Chapter Eight

Relics

 

 

29th October 2016

 

ALICE WOKE UP shivering with cold and stabbed with pain, curling up smaller in an attempt to warm herself. She fumbled for the bedsheets, to pull them closer round her, but they weren’t there. Other details dawned on her; she lay with her cheek pressed against cold leather and she was fully clothed – right down to her shoes. She opened her eyes.

She was lying on the living-room sofa, with bright sunlight streaming through the front room windows. The time, what was the time? Her mobile phone was in her pocket; she fumbled it out and stared at it. Nearly half-past nine.

She sat up, shivering. She remembered the dream – it had to be a dream. The children had attacked her, driven her out into a hostile and unfamiliar night. The warrior, or whatever he’d been, throwing spears at her, and – the ogre.

Alice breathed out and smiled, amused and relieved in equal measure. When had she fallen asleep? Clearly, she’d never made it as far as her own room. Well, coffee would make it all clearer. She got up, wincing. Christ, she was stiff; well, that would teach her to fall asleep on the sofa. Her right shoulder was particularly sore. She flexed it, but that just seemed to make the pain worse. She yawned and went into the kitchen.

As the kettle boiled, Alice stretched and flexed a few muscles, trying to get the stiffness out. On the whole it was working, except on her shoulder. The soreness wasn’t going. She prodded the area gingerly and winced, then pulled down the shoulder of her sweater.

“Bloody hell.”

A belt of livid bruising ran across her shoulder. An image from the dream came back to her: the front door being pulled closed as she stood outside, her thrusting an arm through the gap so it closed on her shoulder instead. But it hadn’t happened, couldn’t have. It had been a dream.

She needed a better look at the bruise, to see how it could have been formed. She went out into the hall; she’d use the full-length mirror in her room. But she hadn’t even reached the stairs when something crunched and gritted underfoot.

Gravel? Was the dream invading the reality already? She looked down and saw that perhaps it was, although not in the way she’d imagined. The hallway was strewn with glittering crumbs and shards of broken glass. In the same moment she became aware of a cold draught, and looked up. One of the glass panes was missing from the front door.

Alice steadied herself against the wall; all of a sudden, her legs felt weak.

Where had the dream stopped and reality started? It must have been local kids, throwing stones, perhaps a firework – they were only days from Bonfire Night, after all. The glass had shattered and she’d half-heard it, worked it somehow into her dream, just like the bruise on her shoulder.

She got to the bottom of the stairs, glanced up the hall once more before starting up.

And saw something else; something that made her walk unsteadily towards it, on legs that felt less and less substantial by the step.

The object lay a few inches from the kitchen door. From it trailed a faint dark smear of what proved to be some sort of powder. It smudged her fingers faintly; when she sniffed them they smelt of damp wood. The smear was perhaps two or three feet long. Two or three feet that had rotted away. No. That was ridiculous; it could not be.

But the object couldn’t be either, and it was. She touched it and her fingers found something cold and hard, pitted and worn, the edges nibbled ragged by time. She lifted it carefully, almost with reverence; it felt as delicate as a dried, fallen leaf. No leaf, though; no, this was a long, tapered spearhead of bronze.

 

 

THE JOINER CAME round within the hour, in a white van marked A.F. GRANT AND SONS LTD. He was younger than Alice had expected; twenty-two or -three, she guessed, in a smart-casual uniform of plain jeans, workboots, a lumberjack shirt and a baseball cap, offering his hand. “Miss Collier?”

She could have said Ms, but didn’t have the energy to press the point. “Hi. Mr Grant?”

“Darren.” He smiled. Nice white teeth, blue eyes – yes, and about half her age, too.

Alice glimpsed something to her right, at the edge of her vision – something white, something that grinned. She gasped, wheeled – but it was only another of those bloody plastic skulls, in the window of the house next door. “Christ,” she said.

Darren followed her gaze and laughed. “Halloween, eh?”

The look on his face said poor scared little woman; on another day she’d have let him know in no uncertain terms that he was wrong, but she didn’t have the energy today, so she forced a smile and said, “Yeah.”

“So what’s happened here?”

She indicated the broken pane.

“I see.” He crouched to study the damage. He was very tanned, and it wasn’t the kind you got from a sunbed either. Someone could afford to take foreign holidays, at a guess. Which was a good sign. Unless of course the money was really someone else’s – she doubted he was the A.F. GRANT whose name was on the side of the van. His dad’s, maybe. “How’d that happen, then?”

“Kids,” she said. “I mean, I think it was. There was a stone, I found it in the hall. One of them must have thrown it.”

“Little fuckers. ’Scuse me French. Want bloody hanging. Well, this shouldn’t take five minutes, Miss Collier. Get a new pane put in in no time.”

“No,” she said. “I want a new door.”

“A new –”

“A new door.” She gestured weakly. “I mean, it’s just got me thinking how vulnerable it all is. All that glass – anyone could just smash through it and get in.”

Darren opened his mouth to argue the point, then realised there was a lot more money in a replacement door. “Yeah, course – see where you’re coming from. Well, we’ve got wood and uPVC in stock –”

“UPVC’s more secure, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “More expensive too, though.”

“That’s fine by me. I’d rather pay a bit more and feel safer.”

