by Adam Nevill
The figure had moved its head in their direction, rather than directly at them, and then staggered away in confusion. As it stumbled out of sight, the piteous breaking voice of a distressed young woman filled the otherwise silent air of the night. ‘I … don’t … where … where … this … am I?’
Amber turned her face to Josh, as if in need of some acknowledgement that what she had just seen had indeed been seen by her friend too. But her eyes moved past him to what lay behind, and to something that had recently altered within the broken earth at his heels.
Inside the little box, and within the small black head, a pair of marble-white eyes had opened.
NINETY-THREE
It was time for her to take control and to protect Josh, because she did not like the way his hand shook; a hand that gripped a gun that was connected to an arm that also trembled, directed by a traumatized mind behind a bloodless face that jumped with tics.
‘Josh. Josh, mate. She’s making us see them. Her. In the box. They’re not really there. And there will be more of them. Please, Josh. Look at me. We’ve got to get rid of it. Outside. And burn it. A gun is no good.’
And while she tried to talk Josh down from wherever his senses had climbed, so taut and trembling, Amber kept her eyes on the wooden chest behind his heels. She gently and carefully eased herself around his body to get closer to the crate that carried the tiny black queen, because Amber felt as if her life depended upon the shutting of the purple velvet curtain, and the concealing of those small white eyes, that were no bigger than pebbles but now shone horribly from the dull black leather of the face.
Slowly, almost unable to move her feet in fear, Amber inched towards the box and then quickly flicked the curtain across the figure inside the crate. She bent her knees and raised the heavy vessel from the earth and instantly hated the idea of the chest’s occupant being so close to her throat. Such was her revulsion of what she carried, she nearly dropped her cargo, twice.
Her passenger stank of earth, of death, and of the reeking dusty darkness it had resided in for a century. About the box hung the fragrance of 82 Edgehill Road, and the scent of those who had lain so long beneath its floorboards and crouched inside its walls. And so powerful was the odour of a history black with murder, she could have been inside that old house in Birmingham again.
Tears welled over her eyes, and then those tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘Petrol,’ she barely managed to say. ‘Josh, petrol. Quick. Quickly. The fucking petrol!’
She wasn’t sure he heard, because he did not move for the petrol can, but stood immobile, an arm raised, as he stared at the mouth of the garage, perhaps wanting to unsee what had so recently staggered across the driveway.
Amber stooped and hooked a finger around the plastic handle of the can. Out into the darkness on unsteady feet she carried the Black Maggie, and her sloshing can of fuel, out of the garage and across the rear of her car, down the side of her house, headed for the rear garden.
Instinct demanded she take it away from the house, get it outside, out of the lightless confines it seemed to favour, off the property, and out of the back gate, so it could burn in the very fields that had been blessed by the sacrifice of its most devoted disciple.
Josh came after her, in silence. At least she hoped it was Josh so close to her heels, but she was too afraid to look behind to make sure.
The security lights clicked on around the farmhouse when she stumbled beneath the sensors on the walls. But beyond the boundary of her property, the night and the fields of night were obsidian black, and more silent than she had known any place on earth.
And she only slowed and then stopped mere feet from the aperture between the side of the house and the perimeter wall, that opened onto the lawn of the rear garden, when it appeared to her that another visitor was down there, waiting somewhere upon the orange-tinted grass. A visitor with a voice that was all too familiar.
‘And then you said … I said … I wouldn’t … unreasonable … but who was I … you, you told me … you swore … it was … meant something … a sign … frightened, the more I … and now I know…’
‘Don’t look, Josh! Please God, don’t look at it! We’ve got to get this lit. Burn it. Now! Burn it. Burn it. Burn it. Burn it.’ And she kept on repeating the phrase in this unreal night to remind herself of her purpose and the sole intention of this rickety journey she had made into the flood-lit garden.
