Bull Running For Girlsl (8 page)

The woman in red came into view in the doorway, wearing a long, gypsy skirt. Her hair was black and she wore a necklace that looked as if it had been made of a dozen dried snakes, oiled to bring a little of their golden colour back. Susan thought of the serpent-fire of her absinthe dream in the French farmhouse, and frantically pulled at the rope that bound her hands. Billy was just behind the gypsy woman and they both backed down the steps a little and then leant over them to get a better look.

With a sudden movement the dog leapt to its feet and started to lick Susan’s face. He brushed against the small, hot lantern once and howled with pain. He bumped it again and it fell off the hook and onto the floor. A flash of fire shot across the caravan floor. Billy and the gypsy woman scrambled back as Susan struggled to get away from the flames, trying desperately to get to her feet. She shot a glance across at Jago, who did nothing but remain still, his arm around Bethany’s tiny waist—a slow smile spreading across his face

 Susan felt the rope binding finally give way from her wrists and she snatched up the lump of iron that held the caravan door open and smashed it against Jago’s head. Pulling Bethany up from the bed, she tried to get her away from the flames that now blocked the door. Realizing there was no escape, they both retreated further into the tiny caravan whilst the smoke thickened, and the heat grew unbearable. The dog whimpered and clawed at the floor as Bethany screamed.

Beneath her feet Susan felt weakened wood and she brought the full force of her heel down on the splintering planks. With another mighty effort she brought her heel down again until she could feel the planks give way beneath her feet. With more stamping and pounding she broke a hole through the floor. Quickly, she lowered Bethany and then Roux through the gap. She continued to hammer at the rotten boards until there was room enough for her to get through too. She ran from the blazing caravan to Bethany and Jane, who were crouching at the edge of the trees. Susan stared once more at the inferno, and once more, saw the flames engulf the Manchester house, back in England.

The council had done a good job on the renovation and the estranged husband tried to rent the house after the fire. I blocked him. If it was one thing I could do, it was to make sure that he didn’t get the house that joined onto mine. A single mother got it, who knew well what had happened there.

Each night, last thing she would do was, say goodnight to her own tiny sleeping daughter
—
and then calm the dead little boys who tried to speak through burnt faces. The boys, refused to leave.

A look of pain flickered across her face as Susan remembered those boys. She looked down into the cobalt-blue eyes of Bethany, and then those of her great-great-grandmother. Jane—with a triumphant smile—began to fade away into the darkness.

The red caravan burned brightly in the night, attempting to outshine the blood-red moon. Billy and the gypsy woman were nowhere to be seen beyond the smoke, but Susan thought she heard cries of pain; Jago, writhing in the inferno, and in his own madness.

“Where’s Grandma gone?” Tears fell down her pale cheeks, across the berry lips and onto the faded autumn flowers that she still held in her hands.

“To a safe place, Bethany.” Susan stared into the flames. “We will find our own safe place, Bethany, I promise.”

Susan was crying now too, but more with a sense of release, than from fear.

Author note: This story has brought back painful memories but had to be written. Distance and time have made that possible. In 1994 I raised the alarm when I heard strange noises and black smoke coming from the house next door to mine, in Manchester. One pathway led to both houses and one month later I removed the withered flowers and rain drenched toys that lined that path. Each day for a month I had walked past them and each day I had wanted to throw them away but couldn’t because I was afraid someone would see.

“
The inhumanly still face leaned over toward her, the shadows of its great horns drooping over its forehead. Within the staring sockets she could see no eyes at all
.” By kind permission, from “Dolls,” in
Scared Stiff
by Ramsey Campbell. MacDonald & Co. Ltd. 1987.

It took a long time to push, with a struggling will, to that higher part of Alice’s mind where she could not tell reality from insanity—between what was imagined and the supernatural. In her indecision she was suffering. That night she had tampered with doors that should not be opened, pushed the car over the cliff with herself in it, and unknowingly had unleashed something from deep within her subconscious, or another place—where dark things live, where creatures as old as time, formless but nonetheless still dangerous, dwelt.

