A Dark and Secret Place

by Jen Williams

  Heather looked up, but Pamela Whittaker was already turning away. She thought of her mother’s suicide note again: monsters in the wood.

  “Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I have a lot to be getting on with.”

  * * *

  On her way back down the cold concrete steps, Heather’s phone rang. Pausing by a battered and ancient telephone box, she pressed receive.

  “Miss Evans?”

  “Oh, DI Parker. Hello.”

  “I got your voicemail. You have something on Fiona Graham?”

  “Yes, I sent you an email. It’s not much, but there’s a photo I think might be her. My dad took it, years ago.”

  “Do you think your parents knew Fiona Graham?”

  The question threw her for a moment. What was he suggesting?

  “Well, I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”

  “Would you come in to the office tomorrow? I’m back in London.”

  “Here I was thinking I’d lost the chance to see you again.”

  He made a small noise of amusement, and Heather was surprised by how much it pleased her to have amused him, even a little bit. It was good to smile after her unpleasant conversation with Ms. Whittaker.

  “No such luck,” he continued.

  “Does this mean you’ve found Fiona Graham?”

  There was a pause, and within it Heather imagined all manner of terrible fates for the girl she might have met fleetingly in her childhood. She stood very still, staring unseeing at the scratched glass of the telephone booth.

  “Listen, I’ll tell you what I can tomorrow. If you can make it then?”

  “It’s a date.” She waited for another laugh, but there was nothing this time.

  * * *

  When Heather arrived back at her mother’s house, it was to find Lillian standing at her gate, a large Tupperware box in her arms. Catching sight of Heather’s bemused expression, the old woman had the grace to look embarrassed.

  “You mustn’t think I’m poking my nose where it isn’t wanted, dear, but you look thin and I’m worried you’re not eating properly.” When Heather opened her mouth to object, Lillian held her hand up. “I know, interfering old baggage, it’s not the role I wanted to play either but here we are. I can’t help worrying.” She hefted the Tupperware box in her arms. “Just a traybake. Something to line your stomach. I whipped it up this morning, and then blithely assumed you would be in. I was just dithering out here, wondering if I should leave them on your doorstep like a good fairy.”

  Heather thought of the pile of washing up from the night before, the lines of empty tumblers and wine glasses. She winced.

  “That’s very kind of you, Lillian. Please, come in.”

  Once inside, Lillian took the box through to the kitchen and deposited it on the side, only glancing briefly at the chaos around the sink.

  “There you are. Just bread pudding, but it’s good and stodgy and if you pop some ice-cream on the side it’s actually pretty good, if I do say so myself.” She paused and laid one warm hand on Heather’s arm. “I’ll leave you be now, I promise, but if you do need anything at all, you will let me know, won’t you? Are you holding up, Heather? I would hate to think that you were struggling, and I know your mother would be horrified.”

  The old woman’s gray eyes were sharp and steady, searching Heather’s face avidly. For a moment, Heather felt close to weeping; close to telling Lillian about everything—the bone freezing terror when the police had called her about her mother’s suicide, the unending guilt she’d waded through every single day since her dad had died, even the haunting presence of Michael Reave. She opened her mouth, ready to spill all of it, and Lillian’s eyes widened, just slightly. For some reason, the eager expression on her face broke the spell, and instead Heather just smiled lopsidedly.

  “Thanks for checking up on me, Lillian. And for the bread pudding.”

  The woman nodded, smiling as she gathered up her handbag, but Heather had the distinct impression she was disappointed.

  “Any time, dear. Perhaps you should think of getting away for a while, after the funeral. Some space by yourself, somewhere quiet. It’ll do you the world of good.” They walked to the door together, and just as she stepped outside, she added, “the Tupperware is dishwasher safe, if that helps at all.”

  When she was gone, Heather served up a large portion of the bread pudding, reheated it, and then poured herself a large glass of wine. It was early enough that the sky was still light, but caught within its trees and bushes, the house itself was already growing the darker shadows of evening. Deciding to take her cue from this, Heather changed into her pajamas and sat on the sofa with the bowl of pudding, a pile of notes, and her laptop next to her. She ate steadily, getting through another serving and another large glass of wine, until she began to feel increasingly dozy. Soon, it was difficult to focus on her notes from her talk with Pamela Whittaker, and the pages of news websites were increasingly difficult to look at—all emblazoned with images of Fiona Graham. Heather yawned hugely.

  She checked her phone and saw that there were a few missed messages from Nikki, but the thought of attempting to type out any sort of answer added to her increasing sense of nausea. Instead, she chucked her phone back onto the sofa—it bounced onto a cushion—and she stood up, a decision she immediately regretted.

  “Shit.” Her stomach and the room seemed to be rolling in opposite directions. Two glasses of wine weren’t normally enough to make her drunk, but she had had only a sandwich for lunch. She chalked it up to low blood sugar. “Early night, I think.”

