While You Sleep

by Stephanie Merritt

  ‘There’s a corkscrew in that drawer under the toaster. I’m going to take a shower.’ She tucked her sketchbook under her arm on the way out.

  ‘Great. I can chop some vegetables if you like?’ Edward said, puppyishly eager. Zoe looked at him. Did he assume dinner included sex, or was it really the prospect of her company making him glow with pleasure? She had no idea what assumptions boys of his generation made any more, though Edward did not strike her as brimming with sexual swagger. Perhaps he was genuinely excited by the thought of an evening away from that spinstery little cottage. She glanced around the kitchen; with the lights on and food bubbling on the stove it would be quite cheerful in here once dusk fell. As long as they kept the conversation safely away from personal confessions, it might be fun to have a guest. And she would send him home right after dinner, she told herself, so there could be no misunderstanding.

  Upstairs, a door slammed, though there was no wind.

  She was applying a quick dash of make-up in her bathroom mirror – half-amused, half-embarrassed by this capitulation to vanity – when she heard an almighty crash from downstairs, as if something had fallen from a height. Pulling on a hoodie over her bra and jeans, her feet bare and her hair wrapped in a towel, she raced down to collide with Edward rushing out of the kitchen, a potato peeler in his hand, his eyes also wide with alarm.

  ‘Was that you?’ she whispered. He shook his head as his eyes flicked towards the corridor that led off the entrance hall. Together they waited, breath held, until it came a second time: a sudden thump and scuffle, the unmistakable sound of a foreign presence. Zoe felt the damp hairs at her nape grow cold. Edward gestured towards a door that led to the drawing room at the north end of the house, a room she had hardly set foot in; on the far side large French windows faced the sea and opened on to the veranda, but it was a cold room, where grey light marbled the walls in wavering reflections. The sound echoed again behind the closed door and she clutched at Edward’s arm. Someone was in there; of that there could be no doubt. He took a step closer; she wanted to call him back, to wait at least until he had a proper knife from the kitchen, or a poker from the range, but his hand was already on the handle. She tensed as he pushed open the door, one arm stretched out behind him to keep her back, a protective gesture, though she stuck close, peering over his shoulder, terrified of finding an intruder while half-hoping for it, feeling that she would be vindicated then for the night noises and that recurring sense of a presence in the house.

  The room stood empty, its walls washed with slanting amber light as the late afternoon sun dropped towards the sea. The only sign of commotion was a scattering of soot and two fallen bricks around the hearth. Edward motioned to her to stay put as he picked his way to the fireplace; there came another flurry of movement, a frantic scrabbling followed by a cascade of dust and more soot; they both jumped back, startled, and watched as a blackened bird tumbled shrieking out of the chimney and flapped around on the rug.

  Zoe laughed aloud with relief, her heart thudding. ‘Jesus. He was lucky I hadn’t lit a fire.’

  ‘Not so lucky.’ Edward crouched closer to the creature as it lurched unevenly in circles. It sounded as if it were screaming. ‘I think it’s broken its wing. It’s only a juvenile, look.’ He reached out a hand towards the gull; its hooked beak snapped at the air and he withdrew it in haste.

  ‘Is there an animal rescue place we could take it to?’ Zoe eyed the bird doubtfully; juvenile or not, that beak looked vicious. She hoped he would offer to take it outside for her.

  He glanced at his watch. ‘There’s a bird sanctuary with a volunteer centre on the other side of the island, but they’ll have gone home by now.’ He looked down at the gull thrashing soot across the rug. ‘The kindest thing would be to put it out of its misery.’

  Zoe shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t know how. Do you?’

  She saw the muscles in his jaw tense. ‘Not really. I mean, in theory. But I’ve never done it.’

  ‘We can’t leave it there.’

  He looked at her from under his lashes, seeming to weigh up the possibilities. The reflections on his glasses hid his eyes.

  ‘OK. Do you have an old cloth or something like that?’

