leaves.
The plants grew to the height of the figure’s knees. And the careful progress suggested the visitor did not want to lose its footing between the drooping leaves or drop the precious cargo that was clutched to its chest: a small thing that suggested it was not without significance, but obscured by the dirty folds of a coat and by blackened hands. Something no bigger than a cat, wrapped in white cloth and cradled by grubby fingers, held close and tight, in the manner of a nervous but joyous father in an operating theatre; this swaddled newborn was safe within protective arms.
A smoky sky streaked with the amber of a breaking dawn created enough light for the visitor’s silhouette, and for some scant detail of the traveller’s apparel and cargo. But the dim orange light, like that of a candle held behind a bottle of brandy, did not reveal the traveller’s identity, no matter how much Amber’s eyes implored the spectre for some sign that it was not what she most feared.
The lone figure strode on, lanky, stooped, tired, ragged, and yet indistinct like a scarecrow with a face shadowed by the brim of an old hat, though this head was not covered, but seemingly shorn and issuing the dull gleam of old leather.
The gate in the garden fence was open to beckon the weary stranger into the garden; to tarry no longer, out there in the rustling and whispering green leaves that caressed the thin legs that strode endlessly and inexorably and inevitably towards her.
All around her bed, the thin women stood up and came closer.
* * *
Amber awoke, her body stiff with cold, as if night air had been flowing into her room for hours, to settle and lower the air temperature to near freezing. She had fallen asleep fully dressed but uncovered by the bedclothes.
Four thirty a.m.
She had not expected to sleep so long; had expected to rouse long before the pitch black of a moonless country night had fallen. But she was tired, so tired now, by it all, by everything, and she had slept deeply … and then dreamed of the stranger’s approach to the house. The very same figure she had seen out there twice before, as if it were guarding the front and rear of a new territory, its chosen habitat; preventing an exit but yearning for an entrance. And it had been bringing something to her. Something that wanted her.
Amber remembered the images that closed the dream, that fell away when her mind hauled itself awake. But the final frames remained, as did her distress at how uncomfortably close the women’s faces had come to her own, peering, determined and bloodless, beneath coils of black hair. One of them had been wearing a hat and had raised unpleasantly thin arms into the air of the black room, exulted or excited by what had been found: her.
The wrists of the woman in the hat had been bony and pale, the extremities of the fingers pointed as the figure reared backwards in its obscene joy. The other three had jostled about the bed and then leant over her body too. Long teeth, bad teeth, discoloured teeth in receding gums inside the ovals of narrow mouths, nostrils black in pinched noses, eyes bright, their expressions sharp, perhaps gleeful: Amber held that much in her mind, after one of the faces had veered too close to her own, as if to embrace her, and she had roused quickly to utter a small shriek as she sat up. Her chest heaved, either from panic or from holding her breath, and she peered around her bed, eager to establish her whereabouts.
Inside her bedroom. Yes, she was inside her room and sitting up in bed. She was alone. But the rigidity of her limbs and the nervous anticipation that churned in her stomach attested to the nature of a dream vivid enough to be a sign. Another sign. Reluctantly accepted but a clear indication of intent.
She turned her head and looked towards the window. Her eyes were greeted with the vision of the same sky that had covered the world in her dreaming mind: sooty and angry with clouds concealing the last few stars; a vaulted carapace of black cumulus, rippled with the distant furnace of a rising sun.
Another sign.
Are you here now?
She lowered her legs from the mattress and stood up. Approached the place upon the floor where she had stood in the dream, before the open window. At the corner of her mind flickers of terror attempted to catch and spread. Nothing about her breathing was easy. But she still approached the window.
He was closer to the house now. In a garden half revealed by the dim dawn, he was down on his knees, with those long, dirty fingers that she had once felt around her skull, stretched towards the sky. And when she appeared at the window the figure raised a murky face to look upon the house. What she could see of the face glistened, as if wet with tears, or with the trails left by the plump bodies of insects.
Amber stepped back and covered her deceitful eyes. Felt the trembling begin in her ankles and spread to her knees and onwards, until her fingers shook with a slight palsy against the flesh of her face.
No.
She would not, she could not give in to the screams that would smash the thin glass of her composure and then rebound and echo off these tranquil walls.
Remember, remember, what use are screams and tears?
Amber uncovered her eyes. She picked up the handgun and returned to the window on poorly coordinated legs; her teeth were so tightly clenched she feared they would soon snap. And she looked down at an empty lawn.
