We haven’t had any post since we came. Perhaps out here it comes much later than it did in London.
Heart thudding, I force myself up out of the chair and into the hall.
There is nothing on the floor — no envelope, no postcard.
I move towards the door, listening.
At the top there is a sturdy iron bolt. Slowly I reach up with my thumb, push hard, and slide it back.
Swallowing, I take the key from its hook. It scrapes as it turns in the lock.
With both hands, I pull the heavy wooden door open. The rafters under the porch roof are laced with cobwebs and the mossy flagstone floor is piled high with brown leaves blown in from over the creek. As the cold, clammy air seeps inside, a few of the leaves spill onto the carpet.
I shiver.
And catch my breath.
Tied on to the iron ring of the knocker, with red twine, is a bunch of bare twigs.
I gasp, don’t know what to do — don’t want to touch it, but don’t want to leave it hanging on the door.
My eyes sweep to the creek. The bridge is almost hidden by the curls of vapour rising from the water. When are Auntie Kath and Mimi coming back?
My heart thumping wildly, I snatch at the bundle of twigs, pull frantically at the red string, but it’s tied with a double knot.
Unnerved, I shut the door, go back to the kitchen, and, in a panic, open every drawer, searching for the scissors. In the end I grab the bread knife, go back, open the door, and clumsily saw at the knot until the twigs fall to the ground. At arm’s length I pick the bundle up by the cut string and toss it as far as I can out into the darkness, then slam the door shut and go back to the kitchen.
My tea has gone cold.
I am all fingers and thumbs, snap two matches trying to relight the gas under the kettle, notice something, and look up. A small piece of wallpaper is peeling off near the ceiling.
I can just imagine what Mr. Blezzard was thinking: nobody here, doesn’t matter if it’s shoddy, charge the bloke a fortune, move on to the next job. Or maybe he wanted to finish quickly because he didn’t like being in the house. What did he say? It’s put the wind up me, working down here, even in the daylight.
Please hurry back, Auntie Kath, Mimi.
Pete writes the sign on a piece of cardboard with a black crayon — PENNY FOR THE GUY — and off we go down the road, pushing the guy in the go-cart.
Outside Mrs. Aylott’s shop we group ourselves on the pavement under the street lamp. We know not to go outside Mrs. Wickerby’s at the post office because she’s likely to come out and shout at us for begging, most probably sweeping us off the pavement with her broomstick at the same time.
The sky is darkening. There are few people about.
“Should’ve come earlier,” Pete says.
We never usually get much. This year’s no different.
The guy’s arm flops out over the side of the go-cart. I don’t bother to tidy him up.
Definitely beginning to feel too old for this.
After a few minutes the shop bell tinkles and a woman comes out looking a bit flustered, with a fair-haired girl of about Terry’s age, eight or so. The girl looks in our direction, then whispers something in the woman’s ear. The woman grabs the girl by the arm and hurries her over the road to the post office.
The girl turns and looks back at us over her shoulder a couple of times as the woman marches her along.
It’s almost dark now, but in the light of the street lamp the girl looks vaguely familiar, though I can’t think where I could have seen her before.
Auntie Kath takes off her coat, slings it over the back of the chair, then starts to unpack the shopping. Mimi walks past the open door but doesn’t come into the kitchen.
“Got some fish fingers for dinner,” Auntie Kath says, her voice slightly brittle. She pushes the packet into the little icebox at the top of the fridge. “And sausages for tomorrow — oh, and a couple of fireworks for Bonfire Night, all they had left in the post office. There was these kids on the pavement doing Penny for the Guy, otherwise I’d have forgotten all about it. Mimi wanted sparklers. Lucky they had one last lot.”
The icebox door doesn’t close the first time. Auntie Kath slams it hard with her knuckles, then shuts the fridge with a grunt of irritation.
When she turns, she runs her fingers through the front of her hair. I notice a tight look about her eyes. She picks up her handbag, thumps it down on the table, and rummages noisily inside it for her cigarettes.
“What’s the matter, Auntie Kath?”
