EIGHTY-TWO

Three days later, Amber opened the front door of the farmhouse and turned off the alarms.

The first thing she noticed on the hall floor and connecting staircase was the dust. Small mounds the size of mice and rats exploring the clean, new spaces, as if poised to clamber further up the polished steps to the bedrooms.

The second thing she noticed was the smell. Competing with the fragrance of the new furniture, floors and walls, was a pungent undercurrent of damp wood, sour emulsion, tangy loft spaces and stale underfloor cavities. The stench of 82 Edgehill Road.

Such was the dross on the floor of the living room, she might have been inside a tomb; one recently opened and excavated by explorers. Only she had not just walked inside a cave in the Valley of the Kings, or ducked inside a Saxon barrow, she had entered her own home. A place so newly renovated it should have retained its pristine condition after only being occupied by a single person for a mere seven days. Yet the interior now looked to have been shuttered and derelict for decades.

With hands she could barely feel, Amber drew the curtains and allowed more of the sun’s illumination to fill the wide space of the living room and adjoining dining room. Bales and rolls of sooty dust, amidst disintegrating clumps and lumps, reared up the skirting and seemed in the process of crossing the wooden floors from one side of the room to the other.

Bands of morning light pierced the clean glass of the patio doors to reveal myriad diaphanous motes wafting on air currents. The harder she looked, the more the very air became a perpetual shower of dust particles, forever falling, constantly stirred, moving, relocating, glittering, gathering, growing.

She peered at the sole of one bare foot; it was blackened by the filth spread around the floor. Same thing in the kitchen. Her fingertip came away black, time after time, on every flat surface the kitchen boasted. The surfaces, the pots and pans hanging above the central work station, the breakfast bar, the oven, microwave and sink, were all filmed with dust, a multitude of specks accumulating and spread finely to fade the room to grey. Twenty thousand pounds to build, but now as dirty as a long-abandoned squat.

Amber opened the patio doors and stepped outside. She sat on the first of the three steps that led to the grassy pasture of the rear lawn and began to cry. Could not stop crying; the tears of bitterness, rage, frustration and outright despair would not end. Tears of the helpless. Her body trembled, her hands twitched as if cold.

The late summer sun was warm and bright, and only the most talented fine artist could have adequately captured the quiet and gentle beauty of the Devonshire morning: a most English idyll, with a subtle, intense power. Maize shivered in a faint cooling sea breeze; momentarily the heads of the nearest plants swayed sideways in the capricious air currents, and then nodded towards her. The crop beyond her garden gate might have become an audience to her wretchedness, raising thousands of hands to the air to wave above a vast crowd that whispered and rustled in anticipation of what came next.

Thine honour, these maidens, thine honour, the corn doth rise like grass.

‘My God, my God,’ she said to herself, and to the earth and trees and sky, to whatever bore witness to her misery.

You took her back, you took her back to the green grass . . . the harvest, to the country. Took her from the city. From out of the darkness. And you carried her back here. You are a carrier.

‘No.’

Or did she take you back?

Black Mag let you run, you stupid bitch. She let you run here. She found you here. She went through your mind. She found your memories of the seaside. Of Dad, Mum. She made you come here. She wanted it for herself. Because she’s inside you.

Used. Used like the others.

You took an oath. You promised to keep her. You would have said anything to get out of that place . . . did you?

‘I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t!’

You did.

‘I can’t remember. Oh Jesus, I can’t remember.’

She couldn’t fully recall her night on the kitchen floor of the ground floor flat, surrounded by broken glass and crockery and splintered wood; the night she had truly lost her mind through sustained terror. A time in which she had become convinced that she was no longer inside the house, or even part of a recognizable world; a time in which she seemed to have existed on the border between one world and another.

And in such places, didn’t she know only too well, that the precision of a person’s recall could not be relied upon. Memory developed a second life, and the imagination cultivated the visuals of memory and embellished them over time. Isn’t that what the therapist had said: that her memory and imagination had combined within that house, and continued to do so after she escaped it? Because in hindsight she remembered herself looking down at her body on the kitchen linoleum, and not lying amongst the wreckage and peering up and into the black, so it was never a true memory, or she would have recalled the room from the floor?