  ‘Use this.’ She pulled the towel from her hair and handed it to him. Reluctantly, he threw it over the protesting bird and tried to bundle it up, swearing as its beak scythed from side to side, catching his forearm. Even his cursing sounded polite, Zoe thought. She hovered, wanting to look useful without having to touch the gull, whose movements were beginning to flag as its cries grew wilder.

  ‘Open the door.’ Edward nodded towards the French windows as he scooped up the towel into his arms in one swift movement, scattering feathers over the floor.

  Zoe sprang ahead of him, fumbling with the lock, flinging the door wide and jumping back as he ducked past, hunched over his bundle, struggling to contain it. The bird’s noises became pitiful. Hurry and make it stop, she thought, with a stab of guilt. She watched as he carried it down the steps and out of sight around the side of the house, then turned back into the room, pulling the door to behind her in the hope of shutting out the sound. What would he do, she wondered – break its neck? Smash its head with a stone? She flinched at the image. He didn’t look like the kind of boy who’d ever had blood on his hands; unlike Dan, with his family’s near-religious devotion to the great outdoors, at least as imagined by middle-class city dwellers with a fetish for playing at woodsmen a few weeks of the year.

  She glanced towards the window. Dan would have had no trouble seeing to the injured gull. He’d have been back in two minutes, wiping his hands on his jeans and grinning. He’d probably have turned it into burgers and have them on the grill by now, she thought, with a twist of her mouth.

  She knelt by the hearth and began picking up the feathers, one by one, collecting them in the palm of her hand. Her eyes strayed to the fallen bricks in the fireplace. Curious, she pushed herself to her feet and crouched to look up the chimney. She ought to warn Mick; if one bird’s panicked struggle could dislodge loose masonry, maybe the entire stack was unstable and the first winter storm would bring the whole lot crashing down. Holding this thought at bay, she stooped in the wide fireplace and reached up into the dark, trying to judge whether the rest of the fabric seemed liable to crumble. The inside of the chimney felt solid enough. As she patted along the wall, as high as she could stretch, she reached a gap where the bricks must have come out; inside it, her fingers met something that felt like skin. She yelped and jumped back, loosing another shower of soot. With a deep breath, she told herself not to be stupid and reached in again. This time her hand closed over an object, soft and grainy to the touch. She withdrew it into the light and exhaled slowly through pursed lips as she turned it over between her hands in a puff of dust and grit. A rectangular package, wrapped in treated leather. There was no doubt that it had been there for decades; a century or more, perhaps. Her throat clenched; with clumsy fingers she scrabbled at the knots in the leather thongs binding it, and opened the wrapping to reveal an old book, mottled with damp, its corners foxed and pages crinkled at the edges. She was shaking so hard she could barely open it, her fingers made clumsy by cold and haste. As she moved to turn the first page, she felt a breath on her neck, her skin softly prickling at the presence of someone close behind her, looking over her shoulder at the book.

  ‘Edward?’ She half-turned, but there was only a sudden draught from the hallway that sounded like laughter, and the room was empty, as she had known it would be. She looked up to see Edward enter from the other end, closing the French doors behind him. His face was bone-pale; the back of his left hand was speckled with blood, though he seemed not to have noticed.

  ‘I think that might be one of the most horrible things I’ve ever done,’ he said, not looking at her. He frowned and his eyes widened, as if only now realising the significance of it. ‘I know it was only a gull, but …’ He lifted his head and caught her eye with a quick, guilt
y smile, trying to affect nonchalance. ‘Well, I suppose I saved a life and took a life today. There’s probably karma in that somewhere.’

  ‘And you only came to bring my scarf.’

  ‘I know. And I left it in the car. Here, you’ve got soot …’ He took a step closer and reached out towards her face as if to brush a smudge away, but stopped abruptly before he touched her. ‘I should probably wash my hands. Just there.’ A shy dip of his head, indicating her cheek with his finger. Zoe lifted a hand automatically, her eyes fixed on his; the back of her knuckles brushed the spot and he laughed.

  ‘You’ve made it worse now.’

  ‘You’ve got blood on you.’ She pointed.

