Unhallowed Ground

by Gillian White

  Is Nancy Horsefield quite as harmless as she seems?

  Georgie tries to avoid Chad Cramer, not only because he’s a nasty piece of work, but because she is sure he resents her friendship with Donna. Donna is always telling her so, she seems quite proud of the fact. He is bound to know the kind of confidences Donna is sharing, and it’s not hard to guess what Georgie’s advice is likely to be—leave him, he’s a bastard. But one dark evening she meets him unexpectedly, he on his way to the farm, presumably to pay the rent, and Georgie on her way home having paid her milk bill. Instead of walking on after an exchange of unfriendly grunts, this time she decides to confront him.

  ‘Oh, by the way, I managed to get some good prices for Stephen’s paintings. I thought you’d like to know. There was also a rather expensive Jacobean chest and a couple of Turkish rugs. And I’ve cleaned up the furniture, I kept it all in the end. The cottage is quite a different place.’

  ‘Some folks have got more money,’ he growls, ‘than they know what to do with.’

  ‘I see you’re not out of your cottage yet? You’re still holding out?’

  ‘It’ll take more than that bleeding lot to budge me.’ He’s wearing his poacher’s cap tonight and a torn brown anorak that comes away from the zip at the front. His skin is an unhealthy blotchy colour. ‘And I see you’ve decided to hang on here now your posh mates have gone back up the line?’

  If it is Cramer up to these grim tricks, and Georgie suspects that it is because there is no other answer, if he is trying to frighten her off, then she wants him to know that his plan is not working. ‘Of course I’m still here, Chad. I’m like you, a sticker. It’d take more than a few small unpleasantnesses to move me out. No, I’m dug in for good.’

  It is hard to gauge his reaction. Georgie can’t stand him. There’s an air of unpleasant arrogance about him, and he stretches out an arm and lets it rest on the wall beside her, too close, much too close. In a subtle way this gesture is a threat. She gives him a most superior smile. ‘I love it here,’ she lies, ‘it’s a quite remarkable place.’

  ‘You’ve not experienced real winter yet,’ is all he grunts as he strolls away, whistling softly under his breath. ‘I’d like to see what you think of that.’ Is that the same whistle Georgie heard coming from the figure on the hill? But no, Chad’s is a well-known song, the other was on two notes and tuneless. But a cheap, pink make-up case, he could easily have picked one up on the road.

  Georgie tackles Donna cautiously the next time she comes over. Donna is nervous enough already, it wouldn’t do to scare her. Georgie turns the conversation: ‘Years ago, of course, travellers were quite different, gentlemen of the road, respected, even, for their eccentricity, and countryfolk used to give them food and let them sleep in their barns. They were quite harmless, those old tramps, funny, you don’t see many these days.’

  ‘No,’ says Donna scrabbling around and half emptying Georgie’s tissue box. ‘Now it’s scruffy old vans and dogs, and nobody gives a toss about them.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a tramp round here, Donna? What about when you’re out alone at night? Have you noticed anything odd? Do many strangers find their way to the depths of Wooton-Coney, I wonder?’

  ‘Nah. I’ve never seen one.’

  ‘Or kids?’ Georgie goes on hopefully. ‘Do the Buckpits have any other family, or friends? It’s rather odd how this place lacks children, even visiting children.’

  ‘You never see anyone new round here, that’s the bleeding trouble, nobody ever comes and Chad’s only got enemies.’

  ‘I’d never have guessed.’ But should she quiz Donna further about her nocturnal excursions? Surely, now the weather has turned, she stays safely indoors. This is not the first time it has occurred to Georgie that Donna could easily have let herself into the cottage that night, and for some distorted reason of her own smeared her painting palette with blood. It could have been she who started the fire. Most of her attention-seeking behaviour is pathetically transparent: wearing a bandage when she’s not hurt, colouring her hair a dreadful purple, stealing small items she knows will be missed, telling the most unbelievable lies. But even more worrying than this, it is now quite apparent that Donna has some kind of schoolgirl crush on her caring neighbour. ‘You’re a bit old for this sort of thing,’ was Georgie’s immediate response when Donna tried to air her feelings.

