The Grieving Stones (11 page)

“Morning,” she said.

“Hi.” His eyes were red-rimmed, slightly bloodshot. “Steve called. They kept Moira in overnight so he stayed with her. I told him we didn’t need the van for anything so he’s coming back later this afternoon. He’s planning to drop off the van and get a taxi to the train station. He doesn’t want to spend another night here.” He looked away from her. “I can’t blame him.”

“Didn’t you sleep well?”

He shook his head. “I had… bad dreams… nasty dreams. About… well, I’m not really sure. That deer we hit on the way here, but it had a human head. Witches. Fires in the sky. A young girl who had no face, just the back of her head all the way around.” He laughed, but it was a bitter sound. “I had a little extra to drink last night, just to help me get off to sleep. The whisky in my flask must be stronger than I thought, especially on top of all that wine.”

She remained where she was, near the door. “I’m going to have a quick wash and get some work done.” Could dreams infect people, she wondered, like a disease?

He looked around the room. “It seems to me you’ve been busy already. What did you and Clive do last night, a spring clean? This place was a mess. Now it’s spick and span.” He stood. “I’m going out for some fresh air. You and your boyfriend can carry on doing whatever it is you like doing together. I might see you later, or I might go for a long walk into the village and see if I can find the others at the hospital.”

At first she was puzzled by his attitude, but then she remembered hearing the bedroom door close last night as she and Clive had spoken of him. He’d obviously taken offence at what they’d said… whatever that was. She couldn’t remember the specifics. Despite not having been drunk, she felt hung-over.

She watched Jake leave the house and then made her way to the tiny bathroom. Clive must have been busy elsewhere, or walking off his hangover; she hadn’t seen or heard him since getting up. She hoped she could get out of the house before he returned; she didn’t want to have to face him in case she mentioned his lies about how well he knew the local legend, and the fact that she’d discovered the pamphlet he’d written about the Staples Sisters. Not to mention her dream and what it might mean in terms of him being a potential threat to whatever forces they’d disturbed in this house.

She used the toilet, had a wash at the sink, and then returned to the attic room to change into some more sensible clothing – a pair of jeans, a sweater, and a sturdy pair of boots. Grabbing her lightweight coat, she went back downstairs and left the house.

The day was overcast but the sun was trying to burn off the fug. She could see it, bright behind the cloud cover, and the sight gave her a sense of optimism.

I could live here,
she thought.
I could stay here and the place would repair and renovate itself without my help. All I have to do is allow it to breathe.
By now she suspected that the gradual tidying up process the house was going through had something to do with the connection she felt with the old building. Grief House was slowly becoming a part of her, and she a part of it.

Symbiosis…

She and the house were exchanging some form of energy. The house was somehow using the resultant emotional cocktail to refresh, and possibly even renew itself; she was using it to learn how to live again. That was exactly how it felt. She’d been dead inside for a long time, ever since she had found Tony hanging by his neck in the spare bedroom of their neat little suburban home. But now she was starting to live all over again, urged on by this house. No, not just by the house; by whatever forces she and the house were concocting together.

She walked down the other side of the hill towards the Grieving Stones, watching them grow bigger and more imposing in her field of vision. She spotted the small stream, which seemed to come out of the earth, a visible tendril of some ancient underground waterway, and further along the side of the hill she saw the two stones mentioned in the pamphlet. She hadn’t noticed them before because Clive had kept her focused on the Grieving Stones. Perhaps he had not wanted her to see them.

She made her way down to the stones. They stood there, impassive, yet she knew they were waiting for her to reach them. The air started to hum, but at a level that she could feel on her skin rather than hear. She tasted metal on her tongue.

“Hello, there,” she said when she reached them. “Hello, sisters.” She reached out and caressed the stones, first one and then the other. There was no mistaking the energy they held inside; she could feel it like a heartbeat against her fingertips.

She closed her eyes and saw them from afar. The sisters. They were small and stooped and dressed in brown rags that had once passed for garments. They gathered herbs from the hillside, placing them in small baskets to take back to the house and prepare healing potions which they would sell or trade to the local people. They were not good, they were not evil. They were just two sisters trying to eke out a living in a world that did not look kindly upon women who lived without a man.

In the distance, storm clouds gathered. Underfoot, the earth trembled.

The sisters looked up from their work, at the angry sky… and then they turned to face her. She was too far away to see their features, but she knew immediately that they were not afraid of her and did not want her to fear them. She raised a hand and waved. The sisters waved back. They began to walk towards her, climbing the hill. She wished that she could walk down to meet them part way, but something told her that they had to come to her; she’d done enough by travelling this far, to the house. The rest was up to them, if only they could only find the strength to break through.

She opened her eyes.

“Found you.”

She turned around and found Jake standing there, a daisy in his hand. He was picking off the petals and flicking them away.

She loves me. She loves me not.

“I thought you’d gone for a walk,” she said, backing up towards the stones.

“I did… then I saw you here. I thought I might pop over and say hello.” He rolled the remains of the flower between finger and thumb, and then flicked that away, too. “You know, you remind me of my sister.”

Alice made no response. Behind her, the stones thrummed with energy.

“When she died… when I lost her… I didn’t know what to do. She was killed, you know. Murdered, in my opinion. By her dealer. Her pimp. He gave her the drugs.”

Yes, she knew; they all did. Jake was a man who rarely kept his thoughts or his feelings to himself. He took over therapy sessions and made them about him. Usually he battled with Moira in this respect; both of them needed to be heard.

