He moved closer, deeper into the woods, expecting to be able to identify the floating white things, but he— wait, is that a teacup? He picked up his pace and forged through the tangle, coming to a small clearing. A small dribble — not much more than moving groundwater — led out of the clearing, toward the ford, presumably, and above and all around him hung small items of broken crockery. He recognized it as the same bland white stuff from the hotel dining room. Some mad tramp had done it. He turned slowly; more popped out as if stars in a dull sky. He banged his head on the teacup as he moved and it set the whole canopy tinkling as the pieces spun and knocked each other. He looked sharply for anyone witnessing his clumsiness, but luckily no one was there.
Why does it matter, anyway? his mother asked, soothing his concerns.
He stilled the cup and tilted it to look inside; fading black writing was still just legible at the bottom: knee 11.
“Knee?” He grabbed a long shard that was spiralling next to his ear: lower lip 6.
Why have I never noticed all this? He’d been coming here for years; some of this stuff looked ancient.
Half a dessert bowl hung over where the water exited the clearing, and as he turned it (right hip 12) he heard movement and singing. It was coming from the direction of the lake, so he pushed through the undergrowth toward it.
When he finally crossed onto the pathway, he was at the ford. A woman in a dirty homespun cloak or habit knelt at the shallow water, her back to him, and appeared to be washing tatty clothes as she sang. The crazy crockery artist. He moved around, giving her a wide berth, and could make no physical details out other than the knotty and gaunt hands that slapped the fabrics in the shallow ford.
“I knew a lad of birth maligned
who used to share my room.
And I was glad to leave behind
that laddie in his tomb.”
It was probably too quiet for her to hear over her chanting, and he was standing at an oblique angle to her anyway. He moved into her field of vision. “Hello?”
Back in the woods the crockery started clinking as if a strong gust was sweeping through the clearing, but the air was still. This caught the woman’s attention, and she looked up and behind her in direction of the noise, alarmed. Behind the cowl was a pallid, sunken face with crepe skin stretched over hollow cheeks.
“Oh my god!” Mark said. It wasn’t a tramp.
The poor woman must be starving. It was a wonder the wretched thing was even able to suck down air.
She continued to look over her shoulder as the noise from the clearing grew louder. Now it sounded like someone was back there, violently shaking every branch; the pleasant chiming from earlier had evolved into a clatter.
“Hello? Are you okay?” he asked. She still didn’t turn.
“HELLO! CAN YOU HEAR ME?” he shouted over the clamor.
Halfway through the sentence the cacophony stopped, and his shout rang through the air.
The hag’s head snapped back to him. Her grey eyes were vibrant and bright, and full of fear. She opened a mouth that was full of peg-like teeth, and rocked back onto her behind.
“Jumbled-up Jack! You’re not to bring him back! Jumbled-up Jack! You’re not to bring him back!” she chanted at him, half-pointing, half-pedaling her naked legs at him, her washing forgotten.
“Each one, each piece; a sign of his release!” she screamed, pointing in the crockery’s direction.
He stumbled back, slipping in the wet clay of the steep bank, and plummeted into the lake two feet below.
In the shock, he inhaled a gulp of greasy, ancient water and spluttered a choking cough that came out through his nostrils. He kicked upwards but his foot caught on something heavy and slow-moving, and he submerged. As he thrashed his leg, the snag slowly yielded but stayed fixed round his ankle.
“Help me!” he called as he broke the surface again, slapping the water. His efforts were weaker now, the icy water numbing his muscles as heat left his body. I’m going to die here. I’m going to be the freshest bait these pike have ever had. But the water was shallower and he felt the substantial lakebed under his foot. He waded to the bank, his foot still snagged, and hauled himself up, too shocked to start shivering yet, but ready to scream at the hag.
She was gone, and there was no trace of her ever having been there: no footprints in the marshy ford, no water up the dry trunks from her washing. Around his foot was a filthy, wet fabric.
The shivering started now and he kicked his leg around to dislodge the sodden thing from his ankle.
