While You Sleep

by Stephanie Merritt

  ‘That’s a horrible thing to say, Robbie,’ she managed, but the boy had turned on his heel and started up a lumbering run towards the gate. She was tempted to hurl herself after him, demand to know what else had been said about her, what else he knew about the house, but it was clear that he would give nothing up voluntarily and it would hardly help her reputation to be seen harassing a child. She now wished, as she quickened her pace towards the far gate with one last glance over her shoulder, that she had not given him the pastry meant for Charles.

  There was no response to her repeated knocking at the old manse. After a few minutes she shaded her face with her hands and peered in the dining-room window, but could see no sign of life. She knocked again, and tried the brass knob of the front door; it swung open as if by invitation, and she remembered Mick’s words about people leaving their houses unlocked here. Pulling it shut behind her, she called Charles’s name tentatively from the hallway. The only reply was a mournful whine from overhead. Slowly, she climbed the uneven stairs to see Horace lying on the landing, grey muzzle resting on his paws, his eyes fixed on a closed door directly ahead. He raised his head a fraction at her approach, thumped his tail once on the carpet and let out the same plaintive moan, his gaze returning to the door as if to direct her attention. She bent and ruffled the dog’s fur.

  ‘Good boy. Is he in there?’ She forced a cheerfulness into her voice to push away the fear that had stolen up on her as she took in the dog’s resigned vigil and the forbidding barrier of the door. Charles must be inside; but if he were, why was he not responding? In the pit of her stomach, she knew her instinct had been right; something had happened, and it was connected to Ailsa’s book. Dreading what she might find, she knocked, at first gently and then with increasing urgency, calling Charles’s name. When this yielded nothing, she turned the handle and stepped inside.

  He was slumped over an antique desk, his white head resting on his arm as if he had fallen asleep, except that he seemed unnaturally still. Horace followed her into the room but hung back, keeping his distance, only emitting now and then another melancholy whimper. The room was long and narrow, stretching the width of the house at the front, and crammed floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves. A threadbare Persian carpet was the only covering over uneven boards which creaked under Zoe’s boots as she crossed to the desk and laid a tentative hand on Charles’s shoulder, her throat closed tight, praying that she would find him sleeping. His skin was icy, even through his shirt.

  She looked around, unsure of what to do next. He did not seem to be breathing, but she could not be certain. She ought to go for help, she supposed, or call a doctor, if they even had one on the island; anything to shift the responsibility of being the one who found him, but she felt frozen to the spot, horribly aware once more of that sense of being watched – and not only by the dog, who was cowering by the door and seemed unwilling to approach his master.

  Zoe cast her eyes over the material on the desk, as if seeking an explanation. There, under Charles’s left hand, was Ailsa’s journal. Under his right, he had pinned down a sepia photograph. She slid it out and recoiled. It was a portrait of Ailsa, but one she had not seen before, taken – she guessed – some years after the last. In this, Ailsa was pictured reclining on a sofa, her hands clasped over the bodice of her black dress, the silver Celtic cross pendant arranged above them. A curious sharpness defined the lines of her face against the backdrop; her hair was pulled back and her eyes stared straight ahead, as they had in the earlier picture Charles had shown her, but in this one the direction of her gaze appeared indefinably wrong. They were, somehow, not Ailsa’s eyes, and they altered her face in a disturbing way Zoe could not quite pinpoint.

  She was scrutinising the photograph, trying to determine why she found it so unsettling, when Charles snapped his head up so suddenly that she let out a small scream.

  ‘Is she still here?’ He cast around wildly, as if struggling to focus.

  ‘Jesus! Are you OK?’ Recovering herself, Zoe laid a hand on his arm until his eyes came to rest on her, confused and fearful. He looked, in that instant, older and more frail than she had seen him, and she wondered if she might have vastly underestimated his age.

  ‘Zoe?’ He squinted, reaching for her hand and covering it with his. His grasp was freezing and papery. ‘What time is it?’

  She glanced at her watch. ‘Just gone two thirty.’

  ‘In the afternoon?’

