by Chris Ward
The kids were waiting back at her parents’ house, probably wondering now where their mother had gone, would she be back later, would she still tuck them in and make their sandwiches for school tomorrow?
The idea tempted her. To go back to her children, to sweep them up into her arms and tell them everything would be fine, it would be all right. But would it? Could she possibly tell them that, when in her own mind she couldn’t even believe it? Kids were perceptive, they picked up on a lot of things adults thought they had got away with. She remembered her own parents’ messy break up. She had known for months about her father’s affair, about her mother throwing him out of the house. Away on business was the line they fed a nine-year-old Rachel. Yeah, right. Children heard, saw, more than they ever should.
Luke had seen. She no longer doubted it.
But while Luke might be scared of his father, Rachel wasn’t, not anymore. Matt hadn’t hit her. Matt was kind, loving, considerate. Matt would never have lifted a finger towards her. Whatever dark secrets that existed in his past had made him this way, and she felt confident she could turn him back. He wasn’t a wife beater, and Rachel would prove it.
Somehow.
She turned off the A–road, sorry to see the street lights at the intersection quickly disappear in her mirrors as she descended down into country lanes, high hedgerows and the craggy, bone–fingers of overhanging trees. For a few miles they enveloped her, the hedgerows wrapping her up in their awkwardness, twisting her one way then the other then back on herself. The road opened out at last as she reached a steep corner leading over a forge, the waters high after the heavy rain. As the wheels of her car sloshed through the water, rather than the rust it might cause she wondered, what if, what if I get stuck here in this? Who’s going to find me out here?
The lights of the occasional farm outhouse or isolated cottage gave her scant comfort as the car ground its way up a long hill, and Rachel wished she had had more opportunity to drive on this type of road during the couple of camping holidays they had taken in France before they got married. These days, she had so little need to leave the city she didn’t think she had ever driven anywhere without street lights before.
Halfway up the hill she found drifts of fog floating past her, gradually thickening. ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ she muttered, as the road leveled out and the car headed straight into a wall of mist. Some people hated driving in cities, but Rachel didn’t feel comfortable unless she was boxed in by angry motorists on either side. At least she would have someone to curse at then; out here there was simply, nothing.
The hedgerows gave way to low grass verges that suggested something vaster beyond, but rather than the shadowy pasture fields she had expected to catch a glimpse of in the darkness, the fog left just a white blindness on either side, giving the illusion of space which could easily give way to dark houses and hedgerows set back a short way from the road. But somehow, she didn’t think so. As she drove across a cattle grate, the shrieking metal of the loose rollers startling her, she understood.
Moorland.
Images of old Christopher Lee films raced through her head, Village of the Damned, The Wicker Man, their low–budget, shock-tactic frights flickering across the old black and white TV in her room at university, herself with the duvet pulled up over her eyes, Matt beside her, lain back on the pillows, chuckling softly. Good times, she remembered, but now those films served only to conjure images of heathen people and crazy rituals, witches, warlocks, evil sorcerers and black magicians, burning children or worse – outsiders – on funeral pyres erected in moorland hollows, their Pagan idolatry hanging from the trees: crosses, corn dolls, evil eyes. It was enough to make Rachel shiver and scan the edge of the fog nervously as the car trundled along, its speed diminishing with every minute that passed as the fog grew thicker.
Then on her left a sign flashed past, Tamerton, two miles, giving Rachel hope, but not enough to quell her unease. Matt was up ahead in the fog, and with him, only Heaven could say what.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ she muttered quietly to herself, checking again the rearview mirror, not for cars behind her – hell, she wouldn’t miss their lights in this utter blankness – but for the person she felt certain would appear in her backseat at any moment. She had heard the myths, the urban legends about the vanishing hitchhikers, the madman banging the head of your dead husband on the roof of your car as you sat trapped inside by the edge of the road; they were enough to put the fear of God into her, make Rachel itch to turn the wheel, pull the car sharply around and head back the way she had come.
