Chapter 27
I think I am going mad.
That’s what I thought over and over, lying in bed, watching the dawn creep round the blue horizon, slowly turning pink and pale before climbing up the ceiling beams of my bedroom.
I had to be mad. What other explanation could there be for what I’d experienced last night? Not to mention the night before. I’d heard the music through the floor, felt the house shake when she let the front door slam. But the house had been silent. Empty.
I ran my hands through my hair. Plaster board powder came away on my fingertips. I shook it off my skin as if it were fungal spores. Maybe I was hallucinating the plaster in my hair as well.
This wasn’t the first time I’d ever wondered if I was going mad. Every time there would be some all-hands announcement at work and my colleagues would nod with approval at speeches that just sounded like corporate nonsense to me, I would wonder if maybe I was mad, out of step with reality.
I checked my phone for messages. Nothing.
Of course not. When was the last time you messaged anyone? No one knows what’s going on with you. No one from your old life even knows you moved away. That was the point, remember?
I threw my phone out of the bed and looked up at the sloping ceiling. I lay there in the stillness of late morning with the pale light creeping round the walls.
If it wasn’t madness, how else could I explain what was happening?
The figure in the basement. The phantom party next door.
It’s not like the place was actually built on a fairy hill.
There weren’t pixies and sprites running around playing tricks on me in the night.
I huffed at the thought. Fergus would love that.
‘Rich English cunt’ chased off by scary stories.
I wasn’t even English. Or rich, for that matter.
I thought for a moment. Then I rolled onto my belly and reached for where I’d thrown my phone.
I opened the browser and searched for “Carlinsrest fairy hill”.
My palms went slick as the little coloured buffering dots danced on the screen.
There were no results exactly for that term, but my phone was clearly still sharing my location, so I got a screed of “Scottish monsters” and “Scottish mythical creatures”.
I clicked on the first result that wasn’t an ad.
An etching of a face sprang up at the top of the article. It was pretty and youthful and charming, except for a too-wide smile. My finger hovered over the picture. Then I scrolled down:
Faeries, Pixies, Fair Folk, Tylwyth Teg, Changelings, Hidden Folk.
This race of mythical creatures is known by many names, but can be found throughout the British Isles and, in fact, most of the world.
Theories vary on the origins of these strange humanoid creatures.
Some believe they are angels; others, demons.
Folklorists speculate that perhaps they were the spirits of the ancestral dead, or a prehistoric race living across the Earth before humanity, or ancient pagan deities worshipped as elementals, nature spirits or the anima of special places in the landscape e.g. hills, large rocks, caves etc.
I looked up and thought of the door in the basement below and Fergus’s story about the hollow hill. I shook my head.
They are believed to have supernatural qualities including long life, the ability to change their appearance and a penchant for illusions. It is debated whether they are benign or malicious, but in Scotland faeries are said to be feared—
I pushed my phone away from me in disgust. There had to be another explanation. Something simpler. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Two different versions of my neighbour. Dolly spinning on her stand at the museum. The old man’s talk of doubles—
Maybe it’s her ghost come to punish me for what I did. Come to drive me insane.
I balled my fists into my eye sockets.
So those were my options. Either I was mad, or I was a murderer.
A cold, heavy sensation spread out from my chest and into my arms and legs.
It was beginning to feel like I had come here not to start a new life, but to die.
My grandmother died of combined liver and lung cancer.
I remembered the day she called my father to her house because she felt unwell.
Her lovely home, decorated with her crafts and her photos and all the porcelain houses she liked to collect—stained with cigarette smoke over the years.
My grandfather’s oil painting of a bridge hung above her chair.
Two cats sat in front of the fire. Her neatly kept gardens the main view from the living room window.
My father took her to the hospital that day.
She left that house thinking she’d be back in the evening.
Or perhaps a few days later. They gave her the diagnosis and moved her to a hospice an hour away up north.
She never saw that house again. All her things, the collected mementos of her life, the afternoon light in the garden, the steam lifting off a hot cup of coffee in her kitchen.
She never saw her home again.
In my worst hours, those quiet dark passages in the night, I wondered what she must have felt like, moving to the hospice, that unfamiliar place, knowing it was the last place she would ever see, that she was only going there to die.
The cold heavy weight in my chest changed into a freezing tremor. Ice cold panic traced down my spine and my hands shook. In my mind’s eye, I saw it, a creeping darkness, inching up from the foot of my bed, climbing over the dressing gown I used as a bedsheet, clutching at my toes—
Knock-knock-knock
I sat up and gasped, hand to my throat. I gulped air like the drowned.
The knocking came again. There was someone at the door. I had no idea who, and I didn’t care. I’d cling to anyone like a life raft in that moment.
I calmed my breathing, quickly threw on some clothes and headed downstairs.