A Dark and Secret Place

by Jen Williams

  “Christ, Nikki, where are you?”

  She checked her phone to see if her messages had been received. They hadn’t. All at once the idea that Nikki had simply stayed out late without telling her seemed ludicrous. She had brought Nikki into danger, and now she was gone. Heather went to the kitchen drawers and pulled out the biggest, sharpest kitchen knife she could find, feeling the weight of it in her hand.

  Well, fuck this.

  Heather went to the front door and eased it open. For a handful of seconds, she stood very still. She could see nothing else from where she was, but somewhere to her right she could hear those slow, methodical steps. The wind gusted in her direction, and she even heard the soft noise of nylon brushing against nylon.

  Holding the knife low by her hip, Heather stepped out into the dark, keeping close to the wall of the cottage. When she rounded the corner, she froze, sure that whoever it was would see her, but she saw almost immediately that she had been lucky; the figure had its back to her, and it appeared to be heading back into the woods. Wearing a thickly padded winter coat, this tall figure had its head covered in a hood, appearing little more than a dark shape. As she watched, the figure turned its head slightly, clearly glancing at the windows of the cottage.

  Fear vanished. She didn’t even feel the cold. Instead, a hot, dry landscape of anger opened up inside Heather, just as it had the day she had slammed a pen through a man’s hand. Here, undoubtedly, was the person who had been terrorizing her these last few weeks. And they were still at it, creeping about in the dark, looking for a place to leave more of their notes and feathers.

  Before she even knew she was moving, Heather had crossed the short space between them and thrown herself at the stranger’s back. They collided and fell together with an oof, crashing into the leaves and mud with more force than Heather realized she was capable of.

  “Who the fuck are you? What do you want?”

  The figure scrambled, trying to buck her off violently, but Heather drove her knee into its back, and they slumped into the dirt again. Grabbing the coat by the shoulder, she yanked the mysterious figure around to face her, bringing her knife up to the throat.

  Lillian glared back at her, with her teeth bared.

  Heather blinked, her hand growing loose around the knife. She couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing; it was her mother’s neighbor, except it wasn’t. There were more lines on her long face, and there was a deep scar on one cheek, white and puckered-looking in the gloom.

  “Lillian?”

  The woman underneath her grinned, her body going slack. She looked, abruptly, unhinged.

  “God, look at you,” she spat. “Exactly as much of an idiot as the rest of your pathetic family.”

  “What?”

  Taking advantage of Heather’s surprise, the woman shook her off and scrambled to her feet. The hood fell back, and Heather saw that her hair was a shade darker than Lillian’s, and her face was a subtly different shape; the nose a little longer, the jaw a little narrower. She stood up, the knife back at her waist.

  “Who are you?”

  The woman shook her head in disgust. “My sister did say you were weak minded. So easy to manipulate. You’re asking all the wrong questions, Heather Reave.”

  “Shut up!” Heather brought the knife up, the moonlight flashing along the blade. “What do you know about that?”

  “Make up your mind.” The woman grinned again, dots of spittle on her lips glinting wetly. “Do I shut up or explain everything?” Before Heather could reply, she continued. “You don’t have time, anyway.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The woman who was not Lillian nodded back toward the cottage. “Go inside and find out. Don’t call the police or go running off to get help—I can tell you now that your friend doesn’t have time for nonsense like that.”

  “Where the fuck is Nikki?” For a dangerous second, the edges of Heather’s vision turned dark. She sucked in a breath and clenched her fist around the handle of the knife. Her knuckles were turning white. “What the fuck have you done?”

  The woman stepped backwards. “Always the wrong questions. It’s not what I’ve done that you need to worry about. I—”

  “Where is she?”

  “Oh, you know where she is. I practically told you, you fool. He’s waiting for you. Hurry up now, little wolf.”

  With that she dashed back into the tree line. Heather jerked, her whole body singing with the need to go after her, but …

  “Nikki.”

