Four British Mysteries Page 12
Relief filled her at the sight of the cottage. She hurried the rest of the way down the street and up the pathway. Catherine would know what to say. They would open a bottle and collapse in her sofas and talk and laugh as they had done for nearly forty years. She could almost smell the robust wine, oaky and delicious in her mouth.
As she stepped up to the door, she realised that she really could smell wine. She noticed the curtains were shut. She also noticed several bottles, nestled in the bushes. She might not have seen them except for the smell and the way they caught the fading light. Anxiety fluttered inside her.
“Catherine?” she called. She knocked against the door, then waited a minute. “Catherine, are you in?”
She entered the cottage using the key Catherine had given her when she had gone abroad last summer and asked Freya to keep an eye on the cats. The key slid smoothly into the lock, turning quickly in her hand.
Movement sounded behind the door as someone sprang back. Only moments behind, Freya heard footfalls against the old wood, glimpsed a pale shape as it disappeared into the kitchen.
“Catherine?” she said, “Catherine, what’s the matter?”
When Catherine spoke, her voice was like a hiss. “Go away!”
She followed the voice and the vanishing shape into the kitchen. Her throat was tight, her stomach sick. She felt as though everything she had eaten these past months was swimming inside her, pushing at her skin, threatening to rise up into her mouth. Had the hunger reached her friend? Had it claimed Catherine?
The cottage was in disarray. More bottles, mostly empty, cluttered the work-surface. She noted sheets of paper, scrunched into tight balls beside the bin. A slab of brie festered on a chopping board. Beside it, a cheese-knife glistened blue and green.
“Catherine, where are you?”
“Please, go away,” said the voice again. She followed it to the wine cellar. The door was locked. She touched it, lay her head against it.
“You know you shouldn’t drink alone, Ms. Lacey.”
After a moment, Catherine replied. “You know you shouldn’t drink at all, Ms. Rankin.”
“Are you going to tell me what the matter is?” she said.
Laughter echoed from the cellar. It didn’t sound like Catherine. “The matter? You might as well ask me the point of cats again.”
“We never did decide on that,” Freya said.
More laughter bubbled up from behind the door. “We decided you were a bitch, remember?”
“Ms. Lacey! That’s hardly something to call someone from behind closed doors.”
“You’re a bitch, I’m a bitch, the whole world is full of bitches.” Catherine’s voice was sharp, acidic. It matched the stench of the kitchen. “Isn’t that the point? The point of it all?”
“The point of what?”
“Life!” hissed Catherine. Something smashed in the wine cellar. “To breed, to feel a man between your legs, to drop screaming children, one after the other, to mother them like they’re you, like they’re a part of you, crawling hungry and bloody across the floor?”
Laughter degenerated into sobs, then bubbled back again until Freya could hardly distinguish between the two. She felt herself beginning to cry. “Don’t do this to yourself,” she said quietly. “Catherine, don’t.”
“How can’t I, when it’s all around me? All I see anymore is the hunger in people’s eyes, the desire burning there, a hunger for life that I can never know. I can never know it!”
Freya choked back her voice. “There’s other things too, Catherine. Think about it. Think about me.”
“Think about you?”
“Think about love.”
Freya felt hot and dizzy from the tears and the heady aroma of wine. Reds and whites and half-drunk pinks had mixed into a kaleidoscope of rank smells, which caught in the back of her throat. Her eyes fell back to the brie, rotting slowly on the side. She found she couldn’t look at it.
“Love is nothing,” muttered Catherine. “Love means nothing.”
“Don’t you love me?”
“I... can’t,” she said. “I can’t have children and I can’t love you! The rest of the village has let go and I can’t! So tell me, what’s the point?”
Freya sank slowly to her haunches against the door. She pressed her thumb to the wood, remembering a promise, pricked in blood. She thought she might lose herself wholly to tears, but instead swallowed them down. Eventually she managed words.
“Did you ever find Merlot?” she said.
