The cut. The dresser. The dog. The dresser. The mould, and the way the blood faded into the wood when McQueen himself was cut. Selfishly I thought about Sally, and then ridiculously of the contract money I was still owed. I was so far into selfish thought that I was missing what McQueen was saying.
‘…still got it?’
‘Sorry, got what?’
‘The bill of sale we took from the dresser drawer when you bought it off me. Surely you remember?’
I had forgotten about it completely, and had to think carefully where I had put it. I roamed back in my mind to the day I saw the dresser for the first time, I had gone to see McQueen by appointment, and I was wearing…I dashed for the wardrobe leaving McQueen hanging on. The jacket I had worn that day was hanging inside the wardrobe and the bill of sale was still inside. A little crumpled, already torn and ink faded from the years, but it was there and it was intact. I couldn’t decipher the writing, nor understand the language in which it was written, but my scant knowledge of old mythology was enough for me to realise what I thought it was. It certainly wasn’t a bill of sale.
The night was a quiet lake of still calm. There were tranquil pools where a sly moon splashed puddles of light. All was peaceful and all was enticing. Martina stepped outside and the coolness of the air touched her young skin, raising slight goose bumps on her body.
The girl was on the swing again, her bare legs flashing like pale moonbeams in the silent garden. If there was rustling in the bushes Martina was deaf to it. If shadows formed behind her, with shapes that were less than natural, she was blind to them.
Martina had thought she would have to search the garden to find the girl and was delighted to see her there. Then the girl jumped down from the swing and for a moment Martina thought she was going to run away again. Instead the girl stood erect, her head pushed back, her arms outstretched, her eyes closed yet staring up at the moon.
Walking towards her Martina became aware of muted music in the background, the organ from a church service. A small breeze played on the girl’s neck, sweeping her hair over her eyes. She made no attempt to brush it away. Then she turned her neck towards Martina and opened her eyes. For the first time Martina felt cold reality drench over her dream like state. The girl’s eyes were as white as the moon, the milky white of blindness and yet it was clearly evident that she could see and that she was directing things around her with liquid movements of her arms. Things that lumbered out of the darkness, pallid countenances draped with cunning and anger. Noises emanated from them that had the form of words but sounded into the night air like evil thunder crashing from below as well as from above the earth.
Screaming with an intensity that shocked even her Martina ran back to the house. The door opened and she sobbed with joy to see the secure figure of her father standing there.
‘Martha, your special day has arrived,’ Milos said.
The kitchen was awash with light when I arrived. A distraught Sally finally answered my frantic knocking at the door. She had obviously just jumped out of bed, her hair dishevelled and wearing just a cotton nightgown.
The door to the garden was wide-open and cool air played into the house from outside. It was impossible to tell if the discordant organ music was coming from outside into the house or was playing from one of the rooms, possibly Milos’s study. I learned that Sally thought he was still there, having refused to join her and Martina for supper, and locking himself in. Apparently he had been shouting to himself earlier, strange words that sounded like a contorted version of his mother language, but which she instinctively knew wasn’t.
A foul stench wafted in from the garden, a mixture of the earthy smell Martina had complained about and rotting flesh. It was the smell I would expect if a centuries sealed pit were opened up.
The scene in the kitchen was worse than I had imagined. With Sally beside me in the doorway to the hall I could see the whole of the kitchen. The pot dresser was swaying. The wall behind it was covered in the green mould, pieces of plaster flaking off and falling to the floor. The dresser itself seemed alive with a pulse of its own, swaying with an ancient rhythm that matched the music and the noises from the night.
Martina was trapped against the dresser. She didn’t appear to be tied to it but her arms and legs were held firmly against it and only her head seemed capable of movement, and that only to mirror the awful motion of the dresser. Her clothes had been ripped off and her fragile nudity added to her vulnerability.
