A Dark and Secret Place

by Jen Williams

  “I have to go there.” The idea had a finality to it that both frightened and excited her. “I have to see this place.”

  CHAPTER

  32

  BEFORE

  THE BLOOD HAD turned his sleeve into a sodden red mass.

  Michael found his eyes drawn to it again and again, taking his attention from the road often enough that eventually he pulled over, parking the van in a little gravel layby.

  She had cut him. The bitch had cut him.

  Jerkily, he opened the van door and stepped out into the summer’s night. He was on one of the winding country roads that ran back to Fiddler’s Mill, and it was utterly dark, with no street lights in sight. Overhead, the stars were bright and clear, and the moon was not quite full. Normally he would have taken a great deal of pleasure in such an evening—he could smell all the good green smells, and somewhere in the distance a vixen was screeching for her mate—but the pain in his arm blotted all that out, made it irrelevant.

  Again, uselessly, he replayed what had happened in his mind, looking for his mistake. He had followed the woman as she walked back from the pub, far enough back that he was certain she had been unaware of him, at least at first. She had taken a path along a canal, poorly lit and deserted, and when she had done that he had been certain; this woman would be coming with him. Her heart would go deep into the black earth of Fiddler’s Woods, and the rest of her he would cover in flowers. But when he had caught up with her, laying one strong arm across her shoulders, the face she’d turned on him hadn’t been rigid with terror or surprise—she hadn’t gasped or screamed. The face she’d turned on him had been angry. Furious.

  On the quiet road, Michael walked around to the back of the van, thinking.

  The woman had fought him. He was the barghest, he was the wolf, but she had pulled a boxcutter, of all things, from her bag and slashed at him with it, tearing through his thin shirt and across the skin underneath. It had only taken him a moment to strike it from her hands, and she only managed to cut him that once, but … What did it mean, if the barghest bled? Had he chosen the wrong one? Was that possible?

  In another, more logical part of his mind, Michael wondered if people had been paying attention to the news lately, and had noted the number of women going missing in the area. Perhaps this one wasn’t the only girl to go out walking with a blade in her handbag.

  He had had the sense to pick the boxcutter up and take it with him, at least.

  Casting a glance back down the road to make sure there were no lights approaching, he opened the back doors of the van. Her body was a crumpled form in the back, her hands and her face pale shapes in the gloom. One of her shoes had come off, and her foot was thrust out at him. In the struggle, her tights had been laddered all over.

  This was all wrong, of course. The rules were very clear about this—he never brought their bodies back to Fiddler’s Mill. It was unthinkable. The fact that he had come this far with it only demonstrated that the entire evening was a mistake, that there was something discordant in the night air. Abruptly, he wasn’t the barghest at all, he wasn’t the Wolf, he was just a man with a knife and a sleeve turning stiff and tacky with his own blood. If he wasn’t the wolf, then was he anything at all?

  He slammed the backdoors shut and got back into the van. He drove. Once he was back within his woods, he knew that his mind would clear. When he walked back over his graves, and felt their hearts singing there, things would seem normal again.

  But when he got back to Fiddler’s Mill, he found his way thwarted; the young people had sprawled their dwellings over one of the main access roads. He could see their lights and hear their voices, and a slow kind of panic began to grow in his chest; the panic of a prey animal, realizing that they had made a mistake, that they were trapped. He couldn’t get to his woods, he couldn’t get to the House. He was bleeding. He had brought a body back with him. This had to be where it all ended.

  Michael was leaning over the steering wheel, convinced that the walls were closing in on him, that he could smell the musty cupboard and feel his sister’s hands taking hold of him, when a white face appeared at the open window.

  “Michael? What’s the matter? Are you … are you bleeding?”

  It was Colleen. She leaned through the window into the cab, her blonde hair falling forward over her face. In the light from the campfires, her hair glittered gold and copper.