  He looked down at his hand. ‘Poor bastard nipped me. I think he could tell I didn’t know what I was doing.’ He fell silent, then his gaze alighted on the book she was holding. ‘What’s that?’

  A fierce thrill of possession rushed through her; she clutched the book to her chest, unwilling to share it.

  ‘I don’t know. It was hidden inside the chimney, where the bricks fell out. I haven’t looked at it yet. It’s old, though.’

  He moved towards her, his face rapt, his attention all on the book. ‘My God. That could be valuable – we should show it to Charles. Don’t open it till you’ve washed your hands.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to.’ Don’t talk to me as if I’m one of your kids, she almost added, irritation stabbing at her. She gripped the book tighter. It was hers; she had found it, and she wanted to examine it in private, at leisure, not hand it over to him or Charles or any other man. Because – with a quickening of the blood – she had guessed what it might be, and hardly dared hope she was right. She had been meant to find it, she knew that with a tug of certainty. It had waited all this time for her. She folded the protective wrapper around it again and placed it on a chair by the door. ‘Let’s eat first.’

  He followed her meekly to the kitchen, where she saw that he had peeled all the potatoes and carrots and set the chopping boards out neatly on the table.

  ‘I didn’t know what you wanted to do with the chicken,’ he said as she soaped the soot from her hands, his tone eager to please once more. She reached for the bottle of wine.

  ‘First things first.’

  They had started on the second bottle by the time they finished dinner and moved outside to smoke companionably on the veranda with the dark beach stretching out before them, white frills of waves visible at its furthest edge.

  ‘So you’ve really not heard a thing?’ Edward said. Violet plumes drifted upwards from his lips as he leaned over the wooden rail, his back to her, eyes on the sea. He wore the blanket from her bed wrapped around his shoulders.

  On her bench in the shelter of the wall, Zoe huddled into the sheepskin collar of her jacket. ‘Someone else asked me the same question today. That boy you mentioned – Robbie. He was in the bookshop. He knew I was living here, he started to ask me if I’d heard anything, but we were interrupted. I don’t know if he meant in the sense of noises or rumours.’

  ‘Robbie Logan. Yes, he’s got reason to be interested in this place. But then all the kids were obsessed with it, even before Iain disappeared. Nothing more exciting than a ruined haunted house. There’s a knowing nod too, the way the older folk tell it. The young men used to try and coax their girlfriends out here for trysts, back in the day when people had to be coy about all that – rumour had it that the McBride house would always get reluctant girls in the mood.’ He glanced up and caught her eye before darting his gaze away. ‘So for a couple of young boys, the temptation must have been …’ He let the thought hang between them, unfinished.

  ‘And then one of them vanishes out here. There’s no way that Robbie kid doesn’t know what happened.’

  Edward shrugged. ‘He’s kept it to himself for a year, if he does. That’s remarkable self-control for an eleven-year-old.’

  ‘Charles thinks he’s scared.’

  ‘That goes without saying. I see Robbie every day in the classroom and it’s clear he’s shutting everyone out. But scared of what?’ He held his hands up, empty.

  ‘Being found out?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Edward bent to stub his cigarette against the boards and pocketed the butt. His silence seemed to imply a contradiction.

  ‘Well, what else? You don’t actually believe this place is cursed, surely?’ She was proud of the bravado she put into her voice, though she half-glanced over her shoulder at the kitchen window as she said it.

  He turned to look at her. ‘Of course not. But one thing was odd. Iain – the boy who disappeared – his phone was never found. For a long time the police tried to trace it and there was nothing.’

  ‘That would make sense if he went over the cliff with it.’

  ‘But he didn’t, apparently. Over the past year the police have turned up at intervals from the mainland, searching for it. A signal appears intermittently and then vanishes for weeks on end, coming from the island, but always in a slightly different place.’

  ‘Whoa. So they think someone here has it?’

  ‘It’s the only explanation. And whoever it is switches it on sometimes. But why?’

  ‘Maybe there’s something on it they need to save. Messages, photos – some kind of evidence.’