Milos was chanting into the garden. He was holding a drawer of the dresser in his hands and he seemed to be searching it for something. He was clearly distressed that the drawer was empty. He was beseeching something that I could not see.
The dresser suddenly stopped, and my attention fell to it. The mould had streaked out so that it covered the whole ceiling in fine irregular patterns of lines, as though someone had randomly flicked paint there. Martina was almost unconscious; her head slumped onto her shoulder. Then I noticed the Green Man motif had gone. In its position at the top of the dresser was a gaping hole, as though a huge bite had been taken.
‘Have you seen it? Do you have it?’ Milos had turned and was shouting at me.
At first I thought he was referring to the motif, but his continued search of the empty drawer told me what he was looking for.
I held aloft the piece of paper we had at first thought to be an innocent bill of sale. ‘Is this what you’re after Milos?’
He glared at me, and the force of fury that controlled his mind behind those eyes was as strong as it was evil. ‘Give it to me,’ he demanded.
‘So that you can bring them back? What then?’
Sally tried to wrest the paper from my hand, but I pushed her away. ‘What is it?’ She asked. ‘Give it to him if it stops all this.’
I shook my head. ‘We have no idea what this is, Milos.’ I looked again at the ancient and crumbling paper, dry and cracked from the centuries. I glanced quickly at the indecipherable words upon it, words that meant little to me, but despite that I was certain that if Milos got his hands on them sure catastrophe would follow.
The windows shattered and a huge green leg broke through. The foul stench of decay accompanied it, and the door was ripped from its hinges as another huge shape smashed against it.
Suddenly Martina let out a great cry and fell to the floor. The dresser began to shake. Sally cupped Martina in her arms and both of them closed their eyes.
I began to tear the paper into pieces.
Milos started shouting in desperation. ‘The sacrifice is ready. The untouched maiden is yours. Make me unto you. Please.’ He ran to the door and the wind whipping into the room lashed at his clothes like sails on a ship.
Martina was crying and laughing at the same time. Sally clearly thought it was hysteria and hugged her all the tighter. But I guessed why the she had been able to escape from the dresser, and the sacrificial rituals.
‘You’re not a virgin are you Martina?’ I asked almost laughing out loud myself.
‘Only once, but it was enough, wasn’t it?’
The green leg lifted away and the roar that filled the night scared the moon.
The paper was in tiny pieces now and I flung it at the dresser. It stuck to the mould and where it touched the wood began to smoulder and smoke as if about to burst into flames.
It wasn’t easy and my hands and shoulders got badly burned, but I manoeuvred the dresser out of the kitchen into the garden and shut the door, pushing the table and chairs against it by way of flimsy defence.
Through the shattered window I was able to see Milos as he was taken. There were bulbous heads lolling on shrunken bodies, and willowy tentacles that adorned bodies with the shape of animals. An outline of a large human shape, with a headdress of leaves, dominated all the restless creatures, directing them all, even the ones with limbs like rope and heads like insects.
As the tumult diminished the last thing I saw was the swing at the bottom of the garden. There was a young
girl on it sitting perfectly still. Her eyes were open and she seemed to be sleeping.
SAND CASTLES
Ben Maddern was alone when he moved into the house; it was the last time he ever experienced solitude.
For someone who had never had a moment in his thirty-seven years when he could remember truly being on his own, the thought of living quietly by the sea with only his own company was tantalising.
There was so much to be done as the divorce gained momentum that the purchase of the two bedroomed house – described obviously as a cottage in the estate agents excitable literature – overlooking the sea, or more accurately an estuary of it, on the south Devon coast, became almost forgotten, an afterthought instead of a new beginning.
Marriage had started so promisingly for Ben and Teresa. Both in their early thirties they had sufficient experience to believe they had lived all their doubts and would either marry for true love or not at all. The reality was an unspoken compromise, mixed with a gentle desperation that neither ever admitted until the solicitors began the savagery of the settlements. Then the truths poured out as if the glass wall that both knew had always been there was shattered, and bile, vitriol and something approaching hate tip-toed over the broken glass and cut each of them far deeper than they could have imagined.
