In the kitchen there were perhaps a dozen men clustered round the area where part of the wall had collapsed. Just three should have been at work on the job. Rumour had spread quickly, and labourers had come from the other sites to see the “treasure”. The sight of them standing idly about slightly annoyed Myra, because parts of her project were already behind schedule, but she decided to let them stay while she solved the mystery of what had been discovered. Perhaps they would learn how to deal with any future “finds” they might make. She was concerned that they might do damage from ignorance or excessive enthusiasm. Keen as they were, and glad of the work, they were mostly recruits from the local building trade, used to the methods and materials employed by the likes of Wimpey, and inexperienced in the delicate work of what amounted to archaeological reconstruction. She felt she needed to keep a constant eye on them.
She stepped between the men, peered into the darkness of the recently formed cavity, and was relieved to see that very little damage had been done. A small section of the lower wall had fallen back, and could easily be rebuilt. There was no indication of any major structural fault.
“Can you see it, Mrs Cooper?” one of the men whispered. “It’s dark in there.” There was a note of awe in his voice.
The top half of some kind of wooden case was visible, jutting out above the fallen stonework. Myra nodded, took a camera from her bag of tools and instruments, and took three flash photographs of the dusty box from different angles. The men smiled as they watched her at work. They had never met anyone quite like this brisk yet solemn, detached, work-obsessed woman, who seemed quite unaware that she was attractive. She said, “Can someone clear away the rubble carefully, please?” and stood back to watch while the work was done. Nobody spoke at all. There was a hushed, churchy feeling of reverence in the air as the relic was revealed. At last, when the front and sides of the box were free of the fallen stonework, the man closest to it turned to Myra and raised an eyebrow.
“Shall I lift it out?”
“Is it heavy?” Myra asked cautiously.
The man bent down, placed his hand on top of the box, and rocked it slightly.
“No, not really.” He looked disappointed.
Myra nodded. “Very well then.”
The box tipped up suddenly as the man tugged at it, and he almost lost his balance. To try to steady himself he stepped back upon a loose rock from the wall and twisted his ankle. He yelped with pain and fell back, hauling the box on top of him. Beyond, inside the wall, something fell away, and a few more stones tumbled into the vacated space. Myra felt a flare of anger at the man’s clumsiness that she hastily dampened down because she thought he might be hurt. But he seemed uninjured. He helped two of the others to lift the box off his legs, stood up awkwardly, and smiled in pained apology at Myra. An elderly, tubby man she knew as Greg inspected the box and said, “The bottom’s fallen out of it,” and placed the object on its back. “What d’you think Mrs Cooper?” he added, and sneezed from the dust in the air, “is it anything special?”
Myra hunkered down next to the find. “It’s a ‘dole’ cupboard. Late medieval, probably,” she said. “They were used to store food so the dogs couldn’t get at it.”
“They kept dogs in the kitchens?” Greg said, sounding oddly prim.
“To catch rats, and other things,” Myra explained, and went over to where the cupboard had been discovered. She didn’t need to refer to the plans of the walls and floors, that she knew by heart anyway, to deduce what had caused the masonry to fall. An ancient drain ran out of the kitchen at that point, to flush waste into the river Wye, which ran along outside the Hall a short distance from the wall. It must have collapsed. She took a pocket torch from her bag, directed its spindle thin beam into the vacant space, and saw that her surmise had been correct. There was a black hole in the floor, about eighteen inches across, where the box had been standing. Its base must have been rotten and had fallen away. Perhaps it had been damp at some time. Whatever it had contained, if anything, had vanished down the drain.
The men, looking slightly sheepish, were standing round the excavated box. Myra joined them, and crouched down next to it again.
