When Tom and Fiona watch Gracey sleep they are struck by the beauty of their child. They see the infant again in their child’s smoothed features, a younger self recovered from a time when their anxiety for her safety was as fierce and blind as any madness. The sight of Gracey asleep touches a depth of feeling in Tom that is too unbearable to sustain moment by moment. Such an insight or vision for him must remain fleeting, like a glimpse of the divine. But tonight, Gracey’s little sleeping face, when neither of her parents are looking, is troubled, sweat-peppered.
Tonight, Gracey dreams a curious dream. She dreams of walking backwards, in complete silence, round the grassy mound in the woodland glade. Round and round she goes until, bidden or controlled by another will as all are in dreams, she stops beside the altar stone.
A floral tribute wreathes the menhir and bloods the weathered sides of the crude column. Amongst flowers atop the altar, beloved Waddles lies inside the stone bowl. Torn open, his white fibrous stuffing is stained scarlet. A lone plastic eye stares at the sky but sees nothing. The second eye is missing.
‘He’s with the sow, Gracey,’ says her mother, whom Gracey can’t see but she knows is nearby in the trees that trap night beneath so heavy a canopy. Yet here, inside the grove, the air is illumined by gold dust. Under her feet and under the grass and under the earth, a stream bubbles fast and makes her feel like she’s tilting forwards and about to fall into the sky at the same time.
‘Archie’s here too. Shall we go?’ her mother asks.
An overwhelming awareness of the vivid colours, the startling definition and the detail of each leaf and blade of grass, begins to push her out of sleep.
Twisting against the force that roots her feet to the grassy earth, before the blood-mired rock, Gracey finally breaks through the membrane of dream. The clarity that her eyes never achieve in the real world suddenly dims.
And she is awake inside her pink room, the space softly frosted by the owl nightlight on her chest of drawers. Hair wet and plastered to her cheeks, her forehead grows as cold and clammy as a wet flannel. She sits bolt upright.
‘We can all go down together.’ Mommy again, with the voice from the dream that Gracey can still hear. Mommy’s just outside the room.
‘Mommy.’ Swinging her little legs out of the bed, Gracey’s eyes search the grubby shadows of the smelly old house. But she can see no sign of Mommy, so she flees the candy-walled room to the unlit cavern of the landing. The latest new Waddles dangles from her hand.
Into Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom she flits, where her parents sleep with a chasm between them. Each dark head is sunk on opposite edges of the mattress.
‘Mommy,’ she calls. Her mother is fast asleep, which confounds her because she definitely heard her voice on the landing.
Bewildered, Gracey scurries to the bottom of the bed and raises the duvet in the middle. And is about to tunnel inside, between her parents, when she pauses, her attention drawn to a red luminance aglow on the bedroom windows where curtains don’t hang.
The night outside is blushed red, not black. She’s never seen sky like this. A window is open and the scarlet light shafts like it’s coming through the stained glass of a church.
Entranced, little Gracey pads to Daddy’s side of the bed and peers at a moon washed in blood. Where the clouds part, the sky is carmine and the stars are twinkling rubies. Down below, the wood is clotted with shadow, the earth blackened as if there’s been a big fire.
And from the darkness, a pale visitor steps forward.
Indistinct but whitey, the thing looks like a skinny lady with a dark, lumpy head. She’s showing her bosom and looks like she’s fallen over and rolled in the ashes of a cold bonfire to make herself ghosty. She stands on one leg and points at the bedroom window.
From behind the lady standing on one leg, something shoots directly up into the air; as fast as a squirrel but as big as a man. Though it can’t be a man because long ears are streaming behind the bumpy silhouette of the head.
Launching from the trees and gliding fast over the garden, the thing drops close to the house. Gracey only sees a dark shape fall. She doesn’t want to see what has arrived down below so close to the house. She steps away from the window but not far enough to avoid hearing a thump below.
Gracey turns to get into bed with Mommy and Daddy but she’s back inside the dream and can only move in slow motion as if her feet and ankles are buried in sand, and all the sound has gone from the night and the house. This must be what being deaf is like.
The room she turns to face is also empty.
