CHAPTER FIFTEEN
She’s in the woods, and she knows she’s dreaming because although it’s night and she doesn’t have her phone with her to use as a torch, she can still see. The trees open out in front of her like a strange corridor, and her feet skim over the ground without effort.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Laurel is beside her, her face pale and her white nightgown stained with blood. “Please don’t leave me. We have to hurry.”
Where are we going? She can’t speak, but Laurel is her identical twin, and in this dream, they share all their thoughts and feelings. Willow’s chest aches where the autopsy saw opened Laurel up for inspection. The pain’s gone on for so long that she’s learned to live with it, but now it comes back to her, a brutal white flare that stops her breath and freezes her in her tracks. She’s afraid to look down at her own chest in case she sees the same wound.
This is a dream, Willow reminds herself. You never saw what they did. She was dressed when you saw her, they dressed her. You only know about the autopsy because you heard the funeral director talking to Mum about it. You don’t know how it happened. But she knows, of course she does. She’s seen a million autopsies performed on TV, the Y-shaped incision and the slow peel of skin just a part of the grammar of the entertainment landscape, so routine she used to look away and check her phone. It’s so familiar that by now she could probably do one herself.
“We’re going to see him,” Laurel says. “He can help us.”
Instantly her feet grow slow and reluctant, but Laurel takes her arm and urges her on. At the fork in the path, Willow tries to turn down the track to the farmhouse, but Laurel shakes her head and pulls her on.
“That’s the wrong way,” she says. “They’re nice, but they can’t help.”
And Laurel’s right, because when Willow takes a step onto the path, it’s like wading through deep water and quicksand, and Laurel is pulling at her arm and her chest hurts so much that she can’t stand it. She follows Laurel, taking the path towards the Slaughter Man.
“Look,” Laurel says.
The signs on the trees have been joined by the butchered head of a deer, flayed and eyeless and terrible, hung on its own nail at head-height so it appears to be watching for their arrival. Willow can smell it, a sweetly rotting smell that turns her stomach.
No, she tells herself. This is a dream. I don’t have to let anything happen that I don’t want. I’m dreaming. I can’t smell anything. She wants to will the deer head away too, but she only has a certain amount of control here, and that terrible pink-and-white face continues to stare at her, muzzle thrust forward, flat thick teeth exposed. Laurel lifts the barbed wire and Willow ducks beneath it. She wonders if Laurel is going to make her go into the Slaughter Man’s house, but instead they glide around the side of the house, to where a small built-on back room has a separate entrance.
“He won’t mind,” Laurel explains. “He’s looking forward to seeing you again. He’ll be here in a few minutes, but we’ve got time to look around first.”
The door is slightly open, so they can both see inside. The cold blue-white light reminds Willow of all the TV morgues she’s casually glanced into, barely bothering to watch any more because they all look the same. Clean white tiles on the floor. Bright lights overhead. An aluminium table. From the sudden fierce throb in her chest, she knows Laurel is remembering her own time on the table, the whine of the bone-saw and the respectful reach of hands inside her chest cavity, the first and last time she will ever be touched in these places, tracing out the secrets inside the chambers of her heart.
“It hurt,” Laurel whispers, and presses the palm of her hand against her chest. There is blood seeping out into the soft frail fabric of her nightdress.
The room feels familiar. When she touches the wooden walls, the texture seems like something she recognises. Is she dreaming, or remembering? Has she been here in her sleep and forgotten? Laurel is sitting on the table now, her legs dangling, hunched over herself, one hand pressed to her chest.
“I don’t feel well,” she murmurs.
Was that what Laurel said when she died? Is this how it was? Willow has no idea. This is another reminder, if she needed one, that she’s dreaming. She doesn’t know exactly what happened to Laurel, because she wasn’t there. She was sitting in her History class, trying to make herself care about Tsarist Russia while also considering whether her teacher was fanciable, or only a little bit earnest and baby-faced in a way that made her feel vaguely protective. Laurel was gasping and choking in the gym as her heart stuttered, then halted, but she hadn’t known. Even when Willow heard the scream of the ambulance she hadn’t known. Her first thought had been, I wonder if Laurel knows what’s going on?
