by Mark Morris
‘I know the place the kids mean,’ she said. ‘We could go there now if you like.’
I considered it momentarily, then shook my head. ‘No, I feel as though I have to do this first. While it’s still fresh in my mind. I feel a sense of … urgency. I can’t explain it.’
Liz shrugged, happy to go along with whatever I wanted. ‘What do these kids look like?’ she asked.
I described them, but she was none the wiser. ‘They may have started only this term. There’s a lot of the littleys I’m not that au fait with yet.’
I didn’t feel much like talking, so we drove in silence for a minute or so. I was peripherally aware of Liz’s scrutiny, guessed that she was assessing my state of mind, perhaps wondering whether to bring up my ordeal last night.
‘So,’ she said when she finally did speak, ‘where are we going exactly?’
Her question broke the spell. Until that moment I realized I had simply been driving, allowing the automatic pilot in my head to guide my movements. Suddenly I felt like the subject of a hypnotist who has been instructed to wake up. I faltered, lifting my foot from the accelerator. The car slowed.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
Liz looked at me, her expression giving nothing away. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
‘I just don’t. I’m driving to the field in my dream … only I don’t know where that is.’
‘But you seemed pretty sure until I asked the question.’
‘Yes, I did, didn’t I? But it was like … Do you ever drive home from school, and because you’ve done the journey so many times you just switch off? You arrive home, and all at once it’s like coming out of a trance?’
Liz gave that little tilt of the head again, and sighed. ‘Every day.’
‘Well, that’s how I was just then,’ I told her. ‘It was as though the dream had taken over.’
‘And now?’ Liz asked.
‘Now I haven’t a clue where I’m going.’
‘Oh.’ She was silent for a moment, then she pulled a rueful face. ‘I’m sorry. That was my fault. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
I focused on the road ahead, tried to relax, to clear my mind. I felt that I needed a distraction, something else to talk about, in order to allow my instincts to take over once more. ‘As well as being arrested last night, I think I was followed,’ I said.
‘Followed?’ exclaimed Liz. ‘By the police, you mean?’
‘No.’
‘Then who?’
For a moment I thought the words weren’t going to come, and then I blurted my answer. ‘The grey man.’
Liz looked at me as if unsure whether she should laugh or look alarmed, then finally said, ‘What do you mean?’
I told her about the figure I had seen standing in the children’s playground, moving across the grass towards me.
‘Creepy,’ agreed Liz. ‘But you don’t honestly think it was the grey man, do you?’
From her tone of voice and the expression on her face I guessed that my next answer would prove vital. We were getting on well, but we still barely knew each other. I forced a smile.
‘Course not. But it might have been the same man who met Alex under the arches.’
‘Come to shut you up, you mean?’
I shivered. ‘It’s not a nice thought, is it?’
‘No,’ agreed Liz. ‘But are you sure this guy was following you? Maybe he was just taking his dog for a walk or something.’
‘He didn’t have a dog.’
‘Well, maybe it had run away and he was looking for it, then.’
I glanced at her. ‘You think I’m paranoid, don’t you?’
She didn’t answer immediately and I laughed. ‘You do, don’t you?’
‘No, it’s not that,’ she said. ‘I think you have reason to be paranoid. If it were me, I’d probably be the same. And I certainly wouldn’t want to walk round Greenwell at night. The whole town gives me the creeps.’
‘I just have this feeling that everyone I meet is hiding something from me, present company excepted, of course. On the other hand, maybe I’m just being hypersensitive because of Alex. Maybe I think everyone is actively working against me when all it is really is that no one except me seems to care what’s happened to him.’
‘Hey, I care,’ said Liz, putting her hand briefly over mine on the steering wheel. ‘I care a lot.’
‘Oh, I know you do,’ I said. ‘I was talking about the people in Greenwell.’
‘Inbred imbeciles, the lot of them,’ Liz said.
‘Including all the kids at the school? Including the teachers?’
