Jess glanced at her watch. Whatever the situation with Polly’s custody, there was no doubt her birth had taken place in remarkable circumstances, and little wonder Nora had felt connected to her baby in a unique and powerful way. To that end, there was one more scene Jess wanted to read closely before she left for the hospital. She found the page she was looking for and slipped back into the confusion and horror of that stormy Christmas Eve night.
DM Notes: Nora Turner-Bridges
January 1960
Nora woke up to the end of the world. She was surrounded by pitch-darkness, flashes of silvery-mauve light, constant low rumbles of thunder. The smell was everywhere: a salty, animal scent of soil and decay. The destruction was inside her, too, a burning, muscular agony, blindingly painful, trying to break her apart.
Nora was lost; she had no idea where she was. In the intermittent light she saw a room of unfamiliar walls and angles. Paintings she could not place, mysterious curtains, a crystal ceiling light, the shards of which jingled and jangled, setting her nerves on edge.
All around her was the noise of a train, a tunnel, a torrent. A witch’s brew of wind and rain and spite. One thing Nora knew for certain: she was alone.
And then, like leaves being thrown in the hurly-burly, it came back to her: she was at Halcyon. She’d fallen asleep in the late afternoon, after tossing and turning in the heat, and she’d had a dream, a wild and wicked dream, in which she’d been woken by a knock at the front door.
Down the stairs she’d gone and into the empty front hall, where dusk had been winning its battle against lingering afternoon, shadows lengthening across the sunlit floor.
Another knock, jarring, urgent, and Nora had opened the door to find two policemen standing there. Out of place, shadowy, yet just as in a child’s fairy tale she’d been helpless but to invite them in.
The policemen stepped across the threshold, bringing with them a deep sense of menace, and Nora was newly nervous. She begged the officers to tell her why they’d come, but as soon as they began, she wanted them to stop. The words they spoke were impossible to comprehend.
“Dead?” her dream self had said.
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Turner-Bridges.”
“But I just saw them. They just left. A picnic. A picnic down by the creek.”
“That’s where they were found.”
“Found? By whom?”
As is so often the case in dreams, she hadn’t been able to make her mind and mouth line up. Her words were imprecise, her thoughts scattered.
“Is there someone we should call to sit with you, Mrs. Turner-Bridges? Somewhere else you’d rather stay tonight?”
Thomas would sort it out, he’d be able to deal with these two men. “My brother,” she said. “My brother, Thomas...”
“One of our officers is contacting him, you mustn’t fret now; we’ll come back tomorrow to see how you’re going.”
“Tomorrow is Christmas Day,” she remembered.
“All the more reason. Don’t you worry—we’ll be back.”
There was something ominous in his comment, and when he went on to ask if one of them should perhaps stay with her at the house that night, she shivered and found herself rushing them toward the door, telling them no; no, thank you; she was fine, just fine. She’d had the strongest sense that they must leave. That all of this would end, if she could just get these harbingers of doom out of the house...
Time skipped, and in this new dream fragment, darkness had fallen. The policemen’s voices had long since faded, replaced by nighttime noises: crickets teeming in the cooling black spaces of the garden, cows lowing in the fields beyond, the eerie still that precedes a storm. Inside, the absence of human voices seemed to heighten the rest, as if permission had been granted to the other things, the secret hidden things that lurk in dark places, to emerge from the corners and shadows.
Nora was still alone in the house, standing motionless in the center of the sitting room. Her gaze moved stiltedly from one item to the next. All of Thomas and Isabel’s possessions, beautiful objects, selected with pride and care, arranged just so. Her brother had always enjoyed beauty, nothing but the best. The record player and speakers, the Herend vase on the side table by the sofa, the sterling silver photo frames. Her attention came to rest on one picture in particular; she had a copy of it in her own home in Sydney. Her brother’s family on a trip to visit her, the children in their finest clothing, the Harbor Bridge behind them.
A terrible noise rose to fill the room, an awful, alarming keening sound. Nora only understood it had come from her when she realized that her mouth was stretched wide open in a painful cry.
She wanted to wake up, she wanted this dream to end, but she couldn’t seem to break through to the surface. The secret hidden things had fled and were cowering now in the looming, lengthening shadows...
The dream skittered again, and she was running, trying to run, scrambling through the dark house, her limbs—in the way of dreams—refusing to do as they were told. She was looking for her family. They were here somewhere, she knew. They were hiding and she had to find them. When she did, she wouldwake up and know the nightmare was over. Upstairs she went, from one bedroom to the next, throwing open doors, searching, hunting, turning over the artifacts of her loved one’s lives...
And then she was awake again. Here and now, alone in the dark, a storm underway. But she wasn’t in her bedroom at Halcyon at all. There was no window on the wall to her left, the ceiling was farther away, the chest of drawers was gone.
Another flash of light and things clarified. She was in the middle of Isabel and Thomas’s bed, the covers in disarray around her, the pillows strewn. The drawers were open, clothing was on the floor. The windows were open, and the wind outside was shaking them in their sashes, making the curtains flail, whipping rain into the room.
In the next flash of light she noticed a book on the bed beside her. She recognized it at once—it was one of Isabel’s journals. Nora had seen her sister-in-law writing in it most mornings. Nora was reaching for the book when the world was plunged once more into darkness and her own body seized again with pain. She was frightened, suddenly, and alone. She needed to get back to her room, where everything was familiar.
