A Dark and Secret Place

by Jen Williams

  Just a coincidence, Heather told herself as she stuffed the photos in her pocket. Just a coincidence, just a coincidence.

  At that moment, there was a loud scuffling noise from the room at the end. Something threw itself against the door, and Heather turned and ran, jumping over the dead bird and flying out the door into the rain. She kept going, through the grass and into the tree line. There was a flat crashing sound as something threw the caravan door open, but she didn’t look back. In seconds, she was deeper into the woods, the sound of her own breathing too loud, and even as she tried to convince herself she was fine—it was just a fox, a fox made a den in there, that’s all—the sense that someone was running after her was irresistible.

  Disorientated by the rough ground, she stumbled to a stop, leaning against a tree trunk, and she forced herself to hold her breath, and listen.

  Rain pattered down through the trees, creating a cocoon of noise that shrouded everything else.

  “Shit.” Heather took a slow breath. Somewhere back toward the caravan, she could hear something—a crackle of twigs being broken underfoot, perhaps. Somewhere nearby, a bird cried out, making her jump.

  Maybe not a fox. She stared in the direction of the noises, although she could see no one in the gloom. Maybe a tramp. Someone who has been using it to get out of the rain.

  She waited, so tense her back began to ache, but nothing materialized from between the trees. As if on cue, the rain began to fall more heavily, and reasoning that the noise would hide her movements from anyone listening, Heather began to pick her way through the woods toward the cottage.

  * * *

  When Heather got back, she found Nikki bustling about, a dustpan and brush in one hand.

  “We’ve been here less than a day, you can’t have found anything to tidy up yet.” She kicked her boots off, cringing at the overly casual sound of her voice. She felt tainted by the caravan and her panicky run from it, as though she’d brought back its fusty, rotten atmosphere to this cozy space. She wanted to have a shower.

  “Oh. Well.” Nikki paused in the kitchenette, looking at the floor critically. “We must have left a window open or something because a bird got in. Feathers all over the place.”

  “What?”

  “It’s all right, I got most of them I think.” Nikki banged the pan against the bin, and Heather could just see a little pile of soft brown feathers disappearing into the binbag. “The bird itself must have done a circuit of the cottage and flown back out again, the little sod … Hev, are you all right? You look like you’re going to be sick.”

  She turned away as she took her coat off, so that Nikki wouldn’t see her face. What has followed me here? And how could it?

  “Did you look in all the rooms? For the bird, I mean?”

  “Yup, no sign. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Heather joined her friend in the kitchen, retrieving a bottle of wine from the side and pouring herself a glass. It’s probably nothing, she told herself, although the sick feeling in her stomach only seemed to increase. If you tell her, you’ll be scaring her for no reason. “Listen, I am a bit tired though. How about we call it a day and have a rest? I want to drink a glass of wine, have a hot bath or something.” She took out her phone from her pocket and glanced at the screen, but still no messages from Ben. The idea of calling to complain that someone was leaving feathers in her holiday home only made her feel worse.

  “Sure.” Nikki smiled, although Heather could see the little crease between her eyebrows that meant she was worrying about something. “It’s raining too hard to go for a walk now anyway. We’ll pick up where we left off tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER

  37

  BEFORE

  BONES, WHITE AGAINST the black earth.

  Michael knelt, curious, pushing away clods of mud and pieces of mulch until a shape emerged: empty eye sockets, long toothy snout. It was the skull of a fox, he was fairly certain, and it had been here a good long time. Long enough to lose all its flesh, to simmer away its fur under the forest floor and then emerge this morning, clean and somehow alert, fitting so neatly into his hands.

  There were bones all over his piece of Fiddler’s Woods, and he knew the location of most of them, but of the women he brought back only their hearts nestled in the mud—that was the rule. This skull felt like a message of some sort, but he couldn’t have said what it was. A warning? A blessing? Were the woods trying to speak to him directly?

