And something is brewing. I’ve felt it all day.
I open my bag when I’m within arm’s reach of the house and take out the salt. White salt, sea salt preferably, is used for most house-blessing spells, but for the rare occasions when a house has a particular negative energy, black salt can absorb and remove it. I pour the black grains into my hand and let them trickle to the ground as I walk round the house’s perimeter.
A magic circle is the starting point of most spells, creating the ‘sacred’ space that contains and focuses the spell’s energy. At the same time, it serves as a protection.
Creating the circle makes me feel better for a moment or two, but then I approach the back door and my misgivings return. The negative energy that Larry left behind has intensified in the years since he left. It frightened me today. It will be stronger now that night is falling.
I slip the key into the lock – how well Ben knows me – I never had any intention of returning the keys until I’d had chance to visit one last time.
Immediately something moves within. I hear a panicked scurrying, maybe even the slam of an internal door and my heart leaps forward like a trapped animal trying to squeeze free of its bars.
‘Have courage, Florence. Nothing here can harm you.’
I speak aloud, because words have power and I cannot perform a blessing spell if I am afraid. I will have disturbed rodents, nothing more.
I move through the kitchen and into the dark hallway. Kneeling, I take out five short candles, place them in a circle and light them.
More movement in the house. Rats, I tell myself, again. Maybe squirrels.
My chalice, a solid silver bowl, goes into the centre of the candle circle, and in it I put a compound of dried herbs and plants. Holly for protection, rosemary for cleansing, sandalwood for exorcism, pine to reverse negative energies and rose to return calm.
You’ve brought some weird stuff, Mum.
The dried herbs catch fire quickly. Smoke will fill the tiniest corners of the house, reaching where even my voice cannot. I open my mouth to begin, and from somewhere above me comes sound so unexpected that it takes me a second or two to realise its significance. A short, rhythmic burst of drums, the whine of a guitar and the rich, deep voice of Elvis crooning about heartbreak.
The temptation to get up and run is overwhelming. My hands are spread on the floor, ready to push me up. The music stops.
It’s not real. It’s not real.
The house is silent, but my breathing is fast and my heart pounding. I have a powerful imagination, so much so that at times the line between what I know to be real and what I know cannot be becomes blurred.
That music, though. Never have I imagined anything so vividly.
I don’t run, much as I want to. I count down from ten, picturing Ben holding my hands, counting with me. Love will combat most negative energy, but it’s hard to throw off the creeping feeling that I’m not alone in the house.
‘I’m not afraid,’ I say, although I am. My back is to the family drawing room and I’m wishing I checked it before kneeling down.
The dark hallway seems to have closed in, the shadows grown deeper. I shut the back door, but there is a draught running through the house, chilling it. My candles are fighting to stay alive. Their shadows dance on the walls and their movement is unnerving as I get to my feet.
‘Touch the hearth and touch the wall; blessings on this house befall.’
Reciting the words of an old blessing spell, I move around the hall, touching each door as I pass.
‘Bless the chair that stands by itself. Bless the food on the pantry shelf.’
I have performed blessing spells before – they are a sweet and simple form of magic – but this one is hard, as I knew it would be. I struggle to remember words and feel drained as I climb the stairs. The burning herbs have none of their usual sweetness, as though something in the house is turning them rotten.
To do the spell properly, I should go into each room, but as I climb, I’m picturing the sleepwalking Cassie with her vacant, wide-eyed stare and flowing silver hair, the evil-smelling black dog curled on my bed with malevolent intent, and Larry, leaning against a wall, eyelids lowered, as though his wandering eyes might be less noticeable if they are half closed. I can’t help feeling that they’re all still here, waiting for me behind the closed doors.
As I reach the first floor, the sense of being watched is stronger. I turn, looking for movement where all should be still, for a shadow that doesn’t belong, but the feeble light from my candles can’t reach up here.
The house is darker than it should be. Outside, some fading light still lingers in the sky, but in here, there might almost be a force that is keeping it away, as effectively as blinds on the windows.
The door to my old room is open, although I’m sure I closed it when I left earlier. I push it further open and step inside. The spell is mainly for my own benefit, and it is in this room that any essence of me will remain.
‘Friends who leave here, let them bear; luck and hope, wherever they fare.’
I touch the walls, try to send calm and happy thoughts into them, but the words I’m reciting sound trite and foolish in my ears. I feel like a child in my mother’s high heels, and when I open my eyes, I’m looking out of my window, at the shadow that is the Hill, and at Larry’s workshop where he kept me prisoner, bound, gagged, terrified, for nearly three days. Down there is the place where I was maimed and changed for ever, the place where I lost part of myself, and I’m not now talking about my missing finger, which to this day burns me with a phantom pain.
I leave the room and walk quickly downstairs. With a quick, last prayer, I blow out the candles, gather the ashes of the herbs, still warm in my hand, and scatter them around the hall in the traditional dispersal of energy. Gathering my detritus, and the keys that are hanging in the kitchen, I leave the house.
