by Jess Kidd
He shakes his head. “I’m fine and fat. I can spare it.” He pats his chest, which is savagely thin. His arms are worse.
Earlier, when he peeled off his clothes for laundering, the man went from gaunt to skeletal in a moment. I had two pairs of trousers, four shirts, and three jumpers off him. He had stood in his vest and underpants in the scullery, with a curve to his back like a bent bow. The shocking thinness of his limbs made his joints, feet, hands, and head look disproportionately large. A giant buckled by famine. His skin hung on his long frame like a flag on a pole on a windless day.
“You had a fair few clothes on, Mr. Flood,” I’d said to him.
“I had.”
“Do you feel better for wearing them all at the same time?”
He shrugged. “I get attached to my bits and pieces.”
“And will you be doing that again, wearing all your things at once, when I’ve laundered and pressed them?”
“I will, Drennan.”
“There’s your coat over the door there; you can put that on for a bit of decency while I deal with these.”
And as tractable as a good child he’d wandered off with his white head wobbling and his gangling arms held stiffly askew from his body and his elbows jutting at a sharp angle. Like the picked and bleached carcass of an ancient buzzard struggling to take flight.
Pity caught in my throat for him and, in that moment, I doubted every one of Renata’s theories. This was no murderer, just some abandoned old man. But then I studied him closely: the breadth of his shoulders, the size of his hands, and his pitiless pale, pale eyes. In his prime this man would have been terrifying.
I sit quietly on the bar stool next to him, turning my face up to the sun, relaxed now that I know where he is. After a while I glance at him. He’s kept hold of the coat, I notice; the pockets are full already.
“How’s the clean shirt? It’s a pity Gabriel didn’t see his old fella looking so fine.”
“I’ve told you. That fat arsewipe is not my son. Capiche?”
There’s a wild gleam in his eyes, so I just nod.
“He’s a lawyer, you know, that pestilent fucker.”
“Is he? I thought he was a university lecturer?”
Mr. Flood looks at me witheringly. “Jesus, do you people ever listen? Or do you just prefer the sound of your own fecking mouths flapping?”
Another fight is breaking out on the roof of the toolshed. A ginger tom scales down the side, his tale snaking.
“He told you to leave?” he asks.
“He didn’t.”
“But he said that I was a pervert?” There is a dangerous hint of a smile on his face.
I say nothing.
“He told you I’d tried it on with one of the carers? Molested her? Tried to finger her?” He bares his dentures in a bitter sneer.
“Any more of that and I’ll be out of here. Straight up.”
“You will in your arse,” he says, but he stops sneering. “So what did he say?”
“Look, I don’t want to get involved in any dispute here.”
“Of course you don’t—and you earwigging with binoculars when I was talking to that bollix in the garden.”
I look at him. “Now, why would I do that? On your private business?”
“Because you have a beak you like to stick into other people’s private business. Fecking snipe.”
“I don’t at all. I keep my head down and get on with my work. Which is what I should be doing now, so if you’ve finished your drink?”
He nods. “Good girl yourself, off you go. I wouldn’t dream of distracting you from your important work. Thieving away my few things and selling them, right under the old caubogue’s nose. Spending my bit of shopping money on yourself and feeding me the cat’s leftovers.”
“You really are a nasty old bastard.” I’ve said it before I realize it.
As I walk down the path I hear him chuckling with delight.
* * *
I TAKE his glass into the kitchen to wash it. When I look out again he has put down the back of the sunlounger and is lying dead to the world, his twiggy old arms stretched out above him. Larkin has crawled underneath the chair and is curled up like a dog.
It’s a nice day for it. The sun shines down on a garden that looks like Armageddon has come to a municipal dump. But the sun doesn’t mind. She burnishes rusty paint tins full of rainwater and warms abandoned mattresses for sleeping cats. Her rays are indiscriminate: they fall on wooden pallets and stacked roof tiles as well as the late daisies and crocosmia that bring pockets of color to this blighted land. I stand at the sink watching Mr. Flood’s old checked shirts flutter on the line I’ve strung between the house and the toolshed. It’s good drying weather for autumn; if I knew where Mr. Flood’s bed was I could tackle his sheets. God only knows the condition of them.
