A Night With No Stars

by Sally Spedding

  ‘M4 or M40?’

  ‘Now why d’you need to know that?’ Griffiths had surveyed him with a look of suspicion and pity. Just like everyone else had done for the past fourteen years, whenever he’d stuck his head above the parapet.

  ‘I just do, OK?’

  But there was no budging the agent on her name or her whereabouts, and Mark knew it was because people talked. He was the object of their gossip, the young man from Ravenstone Hall, who trod too slender a tightrope between sanity and madness.

  But the new office girl there hadn’t been quite so circumspect. For when he, the sawyer, had first called in and seen Lucy Mitchell’s email enquiry about Wern Goch abandoned in full view on the counter, this was just the very information he’d needed. And his anonymous reply to her at her London workplace had been swift and to the point.

  ‘Young woman,’ Lloyd Griffiths had said . . .

  Mark’s own mother had been a young woman too. A wild blend of beauty and laughter, her hair the colour of the copper beech which still flourished close to the Hall and which every autumn covered the ground around it with gold. He’d think of her and touch its bark every time he passed by. Another reason why he’d never been able to leave the area and explore a wider world. This was her place. And where he must be too. He could recall everything about her as if it was just yesterday. Her skin, always as soft and white as Bryn Evans’s goats’ milk. Her wide grey eyes and delicate fingers with their always perfectly varnished nails. The musky after-scent of her clothes when she’d kissed him goodnight . . .

  He slipped and quickly righted himself. He was almost there, where the one tall chimney stood almost defiantly from the little house’s roof. Where the glassless sash window on that north side beckoned him on, as if into harbour. But just then, the prospect of someone else following this very path, of taking possession of what was rightfully his, was unbearable and it took all his concentration not to let the blackness overhead enter his being and strike him down.

  However, this imminent stranger wasn’t the first who’d shown interest in the property. A couple from Birmingham who should have come to view last Monday afternoon, hadn’t shown up because their brakes had failed near Kidderminster. No one had been hurt in the incident, but Lloyd Griffiths had informed his father they’d lost their nerve to proceed to Rhayader.

  At least that was something.

  He approached the ancient scullery door always kept half-open to the weave of the wind and the blowing rain. It provided a passing shelter for the Evans family’s Welsh mules which had successively grazed the land since the death of Queen Victoria. The year the Hall had been built. But this time the door was fully open. His pulse rate jumped. Someone or something must have moved the thing since he’d been there yesterday afternoon. Maybe Bryn Evans, maybe one of his sheep, spared the latest cull. But in his heart he knew somebody else had been there. An intruder with evil on their mind.

  He entered the gap with room to spare and noted the wet flagstones and a trail of sheep’s droppings like mini-grenades glistening in the dull light. Then he ran his fingers down the door’s edge to check if any fleece had scagged on the old splintered wood, only stopping when a distinctive coppery smell reached his nostrils. He sniffed the scullery’s damp air before two more urgent steps brought him into the kitchen space where an old salting slab which had once served as a homework desk lay under the one sash window.

  His chest tightened, his breath trapped in his lungs as the dim light revealed a large black bird slumped across the stone. Rhaca his pet raven. Was he dead or just stunned? Two more paces gave the answer.

  Jesus wept . . .

  As he studied the rigid corpse more closely, the past fourteen years seemed to be slipping away. Except that now, instead of trickling darkly down human skin to that same salting slab, the bird’s blood had congealed against its own skin and bone, because most of its feathers had been brutally torn off.

  He felt himself go pale. His stomach suddenly leaden as a mix of rage and terror bubbled up inside and seemed to concentrate in his head. Rhaca was his only friend. His one true mate.

  This was no normal killing. So who had done it? And why? Surely brave old Rhaca would have tried to guard Wern Goch from intruders? His eyesight the keenest of all the other ravens, his trust not easily won. Yet there was no sign of any struggle. Maybe he’d been tricked into a false sense of security. Whatever the reason – guilt at taming him in the first place, perhaps – bloomed and mingled with the other shit in his mind like night smoke from the recent foot-and-mouth pyres.

