She sang and nodded.
‘I’ll bring the doctor out if you think … if you think it’s necessary … ?’
She watched him for a long time, rocking and singing. He felt cold and sick. Finally she shook her head.
‘He’ll ask some awkward questions. I don’t know what to do …’
Again, she nodded, smoothing Michael’s hair, holding him tightly to her.
She went on singing.
Richard returned
to the phone and called Jenny. She was incoherent with tiredness when she answered, but rapidly woke up when she heard the tone in Richard’s voice.
All he had said was, ‘We’ve got a real problem. Could you come and fetch Susan and Michael? I’ll have a suitcase of clothes ready to take.’
‘Yes, of course … it’ll take me half an hour …’
‘Thanks.’
Then he helped Susan out of the mud and up to the bathroom. He felt oddly calm, almost unreal. It was a form of shock, he knew, but he welcomed the fact that he felt no sense of panic. That would come later, he imagined. He had also expected Susan to want to leave the house immediately, but she too was in a strange, dulled state, and all she wanted was a bath.
Even a bath in
this
house.
She was mostly silent as they went upstairs. She undressed Michael, then herself, as Richard drew the water and tested it for temperature. She settled into the shallow bath and closed her eyes for a moment. She still held Michael, and together they cleaned the infant. The child was surprisingly quiet, apparently undisturbed by his near-fatal experience. When the mud was washed away, Richard ran a second bath to rinse them, then left Susan alone as he packed her clothes for her, and the bottles and sterilizing equipment, ready for Jenny’s arrival.
He was trying to keep a clear head,
trying not to let the pure alienness of this event start to panic him. He had an idea that he would stay in the house and clear away the mess, shifting the massive earthfall into the garden, maybe even as far as the quarry. Get the house clean. Get the
ghost
out of the place.
What had done this? What power could have done this?
‘Keep calm!’ he whispered to himself as he prowled the rooms downstairs, waiting for Jenny. ‘Keep a firm grip …’
Jenny was wearing jeans and a heavy jumper, and without the touch of make-up that she normally used her eyes looked pale and tired. Her hair was tousled, her breath sweet with peppermint, and she shuddered uncontrollably as she stood in the doorway of the sitting room and stared at the mud spill.
‘Good God Almighty! You’re lucky not to have been crushed.’
Richard looked up at the gaping ceiling. It had been a fall of ten feet or more, and Michael had been underneath the slurry.
‘Yes.’
‘I smell blood,’ Jenny said, and started to gag. ‘Oh shit, I’m going to be sick.’
She ran from the room, out through the back door, and into the dawn. Richard blocked his ears against the sound of her retching, feeling nauseous himself. And it was as he stood there, the sharp odour of flesh strong in his own nostrils, that he glimpsed the piece of gleaming white bone.
He used a muddy stick to prod at the shard, and had to fight not to be sick as he unearthed the torn, still bleeding fragment of a dog’s skull. It had brown fur, with a patch of white; a section of ear remained. There was flesh and bone below the skin, a fragment of skull and
upper jaw, one canine still in place.
The blood was fresh, clotting but still textured. This animal had been alive half an hour ago.
Jenny had gone upstairs to see Susan. Now she came back to the sitting room just as Richard unearthed a second piece of the dead animal, a paw attached to four inches of leg. She stood there, hand over her mouth, but more controlled now.
‘A dog?’ she whispered hoarsely.
‘What’s left of it.’ He found a tuft of fur, some glistening white cartilage and two further pieces of red-raw bone.
‘This will seem like a silly question,’ Jenny whispered, ‘but does this make any sort of sense at all?’
‘No.’
‘No human being did this …’
‘No. I know …’
There were other oddities in the earthfall, and he lifted them from the mound. ‘Look at this …’
Jenny came closer, hand still covering her mouth, and peered over Richard’s shoulder.
‘Wood?’
‘It’s wicker. A fragment of wicker.’ Now that he looked he could see several fragments of the wood and he reached for them, piling them up.
‘There’s chalk too …’ Jenny said. ‘Christ, that smell!’
