Wakenhyrst

by Michelle Paver

  The first was a review of a procedure called ‘trepanation’, defined in the introduction as the removal of a circular piece of bone from the skull. Maud learned that the technique had been known for thousands of years, and that medieval apothecaries had used it to cure seizures and relieve pressure on the brain. Father’s note said simply: ‘vide Fig. 13.’

  Figure 13 was an engraving from the fourteenth century. It showed a woman lying on her back, looking remarkably calm, given that her head was clamped in a large vice and a man with an augur was drilling into her forehead. A tiny black demon was flying out of one of her eyes.

  The second paper was a translation of a work published in 1892 by one Gottlieb Burckhardt, who had experimented on lunatics by excising sections of their cerebral cortex (Maud gathered that this meant he’d cut out parts of their brains). Two of Dr Burckhardt’s patients had died, two had developed epilepsy, and one had committed suicide. The sixth had undergone repeated excisions of brain tissue, which had transformed her from a noisy and ‘particularly vicious’ female to a ‘more tractable’ one, albeit with some loss of intelligence. Despite this, Burckhardt had declared his experiment a success.

  Maud couldn’t make out Father’s annotations except for the phrase ‘orbital aperture’. She didn’t know what that meant.

  By the sound of it, Ivy was sweeping the top of the stairs and working her way down. A clank came from the breakfast-room as Daisy put down her cleaning things. Once she’d set it to rights, she would lay the table, and Ivy would do the hall. After that the other servants would file in and await the Master and Miss Maud for morning prayers.

  The final monograph was by an anatomist named Dr Paul Broca, who had made a study of trepanation through the ages, as well as trying out various techniques on the skulls of dead people. He concluded that drilling was the quickest means of penetrating the skulls of adults, while for the softer skulls of children, one only had to scrape the bone for a few minutes with a sharp-edged instrument such as a chisel.

  Father’s note was brief: ‘Cut, or scrape?’

  Maud had four pounds, six shillings and sevenpence from the housekeeping to finance her escape. She wore the dragonfly pendant Maman had given her and put the viper skin and the porcelain wing in her pockets. She would get Clem to drive her to Ely and take the first train out. Then she would find a way to contact Great-Uncle Bertrand in Brussels.

  In the downstairs passage she met Lawson, who told her that Father would not be down for breakfast. Maud noted the distinction: he had said nothing about the rest of the day. She sent Lawson to tell the other servants that there would be no morning prayers, then hurried into the breakfast-room, where she crammed two bread rolls with bacon and stuffed them in her hand-bag.

  She was grabbing her hat from the hatstand when Father appeared at the top of the stairs. He was fully dressed and his cheeks were scrubbed and shining. ‘Ah, so you’ve already breakfasted,’ he said with an absent smile.

  ‘I – I wasn’t hungry,’ she faltered. ‘The heat…’

  ‘To be sure, the heat, the infernal heat.’ As he descended, he tapped a rhythm on the banister. ‘I wouldn’t go into the grounds if I were you, it’ll be no cooler there.’

  Her mind went blank. ‘I – need to see Cole. About the strawberries. For tea.’

  His glance passed over her as if she didn’t exist, and as he entered the breakfast-room he chuckled to himself. ‘Yes, I think we might attempt a little light work on Pyett… If the excellent Lawson permits.’

  ‘Where’s Walker?’ cried Maud when she found Cole.

  ‘It’s his half day, Miss,’ said the old man. ‘He won’t be in till noon.’

  She blinked back tears. She’d been counting on Clem, and now he was three miles away in Wakenhyrst. It would be no use telling Jessop to drive her to Ely, he would refuse. He would tell her that he couldn’t answer for the horses in this heat.

  ‘You’re not displeased with Walker, are you, Miss?’ said Cole.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Only I seed you having words with en yesterday, so I thought you might of heard about that toad.’

  ‘Toad? What are you talking about?’

  ‘No need to take on, Miss Maud, I’m sure.’ He launched into some rigmarole about Clem finding a toad under a flowerpot and the Master making him kill it. ‘Walker didn’t want to, Miss, knowing your feelings for the animiles. So I thought mebbe…’

  A dreadful thought occurred to Maud. ‘When was this?’ she said sharply.