Ben was in his City office when the first call came through. Surrounded by shirt sleeved earnest young men trading stocks and shares in commodities and products they didn’t understand, dealing in services they would never use, the telephone ringing was a constant part of the day. Each minute one of the huge banks of ‘phones would ring from some part of the world and money, invisible and illusory, would be swapped and prices would move, high, low, up or down.
‘Ben,’ a junior colleague called across the frantic office. ‘It’s for you.’
He pressed a button and watched as the red button flashed to indicate connection. ‘Maddern.’
‘Mr Maddern, it’s Penelope Scarling.’ His solicitor always sounded out of breath as if her role was to spend her waking hours rushing from one marital pit to the next, trying with each fee-earning hour to prevent the inevitable. She never quite caught up with herself, and so was destined to be constantly trying to fit in more words per second than her mouth could cope with.
She rarely rang him at work, even in the early stages of the skirmishes, so he prepared for bad news.
‘Your wife wants the house.’
‘She can’t…the settlement’s already prepared.’
On the other end of the line there was an uncharacteristic pause. Ben knew this was a definite sign that the bad news was about to be elaborated upon.
‘She’s found out about Zoë.’
Two traders, from opposite ends of the office were gesticulating at him, indicating calls that needed to be taken. The volume of sound in the room was deafening; so loud that eventually you didn’t hear it at all. His computer screen was flashing out signals that needed urgent attention. All Ben could concentrate on was a night at a house party in Colchester one warm August evening last year.
‘She can have the house, but make sure my Jersey account doesn’t get dragged in. I’ll need funds for somewhere to live.’
August had been as hot as the summers everyone always seemed to recall from their childhoods. Dry, cloudless, the sun relentless and heavy for weeks on end. Neighbours became suddenly friendly as if the unaccustomed heat somehow deepened casual relationships. There were invitations to come round for drinks, and endless lumps of meat cooked outside to capture every moment of warmth and daylight.
People they hadn’t seen for years started ringing up unexpectedly and extended invitations to come round for dinner parties to spend time with other people only vaguely remembered from similar functions through the years. Such was the call that found Ben and Teresa driving up to Colchester and the home of friends who had attended their wedding but hadn’t been seen since.
A quiet man, Ben was never wholly comfortable at social gatherings, even when he knew most of the people. Here, as Teresa wandered about, happily mingling and small talking, he found himself oddly detached from his surroundings. Murmuring banalities if anyone spoke to him, smiling a lot so that people would think he was enjoying himself and leave him alone. Zoë was a fellow escapee.
They bumped into each other in the garden, isolated from the main groups of people by a pergola crawling with clematis. She was sitting by an ornamental pond, her hand trailing in the cool water. He almost turned away when he saw that his solitary spot was already occupied but something about the way her neck curved and her short hair tucked itself in at the nape made him stay. Later she told him she had known he was there but enjoyed the silent attention. Later still, when they talked about his leaving Teresa and setting up home together, they envisaged a small cottage with peace and tranquillity. Now he was putting their dreams into reality, but a solitary dream rather than the possibilities they conjured between them.
An eager estate agent in Totnes held the keys to the new house. Ben stopped off there to collect them on his way through. The offices were halfway up the steep hill of the high street and by the time he had walked up and down again and was back in the car it was almost noon. The narrow and very steep hill down to the house would take some getting used to. Twice he had to pull into the shallow passing points to let another car get through. At the bottom of the hill The Waterman’s Arms, one of the two pubs in the village, served him a pint and a hot lunch. He ate and drank at one of the tables by the river, enjoying the first stirrings of rural isolation. There were plenty of families because of the season, but for most of the year the peace and quiet would be absolute.