There is no bed. There are no parents or furniture or dressing gowns on the rear of the door. No new shade upon the light. The walls are covered in old yellow paper and the floor is dusty boards with no rug. She’s inside her house but at the wrong time and she starts to cry at the gaping absence of her parents that chills her heart so cold it aches and her breathing flaps like loose paper.
Gracey can only shut her eyes and cover them with new Waddles and maybe when she looks again she won’t be dreaming.
When she opens her eyes, so many creaks and rustles that she never usually bothers with explode from a void of silence.
She jumps.
Her parents are back inside the room again, lying in the bed. They haven’t moved. She can hear them breathing.
A glance at the windows can’t be resisted because something was outside the house in the sleepwalking half-dream and the sky was all red and wrong.
The sky is now as black as deep night should be. But through the window crawls a noise, a scraping on bricks as something pulls itself up the wall.
At the foot of the bed, Gracey raises the duvet above her head like it’s a wave about to crash and slips under. Grabbing handfuls of sheet she tunnels along the mattress until the inert bodies of her parents offer immediate warmth and a reassuring solidity. When her head appears on the pillows between Mom and Dad’s oblivious heads, her eyes grope the dark.
Over by the open window comes the thump of an intruder dropping to the floor of the room.
Inside this rigid silence another has arrived, joining her mommy, her daddy and her. She can’t breathe for fear. Gracey squeezes shut her eyes. Squashes Waddles into her face.
And here comes the rustle and bump of the visitor crawling the floor. Then there is silence, for a moment, as it pauses to watch them and make permanent the idea of itself, crouched and waiting.
Gracey pulls up her feet, squashes them into her bottom. Under her chin her whole body tries to become a numb, airless space that won’t make a sound and attract the thing on the floor.
The terrible silence is broken by a clack clack clack clack and Gracey thinks of Nanny’s busy knitting needles, tying tiny complicated knots that became a hat and scarf for her. The clack clack moves round the bottom of the bed and she can’t stop her eyes peering over the duvet and she wants to scream so that her daddy can wake up and fight the monster, and the witch in the garden, while she and her mommy wait in the car.
There’s no light coming through the windows because it’s so dark in the country and only a misty glow from her owl nightlight next door reaches here. She can’t see anything at Dad’s side of the bed, nor at the foot of the bed, nor Mum’s side by the open door.
Click-clack, click-clack, snick, snick, snick . There is the knitting sound again but this time it’s coming from above the bed.
The ceiling!
Her wide eyes dry out, right under the eyelids. She doesn’t want to look up but does because she realises that nothing she wants to happen, or not happen, makes any difference at all.
What reaches down is more smudge than form but she’s sure it’s hanging by its feet, from the ceiling, like a giant, horrible bat. Its whitish length smears the wall and a bumpy head extends. Ragged ears the same size as Daddy’s cricket bat, cock like horns and blade the bony head. And even the thinnest light is sufficient to unveil eyes rusted and liverish and bulging wide on either side of a narrow skull.
Her heart, Gracey is sure, has now stopped.
The clack clack of knitting needles closes over Gracey’s head. As two shaggy limbs become visible on either side of her face, she lowers her chin and sucks air to scream. But the scream gets stuck, suspended at the back of her mouth. The front legs are skinny as a dog’s and furred and smell of the wet cement of a petting zoo. Whitey claws do the click-clacking . One paw grips lost Waddles, whom she saw in the dream. He’s hurt and bleeding. An eye is gone.
Gracey sinks her entire body under the duvet.
And SCREAMS.
And SCREAMS.
And SCREAMS.
* * *
At the same time that Tom and Fiona sit upright, a supple shadow slides over the window sill and draws Tom’s shellshocked attention. It’s gone before he can squint. In the darkness, he and Fiona then find each other.
‘Gracey?’ he asks.
Fiona scrabbles and disinters objects from the bedside table. A water glass bangs and bounces across wooden boards. A smartphone thumps the floor. A click of the table lamp’s switch punctures the solemn, dense darkness with electric light.
Tom stares at Fiona, unable to shake himself from shock and his unformed questions, the compulsions without words. Fiona returns his gaping. Then, together, as if drawn to some tiny emergency beacon, they divert their gaze to the lump beneath the duvet. Tom raises the bed linen.
