Poppet (32 page)

She sits in the middle of the room in the darkness and rocks gently to and fro. She hasn’t been to the day room – she doesn’t like the different colours her monster children wear – or the rainbows that flash across the television set. They send her mood up and down a hundred times a second. So she stays on the floor in her room, still dressed in her lilac gown, still happy because today is a lilac day and she is going to make sure it goes on being a lilac day. In spite of everything.

AJ is the best of her children. He’s getting cleverer too. Cleverer and cleverer. He doesn’t have the extra eye, but maybe he’s growing one. Because he is starting to get near the truth. The big truth that Monster Mother has watched in silence all these years.

AJ has found Isaac’s poppets. The finished-with poppets. But he hasn’t found the ones not yet finished with. The ghosts of things to come. Monster Mother has seen them – she won’t tell a soul, but she’s watched Handel with his busy fingers, his heart full of revenge, and his anger. She’s watched him making the other poppets – the two lady dolls – one with blonde hair, the other with short, spiky hair. Bright, bright red, the colour of a poppy. With dangly earrings and dangly bracelets and a floral dress.

A dark-haired boy poppet is holding on to this lady poppet. Holding on face to face. His arms gripping her tightly, gripping her in that special way boys sometimes hold on to girls when no one is looking.

Monster Mother lets out a small groan. She sways and sways and sways, her moon shadow splintering and leaping around her on the floor. Her lost arm is aching, as it often does when her mood changes. If it gets worse, if The Maude comes any nearer, Monster Mother is going to have to take off her skin and hide again.

Tomorrow is going to be a dark-, dark-blue day. Navy-blue as midnight.

Groundhog Day

FLEA WAKES FULLY
dressed on the sofa at six a.m. Her head is throbbing, her mouth is dry. The curtains are open, outside is still dark and freezing, a crystalline hush – winter on its way. She rolls on to her side, a cushion under her face, stares at the silent television. Maybe it’s Groundhog Day, because on screen is Jacqui Kitson again. Different sofa, different dress, different interviewer. The expression, though, that’s the same. Flea doesn’t turn up the volume. She doesn’t need to. She knows what Jacqui will be saying.

She looks at her watch. There’s no going back to sleep – she’s got to commit to the day.

She falls out of bed and drags on her jogging gear and makes her morning run in the dark, using her head torch and her memory to guide her. It’s frosty, the trees poke their thin fingers through the sheet of white. She sees no one – no car passes, not a single light shows in the few houses she passes on the six-mile loop. The whole city of Bath is down the slope half a mile to her right – but it is silent. The only way you’d know it was there is the orange miasma in the mist.

Back at home she showers, washes her hair, gets into uniform, thermals underneath – ready for another day of searching. She snaps on the long johns and as she does feels something loose about her stomach – as if the muscles are going to split and spill. She stands for a moment in the bathroom, her hands pressed on her belly – wondering about that sensation.

Her eyes lift to the corridor, to all the boxes lined up there. They are so neat, so contained, organized and closed. It’s taken for ever to pack it all away. Fuck, fuck and fuck.

She drags on her fleece, kicks on her boots and goes into the bathroom to clean her teeth. As she brushes, she keeps one hand pressed on the mirror, her eyes down on the porcelain and plug. There’s no need to see her reflection. Absolutely no need.

Old Man Athey’s Orchard

DAMN STEWART AND
his crazyhead ways. He’s still got that fly in his backside about something in the woods and in the morning when AJ lets him off his lead he heads straight across the field and has shuffled under the bushes and round the stile before AJ has a chance to do anything.

He is left standing there, swearing under his breath. He’s tired. He hasn’t slept. While Melanie eventually calmed and fell asleep, curled like a child in the crook of his arm, he lay awake, watching shadows on the ceiling, his head turning and turning. When he did sleep it was patchy. He was conscious of her there – as if her dreams and her fractured faith in him were leaping the barrier into his own nightmares.

In the end he gave up. It’s six thirty and still dark, so he’s put cups of fresh-brewed coffee on Patience and Melanie’s night-stands and has come out here with Stewart. All Stewart seems to want to do is whine and give him pathetic looks. And now he’s buggered off.