  She nodded, watching him carefully as he let out a trembling breath, smoothed his hair and replaced his glasses, his face furrowed with incomprehension.

  ‘You gave me a hell of a scare there. I thought—’ She decided to leave it unsaid. ‘Who did you think I was? Who did you mean by “she”?’

  ‘Oh.’ He waved a hand and looked around the room with apparent relief. He had begun to seem himself again. ‘The woman who cleans for me. She always comes on a Tuesday. I thought you were her.’

  ‘It’s Monday.’ It was clear to Zoe that he was not telling the truth, but she did not press him. ‘I saw the shop was closed this morning. I was going to drop by and see how you got on with the journal.’ She gestured toward the desk. ‘I didn’t mean to barge in – I got worried when there was no reply. And the door wasn’t locked.’

  ‘It never is. People don’t, here.’

  ‘So I understand. Anyone could have walked in, though.’ She gave him a look of reproach.

  He laughed. ‘Locked doors are not necessarily proof against unwelcome guests, as you well know.’ Before she could ask what he meant by that, he levered himself up from the chair, rolling the stiffness from his shoulders with a grimace, one hand cradling the small of his back. He was wearing the same tweed jacket, corduroy trousers and sweater he had had on the evening before. ‘Long past time to put the kettle on. I seem to have missed breakfast and lunch. Shall we have some toast to make up for it? And the poor dog must be starving. He’ll punish me for it, you watch.’

  Zoe followed Charles downstairs, though she noticed Horace still hanging back, as if uncertain of his master.

  ‘I thought you were dead up there.’ The words burst out of her in a rush.

  ‘Oh dear.’ He offered an apologetic smile and busied himself with filling the dog’s bowl and putting the kettle on. ‘No, you don’t need to worry about that. I had a bad night, I’m afraid.’

  ‘With the diary?’

  ‘It’s a disturbing read. I don’t need to tell you that. But there are things—’ he stopped and turned to face her. ‘I’m glad you’re here. I must ask you. You say you experienced identical visions to Ailsa’s, even before you read her descriptions?’

  She felt herself blush. ‘I’d call them dreams, but yes, essentially.’

  ‘And are there physical manifestations?’

  ‘I’ve been sleepwalking. I wake and find myself in a different room. And there are other …’ she hesitated, dropping her gaze to the floor. ‘The first night, I thought I found bruises on myself. But they were probably just from travelling.’

  Charles was looking at her with his head on one side. There was no trace of any salacious curiosity in his expression, rather a reluctant concern. ‘Do you hear voices in these dreams?’

  ‘Sometimes I hear a man talking to me. But it’s as if he’s speaking directly in my thoughts. I know that doesn’t really make sense.’ Her voice had grown quieter.

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘The same things Ailsa records.’ Her face was burning.

  He only nodded, as if this was what he had expected to hear, and turned his attention to measuring out tea leaves into an enormous blue-glazed pot.

  ‘Those drawings in her book,’ she continued, when the silence became uncomfortable. ‘I’ve seen the same images, in the dreams. I drew them in my sketchbook too, before I saw the journal. It’s like some weird déjà vu. I don’t even want to believe it myself, but it’s there. I can’t explain it.’

  He gestured for her to take a seat at the kitchen table.
‘And you’ve experienced other phenomena in the house too, you said?’

  ‘A woman’s voice, singing that song about the drowned fiancé. I keep imagining it coming from different rooms. Once from the telephone. And a woman’s voice speaking to me in Gaelic.’ She shook her head. ‘I sound insane even saying it aloud. And someone’s broken into the house, trying to scare me – I know that for a fact, so I don’t know how much I’m imagining, or—’ She broke off and clasped her hands to her temples. ‘I’m very tired, you see. I haven’t slept well in a long time. And I was on these pills that made me – but I’m getting better now. I feel like my head’s clearer. That’s why I can’t understand why, now—’

  ‘Have you experienced anything like this before?’

