by Jack Lewis
Jeremiah’s eyes glinted. “Oh?”
I took the envelope out of my pocket. My heart began to beat and I felt a smile creep on my lips. There was something pretty damn good about knowing something Jeremiah didn’t. He tried to hide his surprise, but he was no actor. I pushed the envelope across the table.
“Someone slid it under my bedroom door last night.”
Jeremiah teased the paper out of the envelope. He unfolded it and read. It was a weathered piece of paper, with the words typed in black ink. When he had finished reading, he put it on the table and gave me a look of surprise, as if it was strange that I could ever know something he didn’t.
“This is the missing page from the death register,” he said.
I nodded. “And there was a young girl who was born in nineteen-ninety who died seven years later.”
“Someone in this town is playing games.”
“So what do we do now?”
Jeremiah sat back and folded his arms. He looked at me with his teacher expression. It was a similar look that I saw on Professor Higson’s face when I asked him questions about my dissertation. What was it about older guys and smug looks?
“You tell me,” said Jeremiah. “What’s our mantra?”
“Look for the bullshit.”
“Find the bullshit.”
“Whatever.”
“And there’s certainly some bullshit in this village.” He ran his finger along the birth certificate and stopped in the middle. “It lists the girl’s parents,” he said. “So let’s see if they still live in the village.”
11
The girl was called Emily Jenkins, and her parents were Peter and Sharon Jenkins. Their home was outside of town, far enough away that at night it was swamped in pure darkness. Luckily we had decided to visit during the day.
“Now remember,” said Jeremiah as we took brisk strides up the gravel path, “When we get in there I talk – “
“You talk, I listen. How could I forget.”
It was a cottage that looked like it had weathered several centuries. It seemed a lonely place, as though it had been banished from the village and forced to stand in solitude. Ivy spread over the face of the building like spores and the garden was full of weeds that strained out of the mud like hands digging for freedom. Beyond the house and in the distance were the woods. They were a mile away, but from the angle we stood they wrapped around the sides of the house as though they were about to choke it. There was a sign planted in the mud that read ‘For sale.’
“Maybe we should pretend to be buyers,” I said.
“Maybe you should talk less and listen more,” said Jeremiah.
He reached out and gave three sharp knocks on the door. The doorframe rattled as if it were shaking from the physical contact. Footsteps tapped toward us and the door opened with a creak. A man stood in the doorway with a questioning look on his face.
His skin was smooth but it was coloured as grey as his sparse hair. His eyes were large but seemed vacant, like glass eyes floating in water. It was as if different parts of his body aged at different speeds. He was a man who had turned old well before his time.
“Yes?” he said. There was no warmth to his voice, but nor was it cold. It just was.
More footsteps walked toward us and a woman joined him at the doorway.
“Who is it, Pete?”
The woman’s forehead was creased and her skin bore lines of age, though she had done her best to plaster over them. At first glance she seemed to be much older than the man, but I realised it was because of how she was dressed. She wore a cardigan that trailed down her arms and spilled onto her hands, and her blouse looked like it came from the over sixties section in Marks and Spencer’s. It was her eyes that gave her away. There was a youth in them that seemed to fight against the tide of age, as though they were rocks that the sea of time couldn’t move.
Pete looked at his wife. Again, no warmth in his eyes.
“Don’t know, they haven’t said a word yet.”
“Sorry to bother you,” said Jeremiah. “Wondered if we could use your toilet?”
Peter jerked his head back. “What?”
“We saw the sign,” I said, and jerked my thumb back to the ‘for sale’ sign. “We’re thinking of buying in this area and wondered if we could take a look around.”
The woman scratched behind her ears. “We’re not really ready for visitors…”
Peter gave his wife a sharp look. “If they’re interested in buying let them have a look.”
His tone was urgent, as if to say ‘they might buy this hovel from us’. There was desperation in his face.
Sharon and Peter stepped away from the doorway. Peter gave a smile that didn’t sit true on his face, and staring at it made me feel uneasy. I avoided looking at him as I squeezed passed him and walked into the house.
The air in the house was stale. It smelt sweaty and damp, like a towel left in a gym bag. Things were neat and seemed to be in their place, but little things betrayed a mess that hid under the surface. A cobweb hung from a smoke detector and drifted in the breeze. A fly lay dead on the windowsill. A circular red stain was ingrained in the carpet. It stuck out underneath a chair that had obviously been moved to hide it.
We sat on the Jenkins’s sofa. Pete went into the kitchen to make us a cup of tea while Sharon sat in front of us, her lips pursed as if she thought of what to say. I had some questions of my own. The death register named the girl as Emily Jenkins, and her parents were Peter and Sharon Jenkins. This couple had called each other by those names, so there was no doubt we were in the right house. But as I looked around me, I didn’t see anything that betrayed the existence of their child. No drawings from school, no photos to remember her by.
