The Hiding Place, page 13
Annie looked up. Her eyes found mine.
“Joey.”
She smiled…and that was when I realized what was wrong. What was so terribly, horribly wrong…
—
I stand. The closeness of memory feels suffocating, like it’s choking me. I can taste bitter bile at the back of my throat. I stagger upstairs, making it to the bathroom just in time. I spew sour brown liquid into the stained sink. I pause, breathing raggedly, and then my stomach convulses again. More vomit forces its way out of my throat and down my nose. I clutch at the cold porcelain, trying to catch my breath and stop myself from shaking. I lean there for a while, waiting for my legs to regain some solidity, staring at the vomit-splattered basin.
Eventually, I turn on the tap and wash the lumpy brown contents of my stomach down the plughole. I spit a few times and breathe, slowly and deeply. The water from the sink gurgles noisily down the pipes.
That’s not all I can hear. Now that I’ve finished vomiting, I’m conscious again of that invasive chittering, skittering sound. Closer. Insistent. All around me. I shiver. The cold is back too. Creeping cold.
I look over at the toilet. The brick still squats on top of it. I carefully lift it off. Then I reach for the plastic toilet brush and use the scraggy end to flip up the lid. I inch forward and peer inside. Empty. I look around. The shower curtain is closed. I grab the moldy edge and yank it to one side. The only thing lurking behind it is a scum of shower gel and a dirty sponge.
I walk out of the bathroom. The chittering, skittering seems to move with me. In the pipes, the walls? I advance along the landing, still brandishing the toilet brush. I glance in my bedroom. Nothing to see here. Something about this niggles at me. And then it’s gone. I keep moving forward, toward Ben’s room.
There’s a smell. Not the toilet brush. This smell is rich, metallic. I’ve smelled it before. Another house. Another door. But the same feral scent, the same creeping cold, slithering through my guts like an icy parasite.
I grip the handle. Then I push open the door and quickly flick the switch. The bare bulb spews out a jaundiced yellow light. I look around. It’s not a big room. Just enough space for a single bed, a wardrobe and one small chest of drawers. The room has been decorated. Several coats, I imagine…
I see all of this, but I don’t really see it. Because all I see is red. Soaking the new mattress, running down the wall. Slippery, ruby rivulets slithering down from the words painted there.
Her writing. His blood.
NOT MY SON.
When did she decide? When did she realize? Was it a slow accumulation, the horror and dread building every minute, every hour, every day until she could no longer take it? The smell, the creeping cold, the noises. She already had the gun. But she didn’t use the gun on Ben. She killed him with her bare hands. Consumed by fear, rage? Or did something happen that left her with no other choice?
I force myself to close my eyes. When I open them the blood and words have gone. The walls are bare and clean, the same shade of bland off-white as the rest of the house. Malevolent magnolia. I give the room a final glance. Then I back out and close the door. I rest my forehead against the wood, breathing deeply.
Just the cottage. Just playing with your mind.
I turn. My heart stops.
“Jesus!”
Abbie-Eyes sits on the carpet, halfway down the landing.
Pudgy plastic legs poke out in front of her, blond curls stick out in disarray, her wonky eye gazes off toward a dusty cobweb in the corner. The good blue eye stares up at me mockingly.
Hey, Joey. I came back. Again.
I stare around, as if I might spot some cheeky doll-depositing burglar creeping down the stairs, giggling at his little joke. But no one is there.
On unsteady legs I walk over and pick Abbie-Eyes up. The loose eye rattles. Her cheap polyester dress rustles stiffly. The weight of her, the feel of the hard, cold plastic in my hand, makes my skin squirm.
The urge to hurl her out of a window, into the overgrown back garden, is almost overwhelming, but I’m seized by an even more unpleasant image of her crawling back to the house, her plastic, rosy-cheeked face pressed to the glass, peering in from the darkness.