She was actually seriously considering it when a woman ran out in front of the car.
Rachel’s eyes squeezed shut even before she hit the brakes. The car skidded on the damp road, the tyres squealed and Rachel cried out in terror, losing sight of the figure for a moment as it loomed large in her headlights and then vanished again.
Then came a dull thump and the car ground to a halt.
Rachel made herself take a couple of deep breaths before she opened her eyes. She felt sure she wasn’t hurt, although her head had struck the steering wheel hard enough to cause a small cut to open above her eye. The warmth that spread there felt strangely comforting.
No, she made herself take a couple of calming breaths before she opened her eyes.
Only then did she begin to scream.
###
Bethany’s Diary, May 3rd, 1998
Hello diary. How are you doing?
It’s been a long time, I know. I guess I just gave up on you, had nothing left to say. With Mother nearby I’ve had someone to talk to, someone to voice all my fears to. But I’m getting older, now . . . I don’t know.
She’s started telling me things now she thinks I’m old enough to understand, things she’s always kept hidden, and I’ve needed someone else to talk to, because sometimes I just don’t understand unless I can put it all down in front of me.
Thank you for helping me, even if you do nothing other than listen.
The days tend to drift into one. I still do work that they give me down at the special place Father takes me to. I read and I look at magazines sometimes, too. But it’s all meaningless. I’m not like other people. None of this really matters to me, because I can’t talk about it. Can’t talk about any of it. If I can’t talk about it, it can’t really exist, can it? Something can’t exist unless someone else knows it’s there.
Do you know what I mean? Mother tells me this, at least. That’s how I see her, yet sometimes, it’s so hard. Before, it never mattered, I had nothing to say. But now . . .
While I stay silent I can be with my mother. If I talk, I lose her forever. And what’s more . . . oh, God. I can’t stand it.
I can’t stand it. I didn’t think I needed you, now I have her. Thought I’d found someone to talk to, someone who could talk back. But it just makes it harder, more confusing. I get just one opinion, and mother’s words frighten me at times. I can’t just accept them as gospel, but there’s no one else to talk to.
She told me I’d get sick if I ever spoke to anyone, but only recently has she told me why. She said I’d go the same way as her. Even now she won’t talk much about it, only babbles on about decay and weakness, how my silence protects me, saves me from the disease that so overwhelmed and eventually destroyed her. Sometimes I think she’s gone mad. If I didn’t know she were only a ghost or a soul or whatever, I’d definitely think it. It’s only because a ghost can’t go mad, surely? It’s not alive! I don’t know.
I can’t lose her, for all of her strange talk. Dad gets angry at me a lot, begs me to talk. He seems to know what floods of words rest on the tip of my tongue. He goes crazy sometimes, throws stuff around, but I think he drinks too heavily. I smell it on him a lot.
Only Uncle seems to like me. He sits on the end of my bed sometimes, and just talks to me. Talks about the world, about the stars, the planets, about foreign countries, strange peoples and cultures. He tells me stories, talks about bizarre ani
mals, and sometimes even talks about the people I look at in the magazines Dad buys for me. He never wants anything back, never wants me to speak. He accepts me as I am.
I like Red. He’s so very kind to me.
13
Just a shadow, but a shadow with horns and blazing eyes and dripping teeth, and he thought he understood now.
Not his mother. Well, not all.
Out in the woods he could hear her voice, calling him. Soft, shrill, delicate like silver lilies coated with frost, like cookies sprinkled with icing sugar. Shrill, but rich like honey and cinnamon and toffee treacle and rooms full of cakes and so warm, like the childhood assurance of a sucked and torn comfort blanket, like a lover never disagreeing, never commenting always loving, always, always loving.
Her shell, a residue, a creature borne of the darkness she had become, had been trapped in that room like a beast in a circus sideshow. Her soul drifted out here, lost to him, but still, here. He could sense her, and he fought his way through the suffocating undergrowth, the clawed hands that raked at him and grasped for his feet, in a desperate struggle to reach her.
