But... yes there was.
I’d been right after all. Someone had been in the house. They’d prowled around, found the box in the hallway and the note and then the jewellery in the bread bin. Left a note, and then gone.
What should I do? Call the police?
Well, obviously I should. Someone had been in the house and taken something. Though it was something I’d invited them to have, of course.
Unless...
I did another quick tour of the house and couldn’t find anything else missing. My iPad and iLaptop were all where they should be, along with my near-worthless television and DVD player. So was my other jewellery, the stuff I didn’t store in the bread bin. I even dug out my under-used cheque book from the bedside drawer and established no cheques were missing from the middle (a cunning ruse I’d read about in some magazine or other – steal a few from the middle, rather than the whole book, and nobody notices they’re gone until it’s too late). I’m not sure even thieves use cheques much any more, though, and apart from a few objects of purely sentimental value, there was nothing else worth nicking in the entire house. And none of it had been nicked anyway.
But someone still shouldn’t have come into my place, even if their only score was a piece of jewellery I’d effectively offered to them.
I grabbed my phone and went back into the kitchen to retrieve the note from the counter, ready to have it to hand when the police arrived. Did one dial 999 in these non-urgent circumstances, or were you supposed to look up the number of the local station? I had no idea.
I hesitated, and put the phone down.
* * *
The next day at work was hectic and slightly bizarre, as the woman who shares my office appeared to undergo a teeny tiny mental breakdown in the late morning, and stormed out, never to return. I’d always thought she was a bit bonkers and so I wasn’t totally surprised, though I was impressed by how much chaos she left in her wake.
My boss took the event admirably in his stride. He looked dispiritedly at the mess she’d made, told me to leave it for now, but asked if I’d mind answering her calls until she either came back or he could hire a replacement. This meant I was busy as hell all afternoon, but I prefer it that way. The working day slips by far more quickly when you don’t have time to think, and I’d already spent more than enough time arseing about on the Internet during the morning.
I had time to think on the tube journey home, and of course what I mainly thought about was what had happened the night before.
I hadn’t called the police, in the end. It was late and I was tired, and although the event had freaked me out a little, I couldn’t face dealing with them.
Also... I just thought Well, that’s the end of it. The police wouldn’t be able to find the thief (who wasn’t even technically a thief, of course; I suppose “intruder” is all I could legitimately say he’d been), and so it’d end up in a dusty log in the local police station and they’d give me a crime number which I could use in dealing with the insurance company if I chose to try to claim something back for the piece of jewellery.
Before I’d gone to sleep I’d tidied the event away in my mind, electing not to think any more about it, and I reinforced this on the tube and throughout the five-minute walk in the freezing rain from the station – during which, wanton hedonist that I am, I also stopped at the corner store to buy a frozen ready-meal to zap in the microwave for my tea. Plus a small tub of ice cream. And some biscuits. All in all, my evening was shaping up very well.
This time, however, it was obvious that something was wrong the minute I stepped through the door.
One of the advantages of living by yourself is that you get to be in sole charge of certain decisions. The central heating, for example. My father is a total miser when it comes to gas bills, and my parents’ house is so cold in winter that it’s just as well my mother does have an Aga, so she and I can go huddle around it when Dad’s not looking. Living by myself means no man gets a say in how warmly I spend my evenings. I have the heating set to come on mid-afternoon, so the place is nice and toasty when I get home. As soon as you close the door behind you, you’re enveloped.
Not tonight, however. The heating was on, as I could tell from touching my hand against the radiator in the hallway, but the house was chilly.
I went into the living room. The windows were all shut. Through one of them, I could see why the house wasn’t as warm as it should be.
The back door was wide open.
It had been both closed and locked when I left for work that morning.
I thought so, anyway. I knew it had been closed, at least, but I hadn’t actually checked that it had been locked. Hadn’t even checked the key was in its normal place, stuck there in its lock.
I remembered my thought of the day before, that an intruder would be likely to leave a means of escape open if he was on the premises, and found my eyes drifting warily upward, to the living room ceiling and the floors beyond.
What if he was still here this time?
I got out my phone. I dialled 999, but did not press the call button.
“Is somebody here?” I called up the stairs, backing into the hallway and toward the front door. “If so, you should know that I’m calling the police. Right now.”
There was no sound from above. I knew that if there was someone in the house and he chose to get violent, I could be a bloody and broken mess in the corner of the living room before the local cops got halfway here through the traffic on Kentish Town Road.
I opened the front door a little, and walked back to the bottom of the stairs. “The front door’s open,” I said. “I’m going to get out of your way. I’ll... go in the kitchen, so I won’t see you.”
Was this a good idea? Or a really stupid one?
Stupid, I decided.
“Or,” I said, “here’s another plan. I’m going to leave. I’m going to go back out of the house and stand around the corner. I won’t look this way. Shut the door to let me know you’ve gone.”
