‘I didn’t think it showed,’ I answered. ‘Anyhow, are you saying other men have got themselves involved in that cult?’
‘Cult, you say—what gives you that notion?’
‘Weird stuff happened when we went to visit them,’ I mumbled. I wanted to talk again about my mother, and it was as if Mr Ratchetson realised that. He stared at me for a while, and reached his ancient hand across and rested it upon mine lightly.
‘Your mother, Ann, was stubborn, that was the trouble. I believe she even befriended those creatures for a while. I think they laid in wait for her and wanted to play with her hair. But she got frightened of them, especially the mother, whose own hair dragged along the ground for a foot or so behind her. There was a time when your father had to go in and pluck her back from them—the winders had set about her on the forest path one afternoon when she’d gone in there for wood, and they were lashing her with thorny branches until she bled.’
‘Christ Almighty, Mr Ratchetson. . . . Christ Almighty.’
‘That’s what I used to say too. Not that church would’ve done any good where the winders are concerned.’
‘Winders?’
‘Yes, because of what they do . . . the foul stuff they do in the wood.’
‘Do other people round here know about them?’
Mr Ratchetson shrugged. ‘I don’t go talking to people in town, so I couldn’t tell you. Maybe some do, and maybe some don’t. You should get your brother to leave.’
‘I’ve tried. He doesn’t want to. I can’t force him. If that sort of life is what he wants, why should I stop him anyway?’
I sat bewildered at Mr Ratchetson’s table, and for a good while neither of us spoke again. ‘But my mother was okay in the end, wasn’t she, so maybe Eddie will be too,’ I said finally. I stood up to go, as I sensed rather than saw the coming of the dark and the walk back to our house was a bit of a stretch. I was feeling frightened. Mr Ratchetson looked upwards into my face, but all I could see in his eyes was pity.
***
I cursed myself on the way home; I’d asked the old guy far too many questions and come away with hardly any answers. ‘. . . because of what they do . . . the foul stuff they do in the wood’, is what he’d said, and I hadn’t pressed him on the point. I stopped on the track and looked back at his weathered old house, but could not bring myself to return and bother him further.
Eddie was on the veranda reading the local paper when I arrived home. The air had darkened and the first bull frogs were beginning their rasping croaks. I felt utterly forlorn and deeply troubled; it was as if I was watching my brother teetering on the edge of a cliff. I’d considered contacting Cherie myself and asking her over to spend some time with us, but she’d have wanted to talk to Eddie, and I could see only confusion and anger as a consequence.
Eddie patted the seat beside him and I went to sit with him gladly and in the hope he’d changed his mind about Carboh. ‘Anything in the papers?’ I asked.
‘No. There never is. I was just whiling away some time, waiting for you to come back. Wondering where you’d gone, actually. This business with the house isn’t really working out too well is it? We’ve got three rooms finished, that’s all, and those windows in Mum and Dad’s room will take a fair bit of work, won’t they?’
‘Let’s pack up and leave, Eddie. We can hire some painters to do the work for us, it’d be worth the money and we’ve got to pay the woodworm people anyway. I say let’s skedaddle and get back home.’
‘So where did you go, Ross?’
‘To Mr Ratchetson’s.’ I paused, but saw immediately how I could use the moment. ‘He told me about the time Mum cut her hair off.’
‘Oh, wow! I never thought of asking him that.’
‘Yes, well it’s a pretty terrible story and you should know that it directly involves the women that you’re intending to hang out with.’
Eddie shook his head. ‘That was, what? Thirty odd years ago, so you’re talking rubbish, Ross.’
For a moment, I was floored. ‘Well it was the same family, at any rate,’ I said.
‘Carboh and the others can’t be responsible for things that went on in the past. You’re being illogical and really mean to them.’
‘Mean,’ I repeated. ‘Look, I’m worried about you, Eddie. You’re behaving as if nothing you’ve ever known before matters now.’
‘You’ve got it in one. That’s exactly how I do feel.’
‘So when’s the wedding?’
Eddie laughed and slapped his hand down hard on my knee. ‘You won’t let up on that one will you?’ he asked.
‘The winding, then?’
‘Windings happen at dawn, and I don’t think Mother has decided the day yet. Carboh will let me know.’
‘Will there be a party afterwards?’
‘The winding itself is the big celebration, they tell me. But I’ve already said, Ross, it’s a private affair, and you’re not invited.’
‘So, supposing I get in some drinks and a bit of food, sandwiches or something, pizza slices, and you both come back here afterwards?’
‘Yeah. Maybe. But where goes one, goes all.’
‘Huh?’
‘The sisters and Mother, you should invite them.’
I could not bear to turn my face and look at him, so I stood up and turned to go inside. ‘Of course,’ I answered over my shoulder, ‘of course.’�
***
I believe that it was only by chance that I awoke as the sun came up on the morning of my brother’s winding. He was using Mum and Dad’s old room while he prepared to paint his own, and the squeak of that door had never been dealt with. I think I heard it in my sleep and woke up on the instant. I heard the soft click of the front door and went to the window. Sure enough, Eddie was out there heading towards the wood. I knew I could easily lose him if I didn’t move swiftly and by the time I was also on the path, he’d just disappeared into the first line of trees. I sprinted. My shoelace was untied and whipping itself around my bare ankle.
