We crept up on the house as though playing an advanced game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. The trees whispered our approach, passing secrets among themselves over our heads in a wind that we couldn’t feel down here. Brambles snatched, the last stringy nettles of the year wiped themselves down our coats with impotent fury and overhead branches whipped and twisted until more decaying vegetation fell around us. The scenery should have come with its own violin section and narration, telling how nobody who went in ever came out again.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I muttered, trying to give myself the pep talk that absolutelynothingabout my surroundings was offering.
‘God’s sake,’ agreed Tilly around the thumb, and Brass waggled agreement.
‘But that might be a light, and if it is, there’s someone in there,’ I carried on monologuing; it was a state I was used to. ‘Which means I have to make sure that they know about the demolition. Once I’ve done due legal diligence we can go.’Unless skeletal arms have snatched us into the depths of the darkness…‘For God’s sake!’ I snapped at myself again.
Tilly was tugging back against my arm like a dog unwilling to leave an enticing smell. ‘Horrible house,’ she said again, her dark eyes wide.
I bent down and picked her up. ‘Just a couple of minutes,’ I reassured her. ‘Then we can go home and have toast.’ For the sake of getting through this I’d even deal with any concomitant sickness.
‘Ice cream?’ Tilly murmured hopefully against my shoulder.
‘We’ll see.’ The last recourse of the lying mother. ‘But let’s just do this first.’
She settled herself on my hip, wellies streaking my work coat with mud and Brass squashed uncomfortably into my neck, so I walked forward to the accompaniment of swinging boots and part of my vision obstructed by a large stuffed dragon. The front door was still unfastened and swung inwards at my touch to slam back against the hallway wall with a crash like the last call of doom. Tilly hid her face in my neck.
‘It’s all right,’ I said in a desperate attempt to reassure myself. ‘It’s all fine.’
I couldn’t hear the wings this time, but it was evident that the window showing the faint light was the one hidden behind the door and there was absolutely nothing for it but to go and look. I stood in the hall, feeling the unevenness of loose tiles beneath my feet, and wavered. Did I put Tilly down and try to go in alone, but leaving my daughter to the mercy of the house? Or did I take her with me, when she would be in the firing line if the birds were just sitting there in the room waiting for the door to open? I shifted her weight to my other hip and stared at the door. My heart was hammering so hard that I was afraid it might shake her out of my arms with the force of its beat, and the rising nausea could have been from some strange nursery-created bug or the prospect of what lay within the depths of the house.
Quadruple pay. I could do this.
‘Keep your head down,’ I said to Tilly, flipping the hood of my coat so it covered her hair. ‘Everything is going to be fine, I promise.’
I advanced slowly, step by step, one arm outstretched as though I were about to perform some religious rite but had had my crucifix torn away. Something crunched beneath my feet but I didn’t dare look down. Besides, Brass was obscuring my vision, acting like dragon blinkers, which prevented me from seeing whatever I was standing on. Step by step I crept on.
When my fingers could brush the handle of the door I announced myself. ‘I’m Libby Douthwaite and I need to ensure that this house is empty,’ I said to the resounding shade, cracked tiles and ominous door handle. ‘I am here in a legal capacity.’ My voice sounded unnatural, high and squeaky.
The house didn’t respond. There was an almost ominous absence of sound behind the door. I shuffled myself around so that the side holding Tilly was furthest away from it, turned the handle, hauled the door open as though it weighed a tonne, and simultaneously threw myself against the wall.
The silence went on. The birds were gone.
‘Oh.’ The anticlimax was resounding. Nothing flew at me; there were no claws or beaks, no dragging feathers against my face. Only a dark room, funnelling back into a dusty distance and the image of an open window, the outlines of furniture.
And a woman sitting watching me.
6
I advanced one, two slow steps, mostly to check that it wasn’t a huddled corpse in that chair, keeping Tilly’s face pressed against me and hidden under my coat hood. The figure didn’t move but was most evidently alive. In the light that filtered through the trees beyond and in through the dingy window, two sharp brown eyes were fixed on my face with a beaky nose between them.
I wasted a moment wondering if the birds had become this woman: if they were, in aScooby Doo-like effort, crouched and perched under that raggy shirt and skirt, ready to burst forth and contain me in a wild swirling feathery mass. But, as I took one more hesitant step into the room, the woman stood up and held out a piece of card towards me. It had a few words printed on it in bold black marker pen.
I am an elective mute and cannot speak to you. My name is Isobel Isherwood.
‘Oh, that’s just great,’ I said aloud.
The woman fumbled behind her for a second and produced another piece of card.
I’m mute, not deaf.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered, chastened.
‘Go home, Mummy,’ Tilly muttered into my hair. ‘Go home, now.’
The bony woman’s attention switched. Her face softened from the unnatural alertness which drew her skin against her and made it parchment-like, into a small smile. This made previously indistinct wrinkles spring forth around those bright eyes and her pursed mouth cracked open to reveal very white teeth.
Another moment’s scrabbling and she located a piece of paper and a thick pen, wrote a few words and held them up.