Like so much of that time in her life, she seemed to have walked within a perpetual nightmare that began the very moment the front door of that place closed behind her. And what she had experienced in the rooms of the ground floor flat had made her want to die, and quickly. That she had not forgotten. She had desired the void. Total extinction. An end to consciousness. Had prayed for it. Because she had seen things no mind was built to withstand.

So maybe the building had been a prison, a place of exile for something older than the house, even the city? The house was a place it had scrabbled back into, when called. A temple. Perhaps called upon innocently and inadvertently by those idiots of ‘Light’. Had they invited something back to twist the minds of the simpletons that occupied its tomb? Or had Clarence Putnam brought it to the big city from Wales? He had been an amateur historian. But whose will drove his purpose? She would never know. Those fools may have continued a degenerate rite once practised freely. An ancient honour. And what if they were answered when they called out to the darkness?

Nonsense. Nonsense. It was nonsense.

The song. Maidens beneath the grass . . . the nursery rhyme of the gypsy boy in the dream she had a thin recollection of. He had been at the house during the Second World War with his grandmother. They had been committed to an asylum. Four maids. Had he sung something about four maids? To open a door.

Women hanged by washing line. Buried in soil. Cemented into foetal positions like the unborn. Walled up, the crouching bones.

Amber suspected she was going to throw up. She was breathing too quickly and her heartbeat was accelerating her panic to a place where she worried she might need an injection to calm down. She was mad; these were the thoughts of the damaged, the deranged, the impaired.

Amber stood up and turned upon the house. ‘Who are you? Where are you!’

Her shaking vision raked the window panes for the sight of an unwelcome face; one that might peer out at her, gleeful, triumphant, sated, with little white eyes open. A thing that had followed her here.

There had been no nightmares, no intrusions, no trespassers, no darkness beyond the doors of her hotel suite in Plymouth. Whatever she had fled from, whatever she had encountered in her first week in this new house, had followed her here, to this building. So would it follow her anywhere and eventually appear wherever she settled? At sea she had been moving. In sheltered accommodation she had never been alone.

For I have determined there to winter.

What did that mean?

Me? Winter in me?

Oh, God no. Please, no.

Have you been biding your time?

Amber turned and stumbled onto the lawn, lost her footing while she clutched her skull to still the spin and the flash of the images and the ideas that gushed like condemning evidence into the courtroom of her mind, testifying to her collusion and collaboration with something no one believed in. Something that could not exist. And at the edge of her vision, the maize plants continued to flow and wave, like so many small green banners rejoicing at the return of a queen.

All around her property the crops grew to record heights and highs. The local television news said so. She recalled a police constable in Edgehill Road, who had been shushed and glared at by the detectives that first took her back to the address, after he had remarked that ‘those cookers are a good size’; the constable had been referring to the abundance of massive cooking apples rotting brown in the grass of number 82, or pulling down the supple branches of the trees that encroached upon the roof of the ancient, sagging shed.

The blue sky now blinded her eyes into a squint. The vastness of the earth’s cold soil suddenly became apparent: deep layers of turf and root and spindly tendril, sucking at nutrients in the dark, beyond the eyes of the living who occupied some thin, ephemeral film of breathable gas, below the suffocating extinction of the black void above and around, all around.

Was this thin coating of oxygen around such dense earth all there was to life, to existence? How could it be all there was? The idea was ludicrous. The unacknowledged irrelevance of humanity was the notion’s only defence.

We have never been alone.

Amber felt faint, staggered and then fell to the cool, soft grass that embraced her weight. She wiped her nose with her forearm.

‘No.’ She shook her head. It could not be true. The idea was so crazy you’d have to be crazy to even entertain it. This bounty had nothing to do with her. The harvest in South Devon had bloomed to its record-breaking surplus before she had even set foot on English soil at Southampton. The agriculture, the weather, could not have any connection to her.

Not everything is about you. Isn’t that what her stepmother used to shout at her? Was she so egocentric and solipsistic to assume that she had become the focus of the unworldly? Singled out to carry a message or perform a special divine task? Schizophrenic delusions. Wasn’t she hearing voices again?

‘I won’t accept this. No. Won’t. No. No. No. This is not happening. Not really. None of this. They fucked you up. They fucked you up. You were already fucked up, but they fucked you up even more.’

Inside her jacket her phone began to tinkle and vibrate.

She stared at the screen. Number unknown.