He eased the car further along the narrow village lane, running parallel to and looking down on the estuary. It was low tide, the rowing boats tipped at angles on the mud banks. Birds floated on the surface of the water, and the scene was calming, which was just what he had hoped for.
Pulling the car off the road and down the small drive he was concerned to see smoke coming from the chimney. The side gate was open as well, the one that led through to the back garden, with its river frontage. Leaving his cases in the car he fumbled for the keys and at the third attempt located the one that fitted the front door. The house smelt stale, like a lovers breath in the mornings. It didn’t feel as if anyone was there, but if there was smoke from a chimney then someone had to have lit a fire. He hesitated, realising what should have been obvious straight away; it was summer, not as hot as that fateful August a year ago, but still July and pleasant. There was no need for extra heat from a fire.
A search of the two downstairs rooms, and the kitchen revealed one open fireplace, but it was clean and cold; no fire had been lit there for months. The house had been empty since autumn last year, when the previous occupants had moved abroad. He went upstairs to check, but as he expected there were no fireplaces there.
He went out into the garden to see why the gate should be left open. Judging from the state of the grass the garden hadn’t been tended while the house was empty. It would need urgent attention, as would the weed-strewn flowerbeds. Then he saw a man in a small motor launch waving. He waved back, but had the odd impression he was doing so futilely; the man was waving past him.
Ben glanced back at the house; perhaps there was someone in the lane the man knew. Had he left that window open? He didn’t think he had, but it was wide open now, and the curtains were gently moving as if there was someone behind them, although of course it was just the sea breeze.
Discussions about children were the first fissure in the marriage that up until then had made a passable attempt at happiness. They had spoken casually before the wedding about having them, and both thought the decision had been made. It had been but neither had reached the same conclusion. She was adamant they start a family within the first year and he wanted to wait. They had several arguments about body clocks and money, but when it transfixed into one issue it was Teresa who held sway. She would be the mother, it was her in
stincts that were persuading her the time was right and no logical reasons for delay were relevant.
It turned out they didn’t have to wait too long before conception took place and he surprised himself by being secretly pleased. The birth was hugely emotional and he truly felt different afterwards; a father, a parent. The depth of his love for their son was so much greater than what he felt for Teresa that it was inevitable he should pay her less attention, should be less interested in her. Their lives changed completely and although neither of them would admit it, they were glad there was someone else they could convey themselves upon. They had grown apart as a couple fairly quickly; almost before the confetti hit the floor.
Trading was in his blood; that’s what he would tell the eager young blades gathered reverently around him in the bars and clubs they frequented after work. He was the king, the lord of the long position, the prince of the paper millions. He headed up the options team, where uncovered trading positions of millions was the normal way of dealing, where the buzz was in getting to the edge of a price, and then tipping it just over so that it’s legs dangled on the wrong side of the percentage before they reeled it in and counted the profits.
His father had been a shopkeeper in Kidderminster, so the City life wasn’t really in his blood, but the reality of his life was always easier to cope with if he embellished it a little. After his parents death he could re-invent his past into anything he wanted it to be; no longer burdened with a heritage that was visible. The resonance of his loving but ordinary parents remained with him at all times, and he found himself mentally apologising to them if he behaved badly, as if they could see him, as if they were with him at all times, looking over his shoulder.
‘Coming to Pedro’s?’ Sandra, his P.A. asked him, and he knew how the evening would evolve. The whole team was there, no one wishing to miss out for fear of being excluded in some future deal, or worse, of being talked about behind their back. The bar was heaving on a Friday night as the recent bonus payouts were still weighing heavily on their credit card limits. Sandra was rubbing his leg under the table and as he stood to go to the toilet she followed. A stall was empty and they used her make-up mirror to spread out the white powder before taking turns to snort it loudly into their nostrils. As he plunged into her, ramming her forcibly against the door, he was aware that there was very little sensation anywhere in his body. In his mind he was saying a quiet ‘sorry’ to his mother as his father looked away in disapproval.
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