Wake Wood (8 page)

Calmer, although still trembling, Deirdre smiled. ‘I’m going back today. I’m looking forward to it.’

‘I know you are, my pet,’ Mary replied soothingly.

‘I can’t wait.’

‘This time that we’ve had together has gone so quickly.’ There was an infinite sadness in Mary’s voice
that
struck a chord with Louise. She recognised the same depth of sorrow that beset her whenever she thought of Alice.

Mary opened her bag and lifted out a strange contraption. Roughly woven from rope and twigs, it resembled a sort of necklace with attached bracelets – or neck and hand shackles. It reminded Louise of the enormous but similar wooden structure at the back of Arthur’s house that had been constructed to hold the cage that contained the cocoon-type object. Both were rough, rustic and reminiscent of pagan tribal artefacts.

‘Here you go, my pet.’ The moment Mary placed the rope-and-twig contraption around Deirdre’s neck and hooked her niece’s hands into the ‘bracelets’ the girl stopped shaking.

Stunned, Louise shivered as the hairs on the back of her neck rose.

Mary saw Louise watching her and Deirdre and read fear in her eyes. Embarrassed, she took her purse from her bag, removed a banknote and thrust it at Louise. ‘For the sunglasses.’

Louise pulled herself together and checked it. ‘I’ll get your change.’

‘Keep it.’

‘I couldn’t possibly,’ Louise demurred. ‘Wait, Mary …’

‘I’ll pick it up later.’ Desperate to leave, Mary pushed past Louise and shepherded Deirdre out of the door and down the street.

Louise wanted to follow them but the middle-aged woman who’d been examining the bath attachments
accosted
her again. ‘I think I will take this shower attachment, if you don’t mind. If it doesn’t fit, I can bring it back, can’t I?’

‘If you haven’t used it and the box is intact, yes, of course.’ Louise took the box from her and went to the till.

When she was free to look through the window again, the street was devoid of people. There was no sign of Deirdre, Mary Brogan, or the young couple, only the snow, pristine and glistening in the thin watery sunlight.

The rush of customers was short-lived. By lunchtime the shop was empty. There was no doctor’s surgery that day, so Louise decided to take advantage of the lull to tidy the shop. While she was restocking the shelves she was startled by a peculiar noise, accompanied by the steady tramping of feet.

She opened the door.

A procession of townsfolk was heading down the main street towards her. A few people in the front row were rattling sticks in hollow bamboo tubes, those behind simply banging sticks together. There was no musical rhythm to the din they were making and the sound that filled the air was discordant, weird, almost primitive in its intensity.

Wondering what the procession was in aid of, Louise walked towards them. No one in the column of people met her eye or appeared to notice her existence. They looked straight through her as though she was invisible.

Every one of them kept their sights fixed straight
ahead
as they continued on their way past Louise, the open door of the pharmacy and the shuttered shops that lined the street. She noticed that all the people, men as well as women, wore black feathers in their lapels or affixed to their clothes or hats.

Mary Brogan was the last but one to pass her. Her niece Deirdre brought up the rear.

Mary alone turned to look at Louise as she passed. She gave Louise a wan smile before walking on.

Deirdre slowed her pace. She was wearing the rope-and-stick contraption Mary had strung around her neck and wrists, and the new sunglasses concealed her eyes. She lifted her hands and lowered the glasses as she drew alongside Louise. For the first time Louise noticed the colour of Deirdre’s eyes, a startlingly clear brown.

Louise stared back, noting the braces cemented on to Deirdre’s teeth and her childish, undeveloped figure. The girl she had placed in her mid to late teens was clearly younger than she’d first thought. No more than twelve or thirteen years old.

Deirdre smiled, displaying the metalwork on her teeth. Her voice was quiet but it cut through Louise like a knife.

‘Alice has a lovely voice.’

Devastated, Louise reeled back into the pharmacy window.

‘What did you say?’

Deirdre didn’t answer. Simply carried on smiling as she followed the rest of the residents of Wake Wood down the street.

Louise closed her eyes. Images whirled through her mind’s eye at breakneck speed.

Alice as she had last seen her in her coffin. Her skin a deathly pale grey – the exact same shade as Deirdre’s. Her hair unnaturally black in comparison to her face.

The prescription Mary had handed her for Deirdre’s Ventolin. A prescription that bore Mary Brogan’s Wake Wood address and was more than a year out of date.

The ceremony in Arthur’s yard, culminating in the emergence of a fully grown, fully developed man from a womb-like chrysalis. The umbilical cord Arthur had cut with a blade. The man, naked, covered in blood, just like a newborn baby.

The black feathers attached to the clothes of the people marching in the procession. The strange object Mary had fastened around her niece’s neck.

Alice has a lovely voice
.

Alice had been dead and buried for over a year. How would Deirdre know that Alice had a lovely voice unless she were dead too?

How did Deirdre know Alice’s name?

The man walking about Wake Wood with the woman he loved, who so obviously loved him too.

Had he returned from the dead? Had Deirdre?

That simply wasn’t possible. The dead were dead. Gone for ever from the living. Never to be seen again.

They didn’t walk the streets arm in arm. Gaze lovingly … longingly at one another. Was she going insane? Had the loss of Alice finally tipped her into madness?

LOUISE RETURNED TO
her shop after the procession had disappeared from view. It was empty. She looked at the boxes of stock waiting to be put out on the shelves and returned them to the stockroom. The last thing she was capable of was working.

Not wanting to dwell on the question of whether or not she was going mad, exhausted by speculating as to what had prompted Deirdre’s comment about Alice’s ‘lovely voice’, Louise decided to pay Mary Brogan a visit. She knew where Mary lived because her town-centre address had been on the prescription Mary had given her.