Richard picked up the chalk object, a ball, a block of chalk that looked as if it had been smoothed off. There were no marks on it that he could discern. He picked up two or three shards of flint and cast them aside. More bits of wood, and a second chalk ball …
Suddenly frightened, he stepped back from the earth and brushed his hands, as if to remove the taint of the haunting. He was shaking violently. Jenny was watching him through eyes that registered no emotion, only blankness. A sort of
helplessness.
‘Thanks for coming over,’ Richard said in a dull voice. ‘I didn’t want to send for our neighbours … they’d make too much fuss …
Jenny shrugged impatiently. Then she shook her head, despairing as she surveyed the chaos.
‘I mean, what
did
this?’
He looked up through the open ceiling. ‘This has always been such a happy house. My family has lived here for two generations. Nothing sinister has occurred here. Not in our time.’
‘And before your time? How old is the place? A hundred and fifty years?’
He shook his head. ‘Not that old. Late Victorian.’
She was thoughtful. ‘And what was here before the house?’
‘A field, I imagine.’ He caught her drift and tried to smile wryly, but his face remained an impassive, shocked mask. ‘No, it’s not built on the site of a Celtic burial ground. Or a Roman cemetery. Or a Druid’s temple. I wish it was. Digging the garden would be more fun.’
‘What about the tump?’
‘The tumulus? That’s just a Bronze Age grassy knoll now. There’s nothing left in it. Cleared out years ago. Spirits and all. And I’ve seen maps of this area before the house was built. There’s nothing below the foundations.’
She came up to him and took his arm, a determined look on her ashen features. ‘There’s something in the house, Richard. Poltergeist, psychic power, call it what you like. There’s
something
here and it’s malicious. It’s raw. If it’s Michael’s birth-mother, then she’s powerful. And vicious. You have to find out if it’s her. If it’s the house, then something happened here and you can take steps to rid the house of the energy. You need help. You need expert help …’
‘Exorcism, you mean. Bell,
book and bullshit.’
‘Not necessarily exorcism. Not
even
that. Just someone … someone who
knows
about these things.’
‘I can’t think for the moment, Jenny. I’ve got to get Susan and Michael out of here. I’ve got to clean up this mess. Dump this dirt somewhere, the chalk pit … that’s going to take hours … I can’t think for the moment …’
But Jenny was insistent. ‘You’ve
got
to think. Both of you, Susan too. You’re being attacked.
Psychically
. And Michael’s life is in jeopardy. Perhaps yours too. You’ve got to get out of here, Richard. Work on the cause from the outside.’
Even as she said the words the house seemed to shift, to flex inwards, crowding down upon him dizzyingly and with alarming consequences. He felt immediately panicky, stepping back from the earthfall, overwhelmed by its smell and the aliveness of it. There was furtive movement on its surface, and grains of drying soil slipped down the mound, disturbed by the worm-life below. The room seemed to be oppressing him, stifling him, and he laboured for breath, feeling his heart pounding painfully, his skin breaking into an icy, unpleasant sweat.
Jenny tugged his sleeve, and he responded to her sudden concern with a hug.
‘You’re right,’ he whispered. ‘Get me out of here …’
Susan came downstairs, carrying Michael. Jenny went over to her and took her case. ‘Ready when you are.’
‘I’d better take my dolls,’ Susan murmured. ‘I think I’m going to need something to do.’
She went into the workroom and reappeared with a carrier bag. Richard had packed a small case of his own things from the wardrobe and drawers in the spare room. He had intended to turn off the electricity in the house, but in his sudden haste
to escape the place he forgot. He practically ran from the front door, returning only to lock it.
The sound of the car’s engine, revving up, was welcome, and he almost flung himself into the front seat, closing his eyes as Jenny drove swiftly away from Eastwell.
He returned to the house a day later, shortly after dawn, entering by the front door and standing for a while in the heavy, oppressive stillness. When he entered the sitting room he began to shake again, feeling haunted by the silence, by the familiarity of the surroundings. It was as if the room was tainted, as if he was being watched. He knew this to be in his mind, but he couldn’t help the unconscious response of fear that accompanied him as he stepped round the mound of earth.