  ‘I know, I can’t help it, that’s all.’ She stood there with her legs crossed, her head hung low like a naughty child. ‘I just need to be with you, to be near you… I really think that I love you.’ She played with her nail-bitten fingers. Tears dripped down her cheeks as she stuttered her eternal devotion. ‘I know how silly I sound but, Georgie, I can’t get you out of my mind.’

  Stranger things than this have happened between clients and their counsellors, and Donna is badly disturbed. ‘It will pass,’ said Georgie sternly, cutting her off before she went further. Perhaps this transference, although peculiar and most unwelcome, could help Donna eventually in her bid for freedom from Chad.

  But now she has to ask the girl. ‘Do you ever come in here during the night when I’m upstairs asleep?’

  Donna frowns. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Out of curiosity. Out of a need to know.’

  ‘Would you care if I did?’ Donna asks obstinately.

  ‘I would much rather you asked me first.’

  ‘I never did. Although sometimes I sat on the grass and watched. Wishing I could be in here with you. Safe and happy. Asleep in your spare room. Anyway, I don’t go out any more. I only do that in summer when I can see where I’m going. I don’t like it in the dark. It’s dark in our cottage, dark and dingy.’ Poor Donna gazes round Georgie’s kitchen, not de luxe by any means, but far more comfortable than her own. ‘And it’s cold,’ she shivers. ‘It’s always so bleeding freezing in there.’

  ‘So why does Chad choose to make the place so depressing? I can see why he wouldn’t bother to do up the house when they want him out, but he could bring in more comfortable furniture, there’s plenty of electric fires in that old carriage of his, carpets, lamps, why doesn’t he use any of them himself? Couldn’t you persuade him, Donna?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve tried,’ Donna whinges, ‘over and over again. But he’s the sort of bloke who doesn’t notice his surroundings. If it’s cold he puts his jacket on and sits by the fire in that. He’s so sodding mean, that man. I dread another winter here. One more winter in that fridge and I think I might even die of exposure. I really wish I could live here with you. Why can’t I live here with you? I wouldn’t be a nuisance. I could help in all sorts of ways.’

  How often Georgie longs to shake her. ‘I’ve told you why you can’t live here. I need to be on my own, that’s why I came here in the first place, and anyway, it wouldn’t be the answer. Have you tried the social services yet, Donna? Have you explained everything to them?’

  Donna sulks. ‘It wouldn’t do no good, there’d be no sodding point. They’d send me back to Manchester. You don’t really care about me at all, do you? Do you? Tell me the truth!’

  Georgie refuses to get into this. They’ve been through this so many times before and it only ends in more tears. ‘And don’t you think that Manchester might be better than another winter here, with him? You’re not really happy, are you, Donna?’ And that is an understatement.

  ‘But I just couldn’t bear to be on my own. I’m not ready to make the break.’ Poor despondent Donna, waiting for something wonderful, yearning for the impossible. She can’t see that if that’s what she’s after she should damn well go and try for it.

  ‘Well. One day perhaps.’

  Just how damaged is Donna? What might she be capable of? Starting a fire? Cutting herself? She’s done that before, one look at her wrists gives that secret away.

  What other questions can Georgie ask? There are no satisfactory answers. She starts to lock her door at nights. She buys a bolt and chain. She wonders if she should pick some wild garlic to keep the dev
il at bay.

  TWENTY

  SOME HOSTILE FORCE IS tampering with time. The days, which ought to be getting shorter, are stretching themselves into endless weeks, endless like the lonely moor, a thousand feet above the sea, which rolls away to left and right, the road just a small rope in the wilderness. This is loneliness, intense and hidden. Huh. How ironic to think that once Georgie truly believed she was getting over Angie’s death, after those long summer months helped by a change of scenery, a change of lifestyle. But as winter’s metal lid starts to close over the valley and seal it, well, I’m afraid that’s how her head is starting to feel.