Barely revealed by the struggling sun of the new day, the grass was still dark. But nothing was lowered to its knees on the lawn; nothing implored the sunless sky with long, thin arms; no wet and blackened face was trying to reveal itself to her. Not any more. Nothing so filthy and horrid was out there now. And nor was whatever it had transported here: that dark lump covered in what could have been white lace, clinging to the front of the intruder like a babe at the teat.
Outside the door to her room, muffled, uneven footsteps moved away and down the first floor corridor, unhurried, but eager to be followed.
Amber wiped a sleeve across her eyes. Let them come.
Let them all come to speak their minds,
with what little memory and instinct and sense they still possessed in the lightless cold that they could not understand, and had always struggled to know since she, old Black Mag, had harvested them from the pits in which they had been bound and throttled.
How many were there? Why did some stalk her, muttering for her attention, while others remained silent?
It was a small mercy, but she was sure she had never made Harold Bennet’s acquaintance. He had died in prison, been incinerated municipally and not interred on site. But was the son, Arthur, here in Devon? He had died in the house of his criminally insane father and murdered mother, and been active in the dismal apertures of the family home. So where was the rapist?
Fergal was here, impossibly, but he had not died or been interred at number 82. Or maybe he was not dead? Was he really outside? Amber tightened her grip on the weapon.
And where was that bony-faced wretch, the prince of weasels, Knacker? Why had he not reintroduced his reptilian intent into this building? He had appeared solely in dream. After all, he had ended his days in that place too, like Bennet Junior. How could Fergal be here and not Knacker or Bennet?
She wondered again if she now carried the Maggie like a parasite that had nestled into the very flesh and blood of her body. She must travel with her constituency. She’d never know the thing’s motivations or purpose. Why it had let her go free from its temple in the roots of the house. Perhaps Fergal had stolen the thing he served, against its wishes, and it had wanted her to destroy its disciples with glass and acid. Or had it let her go for some other, even more hideous role that she was required to play elsewhere? There were no books on the subject; nothing had been found beside a few old songs and some broken masonry. All she had ever had were her wits, her guesses, her instincts. But the rules to the Black Maggie’s ritual were not clear, not yet. And what would she have to do, where would she need to journey, to understand these rules and find their limits? But whatever happened, she must never add herself, or allow herself to be added, to the growing congregation of the lost and confused. Victims remained victims; tormentors remained tormentors. If that wasn’t hell she didn’t know what was.
She could not be a victim.
She looked at the gun in her hand. ‘I’ll do it before you have me! You hear?’
Maybe suicide after a long and wretched period of depression, enriched by unbearable visions, was the plan for Amber: her fate, wherever she fled. They caught up with you. Found you here. So maybe suicide was no escape either.
The next maiden laid down.
‘Is that what you want, bitch? Another dead girl? That what you came for?’
Holding the handgun at her side, Amber used her thumb to disengage the safety catch. She doubted a bullet would have any effect on what now moved through this building, but the gun made her feel stronger. And if Fergal was still alive, if somehow, by some impossible byway, he had found her here, and that truly had been him down there upon the lawn, then she would finish the task she should have completed three years ago. The idea of executing him, of holding the barrel against his unseemly face and squeezing the trigger, gave her a pulse of excitement that made her breath catch.
‘Are you inside me?’ she shouted as she opened the door to her room. ‘Or are you out here, bitch?’
She could hear the slow and careful tread of something ahead of her, descending the stairs now, and she was reminded, uncomfortably, of the time she had been led down to the kitchen and the garage door, only one week ago.
So was this poor Ryan again, in her home? Was this her blood-spattered knight, broken and then smashed dead by a house brick? She needed to know if he was suffering. Still suffering. And if Ryan was tormented then it was her duty to end his pain.
This was not only about her; if this was happening, right now, right here, then this concerned all of the poor souls that had followed her from their wretched graves in Edgehill Road. She’d always promised that she wouldn’t forget them. ‘How do I set you free? Tell me! One of you! Tell me what the fuck to do!’
Ryan had lost teeth. The forensic detectives had gone through that place in North Birmingham on their hands and knees, and picked up every hair that remained on its rotten floors. Ryan’s two missing teeth had not been overlooked, kicked aside, or trodden into the freshly turned soil of the yard. Of that, Amber was sure. So the missing teeth had been gathered, collected.
Margaret Tolka had lost hair. She had been in the kitchen here too; she had filled the air with a residue of her attempt at sophistication: Anais Anais perfume. Other victims had been found with missing teeth, fingers, toes, perhaps more hair, though it was not possible to be sure of what had been extracted from those that had been buried the deepest for longest. Bennet had lost a finger. All of the Maggie’s victims had been interred incomplete.