Breakfast and taking the kids to school was a blur, something done by another self who was as equally confused as her. Alice kissed the boys, Ellis and Ben, goodbye. She then made her way down Malvern Avenue, and up the Old Town Hall steps to the oldest part of the library. Here, she was helping the librarian clean, document, and index the Vanderbilt Collection that had been bequeathed to the people of Lawson Town ten years ago, but was still gathering dust.

Alice couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was being followed, causing her to constantly look back over her shoulder.

It was as if she could feel someone’s acrid breath on her neck, and she could smell something that reminded her of the stinkhorn that grew in buried wood, with its odour of rotten meat. However, there was nothing or no one there. She hurried past Walter Maitland’s door and settled herself down to the morning’s work, cataloguing all the papers of Sanders Vanderbilt’s travels to China. He had thrown nothing away and the nineteenth century papers belonging to the trading family were in a dozen brown boxes, stacked in random order, taking up half the small room in the library east wing.

Alice shivered and stared abstractly at the snow-chill landscape of the car park, trying to remember the images of the night before. She replied to a question from Jean, the senior archivist, but could only hear the words in a somewhat dull tone, as if she were trying to eavesdrop into someone else’s conversation.

“Alice, are you listening? Take your lunch at anytime you want today—Alice?”

“Sorry, Jean. I’m really not feeling very well. Can I have the afternoon off and work late tomorrow?”

Jean fiddled with her glasses and pulled out a red book that had suddenly attracted her attention from a shelf close by. “What’s that you said?” She set her eyes on Alice and then nodded.

“You look very pale. Yes, you can go home.”

Pulling her coat collar up against the chill wind, Alice made her way through the cold, winding streets, her face bitten by the ghastly February wind. She went home to the house on Holland Avenue, which was usually a warm refuge against the staggering cold. She paused at the gate and looked up at the pale-blue curtain that framed her bedroom window. She thought she saw the curtain move to one side before convincing herself that she had imagined it. Something sinister had happened last night in the middle of that room, something that she couldn’t quite remember. Until a few months ago her everyday life had been rooted in the real world. Now though, she seemed to be slipping into another.

Alice made herself some cinnamon coffee and gripped the mug tightly in an effort to get warmer. Once settled on the couch, she switched on the telly and began watching a programme about cable cars in San Francisco. Suddenly she sat bolt upright, nearly spilling her coffee. Her mouth dropped open in amazement as the camera focused on one passenger in particular. It was her grandmother, on her father’s side, May Thomas—sitting there in her best, blue Sunday coat and a dark blue felt hat with the violet brooch that she always wore. May Thomas, who had been ten years dead and was giving her
that
look she used to save for when Alice, as a young child, had been careless in her grandmother’s house.

“You’re in deep water, Alice—far too deep for you.”

Her grandmother’s tone was abrupt and cold. Alice could smell the sweet fragrance of Lily of the Valley in the air and she knew, in a part of her, that she wanted her life to be simple again, and that her grandmother was right. The sharp, blue eyes of May Thomas held Alice in a solid chain of contact from which Alice could not break away, and then the camera drifted from her grandmother, to the other passengers who looked as though they actually did belong on the trolley. Alice was shocked. She held back the tears and shivered, telling herself she would have to resist whatever Maitland had in mind for her. She then convinced herself that her imagination had got the better of her, and that she had not seen or heard her grandmother.

The telly was in the far corner of the room. Alice got off the couch and stumbled over to it. She turned it off and swayed slightly, the nausea welling up from the pit of her stomach until she could taste the bitterness in her mouth. The room began to spin around her and she felt guilty about the secretive encounters with Walter Maitland, that she needed to end. Her husband, Geoff, was away on business, and Alice believed she had seen her guilt mirrored in his eyes before he left. He didn’t suspect…did he? It was not just the guilt that was haunting her but fear as well.