Gracey’s bloodless face peeks back, eyes stricken wide by a terror they’ve never seen before.
After such an abrupt awakening, their disorientation lengthens and they can only gape at the little girl until she breaks the spell. ‘Witch. Monster up on the ceiling. Hurted Waddles.’
Tom rolls out of bed as Fiona collects Gracey and holds her tight. Immediately, the girl sobs into her mum’s bosom, clinging to her nightclothes for dear life.
Tom checks the open window. The garden is empty. He closes the window and backs out of the room, eyeing the wall they share with the Moots. Outside in the hall, he drags his fingers down his face to wipe away vestiges of sleep. Fumbling on light switches, he stumbles to Gracey’s room on numb feet. Slaps on that light and races to the window. Planting his hands on the sill, he peers between the curtains.
The front garden is as deserted as the rear but the lumpen silhouette of the caravan is as visible as an oppressive stain. A territorial marker. A barricade. The woods fence the rear, the slovenly recreation vehicle bars the front. An open-plan garden on one side. The Moots have truly invaded. After spilling through their meagre defences they are now inside the keep, the house. They must be.
We’re cornered.
Tom raises a hand from the sill and studies his dusty palm. He then rubs his gritty fingertips together.
* * *
Tom peers into inky air, sees little of the two houses beyond their outlines. Nights this far from anywhere are untarnished by light pollution and not a chink of light escapes the Moots’ interior. Nothing stirs out here. Silence thickens the dark. The wind-ruffled trees of the distant wood produce the only sound.
Blackwood needs dust from the sorcerers’ house. Ammunition for the magical battle already raging.
His blood has carried him this far, its rise tangible; a tidal surge drawn by the full moon of his fear and revulsion for what resides next door. But now that he’s alone in pitch dark, apprehension pinches his gut.
Something … there was something. In our room. A cat?
A suspicion that the Moots are entering not only their heads but their home now, and perhaps while transformed into the horrid personae he saw in the grove, is too horrid to dwell upon. Though the idea of the intruder being more substantial than a small animal also grows preposterous the longer he’s fully awake. A window had been open, but scaling a twenty-foot elevation of smooth brick wall would surely be beyond the neighbours and what they believe themselves capable of performing when altered , or when believing themselves to be other .
Nonetheless, his notion that the neighbours somehow got inside the house persists. And if the neighbours’ malevolent influence can truly extend so far, and physically, then why wasn’t he the victim tonight? Because the night’s target was sweet Gracey. The Moots’ actions were calculated to hurt them by the most malicious means: through their child. An escalation that brings Tom close to panic.
He can only pray that what he and Gracey suffered were the ‘hellish visions’ predicted by Blackwood. Within his own eyes, had not two elderly people moved like animals too, through the woods, in pursuit of their quarry? One had even appeared to sit in a tree to observe his rout below. Impossible. A vision? Surely. Please let it be.
What he believes one moment he disbelieves the next. The very idea they command supernormal powers is often too much to accept. And yet…
Reassured that no one will see him at this distance from the houses, with the smudge of the border hedge offering additional concealment, he returns his attention to the caravan. And inhales its ancient respirations: rust, damp metal, a pervasive taint of engine oil.
He digs the screwdriver’s tip between a rusty lock and a doorjamb made from sheet metal, and the blade grinds through. He uses the screwdriver as a lever, resting his weight against the handle. A metallic snap rings coldly.
And the door creaks ajar.
Tom stows the screwdriver in a pocket of his jacket. Collects the torch from near his feet. Holding his breath, he then eases open the squeaking door. Stepping from the chilly night, he enters a new darkness pungent with odours of damp fabric and mouldy linoleum. Carefully pulling the door closed, he seals himself inside the caravan.
Beneath his weight the vehicle creaks, shifts. The shuffle of his feet and his panicky exhalations amplify. Turning himself about, his knee collides with an object that produces a dull, hollow knock. ‘Fuck.’
The torch soon ushers a tired interior into existence. A vintage caravan unchanged in decades: sun-faded laminate surfaces, cupboards and drawers. An old enamel cooker. Wendy House sink and taps. Dinky orange curtains strung along white elastic rails, covering portholes more than windows and maintaining a privacy that feels more like entombment.
