House of Bells

by Chaz Brenchley

  Out of the yard and up into the woods again, but not anywhere near Frank and his desolate chapel. Another path – narrow but well trodden, as if one man used it over and over – took them away through the trees and deeper into the valley. She quickly lost any sense of where she was, in the dim light amid the tangle of trunks and branches and undergrowth; there was only the path to say that the house and the road and all the world lay behind them. She wasn’t sure she trusted even that. If hands could reach from fire or wax, if the stroke of a bell could cut her flesh, if her dead baby could grow in his own absence, wait for her, come for her, come and come and come – then surely paths could shift and shape themselves, lead people who knew where?

  She wanted to ask Cookie exactly what he’d seen, if only to reassure herself that it really had happened, that she wasn’t gone entirely mad; but her voice came as a croak from her poor sore throat, and he shook his head. ‘Don’t try to talk, not yet. I’ve something at the house to ease you.’

  The house was behind them, unless this path was winding itself all the way around. That wasn’t what he meant. There was something up ahead: a bulk beyond the trees, a sense of structure, something built among all this wild growth. They hadn’t come far, or she didn’t think so, but her legs were trembling and her head was dizzy with reaction. Really, she just wanted to sit down and maybe cry a little. A walk in the woods with this strange man was the last thing she’d have looked for, the last thing she would ever have agreed to if he’d said that straight out. And now here she was stumbling along behind him, while he kept that soft grip on her wrist and gave her not a chance to rebel. She was all Georgie anyway, broken and obedient and desperate to please. Grace was somewhere behind her, out of reach.

  The path turned one more time, and here was their goal at last, that building she’d sensed more than seen. If D’Espérance was a house, she couldn’t call this one, though apparently Cookie did. Overshadowed in her mind by the great building at their backs, it was overshadowed all too literally by the trees around, like a fairy-tale refugee: a little low cottage, slate roof and ivy walls, with a tended garden behind a picket fence. Even that was utterly unlike what the big house had to offer, the ordered productivity of Tom’s vegetable patch. Here was a profusion of colour: lupins and hollyhocks and irises fighting for height and attention in this unexpected glade.

  Oh – is this where you live? It’s lovely . . . She really didn’t need to ask; there was his van, parked behind the cottage, at this vanishing end of the drive. Georgie would have said it anyway, just to please him; but he’d told her not to talk, so she swallowed down the jagged, difficult words and was glad to do it.

  Mute and obliging, she followed him up the garden path and into his home. A narrow stone-flagged hallway; a stairway rising; a door into what ought to be a sitting room, but that was closed. He took her to the kitchen at the back.

  ‘Sit yourself down.’

  He wasn’t a man who looked for visitors; there was only a single chair in any case, but the small table was set into a corner in a way that wouldn’t allow two to sit down together.

  She sat anyway and was glad to do it. Glad to fold her hands in her lap just to stop them shaking; glad to sit like a good girl and watch while he gathered up what he thought was good for her.

  The table was scrubbed clean, bare but for a tobacco-tin lid that he’d clearly been using as an ashtray. He swept that away and replaced it with a bottle and a little sherry-glass. ‘Here, sip this while I warm some soup. It’ll soothe your throat.’

  She really didn’t want to swallow anything, let alone his kindness. His apparent kindness. She knew already that he was not as kind as he seemed. She hadn’t forgotten being stranded in the coming dark, with her terror coming for her.

  Anyone she knew in London would have offered her brandy, or more likely a brandy cocktail, make a joke of it: ‘This is good for shock, isn’t it? And fizz is good for anything . . .’

  This . . . wasn’t that. The bottle was green and old, reused; it didn’t have a label to say what might be inside it. Apparently, there was a limit even to Georgie’s willingness; she only sat and looked at it while he fussed at the small stove in the chimney breast.

  When he glanced back to see her still sitting, sitting still, trembling still, not making a move else, he tutted aloud. And strode back across the tiled floor, pulled the cork from the bottle, poured.

