‘I shan’t be joining you,’ Dunning announced. ‘I’ve already made arrangements.’
‘With the siren I suppose,’ mocked Alan, who was beginning to annoy me.
‘It is with Elisha…’
‘Ah, she has a name,’ Alan threw in before I silenced him with a withering look. I felt I’d been brought here under false pretences.
‘You wonder why I haven’t introduced you when you act like this. Elisha and I are going for a meal along the coast, and then she wants me to show her where I found the chest.’
So Alan hadn’t properly met Dunning’s friend, and yet still made such a fuss.
‘Can I see the chest?’ I asked quietly. For some reason this seemed important to me.
Dunning checked his watch. ‘I don’t see why not. It’s in our room.’
I didn’t miss the ‘our’. Alan stayed where he was, which was probably just as well given his mood. Dunning took me upstairs and produced without flourish a fairly large wooden chest, gilded with some base metal, and strengthened at the corners with steel. The wood was as washed out as you would expect if it had been buried in the sand and subject to the advances of the sea for any length of time. The lock on it was a strong one, and I could see it hadn’t been opened. I said so to Dunning, who for the first time looked a little like the old Dunning in his embarrassment.
‘No, I haven’t found a way in yet, and I didn’t want to damage it. Elisha says she knows a way, it’s one of the things we are going to discuss tonight.’
We talked about this for a few moments and then I said, ‘Do you know what you’re doing Robert? With this woman I mean.’
‘I know what you mean, and the answer is no, probably not. Did you know what you were doing when you first fell in love with Mary? Do any of us? I know what you think of me, the old me, and you were right. I feel so different now, and it’s all because of Elisha.’
After he left I re-joined Fletcher, who was getting quietly drunk; Baxter was pouring the drinks and encouraging him. Neither asked me about Dunning and I had no intention of discussing him. It struck me that for the first time in a sheltered and rather repressive life Dunning was examining happiness and he deserved it all.
Alan and I dined well, concentration on the food instead of conversation, and consumed the fine wine while allowing thought only meagre rations. Throughout the meal I experienced the awkward feeling that someone who should have been there wasn’t. My mood was heightened by the sudden realisation that my fragile allegiance with Fletcher hadn’t stood the test of time. His character now seemed too brash, too aggressive for comfort.
It was a faintly warm autumn evening with the light clear as innocence. Some time after dinner, with brandy glasses and cigars still in hand, the two of us found ourselves on the dunes overlooking the beach.
There was a pale mist skimming the surface of the sea, the greyness seeping onto the white-capped waves, trying to stain them. It was a dense mist, getting thicker as we watched, the horizon becoming lost to us.
‘Tide’s coming in fast,’ Alan said, his speech only slightly slurred.
As we watched, each deep in his private thoughts, we became aware of movement at the edge of the shore. There were two figures at the very periphery of the sand, their feet surely immersed in the encroaching sea.
‘My God!’ Alan cried. ‘I think that’s Dunning.’
He was right. Before he called out I had seen what was happening and had started running down the cloying dunes, and out onto the firmer sand of the beach.
All around us the mist was crawling as though it was alive, far denser than any mist I have ever encountered. It engulfed the two of us as we ran to the seashore. It may have been my imagination but it felt as if the mist was resisting us, almost as if there were arms within it that were reaching out and pushing us away. Then I began to hear the sounds. It was the singing and the music I had believed I had heard earlier in the day, but now it was clearly no car radio; this was coming from inside the mist.
I reached the two figures at the shore a little ahead of Alan. Not that it mattered who got there first, as we were powerless.
The chest lay in the sand at Dunning’s feet. It was open, and a black key jutted from the lock. Within the chest were numerous objects that looked like shrivelled leaves at first, but gradually it became clear what they were. Dunning was tied loosely but effectively to a tall wooden stake, which was pushed firmly into the sand. Covering his body were what looked like dozens of leeches, hanging onto his flesh where they had torn through his clothing.
