The Feast of All Souls

by Simon Bestwick

But, to my relief and joy, he laughed. “No, Mary,” he said, “nothing of the kind. In the fullness of time, should you consent to it, you will be my wife.”

  I was fortunate to be in bed already, because I doubt my legs would have held me up following that reply. “But,” he said, “the time is not yet right. I neither expected nor planned for this. I sought only a secretary, not a wife, and Antonia is only a few months dead. There are those who would think nothing – indeed, who thought nothing at all – of the working conditions in my mill, but who would think much of my remarrying so soon after my wife’s passing. It is a weak and foolish morality that does so, I think you will agree” – and I did, I did; indeed, I still do – “but unfortunately it is a prevalent one, and I should make enemies if I transgressed against it.”

  It was true; I could follow his reasoning all too well.

  “And so,” he said, “here is my proposal: that you remain here, as my secretary, until such time as a decent period of mourning may be said to have elapsed – shall we say a year? At that time, we shall announce our engagement, and be married as soon thereafter as may be convenient. As for... this,” he said, and trailed his fingers up along my bare flank, over my hips, rump and back before finally settling on my breast, “well, we can, if you wish, have further night-time meetings such as these.” He smiled; I remember how his teeth glittered in the dark. “Or if you would rather, we can defer them until we are married.”

  I laughed and reached up to kiss him. “I find your proposal more than acceptable, Mr Thorne. As for the question of another such rendezvous as this – I don’t believe I could wait that long.”

  He chuckled. “No, I thought not.” He leant forward and kissed my brow. “Shall we say tomorrow night, at the same time?”

  “Let us say so,” I laughed. I contemplated the sheets. “Although I dare say the state of these may inspire gossip amongst the servants.”

  He frowned. “I most sincerely hope not,” he said. “I shall instruct Kellett to deal promptly with any servant uttering such rumours.”

  “Kellett has no love for me, I fear.” I’d slipped back into the formal diction of a secretary; Arodias had abruptly become my stern employer again, and without even a conscious thought, I altered my own manner to match it.

  “That is of no import,” he said. “Kellett is obedient to me. And he will learn loyalty to you, and indeed to love you, for you will be his mistress.”

  I could not suppress a smile at that, for I doubted Kellett would receive that news gladly.

  Sometime during the night, Arodias slipped away. I rose, feeling no ill effects beyond a slight soreness, and dressed for the day. As Arodias promised, he came to my room again that night, and so our days entered a new routine, where I played one role by day, and another by dark.

  Chapter Seventeen

  A Cross of Fire

  31st October 2016

  ALICE HAD TIME for a split-second of disbelief as the knives flew towards her; then her survival instincts kicked in and she flung herself through the kitchen door.

  She felt the vibration as the blades hit home, thudding into walls and doorframe. Laughter sounded. She scrambled up and grabbed the door to pull it shut. As she did, a child’s face appeared, almost touching her own, grinning its wide, shark-toothed grin.

  Its white irises seemed to fluoresce for a second, as if trying to captivate her, but then she saw another gleam behind it: more knives, rising into the air. With a grunt, she shoved the door shut. A moment later, there was another flurry of thuds, and a dozen sharp knife-points drove through the thin wood of the door, several of them millimetres from her eyes.

  Alice cried out and scrambled away down the hall on her bottom, then got to her feet. She felt a draught in her face. No, not a draught, she realised; a breeze, already strong enough to ruffle her hair. It was blowing from the door – through the gaps between door and frame, through the splits in the wood made by the knives. As she watched, the door began bulging inwards, towards her.

  Just like the previous night’s dream – but this time, when the door burst, it would be in a hail of knives. She turned and ran down the hallway, fumbled with the front door locks. She had to get out.

  The locks turned; the door opened.

  It was only as Alice went through the doorway that she remembered what lay outside the house at times like these. But by then she was already stumbling, because instead of the uneven pathway was a lumpen, rocky slope.

  She swayed, took stock. Before, there’d only been darkness; now she was living her nightmare in broad daylight. In one way that made it even more frightening, but in another less so. There were no shadows or mysteries, only a landscape.

  Parts of it she recognised. There was the Irwell, at least, some way below her – except that it shouldn’t have been visible from where she stood. But perhaps it had been, once. After all, the road and the houses were gone now. The Fall was gone, too; instead a green slope reached down to the water.

  She stood on a steep green hill above the river. Crops and spars of grey stone jutted from its flanks, and to one side was a wide grey apron of crackling scree. The hill itself was bare of woodland. The only trees in sight lay beyond the river; big deciduous trees, gold and russet with autumn. Alice suspected that if she’d been able to inspect them more closely she’d have found oak and hornbeam, the old, first-growth woodlands of prehistory.

  The ground sloped markedly down where the house next door should have been. Of course; to build here, they’d have had to level off the ground, although it looked as though they’d added to the hill’s height rather than reducing it

  How long had she stood here, looking down? She’d lost count of the seconds, caught only in the wonder of the moment. Because she’d quite forgotten to be afraid. This bare, empty land, lit only by a pale sun just visible through the grimy veils of cloud – this was what had been Crawbeck, Salford, Manchester, thousands of years before.