Alice prepared to go out and her thoughts fell upon last Tuesday, when she had gone to Maitland’s house to tell him she was ending the affair. He had been calm. But he frightened her when he pulled out a kitchen drawer, and started rattling the knives. He held one up and the cold sunshine streaming through the window struck the blade and dazzled her. Maitland slowly placed the knife back in the drawer and shut it with a loud bang. Alice jumped and panicked. She could feel the sweat on her palms and see the wry smile on his face. Was he going to try and make her stay?

Today was the day she had agreed to meet him one last time and Alice hurried to his car, when it drew up around the corner. She slipped on the icy pavement and felt herself about to fall. Recovering her footing she made for the car and opened the door—hesitated for an instant—trying to remember a warning that could not now be recalled, and got in. Once inside she turned to face his dark, hooded eyes that both attracted and repulsed her at the same time.

“Where this time? Not the house?” she asked with more than a hint of nervousness.

“Not the house,” he replied.

“Then where?”

“You’ll see.” He smiled and patted her knee. She shuddered. There were very few words between them. The usual day-to-day stuff was of no interest to them at all. Maitland was a mysterious man thirty years her senior, and Alice had been attracted to an
otherness
about him. She was interested in the occult. Maitland was charismatic and reminded her of the sinister Alistair Crowley. She had been willing to risk her marriage—everything—to experience something of the dark side of magic.

February. Cold. But, Maitland took her to a broken down hut in the middle of Nairn’s Wood. Through rotten bracken to a small place that smelt of musk and strange, odorous plants, the names of which she would never know. He had been to the hut before her. The floor was covered with thick, animal furs—enough to cover them too, and keep the cold out. He lit three black candles and indicated that she should remove her clothes. He placed a fur pelt around her waist, which he tied securely with scraps of skin, still attached to the fur. The fur felt good, sensual, and seemed familiar. Maitland picked up a dark-green bowl and bade her drink the mixture that smelt a little like mulled wine but had an underlying taste that was unknown to her.

“I can’t, I can’t do this anymore,” she pleaded.

Before entering her, he smeared his penis with a strange, animal-smelling cream that heightened her orgasm and no doubt his. During copulation her head filled with vile faces of creatures hideously deformed, and yet she found the attraction of their evil irresistible—it lingered like a fugue. When they coupled she felt the evil flow into her and it fed deep within her soul. He had not done anything too foul to her, yet, but the evil started to grow, nurtured by lust and need.

Alice knew that she had to stop. Maitland was beginning to scare her. Each rendezvous, outside the house, was arranged in the remotest of places; occasionally on the cold damp ground in the darkest part of the woods. They lay beside fires in blue-brown clearings that smelt of sacrifice, of animal blood and bone, where no one would hear her scream. In her ecstasy she hardly felt his hands upon her throat.

That night her sons looked askance at her with troubled eyes and she knew she had gone too far. She had been afraid for some time about ending the affair with Maitland. Alice suspected that nothing was ever that simple but she had to end it.

The next morning Alice did not go to work but chose to go to the library; not the one in the Old Town Hall but the one on Raglan Street. It had always been a place of comfort and peace for her. The library was quiet for midmorning—even on a market day—and each of the two rooms close to the main counter were empty. Alice chose to go into the room where three schoolgirls were sitting, legs crossed, on the large table under the window. Each girl was about ten years of age and wore a school uniform, none of which matched the colours of the local school. Alice remembered that Maitland had chosen her because, “…she had something about her that was childlike.”

If the librarian caught the girls sitting on the tables they’d be in for it
, she thought. The girls suddenly started laughing and making faces. They poked one another and pulled one another’s hair. The noise was overwhelming, and Alice watched in surprise as they began screaming even louder, jumping off the table and overturning the chairs.