Maybe it had just been too painful. Sometimes your brain flinches at the things it sees, and bad memories, no matter how many years you put behind them, still prick you. Get enough of these and it’s like death by a thousand cuts, your brain bleeds away and you become hollow. Maybe this was the only way the Jenkins family could cope with their tragedy. I wondered what the hell Jeremiah and I were doing. Intruding on their grief just seemed wrong.
“So you two are buying around here?” said Sharon.
Jeremiah gave a slight nod. From the grumpy look on his face it was obvious he hated having to play along with the pretence I had made. Perhaps it was because he hadn’t thought of it himself. Tough luck, I thought.
“We are,” I said.
“How nice. And are you two…”
My head tipped back and nearly rolled off my neck. “Hell no,” I said.
“She’s my daughter,” said Jeremiah. “And she’s a little brat.”
Sharon gave a smile, the smallest one her pursed lips could carry.
The kitchen door across from us opened and Peter walked out with a tray. There were four cups, and in the centre steam rose from the spout of a teapot. It twisted into the air like cigarette smoke and then vanished against the ceiling.
Despite the inviting look of the tray of tea, there was something about the house that made me feel uneasy. I felt like I had to be constantly on my guard, as if things crawled behind me, shapes that sat in the darkest corners they could find and watched us.
“Take your coat off if you like,” said Peter.
“I would but I’ve got a cold.”
Peter leant forward. His eyebrows arched at an angle. “Are you saying our house is cold?”
Sharon put her hand on his arm. “The girl’s sick,” she said. “This man here is her father.”
Peter picked up the tea pot and poured steaming golden liquid into each cup. He pushed one toward me. I picked it up and looked inside, and I saw tiny molecules of dirt smeared into the china, like someone had done half a job washing the cups.
Peter leant back and folded his arms. “You’re nothing alike.”
“She wasn’t blessed with my looks,” said Jeremiah.
He looked at Sharon, having marked her as the most re
sponsive of the pair.
“Do you have children?” he asked.
The words seemed to cut into the air and then drop right out of it, as though hands had stretched out and knocked them away. A silence pressed over the room. The windows were only single-glazed and looked like a gust of wind could break them, but the sounds of the countryside didn’t break though. It was as though the chirps of the birds and bleating of the sheep didn’t want to enter this house. It was a place where emotions were smothered and happy thoughts died.
I thought that Jeremiah had gone in too heavy. He could have come up with something subtler to say, words that wouldn’t hang like a bad smell. I guessed that after their tragedy, the Jenkins family had spent countless hours being bombarded with questions about their daughter and how they coped without her. It was a wound that was still raw, and every time it started to heal someone else would come along and rip off the scab.
Peter leant forward and swallowed. His face was the colour of elephant hide, and his hair looked brittle enough to fall out of his scalp.
“We never had children,” he said.
12
Peter led us up carpeted stairs so narrow that it felt like one false step would send us all toppling down them. The further up we got, the more the damp smell grew. It was like there was a room up here full of sodden clothes and wet walls, a place that never really dried. I looked at the walls and saw framed paintings of the bleak countryside, the same style as the one in my room at the pub. The guy was definitely a local artist. From his paintings, I got the impression that what he saw in the village haunted him.
“Bathroom’s through here. No shower, but you could get someone to put one in.”
He pointed to his right. The bathroom was cramped, with barely enough room for the dirty bath and sink. There were wet footprints on the carpet. I was glad we weren’t really looking, because there was no way in hell I would buy this house. Just walking through it made me want to put on more layers and pull my hood over my face. It felt like someone watched me as I walked.
“Two bedrooms. We use the one on the end. There’s a walk-in wardrobe, but we don’t bother with it.”
“What about the other room?” asked Jeremiah.
Peter gave his wife a strange look. It lasted less than a second, short enough that I wondered if I had actually seen it. Jeremiah prodded my side with his finger. I looked at him, and he arched his eyebrows toward the other bedroom.
“Could we take a look at the spare room?” I said.
Peter stopped. “Don’t you want to see the master bedroom?”
“Well the spare room would be mine, so I’m more interested in that. Plus sometimes my … cousin will come up to stay, so I want to see if it would be big enough for us to share.”
Wow, I could really bullshit when I put my mind to it.
Sharon stood against a dresser next to the landing wall. She leant back and knocked a vase. It tipped and threatened to fall, but she reached out and steadied it.
“How old’s your cousin?” she said.