  Giggles behind her, and the breath of the wind. Alice gasped and turned to see the front door swinging closed, the children grinning out at her from inside the house. She remembered what had happened the last time, when the back door had shut her out. She’d been trapped in the ‘lost garden’ and fallen foul of the ogre. Only the Red Man had saved her then.

  And what had he told her? That he couldn’t protect her from the children; that she had to protect herself. Protect herself with –

  The rowan cross – she’d had the bloody rowan cross in her breast pocket all the time.

  The front door was nearly shut when Alice flung herself forward and grabbed the handle. It jolted, briefly halting, but then was pushed shut – almost shut. She braced her feet against the ground, struggled to get a good purchase on the treacherous surface as she fought to hold it open. Thank God her trainers had a decent grip on them.

  The house, she realised, was balanced impossibly on the narrow summit. It seemed wholly intact, but there was no sign of its neighbour; where 378 Collarmill Road should have merged into the next house, the brickwork simply stopped, as if sliced away with a knife.

  A shout rang out from behind her. Alice looked round to see a gathering of ragged shapes at the bottom of the hill – men with long, wild beards and hair. More primitive than the spear-wielder she’d faced before, these wore animal skins and brandished what looked like stone-tipped spears. One was shouting and pointing up at her. He started forward; when the others hung back he turned towards them again and bellowed something, shaking the spear aloft. They shifted, stirred; then followed their leader in a bellowing horde up the hillside.

  From behind the door came hissing and whispers and vicious giggling. The door was still open, but by no more than an inch. Alice pressed down with her feet as if walking forward, put her weight against the door to push it further open, then wedged her knee in the gap.

  The door gave back under the pressure; the gap widened. The bellowing of the skin-clad men was getting louder. She could hear their feet pounding the turf. Someth
ing thumped into the ground. Alice looked back and saw a spear sticking out of it, no more than twenty feet away. The skin-clad men had halted a dozen or so yards away, their arms cocked back to throw.

  Alice flung herself against the door again and again, slamming her body’s full weight against it and pushing it wide. Inside, the hall was dim and grey. She saw the children snarling at her, their pale eyes almost luminous in the gloom. None of them were touching the door, but it still fiercely resisted her attempts to get it open. Moments later, their snarls turned to grins as the door began to force itself closed once more.

  The cross. She fumbled inside her jumper for the shirt’s breast pocket, felt the cross’ outline through the material. Her fingers groped for the top of the pocket, slipped inside, found one of the rowan-twig arms. She pulled it free, fingers curled around it so it wouldn’t catch or break on the lining of her jumper.

  The children’s faces gathered in the narrowing gap; they hissed and sniggered in triumph. A spear flew past, missing her by feet to splinter against the wall. Alice pulled the cross free and got hold of it by the upright. Now what? The Red Man had told her it would protect her, but how?

  The skin-clad men charged, bellowing. She brandished the cross at them and the closest ones flinched back, but then came forward again when they realised it was no weapon. The children. She had to use it against them.

  The door was inching closed. With a grunt, Alice thrust the cross through the gap. A frozen second passed, when she was sure it would be plucked from her fingers and snapped to pieces before her tormentors shut her out, leaving her to the skin-clad’s spears. Then she realised a stillness had descended: the children’s horrid sniggering had stopped. Before she could interpret their changed expressions, the cross smouldered for a second and then, like phosphorous exposed to air, it exploded into dazzling white flame.

  There was no pain, nor even the least impulse to let go of the cross. There was a sound: a sort of hissing, sizzling, thundering noise that she later realised resembled nothing so much as the sound of a sea breaking on a shore, only amplified a million times.

  As for the cross itself, for a second or two it was in her hand as a cruciform piece of brilliant light, then it lost all definition and turned the whole world white. The pressure on the door relented and it swung open. Alice had the briefest impression of a female figure, ablaze with light, standing in the hallway. The next moment she lurched forward, tripped over the front step and fell forward, arms out to break her fall.

  THERE WAS A soft thump, and a click. Smooth, cool wooden tiling lay against her palms and her left cheek. When she opened her eyes, she saw the rowan cross lying a few inches from her right hand and, beyond that, her own familiar hallway.

  Alice sat up quickly. The hallway was empty, and the thump and click she’d heard had apparently been the new uPVC door swinging shut behind her after she’d fallen through. Oh God, what had her neighbours seen?

  She could worry about that later. She had to concern herself with the immediate danger. She got up and put her hand on the door handle. It took nearly a minute to nerve herself up to the simple task of opening it.

  Outside was Collarmill Road, the same as always, the tarmac giving way to cobbles almost exactly outside her door, the trees across the road gently shedding their leaves. The sky above had greyed to near-blackness, and the first drops of rain splashed Alice’s face. She breathed out, pulled the door shut and locked it.

  An empty hallway; a kitchen door, hanging ajar, showed an empty kitchen too. No sign of the children. It looked as though the rowan cross had done its work.

  She knelt by it, reaching to pick it up, and frowned. Its colour seemed different; the cross now looked entirely grey. And where was the hair that had bound the pieces?

