Poppet

by Mo Hayder

  She leapt back in the car. Engaged the central locks. He raced towards her. Penny, Penny – his voice low and unnatural. As she started the car, he clambered on to the bonnet, his legs and genitals stained and bloody. She leaned on the horn and rammed the car into such quick reverse that he somersaulted off on to the ground. She slammed on the brakes, flicked up the headlights and sat trembling, watching him. He was already getting up, unsteady on his feet – maybe he’d been drinking – he swayed around, fumbling on the ground until he found what he’d dropped: one of his poppets. He was so hot with blood and death he was steaming in the frigid air.

  He straightened and turned to look at Penny.

  ‘No,’ she hissed. ‘You won’t get me too.’

  She floored the accelerator. The car danced and skidded forward, forcing him to scamper away into the barn. He slammed the doors closed behind him and Penny, high on fear and adrenalin, dared to leap out and run home the big latch, locking him in. It was only when she got to the first phone booth and dialled Harry’s number that the shaking started.

  Now, in her unlit bedroom, she curls up in the bed, the quilt over her ears. She never saw the bodies, never saw the bedroom. She pieced it all together – some from what she saw smeared on Isaac’s naked body, some from later newspaper articles, but mostly from the questions Harry refused to answer. He was never the same man after what he saw in the Handels’ house.

  Something occurs to her. She sits up and switches on the reading light. Grabs her glasses and lifts up the quilt. The missing patch. Two mornings ago its disappearance reminded her of Isaac and his habit of stealing clothing for his poppets. She didn’t know then that he was out of hospital, so she hadn’t given it much thought. Now, trembling, she inspects it feverishly. The stitching all over the quilt is loose. The piece could have easily come away from general wear and tear, nothing to suggest it’s been cut out.

  The thought doesn’t go away though, the sudden shaky idea that Isaac has come back. She gets up and goes downstairs. The big old painted grandfather clock says eight o’clock. She rechecks all the windows and the doors. She’s about to turn to the stairs when her eye is caught by the medlars in the prep room. There’s a store cupboard there where she keeps boxes of citric acid and gelatine. At the back of it is a door. The door leads to the basement. It has a lock on it but she hasn’t checked if it’s closed.

  Stupid, stupid, she tells herself, you’re turning into a bundle of neuroses. Over-reacting. A doctor would say you’re suffering from the curse of the female – hysteria brought on by an imbalance of hormones. When’s your next period due, Miss Pilson? But she can’t stop staring at that cupboard.

  Under the floorboards are the skeletons of the mill. The water-wheel has long rotted away, but the huge stone troughs they used for washing the fleeces are still there, and the old maintenance hatches for the days when they’d send a child down to unlodge a branch that had entangled in the mill wheel. There’s a whole labyrinth of tunnels and culverts and sluice gates – most are wadded and sealed to prevent draughts coming up through the floorboards, but if someone really wanted to come into the house – if they really wanted …

  From the kitchen she gets her heaviest skillet. There’s a torch hanging next to the back door – she loops it round her wrist and clicks it on. She creeps into the prep room and into the larder. There’s a bare electric bulb in here which she switches on. Then changes her mind and switches it off. She’s picturing what she will look like from the other side of the door – lit up and emblazoned like on a movie screen. A perfect target.

  She steps forward. Rests her fingers on the handle. She’s been through this door several times: it leads to a rickety flight of wooden stairs that creak and complain at the smallest weight. There is no electricity down there – nothing. Just moss and stone and hardened expanding foam in the cracks.

  Open it. Open it. There’s nothing there. Nothing.

  Her hand trembles.

  Open it. Open it – prove to yourself he’s not standing there. Open it.

  She lets all her breath out. She runs the two huge bolts at the top and the bottom, turns the old key in the lock. Then quickly she pulls boxes off the shelves and stacks them against the door. Anything heavy – anything with glass that will make a noise if disturbed. The outer door has no lock, just an old-fashioned T-hinged latch. She uses string to wrap around it several times. Then she pushes a chair against it and drops back against the wall, shivering and sweating.