  He had just placed it back into the dark earth, turning it so that its eyes looked up to the trees, when an alien noise made him sit up. It took him a moment to place it—a baby, not crying yet, but whinging in that pitiful way that babies do when something isn’t quite to their liking.

  “Hello?”

  He stood up and moved away from the skull, wiping his hands on his trousers. It was a warm day, and the midges were thick in the air. The closer he got to the sound of the baby, the more he picked up other, more reassuring noises: there was Colleen, her voice pitched higher than usual as she tried to settle the child, and there was the voice of someone else, talking to her. A moment after he recognized her voice he saw her, walking an old woodland path with one of the Bickerstaff sisters. She was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with tiny purple roses on it, and the baby was wrapped in a yellow blanket. Every now and then she rocked it in her arms, trying to get it to quieten down, but the whinging was edging close to crying now.

  “Babysitting, are we?”

  Both women looked up at the sound of his voice. Neither of them had heard him coming.

  “Oh, Mike.” Colleen smiled. Strands of her blonde hair were plastered to her high forehead with sweat. “Just giving Eileen a break. This little one,” she pressed one hand briefly to the baby’s cheek, “is teething, we think. Walking them about sometimes calms them down.”

  “Bit of brandy in the milk works, too,” said the Bickerstaff woman. “That’s what our mother used to do.”

  Colleen looked faintly scandalized. “Everyone’s a bit frazzled at the commune, so I thought we’d best take our walk where it’s quiet.” She grinned suddenly. “This is the second spring baby!”

  Now that he was next to them, Michael peered down at the baby’s face; Colleen, pleased he was taking an interest, pulled the blanket back a little so he could see better. The small face was mottled and pink, and he could see a few curls of carroty hair sprouting from a downy scalp.

  “Two babies and another on the way.” He looked up at the Bickerstaff woman. It was Lizbet. “Are you sure those contraceptive pills aren’t duds, lass?”

  Lizbet scowled at him openly. “It’s not our fault that girls are forgetting to take them, is it? You should be grateful you don’t have to think about it, Michael. God knows where we would be if men had to take some responsibility for what they keep in their trousers, filthy beasts.”

  Filthy. Beast.

  Michael swallowed hard. Something about his demeanor must have changed, because he saw a look of pure alarm pass over Colleen’s face.

  “She’s just joking, Mike, that’s all.”

  He could do it. He could reach out and snap Lizbet’s neck like a twig; it would only take moments. His mother, who had called him dirty and monstrous had died in seconds, too, and then she had moldered away inside the ice house, her doughy flesh turning into brown sticks. But Lizbet was smiling at him, her eyes full of a knowledge she shouldn’t have, and the moment passed.

  “Take the baby up by the stream,” he said eventually, not looking at either of them. “The sound of the water there makes it peaceful. That might calm her down.”

  CHAPTER

  38

  IT WAS, HEATHER had to admit, a beautiful stretch of land. Gentle hills in the distance, clumps of wild, dark trees held apart by empty fields, alive with the movement of long grasses. In the summer, she imagined it was magnificent—and at this end of the year, with most of the red and gold leaves around their ankles rather than on the trees, there was a pl
easing bleakness to it all. And there was the silence. If it weren’t for the constant calling of the birds, it might even have been possible for her to put aside the feeling that she was haunted—the sense that far from escaping the ghosts and horrors of her mother’s house, that she had simply brought it all with her.

  I’m getting closer, though. It was easier to put her worries to one side when the truth about her mother—and the Red Wolf—felt like it was just around the corner.

  “Here, what’s that?”

  They had reached one of the little country lanes and on the corner of a turn there was, standing half hidden in a bush, a strange figure of twisted metal. Heather and Nikki wandered over for a closer look.

  “I didn’t expect to see something like this up here. I mean, wandering down Peckham Road, you’re falling over stuff like this, but here?”

  It was about five feet tall, and made of graceful twists of silver and copper-colored metal. The figure stood with its hands held out in front of it, each curving finger like a melting knife.