‘Ha! Don’t get me started on that one.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that I could tell you some stories.’
‘Go on, then.’
Liz smiled. ‘Some other time, maybe.’
‘I’ll hold you to that.’ I hesitated, then said, ‘Some really odd things have happened to me since I’ve been here.’
‘Odder than you’ve told me already?’
‘Some of them, yes.’
‘Like what?’
‘I’ll give the same answer you did, and not just because I’m playing tit for tat.’
‘Looks like we’ve got a lot to talk about,’ said Liz. ‘How about dinner at my place tonight? It’ll get you out of Greenwell. You could even stay over so you can have a few drinks.’
I didn’t need to think about it. ‘That would be great, but are you sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure. I’m not asking out of charity. It’ll be fun for me too.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘It’s a date. Shit!’
‘What is it?’ exclaimed Liz, alarmed by my sudden change of mood.
I was looking out of the driver’s side window, my foot easing gently down on the brake. ‘We’re here,’ I said and turned to look at her. My whole body was tingling. ‘That’s the field from my dream last night.’
‘You’re certain?’ said Liz as I pulled in at the side of the road and stopped the car.
‘Absolutely positive.’
The words were barely out of my mouth when a feeling of claustrophobia swept over me. I opened the door and scrambled out, then stood up straight, breathing in deep lungfuls of chilly air. I didn’t know how I knew this was the right field, I just did. I had never been to this place before, and there were no particular landmarks I recognized; it was simply as though my head were a spirit level, and after wavering from side to side, the bubble had now come to a stop dead centre. I felt a sense of equilibrium, of balance. It’s hard to explain or justify the sheer sense of rightness in my head. This was the place. I simply knew it as surely as I’d ever known anything. I opened the boot and lifted out the spade I’d bought that morning.
I glanced at Liz. She was standing beside the car, hands on the roof, looking at the field as if she had expected something more. It was a big field, a large uneven area of muddy pasture land, surrounded by a rickety wooden fence that in places had almost been overwhelmed by weeds and undergrowth. In the far corner stood a huge, gnarled oak tree, undressing for winter, leaves scattered around its base like old scabs. I put my hand into my pocket and grasped the rabbit brooch. It wasn’t warm, it wasn’t pulsing, but I liked the shape of it in my hand.
I walked across the grass verge, still wet with dew, tossed the spade into the field and climbed in after it. The fence swayed alarmingly beneath my weight; it appeared that the vegetation that made it look more like a hedge was both strangling it and holding it upright.
‘I haven’t got the shoes for this,’ said Liz, looking ruefully down at her smart, black zip-up boots.
‘Do you want to wait there?’ I asked.
‘No way. I’ve come this far. I’m not going to miss the great climax.’
The ground was a bit squelchy, but firm enough beneath my feet. I took a couple of steps back to the fence and held out my hand. Liz grasped it and climbed up, the fence squealing when she reached the top. She jumped down from a
crouching position, still holding on to my hand. She landed awkwardly, stumbled into me. I put my arm around her waist to steady her. Her cheeks were red, either from the cold or the exertion. ‘Thanks,’ she said. We trudged across the field, to the place where I had dropped to my knees and begun digging in the dream. I now had no doubt where that place was. I think I could have found it with my eyes shut. When I came to a halt, Liz looked surprised, as though she’d expected there to be a big white cross painted on the ground.
‘Are you sure this is right?’ she said.
There was nothing to indicate that the ground had been disturbed, but I nodded. ‘Positive.’
I started to dig. The ground was soft and my spade cut into it easily. Within a minute I had created a mound of earth inversely proportionate to the hole beside it. Liz stood beside me, peering into the cavity of almost-black soil, wrinkling her nose at the sight of a halved worm flipping and writhing. Occasionally she glanced around. ‘If a farmer appears with a, a dog, or b, a big shotgun, I’m off,’ she said.
The hole was maybe a foot deep when I met resistance. My spade cut through an inch or so of soil, then clunked against something that jarred my hand.
