by Jen Williams
“Come on, just a quick chat. He might have known the area in the ’70s and ’80s—he certainly looks old enough.” They came to the door and the man shuffled out a little further to meet them. As the brittle morning light fell on their faces, she saw him frown abruptly, his gnarled hands clenching over the end of his walking stick. He was clearly ancient, his thin, creased skin speckled with moles and liver spots, encasing a head that had lost all but some of its hair, and he had oversized nose and ears, in the way of elderly men. His shoulders were rounded, almost seeming to push at the back of his balding head, and he wore a hearing aid, the beige nub of plastic sitting neatly within his ear.
“Hello,” Heather said again, deciding to front it out. “We’re from up the hill. Just having a wander about really. This is a beautiful piece of land.”
For a long moment, the old man didn’t respond—Heather had the strangest sensation they had frozen him solid with surprise—and then he seemed to jerk into life. He shuffled out the door, his head tipped to one side still so that he was peering up at them through one slightly bloodshot eye.
“It is, it is, and you’ve chosen a beautiful morning to explore it on.” His voice was friendly, warmed slightly with a hint of the local accent. “The woods really sing when the sun is out.”
“Do you know much about the area? About the old house on the hill?” Heather smiled. “I’m interested in local history, you see. I like to learn a little bit wherever I go.”
The man paused then, squinting at them in the bright light. There was something about the way he looked at her, as though he saw through her lies without even trying, that brought all Heather’s misgivings back in a rush. Then, dragging himself and the stick with obvious effort, he moved to one side and indicated the darkened hallway.
“Ladies, you’ve come to the right place, and it just so happens that Linda put a brew on before she left. Join an old man for a cup of tea?”
Heather glanced at Nikki, saw the tiniest shrug of her shoulder, and turned back to the old man.
“We’d love to, thank you.”
He shuffled back inside and they followed him down the shadowy hallway. Heather caught sight of various black and white photographs in frames hanging on the walls and an old, chintzy style wallpaper, and then they were turning right into a large living room. There were prints and paintings on the walls, and a large set of windows looking out across a wild lawn leading down into the woods.
“This is a lovely house,” said Nikki, who went over to the window to look out. “It must be a very peaceful place to live.”
“It is, it is at that. I’m Bert, by the way—it’ll be nice to have some company this morning. Linda, bless her heart, likes to tell me all the cleaning lady gossip but half the time I don’t know what she’s harpin’ on about.”
They both introduced themselves, and Heather felt a little flurry of unreality; standing in a stranger’s home, her mother’s house—and her ghosts—far behind her. The feeling was compounded when she turned to sit on the nearest sofa and spotted an enormous black dog in the corner of the room. He was huge and shaggy, with a long wolfish face like an Alsatian, and he was sprawled on top of a dog bed that was much too small for him. Heather looked back to Bert to ask about the dog—what sort was he, what was his name, would he be likely to eat them both—but the old man had pottered back down the corridor. Instead, she looked at Nikki, who was peering at the prints on the walls.
“Isn’t that a photo of the House?”
Heather looked where Nikki was nodding, and saw it; a very similar image to the ones whytewitch had had in her album, only this looked much older. A long row of men and women in a variety of servant’s uniforms stood outside, lined up on the gravel path, and standing slightly awkwardly next to them, a handful of people dressed in old fashioned clothes. Heather guessed it was from the ’20s or ’30s, judging by the fashions and the rear end of an extremely antiquated car peeking into shot.
“Before it was invaded by the great unwashed,” murmured Heather. A moment later, Bert reappeared at the door carrying a tea tray loaded with a teapot and cups. Nikki jumped up and helped him to wrestle it onto the low coffee table. When they were settled, with cups of tea warming up chilled hands, Bert leaned forward, his voice suddenly much more direct.
“What is it you wanted to know?”
Heather sipped her tea and shrugged. “There was a commune here in the ’70s, wasn’t there? Did you know the place then?”