  He stroked the bird’s denuded wings, aware of summer flies beginning to muster as yet more unanswered questions tumbled around in his mind in the same way the river Mellte swirls around the rocks beyond the alders. Could his own father have thrown a freaky? No way. The old tosser never came near the house any more, too pissed for a start. The drink of oblivion had seen to that. But Bryn Evans sometimes turned up, if only to chase his sheep out of the scullery. Could it be that the farmer was getting greedy, wanting yet more land and another house for himself? Especially as he’d just lost his goats and prize flock of Beulahs. Was this act of savagery some kind of message? A warning?

  It was clearly time for questions, he thought, trying to gently prise apart his raven’s claws. But both lay locked together like the kind of quick-fix sculpture now littering Cardiff’s public spaces. Junk, that’s all it was. Art for the punters. It was all crap.

  ‘Rhaca?’ He whispered, touching the creature’s open beak, as if this simple movement might draw some delayed response from the bird. ‘Who’s been in here? Who did this to you?’

  When no answer came, he quickly cast a wary eye over the rest of the kitchen and beyond to the dark parlour and hallway barred from the marsh by a front door which had never been used for as long as he could remember. He thundered up the short flight of woodwormy stairs and ran from window to window in the two upper rooms in case the killer should be still hanging around outside. But there was no living thing. Only the scraggy mules foraging among the reeds.

  When he returned to the scullery he stared deep into those dead amber eyes, realising with an overwhelming sense of loss that they were already elsewhere, scanning the Otherworld, borne by those same two outspread wings.

  He cradled the lifeless body in his calloused hands and carried it outside to the tumbledown barn which lay just beyond the house’s eastern wall. Here he found a piece of dry sacking and tenderly set down his only real friend amongst its stiff folds.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ he said as if the creature was still alive and listening. ‘Wait here.’ Then he ran back up the waterlogged track towards the Hall. His headache seemed worse, thumping out those same questions who? and why? into his brain with each footfall but, by the time he’d reached his father’s study, once the grandparents’ Chapel of Rest, and opened its door, he knew the answers to both. And that knowing rekindled a deep paralysing fear which he’d suppressed for so long. Someone wanted to drive him mad, and that someone knew just what to do . . .

  He gripped the door handle to steady himself as blood again deserted his face and his first intended question for his father died in his throat.

  ‘That you, son?’ Hector Jones’s voice rose above the gloomy chime of an antique sidereal clock which stood against the room’s end wall. He looked up from inside the tatty gold-quilted corner bar; a half-empty gin bottle in one hand, a glass tumbler in the other.

  ‘Has that scullery door got a key?’ Mark wrinkled his nose at the thick mix of booze and fags. Fags and booze. Every hour Happy Hour. This is what his father, once an able Detective Inspector in Cardiff’s CID had come to. He stank like a wino and he damned well looked like one. Under normal circumstances, he’d have felt some pity for the man who’d once lovingly ironed his grey trousers and packed his daily lunch-box for the school he’d hated, but nothing had been normal since 1st May 1987. And if he searched his heart, his father hadn’t been the only victim.

&nbs
p; ‘What scullery door?’

  ‘At the house.’ He nearly added ‘twpsin’ but thought better of it.

  ‘That Bryn friend of yours had it years ago. And for the front.’

  The way he said ‘friend’ made him catch his breath. What was he implying? Because although there’d been whispers about Bryn being gay, it was the one thing he wasn’t nor ever could be.

  Women were like the moon. Lustrously inviting on the one side, but on the other, dark and treacherous. Why at twenty-six years of age he was still a virgin.

  ‘But surely the cops locked it straight after . . .’ His voice trailed off. Even now, he couldn’t bring himself to refer to the events of that May morning in 1987 when all the neighbouring farms were whitening their stock’s fleece with talcum powder and boot blacking hooves for the local show. His father shook his grizzled head.

  ‘No. They never did do that. You wouldn’t let them. Remember?’