‘I’ve found something,’ I said.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. Something solid.’
‘Maybe it’s just a stone,’ Liz said.
‘I don’t think so. I got the feeling it was something hard but hollow.’
Liz said nothing, but her face looked suddenly tight, anxious. I knew what she was thinking because I was thinking it too. Was there a skull down there beneath the soil, or perhaps even more than a skull?
With my spade I scraped the layer of mud away from whatever was lying beneath it. Both Liz and I were bracing ourselves for the sight of bone, and so were surprised when the object was revealed to be not white but terracotta-coloured.
‘It’s a pot,’ Liz said, leaning forward. ‘Careful, don’t break it.’
I scraped the mud gently away from the pot. It was circular, like a gourd, with a stubby spout on one side that had been sealed with wax. It was hand-fashioned not machine-made; it looked like an old drinking vessel.
When I had cleared as much of the mud away from it as I could, I reached down into the hole and lifted the vessel out. I lay it carefully on the grass, then squatted on my haunches and looked at it, absently rubbing my muddy hands together.
‘I wonder what’s in it?’ said Liz. ‘We could take it back to the school, heat a knife up with a Bunsen burner and use it to cut through the wax seal.’
‘Or we could just do this,’ I said, and picking up the spade that was lying on the ground beside me I struck the pot with the point of the blade.
It broke into several large pieces, like a chocolate egg. Just for an instant I thought I saw a flurry of spindly legged movement from within, and jerked back. Then I recovered my composure, embarrassed and annoyed with myself. How could there possibly have been anything alive in there? For God’s sake, pull yourself together, girl!
Liz must have thought I’d been wary of flying shards because she didn’t say anything. I bent over the pot, my heart thumping, suddenly frightened of what might be inside it. I could see a twist of blond hair, some teeth (which still had tiny shreds of skin and dried blood on the roots as though they had been ripped out forcibly) and a small red gemstone.
My heart began to beat even faster. I picked up the gemstone, then reached into my pocket and brought out the rabbit brooch. With a vertiginous sense of inevitability, I slotted the red gemstone into the metal rabbit’s empty eye socket. It was a perfect fit.
‘This is very, very weird,’ Liz said quietly.
I felt dizzy and sick and scared. As though the rabbit brooch had suddenly turned red hot, I sprang apart the fingers that were holding it. The brooch with its new red gem of an eye fell into the remnants of the pot. I grabbed the spade again and used its broad blade to push the broken pot and its contents back into the hole.
‘What are you doing?’ Liz asked as I scooped up a spadeful of the soil I’d dug out.
I dropped the soil into the hole. It spattered dark on the brooch, partly covering it. ‘I’m burying it,’ I muttered and scooped up another spadeful of soil. All at once I felt feverish, eager to complete the job. ‘I’m burying the lot.’
fifteen
Driving away from Greenwell that evening was not as liberating as I had hoped it would be. All it did was make me realize that I wouldn’t be free of the place until I had found Alex. It was as though the town was encased within a vast dark bubble, and that rather than bursting free of the bubble, it was simply stretching around me, clinging to my skin, the further I moved away from it.
Shelton was everything that Greenwell was not. It appeared to have taken Greenwell’s share of charm as well as its own. The place was all quaint cottages and country pubs; there was a bridge over a stretch of gurgling river; hanging baskets, some still clinging tenaciously to summer’s glory, were a seeming prerequisite beside every front door.
Liz had told me to look out for the ancient church and then to turn left at the drinking fountain whose spout was the carved stone head of a wild boar. Down Primrose Lane, past the little primary school on the right, then second left, which was Thornham Grove.
Liz’s stone cottage, number eight, was set back from the road, a wooden gate opening on to a winding path that sloped down to a tiny red front door peeping shyly from beneath a wooden porch smothered with a sinewy tangle of roses. A quartet of fruit trees, denuded by autumn’s ravages but still proffering the odd brown-mottled apple or shrivelled pear, reduced the light from the cottage’s leaded windows to a shifting glitter of yellow shards.
