by Chris Ward
He said, ‘I’ll get you to talk girl, I’ll make you talk. Give me five minutes. And if you won’t . . . If you won’t I’ll find a use for your silence, I’m telling you.’
Then he grabbed my hand and before I could flinch away he pushed it against his groin. I felt a hardness there, unnatural, desperate, and I saw the carnal desire in his eyes. He wanted me so badly. Perhaps to prove something to his friends, perhaps because I symbolize taboo, something they cannot have, and therefore they want more than ever.
Whatever the answer, he frightened me, and it took all of my nerve to avoid just what he had said and cry out for father, but I resisted and pulled my hand away. Needless to say, I ran then, but not before raking his face with my nails. I ran back to the house, dropped my things down on the table and went up to my room. I locked myself in then cried into my pillow for what felt like hours. I felt shocked, dirty and humiliated.
This is how they see me, the boys from the village. They all want me for the same reason, and because of that I cannot find anything attractive in any of them.
But Uncle Red is different. He wants nothing from me, just to sit and talk, to be my . . . my friend. I know he is not my real uncle, and I’m afraid I let myself get carried away. Yesterday, as he sat on the end of my bed, talking to me about China, about when he visited as a young man, about the places he had seen, the cities, the people, Shanghai, the Great Wall . . . I reached forward and touched his face. At first he flinched, then he frowned, but he didn’t move away. He watched me as I leaned in and kissed him softly on the cheek.
I don’t know what I meant to achieve, but I pulled away then, feeling uncertain; for the first time in my life had I talked I would have had nothing to say, full of the buzz of emotion that ran through me like tiny mice in my veins.
And then he reached up and touched my face with his hand. I froze, felt warmth emanate from my skin, embarrassment, nervousness, and he pulled me forward and kissed my lips. At first I felt like a rabbit caught in headlights, then I managed to relax and open my mouth a little. His mouth felt warm, sweet, and I loved it. I put a hand on his neck and pulled him closer.
We kissed for a few seconds but it felt like only an instant later when he pulled away from me, gave me a smile and went to stand up. He promised to come and see me again soon, then put a finger to his lips, kissed it and placed it on mine. My heart seemed to burst out of my chest and I had to stop myself from pulling him back down to me.
He left me then, closed the door softly behind him, and I heard his boots retreat down the hall. Once, I heard his stride break and he stopped for a second before continuing again. He had thought about coming back, I knew, had thought about coming back to me right then. I know he wants me, only his apprehension holds him back.
Soon, though. I’m twenty-two years old, I’m no child. Whatever they might think of me, I’m still a woman. And I still need the same things that other women need.
For the rest of the evening I buzzed with happiness. I have never wanted to speak to someone so much as I did then. But Mother’s words rang heavy on my mind, and I resisted. I know what happened to her. I know about the corruption that ruined her soul, how it broke and deformed her body, made her desperate, pitiful, eventually causing her death.
(I know Dad killed her. She told me. But she told me too how it wasn’t his fault, how it had all been hers, all hers, that he had done what he had done because he had no choice, had only done it to protect Matthew and myself. She loves him still, so much, enough to keep her here I think, and she doesn’t want me to hate him the way Matthew did.)
I couldn’t tell Dad about Uncle, and I don’t know anyone else. I wanted to tell Mother though, so I went out into the forest looking for her. I wandered around for hours, calling her to me, calling her name, but she never appeared.
I had the terrible thought that I might have made her lost to me by kissing Red, but she has never, ever said anything about that. And I could sense her out there somewhere, close perhaps, but hiding. I have a bond with her, I can feel her, feel her when she is nearby, when she is watching me.
And she was nearby, but for some reason of her own she stayed hidden to me.
I don’t know why. Jealousy? Because I have found something she no longer has?
2
Fingers as damp as the soil pulled boards away from the chapel entrance. He found the top few to be nailed tight, but closer to the ground the boards were rotten and some were loose, already pried away by some past fingers and then replaced as though to hide a secret entrance. They extended just high enough for someone to crawl through on hands and knees, someone small, a girl perhaps.
Bethany.
Darkness had crept up on him, the sky above a grey, amorphous shape that because of the thick fog seemed to begin at a point just above the tops of the trees.
Thank God for the light then.
No: thank them.
A pale, creamy glow encircled him, made him look like a child born inside a halo. He didn’t dare look behind him; had seen them for too long already for his mind to comprehend without embracing madness. But even without looking he could feel them inside him, their minds mixing with his, sending images zipping through him even as they urged him forward, towards what they wanted him to find.
He pulled back the last of the boards, exposing the entrance. No need to crawl, he could walk through now, into this dark, tumbledown space.
Go on.
He stumbled on, feeling them breathe inside him, images flashing through his head like a private slide show, except that he knew they saw them too. They worked the projector, they flashed up the images they wanted him to see, and in some way he could not understand, he knew the words, the notes to these images, lay in here somewhere.