Once I was in the wood proper, I stood for a moment to catch my breath and listen out for sounds. There was nothing but the whispering of wind through leaf. I stuck to the main path for a good while, hurrying, then slowing down, then hurrying again. My heart felt wretched and I knew I was badly frightened, yet just as it was when we first encountered Domescia and Carboh, I couldn’t describe the nature of my terror or explain the reason for it.
I made my way towards the plaited path, supposing that I might be able to locate them in the surrounding area, as surely, if they were having a version of a wedding no matter how peculiar, there’d be noise, and particularly if the activity was as foul as the old man had said. I stopped and started many times, wanting so badly to call out to my brother, but not daring to. I could hear nothing, no birds even, and it was only the sight of some broken stems that sent me off down a meandering track to the left of the main pathway. I blundered along it, suddenly convinced it was the right way, and sure enough, I came to a wide circular opening in the forest with few trees, and there they all were. When I try to tell Cherie this . . . when I try to describe it to her, she starts her uncontrollable sobbing, and yet, she is so fierce to know about it that she never gives up making me describe it. She often says, ‘You say Eddie had no clothes on, Ross. Are you sure?’
‘I could see his legs sticking out under that mess.’
Fact is, after I’d both seen and understood it, I retreated to Mum and Dad’s house and holed up there for many days, and it was only when Cherie arrived noisily by car, that I tried to connect again with the outside world. I came out to the veranda to meet her.
‘Hey, Ross! How’s it going?’ she asked. She had on those shoes poised on a mountain of cork that some women are drawn too, and she was trying to see where best to put her feet as she made her way towards me. ‘I got this idea you might like someone to cook for you while you’re doing up the house, I mean where’s the harm? So I came over,’ she said, just as she read somet
hing on my face that alarmed her. ‘Where is he?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘You know Eddie. He’s gone off, Cherie. He suddenly took it into his head he wanted to go travelling. He’s gone.’
‘You’re kidding me,’ she said. ‘The fucker.’
‘Yes. In any case, I’m not sticking around either.’
‘Why do you look like that, Ross?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like the whole world’s gone to shit.’
‘Do I?’
‘I think you know you do. Something’s happened, and if you try and bull-shit me and say it hasn’t, I’m going to shoot you, right there on that veranda.’
However wrong it was of me to involve someone as child-like and innocent as Cherie, I couldn’t help myself; I didn’t want to carry what I’d seen around with me by myself any longer, and so I think I was brutal in the way I handled her.
I told her as much as I knew before saying anything important, before describing what I actually saw. I thought I could limber up to it, if in the end I had to tell her, and it would be easier that way . . . and I cannot say at what point I did begin explaining what happened to my brother in that clearing—at least what I could see of it.
‘He’d been really restless and snappy before he left Holesville Nine,’ Cherie declared. ‘He was worried about working with you because he reckons you always look down on him.’
I shrugged. ‘You know yourself what he’s like, you’re forever bailing him out of one situation or another.’
‘Yes, but I love him, so it’s my job.’
‘Don’t you ever worry about yourself, Cherie, instead of about my brother?’
‘You think I’m such a small person that I don’t have enough of what it takes to worry about the both of us?’
‘No. Of course not; I didn’t mean that at all. I’m talking about the futility of it.’
‘That’s just mean of you, Ross. Who exactly were the women you say you saw anyway?’
‘A bunch of weird women with very long hair who lived in an old house in the wood, Cherie. That’s all I know.’
‘Hippy types?’
‘Well, I had the idea they were part of a cult at first.’
‘Are you saying Eddie got involved with them or something? You can tell me, I don’t mind; I’m used to him. What you don’t realise about your brother is that he knows he’s got a soul, so he’s always interested in anything that he thinks shows him the meaning of life.’
'What you don't realise about your brother is that he knows he's got a soul, so he's always interested in anything that he thinks shows him the meaning of life.'
***
Which of the sisters was sitting astride my brother’s chest was difficult to see at first, but after some long minutes standing there at the edge of the clearing, I saw that it was Carboh. She was sitting astride his body with her head close to his face, and her hair, all the long length of it was wound, cocoon-tight around his neck and upper chest. I could see Eddie’s face, pale and slack. Below Carboh, and also sitting on my brother’s body, facing in the opposite direction, was Domescia, and she had her hair wound tightly around his middle section. I could see the top of his bare thighs. She kept yanking her head up in little jerking motions, although there were no sounds. Sissiol was attached to one of his legs, her hair wound down the whole length of it, and she was lying face up with her head near his bare feet. Likewise, one of the others was attached to his left leg, and at his two arms, women had wound their hair round and round him. The seventh of the sisters was rocking backwards and forwards a few feet away in the arms of the hideous mother. Beyond my terror and revulsion, I registered that this seventh was not yet ready to feast.
Eddie looked like a gigantic brown cocoon, and I knew he was dead by the striking whiteness of his feet and face. ‘Let’s just stick on this path and find the ash,’ Eddie had said on the first day we ventured into the wood proper, and I’d said, ‘No, come on, let’s just take a quick look down there. Where’s the harm?’
Seven Strange Stories Page 25
