The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (2 page)

Of course. The Okehampton bypass had been built, and altered the route of the A30. Our little village was one of several no longer bisected by the main road into Cornwall, and without hordes of holiday-makers forced to crawl past, the fast food outlet and petrol station no longer made economic sense.

Once I understood how the axis of the village had changed, I found the new primary school near an estate of new homes. There were also a couple of new (to me) shops, an Indian restaurant, wine bar, an Oriental rug gallery, and a riding school. The increase in population had pushed our sleepy old village slightly up-market. I should not have been surprised, but I suppose I was an urban snob, imagining that anyone living so deep in the country must be several decades behind the times. But I could see that even the smallest of houses boasted a satellite dish, and they probably all had broadband internet connections, too. Even as I was laughing at the garden gnomes on display in front of a neat yellow bungalow, someone behind those net curtains might be looking at my own terraced house in Bristol, horrified by what the unrestrained growth of ivy was doing to the brickwork.

Curious to know how my home appeared to others, I typed in my own address, and enjoyed a stroll around the neighborhood without leaving my desk. I checked out a few less-familiar addresses, including Michael’s current abode, which I had never seen. So
that
was Goring-on-Sea!

At last I dragged myself away and wrote catalogue copy, had a long talk with one of our suppliers, and dealt with various other bits and pieces before knocking off for the day. Neither of us fancied going out, and we’d been consuming too many pizzas lately, so David whipped up an old favorite from the minimal supplies in the kitchen cupboard: spaghetti with marmite, tasty enough when accompanied by a few glasses of Merlot.

My husband David and I marketed children’s apparel and accessories under the name “Cheeky Chappies.” It was exactly the sort of business I had imagined setting up in my rural idyll, surrounded by the patter of little feet, filling orders between changing nappies and making delicious, sustaining soups from the organic vegetables Michael planned to grow.

None of that came to pass, not even the vegetables. Michael did what he could, but we needed his income as a sales rep to survive, so he was nearly always on the road, which left me to take charge of everything at home, supervising the building work in between applying for jobs and grants, drawing up unsatisfactory business plans, and utterly failing in my mission to become pregnant.

Hard times can bring a couple together, but that is not how it worked for us. I grew more and more miserable, convinced I was a failure both as a woman and as a potential CEO. It did not help that Michael was away so much, and although it was not his fault and we needed the money, I grew resentful at having to spend so much time and energy servicing a house I’d never really wanted.

He’d drawn me into
his
dream of an old-fashioned life in the country, and then slipped out of sharing the major part of it with me. At the weekend, with him there, it was different, but most of the time I felt lonely and bored, lumbered with too many chores and not enough company, far from friends and family, cut off from the entertainments and excitement of urban existence.

Part of the problem was the house—not at all what we’d dreamed of, but cheap enough, and with potential to be transformed into something better. We’d been jumped into buying it by circumstances. Once Michael had accepted a very good offer on his flat (
our
flat, he called it, but it was entirely his investment) a new urgency entered into our formerly relaxed house-hunting expeditions. I had loved those weekends away from the city, staying in B&Bs and rooms over village pubs, every moment rich with possibility and new discoveries. I would have been happy to go on for months, driving down to the west country, looking at properties and imagining what our life might be like in this house or that, but suddenly there was a time limit, and this was the most serious decision of our lives, and not just a bit of fun.

The happiest part of my first marriage now seems to have been compressed into half a dozen weekends, maybe a few more, as we traveled around, the inside of the car like an enchanted bubble filled with love and laughter, jokes and personal revelations and music. I loved everything we saw. Even the most impossible, ugly houses were fascinating, providing material for discussing the strangeness of other people’s lives. Yet although I was interested in them all, nothing we viewed actually tempted me. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine I would ever really live in the country—certainly not the practicalities of it. I expected our life to continue like this, work in the city punctuated by these mini-holidays, until we found the perfect house, at which point I’d stop working and start producing babies and concentrate on buying their clothes and toys and attractive soft furnishings and decorations for the house as if money was not and could never be a problem.

