Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

BRIAN HODGE Now Day Was Fled as the Worm Had Wished

We would know it as soon as we got there, Vanessa insisted — and more than once. We would know the right place when we found it and not one moment before, so there was no point in second-guessing ourselves. Stop trying so hard. No formal itinerary and that was just the way we should keep it.

‘How about here?’ Heather had suggested a couple of weeks ago at the Tower of London, before we’d left the city for the countryside. Forty-eight hours before that we would’ve still been somewhere over the Atlantic.

‘Absolutely not, you can’t be serious,’ Vanessa had vetoed. ’Are you?’

No reply, just Heather and her puckish little smile, betraying nothing. Even I couldn’t be sure, when I’d known her so much longer. It wasn’t often you could catch Heather giving away anything more than only as much as she wanted.

‘It was the ravens, wasn’t it?’ I asked her later, on the Tube, starting to feel as though I might be catching on to the way she was thinking here and now, in this world instead of the one we were trying to leave behind. Not that it looked all that different yet — those butt-ugly American fanny-packs and the murderous stress of business commuters look the same everywhere — but we at least felt the potential unfurling before us.

Ravens live at the top of the Tower, we had discovered. Live up there under ceremonial guard. Very serious business, those ravens. Tradition holds that the fate of England hinges upon them. Should the ravens ever leave the Tower, fly away, England will be sure to fall.

‘Maybe something about them did make me think of my parents’ marriage,’ Heather said.

‘I thought you wanted to do this.’

‘I do. I just don’t want to do any of it like they did.’

‘In that case, I’d say you’re off to a flying start.’

See, the catch with the ravens is that they can’t soar away even if they want to. The feathers at the ends of their wings are clipped — prisoners, as surely as any heretic or rightful heir to a stolen throne who’d ever been a guest of the Tower when it was operational. It’s possible that if one of them wanted out badly enough, it could tumble off the edge of the parapet and fall like a glossy black stone. But I suppose they’re more apt to simply spend their days pecking at the free buffet and eyeing the sky with longing.

Naturally I hesitated to share this insight with her — the considerate thing to do, given the way her mother had leapt from a hotel window when Heather was fourteen, half her lifetime ago. Which hadn’t done her father’s political career any favours, coming as it did during a re-election campaign. He’d soldiered on in the race, claiming that this was what his poor beloved late wife would’ve wanted, but even his tarnished silver tongue couldn’t sell that one to anyone who wasn’t already lining his pockets. By election night, the Senator was a historical footnote.

Heather had told me that it was the only justice she’d ever really seen in the world, but wouldn’t you know: it had had to hit so brutally close to home.

Oscar Wilde referred to England and America as two countries divided by a common language. While it may not be the most conspicuous example, this is no more significant than in those words applied to the land. Words that you really don’t hear in the States, words like heath and hedgerow, glen and dale, moor and weald and bracken. It’s as though in crossing the Atlantic our ancestors undertook some great divestiture, stripping away the luxuriant wealth of how they might speak of what was beneath their feet and tilled by their ploughs. If it could be semiotically reduced, then it might that much more easily be plundered.

But that’s America for you. Take what you need, then take as much as you can hold or lock away because God forbid anyone else should have it.

Used to, once upon et cetera, when I thought about Europe and someday travelling there, as soon as I had the time, the only way I could imagine doing the Continent was in as much ostentatious style as possible. Five-star hotels, chauffeurs, restaurants that would break the wallets of everyone I ever wanted to prove I had surpassed, eclipsed, outshone. But now that I could afford it, I found that I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for this route. These were the dreams of a twenty-year-old, and a decade later as relevant as the telegraph.

One decade later, the only thing making sense to me, to all three of us pale, long-boned Anglos — admittedly, at Vanessa’s prompting — was to instead walk this ancestral island of ours, and try to drum up any connection that might still be buried deep in our New World bones, along with the trace elements of cesium and mercury and everything else we ingested without intending to or having much say in the matter.

And so walk we did. We’d bought rail passes to train our way into whichever area we felt like exploring, but once there, it was England at a grass roots level. Naive dreamers, perhaps, hoping to find something that we feared might no longer exist, if it ever had, but we wanted an England of standing stones and the Cerne Giant and the Uffington Horse, not an England trampled by the same old cigar chompers who would just as soon bulldoze a burial mound as look at it.

