by Daisy Pearce
I waited till they were on the covered bridge, empty except for the litter blown into the corners, and called out, ‘Hey!’
They both looked back at me, turning slowly. I saw, very clearly, Moya mouth Oh shit. Charlie, of course, was unfazed. She put a hand on her hip and jutted it out, tilting her head and smiling sweetly.
‘Mrs Hudson. We were just talking about you.’ She looked at Moya from beneath her long eyelashes. ‘Weird!’
‘You know something,’ I said abruptly. ‘About Edie. You know something happened to her, and I know that you know that Peter Liverly had something to do with it.’
‘Who?’ Moya said. She looked frightened, but I was too overwrought to be gratified by it. I kept my eye on Charlie, who was still smiling and looking at me with her head on one side. It was like that day back at the beginning, in those numb, strange hours after Edie had disappeared and I’d tried to talk to them in the headmaster’s office – tried to talk to them like an adult would a child, cajoling, patient. I wasn’t going to do that any more. They didn’t deserve my consideration.
‘You mean the old guy from the church? That pervert?’ She said the word ‘pervert’ like a cat purring, rolling her ‘r’s. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s kidnapped her. You should ask Moya, she’s been inside his house.’
Moya looked from Charlie to me and back again. She was wearing a tight skirt of a rubbery material, like PVC, and torn fishnets. Her ears were pierced in neat little rows following the curve all the way to the top.
She pouted crossly. ‘Don’t tell her that, Charlie, you dick.’
‘When? When were you in his house?’
Moya shifted uncomfortably.
Charlie gave her a nudge with her sharp, pointed elbow. ‘Tell her, Moya. She won’t tell on you. Will you, Mrs Hudson?’
‘No,’ I said immediately, unsure if that was true or not. ‘Of course not.’
Moya considered, and when she did finally answer she wouldn’t look me in the eye. ‘Everyone dared me to.’
‘Dared you to what?’
‘Go into his house. There’s a window. I was the only one small enough to go through. I used to bring things out to show them.’
‘Things? What things?’
‘You can see if you like,’ Charlie said brightly, and held out her hand for me to take.
They took me to the back of the churchyard. It was the first time I’d been there since Edie disappeared. My blood roared in my ears. My baby. My little girl. She had been here. Right here.
‘Come on then,’ Charlie said, laughing now. She turned towards me and pressed her face against mine. It was so intimate I could smell her perfume, the powder on her skin. When she spoke her breath fluttered along my cheekbones. ‘We’ll show you our treasures.’
Then she was walking away, swinging her schoolbag by the handle. Moya hustled to catch up with her. I’m drawn to trouble. That’s what my mum always said. So of course I went with them, through the large wrought-iron gates, veering off the overgrown path, which had narrowed to a single line. The air was scented with pine and muddy water and something else, rotten and ripe-smelling, almost sweet. I pulled the collar of my coat up over my mouth. Charlie looked back at me and laughed.
‘It’s the rabbits,’ she told me. ‘See?’
I looked down to where she was pointing and saw a small, furred corpse lying in the grass, leaking a black ichor from its mouth. Another lay not far away, thick with flies. The eye sockets were black and empty, sightless voids. I gagged, feeling the contents of my stomach rise, burning the back of my throat. I remembered the day I’d met Peter Liverly at the back door of the church, the way he’d held the bloodied bag in his meat-like fist. Why has he stopped picking them up? I thought, following the girls with my hands pressed deep into my pockets. The place is full of them. I wove through crumbling headstones and sunken graves, wrong-footing myself into a pothole and nearly stepping on a small pile of rabbit bones, picked clean. I had a single, terrifying image of Peter Liverly sitting here in the moonlight, squatting on his haunches and gnawing the meat from these bones with his yellowing teeth, his sunken, witless eyes glittering in the dark. Jesus Christ, listen to yourself, I thought. He’s a caretaker, not the Wolfman.
