by Jen Williams
“To you both. I know this will be a shock, and I’m sorry that you will have to deal with all this mess, but I can’t live with it anymore—not knowing what I know, and the decisions I have had to make. They say this is the coward’s way—well people who say that don’t know what I’ve lived with, this awful shadow I’ve lived under forever. All those monsters in the wood never really went away, not for me. And maybe that’s what I deserve. I truly am sorry for everything to come, for what it’s worth. Despite what you might believe, I love you both, and I always have.”
Nikki didn’t say anything, instead pursing her lips and looking down the high street. After a moment, she touched a finger to the corner of her eye and sniffed.
“Oh, Hev, that’s awful. Your poor mum.”
“Don’t you see though?” Heather took the note back, folding it away into her bag. She was glad to have it out of sight. “To you both. I love you both. What does that mean? There’s only me. She had no other family left. And what is she talking about, these decisions?”
Nikki shook her head slowly. “Okay, it is weird. But maybe she meant you and your dad? If she was very unwell, she might have forgotten that he’d died already, somehow. Or … or, she could be talking to whoever found her body.”
“But both sounds so specific. Like she had two people in mind. And monsters in the wood? What the hell does that mean?” Heather sighed. “You’re right, she could be talking about Dad, I suppose, but I hate not knowing. Like I’m going to spend the rest of my life wondering what she was on about—as if dealing with all this shit wasn’t bad enough, she had to leave a vague and cryptic suicide note.” Somewhere up the street, a dog was barking, and a light rain had started to fall. The road was mostly deserted as people hurried to get out of the drizzle, but up toward the bus stop, a shadowy figure stood, unmoving. A bus thundered past, not stopping, and the figure turned their face away from its light.
“I know. You’ll feel better after the funeral, I think. They’re supposed to give you closure, aren’t they, funerals?” Nikki pursed her lips, as though she wasn’t sure this was true. “Have you started …?”
“Oh, it’s mostly sorted.” Heather smiled a little. It was good to see Nikki, to have someone steering her back toward the practical things. “People are really helpful in these situations, you know? Her phone though, she had it with her, and it … well, it didn’t survive. So, I need to find her address book, if she had one. Do people even do that these days, write down phone numbers? I suppose if anyone does, it would be my mum.”
“Well. Mum and Auntie Shanice are ready and willing, just say the word. Anything you need. Here, look.” Nikki nodded toward the curb. “There’s our cab.”
* * *
Several hours later, Heather woke up in the spare room of her mother’s house, eyes opening onto utter blackness. Panicked, she grabbed her phone off the side table and the light from it threw the room into a collection of grayscale shadows. Just the spare room, she reminded herself, just the stupid, thick curtains. The window in her own bedroom looked out onto a street light and the place was never properly dark. Here, with the trees outside and the long, heavily embroidered curtains, she had woken into a kind of blindness. Trembling slightly, she snapped on the bedside lamp and sat up, phone held loosely in her hands.
A noise. A scuffling from directly overhead. Heather rubbed at her eyes, reminding herself that she was a grown adult in an unfamiliar house—she should expect strange noises, and she should expect to be creeped out. The scuffling became a kind of flapping, and goose bumps broke out across her skin.
“Okay,’ she said aloud. ‘There’s a bird in the attic. A pigeon got in there, or there’s starlings nesting or something.” Her voice was familiar and normal, and she nodded to herself. “A bird is just a bird. Nothing to worry about.”
She lay there for a few more minutes, listening to the faint noises and getting more and more irritated. Eventually, she threw the duvet back and stomped out of the room and down the hallway. Perhaps, she reasoned, the noise of her footsteps would startle the bird into leaving. The landing was especially dark after the lamplight, and Heather blinked repeatedly, waiting for her eyes to adjust. It was cold, the carpet under her bare feet oddly frigid.
“Bloody place.”
The door to the loft was a barely glimpsed shape on the ceiling. As Heather came to a stop underneath it, the scuffling and flapping noises stopped abruptly, as if they had been listening for her. Still curious, and much more awake than she had been, she stood for a time underneath it, just listening and occasionally rubbing the tops of her arms. It was cold enough, and she was half convinced she could see her own breath.
The house was utterly silent; even the thumps and creaks of a building settling seemed to have stopped.
Heather turned to go and caught sight of the window down the far end of the landing. Just for an instant, she saw movement out there, as though something was watching from the thick line of the trees. Eyes, wide and bright and utterly inhuman, peered in through the darkened glass.
“What—”
A second later a gust of wind blew through the trees and whatever had been causing the illusion was scattered into nothing. Because that’s what it had to be, she told herself, your eyes playing tricks on you. You idiot. Even so, she went over to the window and peered out. There was nothing but the street lights filtering through the branches of trees, the moonlight creating strange shapes and half glimpsed forms.
Annoyed with herself, she went back to bed. The lamp light stayed on until morning. And although she didn’t hear the noises again that night, her mind kept returning to them, and when she did sleep, she dreamt of feathers, downy and brown, and her dad’s round face, scarlet with rage.