Get it off, get it off, getitoffoffoff!
It slapped around, finally untangling and settling in a loose pile. It was a woolen blanket with an embroidered section in the corner — Property of Lake View Hotel — and next to that was the fading ink of a stamp: #7.
~
The light was dimming when he got back to his fishing spot. His clothes felt like wet cardboard, and his body ached from the twitching shivers that had wracked him the past five minutes. He packed up his gear as quickly as he could manage, but his hands were so cold. When it came to the fidgety knots and links on the wire trace, he didn’t even try. Instead of undoing them, he cut them with the forceps scissors he carried — a feat in itself just using them — and slung the lot into the bottom of the tackle box. I’ll sort that crap out back in the hotel, he thought.
After his rod was packed, he leaned down to yank the rod rest from the bank. He saw something in the still water — something white and sickly — and wondered if a fat eel or carp had died in the shallows. He shifted his position and the dead thing shifted with him. No, it must be a grocery bag, caught in an underwater current. But there was an eye, and a… He turned his back to the hazy sun to get a better look. The thing wasn’t in the water; it was wrapped around his waist. He shivered, this time from revulsion: a giant, white tadpole thing with malformed arms and vestigial legs clung diagonally to his belly. Even as he watched, even as he convinced himself it was a trick of the light, it shifted, constricting a little, and the scar down his front tingled. That face…
He forgot his rod rest, picked up his box and holdall and left the lake for the hotel, unable to stop checking his belly to make sure there was nothing there.
~
The landing of the hotel was cool and dark. Either the place was empty in October or everyone was out. The staff were noticeable by their absence, even the weird old porter with the missing thumb, and the only sound other than the gentle creak and sigh of the cambered floorboards was the faint, broken knock of the grandfather clock:
Click-clack, click-clack; Jumbled-up Jack, Jumbled-up Jack.
Who’s Jumbled-up Jack, anyway?
Who cares? Just ignore that crazy drunk.
She seemed pretty sober; maybe a little crazy, but there was... lucidity there.
Yes, dear, some lucidity; kicking her legs and flashing her minge at you like that.
There was an impatient tone to the voice that wasn’t normally there, but the fall into the lake had left him exhausted and all he wanted was a hot bath and a few hours in bed. He could think about this later.
Fiddle-de-dee!
He passed an ornate mirror on a cherrywood sideboard and tried to ignore the reflection. Whether the fat-headed tadpole monstrosity was there or not, he didn’t want to know — even less than who or what Jumbled-up Jack was. He had a suspicion, though, that Jumbled-up Jack was a dead-white thing.
~
A boy — maybe seven years old — came out of room eleven down the hall, and Mark felt his eyes on him. The boy’s arms were undeveloped. How the hell were kids still being born with those kinds of afflictions when thalidomide had been banned years ago?
Perfect!
“Hey, good evening — or is it still afternoon?” the boy said in a rich baritone. “Hard to say, this time of year...”
Mark looked at him; the boy was, in fact, an adult: a dwarf. “Evening’ll do,” he replied. “After the day I’ve had, I’m ready for it t
o be nighttime.”
“Oh?”
“Fell in the lake,” Mark said.
“Yes, you do look a little — er — shall we say blessed?”
Mark laughed. “Yes, you could say that — although it was nearly a funeral, not a baptism. I can’t swim.”
The dwarf waved his tapered arms at Mark like a sea lion. “I obviously avoid water for that exact reason.”
Mark wasn’t sure how to respond to such self-deprecation. He heard himself make an awkward laugh that was half a sigh, and hated himself for it. He nodded and tried not to look at the man’s arms, but the dwarf made a horribly artless salute and then swaggered off down the hall whistling.
You should make friends with him, he might come in handy, his mother said, sniggering at “handy”.
In the room, he changed into a starchy hotel bathrobe and drew a bath; steam billowed from it in the cool drafts that swept the room like negative thermals, obliterating the reflection on the full-length mirror. He was grateful for that and shrugged off the bathrobe.