In her dream, she has joined her sister on the table. They are sitting side by side, holding hands, and the door is swinging open. The tall spindly figure stands in the doorway. He is wearing his bird head, but she knows now what his face looks like beneath. The Slaughter Man has come for her, and she is ready for him. Laurel clutches her chest and sobs, and Willow can see the life draining out of her eyes, the slow transition as Laurel becomes uninhabited meat.
“He can help us.” Laurel’s voice is a wet rattle in her throat. “Let him help us. Don’t be afraid.”
“Don’t leave me,” Willow begs, knowing it’s too late and she’s dreaming and Laurel has already gone.
“Don’t leave me,” Laurel begs in return. “Come with me. Please. I miss you. I miss you so much I can’t stand it. I want to be with you again.”
And even as she begins the frantic rush into wakefulness, Willow feels the tears pouring down her cheeks, because she’s listening to her own words in her sister’s mouth.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She’s sweating with horror, her pyjamas and her sheets clinging to her skin. She hopes it’s only perspiration that’s soaked her, but then her sense of smell wakes up too, and she realises wearily that it’s happened again, she’s getting worse again, and now she has to deal with the consequences.
Shaking from the adrenaline of her waking, she peels everything off herself and off the bed. The mattress is almost dry, apart from a small damp spot in the centre that will probably dissipate in the time it will take her to… to… She thinks of the walk to the utility room which will take her past the kitchen window, a wide uncurtained sheet of glass that the night will turn into a mirror, and shudders.
Come on, she thinks. Don’t be such a coward.
She puts on clean pyjamas, then folds her sheets into a bundle. The stairs grumble and groan no matter how cautiously she moves, and she’s convinced that any second now her Uncle Joe will wake. She can picture it perfectly. First the creak of his bed, then perhaps the snap of a light switch and the shuffle of his feet on the floor. The sound of his door opening, and then his footsteps on the landing and the stairs, and before she knows it she’ll be caught, utterly and completely, when all she wants is to be left alone to lick her wounds in private. She can picture all of this so clearly that it takes her by surprise when she finds she’s made it safely into the kitchen, and Joe is still asleep.
Can she get away with putting the light on? She drops the sheets on the kitchen table and thinks about the shape of the house, trying to guess if the light will leak out and give her away. In a house this old, who knows what’s connected to where? She settles for opening the fridge door as wide as it will go. When she turns around – careful to keep her back to the window so she won’t frighten herself with her own reflection – the light of the fridge glints on something on the table.
They stand straight and tall on the table, a matching pair, except that one is entirely empty and the other’s half-filled. Their labels are neatly aligned and facing towards her chair, as if the drinker was trying to prove they weren’t too drunk to observe the decencies. On the draining board, a single shot glass has been washed but not dried, and is now spotted with watermarks.
Of course it’s vodka and not water –
grown adults don’t keep water in vodka bottles – but she unscrews a lid and sniffs it anyway. Then she takes a gulp and holds it in her mouth, letting it scratch at the root of her tongue. She wonders how much was in the first bottle.
No wonder Joe hasn’t woken up. Does he do this every night? Or has she got lucky and caught him out the very first time? She unscrews the top again, tilts the bottle to her mouth, takes another hot white swallow. She hasn’t drunk for months, and she’s pleased to find she can still get it down without flinching. The warmth spreads out from her stomach and melts the tension in her muscles. Why hasn’t she thought of this before? Maybe if she drinks enough, she’ll be able to sleep without dreaming.
The thought that she has the whole house to herself and no need to worry about waking Joe makes her feel loose and liberated. She doesn’t need to worry about being caught. She can take all the time she likes, and make her arrangements at her own pace. Vodka singing in her blood, she grabs clumsily at the bundle of sheets and pads through to the utility room. No need to worry about the accidental slamming of the cupboard doors. No need to worry about the washing machine waking Joe up. No need to worry about anything at all. When her feet begin to ache against the cold slate floor, she slips her feet into the oversized Crocs that live by the back door and seemingly belong to no one, enjoying the clumsy slither they make as she stumbles across the tiles.