And so. We walked. Backpacks on our shoulders, hiking boots on our feet, extra support in Vanessa’s — uncommonly high arches, she has — and, just to make it interesting, an additional agenda in our hearts. Figuring for this one we’d be entirely on our own, and just as well, since most people frowned on the sort of thing we had in mind.

At least that’s one good thing about lots of money:

You get to say ‘Fuck you’ like you really mean it.

A grand place for hikes, rural England, as though the glaciers of the last Ice Age had carved the land for feet and walking staves, and nobody can bear to challenge that. You can go virtually anywhere, cut across great tracts of farmland and tarry as long as you like, and with the farmers’ blessings, too, as long as you remember to shut the gates behind you so the sheep don’t stray out. Just try that in the US without risking buckshot or worse.

Denied that level of freedom to roam the eastern county of Suffolk, surely we would never have found the old manor house. Well off any road of consequence, a few miles from the nearest town of Lavenham, it sat entirely by itself, surrounded by a quilt of tilled fields and wild meadows and pastures. It was the sort of place that becomes invisible to those who grow up familiar with it, seen but no longer noticed, as much a feature of the landscape as the oldest yew tree or some far-off tor, and given just as much thought. Even from a distance we could see that it was in ruins, bricks overrun with vines and ivy, one end’s outer wall collapsed inwards, and two of its five chimneys crumbled halfway back to the many-gabled peaks of the roof.

‘Well, look what we have here,’ Vanessa said. ‘Stumbling onto a place like this can make an eight-year-old out of anyone.’

And for the moment she reminded me of one, tall and lanky though she was, and older than I was by a couple of years. It was the eager flush of excitement that did it, and how she seemed somehow smaller beneath hair gone mad in the moist air of early autumn. Streaks of colour had been dyed into it these past few months, then thickly braided… one purple, one green, one the same blue shade as her eyes.

She cupped a hand to her ear and cocked her gaze sideways to the sky.

‘Hear that?’ she asked Heather and me. ‘Hear it?’

‘What?’ we asked.

‘That big booming voice, full of thunderbolts and glee,’ she said. ‘And it’s saying, “Explore… explore!”‘

She sprinted towards the manor house to oblige, sprinting surprisingly well considering the forty extra pounds’ worth of backpack and sleeping bag.

Heather and I opted for a more leisurely pace. Because her legs were not nearly as long as Vanessa’s, I knew that Heather was afraid how she might look by comparison, that anything less than reminiscent of a gazelle wouldn’t be worth the effort.

‘Just once I’d like to be the first one to hear the voices,’ said Heather. ‘Just once I’d like to be the one to tell her what they’re saying.’

‘Well, don’t you think she’s probably been hearing voices her whole life?’

‘Life is just so weird,’ and then Heather laughed. ‘All that time you and me thinking we’re regular people and then we both fall in love with Joan of Arc.’

‘Don’t forget, I fell in love with you first,’ I told her, and hoped that this would always be enough to sustain us through whatever else we might be lacking. As though, deep down, I didn’t suspect that each of us knew better.

Heather’s mother, zoned on tranquillisers and launching herself nine floors towards the limousine that had glided up in front of the hotel to whisk her husband to a campaign appearance…

That was love too. Or at the very least the end result.

Realistically I cannot say that I was expecting this arrangement, this trinity we had formed, to work for a lifetime, or even for a decade. I’d never heard of these things lasting for any duration, everyone’s love and affection and ardour bifurcating equally. Such a delicate balance to maintain, able to tip so easily, someone beginning to feel that they’re getting the lesser end of the bargain, then demanding one partner or the other make a choice. All right, so there was the poet Ezra Pound, with a wife and a mistress who were crazy for each other, but I couldn’t shake this feeling, the laudable attributes of Heather and Vanessa notwithstanding, that I had used up my personal share of good fortune already.

Heather and I had been together for years before Vanessa entered the picture. Heather was the one who met her first, Vanessa temping for a receptionist out on maternity leave at the brokerage firm where Heather gambled on the Dow Jones with other people’s money. This was one of Vanessa’s quote/unquote respectable phases, when five mornings a week fiscal realities sent her to the end of her closet that she didn’t really like to visit, and impelled her to leave her hair one colour, an alien amongst people she could fool into thinking she was no different.