  She crashed back through the cottage door, wanting more than anything to see her friend standing in the kitchen, yawning in her pajamas and complaining about the noise, but the place was dark and silent.

  “Nikki?”

  The bathroom was on the way to Nikki’s bedroom, so she kicked the door open as she went; nothing, an empty bath, the brief flash of her reflection staring back at her, pale and wild. As she came up the hallway to the room on the far end, she caught sight of dark smudges on the pale, biscuit-colored carpet which she hadn’t noticed before. Mud, she thought, it’s mud, it has to be mud.

  The last room was the utilities room at the back, with the washing machine and dryer. There was a back door here, and racks for hikers to leave their muddy boots, but she and Nikki had barely used it. When she opened the door to it, there was a thick, mineral smell, the smell of a butcher’s shop in high summer, and Heather felt some of the strength leach out of her legs. She slammed on the light, throwing everything into a hectic, yellow glow.

  I brought her here, she thought. I brought her up here, said it was safe. Oh god, I brought her here.

  Her bones heavy with dread, she crept to the far end of the room. Slumped in the space between the washer and the door was a body. It was difficult, for a moment, in the midst of her shock and the sheer amount of blood, to recognize that it wasn’t Nikki at all, but eventually her mind caught up with what her eyes were seeing; it was a man in his boxer shorts, those parts of his skin not covered in blood painfully white. His neck was gaping open. It was Harry. Harry the artist, his hands lying palms up on his thighs and his face turned up to the ceiling, looking a little like a martyr in a sixteenth-century painting.

  “Fuck. Fuck.”

  Heather ran back to the living room and snatched up the phone. There was no dial tone. Picking up the unit itself, she saw that the wires had been cut, ending a handspan before they reached the wall. She fumbled her phone out, but of course there was no signal. Outside, Nikki’s car was still missing from the drive way. She was stuck.

  She sank down against the cottage wall. It was the middle of the night. Somewhere out there was a killer—someone who had murdered a man, perhaps while she had been sleeping in the same house, and taken her friend. She could not call the police. The nearest neighbor was a good hour’s walk away. You know where.

  That was what the woman had said. She had said she knew where, that she had already told her.

  “She called me a fool.” Heather thought of the Polaroid, with the beach in the background. The Folly, standing empty behind them—the Folly that was owned by the same environmental charity that partly owned this land. Something about this tickled at the back of her mind, but she dismissed it. There was no time. If she headed out through the woods, she would get there eventually. Right now, she was Nikki’s best hope of getting away alive. And more than that, she had the sense that this was exactly what she had been heading toward all along. Walking into these woods with murder on her mind—it would be a kind of coming home.

  Heather went back into the cottage and retrieved her knife. She put on her coat, tucked the blade into an inner pocket, and ran out into the darkness.

  CHAPTER

  43

  HEATHER HEARD THE ocean long before she could see it; a huge, hissing roar, both loud and quiet, the canvas that all the other noises were painted on—the crunch of dry leaves underfoot, her own labored breathing, the wind in the trees.

  The woods had
been dark, yet she had not felt afraid. Instead, she’d had the strangest feeling of being watched—not by enemies, or by this monster she was currently chasing, but by a warm silent presence that urged her on. When she emerged from the tree line she stood still, letting her eyes adjust to the moonlight glinting off the vast stretch of sea, to the pale sand that seemed to contain its own luminescence. To the right was the Folly, a darker shape pointing up into the night sky. She could see no lights there, no glow from the narrow windows, but there was a smaller shape crouched at the base of it. The small, dilapidated house had been missing from the images she had seen of the beach, and she suspected people had been careful to crop it from their photographs. Squat and covered in cheap pebbledash, it quite ruined the bleak romance of the shoreline and the wind-blasted tower.