She sits down heavily. The chair legs squeal. “Flippin’ funny people round here,” she says.
“What funny people?” I sit down opposite and begin to move my books back into my bag.
“There was these two women we passed up at the main road,” she says, “the oddest-looking pair I ever saw — tall, they were, you know, and the old one had this pointy hood on. Honest, it was enough to give me the flaming doodahs. I said ‘Good evening,’ as you do, and she mumbled something, but I couldn’t quite catch it. And then …”
“Then what?”
“Then I carried on, and turned to say a word to Mimi — and realized she wasn’t next to me. I looked back, and there she was, stock-still in the middle of the blimmin’ path, staring at the two of them, and they was just standing there staring back, not ten feet away. I grabbed Mimi and muttered something like ‘Excuse me, we’re in a hurry,’ and dragged her off. I asked her what on earth she was thinking of, looking at peculiar people, but she wouldn’t say a blimmin’ thing and hasn’t opened her mouth since.”
I look towards the door, hear Mimi moving away down the hall.
“Never had this sort of trouble in London,” Auntie Kath goes on. “Didn’t have no weird people there.”
The low mist is clinging to the muddy grass.
I walk down the garden, halfway to the creek where the slow-moving, foamy water is draining out on the ebb tide, then turn back and look at the house.
I think about the bunch of twigs on the front door, about the two women.
The angles of the walls of Guerdon Hall, the window frames and timbers, are softening in the thickening grey air.
We were expecting Dad back, but he hasn’t come.
The house is in two distinct sections. The ivy has been stripped off the side we are now living in, but a few long trails of clinging stems are left behind and have been painted white, along with the rest of the walls and the wooden framing. To the right of the cobbled yard, the other side of the house is unchanged, the cracked timbers greyish-brown. The ancient leafy walls seem to have sunk even more deeply into the ground than before and appear now to be attached to the rest of the spruced-up building like an infected boil.
Inside, Auntie Ida’s kitchen is on the other side of the locked door at the end of the hall, but its dark, crooked window is along the wall there, set into the old brickwork.
If I screw up my eyes, I can almost see her in her headscarf behind the leaded diamond panes, filling the heavy cast-iron kettle from the tap over the stone sink, then moving back to set it down on top of the big black stove. For a silly moment, as she crosses in front of the table, I fancy she turns and looks at me, even gives me a little smile. I don’t try to be sensible and shake off the small lift this imagining gives me, a shred of comfort in this cheerless place.
My gaze moves down to the bottom of the wall. Below Auntie Ida’s kitchen, almost completely under the ground in the old, dark roots of the house, is the other, ancient kitchen, where the leper Cain Lankin and the witch Aphra Rushes killed Lady Ygurne, the wife of Sir Edmund Guerdon, and their baby son, John. How can I ever forget that room is there? Sometimes I visit it again in unsettling dreams, see the low arch over the fireplace, the thick, grimy chains and hooks hanging from the chimney.
A thread of wind blows across the grass. The mist shifts.
I feel a little shiver on the back of my neck.
I should have worn my gloves.
&nbs
p; A movement draws my eye to another window, upstairs. A pale moon face appears between our bedroom curtains, a real face — Mimi’s, her hair like a fair, hazy ring.
I wave.
She is looking in my direction, slowly raises her hand, then brings it down again. Her eyes shift. Are they fixed on something over my shoulder?
I know there is nothing behind me, just the creek and the empty marshes, but why is there a prickle on my skin, a tingle in the roots of my hair? What is Mimi looking at?
The child has Guerdon’s face, his hair, the lift of his chin. I saw him standing at that very casement, the day he and his men hounded Lankin away.
She sees me, sees me as I saw the spirit children — Matty the Boy and Dorcas Oates — as I saw the phantoms in the Bonesmen’s house: a glimmer, a change in the substance of the air, a faint likeness in a misted mirror.
She does not turn away.
She sees me because upon her soul is the mark of Cain. She was touched by him, taken by him to the fringes of the halfworld, and can never wholly return to this one.
Others did not escape him. Lankin hunted them, feasted on them for his sustenance.