  A thick golden liquid flecked with green, the scent of herbs and sweetness. She made some soft noise with the air in her mouth – nothing that could scratch or stick in her throat.

  He understood that to be a question. ‘This is called metheglin. I make it myself, so I know it’s good. Honey from my own bees, herbs from my garden. Sip it slowly, and when that’s all gone, take more. Two glasses, before you try to talk.’

  She lifted the glass, looked at it doubtfully, raised it to her lips under his stern gaze. Took the least possible sip, barely more than a breath of vapour – and was astonished at the flavour that flooded her mouth, rich and complex, sweet and deep and soothing. Took a proper mouthful and found that swallowing was an effort, a harshness, but not the pain she had been dreading – or at least only a dull muscle-pain, nothing worse. And the second swallow was easier, and then somehow her glass was empty and she was being good, doing what she was told, reaching for another.

  Cookie grunted, repeated what he’d said about sipping slowly, and then turned back to his stove, apparently satisfied.

  She sipped, and savoured, was happy just to do that. She wasn’t too interested in soup, now that she had this astringent sweetness on her tongue; she had lost all interest in questions: what did you see? or what did it mean? or how could that possibly happen . . .?

  Either she was secretly, unknowingly stoned, or it had happened. Her sore throat said that it had happened; so did his abrupt and unexpected care of her. She wasn’t really in any doubt.

  Nor, apparently, was she in terror, though the experience had wanted to kill her. Her terror was another thing, and deserved, and hadn’t come.

  Mr Cook left a saucepan heating on the stove, rolled himself a cigarette and came to perch on the edge of the sink, where he could watch her through his smoke.

  She couldn’t tell quite what he was looking for, but again he seemed satisfied. He grunted softly and said, ‘D’Espérance can be a hard house, if you come here with baggage – and who doesn’t have baggage, these days? For the older ones, it’s the war; for you kids, it’s whatever you’ve been up to since. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘I remember the war,’ she said, though it was only barely true. She remembered the end of it, though mostly what she remembered was being too young to understand and needing to have her memories explained later.

  She thought Mr Cook was old enough to have been in the first war, maybe. And wondered about his baggage, and decided not to ask. Those few words just now had been sharp in her throat, made her reach again for the medicine, metheglin. Made her pour herself another glass.

  He watched, then took the bottle and corked it. Put it away.

  ‘You kids,’ he said, as though it was a revelation. ‘You’re all greedy these days; you all want to snatch. Nothing’s ever enough. But – well, D’Espérance is a hard house, but she’s not usually this hard on someone newly come. You’re having it rough, and I’d like to know why.’

  Because I can never be punished enough. She didn’t say so. She sipped at her glass and fidgeted with the cuff of her bandage – no fresh blood, despite the effort of upturning a bathful of wax: that was a relief, late but powerful – and said nothing at all.

  He said, ‘What have you brought here, missy? You’ve a secret, and I mean to learn it.’ He sounded . . . grim. Not so much like a teacher now; more like a soldier, or a policeman. An officer, either way. She had ample experience of both. Soldiers in the bedroom, policemen – well, everywhere. Prison officers, too. In the prison.

  They were relentless, his type, but even so . . . She had no
secrets – all her privacies had been paraded over and over again – and even so . . . She still wasn’t going to tell him anything that mattered. If he wanted to know about her, he could learn it the way everyone did, all the rest of the country, from the pages of their favourite papers.

  She shook her head resolutely. ‘It’s not me. Not mine. You – you saw them too, right? Those hands . . . you saw the hands?’

  ‘I saw what I saw.’ But he wasn’t denying the hands.

  She said, ‘I saw them before. Last night, reaching for Kathie from the fire. They’re nothing to do with me.’ I’m a victim here, just another victim, not responsible – it was such a rare feeling, she could hardly believe herself that it was true.

  He just looked at her: not disbelieving, not yet, only utterly judgemental. Talking more was like pulling a strand of barbed wire from her throat, but this was important. It mattered suddenly, enormously, that he should believe her. She said, ‘I was talking to Frank, you know, at his place in the wood –’ not like yours – ‘and he was telling me about a woman who was burned to death here, by the lake. I think it’s her. Her ghost. Fire by the water, and there was fire under the wax. It must be her.’ Not me, she was saying again. Not my boy.

