Bone Harvest

by James Brogden

  Sometimes she and Sabrina go for walks in the night. Sabrina shows her magical things like fairy rings of toadstools in the moonlight and a woodland clearing where baby badgers play. When her parents find out about this they do not like it at all. Her daddy starts sleeping with the house keys under his pillow and her mummy takes her to see the doctor, who says not to worry, it’s just a phase that she’ll grow out of.

  As she gets older, some of the things that Sabrina tells her are confusing, like the feelings behind the words that her mummy and daddy say to each other, or the reason why the lady from next door had to leave suddenly in the night with just a single suitcase. One time Sabrina even saves her life and that of her brother and parents, as they are driving to see her Uncle Robert in Norwich. They are going smoothly and steadily along the road when all of a sudden Sabrina starts shouting We have to stop! over and over, and her voice is so loud that it starts to come out of Dennie’s mouth too – Wehavetostop!Wehavetostop!Wehavetostop!Wehave tostop! – so her Daddy pulls over to the side and while her mummy is fussing and her brother is teasing, they all notice the big cloud of oily black smoke from in the road up ahead. It later turns out that there has been a six-car pile-up with multiple fatalities, which would have killed them too if her Daddy hadn’t listened to her.

  But as she gets older, Sabrina begins to fray. The print on her clothing fades and becomes threadbare, the buttons on the back of her blouse keep falling off, and her cotton stuffing starts to show. This is especially distressing when it happens to Sabrina’s face. Mummy does the best job she can with big strips of Elastoplast, but eventually they have to take Sabrina to a dressmaker who stitches a completely new face on her, reproducing her eyes and smile exactly. Dennie can tell that Mummy is worried that she won’t think it’s the same, but by now Dennie is old enough to understand that Sabrina’s voice comes from somewhere inside her, not her face.

  It will be years yet before Dennie recognises that Sabrina’s voice is actually her own voice, and that it isn’t coming from the doll at all but from inside herself. The day she realises this is the day that Sabrina stops talking to her. Then all too soon Sabrina will be spending more and more time on her bedroom shelf while she discovers the toys of adulthood, and then Dennie will have her own children and that voice will fade as it finds expression in her love for her family, and she will forget that Sabrina ever spoke to her, and in the end she will forget even Sabrina herself.

  Which was why it was with such mingled homesickness and dread that Dennie saw her old rag doll clutched in Sarah Neary’s arms as she stood in the corner of the bedroom. It was 3:07, just like last time, which couldn’t have been a coincidence. She closed her eyes, counted to ten, and opened them, but the apparition was still there. The house around her seethed with echoes, like restless birds’ wings.

  ‘Having a moment,’ she said to herself. ‘You’re just having a moment, that’s all.’ It would pass, but she had to make sure that she was in the here and now. Trying to ignore Sarah, she got out of bed and went downstairs to the kitchen, where Viggo greeted her with a worried lick. ‘It’s all right, I’m just having a moment, boy, that’s all.’ She drank a glass of water, and switched the television on to a rolling news channel. It was the same litany of wars and scandals, but at least they were up-to-date wars and scandals rather than the regurgitated fragments of her unstable memory. She hadn’t thought about Sabrina in years, and couldn’t even remember whether she still had her. It was possible that she’d gone during one of the clear-outs when the children had left home. One would have thought that a toy so precious couldn’t just slip out of the world unnoticed. The water was helping to clear her head, and she thought maybe the moment had passed. ‘No,’ she told a hopeful Viggo. ‘It’s not breakfast time and I’m not letting you upstairs with your stinky dog farts.’ She patted him, put a few dry biscuits in his bowl anyway because she was a soft touch and he knew it, and Sarah was standing by the back door.

  Dennie shrieked and dropped the box, scattering dog biscuits all over the floor.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ she whispered.

  Neither Sarah nor Sabrina replied.

  ‘I did everything you asked. You can’t do this to me. It’s not fair!’

  Then somehow Sarah was outside the back door and walking away, carrying Sabrina so that the doll’s face appeared over her shoulder, looking back at Dennie as she receded into the shadows of the garden like a drowned person sinking into deep water.