  ‘When?’ The old gardener tugged his ear-lobe. ‘I dunno. Three days since. Mebbe four?’

  ‘The twenty-eighth of May.’

  ‘Thereabouts, Miss.’

  On the 28th of May, Father had written: ‘Once again, it has taken human form. I have seen it.’

  Cole was squinting at her curiously.

  ‘When the Master was talking to Walker, how did he seem?’

  ‘Seem, Miss? I don’t know as I—’

  ‘How did he seem? Was he startled or brusque or what?’

  ‘Oh, no, nothing like that. He wor his usual self.’ He grinned. ‘He did give Walker a bit of a look when his back wor turned, but I’m sure he meant nothing by it…’

  The pieces of the kaleidoscope shifted, and Maud knew that she’d got it all wrong. Father hadn’t been feigning indifference to her, his indifference was genuine. He didn’t believe she was the one possessed.

  At last she understood the entry in his ledger about having overlooked a crucial aspect of the nature of demons. ‘How could I have forgotten, when it is so familiar? Revelations, Milton; it’s plain for all to see.’

  It was indeed in Revelations: a well-known passage which she also knew well. ‘And there was war in Heaven… and the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan… he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’

  That was the aspect Father had remembered: that demons were fallen angels. They weren’t always ugly.

  Demons could be beautiful.

  Like Clem.

  ‘… for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.’ Revelations 12:12

  Saints’ Feast Days for 2nd June: St Ada, St Adalgis, St Blandina, St Bodfan, St Erasmus, St Eugene, St John de Ortega, Sts Marcellinus & Peter,* the Martyrs of Lyons, St Nicholas of Peregrinus, St Pothinus.

  * also known as Petrus Exorcista, or St Peter the Exorcist

  THE track over the Common seemed endless. The sun was a strange angry red and a hot wind was whipping up blinding clouds of dust. It was nearly ten o’clock. Maud was still a mile from the village.

  At last the Rectory rose into view, and beyond it the cottages of Wakenhyrst. But in front of them Maud made out a cluster of tents flapping in the wind, and pedlars’ barrows and people holding on to their hats. It was the day of the Fair. She’d forgotten all about it.

  To avoid it she took the path that led behind the Rectory and came out into the High Street, not far from the Walkers’ cottage. Clem wasn’t there. His younger brother said he’d gone eel-babbing the night before and was camping in the fen, so that he could go straight to work.

  Maud stood blinking the dust from her eyes. Her boots hurt and she was drenched in sweat. It was nearly eleven o’clock and she was three miles further from Clem than when she’d started. Ignoring Ned’s frightened offer of a cup of buttermilk, she ran back to the Fair. She collared the carter and offered him a guinea to take her to Wake’s End and stay with her till she’d found Clem. The carter dursn’t risk his horse in this heat, not if she promised him ten guineas. She started back to Wake’s End on foot. Clem was bigger and stronger than Father. If she could warn him in time, he’d be all right.

  She thought of Father’s neat annotations on Dr Grayson’s monographs. Drilling was the quickest way to pierce the skulls of adults, while for the softer skulls of children, you scraped the bone with a sharp instrument like a chisel. Cut, or scra
pe? Father must have written that because Clem was young.

  And the tools he intended to use had already arrived. Before leaving the house, Maud had ascertained from Daisy that Tuthill’s boy had brought them the day before – Father having telegraphed the blacksmith to send the items by the 2nd of June without fail. ‘One ice-pick; one geological hammer, its leading edge to be sharpened in the manner of a chisel.’

  It was half past noon when Maud finally reached Wake’s End. She shouted for Clem, but he didn’t appear. The grounds were deserted. The house stared at her with blinded eyes. In the orchard the trees were thrashing and groaning. Across the Lode the reeds were hissing, as if the fen itself was angry.

  No one opened the front door for her and she found nobody in the library, the drawing-room or the breakfast-room. Father’s study was empty, his desk orderly and undisturbed. But the ledger was gone.

  She ran out into the passage. ‘Hulloa?’ she called. ‘Anyone?’

  The green baize door opened a crack, and the boot-boy peered at her with frightened eyes.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ she cried.