All that stood in his way was a locked door and the rise of the tide — but a locked door can be opened, and the tide goes out… .
I pull up my collar, turn slightly, and see nothing at the edge of my eye but the water in the creek and the tufted reeds.
“Cora! Cora! Where are you?”
It’s Auntie Kath, sounding frantic.
I sprint across the grass, dash across the cobbled yard, through the door, and along to the kitchen.
“Auntie Kath. What’s wrong?”
“Oh, Cora, where were you? I couldn’t find you nowhere.”
“I only went outside for a minute, not to Timbuktu.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry, Cora.” She reaches for her cigarettes.
“Mimi’s here,” I say. “She’s upstairs.”
Auntie Kath is quiet for a moment. “Oh, you know Mimi,” she says. “Even when she’s around it’s a bit like you’re by yourself, if you get what I mean — no offence.”
She points to the wall. “Look.”
An entire sheet of wallpaper has rolled down the old plaster and has come to rest in graceful folds across the sink.
“The next one’s unsticking an’ all,” she says.
“I saw it beginning to go yesterday,” I say, gathering it together. “What shall I do with it?”
“I dunno — it’s too big for the bin,” she says, striking a match. “Chuck it in the passage. That blimmin’ Blezzard bloke must’ve used cheap paste. Crikey, there’s another bit coming down.” She puts her cigarette on the draining board, climbs onto a chair, and starts pulling the paper off the wall.
“Watch your elbow on the shelf,” I say, giving her a hand. “Do you think we should phone him — Mr. Blezzard? I remember the number from the side of his van.”
“Leave it for your dad to do,” she says. “Blezzard won’t take a blind bit of notice of a couple of females. That’s men’s business, that is.”
I go down the stone passage and bundle the paper under the sink in the downstairs toilet.
When I get back, Auntie Kath is standing in front of the window, blowing out a swirl of smoke. I sit down at the table.
“Look at that fog coming up,” she says, flicking a bit of ash into the sink.
I almost don’t want to ask it. “What … what do you think of this house, then?”
She doesn’t speak for a while, picks a bit of tobacco off her tongue. “It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, that’s all,” she says. “Your dad said a big house with central heating, a big garden.”
Auntie Kath was thinking Strand Drive.
She was so excited that first day, getting into the car in London, in her blue “I’m going up in the world” pillbox hat like Jackie Kennedy’s, swingback coat, and clicking shoes, waving at the neighbours peeping round the edges of their net curtains, while Dad stowed her huge case and blue-spotted vanity bag in the boot, looking over his shoulder all the time and telling her through gritted teeth to keep it quieter. Her mood began to dampen as we left the city behind, perked up a little as we slowed down to look at Glebe House through the wrought-iron gates, then lowered again as we drove straight past it, down the hill and along the Chase.
When we came to Guerdon Hall, Mimi and I trailed around after Dad as he proudly pointed out to Auntie Kath the things he’d had done in the house, showing off the new furniture and the radiators, ignoring the bleak expression on her face every time she looked out of a window over the wasted garden, the creek, and the empty marshes beyond.
“He said it’d be posh,” she says. “He said the lawyers had let him have some of the money to do this house up for you and Mimi. We’d all be posh and you was going to go to a posh school with a nice uniform an’ all. It wasn’t what I expected — this, you know. There’s nobody to talk to. And there’s, well …” Her voice trails off for a moment.
“What?”
Then she adds, “I — I don’t like it here, Cora.”
She puffs out some smoke and joins me at the table. “Your dad, um, wants to invite them people in the big house for dinner — them people up the hill, that headmaster bloke and his missus.”
“Crikey. The Treasures? Why?”
“Dunno. Must be bonkers. Wants me to cook something posh — you know, French or something — and have it in the other room over there” — she jerks her thumb behind her — “where he’s put that new teak table and all them uncomfy chairs.”
“Can you do French food?”
“Dunno. They’ve got them volervonts in that fancy grocer’s in Lokswood. I think you just warm them up in the oven. Or I suppose I could do a tin of soup, something a bit different. Heinz do a nice minestrone.”