  ‘No,’ Cookie said flatly. ‘That’s not what happens here. D’Espérance has no ghosts of its own: only what you bring with you.’

  She had brought one of her own, enough for her – but he was a good boy: he wouldn’t play with fire, and he wouldn’t hurt anybody else. Besides, he was only little yet. She shook her head again, stubborn still. ‘Not this. I didn’t bring this. It’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘It wants something to do with you. It tried to kill you, just.’ Perhaps he was coming round to the idea of believing her, though; he went on, ‘Kathie too, you say? Mary told me she was an accident, and unlucky, and perhaps underwater too long.’

  ‘No. I saw – well. What you saw. Hands. Hands of flame, for her.’ And then what came for her later, and that was my fault, but she still wasn’t confessing that.

  Her own hands seemed to be shaking. What they called shock, she supposed, delayed reaction. She knew what to do about that, but her glass was empty and he had taken the bottle away.

  She might have asked, but he was back at his stove now, busy with ladle and bowl. She wanted more drink, but he brought her soup: silent now, and she couldn’t tell if he had accepted what she told him or rejected it entirely, if he thought he was feeding a liar.

  She really didn’t want soup, except that the steam of it was in her mouth like the perfume of the metheglin, potent, overwhelming. She lifted her head just for a moment, looked at him, said, ‘Do you do the cooking for the house too?’

  He smiled. Just a little, a thin thing, almost meaningless, but still a smile. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I only taught them a few things.’

  She would have bet on that, at least. This bowl of soup looked different, smelled different, and even so: just the smell of it was reminding her of last night’s stew.

  She said, ‘What is this?’ – stirring it with her spoon just to raise more steam, to give her mouth something to enjoy while she waited for it to cool. It was too hot for her poor throat right now, and she wasn’t going to spoon it up and blow on it. Not here, not under his eye.

  ‘Mushrooms, mostly. What I gathered this morning, with some of last year’s ketchup for added flavour. They use the ketchup for stock up at the house; that’s probably what you’re recognizing.’

  She hadn’t known till now that you could make ketchup out of mushrooms. Ketchup was bright tomato-red, and you ate it with sausages and worried that it might be fattening. She tried to imagine what he meant: something thick and gloopy, creamy white like mushroom caps or brown like the fins underneath, but sweet and tangy like tomato ketchup. She didn’t think there was anything like that in the soup. What there was – what she could smell, even before the temptation grew irresistible and she risked burning her mouth on the first spoonful – was that same darkly savoury flavour she’d found last night. Except that last night’s stew had been all root vegetables, and this was all mushroom, and they tasted completely different. Except for that undertone, that bass note that lifted them both.

  She’d have liked to say something to him, something about that, but she didn’t have the words. Georgie might, but not Grace, and she was all Grace now: reduced, stripped down. Frightened.

  Instead of talking she ate, spooning down soup gracelessly, greedily. Every swallow hurt, but even so. She didn’t want to stop.

  He seemed content just to watch her. And then, when she was done, to chivvy her gently out of his cottage and see her on her way back to the main house. Letting her go alone, just as he had before, even though he knew this place was dangerous to her.

  If she was going mad, then they both were; and there was something coldly, unkindly sane that underlay everything he said, just as his ketchup underlay everything she’d eaten since she came here. She wasn’t at all sure about herself, but she didn’t think that he was mad at all.

  She didn’t want to walk the narrow path he’d brought her by, back to the stable yard. Particularly, she didn’t want to walk through the stable yard again.

  She could tell herself she didn’t want to face irate candle-makers, with their wax all spilled and their bath upturned. She could tell herself that, so long as she recognized the truth, that it wasn’t true at all. What she didn’t want to face was – well, something else. Something with hands. Not her dead baby, who had nothing and was nothing and would have sucked wax in rather than reaching out with it.

