Chapter Ten
TEN
As Sam sets up the video camera in the sitting room to prepare for interviews with the other members of the Webber family, I find myself standing outside Alice’s bedroom door. My mouth is tacky and dry with nerves, heart fluttering in my throat. I’m holding Sam’s Dictaphone in my left hand, a notebook in my right. He wants everything documented, right down to the dreams we’re having. I haven’t yet told him about the noises outside my room last night or the dense, empty silence as I yanked the door suddenly open. I want to speak with Alice first.
I knock softly, and when there is no reply I gently push open Alice’s bedroom door. I’m instantly struck by the same thick odor that I noticed last night at dinner—a coppery, mineral-rich smell, like sunless water in a still lake. It’s stronger here, in this airless, gloomy room, and almost sweet like marzipan. Alice is sitting in bed, leaning against the headboard with a magazine on her knees. Her skin is burnished a dark and ugly red except in the places where her sunburn has started to peel; the bridge of her nose, her shoulders. Her hair is loose and unwashed and even though she smiles at me as I walk in I notice how tightly the tension is drawn on her features. She lowers her headphones and straightens up as I close the door behind me.
“What star sign are you?” she asks brightly.
“Sorry?”
“Your star sign, Mina. What is it?”
She indicates the magazine open in front of her. The curtains ripple slightly as I walk past them and lower myself onto the end of her bed.
“Um, Pisces I think. Why?”
She clears her throat and reads aloud.
“Your horoscope for July. ‘Tough times call for tough measures, Pisces, and we all know how much you hate difficulty. A man with red hair will catch your eye but he could spell danger.’”
She lifts her eyes to meet mine, smiling slightly. “Woah. ‘A man with red hair.’ Spooky! Who do we know with red hair, I wonder?”
“Alice—” I keep my tone light, but the look I give her is firm.
She ignores me, practically curling her toes with pleasure at my discomfort. “I’m just saying.” A beat. “Would you say Sam’s hair is red, or just auburn ?”
“Very funny. I’m engaged, remember?”
She’s laughing, giggling almost.
“You must love your fiancé a lot to want to marry him.”
“Of course.”
“I bet you’ve got a beautiful house. Is he handsome? Oh, of course he is. You’re so pretty.”
“Your dad seems to think I could do with being prettier.”
She licks her finger and turns the page of her magazine.
“You mustn’t mind him. He always gets like this when he’s on the killing floor.”
Something about the way she says those words—“the killing floor”—so light and airy and distracted, it chills me to the bone.
“The what?”
“It’s the part of the factory he works in. He says you need a strong stomach and a steady hand to put a bolt gun to a cow’s head and pull the trigger. You can only work there a little bit at a time. Three days on, four days off. It does something to the brain otherwise. Something bad.”
I study Alice carefully. She’s still flicking through the magazine, touching the pad of her finger to her tongue. Her tone is so strange, almost as if she is on the cusp of laughter.
“The killing floor is where all the messy stuff happens. Blood and guts and stuff. He tells us stories sometimes. They’re horrible, but he thinks they’re funny. One day, one of the other workers put a cow’s tongue in his lunch box and Dad laughed so hard he nearly passed out showing us. Mum says that the job has made him mean. That’s why you shouldn’t mind what he says to you. His jokes and that. He doesn’t know he’s doing it.”
She searches my face with a perceptiveness that is almost uncanny, eyes glittering. I set Sam’s Dictaphone on the mantelpiece, red light glowing, reels inside turning with a slow clicking sound.
“I’m going to be making some notes while we talk, Alice. It’s just to help me remember our conversation.”
“Sam said you were a psychologist.”
“That’s right. Do you know what that means?”
“I’m not stupid, Mina.” She sniffs. “It means you think I’m crazy.”
She’s drawing into herself, pulling her knees toward her. Alice’s voice has taken on a flat, weary affect as she pushes her magazine to one side and I realize she is already tired of having this conversation, of the focus being on her. I don’t blame her. I give her a smile and close my notebook.
“You know, Alice, I happen to think you’re very much sane.”
“So what’s happening to me, then?”
“Well sometimes the answers aren’t always straightforward. It’s why I’m here. To look at your homelife, your health, your friendships—all the things that shape you.”
I smile encouragingly. Her knees are still drawn up to her chin but she’s watching me from under her lashes and I take that as a good sign. She’s interested.
“How have you been sleeping, Alice?”
“Not great. I have bad dreams.”
“Can you tell me about them?”
She shrugs. “It sounds dumb.”
“Thing is, Alice, dreams can sometimes be a tool to unlock a problem. Even the bad ones.”