It was talk of suicide that nailed together the bridge between them, the first commonality that they’d realised they shared. Heather’s mother, of course, and a couple of years ago Vanessa’s younger brother had hung himself two months after his university commencement. He’d run up nearly thirty thousand dollars in credit card debt while a student, more and more companies sending him new cards or raising his limits, and he saw no other way out from under the burden. Ever since, Vanessa had been attempting to sue the banks for wrongful death. As though she could get anywhere in a system so beautifully designed to indenture its slaves at ever-younger ages.

All of which comprised a strange, even morbid, basis for the two of them to start going out for lunch together, but there you go, and as so often happens between co-workers who’ve begun looking at each other over menus, one thing led to another, and, rather abruptly, a few nights each week Heather started working extra hours. That old euphemism.

Once living the lie ballooned up with too much pressure at home — four or five weeks, something like that — she burst into tears and told me what had really been going on. It was far less a confession than a great avalanche of bewilderment, half or more of all the assumptions she’d taken for granted about herself now being called into rigorous question.

And I tried, really tried, to react the way I was supposed to, to get enraged over the betrayal, and had it been another man I might’ve found it easier, but I couldn’t, just couldn’t summon the fury, because I was intrigued and it wasn’t so much out of base prurience as suddenly feeling as though I’d spent our years together with my eyes half-closed and now they were beginning to open, and when I looked at Heather and her tears and her confusion all I could think was I didn’t have one clue you had this in you. But neither had she, so at least we were even.

‘I’m not supposed to want her, this isn’t the way I’m supposed to be,’ Heather said.

‘Yeah, who told you that?’ I said, but hardly had to ask, so then I said, ‘Well, just about everything your parents told you about themselves and each other was a lie, so what makes you think they knew what they were talking about when it came to you?’

Which upset her further for a while, because she was the only one allowed to bad-mouth her family.

‘So you’re not mad?’ she asked later, once this lesser storm had passed.

‘I’m too tired to be mad,’ I said, and wondered if maybe that wasn’t a huge part of all the problems we’d never even stopped to realise we had.

We caught up with Vanessa inside the manor house, this ill-kept hulk gone far down the road to ruin. High-ceilinged and dank within, it was now a home fit for little else but mice and ghosts, although rather than diminish its grandeur, the state of the place only took that grandeur and turned it tragic. You could look at the staircase, dingy and splintered, and envision what it had once been, polished and gleaming in the mellow sunlight from the tall leaded windows. Could look at one of the cold fireplaces, filled now with leaves and grit, and imagine a blazing log that had taken four strong hands to wrestle onto the grate.

‘Charming starter palace for young royal newlyweds,’ said Vanessa, to no one in particular. ‘Needs a little work.’

She’d temped for a real estate agency, too. Have to assume she learned how to read between the lines.

We wandered about, spotting the occasional evidence of prior squatters and steering clear of the unstable end where the wall had collapsed. A yawning, broken-timbered fracture now framed a ragged view of lawn and trees, but the pile of rubble looked too trifling to refill the hole, all the bricks worth salvaging long since hauled away by some frugal herdsman.

It was the gardens out back, or rather what had become of them, that really seized our fancy. Season after season, year upon year, hedges and flowerbeds and ferns had been abandoned to run riot over a couple of acres enclosed within a high stone wall. Vines had woven treacherous mats over flagstones and pathways; moss and lichens had crept up from the bases of statuary and birdbaths. A small fishpond, replenished solely by the frequent rain, had grown thick with algae, resounding with the plop of frogs when we came near. I couldn’t remember when I’d ever seen so many shades of green.

Even the walls surrounding the enclosure had succumbed to the onslaught, most of them carpeted in ivy, and Heather pointed to the sleek black shapes perched atop them that watched us or probed for insects under the greenery.

‘If anyone tries to clip your wings,’ she called to the ravens, ‘I hope you peck their eyes out!’

They stopped, heads cocked and beaks stilled. They listened, or seemed to. One squawked with its loud, ugly voice.

‘You almost get the feeling they understand,’ I said. ‘It’s that damned Hitchcock movie, you know.’