  She cannot get rid of the nightmares—a child clad in a nightie tumbling down the steps at Kurzon Mount Buildings, with huddles of crow-faced women screaming at the burning doll in her arms. Somebody could have saved her, but he was standing on a hillside too far away, a dark figure just watching. Just a dream, only a dream. Trembling and sweating into wakefulness she staggers downstairs, but after finding the blood—was it blood?—she feels uneasy at her own kitchen table. By now she has convinced herself that Cramer is the culprit, that vicious slob broke into her cottage and smeared the blood in a mean act of vengeance. And she starts to dwell on the way she was hounded out of her London flat with bricks and letters and phone calls, that slowly turning cycle seems to be in motion again. When will her persecutors leave her alone?

  But she is just an ordinary person trying to get on with her life. Never the centre of anyone’s interest. Even at her most overwrought Georgie had never before been beset by such dark, astounding happenings as these.

  Is it outside the bounds of reason that someone related to Angela Hopkins is conducting their own vendetta against her? Following her down to Dartmoor, stalking her, frightening her, driving her mad, venting his fury in some obsessive bid for justice? To make her pay the ultimate price? And if that is the case, would they be wrong…? And if that is the case, by coming here she has played straight into their hands.

  In her mind she sees him in the distance, a tall man, wide-shouldered with thick limbs, a lumbering in his movements and a heaviness in his stance.

  With appalled horror Georgie notices how her hands have taken to shaking again.

  Stephen remains insubstantial. Only scraps of information occasionally come her way, like how he religiously fed the birds, how he would set off alone with a rucksack and not be seen for days, and Mrs Buckpit unfolds her face enough to reaffirm, with distaste, that Stephen refused all help at the end, insulted the doctor, turned away the ambulance, and the only person he allowed to come near him was the melancholy Horace.

  Mrs Buckpit adopts her most menacing tone. She might well prefer to cross herself. ‘He got drunk regular. You could hear him, you’d see him performing out there on the road when he got very bad. He was disgusting.’ If she considers Stephen disgusting, what does she think of her own two boys? Or doesn’t she know that they piss in the parlour in full view of her husband’s ashes?

  ‘But what about when he was sober?’ Georgie pleads to no avail. Mrs Buckpit, reluctant to give any more away, wipes all expression from her face. ‘And surely when Stephen first arrived he couldn’t have been as bad as you paint him? After all, he was a young man.’

  ‘He never wanted no-one, not at the end, or the beginning. He should never have painted those naked women. Drove him quite mad in the end.’

  And that seems to be that. The real truth at last. Mrs Buckpit had somehow got wind of Stephen’s few innocent nudes and considered him pagan thereafter. And the truth about Stephen’s life is probably equally simple, he chose his retreat, paid for the cottage—cheap in those days, no doubt, compared to today’s standards—by selling his paintings, and refused to abandon it. But had he never felt an urge to move on?

  Georgie regularly phones her friends. With a bright and breezy air, she says, ‘I am absolutely fine. It’s all rather novel, being on my own, but I’m fine.’ She turns every problem into a joke and sits and listens as they laugh on the other end of the long, long line. And that is another feature of horror films she has always despised, that abysmal lack of communication, almost deliberate, that strikes the victims and turns them mute so they can’t seek the help they so urgently need.

  And she tries to remember the useful activities she promised to do with her time.

  Helen and Roger Mace and the kids are coming to stay for Christmas, so there is a break to look forward to, if only for three days. But after that there’ll be three long months to endure before the tenants are out of her flat and she can sell it, get rid of the cottage and move back to the city.

  Should she take up her old job again? She toys with the idea of a brand-new career, in law perhaps, or teaching, but does not progress very far with that.

  The days are so long. She can’t go for long walks because of the steady, penetrating drizzle. Born on a Dartmoor wind, it breaks through whatever protection you use, you are soaked to the skin by the shattering rain after five minutes’ exposure. Drives in the car are nothing but a depressing battle with wipers and demister. ‘I want to come. How can you be so mean, driving off and leaving me here?’ pleads Donna, struggling with her infatuation, which time only seems to intensify.

  ‘Donna, you can’t always be with me. It’s not good for either of us. I’m only off for a drive, dammit! Go and find something better to do.’