CHAPTER
5
THE NEXT MORNING was not a pleasant one for Heather.
She had known that staying in her mother’s house would summon a lot of uncomfortable feelings, and so it was with no great surprise that she felt a shroud of misery settle over her when she woke up in an unfamiliar bed. Once this room had been her dad’s box room, full of his random junk—old car manuals, big plastic buckets for home brewing beer, and a massive chest freezer, which mum had filled with frozen ready meals and tubs of Neapolitan ice cream. As a kid, Heather had loved the room, convinced it contained all her dad’s secrets. Now, the guest room was small, and neat, and entirely without personality, but even so Heather couldn’t help but feel her mother there still—in the pile of towels on the footstool, on the doily on the windowsill, the empty vase. It was too quiet, and too cold, so she got up and put the heating on as high as it would go, and put on both the television and radio. Once there was a comforting level of noise, she made herself a strong cup of tea, sat at the kitchen table, and began making a list of things that needed doing.
To her surprise, she found her mother’s address book almost straight away—it was sitting in a wooden magazine rack in the living room, half forgotten—and as quickly as possible, she called everyone who needed to be called, passing out bad news, and taking in condolences. When that ugly business was done, she found herself wandering back upstairs, her hand resting on the doorknob of her old room. Holding in a sigh, she stepped inside. It was still possible to recognize it as hers; the duvet cover on the bed, neatly turned down and clean, of a color only a teenager would choose, and the wallpaper that still had a series of tiny bald patches from old Blue Tack, to hold posters in place—the posters her mother had taken down and rolled into tubes not long after she’d left home. During her visits over the years, Heather had gotten used to the fact that this wasn’t her room anymore, but for the first time she noticed that her mother had apparently started using it for other things—there was a small card table in the corner, covered with crafting materials.
Half smiling, Heather sat down on the foldaway chair and sifted through the bits and pieces. It looked like she’d actually rescued an old abandoned crafting set of Heather’s, one of the expensive packs
of multicolored clay she had campaigned for one birthday, and with it she’d been making jolly napkin holders festooned with holly and snowmen. Next to the finished pieces was a Post-it note with the address of a nearby old people’s home. Had she intended to give them to the retirement home as part of their Christmas fair? They had gone to it many times when she was a kid, buying cakes and talking to the old dears. Heather picked up one of the napkin rings and slipped it on to her finger. She’d done a lot of work on these, had been halfway through making another. What made someone put down their cozy crafting project and think about ending their life instead?
The texture of the smooth clay against her fingers reminded her of the times she had tried to make things herself. The clay was tough to mold straight out the packet, so you had to warm it up in your hands, but Heather’s small fingers had never been much good at it. Abruptly, she remembered sitting in this very room with her mother, newspapers spread carefully over the carpet, and small plates in front of them both. Her mum had taken each piece of colored clay and warmed it in her own hands first before passing it over to Heather, so that she could make something out of it …
Heather put the napkin ring back, her hand shaking. Nikki was right, she told herself. I can’t know what Mum was going through. I’m seeing mysteries where there are none.
Even so, as she left the room, turning back to look again at the industrious little table, the sense that something somewhere was deeply wrong wouldn’t quite leave her.
* * *
Heather spent the next day moving around the house, making notes and wondering at how much stuff people accumulate around them. At lunchtime she heated up the stew Lillian had left her, eating it from a big bowl in front of the television. It was tasty and thick, but by the end of it she felt faintly ill, and she wondered if she’d waited too long to heat it up—if some ingredient in it had gone off. She washed up the dish diligently, just in case Lillian called back for it.
There was so much to think of with every room; what to do with clothes, knickknacks, old photographs—even boring things like bed linen and curtains. And with every room came a new cascade of memories, as though every space was packed with ghosts from her childhood. Most of them were not as pleasant as playing with modelling clay on the floor of her bedroom, either. And as she stood in the door of the bathroom, remembering a blazing row that had resulted in Heather kicking the bath so hard she had to go to the hospital, she wondered why on earth she hadn’t brought someone with her to do this. Terry, her housemate, had even offered to help, but she had turned him down automatically. Nikki, too, she was certain, would have been glad to shoulder some of this unpleasantness.
What was that about? Was she worried Terry would have judged her for this ordinary, suburban childhood? Or, was she more afraid of him seeing her in a vulnerable state?
Going through the paperwork and shifting things around had tracked dust all over, so she dragged the hoover out and pushed it—somewhat unenthusiastically—around the living room. As she was chasing down a few errant hairs, the edge of the nozzle smacked against something solid underneath the sofa. Reaching down, she tugged the blockage out and was surprised to see it was a book, and quite an old one by the looks of it. She rubbed the dust and fluff off, and frowned at the cover. It was a collection of fairy tales, a battered old paperback, and on the front was a large black wolf, its jaws agape to reveal every one of its lethal teeth.
“Weird.” She chucked it on the sideboard and finished up.
