by Jonathan Coe
I sighed. ‘Well, that’s obvious. She’d never let us in.’
‘True,’ said Alison. ‘Not unless we had some excuse. Like, for instance, if we had something that she wanted.’
‘But we don’t,’ I pointed out.
‘Ah,’ said Alison, proudly, ‘but we do.’ She held up the playing card, the one with the really revolting, brightly coloured picture of a spider. ‘Remember what she said to us in the woods? “They must be returned to me – all of them.” But we haven’t given her this one.’
My heart sank. Alison was outwitting me again. It was true: the Bird Woman had insisted that every one of those cards be returned to her, so we would only be doing what she had asked.
‘So you think we should take it round?’
‘Yep.’
‘When?’ I had been so happy sitting here. And now I was less inclined to move than ever.
‘No time like the present,’ said Alison, brightly. ‘Come on, let’s get it over with.’
We locked up my grandparents’ house with the spare set of keys, and set off into town. We were breaking my promise to Gran that we would stay at home, of course, but Alison was no longer to be swayed by thoughts like that. She strode on ahead of me so quickly that we reached Needless Alley in little more than ten minutes. When we arrived, it was getting on for noon and the fierce July sun was high in the sky. Beverley appeared placid and friendly that morning, but as soon as we turned into the narrow opening between those two tall houses, shadows started to encroach, the temperature seemed to drop, and Number Eleven, as we approached it with increasingly reluctant footsteps (on my part, anyway), looked more threatening than ever. A thick, blanketing silence covered the street, as it had yesterday, and it wasn’t until we had penetrated the front garden and almost reached the front door that it was broken: first of all by the sound of our footsteps scuffling against the stony obstructions in our path, and then by the melancholy chirping of the birds trapped in the leafy aviary that made up the house’s bizarre façade.
At the foot of the four steep steps that climbed up to the front door, we paused. This was it. Our last chance to think better of the adventure, and turn back.
Alison’s eyes met mine. I saw at that moment something I had not suspected before: she was as apprehensive as I was. But she was also, at heart, much braver: and without any more dithering she now marched boldly up the steps, grasped the heavy iron knocker (in the shape of some contorted gargoyle) and let it fall three times against the door’s thick oak panelling.
There was a long pause: long enough to allow me the luxury of some sweet relief, a few moments’ precious hope that the knock would not be answered at all. But finally we heard shuffling footsteps behind the door; and then it was pulled open.
Already dark with suspicion, the Mad Bird Woman’s face hardened still further when she saw us.
‘You! What do you want?’
‘Please, miss,’ said Alison, ‘we’ve got something that belongs to you, and we’ve come to give it back.’
I looked at her full of new admiration: her tone struck just the right balance between insolence and wheedling politeness. She held up the spider card and, as soon as she saw it, the Mad Bird Woman reached out a demanding hand.
‘Ah, yes. We were wondering where that one had got to. Come on, pass it over.’
But Alison kept the card back. ‘Please, miss, we’ve walked all the way across from the other side of town to bring you this, and now we’re thirsty. Can we have something to drink, please?’
The Woman’s eyes narrowed at the audacity of the question. She licked the studs on her lower lip, thought for a few seconds, and said: ‘All right. Come in.’
We squeezed past her into a hallway which was gloomy enough already, but was plunged into even greater blackness when she promptly slammed the door behind us. Now she was just a shadow, a mannish bulk looming indistinct against the dun-brown background of the wall. We had all become shadows.
‘I’ll get you some water,’ she said.
‘I’d rather have a cup of tea, please,’ said Alison. ‘With milk and two sugars.’
The Woman gave an incredulous grunt, and said, ‘Would you now?’ But she threw open a door, all the same, and held it wide for us. ‘In here, then.’
We stepped into a room which was slightly – but not significantly – brighter than the hallway we had just left behind. Most of the noonday sunlight was held at bay by the thick screen of ivy which covered much of the window, in the midst of which a couple of dozen birds were hopping and nesting and looking in at us with bright eyes and curiously inclined heads. This was the same front room we had peered into the day before. It was dominated by a long, narrow dining table in dark wood, with massive wrought-iron candlesticks at either end; and by a large, murky oil painting, half abstract and half landscape, which took up most of the wall opposite the windows. The walls must once have been white, I supposed, although now they were closer to grey. Cobwebs sprouted from every corner and dangled down from the flaking cornices. It was a singularly cold and cheerless room.
‘Are you going to give me that?’ the Woman asked again, holding out her hand.
‘Tea first – card later,’ said Alison, in a defiantly sing-song tone. The Woman glowered at her and left the room, closing the door behind her with a firm slam.
I rushed to the door and tried the handle, fruitlessly.
‘Now look what you’ve done,’ I wailed. ‘We’re trapped! She’s locked us in!’
Alison strolled over and opened the door in a relaxed and easy movement.
‘Calm down, can’t you? You were turning the handle the wrong way. We can leave any time we want.’