  ‘No.’ She raised her eyes to meet his steady gaze. ‘Except – years ago, after …’ She paused; what was the point of concealing it now that Mick and Kaye knew about Caleb? ‘I had postnatal depression very badly when my son was born. Well – postpartum psychosis, they called it. I heard voices, saying terrible things. I imagined all kinds of stuff … I was in the hospital for a while. But it passed. I thought I was doing OK.’

  The kettle shrieked; Charles lifted it from the hob and poured water into the teapot.

  ‘I had wondered, reading the diary, whether Ailsa experienced something similar at the beginning,’ he said softly. ‘It wouldn’t have been recognised in those days, of course. She might have thought she was going mad, or believed it was the effect of her husband’s séances.’

  ‘But her son was seven by the end of the journal, and her husband was long gone.’ Zoe pulled at the ends of her hair. ‘She couldn’t have had postnatal psychosis for that long, surely? And that doesn’t explain how we had the same dreams.’

  ‘Then we must consider the other possible explanation,’ Charles said carefully, setting a mug of tea in front of her.

  ‘You mean, that the house is actually haunted.’ She wrapped her hands around the mug and fixed her eyes on the table. It was not framed as a question.

  ‘I mean that Tamhas McBride, knowingly or unknowingly, unleashed a force there whose psychic influence has persisted.’

  ‘That’s an academic way of saying he did summon a demon.’

  Charles merely tilted his head.

  ‘You really believe that?’ She wanted to sound sceptical, but could not muster the necessary energy. There was too much that remained unexplained, and she was left with only two possibilities: either she was losing her mind, or what she had seen and heard in the house was real, and Ailsa had seen it too.

  ‘I’ve made a life’s work out of studying the history of occult and esoteric beliefs, and I’ve concluded that certain experiences can make us more receptive to what might be deemed supernatural influences. Trauma, loss, despair. Consider it – Ailsa had been suddenly widowed, she was left alone, then an unexpected pregnancy and the resulting social isolation. All that would have left her extremely psychologically vulnerable.’

  Zoe considered this. ‘But you said that, according to Tamhas’s letters, she’d already been affected by his experiments even before she was widowed.’

  ‘True. Perhaps she was always susceptible.’

  ‘You mean unstable.’ She found she did not want to acknowledge this possibility. She had seized on the idea of Ailsa’s independence and her ferocity to bolster the idea that the dead woman had been maligned by history; she had liked the theory that Ailsa had become a victim precisely because of that independent spirit, because she had lived in a society that needed to punish a woman for wanting to determine her own fate. But what if hearsay had been right all along, and Ailsa really was an unbalanced woman who had lost her mind and killed her child? Zoe had to concede that the journal, particularly towards the end, read like the outpourings of a mind that had been thrown off-kilter. And if Ailsa was crazy, and she was suffering the same delusions as Ailsa, that would mean she was also crazy. Dan had tried to tell her she was unstable. Dr Schlesinger never used such loaded words; she talked of ‘mood shifts’ and ‘unhelpful cognitive patterns’. But it amounted to the same thing: attempts to make Zoe believe her mind was not securely anchored, that her judgement could not be trusted. Charles was too tactful to say it openly, but he was inevitably drawing an implicit parallel between her experience and Ailsa’s.

  ‘I see you found the photograph,’ he said, nodding at the portrait of Ailsa that lay beside her on the table where she had set it down. ‘Have you worked out what’s strange about it?’

  ‘Her eyes.’ Zoe picked it up, grateful for the swerve of subject.

  ‘Well spotted. They’ve been painted on afterwards – do you see? It was often done with Victorian death portraits.’

  ‘Wait – she’s dead in this?’ She recoiled, holding the picture at arm’s length. ‘That’s so creepy. Why would they do that?’

  ‘It was a common custom. Macabre to us, but the Victorians saw it as a way of honouring the loved one. Usually commissioned by the family, but in this case, the portrait was taken by Bonar, the solicitor, who was a keen amateur photographer.’

  ‘Bonar again, huh.’

  ‘He sent a copy to William, but it seems he rather sneakily also gave it to a doctor friend of his who came over from the mainland to look at the body. It later became quite celebrated in scientific journals of the time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well – look at her. What do you notice?’