Come on. Time is short. We don’t have long.
He felt them behind him, radiant. He didn’t dare look; whatever they were, he had seen enough. He knew they could not be real, they could not possibly exist as they did; surely they were no more than a figment of his fragile imagination. Yet somehow they defied all the logic his mind had built for him over the years, in the years since –
--( she came for him )–
– she died at his father’s hands, all the logic and the secular belongings which told him that this–could–not–be–possible.
Yet, it was. And whether he were alive or dead or lost in the limbo between the two, nothing could deny that he was here, in some shape or form, and he had no option but to oblige and adhere to what they asked of him.
The chapel was nothing like he had ever imagined. There were no pews, for one thing, no altar, font, pulpit, nothing he thought of when he imagined religious buildings. Only an empty room with a partially collapsed ceiling that looked as though God had once got angry and punched one giant divine fist down through the roof, leaving a splintered hole through which a slim birch tree now grew, its canopy of branches helping to keep out the rain. To his left he saw nothing but a damp, crumbly wall, to his right the same, except there was a window space in this one, boarded up as the entrance had been.
And up ahead, a raised platform of cobbled stones, a stage from which sermons would have taken place before an enraptured (or enraged) congregation. Up there, where they wanted him to go. Up towards the front. Where the priest would have stood.
Little more than a primitive cattle shed, the chapel had rested, buried by weeds, on his father’s land for perhaps as long as the land had been owned, long before his father’s house and gardens, since the present trees were young and amidst the towering boughs of their long-rotted parents. The Norman church stood down in the village, so maybe this chapel pre-dated it, escaping destruction by the Norman armies for reasons unknown. Maybe it had been too small, too insignificant to bother with. He would probably never know.
His father clearly revered the place, hence his mother’s grave and the scattering of his sister’s ashes here.
His father had wanted seclusion. A private place, away from prying eyes,
where his wife, and now daughter, could rest without threat from the suspicious people of the village. The people who had whispered in corners about his sick wife and mute daughter had in their small town bigotry labeled the Cassidy women as freaks and outcasts even before their deaths, and would condemn their place in the town cemetery alongside their neighbours to an eternity of sideways glances and snarky remarks. Ian wouldn’t have wanted that. So here, amidst the forest and with the crumbling walls of their private chapel for company, he had hidden them.
Matthew crawled towards the back, ducking under vines and the prickly branches of the birch that tried to claw him every time the wind gusted. He pushed brambles aside and pulled nettles out of the cobblestone floor without noticing the stings, working his way towards the back wall, following their directions, going where they wanted him to go.
He was almost there.
He climbed around a fallen concrete lintel and up onto the raised platform, crawling over the wet stone towards a place which now seemed to shine out of the darkness, mirroring the light which still shone over his shoulders, brighter than ever. He could see the place at the foot of the back wall, tucked into the left corner from where the light seemed to radiate, a grainy, punctured glow that looked as though someone had hidden a spotlight behind thin concrete blocks which prevented it from blinding him with its brightness. He knew in the sane part of his mind that no light could come from there, that they were nothing but thousand–year–old stones packed on top of one another, but he knew it was no more unlikely than the light that still glowed from behind him, and the voices that talked in his head. All wrong, all impossible, but somehow, all there.
He lurched suddenly as a horrific image flashed in his mind like a neon sign and then was gone, and he slipped to the ground, bruising his leg on hard, uneven stone. Something about his mother, about why she got ill. A collage of images all interlinked with each other that if true made him sick to the stomach. This was what they wanted him to find. In a way he could barely understand, he had discovered the ability to connect with them, and they cannoned their knowledge into his thoughts, bombarding him with images of their past, of a past he had been part of before running away.
A past corrupted, that they now wanted put right.
‘That’s why you’re here,’ he whispered, crawling towards the light at the foot of the wall. ‘Whatever you are, that’s what you want.’ Again, images flashed in his mind, the anger they caused making him cry out and slam a fist against the damp stone.
Brief, flitting images. Pieces of a puzzle, random, scattered pieces. And he knew now, that the complete picture was here. Ahead of him. Beyond the flag stones of the wall.
His fingers reached out, guided by the light from behind and the voices that rose to a cacophony in his mind. It did not surprise Matt to find the stones to be loose.
He tore away part of his T–shirt to use to grip the damp, moss-covered stones, and with a grunt, he pulled. The first resisted for a second, the stone and the moss around it swollen by the water, then slid free. The others followed easily, and Matt tossed them away behind him. With his heart beating nearly hard enough to bruise his chest, he peered into the ten-inch space at the foot of the wall.
A keep-safe compartment, a hiding place for a small steel biscuit tin, tucked away near the back. His fingers caught it and he pulled it out.
Trepidation rose in him, thoughts of Pandora’s Box and the evil secrets within, but the voices implored him to open it, open it. In here it lay, what they had brought him here for.
The answer to the puzzle.
The answer to everything.