‘Well, as birds go, they’re sure not stupid, ravens aren’t,’ Vanessa said. She wrapped her arms around Heather from behind and regarded the ravens with a wistful smile, and why not — consorts of gods and goddesses, eaters of the dead on sword-strewn battlefields, bearers of arcana, these birds and their mystery and their downright pagan mythos were just the sort of things closest to her heart. In her daydreams, I was certain that they whispered in her ear as surely as they were to have whispered into Odin’s.

Starting to graduate down to finer details, we converged on a section of the encircling wall that was free of ivy, and, aside from the statues, the only aspect of these gardens-run-amok that alluded to the touch of human hands. Vanessa traced their long-ago labours with her own, fingertips caressing one of several malformed faces that leered from the wall, bulging from the stone in bas-relief.

‘God, they look like they could take your hand off in half a second,’ Heather said. ‘They’re worse than snapping turtles.’

‘Meaner, maybe,’ I said. ‘But not a whole lot brighter.’

‘Hush, both of you.’ Vanessa, doing some snapping of her own. ‘You’ll hurt their feelings.’

‘Oh, go hug a tree,’ I said, just to be contentious, only half in play, my elder self swimming up from the depths. In truth, it was still closer to the surface than I would’ve liked, but I really was trying to be a born-again lackadaisical transient.

The carvings on the wall were the sort of thing I generally associated with churches, and old churches at that — cathedrals, really — mediaeval leftovers from Catholicism’s gaudier heritage, when popes and priests still condoned a discreet nod towards all things heathen that they’d borrowed, burned, or buried beneath a layer of revisionism. Then again, some people just think they look bitchin’. Hard to say how old these particular fellows were, but they certainly didn’t appear to have put up with centuries of weathering. If they’d been carved much before 1900, I would’ve been very surprised to hear it.

They were almost all head, and their heads almost all mouth. Fierce of eye, they gaped or seemed to bellow. Their arms and legs and compact barrel-bodies looked stumpy by comparison. Some of them reached around to grab their mouths at the corner and stretch them wider still, exposing the depths of their gullets. Giants, I guessed they were, because others grappled with smaller figures of normal human proportion and stuffed these poor unfortunates into their vast maws.

‘Fe fi fo fum,’ I whispered into Vanessa’s ear, quietly, so they wouldn’t hear me. ‘I smell the blood of an American.’ Nuzzling her there and nipping at her lobe until she laughed and pushed me away.

‘What do they mean?’ Heather asked, defaulting to Vanessa on this one. ‘They’ve got to mean something, don’t they?’

‘Oh sure. It’s like pictures in stained-glass, they have a story to tell, a little lesson in them.’ Vanessa shot a playfully bitchy glance at me. ‘For illiterates.’

‘So what is it these fatheads have to say to us?’ Heather said.

‘If I’m remembering correctly, they’re to remind us that there are always forces out there much greater than we are.’

‘Wow, they’re absolutely right,’ I said. ‘For me, it was Microsoft.’

I expected recriminations from Vanessa, but no — something clearly more important had crossed her mind. She glanced about the gardens, then broke loose with a slow, broad smile as she looked at Heather and me.

‘We’ll do it here, right here, tomorrow,’ she told us. ‘Haven’t I been saying all along we’d know the right spot when we found it?’

And it was fine with me, because the place really was beautiful, and we surely wouldn’t be lucky enough to blunder across another like it anytime soon. Heather looked startled for a moment, as if our intentions had never been genuinely real until this moment, and the truth of it was only now sinking in.

‘It’s perfect,’ she said.

‘Besides,’ and Vanessa swept her hand toward the devouring heads peering from their wall, ‘if we’re getting married, we really should have witnesses.’

The money. Oh, right — that.

There are no better mousetraps any more. These days, if you want the world to beat a path to your door, you’d best come up with something new and improved going on at the other end of the mouse plugged into your computer. While still in college, I founded a little start-up software company called Cerulean Data that grew in surges over the next ten years. Our greatest achievement was developing an applications programming interface that brought the giants calling. Next big leap forward in better-faster-wilder 3D graphics. Simply put, the giants had to have it.

