THIRTY

The metal of the structure was painted green to match the long grass and clumps of weeds in the overgrown garden. From within the circular mouth of the corrugated iron dome, the old woman did nothing but stare and grin. The elderly figure wore a brown cardigan that was too big for her small shape, over a threadbare tea dress frayed around the hem. Her face was weathered and impossibly old, reminding Stephanie of a small baked apple set inside a white wig.

Stephanie kept looking over her shoulder at the house behind her, while trying to account for the occasional far off crumps and the corresponding shudders beneath her feet. Up in the air a siren wailed with such urgency and despair it made her panic worse.

‘Where should I go?’ Stephanie pointed at the house. ‘Do I go back in there?’

The old woman didn’t answer or seem to be anything but amused at her plight in the cold rain beneath the featureless metallic sky.

A little boy dressed in a cowboy costume made from offcuts, hobbled around in front of the old woman. The boy’s identity was concealed by a handkerchief over the lower half of his face, which met the brim of the hat covering his eyes. He sang a song that was muffled by the handkerchief. ‘All around the Mulberry Bush, The monkey chased the weasel. The monkey stopped to pull up his sock, Pop! goes the weasel. Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle. Four maids to open the door, Pop! goes the weasel.’

Come and be his friend, come, come. The woman’s gleeful expression succeeded in pressing home this suggestion, while her black eyes glinted with what could have been welcome or mischief; Stephanie didn’t know.

A few yards behind the shelter, hanging from the branch of an oak tree by their necks, were the bodies of four women. They wore long grey gowns and their hair was tied up in coils from which stray locks fell across their bloodless faces. All of their wrists were tied together with shoelaces.

You can beat them too. Come, come. They don’t mind. Stephanie didn’t hear the old woman say this; she heard the message inside her head.

Even from a distance she could see that the eyes of one of the executed women were open. The moment Stephanie realized this, she saw the hanged woman’s face in close-up. When their stares met, the woman’s expression filled with a frightful intelligence at the horror she swayed through beneath the tree branch.

Stephanie turned and ran to the house, the ground seeming to shudder so violently it added a buoyancy to her progress, like she was on the surface of a trampoline that was gradually settling down after a period of frenzied activity.

Inside the old kitchen with the flagstone floor, someone she couldn’t see said, ‘They’re inside. They want a word with you.’

The people in the next room she entered had all lifted their arms into the air, as if they had recently been holding hands around the table but now preferred to dangle their fingers in the darkness that filled the spaces between the candle flames.

The eyes of two of the people were closed as their pale features stiffened in concentration. The jowly face of a bald man, his remaining hair oiled flat against his skull, glistened with sweat. The white shirt he wore with a tie and braces was sodden. Beside him a bespectacled woman with set hair and a severe fringe had screwed up her mouth as if in great pain. The third person at the table was female and wore a hat and dark glasses indoors for a reason Stephanie didn’t understand but immediately disliked. On the centre of the table was a wooden box with what looked like a curtained door of purple velvet.

Stephanie couldn’t see the walls or floor, despite the four candles set beyond the table and arranged in a line along the dark sideboard.

Suspecting that something nearby was moving on the lightless floor, she fought a desire to cringe. She flattened her back against the nearest wall. Sounds of a heavy, thick presence uncoiling continued beneath the table.

The air of the room was cold enough to make Stephanie’s teeth chatter; gusts of air whipped her face like slipstreams of energy produced by darting movements in narrow spaces. The sudden flattening and then springing up of the candle light attested to a motion she couldn’t see and certainly didn’t want to venture her hands into.

Her legs and feet were numb. Not only was she unable to move across the room to where she knew a door to be, she actually began slipping sideways and away from what she yearned for. The movement of her body brought a fresh surge of panic into her unravelling thoughts. An attempt to cry out from a mouth now swollen with what felt like a squash ball wrapped in a handkerchief, was as ineffective as the resistance of her nerveless feet which slid her body sideways along one wall. Her fingernails snatched at the wallpaper at her back.

As she neared the head of the table and slipped behind the seated man, her feet also rose off the floor, and she bent double to try and seize something at ground level before she rose any higher into the cold air.

The moment the three seated people raised their faces to the ceiling and opened their mouths to utter cries of delight, Stephanie understood that her ankles and knees were bound together by a rough string that looked hairy. And her fingers may have been pulling at the twine for long enough for her to have lost several fingernails.

Her inability to breathe around the sopping impediment in her mouth, that felt in danger of sliding over her tongue and blocking her throat, brought a terror of suffocation into the jostle of trauma, panic and horror already overfilling her skull. It was a terror soon eclipsed by the elevation of her body, further up the wall and into thin air, as if gravity no longer had any claim upon her. No hands pulled or pushed her upwards; she was just too insubstantial to remain on the ground.

And it was then she knew the destination of her unwilling journey. She was going up and up and up, and there was nothing to hold onto, because she was being drawn into the black thing upon the ceiling. It was already in position and waiting for her.