She thinks for a moment, her hands folded across her chest.
“Are you recording this?” she asks me. I nod, pointing toward the Dictaphone.
“It’s just to help me remember the things we’re talking about. I can stop if you want.”
She doesn’t answer, just looks down at her painted toenails.
“Can you tell me about the dreams?”
Alice shakes her head miserably, drawing her knees a little closer toward her.
“Alice?”
“I can’t,” she says quietly.
“Why?”
Silence. The whirr of the tape. Alice looks up at me and whispers, “She watches me through the cracks in the bricks. She’s in there now. That’s why we can’t talk about this.”
I nod, trying to keep my voice neutral. I’m not afraid, not yet, but there is a spidery sensation creeping up my back.
“Who is ‘she,’ Alice?”
Alice doesn’t say a word. I try again.
“Is it the one you’ve talked about before? The witch with the upside-down face?”
“Yes,” she murmurs. “She lives up in the chimney.”
Alice stares straight ahead, her whole body practically vibrating with tension. I can feel the air thicken around us, dust motes shift into strange, twisting sigils.
“Your mother mentioned something to Sam about this. There was a wasp’s nest found up there, wasn’t there? Do you think that could have something to do with it?”
“I see her eyes in the holes.”
“In the dream?”
Alice licks her lips. The soft, muggy heat of the day is rising, the sunlight slicing through the gap in the curtains a sickly orange color, like sodium lights. Sweat beads my brow and rolls down my collar. I uncross my legs, suddenly aware of how fast my heart is beating in the notch of my throat.
All the time, she mouths. Something about the way she says it makes my skin turn cold. She lifts a finger and points to a spot just behind my head. Right there.
I turn my head so slowly I can hear the tendons in my neck creak. There is old, faded wallpaper peeling away from the chimney breast. In the places where the paper has peeled away, there are small black gaps between the brickwork. I lean closer, teeth clenched against the feeling that my racing heart might just burst out of my throat, palms tingling. I stare into the narrow space.
What will you do if something looks back at you, Mina? That voice again, panicky. If you see an eye gleaming in there in the dark?
“I don’t see anything,” I tell Alice, pulling away with some relief. “I think this is probably one of those things we can chalk up to your brain playing tricks on you. It happens more often than you’d think.”
Just then, the slightest sound, maybe just wind in the chimney, maybe a bird landing on the roof. I laugh uneasily but Alice doesn’t smile.
“Am I going mad, Mina? Are they going to take me up Bodmin?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the loony bin, only you don’t call it that no more. They call it St. Lawrence’s Community Hospital so it doesn’t frighten people. It means the same thing though. It’s where they lock up all the weirdos. Like me.”
St. Lawrence’s. Lisa had said her great-grandmother had been taken there, hadn’t she?
“Do you think you’re mad, Alice?”
The magazine slithers from her knees and onto the floor. I take her hand—God, her skin is still so warm, she must surely have a fever—and squeeze it gently. She looks at me, her eyes wide and wet.
“That’s what hearing voices means, doesn’t it? Everyone said so.”
“Like who?”
She looks upward, toward a series of photographs tacked to the notice board that hangs over her bed. I move closer, leaning in to see the faces of this group of teens clowning around for the camera—there’s Alice, long hair swept over her shoulder, sitting on the lap of a tall, brown-haired boy. There she is again, pouting in a bikini with a friend wearing mirrored sunglasses. There are several photos of Alice and what appears to be the same girl, hair coiled into tight little curls, skin pale. All freckles and teeth and neon bracelets. Bright young things.
“Who’s this, Alice?”
“Vicky.”
Her voice is dull, and she doesn’t offer any further information. I lean closer to read the words scrawled on the bottoms of the photographs. Best M8s 4 Ever! in coiled, swirly writing. Another reads Feelin’ Gr8 in ’88!
“Those people outside the house, the ones that have been hanging around the last few days—they say I’m holy. They write me letters and post them through the door. They’ve left things out there, little statues, toys. Did you know that?”
I think of the small offerings I saw when I arrived at Beacon Terrace; the wreathed bay leaves, dried to a dark green, the ratty-looking teddy bear leaking stuffing. I nod.
“But people at school don’t think that. They don’t think I’m special. They all think I’m a nutjob. Even the teachers.”
“I’m sure they don’t,” I tell her, but it isn’t true. I know how it can be. School wasn’t kind to me, the girl with the dead brother and the father who handed out religious pamphlets outside the shopping center in his brown shoes and coat, face a study in grief. I suffered, too.
“Besides, you’re not at that school anymore, are you? Sam told me you were going to college in September.”
