The Revenant #4
I crouched down and ran my fingers over the coarse mat and was absurdly relieved when my fingers connected with the cold metal.
Silly to get the wind up. I shot the bolts top and bottom, just to be sure.
After the events of the day, my nerves were bad.
I picked up my glass and headed out into the cold hallway, then stopped dead.
My stepfather was standing in the corridor. Somehow, without making a noise, he’d got himself up and out of bed on his own. My heart sank. It didn’t happen often, but on the odd occasion when he did wake in the night, not knowing where he was, it could take hours to get him settled again.
‘What are you doing up?’ I said, not expecting an answer. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
He was rocking from side to side, old legs that could barely hold him. His hands were balled into fists. I felt a wave of revulsion, though I knew I ought to feel pity. Then I saw his eyes. They were sharp for the first time in years, unclouded, and fixed at a point behind me.
‘She’s here.’
His voice was thin, quavering, but the words were clear.
‘What?’ I blurted out, shocked that he’d spoken at all.
‘She’s here. Come for me.’
‘Who’s here?’
But even as I said it, of course I knew.
I could feel the prickling on my skin at the back of my neck, my hands.
And the smell of the shore at low tide. Seaweed and sulphur and mist, the foul breath of the grave.
I didn’t want to look round, but I couldn’t stop myself.
Taking my eyes off him, for a second, slowly I turned.
To face the girl I knew was standing behind me.
The skin at her wrists, rubbed raw where the wire had cut through.
The ragged red seam where his knife had dragged across her throat, left to right.
The work of a right-handed man. Not Harry.
Harry was left-handed. For all his faults, not Harry.
For an instant, time seemed to stop and I saw her clearly, a terrible melding of both the girl she had been and the girl she now was, a girl fifteen years dead, lying in the churchyard with a headstone at her feet.
I wanted to speak, to reach out to her, but terror had stolen my voice from me. Then, slowly, she began to lift her head, the same steady and deliberate movement as on the path earlier. This time, I held my ground. Saw her brown eyes, determined face, the brown curled hair kissing her chin.
All at once a rush of air, cold and damp like the mist on the marshes, as if someone had opened a door and let the night in.
And a dreadful howling, like a deer caught in a steel trap.
For a split second, the girl appeared to smile as she gazed upon the face of the man who had murdered her.
Then, before my eyes, her face began to change.
Her features, pretty printed on the front page of the newspaper all those years ago, started to collapse in upon themselves.
Her brown eyes became red, then rolling white, her rouged lips shrivelled to black, her skin turning to a spider’s web of veins and sinew.
Suddenly, without warning, she leapt.
At the hour of his death, she had come to claim him.
I screamed, beating the air with useless hands, trying to protect myself or him, I can’t say.
But he didn’t resist. Her bloody, broken body seemed to cover him, bones and blood, taking him with her.
His legs buckled and he fell forward, arms by his side, making no attempt to break his fall.
Then silence.
I sank to the ground, knees drawn up to my chin, oblivious to the blood seeping across the tiles and soaking into the hem of my skirt. I heard nothing, was aware of nothing, until someone started banging on the front door and I heard them calling my name.
Later, they told me it was the sound of my stepfather screaming that alerted the neighbours. That, and a strange smell of rotting seaweed permeating through the thin cottage walls.
The doctor said it was a heart attack. A blessing, he called it, that he went so fast. One minute here, the next, gone. The blood from where he’d hit his head. Just like that. But I understood now. I knew he had been dying for years. Rotting from the inside out.
Waiting, all that time, for her to return.
And what of me? I found, after all that, I was happy in Fishbourne, now I was at no one’s beck and call.
I stayed in the cottage, painted it top to toe, discovered I liked living on my own.
Every spare minute I spent researching, checking every tiny detail, until I was ready to write about the case.
A famous unsolved murder in November 1940, the brutal killing of a WAAF girl in Cornmill House.
Cleared my brother’s name. Although Harry was never charged, suspicion hung over him – over us all – rightly as it turned out.
My mother had gone to her grave never knowing the truth.
Or had she? From time to time, I wonder.
In my own small way, I became quite well known. An interview in the Observer and a few talks to the WI. My book sits on the True Crime shelves in the library where I still work. The church warden at St Mary’s tells me that people often come to leave flowers at the girl’s grave.
And on winter nights, the lights still shine through the windows of the library and out across the marshes. A sanctuary for anyone who needs a place to go.