  Mark used the silence to refocus on that one important question. To regain his courage to ask it.

  ‘Has Richard been in touch at all?’ As casually as he could, but Hector looked as if an electric current had just passed through him. He reached for the bar in front of him like a drowning man to a lifebelt.

  ‘No. And long may it stay that way.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody sure. Jesus Christ, give me strength,’ he sighed, regained his former position then added more gin to his glass.

  ‘Well, someone’s been in the place – yesterday sometime, I reckon. Rhaca’s dead. Stabbed in the neck.’

  The ex-copper stared at this son who’d seemed to have inhabited a different world since the day he’d left his mother’s womb. He poured out a further generous amount of gin from the Gordon’s bottle and stood it next to his glass on the ring-marked mahogany bar. ‘Look, son, some old bird’s not exactly what we’ve been missing all these years, is it? Get real, I say. Get a life, eh?’

  ‘Just like you, huh?’

  Hector took a drink and wiped his lips with a dirty pullover sleeve. The old scar on his right wrist still visible. Still raw after all this time. Mark waited with a suddenly dry mouth for a reaction but his father was clearly full of surprises. ‘I heard they’re looking for army recruits over at Sennybridge,’ he said. ‘You’d have a decent wage there. The chance to see the world . . .’

  ‘I don’t want to see the fucking world.’

  ‘You should.’

  ‘So what I’m bringing in here isn’t enough?’

  Hector laughed. A great gaping roar which showed a throat as deeply red as the dead raven’s flesh.

  ‘You must be bloody joking.’

  Mark drew closer. His head pulsing. If he’d had a weapon on him then his dad, who was disposing of his whole world for peanuts, would be breathing his last. Instead, he backed away because with that much drink inside him, Hector Jones was capable of anything and he didn’t want his head messed up any more. To the Celts, this soul home contained the most potent source of power, and that fact was as real to him as his late mother’s smile.

  Hector Jones recovered his composure and emitted a loud burp. He then pointed to the ceiling over his head where Mark’s official bedroom lay. ‘Oh, and by the way,’ he began, ‘if and when our viewer comes a – calling, you steer clear. I don’t want her put off the place. Understood? And if there’s any mess down at the house, get rid. Pronto.’

  Fuck you.

  He slipped out to the tiled hallway and found the bunch of keys he was looking for in his father’s old duffle-coat pocket. It took him just five seconds to extract the one he wanted from the keyring, knowing that in the hour it would take to get a replica made at Kwiklock in Newbridge the old git wouldn’t notice it was missing.

  He heard the study clock chime three as he leapt up the shallow stairs three at a time and reached the locked door he wanted. Upon it hung a dusty ceramic rose whose petals were the colour of blood. He hated the thing, but even after fourteen years still hadn’t yet plucked up the courage to shift it. However it was the key to his mother’s room which mattered.

  At last.

  As a pub and club singer originally from Bute Town, Cardiff, Sonia Jones had kept her working shoes and dresses strewn everywhere, often spending days altering hems and necklines on a venerable old Singer sewing machine which always stood on its own table in the window bay. For him growing up, the room had been a real Aladdin’s cave, with bright pink stoles, glitzy baubles covering every surface and cottons of cobalt emerald and scarlet which he’d rewound for her, pretending they were temples from some far-off land . . .

  That’s what he’d remembered.

  He held his breath as he turned the key in the lock and entered, as if this still musky-scented air which met his nose wasn’t his to breathe. Then he stopped in his tracks wondering for a moment if he’d got it wrong because apart from two unfamiliar wardrobes, the room was bare. Even the sewing machine had gone. He felt numb as he looked around in vain for some remnant of his childhood there when the afternoon sun had turned the floorboards the colour of sand and the noise of her feet working the treadle had been the most soothing he’d ever heard. But now, not one single coloured thread remained and soon his numbness changed to anger. There could have been only one person who’d done this, and he was downstairs, probably comatose by now.