There arose a mighty tug-of-war over how I should handle this, with my accountants and lawyers on one side, my doctor on the other. The former clamoured in favour of licensing the API, since through me, they’d make far more money that way in the long run. But let it be understood they weren’t the ones with blood on their toilet paper, the trickle-down effect of my ravaging ulcer. My doctor, who had told me more than once that I was killing myself, voted to sell the company.

In a college business course I had learned that during the development of the original Macintosh, one of Apple Computer’s founders gave out T-shirts to his employees that said 90 HRS/WK AND LOVING IT. That’ll never be me, I vowed. Never wear a shirt like that. No. I’m going to have a life.

Ten, eleven years later, anyone who might’ve heard me back then would have been fully entitled to laugh themselves silly.

Human beings aren’t meant to live this way, Vanessa told me, because by this time she had moved into our condo and come to realise that Heather wasn’t exaggerating about how little time I actually spent there. Visitor in my own home. Human beings weren’t meant to shit blood either, but it happens.

Cerulean Data had gone public two years before Microsoft came knocking, with me as the major shareholder, and the last thing the other shareholders’ board of directors was going to do was stand in the way of something like this. All they did was rub their pudgy hands in anticipation, because they knew exactly what would happen with their stock.

So did I. So did Heather. She brokered the deals for herself and Vanessa, the two of them pulling every penny they had out of the bank and borrowing money from whoever would lend it to them to buy up as much stock as they could, then sit back and wait for the windfall. Insider trading, it’s called, and plenty of people have gone to prison for it. Worth the risk, though, and I don’t know but that only half of it was the money, and the rest of it the thrill of committing a smash-and-grab on a world that each of us wanted less and less to do with…

Maybe because of everybody we’d found out we had to share the place with.

Since Heather and Vanessa had their hearts set on a noon ceremony, in which we would each profess our vows to the other two with the sun at its zenith overhead, we planned to spend the night in the manor house. We found a ratty old broom and swept clean an area in front of the fireplace in what might once have been the drawing room. A quick test with dry leaves and scavenged kindling proved that the flue still drew smoke, and so we built a fire and spread out our sleeping bags, and it was as fine a lodging as any hotel or B&B where we’d spent a night, as long as you could overlook the lack of running water and a proper bathroom.

Food we had, bread and cheese and apples and wine, and as night fell past the windows, the chill deepened beyond the circle cast by our fire. It was all the light in the world right now, and all we needed. We sat cross-legged or sprawled along our spread sleeping bags and it seemed befitting to tell stories about this place we had found. How it had come to be; how it had got this way.

According to Heather, its decline dated back to the darkest years of World War II, while the Germans were steadily bombing England and Churchill vowed that the British would never surrender. The house belonged to a charmingly proper couple in their late middle years, distant royalty, almost assuredly, but still very far from the throne. One dark night during the Blitz, a stray bomb had taken out the end of the house, but it just so happened that one of the German planes crashed in the nearby woods. They heard it go down, and for hours they waited, until the break of dawn, when the gentleman donned his tweed hunting jacket and brought the shotgun he used for pheasants, and went looking for survivors. He found the pilot alive but injured, and marched him back to the damaged house. But instead of calling the Royal Air Force, the gentleman and his wife, quietly enraged over what was happening to their country, kept the pilot tied captive in their cellar, where they tortured him to death over the next week. Then buried him in the gardens. Shortly thereafter, they went mad with guilt and shame, and, hollow-eyed and searching for absolution, roamed the hallways of the estate until they died. The end.

Overwhelming silence; finally:

‘My god,’ said Vanessa. ‘I had no idea you could be so morbid.’

‘Still want to marry me?’

‘Yeah, more than ever.’ Fingers stroking Heather’s inner arm. ‘Only now I want to marry you so I can cure you.’

‘Does a plan like that ever work?’ I asked. ‘I mean, wouldn’t there be a lot fewer divorces if women would just forget about trying to change who it is they’re marrying and accept that it can’t be done?’

‘Well, we sure changed you, didn’t we?’ said Vanessa.

‘Did we ever.’ Heather, backing her up all the way. ‘You used to be this hypertensive workaholic I was perennially on the verge of leaving. And look at you now… unemployed and a permanent member of the leisure class.’

‘We made you what you are today Just admit it and adore us.’