“Right. Right. Okay, Yeah, of course, understand completely.” Darren obviously knew enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth. “I’ll just go get the catalogues and you can pick.”

 

 

DARREN CROUCHED TO measure the doorway. Muscles stood out under the jeans and shirt: pecs, biceps, abs. She studied the catalogue, occasionally casting glances at him. “This one, I think.”

“Which?” he peered. “Okay, yep, that’s fine. Right then, and I should be back about early afternoon – one-ish, two-ish?”

“That’s great. As long as it’s put in today.” She’d waved a cash bonus under his nose to make sure it would be. “I’ll feel a lot safer.”

She hated how she sounded; jittery, anxious, needy. Of course, that was how she felt. Everything that had happened had left her scared, and she doubted this pretty-boy workman would have fared much better if he’d had an experience like last night’s, but she didn’t have to show how shaken she was. Even now, she had the nous and the self-possession to hide it. Perhaps she didn’t want to: perhaps the new her, the broken, post-Emily her, had less pride and was more willing to play the scared, vulnerable little-girl-lost. Well, if it worked...

And yet of course it wouldn’t. Because the spear had come through the door, the bruises on her shoulder were a lividly discoloured bar on either side of her body, as if she’d been slammed between two hard surfaces. Because it hadn’t been any kind of dream at all.

“No problem then, love. See you later.”

“Bye, Darren.” Well, at least it was nice to know she hadn’t lost whatever charm she’d had entirely; she’d caught him eyeing her several times. Probably thought she was going to play Anne Bancroft to his Dustin Hoffman. Good luck with that, young Darren. Then she shook her head; it was hard enough persuading herself she still had a right to even the simplest kind of happiness any more, without bringing sex into the equation.

Casual encounters had never been her thing anyway: for her, sex was the natural product of the right kind of emotional intimacy, the kind that became a lasting relationship. It had been like that with John – she’d been so sure they’d marry – and then with Andrew. Before John there’d been Tom Passmore at school – she’d given her virginity to him because she’d really believed it was love. Within a week she was dumped and he was practising his smooth talk on another girl. And after John there’d been a brief fling with David, a work colleague’s friend – God, she couldn’t even remember his surname now. Everything had seemed pointless after the split; she’d had some idea that relationships driven by some great passionate love were doomed to burn out. Perhaps it was best to just find someone you could get along with and settle for that: share the mortgage payments and the bills, have someone to provide TLC and cuddles when you were ill or miserable (with the occasional shag thrown in, of course.) That had been David, and it had lasted all of three weeks. That had been the closest to a casual relationship she’d ever had. And, after that, there’d been Andrew.

Sex, moving in, marriage, babies. Was that still her personal equation? If not, what was? Celibacy? Or stolen afternoons of rutting with handsome young builders? She wasn’t sure if she found the picture ludicrous or depressing.

She made coffee and shuttled, restless, between the kitchen and the front room. She couldn’t quite bring herself to go upstairs. Christ, what next? Already she was letting her hallucinations confine her to one small part of her house. She needed to see Dr Whiteley again, and quickly, before she had a complete breakdown.

Except that it hadn’t been an hallucination, no matter how much she wished otherwise. Or was she hallucinating the physical evidence too? The broken pane, the bruises, the spearhead – the spearhead most of all, because the other items were more easily rationalised. If she showed the spearhead to someone else, what would they see? A rusty old kitchen knife, perhaps.

She went outside, nursing the coffee cup, and sat on one of the lawn chairs. It felt a little safer than the house, although not much – last night, this had been the garden, after all. And there’d been the ogre – but she refused to think of that. Instead, when she’d finished the coffee, she nerved herself to go back and get the few gardening tools she’d brought – clippers, hoe, fork and trowel, gardening gloves and secateurs.

For the next hour or so, waiting for Darren to come back, she uprooted weeds and hacked at the brambles that overgrew the flowerbeds. She might leave a patch of them – after all, that would mean her own personal blackberry crop come the summer, which could hardly be bad. She filled a pair of bin-sacks, although rents soon gaped in them where the bramble-thorns had slit the plastic.

The clipper’s blades clanked on something hard. Alice frowned, knelt, parted the brambles. Hidden beneath the hard, cable-like creepers was a hard grey block of stone, canted at an angle in the ground – buried, perhaps, but pushed slowly to the surface. Something about it made her want to look more closely; she took the secateurs and began snipping the brambles away.

Yes; she could see it better now. It was very regular in shape, or had been. On three sides it was neatly squared, the corners filed off, but the fourth side was jagged and uneven, as if cracked. Yes, that was it; this must be part of a larger whole. She clipped away at the brambles, until she was left with the thick knot of the central mass. She set to work with the trowel and fork. After that, a little more hauling with her gloved hands was all it took before the plant tore free of the earth, trailing roots like so much dead hair. Earth rained onto the grass, and over the stone; worms writhed in the hole where the bramble bush had been.

Alice reached out and brushed earth away from the stone. There was something about it; something familiar, she was sure, but she couldn’t say what. Then she did see it; it was partial and worn and faded, but it was definitely there. Something had been carved on the stone.

She cleaned away more earth, peered closer, and saw it. Just one word, and a fragment of another, but it was enough: ...eth forevermore.