Amber’s heart sped up at the notion that gradually grew and formed; one that suddenly seemed less macabrely fanciful and more logical, as she took step after step to the summit of the staircase. Without a physical emissary, without jailors and assassins, could Old Mag do anything but harrow her and drive her crazy? She wondered if she could live with the dreams, and if she could learn to live with ghosts, until she found an answer and a way out. And was this how old Black Mag carried her companions, through gathered remains, trophies? Which implied she must be right here in some physical sense, but how was that possible? Had she been cradled outside in Fergal’s arms, and carried for three years?
There was no one on the stairs. Though as before, Amber heard feet scuffle along an old track, like an invisible path or routine was now forming on the new floors as a fresh infestation of the dead took hold. These presences had always been known to repeat themselves.
Distracted, clutching at logic, even at such a time as this, she searched her mind for a solution to how the grisly artefacts, these trophies of a devil, were transported here? Fergal. He had to be alive. And he must have carried the relics of a foul God here. ‘How? How? How can you be here?’ She shouted to squash her panic.
A door opened inside the kitchen.
Amber stopped moving. She remembered too vividly what had assaulted her down there; what had opened her mind and flicked through her memories like they were playing cards, shuffled quickly between unseen hands and read by the presence of something unnatural, a thing that had nearly put out her life like an irrelevant ember fallen from a hearth.
She was wanted by the void. Nothingness, endless darkness desired her. The eternal cold, the end of self, the repeated stuttering of final words awaited her inside this very house. She was needed. Someone had come to the house to take her across, over to the other side. It had been kneeling on the lawn like some dreadful blackened ferryman. Was that its purpose: unfinished business?
‘Fergal! You bastard! You want me? I’m here!’
She chased another idea and its surreal consequences, because if she were to die and her estate was given to the charity for battered women that she had been so generous towards, and as instructed by her will … my God, the will … that bequeathed the house to women who were denied homes where they could be safe … if she died here would she one day mutter to them herself? Was it her destiny to be dead here, but present and unseen? Would she plague the shattered and nervous female refugees who came to this farmhouse for shelter in years to come? Would she climb into their beds to seek warmth and companionship? Would she harrow them with her own vague memories and her stammering, her blindness and her confusion?
What is the time?
Amber swallowed and wished she could rinse away the dreadful enormity of the thoughts that swelled inside her skull. She would have to change her will, and insist that the property was pulled down, destroyed, the very earth around its foundations sown with salt, then sealed flat with concrete.
Her attention was seized by the open kitchen door.
She had reached the foot of the stairs, and through the kitchen doorway she could see that the door into the garage was open on the far side of the room. The
dawn light that fell from the kitchen windows glinted off the paintwork and windows of her car. And there was the edge of the freezer cabinet too. At least the interior of the garage had not dissolved into an impenetrable but seething darkness.
Amber raised her arm and pointed the gun at the mouth of the garage. ‘I know you are in there.’
Can’t hurt you, can’t hurt you, can’t hurt you …
She tucked herself inside the kitchen door, but leant her back against the wall so she could see the whole room. And it was then that she became aware of the smell. The air of the room was now fragranced with Ryan’s scent: his deodorant and soap, the fabric conditioner, his perspiration. And the sense of him in here blurred her eyes with tears. ‘Ryan?’ Her voice was no more than a whisper, but the word invoked a response from the unlit garage.
An ungainly mouth, one perhaps filled with saliva or liquid, tried to speak within the far darkness to which it had retreated. The wet muttering was unintelligible. But she could hear the speaker moving, the distant thumps of a clumsy body against the garage door. A shuffle as if from a foot scuffing cement or being dragged behind a cumbersome shape.
‘Ryan.’ She swallowed to clear her throat of emotion. ‘Ryan?’
‘Ba … a … ee.’ Baby: that’s what he used to call her.
‘Stefff.’ Steph.
There was now a terrible sniffing, and a wheezy inhalation, as if the speaker was afflicted with infected sinuses that filled his airways with liquid. It sounded as if someone in her garage was not only struggling to speak, but to breathe.
Blood. Drowning in blood.
‘Stefff…’
What followed the attempt to pronounce her old name sounded like ‘Here’, or even ‘Come here’, but Amber couldn’t be sure, so insufficient, or mangled, was the mouth that uttered these horrid but pathetic sounds.
Amber took four steps across the kitchen towards the doorway. ‘Ryan?’