‘Don’t you have a story to tell us or something?’ I asked Vanessa. ‘Because I’d sure like to hear it now.’

‘Stubborn bastard,’ she said to me, but stretched across to kiss me anyway.

And as Vanessa envisioned the history of this place, it wasn’t surprising that she would focus on the carved heads. Heather, I couldn’t help but notice, had ignored them entirely, but it was only natural that her idea of forces greater than herself should involve things plummeting from above.

In Vanessa’s firmament, the house belonged to a renowned sculptor whom the world has long since forgotten. This was during the ‘20s, in that more optimistic period after the Great War, the War to End All Wars, before the shadow of the next and even greater war began to fall across Europe. Suddenly the sculptor withdrew from his adoring public and the world at large, for reasons he would share with no one, not even his wife, because, well, men are like that. All she knew was that it seemed to follow some mysterious encounter he’d had while walking in the woods, about which he steadfastly refused to say a word. Over the years to come, he spent his days chiselling ancient faces into the garden wall, recreating carvings whose origins were shrouded in the mists of time. And even though he’d turned his back on greater fame and greater fortune, he was much happier now, and then one day he simply walked into the woods and was never seen again, although his wife said that during their final breakfast together he seemed to be holding onto a secret that brought him both joy and sorrow. And so for years and years afterwards, she simply couldn’t abide noise, in case she might hear him calling for her to reunite with him at last, at the edge of the trees, and together they would walk into the forest and slip into that much older England, where only a privileged few were now allowed to tread, and where they would join with the elder spirits of the land.

Overwhelming silence; finally:

‘But eventually she remarried, right?’ said Heather. ‘And then some Nazi asshole dropped a bomb on the house?’

‘No!’ cried Vanessa. ‘Just see if I tell you any more bedtime stories.’

Me, I was just glad I hadn’t been the one to say that.

‘Beautiful story, Vanessa,’ I said instead, and meant it, wondering if she really could hear voices; if ravens whispered in her ear after all; if, even though she’d made up the details, every word might nonetheless be true.

‘And you’re absolutely, positively sure you want to marry me?’ Heather asked her.

‘You know, I’m really not liking the way you keep steering the conversation around to that,’ Vanessa said. ‘Now what’s wrong?’

Heather, rolling onto her back: ‘Hasn’t the irony of the situation hit you yet? I mean, with the example I had set for me, way back when, I’ve always thought of matrimony as a kind of prison sentence.’ Hands laced behind her head now as she stared at the ceiling. ‘And what am I doing? I’m doubling the usual number of jailers.’

Until Vanessa, my idea of other worlds, other realms, had always tended to begin and end with cyberspace — nebulous enough to imbue with a reverential awe, yet ultimately the creation of a binary number system, and therefore not impossible to grasp.

Such arrogance. Such blinkered vision, no better than a horse allowed to see only what stands directly before its eyes.

And my idea of a power greater than myself tended to acknowledge death and only death. Veterans of wars talk of the bullet with their name on it, but since I had no wars to fight, I thought instead of that graveworm underfoot, the worm with my name on it, keeping pace with me through the soil, wherever I might go, patiently waiting for the twilight of my life so that it could begin its work at last.

In moments of insight, of honesty, I would wonder if Heather and I hadn’t sucked Vanessa into our lives because she made it easier, somehow, to believe in things we otherwise never would have. Like purpose. Like reassurance that we had not squandered our lives chasing articulated goals only to end up well-fed slaves. Like the existence of doorways to someplace, anyplace, better than those places that had shaped us as children and younger adults… a new and welcoming place that had withstood the test of time because time could not permeate it.

And while I was starting to believe in these, that didn’t mean I understood the keys that might unlock their doors. Was it faith? Longing? Or need? Was it the energies released before a blazing fire by the Saturnalian couplings of three people whose mouths and loins were so eager to violate the taboos of the only god others had tried to ram down their throats?

Or were the keys never ours to turn at all, those doors opening only for the ones who were most desired by those on the other side?

Fickle and capricious, maybe. Yet since when has life been anything but?