To welcome his trespass, a gust of sewage releases from the sink area, and as he reaches the check curtain dividing the kitchen from what must be the living space, the aroma of a ripe bin forces his breath shallower.
One tug and the drape shrieks across plastic runners.
‘Fuck! Fuck off. Shit.’
His torch beam drops from what hangs from the ceiling. Scattered light flashes about his feet as he scuffles a retreat.
The remainder of the cabin is obscured by the hanged figure’s silhouette. Its booted feet hover a clear foot from the floor.
Tom returns the torch to it and dusty shadows recede from the horror occupying the airless space. Against the interior murk of orange and brown upholstery, the figure’s arms are spread wide as if it was crucified first, then hanged. A pair of paint-spattered boots begin where the hems of a blue jumpsuit end. An overall that a garage mechanic would wear to toil beneath an open bonnet, covers the torso and limbs.
Tom’s beam gropes higher. Despite a strong aversion to seeing a face, he finds himself impelled to seek just that, from near the ceiling where the form hangs by its neck.
‘Dear God.’
If there was a face upon the murky, ball-shaped head, the grimacing features are shielded behind a portcullis of cross-hatched sticks. A dusty grate of bent and woven twigs, through which he too easily imagines teeth and an echo of the choking noises once rinsed from a throat.
It might be the result of his shock but the floor seems to shift beneath his feet. It’s as if he’s now aboard a small boat, abandoned in some foul estuary with the captain hanging from a bulkhead.
White electrical cord is knotted beneath the hanged figure’s shapeless chin. A neck so squeezed by the garrotte, the woody ball of the head rests at a slant. Between the stained cuff of one sleeve and a protective glove, a network of entwined sticks suggest the fine bones, sinews and veins of a skinned wrist.
A dummy. Human-shaped, the head and hands made from willow or hawthorn twigs. The effigy’s neck encircled by a tightened noose.
Why? he asks. Why, why, why? But he knows the answer and the answer almost turns his stomach inside-out like an upended sack. Maleficium . Part of a spell. Intent and invocation. This is no mere effigy hanging in a decrepit caravan. The figure was designed to impel the accursed into performing this grotesquely depicted act. This is how his neighbours rid themselves of his predecessor. They turned a recreational vehicle into a killing bottle. A trap in which the Moots rid themselves of vermin. And you chopped down their bloody trees. This man didn’t. For you, they will…
Reluctant to touch the hanging basket of man-sized horror, Tom ducks around it. But clips one of the figure’s idle boots and the form sways, an unpleasant creak issuing from its anchor.
Shaking off a shudder and stepping beyond the condemned twig-man, Tom enters a living area suffocated by wood-effect panels, sallow curtains, check upholstery on benches, a fold-down table the size of an ironing board.
And about that table, three more occupants draw a gasp from him. A trio of stick-figures, sitting upright, fashioned to resemble a family. Two seated adults and the smaller figure of a child, their limbs and heads woven from wicker, have been dressed like Guys destined to roar and snap atop bonfires.
‘Oh Christ.’
Tom’s beam shifts across a mum crowned by a wig that too easily resembles Fiona’s bob, styled from shredded rags. A bearded father sits opposite her, his facial hair fashioned from an old paint brush. A little girl with a ponytail, artfully woven from straw and tied with a red ribbon, leans toward her father.
Between their stick hands, defined only as stunted extremities without fingers, a vase stands upon the table. A pot filled with cut flowers; red blooms that draw placid stares from three wooden faces as if all in this family have silently accepted their fate.
Sickened, Tom turns from the sinister tableau and drops a hand to the nearest counter top to steady himself, its surface filmed with dust. And he is reminded of his purpose for being here.
He grows frantic, tugging a Ziploc freezer bag from a jacket pocket. When the bag is open, he begins sweeping.
* * *
From the bedroom doorway, Tom beckons Fiona. He knows his eyes are wild but he can’t adjust them. Why should he? When Fiona sees what sits around that flimsy table in the caravan, he might have to hold her upright. ‘Fi’. Come with me.’