Another stood on the patio, but Amber refused it her attention. ‘Don’t look, Josh. Please don’t look,’ she shouted again into the cool air, as if to press an oversized lid onto the tin of her own red madness and the white lightning of hysteria that sparked and flickered amidst her disintegrating thoughts.
What she saw in her peripheral vision, this pale and wasted and unclothed thing with its bony arms raised to the black sky, Josh must have seen in greater detail, because he began to say, ‘What? Who? Amber?’ in a voice like a little boy.
A fourth intruder spoke, but Amber turned her face away the moment she saw the brown, bandy legs of a silhouette, too thin to be alive, that skittered more than walked across the ground on the far side of the garden, as if it were circling them on the terrible shanks that serviced as legs. ‘Involved … you are … you said … not that simple … must understand … Not going … refuse. I said it. I said it … wouldn’t stop … and look … what happened … the lights … even listening.’
‘Stop! Right there. Stop!’ It was Josh shouting behind her.
Amber left him and headed to the garden gate that stood before the acres of night-drowned maize. She did nothing more than flinch when the handgun began to pop.
‘Donegal, you bastard!’ Josh shouted from a position closer to the house, before his voice seemed to continue from a distance as if the plain they stood upon had expanded, stretched impossibly. ‘Stop, Donegal. Or I’ll drop you.’
She kept her eyes down, on the grass, on her feet upon the grass that was real, tinted amber by the lights that were real, attached to the house that was real. She was moving, she was breathing, she was carrying something so heavy her arms screamed in pain and resistance, and her hands began to numb, which meant she could feel and that this was all real.
At the edge of the orangey light that lit up the inside of the treeline and the stone of the perimeter walls, and in a fashion that inappropriately suggested a nocturnal celebration was about take place, Amber detected fresh activity that brought her to a stop. There was a bustle of vague silhouettes gathered about the rear gate. Their faces were indistinct, but their thin arms were raised in the darkness. But whether in awe or from some mute and desperate plea for mercy she did not know. She looked away. Out of the bustle she heard Ryan call her name once: ‘Steph!’
But from the old oak tree in the bottom corner of her garden, others demanded her attention.
She steeled herself and did not look again at the four women who kicked their little booted feet, as they swayed and buffeted each other beneath the limb they hanged from. They were as real as the blanched bark of the tree they swung below. A mere glance had informed her that the eyes of the hanged were open and bright and that their dark mouths were moving and mouthing things she could not hear.
It was a dream. She was seeing things from a dream. Being made to see things from a dream.
‘Dad, help me now! Dad. Please, Dad. Josh! Help me now,’ Amber shouted as she cried, and turned her head to find Josh.
There he was, on his hands and knees, his glasses gone. He had taken some of his clothes off, his jacket, his shirt. His pale, freckled torso shone like a grub as he went round and round on his hands and knees, in a circle on the amber grass, blind but talking to himself. With each hand he slapped the earth in some demented rhythm.
A tall, blackened silhouette, a scarecrow vestige of a freakishly tall man, now stood upon the patio. Beside the lanky figure, a smaller, withered creature wearing glasses and a dirty coat grinned at Amber. It cupped its shrivelled genitals inside a thin, brown, four-f
ingered hand.
And in her panic and disorientation her vision skimmed the upper floor of the farmhouse. Indoors, all of the lights burned brightly. Thin, naked shapes draped in polythene clattered their fingers against the window panes. Amber tore her face away from the house and looked at her feet.
Beyond the line of trees on her left, a little boy she could not see broke into song:
‘All around the Mulberry Bush, The monkey chased the weasel. The monkey stopped to pull up his sock, Pop! goes the weasel. Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle. Four maids to open the door, Pop! goes the weasel.’
Ryan called to her again, from behind her back this time, from nearer the house. His mouth was no longer full of blood. His voice was clear. ‘Steph. Help me.’
She used all of her will and concentration to prevent herself turning her head.
Inside the wooden box a small drum began to beat a rhythm she had heard before. The sound tried to put an end to her heartbeat.
Josh’s hands fell upon the grass in time to the beat of the tiny leather drum.