Back in the kitchen, she takes another victorious swallow from the bottle. She’s survived the terror, the night is hers, and as long as she doesn’t sleep, she’s invincible. As she replaces the bottle on the table, she finds a long slim white packet that makes her fingers tingle.
Don’t touch it, she tells herself. Leave it alone.
She picks it up and turns it over and over in her hands, feeling the rattle and shimmy of the pills in their little foil-and-plastic prisons. She’s heard the name before but hasn’t seen it in the flesh: Temazepam. She can’t quite believe what she’s looking at.
They must have told you to be careful about stuff like this. Back at home, her parents policed their house as if she was a child once more. No painkillers in the first-aid kit, nothing sharp in the kitchen or the bathroom, all their own prescriptions kept in a padlocked cupboard with the key hidden somewhere she hasn’t managed to find yet. And to be fair to Joe, up until now he has kept them from her. She had no idea he had anything like this.
She’s managed to get the box open, and she can feel the tablets rolling a little in their chambers, begging her to push against the blisters and feel the satisfying pop as they tumble into her hands. The pack is almost full, just two missing from the blister. If she took these pills, the whole lot all at once, that would be enough. Of course she’s not going to take them. She’s only looking. But if she took these pills, she could be gone before Joe even woke in the morning.
And then what? Would she be with Laurel? Or would she somehow still be trapped inside her body, ready for her own time on the table, her own moment to be opened up like a puzzle-box?
She takes another mouthful of vodka. The packet is still in her hand, but she’s not going to take them. She’s only tempted by the feel of the packaging, so similar to bubble wrap. Just a quick press of her fingers and she’d hear that joyous little snap, inviting her to do it again and again and again until all the blisters were crushed and torn.
And then what? You’d have to hide the evidence, wouldn’t you? You can’t put them in the bin, he’d find them. You could flush them down the sink, but that’s bad for the environment. So why not put them inside you?
Her resistance weakened by alcohol, she finally lets herself glance towards the window. Is that her own face looking back at her from behind frightened eyes? Or is it…
And then she knows she can’t stay in the kitchen any more. She has to get out.
Please, Laurel’s eyes beg her. Please come and find me. I need you.
It takes her a few tries to get the door open (I’m not drunk, she thinks to herself, I’m a bit tipsy but I’m not drunk). The night air rushes to greet her, sweet and cool and slightly damp. She slip-slithers past the empty chicken coop, past the little shelter that she now knows was built to hold pigs, telling herself that her clumsiness is because she’s wearing borrowed shoes. It’s less than an hour since she came this way in her dreams, Laurel by her side. Is she trying to escape her own destructive impulses? Or is she simply recreating her own nightmare? She pushes her way down the garden and over the fence that leads her into the woods.
If Joe wakes up and comes to check on her, he’ll be worried. But he won’t wake up and check on her because he drinks and he takes sleeping pills. She stumbles over a root, then staggers into a bramble bush, aware that this should hurt, but somehow immune to the pain. I’m not drunk. I’m definitely not. It’s the Crocs, they don’t fit me. The path is growing familiar, the distance getting easier, and when she reaches the fork in the pathway she has a curious sensation that the world around her is shrinking. Surely she shouldn’t be here already? But no, this is definitely the place, she recognises the shape of the trees and the curve of the path.
Have I come here before in my sleep? Did I sleepwalk up that path? If I go there now, will I find a butchery room at the back of his house? And will he be waiting for me?
Perhaps he, like she, is a night creature. Perhaps he’s expecting her. Perhaps he sits up every night in the darkness of his little shack, his gun lying across his knees, waiting for the intruders who may or may not arrive. If she doesn’t visit him, will he be disappointed?
