Hiding From the Light

by Barbara Erskine

  She glanced up as an owl hooted, and watching its swift silent traverse of the garden, she smiled. ‘It’ll be child’s play for us, won’t it. With Liza’s help.’ She paused, turning round. ‘You will help, Liza, won’t you? We don’t want any newcomer pushing her way in here. This is your place. Yours and mine.’

  The Simpsons had lasted eighteen months, so she’d been told, before they moved out of the cottage. Holidaymakers came and went. They didn’t seem to bother Liza. After all, there were long periods when the cottage lay empty in between. And since Lyndsey had come back to the village there had been no holidaymakers at all. She had seen to that. She wanted the house empty because the garden was hers; the place, though with such care that no casual observer would see that anyone had been there, where she planted and tended and harvested her herbs.

  She had lasted four terms at university. Hateful place. In town. Full of people and cars and noise. Her parents had washed their hands of her when she walked out, her father blustering and indignant, her mother crying. ‘Most people would give their right arm to go to Cambridge, Lyn! How can you do this to us? How?’

  They had never understood her. Never cared about who she really was, about what was best for her, rather than for them. When Lucy Stebbings, her great-aunt, had died and left her the tiny terraced cottage in Mistley she had taken it as a sign that she was blessed and supported in her bid for total freedom. She moved in and earned a modest living doing odd jobs around the village to subsidise her real work and her passion: her exquisite, detailed paintings and her research into the occult use of herbs which would one day form the core of the witches’ herb Bible she was planning to write. She had never gone back to her parents’ home in Wood-bridge. Had never seen her father again. Her mother came over occasionally with food parcels and clothes and clucked around. Lyndsey was barely civil to her. All she wanted was to be left alone.

  She shook her head. What had got her thinking about her past suddenly? Liza, probably. Liza wasn’t an ancestor. She had had no children who had lived. But Sarah had, and Sarah was an ancestor. Sarah, who was Liza’s nursling, Liza’s friend and Liza’s pupil. Sarah who had ended her days in this cottage, the dower house where she had come to live in her old age and where she had carried on Liza’s work.

  This cottage should have been Lyndsey’s by rights. That it had not belonged to anyone in her family for three hundred years made no difference to her at all. This land, this home, this place, was hers, her natural inheritance, and no one was going to steal it from her.

  She shuddered. She could feel her everywhere, the stranger who was buying the house. She too had stood out here beyond the terrace. Her energies were strange. Uneasy. Afraid. She was bringing unhappiness and danger. Suddenly Lyndsey’s senses were screaming. This could not be allowed to happen. It would undo all the good she had worked for over the years; unleash everything that she had fought to contain. She was going to re-awaken the evil, allow it in, encourage that mist to drift in from the sea and engulf them all.

  The spell was an easy one. First the circle drawn faintly in the grass, her whispered invocation to the guardians of the quarters, her arms raised to the goddess moon as she sailed serenely in the clear, midnight sky.

  ‘Let no one buy this house. Let no one live here. Let no one enter these doors who does not belong. Liza, mother of my mother’s race, listen to my prayer and help to guard your home. If anyone should move here, let their stay be short. Let the very doors and walls, ceilings and floors, the spiders, the rats and mice, let them all conspire to drive her out. Let the chimneys smoke and the mildew curl about the walls, let the rot take the boards and the worms the beams.’ She paused, pleased with the resonance of the words. Then suddenly she frowned. ‘But not so badly that it falls down, of course.’ She smiled to herself and shook her head. ‘Liza, this is still your home. Your house, your place. Keep this woman out. Haunt her! Scare her! Make her ill. Send her mad. Do not allow her to stay!’