The kitchen window doesn’t cast enough light to follow, so AJ goes to the garage and gets a torch – a huge thing that frightens the wildlife – and starts after the dog. He finds him about twenty metres inside the forest, his tongue out, his tail wagging eagerly to see AJ following him.

‘Stewart,’ AJ hisses. ‘You total pain – don’t give me a hard time, I’ve got enough to think about at the moment.’

But Stewart gives him a look of such hope and faith that AJ sighs. He might live by the maxim that what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him, but he’s had enough of his dog and this emotional blackmail.

‘Come on,’ he tells him. ‘We’ve got exactly thirty minutes, fifteen out, fifteen back – let’s go see what all the fuss is about.’

They go through the forest and out the other side, over a field and up to the plateau. Though he doesn’t know exactly which turnings the path goes through, he knows where it could lead eventually. The place he doesn’t want to think about. The dog is beside himself with excitement. He runs with his stumpy tail high in the air, fantasizing he’s some sleek high-bred gundog. AJ follows at a short distance, grumbling every inch of the way. The fields are dark and the ground crunchy with frost. His nose is cold and he wishes he’d stopped to put on gloves – his hands are like blocks of ice.

‘This had better be good,’ he yells to Stewart, who is waiting at the top of the path, looking back at him, his tail wagging crazily. ‘Another five minutes and then we turn back.’

Stewart has taken him over the plateau, down the other side, and along the edge of the evergreen forest with the views of the village on the far side of the valley, a few lights coming on in the windows as the early risers wake. Old Man Athey’s apple orchard, the place AJ scrumps for Kingston Blacks, lies to his left in a cone-shaped section that bites into the forest. Ahead is the place called The Wilds by the locals because it seems no one knows who owns it. Could be it’s National Trust property, or the forgotten estate of someone decaying away in an oxygen tent on a remote Greek island. AJ has known about The Wilds all his life, but he can’t recall ever having set foot in it. Upton Farm lies beyond it.

Stewart stops so suddenly that AJ almost runs into him.

‘Hey, you lunatic. What the hell’s going on?’

The dog doesn’t move. He’s as still and obdurate as a rock – his ears forward, all his attention on the path ahead. Dawn has made a wash of white in the sky overhead, and enough light is creeping down here for AJ to discern individual trees without the aid of his torch. The path stretches into the forest, greying about fifteen metres ahead, then vanishing in the poor light.

AJ is a child of the countryside and nothing scares him. There is no reason for the way the hair suddenly stands up on the back of his neck. He holds his breath, strains his senses ahead in the wood. He can’t be sure, but he thought he saw something a little darker than the surroundings, a shape moving in there. Isaac Handel. AJ can’t shake the thought – the certainty. His skin crawls.

Stewart suddenly gives a whine and half turns to head back in the direction they’ve come, as if cowed by what’s in the woods. He gets a few metres behind AJ and hesitates, undecided. He turns his head back inquisitively, looking past AJ into the woods.

‘Hello?’ AJ shines the torch into the path. ‘Hello?’

His voice is thin and hollow. It is swallowed instantly by the trees. He takes three steps along the path.

‘Hello?’ he says again. ‘Don’t want to scare you, I’ve got a dog.’

Silence. Not even a crack of twig. Gathering his courage, he goes forward a few more experimental paces. He can see nothing.

‘Isaac? Is that you?’

Stewart creeps up next to him, tippy-toed and cautious, his rugged body pressed hard against AJ’s shin. Together they move further into the woods.

About five metres ahead, at the place the path seemed to disappear in the gloom, it opens instead into a wide and unexpected glade. AJ and Stewart stand at the end of the path and look around. Thready daylight creeps in, finding thin plumes of mist erupting from the forest floor, a few leaves dropping listlessly from the trees. In the centre of the glade is an object that for most would defy description. Even AJ is taken aback by it at first.

It’s a tree, but its trunk is three metres across. The branches are so thick that at seven or eight metres from the centre, bowed under their own weight, they stoop to the ground, as if the old tree at the centre was resting its elbows on the cold earth. Under the arching branches, the earth is dry and the air is silent and still, like a cathedral. And where the walking tree leans its elbows, it takes root, creeping outwards from the centre. Around it, an outer ring – a magic circle of seven trees. All identical, all cloned from the older one at the centre.