She stumbled to the bottom of the lawn, before that backdrop of so many blackened and piteous figures, half concealed by darkness. A scant-haired congregation of stained bones was waving; their gaunt postures quivered as with the ecstasy of having risen.
Thine honour, these maidens, thine honour, the corn doth rise like grass.
Then silence came, and darkness, total darkness, as if all of the security lights and the lights inside the house had failed. This was followed by a distant scream that made Josh sound feminine. And into the black came the noise of a pack of dogs fighting each other, snarling, scrapping over something on the ground, somewhere far off. She thought she heard the gun again.
Amber closed her eyes on it all.
Behind her closed eyes, deep within her mind, the red-black night leapt and was alive with movement. At the gate, even with her eyes shut tight, she plainly saw that more and more of them had come to stand like piecemeal relics risen on judgement day, their genders and identities erased by an age of suffering and decay. So many arms as slim as bamboo wavered in the air as far as she could see. So many fingers reached for the blooded sky, like corn waving in a breeze, like the crucified, the gibbeted scarecrows left to the elements, to linger in suffering.
The end of the world.
Matches. Petrol. Burn it.
She opened her eyes to find the matches and remembered there was no light. Amber wasn’t sure if she was even awake. Was no longer certain where she was.
She placed the box upon what she hoped was grass, but the connection of the wooden chest upon the ground made a hollow knocking sound, as if it had fallen upon a stone floor.
She fumbled for the box of matches inside the pocket on the front of her hooded top. Her hands were real. The cardboard matchbox was real. She was real and warm and solid. ‘I’d rather burn. You hear me, bitch? I’ll burn before you have me.’
A moving susurration, with a suggestion of a great weight and girth, began to circle her.
Amber slipped to her knees.
From inside the wooden box, a baby began to cry in a way that pierced her heart.
From the sides of the surrounding absence other unseen figures crawled across whatever she now sat upon in complete darkness. The crawlers wheezed, sucked at the air.
The baby cried with a consuming, engulfing distress; a sound from the beginning of time.
The circling movement about her position drew nearer.
Once the match was lit, at first it illumined nothing but her legs and the box. But then, beyond the flame, the air above the maize field appeared to lighten. She wondered if a red sun was rising from the sea, up from the horizon to spread this hideously beautiful fire of crimson across the sky.
With her other hand she uncapped the petrol canister.
What is the time? Is dawn here for me?
Someone spoke, next to her ear. And she stifled a scream but dropped the match into the cold darkness where it doused. She did not turn her twitching head to see the face that had drawn so close to utter, ‘Involved … you are … you said … not that simple … must understand … Not going … refuse. I said it. I said it … wouldn’t stop … and look … what happened … the lights … even listening?’
Her arms were shaking so violently now, but her fear-weakened fingers managed to seize the handle of the can and then upend the nozzle over the purple curtained front of the box she had dropped to the ground. The stench of petrol seemed to revive her, then make her nauseous.
‘I’m cold … I’m so cold … Hold me. I’m cold … I’m so cold … Hold me. I’m cold … I’m so cold … Hold me.’ The breath of the girl was cold upon the nape of her neck.
The infant inside the box wailed anew. The newborn kicked and struggled for life behind the sopping purple curtain.
Black scales writhing in chitin. Black teeth on a thong. The arms of the bereaved raised to the ceiling of a black chapel. A withered man upon a pink bed, his eyes are open. A mother stands up in polythene, her bulk mottled like the skin of a pudding.
What is the time?
Amber joined the babe in its misery and distress and horror, and she wept and felt her own mind sink away and give up its space to an urge that needed to scream until an artery popped and sprayed behind her eyes.
The tightening coil, and its rasp across wet stone, was all but around her.
Her frail hands lit a second match. Dropped the flaring stick upon the tiny regal curtains of hell.