Back in the summer Peter Liverly had told me that the graves would flood and sink right into the ground. He’d been right about that. Days of rain had left the churchyard waterlogged and swampy, thick with mosquitoes and mayflies. Puddles had formed in the cradle graves on which floated brown leaves like small, rudderless boats. As we headed further in, the headstones grew smaller, less stately, becoming grey and blotchy with algae. One or two had crumbled away entirely, leaving unadorned humps of grass. Up ahead was the deep grove of trees, swimming with shadows: the yews, black against the sky and studded with waxy berries, a clutch of holly trees, gospel oaks wrapped in ivy. I could hear crows calling to each other from the branches.
‘In here,’ Moya said, and pointed through the treeline. I squinted into the gloom. Up ahead there was an elm tree, the trunk thick and gnarled with age. Its leaves were a burned amber colour, mottled with decay. I peered closer. There was something hanging on the low branches. It looked like a face.
‘Go on,’ Charlie said. ‘Go in.’
I turned and looked at them both. Moya was chewing her sleeve, round eyes watching me closely. Charlie gave me a flash of teeth, the tip of her tongue just brushing her upper lip. I suddenly realised that I was afraid of these girls and told myself not to be ridiculous. I had nearly twenty years on them. I’d survived birth and death and divorce. I was older and wiser and uglier, so why did I feel so afraid of following them into this dark, shaded copse? Why did I feel that ripple of unease? Is this what Edie felt the night she disappeared? I ducked my head and walked slowly behind them across the grass. My head will be caved in with a stone, I thought, unable to help myself, and the hand that holds it will wear chipped black nail varnish.
‘Slow down,’ Charlie snapped at Moya as she stumbled across the damp ground in her heeled boots. She tugged at the hem of her skirt, swearing. Moya put on a baby voice, pretended to suck her thumb: ‘I’m sew sowwy.’
Under the canopy the light was grey and diffuse, like old film. There was a hush under here that was almost unnatural, the drip-drip-drip of rainwater from the leaves. Something caught my eye as I turned my head. A little to the left, through the trees. Movement, something caught there and blowing in the breeze. Police tape.
Edie.
I took a step or two forward and then hesitated. The tape had obviously been there a while – it had come untethered from its mooring at one end, sagging limply to the ground. I remembered Tony saying they had cordoned off an area of the churchyard where Edie had gone missing so as to preserve any evidence that might be found there. ‘What did you find?’ I’d asked him, and he’d shaken his head. ‘Nothing. Not a button,’ he’d replied.
I lifted the end of the tape up and tied it back around the tree. There was a squirrel in there, a grey one – my little brother Danny had always called them pirates because they’d seen off all the reds – and it sat on its haunches, quivering at my approach. It was even darker over here, where the yews pressed thickly together. What little light fell through was milky and cold. The squirrel stared at me with round black eyes. He was sitting on a cantered gravestone, old and weathered. I peered a little closer, careful not to cross the tape, and read the inscription there: Mary Sayers. Departed this life 1897, Eighteen years old. Lost to the Waters, She will Return.
‘Mrs Hudson.’
The voice was breathy, muffled-sounding. Right behind me. I spun on my heel and there was a monster there, something with round insectile eyes and a horrifying black proboscis. It was leering towards me, gasping for breath like something birthed from a nightmare. I screamed, flinching away, my hand reaching for the back pocket of my jeans without thinking, a smooth, practised motion. The creature reared up, shrieking. I’d got my teeth bared like an animal; I could see
myself reflected in those strange round eyes.
‘Jesus, Mrs Hudson! No!’
I saw Charlie standing off to one side with her hands stretched out, pleading. Her face looked pale and sick. The monster had stumbled backward and landed on its behind. Now it scooted away from me until it backed up against the tree. I gasped, couldn’t seem to get any oxygen. Adrenaline is a strangler, a robber of breath.
‘What the fuck! Is that a knife?’ a muffled voice said. I looked down at my hand. Back up again. It wasn’t a monster, I saw now. It was Moya, her face sheened with sweat. She tossed something to me over the grass. I looked down at it.
‘A gas mask?’
‘Mrs Hudson,’ Moya said, her voice watery. ‘Please, we’re sorry. We were just kidding around.’