Taxus baccata
: its needle-thin leaves, bark, seeds and sap are all deadly. The walking yew. A tree as old as time. As mean and still and deadly as a snake.

AJ lets out all his breath. Just a tree. Nothing to be scared of. Absolutely nothing here. He and Stewart stand for a moment longer, breathing in and out, in and out. Nope. Not a thing.

Even so, he’s not going to get any closer to the damn thing – and he certainly isn’t going to pass it.

‘Come on, mate.’ AJ clips on Stewart’s lead, turns him in the direction of the house. ‘Whatever you thought was there, it’s not there now. Let’s get breakfast.’

Inside the Poppets

IN THE MENDIPS
, Caffery wakes aching in every bone and joint. He lies there with his hands over his face, feeling the pain as a death sense. Dull and ancient. It takes a long time to go, and for him to find the energy to get up.

He sits in the kitchen drinking coffee – waiting for it to work. Then, when his head starts to move a little, he realizes he feels like this because something has occurred to him overnight. Something that outside in the real world would be unspeakable, but viewed from inside Handel’s skewed world order makes perfect, nasty sense. He pulls on an old sweater that’s hooked over the banisters and gets his glasses. He finds his Swiss Army knife and, buoyed up by the caffeine, opens the door to the utility room.

The window has been open overnight – cracked on to the secure setting so some air can circulate – and the room is freezing. Early sunlight comes through the window. The poppets lie on the tiled surface, motionless, eyes staring at the ceiling. What is it about them that makes him sure they’ve only lain down like this in the last few seconds? That all night while he’s been asleep they’ve been moving? Maybe creeping out of the window frame. Finding the nearest churchyard and lifting gravestones.

He pulls on his gloves and picks up the male doll. Graham Handel. Using the knife’s tweezer head, he carefully unpicks the stitching. Underneath the outer layer is an inner layer of stained muslin. This is covered in writing, though Caffery can’t immediately decipher it – or even decide which language it’s written in, the ink is so smudged. He finishes stripping the outside covering, lays it out to one side, like a miniature flayed skin, and sets to work unpicking the muslin. Inside is another layer.

When both dolls are unpicked he has lined up in his utility room eight tiny skins all in different shades and fabrics. One set of four has all the characteristics of a female, with breasts and hips. The other has a penis. Scattered among the fabric wrappings are the other things he’s discovered stuffed inside the dolls. The dolls’ teeth, he sees, are not fashioned from polished shells as he’d thought, but human. Eight of them – yellow and old. Incisors and molars. Two tangled masses of hair – one blond, one dark – and something that looks, to his experienced eye, like the shrivelled, mummified remains of human ears.

Suki and the Snow

THE RECURRING DREAM
is different tonight. It starts, as always, in a room with smooth walls. There’s the length of silk reaching into a hole from the ceiling, but this time it’s a wire. And this time Penny knows the room is in a wood. She can hear the chatter of birds and smell the fresh air. She gets a glimpse of an opening – sees snow. She stands and turns towards it, and there is Suki, a puppy again, leaping in the snow, leaving the ground and landing on all four paws, her ears flopping. She snaps at the flakes, turns and turns, chasing one flake that evades her.

Oh, Suki, Suki
.

The dog lifts her head and bounds towards her. There are wet snow and leaves in her hair – but Penny is so overjoyed to see her she scoops her up and sits down, hugging her, burying her face in her fur. She smells like a wet jumper and she is soaked, completely soaked, and so, so cold.

Come on
, Penny says,
come on
–
let’s get you dry
.

Thank you
, Suki says in a deep voice.
Thank you – you’ve always been so kind
.

Surprised, Penny puts the puppy on the floor. Suki looks up at her. Her face is different – bigger and coarser. Her eyes are narrowed like a human’s.

Suki?

In reply, Suki lifts her paw. It’s a human hand – large and hairy like a man’s. She takes Penny’s hand and squeezes it.

You locked me in
, says Suki.
You locked me in and now I want to get out
.

Penny wakes with a jolt. She is panting. The smell is real and someone is holding her hand. It’s dark in the bedroom, darker than usual. But she can just make out the face on the pillow next to hers.