He swallowed down his fear, took hold of the lid and pried it off.
For a moment the light seemed to vanish as though they had flinched back from whatever the tin held, and it was like peering into darkness, nothing revealed inside except a black, endless void. Then the light returned – though tentative, he felt – and he saw what the tin held clearly for the first time.
Notebooks.
Frowning, he pulled out the little pile of books, seven in total, most of them thin, no more than twenty or thirty pages. The true understanding of what they were took a moment to register, then as the voices screamed in his head he realised he had already known, long before he came here, long before his mind had failed him and two spirits (ghosts angels demons wraiths whatever) had led him to this collapsed and overgrown place. Back home as a child, he had known.
She’d had a voice after all. Of course she had. It was just a little different to his own.
Feeling a trepidation he had never felt before, he held the first book up into the light and read the neat inscription on the front, written in pencil and in a young girl’s handwriting.
Bethany’s Diary.
In here lay the answers to his entire life. The keys to his past, the keys to Bethany’s death and the understanding of everything he had seen and felt since he had come back here, an explanation for the horrible images that even now left a bloodstained residue on his mind.
He could almost feel the power emanating from the books.
The light at his shoulder flickered but held strong. The diaries held answers for them too, answers which he had no choice but to reveal; there was no option to throw these away and run, run out of this place as he had before, to leave it all behind him.
He had run a million miles into oblivion to escape his past, but after fourteen years he had come right back around.
The voices reached fever pitch. Time, whatever that meant, was short.
He flicked open the first book, slightly damp, dog–eared and yellowed around the edges. The light behind suddenly bloomed to illuminate the handwriting on the page, single-spaced, pencil-written, a little difficult to read but unmistakably that of a child. Bethany’s beginnings. He glanced quickly back at the other books. A couple of the more recent ones had dates written on the front, now in pen, now in a neat, elegant script. They led right up to the month of her death.
Without giving himself a chance to question the ethics of reading his sister’s diaries (after all, she seemed to be giving her blessing), Matthew began to read.
He read fast, flicking over the pages almost too quick for the words as they rushed to lay themselves out ahead of him, aware at last of what the images in his mind meant, accompanying the books like a film with subtitles. He finished one book then carried straight on to the next, and gradually the small pile diminished.
He paid no heed to the damage being done to his own sanity as the secrets of his family were revealed, how they left his semblance of a new life in tatters; everything was lost to him and could never be found until he had the answers, until he had fulfilled this part of his destiny that God and whomever else had long ago drawn up. He rocked back on his haunches, a book held open in one hand and with the two beings (that really were really were – really were – there) hovering just over his shoulder, he let his family’s secrets pour from the pages up into his eyes.
Beyond the crumbling walls of the little chapel, the wind had got up and the rain had started to hammer down, battering the ground like bullets fired by Heaven’s artillery in the beginning of a war against Earth. The trees shook back and forth, their branches creaking and whining like frightened animals lost in the dark, while up on the moors an injured woman whom Matt would have recognized hobbled towards a cottage nestled into a hollow near to a raging, overflowing river. Inside the cottage . . . well, Matthew and also the wet, hurt woman would know soon enough.
But outside was lost to him. Inside the chapel were only Matthew and the voices in his head.
And the books.
3
‘Drive faster, Ian.’
‘I can’t drive any faster, come on, you can see the fog –’
‘Drive faster.’
Red’s voice growled like the engine, and despite himself Ian pressed down the accelerator a little more than he wanted to. Red had assumed a whole new persona since they had decided what to do, and it had b
egun to slip out of control. Red wanted revenge; he wanted blood, and Ian was beginning to wonder if Red cared about whose he spilt first.
He had never seen his friend like this. Red, normally so calm, was on the verge of losing control, like a gas main set to blow.
Red lived on the edge of the village, his whole life unmarried, in a house left to him by his aunt, who had raised him after his parents, as far as Ian knew, had died when he was very young. A farming accident, Red had always told him, though details had remained vague, and Ian had often wondered if there was more. Perhaps he had been abandoned, or adopted, and couldn’t face the truth. Whatever the real reason, it had made Red attach himself to the Cassidys as though they were a surrogate family, striving to be part of something he had never had for himself.
On more than one occasion he had proved himself as worthy as any brother. He had been the strength Ian needed in the aftermath of Gabrielle’s death and Matthew’s departure, the person who had kept Ian sane during those dark days. When Ian had been at his lowest ebb, Red had been everything. He had been a rock Ian had leant on, a walking cane, a safety belt. Red’s friendship had been the one thing that had stopped Ian following his wife by his own hand. Red’s friendship had kept him alive.
So why did he feel such a sudden antagonism towards his friend? From nowhere Ian felt a surge of anger and hatred, and an assurance that what Red intended to do was wholly wrong. Yet he didn’t understand his feelings. If the Meredith sisters had stolen Red and Bethany’s baby, then surely they deserved everything coming to them, and worse?
