The Grieving Stones (12 page)

“I’m getting something out of all this. I’m glad I came.”

He stared at her, his tired eyes filled with disbelief. “You’re kidding me?”

“No. Everything seems a lot clearer to me out here. I’m not sure what it is about this place, but I like it here. Especially now that the house has been cleaned up and it looks all shiny and new.”

Clive looked around, his pale face serious. “Are you taking the piss? This dump? We were supposed to be cleaning it up, getting rid of a lot of this trash. I feel guilty that we’ve barely even touched it.”

Alice shook her head. Could he not see what she saw? “You must be in a bad way. Here, drink your water.”

He took small sips from the glass. “Thanks.”

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

“What?” His voice was dreamy, drifting.

“I found the pamphlet. The one you wrote.”

“What?”

“The pamphlet. You told me you didn’t know much about the local legends, but you wrote a pamphlet about the Staple sisters and the Grief Stones… the Backwards Girl. All of it. There was no need to lie to me, you know… no need at all.”

“No… not me. I don’t know what you mean.” His eyelids flickered; he was going down into the darkness.

Alice smiled took the glass and put it on a small table near the head of the sofa. “You just curl up and rest. Shout if you need me. I’ll let you know when Steve gets back.”

“Yes…” His eyes were closing; he was drifting already. “I feel weird… a little sleep would be good.”

Alice picked up the glass and sniffed it. She couldn’t smell a thing. She turned her head and glanced over at the kitchen doorway, to see a small, dark figure vanishing back into the other room.

She sniffed the glass again. “What did you give him? Was it one of your potions?”

A small sound from the kitchen: half laughter, half coughing.

“Don’t hurt him… he hasn’t done anything wrong. Just told a few little white lies…”

That sound again, but this time it was trying to form into a word:
“Hed…Hedleeeee…
”

“Hedley? Hedley Mills?” She remembered the name form the pamphlet, of course, and last night’s dream. That had been the landowner who’d instigated the hanging of the sisters. He’d obviously murdered them because they were inconvenient, a nuisance, and to get his hands on the power she could feel here even now, thrumming like a machine in the background.

“Clive… Clive is Hedley Mills? No. You’re wrong.”

Silence.

She turned and looked at Clive. He was sleeping. Could it be true? Was he in thrall with the spirit of Hedley Mills? It made a kind of sense. The ghost of the old aspiring occultist was controlling him, and had made him bring her here so that he could use her to tap into the energy within the house, and perhaps even help him defeat the sisters.

She remembered what he’d said about the human mind clutching at linear stories to try and make sense of the world. She also recalled his statement about everyone embracing their own madness. And wasn’t that what she was doing here, embracing her madness?

A week ago none of this would have made sense; she would have laughed at herself for even thinking these thoughts. But now… here and now, cloistered in this place, she believed that it was true. There were far greater forces at work here than the ones she’d known all her life. She’d been blind; the world was a stranger, darker place than she’d ever suspected.

“Don’t kill him,” she said, setting the glass back on the table. As the light caught it, the water inside seemed to glow for a second. Whatever the sisters had put into his drink, it was part of the odd, ambiguous magic infesting this place. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad, it just
was.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Just keep him out of the way for a while, don’t let him die.”

Something in the kitchen snickered. A shadow passed slowly across the floor near the doorway. Then the house went quiet.

“I almost told you something earlier.”

Clive did not move.

“I almost told you what really happened. I suppose it’s okay now; I can tell you. I doubt you’d even be aware that I had.”

His left eyelid twitched, but he didn’t wake.

“I’d been out, just driving. I was scared to go home because I knew what kind of mood Tony was in. When he got like that, the best thing to do was to leave him alone.

“When I got back home the lights were still on, so I knew he was still there. I braced myself for the violence, and then I went inside. The house was quiet… so very, very quiet. I walked through into the kitchen but he wasn’t there. I went upstairs, to our room, but he wasn’t there either.

“Eventually I found him.

“He was in the guest room, dangling from the ceiling beam by a clothesline. He’d fashioned it into a noose. When I got there he was still alive. That’s it. My big secret. He was still alive when I found him, but rather than try to save him, or phone an ambulance, I just stood there. I stood there and I watched him die.

“I’ve tried to bury it for so long, and so deep, that I don’t remember a lot about the next few minutes. I do recall him trying to reach out to me, but he couldn’t lift his hand. I think he might have changed his mind. He tried to speak but all that came out of his mouth was a kind of liquid gurgling, and a lot of stringy spit.

“Finally he stopped trying to move. He just hung there, with his bare feet dangling inches from the carpet. I watched him for a little while longer, detached, and then I went downstairs to call the ambulance. By the time they arrived, I’d managed to reconnect with the moment and started to cry. As I spoke to them, I convinced myself that he was dead when I found him, and that I’d called the ambulance immediately.”

Clive moaned. He wasn’t saying anything, just making a sound in his sleep. He looked worse than before. His lips were so dry they looked as if they might start to crack. His eyes bulged beneath the waxen, purplish lids.

Then, as if this were a dream she was having rather than anything happening in real life, his features became fluid and his face turned smooth and pink, his arms were pulled right into his torso, and it was no longer Clive lying there on his back. It was the punch dummy.

“I’m glad I don’t have to watch you die,” she said, running a finger along the dummy’s forehead and drawing an imaginary line down its blank face.