  Graham and Louise Handel

  CAFFERY STARTS TO compose a message to Flea. He gets twenty words in then changes his mind, puts the phone in his pocket and walks around the garden impatiently like something that’s about to explode. This is like the man who keeps hitting himself in the face over and over. Still hoping Flea’ll change her mind? What a joke that is. Whatever is stopping her isn’t going to go away. His best bet is to get to the bottom of the Isaac Handel case, then take a long breath and move on to alternatives for closing the Misty Kitson case.

  Eventually, for no particular reason except that he can’t think what else to do with them, he re-buries Misty’s clothes in the garden. Covers them with soil. He doesn’t want to get the holdall with the dolls out of the car, it’s the last thing he wants, but he does it anyway. The one place he can close off from the rest of the house so the smell doesn’t permeate everywhere is the utility room, so he carries them in there. Then he showers and changes into an old T-shirt and sweatpants. He spends an hour printing anything he can find about voodoo dolls, then pours a large Scotch and carries the printouts through into the utility room. He puts his nitriles back on and starts picking through the dolls.

  They make an ugly hotchpotch of textures – Handel seems to have used all manner of materials, from patchwork squares, to raw sheep wool, to glazed clay, to small pieces of stick or wood. Anything he can scavenge. They are crude and unsettling – having them here is like having extra people in the house.

  The printouts tell him the notion of a voodoo doll is a popular myth. There’s almost nothing to connect it to the Haitian strand of voodoo; the only place the dolls seem to surface is in New Orleans, where voodoo has undergone a kind of Americanized renaissance for the tourist industry. Nevertheless, in the popularized fiction of voodoo – the sort of thing a fourteen-year-old boy might read – voodoo dolls not only exist, they are objects of terror. They obey a fixed set of rules, they can be used to control the humans they represent.

  Caffery fumbles two of the dolls to one side. Both are made from leather – human outlines stitched crudely together with something that looks, to Caffery’s uneducated eye, like catgut from a stringed instrument. When Isaac came out of the house after the murders he was clutching two dolls. Penny only glimpsed them, and doesn’t know what happened to them afterwards, but she maintains she’d seen them before and they were the ones which represented Graham and Louise Handel.

  Isaac’s juvenile-custody record was destroyed – as is usual – after three years, so there’s no way of finding out what property was detained. But it’s not a leap of faith to believe that the dolls Caffery’s looking at now were the ones Isaac was holding. They are dressed in clothes strikingly similar to the ones itemized in the CSM’s report as found on the Handels’ bodies – jogging trousers and a T-shirt on the female doll, brown cord trousers on the male. It may be that they seemed innocuous enough to a string of custody officers and nurses to have slipped unnoticed through the system. A sectioned patient showing a particular attachment to an object? One which, when scanned, showed no traces of metal, no sharp objects – it’s feasible he managed to convince people to let him keep the dolls.

  Why? Caffery wonders. Graham and Louise were already dead. Why would he want to keep their effigies?

  He goes into the kitchen and fetches a reading light and a magnifying glass. Studied under the glass, the dolls are even more disconcertingly ugly. They have polished shells in place of their teeth, and they differ from the other poppets in that
they both have their eyes sewn shut. If the poppets symbolized whatever it was Isaac wanted to inflict on their real-life counterparts, did he stitch their eyes closed because he wanted them dead? And did he continue doing things to the dolls after his parents’ murder? The dolls are covered in tiny puncture marks, the heads have been twisted repeatedly, leaving a cracked black crease in the leather delineating the neck. Maybe it wasn’t enough simply to kill his parents, Caffery thinks, maybe he’s kept these dolls so he can continue to torture his mother and father beyond the grave.

  He sits back in the chair and stares at his reflection in the black windowpane. There are a few stars visible above the trees – otherwise the countryside is wide and black and limitless. He imagines Handel out there somewhere – tries to picture what he’s thinking. What he’s planning with his Stanley knife, his pliers and his wire.

  Dandelion Ward

  THE MAUDE HASN’T gone. It’s tricked them all. It has changed its mind and it’s coming back. It’s not far away, not far. Already it has done things Monster Mother can’t think about. Things it never should have done.

