Creeping Jenny

by Jeff Noon

  And then, at last, the song came to an end.

  He could move forward.

  There was a hissing sound, from deep inside the bound twigs.

  Her voice.

  Nyquist was close enough now to see the wearer’s eyes staring out from the darkness within, glistening. Those were human eyes, he told himself. Nothing more! He had to force himself forward. He tried to speak, but couldn’t, his mouth was still sealed with fright.

  He reached out…

  But the Tolly Woman turned from him and moved away around the next corner of the tower. Nyquist followed, doing his best to keep up with her, but every corner, every wall, seemed to take her further away, until at last he rounded one more corner and she was gone. But he could not stop, not now. He moved on. One wall, another. So many walls. He was rushing ahead, uncaring, almost stumbling in the dark.

  And then he stopped, out of breath, his body protesting.

  But around the next corner and he could see flickers of light and trails of smoke. The smoke caught in his nostrils. He took another few steps, slowly now, painfully, and found himself once more at the campfire. This time the fire was fully alight, roaring away in the night. And sitting on a small wooden stool by the fire, warming her hands, was a woman.

  He stood before her.

  “Agnes Dunne?”

  His voice croaked on the words, as though long out of use. But he had to ask because of the changes she’d made to her appearance.

  “That’s right. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  She gestured to a second stool. Nyquist sat down opposite her, across the fire.

  Agnes took a bite out of a cracker.

  The Tolly mask was resting on the ground, just by her side.

  For as good long moment they sat in silence, the two of them, allowing Nyquist to get his breath back. And then Agnes said: “It’s been a while since I posted the photographs to you.”

  And still he couldn’t speak.

  Agnes pulled a twig from the Tolly mask and added it to the fire. She was burning it, piece by piece by piece. Nyquist saw that a lot of the twigs had already been taken for firewood and kindling. Only the barbed wire held the effigy together.

  She asked, “Did you have your fortune read?”

  He nodded, and he took his Madame Fontaine card from his inner pocket and handed it to her. She read this and smiled to herself, and then asked, “You’ve followed a pathway through the woods?”

  “I have.”

  “Very well then… ask a question of the fire.”

  His lips moved awkwardly. The words were trapped in his mouth and would not spill over into sound. He thought that if he spoke them, they would surely float away, unheard, and be wasted.

  Agnes was looking at him calmly, waiting for his response.

  At last Nyquist said what he needed to say, staring into the flames.

  “Can you tell me where my father is?”

  The twigs crackled in the fire and smoke and ash took to the air, a marriage of ghosts bound for the night sky.

  PART 4

  THE PENNY BLOODS

  A SEVENFOLD KNOT

  Agnes Dunne spoke softly, summoning a spirit. “If Creeping Jenny permits, I will draw your story together from its various strands, filaments, roots and offshoots.” She took out a cigarette and used a burning twig from the Tolly mask to light it. This act of sacrilege gave her some pleasure for a smile played on her lips. It was soon gone.

  “Two people of the village have died. Another is lost to madness. The reasons for these acts are varied, but they all come from a single idea: that blood always returns home, in the end.”

  Nyquist didn’t respond. Her eyes sought his over the flames.

  “Really, I believe that to be the case. It’s the reason why you came to Hoxley, John Nyquist. And why your father made the same journey.”

  “And your part in all this?”

  “I wish to take revenge on those who brought harm, both physical and mental, to my husband, Mr Thomas Dunne of this parish.”

  She spoke carefully, weighing each remark as though defending herself in court.

  Nyquist let her proceed at her own rate.

  He’d first seen Agnes Dunne in a series of portraits, photographed and processed by her husband. He next saw her image carved in wood as the face of Madame Fontaine, this time created by Len Sadler. Both men in their own ways had idealized her. In lighting and mood, Thomas presented her as a glamorous tousled-haired Hollywood actress in a cover shot, while Sadler made her out to be a pagan goddess. But the woman sitting by the fire – now talking, now in silence, now putting another twig to the flames – looked very different from either presentation. The long curling locks of the portraits had been severely chopped down into a more functional style. Her skin was wind-chafed. Her facial features were defined entirely by the bone beneath, not by muscle and fat. Her eyes held darkness. Many tiny scratches marked her cheeks and brow, some of them scabbed over, others still fresh. The thorns had dug in.