And that’s what I did. I went out of the front door, closing it behind me, my finger still hovering over the call button on my phone. I walked quickly to the corner.
I waited ten minutes. I didn’t see anybody come out of the house. The front, anyway.
I walked back. I let myself back in, cautiously.
The back door was now closed.
I ran quickly up to the next floor, making as much noise as possible, and found it empty. Then I went right to the top, including poking my head into the tiny attic room. Nobody anywhere. No sign of anything disturbed.
When I made it back down to the kitchen, I realised the back door wasn’t actually shut. The intruder had pulled it to when he left, but hadn’t closed it properly.
I pushed it open and stepped out into the garden, on impulse, even though I knew he could still be out there.
To the side of my kitchen there’s a tiny concrete patio. Beyond that, my “lawn” – a scrappy patch of grass that would be about ten feet square if it was actually a square. In fact it’s a kind of parallelogram, barely six feet wide at the far end. Because of the high hedges that surround it, the grass rarely gets much light even in summer, and it’s ragged and muddy in the winter.
Soggy enough this evening, I thought, that you should be able to see the foot marks of a departing intruder, indents from shoes or boots.
There were none.
Something else caught my eye, though, and I stepped gingerly onto the grass to have a closer look.
The garden gets its shape from the fact the left-hand wall slopes radically toward the back, and it’s this that’s made of stone and features the faded old plaque. The plaque’s low down, as if to be at child-height, not very large and made of the same basic stone as the rest of the wall. I’d been in the house for nine months before I’d ever realised it was there. All it says is—
[...] GARDEN
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
—the first word so weather-worn and chipped that it�
�s unreadable. The wall must pre-date the buildings that now overshadow it by several hundred years, this scrap of it left by early Victorian developers because it happened to more-or-less coincide with the layout of the minuscule back gardens they were affording these somewhat perfunctory workingmen’s cottages.
Something was lying on the grass, close to the point in the wall where the plaque is.
It was my piece of jewellery.
* * *
Half an hour later I was in the living room with a cup of tea. The brooch was on the coffee table in front of me. The house was nice and warm now that the back door had been shut for a while.
It was my brooch, without doubt. It had a distinctive triangular design, capped at each point with a dot of some green, semi-precious stone. When I’d found it in the antique store years before, I hadn’t been convinced it was even an antique. The shape was so minimalist – literally a triangle, albeit one of unequal sides and with a slight curve to all the lines – that it had looked pretty modern to my admittedly untutored eye.
It looked different now. When I’d got it back to the flat I was living in at the time, I’d intended to have a go at cleaning it. I realised I rather liked the tarnish, however, and decided to leave it be. Over the years since, it had become darker and darker, and when I’d put it in the bread bin months and months ago, the metal had been a very dark grey indeed.
Now it shone. The silver – and there was no longer any doubt that was what it was made of, which meant I’d probably got more of a bargain than I’d realised – was so shiny it seemed almost white.
It didn’t merely look clean – it looked fresh-minted.
Whatever process had brought this about had revealed something else, too. There were designs all over it. Etched very lightly into the silver was an incredibly fine and detailed series of lines and curves and interlocking Celtic shapes. At first glance it seemed chaotic, but the more I looked – and I’d been sitting there for quite a while now – the more I sensed there was a pattern that I hadn’t yet been able to establish. It looked beautiful, and otherworldly, and extremely old.
The problem was I was pretty convinced that the pattern hadn’t been there before.
Yes, it had been tarnished when I got it, as discussed – but in the early stages of oxidation you’ll often find that any engravings (or imperfections) in metal are more, rather than less, obvious. It’s easier to spot hallmarks, for example. You’ll glimpse a pattern, at least, especially when looking at something as closely as you do when you’re considering blowing hard-earned cash on it. I hadn’t seen any such thing.
So what was it doing there now?
I belatedly realised I hadn’t done anything about my shopping from the corner store, dropped in the middle of the room when I’d seen the back door hanging open. I hurried over and grabbed the bag. The tub of ice cream was glistening in that way that says it’s well on the way to melting, courtesy of my generous central heating policy. I carried it to the kitchen, still worrying at the problem of the design on the brooch, and stowed the contents in the freezer of my poxy little fridge.
When I straightened from doing this, my eyes were directly in line with the bread bin. Something made me reach out and open it.
The same smell of old bread greeted me again, though it seemed stronger this time, which made no sense.
There was a piece of paper in there, too.
I knew it couldn’t be the one I’d found the night before, as I’d put that in the drawer of the bureau in the living room (an old and cheerless piece of crap that belonged to my grandmother).
I picked the paper up and read it.
I hope you like what I have made on it
I didn’t need to compare the handwriting on it to the other paper. It was clearly the same.
There was another line of writing, an inch further down the page. Why hadn’t I spotted that right away? Because it was much fainter. Not as if faded, however – in fact the opposite.