  “Look, there’s a sign.” Nikki reached out and tapped the palm of the left hand: there was a small metal tag there, letters neatly pressed into it. She read it out loud. “The Shifting Man, a work by Harry Bozen-Smith. Commissions accepted. Follow the signs to my studio.”

  Heather straightened up and looked down the turning. The road there was narrower, the bare trees crowding in on either side, but she could already see the next “sign”—another figure of metal, this one with its arms raised and body bent, like a ballerina stretching.

  “Let’s go and have a look.”

  They wandered down the narrow lane, spotting another three figures made from metal before they found another turn off. This one led straight into a field, the grass snipped down to make a tidy path, and in the middle of it was a caravan and a shed. The shed doors were open wide, and it was possible to see a jumble of machinery and tools, half-finished statues and what appeared to be a very elderly car in the midst of being reduced to its parts. The caravan was old, too, but clean and shiny, with a neat sign on the side: Harry Bozen-Smith, Artist.

  “Hello?” Heather called, and after a moment a man emerged from the shed, wearing a pair of dungarees streaked with oil and paint, and a black t-shirt. He was rubbing his hands on a rag, and as he emerged into the daylight, Heather glanced quickly at Nikki, catching her raised eyebrow.

  Harry Bozen-Smith was unreasonably attractive. He had untidy dark hair, a carefully trimmed beard, and large brown eyes framed by a pair of thick expressive eyebrows. His arms, as he moved to throw the rag into a bucket, were firmly muscled, although not excessively so. Seeing them both, he smiled—a dreamy Disney prince sort of smile.

  “Holy shit,” muttered Nikki.

  “Are we in a jeans advert?” muttered Heather back.

  “Hello!” He walked down to meet them. He was wearing a battered pair of Dr Marten boots, and had a tattoo that circled the top of his bicep, almost hidden under his t-shirt. “Can I help? Have you come to buy something? You’d make my day.”

  “We saw your man on the corner,” said Heather. “Harry, is it?”

  The man nodded. “Don’t see many people around here this time of year.”

  “You work out here by yourself?”

  Harry Bozen-Smith shrugged. “Live out here, really, at the moment. Did you want to look at my work?”

  Nikki nodded and stepped up to follow him, while Heather battled a sinking feeling—she’d been to enough final shows at art colleges to dread this sort of thing, but when he led them around the back of the caravan, she was pleasantly surprised. There was a small awning attached to the caravan, and underneath were a series of shapes and figures, all pieced together from junk or unidentifiable pieces of metal. She saw a great copper hare, his eye a shining bicycle light, and a crowd of bats, their tight formation held together by pieces of wire. The most striking piece was a great snarling wolf made of silver and black metal. Heather leaned down to look more closely, and caught sight of her reflection in its shining flank. I know what you are, and I think you do too. She looked away hurriedly.

  Nikki knelt to examine a crow more closely—the black metal had been treated with oil somehow, so that its feathers shone rainbow-like even in the shadows.

  “This is incredible,” she said. “You take your inspiration from the landscape?”

  Harry beamed, his hands in his pockets. “I do. This place …” he looked away, across the field. “This place is full of strangeness.”

  “We’re trying to find out more about it, actually,” said Heather. “Do you know much of the history of Fiddler’s Mill?” She tucked a stray bit of hair behind her ear; the wind was picking up, and the awning caught the flat sound of the first few drops of rain. “We met a chap yesterday who said there’s a haunted field around here somewhere.”

  “There is, that’s true. I’ve been there. I didn’t see any ghosts …” Heather glanced at him, but couldn’t tell if he was joking. “Some powerful energies though. Very powerful.”

  “And there was the hippy commune up at Fiddler’s Mill House. Did you hear about that?”

  Harry straightened up. For the first time, Heather thought to wonder at his bare arms—it was hardly a warm day.

  “You know that’s infamous around here.” He grinned. “I grew up in the little village down the road, and my mum used to talk about it with the neighbors when I were a lad. Enough scandal to keep them talking for decades.”