It was coated in umber dust, and tendrils of what looked like petrified fern or fungus, like thin, grey, bony fingers, clutched at the blackened wood over most of its outer surface. It was about four feet tall, three wide, and one deep, and of very basic design. It had a door in the middle with two dissimilar, quaintly carved holes at top and bottom. The door was flanked by panels on either side that also had small holes, about six inches square, with crudely cut, curlicued edges. The door was held shut by a simple, revolving peg. The cupboard, lying as it was on its back, looked like a coffin for a flattened out dwarf; a coffin with windows. It was palpably sinister. It looked as shut up and empty as a dead man’s face. Myra decided to open it. She reached out to grasp the peg that locked it.
“Might keep out dogs, but it wouldn’t keep out the rats,” said Greg, who was squatting next to her. To illustrate his point, he put the tip of his finger into one of the holes in the door, and moved it around inside the cupboard.
And suddenly snatched it back with a curse. He jumped to his feet.
“Bloody thing!”
Myra paused with her hand on the peg. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s something in there.” Greg was staring at a bead of blood that was swelling out from the side of his fingernail.
“You’ve cut yourself,” Myra observed, unnecessarily.
“It was more like – it felt like something bit me,” Greg insisted.
“Perhaps you were right about the rats,” someone said, and a couple of the men laughed uneasily.
Greg smudged the blood off his finger onto his overall. He looked embarrassed. He smirked at Myra and shook his head. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just a bit of a shock. I’m sorry.” He prodded the cupboard with his foot. “Open it up. Let’s have a look inside.”
The peg had warped and tightened, and did not give way easily under the pressure of Myra’s thumb. When at last it turned, she reached under the bottom edge of the door and lifted it wide open. A cloud of thick, seething dust surged up and out. It swirled up surprisingly high, hung for a moment, spinning indecisively in the air, then drifted swiftly towards Myra as though reaching out for her, or caught in some quirky breeze. She was about to move back, to avoid inhaling the dust, when it suddenly dropped, as though whatever current in the air had moved it had abruptly died. The front edge of the cloud settled out, reached as far as her bent knees, and drifted onto her white skirt. At the same moment, she experienced a tiny, tactile sensation, as though something more heavy than dust had actually touched her leg. She stretched her hand to brush off her skirt with her fingers, but thought better of it. She didn’t want to risk rubbing the ancient, grimy powder into the fabric of one of her most expensive articles of clothing.
“Did you see that?” asked one of the men. “That was very strange.”
“I did,” said another.
Myra said, “What do you mean?”
Greg answered. “Well, Mrs Cooper, for a moment then – in the dust – I seemed to see . . .”
“Yes?”
“. . . a sort of shape. A little shape.”
“I saw it too,” said a grumpy voice with an aggressively rational, crushing tone. “It was just the way the light was shining at an angle through where the dust was thickest. It was nothing.”
No one seemed to want to argue with this, or comment any further on their own observations. Myra shifted her weight forwards and peered down into the ugly little food safe in front of her. It contained a single object that must have been jammed behind one of the doors, because it now lay flat against the back of the cupboard. It took her a few moments to guess that it was perhaps some kind of doll. She reached in and carefully lifted it out. The head, body, and upper arms and legs had been unskilfully fashioned from a single piece of wood. Sections of the lower arms and legs h
ung loosely down, connected at the elbows and knees with black, shrivelled strips of something, probably leather. The features of the face were two deep holes, that had perhaps been burned in with a red hot nail, for eyes, a triangular cut for a nose, and two rows of shallow indentations, probably also inflicted with the point of a nail, for a mouth. The mouth curved up slightly in a grin. It had once been dressed, as shreds of faded cloth clung to it in places, but it was naked enough now to reveal its sex. A v-shape had been cut under the belly at the top of its legs. The doll measured about eighteen inches from head to foot. Its surface had not been smoothed, and the chisel marks looked like wounds. Nevertheless, there was nothing sharp protruding from it that could have cut Greg’s finger, and she could see no nails jutting out inside the cupboard.