Like a fish on a hook, wound slowly, unknowingly in.
Just as it had wanted him before, it wanted him again. Why? His soul could free it. Could it?
He ran on, the darkness irrelevant for the tears left him blind anyway.
Rachel, oh my darling Rachel, how have I done this to you, how have I hurt you so bad? My children, Luke, Sarah, so beautiful, why do I alienate you from me?
I alienate myself. I am the corruption. The corruption is me, not around me.
A rock tripped him, and he rolled over and over through soggy bracken, the sharp ends of a few dead stalks snagging his clothes and scraping at his skin and his hot, feverish face. He cried out in pain, but more as a reflex than for the actual hurt he felt; his body had numbed to it, his senses and his nerves were packed inside his brain like hostages trapped inside a building.
Somewhere down below he heard the river, and moments later he burst out of the trees, almost sprawled headlong but just managing to remain upright, leaping the small, busy stream in a single bound. He stumbled onwards as the ground began to rise, fingers grasping at the wet, sticky undergrowth, feeling like a desperate fugitive with a dog pack on his tail. He breathed hard, sucking in the scents of damp vegetation and the warm peaty odour of decomposing matter; around him the world seemed to sway and circle his head as though he were lying on the ground drunk rather than climbing with desperate necessity. The sounds of the forest – bird calls, the rustle of foliage in the wind and the roar of the river had vanished behind a howling in his ears like a great wind, but more, like a thousand voices raised together, all of them lost somewhere terrible, all of them screaming.
He grabbed at his ears as though to tear them from his head, screamed his own rage up at the towering, swaying trees, but to no avail. The voices filled him, ripped him apart from within, sucked out his life, consumed him.
And then he stumbled out into what he would once have recognised as a clearing, had his eyes not been blinded by images of dark shadowy creatures, his ears not filled with their torturous wails.
He stumbled a few feet further, his whole body weary from the climb, then sprawled forward on to the damp earth. His face struck ground as soft as a sponge, and a moment later he came up choking, spitting bits of grass and mud from his mouth. Around him the world seemed to shimmer, and it took a moment to recognise it as driving rain.
‘Rachel . . .’ he called to no one, desperately crying out for help, but to the one he thought the least likely to hear, the least likely to aid him. ‘Help me!’
His arms buckled under him and he slumped forward, the ground coming up to embrace him like an eager, long forgotten lover. Watery mud rose up to fill his mouth and he found himself biting down on it, choking, feeling matted grass pressing into his eyes, blinding him.
‘Help me . . .’
His sobs were real, his agony immense. Tears flooded from him as his age disintegrated, his body fled back from its tormented adulthood through adolescence and beyond the catastrophic anger of his youth, back to his young childhood and his infancy; gradually he lost the ability to walk, to talk, to crawl and then even to think . . . and as he reached up to embrace the dark tunnel that had appeared before him, he looked up to see her standing there, just metres away, ephemeral, translucent, but still – there – his mother oh Mother oh Mother oh Mother –
And beside her another: a girl, her beauty almost equal, but younger, closer to his own age and with features that almost matched his own. Haunted like his, tormented, yet at peace, at ease. He craved for her, he craved for them, and as he reached out for them a sound fell from his throat, harsh, breaking through the screaming in his ears and shattering the swirling glass that wavered before his eyes.
A baby’s cry.
Interlude Two
14th May 1984
‘Tears can shatter clouds like rain can shatter clouds, tears are rain, tears are human rain, human rain . . .’
Matt strokes his chin with one finger. He reads the line back to himself once more in his head, eyes lingering over the words that dance drunkenly across the crumpled page in his own erratic handwriting.
Maybe this one might do. Maybe this one would be okay.
