Alison Littlewood

by A Cold Season

  ‘I didn’t send anyone away – Ben, what do you mean?’

  ‘You made my teacher go away. You shouldn’t have done that.’ Ben’s face collapsed and she realised he was holding back tears. ‘You sent Daddy away.’

  ‘Ben.’ Cass went up and put her arms around him. He was trembling. ‘Sweetheart, I didn’t send Daddy away – I loved him, you know that. Is that what this is about? Did Jessica say something about him?’ Past tense, she thought, I loved him – no wonder he’s confused.

  Ben twisted away from her and said forcefully, ‘He’s coming back.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Daddy’s coming back.’

  Cass stroked his hair. She tried to look into his eyes, but his face was obscured by shadow. ‘I’m sorry, Ben, but you can’t go on thinking that. I wish it was true, but it’s not going to happen. Daddy died.’

  Ben shook her off, and as Cass started back he lashed out and struck her face.

  She put a hand to her cheek, not sure if the blow had been an accident or something else.

  ‘He’s coming,’ said Ben, ‘and you can’t stop him.’ He ran along the hall, turning the corner before Cass could bring herself to move.

  Above her, a door banged and she raced up the stairs, slamming through to the first-floor hall. Where was he? But Ben was there, sitting with his back to their door. She still couldn’t see his face, but as she went to him she realised he was crying.

  ‘Theodore’s going to be my daddy now,’ he gulped.

  ‘Oh Ben. No, sweetheart— Shh. Look, it’s okay. No one will ever replace your daddy.’ She looked at him helplessly. ‘Ben, if it upsets you so much, I won’t see Mr Remick again.’ How had he known his name was Theodore?

  Ben looked up and brushed tears from his eyes. ‘You have to,’ he wailed, ‘you have to.’

  Cass gathered him in her arms and sat with him. Eventually she spoke. ‘I know this is hard, Ben. So many things have changed. But you know your daddy loved you very much, and no one can ever take that away. No one’s trying to replace your daddy.’ He shifted in her arms. ‘You’re my Number One, you know that? No one will ever take that away from you either.’ She tightened her grip. ‘Come on, let’s go inside.’

  ‘But Sally says that Theodore—’

  So that was it. Cass bit her lip. ‘Sally shouldn’t be saying anything at all.’

  Ben scowled, his eyes going distant, and she bent and kissed his head again. When she unlocked the door he pushed past, knocking her into the frame. ‘Ben. Maybe you shouldn’t go to Mrs Spencer’s any more, if it upsets you so much.’

  He went straight to his room, slamming the door in her face, and Cass rubbed her elbow where she’d banged it.

  When she went into the bathroom and flicked on the light, Cass flinched at the sight of her face in the mirror. She was deathly pale, save for a red mark where her son had hit her.

  Cass pulled the box from under her bed. She ran her palm over the top, heard the dry rustle of ageing paper. Pete was in there somewhere, in among the old bills and papers and pictures. His voice.

  She found the bundle by touch, slipped off the smooth ribbon and held the letters against her cheek.

  Pete had always said he wasn’t good at writing letters, that it didn’t come naturally to him, but once he started, he could describe a scene exactly – she could almost see it through his eyes.

  We saw a wedding party today. Life going on as normal, at least for some, or as normal as they can make it. They do what they can. The bride wore the local dress and had ribbons in her hair. They all danced in the street, kicking up a big cloud of dust, and they never stopped smiling. Everyone danced, the grandmothers and grandfathers and everyone right down to the little kids. It was so loud, but good loud, you know? Not like the shelling. It was strange, hearing something so loud that wasn’t trying to kill me.

  I thought about our wedding, and wondered if your family would have come if you’d asked. Isn’t it time you made up, Cassie? Life is short. Too short, sometimes.

  Cass started and almost dropped the letter. She had forgotten that – how strange that she should choose that one to read out of them all, the dry, desert-smelling letters, when she had so recently received one from her father.

  It must be her father Pete had meant. The rest of her family had been at the wedding – her mother and an uncle she’d almost forgotten she had. Neither of them had danced.