She brightens a little at this, picking at the chenille bedspread with her fingernails.
“Yeah! I’ll be studying hair and beauty. They have the classroom all set up like a salon, it’s so cool.”
I nod and smile and pick my notebook back up. During my studies I learned that teens value self-determination. “Let them set the agenda,” the professor told us, rolling up her sleeves, “and engage with them on their terms.” Besides, I don’t want to keep thinking about that chimney breast and the dark cracks in the brickwork, the way Alice whispered to me, “I see her eyes in the holes.”
“Have you always wanted to do that? Be a hairdresser?”
“For sure. I was cutting the hair off all my Sindy dolls as soon as I could hold a pair of scissors. I cut poor Tamsin’s hair when she was a toddler, took off all her beautiful baby curls. Not sure Mum will ever forget it to be honest but she asked me for a trim the other day so I hope that means I’ve been forgiven. I’ve been cutting our neighbor Mary’s hair and at Christmas her and Bert bought me my very own proper hairdressing kit to take to college.”
“I met Bert yesterday, up at the church. He mentioned his wife was ill.”
“Yeah. It’s a real shame. Mum said she had got really sick a few years ago and she’ll never get better. She talks funny now, like her voice is all mushy, and she needs Bert’s help to get around. I still cut her hair but I don’t know if she even knows I’m there sometimes. It makes me feel sad. Especially for Bert. He loves her more than anything.”
She looks up and gives me a weak smile.
“They used to look after me and Tamsin a lot when Billy was born. It made Mum sad having Billy. She cried every day. Bert said that some women feel like that sometimes, after having a baby. That the pregnancy can make them unhappy but they get better in time. Billy was a proper handful, he was wild. Still is, although I don’t notice it too much anymore. He doesn’t mean it, but some days it’s like the Devil got inside him, that’s what Bert says. At the time I didn’t mind too much because Bert and Mary used to make us nice dinners and let us help ourselves to the choc ices in the freezer. It was a bad time but not a bad time, does that make sense?”
I tell Alice it makes perfect sense.
“A few years ago, I started going ’round some evenings to set Mary’s hair and Bert would come in and play his old records for us. I sort of pretend I don’t like it but I don’t mind really. He made us funny little cocktails out of orange juice and pineapple from a tin. He calls them Bertinis and puts little paper umbrellas in them. It always makes Mary laugh. Sometimes he plays a song that was the first dance at their wedding but it’s slow and Mary always falls asleep before the end of it.”
She sighs, hugging her knees to her chest.
“After I started cutting Mary’s hair, I had other people want me to do theirs. People in our street mainly, friends of my mum. I’d go to their houses and I didn’t charge much—I just needed to practice. At Christmas I had a booking for an address on the other side of town. It was raining that evening and I remember thinking maybe I won’t go. I couldn’t really be bothered, and I didn’t want to get wet. I wish I hadn’t gone. I really, really do.”
“What do you mean?”
Alice swallows loudly.
“I don’t want to talk about this now, Mina. I’m tired.”
Ah, I think. Here it is. Alice folds her arms, jutting out her lower lip. It’s a sulky, petulant posture that would seem like artifice in anyone else but this exhausted young teen, her eyes suddenly hooded and cold. I lean forward, keeping my voice calm, trying to hold her gaze.
“Alice, I can’t help you unless you give me the information. Otherwise I’m just out here working in the dark.”
She thinks for a moment, leaning back against the pillows, eyes closed.
“The address was out on Tanner’s Row, just on the edge of the village. It’s probably only about a ten-minute drive but on the bike it takes a bit longer. I should have known all those houses were empty—Dad was talking about nothing else for weeks—but I was just thinking about the money. I’d been saving for a new stereo, because the one I’ve got is knackered. Of course once I got there, cycling all the way in the sleet and the cold with my fingers so numb I could hardly feel them, I realized right away. There were no lights on for one thing. Not even a streetlamp. No one goes in or comes out of Tanner’s Row anymore. All the cottages there got sold to a developer and now all six of them are just sitting there falling to bits, waiting to be knocked down. That’s what Dad gets so mad about. Good Cornish granite going to waste, he says. The last house on the row, number six, was where I was headed. When I got there the front door was already standing open.”
A pause. Her eyes flick to the collection of photographs again, her and that girl and those hundred-watt smiles.
“There was someone standing there, calling me over. It took me a while to realize that it was my friend, Vicky.”
I glance up at the photos again, Alice and Vicky with their faces pressed close together, eyes shining with bright adolescent fervor.
