Chapter Thirteen
THIRTEEN
We walk along the High Street, up the hill and past the church. The heat makes it hard to speak and after a while we are comfortable with the silence. By the time we take the turning onto Tanner’s Row, the street sign eclipsed by a sharp tangle of nettles and bramble, the church bell is chiming out the hour. The cottages are a small row of six granite-built houses in varying stages of dilapidation. They are gloomy and dark bricked, addled with rot. Window frames buckle and swell and old iron drainpipes are streaked with rust. A skinny-looking cat watches us from one of the overgrown gardens, eyes narrowed. It has a mouse hanging from its mouth, pink tail still twitching, beads of blood on its whiskers.
“Which one is it, Mina?”
Sam’s voice is hushed in the still, heavy air.
“Alice said it’s the one on the end. Number six.”
I feel tension ratchet up my spine as we pick our way down the narrow lane spiked with weeds and cow parsley, long tongues of nettle.
We find Alice’s bike still leaning against the low stone wall of the last cottage along the row, just like she said it would be. I don’t know much about bikes but it occurs to me that even a cheap bike would be worth something to someone with nothing and wonder why she has never come back for it. Sam bends down to check the tires and looks up at me frowning. “They’re flat.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s been here about six months.”
We’re talking in big, exaggerated whispers and now we exchange a glance, laughing nervously. Sam holds out his hand toward the last cottage on the row and steps aside so I can enter. After you, no after you. We laugh again.
Alice was right about the smell in here—it’s fetid, as though something is putrefying in the walls. A cloud of flies moves in drowsy circles in the hallway. Through the doorway I glimpse graffiti on the walls, a tide of litter swept into the corners. The ceiling bulges. The old sofa is askew, all the stuffing ripped out like dusty white entrails. Sam brushes up beside me as I hesitate on the threshold.
“You going in?” he whispers.
“Yes, I’m just—”
“Just what?”
“Don’t you feel it?”
I’m not expecting him to say yes. I’m expecting him to play dumb, to say, Feel what, Mina? and tell me I’m being paranoid. But he does say yes. He does. Then he reaches out and squeezes my hand with his own, drawing a quick, sharp breath from me.
Stepping through the doorway is like stepping into a vacuum, as if all the air has been sucked from my lungs. The room is dark and cool with blotches of damp crawling down the walls. Torn curtains hang limply on skewed rails. In the farthest corner a pile of stained material—clothes or a sleeping bag, maybe—has been heaped. Something small and fleeting, glimpsed from the corner of my eye, scurries behind the skirting board as I cross the floor slowly, heading for the large fireplace. A floorboard creaks overhead, like a weight settling and I freeze, looking upward.
“It’s an old house,” Sam mutters. Still, his grip tightens on my hand just a little before he pulls away. He reaches up and traces a finger along a line of carvings on the wooden beam over our heads. “Look at these. Is that writing?”
The rafter is covered with a cross-hatching of scratch marks. They’re not new—the scarred wood has already darkened with age—but they run deep, as if carved with a heavy, deliberate hand. Sam is cursing himself for not bringing the camera when I see the scorch mark a little farther along the beam. I reach up on tiptoes, brushing aside a net of old cobwebs. The mark is small and black, almost invisible against the old wood. The shape resembles a tadpole, with a round head and curved, narrow tail. Like a comet. I rub it with my thumb. The old wood is worn smooth.
“I’ve seen this before. Outside the Webbers’ house. Someone drew it on the ground.”
“Looks like it’s been burned in.” Sam peers at it, so close his nose is almost touching the wood. “See the way it’s been branded? Like a hallmark on silver.”
Another creak overhead, a floorboard shifting. This time, Sam does not smile.
“Do you think there’s someone here?” he asks, in a low, husky voice. His eyes glimmer in the dusty room. “Squatters maybe?”
I incline my head and listen. There is no more creaking, no sighing of old wood or rustle of movement.
“I don’t think so. Let’s hurry anyway, it’s already gone twelve.”
I turn away from him and on my next step something crunches beneath my foot. I slowly lift my heel to see broken glass glittering on the dark wood. There is more of it just ahead. I pick up a small chunk—it’s milky green and smooth, like sea glass—and cup it in my palm.
“This must be it,” I say simply. “The witch’s bottle Alice found in the chimney. There’s more of it over here, look.”
It’s like putting together a puzzle. The bottle has mostly broken into large fragments, some as big as my palm, and it’s an easy job to bring most of the pieces together. I find the base of the bottle nearest the fireplace—it must have bounced and rolled as it had fallen out the chimney—and inside it is a little liquid, tacky to the touch. I sniff it cautiously, recoiling at the sharp, bitter odor.