  She sits in the middle of the room in the darkness and rocks gently to and fro. She hasn’t been to the day room – she doesn’t like the different colours her monster children wear – or the rainbows that flash across the television set. They send her mood up and down a hundred times a second. So she stays on the floor in her room, still dressed in her lilac gown, still happy because today is a lilac day and she is going to make sure it goes on being a lilac day. In spite of everything.

  AJ is the best of her children. He’s getting cleverer too. Cleverer and cleverer. He doesn’t have the extra eye, but maybe he’s growing one. Because he is starting to get near the truth. The big truth that Monster Mother has watched in silence all these years.

  AJ has found Isaac’s poppets. The finished-with poppets. But he hasn’t found the ones not yet finished with. The ghosts of things to come. Monster Mother has seen them – she won’t tell a soul, but she’s watched Handel with his busy fingers, his heart full of revenge, and his anger. She’s watched him making the other poppets – the two lady dolls – one with blonde hair, the other with short, spiky hair. Bright, bright red, the colour of a poppy. With dangly earrings and dangly bracelets and a floral dress.

  A dark-haired boy poppet is holding on to this lady poppet. Holding on face to face. His arms gripping her tightly, gripping her in that special way boys sometimes hold on to girls when no one is looking.

  Monster Mother lets out a small groan. She sways and sways and sways, her moon shadow splintering and leaping around her on the floor. Her lost arm is aching, as it often does when her mood changes. If it gets worse, if The Maude comes any nearer, Monster Mother is going to have to take off her skin and hide again.

  Tomorrow is going to be a dark-, dark-blue day. Navy-blue as midnight.

  Groundhog Day

  FLEA WAKES FULLY dressed on the sofa at six a.m. Her head is throbbing, her mouth is dry. The curtains are open, outside is still dark and freezing, a crystalline hush – winter on its way. She rolls on to her side, a cushion under her face, stares at the silent television. Maybe it’s Groundhog Day, because on screen is Jacqui Kitson again. Different sofa, different dress, different interviewer. The expression, though, that’s the same. Flea doesn’t turn up the volume. She doesn’t need to. She knows what Jacqui will be saying.

  She looks at her watch. There’s no going back to sleep – she’s got to commit to the day.

  She falls out of bed and drags on her jogging gear and makes her morning run in the dark, using her head torch and her memory to guide her. It’s frosty, the trees poke their thin fingers through the sheet of white. She sees no one – no car passes, not a single light shows in the few houses she passes on the six-mile loop. The whole city of Bath is down the slope half a mile to her right – but it is silent. The only way you’d know it was there is the orange miasma in the mist.

  Back at home she showers, washes her hair, gets into uniform, thermals underneath – ready for another day of searching. She snaps on the long johns and as she does feels something loose about her stomach – as if the muscles are going to split and spill. She stands for a moment in the bathroom, her hands pressed on her belly – wondering about that sensation.

  Her eyes lift to the corridor, to all the boxes lined up there. They are so neat, so contained, organized and closed. It’s taken for ever to pack it all away. Fuck, fuck and fuck.

  She drags on her fleece, kicks on her boots and goes into the bathroom to clean her teeth. As she brushes, she keeps one hand pressed on the mirror, her eyes down on the porcelain and plug. There’s no need to see her reflection. Absolutely no need.

  Old Man Athey’s Orchard

  DAMN STEWART AND his crazyhead ways. He’s still got that fly in his backside about something in the woods and in the morning when AJ lets him off his lead he heads straight across the field and has shuffled under the bushes and round the stile before AJ has a chance to do anything.

  He is left standing there, swearing under his breath. He’s tired. He hasn’t slept. While Melanie eventually calmed and fell asleep, curled like a child in the crook of his arm, he lay awake, watching shadows on the ceiling, his head turning and turning. When he did sleep it was patchy. He was conscious of her there – as if her dreams and her fractured faith in him were leaping the barrier into his own nightmares.