Instead, holding her at arm’s length, like an unexploded bomb, I walk back down the stairs and into the kitchen. I open the cabinet under the sink, stuff her inside, along with the toilet brush, and slam the door shut.
Shit. My whole body is shaking. I’m not sure if I’m about to faint or about to have a heart attack. I pour a glass of water and gulp it down greedily.
I try to rationalize. Maybe I moved Annie’s doll myself and forgot—some kind of alcohol blackout. I remember Brendan telling me how, in his drinking days, he suffered from hallucinations and memory loss. Once, he woke to find he had pushed a wardrobe down the stairs. He had no recollection of doing it or any idea why.
“ ’Course, I was a lot bigger back then.” He winked. “Alcohol weight.”
Brendan, I think. I need to talk to Brendan. I try his number. It goes to voicemail. This isn’t comforting, despite Gloria’s assertion that he is fine. Gloria is not, I don’t think, a liar. But it would be good to hear his voice, even if it is just telling me to “feck off.” It occurs to me that I have come to count on Brendan being around when I need him, his presence as familiar and comforting as an old pair of jeans, or my boogie shoes. Worry gnaws at my already ragged edges.
I limp back into the living room. The folder is still open on the coffee table. I haven’t finished it. Some pages I skimmed. But I’m done for tonight. I get the message: Arnhill is a grim little village where a lot of bad things have happened. Jinxed. Cursed. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
I start to pile the pages back into the folder. One of them catches my eye. It’s another newspaper cutting:
Tragic death of promising student
The picture: a smiling teenage girl. Pretty, with long dark hair and a glinting silver nose ring. Something about her smile reminds me of Annie. Despite myself, I scan the story. Emily Ryan, thirteen, a student at Arnhill Academy who killed herself with an overdose of alcohol and acetaminophen. Described as “bright, fun and full of life.”
“You ever lost one?”
Beth’s voice pops into my head. The student she talked about. Must be. But something about that is wrong. I sit down. It takes me a moment, my frazzled brain taking a while to haul itself up to speed. Finally, it clunks rustily into place.
I couldn’t tell you what day it is most of the time, but I could recite whole passages from Shakespeare (if you were very unlucky. And I really didn’t like you). I can memorize reams of text and random words. Just the way my mind works. I collect useless information like dust.
“One year, one day and about twelve hours, thirty-two minutes.”
That’s how long Beth said she had worked at Arnhill Academy. Which would put her start date at September 2016. According to this story, Emily Ryan died on March 16, 2016.
Of course, maybe Beth was wrong. Maybe she had her dates confused. But I don’t think so.
“Oh, I’m counting.”
Which means that Beth wasn’t a teacher here when Emily Ryan killed herself. Emily Ryan certainly wasn’t one of her students. So why did she lie to me?
18
I wake early the next morning. This is uncalled for. I half open one eyelid, groan and roll over. Annoyingly, my brain refuses to slip back into oblivion, even though the rest of my body feels like it has molded itself to the bed overnight.
I lie there for several minutes, willing myself back to sleep. In the end, I give up, peel myself from the mattress and swing my legs out, onto the cold floor. Coffee, my brain instructs. And nicotine.
It’s a gray, blustery day, the wind herding clouds across the sky like a parent hurrying along recalcitrant children. I shiver and finish the cigarette quickly, eager to get back inside to the relative warmth of the cottage.
Already the events of last night have become indistinct, blurred in my memory. I take Abbie-Eyes out of the cabinet. In daylight, she looks harmless. Just an old, broken doll. A little worse for wear, a little unloved. You and me both, I think.
I feel bad now about sticking her beneath the sink. So I take her through to the living room and place her on an armchair. I sit down on the sofa and finish my coffee. Abbie-Eyes and me, enjoying a little morning downtime.
I try Brendan’s number twice more. Still no reply. I re-read the newspaper article about Emily Ryan again. It makes no more sense this morning than it did last night. I try to distract myself by taking out a pile of papers to grade. I get about halfway through before I realize I have just written, “Feck, no!!!” beside one particularly clunky paragraph and give up.