  Then he remembered the object of his mission. To find something of hers to wrap Rhaca in, and surely she’d have forgiven him that? The bird who’d stayed constant during the worst years of his life. The one living creature who’d kept him sane, so it was important that this latest burial and the shroud itself – the racholl – represented both loss and love. He glanced at the two matching wardrobes ranged against the far wall, chose the nearest then pulled opened one of its doors.

  Nocturne . . .

  He gripped the door knob to steady himself, wondering how come that scent was still so powerful after all these years?

  Suddenly he heard his father clomping around in the study. Time was short. He must find something for his raven before his chance was lost, and when he peered inside the wardrobe, saw his mother’s clothes pressed tight together on their rusty iron hangers; the toes of her stilettos and leopard-skin ankle boots protruding beneath the dress hems, as if ready to move. But in fact going nowhere.

  A bolt of pain seemed to hit his heart as he prised the hangers apart. Finally he chose a pink silk blouse with a scalloped collar, and having hidden it hidden inside his parka, re-traced his steps. At the sight of his father shuffling around downstairs he kept his clenched fists in his pockets. If he hadn’t, there’d have been more blood. More misery.

  Chapter Six

  I have fled as a wolf cub, I have fled as a wolf in the wilderness . . .

  Taliesin

  The now deeply rutted track abruptly turned downhill – its gradient as vertiginous as a Big Dipper run, except that this particular route was awash with surplus water and large loose stones which lifted her wheels, made the car lurch perilously from side to side, and sent her book flying to the floor.

  At last Lucy reached the bottom which was under at least a foot of mud and saw a further track lead off on the right. At its corner stood a washed-out sign saying RAVENSTONE.

  Thank God.

  And, without realising, she began to breathe normally again.

  But her relief was short-lived. She peered through the filthy windscreen and noticed with dismay a high ridge of grass between the ruts. Almost too high, she thought, slipping into first gear, just in case. The Rav stalled, again and again, trapped on this unkempt island until with a surge of power, she pressed onwards as the track opened out on to a weed-strewn hardcore driveway.

  She stared in amazement at what lay at the end of it. Was this huge Gothic pile real or was she hallucinating? Anything was possible after what she’d just endured. She blinked, switched the smeary wipers to top speed for a better view, without success, and the longer she stared at the building
’s forbidding bleakness, so did thoughts of Transylvania stay stubbornly in her mind.

  While the visitor waited, the rain strengthened and drove down mercilessly on both man, beast and the boggy land they shared while the forestry worker made his way round to the blind western side of the Hall. Mark knelt down next to the unmarked spot where his mother now lay and used his bare hands to gouge out a small hollow alongside her. Just as he was smoothing the top layer of soil over the pink silk bundle, he heard an unfamiliar car’s engine close by.

  He sat back on his haunches and stared in the direction of the access track beyond the drive, convinced that neither Bryn Evans’s Defender nor Dai Fish’s Transit was paying a call. For a start, there was some hesitation going on with the engine idling then revving. His pulse quickened; the carotid pumped in his neck. Maybe Miss Mitchell had arrived and was changing her mind after all. And why not? He’d worked hard enough to prevent her getting there, but, if she still insisted on viewing his den, at least that blood on the salting slab would be sure to put her off. No way was he going to clean up and sanitise the place as he’d been instructed. Those souvenirs were all he had.

  His wait was soon rewarded, for a muddy metallic blue poser’s car appeared at the end of the track and struggled up the last few yards to the turning area in front of the Hall. After a few moments he saw the slim figure of a young woman wearing jeans and a white T-shirt under a denim jacket emerge from the driver’s side door and, having checked the car’s bodywork on both sides, began making her way towards the Hall. He saw several sheets of printed matter in her hand and with a lurch of his heart recognised the estate agency’s distinctive logo on the top page. So, here she was. At last.

  Chapter Seven

  The Samhain’s passed and in the sky

  The moon so bright it blinds my eye,

  While all around, Dark Mother sleeps,

  And binds my soul to hers for keeps.

  Englynion, MJJ 1987