  She stared in silence at the moon, feeling its power touching her, feeling her own hatred. Then she frowned. The moon was still a fraction off the full. Perhaps she should return tomorrow when she was at her maximum power and repeat the spell. What had Will told her the woman’s name was? Emma. That was it. Emma Dickson. She raised her arms again. ‘This house will never be yours, Emma Dickson; you will not thrive here. Don’t darken its doors. Don’t cross its threshold. Don’t touch this garden, which is sacred to Liza’s memory.’ She felt in the pocket of her jeans. Yes it was still there, the short length of cord she carried with her in case she should have to make a binding spell. Holding it up in both hands, she began to knot it. ‘A knot to bind my spell. A knot to keep it well. A knot to hold at bay, the danger that comes by day.’ Three knots. The triple seal. Scrabbling with her fingers in the grass at the centre of the circle, she managed to scrape a small hole into which she tucked the cord. She covered it and rearranged the grass. It was done. If Emma Dickson ever moved into this house, she would regret it for the rest of her days.

  Part Two

  20

  End of September

  Unable to sleep, Mike had walked out into the icy dawn and was looking across the river. He could see nothing. The previous night’s mist had settled into thick fog, blanketing a clammy, viscous tide as it licked towards him across the mud. The silence was intense, heavy and cloying, beating against his eardrums as he narrowed his eyes, trying to see the outline of the old boat lying on the saltings, her ribs bare, her keel rotted and broken.

  The atmosphere was eerie and disorientating and he found himself suddenly catching his breath, overwhelmed with fear that there was something out there, hiding just off the shore out of sight. Somewhere across the water he heard the lonely whistle of a bird and he found himself turning round and round, unable now even to see the road, the grass at his feet, the water’s edge; totally lost.

  He pulled his hands out of his pockets and held them out in front of him, grasping at the air, feeling the icy droplets of fog condensing on his skin. Whatever was out there was evil beyond measure and it was coming closer. He wanted to turn and run, but he seemed incapable of moving. His breath was growing constricted and it was only then that he realised he had been so paralysed with fear that he had been unable to pray.

  ‘Dear Lord, Jesus Christ, be with me.’

  His words were muffled by the fog, but he felt comforted.

  There was something terribly wrong in the town and others were feeling it too. He frowned. Several times now he had caught sight of Bill staring out towards the river, that look of worried preoccupation on his face as though he were expecting something awful to emerge from the quiet, muddy water. And the atmosphere had been mentioned at the PCC meeting only the night before. Someone had vandalised the church hall, breaking the windows, spraying graffiti on the walls. Telling him about it, Donald James had shaken his head mournfully. Too many things were going wrong. The crime rate in the whole area was soaring. The head teacher at the school was complaining that the children were becoming moody and uncontrollable, joking wryly about it, wondering if it was something in the water. Mike narrowed his eyes, trying to see through the mist. Was there something in the water? Not in the sense the teacher had meant, of course, but something else. Something infinitely more sinister.

  It was growing lighter. And suddenly the terrible sense of impending doom seemed to have withdrawn. Suddenly he could see again. The fog was thinning and towards the east he could see a flush of red.

  As the sun began to rise through the mist, it was the colour of blood.

  21

  The house was very quiet. Looking round the small, low-ceilinged living room, Emma added two items to her shopping list: extra-soft cushions for the little sofa she had bought from Peter Jones before she left London, and yet another lamp. In spite of the radiant September sunshine outside, the room was dark. The corners never reflected the light. Shadows seemed to hang there whatever she did to rearrange the lamps she had brought with
her.

  It was a week since she had moved in, just over six since she had first seen the cottage. In that time the sale had gone through without a hitch, her resignation had been accepted by David Spencer – if reluctantly, and only after her promise that she would continue to supply him from time to time with reports and summaries, that she would stay in Internet touch, and that if or when she changed her mind, she would ring him immediately. Last but not least, she had on that last terrible, miserable day, removed all her possessions, including Max and Min, from what was now Piers’s flat.

  The cats had at first been astonished and nervous at finding themselves the owners of an entire house and a three-acre area of ground. But the fear was slowly wearing off and now they were intrigued, anxious to explore. She had only let them out for the first time yesterday, all eight paws duly buttered, and they had proceeded cautiously out onto the terrace, sitting close together, the swagger and bravado they had displayed when looking out of the windows all gone. She had watched them fondly, at first afraid they might run away and disappear. She needn’t have worried. The first sound of a car in the lane had them bolting back into the kitchen and up the stairs. But it was only minutes after that they were creeping downstairs again, their eagerness to explore and their excitement outweighing their caution.