  Life is too short, sometimes.

  He got that right.

  She stuffed the letter back into the pile. There was no point thinking about it now; with no post going in or out of the village she couldn’t write to her father anyway.

  And yet … just why had Cass chosen to come back to Darnshaw?

  She shoved the bundle back into the box and pushed it out of sight, lay down and closed her eyes. After a while she heard a sound and she half-sat, turning towards the wall at her back. It was sharp and loud and deliberate: scritch, scritch, scritch, like fingernails scraping on wood. Cass put her hand against the cool plaster. Now it sounded as though the noise was coming from her hand. She tapped it against the wall.

  The scratching stopped and instead there came a skittering, heading away.

  Cass wondered if Ben had heard it too. It had been louder than before. Maybe he was right: it could be rats, not mice. She shuddered, pushed herself up from the bed and went to check on her son.

  She switched on the hall light, blinking in the sudden glare, cracked open Ben’s door, then pushed it wider: his bed was rumpled, the sheets pushed back, but it was empty. She stepped in, looking about. There was no sign of him.

  ‘Ben?’ she whispered. She switched on his nightlight. There were his clothes, in a pile, his books all heaped on the shelf, but no Ben. And then Cass did a double-take. It was his pyjamas lying on the floor: Ben had never changed out of his daytime clothes.

  She stood stock-still, then rushed into the lounge, flicking on the lights, checking behind the sofa in case he was hiding. She kept expecting to hear him giggle, but never heard a sound except her own ragged breathing.

  The bathroom was empty too. She swept back the shower curtain, hurried into the kitchen—

  —and stopped in the doorway.

  The cupboard doors gaped, their contents strewn across the worktop. It looked as though everything had just been thrown out, cereal boxes and tins and packets, but she had never heard a thing. It had been done quietly.

  There was nowhere left to look in the flat.

  Cass caught her breath, putting a hand to her chest. The blood rushed in her ears and she leaned over the counter, feeling sick. No Ben. She pushed herself up and went back into the hall. He could have sneaked from one room to the next while her back was turned, could even be hiding in his own room, or in hers – in the wardrobe, or under the bed. He could be lying in the dark, grinning, one hand resting on the bundle of letters.

  But no, she knew he wasn’t. And as if in answer to that thought she saw that the front door was ajar.

  Cass pulled on her shoes, grabbed her dressing gown from the bathroom and went out.

  The hall was quiet, but the lights were flickering: someone had come this way a short time ago, the movement triggering the lights. Cass hurried along the hall. If she was quick, the lights might show her where Ben had gone.

  A yellow glow shone through the glass panel of the door to the stairwell. She ran to it, trying to keep quiet, and reached for the handle just as the light on the other side went out.

  ‘No! Damn.’ Cass banged through the door, the lights coming back on in response. Downstairs it was brighter, as though the entrance hall lights were on too.

  She swallowed her panic, trying not to think of worst-case scenarios: if Ben had gone outside she might never find him. She brushed away the image of the millpond that came into her mind, inky-black water beneath an acid-green coating.

  No.

  Cass jumped down the last few steps and her ankle gave, but she recovered and kept goi
ng. She went to the entrance and pressed up against the glass. Light spilled onto the snow outside, turning footprints into deep black arcs. Cass grabbed the handle and had started to turn it when the light behind her went out.

  She stopped. Think.

  She waved a hand, triggering the lights. The footprints reappeared. She recognised Ben’s, but her own prints were there too, facing in both directions, criss-crossing. Ben’s could have been from this morning, earlier today, even yesterday. But the lights – the lights at her back had already been on when she came down the stairs.

  The lights went out again. She turned. The ground-floor hall was dark now, but it felt present somehow. Had the lights really been on when she came down? She wasn’t sure, but she thought they probably had been. It felt as though they had.

  She mouthed his name as she headed away from the front door. The hall lights came on with a low buzz, but just before they did, she saw a pale moonlit glow coming through one of the doorways: the empty apartment. Apartment 6. That must be where Ben had gone.