“When they caught him, that bastard, and I found out that he’d also killed three other women, I was so angry, so upset. My Lisa, she never got the attention she deserved. Not in life, not in death. Those other women stole her thunder because he murdered them with his bare hands instead of a dodgy batch of drugs. And there was something else…”

He seemed manic, on the verge of a breakdown. Mute rage and bitterness bled from his pores.

“They were younger, you see. Those other victims. Prettier. Lisa was… homely. She didn’t have much of a life. No hobbies. No interests other than getting high. She never got married, never had kids. Those other three women were mothers and daughters and wives. They had big lives, and those lives eclipsed that of my Lisa, even when they were dead. She was just a junkie whore… a non-person, at least in the eyes of the public.”

There were tears in his eyes. He moved towards her, shrugging as if to say that he had no choice here, events were controlling him. When he got close enough, he reached out his hands and grabbed her.

“Please,” she said. “I don’t want that.”

It had been coming all along. She’d been expecting this situation to occur eventually.

“I do. I need it. You’re so much like her… only prettier, and with a bigger life. I need something… I need anything. Just give it to me. Give me a bigger life.”

She wasn’t afraid of him. He was pathetic, not powerful at all. He barely even knew what he was doing, or what it was he wanted. He was simply acting out of shabby desperation. He smelled of stale whisky and body odour and things that had broken long ago and been left to rot in the dark. His large face was pale and sweaty. He had a powerful physique, but in that moment she knew that she could overcome whatever physical presence he had. This silly man was no match for her, not when she had her sisters behind her.

“Get off me,” she said, softly but firmly.

The world froze. Time stopped and the sky turned bright; clouds parted, the sun shone through, creating a wide beam of pure and healing light.

Alice wasn’t aware of the details, so she didn’t really appreciate what she was doing, but she moved sinuously and instinctively out of Jake’s grip. Like a dancer, she arched and curved her body, slipping easily out of his reach. He turned, attempting to grab her again, but his feet went out from under him on the uneven hillside and he fell, cracking his head against one of the sisters with a sound that was dull and distant, like a gunshot heard from a mile away on a quiet day. He didn’t cry out; he was silent and as heavy as stone himself as he went to ground. She almost expected him to slide quietly into the earth, and to sink into the soil until he was gone, leaving no trace, even less of a trace than he had left behind in his life. His small, small life.

Alice did not feel anything as she looked at the fallen man. There was no fear, no remorse, not even idle curiosity. This was just something that had happened. An event over which she’d had no control. A mess she needed to clean up, in much the same way as Grief House had begun to clean away its own mess.

The clouds closed once again over the sun once again. Shadows fell, encouraging her.

“I told you not to,” she said, bending down to Jake. There was blood on the side of his face, coming from a cut near his temple. “I don’t like to be touched… not by someone like you.”

If anyone finds him, they’ll make me leave this place…

The thought was hers but it felt as if someone else had placed it inside her head. She knew it was true; if the police were involved there would be an investigation, and that meant more people coming here, leaving her less of a chance to remain in the house on her own. This, she realised, had been her plan ever since she’d arrived here with the others, but it was the first time she had confronted it head on.

Alice knew what she had to do and she did not feel bad about doing it. The worst of it was over, and she’d done worse things in her life. She’d had worse things done to her, too. She stooped again and started to drag Jake’s body down the hill. He was heavy, but gravity was in her favour.

There was a copse of trees a few hundred yards down the slope. She could hide him there; she could cover him with leaves and twigs and dirt and branches, offering him into the embrace of the earth. Nobody would find him if she was careful enough, at least not for a while.

Long enough, she hoped, for her to settle in properly and meet the sisters for real.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When she got back to Grief House Alice was struck by the transformation. The stone walls were clean and dust-free, the door looked as if it had been repainted, and the windows glistened in the weak sunlight. She stood for a moment and admired the building, wishing that she could have seen it back in the day, when the sisters lived here. She knew for a fact that they would have been house-proud, but out of necessity rather than any other reason. It paid to keep a clean house. No vermin, no insects, no dark, filthy corners in which pestilence might breed.

She went inside and inspected the interior. She hadn’t seen any piles of rubbish outside, so she had no idea where the junk had gone. The room looked much bigger than it had when she’d first arrived. The space was brighter, and welcoming. Even the stuffed animal heads had been taken down.

“You’ve been busy,” she said to Clive as he came out of the kitchen, clutching a glass of water.

“Huh… sorry?” His eyes were swollen, his skin pale, and his lips had a slightly bluish tinge.

“Nothing… Are you okay?”

He leaned in the doorway, one hand rubbing at his flat belly. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on last night – she assumed he’d slept in them. “No. To be honest, I’m not feeling well at all. I’m dizzy, I feel nauseous. I think I’m coming down with something. I wish Steve would hurry up and get back with the van.”

She approached him and took him by the arm, leading him to the sofa. “Lie down. Steve will be back soon. He’s due back this afternoon. Why don’t you take a nap? You might feel better then.”

He nodded. “Where’s Jake?”

“He went out for a walk. I think he overheard us slagging him off last night. He seemed pissed off.”

“This is going really well, isn’t it? This weekend of therapy. One person is in hospital, another wants to go home, a third is wandering around the countryside in a fucking huff…” He winced, bit his lip. “Ouch. Stomach cramp.”