The old man nodded slowly, not looking at them, as if confirming something to himself.
“Oh aye, yes, I knew it. It was lively, very lively. I remember when it was at its peak, when things were really jumping.” He smiled again, baring his long teeth.
“Do you know who was living in the big house at the time?” Nikki smiled to lessen the baldness of her question. “It’s just interesting to think of the history of the place, you know, while we’re staying there.”
“In the big house, are you?” said Bert, and Heather had the strangest idea that he knew that was a lie. Nevertheless, she nodded. He rubbed his thumb over the handle of his tea cup, back and forth, back and forth. “I don’t rightly recall. It belonged to the same family for generations, but they dwindled, as big families sometimes do.” His free hand clutched at his knee convulsively, and something about the movement made Heather shiver; it reminded her of a crab, sidewinding its way across some barren stretch of beach. “There was a lot of gossip about them, that family, most of it quite vicious.” He grinned briefly, then it was gone. “Eventually the house was sold to the company that own it now, and I’m sure they were glad to be shot of it. It’s hard maintaining a place like that, you know.”
“What do you remember about the commune?”
He sniffed and nodded, leaning back in his chair. “A lot of noise, they made a lot of noise, and they got up to some strange things in the woods. Some of it would have turned my father’s hair white, but then we live in a different age now, don’t we? Quite different.” He looked toward the window, sunlight shining off of his scalp. “I don’t pretend I understood much of it, but I would help them where I could. Brought them groceries, sometimes, taught them which mushrooms were safe to eat.” He smiled. “Although some of them were interested in the less-than-safe varieties, if you get what I mean.”
He put the tea cup down, and for the first time Heather noticed that there were dark reddish-brown rings under his finger nails, as if he’d been digging in the dirt. Without really knowing why, she looked back toward the dog, and wasn’t surprised to see that it was staring at her, brown eyes luminous in a shaft of sunlight.
“Did you get to know them well?” asked Heather. “The young people, I mean? My mum knows a lady called Pamela who said she stayed out here for a time—did you know her at all?” Outside, the sun passed behind some clouds, and the sunny living room grew dimmer. Something about that made her feel uneasy. The lawn through the window looked suddenly dreary, and the woods at the bottom seemed to promise horrors.
“Lots of young people came here, looking to get away from their parents and live more interesting, freer lives. They wanted to know the country, to live closer to the wild, but most of them found they didn’t like it much when the winter came, and it got cold. They started to miss their parents’ central heating.” Bert smiled again, and it pinched his eyes into networks of wrinkles. “Some were committed though. A few really loved this land. Gave themselves to it. Can’t remember individual names though, I’m afraid.” He tapped the side of his head. “Not as sprightly up here as I was, more’s the pity.”
“It sounds like you spent quite a lot of time there,” said Nikki.
“I just helped them, is all. Can’t pretend I understood it, what they were up to,” said Bert, all the decisiveness leaking from his voice. Suddenly Heather felt guilty, seeing Bert as he was: a very elderly man, living alone in an isolated house.
“Anything else you can tell us about the area?”
He brighte
ned at that. “Oh yes, there’s lots of history around here.” He stood up, almost looming over them, and Heather realized that before his back started to bend him in two he had been very tall. He shuffled over to a nearby cabinet and picked up some papers, which he brought back over to the coffee table. Unlike the slick pamphlets from the spa, these were printed in black and white, and on cheap paper.
“A civil war battle, a mile or so down the road.” Bert picked up one of the leaflets and passed it to Heather. There was a drawing of a Roundhead soldier on the front, clearly photocopied from some history book. “An especially bloody one, apparently. There’s nothing to see there now, of course, but you could always have a look there, soak up the atmosphere. Course, local legend says its haunted.”
“Haunted?” asked Nikki.
Bert smiled, as if amused at the ludicrousness of it all. “Go there on a moonless night and you’ll hear the sounds of battle. There’s lots of stuff like that up here, you’ll find. The lady in white who haunts the back roads, and the barghest that stalks the fields and the lanes, all the lonely places.”