‘Huh?’
She pointed at my hand. Her fingers were shaking.
‘The knife,’ she said. ‘Please put the knife down.’
I looked down at my hand holding the stiletto knife. It was Italian, belonged to my father, the man Edie called Nonno. He used to slice apples with it, spearing the flesh with the needle-sharp tip and eating them right off the blade. ‘Oh. You scared me.’ I felt embarrassed now.
‘Why do you carry that thing round with you?’ Charlie asked. Some of the nervousness had left her voice. Now she just sounded curious, her voice soft. It was nice. It was like being stroked by a cat. Despite myself, I found that I wanted her to like me.
‘Protection.’ I snapped it away and slid it back into my pocket. ‘I don’t like people creeping up on me.’
‘It was just a joke,’ Moya protested, and she looked at Charlie for help.
Charlie ignored her. ‘That’s cool. I wish I had a knife like that.’
‘You wouldn’t know what to do with one,’ Moya snapped. Charlie stared at her before rolling up the sleeve on her right arm and turning the wrist there outward to face us. Even in the dusk I could see the white stippling there, the scars that embroidered her skin. She poked her tongue out at Moya, who was getting to her feet.
‘Is this what you found in his house?’ I asked her, lifting up the gas mask with the tips of my fingers. This was what I had seen hanging from the tree in the dusk. I didn’t like to touch it. It was heavy and the blank eyes made my skin crawl.
Moya nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘Anything else?’
They’d hidden all the things Moya had stolen from Peter Liverly’s bungalow in the hollows at the roots of the big oak: old playing cards, a silver teaspoon, a matchbox. There was even an old snuff tin down there.
I dusted the earth from it carefully. ‘You know Edie used to do this. Bury things. When she was a little girl. I’d find them all over the garden.’
The two girls looked at me mutely. Charlie came over and kneeled across from me, taking my cold hands in her own. She didn’t seem to mind the damp and the dirt beneath her. At this angle her skirt rode up over her pearly thighs to reveal the delicate pink of her underwear. She looked at me, her tongue trembling, the tip of it touching her upper lip. It was delicious, like we were about to share a secret.
‘You must miss her, Mrs Hudson.’
‘Call me Samantha, Charlie.’
‘You know, Samantha—’ She looked at Moya as if for approval. ‘Maybe there is something we can try.’
‘What do you mean? What thing?’
She and Moya exchanged glances again.
‘The night Edie went missing was a full moon. I know this because we were playing Quiet Mary. If you go under the police tape right now you’d find the stubs of our candles on her grave.’
‘So?’ I stared at her. It was now getting so dark she was just luminous eyes, a snarl of white teeth.
‘Imagine. If we spirited her away, maybe we can spirit her back.’ She patted my hands gently, still smiling. ‘Think about it. We’ll do it if you want. We’re good at rituals.’
She stood up carefully, unfolding her long limbs like a mantis. She’s so beautiful, I thought. No wonder all these girls are in awe of her.
‘You can bring your knife, too, if you like, Mrs Hudson,’ she said, and blew me a kiss before walking over to where Moya was standing and looping an arm around her waist.
I found I couldn’t stand. My legs wouldn’t lift me. I watched the two girls flit off into the gathering dusk, all blue and violet shadows cradled in the hollows of the trees. A magpie barked from somewhere behind me, chk! chk! chk! That smell again, rolling on the slow-moving breeze, beneath the fragrant wood and moss and old stone, of ripe decay.
What are you doing, Samantha? I asked myself, creaking slowly upright like a woman twice my age. Sitting out here in the dark with teenagers? And why are you even considering this? A spell won’t bring her back.
Hope shatters you. It does it with great care, so slowly you barely notice it. It carves you hollow, leaving nothing but the seed of itself, and of course you plant it and nurture it because even though it is destroying you, without it you are a shell.
So no, it might not bring her back.
But what if it does?
When I got home that evening Rupert fussed over me, rubbing my damp hair with a towel, pressing a cup of tea into my numb hands.
‘Your detective called. Tony.’
