by Jen Williams
“Nikki?”
Her voice sank into nothing, but below her the noises increased. Heather headed down, one hand braced against the wall, until she came to a nondescript wooden door. Beyond it was a dank, cold little room, and in it Nikki and another woman she didn’t know huddled together on the floor. At the sight of her, the other woman moaned, a desperate, terrified noise, but Nikki sat up, her eyes very wide. They were both bound with nylon rope, hands cinched tightly behind their backs and gags around their mouths, and Nikki was sitting slightly in front of the other woman, as though to shield her from something.
“Christ.” Heather went to them, bringing up the wicked little knife, and the woman behind Nikki wailed behind her gag. “It’s all right, I’m just going to cut you loose.”
There was a noise on the staircase behind her. Heather turned, the knife held up again.
“Here you are, lass. I suppose it was inevitable you’d get here eventually.” It was the old man who had given them tea; the small, bent old man who peered at them out of one eye and had seemed so frail and fragile. Now, standing in the doorway and blocking the staircase, he did not look frail at all. His dog, the huge shaggy black creature, was standing at his knee. Bert smiled and nodded, as though confirming something. “Jesus wept, but you look like him. Like both of them. Where is my boy, eh? What have you done with him?”
“He’s dead,” said Heather. “Who are you, really?”
The old man shrugged, taking a further step into the room. Behind her, the two women were silent.
“You can’t save them,” he said quietly. “Especially not my Cathy. Cathy belongs here, do you understand? She belongs to me.” The eerie contentment on his face began to fade, to be replaced by something else. “I made her. I brought her parents here, I gave them this free world to live in, and the fruits of that are mine. All of them …”
“The women were all born here, at Fiddler’s Mill. And then what? Taken away? Adopted out?”
Bert smiled. “The Bickerstaff sisters you just met were nurses, did you know that? Or at least, nurses in training. I’m not sure they ever qualified though, or whatever you might call it. They knew the drugs to use, they knew how to deliver babies onto pure, black earth. Very persuasive, the Bickerstaff sisters. The children of Fiddler’s Woods went off to their new families, and we’ve waited until now. Until the harvest.”
“You are out of your fucking mind.” Heather swallowed hard. Standing up felt like the hardest thing in the world, and there was a ringing noise in her ears. Distantly she was aware of blood pooling inside her jeans, and every time she moved fresh lines of pain encircled her body. “All of you.”
Bert pursed his lips together. Now that he was looking at her dead on, she could see that one of his eyes was false; it looked dull under the fierce white lights.
“Michael, he didn’t care who he took. He was always so primitive, that one. That little beast. But I was interested in the perfect victim, one bred for the very purpose of dying. Don’t you see how fine that is? How apt? Livestock, ready for the culling.” He grinned, revealing his long teeth. “We raised the boy to have more refined tastes. And if the police started to think that perhaps they hadn’t got the real Red Wolf, all those years ago, well … The lad was keen to see his father again. A boy like Lyle, he can’t exactly go visiting people, as I’m sure you’ll agree.”
“You mad old bastard. Haven’t you got it yet? This is the end of your nonsense. Your weapon is dead, and me and Nikki and Cathy are bloody walking out of here right now.”
He cocked his head to one side again. The dog sat up, its ears pricked.
“You have to get through me, lass. You’ll have to kill me. And you don’t have what it takes to do that, because your blood is weak. Michael was a suggestible idiot, easily molded into what I wanted him to be, and in the end, Lyle was even worse, tainted by the blood of your mother. And what are you? Just some other little offshoot of a damaged, incestuous family.” Seeing the look of surprise that passed over her face, he grinned a little wider. “You wouldn’t know, of course, but the woman Michael killed when he was a child wasn’t his real mother. Ask him sometime about the woman in the red coat. Ask him what she did to him.”
“Enough.” Heather raised the knife. “Get out of my way. Now.”
“I told you, you’ll have to kill me.” He raised his hands up, palms flat. “And you don’t have it in you, little girl.”
Behind her, Heather heard Nikki moving against the concrete, but sounds in the square concrete room were growing distant and distorted. She could see the old man in front of her, his sneering expression of disgust twisting his face into something goblinlike, but hanging over him and obscuring him was a stark, red landscape—a place that beckoned to her, that called her home. She held the knife up.
“You don’t know me at all.”
She slammed the knife into his chest. A fierce bolt of joy passed through her, and briefly all the pain from her own wounds was wiped out. The old goblin made a strangled noise and he seemed to crumple in front of her. There was a dog barking, somewhere.
Heather, Heather, Heather.