  ‘Master sent en off to the Fair, Miss.’

  ‘What, everyone?’

  Billy ducked his head. ‘There’s only me, Miss. An Ivy upstairs with Master Felix.’

  ‘Where’s Walker?’

  ‘I dunno, Miss, I an’t seen en.’

  ‘Where’s the Master?’

  ‘I dunno, Miss. I’m to stay out back. Did I do wrong?’

  Maud picked up her skirts and ran upstairs. Ivy wasn’t in the nursery, but Felix was fast asleep. He was flushed and breathing heavily through his mouth. On the nightstand, flies clustered on a spoon and a bottle of Rawlinson’s Quieting Syrup. Ivy must have drugged him and slipped off to the Fair.

  Maud ran down to the bathroom. Her reflection in the looking-glass was wild-eyed and spectral with dust, the skin of her face as taut as if someone had pulled back her scalp.

  Down the passage a door slammed. Peering out, Maud saw that the doors to Father’s bedroom were shut. They’d been open before. Taking her knife from her pocket, she crept along the passage.

  No sounds from within. But downstairs, the study doors softly closed. He’d been up here and he’d slammed these doors. Then he’d stealthily descended to the study.

  Noiselessly, Maud turned the handles. Father’s bedroom and dressing-room were stiflingly hot and smelled sharply of lime. Sheets hung motionless across the windows, bathing the room in a strange, fiery light. On the side-table by the chaise longue lay a pen and a bottle of ink. On the chaise longue lay the ledger. It was open.

  Wincing at every creaking floorboard, Maud crossed to the chaise longue. Father had started a new page with the heading: ‘The Second of June – The Feast of Petrus Exorcista.’ Beneath this he’d drawn the head of a child.

  The drawing was in black ink and executed with the clarity and precision of an anatomical diagram. Above the child’s left eye, a neat triangle of scalp had been sliced and partly peeled back to expose the skull.

  The blood soughed in Maud’s head. The child was a boy about four years old with a luxuriant mop of curls and a chicken pox scar on the bridge of his nose. Felix.

  Beneath the drawing, Father had written a Bible reference, Mark 5:9. Maud grabbed his Bible from the nightstand and rifled the pages.

  St Mark, 5:9: ‘And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.’

  It took her a moment to grasp what this meant. Even then she couldn’t believe it. Did Father think the demon was in Felix and Clem?

  My name is Legion: for we are many.

  THE study doors creaked open, and Maud heard Father calling for Billy. He sounded vexed, but bizarrely calm.

  ‘You wanted me, sir?’ the boot-boy said timidly.

  ‘Which is why I rang,’ chided Father.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  Maud couldn’t make out what Father said after that, but a minute later she heard the study doors close. Billy trotted back down the passage. Maud went to the top of the stairs and stood twisting her hands. It sounded as if Father was opening drawers in the study and talking to himself. She couldn’t leave Felix to be slaughtered. But what if Clem came in from the fen and Father attacked him?

  She thought of that drawing of Felix’s head, with the scalp peeled back. She thought of Clem. Clem was strong. He could defend himself. Felix was four years old. She turned and ran upstairs to the nursery.

  Felix was still asleep, whiffling into his pillow. Maud locked him in and slipped the key in her pocket.

  She’d just descended to the first floor when she heard the front door shut. Through the round window at the end of the passage, she peered down on to Father’s fair head. He stood on the steps, looking about him. In his right hand he held an ice-pick and in his left, a hammer with a long thin head of grey steel that glinted in the sun. As Maud watched, he straightened his shoulders and started down the steps.

  Abandoning stealth, she clattered downstairs, yelling for Billy. ‘The Master’s gone mad! Run as fast as you can and fetch help! Go on, run!’

  Pushing the terrified boy through the scullery door, she rushed into the boot-room. The gun-cupboard was locked. She darted into the scullery and grabbed a cleaver, ran back to the boot-room and tried to prise open the cupboard. She couldn’t do it. Besides, she’d never held a gun in her life, she was wasting time. Still clutching the cleaver, she burst through the back door. Her stomach turned over. Propped against the pump was Clem’s eel glave. He must have come in from the fen and stopped to have a wash before going off to start work.

