It was only Thursday morning, but Richard had given up on work. He was getting behind, and he couldn’t make himself care. It was becoming clear that he was not going to complete his Master’s. He knew that he would have to admit it, but he wasn’t sure how. The waste of time and money was horrible, but the disappointment was worse: so it was the wrong thing, after all. And he wasn’t any closer to finding the right thing, the thing that would complete him. Perhaps he was even further away. He didn’t know what, without the prospect of the PhD and the academic career, would be left for him: just a part-time job that he had never liked. At another time, he would have unburdened himself to Eleanor, and let her help him. The idea seemed wildly inappropriate now.
He was at his desk, making calculations. It was no good. He couldn’t do it. He wanted to make a start on the house in earnest, do as much as he could, try to get the thoughts of ghosts and mediums out of Eleanor’s head. But there was simply not enough money there. And he didn’t see how that would change.
They couldn’t sell the house. He’d boasted about how they’d been the only people to offer on it – he’d seen it as a sign of their vision and insight – but now the fact was terrible, ominous. And even if they could find someone to buy it, where would they find the money to move, for the lawyers and surveyors and estate agents? They were stuck.
Something dropped onto his desk. He started. He didn’t know what had happened: he was only aware of something falling and a tiny wet sound. It happened again. He pushed back his chair. Something was moving. Then he saw it: three white maggots crawling over the black keys of his laptop. Another one dropped to join them.
He looked up at the ceiling. Above his desk was a hatch that led to the attic. He’d noticed that the wood was starting to rot in the centre; it was on one of his many lists of things to do to the house. Another maggot dropped. He pulled away from the desk, repulsed. He stood on his chair and gingerly looked upwards. The rotten patch of wood had almost entirely disintegrated and its centre squirmed. He felt sick. He slid back the lock and started to ease the hatch down. It was heavier than he thought it would be and his hands gave; something slid off it and softly thumped onto his desk. It was the corpse of a bird, covered in maggots. Its surface was live and crawling.
He stood suspended for a moment. Then he went downstairs and got an old tea towel and a torch. Shaking, he wrapped the bird up and stood on his chair, shining the torch into the attic. All he saw was boxes and rafters. He supposed the bird must have come in through the roof, although he couldn’t see how that could have happened. They’d had intensive surveys; the roof was in good condition. Then he saw that rows of pebbles were lining the opening of the hatch, a perfect square. It looked as if they had been deliberately placed there.
Richard sat back down. He was rational; he knew this about himself. If he didn’t understand how this bird had got in the roof, then he should find out. It could indicate serious problems. But the bird was directly in the centre of the hatch, in the centre of the square of pebbles. It was so unlikely that it would have fallen there. There were two entrances to the attic – one in his study and the other in the room next door, Emily’s room. An image came into his head of someone crawling about in the roof. He sat for a few moments with the hole gaping above his head, maggots wriggling on his keyboard.
He picked up the corpse and, after a moment’s hesitation, carried it out into the garden. He forced himself to take care on the stairs, to resist the fierce compulsion to hurry and get rid of the thing in his hands. He thought he could feel the movements of the maggots through the cloth. It was all he could do not to hurl it away from him.
He had not been out to the garden since they’d moved in and the grass was wild and long. The soil was becoming overgrown with weeds – clearly no one had cared for it for a long time. It was a cold, grey day and he hadn’t taken a coat out with him. He carried the corpse right to the end of the garden, where a flowerbed ran along the back wall. He was shivering as he knelt down, tipping the corpse out of the cloth, onto the soil.
Richard realized that the flowerbed was covered with different arrangements of pebbles: sometimes little rows in size order, sometimes circles, sometimes pentagons. The most elaborate was a large spiral, in perfect size order, the smallest pebble on the outside, gradually getting larger as they wound in. The one in the centre was the size of a small fist. Richard wasn’t sure what instinct made him dismantle it, but he pushed the pebbles to one side and started clawing at the earth, his heart beating faster. His hands hit something unexpectedly soft. He pulled back the soil more carefully. He saw feathers, sensed something white and undulating. His stomach lurched. Another bird corpse.
He roughly covered it in soil and rocked back into a squat. He looked at the other strange shapes and pebbles with dread. He remembered the birds drawn on the walls of the upstairs room. Emily.
Richard went back inside and scoured his desk and the wooden panel, taking care to stop it disintegrating completely. By the end, it was impossible to tell if the tiny movements he saw were maggots or a trick of the light. His whole body was itching. He shut and locked the hatch and had a scalding shower.
He sat back down at his desk. It must have come from Emily. She was traumatized; they knew that for sure now. The family was bereaved; this was just her reaction. Could a corpse survive a year? It was big, perhaps a pigeon, and he hadn’t got a close look at it. It was just another horrible remnant of the Ashworth family. They would clear them out, get rid of it all, start again.
Still, he found himself getting up from his desk and opening the door of Emily’s room. How much had come from Emily and how much was there already? The air felt viscous here, like wading through cobwebs. He thought about Eleanor telling him that things moved in the house and the memory he’d been trying to suppress, the door to the upstairs room wide open, surfaced again. He remembered what Eleanor had said about the medium: she says it doesn’t want us in the house. He looked at the faint images of birds on the wall.