The fire licked petrol blue. Swayed and danced orange tips. And flared so fiercely she thought she was inside an explosion. The hair of her fringe crisped away with a crackle. Fire licked her eyebrows. One leg caught fire. A sun’s warmth cupped her face.
A hissing of something dry and hollow followed the implosion of the spitting fire. Liquid dripped and fizzed in the grass about her legs. She slapped at the flames on her thigh.
Burning hair smoked the air.
Light.
She heard animal cries, bestial grunts, as if every field bordering the farmhouse were crowded with panicking livestock.
She slapped and slapped at her legs.
The small petrol-fuming pyre lit up the lawn nearby, but she refused to look into the crude shallow holes in which the black-boned crouched foetal and yawned. The land beyond was charred and red with embers into forever, devastated like a great battlefield. She saw it for a moment. Distant stick figures tottered blind, felt their way through ruin.
Amber recoiled from the fire, and away from the activity in the flame-smothered box, from the small black head that rose to briefly gulp at the flames, as if in ecstasy. She fell to the ground and rolled into the darkness to put out the flames on her legs.
EPILOGUE
‘Ashes in the water, ashes in the sea. We all jump up with a one, two, three.’ Amber didn’t know how long she had been singing to herself, but stopped when her throat was dry enough to reduce her voice to a whisper.
Once the sun had gone down, the blue-black tumult below the passenger decks faded to black. Of the ocean she could see nothing, but the great heaving and occasional wallops against the hull of the ship, so far below Deck 12, remained constant. Above her, the same infinite dark stretched, only pinpricked by stars so distant her dad had once told her that they were already dead. At the time she had found the idea both awful and sad.
Despite her jumper, coat and the blanket she had wrapped around herself, the mid-Atlantic night air still beat against her body, bit her nose with cold, and stiffened her joints. But she continued to sit alone on the balcony outside her cabin, content to stare into the darkness out there and inside herself. Only here, in such a cold and lightless place, did her thoughts find the right space in which to expand and to cope with what had happened.
From the newspapers that had been brought on board in New York, she could see the story had now vanished from every tabloid and broadsheet. And for that she was glad. The story had
never made the front pages anyway. To her satisfaction, the fire in her home had only been treated as a novelty piece. Greater scandals and tragedies occupied the more prestigious and significant column inches. The Times had shown a photograph of the blackened ruin of the farmhouse, the old picture of her walking into the inquest, and a still of the actress who played her in Nine Days in Hell. The photographs were augmented with the headline: TRAGEDY CONTINUES FOR EDGEHILL ROAD GIRL. FIRE DESTROYS LUXURY HOME.
The articles mostly mentioned her success as a film producer, bestselling author, her reclusive existence following her escape from the notorious North Birmingham house, and the tragedy that befell her plans to settle in South Devon. For once the media didn’t know anything else and appeared disinclined to just make things up.
Her representatives had said little and the journalists were probably too fatigued by her story to revisit her life in any great detail over a house fire. Online trolls had claimed the fire was an obvious publicity stunt now that the theatrical run of her film was over, and that her exploitation of her story was exhausted. Others remarked upon the evidence of a curse without ever knowing how close to the truth they were.
Remnants of what she and Josh had burned before the farmhouse would never be found. The ashes of her nemesis and its acolyte they had scattered in the Teignmouth Estuary to wash out to sea. It was a measure they had devised in the hope that they could prevent such foul seeds taking root on land again. Perhaps they had even buried a God at sea. When she’d shared this thought with Josh, he’d not said anything.
Josh had only begun to speak again two days after the sun had risen and bleached away that last night in the presence of the Maggie. And when he began to communicate he hadn’t questioned Amber’s wishes to destroy the property. Instead, he had rediscovered those concealed resources that had performed so well for him in service, and had committed himself to a silent, methodical, critical path that began with the disposal of an unnaturally long human body, and what was left of the effigy that had been obeyed so faithfully. The miserable trophies of the thing’s constituency, that they had separated from the blackened effigy, they’d concealed inside a shoebox and buried the box in the corner of a local churchyard.