  ‘That’s what the police are hoping for, I gather. It’s weird though, isn’t it? If Robbie found it, and there was anything on the phone that compromised him, you’d think he’d have destroyed it right away. Besides, he’s been questioned repeatedly and his house searched, and they’ve found nothing.’

  ‘He might be smarter than they give him credit for.’ She pictured the flat-faced boy with his shifty gaze.

  ‘Hm.’ Edward looked unconvinced. ‘He’s always stuck to this story that he stayed behind on the beach, and he thought whatever Iain saw in the house made him scream and run away up to the cliff path. He maintains he didn’t see what happened after that. But if Robbie was telling the truth, maybe that’s why he kept the phone. Iain could have taken a picture of whatever it was before he dropped it.’

  ‘Then surely Robbie would have given it to the police, to prove his innocence?’

  Edward shrugged. ‘Depends what it was that Iain saw. Ten-year-old children don’t always think that logically.’

  His assumed tone of expertise needled her; she would have liked to assert her superior knowledge of the ways of ten-year-old boys, but that would have meant revealing too much.

  ‘For God’s sake don’t say anything to Mick about all this, though.’ He leaned back against the rail of the veranda and craned his neck to look up at the house. ‘The old stories about his family are one thing – he’ll try and laugh those off as superstition. But the business with Iain was different – they knew the family, Iain was at school with their daughters. I get the sense from Kaye that he feels somehow guilty, because it happened at this house.’

  ‘That’s crazy. He couldn’t be held responsible for a couple kids out here in the middle of the night.’

  ‘I know, but apparently people in the village started muttering about how it would never have happened if Mick hadn’t decided to renovate and stirred up the old curse. Some of them were pretty unhappy that he didn’t abandon the project after Iain disappeared. There’ve been mixed feelings about the McBride house being inhabited after all this time.’ He gave her a long look, until she understood.

  ‘You mean, I’m not welcome here, by association?’

  He shrugged again. She studied his face in the spill of light from the kitchen windows.

  ‘You think they might try to frighten me out? Play tricks on me?’ Another possibility she had not considered.

  ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it past some of them – it’s a weird place. People here don’t welcome change. But I can’t imagine they’d want to upset Mick by driving you away altogether. I think it might make them happy if you were to imply that you’d seen or heard strange goings-on. Act scared, go along with the stories – it might mea
n they’re on your side a bit more.’ He picked up his glass and tilted it as if trying to comprehend how it could be empty again.

  ‘Who says I want them on my side? I came here to get away from people questioning me all the time, pretending to be concerned.’ Careful, said a sober voice from some deep recess in her brain. She had not drunk as much as Edward, though she had drunk enough to be incautious. But she was having fun, damn it; drinking wine and talking inconsequentially with a good-looking man (boy, said the uptight voice) whose earnest attention was flattering to her bruised ego. And he was funny, too, more than she’d expected from his serious demeanour; he had made her laugh over dinner with stories about the island parents, the women in the shops, the pub band and their delusions of local celebrity. There had been a sense of collusion in their laughter, the relief of a shared snobbery that she was aware she should not be proud of, but for which she felt no need to apologise. Someone else to whom she could finally say, what about these people? She felt lighter than she had in months, and whose business was it to tell her she wasn’t allowed that? Only the prissy monologue in her head, it seemed.

  ‘Anyway, I haven’t,’ she added firmly. ‘Heard any strange goings-on. So there’s nothing to tell.’ She was nowhere near drunk enough to admit to that, not after the neurotic way he had seen her behave two days straight. He seemed friendly enough now – on her side, as he put it – but he was the one who had called Mick to tell him about her haring off into the rain yesterday; there was no guarantee he wasn’t going to discuss her with Mick in future, or with Charles, or anyone else who seemed interested. Information on other people’s business was a kind of currency here, she could see that, and she did not know Edward well enough to trust him on that score.

  ‘You know what we should do now?’ Edward said, his voice jolting her back. She raised her head to see him pick up the wine bottle and offer it with a knowing grin. She shook her head, and he upended it over his own glass.