  Dennie’s sense of clarity drained away. She wasn’t just having a moment – she was in the moment, always had been and probably always would be until she found out what it was that Sarah, or her own mind, or whatever was responsible for this, wanted. She opened the back door and followed Sarah out into the night. After a quick pause to take advantage of the unexpected floor feast, Viggo followed.

  The moment folded around her again and held her in its bubble, making the outside world dim and hard to see. Some part of her knew that it was night, it was cold, and she was walking barefoot in her nightie along wet pavements, but that part felt like it was dreaming. The only thing she could focus on with any certainty was Sarah, who maintained a constant distance in her slippers that didn’t seem to get damp at all, with Sabrina continuing to peep over the shoulder of her pink hoodie, either encouraging her to follow or warning her not to.

  The village streets gave way to country lanes, hedgerows dripping and rustling with the furtive movements of small animals. Then there was a gap, and a wide wooden gate with a freshly painted sign that read ‘Farrow Farm’. A bright light grew behind her, sending her own long shadow skewering ahead, and Viggo began to bark.

  Sarah was gone, and the moment burst.

  * * *

  ‘I could run her down,’ the deserter suggested. ‘Nobody would ever know.’

  Gar grunted in agreement.

  Ardwyn considered it for a moment. ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘It’s still too soon. And she’s too easily missed, not like the others. Let’s stick to the plan. She’s an annoyance at best, and that’s not a reason to kill her.’

  ‘But what’s she doing here?’ the deserter insisted.

  ‘What does it matter? She can’t do anything. I mean, she’s done us the biggest favour she could have by coming out here like this. They’ll have her taken away if we choose to tell anyone, and we can hold that over her. She still might be useful.’

  ‘I think you’re being complacent.’

  ‘I don’t care what you think. I am Mother. Gar, get out of the van. And take the remains with you.’

  ‘Why?’ he growled.

  ‘Because Everett is going to take nice, confused old Mrs Keeling back home and we don’t want to be driving that back and forward all night, plus her dog wants to kill you. That’s why.’ There was unhappy muttering from the back and then the sensation of the vehicle shifting on its suspension as Gar opened the back doors and hopped out, carrying the empty vessel. Then he slammed them again and Everett heard him trudging back along the road.

  Ardwyn got out and approached the old woman. ‘Mrs Keeling? Are you all right?’

  The old woman shook her head as if waking up, and shushed her dog. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice stumbling. ‘I’m not quite sure what I’m doing here.’

  Ardwyn took off her coat and draped it over the old woman’s shoulders. ‘Well, why don’t we get you back home, hey, before you catch your death? What’s your address, dear?’

  Keeling looked at her, obviously suspicious.

  ‘Or, if you like, I can call someone to collect you? Your daughter, perhaps?’

  ‘No,’ said Keeling immediately. ‘No, that’s fine. You don’t have to call anybody. I’ll… a lift would be very kind. Thank you.’

  Keeling told her where she lived and Ardwyn helped her into the van. The dog balked at getting into the back, growling and whining and obviously not at all happy about what it could smell in there, but the old woman coaxed him in and they set off. She
still seemed distracted and he didn’t attempt to make conversation. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to take care of her off in the fields somewhere – there were plenty of small pools and reservoirs in this part of the Trent valley, not to mention old pit workings, quarries, and any number of other places to dispose of a body. Ardwyn was Mother, and he might still be nothing more than a deserter, but he’d fixed his colours to her for good or ill and he would stay loyal to that, at least.

  So he saw the old lady safely back home and returned to the farm, where Ardwyn was waiting for him in bed with warm arms, but there was something that needed to be done first.

  Gar was waiting for him. He had lit a fire by the hole where they would soon be burying the empty vessel. It lay partially wrapped in a tarpaulin, awaiting disposal.

  The deserter looked at it and shook his head. ‘What a waste,’ he said, taking out his butcher’s knife.