‘Then let’s leave now,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t want us here. She looked like she was going to murder us. Did you see those … things all over her face? And those tattoos!’
‘Lots of people have tattoos,’ said Alison. ‘And if she didn’t want us here, she wouldn’t have offered us tea.’ Now she wandered over to a second painting, a smaller one, some sort of still life, which hung next to the door. ‘What do you make of this?’ she said.
‘For heaven’s sake. We’re not here to look at paintings. What did you want to come inside for? Why couldn’t we just have given her the card and gone home?’
‘Because that wasn’t what we came for. Now look – when she comes back, I’ll slip out and go down to look in the cellar, so you’ll have to keep her talking.’
I was horrified. ‘What? I can’t keep her talking.’
‘All right, then – I’ll keep her talking, and you go down to the cellar.’
‘No! I can’t go down to the cellar either.’
‘Well, there are only two of us. You’ve got to do one or the other. Is that meant to be a tennis racket, do you think? And what about this? It looks like a football.’
I tugged her away from the painting, maddened by the insouciance with which she now seemed to be accepting this desperate situation. I was convinced that we were never going to get out of this house alive.
‘By the way,’ Alison added, ‘did you notice what she said?’
‘When?’
‘Back on the doorstep, when I showed her the card. She said, “We were wondering where that one had got to.” Not I was wondering. We.’
She gave me an emphatic, meaningful nod, seeming happy at this apparent confirmation of her theories. As for me, this further proof – if proof it was – of the Bird Woman’s madness sent my heart plummeting even further. The thought of being alone in the room with her made me want to be sick. In fact,
I couldn’t do it: there was simply no way. I was going to have to choose what now seemed (incredibly) to be the lesser of two evils.
‘Look, Ali – I’ll go down to the cellar. You stay here and keep her talking.’
‘Are you sure?’
I nodded miserably, and just then the door was opened again and our terrifying host reversed into the room, carrying with her a tea tray rather than an axe or a carving knife. This was some consolation, I suppose, although it still left open the possibility that she intended to poison us.
‘Here you are, then,’ she said. ‘Two nice mugs of tea.’ She put the tray down on the table and then swirled the teapot around a few times before starting to pour. ‘Aha!’ (She noticed that Alison had wandered over to the larger of the two paintings.) ‘Admiring my artwork, are you?’
‘Did you paint this?’ Alison asked, evidently impressed.
‘All the paintings in this house are mine.’
‘Cool. So where is this?’
Still carrying the teapot, the Woman came over to stand beside Alison and look more closely at the canvas. Despite everything, my gaze was drawn towards it too. Now that I looked at it properly I could see that it showed a bleak swathe of moorland, beneath a stormy and cloud-covered sky rendered in such brutal strokes that it appeared at first to be a mere chaos of grey and black shades.
‘North Yorkshire,’ said the Woman. ‘You see this house?’
She laid her finger upon a patch of canvas. Perched almost on the crest of a vast, forbidding ridge, overlooking a large expanse of dismal and featureless water, was a gaunt mansion rendered in the blackest of blacks. It took up very little of the painting, but somehow seemed to dominate it: a mad conglomeration of gothic, neo-gothic, sub-gothic and pseudo-gothic towers which collectively resembled nothing so much as a giant hand, snatching at the clouds as if in the conviction that, despite their vaporous insubstantiality, they could be pilfered from the sky itself.
In the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, two words had been written: ‘Winshaw Towers’. They were followed by the initials ‘P. B.’ and the date ‘1991’.
‘That’s a real house,’ the Woman continued, ‘where I used to work for a while. As a nurse. Until one night, twelve years ago …’
She fell silent, lost in a memory; and not a very pleasant one, by the sound of it.
‘Twelve years ago …?’ Alison prompted.
‘Something bad happened.’
We waited, but clearly no further explanation was forthcoming. Not wishing to talk or even think about it any more, the Woman went back to the table and the tea tray. ‘Milk and two sugars, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘Is that the same for both of you?’
‘Yes please,’ I answered; and then – aghast at my own courage – I began to set the plot in motion. ‘Can I use your toilet?’
She threw me a look full of mistrust, but after weighing the request briefly she seemed to relent. Turning away from me to concentrate on pouring the milk, she muttered: ‘All right then. There are three doors at the end of the hallway. It’s the one on the left. Don’t touch either of the others. And come straight back.’
‘I will. Thank you.’
I began to back out of the room, slowly and unwillingly. Now that the deed had to be done, I was still not sure that I was capable of it. Alison glanced at me, her eyes eloquent with the command to hurry up and get on with it. But still I lingered, gripped by some sort of absurd inertia. In desperation, Alison turned back towards the Woman and began to babble at her about the other painting.
‘Can I ask you something about this?’ she said. ‘I just wondered what you were trying to do when you painted it. I mean – this is a football, right? And this is a tennis racket …’
Upon hearing these words, the Woman made a noise we had not heard before – something akin to a growl – put down the milk jug and came storming over towards the picture. This was my cue, at last, to beat a final retreat, and this time I actually managed to slip out through the door and back into the hallway, staying within earshot just long enough to hear the disgruntled artist say:
‘Why does everybody get this painting wrong? It’s Orpheus, for God’s sake! It’s the lyre of Orpheus and his disembodied head being carried along by the waters of the Hebrus. How many times do I have to explain this …?’