It is thirty years since I set foot in Larry’s workshop. The space has been cleared. The heavy power tools I remember have gone, possibly sold. There are no coffins or caskets, either complete or in a half-finished state, and I guess Roy Greenwood, who ran the business until his early death, removed them.
In his testimony, Larry claimed he kept me in the smaller wood store at the back. I walk past workbenches and clamps, and feel the trace of wood shavings underfoot, as though no one has swept here in thirty years. The door sticks and I have to push it hard. As I do so, I remember heavy doors banging shut.
Doors, I remember, not a door.
But it was all so long ago, and I’ve buried those memories, far deeper than Larry buried his victims. After I gave evidence, I never again consciously tried to think about those few days. I never spoke of them. When I woke in the night after dreams of being trapped, immobile, in the dark – and those dreams lasted for many years – I switched on the reading lamp or the radio, read a book, anything to draw my mind back to the light.
So my memories are vague and elusive but, even so, this room I’m standing in now feels smaller than it should. In my head, it was a large, cold space that felt damp and very old. This utilitarian building is neither old nor damp.
‘Hey!’ I listen for the echo that doesn’t come.
There is one way to know for sure. I get to my knees and lower myself to the floor, already knowing that there isn’t room in here for any scuttling about. I lie flat, my cheek pressed against the hard floor, and I know for certain then. This floor is rough concrete. When I was Larry’s prisoner, I lay on smooth stone. He lied.
I was kept in a large, stone space. There were wooden doors, and when I left that place, I was thrown upwards, as though from underground. A cellar. The drive to the churchyard was a short one. It was somewhere in town.
I leave the wood store, slamming the door behind me, telling myself that it is not my problem. Larry confessed. The killings stopped, and I should let sleeping dogs lie.
And then I stand in his workshop and remember him dancing to Elvis as he showed me how he ma
de his beloved caskets. I never felt comfortable with Larry, but was he really a killer?
We can never predict who will be killers, or recognise those who have become so. If I’ve learned one thing in thirty years, it’s that.
Outside, the absence of the moon unnerves me. I feel a sudden urge to get back to the Black Dog, to my son. At the same time, there are stars above me in the dark sky, and not too far from here, they’ll be shining down on a black lake, as still and clear as a mirror. It was on a night like this that I swam with the man I loved and became a woman of the Pendle Forest.
A woman who will forever be trying to come to terms with her dual nature.
A feeling steals over me that I haven’t known in years, a sense of wild and twisted possibilities. I can’t help thinking that if I were to drive to the Black Tarn now, Tom would be waiting, and that my life, even so late in the day, might take a very different turn.
I love my husband. I adore my son. But Tom.
Tom …
They are powerful, these primitive, unsought urges, and I actually set off for the drive, and my car, when I catch sight of the face in my old bedroom window, staring down at me like one of the ghosts of the house.
This is no ghost, though. I’ve found Luna.
61
She is waiting in the hallway, staring down at the remains of the burned herbs.
‘I kept hearing noises,’ I say. ‘Even music. You scared me.’
She doesn’t apologise. ‘I found his old record player in the attic. I’d forgotten how much I hate Elvis.’
She looks down again at the burned herbs. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘It was good of you to try. We did lots over the years. Mum mainly, but Cassie and I pitched in sometimes. It won’t work, though.’
Spells never work in the face of doubt, but I don’t say this. Instead, I take in the woman she has become. Some women only really grow into their beauty in their forties and Luna is one of them. Her nose, chin, cheekbones fall a fraction short of being sharp, and her skin is tight and smooth. Her eyes are still huge, but the make-up she wears seems to soften them, to make them inviting rather than challenging. Her lipstick is perfect, even so late in the day, even here, and it strikes me that this is a woman constantly maintaining her make-up like a mask.
She is wearing the same tailored black dress and smart shoes that she wore to the funeral. I know she is a corporate lawyer in London and that her clothes will be expensive. Over her shoulder, though, is a large bag that is utilitarian rather than beautiful.
She is breathing heavily, too heavily for someone who has been doing nothing more than meandering about an empty house.
‘You look well, Luna,’ I say, although actually think she looks like a polished but empty vessel. I think something may have gone from Luna and I’m starting to feel nervous in this dark hallway.
‘Elanor,’ she corrects me. ‘Luna was his name for me.’
She stares at me for too long. To break the tension, I walk back to the kitchen and hear her heels clipping behind me.
‘Sit down,’ she says, and it sounds like an order.
I’m unsettled and want to leave, back to the Black Dog now and my son – all thoughts of searching out lost chances have fled – but at the same time, I’m starting to accept that I came back to Lancashire for answers and this woman may have them.
She waits for me to do what she says and so I pull out a chair slowly and take my time sitting in it. We are playing a game, dancing in the dusty, dark kitchen, and I hope she knows the rules, because I’m not sure I do.
‘My father was a monster.’
I don’t argue.
She is still standing over me. ‘I came to burn this house down.’ She pulls her bag up from the floor and takes out a plastic petrol can. I hear liquid sloshing inside as she puts it on the table. The can is small but, if full, would provide enough accelerant to ensure the house goes up quickly.