  The deserter cut two slices from the vessel’s flank and tossed one to Gar, then removed a large flat stone that had been sitting in the embers and placed his slice on it. It began to sizzle, and the smell of cooking flesh made his mouth water in a way that the meat of no other animal could. ‘First flesh, first fruit,’ he murmured, watching it sear and shrink, muscle fibres contracting in the heat. ‘Thank you, Ben.’ Gar ate his raw, chewing noisily.

  The deserter missed the monthly replenishment feasts in Swinley, where the vessel swine would be thanked and eaten with celebrations, dancing and music, light and fun. It was different now, he accepted that; reforming the worship of Moccus to include human sacrifice meant that certain practices would inevitably have to stop. Emptying a vessel was one thing. Feasting on human flesh was entirely abhorrent. Ardwyn would certainly never understand. There was no danger that Gar would tell her what they were doing, he reflected as he turned his strip of flesh over to cook on the other side, because in this he was of the same mind: that there were some forms of worship even older than praying to gods.

  Sometimes he wondered if Ardwyn appreciated that.

  13

  A NICE NEIGHBOURLY CHAT

  IT TOOK DENNIE THE BETTER PART OF SATURDAY TO recover from her not-quite-sleepwalking adventure, but by Sunday she was feeling enough of her old self to start asking the older folk on the allotment what they knew about this ‘Farrow Farm’ place. She was pretty sure she’d never heard of it before, at least by that name. Sian Watts, who had once been a postal delivery woman, said that it sounded like the old Harris place. It was too small to be called a farm, only a dozen acres, but Harris hadn’t even been able to manage that properly once his kids escaped the gravity of its black hole grip on their family. When his wife had died he jumped into a bottle with both feet, and had only ever been seen in town to pick up his pension and his daily ration of Special Brew until his liver finally had enough and quit on him as well. His kids had tried to sell the property, but found that the land had never been officially registered since Harris’ own grandfather bought it back in the ’40s, and now the Turner family, descendants of the original landowner, were claiming it had been rightfully theirs all along. This was a legal fight that nobody could afford, and so the impasse had resulted in the Harris place being left to rot in conveyancing limbo for years. Which meant that Ardwyn Hughes and Everett Clifton were squatters, and not the respectable, well-heeled young millennials that they presented themselves as.

  When she’d put this to Sian, the ex-postie shrugged. ‘None of our business,’ she said. ‘Unless you want to get mixed up in a lot of legal wrangling that could take years to drag out. Besides, they’re a nice young couple. And you can’t blame them, really, can you, property prices being the way they are? If you ask me, they’re doing the village a favour by fixing that place up and not letting it get used by one of them “county lines” gangs to sell drugs to our kids.’

  Armed with this knowledge, Dennie took a box of some early pickings from her plot – spring cabbages, broccoli and asparagus – and set off for a Monday afternoon stroll to pay her respects to the residents of ‘Farrow Farm’.

  The farm gate was timber and wobbling with age, but the sign nailed to it was very fresh and proudly painted with the name FARROW FARM in curling letters. Presumptuous, she thought, as if they could lay claim to a place simply by declaring it so arrogantly. Mortifying, too, to think that they had seen her out here in her nightie, as if it had been anything other than her own stupid fault. Why had Sarah led her out here, anyway? She didn’t, because she’s not real. It’s just you. You’re going bonkers. Whether or not that was true it wouldn’t hurt for Miss Hughes and Mr Clifton to keep believing it, especially since she’d confronted them so belligerently after smacking her head, so Dennie put on her best doddery smile, let herself through the gate, hoisted the box of veg in her arms and walked along the muddy track to the house.

  Despite the promise of the sign, she was not impressed. She saw overgrown hedges and tumbling stone walls, piles of rubbish and rusting farm equipment lying in weeds, and a crumbling outhouse where the ancient terracotta roof tiles had slid away to reveal warped trusses. A rust-streaked tractor was parked in a wide farmyard which was mostly mud and puddles, and she was surprised to see Matthew Hewitson just getting down from its cab, dressed in tattered blue overalls and wellingtons. The boy scowled when he saw her.

  ‘Why hello, Matt!’ she said cheerily. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’

  ‘I’m working here,’ he replied. His arms were crossed tightly over his chest as if she’d accused him of something. ‘It’s a proper job. They pay me.’

