by David Mark
She held his gaze for a second then took the card. She turned on him and led me out of the parlour and down the corridor. We did not look back. She opened the door and walked slowly down the steps and I realized I was hissing after her to stop.
She never did. She kept walking. Walked right across the grass and turned right onto the lane and stalked away from me, heading for her own house.
‘Cordelia?’ I shouted after her, and I realized she had no intention of turning back.
I walked home alone, jumping at every sound, startled by every flicker of cloud across the moon. John was waiting for me at the bottom of the lane. He’d been there for a while.
‘’Ow were it?’ he asked.
I didn’t answer. It would be a long time before I felt able to speak about it, and by then, all the lies had changed.
CORDELIA
There was a light covering of snow the morning of Christmas Day 1967. It wasn’t deep enough to get anybody worked up but it was enough to make the place look a little more festive. The weather had gone to more trouble than I had. My own attempts at decorating for Christmas were feeble. I’d hung some paper streamers above the fireplace in the library and my paltry selection of cards sat on the mantelpiece. Three of them were the same and carried identical pictures of glittery robins. The inscriptions from my old university friends were as saccharine and bland as I had feared. They were thinking of me, they said. Hoped to catch up soon, they said. It had been all I could do not to throw them on the fire.
I’d received a nicer card from Felicity. We’d seen each other only once since the night at the Parker Farm. She’d been walking towards the post office in the village as I was making my way back from sending a telegram to Cranham. He was holidaying in Italy and had urged me to get in touch if I needed any extra money for the festive season. Instead I had simply sent him my best wishes and told him to have a lovely time with his friend. There was a little grin on my face as I imagined him receiving it. It had been both a kind and a malicious act and the sisters would no doubt have called me wicked for such a thing.
She seemed strangely nervous as we drew closer. She had a wicker shopping basket over one arm and she’d had her hair restyled. Her skirt also seemed a little shorter and there was a new colour to her lips. She looked good – even if the hairstyle did seem a little too familiar to my own. I found myself aware of the changes in my own appearance. I was wearing boots more at home in a stable than in any of the pubs I frequented at Oxford, and my waxy jacket had been chosen for its waterproof qualities rather than anything to do with style.
‘Flick,’ I said, and I swear she seemed to sag with relief that I was still content to use the nickname I had bestowed. If she’d called me Mrs Hemlock I think I’d have burst into tears.
‘Cordelia,’ she said, smiling.
We didn’t hug. This was still Gilsland. Spontaneous displays of affection in the main thoroughfare would have made it into the Hexham Courant.
‘You’re looking well,’ I said. ‘Love the skirt.’
‘So does John,’ she said, and I think she may have tossed her hair a little. She looked good. Happy, even.
‘How are the boys? Brian maimed anybody this week?’
‘Not yet,’ she said, smiling. ‘Been knuckling down, actually. The school wants to have him tested and apparently that’s a good thing not a bad one. Reckon he might be clever.’
‘He’s got something about him,’ I said, nodding.
‘I hear you’ve been courting scandal,’ she said, dropping her voice. ‘Seen out walking with Heron. Picnics by the river. And there’s a rumour he’s brought you a Christmas tree.’
I smiled at that, rolling my eyes. ‘We talk. He listens. He’s not the sort for indoors.’
‘But you’ll not be alone for Christmas, eh? He’ll be coming up? Your husband?’
I shook my head. ‘Already sunning himself in Lake Garda.’
‘Be better if he were drowning himself in it,’ said Felicity, and appeared shocked at herself. We shared a smile.
‘There’s a card for you,’ she said, remembering, and started rummaging in her basket. She handed over an envelope. On the back, James had drawn a squirrel with its head cut off. ‘There’s a plate for you at the table if you want company.’
