by S E England
It was the only way we could afford to live in a posh area like this, Dad explained as we walked up the drive. He planned to renovate it all himself.
“Call it an investment – a chance for your old dad to make some proper money!”
A man in a suit stood on the porch, clutching a folder. “Mr and Mrs Hart? I’m from Bradock and Bradock. If you’d like to follow me.”
My dad was practically bowing; it was embarrassing. Somewhere underneath all the ivy and weeds, there was a stone bird bath and a tiny pond coated with emerald algae. I had the feeling the garden had once been loved, that a tiny wren had flapped its wings and sprayed the air in a fountain of diamonds… Someone had caught that joy…
“Come on, Eva. Wake up, love.”
I trailed after them as the man walked briskly around to the side of the house and let us in.
“The price is for a quick sale,” he was saying. “The owner passed away, and her son’s put it on the market. This is a great chance to do the place up and make a profit, or of course”—he smiled at my mother—“it would make a wonderful family home.”
Thing is, while he was talking, I was staring open-mouthed at the scene behind him. There, still on the kitchen table, was a layer of pastry half rolled out and a pie dish partly lined. Had the old lady dropped dead right there, then? Is that where she’d died? No one asked the question. Instead, they walked right past the flour scattered on the floor and the rolling pin under the chair to admire the view from the kitchen window.
“Ooh, isn’t it lovely, Pete? Look at them woods!”
Dad smiled and put his arm around her shoulders.
Shit! We’d be moving in.
So that was how we came to buy a big old house that someone had just died in. A big old house with a big old back bedroom looking out onto a wooded copse that screeched with crows. And it came ready-made with bloodstains that trailed up the wooden staircase and across the landing floorboards, all the way to the back bedroom – drips, streaks and splotches.
This was our fresh start, though.
“This is where you’re going to get better, Eva,” Mum said. The mess was nothing to worry about, and old people died at home all the time – there wouldn’t be a house in Britain that hadn’t had someone die in it, so it didn’t do to dwell. “We’re going to get you off those drowsy tablets, too. And then you can go to the all-girls’ school down the road. It’s got lovely navy-blue uniforms. Come on, love. Be a bit excited, eh?”
The move seemed to be the next day. Of course, it wasn’t, but it seemed that way to me. So fast. A jump. And immediately Dad set about knocking the old-fashioned pantry and coal house out of the kitchen. He had a red bandana round his head, and Mum had the Carpenters playing on the record player. Cement dust coated every imaginable surface as he went at it with a sledgehammer, and two days later, there was a huge gaping hole in the outside wall.
They stood back and looked at it.
“Don’t worry, love,” he said to my mother. “I’ll get some plastic sheeting over it, just ’til I’ve got hold of a brickie.”
She laughed, and they started kissing again.
Next day, he got down to the next job, steaming off years of layered-on wallpaper in the lounge. Ah, this was going to be such a transformation! I never saw him as happy as he was then, with the radio on, smoking and hammering, nailing, steaming, sandpapering, and painting.
But the following week, my mother lost her job, and everything changed. She’d been an evening cleaner at the secondary school in Eldersgate and had a nasty row with one of the other women.
I knew all this because the doctor was reducing the dosage of my drowsy tablets and I’d taken to sitting on the stairs, listening through the bannisters.
“I’m not bloody ’aving it,” Mum was saying. “I’m taking this to a tribunal.”
“Oh, Alex—”
“Don’t ‘Oh, Alex’ me! That bloody bitch called me a Nazi, Pete!”
“You didn’t ’ave to belt her one.”
In the end, Dad persuaded her to leave it, advising she channel her energy into looking for another evening job – he’d do double shifts, and she could look after me full-time until I started school. By then the year was tipping into November, so it meant we’d have to go through winter with nothing but plastic sheeting between us and the outside world, running the constant risk of burglars. It also meant putting up with exposed bloodstains on the floorboards and the horrible dark green bathroom with its rust-spotted mirror. The unpredictable, clunking boiler would have to stay, so, too, the oppressive oak panelling in the hall downstairs. Ditto the heavy oak wardrobe in my bedroom – the back bedroom looking onto the woods, the one with peeling flock wallpaper and a whistling fireplace choked with birds’ nests and soot.
