I lowered Alison to the ground and started trying to remove my jacket, meaning to drape it over her, but when I tried to pull it clear of my shoulder, there was an explosion of brilliant, glass-white pain. I toppled over onto the grass, dizzy, sick, head spinning. The summer sky darkened slowly into oblivion, painted black.
EPILOGUE: ECHOES
‘You were right,’ said the sergeant when I’d finished. ‘If you expect me to believe a word of that. . . .’
Taylor didn’t say anything. He just looked at me and chewed on his lip.
‘Trying for an insanity plea?’ asked the sergeant. ‘For Christ’s sake. . . .’
I ignored him. ‘Check the garden,’ I told Taylor. ‘The cellar floor. There are five women’s bodies buried in that house. Minimum.’
Someone knocked on the cell door. Taylor got up to answer it.
They came back the next day. The sergeant didn’t make any more sarky comments, and I noticed that his yellowed fingers shook as he lit his cigarettes.
‘Five bodies, like you said,’ Taylor said. ‘The earliest dates back to 1966. Two years after Trudy Fuller left her husband. We compared your dental records to the bite marks we found on Miss Davis. They don’t match. There was nothing under your fingernails. And whatever it was under hers didn’t come from you.’
‘And,’ said the sergeant, ‘there was this. We found it in the cellar wall, behind a loose brick.’
He produced it from under his coat and laid it on the table in front of me. I looked down at the dustjacket. Old Bones. By Raymond Wesley.
‘So,’ I said at last, ‘what happens now?’
Calmly, ceremoniously, Taylor reached under the desk and pulled out the steel wastebin, then took a cigarette lighter from his pocket and laid it beside the book. ‘Do you want to do the honours,’ he said, ‘or shall I?’
Alison had arrived at the house minutes before I did. The battery on her mobile phone was dead; that was why I couldn’t reach her.
She’d got Fuller’s address from the library. He was a member there in good standing, and had bought the Wesley book when it was withdrawn. The woman at the library remembered him well, and him buying the book—it had been less than a week before his death. But she couldn’t understand why she’d given Alison the address. It was hardly common practice; emphatically against it, in fact.
‘She said,’ Taylor’s sergeant said, eyes lowered from mine, looking into his notebook, ‘that she didn’t know what could have come over her.’
Taylor looked at me; I looked at Taylor. We were both silent; neither of us needed to say anything right then.
Alison and I, we thought we were so clever; playing detective, tracking him down. Thought we’d turned the tables and had become the hunters. But Fuller had only changed the rules of the game, luring us to his home turf, where he was all-powerful. Where he could do whatever he wanted to us. To her.
Fire, in the end, is the best cleanser of all. When the story broke across the tabloids, the house prices plummeted all along Saltash Row. Under those circumstances, and with the existing damage to the building, it wasn’t hard for Taylor to pull a few strings and ensure that number ten was demolished, the rubble burned, right down to the remaining stones of the cellar floor, to every blade of grass in that garden. I only wish I could have seen the ashes poured into a river and the ground sown with salt.
I came away, in the end, without being charged, but mud sticks. With one thing and another, I lost my job, and it was some time before I was able to get another. I sold off most of my books, partly to make ends meet and partly, as I said before, because I’m only now just coming to the point where I think I might, one day, even be able to open a book again. I sold the books to Mr Lloyd, up in the Lake District. He gave me a fair price for them. I’ve never been back there, and never will.
Ironically, for those interested, Raymond Wesley’s publisher reissued his story collection Old Bones last year in a handsome hardcover edition, larded with such quotes as ‘a classic of the genre’. You won’t be surprised to hear that I didn’t avail myself of the opportunity.
This began with someone pouring their soul onto someone else’s paper, emptying himself, or some part of himself, to linger on there. In my doing the same on these fresh, virgin sheets, may it end. And may all of us, at last, rest in peace.
I want to believe that, but I can’t, not quite.
I have to go now. It’s a Saturday, you see, and there’s somewhere I always go on a Saturday.
I visit Alison, in the hospital. Some days she just rocks and stares; on others, she seems to know me. The doctors say she’ll be all right. One day. I keep trying to believe them.
From John Mitchell’s Diary
28th January
Alison will be discharged from the hospital tomorrow. We’ve been talking about what she’ll do. Her flat’s gone—her landlord rented it to someone else—and she doesn’t get on with her parents. I have a spare room, where she can stay. For now, I will be only a friend. I will be patient and gentle. She has need of both.
3rd April
Three months now, and we live together in the fullest sense. Slowly she is coming to forget his touch and recognise mine.
But she woke up screaming last night, flinching from me until I convinced her who I was.
She kept saying she could smell aniseed.
4th April
God help me.
Last night, I smelt it too.
17th April
We’re going away. I won’t say where. Far away; leave it at that. I can only hope it will be far enough.
Alison’s upstairs just now. She’s supposed to be packing. But I don’t think she is. When I popped up before, she was just sitting by the window, staring out.
Humming to herself.
The same tune, over and over again.
Dedicated to the memory of Robert Westall—
a great writer sadly missed.
Acknowledgements
Debts of thanks are owed to various people:
Editors: Rick Bennett, who first published me and gave me a job into the bargain; cheers, mate. David A. Green, Andrew Busby, Len Maynard and Mick Sims, Brian Willis, Brian A. Hopkins, John B. Ford, David ‘Diamond Dai’ Price, Paul Bradshaw, and, of course, Barbara and Christopher Roden, for helpful advice, support, and encouragement over the years.
Family: Mum, Dad, Nana and Nanw, Ruth and Eddie, for support and faith.
And friends: Rick and Clare Glester, Matt and Kathryn Colledge, Bernard and Clare Nugent, Mark, Marianna, and Samuel L., Nick Wilson and Nicki Ankers, Joe and Gill Rattigan, Paul Finch, Terie Garrison, Sami Ali, Dave Southall, Rob Krijnen-Kemp, Amanda Murphy, Beryl and John Palmer, and, of course, Joel Lane, all for more reasons than I can decently fit into a paragraph.
Cheers also to all at the South Manchester Writer’s Group, especially Gary Parkinson, Phil Caveney, Ed and Gill Wilson, Annemarie Biggs and Kate Fairhurst, for guidance, more encouragement and a lot of laughs.
And anyone else I may have missed out (I’ll be sure to mention you in the next book. . . .).
Sources
Nine of the stories in A Hazy Shade of Winter are original to this volume. The other five stories originally appeared as follows:
‘The Foot of the Garden’: Enigmatic Tales #1 (Spring 1999)
‘Graven’: (as ‘The Graven’) Darkness Rising One: Night’s Soft Pains (2001)
‘Severance’: All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society, #29 (February 2002)
‘Close the Door, Put Out the Light’: All Hallows 31 (October 2002)
‘Love Knot’: All Hallows 34 (October 2003)
If you enjoyed this book from Ash-Tree Press, you may also enjoy the following eBooks, the work of contemporary authors, also published by Ash-Tree Press:
Divinations of the Deep by Matt Cardin
The Earth Wire and Other Stories by Joel Lane
The Far Side of the Lake by Steve Rasnic Tem
The Night Comes
On by Steve Duffy
Tragic Life Stories by Steve Duffy
Lost Places by Simon Kurt Unsworth
Rope Trick by Mark P. Henderson
Masques of Satan by Reggie Oliver
For full details of all eBooks
published by Ash-Tree Press
please visit our website at
www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm
A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER Page 25