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Minutes later I arrive in the clearing, and suddenly my mouth is as dry as the knucklebones in my Collection of Keepsakes and Weird Finds.
VII
It’s a mopey-looking spot. Not the best place for a cottage, which is probably why it was left to rot. Papa once told me that the estate’s head gardener lived here, back when Meunier’s ancestors needed one. What makes it so creepy is that it’s an exact replica of our own cottage, right down to the horseshoe nailed upon the lintel. This one is rusty, though. And it certainly hasn’t brought the place much luck.
Not a bit of glass is left in the windows. The branches of an ash tree poke out of what would have been the sitting room. Some of the tiles have vanished from the roof,plundered to repair other buildings on the estate. Papa’s work, no doubt – he hates to see useful things go to waste. Those that remain are streaked with bird mess and felted with moss, making the cottage look less like it was built by human hands and more as if it was raised from the soil by an evil wizard’s spell. There’s a toilety smell about the place, mingling with the stench of something even fouler.
I wish I’d worn my coat. It’s chilly in the Memory Wood, but where I’m going it’ll be filthy, cold and dark. Screwing up my eyes, I check the clearing one last time. I see dripping trees, tangled bracken, a metallic sky hanging like a guillotine’s blade.
Near the cottage’s front door there’s a lighter patch in the mulch, as if the dead leaves have recently been disturbed. Last time I was here, I’m pretty sure I saw a pallet box outside the entrance, filled with old tools. It’s not there now, but there’s no dink in the ground marking where it lay. Perhaps I don’t remember right. Perhaps it didn’t leave a trace.
A cry pierces the silence. From a tree across the clearing, a magpie fixes me with a glossy eye. I think of the old rhyme:One for sorrow. When I clap my hands, the magpie flaps its wings, but it doesn’t fly off. Moments later I hear an answering shriek. I look up at the cottage’s sagging roof and see two more birds perched there.
One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl.
Claws of ice climb my spine. I’ve never liked magpies. Once, I saw an adult bird drag three baby blue tits from their nest. It killed them all before I could frighten it off. I buried the chicks near our laurel bush, making a cross from two lolly sticks and a piece of wire. The worst thing wasn’t watching the chicks die, or having to pick their bodies from the grass. It was seeing the parents return to an empty nest, hopping around in confusion as they searched for their babies. One of them even flew down and perched on thecross. I cried and I cried, and when Papa came home and wanted to know what was up, I couldn’t even look at him.
Some stuff just isn’t meant to be shared.
Besides, Papa wouldn’t ever understand a thing like that.
Turning my back on the memory, I edge towards the cottage, avoiding its blank-eyed stare. Soon, I reach the patch of disturbed mulch a few yards from the entrance. The kicked-over leaves glisten like the whitish bellies of slugs. Has someone, I wonder, dug a trap to capture peeping Toms like me? Perhaps, under this shallow carpet of litter, a pegged sackcloth hides a steep-sided pit. Deadfall traps, they’re called, in the survival books I’ve read. Sometimes, their floors are fitted with sharpened stakes to skewer anything that falls in. Sometimes they’re empty, forcing whatever’s inside to wait for the trapper’s return before discovering its fate. The worst option, I always think, would be for the trapper never to return at all, leaving the victim to die of hunger or thirst, knowing all the while that safety lay only a short distance away.
Magic Annie told me a horrible story, once, about a Daddy Fox who fell into a deadfall trap while hunting for his family’s supper. Mummy Fox tried to rescue him by throwing down a rope, but while she was hauling him up her feet slipped and she tumbled in too. The five children, when they learned what had happened, made a fox-chain to rescue their parents. The oldest son locked his jaws on to a tree trunk while his brothers and sisters lowered themselves into the hole. Mummy Fox began to climb, and she was halfway to the top when Daddy Fox began to follow her. All that weight was too much for the oldest son, and when his jaws loosened on the tree his entire family tumbled into the hole. He waited at the edge for five days, watching his parents and siblings die, and then he died too – not of hunger or thirst but of heartbreak.
I’ve never found that story in a book, which makes me wonder if Magic Annie made it up. Often, I’ve tried to imagine what would happen if I fell into a trap like that. Papa could hold on to the tree, but with only Mama to help him, how would they reach down far enough to rescue me?
It’s not something to ponder right now. There’s no deadfall trap beneath these leaves. I’mprocrastinating, which is a word for putting off something you don’t want to do but must. Closing my eyes to calm myself, I count to ten, then backwards to one. I empty my lungs and take a long breath. Finally, my eyelids spring open.
Strangely, the cottage seems closer now, as if it slunk a tiny bit nearer while my eyes were shut.
Disgusted, I shake my head. ‘Witling,’ I mutter. ‘Melodramatic witling.’
Up on the roof, one of the magpies caws and shakes its wings.
I creep towards the entrance. The door, swollen in its frame, has stuck halfway open, revealing a narrow rectangle of dark. I mouse around outside for a bit, building my courage. Then I go in.
VIII
In here I use my nose more than my eyes, as if by crossing the threshold I’ve transformed into some kind of bloodhound. The cottage reveals itself in a jumble of different scents: mildew and rust, damp mortar and wet ashes, mouldered curtains, weeping plaster, rotten wood. Overlaying that are the smells from an earlier time which my imagination fools me into sensing: woodsmoke, hanging bacon, the yeastiness of fresh bread.
This far into the woods, there was never any possibility of electricity or gas. Water was fetched from the well near Knucklebone Lake. Light was provided by tallow candles and the burning of lamp oil refined from fish or kerosene or mustard. At least, that’s what Papa says.
Now, my nose tickled by old ghosts, I step deeper into the ruin. Its layout, identical to my parents’ cottage, is unsettling. It feels like I’ve catapulted myself forwards to some future date, seeing our home as it’ll look after a cataclysmic event: an alien invasion, a zombie plague or a worldwide nuclear exchange.
Paper has peeled from the walls like old skin, exposing plaster blotched with black fungi. A dresser of scarred hardwood stands beside the stairs, flanked by a row of rusted petrol cans. Tucked into one of its alcoves is a parcel of sticks that looks vaguely like a broken wicker doll, but is most likely the nest of some departed bird.
On my left looms the sitting room. Inside I see the ash tree, so strange and out of place that it hardly seems real. The uppermost branches press against the ceiling. It’s only a matter of time before they punch through.
As I move along the passage towards the kitchen the thud of my trainers sounds disconnected, as if this is playing out on an old cinema screen and there’s a lag between the images and the sound. For a moment I wonder if I’m really here at all, but I’d have to be pretty crazy to dream up a situation like this and place myself at the heart of it.
Are you looking forward to going home, Elijah?
That’s what one of the policemen asked me in the interview room, earlier today. But this isn’t my home, just a dirty reflection of it. I step into the kitchen and tell myself that again.
This isn’t my home.
IX