  “I had an accident.” For some reason, the pure concern on her face had chased away his anxiety. Suddenly it was easier to think. “I was out clearing away rubbish for some people. You know, just a dirty job to make some easy money.” He made himself smile. “But there was broken glass in the dump, didn’t see it until it was too late.” His arm, when he held it up, looked awful, and he saw her recoil. “It’s not as bad as it looks, honestly.”

  “Jesus, Michael, I think maybe you should go to the hospital.” But she said it doubtfully. No one at Fiddler’s Mill was very keen on hospitals. The hospital might find out what drugs you’d been taking; the hospital might try to contact your parents, or the police. “Here, come out here where I can see it.” She held up a plastic battery powered torch—a lot of the young people carried them, for the woods at night.

  When he was standing by the van, Colleen bent her head over his arm, shining the white light over his tattered sleeve. She made a small noise of sympathy and tugged at a piece of the material. Michael grunted with pain.

  “Ok. All right. Do you trust me, Michael?”

  “What?”

  She looked up at him, smiling shyly. Again, he was struck by the delicacy of her.

  “I have a first aid kit back in my camper. I can try and see if I, uh, can make it better? But I’ll have to cut your sleeve off I think, because it’s stuck in the wound. Although I think you’ll have to give up on this shirt anyway.”

  Somewhere nearby, someone began plucking notes on a guitar, only to be laughingly shouted down by several others. For a moment, Michael found he couldn’t speak. Colleen still had her hand on his arm, apparently untroubled by the blood, and a few feet away, inside the van, a woman lay on a coarse blanket, her eyes staring sightlessly at nothing. It all seemed impossible. Colleen smiled encouragingly.

  What is she?

  “Come on, my camper’s not far.”

  She was parked up a little way from the others, which Michael was glad of. Inside, it was cramped and untidy, with all the chaos that indicated it was home to at least two young women who kept unsociable hours. Colleen made him sit on the thinly cushioned seat that ran along one wall, and then pulled down a green plastic box from one of the cupboards. As she did so, a packet of plasters shed its contents all over the sink.

  “Oh, whoops.”

  Then she fetched some water and scraps of dry cloth, and a pair of huge fabric scissors. Seeing the look he gave them, she held them up, smiling.

  “They’re Charlie’s. She makes her own clothes.”

  For the next few minutes, they fell into an awkward silence as Colleen cut his sleeve away, peeling the fabric back from his tacky skin. Next, she wet one of the cloths and used it to wipe the blood away. As she did so, he watched the soft curve of her pale neck as a thin blush of pink moved up it.

  “There, it’s not so bad, actually. Bit ragged, but …” She opened a small, brown bottle and the stink of antiseptic flooded the small space. She wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. Hold still.”

  She swiped a cloth over the wound, and it burned fiercely for a few seconds, but Michael barely noticed. In here, with Colleen, all of his misery and fright had fled. In here, he was strong again. The knowledge that he could, if he wanted, take the scissors from her and cut her—that he could place his hands around her slim neck and push the life out of her—was comforting. It also increased his feelings of protectiveness for her. She was the one good thing. She was his alone.

  “Colleen.” She looked up at him, and he saw that the blush had turned her cheeks quite pink. He knew then that she felt it, too.
“What would I do without you?”

  CHAPTER

  33

  “I NEED TO GET out of here for a bit. Do you want to come with me?”

  Nikki clearly hadn’t been home long as her shopping was still on the kitchen counter and she had kicked her tights off in the hallway, replacing them with a pair of fluffy pink slippers that looked especially quirky with her sober navy blue shirt.

  “Where were you thinking of going?” She shifted the shopping out of the way and began filling the kettle. “Cup of tea?”

  “Got anything stronger?”

  Nikki looked pointedly at her watch, but nevertheless went to the fridge instead and liberated a half full bottle of white wine.

  “Hev, you look like you’ve been up all night. What’s going on?”

  Heather shook her head and accepted the glass of wine, taking three deliciously cold gulps before answering.