I knew what I had to say, but I didn’t want to say it. The couple obviously had a reason for hiding their truth. Jeremiah prodded me again, this time so hard his finger dug in my side. I winced and stepped back.
“Watch it,” I said.
“Sorry love,” said Jeremiah. He smiled at Sharon. “I’m a clumsy bastard.”
I looked at Sharon. “My cousin is seven,” I said.
There was a silence in the landing. The only sound was the whistling of the wind as it blew through the attic above us. It sounded like an enormous cavity that sucked in the wind and threw it around. I looked at the ceiling and saw the entryway, but it had been boarded up and painted over, as if someone had tried to hide it.
Pete followed my eyes and saw what I looked at. He flinched, and then his face straightened.
“This house is no place for children,” he said.
“What do you mean by that?” said Jeremiah.
Peter’s face looked stern, and his cheeks flushed red. Sharon answered for him.
“It’s not really big enough” she said, her words not sounding completely true.
I coughed, and the back of my throat burned. “Not to intrude, but do we think we could take a look round on our own? Get a feel for the place?”
Sharon looked at Peter as if asking permission to accept. He looked up and his eyes glazed in thought. He grabbed his wife’s arm and pointed her toward the stairs.
“We’ll be downstairs,” he said. Then, trying to add warmth to his tone but failing, he added: “We’ll be waiting.”
They turned and walked down the stairs. As their footsteps trailed away and then sounded on the carpet downstairs, Jeremiah walked to the spare room doorway. I stopped before following him. For some reason, I wanted to delay for every second before entering the room.
“Did you see the attic hatch?” I said, and pointed at the ceiling.
He looked up. “Of course. Did you think you saw something I didn’t?”
“Jesus. Do you ever get tired of this?”
If he heard me speak, he didn’t show it. “Someone’s done a rough job covering it up.”
With that he pushed open the spare room door and stepped inside. I stayed in the landing. The room was dark and looked featureless from here, and the doorway seemed like an enormous wide-open mouth. I felt a sensation in my chest, as if something were pushing me away. It felt like my body was telling me not to enter the room.
Pull yourself together, I thought.
I followed Jeremiah into the room. As soon as I stepped inside I felt a deep chill, as if my bones were freezing and would start to crack if I stayed too long. The walls and ceiling were cloaked in shadow, and it was so chilly that I thought I saw icicles hanging from the roof. It was an all-consuming cold, like the onset of winter.
Jeremiah walked over to the window, reached for it and pulled it shut.
“Not ones for home comforts, are they?” he said.
I put my hand on the wall next to the door and felt for the light switch. I pressed it in, but the lightbulb above stayed dead. It swung softly from a cord that stretched out from the ceiling.
This was a room I shouldn’t be in, I decided. I knew instantly it had been the girl’s room, and it felt like I was intruding on something private. I walked over to the window and looked out. From here I could see the terrible woods. It gave me an unspoiled view of the darkened tree trunks and spindly branches that hid their secrets within.
How far into the woods had the witches been hanged, I wondered? Would the townsfolk want to venture too far into the labyrinth? This house must have been here when the witch trials happened. Had the occupants back then heard the women’s screams as they were murdered?
“Let’s get to work,” said Jeremiah.
He opened a wardrobe and poked around in it.
“What exactly are we looking for?” I said.
He turned his head toward me. “I honestly don’t know. Something. Anything that might belong to the girl. They’re hiding something from us.”
“Maybe they have a right to do that. It’s not for us to poke around.”
“Just check the bed. Try and pull it away, something might be behind it.”
I walked over to the bed. It was a single-sized frame, certainly small enough for a kid to sleep in. I took hold of the headboard and pulled it back, but I couldn’t see anything in the crevice between the bed and the wall. With every step I took and everything I touched in this room, a feeling of dread built up in my chest. The back of my neck itched as if eyes burnt holes in my skin.
Jeremiah rifled through the wardrobe. I heard the clang of metal as he pushed back coat hangers, and a thud as he lifted a shelf and let it drop. We shouldn’t be here, I thought. I lifted the mattress, my arms straining with the weight. When I didn’t see anything underneath, I let it fall. I had the feeling that something was hidden in the room, but I didn’t know which direction to look. It was like my body was
a compass drawn to whatever it was, but something span the dial so that the reading changed constantly.
Footsteps sounded on the floorboards as someone walked into the room. I span round and felt my face go red like a naughty school child. Peter stood in the doorway, his arms crossed. He looked at Jeremiah with his head in the open wardrobe, and grimaced.
“I think it’s time you left,” he said.
Peter walked down the stairway first, his angry steps pounding on the carpet. Jeremiah walked behind me, and he leaned toward me and whispered into my ear.