  Cass took a deep breath and padded softly along the hall to the apartment that lay beneath her own. The door was open, and when she looked in she saw Ben at once. He was sitting motionless on the floor, muttering something over and over. It made her think of an elderly person trying to remember something long forgotten.

  Ben didn’t turn round as she stepped towards him. The light was dim, the air granular, and Cass’ ears rang. She couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  ‘Ben,’ she said, but her voice cracked. She cleared her throat, took a step closer. And then she froze.

  The floor around her son was moving: shadows flowed around his legs and across the floor, always moving, darker grey against the grey boards.

  Cass took another step forward and everything clicked into focus. A boiling mass of rats covered the floor around her son. They flowed into and out of the window frames, down the walls and across the space between, throwing up clouds of dust. She heard them now too, the faint scratching of their claws.

  Cass’ voice dried in her throat.

  They crawled into her son’s lap, piling up, fighting to get close. Ben sat with his eyes closed, hands in his lap curled like dead things. Rats pushed their heads between his fingers, lapped at his palms.

  ‘Suffer the—’ he said, his voice distant, like a child speaking in his sleep. ‘Suffer the little—’

  ‘Ben!’

  His shoulders jumped.

  ‘Suffer them to come.’

  The rats ate out of his hands, lapped at his fingers. His palms shone with their saliva. They thrust forward and stole the crumbs he held. Around him the rats crawled over empty packets and boxes, their contents carried away like trophies, and streamed away out of the empty windows. The pale night shone down on their slick, smooth fur.

  One rat turned to stare at Cass, its eyes a sudden white glow, like the boys in the hall, the ones she hadn’t seen until they turned to glare at her. Like Ben’s eyes earlier, when he turned on her.

  Cass made a choking sound. Then she was moving, grabbing her son by an arm and pulling him clear, rats falling from his lap.

  Ben cried out at last, a sound without words, but he didn’t fight her as she dragged him along at her side, his feet streaking the dust.

  Cass pulled him into the hall and tears came as she bent over him, crying into his hair, feeling it against her skin. She knelt and pulled him against her. ‘What were you doing, Ben?’ she asked. ‘What are you doing down here?’

  His eyes were glazed, looking blankly over her shoulder. She squeezed his arm. ‘Ben, look at me.’

  And he did: he turned his eyes on her so that the empty white of them took her in.

  Cass wanted to scream – and then his head moved, just a little, and the reflected light passed on, restoring his eyes to their own soft grey.

  ‘Ben, do you hear me?’

  He looked at her and blinked, like a child waking from a dream.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘I heard them,’ he said in a small voice. ‘They were hungry, Mummy. Very hungry.’

  ‘Oh Ben.’ Her head sank onto his shoulder.

  ‘I thought I heard them talking.’

  ‘I heard them too, Ben. They’ve been getting into the walls somehow. But you mustn’t go off like that. Never, ever do that again, do you understand?’

  His eyes clouded. ‘I’m tired, Mummy.’

  ‘I know. So am I. Come on, let’s go back.’ But first Cass took his hands in hers and turned them, wiping the sticky dampness on her clothes, checking for marks or bites. She found they were whole, not a scratch to be seen.

  He pulled away; she was gripping too tight.

  ‘Time for bed.’

  She led her son back down the hall, pulling the door to Apartment 6 firmly closed behind them. His hand was clammy, and she imagined long yellow teeth nestled into his palm, whiskers snuffling against the skin, and shuddered. She half-carried him up the stairs, glancing back and half-expecting to see a trail of rats following them like the Pied Piper. Then they were inside their own apartment. Cass leaned on the door with relief.

  ‘They were hungry,’ Ben said again. ‘They only wanted a daddy to look after them.’

  ‘Oh sweetheart.’ Cass picked him up and carried him into the bathroom. She rinsed a flannel and then soaped him with it. Halfway through cleaning his hands, she paused. Apartment 6. Her own, the one above it, was Apartment 12. Two sixes. She shook her head.

  ‘Mummy?’

  Cass looked down at her son. She ran her hands through his hair, pulling bits of plaster and dirt from it, letting them patter onto the linoleum. She wanted to shower him, but Ben’s eyes were closing. Better that he should sleep.