  Flinging down the cleaver, Maud grabbed the eel glave and raced round the corner to the orchard.

  Father was kneeling in the long grass under an apple tree. His hands and shirt were scarlet with blood and he was bending over Clem, who lay on his back.

  Clem must have been tired after his night’s eel-babbing. He’d left his pail of eels in the shade to keep cool, then folded his jacket under his head for a pillow and lain down and gone to sleep. In an instant that would stay with Maud for ever, she saw the shiny mahogany handle of the ice-pick sticking out of his left eye. She saw where Father had sliced away part of Clem’s scalp and hammered a hole in his skull. She saw splinters of white bone, and the glistening red and grey sludge that had been Clem: his thoughts and hopes and loves.

  As she stood on the path, Father yanked out the ice-pick and put it in his pocket. Then he pressed a shard of green glass into Clem’s ruined eye, and lifted the lid of the other eye and did the same, after which he prised apart Clem’s lips and stuffed more glass into his mouth and a handful of leaves. Throughout all this he’d been muttering in Latin, but now he sat back on his heels and frowned. ‘But where did it go?’ he exclaimed.

  Catching sight of Maud, he waved her away. ‘Go back inside, there’s a good girl. Can’t you see I’m busy?’ Rising to his feet, he cast about, as if looking for something in the grass. With a sigh he gave up the search. Taking the hammer from one pocket and the chisel from the other, he started for the house.

  ‘Get back,’ said Maud, barring his way with the eel glave. ‘You can’t have Felix.’

  ‘But it isn’t Felix,’ he said irritably. ‘Now give me that thing before you hurt yourself.’

  ‘Get back! I won’t let you kill Felix!’

  ‘I told you,’ he said with the weary pedantry of someone correcting a grammatical error. ‘It’s not Felix, it’s the adversary.’

  He stood ten feet away from her, a tall, powerful man. She was a girl of sixteen. She thought fast. ‘You won’t find him in the nursery,’ she lied. ‘Ivy took him to the Fair.’

  ‘Now we both know that’s not true. I saw Ivy run off on her own. It’s in the nursery. Its mortal body is asleep, I saw it myself. Now get out of my way.’

  ‘It went down the well,’ she blurted out.

  He looked at her.

  ‘It’s true, I saw it! What you were
looking for just now, a little black imp? I saw it fly out of his – out of his eye, when you pulled out the ice-pick! It went down the well. If you don’t catch it, it’ll get away!’

  The well was behind him. He couldn’t resist moving towards it and glancing in. Maud rushed at him with the glave and shoved him in the back.

  He didn’t utter a sound, he just fell. Maud heard an echoing splash. She held her breath.

  ‘Why on earth did you do that?’ Father sounded angry, but weirdly rational. ‘Run and fetch Billy at once and get me out of here before I catch my death!’

  She had hoped that the fall would break his neck. She wondered if she had the courage to kill him. She wondered how to do it. The prongs of the glave were curved, so she couldn’t stab him. Perhaps if she steeled herself she could claw open his throat, or—

  A gasp behind her made her turn.

  Ivy stood on the path with her mouth open. ‘You pushed him. I saw you.’ Picking up her skirts, she ran to unwind the rope and let down the well-bucket.

  ‘Leave it!’ shouted Maud, warning her back with the glave. ‘I mean it, Ivy. Don’t you touch that rope!’

  Ivy stared at her. She hadn’t yet spotted Clem’s body. The well was in the way.

  ‘Ivy, is that you?’ called Father. ‘Be a good girl and let down the rope!’

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ repeated Maud. Jabbing with the glave, she moved in front of Ivy and peered into the well.

  Father stood ten feet below, waist-deep in filthy black water. He was smeared in blood and slime, and his face was pale and furious. ‘You lied! It isn’t in here! Now put that thing down and help me out!’

  It was no use. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Casting aside the glave, she stumbled off to fetch Clem’s pail. It was full of fat black eels, and so heavy she had to carry it with both hands. As she staggered to the well, the eels began to writhe.

  ‘This is for Clem,’ she told Father, hefting the pail on to the wall. Then she tipped the eels on to his upturned face.