Alice sat down in the middle of the floor and crossed her legs, a yoga pose she remembered from years ago, when she’d took some classes to avoid Tony’s black moods. She closed her eyes and saw them standing there, the sisters. They were pleased with her. Their faces were dark, masked by shadow, but she knew that they were smiling. She felt them urging her on, wanting her to go further, to get closer so that they might finally touch her.

For the first time in her life, Alice felt truly loved.

She stood and went to the kitchen. She took the knife from the drawer. The blade winked at her; the handle felt firm in her hand. She walked back into the main room and crouched down beside the punch dummy. She touched its egg-like face; it didn’t move a muscle. The skin was pulled taut across that dome of a head, tight and drum-like.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said. “Not really. But I think I have to. I need to complete the ritual, seal the circle.”

Without saying another word she pressed the blade of the knife against the dummy’s exposed throat and slashed it sideways, opening up its rubbery flesh. The cut opened, blood pulsing out of the wound. She began to saw at the neck, hoping that she could finish the job quickly so that she could move on. She’d never killed anything in her life; she was no good at this.

But I can’t kill something that was never alive in the first place,
she thought, smiling.

Behind her, the sisters began to slowly clap their hands; a spontaneous round of applause.

Alice took the pamphlet out of her pocket and looked at the title page. She’d been mistaken after all; it wasn’t written by Clive. The author was called Colin Barlow; the names didn’t even look the same. It was someone she’d not even heard of.

“What is this?”

The sisters continued to applaud. She turned around and saw them standing there, clapping their hands. They were each wearing a stuffed animal head as a mask – very much like the trophies that had been on the wall when they’d arrived here. One of them wore a fox’s head; the other’s face was hidden beneath that of the odd deer-like creature that she knew for certain was the same one they’d killed on the road during their journey here.

The two figures started to shuffle slowly backwards, still clapping, and into the kitchen. Even when they were no longer visible to her, Alice could hear the sound of their sharp, cold hands slapping together.

The punch dummy was gone. She looked down at Clive, at last feeling some form of regret.

Clive had no answers to her questions, so she shuffled over on her backside to the centre of the room, closed her eyes, and waited for a sign.

CHAPTER TWELVE

When Alice opened her eyes the house looked the same. Whatever regenerative process had been set in motion by her arrival was done; the house was finished. It looked as if someone had gone through the entire house and cleaned every corner, washed every window, thrown out each piece of junk that had been stored here.

Before her, on the carpet, was the stuffed deer head: a small offering from her hosts. She reached out and picked it up. It wasn’t stuffed after all; the head was hollow. She knew what she was expected to do, but one last remnant of the person she had been made her pause. She thought for a moment…
Is this it? Is this the place I’m meant to be?

The only answer she could think of was,
Yes.

Slowly, carefully, she raised the deer head high into the air, and then, without any kind of rigmarole, she placed it over her head. Despite the lack of gravitas to the moment, it felt ritualistic. Whatever chain of events had been triggered when she got here, they were coming to an end – or at least they were approaching a point from which there was no return.

Even though her face was covered, her vision obscured, by the deer head, she could see perfectly. If she closed her eyes, she knew that she would still be able to see.

She stood and walked to the door, opened it, and saw the sisters walking ahead of her; they were moving around in a circle, walking in an anti-clockwise direction around the house. She followed them, knowing exactly where they were heading.

But she was wrong. The sisters were not going to the Grieving Stones; they walked past them, down the hill, and towards the copse of trees where she’d hidden Jake’s body.

She paused at the standing stones, looked at them through the dead deer’s eyes, and wondered if she’d be able to pull off the mask and run away. The desire for escape passed over her quickly, leaving behind a sense that any chance of changing her mind was long gone. She was meant to be here. This was her place now, and she had to follow through on her actions. She had to complete this, whatever it was.

She set off towards the trees. The sisters were out of sight now, but that didn’t matter; she knew where they were, and that they were watching with interest. She entered the shadows of the trees and made her way to the spot where Jake lay. The leaves and twigs she’d scattered across his body had shifted, perhaps moved by an animal. The upper half of his body was on display. He was lying on his front, so thankfully she was unable to see his face, but she could make out the blood. There was a lot of it, spattered on the ground beside his head. Up close, she saw that his skull had fractured; there was a hollow above his ear, from which the blood had clearly flowed. There was no blood running now, of course. He’d been dead too long.

“Help me,” she said, looking towards the sisters. They were standing several yards away, still wearing shabby animal heads – different ones now, that she hadn’t seen before. She couldn’t discern which one of the sisters was wearing which head, but it didn’t matter. For all intents and purposes, they were one being: and she was to be the third part of the elemental cocktail that would transform them from the ethereal to the corporeal. She realised now that it was her flesh and blood and spirit that was the final piece in the puzzle. Once she joined them completely, they could walk freely across the land, no longer bound to Grief House and its environs.

She looked back down at Jake. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I killed you.” He hadn’t fallen; she had pushed him. She remembered it clearly now: turning, twisting, insistent that no man would ever put his hands on her in that way again, she had pushed him hard in the chest, and because of the slope and the angle at which he’d been standing, he’d gone down, smashing his head against the stone.

So she had killed before after all.

Nor was this the first lie she had told herself. She had spent her entire life blocking out the truth, creating layers of reality in which certain events could be covered over and lost. Until now. Until she had found this place and allowed it to peer deep inside her and see through those layers to what was at her core.