The upstairs light was still on, its dim illumination spilling down on to the brooding mound. The earth, which had been so alive and vibrant, was dead now, the worms burrowed deep. When he touched it, it was cold; no colder, probably, than when it had fallen, but cold in a different way. It was drying out. It was settling. It was quite simply … dead.
He rubbed dirt between his fingers, sniffed it, then brushed it away. Then he took up the two chalk balls and carried them from the room, opening the back door and stepping out into the grey light.
The land was swathed in a heavy ground mist and the air felt cold as well as damp. There was no sound in this new day, save for the distant, melancholy calling of a single rook, out in the grey fog that clung to the trees around the disused chalk quarry.
He walked over the field, now, and through the trees to the rusting wire fencing that protected animals and children from the pit. He was able
to pull the fence down and tread out a path, through the dog’s-mercury and fern, to the sheer edge of the chalk where it dropped away into the dense tangle of undergrowth and rubble below.
It would be hard work, getting the earthfall here, but he wanted it away from him, away from the house, as far away as possible.
Resigning himself to a long and aching day, he walked back to the garden and fetched the wheelbarrow and spade.
In the sitting room, he began to dig.
Eighteen months later …
Michael sat in the corner of the kitchen, a sheet of white paper on the linoleum floor in
front of him, bricks, wooden cars and crayons scattered in abundance. He was using the red crayon to fashion loops on the paper, winding one loop inside another, keeping a continuous form emerging as he listened to the excitement in the house.
The voices were high-pitched and happy. The movement around him was frantic, random, making breezes as it passed.
As he fashioned the spirals he kept his eyes on the white paper, glancing only at the feet that passed by in his peripheral vision: sometimes the green slippers of his mother; sometimes the muddy boots of his father; occasionally the shoes of people he knew only slightly.
The paper filled with his drawing.
As the buzz of voices and activity grew loud and near, so he drew more vigorously. When the storm passed deeper into the house, away from him, he slowed, letting the crayon idle in his fingers, the tip crawling like a snail over the paper.
He heard his name, and the word ‘picnic’, which made him smile with anticipated pleasure. And sometimes the tone and the words he knew combined to give an impression of what was
happening, so that as the shadows of the giants swept past him, looming briefly at the edge of vision, sweeping through, closing and opening doors, gathering food, gathering bottles, packing, preparing, throwing together boots and raincoats and all the familiar items of ‘picnics’, so he began to understand that there was something special about today.
He filled in the gaps between the loops with other loops, then reached for the black crayon and drew in the shadows that walked these tunnels. He used the green crayon for his mother, and the brown crayon for his father, but placed their images
outside
the swirl of circles.
The fainter shadows in the house clustered and scurried about him, silent and curious. They mixed and mingled with the bulky vibrancy of the giants. They hovered and quivered, just out of sight. He sketched them all. Drew every one of them that he could imagine. They were nothing but blobs, with the extensions that were arms, and the extensions that were legs, and the slashes in their faces that were mouths. And all the time he drew on the paper he listened for his name, and for the mood, and for the
feel
of what was being said in the noise of the giants, the words that he
knew
were words, but could still only partly understand.
Around him, the strange and silent shadows faded suddenly against the bright sunlight that streamed in through the open door to the garden. On impulse he stood, then waddled to the door, to stand at the top of the step. He stared out into the brilliance of the day, across the lawn, the fence, to the blue of the sky above the distant sea.
He loved the sea. He loved its colour. He loved the sound it made. He loved the stones on the beach, and the crisp sound that came from them when the breakers rushed and rolled across them. He loved that grey-green water. He dreamed of being
down below it, waves surging above him. He dreamed great shadows in that water, dark masses moving through the grey-green …
Would they go to the beach for the picnic? Or to the woodland?
He started to step down, down across the concrete, down to the garden, his chubby legs quivering as they flexed into a position that his body was not yet ready to accommodate. He was aware only that his body was denying his need, and that his nappy was suddenly warm and sticky as a relief flooded from him. The smell touched his nostrils and he knew what would happen.