“No.”
“She’s the point, Catherine. Merlot’s the point. Follow in her footsteps. Go, be with her.” Freya felt herself smiling. “You always were more of a cat woman.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In the hallway of Haven House the next morning, Freya slipped into her wellies. Her Parka felt dry against her skin and strange, as though she shouldn’t be wearing it. It was a moment before she slid it over her arms and zipped it up to her chest.
She had to know the truth of George’s story, to verify what had happened to those boys in the tunnel, if not for peace of mind then to sate her own curiosity. There could be no peace of mind, not while she still belonged to the village. There was only her hunger, which she knew would never end. Eaton paced around her legs, his tail wagging, anticipation shining in his eyes. She thought he looked sad. As she attached the leash to his collar, she wondered about the emotional capacity of the dog. Was he really sad? Or was she just imagining the upset in his eyes? He had food, water, shelter and love...
She opened the door and stepped out into the bracing cold. They moved quickly through the village, woman and dog. Snow fell softly around them. She thought of George, of the snow he had dreamt, then insects and hungry swarms, swirling in the air. They passed few people on the way. She exchanged a furtive glance with a teacher from the school. The man was white with cold, his eyes dark, narrow. His vanishing footsteps crunched in the snow behind her. Once or twice a curtain twitched, but when she turned to look it was too late. Once she thought she saw a pale face, staring at her through a window, but only once. All other times there was nobody there, and after that she let the curtains twitch and didn’t look again. She passed through the village, across the high street and the abandoned station, and walked towards the trees.
As the last time, she followed the overgrown tracks. They proved slippery with ice, so she walked across the embankment, where the cold and snow had made the mud hard. She released Eaton from his lead. He bolted across the grass after some invisible prey or, she thought, the silhouette of her son, who she pictured running ahead, peering between the metal slats, moving ever closer to the yawning mouth of the tunnel.
She followed the apparition through the snow. Often he stopped to examine the unseen, and she realised she was smiling; her little boy, lost and fascinated in equal measure at the monstrous size of the world around him and the unknown things within. They were all lost, really. No one person truly knew their place in Lynnwood, domesticated by school and society into good, orderly citizens.
It was madness, she realised, faltering in her step. It was insanity, branded the norm. Her eyes studied her son a second longer, then he dissipated under a flurry of snowflakes and she watched Eaton instead as he raced across the heathland. The sadness was gone from his eyes. His paws churned clumps of snow.
The tunnel mouth seemed wider than she remembered. It whistled with wintry breath and an undercurrent of something else. She smelled the foetid stench, so much like spoiled meat, and her face fell. Inside she seethed; the maternal against the hungry, the social against the wild, the wrong against the right.
Another gust of wind brought the stench renewed, and she winced. Eaton must have caught the smell too, for he inched past her, his ears flat, one paw in front of the other. What did it mean, if the three boys rotted in there? They had lives once, futures, mothers of their own. She could still hear Mrs. Foxley’s wails from when she had passed Haven House after the searches were cal
led off. They were honest sounds, heartfelt and human as anything Freya had come to expect.
And yet everything had changed now. She saw Lynnwood for what it was, and in the village there were only two sorts: those that hunted and those who were their prey. One fed, the other was fed upon. And in doing so they nurtured the hunters, who grew strong and full beneath the Forest canopy, or the oaken beams of their cottages, bright and indomitable as the constellation Orion itself...
Inside the tunnel nothing moved that she could see. The darkness was dense and velveteen. Frost clung to the tunnel mouth like ravenous spittle and, around the base, more snowdrops broke through the blanket of white. Nature’s bouquets, commemorating the three boys who festered within and the role they played in the insatiable cycle of life.
Cold and contemplative, she didn’t notice the trap, concealed in the snow. A single, heavy crash echoed across the clearing, followed by Eaton’s whimpers. Arms stiff, chest frozen with fear, she rushed towards the wounded dog even as something else darted from the darkness of the tunnel. Much closer than Freya, it reached Eaton first, and seeing the skeletal figure in the overcast light she faltered, slipping in the snow.