  The furnishing in the house was as yet sparse. Peggy and Dan had come up to see her only three days before, bringing with them a small antique pine table and four chairs for the dining room – soon to be linked to the kitchen by the removal of the lathe and plaster between the studwork – and the oak side-table and the pair of Victorian velvet granny chairs had come from them as well. Upstairs, the bed was new. The Victorian chest of drawers had been her grandmother’s, the oak coffer had been Peggy’s. But still it didn’t feel like home. Thankfully she had not heard the voice again.

  She wandered outside. A robin was singing its thready, wistful, autumn song from the collapsed pergola halfway down the garden. That would have to be mended, as would so much of the fencing, the trellises, the gate. The list of work to be done out here was endless, the work to do on the house equally so. She stood still, feeling the sun on her face, breathing in the soft, slightly salty air. She could see down to the widening estuary from her bedroom window and already recognised the fresh cold smell of the mud as the tide crept out leaving the broad dark grey glitter of the river margins exposed.

  She perched on the wall for a few moments to get her breath back after her strenuous morning’s work on the house. But stopping for too long was dangerous. It was then that the doubts crept in. Her happiness, her sense of absolute rightness, her triumph at finding herself here was not enough all the time, to blot out the worry at what she had done. She had turned her back on a first-class career. She had moved out of the home she loved with the man she adored, and she had spent without a thought a good chunk of her savings and for what? A dream. A fantasy. Even the prospect of doing a bit of freelance work for David didn’t entirely comfort her. The income she made from that would never be huge. She glanced up at the window of the back bedroom where her computer sat on a wooden table. Sitting at it she could look out over the garden. That would be her office, if and when she got round to organising it.

  Min landed on her lap with a small chirrup of greeting and she bent and kissed the cat’s dark head. ‘You like it here, don’t you, darling,’ she whispered. She sighed.

  She longed to ring Piers, if only to hear his voice. Glancing back at the kitchen door she could see the phone from here. It was blue, to match the Aga which would be fitted next week. No. What was the point? He would see through her, sense her loneliness and she would rather die than admit she might have made a mistake.

  Standing up, she set the cat down on the moss-covered wall and began to walk down the garden path. ‘You coming?’ She turned and clicked her fingers at Min, who cautiously jumped down and followed her, sniffing at the grass. As Emma watched, the cat paused and began to paw at a bare patch of earth, patting, sniffing, and leaping back, her hair on end.

  ‘What is it, Min? Be careful.’ Emma went over to see what she had found.

  Lying there, partially exposed, was a knotted length of muddy red cord. Emma picked it up with a frown. She examined it closely. There was something unpleasant about it, although she wasn’t quite sure what. ‘It’s only a piece of string, Min. Here, do you want a game?’ She dangled it in front of the cat invitingly. Min backed away and spat.

  Emma jumped. ‘Sorry! I thought you’d like to play.’

  But already Min was trotting back towards the terrace. There, she sat down and began to wash her face. That was enough exploration for one day.

  Emma moved on, pushing the string absent-mindedly into her pocket.

  The lawn was a matted tangle of knee-high grasses and wild flowers. Two old apple trees, laden with small hard green fruit, stood one on either side of the path and once-symmetrical beds of roses featured beyond them where the pergola had collapsed beneath its riot of blown and dying flowers.

  She paused, suddenly uncomfortable. Each time she walked down the garden she stopped here and without quite knowing why, looked round, glancing over her shoulder. She shivered and hurried on. Beyond lay the gate into the herb garden. Beds of herbs, woody and untrimmed, lay around an old boarded barn and behind it there was a poly-tunnel, torn and mildewed, where the young plants had been raised. She loved the barn. It had obviously been the centre of activities when the place was a business and boasted water and electricity that worked, two benches, shelves of pots and broken tools, labels, jam jars, all the stuff which she assumed had not been worth saving.