  There was no one in sight, and no movement to be seen anywhere. Checking once more that the knife was still in her coat, Heather began to climb down the rocky bluff that separated the forest from the beach, until she stood on the plain of shingle that led down to the sand. Something about the angle had changed her view of the house, and she could now see a tiny slither of light emerging from under the blind of one window.

  “Bastard.”

  She curled one hand around the handle of the knife. Fear still felt like a very distant thing. Instead, the dry kindling feeling of rage that had nestled in her chest when she’d slammed the pen through her colleague’s hand was back. It didn’t matter what happened next, because she was right. This person she was chasing, the person she intended to hurt, was a monster, and she couldn’t be feeling guilty for wanting to hurt him. And perhaps she would find the woman who looked like Lillian and hurt her, too. The sensation was incredibly liberating.

  As she drew closer to the Folly and the house, she got a better idea of the layout of the place. The Folly didn’t sit directly on the sand—she supposed that would have been a very unstable foundation—but on a spur of rock that had been laid, spiking out from the forested area toward the sea. There was a rough sort of road leading away from it, curling away into the dark somewhere out of sight, and the house crouched within its shadow, a strange sort of afterthought.

  She had just stepped onto the rock when the thin line of light under the window blind vanished. Stopping where she was, Heather waited, expecting to see another light come on elsewhere in the house, but several long minutes passed and the darkness remained complete. She listened, too, desperate to get some sense of where this person was, or where Nikki was, but no voices were carried to her on the wind, no slamming doors or footsteps. Everything was eerily quiet. With the knife now held at her hip, Heather circled the place until she found a back door, a short flight of steps leading up to it. In the dark, everything was colorless.

  Wait. Wait, wait, wait. She screwed her eyes up tight, trying to concentrate on the small voice of reason. Try your phone again. You have to. You could be about to get both yourself and Nikki killed, idiot.

  Half a bar of signal. It might be enough, but then again, she might get a few words out before she lost the connection, and then what? She quickly texted Ben: Fiddler’s Folly. Red Wolf found. He has Nikki. Help.

  She didn’t wait to see if it had gone through or try to call him. The monster inside this place would get a good early warning that she was here, and that could doom Nikki. Better to go in quiet now, Heather told herself. Better to take the chance.

  The door was unlocked. Heather stepped into a small, filthy kitchen, thick with shadows. A square window let in enough moonlight for her to see a sink filled with dirty plates, an old wooden table riddled with burn marks and scratches, a packet of breakfast cereal open on the counter. There was an old-fashioned radio sitting on a cupboard shelf, and the wallpaper was peeling away in long, moldy strips. The place was old and badly maintained, but also clearly still inhabited.

  She moved out into the hallway beyond, which led at the far end to a staircase that turned back on itself. There was a door to either side—one, which was standing open, revealed a room used as both a living space and bedroom. She could see a vast lumpy sofa covered with sheets, a coffee table littered with cups, and as she moved into the room itself, piles of dirty clothes just thrown all over the floor. Her heart in her mouth, she checked in every corner, but the place was empty.

  Perhaps he’s gone, she thought suddenly. Saw me coming and left. He could have left through the door I couldn’t see when I was walking across the beach.

  Or, suggested a darker part of her mind, perhaps this is a perfectly innocent house. Perhaps you have broken into the home of some poor, lonely soul, and you’re about to frighten the living shit out of them because you’ve lost touch with reality.

  Heather backed out of the room and went to the closed door. Her hand on the door knob, she paused as a painting on the wall next to it caught her eye. It was difficult to see in the gloom, but something about it made her fish out the phone from her pocket again, letting the screen light up the canvas briefly. It depicted a strange, red landscape, a flat and arid place with soft hills clouding the horizon. In the foreground, there was a single stunted tree, so twisted and black it almost looked like a crack in the arid ground, its sharp branches reaching like fingers. Heather swallowed and looked away. The painting frightened her.

  As quietly as she could, she opened the door. Beyond it was a sheet of utter darkness, so she illuminated her phone again and cast the light ahead of her. There was a set of concrete steps leading down into a basement, and a strong smell of salt and bleach. Her stomach cramped.