It had been Mr. Shepherd, once. She had seen it before, watching her from his workshop. But under the wintry light it looked horrible. Its naked flesh seemed blue and pink. Ribs pressed from its chest, its eyes wild behind that monstrous mask, which was at once ornate and revolting.
She struggled to her feet and started towards Eaton. His head lolled wildly, eyes mad, as the snow became red around him. It was darkest around his forelegs, where the metal had mangled his flesh, becoming paler and icier as it diffused into the flakes.
Long fingers reached for the dog’s head. He snapped once, instinctively, yellow teeth flashing from black gums, then the figure grasped his head and twisted. A crack, like thawing ice, echoed in her ears.
Silence settled over the clearing as Freya fell upon the man. She remembered the press of it beneath her, the surprising softness of its skin for one so thin and hard. Her face felt hot, burning with anger and sadness and a thrill she had never known. This was a new instinct and an old one, no less bred into her blood. The figure might have kicked her, or thrown her back, she couldn’t be sure. It was strong. It thrashed wildly beneath her, and then she was on her back in the snow, the breath knocked from inside her. Tears ran into her hair.
The roar of the Forest filled her ears. Turning sideways, she watched as the figure dragged Eaton’s body into the tunnel. Then a howl emerged from the darkness, half human, half beast, and as she crawled to her feet and staggered toward the village it was answered by another from the trees, and another, and another, until the morning air filled with cries of wild hunger.
* * *
Lynnwood blurred around her as she ran. She might have been moving through banks of fog, or a distant memory. In many ways, the village was a memory now. Lynnwood as she had known it all her life no longer existed. The streets, the trees and the stone-cold tiles of their kitchen floors were all bathed in invisible blood; monstrous deeds committed by monstrous people, dried and flaky in the cracks between the stone, or soaked into the soil beneath their feet. She felt lost, stripped of the society she had been raised to depend on. It had been torn from around her; a lamb, devoured by Aesop’s wolves, leaving her naked and vulnerable in the cold and the snow...
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It might have been midday when Freya found herself outside Catherine’s house. The cottage was still. She stared numbly at the building, which meant so much and so little, Eaton’s lead hanging limply by her side. She knew Catherine had gone, to be as the others in the Forest. She could tell just from looking at the house. Still she walked slowly up the path to the oak wood door and knocked.
She didn’t know quite how old the house was, or how long the Laceys had lived there, only that it had stood for hundreds of years at least. Families had lived out their lives behind the grey stone of its walls; their loves, their hates, their tender moments and cruel words imprinted on that stone for as long as people living remembered. She knew Catherine’s pain when, late for school one morning, she had stubbed her toe on a table-leg. She heard the echoes of Catherine’s laughter when they had discovered a dirty book in her father’s study. How they shrieked at the thought of learned Mr. Lacey, nose-deep in those pages! She remembered the quiet sound of the floorboards beneath their feet as Catherine had leaned in to kiss her, the thrill that had coursed through her as their lips brushed together that first time. It had been their last day of school and her breath was hot with celebratory wine. The taste, she knew, had remained with Catherine for decades afterwards.
She knew the sounds of grief, when Catherine’s parents passed away, of joy, when she had bought Merlot, and the animal screams of birth when the cat had produced her litter. She knew tears and smiles and the warmth of desire and the walls knew all these things too. A lifetime witnessed and remembered.
She used her key to enter the cottage. The inside was just as she remembered it. The hallway had been tidied recently. Six empty wine bottles stood beside the door. She smelled lavender and loneliness and realised she was breathing heavily.
She moved into the front room. The scarlet curtains were stark against the whiteness of outside. Some books had been left open on the coffee table, their spaces vacant in the bookcase. They looked like poetry collections. She didn’t read them but turned to inspect the rest of the house, revisiting the rooms and retracing the steps she had walked a hundred times.