Matt hates the stupid English assignments Mr. Birkswill set them. Write a short narrative piece about an emotional state of your choice. Okaaaay . . .
Sadness.
Why sadness? The first one to come into his head. The first emotion he felt when he sat down to think about it.
His dad is out. Bethany is, as far as he knows, in her room. His mother is
(––––––––––)
Who? (––––––––––) Where?
. . . upstairs. He thinks.
The word mother seems to turn a lock in his mind and he immediately stops thinking about her. That shut off seems to happen more and more often now, and he starts to forget about her up there. Upstairs.
Mother has not gone anywhere. Nothing has happened to her. She’s just taking a nap, that’s all. A nice, long nap. She’ll feel better soon.
Soon.
He turns his thoughts to his father. Matt is worried. For months now, ever since (––––––––––) his father has been so despondent, so depressed. As though nothing will ever get better. (––––––––––) won’t ever recover.
It will. It always does. Whatever it is, it will get better.
Matt’s problem is that he has the same feelings. Most of the time the tangible despair that seems to surround him leaves him feeling weak and depressed, other times it manifests itself as a violent anger, as though he were a battered remote-controlled toy beneath the controls of a vindictive kid. Like last week, for instance, when he got in a scrap with Simon Camwell in the playground and ended up with a scuffed cheek and bruised eye. A fight over nothing: Sy had looked at Matt sideways and Matt had flipped. Sy Camwell had a reputation for being solid, but all thoughts of personal safety had fled as Matt waded in. He had done okay, getting a couple of punches in before Sy had, inevitably, pounded him to the floor. After his anger had dissolved into regret and dismay, Matt had silently thanked the teacher on break duty for stepping in while he still had half a face left. Old Birkswill; Matt could almost forgive him for the stupid homework.
Matt often hears his father now as he tramps around the house, slamming doors, kicking chairs and other obstructions out of his path like someone kicking Coca Cola cans about in the park. He throws bags into the back of the car rather than puts them; he shouts for Matt to hurry rather than simply calling. His father seems on the verge of some sort of breakdown, but Matt cannot ascertain why. He knows his (––––––––––) mother (––––––––––) is (––––––––––) sick, but she’ll (––––––––––) get better; she’ll be (––––––––––) out of that (––––––––––) out of that
(–––––room–––––)
She’ll come downstairs soon.
Perhaps the problem is Bethany. Matt’s kid sister is now six years old, and his father’s worry increases as time passes. She’s grown too old for her silence to be passed off as late development; now that physical shortcomings have been ruled out there is no answer left other than some form of mental deficiency. But Matt can’t look at her and believe for one moment that Bethany has any sort of handicap. He only has to glance at her eyes, see the intelligence there and he knows that she is fully aware and comprehending, that there is no more wrong with her ability to speak than there is with his own. And frankly, he finds that a little terrifying.
The kids in the village scream and shout like a flock of angry birds as they walk to school in the morning, and Matt wishes just for once Bethany would do the same. She doesn’t even act like them, not to mention her apparently self–imposed silence. As he watches her wandering the corridors, a feeling running down his back like the touch of a cold, dead hand, he can only think of a tiny, moving porcelain doll, patrolling the house like a sentry on the border of Toyland. Except in the Toyland Matt sees there aren’t any bright green bouncing balls and wobbling policemen and bears wearing pinafores; no cars that talk, pixies that bake cherry fruit cakes, not even any dark forests filled with nasty golliwogs. No, the Toyland Matt sees is grey and lifeless; the houses are half collapsed, the paint stripped off, the windows smashed and the doors kicked in, the roads are cracked and traveled only by rolling tumbleweeds (yes, in Matt’s mind Toyland has tumbleweeds), the pond where children once played and threw pieces of marzipan flapjack to the ducks has dried up to a sticky, lifeless marsh; the trees are all dead and their brittle branches are the grey of plaster casts: when the wind blows their branches snap away and fall to shatter on the barren, cracked earth.