I didn’t feel that I could or should, however, and it was a couple of days later—after I’d seen Brian go through his late-night ritual twice more—that I finally asked him about it. He rolled his eyes.
“Silly idea,” he muttered. He gestured for me to come over. “See what it says?”
“‘Look Inside,’” I said.
“What does that make you want to do?”
“Well … look inside.”
He smiled. “Good. Go ahead.”
I opened the little box. Inside was an envelope. I looked at Brian. “Go on,” he said.
I pulled it out. The envelope was unsealed. I removed from it a cheerful greetings card which had the words WELCOME, FRIEND printed clearly on the front. Inside was another envelope, a little smaller than the first. I let this be for a moment and read the message which had been inscribed in the card:
Dear Uninvited Visitor.
Welcome to this house. We have called it ours for a long time now, and we like it very much. We hope you will find good use for what is in this card, and that it will be sufficient incentive for you to go on your way, without further loss or damage to our dear home. If so, you leave with our thanks, and our very best wishes.
Regards,
Randall & Brian
I frowned, and looked up at Brian.
“Look inside the second envelope,” he said.
I put the card down and opened the envelope. Inside, held together by a large paper clip with a smiley face on it, were bills totaling two hundred and sixty dollars.
“We started with a hundred,” Brian said. “And have raised it by twenty every year. So it must be seven years, now, I suppose. No, eight. Time does trot along, doesn’t it?” He gestured vaguely to indicate the house as a whole. “Nobody’s going to break in through the front door,” he said. “It’s right on Main Street, and in a town this small, people tend to keep a friendly eye on each other’s properties. Someone could come around the side, but breaking windows is such a chore, and prone to be noisy. So we always leave the back door unlocked.”
“What? Why?”
“Otherwise that would be the obvious way to break in, my dear, and a broken door alone would cost several hundred dollars to put right, never mind the time and inconvenience—and who knows what they’d steal or damage once they’d gained entrance? The way it stands now, someone can simply open the door and come straight in, and once you’re in the kitchen the very first thing you see is that box. Hard to resist, don’t you think?”
I was smiling, charmed by the idea. “And does it work?”
“No idea,” Brian said. “I have never once risen from my slumbers—nor returned from promenading during the day—to discover the envelope gone. The whole thing was Randall’s idea, to be honest. I generally find it’s best to let the old fool have his way. Except when it comes to the proper method for making a nice, silky hollandaise, of course, with regard to which he is … so very wrong.”
A couple of days later I got back into my rental car and set off to wherever I went next (a vague trawl through the Carolinas, I believe, though as my route was completely without form, and void, it all gets a bit mixed up in my mind now). I evidently brought Randall’s idea back home with me to London, however—buried beneath the levels of conscious recall until I moved into this house.
In my previous apartment it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense, what with it being on the third floor. Quite soon after I moved into my house in Kentish Town, however, I saw a little wall-box in a local knickknack store and the idea popped back into my head as if it had been waiting patiently for attention all along.
I bought the box and picked a spot on the wall, about six feet up the corridor from my front door. I spent a happy evening rather painstakingly painting the words LOOK INSIDE! onto the lid. You’d have to be charitable to describe the result as artistic, but it was legible. When I’d finished, however, and hung the result on a nail, I felt foolish.
Not because I’d done it—I was still charmed by the notion—but at stealing the fruits of someone else’s personality. This was Randall’s idea, not mine. In the house he shared with Brian (the latter sheepishly colluding, out of love) it was a song of individuality, like the mandatory dill stirred into their cottage cheese. If I did the same thing, I was merely a copycat.
So I changed it a little. Instead of putting an envelope of cash in the box on the wall, I left a note there telling them to look …
In the bread bin, in the kitchen.
And I didn’t make an offering of cash. I left a piece of jewelry there instead. It wasn’t a piece that meant the world to me, admittedly, but it wasn’t without emotional value, either. I’d found it in Brighton years before, paid more than I could afford at the time and had real affection for it. I chose it for the offering on the grounds that a genuine sacrifice could not be made without cost. It was probably worth about a hundred quid too, or at least that’s what I imagined you could get for it, should you show it discreetly around one of the area’s less reputable pubs.
Like Brian, I’d never yet woken or returned to find evidence that the note in the box in the hallway had been found.
Never, that is, until now.
I walked quickly back out into the hallway. I stopped when I was a few feet from the box and approached cautiously.
It looked the same as always, though to be honest I’d stopped noticing it some time ago. I looked inside.
The envelope there had been opened.
Of course it had. It had to have been. Without reading the message I’d written on the card—almost the same as the one Randall had concocted—the person wouldn’t have known to look inside the bread bin and find what was there and leave me the note.
Suddenly all the strength seemed to go from my legs, and I tottered into the living room and sat down on the sofa just in time.
The house was still empty, of course. I’d already established that, and what I’d just discovered made no difference. There was nothing to be frightened about. Nothing in the present situation, anyway.
But … yes, there was.