Standing next to him, but looking into the mist, looking out to sea, was the woman I took to be Elisha. She was wet, not just damp from the mist, but drenched as if she had been in the sea a long time. Her raven hair cascaded down her back like seaweed, and her skin was as white as a bleached shell. The grey mist was forming itself into shapes. The shapes were taking on the appearance of the female form, a few at first, then more. All were attaching themselves to the things that looked like leeches that were covering poor Dunning. As the women attached themselves so Elisha brought more of the small shapes from the chest until it was empty and there was no part of Dunning that was not covered.
Then I realised what the chest contained, and why the women were claiming them.
Dunning was making a low groaning sound that under different circumstances might have been mistaken for pleasure. To our shame neither Alan nor I did anything, except watch. I don’t in all honesty think there was anything we could have done. The sea, and its occupants, was claiming its own. By now all the shapes had transformed into women, too many haunted figures to count. Dunning had fallen to the sand, as they feasted upon him. The mist was curled protectively around the tableau, gradually excluding us from the scene. Around us the sea had risen to more than a foot in depth and it was curving dangerously behind us. If we waited much longer we would be cut off from the land.
Neither of us said, ‘shouldn’t we do something?’, neither of us suggested we go for help. It was beyond all that, and most likely it always had been.
When we got back to the hotel we were wet, cold, and full of self-disgust. Only later did we learn, from Baxter the disgruntled barman, the name of the last woman to have been sacrificed to the sea.
WARM LIES, COLD SECRETS
Bright sunlight swathed the forest, kissing the branches with the abandon of drunken young girls on New Year’s Eve. Silver and gold filtered through the leaves, leaving puddles of light that looked like angels on top of traditional Christmas trees. Seasonal allegiances that were lost on Chris Parker. The brilliance cut into his eyes, making him shelter them behind his free hand; the other one still grasping the sack that held something within that struggled.
Some of the trees were as ancient as evil, and yet they were like gangling youths compared with Chris’s guilt. His self-loathing had transcended mere human feeling long ago, and taken on the persona of perpetual shadow. Those who met him recognised the blind and angry thoughts that fed upon him, the emotions that crawled inside him. He had been avoided for years.
It began with a smile that was held too long. A touch on his arm that was less lingering than it should be; an admission of friendship that meant more than friendship. ‘Yes, of course I care about you.’ He whispered in answer to the flirtatious question from his brother’s girlfriend. ‘I mean really care.’ She teased. ‘But what about Charles?’ The guilt was born. ‘He knows. He wants it too.’
He was more used to pubs these days, than the forests. More used to the bright safety of the indoors. He could lose himself in the noise and the numbing music whose rhythms pounded away at reason, sending it scuttling for safety. But the noise did little to settle Chris’s permanent tension. Huddled over a pint, he barely acknowledged he was in a public place, surrounded by people and life. He could lose himself in his misery, which was never-ending, because he always knew they would come back. His brother and his girlfriend had left, but one day he knew they would all have a price to
pay for what they had done.
The forest grew denser as the insular protection of the town became a memory, and the reality was wet bracken underfoot and whispers in the ferns, unease in the branches. Bird song grew fainter as the leaves snuffled a damp echo of sound that was reminiscent of an orchestra warming up; discordant, with overtures of rustling paper, as if a script was being prepared for delivery to an audience.
Chris shut out all external sound, just as he had locked and bolted the door to his sub-conscious mind twenty years before. He should have known then that denial was never going to be a permanent solution; just a dam holding the flood waters at bay. But still they churned against its flimsy walls, pressing insistently, awaiting the first crack. The breach was imminent, and he felt it like a rent in a painting, the canvas split by too much restoration.
He turned off the path and trudged wearily up the steep bank to the field beyond. The mud left by a week of heavy rain sucked greedily at his feet, slowing his progress and making the muscles of his calves feel like they had been kicked and bruised. It wasn’t difficult to imagine those beneath the ground pulling at his feet to get at him. Somehow he knew they would be beneath the ground, waiting for him.