She’s stroking Gracey’s hair in an attempt to resettle the little girl after her fright. Fiona frowns at him. She’s still confused by Gracey’s outburst and now irritated with him for interrupting her thoughts.
‘You have to see this. Now.’
A minute later, outside in the cold, Tom hands the torch to Fiona. Then uses a finger to pull wide the caravan’s door, the panel bulging over the broken lock. ‘Go and look in there. Then tell me I’m paranoid.’
Fiona takes the torch. She’ll do this, go inside and see what’s riled him. For now, she’s sufficiently impelled and alarmed by the intensity in his eyes to play along. Wrapped in her dressing gown, her feet covered in Tom’s unlaced working boots that she slipped on quickly, she steps up and inside the caravan. Ahead of her, the torch beam grows white circles on wood-effect panelling, doors, grubby lino.
Tom watches her swallowed by the innards of the grubby box the neighbours dumped outside their home. ‘Brace yourself.’
‘Go back inside. Gracey needs one of us.’ A mother’s instruction cast from the caravan’s interior, rising over the scuffle of her hesitant steps. As she bumps about, the nearest window briefly glows orange, then fades as the torch-beam crosses the curtain. From behind Tom come distant calls for ‘Mommy!’ from Gracey. Tears are not far away. Tom bites his lip. He’ll go to her in a moment.
Head ducking through the narrow doorway, Fiona reappears. ‘Shit-hole. But what am I looking for?’
‘Aye?’ Tom snatches the torch from his wife and squeezes past her as she steps down.
Inside the empty caravan, all is as it was when Tom was here minutes ago, minus the four twig figures.
He looks twice, turns about and wants to smash something in his frustration. Then he barges out of the confined space, the vehicle rocking and squeaking in protest as he stamps through it. When he emerges, Fiona is already jogging back to the house, drawn by the insistent, anguished cries of their daughter.
‘They took them,’ Tom says, uselessly, while also doubting his own thoughts and his closest memories. Bewildered, he entertains new ideas, ludicrous in any other situation; notions of a bewitchment that makes people see things that were never there.
Fiona has heard him and pauses in the crooked cape of their porch. ‘What?’
‘Us. The bloke who topped himself. Effigies. Made from sticks. In there just now! We were in there!’
Fiona doesn’t move. She just stares at him. He can see the pale smudge of her face but cannot read her expression. He dares to hope she is taking his claim seriously. But when her hand covers her mouth, in the same way people smother guilty laughter or conceal grief, he understands that he’s only convinced her of something else.
She straightens and her hand drops. She’s still looking at him. He can tell. ‘Tom. This stops. Now. Tonight. Or… Or…’ Her distress returns and cuts off the ultimatum. Tom hears a sob and the pitiful sound of anguish his wife unleashes bruises his heart.
Fiona turns and bustles inside the house, her head lowered. He can merely watch her go. He knows what she’s thinking. She no longer recognises the man she married, her friend and lover of eighteen years. The father of her only child, whoever he was, has been replaced by this adult changeling. A grown man paying a magician out of their savings to lift a curse. A man whose limbs are laced with fierce scratches, who only last night cut down his neighbours’ trees with a chainsaw.
Such a train of derailing thoughts and hopes gains momentum, until something catches his eye. On the neighbours’ roof.
Silhouetted against a moon-lightened sky, four black figures sit in a line at the peak. Even from below at this distance, the bulbous body and ball-shaped head of the hanged man from the caravan is immediately evident. Three thinner figures, their outlines stiff and literally wooden, sit beside the suicide. Tom can see the ponytail on the golem of Gracey, the jut of his double’s beard, the mop of the Fiona doll’s bob. All three members of the wicker family, artfully composed yet rigid, stare down at him with their sightless eyes.
Emerging behind the stick people, a longer form soon reveals itself. The long-eared, misshapen skull of the hare rises. The scrawny upper body widens. Powerful thighs become visible, sloping to the spindly lower legs as the thing stands upright. The tatty face moves in his direction.
Tom gapes until a fear of being reduced to the equivalent of a vole, aquiver beneath the golden eyes of a hawk, drags him from his stupor. He sprints to the open door of his home.