  In the moment before her fingers touched the cross she remembered what its appearance reminded her of; a cigarette of Dad’s, back when he’d still smoked, that he’d left unattended. It had burned down to the filter to leave a grey tube so perfectly formed that she’d still been able to make out the cigarette paper’s seam. But then she’d touched it, and seen it collapse into ashes.

  Alice plodded back to the kitchen, found a dustpan and brush and swept up the ash. Then she went back to the kitchen door and stared at it, studying first one side, then the other. After that she checked the walls, but neither they nor the door were damaged in any way. Nor was there any cutlery lying around. When she opened the drawers, all the kitchen knives lay there, undisturbed. A tapping sound made her start – but it was just the rain, speckling the windows.

  A faint noise stirred in Alice’s throat. Then she remembered: the journal. She ran, found it, fumbled the cap off the pen and scribbled down her answers, fast as she could. She pushed the pad away, shaking.

  She turned and studied the video camera John had mounted in the kitchen, saw that the baleful red eye of the recording light still glowed. When she went down the hall, the other cameras there were the same.

  She went back into the kitchen and fumbled with the camcorder, stopping the recording and hitting rewind. The picture became a jagged blur; she pressed play. Yes, here she was, entering the kitchen, putting on the kettle.

  She watched. Watched as she started, looking around, then froze, staring towards the back door. Watched herself back away from something that she saw but the camera didn’t, all the way to the door, and then dive headlong through it. Then the door swung shut.

  Through all of this, Alice could see that the kitchen stayed empty and its drawers stayed shut. Not one knife stirred, and nothing else happened until she came back in some ten minutes later, staring around her to find the room unchanged.

  It was a formality now, but Alice went through into the hall and played back the camera footage there. Much the same story. She watched herself dive to the floor and drag the door shut, then run down the hall to the front door, which swung wide open before swinging closed behind her – until she grabbed it, grappled with it, wrestled with thin air.

  Alice cringed. Was that how she’d looked? Oh God, had any neighbours or passers-by seen? The madwoman fighting with her own front door, fighting with it and then –

  And now the last part came. The camera, it seemed, was determined to offer her no comfort while sparing her no humiliation. She saw her forcing her own hand through the gap with its pathetic little cross, saw it thrust the useless talisman at thin air and then –

  A flash, and the screen flickered; bands of static rippled across the picture as she watched herself trip and tumble into the hallway, sprawling. The cross spilled out of her hand. It was on fire. Brief fire, bright fire, that quickly flamed and danced to nothing, but fire, beyond doubt. And in the same moment, like a curtain closing on a play, the front door swung closed, as if drawn by a very firm hand.

  Alice sat in silence. There was a hissing sound from outside as the rain fell; faster now, and harder. When she studied her fingers, she saw they were very faintly smudged with ash, but couldn’t be sure if that had happened when the rowan cross had burned – heatlessly, painlessly – in her hand, or when she’d touched its crumbling remains afterward.

  She watched the footage again, and got the same story. The footage of the kitchen actually gave her something new, the second time around. At the moment of the flash in the hallway, static buzzed across the screen in the kitchen as well. Alice suspected that to a greater or lesser extent, the same would be true of the other footage in the house.

  She got up and went through to the kitchen. Her legs still felt unsteady. She wasn’t sure if the cameras’ evidence made her feel better or worse. Once again, there was no claiming it was all in her head.

  Not by her, at any rate. But anyone else, even John? What was her evidence? A pair of twigs that burst into flame? She was still a scientist – enough of one to know how easy it would have been to fake that effect for the camera.

  So, it seemed she was being spared the ultimate torment of doubting her own sanity – to an extent, at least. Af
ter all, she realised, that wouldn’t have wholly been a torment; it would have been, at least, in part a relief. What she was being denied was the faith of others – it was almost like a punishment for all her years of stubborn doubt, for deriding John and those like him. She would know it wasn’t all in her head – but she’d never be able to convince anyone else.

  And, of course, she’d never be quite certain herself where exactly the dividing line was. Which was a far more insidious form of madness.

  One thing she did know, though: the rowan cross had worked. But now it was gone.

  Except that she’d made three. Alice fumbled in her breast pocket, looking for the others. Her hand came out clutching a jumble of snarled hair and splintered twigs.

  When she’d fallen, they’d both been crushed. They were green wood, should have been much stronger, but they were in pieces. She searched the debris for the makings of a new cross, but there were none; she was defenceless.

  And as she realised that, someone pounded on the door.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Diamonds and Rust

  31st October 2016

  ALICE CRIED OUT, and the smashed remains of the crosses slipped through her fingers to the floor. For a moment she was ready to drop to her knees and grub through the fragments for something she could use, but stopped herself. She’d already looked, and found nothing. Whatever had come for her now would at least find her standing, not grovelling on her knees.

  She dusted her hands and stepped towards the kitchen door; as she reached for the handle whatever it was struck the front door again. She flinched back, then took a deep breath and opened the kitchen door.

  What would the tape show? Would she fall dying from no visible wound – a heart attack, a stroke – or would she be remembered as ‘killed by person or persons unknown’?

  Two steps down the hall, then a third. The door loomed nearer.