The bedrooms were perfectly made. The bathroom too appeared to have been thoroughly cleaned. On descending into the wine cellar she found it empty. Where before there had been stacks of wine, cases of bottles older than she, now there was only darkness and the skeletal framework of the racks. The air was sweet and vinegary on her tongue.
The kitchen was cold. The whole house was cold, as though Catherine alone had warmed it with her lips, her eyes, her wild, drunken laughter. On the work-surface, beside the knife block, she found a piece of paper. It was a page, torn carefully from a book. A lipstick had been used to weigh it down.
For several minutes she read silently from the page. Then she turned and walked out of the cottage, closing the door behind her. On the doorstep she smelled the lingering aroma of lavender. She fancied she heard laughter and crying and the mewling of a cat. Then she left.
Marry me, my Lady,
By the Forest’s edge,
Hear the trickling of the stream
As we, as one, are wed.
Marry me, my Lady,
By the Forest’s side,
Hear the roaring of the trees
As we, as one, are wed.
Marry me, my Lady,
By the Forest’s kiss,
Hear the silence of the leaves
As we, as one, are wed.
* * *
She has almost caught up with herself. It could not have been a week, days perhaps, since Eaton stepped in the jaws of the trap. He flashes behind her eyes, his auburn fur matted with blood, as though the colour seeped out of him with the passing of his life into the snow. She misses him more than she can express in words, or through the nib of a pen. A memory resurfaces, which she had thought lost. She is watching a puppy as it crosses their sitting room, head low, ears flat with the curiosity of youth. He is awkward-looking, like the foals born to the Forest in spring. He grew into his limbs, his speed, her love; a constant reminder of that last meal with Robert, when she had first decided they would one day get a dog. And now he has gone. They have both gone. There is almost nothing left, to remind her who she was.
She clutches her chest, feeling the texture of her clothes – these had mattered, once – then the hardness of her chest beneath. She traces her ribs with her fingers, reminding herself that when all else fails she is flesh and blood and sweat and bone and hot, wet breath...
Eaton was all these things, and now he is none of them, even his bones snapped and sucked cl
ean by the man that had been Mr. Shepherd. Her stomach growls, and she hears Eaton in her mind, lips drawn back, teeth bared, and then it is not Eaton but Mr. Shepherd, jaw set, mouth red, and then her son, his eyes sharp in his pale face, mouth open, a hungry shout tearing from his throat.
She does not know for certain if Mr. Shepherd was always in the tunnel. She does not know whether he visited her son at night, whether it was he who bequeathed him the brooch from Ms. Andrews’s grave. She does not know whether it was he who protected her son from those boys, who dragged their bodies into the tunnel and ate from them, or whether it was George himself, her little George, who fed on their flesh, every bite a rebuke against their bullying, against school, against uniform and smart shoes and Sunday service and a world that neither loved or understood him, but expected him to comply all the same.
Her chest rises and falls quickly beneath her arms. Her ribs are hard, her body shaking. This is not the first time she has considered his role in Lynnwood’s darkness, but it is the first time she has faced it. Inside, she has always known, always suspected. They all grow lean and hungry. Why should her son be any different? Nothing else could have driven her back to the tunnel that day, where the trees grew so close, except to stare with her own eyes into the abyss where her son had simultaneously found and lost himself.
Another figure flashes behind her eyes and she starts as, outside, pink sky turns to midnight blue. It is her daughter’s face, so similar to her own. It stirs more feelings inside of her. Pride struggles to surface above the forest of primitive drives, which are so strong now. Pride and sadness enough to dredge her from instinctual descent, for just one moment. One moment is all she needs, before she is free to run as the dogs through the trees. One moment of remembrance for one solitary girl, who, when the rest of Lynnwood succumbed to their wilder instincts, fought a silent battle with her hunger, unnoticed by all.