And then reality crashed back into her in a rush. At some point, she had pulled the knife back out again—she had stabbed him in the upper part of his chest, not far from his collar bone—and bright spurts of his blood covered her hands and arms. In a shudder of revulsion and horror she dropped the knife, and it clanged against the concrete floor.
“Fuck!”
“I knew it,” he croaked. “All of you, so weak.” He pressed one gnarled hand to the wound turning his shirt black. “Why … do I even … waste … my time?”
“I can’t …” Heather glanced at the knife, then back to the old man. “I’m not —”
From the shadowy stairwell behind him, an arm reached out of the dark and circled his neck. The old man was yanked backwards, and this time he did scream, just before something shiny and lethal ripped his throat into a giant gaping mouth. There was a brief struggle, Bert’s arms flapping at nothing, and then he fell back to the floor in a rapidly expanding pool of blood. Heather had a glimpse of the figure on the stairs—he wore her face, though his eyes were not human, not human at all—and then Lyle was gone. His footsteps were light scuffles on the steps, and there was the crash of a door opening and closing. Gone.
With some difficulty, Heather reached down and plucked the knife from the floor, then staggered back to Nikki and the woman called Cathy. She tugged away her friend’s gag, then used the last of her strength to cut the bonds around her hands.
“Hev? Are you all right? Christ, you’re bleeding all over.”
Heather nodded dumbly. She sat down, and she now had the distinct feeling she couldn’t get back up. Nikki was still looking at her even as she untied the other woman.
Heather looked slowly around the room. It was growing darker. “Hey, where’s the dog? I didn’t see where the dog went.”
“What dog?” Nikki took her arm then and shook it. “Stay awake, Hev. What dog? There wasn’t any dog. Hev?”
CHAPTER
46
BEFORE
THE NIGHTMARE OF Fiddler’s Mill retreated for Colleen, but only so far. The creatures she had left behind in the woods didn’t forget about her, after all—and all her life, she felt them watching.
There was the summer fête, where she had seen the Oak Leaf symbol on an awning, where small children were queuing to pick up their prizes. It was his company, his way of keeping track, and although he wasn’t there, it was as though she could smell his fetid old man breath on the back of her neck. In a blind panic, she had scooped Heather up into her arms and turned toward the carpark.
There was the card, left outside their front door. When she thought how close they had come then to finding out the truth, it had knocked all the strength from her.
And then, eventually, there came the Bickerstaff sisters, creeping around her door and pushing their way inside. All of Colleen’s careful defe
nses, built up over so many years, were tattered into pieces over that long, horrific afternoon. She learned the fate of her long-lost child, of the harvest that was coming, and still they kept her pinned in place with the worst threat of all: tell anyone, and we’ll come for your daughter, too.
When they finally left her—after they’d extracted every painful secret she’d ever held close to her heart—Colleen went and fetched her nicest notepad, the one she had never used to write to Michael. She sat down at her own kitchen table and, just like her daughter, she tried to find the words.
CHAPTER
47
THE FOREST DID not seem darker with him in it. The birds still sang, the sunlight still filtered down through the branches, a dappled blessing on the earth and grass. Michael Reave walked with his face turned up, trying to take it all in, and Heather watched him closely. It seemed wrong that Fiddler’s Woods did not recoil from him, that the skies didn’t turn black and the trees die, but then, she reminded herself, he was their creature. He had fed the roots and nourished the ground, in his own way.
“Heather?” He turned to face her, smiling. “Look, do you see that there?” He nodded toward a hole next to a small mound of fresh earth. “That’s the entrance to a badger sett. I used to see them sometimes, but they’re shy animals. They can have big families living inside them, the larger setts. A clever little network of tunnels.”
“This isn’t a nature walk.”
“No, lass.” He put his smile away, and his eyes drifted up to look over her shoulder. “No, you’re right there.”
Behind her, she knew he could see the police gathered, DI Ben Parker among them. They were never far behind.
So far, Michael Reave had led them to the remains of four women, one of which, he said, had never been listed as one of his official victims. Identifying them was going to be difficult—he had only ever buried what he called “the soft parts” of them within the woods, although he had sometimes included other things—trinkets, items from their purses, or hairclips, even a shoe. He had agreed to do this as long as Heather continued to visit him and came with him on these little jaunts to Fiddler’s Woods. With the death of Albert “Bert” Froame and the capture of Lyle Reave, all his pretenses of innocence had vanished.
“You’re happy here.” It wasn’t a question.
“Aye. I was happy here, once.” He stopped, so she stopped. His hands were bound behind his back with steel cuffs, and he had made no threats toward her, but she still didn’t like to get too close. “Before it all really started …” He shrugged. “There was a bit of time where I thought I was free, and I spent it here, with these trees. Those were good memories.”
She nodded. She supposed, that if you didn’t know what was buried here, it could seem like a peaceful place.