That old lady had died in here, in this very room, I was sure of it – could picture the stained sheets where she’d stewed in her own body fluids, the yellow tidemarks just like the one in Baba Lenka’s bedroom… Someone had lifted her up and put her here, where she had decomposed, staring out at the same barren treetops I was staring at now, but with unseeing opaque eyes…her flesh festering in pee and pus and old blood…
I’m not sure exactly when the night terrors started. And I don’t mean nightmares but night terrors – paralysing, heart-stopping visions meant to cause maximum fear. They became so bad I ended up in hospital with suspected heart failure. Sometimes they started with the plane flying into the side of a mountain, but the bad ones, the ones when something unimaginably terrible and unstoppable was coming, something unspeakably horrific, would always start the same way. That was how I knew they weren’t dreams or memories or anything else…but visions. I was meant to see them.
Around this time, the sedative effect of the drugs was wearing off, with the result that every sight, smell, and sound hit me with hyper-surreal, almost psychedelic impact. And the more it wore off, the more the feeling of disconnection and alienation crept back in. Once again, I was floating away. Just like when we’d first returned from Bavaria, the world seemed strange and so did the human race – as if everything had simply been put on hold. My eight-year-old mind tried desperately to make sense of it but could not. And back came that same feeling of impending doom, of something about to happen – just like at the funeral before the casket had been tipped over and the morning before I’d stabbed Maxine Street.
Those night terrors would start the minute my bedroom door was shut and the landing light turned off at seven in the evening. By then, Dad was counting every penny, and no light was ever left on if it didn’t need to be. Downstairs, the sound of murmuring voices on the television would drift up the stairs, and Mum and Dad would come up around ten. Which meant three hours up there on my own. Sooty would always leave at dusk. As soon as the light faded, he stood up, stretched, then leapt onto the windowsill to be let out. Looking back, I realised he wasn’t ever with me at night and only returned at dawn.
The first time it happened was about two weeks after we’d moved in. I was probably on about half the dose of the blue tablets by then and had trouble getting off to sleep. Dad had shut the bedroom door and clomped back downstairs. Initially it was more of a feeling that something was off, that my stomach was prickling and my pulse points ached. I lay there, eyes wide open. It was far darker than usual. It’s hard to explain except the blackness was total and seemed to breathe, hiss, be alive. The sense of foreboding racked up rapidly, exactly as it had on the hill to the cemetery in Bavaria, and all at once, the need to get out became overwhelming. Every nerve was firing. I imagine it’s the same kind of panic as being trapped underground or buried alive. All I knew was I had to get out.
This is our fresh start; this is where you get well…fresh start…fresh start…
I sat up, hot, breathing hard.
Mustn’t scream, mustn’t cry out…mustn’t ruin it… This is me being silly, causing problems for them…
But the atmosphere was electric. Someone else was here in the room �
� they were breathing, loudly, the rasping gasps of one old and sickly. Who was here? Who? A feeling of menace crawled up my back; pressure pounded on the top of my head. Someone was going to arise out of nothing, out of the air, and materialise in front of me. What was coming?
My eyes burned into the void. A face would appear, or eyes…something horrible… And then what? I couldn’t scream, could not even breathe…my throat had constricted. I was going to see eyes in the darkness, and I thought my heart would stop.
There was a lull, a moment.
Before what sounded like the dull, rolling roar of a strong wind whipping up. Not from outside, not thunder, but from inside the room – to be precise, from inside the wardrobe! This had to be a dream. But here I was, sitting up, ramrod straight with my eyes wide open. And the wind was not imagined, either – it was icy, blowing the hair back from my forehead, whistling as it had that day in Bavaria, racing down from the mountains and through the trees. The cries of crows carried on the air along with the wailing cries of the ancients. Every detail of the funeral procession then began to replay, as if we were still standing there on the hill to the cemetery, as sharp and clear as the day it had happened. The wintry blast nipped my face, and the smell of smoke and pine filled the air.