If it’s worrying you that much, why don’t you turn the mirror round?
He could. He didn’t need the mirror, wasn’t going anywhere special other than the lake. If he turned it round, he’d not have to do this silly dance every time he came in. He felt the side of the mirror for some kind of purchase or hooks. It had been hung with a simple chain along the back and as he hefted it up, the thing fell toward him, sliding down his body onto his toes.
“JESUS!” He didn’t expect it to be this heavy.
Maybe it was that his feet were still cold from the icy lake, but it was as if his toes had burst like pressed grapes. Stumbling backward, still pinned by the mirror’s weight, he fell onto his back and the mirror crashed on top of him. It didn’t break, but he wasn’t so sure about his spine. He lay there, winded, staring at the yellow-stained glass bowl light shade, scared to move in case the slightest motion did crack the mirror.
Roll out carefully, son, and don’t look at it.
He slid his feet clear of the base, trying to be gentle, but when the thing juddered across the bridge of his feet and back over his pulped toes, the pain made him scramble out. Once he was freed he crouched against the bathtub, staring at the fallen mirror sulkily, ordering his thoughts. Tomorrow would be better — although he was running out of bait. In a few moments he stood up — nothing broken — and sat on the tub’s broad ceramic edge. The wall behind the mirror had not benefited from subsequent paintings, and the finish was a drab olive that made Mark think of war.
When his heart and feet had stopped pounding, he pivoted on the bath’s edge and tested the water with a battered toe. At first a searing heat flamed over his submerged toe, but it calmed to a hot itch. It probably wasn’t the best of ideas to put swollen feet in hot water, but he gingerly slid into the water.
He lay submerged, knees jutting out, and listened to the squelching thump of his pulse. He let his nose break the surface and lay that way, allowing the tension of the day to slip into the water like emotional osmosis. Not one fish, either, he thought.
The absence of a catch made him wonder if he was using the right bait for these country pike; they wouldn’t have had much contact with humans, so maybe they weren’t used to artificial baits. Maybe he should— now he thought of it, he couldn’t quite recall what he had been using as bait; he’d started off with a plastic lure, but he’d changed that when… when?
Oh, never mind all that, son. Just relax; relax and then call reception to fix the mirror, and go to bed.
It was far too early to sleep, but it sounded like good advice.
Just don’t think. Relax.
He tried to not think, to unthink, and at some point fell into a light, floating sleep.
~
He woke with a jerk, to cold water, choking on the little he’d inhaled. It was very dark outside. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Skeletal brown leaves floated on the surface, and there was a pink hue to the water. He checked his feet for cuts as he got out, but saw none. The water here has a high iron content, that’s all.
As he brushed his teeth, he remembered dreaming about the dirty hotel blanket. The Lake View Hotel, #7, it’d said. And there was something to that, wasn’t there?
I told you not to worry about that.
Yeah, but still...
No, son, I said forget it.
He looked at the wall: the section the fallen mirror had exposed. There was something about that, too. Nothing he could put his finger on, but there was a kind of magnetism there.
You need rest, come on, get into bed. You’re more or less dry anyway.
No, he didn’t want to get into bed. There was something here he needed to...
Need to what? Figure out why they never did a professional job cleaning and repainting behind the mirror? What color palette they should’ve used? Maybe that shitty TV show, Renovation Nation, did it. Ever think of that?
Her voice had never been sarcastic before. It was hurtful. She shouldn’t speak to him like that. She sounded impatient. What would annoy her about something so trivial? He hefted the mirror up and leaned it against the wall. Again, the image of the blanket appeared in his mind. He took a step toward the wall.
There was a dark gap, where the wall didn’t quite meet the floor, and a little blue triangle — some folded paper, perhaps — peeked out.
Ignoring the insistent voice that told him to get into bed and not look into things that didn’t concern him, Mark crawled over to the section of wall where the skirting board stopped to make room for the mirror, and knelt down. A sharp cool draft blasted from the gap where the blue triangle was jammed. He passed his hand along the gap — that was some draft! The folded blue paper was actually satiny cloth.
