EIGHTY-FOUR

Her face was in her hands. She sat in the dirty living room. Every place would be dirty that she made home. Dirty and murdered. It was hopeless. Coming back to England, to Devon, had been futile. Telling the truth and trying to hold the meanness and savagery and cruelty of the world back had been in vain. Because here she was again: a young, frightened woman, alone and waiting for something much greater than herself to destroy her.

Stepmothers, jobs, landlords, murderers, the police, journalists, the crazies – they’d all had a go. She’d stood tall for a long time, she had resisted them all. But could do so no longer. She was drowning again in cold black water with no sandy bottom beneath her raking toes; maybe it was better to sink now, get it over with.

She thought again of the warm voice of the woman outside her gates. And yearned for it so much she felt pain.

No matter how much she now craved an end to her solitude, she’d only occupied a world of silence aboard the cruise ships, rarely indulging in fraternization, beside small talk with the other passengers; always guarded about her past, while forever pausing to consider what she should say about her new identity. And this charade had continued for so long, she’d found herself absurdly excited at the mere prospect of a stranger’s company. Pathetic. She realized now just how greedy she had been for the warmth of another.

But she had not run for the nearest sea port, despite gazing longingly at the docks for a week in Plymouth. Nor would she check into the hotel nearest the farmhouse tonight, accompanied by nothing but an overnight bag, even if she suspected that an anonymous room was the safest environment and possibly all she would ever be able to call home again. Instead, she had come back and she would stay in the place she had wanted to call her own.

Amidst the exhausting push and tug of confusion, fear and rage, she recognized a new purpose to resist, and also a morbid curiosity that comes from acceptance. Defiance was hardening inside her; resistance stiffened from an unstable current of vengeful anger. It felt like a heat behind her face. She would not be moved from here. She would not abandon her new home, or the person she wanted to be.

Resigned but frightened, and even appalled by her decision, she had returned to where they were. All of them. The Black Maggie and her constituency of the lost, the desolate, and possibly their killers too. So perhaps she was acknowledging she could run no more. Her sense that the experience was destined to repeat itself, no matter how far she ran, would not desist.

Because you have determined here to winter.

What was here must be found, drawn out, confronted. And she had to do it alone. The box! The little box. Where was it?

So maybe it was all about her when on land – an idea Amber had toyed with until the weight of it began to feel unbearable, and she could only imagine herself as a silent and haunted figure, elderly, friendless, childless, whispered about, and sitting alone on the deck of a ship in the middle of a vast ocean, her legs wrapped in a blanket.

But would that be so bad compared to . . .

For how long could she hold out here before fleeing back to the sea? How much time did she have to summon priests, and those with second sight, and commit to other desperate measures to diagnose what had returned and now moved around and through her like an unidentified virus?

What will it take?

It did communicate. Amber thought of Fergal’s bony and soiled length, pressed against the innocuous ground floor door of 82 Edgehill Road, his face committed to some horrid transmission emitted from deep inside those abandoned but still occupied rooms. He’d once said it was Bennet that told him things, but maybe Bennet was only a go between for something older and far worse.

‘When will you speak to me? What do you want?’

There was a physical dimension too: dust and odours were conjured, sounds, then freezing hands that had once stretched across a tingling space to touch her flesh at night. Once the seal was broken it happened quickly. Once the Maggie was awoken, once she found you, she didn’t waste time: nine days in Birmingham . . . and the ninth should have been your last.

She hadn’t slept for days, not properly, and could barely keep her eyes open. The last of her energy was burned off in the garden. She made her way upstairs to her room.

Amber unlocked the drawer beside her bed and took out her weapons.

She called Josh. Received his answering service.

‘Mate. I’m back. Here. They’re all here too.’ She started to cry and ended the call.

Apprehension throttled her like a ligature; anxiety paralyzed her limbs. What new strategy would be employed against her tonight to drive her out of her mind?

She called Josh again. ‘I used to hope that I was sick, mate, so then I would know it wasn’t real. But I had tests. Scans for tumours and strokes, vascular problems, dementia, abnormal brain function. I had to. After what I came out of that place claiming, I didn’t have any choice. But nothing unusual was found by the doctors. Only Cyclothymia. It’s a bipolar disorder. Depression. I had it two years. I was manic, then depressed, manic, depressed.

‘I know what you think, but I had clinical interviews with psychiatrists too. I saw a therapist who helped me through the shock. The depression surprised no one after what I had been through. They expected it.’

The time allotted for a message ended with an insolent bleep.

Amber called Josh again; was glad he never picked up. ‘Josh, I think I was already on my way into depression by the time I moved away from Stoke, because of Dad, and Val, being unemployed, money, all kinds of crap. This isn’t about depression. Or hypomania and hallucinations. I always knew it was something else. I knew it was and it still is. It’s more than all that. It’s here. I think it’s inside me. It got inside.’ She ended the call.

She would soon be all out of fear; her reservoir was close to exhausted. She told herself that she must use all of her strength, the inner resources that had gotten her so far away from that dismal hell in North Birmingham, and these resources must now divert or quell the terrible rip currents of panic when it started again.