  Zoe held the picture up to the light. ‘Apart from the eyes, nothing special. It’s very sharp.’

  ‘That’s due to the long exposure. Most portraits from that time are slightly blurry, because living subjects can’t help moving even minutely while the picture is being taken. The dead, on the other hand, are obligingly still. Where you have living relatives posing with a corpse, the dead person appears much more clearly in the photograph than those around them – it’s an uncanny effect. But that’s not what’s curious here.’

  ‘She looks like she’s resting.’

  ‘Exactly. Remember, she’d been missing for three days before her body washed up on the shore. Have you ever seen a drowned corpse?’

  ‘God, no.’

  ‘Well, I promise you they don’t look as serene as this. And everyone in that community would have been familiar with the state of a body that had been in the sea for three days. You can imagine – this extraordinary state of preservation only fuelled the idea of supernatural intervention.’

  ‘But …’ Zoe stared at the picture, frowning. ‘Surely this strengthens the argument that she was murdered? Obviously she didn’t drown at all – someone must have hidden her body and dumped her on the beach to be found as if she’d washed up. And the forensics weren’t good enough back then to prove otherwise.’

  ‘It won’t surprise you to learn that that line of enquiry was not pursued,’ Charles said. He unwrapped a loaf from the larder and cut two thick slices, which he trapped between the two halves of a mesh disc and imprisoned under one of the steel lids on the range. ‘Though much energy was devoted by Bonar’s doctor friend to investigating how a body might feasibly be preserved in salt water. The same doctor, incidentally, who ruled death by drowning – the local physician was indisposed at the time.’

  ‘Convenient. See – everything points to Bonar.’ She slammed the photo on the table as if to close the case. ‘He even gets his buddy to say she drowned when it must have been clear to everyone that she couldn’t have. How come no one challenged that, if they all knew what drowning looked like?’

  ‘This is a small island community,’ Charles said patiently. ‘Few people were educated beyond childhood back then. Fishermen and crofters didn’t question the authority of doctors and lawyers – at least, not aloud. People were inclined to believe the explanation that suited them, anyway.’

  ‘You mean, they’d rather accept that her body was in perfect condition because she was a witch than because she didn’t really throw herself in the sea.’ She bit her lip, angry on Ailsa’s
behalf. ‘You must have looked into Bonar.’

  ‘Of course.’ The smell of toast had begun to warm the air. ‘There’s not much to discover. He left the island with his wife and four children shortly after Ailsa’s death, even before her estate was settled. He wrote to William Drummond saying he had taken up a position in Canada and could no longer represent the family.’

  ‘That’s a long way to run. As good as a confession.’

  ‘It would be a neat solution, wouldn’t it?’ Charles slid the wire disc from the hotplate, flipped the toast on to a plate and inserted another two slices. ‘Of course, an alternative view might be that he was so distressed by the deaths of Ailsa and her son that he felt unable to stay here.’

  ‘I don’t buy that.’

  ‘It’s merely conjecture. As is your theory. I’m simply saying there is no shred of evidence to prove that Richard Bonar was the father of Ailsa’s child. By all accounts, he was an entirely upright man, a pillar of the community, and a devoted husband and father.’

  ‘Exactly – someone like that would have the most to lose, and the most need to hide the truth.’

  Charles gave her a tired smile. ‘You’ve got it in for Bonar, haven’t you? You can make his very probity argue against him. He never made it to Canada, incidentally. Died of pneumonia on the journey, less than a year after Ailsa’s death. She left him a small bequest in her will, which passed to his widow.’

  ‘So,’ she counted the charges off on her fingers, ‘he’s the only man that ever sees her, he knows she’s leaving him money, he vamooses the minute she dies, he gets his friend to say she drowned in spite of all the evidence – but you still think he’s innocent.’ She twisted her mouth. ‘OK – say he is. You must have some other idea of who the lover was? Did you get anything from the book?’

  ‘Ah.’ He slapped a chunk of yellow butter on to the toast and pushed the plate across the table to her. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes,’ he added, catching her expression.