He pulled it, expecting some resistance, but instead the cloth came free easily, bringing some of the wall with it. Crumbling gypsum fell onto the tiles, and a crack in the olive paint tore up the wall in a lightning-strike rip.
“Jesus!” he said, and looked behind at the bathroom door. Not that any staff would come into his room uninvited — despite how dodgy they were — but if anyone had come and seen him like this, mirror on the floor, wall half-demolished, they wouldn’t have been worried about staff etiquette.
The pressure of the draft had dropped with the widening of the hole, but the cool air still blew strong, and carried with it the smell of — what was it — gas? Had his excavations exposed a gas pipe?
GET OUT NOW! BEFORE IT BLOWS! GET OUT, GET OUT OR YOU’LL BE SORRY!
She sounded angry. Like never before. Angry and scared. And with that change of tone she sounded masculine — a roaring, enraged man’s fury. He thought of occasions over the years when she had sounded displeased; even the slight change in her tone had made him back away from whatever it was he’d been doing then, but now he felt different. Why should that be?
ONE MORE CHANCE, BOY, I’M GIVING YOU ONE MORE CHANCE…
And another voice called to him from inside the wall. It was a fraction of the volume of the other, jangling, raging one, but it rang with the truth of a polished bell. Clean, pure and full of love. He was transported by this voice to summer fields of flax, dotted with poppies, and the bitter stink of autumn outside was replaced with the smell of newborns and cotton.
He fixed on this voice, heading toward it in his mind; down warm fallopian corridors, homing in on the voice that wasn’t really saying words, but spoke to him all the same. A searing flare flashed in his head, from a pinprick that became a supernova, and he opened his eyes to find himself inside the wall.
It was a small space, not even a box room, and he recognized the rough, cobwebbed arch of bricks of an inglenook. His hands were dusty from breaking through the white plaster and lath. As dust settled through the shafts of light shining in from the bathroom behind him, he wondered how the hell he was going to explain this to the hotel; he’d created a building site!
He held what he thought was a large sheet of bundled wallpaper, but
it was soft and far too thick, so he shifted in the light to see it properly: a blue woollen blanket, edged with a satin hem. A drier version of the one he’d found in the lake. This one was marked with the same stamp: “Property of Lake View Hotel, #7”, but was bundled around something at the back of the large hearth. When he pulled it toward him he recognized the dry clatter from inside, even before the collection of brown human bones tumbled out onto him.
Like a relieved gasp, he heard a blissful sigh from the calmer of the two voices in his head, and there was a sense of relief.
I chose you, she said, then she was gone. The only sounds were the background hum of the hotel and the buffeting sigh of the breeze outside. With her departure came understanding.
“Mother?” he said, looking down at the small collection of bones in his lap.
From the back of his mind came a roar. It was distant but approached fast, until it crashed through his mind like a stormy surf, and he scuttled backward as if recoiling from a physical thing.
Even when he was back in the bathroom, he continued, pushing his heels down, skittering away until the immovable side of the bath stopped him with a winding jolt. His bathrobe had slid off, and he saw his dusty white reflection in the mirror opposite, where he’d leaned it.
SHE CHOSE YOU! The roar came like an accusation, and he felt a slick movement on his belly; the milky human tadpole attached to him pushed itself up from his body and twisted its miller’s-thumb head, to face him in the mirror. Minuscule undeveloped eyes, black olives in dough, fixed on him and he thought of misshapen deep sea fish.
BUT I DID FOR HER JUST AS SHE DID ME! he heard, and for the first time in thirty-eight years he realized the voice was not his mother’s; had never been.
MOTHER? The voice softened before continuing. Mummmmmeeeeeeeee? Oh mummy what should I do? it cooed, mocking and cajoling. The thing in the mirror pulsed and shivered, and he realized it was laughing.
Not mother, never mother. She was never a mother to either of us! Was leaving you like that a motherly thing to do?
The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel Page 9