‘Okay.’ I lit a cigarette. ‘Any news?’
‘Nothing to report, he said. The man is worried about you. I’m worried about you.’ Rupert looked at me suspiciously. ‘Where did you go?’
‘I went to the school to talk to those friends of hers.’
‘Those goth girls?’
‘That’s them. They want me to join them in a ritual.’
He scoffed. ‘A what?’
‘A ritual. Like a spell. They said they were doing one in the graveyard when Edie went missing.’
Rupert was silent, anticipatory. He was waiting for me to tell him the punchline. I shrugged and turned away from him, jettisoning my cigarette into the sink, where it hissed and died.
‘Come on, Pot, really? Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
He put his hand to my forehead dramatically. ‘Are you feeling all right, Pot? Think we should call a doctor? How about a witch doctor?’
‘Stop it.’ I brushed him off more angrily than I intended. ‘I’m the only one left looking for Edie. I’m all she has, Rupert. Don’t fucking patronise me.’
‘Oh, Sam—’
‘Besides. What if it works? What then?’
‘If the spell works, you mean?’
‘It’s not a spell, it’s a ritual. What if it could bring her back and I haven’t at least tried it?’
‘Pot, you’re not thinking straight. Edie will come back when she’s good and ready. I’ve never met a more headstrong girl. Not even all the combined forces of hell could budge her. You must know that. This is madness. It’s madness. Let the police do their job.’
I snorted derisively. ‘And where’s that got me? Here. To a point where all I have left is watching some girls do parlour tricks in a graveyard. That’s where it’s got me. You know I walked into town the other day? Most of the posters I’ve hung up are gone, either blown away or ripped down. I went into the school and the headmaster couldn’t even look me in the eye. Did you see the piece on her in the Argus? They called her “Ellie”. “Missing: Ellie Hudson”. No one cares, Rupert. I’m all she’s got. So I have to try.’
‘Sam, I have to go back to Devon tomorrow. I can’t leave like this. What’ll happen to you?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I told him. The Valium had made my tongue thick and it came out Uhllbefine.
He stared at me and I held his gaze until he huffed a noisy sigh and I reached for the phone, dialling Tony’s number.
‘Samantha. Thanks for getting back to me.’
‘What news have you got for me?’
‘Nothing much. We’ve let Liverly go.’
‘What? Why?’
‘We can’t keep him past twenty-four hours unless we charge him and we’ve got nothing to cha
rge him with.’
‘Well, what about the photos?’
‘He said they were for security purposes. Those girls have been causing a lot of mischief in the churchyards. He’s convinced they’ve been coming into his house at night. Talking about getting a guard dog. He’s built up quite a file on them.’
‘What about Edie? You asked him about her?’
‘Well, the problem there, Samantha, is that I can’t prove anything. We deal in evidence and as far as Edie’s concerned, there is none.’
‘But you searched his house, didn’t you?’
‘We’re doing everything we can with everything we have.’
‘I don’t – I don’t know what that means. Have you searched the house?’
‘You know, you need to get some sleep. Let me get on with my job.’
‘I’m sick of people telling me that!’
I could feel the weight of Rupert’s gaze on my back, a heat building between my shoulder blades. Tony was right, though – I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a full night’s sleep. I ached all over, and my head pounded like a muffled drum. I should have told him I went to see the girls at the school – the Rattlesnakes, as they called themselves – but I had a feeling low in my gut that Tony would disapprove of it so I kept quiet, holding the phone so tightly to my ear the skin there started to burn.
‘What about that boy she was seeing? William? You going to bring him in?’
There was a rustle of paper. ‘William Thorn was at school all that day. That’s been confirmed by his teachers. In the evening he and his brother had a takeaway pizza. That’s confirmed by his mother.’
‘And Edward Thorn? His father? Didn’t you say something about his car being parked nearby?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘But what?’
He sighed again. I knew he was looking at his watch, hoping to wind this conversation up. ‘I went to school with Edward Thorn. Did you know that? He taught me how to fish. He works hard and he’s built up a lot of goodwill in this community. It’s a currency, Sam.’