  Nyquist asked her, “Did you steal the Tolly mask from the museum?”

  “I removed it from captivity, yes.” That smile again.

  “And you’ve taken to wearing it?”

  “Now and then.” She nodded. “I know people will frown, for it’s only meant to be taken up on Saint Algreave’s Day, but I needed to feel as my husband did.”

  “So Thomas played the Tolly Man this year?”

  “He did. It was a dream of his for so long, but the committee turned him down a good many times.” She smiled faintly at a memory. “So he was very excited this year, as you might imagine.” The smile faded. “I guess that’s where it all started.”

  She looked at him. “I don’t suppose you know much of our traditions?”

  “I’ve had a crash course.”

  “During Saint Algreave’s Day, the Tolly Man parades about the village, frightening the children, dancing with maidens, offering mock duels to the young men. And so on. It means very little these days, an empty custom. But towards the end of the day, the volunteer is taken out of the village for the grand unmasking, witnessed by a few of the elders only.”

  She took one last drag of her cigarette and then threw it into the fire.

  “I waited until they had set off, and then took the same road. I gave them ten minutes’ start. Mr Sadler drove me in his van.”

  “You followed them?”

  “There was no need to follow them, for we all knew where the unmasking takes place. A place called Birdbeck Tarn.”

  “Where the airplane crashed?”

  “That’s right. Leonard wanted to come with me across the fields, but I insisted that I did this alone.”

  “Why, Agnes? What were you hoping to find?”

  “The unmasking was a great secret in the village. As children we learned a little of its mysteries, the way it affected the wearer of the mask so much, for instance, or how some people never recovered from the extreme nature of the ritual. So, I was worried. Worried for my husband’s welfare, but also… I wanted to know. The truth. And the thought of Thomas going through this ritual without my knowing, well, it upset me.”

  She plucked another twig from the mask and set it to the flames.

  “Ours was a volatile marriage, often fraught. On other occasions, yes, quite passionate.”

  Sparks flew up into the air. Snow was falling, but a brief flurry only, thank the saints. The fire roared on and Nyquist warmed his hands at it and leaned forward to feel the heat on his face. With a shiver he realized that he missed his fret. But when he looked up again, he felt that all the known and unknown stars were visible, to the last pinprick of distant light – and here he was, sitting at the center of it all, listening to a tale being told.

  “It was a high summer’s day,” Agnes said. “A warm and bright early evening. From the top of Hawley Ridge I could see everything that happened, as they gathered around the tarn. We were always warned off going there, when we were kids, because it’s sai
d to be the place of ghosts, and a site of worship for the demon, Creeping Jenny.”

  “I’ve been there,” Nyquist told her. “It’s an eerie place.”

  “Yes. The Tolly Man ceremony was designed to keep the ghosts away from the village, at least that was the story we learned at school. I now believe the opposite.”

  She took a moment to gather her words.

  “There were five people in attendance, each standing at the pool’s edge. Thomas, with the mask of twigs still in place. Nigel Coombes, Ian Bainbridge, Jane Sutton, and Doctor Irene Higgs. Every year those four would take the Tolly Man out to the tarn, to perform the unmasking. And this year, I was a witness, an unseen spectator.”

  Agnes paused. Nyquist was worried that she might not continue.

  He asked her quietly, “Do you want to go on?”

  “I do. Your question, about your father, must be answered, as best I can manage it.”

  He nodded his thanks for this.