I took the card but ignored the request. There was no way I could go. I’d planned a Christmas Day in front of the television. I’d been learning how to cook over the past few weeks and reckoned I could handle a Christmas luncheon of scrambled eggs with Alphabetti spaghetti and white toast, provided I washed it down with one of the bottles of sloe and damson wine that Heron had left on the back step next to a spindly silver Christmas tree and a carving of a bird. None of the gifts had come with a card and we had not spoken about them on our walks but there was something between us. It would never become more than it was, but it mattered to me.
‘I’m here if you need me,’ she said, and I was grateful to her for not making a big deal of it.
‘Me, too,’ I said, though I figured I would be less use.
I opened the card when I got home. It showed a little church against a fading sky; snow on the ground and a robin sitting on a cross. Inside she had written something that made me feel like I had already drunk the wine.
To Cordy. The strongest person I know. I am proud to be your friend. Flick (and family) xxx
It sat in the centre of the mantelpiece. I still have it, all these years later. Still can’t look at it without feeling a little giddy and nostalgic.
I woke early on Christmas morning. I could hear church bells. We’d never had much in the way of Christmas mornings when I still lived with Mam and in the convent school we were lucky if our presents weren’t a cold shower and a slap around the face. But I still felt oddly pleased with the world as I opened the curtains and looked out upon fields that had been turned a muddy white by the soft snowfall. I lit the fire in the hearth and pulled on warm clothes, filled the kettle and spooned real tea into the pot. I’d stopped bothering with the coffee machine. I’d lost the taste for it. Then I switched on the wireless and ate thick bread with jam and felt absurdly happy with myself. Even now I can’t fathom it. Perhaps it was simply that I had made it to Christmas. Stefan had been gone for nearly eleven months and I had managed to keep on breathing. Last Christmas it had just been him and me and we had delighted each other with crackers and silly hats and stuffed ourselves with chocolates and clementines, brazil nuts and lemonade. This year it was just me. There would only ever be just me, of that I was certain. But it didn’t mean he hadn’t lived. It didn’t mean that all was for nothing. He’d lived a life full of smiles and though it had ended decades earlier than it should have done I could take comfort in the knowledge that none of his life had been anything other than glorious. I couldn’t think of anybody else who felt the same.
After breakfast I made a decision I had been avoiding for some time. I should go and see the Parkers. We had only glimpsed each other fleetingly since that night in November. We’d exchanged waves across the boundary wall and Mrs Parker had honked the horn of her car as she passed me on the lane. But nothing real had passed between us. Christmas Day seemed the right time to make a gesture. I opened the box of Christmas cards that I had bought and then not bothered to send to my university friends. I wrote a simple, heartfelt message inside and placed it in the envelope. I had a box of ribbons in a button box in the dresser and I carefully selected a neutral spool and wrapped it around one of my bottles of wine. The finished product looked rather fetching and it was with some remarkable joie de vivre that I set off to my neighbour’s house. I suppose I felt like a grown-up. I don’t think I’d ever felt that way before.
I left footprints in the snow as I walked and it was all I could do not to run in a circle just to enjoy the image they punched into the pristine surface. It was a little before twelve. The Parkers would no doubt be at church. Everybody else would be too.
Nobody answered when I knocked on the door. In many way
s, that was a relief. I wasn’t really sure what kind of conversation I was expecting but I knew there would be awkwardness aplenty and my shoeprints in the snow would be a better indicator of my gesture of friendship than any amount of stilted conversation. I decided to leave the gift where it would be easily seen. The front step seemed the obvious place but I had seen plenty of magpies and crows pecking at food parcels and shiny bottles and could imagine nothing more likely to send the wrong message than the Parkers returning from church to find smashed glass and a puddle of red against the pristine whiteness.
I wondered if the back door might be better. I crunched around to the side of the building and towards the courtyard that led down to the outbuildings. I could hear the distant sound of a cow making a racket. I wondered if the calf it mourned was currently laying in a roasting tin surrounded by onions and potatoes, then shuddered when the cruelty of the notion hit home.
The back door was set back into a rough-hewn wall of grey stone. The red slates that made up the porch had been turned into a stripy Christmas scarf by the fine dusting of snow. And through the glass I could see the little room where the Parkers would change into their workboots and hang up their damp clothes. I decided it would be a good place to leave the gift and reached out for the handle of the outer door.