  “I’ve had enough of that house, Nikki. It’s, uh, it’s sending me round the bend. I was thinking of driving up to Lancashire, going to this Fiddler’s Mill place, having a look around. Why not? Call it a tribute to my mum, call it closure, whatever.”

  Nikki joined her at the kitchen counter, a glass in her hand.

  “And what about your visits with Michael Reave?”

  “They’re over. After the article, I, …”

  “Hmm. You haven’t heard from the detective, then?” Nikki’s face was carefully blank. She knew all about Heather’s night with Ben Parker, thanks to a hushed chat before her mother’s funeral, and so, inevitably, Heather had texted her the ignominious details of the end of the whole thing, too.

  “I think, I can safely assume I’ve lost my chance there, in more ways than one.” Heather forced herself to smile, hoping to cover up exactly how painful those words were. “A trip to the countryside is what I need now. It won’t be completely terrible, I promise. The big old building is a spa now, and there’s a nice cottage where we can stay, in the grounds. Fresh air, long walks, and I could do with some company. Stuck inside that house by myself, it’s not healthy.” She thought of the petals on the stairs, the heart on the terracotta pot. “Diane might have fucked me over with the Red Wolf story, but that doesn’t mean I can’t eventually write my own version of it. And this would be great background—absorb the atmosphere of the place. And maybe get a massage at the spa, I don’t know.”

  Nikki swirled the wine in her glass, frowning into its depths.

  “And, okay, mostly I am just curious to see the place. Pamela Whittaker said it was evil.” Heather smiled as Nikki rolled her eyes. “I want to see this miserable patch of grass my mum apparently thought was so amazing. Where this all started. I’m sure that … I’m sure that if I want to know more about her, I have to go to this place and see it for myself.”

  “This place is in Lancashire, isn’t it?”

  “Yup.”

  “Lancashire, where they recently found bits of a woman’s body shoved inside a tree.”

  “Come on, it’s the same county. It’s not like the murderer is on the welcoming committee as you drive up the M6.” For a moment, an image of the petals and the dead bird floated across her mind. She could still smell the blood. Guiltily, she pushed it away.

  “Hmm.” Nikki, who had been nursing the wine rather than drinking it, took a long swallow of her drink, then shrugged. “All right. I have some time off owing. And apparently, I have nothing better to do.”

  * * *

  Heather had always liked long car journeys. They put her in mind of her earliest childhood, when her dad was still alive and he would get a sudden urge to drive to the coast. Her mother would give her a big bag of barley sugars to settle her stomach—never forgetting the incident where she had vomited noisily out the window while they were on the motorway—and she would spend hours sucking sweets and looking out the window at stretches of green and brown, smears and smudges of places she would never know. Sometimes she would play games with her dad, iterations of I-spy or word games based on number plates, and when they got to their destination, she would always be faintly disappointed. There was something precious and strange about having both her parents’ undivided attention for so long.

  Nikki looked less excited about the journey, repeatedly fiddling with her phone in its holder on the dashboard, which was serving as a sat-nav. Factoring in breaks, it was a good five hour drive to Lancashire and they had set off in the late morning, shunting and winding around the slow-moving traffic of London, and now they were out beyond the M25, free of the city’s shackles. Hours passed, and anonymous fields and stretches of vegetation zipped by on both sides of the motorway, the sky overhead gray and nondescript.

  They got to the borders of Lancashire just as the last of the sun was bleeding from the sky. Heather had been dozing in the passenger seat, but something woke her as they turned down a country road. She sat up, blinking and trying to recapture the specific sensation. A voice saying her name? Had she been dreaming?

  “Oh good, you’re awake,” Nikki sounded distracted. “Can you keep an eye on the map for me? These roads are all really twisty, and this place is in the middle of bloody nowhere.”

  Heather nodded and peered at the electronic map. They drove for another hour or so, trundling up and down roads boxed in with trees and low stone walls, until it was completely dark. There were very few lights out here, and more than once Heather found herself staring out into the night, at the yawning blackness of the fields.