“I think that’s Italian.”
“Is it?” Auntie Kath draws nervously on her cigarette. “See, I’d be no good at it. I’d be a nervous wreck. Don’t even know how to put the knives and forks out proper.”
She taps the ash into the ashtray. It’s got Take Courage running round the rim — must have been nicked from the Half Moon in Limehouse.
“It just ain’t my sort of place,” she says as another sheet of wallpaper over the door curls down over the lintel and flops onto the floor. “Oh, no, not another blimmin’ bit.”
“Dad’s going to be mad with Mr. Blezzard when he comes back.”
“Better get the stuff out the way so he can’t see it the moment he comes in,” says Auntie Kath. “Where shall we put it all?”
“I put the other lot in the toilet.”
“We can’t leave it there,” she says. “Don’t fancy climbing over a load of paper every time I need to go.”
“We could chuck it in the barn with the other rubbish,” I say. “Then Mr. Wragge can take it away when he comes. Fancy doing it together?”
Auntie Kath gets up quickly and puts a match to the gas under the kettle. “Tell you what,” she says, avoiding my eyes. “You go and I’ll make us a nice cuppa.”
“I can’t carry it on my own.”
“Oh, it’ll squash up all right.”
The freezing mist clings to my coat, its moisture crinkling my hair as I walk with a muffled crunch through the gravel round the house. The only other sound is the creak and rustle of the thick crumpled paper in my arms. It is an unsettling quietness, and the air is clammy, with a curious, unpleasant taste, so bitter it makes my eyes water.
The margins of the garden have faded to nothing. I stay near the walls until the wooden struts of the porch appear out of the slowly swirling grey, and I know I must turn towards the creek. As I narrow my eyes, squinting for the edge of the bridge, I tread more lightly on the stones; don’t want to make too much noise.
The mud under the bridge cracks.
I shiver, cross carefully, make my way over the old farmyard.
Peering over the mound of paper, I move hesitantly towards
the dark, gaping mouth of the barn entrance, where the huge door is hanging at an angle, one of its hinges broken off.
Tendrils of mist follow me in, turning to nothing a foot or so inside.
I run my eyes over the humdrum builders’ rubbish littering the dirty straw — discarded paint tins, broken-off pieces of kitchen tiles, the ends of carpet grippers, and offcuts of wallpaper — the brown and black squares in the bathroom, the awful zigzags in our bedroom — all waiting for Mr. Wragge to get rid of.
After tossing the bundle of paper by a stack of dusty logs under a grubby window in the far wall, I move back and my foot twists over something hard. I bend down and see pieces of broken earthenware half hidden in the straw, like the smashed remains of old jugs or bottles. I bend down and uncover an intact cup-shaped pottery base. Inside, fused together into a spiky lump, are long rusty iron nails and a tangle of what appears to be coarse brown wool. When I tip it slightly, the lump flops slowly in a thick brown sludge that coats the bottom. I put it to my nose. It smells nasty.
There are so many bits of earthenware on and under the straw, I fetch a long length of wallpaper to spread it all out on. The pieces are coloured a mixture of browns, greys, and brick-reds. I guess which bits belong together, and there seem to be the remains of seven, possibly eight earthenware bottles, with swollen, rounded bottoms and narrow necks. Some are nearly nine or so inches tall.
One smaller grey pot is almost complete, just missing its neck, which lies close by. The top is stopped up with a lump of hard wax tightly wrapped around with string.
I shake the pot over the paper. It makes a dull rattle, and a couple of bent rusty nails drop out with some pieces of sharp-edged green glass. Behind them, a tangle of brown fibres like chair stuffing sticks in the broken opening. I peer more closely. Swallow. It looks almost like matted human hair. I pull it away from the hole. A little hard yellow thing pops out, about half an inch across, shaped like a crescent moon.
Teasing it out onto my palm, I lift it to my eye.
And gasp.
It’s a fingernail clipping.
A rustle.
I look up. Something is at the entrance.
The mist curls around the doorpost like a thin white hand.
The Mark of Cain Page 7