“Barghest?” Heather took a sip of her tea. It had an unpleasantly grassy flavor. “What’s that?”
“It’s a word for a phantom dog,” said Bert. “You get versions of the legend all over the country. Black Shuck, Gyrtrash, Padfoot. Demonic hounds. Very popular bit of British folklore, that. Blazing eyes and slathering jaws.” He chuckled warmly.
Heather felt another tingle of unease, thinking of her mother’s suicide note: monsters in the wood. The old man was poking through the leaflets again, apparently intent on finding something. Despite the tea, she felt cold, and she realized that she didn’t like Bert. She didn’t like him at all, yet she couldn’t have said why. He nodded as he found what he was after, and passed Nikki a photograph. It showed a dense wood in spring, full of golden early morning light and dusted with bluebells.
“It’s beautiful,” said Nikki. Bert nodded seriously.
“These woods—the Fiddler’s Woods, which you would have walked through a small section of to get to my house—are ancient woods. Did you know that?”
“Aren’t all woods pretty old?” said Heather.
“Oh no,” Bert leaned back in his chair, his hands on the tops of his legs and his elbows pointing out, as though he were about to give them a painful estimate on an MOT. He sucked air in through his yellow teeth and shook his head. “Oh no. Trees were planted, you see, forests have been planned. But ancient woodland has been here a very long time. Longer than many of us have been here.” He shot a quick look at Nikki, and Heather stiffened, but he didn’t elaborate. “Ancient woodlands are forests that existed before 1600. If they were around before 1600, then it’s likely no one planted them—that they grew here, naturally. That they have always been a part of the landscape.” He leaned forward and tapped the photo with a slightly overlong fingernail. “Bluebells are often a sign that the wood is an ancient one. Wood anemone, primroses, too. We have them all in Fiddler’s Wood.” He said it with obvious pride, and Heather fought down an urge to ask if he’d planted the woods in his youth—he looked old enough, after all.
“Where was this taken? Is it nearby?”
Nikki had picked up another photograph. This one was of a cold-looking beach, the sky a flat gray and the sea a steely band flecked with white foam. There was a rugged romance to the scene, and an odd building sat off to one side. Heather took it from her friend to get a closer look.
“Ah,” Bert raised his eyebrows. “It is, it is. Beyond Fiddler’s Wood, if you go far enough.”
“And what’s this?” Heather tapped the building. It was a tall structure of warm brownish stone, marked here and there with narrow leaded windows. It stood alone, a tower on the edge of the land.
“Fiddler’s Folly, they call it round here. The family up at the big house was responsible for it, and there were lots of rumors about it, what it was for, why they built it.” He grinned, looking at them with his head tipped to one side. “But no one knows, not really. It’s standing empty now.”
When they’d finished their tea, Bert walked them to the front door. The sunshine had gone, to be replaced with a blanket of thick clouds, dark with potential rain.
The old man peered up at the sky, smiling faintly. “Well, it looks like the sun is over for you.” He turned back to look at Heather. “Take care, won’t you?”
CHAPTER
36
THEY MADE IT through the first stretch of woods and then it began to rain heavily, in the steady sort of way that suggests it is planning to hang around all day. Deciding to try a short cut, umbrellas brandished above them, they walked through another, sparser set of trees, and came across an ancient looking caravan. Once it had been white with a red and a brown stripe along the side, but now it was camouflaged with patches of rust and a thick covering of dead leaves and forest debris. At some point someone had attempted to fence the thing off with wire panels, but those had mostly fallen down, and thick tangled bushes had grown up around its wheels.
“Hey, that’s got to be from the commune. Do you want to have a look inside?”
Nikki grimaced. The rain was getting stronger all the time, the ground under their boots rapidly turning into mud. “Can we come back later? We should go and get the car.”
“You go. I’ll join you in a bit.”
“Are you sure?”