As she studied the doll, she had a sense that she was also being observed, and not just by the men close to her. She looked round and saw, standing at the door through which she had entered the kitchen, a stooping, leering man. He was making some half-completed gesture she did not understand. He held his left hand, with a finger crooked, in front of his face, as though summoning someone to him. The instant their eyes met, the hand moved towards her and the finger straightened. When the arm was full extended, he was pointing straight at her. He remained like that for a moment, while his expression changed to one of aching, greedy lechery. Myra saw that the marks, the stripes upon his face, were ancient scars. She jumped to her feet, appalled and intimidated by the gross implications of his look.
“That man,” she said, grabbing Greg’s arm to turn him towards the door, “he shouldn’t be here. Who is he?”
Greg said, “I’ve no idea . . .” as the man slid backwards and away, out of sight down the corridor.
“Go after him please. Ask him his name, and what he’s doing here.”
Greg nodded assent, and stumbled off. Myra found she was shaking. She would have been outraged by the mere fact that the intruder was there, at her place of work, on her ground. But the sexual threat expressed on the man’s face had been so intense! She was sure he had been the person she had seen earlier, among the children in the Great Hall. Then, he had appeared to be acting violently, and for no reason she could discern. She wondered, for the first time, if he had been pursuing her. If so, why? And she wondered not just who, but what he was. He had looked, somehow, more or less than human, and so out of place, so alien. This impression was created not merely by his grotesque, mangled face and warped posture. It was something intrinsic to him. Something unknowable; something impenetrable.
She was so shaken, she decide she needed to return to her office to recover. She instructed the men working in the kitchen to remove all the fallen masonry, and fled. She bumped into Greg, returning. He too looked flustered. His face was crimson, engorged with blood.
Myra said, “Did you catch that – person?”
“I couldn’t get to him.” Greg was anxious; fearful even. “I ran after him, and he was just walking along as if he were out for a stroll, but I kept falling behind. Somehow, he – he kept a distance between us.” He rubbed the finger he had pricked against his overall, as though it itched intolerably. He was gasping for breath. “My heart,” he said, in explanation of his condition. “I have to be careful.”
“Go home,” Myra said. “You’re ill. Take the rest of the day off.”
She made her way swiftly through the now somewhat thinner crowds of children to her office. She sat for some minutes, composing herself, then remembered the dust that had fallen on her favourite skirt. She was surprised to see that some of it was still there. There were two marks, each of six separate dabs, spread like the palms and fingers of little hands, just above her knees. She moistened her thumb and dabbed one of the stains experimentally, to no effect. The marks seemed indelible. She thought crossly that one of the children in the crowd she had forced her way through when she had set out must have grabbed her skirt and left sticky finger marks that the dust had adhered to. She took off the skirt, put it to soak in the washroom sink, and changed into the jeans she normally wore when on-site, but had forgotten to put on earlier, in her hurry.
Back at her desk, she discovered the nasty little doll resting on her computer keyboard. She must have brought it with her, and put it there herself, but had no recollection of doing so. She picked it up and took it to the window to give it a closer scrutiny. She turned it face down for the first time and saw marks of some kind scratched into its back. An ornate design or numbers, perhaps? Or, more likely, letters? If so, they were unreadable. She put a sheet of paper over the doll’s back and carefully made an experimental rubbing with a soft pencil. As she finished this operation, the phone rang. She thrust the doll into a drawer in her desk and picked up the receiver. It was Ron, her foreman, calling from home. He wanted to know what had been found.
“Something and nothing,” Myra said. As she explained to Ron that the damage in the kitchen was slight, and what had been found in the wall was of interest but no great value, she twirled slowly round in her revolving chair and surveyed her office to make sure she was alone. She thought she heard some slight movement somewhere quite close to her and other soft sounds; whimpering whinings, like an animal in pain, or a child pleading. She wondered if one of the young visitors to the Hall had somehow followed her in. But the room seemed empty, apart, of course, from herself. Once, behind her, something scampered a few paces across the floor, or so it seemed. She turned quickly towards the source of the sound and saw – well – something and nothing. A blur, perhaps, that vanished in an instant. I’m tired, she thought, and under a lot of strain. My mind is playing tricks.