“I wanted to ask you …” Heather glanced back to the police, both making sure they were close enough to help, and far away enough not to hear. “About the woman in the red coat.”
Michael Reave straightened up. He took a long, wavering breath in, then held it for a moment. His eyes were too bright.
“My sister,” he said eventually. “My older sister. Only she wasn’t just that. My father, your granddad, was a sick man, and he infected the whole house with his sickness. My sister was born in 1947, her name was … Evie.” He stopped. Saying her name seemed to cause him some physical pain. “And then when she got a little older, when she’d just turned thirteen, Evie had me.”
Heather looked down at her hands, feeling sick. She thought of Ben Parker telling her that killers had almost always experienced abuse.
“The woman who called herself my mother, she hated me for it,” continued Reave. “I was a sign of everything that was wrong with our family, lass, do you see? And Evie, I think she tried to make up for it, for how much her mother hated me. But she only knew one way of expressing that. Because of what had been done to her. She would come to me, at night.” He paused, shuddering. “I still remember her standing in my bedroom door, in her red coat. Smiling. She said she just wanted to love me.”
“What happened to her? To Evie?”
“She died. Long after I ran to Fiddler’s Mill, she drifted away to live with some bad people. The house she was staying in burned down while she was in it. I only heard about it because it was in a newspaper.” When he looked at Heather again, he had composed himself. “And … I don’t think you should hear any more about it. It’s not healthy, lass.”
Somewhere in the trees above them, a magpie was making a racket. He looked up into the branches, smiling again.
“I would like to tell you another story,” he said.
Heather shrugged.
“Once upon a time, there was a rich man who had spent all his life doing evil deeds. He had been mean, never shared his wealth, and had watched as others starved. He had hurt people for his own pleasure and enjoyed it. Then one day he had a change of heart. When his neighbor, a poor man with hungry children, came calling at his house, he promised that the poor man could have half his food and wealth if, when he died, he watched over his grave for three nights in a row. He was worried …” Michael Reave paused, his face slack. “He was worried that the devil would come for his soul.”
For a long time, Reave didn’t say anything more, although Heather was sure that wasn’t the end of the story. They walked a little further, with the soft trample of the police coming along behind.
“This doesn’t change anything, you know,” Heather said eventually. “It doesn’t change who you are, or what you did.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.” He turned to look at her, and not for the first time Heather felt a shiver of discomfort; it was as though he looked straight to the heart of her. As though he could see down to her bones.
“What is it?”
“I was just thinking.” He smiled, that rueful almost-smile made so famous by his mugshot. “I was just thinking that Colleen should have given me you, instead of Lyle. There’s so much more of me in you.”
* * *
It was spring. The dog roses on the cliff path were all in bloom, their soft pink and yellow heads nodding in the freshening sea breeze. Heather brushed her fingers against the petals as she passed them, plucking one or two blooms and thinking of nothing in particular until she came to the cliff’s edge. Yawning away below her was the drop, and the solid blue sea—the last thing her mother had ever seen, probably.
Colleen Evans had been faced with a terrible decision—the worst decision, perhaps, that anyone could have to make—and, ultimately, she hadn’t been able to live with it. Certainly not when the Bickerstaff sisters had come sniffing around her door, not when the time had come for the dark harvest of Fiddler’s Wood. Such a decision had broken her, twisted her into something sharp and cold, and Heather wondered if Lyle, sitting in his prison cell, deserved to know that: if he deserved to know how it had broken their mother, to give him to the monsters. She thought, all in all, that it was a mercy he hadn’t earned. However small a mercy it was.
“I think I’m more like you, actually.” She said it forcefully, but the wind picked up her words and snatched them out to sea. “I really do think that. I’m sorry I didn’t see it sooner, Mum.” A seagull cried overhead, a clear and hopeful sound. “I’m sorry.”
Heather scattered the dog rose petals where she stood and walked away from the cliff’s edge.
Also available by Jen Williams
The Winnowing Flame Trilogy
The Poison Song
The Bitter Twins
The Ninth Rain
The Copper Cat Trilogy
The Silver Tide
The Iron Ghost
The Copper Promise
Short Story
Sorrow’s Isle
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jen Williams lives in London with her partner and their small ridiculous cat. Having been a fan of grisly fairy tales from a young age, these days Jen writes dark unsettling thrillers with strong female leads, as well as char
acter–driven fantasy novels with plenty of adventure and magic. She has twice won the British Fantasy Award for her Winnowing Flame trilogy, and when she’s not writing books she works as a bookseller and a freelance copywriter.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Jen Williams
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-574-5
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-575-2
Cover design by Nicole Lecht
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
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New York, NY 10001
First Edition: June 2021
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