‘I’m glad you changed your mind.’ Mentally, I’m measuring the distance between me and the back door. I’m closer than she is, but I’m sitting down. ‘It wouldn’t have been wise.’
She looks at the can, then at something I can’t see in her bag. Matches, I think.
‘Were you here earlier?’ I ask, and I’m thinking about the effigy in the beehive.
She shakes her head. ‘I didn’t want to bump into Mary. I doubt she comes here after dark. I doubt anyone does. You’re braver than most, Flossie. But then you always were.’
‘Did you suspect?’ I ask her. ‘When it was happening, when you were all living here? When you were taken, did you never once think that perhaps you knew who was holding you prisoner?’
I’d known. In the first few hours, maybe days, I hadn’t, but when Larry came to take me out of that place, it had been obvious. The smell of him, the feel of him. I’d known Larry. How could Luna not have known her own father?
‘I would have defended him to my last breath.’ Her big eyes are glistening in the dark kitchen, and her lip is trembling, but the Luna I remember was a great dissembler.
‘Once,’ she says. ‘Just once, I thought, Oh, that’s not right. You know when something hardens in your stomach, Flossie, as though you’ve eaten clay and it’s setting and tightening, and drawing everything in so that you can hardly breathe?’
‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘I know that feeling. It’s called dread.’
She nods, sharply, with a tiny smile, as though pleased by the word. Then she crosses to the window and leans over the sink.
‘He was out there, one night. Oh, we can’t see it from here. Come upstairs.’
She turns and walks from the room. I hear her heels echoing along the parquet floor of the hall, and her muttered ‘Come on.’
The petrol can is still on the table; her bag is at my feet. It seems safe enough, so I follow her up. She is in my old room, kneeling on the bed so that she can see out of the window. She beckons me to join her.
‘You were in my room?’ I say, because I can’t resist.
‘You’d been missing nearly three days,’ she replies. ‘Cassie and I were doing a protection spell for you. We looked it up in one of Mum’s books. Cassie said it would work best in your room.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, oddly touched. ‘Maybe it worked.’
‘Cassie got called downstairs and left me to tidy up. Typical. But I’d just finished when I saw someone in the garden outside.’
I climb onto the bed and inch my way to her side. There is still some light in the sky and we can make out the outlines of the garden: the orchard trees, the line of box hedging round Sally’s herb garden, the old beehives.
‘In front of the hives,’ Luna says. ‘It was Dad. He had a spade and he was digging.’
‘It’s a garden,’ I say.
‘It was dark,’ Luna counters. ‘And did you ever once see Dad gardening, in all the time you lived here?’
I hadn’t. Sally worked in the garden, with Mary’s husband to help her with the heavy stuff. I’d never seen Larry dig.
‘It gave me shivers, watching him,’ Luna says. ‘It wasn’t right. No one digs at night unless they have something to hide, do they?’
‘Were you tempted to find out what it was?’
‘I didn’t dare,’ she says. ‘And then within hours you’d been found and he was under arrest. We heard he’d confessed. I suppose I thought he was hiding evidence, and it wasn’t as though you needed any more of that. It seemed best to keep quiet. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to know.’
‘You never told anyone?’
‘No.’
I would have to tell Tom. Or get a message to him somehow. Seeing him again probably wasn’t the wisest idea. It was good, though, potentially, that there was fresh evidence to be found. Reassurance that we’d charged the right man after all was what we – I – needed.
‘I have to get back.’ I think it better not to mention where I’m staying. ‘Where are you spending the night?’
‘Here. I don’t like hotels. Es
pecially not in this town.’
‘Then you should probably rethink your plan to burn it down.’
She gives me a glum smile. ‘The morning will do.’
As I walk downstairs, I can hear her following me, but I don’t look back until I’m at the kitchen door.
‘Do you think he was guilty, Elanor?’ I say.
‘Of course,’ she tells me. ‘He confessed.’
As I walk down the drive, I’m conscious of a lightness in my step that has been missing all day. Luna’s certainty in the face of her father’s guilt has cheered me. She knew him. She has no doubts. Earlier today, Cassie expressed no doubts. We caught him and now he is dead. Finally it is over.
Traffic is light on the way back to the hotel and I make good time. I catch a glimpse of the public bar as I head through reception and see the head and shoulders of someone who might be Tom, but I don’t stop. It is my son I need to be with now. My son, who has been my rock today, centring and grounding me, just as he’s done since the day he squeezed and yelled his way into the world.
I swear that darling child was cursing as he pushed his way out of me. I feel a sudden, twisted desire to hear him swear.
His door is unlocked and his room empty. I knock on the bathroom door and getting no grunt in response, push it open. Empty. For a second I wonder if he is hiding, but it is years since he and I played hide and seek and I know that he wouldn’t. Not here. Not now.
He will be in my room, messing up the covers on my bed, having munched his way through the biscuits in his own. I close his door, spotting his phone on the floor beneath a chair but not giving it much thought.
My own door is locked, and as I pull out my keys, my breathing is quickening. The room beyond is in darkness, and exactly as I left it. There is no sign that Ben has been in here, but I check the bathroom all the same.
My son has gone.
The Craftsman Page 29