They were here. There was no mystery now. No doubt left in her mind. Wishful thinking had finally been put to the sword; doubt had been beheaded. At least that was something: the first step to self-preservation and the wall you leant your back against when you made a stand.

What did it want, this Maggie, this God? The ghosts of its victims were lost, cold, lonely, but somehow still entrapped by what they had been slain to honour; those pitifully repulsive remains, mottled dark and moist, twisted, crouching, tethered and collared inside soil or plaster, nailed under the stained planks, but still grinning through their polythene shrouds. She wanted to free them, the slaves that were awoken and sent to harrow her. Or maybe they were here to prepare her for the presence of a God? She didn’t know. ‘Are you here for revenge?’ she called out from where she lay. ‘Or do you think I owe you?’

The sound of her own voice seemed brazen in the air of her bedroom. But her words also possessed a hard outer case of triumphant defiance that felt accidental or unintended. She wondered if she were so morbidly desperate she was now trying to goad whatever stalked her. Did she really want this thing out in the open, this squatter that sat upon and suppressed her reason with heavy black coils?

But when next it swelled around her, with the sounds and movements and smells and the words in the darkness, Amber knew her only chance of survival would require the shutting down of her own instinct to scream and run. She must rediscover and then tear open the part of herself that had once cut a throat, castrated a man, and then walked up a flight of stairs to burn the face off a murderer.

She needed to enter the mad red place that killers inhabited; inside there she might see her enemy’s face. And when Amber reached the outer limits of her reason, only then might the Maggie reveal where she was hiding.

And if she is hiding inside me . . . then there was only one thing to do. Amber clenched her hand around the gun on the bedclothes beside her hip.

The idea took her breath away.

Only grace or rage had any hope against such horrors as walked with her, and she had always struggled with grace.

Her thoughts drifted and she reminisced of her ‘slaughter’ of Knacker McGuire, as the press had described her actions, and how she’d ‘disfigured’ Fergal; she had always told herself that she had just cause, that the extremity of her situation had compelled her to act in a way that she had never acted before. But what she had done to those men was judged, by nearly everyone else, as evidence of insanity. She had come out of that house with her arms bloodied to the elbow and her teeth bared like an ape menaced by leopards.

So perhaps an ability to destroy had been bequeathed to her, and with it the desire to damage and maim her enemies had been a gift too: such suspicions often made her suspect that she had been tainted. Corrupted like the others, altered when visited inside her own madness by the greater darkness that surrounded us all, and always had done. Wasn’t consciousness raised and opened wide to admit spirits and accept the blessings of gods? Was chaos not a path to the most total darkness? Perhaps the worst of her was truly determined by other things she could only imagine and not perceive.

‘Do you think I will kill for you?’

Josh, Peter, Victoria, Penelope: all of her managers, representatives, biographers and guardians, were uncomfortable with this facet of her story. Perhaps even more uneasy with her violence than they were with her claims that something old and powerful and unnatural had filled the stinking air of that place; a place where something other had created an environment for cruelty, sadism and sacrifice. And it wanted her for itself, for its purposes.

She called Josh again. Left another message. Whatever happened here next, she wanted him to know how she felt before the end.

‘She’s old, Josh. Very old. Peter’s shown me. The information is on the red pen drive in my study. I don’t know what I can do. I’m trying to work that out. How do I fucking fight her? What if she’s inside me? Oh God . . .’

Old tastes and habits had been sated at number 82, where she had determined to winter.

‘It’s in a folk song, Josh, and on some broken pots from a long time ago. It’s all Peter can find. All we know. But she’s old. Black Mag is very old.’ The message time came to an end with another long bleep.

Perhaps it was not hard for old, unseen others to detect this propensity for the bestial in a species of animal that claimed Amber among its multitudes; the potential was everywhere, smouldering black and red behind every face. Easy to find in the Bennets, in Fergal. Maybe she was a challenge, and a greater reward.

From wars and holocausts to seedy murders in suburban houses, and ordinary wives smashed in banal kitchens, there always appeared to be so many takers for the darkness, the clever and patient darkness. And for those that strangled and buried its maids and maidens there were rewards: vast, bountiful, fertile, whispering rewards.

A terrible gravity of inhumanity now oppressed Amber’s thoughts as she lay upon the bed, as if some barely defined but incalculably vast history of burnings and torture and murder and war and violence, of despair and hopelessness, had gathered around the bed to expose itself; to extinguish any momentary and futile urge to resist the great momentum of indifferent darkness.

The one we will all reach in death.

She called Josh a fifth time. He didn’t pick up. ‘What’s the point, to anything? The darkness was always there anyway. Was there first. It will always be there. We love but those we love die, like Mum, Dad . . .

‘I’ve seen such beauty in the world, mate. From the decks of the grandest ships. But it didn’t care about me. Beauty doesn’t care about any of us. Only darkness wants us.’

Exhausted by her bleakest thoughts, Amber looked at the window. She could almost hear the distant rustling of the maize.

Her tired eyes closed.