I’d been right after all. Someone had been in the house. They’d prowled around, found the box in the hallway and the note and then the jewelry in the bread bin, left a note and then … Gone.
What should I do? Call the police?
Well, obviously I should. Someone had been in the house and taken something. Though it was something I’d invited them to take, of course.
Unless …
I did another quick tour of the house and couldn’t find anything else missing. My iPod, iPad and iLaptop were all where they should be, along with my near-worthless television and DVD player. So was my other jewelry, the stuff I didn’t store in the bread bin. I even dug out my underused checkbook from the bedside drawer and established there were no checks missing from the middle (a cunning ruse I’d read about in some magazine or other—steal a few from the middle, rather than the whole book, and nobody notices they’re gone until it’s too late). I’m not sure even thieves use checks much anymore, though, and apart from a few knickknacks of purely sentimental value, there was nothing else worth nicking in the entire house. And none of it had been nicked anyway.
But someone still shouldn’t have come into my place, even if their only score was a piece of jewelry I’d effectively offered to them.
I grabbed my phone and went back into the kitchen to retrieve the note from the counter, to have it to hand over when the police arrived. Did one dial 999 in these nonurgent circumstances, or were you supposed to look up the number of the local station? I had no idea.
I hesitated, and put the phone down.
The next day at work was hectic and slightly bizarre, as the woman who shares my office appeared to have a teeny tiny mental breakdown in the late morning and stormed out, never to return. I’d always thought she was a bit bonkers and so I wasn’t totally surprised, though I was impressed by how much chaos she left in her wake.
My boss took
the event admirably in his stride. He looked dispiritedly around at the mess she’d made, told me to leave it for now but asked if I’d mind answering her calls until she either came back or he could hire a replacement. This meant I was busy as hell all afternoon, but I prefer it that way. The working day slips by far more quickly when you don’t have time to think, and I’d already spent more than enough time screwing about on the Internet during the morning.
I had time to think on the tube journey home, however, and of course what I mainly thought about was what had happened the night before.
I hadn’t called the police, in the end. It was late and I was tired and although the event had freaked me out a little, I couldn’t face dealing with them.
Also … I just thought, Well, that’s the end of it. The police wouldn’t be able to find the thief (who wasn’t even technically a thief, of course; I suppose “intruder” is all I could legitimately say he’d been), and so it’d end up in a dusty log in the local police station and they’d give me a crime number which I could use in dealing with the insurance company if I chose to try to claim something back for the piece of jewelry.
Before I’d gone to sleep the night before I’d tidied the event away in my mind, electing not to think any more about it, and I reinforced this on the tube and throughout the five-minute walk in the freezing rain from the station—during which, wanton hedonist that I am, I also stopped at the corner shop to buy a frozen ready-meal to zap in the microwave for my tea. Plus a small tub of ice cream. And some biscuits.
This time, however, it was obvious that something was wrong the minute I stepped through the door.
One of the advantages of living by yourself is that you get to be in sole charge of certain types of decision. The central heating, for example. My father is a total miser when it comes to gas bills, and my parents’ house is so cold in winter that it’s just as well my mother does have an AGA, so she and I can go huddle around it when Dad’s not looking. Living by myself means no man gets a say in how warmly I spend my evenings. I have the heating set to come on midafternoon, so the place is nice and toasty when I get home. As soon as you close the door behind you, you’re enveloped.
Not tonight, however. The heating was on, as I could tell from touching my hand against the radiator in the hallway, but the house was chilly.
I went into the living room. The windows were all shut, but through one of them, I could see why the house wasn’t as warm as it should be.
The back door was wide-open.
It had been both closed and locked when I left for work that morning.
I thought so, anyway. I knew it had been closed, at least, but I hadn’t actually checked that it had been locked. Hadn’t even checked the key, for I knew it was in its normal place, stuck there in its lock.
I remembered my thought of the day before, that an intruder would be likely to leave a means of escape open if he was on the premises, and found my eyes drifting warily upward, to the living room ceiling and the floors beyond.
What if he was still here this time?
I got out my phone. I dialed 999, but did not press the call button.
“Is somebody here?” I called up the stairs, backing into the hallway and toward the front door. “If so, you should know that I’m calling the police. Right now.”
There was no sound from above. I knew that if there was someone in the house and he chose to get violent, I could be a bloody and broken mess in the corner of the living room before the local cops had got halfway here through the traffic on Kentish Town Road.
So I opened the front door a little and walked back to the bottom of the stairs. “The front door’s open,” I said. “I’m going to get out of your way. I’ll … go in the kitchen, so I won’t see you.”
Was this a good idea? Or a really stupid one?
Stupid, I decided.
“Or,” I said, “here’s another plan. I’m going to leave. I’m going to go back out of the house and stand around the corner. I won’t look this way. Shut the back door to let me know you’ve gone.”
And that’s what I did. I went out of the front door, closing it behind me, my finger still hovering over the call button on my phone. I walked quickly to the corner.