I was surprised and slightly embarrassed to see that Liz had dressed up for the occasion. She was wearing a little black number, heels that added a couple of inches to her height, and whereas I wasn’t exactly in sweatshirt and jeans, I couldn’t help feeling that my pink cashmere sweater and black velvet trousers didn’t quite hack it. I wondered whether to apologize for my lack of effort, but decided almost in the same beat that that would have made us both feel awkward. In the end I merely grinned at her ebullient ‘Hi!’, stepped forward to embrace her and kissed her on the cheek.
‘You look fantastic,’ I said, and then quickly, to save her feeling obligated to respond in kind, ‘and what a brilliant house! It’s like something out of a fairytale.’
‘It was my grandmother’s,’ Liz said. Her eyes were sparkling and her cheeks were flushed. Either it was hot in her kitchen or she was already a couple of glasses ahead of me.
‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked.
‘Seven years.’
‘You inherited it?’
‘No, I bought it. The stairs got too much for Gran so she put the place on the market. I was renting at the time and kind of thinking of buying somewhere, and Dad just said, “Well, why don’t you buy your gran’s place?” I was really lucky. I’d always loved the house, and Dad gave me some money towards it. I don’t think he wanted to see some stranger taking it over. He was born and brought up here.’
The idea of generations of Liz’s family making their home in this wonderful place gave me a cosy rush of nostalgia. ‘It’s a lovely idea,’ I said, ‘passing a house down through the generations. Maybe you’ll do it too eventually.’
‘There’s not much chance of that,’ Liz said, evidently amused by the idea.
‘Why not? You’re young yet. You’ve got plenty of time.’
‘Hmm,’ said Liz, then took my arm. ‘Anyway, come in properly, let me show you around. Did you not bring an overnight bag?’
‘It’s in the car,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d bring it in later.’
She turned and led the way into the house, patting the yellow walls on either side of her. ‘This is the hallway,’ she said, ‘and this is the lounge.’ She indicated the only door on the right beside a steep, narrow staircase.
I poked my head in dutifu
lly and saw a roaring log fire, terracotta-coloured walls, bookcases in the two alcoves flanking the chimney breast. There was a beautiful old wooden sideboard, thick rugs on the floor, a sumptuous three-piece suite upholstered in fine airforce-blue needlecord.
‘Wow!’ I said. ‘This is fantastic.’
Liz grinned and pointed up the stairs. ‘Thanks. Those are the stairs, believe it or not. I could show you round now or we could have a drink first and do the guided tour thing later.’
‘Let’s have a drink,’ I said. ‘I could do with one after today.’
‘What’ll you have?’
‘Anything. What are you drinking?’
‘I took the liberty of opening a bottle of Sauvignon.’
‘Great,’ I said. I handed her the bottle I’d brought. ‘You might want to put this in the fridge.’
She led me into a kind of back lounge or dining room dominated by a large inglenook fireplace with a cast-iron hood. The room smelled deliciously of wood smoke and cooking. The lighting consisted of the dancing, twisting flames of the fire, the glow of a rose-coloured Tiffany lamp and various strategically placed candles. Liz went through an arch into the kitchen whilst I sat at the table which had been set for two, nibbling tortillas and listening to Macy Gray as I stared mesmerized into the fire.
‘Have you done much to the house since you moved in?’ I asked, raising my voice above the popping and crackling of logs.
Liz reappeared, bearing a glass of wine which trapped the reflection of flames within it. ‘Not structurally. I had the place rewired and a new bathroom suite put in, but most of the changes have been aesthetic ones – carpets, curtains, paint.’
‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but is your gran still around?’
‘She is. Still going strong at ninety-three. She lives with my mum and dad now on the other side of Shelton.’
‘And how does she feel about the changes you’ve made? I know if it were me I’d be worried that my gran would take offence every time I undid something she’d done.’