“Vicky had a flashlight in her hand. ‘Come on,’ she was saying, like something exciting was happening, ‘come on, we’ve been waiting for you.’ She was laughing. I wasn’t laughing. I was pissed right off. Confused, too. Something still didn’t feel right, but you know—I’d gone all that way in the cold. Might as well see what was going on. I leaned my bike against the wall. As far as I know it’s still there. I haven’t been back to get it.
“When I went inside the house, I had to duck because of the way the ceiling was sagging. Everything stank, like dirty water. There was carpet but no furniture and so the people inside were sitting on plastic bags on the floor.”
“What people?”
“From my school, mostly. It was hard to see in the dark. Vicky’s brother was there, he’s at college, and some of his friends I suppose. A few girls from my class. They had flashlights and were drinking bottles of Thunderbird. They were obviously all in on the joke because when I arrived someone said, ‘Who ordered the hairdresser?’ and they all just about wet themselves laughing. Even Vicky. She offered me a go on the wine but I didn’t want any. I wanted to leave. The house was gross, so dark and damp. There was graffiti all over the walls and empty cans everywhere. One of the girls stood up then, a bit pissed. They all were, I think. She held the money for the appointment out to me. Five pounds. Said it was only a joke, that they were still going to pay me. Only I had to do something first. Before she’d give it to me, like.”
“What did they want you to do?”
Alice sighs, hands plucking at the cover. Her voice is soft and almost slurring, so deeply buried is she in the memory. Her eyes are wet and distant, mouth drawn down.
“I had to get something out of the chimney. I didn’t want to do it. I told them that. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘Whatever it is I’m not putting my hand up there, why couldn’t someone else do it?’ That’s when Vicky stood up. She came right up close to talk to me and she said, ‘Come on, Alice. It’s only a bottle. Just take it out and then they’ll pay you. Please, Alice, you’re the only one brave enough.’ On and on like that until I said, ‘Fuck it, fine, I’ll do it.’ Everyone cheered. One of the boys even put his arm around me which was, you know, nice. They shone their flashlights up there so I could see. Lit up like that I wasn’t scared at all. It was only a chimney. Bricks and cobwebs and soot. It smelled bad but the whole house smelled bad, like everything in it had drowned. I couldn’t work out why they’d all been so afraid to do it. I reached up all the way to my shoulder—it was awkward, and it ached for a long time afterward but in the end I found it in a hole in the bricks, right where they said it was.”
A beat. I watch her carefully. There is the slightest tremble in her hands, voice wavering as if on the cusp of tears.
“Go on, Alice.”
“It was a bottle.” She swallows, her eyes deeply socketed and ringed with shadow. “I managed to pull it free but I suppose my fingers were so cold I couldn’t hold on to it properly. I dropped it and it smashed on the fireplace.
“Everyone screamed. I think Georgia said, ‘Oh my God. I’m going to be sick.’ One of the boys ran first but most of them followed, straight out the front door. Only Vicky hung back, and she was so frightened I could hear her voice shaking. I kept asking her what the matter was, why everyone had freaked out. She said, ‘You broke the witch’s bottle, Alice,’ and then she ran. After that I don’t think we said two nice words to each other— and I never got my fiver.”
I sit breathless, watching her. Her knees are drawn right up to her chin as if she were receding into herself.
“Alice, when I was studying psychology, I wrote a paper on mass psychogenic illness. It’s the theory that an idea or a feeling—particularly a strong one like terror or excitement—can spread through a crowd like a disease. It can even change the way people behave.”
As I lean toward her, I feel the slightest pressure on the back of my neck as if someone is watching me. Some oculus perhaps, cracks in the brickwork. I ignore it, threading my hand into Alice’s own.
“It’s what happened in the Salem witch trials and the dancing mania of the Middle Ages. It’s even been observed in animals, that’s why they call it ‘herd mentality.’ It doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. Quite the opposite. It’s a shared experience, that’s all.”
I reach out and turn off the Dictaphone. I almost feel disappointed. Teen fever, a whipping up of emotions. There was a case recently in an all-girls school in upstate New York—hundreds of girls came down with a ‘fainting sickness’ despite tests showing there was no medical reason for the mysterious fits. It’s a social contagion and even though it’s fascinating it’s also normal. I need to go and talk to Sam. At last, I think, we might have an answer to what’s happening here. It’s only as I stand up and cross the room, one hand reaching out for the door handle, that I hear her say, “You didn’t ask me.”
“Ask you what?”
“How it feels.”
“How what feels, Alice?”
“When dead people start talking to me. You didn’t ask me what it feels like.”
My mouth floods with the taste of hot metal. Fear, polluting me.
“What does it feel like?” I ask her quietly and she looks right at me.
“Like biting into ice,” she says.