This is a stupid idea. I don’t want to go and see him. But she does, she does, she does. I should go home and go back to bed. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t. She doesn’t. He can help us, Laurel whispers. And he can. He can. He can.
The pull of his house is like gravity. She can’t resist it any more than she can fly. She’s turning towards him, her feet in their ridiculous Crocs shuffling through the leaves. Then, at the edge of the circle of light cast by her phone’s torch, she glimpses a flicker of movement. Two round green eyes like lamps stare back at her from the darkness. She feels the sharp jump in her chest that is the closest she can manage these days to a scream.
It’s not him, she thinks, forcing herself into calmness. It’s not him. He hasn’t come for me. This is someone else. Cautiously, she points her torch into the darkness, letting it feel out the shape of whatever’s watching her. It’s an animal. One of Katherine’s goats? No, it’s a deer, not the dainty delicate creature Luca described but a big sturdy beast with a strong thick neck and twin sprays of bone flowering from his head like a warning.
Oh, she thinks, and holds her breath.
His nostrils flare as he takes in her scent. Should she take a photo? No, this is a holy moment; taking a photograph would be greedy. The stag studies her, curious and considering. Then he turns away – not frightened, not aggressive, just ready to leave – and she hears the soft neat thump of his first few steps as he disappears in the direction of the farmhouse.
It’s like the breaking of a spell. She turns away from the path that leads to the Slaughter Man and follows the stag. Not because she thinks she might catch up with him, but because the universe has sent her a sign.
At the edge of the forest, the sky is lightened by moonlight. Switching off her torch, she puts her phone in her pocket, climbs over the fence and drops into the grass. The goats are huddled in their shelter and do not come to greet her as she crosses their field.
She’s not trespassing. Katherine said she could come here whenever she liked. Of course, even Katherine probably didn’t mean for her to visit in the dead of night when everyone was asleep. But she’s not going to do any harm, so why would it matter? She feels as if she’s not entirely in her body. Maybe this is all a dream too, another kinder dream to make up for the torment of her nightmares. Or maybe if she gets caught, she could pretend to be sleepwalking?
Now she’s by the vegetable beds, and she can smell the fresh green scent of late gr
owing crops. She shines her phone on the bushes, finds a lone plump raspberry, its colour leached by the darkness, and lets it burst against her tongue. Now she’s a thief as well as a trespasser. What would the penalty be for a single raspberry? She picks at a seed trapped in her front teeth.
She can see the long crouch of the farmhouse clearly now, each window dark, each pair of curtains tightly closed. The yard is missing its bustling background cast of bad-tempered geese and flouncy, pecky chickens, tidied away for the night to keep them safe from foxes. She crouches in the shadow of the chicken coop for a few minutes, listening to faint rustling inside as the hens shuffle and mutter and move closer to each other for warmth.
It must be very peaceful to be a chicken, surrounded by all the other chickens, shut safely away in the warm darkness. Could she get into the coop with them for a minute? And what’s it like inside? Is it warm and comforting? Or does it just stink? She puts her face close to the door, takes in a deep incautious sniff, and backs away hastily. From inside comes a low broody chuckle as one of the hens calls back to her.
It’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you. She wonders if they’d find her voice reassuring or frightening. She doesn’t want to go in there, the smell is appalling, but she still covets the thought of stroking their loose ginger feathers. With them all tucked away like this, maybe she can reach in and pet one before it can argue?
The coop’s dotted with boxes and hatches, each with its own little door, held shut with a fat metal peg. She fumbles with the nearest opening and puts her hand cautiously inside, picturing the hen arching her neck like a cat as she strokes her fingers over its back.
There’s no hen, but instead she finds something smooth and cold like a stone. It’s an egg, that must have been missed at the morning collection. The shape feels satisfying against her palm. She can hear the hens shuffling and crooning, aware that someone’s raiding their nest box. Do they mind her taking the egg? Do they want it for themselves? Or is it something they forget about as soon as it’s laid?
The Slaughter Man Page 15