I can’t remember exactly how it happened but one moment I was lost in a haze of thought about Christmas and cattle and whether or not I had been right to send Mam a card when I had received none in return, and then I was staring at a set of boot prints that were so familiar to me I could just as well have been staring into a mirror.
The prints led away from the back door and towards one of the outbuildings. The pattern was unquestionably the same as the one that had been left on the floor beside my bed several weeks before.
I stood perfectly still. The pattern was perfect. Whoever had walked across the courtyard had done so purposefully, with neat, even steps. I thought of the shuffling, shambolic Mr Parker, dragging his leg behind him. Thought of his wife. Her feet were surely too small. Could it be Christopher? Surely he would be back in London by now, squatting at the centre of his twisted web of lies, spies and secrets.
I took a step towards the window and peered through the glass, hoping I could work out who the steps belonged to by examining the shoes within. I saw only a further array of wellingtons and a stand for umbrellas into which somebody had deposited a dozen different walking sticks and a gaudy brolly.
Before I had even realized it, I was following the footsteps. I wasn’t sure whether to walk beside the prints or on top of them but as I looked back at my own steps I realized there was no way of disguising my presence here. And besides, it suddenly seemed important to me that I preserve the prints. I would need to show them to somebody later. I would need to photograph them. I would need plaster casts made for comparison against the prints that were still a dark stain against the wooden floor of my bedroom.
Should I have gone straight for Sergeant Chivers? Should I have gone home and called the exchange and demanded to be put through to the first available police officer? Should I have run down the hill to Felicity and John, or stood still and shouted Heron’s name until he came to my aid? Probably, yes. But I was a stubborn thing and it seemed absurdly important that I do this by myself. I needed to know. Needed to see if I had been the worst kind of fool.
The footsteps sloped gently upwards towards the nearest field. To my left were outbuildings with big open doors and high roofs. The floor was muddy and the space had been sectioned off into what looked, to my inexpert eyes, like individual cells. I passed them by. There was a tight feeling in my chest and I was gripping the wine tight in my right hand as I walked – the knuckles turning white against the green of the bottle and the deep red of the liquid.
The footsteps carried on past the metal gate that marked the entrance to the field. They doubled back slightly. Whoever had made them had opened the gate and then retreated back into the courtyard as they swung it open. There was a small area of smudging and mess and then the steps carried on, across the field, where I could make out the shape of a small stone building with a brick roof.
That would have been the time to turn back. There, under the cold blue sky with its pale, liquid sun and the playful fingers of the frosty air pinching at the areas of exposed skin.
I walked quietly, deciding, without really knowing it, that I would be best served by standing in the existing footsteps. I had a fear of putting my foot in one of the trenches made by the cow’s hooves and twisting my ankle – leaving myself immobile and vulnerable on the cold hard ground.
I smelled the building before I reached it. The reek was almost physical: a ghastly, chemical tang that seemed to reach into my mouth and nose like tree roots and which made tears instantly spring to my eyes. I stopped where I was, a dozen steps from the entrance; that rectangle of complete blackness set into the old, lichen-mottled stone.
There was a noise from within. It was a soft, damp sound, like a boot being pulled from thick mud. There was a rhythm to it. As I stood there I found myself able to count the beats between each occurrence. I stayed perfectly still. Heard it half a dozen times.
There was nothing inviting about the little stone structure. The stench, the sound, the sight of it, all spoke to me of something from the most menacing of fairy tales. And yet I needed to know. Despite everything, despite the risk, despite the damn stupidity of pressing on, I had to know what was inside.
Softly, barely lifting my feet from the ground, I crossed to the door of the building and peered inside.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. The smell that emanated from the darkness was almost unendurable. My eyes started streaming immediately and I felt a cough start to tickle at my chest and throat. It was through a blur that I saw the thing within. It was through a veil of tears and dread and against the surging of my own blood in my ears that I saw the figure in white standing, bent-backed, in that room of skulls.