  As she put him to bed and tucked him in she could already hear sounds in the wall. She pulled a face.

  ‘Suffer them to come,’ Ben murmured, his eyes closed, already half-asleep.

  ‘What did you say?’

  He turned, burying himself in the covers.

  Cass watched him a while longer, then went to the front door and double-locked it, pushing the bolt home with a snap. At least she would hear something if Ben chose to go wandering in the night again.

  She sat on her bed for a long time, watching her hands shake.

  ‘Suffer them to come,’ she said at last. ‘Suffer the little children.’

  She slipped her legs under the covers, laid down her head and tried, pointlessly, to sleep.

  SIXTEEN

  Loud banging roused Cass from sleep. The quality of the light told her it was late morning, much later than she usually stayed in bed. She rushed into the hall in time to see Ben, fully dressed, pulling back the bolt and opening the door.

  Mr Remick stood there, waving bread and the carton of eggs from the night before. ‘I’m too early. Sorry.’

  Cass ran a hand through her hair, fingers catching in the tangle. ‘No, it’s me. I’m so late.’ She was still wearing her nightdress. ‘Ben, take Mr Remick through to the kitchen. I’ll be with you in a second.’

  She backed into her room, threw on jeans and a jumper, tried to pat her hair down in the mirror. As she went back out she heard the kettle boiling.

  Mr Remick and Ben were sitting at the kitchen table, chatting companionably. Mr Remick looked up and smiled. ‘Here’s your mum,’ he said.

  Ben looked up without speaking. His mouth twitched; he still looked pale.

  ‘We slept in,’ said Cass. ‘Well, I did.’

  ‘And why not? I shouldn’t have disturbed you on a Saturday. It’s just I forgot to give you these.’

  Cass looked at the bread and eggs. ‘Why don’t I make us something?’ She looked around and saw the tins and empty food packets laid out on the worktop. ‘We’ve been having a sort-out.’

  ‘Looks like a good job I brought the eggs.’

  Cass ran her eye over their remaining food. ‘Actually, it is. It really is. Thank you, Theo. I appreciate it.’

  S
he went to the counter, touched a hand to the mugs that he must have set out himself, opened a cupboard and realised it was the wrong one.

  ‘Here, let me.’ Theo stood between her and Ben, put a hand on her arm. ‘I’d like to. Why don’t you sit down for a bit? I’ll bring you a coffee.’ As he spoke, the kettle clicked off.

  Cass nodded and slipped into the chair next to Ben. She leaned over and kissed his hair. She could smell the dust on it, feel the grease under her lips. What must Theo think?

  ‘We could eat, then go for a walk maybe,’ he said.

  Ben wriggled, already wearing a broad grin.

  They went out into the clean cold air and turned towards the river. Across the field she could see Bert, ambling his way along the path towards them, the low black shape of Captain waddling at his side. He looked like part of the landscape. Cass smiled, raised a hand and waved.

  The distant figure paused. The dog came to a stop too, waiting.

  It looked as if the old man had seen her, was staring directly at her. Then he tugged on Captain’s lead and headed back the way he’d come.

  Cass exclaimed.

  ‘He’s a funny sort,’ said Mr Remick, ‘one of the more local locals, if you know what I mean. You shouldn’t let it bother you.’

  He took her arm and they headed around the mill instead, towards the pond.

  Ben slipped his hand into Mr Remick’s, laughed and swung on his arm. ‘Will you play soldiers later?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and Cass found she didn’t mind the idea. Ordinarily she liked her own company, hers and Ben’s, but the teacher’s company was comfortable. He fitted.

  Ben whooped and ran ahead, kicking chunks of ice into the air. The previous snowfall was frozen solid, as deep as ever.

  ‘He’s been so odd lately,’ said Cass. ‘Last night … ’ But she found she didn’t want to tell him about last night. The thought of those grey bodies crawling over her son, lapping at his fingers, their feet on his body, made her feel sick. She stopped.

  ‘Is everything all right? I know he had that thing with Jessica. He seems fine now though.’