‘Just a hug, Chris, it’s just a hug.’ The teasing was always a feature of Marissa’s character, one of the things he found so attractive. Charles didn’t seem to mind. He even smiled when they sat with their arms around one another. It couldn’t do any harm, surely couldn’t hurt anyone. ‘Will you tell Charles?’ Chris had asked, the guilt almost spoiling the enjoyment of the illicit moment. ‘Will you? Anyway he knows. He wants you to be happy.’ Happy, my brother wanted him to be happy and how proud that made him. He was able to condone the unfaithfulness quite easily after that.
At a stile on the far side of the field he stopped and knocked the mud from his boots, and climbed over, threading his way through the taller trees of the forest beyond. Apart from the crunch and swish of his tread through the bracken, the forest was quiet now, with not even the startled cry of a single bird to pierce the silence that draped the place, muffling his tiredness, but tempting his fear. It was an unnatural peace, pregnant with menace, claustrophobic in its totality.
A mile into the forest he came to a clearing. A solitary building stood there. Once a grand house, now deserted and neglected, the past splendour of the redbrick façade scabbed with moss and lichen, giving it an ugly, cancerous aspect. Window shutters hung askew from hinges eaten by rust, and where the front door should have been, was now just a black rectangle, opening the house to the elements and giving easy access to the opportunists who, throughout the years, had stripped the wealth from the place. If the opening was the mouth, then it was the bowels of the house that contained what he had come for.
Parker stood in the doorway and peered into the blackness. The smells that seeped from the house were ones of dirt and decay, rotting meat and death. He took a step backwards. To go in unarmed would be suicide, but he had no wish for conflict. Not after all these years. All he had was contained in the sack that grew heavier with every moment that drew nearer to the meeting. He had no doubts now that he was here that his brother and Marissa were back.
Circling the outside of the house he came to the area that could once have been described as the garden, but now resembled nothing more than a wilderness. Nettles and dock grew waist high and rough couch grass had overrun the lawn and stood swaying in the suddenly muted sunlight. A dilapidated greenhouse stood in one corner, its panes smashed and missing, timber frame rotten and falling apart. To the left of it was a series of wooden huts, their doors ripped from their hinges, broken and scattered about.
He stepped into the nearest hut, brushing away the cobwebs that curtained the opening, shuddering as small spiders scurried over his hands. There was little to be found inside; a pile of rotting sacking, a few flower-pots, and in the corner, a heavy roller, a relic from a bygone time when the lawns of the house were kept neatly trimmed and croquet was played on the velvet growth. In the second hut, piled into the corner were some rusting tools, blades blunted and pitted by time, wooden handles split and cracked. It was here, so many years ago, that the ultimate deed was performed.
‘Why here?’ He asked, breathless with the passion of the moment. ‘Why not?’ The furtiveness added to the excitement. It was all right, it wasn’t wrong. Charles knew. He did, didn’t he? ‘God, yes do that again.’ She breathed. ‘Do you like that?’ ‘Can’t you tell?’ Her hands as they stroked him belonged to him at this moment, not shared. The body he caressed was given to him, not cheated from his brother. Damn Charles if he let his girl play with another man. ‘Touch me there.’ She instructed. ‘I can’t see. Where?’ ‘I want you.’ The final submission.
He took a box of matches from his pocket and struck one, cupping the flame, guarding it from the breeze blowing through the broken window. After a moment’s search through the debris he unearthed a length of metal, rusted to spikes at either end. He hefted it in his hand. It wasn’t heavy, probably hollow, but it suited his purpose. It would make an adequate weapon. He curled his fingers around the cold, damp metal and went back out into the rapidly departing daylight, as dusk rushed forward to stake its claim. As he walked back to the front of the house, a thought nagged at him: would he have the strength of mind to use it? The sack whimpered and he knew he had to be strong enough. He owed it to what was inside.