And then one day, traveling between the viewing of one imperfect property to look at another which would doubtless be equally unsatisfactory in its own unique way, Blondie in the cassette player singing about hanging on the telephone, we came to an abrupt halt. Michael stopped the car at the top of a hill, on one of those narrow, hedge-lined lanes that aren’t even wide enough for two normal sized cars to pass each other without the sort of jockeying and breath-holding maneuvers that in my view are acceptable only when parallel parking. I thought he must have seen another car approaching, and taken evasive action, although the road ahead looked clear.

“What’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing. It’s perfect. Don’t you think it’s perfect?”

I saw what he was looking at through a gap in the hedge: a distant view of an old-fashioned, white-washed, thatch-roofed cottage nestled in one of those deep, green valleys that in Devonshire are called coombs. It was a pretty sight, like a Victorian painting you might get on a box of old-fashioned chocolates, or a card for Mother’s Day. For some reason, it made my throat tighten and I had to blink back sentimental tears, feeling a strong yearning, not so much for that specific house as for what it seemed to promise: safety, stability, family. I could see myself there, decades in the future, surrounded by children and grandchildren, dressed in clothes from Laura Ashley.

“It’s very sweet,” I said, embarrassed by how emotional I felt.

“It’s exactly what we’ve been looking for,” he said.

“It’s probably not for sale.”

“All it takes is the right offer.” That was his theory: not so much that everything had its price, as that he could achieve whatever goal he set himself. It was more about attitude than money.

“But what if they feel the same way about it as we do?”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“The people that live there.”

“But you feel it? What I feel? That it’s where we want to live?”

I thought about the children—grandchildren, even!—in their quaint floral smocks—and nodded.

He kissed me. “All right!” he cried, joyously, releasing the hand-brake. “Let’s go!”

“Do you even know how to get there?”

“You’ve got the map. Direct me.”

My heart sank. Although I had the road atlas open in my lap, I never expected to have to use it. Michael did not understand that not everyone was like him, able to look at lines and colored patches on a page and relate them to the real world. His sense of direction seemed magical to me. Even when the sun was out, I had no idea which way was north. On a map, it was at the top. In the world, I had to guess at right or left or straight ahead.

“I don’t know where we are
now,
” I objected. “We need to stop and figure it out.”

Fortunately, we were approaching a village, and it offered parking space in front of the church, so that was easily done. Michael had no problem identifying which of the wriggly white lines was the road we’d been on, and where we’d stopped and seen the house, and with that and the location of the village we were in, he was able to perform some sort of mental triangulation that enabled him to stab a forefinger down on a blank place within the loops of spaghetti representing the nameless country roads. “There,” he said with certainty. “It’s got to be there. An OS map would show us exactly, but anyway, it shouldn’t be hard to find. We’ll just drive around until we spot it.”

We drove around for the next two or three hours. Round and round and round. The same route, again and again, up and down the narrow roads, some of them like tunnels, they were so deep beneath the high-banked hedges, until I was dizzy, like a leaf swept away in a stream. Deep within those dark green lanes there was nothing to see except the road ahead, the deep, loamy earth with roots bursting through on either side, and the branches of trees overhead, through which I caught pale, gleaming shards of sky. The house remained hidden from view except when Michael drove up to higher ground, and found one of the few places where it was possible to see through, or over, the thick, ancient hedgerows that shielded nearly every piece of land from the road.

There it was, so close it must be just beyond the next curve of the road, yet forever out of our reach. The faint curl of smoke from the chimney inspired another yearning tug as I imagined sitting cozy and warm with my dear husband beside a crackling fire. I could almost smell the wood-smoke, and, closer, hot chocolate steaming in a mug.

I was hungry, thirsty and tired of stomping my foot down on an imaginary brake every time we met another car. There was a chill in the air as afternoon began to fade towards evening, and I wondered if we’d be able to get lunch anywhere, and made the point aloud.