  Nikki returned his smile. “Scandal? Do tell.”

  “Oh, you know.” Harry shrugged. “Nothing especially scandalous to people from London, I’ll bet, but up here? Drugs and drinking and loose women. I always preferred my nana’s stories about Fiddler’s Mill—she was more about ghosts and that, fairies and witches, you know. I always …”

  His words were lost in a gust of wind, and the pair of them shuffled further under the awning.

  “Sorry?” Heather nodded encouragingly. “Please, local folklore is a special interest of mine.”

  Harry looked faintly embarrassed now, and he rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Aye well. She said there was a woman who haunted the woods around here, a woman wearing a red coat. Swore her life on it, she did. You’ve heard why it’s called Fiddler’s Mill, have you?”

  “No?” Heather wrapped her arms around herself and glanced out across the grass. The line of dark woods continued there, waiting for them.

  “Well,” Harry said, “There was a mill, a long time ago, but that was named after the woods, you see. And the woods were said to belong to the fiddler, a man who came to the village with a magical fiddle. When he played it, the children became so caught up in the music, so absorbed in it, they would do whatever he wanted them to do. He took them away, to his secret home in the woods, and they never came back.”

  “What?” Heather ignored the look of surprise Nikki shot her. “What are you talking about?”

  “The wood,” said Harry, mildly enough. “The villagers got angry, and when he came back to collect more of their children, they chased him into the trees but lost him there. He never came back, and neither did any of their kids.” He shrugged. “It’s a creepy story, but you love stuff like that when you’re a kid, don’t you? I was always getting my nana to tell me that one.”

  “It’s fascinating,” said Nikki seriously. “Like the Pied Piper legend, but a local variety. Harry, I work at a college teaching English. I reckon my students would get a kick out of a proper old piece of folklore like this. I’d love to write about this story, if you wouldn’t mind?”

  “Uh, sure, knock yourself out.” He looked bemused now. “Here, look, take my card.” He fished a slightly bent business card out of his pocket and handed it over to Nikki. “Call me. You know. If you want to know more old stories.’ He grinned. “Or you want to buy a giant crow.”

  As they walked away, back down the twisting paths, Heather elbowed her friend in the side.

  “So smooth,” she said.
“You always were a player, Nikki Appiah.”

  “Oh, shut up.” But Nikki was laughing while she said it, her eyes bright. For a moment, Heather felt a genuine measure of contentment—it felt good to be teasing her friend, just like she did when they were kids in the school playground. When the rain picked up, however, the pattering of the rain on their umbrellas made her think of the abandoned caravan, and the lost and tiny faces of the children in the photographs, and all feelings of warmth and safety seemed to drain away into the soil.

  * * *

  They spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the countryside, taking photos here and there and sitting on low stone walls. Heather brought out her folder of Pamela Whittaker’s paintings every now and then, trying to match the images with the landscape around them, but she was never quite convinced she had got it right. She realized gradually that she was trying to pin the place down, as though it could be captured on Google street view, skewered like a butterfly on a board to be better examined, but Fiddler’s Mill and its environs were ever changing; in a constant state of flux, eroded into change by the seasons and wildlife and weather. It was an unknowable place—unless, perhaps, you were prepared to live under its bare skies for a while, like the commune had. She tried to picture her mother out here, living with a bunch of long-haired bath-dodgers, but it was difficult. It was difficult to even imagine her mother being happy.

  Nikki was a good sport about it, wandering wherever Heather’s vague impulses directed them, but she noticed that her friend spent a lot of time looking at her phone, and any time there was a flicker of signal her fingers would fly across the screen. Giving into her nosier instincts, Heather peeped over Nikki’s shoulder at one point and saw enough of her phone screen to know that she was already engaged in a lively text conversation with Harry the artist. She looked away, smiling. It made her think of Ben Parker and his tousled sandy hair—but of course there was little chance he would reply to her text messages, and she could hardly be surprised at that.