Somewhere in the house above me a door slams, hard. Then it does it again, and again.
Then there is silence.
I grab a pair of salad tongs and run into the hall.
Nothing is moving; even the clutter is waiting, holding its breath.
On a box of tangled electrical leads a black handbag purses its leathery mouth and a knitted spider frowns. In a laundry basket a troupe of china ladies grip their parasols and hats.
Dame Cartland peers out from behind a tea chest, big-eyed. We listen hard, the shabby-arsed cat and myself. We listen to the silence.
There is definitely silence. But what class of silence is it?
The rubbish is still and the mice are dead in the teacups. Mr. Flood is asleep on the lounger and Larkin is curled up in his shade.
Holding the salad tongs, I edge along the hallway and stare in astonishment at the Great Wall of National Geographics.
Backlit with afternoon sun, there is a crack of radiant light right down the middle.
* * *
DAME CARTLAND sits back on her haunches and shakes out a paw. She starts cleaning it nonchalantly, biting between the pink pads.
“Will I go through? I could just about fit.”
She throws me a look of majestic indifference, then turns to lick her flank.
I grip the salad tongs and take a deep breath.
* * *
EVERYTHING IS different on the other side. On the other side there are no cobwebs, cat hairs, or drifts of newspapers. There are no piles of pizza menus or heaps of sardine cans. Instead there are objects that glisten as if they are newly minted, like pristine treasures on a beach when the tide goes out. But these objects are not new or remotely lovely; I have stepped through the Great Wall into a museum of terrible wonders.
Glass cases of differing sizes are stacked all along the hallway. In one, a pale Botticelli Venus reclines, spooling out her gastric organs with a smile. In the case above her is a severed foot with bubbling skin and wizened toes. I peer at the label: gangrenous necrosis. Next door is a female pudendum with an advanced case of syphilis. I hum a little song and remind myself that I am not squeamish: I have entry-level training in bedsores.
Dame Cartland comes slinking through the gap in the Great Wall with her rear low to the floor. She glances around and, hearing a rustle, gives chase, her tattered rump shaking as she runs. I watch her disappear out of sight at the end of the corridor.
Farther along, under a magnificent domed bell jar, is a tray of glass eyes. As I draw nearer I hear a click. The click is followed by a whirr.
I watch in horror as the tray begins to move and tip, causing each eyeball to turn in its own small hole. As I pass by, the eyes follow me. A hundred lidless glares, each one pale, pale, boreal blue.
On a nearby stand sits a shrunken head, a sinister coconut in a hellish shy. It cries trails of thread from its sewn-up eyes, on its wrinkled lips a stitched pout. A plume of hair spills down and around its stand.
There is a card tacked to the plinth, it reads:
Cathal T. Flood
Purveyor of Antiques and Curiosities
Flora and Fauna, Medical
, Scientific
Specialist in Taxidermy and Victorian Automata.
Out of the corner of my eye I see movement. Along the corridor a pack of stoats are playing poker. The dealer wears a visor and a cigar in its twisted smile and deals a rackety hand. Across the hallway there is a raven in a Yeoman Warder’s hat. It shifts on its perch, ruffling its wings with a noise like the grinding down of gears, the black beads of its eyes glittering.
Certain words return to me from Biba Morel’s legal disclaimer (hardly read). Council raid, booby traps, ingenious mechanisms—
I freeze and wait for the feathered darts with fatal poisons to hit, the net to drop, the whetted axe to fall.
The floor beneath my feet is covered with Turkish rugs. There are trapdoors lying under them. A headlong route onto bloodstained stone flags in a dank cellar, cranium smashed, splattering skull shards and jelly. I move slowly, treading carefully, keeping my eyes open for tripwires. I pass doors obscured by drawers and cabinets. I creep gingerly between them to try locked handles.