Dumping a sack of recycling outside, by the front door, Heather took a deep breath of cold, autumnal air. Out here, when she had been around seven or eight, she had sat with her new magnifying glass, burning little holes into dried leaves and pieces of paper, whatever she could get her hands on. Ants, she had discovered, popped when you burned them with the magnifying glass, and she’d spent an entertaining afternoon creating lots of tiny shriveled bodies on the path until her mother had come outside and caught her at it.
Heather had been banned from the garden for a week, at the height of summer, and she still remembered her simmering fury so clearly it made her cheeks feel hot. Trapped in her room, she had taken to other petty forms of destruction—breaking the plates her sandwiches arrived on, tipping her mother’s perfume down the bathroom sink. She had been so angry then—and that had only made things worse.
That’s why I didn’t want Terry with me. Who would want their adult friends to see the child they once were? Standing in the cold, Heather felt a fresh wave of anguish move through her.
“The ghosts are just too bloody loud.” She wiped her hands down the front of her jeans and went back inside.
* * *
It was after a few hours of sorting and cataloging that she remembered the attic. There had been no more strange noises, but passing under it again with a mug of tea clutched in both hands, she found her eyes drawn to it. The man in the loft, she thought to herself. When I was little, granddad used to blame the Man in the Loft whenever anything went missing.
It wasn’t a reassuring thought, and Heather knew she would have to go up and check it out, or be doomed to lie in bed that night, listening for the Man in the Loft—or even worse, the soft footsteps of her mother.
“Christ, what’s wrong with me? There are no monsters in the attic. A couple of days alone in the house and I’m behaving like a hysterical five-year-old.”
An hour later and she was sitting, legs crossed in the surprisingly comfy space, sorting through a box of old vinyl records. There was a lot of dreck—a lot of bands and singers in strange suits that she did not recognize, and a handful that were promising: Led Zeppelin, Siouxsie Sioux, David Bowie. Her dad’s, no doubt. He’d told her once that when he and her mother had been dating, he had been trying to form his own band; he had been learning the bass guitar, but never quite got the hang of it. Smiling faintly, she put the records to one side, thinking that she would either keep them or put them on eBay, and when she went back to the box, she saw that they had been hiding an old, battered biscuit tin. She levered it out and popped the lid, wrinkling her nose at the dust. Tightly packed inside were two fat bundles of letters, secured with elastic bands.
Each one was addressed to her mother, and the ones in the first bundle looked very old indeed, the envelopes stained and creased, the ink faded to shadows. The ones on the top of the second bundle looked right up to date—she even recognized a recent set of stamps featuring old Doctor Who villains. Unable to resist, Heather pulled out one of the letters from the second bundle and began to read. The correspondent had untidy, expansive writing, and the black inky scrawl stretched from one edge of the paper to the other. The spelling was extremely erratic.
Dear Colleen,
Today has been quiet. So still. I have very little to do here, and when I have done the jobs they ask of me, I feel the emptiness closing in on me on all sides. Its in the yellow lights and the cleen floors, an emptiness that is more than emptiness, it is nothingness. A place that is so sour with man made things has no real life in it so I think of the time we spent together. On the grass and in the feelds thats how we were best. I cant see the grass here, or any trees.
Heather blinked. Without reading further, she plucked another, older letter from its envelope, and recognized the same messy handwriting immediately.
You discribe these places so well. That you would still do this for me after all these years just tells me that I was always rite about you. Your joining us at the commune changed my life.
“Commune?”
Another, to find the same. All of these letters were from the same person. And her mother appeared to have replied to them. The handwriting was not her dad’s, she knew that straight away; he had only ever written in neat, block capitals, a consequence of his construction work and a need to write legible receipts. Who was this person with such strong feelings about her mother?
“You never mentioned a pen friend, Mum.” The words sounded odd and flat in the warm air of the attic, as though
they, too, were covered in dust. Because underneath her surprise, and even her slight amusement, a cold feeling was settling in Heather’s gut. “I don’t think I ever heard you talk about writing letters at all.”
Its so noisey here at night. Do you remember how quiet it would be in the feelds, under the stars? When we were in the woods. Like we were the only people in the world even though we werent. The other people who came and lived under the stars, they didnt feel it like we did Colleen.”
Heather scanned to the bottom of the page and squinted at the name there. A Michael? Next to the scratchy signature was a green tick stamp, and then printed next to it in a different pen and handwriting were the words REAVE and APPROVED. Reave, thought Heather. Michael Reave.
Her stomach turned over slowly. The name felt oddly familiar, although she couldn’t say why. She stood up, putting the letters back in the biscuit tin, and took them with her down the ladder. Back in the kitchen, she spent some time making a quick sandwich and a pot of very hot coffee.
She removed the elastic bands from both piles, and for the next hour read through twenty or so of the letters. By the end of it, her throat felt hot and her head was thumping steadily, the sandwich abandoned on its plate. With a slightly shaking hand she put the letters back in the tin, and thought about all the things she knew about her mother, and all the things she didn’t.