I glance at my watch. It’s 9:30 a.m. I have no real desire to hang around the cottage all day. And nothing else to occupy my time.
There’s nothing else for it.
I decide to go for a walk.
—
The first tentative excavations in Arnhill began sometime back in the eighteenth century. The mine grew, expanded, was demolished, rebuilt and modernized over a period of two hundred years.
Thousands of men and families built their livelihoods around the mine. It wasn’t a job. It was a way of life. If Arnill was a living organism, then the mine was its beating, smoke-bellowing heart.
When the mine closed it took the council less than two years to rip out that heart, although by that time it had long stopped beating. Soot and smoke no longer circulated around its steel arteries. The buildings had crumbled and been vandalized. Thieves had stolen a lot of the metal, fixtures and fittings. In a way, it was a mercy when the bulldozers moved in.
Finally, there was nothing left. Nothing except a deep wound in the land—a constant reminder of what had been lost. Some families moved, to find work elsewhere. Others, like my dad, adapted. The village limped its way back to a sort of recovery. But some scars don’t ever really heal.
The rugged landscape rises in front of me, grown thick and abundant with wildflowers and grass. Hard to believe that once, in this same place, stood great industrial buildings. That beneath the earth there are still shafts and machinery, abandoned because it was too costly to remove.
But that’s not all that lies beneath the earth. Before the mines. Before the machines that bore into the ground, there were other excavations here. Other traditions upon which this village was built.
I start to ascend, glad I brought my cane to aid my progress along the uneven ground. I found a way in through a narrow gap in the perimeter fence. From the trampled-down grass and bare earth on the other side, I guess it is a well-used entrance.
As a kid, I knew this place well. Now, it is foreign to me. I can’t place exactly where I am or even where the old shafts used to be. And the hatch doesn’t exist anymore. That was lost, along with our way in, thanks to Chris. For good, I thought. But I should have known. Some things won’t stay buried. And kids will always find a way.
I stand at the crest of one steep hill to catch my breath. Even if I didn’t have a crippled leg, I am not a man used to hiking and hill-climbing. I’m built for sitting at tables and perching on bar stools. I have never even run for a bus. I try to force my lungs to drag in some much-needed oxygen. And then I give up, pull out my cigarettes and light one. I thought that when I got out here I would feel some instinctive recall, a twinge, like an internal divining rod. But there is nothing. The only twinge I am feeling is from my bruised ribs. Perhaps I have worked too hard to forget. I am not sure if that makes me disappointed or relieved.
I stare around at the undulating lines of brown and green. Scraggy grass and hard thorny bushes, slopes of slippery gravel and deep hollows filled with muddy marsh water and swaying reeds.
I can almost hear them whispering to me: You thought you could just stroll up here and find your way back? It doesn’t work like that, Joey-boy. Haven’t you learned anything by now? You don’t find me. I find you. And don’t you fucking forget it.
I shiver a little. Perhaps this little hike up memory hill, like many of my actions, is a fruitless exercise. Perhaps the email isn’t important either. Or the text. Or any of it. Maybe the best thing to do would be to get what I’m due and get out. I’m not the hero type. I’m not the guy in the film who goes back, solves the mystery and gets the girl. If anything, I’m the deadbeat friend who never makes it past the second act. What happened here was a long time ago. I’ve lived twenty-five years without having to revisit it. Why bother now?
Because it’s happening again.
Who cares? It is not my problem. Not my battle. With any luck, the excavators will cause the whole rotten village to fall into the earth, and that really will be the end of it.
I start to turn but something catches my eye. Something fluttering on the ground. I stare at it for a moment. Then I crouch down and pick it up. A Wham bar wrapper. I’d recognize that bright blue and red anywhere. Chris’s pockets used to be stuffed with them. If he had made it to adulthood, I doubt his teeth would have done the same.