“Urgh.” I hold it out to Sam. “Does that smell like urine to you?”
He looks at me evenly, mouth curved in a slight smile.
“Are you trying to seduce me, Miss Ellis?”
“All right, all right. Pass me that newspaper, would you?”
It’s not a newspaper, as we discover when Sam lifts it by the corner with a pinched finger and thumb. It’s a crumpled porn magazine. He hands it to me gingerly and watches as I rip out a couple of pages, trying not to look at the topless woman standing on the deck of a boat with frosted hair and a high-cut thong, tiny pink nipples like hard candy. I start arranging the pieces of broken glass onto it, wrapping them carefully in the damp pages so they don’t get damaged. I collect another piece of glass from the tiled hearth, half-buried in soot. It is the color of a blinded eye spotted with droplets of a gummy red wax. The largest of these droplets is about the size of a hazelnut and heavily dimpled, as if it were stuck with pins. I pick it free of the glass and turn it between my fingers thoughtfully.
“Mina?” Sam’s voice has a worried note in it. “Do you hear that?”
I look up.
“Hear what?”
We wait. The flies have drifted into the center of the room as if drawn by some obscure corruption. Sam looks anxious, staring up at the large, curved chimney breast. I open my mouth to speak and that’s when I hear it, too. A scratching sound inside the chimney. We both turn our heads toward it mechanically, eyes wide. In that dark, gloomy enclosure it feels as if the walls are suddenly rushing toward us, sealing us in.
“Maybe it’s a bird,” I say. A thread of soot patters into the grate. “It’s an old house, right? Stands to reason there would be all sorts of stuff nesting here.”
“We should go, Mina.”
“Okay, okay.” I wrap up the broken bottle and I notice, right at the back of the fireplace, another piece of that milky glass.
“Oh wait, one more.”
“Mina—”
Another scratching sound. It’s not panicked, like a bird or a squirrel would be. It’s as if something is slowly working its way loose.
“Just let me—”
I’m leaning into the fireplace and it’s big, bigger than I thought it would be. Alice could have fit her whole self in here easily, and it smells cinereous, like cold ashes long dead. I reach out for that scrap of glass, my fingers outstretched and trembling, the chimney rising above me like a long black throat, and as I feel a cold draft on the back of my neck I have one simple thought. Don’t. Look. Up.
A scraping overhead and a fine scrim of powder trickles onto my bare shoulder. I almost cry out at the feathery touch, pinching the glass between my fingers and lifting it away hurriedly. Beneath it there is something half-buried in the soot and ashes. A child’s shoe. Something about it stops me cold, stirring the hairs on the back of my neck. My teeth snap closed. Sam is behind me now—so close that I can smell the sweat on his skin, the mint gum he is chewing—but I can’t move. I just stare at it—a tiny leather shoe with yellow stitching and a strap with a silver buckle.
“Hey, what the hell?” Sam croaks. I know what’s going to happen as soon as he sees it. He is going to reach in there for it. “Maggie had those shoes.”
“Don’t.” I put my hand on his arm. His skin is shockingly cold. “Don’t. It’s a trap.”
“Huh?” Sam’s brow knits together, his face drained of color, and I don’t know how I know it but I do, it’s a trap set just for him. It’s bait. It’s a fucking lure.
A scraping comes from above us in the chimney and I have a vision of the witch folded in up there, eyes wide and luminous in the dark, arms knotted over her head, legs crooked and bent, knees jutting somewhere up near her ears forming impossible angles. Her broken bones grind as she moves, desirous to be free. Her tongue will be long and black and spongy like a cancerous lung, and in her hand a piece of fishing wire, the end of which is tied to that single child’s shoe, half-buried in the soot. She is drooling with excitement.
“Come on.” I tug Sam’s arm, practically hauling him away from the fireplace. The scratching sound has resumed with more intensity than before. “We have to go. Now!”
Sam hesitates but only for a moment, his face still drained of color. I dig my nails into his skin, as if trying to break through his captivation.
“Now, Sam!”
That seems to do it. His expression changes from that haunting, slack-jawed shock to something almost like comprehension. We leave at a run, shins stung by the nettles in the overgrown yard, almost slamming into Alice’s discarded bike left leaning askew against the wall. We only slow down as we pass the sign for Tanner’s Row at the top of the lane, hearts bright and quick in our throats.