He stepped through the doorway into the house, pausing just over the threshold to accustom his eyes to the intense interior gloom. The house was filled with small sounds that unnerved him. Pigeons had made their nests in the upper reaches and he could hear them shuffling on their perches, cooing softly as they called to each other, and the occasional flap of wings as they flew around the attic space. The tiled floor of the hallway was littered with dead leaves, blown in through the doorway, and he kicked aside the decaying body of a dead rat as he made his way across to what would have been the drawing room. That was where the entrance to the cellars was located. They would be in the cellars.
Fading sunlight had found its way through the windows of the room, making it lighter than the hallway. The room was bare. In places the floorboards had been torn up, and over in one corner the floor was scorched and covered with a thick coating of ash where someone had lit a fire. He went across to it and poked the ashes with the spike, but they were cold and dusty, the fire long dead. Like the house itself, he thought. Like him and all he had.
He froze as he heard footsteps crossing the floor below. The realisation that his intuition about the place had been correct slithered through his thoughts like something sightless suddenly thrust into daylight, and once again he fought down the urge to turn and run.
It had to be faced. It was mapped out for him twenty years before, and he knew with equal certainty that the past had finally caught up with him. He had always known that this day would come; but now it was here, he felt totally unprepared for it.
His jaw set with determination, he moved to the small door, and silently walked to the cellar rooms below. The stairs were still carpeted, the carpet decaying, flecked with mildew, toadstools growing in small circles. The carpet softened his footsteps, and he trod carefully, wary of any creaking boards that would betray his presence; yet, at the back of his mind, the suggestion that his entry into the house had not only been noted, but also expected, nagged at him.
He remembered the design of the house well; the second door on the left from the upstairs landing had been Marissa’s room. He could picture her sitting on the bed, head thrown back in laughter, tossing her auburn curls so they swept across her naked, alabaster shoulders. The laugh was cruel, mocking, as was her nakedness, taunting him with salacious glee, knowing that he wanted her but was too frightened to venture past the doorway. And his brother, naked on the bed beside her, his skin faded a hideous shade of blue, as the girl they both loved leeched from him all finer feelings. All trust, all passion, all commitment, all faith. The garish lipstick smudges at his thr
oat, crimson, matching the stains on Marissa’s lips, giving a sated cloak to the scene.
‘Look Charles, I think Chris wants to join us.’ Two brothers stare at one another and the sly pull of sexual pleasure holds sway. Not for this moment is caution. Not now the sense and sensibility of their upbringing. Here is the debauchment they think they crave. Here is the rich tapestry that may free them from family traditions, from notions of respectability and reason. ‘Shall we let him?’ Charles assumes a disinterested air but the latent tension is clear. ‘I’m sure he wants to, don’t you, Chris? You want to touch me, and watch us.’ Marissa finished her kiss of Charles, completed her caress, then opened herself to Chris as the a trois became reality.
Chris rubbed a hand over his face, sweeping away the nightmare images, and crept silently over stair boards thick with dust, eventually reaching the bare concrete of the cellar floor. It was dark, with such a premonition of being crowded in. He was shut in here he knew, could not move, his arms pinned to his sides, despite the sack and the iron bar both grasped like talismans in his hands. He had to strongly resist the urge to fall to the ground and hide, as though there was no place in this dank tomb for creatures that could stand upright.
And then the laugh, horribly familiar.
He was not sure what he was expecting as he stepped through the narrow doorway from the cellar into a room lit by candlelight; a repeat, perhaps, of the tableau he had witnessed once before. Some tremor of desire still suggested that the performance he had briefly enjoyed might be repeated. But this was different.
All the remaining furniture in the house had been collected into this one room. There was a bed, iron-framed, single, no mattress; two dilapidated armchairs, their leather upholstery ripped and torn, cracked and scabrous, and, in the centre of the room, a small table. He gave a shudder of revulsion as he realized that the shapes gathered together on the table were the headless bodies of three rats. He took another cautious step into the room and for the first time saw the figure crouched in the corner.
Incantations Page 9