  Uneasily she made her slow way upstairs to the bathroom. Blinking slowly at her reflection in the cabinet mirror, it was possible to see why Lillian had been so concerned; her skin was chalky white, and there were dark smudges under her eyes, like elderly bruises. Even her hair was greasy, strands of it stuck to her forehead. Grimacing, she went to grab her toothbrush only to find it wasn’t on the sink where she habitually left it, nor had it fallen on to the tiled floor. Assuming she must have chucked it in the medicine cabinet that morning, distracted by thoughts of meeting up with Pamela, she swung the door open—only for something to flutter out into the sink.

  It was a piece of lilac paper, and a handful of brown feathers. Bile rising rapidly at the back of her throat, Heather hooked the paper out of the sink before it could absorb any more droplets of water. Turning it over, she saw the little printed wren at the top of the page—the same paper, she realized, her mother had written her suicide note on. There was a small note written on it in black ballpoint pen, printed carefully in block capitals.

  “So?” she said to the room at large. “Just a bit of paper she left lying around. And the feathers are from that bloody bird. That’s all.”

  Even so, her stomach was churning before she read the words.

  I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE, AND I THINK YOU DO TOO

  And underneath that, a tiny black heart.

  CHAPTER

  18

  BEFORE

  MICHAEL GREW TALLER and stronger at a tremendous rate, putting on a layer of muscle and shooting up to be almost as tall as the man. If he was starved of human contact, he did not mind, or even think about it very much—he spent his days outside in the woods, or in the man’s library. He did drawings sometimes, although he was very careful to hide them, slipping them under his mattress in the early hours of the morning. Sometimes the woman who cleaned the big house came, and he would stay out of her way, listening for the sounds of her hoover or the faint sigh as she polished some piece of silver, and every now and then other men would come to the house; big, brash country men who brought a trail of cigarette smoke and the faint sour smell of beer. When they came around, Michael made sure to leave the house entirely, staying out in the woods all night sometimes, watching the lilac dawn light filter through the trees and tending his graves.

  One afternoon, he returned to the house to find it filled with a new presence, something he couldn’t name. He hung in the door
way, sniffing carefully—there was a scent, something floral and exotic, and a different energy. The dog appeared across the hall and then was gone, and a second later he heard the man call out to him.

  “Michael! We have guests. Come and meet them.”

  It was summer. The living room was hot and still. Motes of dust hung in the air, making Michael think of old water moving slowly in a forgotten fish tank. The man was sitting in one of his wooden chairs, leaning forward eagerly to see Michael’s face. On the large green sofa two women were sitting—they were both older than Michael, but not as old as the man. One had chalky white skin with glossy pink lips, and her eyebrows looked as though they had been drawn on with a pen. She wore a tight blue dress with holes in the side; her pale flesh poked through like uncooked bread. The other had a lot of yellow hair that she had pinned up on top of her head and somewhat incongruously she was wearing a thick white fur coat over a short black skirt and a top with spots on it. Michael could tell from looking at it that the fur wasn’t real; it fluffed up around her as though she were sitting in the arms of a big white bear. This one smiled at Michael, revealing small neat teeth.

  “This is your boy, is it? He’s a big lad.” The other woman laughed at this, raising her pretend eyebrows at some meaning Michael couldn’t grasp.

  “Come and say hello.” The man waved him over. “These are friends of mine.”

  Michael did not move. The weird floral scent was coming from these women, and in the confines of the hot living room it was overwhelming. There was too much to take in about them, and he could feel his heart starting to beat too fast; thick silver rings on bony fingers, shiny red shoes with heels like knives, the soft pouches of flesh that seemed to be seeping out from everywhere he looked. The girl with the eyebrows leaned forward, threatening to spill out of her tight top.

  “He’s not frightened, is he? Not of us.”

  “Of course not,” said the man, and Michael caught the look he gave him; interested, close to being angry. There was a path Michael was supposed to take here—just like with the chicks—and he was close to missing it. But quite abruptly, he didn’t care. He was disgusted by these strange colorful women and their strong smells. They were disrupting his home, turning the air strange and charged. For the first time he felt a flare of anger toward the man, a sense of betrayal. This place was supposed to be safe.

  He left the living room, ignoring the trill of laughter from one of the women, and headed back outside into the lengthening afternoon. He walked and walked, taking himself down the paths he was fondest of, through Fiddler’s Woods and down through the fields and further, out past the hedgerows and thickets until he came to paved roads. He walked these, too, walking further than he ever had, with the sun pressing hot on his head and his mind carefully blank.

  The sun was inching toward the horizon when he came to the outskirts of a small village. There were cars parked outside cottages set back from the road, and a little further in, he could see a pub sign swinging from a black and white building. There were people here, he realized. People who might wonder what a fourteen-year-old stranger was doing wandering by himself; people who might even know his family. Jumping as though he had been doused with a bucket of water, Michael turned to head back to the fields, suddenly feeling terribly exposed—he was the mouse out after dark, caught in the shadow of the owl—and that was when he saw her.

  A figure in a red coat, standing just by a low drystone wall. She was leaning back, her pale face tipped up to the last of the sun, grinning. Her sharp white fingers were spread against the stone, but he knew that they could move fast. They could be touching him in moments.