  “The Tolly mask was removed. Nigel and Ian helped with this, and Doctor Higgs examined Thomas’s face. He’d been wearing the mask for many, many hours and he must have been very badly cut up from the thorns. But the doctor made no attempt to heal him. She left the wounds open, so the blood would flow freely. And then he had to kneel at the side of the tarn and look down into the water, at his own reflection. The other four watched him as he did this. I don’t know what was being said, if anything, I was too far away. Perhaps they were chanting. After a while, Thomas stood up and he paused for a moment on the bank, and then he walked forward into the water, towards the propeller at the pool’s center. He ducked down and lowered himself below the surface. He did this quite willingly, I could see that. But it still worried me. And I waited, and waited, hoping to see him come up again. But he didn’t appear, not for some minutes. I thought surely he was drowning, but then at last I saw him. His head broke the surface and he took a great gasping breath. I could see the distress on his face. His hands were flailing around, splashing at the water, and he struggled to get to the bank. The others helped him to climb out. They looked to be delighted. I had the sense that their ritual, whatever it might be, had worked.”

  Here Agnes stopped, her story interrupted by a loud screeching sound. The noise was made by a raven that flew down and entered the glow of the firelight. Scraw, scraw. It landed on the soil near the fire. Sparkles of light caught at the tips of each wing. The sound of its call was loud and insistent until she calmed it with a gentle pat on its beak. Nyquist saw the silver mark on its brow and knew it be the same bird that had stolen his naming card, and that turned up in the budgerigar’s cage at the Bainbridge house. Agnes spoke to it, as she would to a household pet.

  “There, there, Mr Peck. Have you been hunting for trinkets?”

  The bird answered her in a series of softer screeches.

  “Nothing doing, eh? Nothing on offer? You poor thing.”

  “You own a raven?” Nyquist asked.

  “I don’t own him. You can’t own a raven. But his spirit was linked with mine, on Saint Malachi’s Day last year, when all animals and villagers join as one. It is the same power that Leonard uses, to train his pigeons.” She smiled. “I have, over my life, gained some little knowledge of the earth, the trees and the air. And how the various elements might be turned to use.”

  “He stole my naming card.”

  “Yes, Mr Peck showed me that. Written in Blood. A difficult name to live up to.”

  “You think so?”

  “I hope you have enough left in your veins once the writing is done.”

  Agnes fed the raven half a Sutton’s cracker, which he gobbled down in one go. This was enough to get Mr Peck flight-worthy again, and the bird took off, a darkness of feathers gathered by darkness of sky. A silence settled between the two people.

  The bird had broken a spell.

  Agnes sighed. She pointed over her shoulder to the knotted shape painted on the wall and said, “This is a witch’s knot of seven folds. Likewise, there are seven people involved in the story, at its heart: Thomas and the four elders. You, John Nyquist. And your father.”

  “How many sides are there to the tower?”

  She laughed gently. “Five, Of course.”

  “And widdershins?”

  “Four hundred… and sixty… nine. All told. And then the traveler will come back to the main doorway. At last. Oh, at long last! But there is another entrance along the way. Move on seventeen walls from this one, leftwards of course, and you will pass the fire once more.” She smiled into the flames. “The fire will be out this time, stone cold. But keep walking on from there, and twenty-five walls afterwards you will reach the second, smaller doorway. This one is unlocked. I’ve been staying there, inside Clud Tower. There’s a fireplace, and a chimney. A bed of straw. It’s cozy enough, if you wrap up warm. No ghosts, or none that have any interest in me. Cracker?” She had an entire packet open at her side.

  Nyquist refused the offer. “Will you tell the rest of it, if you can?”

  Agnes looked despairing. “It’s not easy.”

  “I understand that, but–”

  “Too much has been lost.”

  “Tell me. You have to.” For the first time since he’d met with Agnes Dunne, he felt his anger rising. “Tell me, goddamn it, Agnes. By all the saints, I need to know.”

  She narrowed her eyes. The colors of the flames danced on her face. She said in a monotone, “I find it disturbing that the left-hand number of sides on the tower isn’t divisible by five, to correspond in some way to the right-hand path. Yes, very strange indeed.”