  ‘I’m sure they do. Is Miss Hughes in?’ She hefted the box. ‘I have a present for her.’

  ‘Miss Hughes,’ he smirked. ‘Yeah, she’s in.’

  ‘Can you please tell her I’m here?’

  He laughed. ‘They don’t pay me for that. She’s round the back.’ He stuck his hands in his pockets and squelched off across the yard in the opposite direction.

  Charming boy. His mother must be so proud. Dennie made her own way around the farmhouse, assuming that was what he meant by ‘the back’. For all that the yard was a mess, someone had paid attention here, at least. The window frames and front door were freshly painted, there were tubs of daffodils and crocuses set beside the path, and it looked like several roof tiles had been replaced. There was a long stone structure that might have been a barn or a cowshed that looked like it had been given a new coat of paint, with some very large and shiny padlocks securing the doors, and past this she was into a field full of thistles and ragwort where she saw two figures standing by one of the tumble-down stone walls. One was Ardwyn, but she hadn’t expected to recognise the other. It was Shane Harding, who along with his partner Jason had built their allotment in the shape of a Viking longship. He had the beard and brawn to match, but he ducked away when he saw her approach as if ashamed of being seen here.

  ‘Sorry for just barging in like this,’ she said. ‘I would have called ahead but I don’t have your number. I can see you’re busy so I’ll just drop this off and leave. Morning, Shane!’

  ‘Morning, Dennie,’ he replied, turning red. He was wearing thick working gloves, and it looked like he was getting set to rebuild this part of the wall.

  ‘Mrs Keeling, so good to see you!’ Ardwyn turned, beaming with welcome, but Dennie had been on the receiving end of enough surprise visits by well-meaning friends and relatives to know a fake smile when she saw one.

  ‘Oh God, Dennie, please.’

  ‘Dennie, then. What brings you here?’

  ‘I’m not going to say that I was just passing, but I’ve come to say that I can’t thank you enough for the other night, and to say sorry for the trouble, and to bring you a present.’ She held out the box. ‘First pickings from my allotment.’

  ‘That’s so lovely of you!’ Ardwyn replied, taking the box and examining its contents. ‘Thank you! You will come in for a cup of tea, I assume?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

 
Ardwyn turned back to Shane. ‘You’re okay with what needs doing here?’

  ‘Mm-hm.’ He nodded and bent to work, picking up a large lump of stone and hefting it.

  ‘Bye, Shane!’ Dennie said, even more brightly than she’d greeted him, because it obviously made him uncomfortable and she couldn’t work out why. He was acting like a guilty teenager. This wasn’t like him at all. ‘See you at the Pavilion some time?’ He mumbled something in response.

  ‘You seem to be gathering quite a little army of helpers,’ she said to Ardwyn as they walked back to the house. ‘I saw Matt Hewitson just now, looking like a regular member of Young Farmers.’

  ‘I know, people are so generous with their time, offering to help. It’s exactly the sort of village community spirit that Everett and I were hoping we’d find.’

  ‘Well, Matt’s mother will be pleased that he’s doing something constructive with his time, anyway.’

  They laughed together.

  Viggo was given a bowl of water outside the back door and leashed to the pole of the rotary clothes hoist. There didn’t appear to be any livestock nearby but it was lambing season and an unsecured dog, even one as well behaved as Viggo, was asking for trouble.

  ‘He’s gorgeous,’ said Ardwyn. ‘What breed?’

  ‘He’s a Great Dane. Six years old. Not a youngster, but not over the hill yet, just like his owner. They were originally bred for hunting boar, I believe, but all he gets around here is rat.’

  ‘I bet he’s great company for you.’ Ardwyn squatted down in front of Viggo and took his ears in her hands, scrunching them playfully. ‘Are we going to be friends, Viggo?’ she said. ‘Are we?’ She scrunched his ears and scratched the fur beneath his throat and he panted, adoring the attention. Dennie found herself surprised and even a little jealous. You big traitor, she thought. ‘Yes, I think we are, aren’t we?’ She turned back to Dennie. ‘Can I give him a treat or something?’