  He ran.

  There was movement as he passed her, and he sensed her turning her head to look at him, sensed her sharp hands reaching out, and he knew that if he felt the feathery touch of her fingers he would faint dead away, and that would be it, he would be back there, in the cupboard, at the mercy of his family again—at the mercy of his mother, who beat him, his father, who hated him, and his sister … who came to him at night, with her red coat and her sharp smile.

  She did not catch him. Instead he ran wildly out into the fields, running until he was back under the blessed trees again, and eventually his terror became something else. Something red. He rubbed his face angrily, outraged at the tears he felt there and the slow throb of the stitch in his side.

  It’s not right.

  It wasn’t right that they could come with their smiling faces and sharp hands and take his safety away. It wasn’t right that they could make him weak like that, when he was the strong one. They were soft, after all, he had seen it; the weakness of their flesh, seeping out of their clothes—had tasted their prey-scent in the flowery perfumes they doused themselves in. Women were dangerous, and difficult, just as the man had said they were. They would always be lethal to him, a thing to be feared.

  When he returned to the house, the man was nowhere to be seen, but the living room door was open and Michael could see one of the women still sitting on the sofa. It was the one in the white fur coat, and she looked bored, picking at a loose thread on a cushion. The other girl was gone. Michael went down to the kitchens and picked out one of the long meat knives; he had seen the man cooking with it sometimes, cutting up steak or carving a pork joint. When he returned, the girl was still there, and in the lengthening shadows of the evening Michael realized that she couldn’t see him just outside the room. He imagined himself as he was in the woods, silent and at home, a predatory force. He thought of all the little ghosts he had packed neatly away in the black earth, how they knew him from his silent footsteps as he passed over their graves.

  The knife held loosely in one hand, he went into the living room and closed the door.

  * * *

  Later, much later, Michael became aware of the man standing in the doorway, watching him. He blinked rapidly. The room appeared to have changed; it was a different place, a room in a red landscape full of silence.

  “Michael.” The man’s voice was very soft. “We can’t leave her here, lad.”

  He shook his head. “We’ll take her to the woods.”

  “No,” the man came a single step into the room, then seemed to think better of it. “Even that’s too close. We’ll have to take her far away, Michael, just to be sure.”

  “But that’s what I promised her, a place under the trees.” Michael didn’t recall making the woman any such promises, but the last hour or so was already fusing into one strange fever dream, and it seemed right enough. She belonged in Fiddler’s Woods with the rest of them, so she would feel his silent footsteps walking over.

  “That can’t be, lad,” said the man, and there was an edge of danger to his voice now. Michael dragged his eyes away from the mess on the carpet and looked up. The man was a creature of black and gray shadows, the light from the single lamp winking out of his dull, false eye. “You’ve done well, but you’ve got to bloody listen to me now, right? Every word, you pay attention now, and learn something. Right?”

  In the end, they gave her heart to Fiddler’s Woods. The rest of her they loaded into the man’s battered old van, and they drove a long way, the hot, sweet smell of her flooding the cab and making the man grimace. Eventually, when they had found a good, remote place, they took her out of the van and placed her in the grass. By that time, the sky in the east was turning a burnished silver color, and the man was eager to be gone.

  “A lot of tidying up to be done lad, and don’t think you’ll be getting out of that. It’s important you learn it. A proper good clean will save your neck.”

  Michael ignored him for the moment. The woman in the grass looked oddly serene, her eyes turned up to the brightening sky, everything below her collar bone a churned, butcher-shop mess. He knew why she looked so peaceful; because her heart was in the cold, black dirt, deep in the roots of the ancient wood. With a single gloved finger, he drew a heart in her blood on one of the few patches of her skin that wasn’t ruined.

 
“A heart for a heart,” he said.

  And her coat. Her coat, which had been so white before, was a deep and sopping red. He smiled at that, drinking in the sight, before getting back into the van.

  CHAPTER

  19

  IN THE SPARE bedroom with the lights still on, Heather sat in the bed with her knees drawn up to her chest, waiting for the nausea to pass. There was a bucket on the floor next to her. She had screwed up the note and thrown it in the bin in the bathroom, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the words, so neat and so damning. It hadn’t looked like her mother’s handwriting, but then how familiar was she with it, anyway? Not to mention the fact that it had been written in big, uppercase letters, much closer to the way her dad had used to write his notes: Post-its on the fridge for more milk, or receipts for building work. Nikki had said, she reminded herself, that suicidal people were very ill, that they might not be thinking clearly when they wrote their notes—perhaps this message had been her mother at her most unwell, writing accusing letters to no one in particular, or perhaps even to herself. She wanted to believe that, for the shred of comfort it gave her, but she didn’t.

  She knew the note was for her.

  It made sense. It was too close to all the barbs her mother had thrown at her in the months before she had finally moved out. Back then, in the dark days following her dad’s funeral, the two of them had been in a state of war, all the conflicts between them finally exposed by the loss of the one person that had kept them together.