Chapter 14
Andrew puts the pillowcase over my head.
I struggle, but it’s clumsy and I’m overpowered very quickly.
Despite his slim build, Andrew has a mean, wiry strength, the kind that leaves bruises.
Pinching, digging his fingers into my flesh.
The pillowcase is musty but also smells like the blanket—cloying, cheap detergent—and I experience that same jolt of familiarity again, this time as a static image: a neatly made bed, the covers stiff with starch.
I am sitting on this bed and looking down at trainers which slide off my feet because they have no laces in.
The pillowcase is thin cotton, almost translucent.
Looking through it gives everything a strangely hallucinatory quality, my vision condensed to muted shapes and throws of light.
Andrew grunts as he draws a length of something around my neck.
It feels warm and smooth, almost like skin.
The coils of a living thing. I begin to panic, repulsed by the feel of it, twisting and clawing and trying to break free.
I think of hooded prisoners, condemned men.
Gallows and gibbets, broken necks. A wave of terror moves through my body, as muscular as a spasm.
I twist and claw at the noose, sucking in sharp little breaths like a panting animal until he warns me sternly to stop.
“You ever see a dog in a slip leash?” His voice is thick with disdain. “The more it fights, the tighter the leash gets until eventually it chokes. A dog on a slip leash learns to behave pretty fucking quickly. Do you understand me, Hazel?”
I nod miserably, wondering for the hundredth time how I’ve found myself in this position. This would never have happened to Cathy. She’d have karate-chopped his windpipe and stolen the keys to his car the first time he’d tried to talk to her.
“We’re going to take a walk now, Hazel. Stay close. Don’t try and run.”
Andrew guides me slowly to the top of the stairs before leaning across me to unlock the basement door.
There is a rush of cool air as the door swings out into the hallway.
I don’t move until he shoves me forward—not hard, but enough to make me gasp as the strap around my neck digs in, pulling tight.
I make a soft hurrgh! noise. The light diffuses, grows brighter, like looking through filmy glass.
Andrew turns me toward the light, tugging the strap.
This way. I stumble behind him, acutely aware of the sound of that churring bird outside—a nightjar maybe.
Cold draft against my ankles. I reach out for the walls and run my fingers along the embossed wallpaper.
Flowers and fleur-de-lis, whispering under my fingers.
Lifting my head, I see the outline of a figure off to the left, framed by light as if they are standing in an open doorway.
The dark form is smudged, like someone has drawn them in charcoal and then run a thumb over it, and even as I try to focus, the shape seems to melt away, if it was ever there at all.
“You’ve got ghosts,” I say, but Andrew doesn’t slow his pace.
He simply tugs me forward and I am compelled to follow, lumbering and bovine.
The strip of light becomes wider, fills my vision, becomes a doorway.
We pass through it. Outside now. Even through the cotton I can smell the rich damp earth of late autumn, a bite of frost. I usually love this time of year, when the moon rises full and orange like a glowing, jaundiced eye.
“Where are we going?” My voice is husky, I don’t know that he hears me. He simply tugs a little harder to draw me toward him. “Andrew? At least take this thing off my head.”
“Can’t.” The creak of his leather boots. The rustle of his clothing. “Can’t let you see where we’re going. It’s sacred.”
“Sacred how?”
Another tug, sharper this time. Shut up.
We walk a few steps before Andrew starts that maddening whistling again, the same atonal notes over and over.
A female cuckoo calls from the forest, a sound like the bubbling cackle of a witch.
Damp grass whispers against my shins as we walk silently for what feels like hours but is in reality probably only about twenty minutes.
We appear to be following a stony path or old track, overgrown and bristling with nettles.
Even through the hood, I can smell the bright, antiseptic fragrance of them.
The ground begins to dip and we walk steeply downhill for a minute or so, before passing beneath creaking, swaying trees.
Dusky light plays on the fabric in front of my eyes, dappled shade.
“Here.” He stops abruptly.