Heather nodded. “Go on. I just want to have a quick poke around, and then I’ll head back to the cottage. I think our exploring is done for the day.”
When Nikki had trudged away toward the clearing, Heather picked her way across the wild undergrowth until she reached the flimsy looking door. It came open with one fairly solid kick, and, collapsing her umbrella, she stepped inside.
It was dark, the only light filtered through a series of small, dirty windows, and it smelt powerfully of damp and moldy clothes. Heather took out her phone and turned on the torch function, slowly turning around to take in the whole scene. There was a kind of sitting room, seats with padding that could be flipped to turn into beds, storage units and a fold down table. Further back was a tiny sink, with more cupboards lining the available wall space, and then at the far end, a closed door leading into another room. Here and there she could see more evidence that the place was more than forty years old—orange and brown wallpaper with a familiar ornate flower pattern; stickers on the cupboard doors that demanded the government “ban the bomb,” several on the fridge that were of the Smurfs, their blue faces mottled with damp. More interestingly, there were signs that the owners had been interested in an alternative lifestyle of sorts. Heather spotted what could only have been a very old bong lying sideways in the sink, and an ancient poster on the wall detailed the months and signs of the zodiac, as well as phases of the moon and other esoteric advice.
Heather moved down through the van, the stench of the place coating the back of her throat. The rain was growing heavier, drumming on the roof in a persistent roar. She opened one of the little cupboards with her free hand and grimaced at the thick spiderwebs inside, but the cupboard above that one was full of small brown glass bottles with white tops. Bringing the phone closer, she tried to read some of the labels, but they were all blurred and warped with age. She did see several needles at the back, old-fashioned-looking bulky things, plastic packets of what looked like condoms and ancient plasters.
“You’d think kids would have been in here and had all this stuff years ago.” She paused, thinking better of it. “Mind you, maybe kids aren’t that stupid.”
Moving down the small space she came to the little work area next to the sink. Here, a stained wooden chopping board had been left, its surface crisscrossed with deep knife marks. On the floor next to it was a big tea chest, painted with pentagrams and runes in paint that had probably been silver once. Heather smiled slightly, imagining the hippies that had once lived in this cramped little space, and reached down to open the lid. Disappointingly it was empty, but just as she was fl
ipping it closed again Heather spotted a tiny corner of white sticking up from the bottom panel. She leaned down and took hold of it with her fingernails. When she tugged, a false panel in the base of the chest popped up, revealing a small recess filled with old Rizla papers and bits of foil. Underneath the old drug paraphernalia were a couple of Polaroids, their familiar white borders catching Heather with an unexpected stab of nostalgia. She fished them out and took them over to the closest window to take advantage of the weak natural light.
They were both of babies, both very young, their faces still quite red and raw looking. One was laying on a yellow blanket, wearing a white baby grow that was too big for it—the sock ends were flat where the baby’s tiny feet did not quite reach them—and the other was being held by a woman whose head ended at the chin, cut off by the framing. The baby was wrapped in a blue and pink knitted blanket, and it was looking up at the camera with the particular expression of annoyed confusion special to all very small children. There were tiny wisps of ginger hair on its downy scalp.
Heather stood very still. There was nothing especially sinister about this, she told herself. People loved to take photos of babies. Judging by her Facebook feed, it was a pastime destined to be forever popular. But her mind kept returning to Anna in the visiting room, touching a hand to her stomach, saying “they took my baby.” And the more she looked at the photo of the woman, the stranger it was to her that the photographer had cut her head off—if they’d taken a step back, they could have got mother and baby both in the picture easily enough.
And why were the photos still here? And hidden?
She turned the Polaroids over. On the backside of each, someone had drawn a tiny heart in red felt tip.
Taking a stumbling step backwards, Heather’s boot landed on something soft and yielding. She lifted her foot and made a small noise in the back of her throat. It was a dead bird, quite a large one. Maggots moved busily under and around the feathers, a tiny squirming civilization.