  Maybe that was how he grew, how come he was growing: he sucked in stuff and made it into nothingness. It’s what he was doing with her, she thought, slowly and surely. She had been something once: not a great thing, maybe not a good thing, but something at least. Already she was only a shell, hollow and pretending, inhabiting the story of who she used to be. Soon enough now, she’d be nothing at all.

  Avoiding the stable yard, though, meant walking the other way, down the wide rough lane until it joined the drive from the road. Deeper into the wood, that meant. Some girls she knew would be frightened as a matter of course, going in among the trees on their own. She had better reason for it, a dozen better reasons, everything that had happened to her since she came here; all the strangeness had started when Mr Cook dropped her in the wood.

  Except that – she thought – it had started when Frank rang his bell, and it would have happened wherever she was, whenever she heard it. She thought. It wasn’t the trees to blame. She was no more afraid here than anywhere – or just as much, which came to the same thing in the end.

  Her clothes were splashed with wax, like a vivid confession; her sandals were slimy with the stuff. She wanted to sit and pick her feet, peel wax away like dead skin. She’d like to bathe and change, if she could find something clean to wear. She’d like to hide the evidence, whether or not.

  She came on to the drive with nothing else in her head, blessedly free of premonitions or memories in the cool shadows under the trees. Dressed in guilt and wanting only to be free of it, she turned towards the house – and heard a car coming, and stepped back into the leaf litter before she saw it, before she could even think how unexpected that was.

  She knew the car as soon as she saw it, perhaps even before she saw it. There was only the one car up at the house, though she supposed they might have had visitors. It might have been a new recruit, brought by a taxi that was now returning. Or it might have been a police raid, against all the drugs in the house; or an old shipmate of the captain’s, come to pay a call; or . . .

  All sorts of things it might have been, but she didn’t believe any of them, and she was right. The car that came bumping into sight around the curve of the drive was that same old Morris Traveller, without the ladders now but still gaudy, still decorated with strange symbols that she might guess to be letters of their new language. Still inhabited by two hairy people who honked cheerfully at her, slowe
d unexpectedly, stopped right where she stood.

  ‘Hi!’ The boy with the Afro leaned out of the passenger window. Squinting past him, she decided that the driver was almost certainly another boy, though it was still hard to be certain, to see through long hair and shadow. Hippy men should be obliged to wear beards, she thought, just to keep the poor girls clear, who was which. ‘I’m Charlie,’ he went on, ‘and this is Fish.’

  Which was no help at all; and why Fish? was as impossible to ask as what sex is Fish?, so she settled for a neutral, ‘Hullo. Where are you going?’

  ‘Into town, if you want to come along. Run a few errands, pick up some stuff. Have a drink, if any pub in town will serve us. Fancy it?’

  ‘Oh!’ Yes, but . . . ‘I don’t know. I ought to . . .’

  ‘Ought to what? There isn’t any ought to, not here. That’s why we like it. One reason why. Anywhere else, we ought to be doing something useful too, but we’re not. We’ve decided to skive off for the afternoon, so we are.’

  She seemed to be opening the rear door already, as though some decision had already been made. Sitting down on old rubbed leather, she said, ‘I thought you were running errands? That sounds useful to me.’

  ‘That too – but we’d decided to skive first, which is what matters.’ Apparently that was important, that their choice had been for idleness, whatever came after. Whatever they knew must come after. ‘Then people started loading duties on us, “while you’re there”. That’s how it works. It’s the old “while you’re up” trick.’

  If he wanted to sound aggrieved – if he wanted to feel aggrieved – he should probably work harder at it. She was fairly sure that the truth was entirely the other way around: that he had volunteered and was trying to cover for it after the fact. Maybe it didn’t do to seem too keen. Like girls at school, where it didn’t do to seem too bright. Boys didn’t like that. She wasn’t clear here who he wanted to impress: the silent Fish, perhaps, who had to do the driving? Or her, perhaps? She had after all been walking quite the other way, but the car had stopped regardless . . .