I straighten and look down the hill. I’m sure it isn’t steep enough. But still, I tuck the wrapper into my pocket and scramble down the slope. It’s actually steeper than I gave it credit for at the top and halfway down my bad leg gives, my feet slip out from under me and I skid the remaining few yards on my backside.
I lie at the bottom for a moment, winded and shaken. Getting vertical again seems like an effort. I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths.
“You never called my mum.”
I start and sit up. A young woman, her pale face framed by a hooded parka, stares down at me. She’s holding a small, scruffy black dog on a lead. Something about her is familiar, and then it clicks. The charming barmaid from the pub. Lauren.
If she notices that I am lying prone, covered in dirt, it doesn’t register on her face.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Thanks for asking.”
“Old bloke fell up here last year. Died of hypothermia.”
“Thank God a good Samaritan like you found me.”
I grab my cane and force myself clumsily to my feet. The dog sniffs around my boots. I like dogs. They’re uncomplicated. Easy. Unlike people. Or cats. I reach to chuck him under the chin. His lips draw back and he snarls. I snatch my hand back.
“He doesn’t like being stroked,” Lauren says.
“Right.”
There’s a patch of missing fur, almost like a ring, around his neck: an old scar.
“What happened to him?”
“He got caught on some barbed wire, slit his throat open.”
“Amazing he survived.”
A shrug.
“Is he your dog?”
“No. Mum’s. She’s had him years.”
“You walk him up here a lot?”
“I suppose.”
“Many other people walk up here?”
“A few.”
The words “blood” and “stone” come to mind.
“I hear some of the kids from school hang around here too.”
“Some of them.”
“When I was a kid, we used to do that. We’d look for ways into the old shafts.”
“Must have been a long time ago.”
“It was. Thanks for rubbing it in.”
She doesn’t smile. “Why haven’t you called Mum?”
“I don’t need a cleaner right now. Sorry.”
“Okay.”
She turns to go. I realize I am missing an opportunity.
“Wait.”
She looks back.
“Your mum—she cleaned the cottage for Mrs. Morton?”
“Yeah.”
“So she knew her?”
“Not really.”
“But she must have spoken to her?”
“Mrs. Morton kept herself to herself.”
“Your mum never mentioned Mrs. Morton acting oddly—seeming upset, disturbed?”
A shrug.
“I heard Ben went missing. You think he ran away?”
Another shrug. I try one last time.
“Was Ben one of the kids who came up here? Did they find something? Maybe a tunnel, a cave?”
“You should call Mum.”
“I told you, I don’t—” Then I catch myself. “If I call your mum, will she talk to me?”
She stares at me. “She charges ten pounds an hour. Fifty pounds for a deep clean.”
I get the drift. “Right. I’ll bear it in mind.”
The dog edges toward my boots again. Lauren gives it a little tug on the lead. It wrinkles its gray muzzle at her.
“He must be pretty old,” I say.
“Mum says he should be dead.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t mean it.”
“Yeah, she does.” She turns. “I have to go.”
“See you then!” I call after her.
She doesn’t return the farewell, but as she walks away I hear her murmur, almost to herself: “You’re in the wrong place.”
Weird doesn’t really cover it.
—
A white van is parked outside the cottage when I get back. There’s a picture of a large tap on the back. I make a wild guess that it belongs to a plumber. Bearing in mind my current bathroom issues, this would be fortuitous. If I had called a plumber.
As I draw closer my worst fears are confirmed. The name on the side reads: Fletcher & Sons Plumbing and Heating. I watch as the doors swing open. Unwise Hair climbs out of one side. Another figure, less familiar these days, climbs out of the driver’s side. He spits yellow phlegm on the ground.
“Thorney. Fuck me. Never thought I’d see you back here.”
I can’t say the same. I always knew Fletch would never leave. Some kids, you just do. It’s not that they don’t want to move somewhere else. It’s just that the thought that there is somewhere else has never even occurred to them.