The corridor gives way to a grand entrance hall with a sweeping dark-wood staircase. A stained glass window, graced with knights with pointed feet and ladies with great ropes of hair, throws a kaleidoscope of jeweled colors on the stairs below.
And there, perched on the newel post, is a nightmare.
I would consider running if I could move my legs. For here is a horror that not even Jason and a whole rake of Argonauts would take on.
A four-headed beast keeps watch in every direction.
The exact species that contributed their heads is uncertain, but I hazard a guess at dog, horse, pig, and deer. Each creature appears to have met its death through a collision. The heads are set on the body of a carved wooden figurehead, full-breasted, arms by its side. Swan’s wings, molting badly and yellow with age, curve from the shoulders of this terrible, raddled guardian angel.
As I inch nearer to the bottom of the staircase the wings flutter stiffly and the heads begin a slow revolve. Each set of eyes, in their respective mashed orbits, addressing me in turn. I stand firm and expect the worst. The mechanism comes to a tottering halt with the head of a pig facing me.
I wait. The pig has a flinty twinkle in its eyes and a haughty wrinkle to its nose.
Nice pig. Good pig.
I force myself to look away—at a staircase awash with curiosities.
There are oddly shaped parcels and baskets of furled rolls of paper. A prosthetic arm sticks out from one of them as if hailing a cab. There are specimen jars containing slivers of gristle and boxes of contraptions with rubber nozzles, like distant relations of the sink plunger. On the bottom step a plaster model of a human heart lies broken.
There is a rustle and a clank above me. A shadow flits along the first-floor landing. Every last hair on my neck nape stands up.
I watch, riveted, as an object begins to roll down the stairs. It pitches unhurriedly from step to step. Sometimes falling with a dull thud, sometimes with the chink of glass on china or metal. Occasionally it loses momentum and wobbles on the spot for a while. Then it musters strength and continues. Eventually it lands at the bottom of the stairs, where it knocks against my feet.
Something wrapped in newspaper.
I pick it up. Unwrap it. It’s a paperweight. Cut glass, a carved starburst on the base. I stare at it in my hand for the longest time and wonder what the message is.
Then I realize.
I put the paperweight down and look at the newspaper cutting in my other hand. I read the headline:
Missing Dorset Schoolgirl
A girl with fair hair looks at the camera with a wide, rakish grin. She has her arm around a goat and seems to be intent on feeding it a crisp packet. Underneath is a name: Maggie Dunne.
CHAPTER 11
At Pearl Strand the tide would arrive in a sly fashion. Insinuating itself in snaky rivulets carved in the sand, at first lazy, then rushing in with a pace that terrified me. If I wanted to survive I should stay exactly where Deirdre said. To the left of me was sinking sand, to the right, a nest of horseflies. Behind me Old Noel was taking his afternoon stroll with his fingers just twitching for a feel. And before me the Atlantic was always sneaking nearer.
* * *
DEIRDRE SHAVED her legs with Mammy’s razor. When she cycled she tucked her dress into her drawers. She stole lipstick and money and cigarettes. Deirdre was wild. This was common knowledge. That summer Mammy made her take me everywhere with her, for wouldn’t that take the wind out of Deirdre’s sails?
* * *
ONCE UPON a time we had chased each other up and down the beach, Deirdre and me. She had chased me one way and I had chased her the other. That was the summer that Deirdre lived only for horses. We had a stable full of them, with golden manes and diamond hooves and we rode them fast along the hem of the sea.
The next summer, castles were the thing. We banked sand and built forts with the treasure the sea left behind. Crab Death Castle with its portcullis of pincers and broken legs waving from the battlements. A place with a cursed aspect. Bladder wrack crawled down its walls and its moat was infested with deadly rope octopuses. Princess Castle had stained glass windows made from smooth-edged fragments of bottles, clear, green, and brown. Its drawbridge was paved with a million shells. Its wildflower garden had been picked from the dunes—
* * *
DUNES CREEP. Deirdre told me as much. They could move inches when you weren’t looking. If you annoyed them by running over them, or snooping round them, or digging into them they would simply glide over you and you would never be seen again. The sand would fill your mouth, plug your nose, and squash your eyes. You’d suffocate with the whole massive weight of the dune above you. You’d die in the dark, listening to the sound of your ribs breaking and the sand rushing into your ears.