As I watched, feeling the hairs rise on the back of my neck, the writing, at first so faint it was barely visible, gradually strengthened until it was as distinct as the line above.
It said:
I have designs upon you, too
No, I didn’t call the police.
I could have. Probably should have. I could have told them that both lines of the message had been visible when I found the piece of paper. I didn’t have to tell them it had been left in my bread bin. I didn’t have to say that I was convinced someone had somehow etched a faint and intricate design on an old piece of jewellery, so that it looked as though it had always been there.
The problem was, if I wasn’t truthful about these things I wouldn’t be conveying the reality of the situation. They’d assume some local miscreant was making a habit of breaking in, and I already knew that wasn’t what was going on. I’d known this, or at least suspected it – and now I must finally start to be honest – since the beginning. Since I told my fib.
It was a small fib, but significant.
When I came home the night I had dinner with my boss, and first had the intuition that someone had been in my house, and checked the back door, it was unlocked. That’s what I told you, anyhow.
But it wasn’t true.
The back door was locked.
It was locked, from the inside. So were all the windows, on all the floors. So had the front door been, too, until I unlocked it on my way in. Nobody could have got into the house from outside to find my note in the box in the hallway and then the brooch in the kitchen.
Whoever did these things had already been inside.
I don’t know for how long. Perhaps always. That’s what I’ve come to suspect. At least since the house was built, upon land that had once been a garden meadow on a little hill, near woodland and a pretty stream now trammelled far underground.
Before the day went pear-shaped – after my co-worker went sweeping out of the office and saddled me with all her work – I’d spent an hour covertly using the Internet, doing some digging I probably should have done long before. I’d always assumed that the missing word on the stone plaque on the wall in my garden was MEMORIAL – the sign put there to cordon off a patch of garden where people came to remember those now dead.
I could find no reference to such a thing in the area, even though the records for this part of London are pretty good, and I’d never understood why the plaque was positioned so low, as if for the eyes of people well below normal height.
I did find a single mention of an “Offering Garden”. An uncited reference on a rather amateur-looking local history site, claiming that the old stretch of open countryside belonging to St. John’s College had featured an example of the long-forgotten practice of securely walling off a portion of any meadow or hillside or forest that had a reputation for being home or playground to wood-nixies or elementals, co-inhabitants of our world that could not be seen. The idea being, apparently, that any such creatures would remain within such walls. Forever.
The people who eventually developed the area, several hundred years later, would not have known this. The practices and the beliefs supporting it had long ago died out. They could not have been expected to notice, or to care, that the weathering on the plaque was uneven, almost as if someone had chipped away at the first word in order to obscure the wall’s original purpose.
Just before my ex-colleague had her meltdown and I had to stop looking, I finally tracked down a website with a very old map of this part of Kentish Town. It had been badly reproduced and was hard to make out, but seemed to show a small, boundaried portion within a fifty-acre parcel belonging to a Cambridge college. The circumscribed area was not named or labelled, but by super-imposing it upon a modern-day ordnance survey map of my street, I was able to establish both that the plaque must have been placed on the inside of the wall, and that the area it had encompassed had not been large.
Just big enough to include my house.
* * *
I eventually microwaved m
y dinner and ate it in front of the television, turning it up loud. The frozen curry tasted a lot better than I expected. The ice cream was really good, too, and I finished the entire pack of biscuits. My appetite seemed huge, despite an odd tickle of nervousness in the pit of my stomach.
I had a bath. As I dried myself afterwards I noticed some very fine lines on the skin of my shoulders, not quite random, and when I went up to bed I discovered the room smelled faintly of new bread.
Not quite of bread, in fact. Though the odour was reminiscent of a fresh-baked loaf, now it was divorced from the bread bin in the kitchen I realised it was actually closer to the smell of healthy grass, warmed by a summer sun. Warm grass or recently opened flowers, perhaps. Something vital, but secret.
Something very old.
I saw that the cover on my bed had been folded back. Neatly, as if in hopeful invitation. A piece of paper lay in the area that had been revealed:
Soon, my pretty
—was all it said at first.
As I watched, however, another line revealed itself. It was delivered to me slowly, as if brought to life by the moonlight coming in through the window.
All I need is a little more blood
It was then that I heard the first faint creaks, like small feet on very old floorboards, coming from the little attic room above.
Though it turns out he’s not so small.
If you know what I mean.
LITTLE RED
JANE YOLEN AND ADAM STEMPLE
Seven years of bad luck. That’s what I think as I drag the piece of broken mirror over my forearm. Just to the right of a long blue vein, tracing the thin scars that came before.
There’s no pain. That’s all on the inside. It won’t come out, no matter how much I bleed. No pain. But for a moment…
Relief.
For a moment.
Until Mr. L calls me again. “Hey, you, Little Red. Come here.”
Calls me. Not any of the other girls. Maybe it’s because he likes my stubby red hair. Likes to twist his stubby old man fingers in it. And I can’t tell him no.
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