He was impatient with my weakness. “We’ll get something afterwards. Surely they’ll invite us in for a cup of tea when we get there. They can’t have many visitors!”

“If we could find that house by driving around, we would have found it already. You’ve already taken every turning, and we’ve seen every farmyard and tumble-down shed and occupied house in the whole valley.”

“Obviously we have missed one.”

“Please, darling. It’ll be dark soon. Look, we need to try something else. Why not go to Okehampton and ask an estate agent?”

“So now you’re assuming the house is for sale.”

“No. I assume it was for sale some time in the past and will be again in the future, and it is their business to know the local market. It’s a beautiful place. We can’t be the first people to have asked about it.”

“No, but we will be the ones who get it!”

No one knew the house in the offices of the first two estate agents, and the man in the third one also stated there was no such cottage in the valley where we claimed to have seen it—that area was all woods and fields, he said—but there was something in his manner as he tried to fob us off with pictures and details of ever more expensive houses located twenty miles away that made me think he was hiding something, so we persisted, until, finally, he suggested we go see Mr. Yeo.

Mr. Yeo was a semi-retired property surveyor who had been in the business since before the War, and knew everything worth knowing about every house in this part of Devon. He lived still in the village where he had been born—Marystow—a name we both recognized, as it was one of the places we’d passed through a dozen times on our futile quest. So off we went to find him.

He was an elderly man who seemed friendly, happy to welcome us in to his home, until Michael revealed what we had come about, and then, abruptly, the atmosphere changed, and he began to usher us out again. The house was not for sale, we would not be able to visit it, there was no point in further discussion.

“But surely you can give us the name of the owners? An address to write to?”

“There b’ain’t owners. He’s not there.”

I thought at first “he” referred to the owner, unused to the way that older inhabitants of rural Devon spoke of inanimate objects as “he” rather than “it.” But Mr. Yeo made his meaning clear before sending us on our way: the perfectly desirable house we’d seen, nestled in a deep green coomb, did not exist. It was an illusion. We were not the first to have seen it; there were old folk and travelers’ tales about such a house, glimpsed from a hilltop, nestled in the next valley; most often glimpsed late in the day, seemingly near enough that the viewer thought he could reach it before sunset, and rest the night there.

But no matter how long they walked, or what direction they tried, they could never reach it.

“Have you ever seen it?”

Mr. Yeo scowled, and would not say. “ ’Tis bad luck to see ’im,” he informed us. “Worse, much worse, to try to find ’im. You’m better go ’ome and forget about him. ’Tis not a good place for you’m.”

Michael thanked the old man politely, but as we left, I could feel something simmering away in him. But it was not anger, only laughter, which exploded once we were back in our car. He thought Mr. Yeo was a ridiculous old man, and didn’t buy his story for an instant. Maybe there was some optical illusion involved—that might explain why we hadn’t been able to find the house where he’d expected it to be—but that was a real house that we’d seen, and someday we would find it.

Yet we never did. Not even when Michael bought the largest scale Ordnance Survey map of the area, the one for walkers that included every foot-path, building and ruin, could we find evidence that it had ever existed. Unless he’d been wrong about the location, and it was really in a more distant coomb, made to look closer by some trick of air and light . . . Even after we moved to Devon—buying the wrong house—we came no closer to solving the mystery. I think Michael might have caught the occasional glimpse of it in the distance, but I never saw it again.

I shouldn’t pretend I didn’t know what made Michael’s thoughts return to our old home in Devon, because I had been dreaming about it myself, for the same reason: the Wheaton-Bakers Ruby Anniversary Celebration. We’d both been invited—with our respective new spouses, of course—to attend it at their house in Tavistock in four weeks’ time. I didn’t know about Michael, but I had not been back to Devon in over twenty years; not since we’d sold the house. The Wheaton-Bakers were the only friends from that period of my life with whom I’d kept in touch, although we saw each other no more often than Michael and I did.