The best thing to do was not to annoy the dunes but rather to sit still and read your book and keep your fecking mouth shut.
* * *
I COULDN’T read and watch the dunes at the same time. So I brought a book I knew so well I wouldn’t have to look at it. That way I could keep my eyes on the dunes. The book was called The Illustrated Book of Saints; it had been Granny’s and then it was mine. I knew it by heart, words and pictures both.
I liked the pictures best.
St. Joseph of Cupertino flying over the wall of the monastery with an unflattering tonsure and a look of amazement on his face (as well he might—a plump monk clearing eight feet). St. Dymphna, with her laughing eyes and gold crown, walking over a field with her feet white against the green. St. George, a secret favorite of mine just for his glinting armor and smirking yellow-eyed dragon. I knew every habit and robe, halo and attribute of the major saints and many of the minor ones.
The saints were brilliant. There they all were having revelations, or building churches, or being fed to lions. I loved their veils and coronets, coifs and birettas, their holy expressions and long pale hands. If I closed my eyes (quickly, because of the dunes) I could hear their voices—soft supplications and whispered prayers—in the wind coming in off the bay and the waves washing the shore. Sometimes I could even smell the saints. A subtle smell that came and went. Starched wimples and elderly velvet, spicy incense and the odor of sanctity—like the sweet, sad scent of overblown roses.
On cold days, or on wet days, or when the dunes moved and my heart stopped with the fear of being smothered, I imagined it was all part of my nun training, such as the wearing of itchy knickers or the eating of soup. I would suffer these privations willingly: it would be worth it to join a convent. Granny said a nun’s life was dull, but I knew better. At a convent you had your own room and coach outings every weekend. Depending on the order, you could grow flowers, play with chickens, or go out helping people. And best of all, if you had enough misfortune and didn’t whine or moan about it, you had a cast-iron shot at becoming a saint.
* * *
ST. MAUD. Imagine the picture in The Illustrated Book of Saints. I am no less
than seven. My eyes, blurred with tears of anguish, are raised to the heavens. My hands are clasped, my face paler than pale.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I made my sister disappear.
CHAPTER 12
“It’s from Mary Flood,” says Renata, gazing at the newspaper cutting through her varifocals. “Voiceless as only the dead are voiceless, she communicates with us by sending material clues from beyond the grave.”
I don’t even try to contradict her, for Renata is particularly strident tonight. She is favoring Liza, her most flattering wig: the black bangs set off her burning pirate eyes. She has teamed it with a wiggle skirt and a pair of kitten heels. The effect is that of a retired 1950s vixen, all in honor of our guest, no doubt.
Sam Hebden looks baffled.
This afternoon Sam and Renata discovered that they are kindred spirits, for they both have chakras, share the same animal totem (the goat), and worship Johnny Cash. They also learnt that Sam has little recollection of Mr. Flood’s assault with a hurley. Renata interprets this as evidence of post-traumatic stress and Sam seems happy to go along with it. In hushed tones in the hallway Renata informed me that I am not to plague Sam with questions. He will tell us what happened in his own good time, when his fractured psyche repairs itself, memory loss being common to victims of trauma.
To be fair, Sam doesn’t appear to have suffered any great trauma. An absent air sometimes comes over him but this could be due to Renata’s experimental cocktails. Otherwise Sam gives the impression that he’s very well in himself, lolling on the easy chair with his stubble and his gray eyes and his devilish smile.
“Maud.” Renata clicks her fingers under my nose. “You must keep an open mind. The trouble with Western thinking is that it sets science at odds with the supernatural. These are simply different, but equally valid, ways of telling a story.”
I grimace. Renata has memorized entire articles on true spectral crimes and the science behind them. She has shared every one of them with me. I have contemplated for hours pictures of middle-aged bearded virgins called Dave with machines made out of tinfoil and kitchen probes.