  In the end he gave up. It’s six thirty and still dark, so he’s put cups of fresh-brewed coffee on Patience and Melanie’s night-stands and has come out here with Stewart. All Stewart seems to want to do is whine and give him pathetic looks. And now he’s buggered off.

  The kitchen window doesn’t cast enough light to follow, so AJ goes to the garage and gets a torch – a huge thing that frightens the wildlife – and starts after the dog. He finds him about twenty metres inside the forest, his tongue out, his tail wagging eagerly to see AJ following him.

  ‘Stewart,’ AJ hisses. ‘You total pain – don’t give me a hard time, I’ve got enough to think about at the moment.’

  But Stewart gives him a look of such hope and faith that AJ sighs. He might live by the maxim that what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him, but he’s had enough of his dog and this emotional blackmail.

  ‘Come on,’ he tells him. ‘We’ve got exactly thirty minutes, fifteen out, fifteen back – let’s go see what all the fuss is about.’

  They go through the forest and out the other side, over a field and up to the plateau. Though he doesn’t know exactly which turnings the path goes through, he knows where it could lead eventually. The place he doesn’t want to think about. The dog is beside himself with excitement. He runs with his stumpy tail high in the air, fantasizing he’s some sleek high-bred gundog. AJ follows at a short distance, grumbling every inch of the way. The fields are dark and the ground crunchy with frost. His nose is cold and he wishes he’d stopped to put on gloves – his hands are like blocks of ice.

  ‘This had better be good,’ he yells to Stewart, who is waiting at the top of the path, looking back at him, his tail wagging crazily. ‘Another five minutes and then we turn back.’

  Stewart has taken him over the plateau, down the other side, and along the edge of the evergreen forest with the views of the village on the far side of the valley, a few lights coming on in the windows as the early risers wake. Old Man Athey’s apple orchard, the place AJ scrumps for Kingston Blacks, lies to his left in a cone-shaped section that bites into the forest. Ahead is the place called The Wilds by the locals because it seems no one knows who owns it. Could be it’s National Trust property, or the forgotten estate of someone decaying away in an oxygen tent on a remote Greek island. AJ has known about The Wilds all his life, but he can’t recall ever having set foot in it. Upton Farm lies beyond it.

  Stewart stops so suddenly that AJ almost runs into him.

  ‘Hey, you lunatic. What the hell’s going on?’

  The dog doesn’t move. He’s as sti
ll and obdurate as a rock – his ears forward, all his attention on the path ahead. Dawn has made a wash of white in the sky overhead, and enough light is creeping down here for AJ to discern individual trees without the aid of his torch. The path stretches into the forest, greying about fifteen metres ahead, then vanishing in the poor light.

  AJ is a child of the countryside and nothing scares him. There is no reason for the way the hair suddenly stands up on the back of his neck. He holds his breath, strains his senses ahead in the wood. He can’t be sure, but he thought he saw something a little darker than the surroundings, a shape moving in there. Isaac Handel. AJ can’t shake the thought – the certainty. His skin crawls.

  Stewart suddenly gives a whine and half turns to head back in the direction they’ve come, as if cowed by what’s in the woods. He gets a few metres behind AJ and hesitates, undecided. He turns his head back inquisitively, looking past AJ into the woods.

  ‘Hello?’ AJ shines the torch into the path. ‘Hello?’

  His voice is thin and hollow. It is swallowed instantly by the trees. He takes three steps along the path.

  ‘Hello?’ he says again. ‘Don’t want to scare you, I’ve got a dog.’

  Silence. Not even a crack of twig. Gathering his courage, he goes forward a few more experimental paces. He can see nothing.

  ‘Isaac? Is that you?’

  Stewart creeps up next to him, tippy-toed and cautious, his rugged body pressed hard against AJ’s shin. Together they move further into the woods.

  About five metres ahead, at the place the path seemed to disappear in the gloom, it opens instead into a wide and unexpected glade. AJ and Stewart stand at the end of the path and look around. Thready daylight creeps in, finding thin plumes of mist erupting from the forest floor, a few leaves dropping listlessly from the trees. In the centre of the glade is an object that for most would defy description. Even AJ is taken aback by it at first.