  Heather made her way down the steps, tipping her makeshift torch into the room ahead. The floor was bare and stained, and a long sturdy table stood on one side, much newer and better cared for than the one in the kitchen. There was a large plastic storage box in one corner, filled with big industrial bottles of cleaning fluids and other things she didn’t recognize, and next to the table there was a metal trolley, littered with tools.

  Still think this is the wrong place? Part of her asked mockingly.

  The light dawdled over the trolley, winking off of scalpels, knives, and small saws with tiny jagged teeth. There were other things there, too— razor blades, ice picks, a long length of nylon rope, dark brown glass bottles with white paper labels. On the corner of the thing something dark and gelatinous clung; it had hair coming out of it, long strands of slightly curly red hair. Heather backed up rapidly, her heels striking the front of the last step and making her jump.

  “Fuck. Fuck.”

  All of her previous certainty seemed to flee her. Grinding her teeth together to keep from crying out, Heather ran back up the steps and into the hallway, the light from her phone jumping and flashing. For a few seconds she stood at the kitchen entrance, quite ready to run back outside and across the beach, when she heard someone moving upstairs.

  It was the briefest sound—half a footstep, the shifting of a shoe against carpet—but it was enough to stop her dead.

  Nikki, she told herself. Nikki could be up there.

  She went to the stairs and climbed them, wincing at every creak of the floorboards. At the top was a wide landing, the carpet stripped up and rolled against the walls. There were three doors that she could see, one standing open to reveal a tiny, dismal looking bathroom. She opened the door closest to her, the knife held high. The blinds in this room were drawn tight, and she could barely see anything save for a vague impression of some bulky furniture; a bed, a wardrobe perhaps?

  “Nikki?” No response.

  She lifted the phone light again and had a brief glimpse of a big mirror on the other side of the room. She saw her own face, pale and gaunt, her dark hair strewn haphazardly across her forehead—and then watched in shock as the face blinked and held up both hands to shield its eyes.

  “What—?”

  The figure lunged at her, throwing her down and to the floor with a crash. Heather cried out, the knife flying from her hand, and then the figure had both hands around her throat. It was a man, she bel
atedly realized; a man who had her face, her stature, her hair. He crashed her head against the floorboards, and her vision filled with static.

  “I am the wolf,” the man shouted. “I am the wolf!”

  With some difficultly, Heather bucked him off, causing him to smash his head into the door frame. For a second he was stunned, and she took the opportunity to scramble away.

  “Who are you? Where’s Nikki?” The knife was by her foot, so she snatched it up. She had dropped the phone, but to her surprise he stood up and flicked a light switch in the bedroom, casting them both into a harsh artificial glow. “I … who are you?”

  He stood unmoving, watching her. Now that there was more light, she could see that they weren’t identical after all, of course they weren’t. He had a wider jaw and thicker eyebrows, and there were scars, lots of them, crisscrossing their way up his forearms. His hair, too, was shorter. But other than that, the resemblance was uncanny—there was little doubt who he was, not really. For a strange, horrible few seconds, Heather found she wanted to laugh, or be sick; she wasn’t sure which.

  “Why do you look like me?” He sounded petulant almost, a child angry because he was confused. His hand crept up to his head, touching the place where he had struck it on the door jamb.

  “I’m your sister.” Heather paused and made a strangled noise, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “I’m your bloody sister, aren’t I? Who’s your dad?”

  He looked confused by the question. Instead, he took out a knife from his back pocket. It was slim and lethal, and not clean. As he held it up, Heather found herself noticing other details about him; his hands had spots of blood on them, and his shirt, which was a dark navy blue, had darker patches on it.

  “Listen,” he said. “Listen.” He shook the knife at her. “I am the wolf. I am the barghest. There can’t be two of us. It’s my job.”

  “What is? What is your job?”