When Vanessa and I awoke, we woke up alone, Heather’s spot between us on the sleeping bags empty. At first we thought nothing of it. I’d last roused to tend the fire during the wee hours, while it was yet pitch black outside, and she’d still been there, curled onto her side. Vanessa recalled being awakened briefly sometime after dawn, Heather stepping over her and whispering that she had to go outside to pee.

Smouldering embers now, and chilly mists and morning dew.

We checked the house, calling down its hallways and into its forsaken rooms. Checked the garden, both sides of the wall. Perhaps she had strayed beyond, towards fields or treeline; gone for a walk with a craving for solitude or an impulse to watch border collies run sheep.

‘Or maybe it’s wedding day jitters,’ Vanessa said.

An hour, then two, and after packing and repacking our gear we had done as much as we could to kill time, unless we were to grab the broom and start sprucing up the house as a whole.

Such a peculiar thing, when something feels amiss and you’re trying not to allow your imagination to play the worst tricks it knows, the way the obsessions and compulsions take over. A plan of helpless desperation begins to hatch: if you can just dial the same phone number enough times, or look out a window, or down a street, you can eventually materialise someone out of thin air.

With me, it was the garden, patrolling its blossoms and fronds and leaves every twenty or thirty minutes. Had Heather walked here, stood there? What had I missed a half-hour ago that was in plain view? All along envying the ravens their undipped wings and their sharp eyes.

While walking past a section of the wall, for a moment it was tough to say who had startled whom more — me, or one of the ravens. With a harsh squawk and a flurry of shiny black wings, it came bursting out from behind a veil of ivy, at the same level as my knees, and it was only after it had rejoined its clan along the top of the wall, some tattered morsel glistening in its beak, that the unlikeliness of this struck me: from behind the ivy?

Where was there room enough?

I stood before the spot that had disgorged the raven, and even though I didn’t want to reach a hand into that dense greenery and pull it aside, this had to be done. And in the cavity newly revealed, there she was, or at least as near as I could tell it was her.

Seconds. Or hours. How long? Goddamned if I know. No matter how many times I bunched the ivy shut, like a curtain, then pushed it aside again, I could not change what I was seeing. Our Heather, my Heather, between stone teeth.

It occurred to me to start ripping the ivy away, so I began tugging it free a few tendrils at a time where it had anchored its roots into rock, and while I did this, yesterday’s grim little rhyme crawled through my head like the tiniest of worms.

Fe fi fo fum,

I smell the blood of an American

Features revealed — an enormous eye, glaring directly at me as I stripped it bare; a nostril the size of a basketball.

Be she alive or be she dead

The hollow in which she lay crushed was but the mouth.

I’ll grind her bones to make my bread.

Hours. Or seconds. How long? I couldn’t know, since time did not permeate here, aware only that Vanessa was running across the gardens from the house and I was meeting her halfway, trying to hold her back while shaking my head and telling her, ‘No, no, you don’t want to go back there and see this,’ and of course she did because you can’t tell a person a thing like that and expect her to listen.

Hours. Or days. Living by the clock and the sun again, when it seemed that Vanessa and I could only look at each other as if the other were to blame somehow, and finally her voice broke and she said, ‘We can’t just stay here, and we can’t leave her out there, out in that thing’s mouth, we have to tell someone…’

‘You go,’ I murmured. ‘I’ll stay and make sure… nothing else happens.’

Alone, then, I returned to the garden, half of me wanting so badly to follow Vanessa into the world of badges and inquests, because I would at least know my way around there, while the other half longed to follow Heather, if only I understood how, and leave Vanessa behind to find her own way, wherever and whenever she was able.

Because I wondered if, in the dawn, heeding nature’s call, Heather hadn’t finally heard the voice she’d always yearned to hear.

As I waited, I realised that last night we had got sidetracked and I’d never told a story of my own about this place. But for the time being I simply didn’t have the heart to contrive one, and decided that Vanessa’s tale would do, because in a way I was living it now, listening for Heather in case she called out for me to come, follow — you won’t believe what I’ve found on the other side of the inside of the wall.

But the only sound I heard was made by some of the ravens, who plainly had more purpose to their lives than I ever did, as their smooth claws found purchase halfway down one blank section of weathered wall, and slowly, with infinite patience and an intelligence I would never have dreamt of, they began using their beaks like chisels to render yet another likeness of their masters.

I was no threat.