  Two sides of the gardens were enclosed by an old brick wall, some eight feet high. On the third side where she had come in, most of the wall was hidden beneath ivy and wisteria and once-trimmed espaliered pear trees. The shelter the walls gave from the wind created a wonderful fragrant haven. This had once been, she understood, one of the kitchen gardens for the manor house up the road. On the fourth side of the herb garden the wall had almost gone completely, to be replaced by a high untrimmed hedge. Beyond that lay the two-acre paddock – wind-sewn with thistles and ragwort. Wandering between the beds, she snapped off a piece of rosemary and rubbed it between her fingers. Next spring would be the time to start some sort of project here. Until then she would spend her energies on the house itself and on finding her way around the district. Another spontaneous wave of out and out happiness swept over her. At whatever cost, she knew it was right to have come.

  When she returned to the kitchen it was with a posy of herbs and roses which she put into a glass and carried through into the living room. Frowning, she glanced round. It was still too dark, even with all the lights on. And there was a strange feeling in the room, as though someone had just walked out of it. She frowned, looking out of the window, but the front garden was empty, the gate closed. There was no one there. She tried to push the sensation aside. Perhaps if she moved the table-lamp closer to the chair and threw another log on the fire the room would cheer up a bit.

  It was as she was standing there, at the window, that she became conscious suddenly of the piece of red cord in her pocket, nestling against her hip. It felt hot. Unpleasant. With an exclamation of disgust she pulled it out and stared at it, frowning. What on earth was it? She glanced round for Min. The cat had spat at it. Why? She walked over to the fire. Whatever it was, there was only one place for it. As she threw it onto the smouldering logs, the flames hissed and flared almost angrily. In seconds they had devoured it totally. Suddenly the room seemed lighter.

  When the phone rang that evening, she was standing at the sink, washing earth from her hands. She had been weeding the old flower pots on the terrace, dragging them into new positions, working out where a garden table and chairs would go.

  ‘Em?’ Piers’s voice rang in her ear. ‘Just checking to see how you’re getting on.’

  She closed her eyes, fighting the pang of anguish his voice provoked. ‘I’m fine.
Really happy.’ She realised that there were sudden tears trickling down her cheeks. ‘You will come down and visit us one day, won’t you?’ She took a deep breath, steadying her voice with difficulty.

  Their parting had been so hard. Nothing had been said to emphasise that this was the end of their relationship, but what else could it be? Piers had not relented. He had helped her pack up sadly, resigned to her going. He had helped her load the cat baskets into the seat beside her, he had kissed her goodbye and waved as she drove away and then – nothing.

  She had waited and waited for him to ring, her pride preventing her from being the first to pick up the phone in case she cried.

  ‘The cats are missing you, Piers.’

  ‘Just the cats?’

  She couldn’t tell if he was smiling or irritated.

  ‘Not just the cats. Me, too.’

  There was a moment’s silence. ‘I’m missing you lots, too. No one’s scratching the sofa any more.’

  She gave a wistful chuckle. ‘You know I tried to stop doing that.’

  There was a fractional pause. ‘You are sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Quite sure. Peggy and Dan are coming down at the weekend with another load of stuff from Waitrose. They seem to think I’m going to starve. Which is silly. There are a couple of lovely food shops here.’

  She stood staring out of the kitchen window for a long time after he had rung off. She felt bereft.

  Max jumped up onto the window sill beside her and she fondled his chin. ‘He said he’d come,’ she whispered. ‘But I don’t think he will.’

  The nights were colder now as late summer pitched into autumn and lately they had been very foggy. She switched on an electric fire in her bedroom. Central heating would be necessary at some point soon. She must find a good local man to work on the cottage. The cats were both asleep on her bed and she had locked the doors downstairs. Time enough for night-time excursions when they had grown used to the place and found their way around and she had found someone to put in a cat flap.