Cornwall, 1947
I have discovered that if I peer close enough into the forest, I can see the women inside it. It has taken hours of solitude. I think it has taken days but I cannot be sure, because the light outside is so faded and drab that evening might just as well be the small hours of the dawn. Hours. Days. Weeks. Who cares for time passing? It has no bearing on me. Now I see their eyes, the curl of their fingers, and it is only a matter of time before one pushes through. Who will she be? Will she be like me? Laura painted the forest, I feel sure. Then she took one of the loops and she hanged herself with it.
I have the impression that other women have escaped the pattern. I feel them surround me. I hear them whisper when I lie on the boards, my cheek pressed against cold wood, wondering at the difference between that surface and the cool plump flesh that touches it. At the same time as they escape, they invite me in. The mural is not a flat pattern; it has depth, like a glass aperture breaking on to woods far darker and more plural than I know. New shoots grow from branches that are already there and I try to count them but I keep losing count. Why must they make themselves so innumerable? Repeat, repeat, they keep repeating, confusing me, trapping me, toying with me! Just as soon as I believe I am in control of it, it surprises me again, making me turn back to see the fresh buds that have caught me from behind.
It is like the seaweed on the beach below the Landogger Bluff. And the woman I see most, the woman who crawls from the pattern and cradles my head in her crooked arms is like the woman I saw on the sand, crawling and creeping towards the water. Her hair is black, matted and lank, and she reminds me of the little girl in my painting, moving by the day, made of oil and blood. She calls to me, Come in, come in, and I hear her, I do! I want to follow but I cannot risk my baby.
Whirls and spirals and coils and whorls, it is a miracle I hear anything above the din. Occasionally, though, I do. I hear the children, those devil-sent children, siding with my tormentor. Sometimes I cry over them. I failed them, just as I have failed my whole life, at love, at happiness, at becoming a mother. Laura tells me this is how she felt. The twins decided they did not like her. What was she to do?
I hear running footsteps and clattering laughter. I hear the hectic ringing of the bell box in the cellar. There are more children here than two. I attempt to reckon their steps and where or on what floor they hurry but it is just like the mural, just like that; it keeps multiplying until I meet myself again, not knowing which way is up and which is down. The horror of it! They are all around, these hurrying people, and I am at their centre, cornered like a beast about to be drowned.
Do they knock? Sometimes they do. They knock and run, tittering or crying, and whispers like feathers come floating through the door, Alice, oh, Alice, are you there, Alice? Am I here? I am not sure. I think I am. Somebody is.
*
In a distant recess, he calls for me. The man I love calls for us both, Laura and me, and I sense him in another place, close by, far away, and I long for him to rescue me. My tears fall but often I get the better of them. I am stronger than this. My only rescue is here, in this room, with them. My only rescue watches me each day, and I it, contemplating which will move first. The life inside me is all that stops me climbing inside. You see, I think the women want it. I think they mean to take my child.
Come to us. You will be safe.
But my safety is with him.
Jonathan…
His name is a lost language, one I spoke for the shortest time. When I wonder at how he can keep me here, locked in this room, I tear my hair and batter the floor and howl like a dog. Do they hear my howls? They must, as I thrash the door, stupid girl, silly girl, thinking things that are not real. The creepers are real. The climbers are real. I could reach in and take one – there! I did it. It is heavier and greasier than I thought, wet as a snake and rough as rope. They would hear me if I did this.
They would hear you then. And I take the weed in my hands and close my eyes and let it wind around my throat. I am ready. I will do what I must.
In my mind I open the door that Mrs Rackstile locked. Then I am crawling through this big, big house, crawling as swift as clouds across a wind-blown sky. I try to catch one, my feet and palms flat on the floor, try to bite it; it skitters into a corner. Why so secretive? That is what they say about me. They keep me inside, all day, behind windows, a prisoner. Sky is purple. Bats swoop. Outside, a lone star blinks.
In my mind I travel to the place where it happened, the place to which the girl Constance walks in her sleep, the hallway beneath the hook, and I look up at the hook and I see it clearly, as if it is real. I touch it, this special place. Where Laura died… In my mind I feel them pull me back, pull my ankles, but I will not let them take me. My fingernails dig into wood, scratch until they bleed. I see the blood and struggle from the ones that went before, the marks they have made, and mine fit perfectly into those grooves, feeling my way through a space I know well. It is where I need to be, deep down there in the wood where they can’t find me. And then I reach it. The dark spot, climbing up through the floor: it is beneath the floor, yet part of it, yet beyond it, all at once! It makes me spiral to think of it. I turn my head, winding it to the ceiling, like a cat with its neck twisted wrong. A storm is coming. I can tell by the sigh of the sea, its grey-green swell as it foams against the cliffs. It is a mad sea.
In my mind, I climb. Quiet. Quiet. Listen again. They have gone. It is just you and me now. I had better hurry, before they catch me once more.
I attach the rope to the hook.
I stare down at my pale feet. The moon peers in. I am not in the hallway at all, but still inside my room as I always have been, bolted inside.
Now, I will escape. I tighten the loop. It was always going to come to this. Just as Laura let go of her life, for the next would surely be kinder. She kicked the stool from beneath her toes and choked and bucked and kicked to her death.
Years ago I wrote my fate – and now is the time to meet it.