I left her to her rant, and stole quickly through the shadow-filled hallway, past a steep and thinly carpeted staircase ascending to the first floor on my right, until I had reached the three doors at the corridor’s very end.
The first door, to the left, opened on to a small bathroom containing toilet and hand-basin. The second door, in the middle, was solidly locked. The third door, which led under the staircase, was obviously the one that would take me down to the cellar. Before putting my hand to the doorknob, I prayed that this one would be locked as well. Then all I would have to do would be to go back to Alison and report failure. I would have done my duty, at least. Please God, I prayed silently, let this be what happens. Don’t make me go down there. Don’t make me go down into the darkness.
Then I grasped the doorknob, turned it … and the door swung creakily open.
The first thing that hit me was a strange, damp, stale smell wafting from somewhere in the depths. It had elements of dry rot, rotting fruit and fried onions – or fried food of some sort, at any rate. It was not quite as off-putting as I had expected.
What was off-putting, certainly, was the profundity of the darkness that greeted me as I stepped forward and peered down the stairs towards the cellar. It was almost impossible to make out anything at all. With my left hand I reached out and found that there was some sort of rail or bannister to hold on to. The steps beneath my feet were concrete. I took one more glance towards the room where the Mad Bird Woman had served us tea – half expecting her to be looking out through the doorway, checking on me – and then started my descent.
As I got closer to the foot of the stairs, the silence became heavier and the smell grew stronger. Surprisingly, too, it became slightly easier to see ahead of me. This, I realized, was because the staircase ended in a closed door, and from behind this door, visible around its edges, a soft yellow glow was emanating. And so, whether the cellar was occupied or not, there was certainly a light on in there. Just like we’d seen yesterday, through the window.
I stopped outside the door. In the silence I could hear my heart beating, my breath coming and going, the blood ringing in my ears. Nothing else. Not another sound.
I laid a hand upon the door, and pushed. It began to swing open.
Again, it creaked: much louder than the door at the top of the stairs. But the noise was still not loud enough to disturb the figure sitting at the table in the centre of the room.
From where I was standing, it was evidently the dead body of an elderly lady. Her back was towards me, illuminated by the harsh glare of a light bulb hanging directly above her. I could see straggles of thin grey hair hanging off the skull, down as far as the prominent shoulder blades. She wore a blouse which was torn, decaying, almost in tatters; what was left of the yellowing flesh peeped through in patches underneath. I took a few reluctant, appalled steps towards her, my head swimming, my stomach tightening with nausea, and even though I knew that she was dead, stupidly, irrationally, I could not help myself saying, in a tiny voice:
‘Mrs Bates? Mrs Bates?’
But the corpse remained quite motionless. I came closer, and realized that she was sitting – or had been placed, rather – in front of a table. A green baize card table. Laid out on the table was a game of Pelmanism. The cards featured those
by now familiar crude, slightly sickening pictures of animals, and had all been paired off, one with another: fish with fish, tigers with tigers, snakes with snakes. There was only one that was lacking its partner: the card showing a single, giant spider, standing upright on two of its legs, raising the others fiercely in the air as if challenging someone to a fight, the pale green of its underbelly shining out with queasy clarity. It was waiting to be paired off with the missing card, the one we had come here to return.
Tearing my eyes away from this horrid but compelling image, which I could see from behind the dead body by peering over one bony shoulder, I raised my hand slowly, wondering if I actually dared to touch the thing. Would it crumble and decay the moment I laid my hand on it, however careful I tried to be? Would an arm fall off in a cloud of powder and dust, the bones clattering to the floor? How long had she been here? What sort of state was she in?
My hand came closer, closer to the brittle, angular shoulder blade.
‘Mrs Bates?’ I whispered, again.
And then, at the moment of contact …
… at the moment of contact something truly astonishing happened. The corpse jerked abruptly and violently into life. It swivelled around in its chair and instead of being confronted by a fleshless skull I found that I was looking into a pair of wide-open, startled, madly staring eyes. And then the mouth opened, too, and a terrible sound came from inside it. A long, animal monotone: a single-note scream of fear and incomprehension which, the moment it started, felt as though it was never going to stop. Which meant there were two screams, of course, because I was already screaming, too, at the top of my voice, and it must have been the pitch and volume and suddenness of my scream that made the figure raise its painfully thin arms up in the air, crashing into the light bulb and sending it swinging, back and forth, back and forth, so that now his crazed, distorted face (because it was a man, after all, there could be no doubt about that) was bathed in light then shadow, light then shadow, as the bulb above it swung like a pendulum, and the two of us locked eyes and continued to scream as long and loud as we could until there were footsteps on the stairs and the next thing I knew …
