Chapter Seventeen #3
“If the world learned that it was her, that she was insane, they’d think badly of her, and I couldn’t allow that.
She had an honest heart with a tortured mind, and it wasn’t her fault.
I married Louisa to protect her, and I vowed I would do so until the last. And now, Grace, I vow the same to you.
Never will your secrets leave my mouth. Never will this monster hurt you again.
Never will the ghosts of your past threaten your happiness today.
And I will never, ever again lie to you. ”
Nick kissed my wrist. I wanted to lay with him again, and show my love for him, but there wasn’t time. We had to move the body.
“Could we leave him here, in the forest, buried deep?” I asked. “There could be tools in the truck.”
“That would be careless,” said Nick. “It’s too public. It wouldn’t be long before he was found. We’ll move his truck and bury him somewhere remote, somewhere private. Somewhere we can keep an eye on him until we figure out how to dispose of him more permanently.”
“Somewhere like Heather House,” I said. “We can return his truck to the Stoddard farm before morning.”
“No, no, the truck will be abandoned here. We’ll use my car to transport him. It’s a hearse, after all. We need to work fast now.”
I had the distinct feeling that this was not Nick’s first time planning an unlawful burial, but I decided privately to let that curiosity lie. There was clearly more darkness in common between myself and my husband-to-be than I’d ever realised.
Nick moved the truck into the forest, wearing his black leather gloves.
He stripped off his blood-soaked coat to avoid leaving smears in the vehicle.
Then he moved his car, the Rolls, into the forest, and opened the back end.
We wrapped Tom inside Nick’s bloodied coat and, just as if we were collecting a body without a gurney, we loaded him on together.
I lifted his feet, while Nick took the head and shoulders.
Sadness captured me for a moment, to know I was holding the lifeless body of my childhood friend. It didn’t hold for long, but I recognised the feeling for what it was; a wave of grief that would, like everything else, pass over.
We drove on towards the north, sharing a pleasant silence, content in our love for one another. Hours passed.
We turned into the lane approaching Heather House, parking behind the outhouse to avoid being seen by anyone from the road.
The old curse fluttered down like a veil. An immediate heavy, dark sensation came over me, like a hot, wet, blanket, smothering me head to toe. Its weight made me breathless, my legs struggling to drag one foot in front of the other.
Seeing it, now, even with its repaired window and the fallen tree removed, gave me such nausea it was suffocating.
As if dreaming, I walked, almost asleep, to the back door, and let myself in.
The door creaked open, revealing the dank kitchen and barren living space, its floorboards bare, the walls freshly painted and still somehow drab.
Then I saw father’s portrait, his eyes boring into me, looming above my head.
The nausea, and the darkness, threatened to consume me.
A woeful depression fell over me, as if the weight of all those years was pressing down on me all at once.
I drifted toward the staircase, the pressure increasing, a whistling sound building in my ears.
And then I saw her.
She was at the top of the stairs, watching me, suspended in mid-air with her white hair flailing all around her head. Her white nightdress seemed little more than a chalky vapour.
“Hello, mother,” I said solemnly.
Just like in my dreams, she opened her mouth, a gaping, dark wound of flesh and seeds. Wasps crawled from the orifice, and began humming around her head.
I was afraid, at first. But she gave me an excellent idea.
I went to the outhouse and found a shovel.
“The fig tree,” I told Nick in a whisper as he paced back and forth, stretching his legs. “The base of the fig tree.”
I wondered if for once it would bear decent fruit before the wasps destroyed them.
Or perhaps Tom would be consumed, too, by the sour rot.
It seemed a fitting end for him. My dear childhood friend, who was not so dear after all.
But of course, Tom’s resting place was temporary.
We would have moved him long before he would feed the tree and ripen any figs.
A dreadful truth came over me, then, as I looked at the infected tree.
A kind of sour rot was already within us all; it was in me, and Louisa, and Nick and Tom.
It found us in the soil and we were doomed from the beginning.
It had been eating away at us since our childhoods, warping our growth.
What hope did any of us have in our circumstances, to be functioning, wholly ordinary people?
“The storm’s finally passed. It’ll be a lovely ride home. Look at the stars, darling. They’re so clear and beautiful outside of London,” said Nick, looking up at the night’s sky.
I made to dig the first spadeful, but the ground was solid, icy cold. The shovel bounced back with a delightful ring. Above our heads, mother watched from the window, the wasps in a fury all around her.
She isn’t real, I told myself. And yet she was painfully real. I had to wonder where my father was, and why he wouldn’t appear to me now. He was, no doubt, too cowardly to face me. My mother, too angry and defiant to stay away.
Nick took the shovel from my hands.
“Allow me,” he said, digging the spade into the earth with one shove.