My breath had lodged like an iron nut in my chest, and I could neither breathe in nor out. My lungs had set to stone. In desperation I tried to move my arm, to knock something onto the floor so someone would come; I was in bed at home, not here on this hill in the freezing cold. I was not on this mountainside but trapped in a waking nightmare. Yet even as I told myself that, the daylight of the scene switched to night, and the sun became a brilliant full moon, starlight glittering on the snow.
The shock of what happened next caused my breath to come back with such force it left me gasping as frantically as a person half drowned and given the kiss of life. Something was walking out of the wardrobe. And taking form.
I shut my eyes, opened them again. She was still there. Only much, much closer.
Wake up, Eva! Wake up…wake up!
Baba Lenka, with her twisted, broken neck, was almost level with the end of the bed, ankle bones cracking and crunching with every step, that one staring eye fixed directly on me just as it had the day she’d fallen out of the casket.
I screamed so loudly that Dad thundered up the stairs two at a time.
“What the hell’s happened? Has someone broken in?”
He had the light on, was scanning the room, his face ashen.
“Baba Lenka’s in the wardrobe!”
“You what?”
“She’s in the wardrobe,” I wailed, sobs hitching in my throat. “The door opened, and she came out.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed, shouting down to Mum that it was just a nightmare.
“Sweetie, she’s not in the wardrobe, okay? It’s just a bad dream.”
“But I wasn’t asleep.
“You were, chicken. You’d nodded off and had a bad dream. It’s understandable considering what happened, but it was just an old lady’s funeral, and it was eight months ago now. She’s dead and gone. And when people die, they go to heaven. They go to be with God. It’s over. They definitely don’t come back and open little girls’ wardrobes. It’s not possible.” He walked over to the wardrobe and yanked open each of the doors. “Look – just your clothes in there, see?” He parted the new little school pinafores and dresses to show the solid wood at the back. “That’s it. It’s just a lump of wood, and there is nothing in it other than your things.”
I bought it. I believed him. I wanted to so badly.
He smoothed back my hair. “Maybe those drowsy tablets delayed the reaction. But it’s all over, all right? We should never have taken you, but we’d no one to leave you with – we couldn’t tell your grandparents we were going, you see? Not with how me dad is about Germany. Listen, it were a bad experience for you, but you’re home now and you’re quite safe. So go back to sleep, there’s a good girl, and let us grown-ups have a bit of peace – I’ve to get up at four in t’ morning.”
“Okay. Sorry, Daddy.”
“That’s all right. You just call me if you’re frightened, chicken. But remember this – only human beings can hurt you. If a big fella comes to take you away, then you scream your lungs out, all right? But nothing else can hurt you – no old ladies coming out of wardrobes, and there are no ghosts.”
I smiled.
He got up, walked to the door and turned out the light.
But as the door clicked shut and I turned over to go to sleep, doing what he’d told me to do, Baba Lenka was staring right back. Up close. With her head on the pillow next to mine.
***
Chapter Five
“She’ll ’ave to see a psychiatrist, Pete.”
My parents stood over me, faces bobbing like white balloons, voices disembodied.
By then, the night terrors had been going on for weeks. After the first few episodes of bloodcurdling screams, my parents had stopped running upstairs and decided instead on a tactic of ignoring me. Maybe that would work? Maybe it was attention-seeking and would stop?
Only it didn’t. As soon as the bedroom door shut, the blackness thickened and crackled. It pulsated, hissed, watched and breathed. She knew I was alone. Knew I’d be lying there fixating on that wardrobe, never wavering, waiting for the key to turn in the lock and the door to nudge ajar…until the creak sounded as it eased away from the hinges, followed by a rush of icy air fresh from the snow-topped mountains.
