Chapter 5
The woods were on the edge of a small village which bore no trace of human life.
It had wide roads and verges, and was dotted with the sheep that had come down from the moors to avoid the wild weather.
There was a boarded and shuttered pub, large houses all blank-windowed and a bridge under which the river ran, gurgling with intent.
It was practically a horror-film set. Truly nobody would hear me scream.
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and checked Tilly in the mirror.
She was playing with Brass and hadn’t been sick again, thankfully, although she was muttering rather rebelliously about toast. She’d levered off one of her boots and it rattled around, discarded, under the back seat with a disturbing clopping sound every time I turned a corner.
There were a lot of corners. These old roads, built to follow ancient drainage ditches or even more ancient boundary lines, wound and twisted like yarn, intersecting briefly to give a glimpse of an alternative way and then disentangling to venture onward in a lonely strip of grey.
All the landscape outside the city gave me a vague feeling of agoraphobia.
Roads that seemed to go nowhere, looping back upon themselves, and skies that held the whole of infinity pinned above our heads in ever-changing streaks of blue and grey.
I sighed and bent the car around another sharp corner.
This marked the beginning of the woods, a few isolated trees in a field at first, gradually building to a wall of trunks and branches as impenetrable as if they contained a dormant castle.
They had, once upon a time; this had been a king’s hunting ground and a pile of mouldering rocks on a slumped hillock a couple of miles away bore testimony to the ancient lodge that had guarded this land.
But here there was nothing but trees, and that cottage.
I pulled up where I’d parked the day before. The tyre marks of my speedy departure were still scribed into the mud, and I parked alongside them with a grimace. It couldn’t be avoided. But it would be over soon, and at least Ross Ventriss wasn’t here to witness any nervous breakdowns.
‘Come on, Tils, let’s go and have a look at this house,’ I said, assuming a bravery that ought to have won me a medal. ‘I just need to go inside for a few moments’ …those wings… ‘and check that it’s empty and then we can go for our walk.’
Brass was tucked firmly under Tilly’s arm, his felt teeth snagging against the toggles of her duffel coat. I raked about and located the missing wellie, popped it on and then decanted Tilly from her seat.
‘Trees, Mummy.’ Tilly stared around her.
I felt that this ought to be a teaching moment – I should be pointing out the species of trees and showing how the undergrowth was thickest where the light reached the ground – but I couldn’t bring myself to.
The atmosphere was oppressive; the wind didn’t reach under these trees with their stern grey trunks and their leaves, which fell every so often as though to emphasise death and decay.
‘Yes,’ was all I could say.
With Tilly huddling against my coat and me clutching her hand as though I feared the trees may spirit her away, we advanced on the cottage.
It seemed to have degraded even since yesterday.
The roofline was surely a little more slumped, a window frame had parted company with its fixing on one side and a crack had become visible which showed a surrendering flag of wallpaper waving inside.
It practically screamed haunted.
Even more worryingly from my point of view, there was a dim light gleaming from the broken remnants of one ground floor window at the side of the house.
It was so faint as to only be visible out of the corner of my eye; if I looked directly at it the entire space seemed to have the same level of illumination as the rest of the place, which was not very much.
It looked as though the whole house had pulled the shadows from the trees and surrounded itself with them, trying not to be noticed.
But still, that faint glimmer, which could have been simply a reflection of light on broken glass. Or not.
‘Bugger,’ I muttered. Tilly tugged at my hand.
‘Don’t like it,’ she said, around her thumb. ‘Horrible house.’
Well that was it. I couldn’t show weakness, not in front of a two-year-old.
I was the mum here, I had to appear in control and show no fear.
It had been an attitude that had carried me this far and kept us safe, away from David and all that entailed, and ensured that I kept emotion squashed down as far as it would go.
‘It’s just an old house, Tilly,’ I said, with a strictness that made her lip wobble. ‘It only looks scary because of all the trees.’
We crept up on the house as though playing an advanced game of Grandmother’s Footsteps.
The trees whispered our approach, passing secrets among themselves over our heads in a wind that we couldn’t feel down here.
Brambles snatched, the last stringy nettles of the year wiped themselves down our coats with impotent fury and overhead branches whipped and twisted until more decaying vegetation fell around us.
The scenery should have come with its own violin section and narration, telling how nobody who went in ever came out again.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I muttered, trying to give myself the pep talk that absolutely nothing about my surroundings was offering.
‘God’s sake,’ agreed Tilly around the thumb, and Brass waggled agreement.
‘But that might be a light, and if it is, there’s someone in there,’ I carried on monologuing; it was a state I was used to.
‘Which means I have to make sure that they know about the demolition. Once I’ve done due legal diligence we can go.
’ Unless skeletal arms have snatched us into the depths of the darkness…
‘For God’s sake!’ I snapped at myself again.
Tilly was tugging back against my arm like a dog unwilling to leave an enticing smell. ‘Horrible house,’ she said again, her dark eyes wide.
I bent down and picked her up. ‘Just a couple of minutes,’ I reassured her. ‘Then we can go home and have toast.’ For the sake of getting through this I’d even deal with any concomitant sickness.
‘Ice cream?’ Tilly murmured hopefully against my shoulder.
‘We’ll see.’ The last recourse of the lying mother. ‘But let’s just do this first.’
She settled herself on my hip, wellies streaking my work coat with mud and Brass squashed uncomfortably into my neck, so I walked forward to the accompaniment of swinging boots and part of my vision obstructed by a large stuffed dragon.
The front door was still unfastened and swung inwards at my touch to slam back against the hallway wall with a crash like the last call of doom. Tilly hid her face in my neck.
‘It’s all right,’ I said in a desperate attempt to reassure myself. ‘It’s all fine.’
I couldn’t hear the wings this time, but it was evident that the window showing the faint light was the one hidden behind the door and there was absolutely nothing for it but to go and look.
I stood in the hall, feeling the unevenness of loose tiles beneath my feet, and wavered.
Did I put Tilly down and try to go in alone, but leaving my daughter to the mercy of the house?
Or did I take her with me, when she would be in the firing line if the birds were just sitting there in the room waiting for the door to open?
I shifted her weight to my other hip and stared at the door.
My heart was hammering so hard that I was afraid it might shake her out of my arms with the force of its beat, and the rising nausea could have been from some strange nursery-created bug or the prospect of what lay within the depths of the house.
Quadruple pay. I could do this.
‘Keep your head down,’ I said to Tilly, flipping the hood of my coat so it covered her hair. ‘Everything is going to be fine, I promise.’
I advanced slowly, step by step, one arm outstretched as though I were about to perform some religious rite but had had my crucifix torn away.
Something crunched beneath my feet but I didn’t dare look down.
Besides, Brass was obscuring my vision, acting like dragon blinkers, which prevented me from seeing whatever I was standing on. Step by step I crept on.
When my fingers could brush the handle of the door I announced myself. ‘I’m Libby Douthwaite and I need to ensure that this house is empty,’ I said to the resounding shade, cracked tiles and ominous door handle. ‘I am here in a legal capacity.’ My voice sounded unnatural, high and squeaky.
The house didn’t respond. There was an almost ominous absence of sound behind the door. I shuffled myself around so that the side holding Tilly was furthest away from it, turned the handle, hauled the door open as though it weighed a tonne, and simultaneously threw myself against the wall.
The silence went on. The birds were gone.
‘Oh.’ The anticlimax was resounding. Nothing flew at me; there were no claws or beaks, no dragging feathers against my face. Only a dark room, funnelling back into a dusty distance and the image of an open window, the outlines of furniture.
And a woman sitting watching me.