  Hearing this, Nyquist was aware that he might be talking to a murderer. There might be limits to what she allowed herself to say. Or she might be mad, completely so, and therefore unbound by the limits of meaning and logic.

  He asked, “Did you come here as a child?”

  “No, later on. When we were teenagers. Leonard and I. It was a place you were never supposed to visit, because of the curse of the Clud family. Leonard really didn’t want to come, I had to persuade him. We were sweethearts, I guess. He followed me. But he would never walk round it widdershins.” She gave a little laugh.

  “How many times have you walked all the way around?”

  “Twice. Just to confirm the number of sides.”

  Nyquist leaned over and took a twig from the Tolly Man mask, and he placed it on the fire. Agnes had closed her eyes, but his action must have moved her in some way, for when he leaned back in his chair, she took up her tale again, quite freely.

  “I got up from my hiding place and walked quickly across the fields to Leonard’s car. He was waiting for me. We drove back into Hoxley. All the way he wanted to know what I’d seen, and in the end I lied and told him that the elders had removed the mask from Thomas, and said a few prayers to Saint Algreave, and that was it. I’m not sure if I convinced him or not. Well, it matters little now. For I had no real conception of what I’d seen, exactly. Such knowledge came later.”

  “I still don’t understand what this has to do with my father.”

  Agnes nodded. “I am coming to that. For the first month, nothing happened, and I put all thoughts of Saint Algreave’s Day from my mind. And then Thomas started to change. He lost weight. His face was gray, his eyes drawn. He was looking out on other worlds, that’s the only way I can describe it. I knew he’d been going to see Doctor Higgs a fair few times, and these visits increased now. I thought he was ill, and it worried me. But whenever I asked him for news of his ailment, whenever I pleaded with him, he wouldn’t answer, only saying it was nothing, that he would soon be well again. And indeed, he did seem to get a little better.”

  She put another twig on the fire. The mask was starting to look fragile by now; a few more sticks removed and it might collapse entirely.

  “There were times when he went out alone, for hours on end, and I never found out where he was going. I suspected he was having an affair. But it was more than that, much more, for whenev
er Thomas returned, he would look worse than before. And his illness really started to eat into him now. He looked drained, his hands would shake, his skin was peeling in places and his face caved in at the cheekbones. It looked ghastly. He’d stopped taking photographs, as far as I knew. I had to fulfill our existing orders myself. And yet he was driven by some other purpose.” She thought for a moment and then continued, “At one point I walked into the darkroom unexpectedly, and I saw him pouring something into the developing tray. It wasn’t the usual chemicals, I knew that. But when I confronted him, Thomas lost his temper and told me to get out. He effectively banned me from the room, locking himself inside. Saints preserve me, it was a terrible time.”

  Agnes’s face showed her discomfort; memories were infecting her, spreading through her body like a fever.

  “Never, in all our years of marriage, had I seen him like this. And then, one day…”

  She stopped and drew in a breath. She reached for a cigarette, only to find the packet empty. This made her frown. Nyquist offered one of his own, but she refused, and drew herself taller in her seat.

  “Thomas began to age,” she said. “His hair grew thinner, and he was very distressed by that. The skin sagged around his neck. He seemed to put on years, years, in a few weeks, and there was nothing I could do but watch, and worry. I knew that something had gone wrong in that pool, in the tarn, with the open cuts on his face. He’d become infected by something in the water, that filthy water. A bacteria or germ of some kind. I really believed this, and I went to the doctor’s surgery, demanding that she tell me everything, all about Thomas’s illness. But of course she muttered away about the patient’s right to confidentiality. It was pitiful! I felt like telling her that I’d witnessed the unmasking, and all that followed. But I didn’t, I kept it to myself.”

  The marks of the thorns on her face glowed bright red, inflamed by her anger.

  “The thing is, John, another truth worried at me.”

  “Which was?”

  “Have you heard of Adam Clud, and his part in the village’s history?”