Baba Lenka was as starkly vivid to the eye as anyone else, the rotting stench gag-inducing as she hobbled out, bones and joints cracking and splintering with every step. I could not face what was coming, my small heart banging so hard it hurt. I screwed up my eyes, repeating over and over that she was not, could not, be real. But when I opened them again, she was inches away from my face. And my throat was raw from screaming. But like I said, after the first few nights, my mum and dad didn’t come running anymore, didn’t switch on the light or say it was a dream. They left me screaming – screaming with my hands over my ears until I began banging my head on the walls to get her out of it.
“This will end when you let me—”
“No, no, no, go away! Go away!”
I took to holding on to the crow poppet, which once again offered comfort, a silken balm to the raw terror. I held it like a nun holds a cross. When Baba Lenka appeared, I would reach into the pillowcase for the doll and hold on fast, whimpering, sobbing, begging, “Leave me alone, go away, leave me alone, please! Oh, please!”
And every time, the room grew cold. The shivering that began in the dorsal spine would ripple up my back and across my arms like a breeze across a pond, making my teeth chatter and skin goose. The smell, too, was something I’d only ever encountered once before in my young life, that of rank, diseased flesh mixed with human excreta and black mould, the stench that had pervaded the farmhouse in Rabenwald.
So, I knew when she was coming.
And that she wanted something.
When you let me…when you let me…
She wasn’t going to stop, was she? The more I begged her to leave me alone – the more I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, the more I screamed – the more that fact became clear. It was going to go on and on and on…until what? Until I let her what…?
The courage to not screw up my eyes and scream anymore, to open them and keep breathing while looking her in the face, came nearly two weeks after my parents had left me to scream myself hoarse. Maybe not courage. Maybe it was exhaustion?
Baba Lenka was lying on the bed. Right next to me. Her head on the same pillow.
Look at me…look at me…
The breath stuck hard in my chest, my stomach clenched in a tight knot, and my heart slammed like a hammer into my ribs.
Don’t scream, don’t scream, see what she wants…breathe…breathe…
Slowly, very slowly, she turned towards me. A bone cracked as she did so. Fetid bre
ath wafted into my face. And then one long, gnarled finger traced down the side of my cheek. I shut my eyes fast.
Oh God, oh God, oh God…
Opened them.
Holy hell! She was suspended over me, floating a matter of inches above my face.
The white muslin shroud, stained and dirty, dropped in folds around her, and the tissue flesh of her cadaverous face hung from shiny white cartilage. It was impossible to resist, to not look, to not see what was in those hollowed eyes boring into mine. Mesmerised, I stared right into them.
At which point there was such an almighty bang in my chest, it nearly stopped my heart. My reflection in her eyes was upside down.
***
Hands reached down and shook me. Someone was patting my face, more than patting – slapping. “Call the doctor, Alex! Tell him she’s got a pulse but not much of one. Christ, what’s wrong with ’er? What the bleedin’ hell’s happened?”
Brushstrokes of weak light fanned across the far wall, and a wood pigeon cooed from a nearby tree. Where was this?
“Eva, wake up, love! It’s seven o’clock in the morning. Can you ’ear me?” His voice was breaking, this man whose face swirled in mist. “We’re going to get the doctor to you, love. Your mum’s on the phone now. Christ, I think you’ve frightened yourself to bloody death. We should have got you more help, but we didn’t know what to do. We thought the memory of that place would fade, that you’d eventually forget…”
The doctor came in the next flutter of my eyelashes. Listened to my chest with a stethoscope. Did the pulse and temperature routine. “Nightmares, you say?”
This was a new doctor, not the one who’d taken me off the blue drowsy tablets.
“She had tablets earlier this year from the doctors in Eldersgate,” my mother told him. “For anxiety.” She then told him a pack of lies about what had happened at infant school last February and how a family funeral had upset me. I heard the word amitriptyline and saw him frown and shake his head.