I stand very still, straining to listen. It feels as if there is a knot in my chest, pulled so tight I cannot draw breath. “What are we—”
Another yank on the strap, hard enough to make my eyes water.
I bite back a yell. Andrew doesn’t remove the strap—I assume he thinks if he gives me the opportunity, I’ll try and make another run for it, and to be honest I don’t blame him, not even a little bit—but he does loosen it, and when he draws off the hood, I see that it is a length of flexible rubber tubing.
“Go on, then.” He gestures toward the ground. “Take a look.”
We’re standing on an uneven patch of ground covered with dead leaves and flattened grass, earth so rich it is almost black.
Tangled deadfall and knotted roots. Around us, tall firs and pines stand like ancient, tongueless sentinels.
Andrew’s face is flushed with exertion, lips torn apart in what appears to be a smile.
“What am I meant to be looking at, Andrew?”
The wind blows in then, a silvery, whispering ghost. The leaves scatter, and I take another look at those dark patches of earth in front of me.
A fine, spidery sensation creeps up my spine.
Someone has dug here. You can see it in the variation of the sunken soil, how fine and dark it is in these patches here, here—and here. Oh God.
My knees unlock and I sink slowly to the ground, barely aware that I am doing it. It’s a graceful movement, fluid and silent. Andrew lets go of the tubing and it slithers out of his hand. I think he can see, for the moment, that I am not going anywhere.
He points. “There’s two here, side by side. They’re some of the oldest. I thought I’d put ’em down deep enough, but the animals came and dug them out, so I had to make ’em deeper. ’Nother one over there. Right by that rock. That’s the markers, see? The rocks.”
Of course, I think, lightheaded with shock.
Grave markers. How else would he find them otherwise?
The rocks are gray and ordinary, the largest about the size of a basketball.
There is no writing on them, no epitaph.
Not even the initials of whoever is buried down there.
I think of that name scratched into the cellar window.
Are you here, Diana? I think. Did he drag you here with a hood over your head and a loop round your neck?
Did he show you the place you’d be buried?
“People think you can just put a body in the ground and nature’ll do its thing, but let me tell you, it’s hard work.
” Andrew is still talking in his thoughtful, deep monotone.
“It’s a lot of heavy lifting. You need a layer of rocks, you need tarp.
You need quicklime, and that stuff isn’t something you just mess around with.
If you’re handling quicklime, then you need gloves and you need a mask, unless you want to spend the day picking burning boogers out your nose.
” He hawks phlegm into his mouth and spits.
“I’m not keen to go through all that again, Hazel.
You understand? I need you to work with me. ”
The damp earth is soaking through the knees of my jeans. There are beetles scurrying across the tilled soil, roots tangled through it like wires. Moss clings to the trunks of the trees.
My voice is quiet, but he hears me just fine. “Who were they?”
“They were women, just like you.”
“And why—” I’m trying to hold my nerve, but it’s so hard. “Why did you kill them?”
“I was trying to save them, Hazel,” he tells me as if it were the simplest thing, as if he is explaining it to a child. “But the devils in their heads had already got a hold of them. In the end, it was a mercy killing. They’d thank me, if they could.”
I stare at the graves. The dark earth bristles with a good crop of inky-black mushrooms. Coprinopsis, I think.
I wonder how long these poor women lasted, trapped in the old Bray Farm with the ghosts and Andrew and his big, clumping feet, the way his eyes pass over you like a stone skimmed over a lake, never quite touching the surface.
What did he mean by women just like you?
The phrase nags at me, an answer to a question I can’t quite reach.
Andrew leans back on his heels and looks up at the sky. “We should head back. It looks like it’s going to rain. You don’t want to be sat in that cellar in wet clothes. You’ll catch your death.”
“You know people will be looking for me, don’t you? My parents, my sister. My husband, Joe. He’s expecting to hear from me any minute now.”
He considers me with a level, steady gaze. “Now, come on. You and I both know that isn’t true. It was one of the things I liked best about you, Hazel. You have no one to miss you.”
I stare at him, all my fears compounded. He’s right. But how does he know that about me? How?