My senses were flooded. It all came at me like a shotgun blast. The shelves, floor to ceiling, with their hideous array of perfect, moon-bright bone. Horns. Teeth. Eye sockets. Grinning smiles and jutting jaws, all denuded of flesh, feathers or fur. The soft, blood-red light of the gas-lamp, giving off only a whisper of illumination at the figure’s right hand.
He stood with his back to me, stirring the great wooden pot like a witch with a cauldron; the metrical thump of his large wooden mortar sploshing through the liquid to create the sound which had frozen me where I stood.
He was naked from the waist up. His skin was as white as the skulls that lined the wall and bore the scars of a life lived hard. His spine curved slightly, like a rat’s tail in repose.
His head was a thing of horror. The skin looked like it belonged to a dead creature; all patchy and stippled with patches of purple and red.
In the centre, beneath the crown of his perfectly bald head, were the livid red lines of the swastika that had been carved into his skin more than two decades before by the countrymen he betrayed.
Jean Favre.
Le Tanneur.
I don’t know if he heard me breathing. But he stopped moving. Stopped stirring the pot. Then he reached out a pale white hand and picked up the light.
The shadows changed. I turned to my right and saw how he had decorated the wall. At first I thought it was a tapestry; a motley assemblage of different threads and colours, swirled together into an abstract wall hanging the length of the room.
It was only as I peered closer that I made out the details. Saw, with cold terror, that the hanging was made up of skin stitched to skin stitched to skin.
I couldn’t move. Just stood there, staring at this collage of flesh; this confusion of different leathers, and tried to keep myself from sinking to the floor as the sheer horror of what I was seeing flooded my senses. This was not just animal skin. I could make out great patches that were unmistakably human; unfolded features, flattened out as if their owners had melted into vile puddle
s of membrane and tissue, then stitched to the flanks of cows and calves, pigs and deer, birds and fish and foals.
There was movement to my left and then a sudden swift blur. I was on my knees before I felt the pain. Then there was wetness on my face and filth in my hair as I collapsed forward onto the damp floor. I tried to stand but my legs wouldn’t work. Far away, I heard the smash as the glass bottle hit stone. The light in the room had changed. Through the flashing colours I could see a round, flat stone, the diameter of a cart’s wheel. Laid out on the smooth surface was a corpse. The entire torso had been stripped of meat. Beside it was an older body; grey and green and putrid. The top of its head was missing.
I looked up and into the face of Mr Parker. Without his wig, and with the battle scars carved into his bare chest, he looked like a child’s drawing of a monster.
He raised the paddle a second time. There was no emotion on his face as he brought it down once more.
My final thought, before everything went black, was a kind of sad, scared acceptance. I had what I wanted. I had revelation and truth: reward for my perseverance and stubbornness.
And now I had the consequences.
FELICITY
Transcript 0011, recorded November 1, 2010
Both boys had got bikes for their birthdays. We’d started paying for them back in January and had made the final payment with two weeks to spare. Brian probably didn’t deserve his but we’d spent so long paying for them that it would have felt daft not to let him have it. And to be fair to the little sod, he was grateful. He was first down the stairs, as always. Came bouncing into our bedroom like he was still six years old and announced that it had snowed overnight and that he’d been awake since not long after midnight. He hurried us out of bed like there had been a fire and woke his brother by hitting him on the head with a pillow until he opened his eyes. Then it was dressing gowns and slippers and Brian led the way downstairs and into the kitchen where he found the Schwinn Sting-Ray ‘muscle bike’ that he had been going on about for the past three years. James had one too, along with a set of pencils and paints and three new toy cars. Brian got some marbles, a book on fly-tying and a Meccano crane. Between them they had plenty of chocolate and a distant auntie had sent them a Napoleon Solo gun for them ‘to share’. Before breakfast, Brian had shared it with his brother by shooting him half a dozen times in the back of the head.