I waited ten minutes. I didn’t see anybody come out of the house. The front, anyway.
I walked back. I let myself back in, cautiously.
The back door was now closed.
I quickly ran up to the next floor, making as much noise as possible, and found it empty. Then I went right to the top, including poking my head into the tiny attic room. Nobody anywhere. No sign of anything disturbed.
When I made it back down to the kitchen, however, I realized that the back door wasn’t actually shut. The intruder had pulled it to when he left, but hadn’t closed it properly.
I pushed it open and stepped out into the garden, on impulse, even though I knew he could still be out there.
To the side of my kitchen there’s a tiny concrete patio. Beyond that is my “lawn”—a scrappy patch of grass that would be about ten feet square if it was actually a square; in fact it’s a kind of parallelogram, barely six feet wide at the far end. Because of the high hedges that surround it, the grass rarely gets much light even in summer, and it’s ragged and muddy in the winter.
And soggy enough this evening, I thought, that you should be able to see the foot marks of a departing intruder, indents from shoes or boots.
There were none.
Something else caught my eye, though, and I stepped gingerly on to the grass to have a closer look.
The garden gets its shape from the fact the left-hand wall slopes radically toward the back, and it’s this that’s made of stone and features the faded old plaque. The plaque’s low down, as if to be at child-height, not very large and made of the same basic stone as the rest of the wall. I’d been in the house for nine months before I’d ever realized it was there. All it says is—
[…] GARDEN
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
—the first word is so weather-worn and chipped that it’s unreadable. The wall must predate the buildings that now overshadow it by several hundred years, this scrap of it left by early Victorian developers because it happened to more or less coincide with the layout of the minuscule back gardens they were affording these somewhat perfunctory workingmen’s cottages.
Something was lying on the grass, close to the point in the wall where the plaque is.
It was my piece of jewelry.
Half an hour later I was in the living room with a cup of tea. The brooch was on the coffee table in front of me. The house was nice and warm now that the back door had been shut for a while.
It was my brooch, without doubt. It had a distinctive triangular design, capped at each point with a dot of some green semiprecious stone. When I’d found it in the antique store years before, I hadn’t been convinced it was even an antique. The shape was so minimalist—literally a triangle, albeit one of unequal sides and with a slight curve to all the lines—that it had looked pretty modern to my admittedly untutored eye.
It looked different now. When I’d got it back to the apartment I was living in at the time, I’d intended to have a go at cleaning it. I realized I rather liked the tarnish, however, and decided to leave it be. Over the years since, it had become darker and darker, and when I’d put it in the bread bin months and months ago, the metal had been a very dark gray indeed.
Now it shone. The silver—and there was no doubt that’s what it was made of, which meant I’d probably got more of a bargain than I’d realized—was so shiny it seemed almost white.
It didn’t merely look clean—it looked fresh-minted.
Whatever process had brought this about had revealed something else, too. There were designs all over it. Etched very lightly into the silver was an incredibly fine and detailed series of lines and curves and interlocking Celtic shapes. At first glance it seemed chaotic, but the more I looked—and I’d been sitting there for quite a while—the
more I sensed there was a pattern that I hadn’t yet been able to establish. It looked beautiful, and otherworldly, and extremely old.
The problem was I was pretty convinced that the pattern hadn’t been there before.
Yes, it had been tarnished when I got it, as discussed—but in the early stages of oxidation you’ll often find that any engravings (or imperfections) in metal are more, rather than less, obvious. It’s easier to spot hallmarks, for example. You’ll glimpse a pattern, at least, especially when looking at something as closely as you do when you’re considering blowing hard-earned cash on it. I hadn’t seen any such thing.
So what was it doing there now?
I belatedly realized I hadn’t done anything about my shopping from the corner shop and had dropped my shopping bag in the middle of the room, when I’d seen the back door hanging open. I hurried over and grabbed the bag. The tub of ice cream was glistening in that way that says it’s well on the way to melting, courtesy of my generous central heating policy. I carried it to the kitchen, still worrying at the problem of the design on the brooch, and stowed the contents in the freezer of my poxy little fridge.
When I straightened, my eyes were directly in line with the bread bin. Something, I’m not sure what, made me reach out and open it.
The same smell of old bread greeted me again, though it seemed stronger this time, which made no sense.
There was a piece of paper in there, too.
I knew it couldn’t be the one I’d found the night before, as I’d put that one in the drawer of the bureau in the living room (an old and cheerless piece of crap that belonged to my grandmother).
I picked the paper up and read it.
I hope you like what I have made on it
I didn’t need to compare the handwriting on it to the other paper. It was clearly the same.
But then I realized there was another line of writing, an inch further down the page. Why hadn’t I spotted that right away? Because it was much fainter. Not as if faded, however—in fact the opposite.
As I watched, feeling the hairs rise on the back of my neck, the writing, at first so faint it was barely visible, gradually strengthened until it was as distinct as the line above.
Fearie Tales Page 12