  “When I was a kid,” she said, “I used to imagine how scary it would be to suddenly be transported somewhere like this. If you were just at home, watching television in your pajamas, and then suddenly you were in the middle of a field at night, no idea where you were, no way to contact home. Cold and alone, no idea what might be in the woods. I used to imagine that a lot.”

  “Do we take the next left? No wait, I’ve got it …” Nikki nodded toward the windscreen. “There it is, look. There’s the entrance.”

  Their headlights caught it—a flash of white in the night. It was a big shiny board, advertising the Fiddler’s Mill Spa Complex in an ostentatious green font. Underneath it was a big stylized acorn with the words Oak Leaf written through it, and beyond the sign they could make out a long, smooth road, helpfully lit with discrete lamps. Somewhere out in the dark, up a gradually sloping hill, Fiddler’s Mill House lurked. Heather squinted at the windscreen, thinking it would be possible to see lights in its windows perhaps, but the glow from the car cast everything beyond the road into a blank kind of darkness.

  “Our cottage should be left of here,” Heather leaned back. “It’s a little way from the big house.”

  Dutifully they turned left, and after about twenty minutes of driving through more fields and trees, they came to another signpost, discreetly lit with a softly glowing lamp. It displayed directions to five holiday properties, each of which had been given their own name: Herne, Titania, Puck, Woden, and Frig.

  “We’re staying in Herne, apparently.”

  They drove on, following a narrow country road that seemed to hug the edges of a sprawling field, until a cottage loomed up in their headlights, box-shaped and oddly inert looking. Heather retrieved the keys from the lock box by the side of the front door, and together they brought their stuff in; suitcases, a bag of food and drink. Inside, all was cozy and neutral, and Heather found that she was oddly relieved. This was a place designed to be inoffensive, palatable to any holiday maker—no personality required. There were biscuit-colored sofas, deep red rugs, and discreet modern lighting, hidden among the beams that crossed the ceiling. No chance here, she told herself, of coming across sheets of paper from the notebook your mother used for her suicide note, no danger of some innocuous object rousing some long-forgotten trauma. Whatever was haunting her in Balesford could stay there.

  Someone had thoughtfully left a small pile of the day’s newspapers on the central table along with a pair of empty wine glasses, a bottle of wine, and a box of posh biscuits. Nikki went
to the small open kitchen and began unpacking food, while Heather searched for a corkscrew.

  “This isn’t so bad,” Heather said as they were ensconced on the sofa, sipping from glasses of wine. Nikki had her legs tucked under her, one of the local newspapers spread on her lap. “I could easily put up with four days of this.” She slipped her phone out of her pocket. No messages from Ben Parker, but then, there was no phone signal either. She resolved to text him the next time she saw some stable bars on the screen, just to see how he was—it might not make any difference to how he felt about her, but it could ease some of her own guilt.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “Hmm? Oh, eat a lot of crap, sleep a lot.”

  “How is that different from usual?”

  “Ha ha ha.” Heather swirled the wine in her glass. “So. This is the place my mum ran to when she was a teenager. Maybe I’ll never understand what she did, but perhaps I can get a bit closer to understanding her.” It was also the place where she met a man who she maintained a bond with for the rest of her life, despite what and who he turned out to be. She remembered what Pamela Whittaker had said about the land soaking up memories, keeping them to itself. She remembered Anna’s face, how it had crumpled in on itself when she thought of her missing baby. There was something bad here, and the land remembered, deep in its bones. She had to find out what it was. What did she have to lose, at this point? “I’ll have a look around tomorrow.”

  Nikki lifted the paper from her lap and turned it to show Heather the front page. There was a photograph there, blown up slightly too big so that the edges of the woman’s smiling face were blurred, and across the top the headline screamed “LATEST VICTIM OF THE RED WOLF?”

  “Whatever you say, we’re in his territory now, Hev. Be careful with your snooping, yeah?”

  Heather raised her glass. “I’ll drink to that.”