She spent the rest of the afternoon working on a drawing for the next stage of the renovations of the Hall. She found it hard to concentrate, because the feeling that she was not alone persisted. In the end, to divert herself, she looked through some of old reports and documents from the sixteenth century her researcher had provided to give her background information about the period. It was mostly irrelevant. She read of an insurrection in a local village when the crops failed and the people faced starvation, of a fire that had threatened to burn down the Hall, but that had been put out by a “myrical”, and of a legendary warlock who had retired to the Hall as part of a bargain struck between the Devil, himself, and Sir George, Master of the Hall when the latter man was young and foolish. The warlock, who was also a knight, was a “master of Divination and All Subtle Sorcery” who had made the Hall an “eville dwelling playce” by his presence. Evidently he was “a hayter of all womankinde and treated them right cruwly. As an example of his ill nature in this respect, the instance was given of his treatment of a young woman who had been his mistress. He “caused her to be haunted by the Gowst of his dead daughter, to the end of her days, though people said she was a poore, mad, innocent creature, who had done him no wrong, though he her much.” Why he had taken this drastic step was not made clear. Myra soon grew tired of the nonsensical story, and put the papers away.
And still felt she was not alone. She resisted the urge to look around, but became more and more uneasy as the day drew to a close, because she was worried that she could be breaking down when her work was at a crucial stage. The success of the project meant everything to her. It would be the making of her career.
She slept in the Hall during the week, in a tiny room annexed to her office. In bed, she found she could not sleep because her delusions, if that was what they were, continued to manifest themselves, and that in itself engendered deeper anxieties. In the end she took one of the sleeping pills she had been given when her family had been killed, and she dreamed all night of that event. Her daughter, then almost four, had pestered her husband for ice cream for hours one hot summer evening, and, in the end, he had given in to her. He took her with him in the car. On the return journey, they had been hit by a joyrider. When Myra got to the hospital, they were both dead. To her horror, in her own mind, Myra blamed her daughter. If only the child had not insisted that her father, tired
from a long day at work, had to take her, there and then! Myra felt guilty about blaming the child, and that guilt provided substance for her nightmares.
When she woke up she remained face down on her pillow for some time without moving, because she was immediately aware that someone was holding her hand. Her left hand, which was resting on the side of the bed above the quilt. It was a small hand that held hers. It clutched her fingers tight. It was cold and sticky and damp. When, at last, she slowly turned her head, and looked down along the length of her arm, there was no one there. The sensation that her hand was was in someone’s grasp weakened and vanished. She looked at her fingers and saw that were indeed moist. Then she realized she was soaked in sweat.
As a rule, after showering, she was used to making her own breakfast of coffee and muesli, but that morning she found she couldn’t eat. Instead she went straight through to her office, determined to lose herself in work. When she reached her desk, she found the drawer she had stuffed the wooden doll into on the previous day was open wide. Except for some papers and a calculator, it was empty. She went to the main door of her office and tried to open it, but it was locked, as it should have been. No one could have got in from outside, and taken the wretched little toy.
She spent ten minutes looking frantically for the doll, but found nothing except the piece of paper she’d used to make a rubbing of the marks she had found on the thing’s back. She studied it for the first time. There was writing there, crudely etched, but she found it surprisingly easy to read. There were two lines of words:
Thow I comme and go
She remanes with you.
So the doll was some kind of keepsake, she guessed. A gift from someone who had gone away, or was in the habit of doing so. A compensation for their absence. It seemed a rather pleasant sentiment, or so Myra thought at first. Later, when she’d given the words more consideration, and spoken them aloud to herself a number of times, it seemed to her that perhaps there was almost an element of threat in them; they took on a rather uncompromising tone, especially those in the second line . . .
The Best New Horror 7 Page 29