  Concentrating on books is beyond Georgie, life gets so bad that she finds herself looking forward to bedtime, and tries to prolong that longed-for moment. She watches TV until well after midnight, and only then will she release herself and plod up the stairs to try to sleep. When it comes it is balm. More often than not it does not come. She remembers being a child at home, jumping when the door creaked open. She shouted into the terrible silence, ‘But I locked the door, you can’t get in!’ and wakes to discover she was asleep, having another terrible nightmare. So Georgie lies there tossing and turning, listening to the stream rushing relentlessly under her window, the moaning wind and that infernal rain, ceaseless during this long October. Drip drip drip. It patters off the thatch with such weary regularity it is a Chinese water torture. And so is the fact that Lola, on the floor beside her, sleeps the sleep of the just and feels no need to keep one eye open. Like she does.

  Movement, any new undertaking, is a real effort. What the hell did she expect? And what is happening to her mind? Is she turning into a hysteric, the sort she has always despised?

  Truly, she is pitiful to see. Georgie is a textbook case. To help herself find sleep she takes to drinking red wine at night. It starts with one glass, but when that fails to work it is two, then three, then the bottle, until the room spins round as she lies there, miserable, wretched, unable to understand what is happening and not knowing how to beat the depression that has gripped her so completely. Georgie never could handle drink. She begins to feel guilty about putting all those empties out, sure that the beady eyes of Mrs Buckpit are watching and counting, marking the results of her failure on some hidden pad to be accounted for afterwards. The cow will think the same boozy weakness runs in the family. She takes to boxing the bottles up, trying to disguise her shameful habits.

  Is she heading for a nervous breakdown? This is what frightens her. And no-one would know. Donna, so self-obsessed, probably wouldn’t even notice. She’ll be too far gone, a screaming wreck by the time they find her, too extreme a case for help.

  At last November is almost here. Bonfire night was always a favourite, but there’ll be no celebrations in Wooton-Coney. Does anyone here recognize Christmas? That’s doubtful, apart from the Buckpits’ visit to chapel. Bedtime at last, and Georgie picks up the log basket and trails into the woodshed, one of her little habits by which she has learned to tell the time. She likes to pick out a hefty log to burn on the fire all night so the downstairs is warm in the morning. Earlier, when it wasn’t so cold, she let the fire go out, but the stone cottage takes ages to warm through thoroughly. There’s a good stack of wood out there to
burn, and the fireguard is a sturdy one, so it’s safe and well worth it.

  She turns on the woodshed light and searches for a suitable log. It has to be flat so it won’t roll off. Georgie is fearful of fire, these days she is fearful of just about everything. Something makes her look up, something must have grabbed her attention, and the eye that stares down from the hole in the roof is quite unmistakable.

  One horrendous staring eye.

  A hideous shock.

  Georgie freezes.

  Every nerve in her body is screaming.

  Bent as she is, arms stretching out towards the log, neck twisted round, her eyes hold to the one that stares back with a glaring intensity. No colour, no blinks, just an eye where the stars should be. Glittering through a hole in her roof. Tense as an animal in a trap she whispers to herself as she backs away, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’ But she cannot wrench her gaze away. She feels her way blindly from the shed, sobbing softly.

  Oh God, where is Lola? It’s OK, it’s OK, the dog is indoors, asleep by the fire. Georgie slams the kitchen door, fixes the chain and stands there frozen, trying to breathe with her jaw slackly open. She wants to press her weight on the door and not let up for an instant lest the thing, lest the creature with the eye, tries to push its way through and grab her. Licking her lips Georgie slyly tiptoes to the phone, the eye might guess what she’s up to and attempt to stop help coming… it might slam itself against the door…

  With a hand that is dead, nothing like her own familiar warm one, Georgie dials 999. The voice that gives her address is steady and, astonishingly, sounds like her own. She is careful to give precise directions. It will not do for the police to get lost. She stresses the need for urgency and watches the night through the windows so hard that her eyes hurt, particularly as the curtains are drawn so she can’t see out.