The more she considered it, the more she thought it strange that Deirdre’s prescription should carry Mary Brogan’s address. Surely any mother would ensure that her asthmatic daughter would pack more medication than she needed before visiting a relative.

She closed the pharmacy, locked the door and walked to Mary’s home. It was a neat terraced house in a street peppered with dilapidated buildings. Most of the doors were boarded up. Mary’s was freshly varnished with a polished lion’s-head brass door knocker.

There was no answer to her knock. She checked her
surroundings
. The street was empty, which wasn’t surprising. The procession had been a large one. She hadn’t counted heads but she began to wonder if everyone in the town had joined it and, if so, why.

The more she thought about the noise they’d been making and the almost trance-like state of the participants, the less it made any sense. Was it a religious occasion? An anniversary of some kind? Had something traumatic happened in the history of Wake Wood; if so, why was it being celebrated? Was it somehow connected to the offerings tied to the circle of standing stones she and Patrick had stumbled across on their night trek after the car had broken down the night before? Or the strange happenings she’d witnessed in Arthur’s yard?

The more Louise mulled over events, the more unanswerable questions she came up with. She left Mary’s door and took refuge from the rain that was now melting the snow, sheltering in the porch of a derelict house a few doors down.

Half a damp, bone-chilling hour later she saw Mary Brogan approaching. She was wheeling a bicycle. Given Mary’s long flowing skirts and scarves, the bicycle appeared somewhat incongruous. Two bags of shopping filled with the staples of bread, milk and coffee hung from the handlebars. Louise wondered if Mary was wheeling the bike because she was afraid of her clothes getting caught up in the wheels. If so, why even take the bike to the shops?

It was then that Louise realised she was beginning to look for odd and sinister aspects in all her neighbours’
movements
. Why shouldn’t her neighbours march in an unmusical procession down the main street of Wake Wood if they wanted to? Why shouldn’t Mary Brogan take a bicycle with her when she shopped? And why shouldn’t Arthur visit them at the cottage early in the morning, especially if he was concerned about them? After all, he was Patrick’s business partner. And Patrick’s ability to do his job was one of Arthur’s legitimate concerns.

Louise waited until Mary unlocked her door. When Mary picked up the bags of shopping Louise rushed down the street, in through the open door and into the tiny hall after her. Mary dropped the bags, spun round and tried to close the door against her. But not to be thwarted, Louise forced her way through. Mary retreated. Grabbing Louise’s clothes in a futile attempt to steady herself, she fell backwards on to the stairs.

Louise’s phone started to ring as she kicked the door shut behind her. She ignored it and loomed over Mary, pinning her down.

‘Tell me my daughter’s name!’ she demanded.

‘I don’t know,’ Mary protested.

Louise grabbed Mary’s arms and held her wrists above her head, fast against the tread of one of the stair risers. ‘Tell me my daughter’s name,’ she repeated earnestly.

‘I don’t know. Truly,’ Mary insisted.

‘Tell me!’ Louise stared into Mary’s eyes.

‘I don’t know.’

There was an honest sincerity in Mary’s voice that Louise found difficult to ignore. ‘Her name was Alice,’
she
informed her coldly. ‘Now tell me. How did your niece know that?’

‘Your phone is ringing,’ Mary said, as though Louise couldn’t hear it.

‘It’s not urgent.’

The phone stopped and Louise stepped back. Seeing Mary cower as if she were about to hit her, Louise felt ashamed. Ashamed of breaking into Mary’s house the way she had, but more than that, ashamed of threatening Mary in her own home. What was she doing? What had she become? She leaned back weakly against the front door.

When Mary realised she was free to move, she pushed herself off the stairs, rose to her feet and walked into the living room. To Louise’s amazement, Mary beckoned her forward.

After a moment’s hesitation, Louise followed Mary into her warm, cosy, old-fashioned living room. The carpet and three-piece suite were worn and shabby but spotlessly clean. A fire blazed behind a brass guard in the hearth and the fire irons shone, highly polished, in the light from the flames.

The wooden mantelpiece was covered with knick-knacks, principally small china animals; the sort of cheap ornaments given away as fairground prizes or bought in bargain-priced novelty shops by children with precious pocket money as gifts for their mothers. In pride of place in the centre was a silver-framed photograph of Deirdre. She was wearing a straw hat and smiling as she leaned on a farm gate. Behind her, horses grazed in a field. Louise wondered if
the
picture had been taken locally, in Wake Wood.

‘Sit down.’ Mary offered Louise a chair. When Louise took it, Mary sat opposite her and leaned forward. Silence reigned for a full minute. When Mary finally spoke it was obvious she’d chosen her words with care.

‘I understand your pain, Louise, but I worry about you. You’re putting yourself in serious danger.’

Louise shook her head. ‘I saw something last night. Something strange … then Deirdre spoke to me about Alice … about her having a lovely voice. Alice adored singing. Her teachers said she was talented … she sang all the time … loved learning new songs …’ Louise suddenly remembered her reason for visiting Mary. ‘I’m looking for an explanation as to why Deirdre mentioned Alice’s voice.’

‘Put the light on.’

Louise reached out to the side table next to her and switched on a lamp.

‘You’ve suffered a great tragedy with the loss of your daughter,’ Mary sympathised. ‘But forget what you’ve seen and heard here. What goes on in Wake Wood is not for everyone.’

‘And what does go on in Wake Wood?’ Louise demanded.

‘Please,’ Mary begged, ‘you and Patrick should try to make another baby to love.’

‘I can’t. There were problems.’ Louise bit her lip, fighting back the memory. ‘The doctors told me that my first would be my last.’

Mary nodded. ‘I know how you feel.’

‘No, I don’t think you do.’ Louise watched Mary turn
her
head and gaze longingly at the photograph of Deirdre next to the china dogs and cats on the mantelpiece. Realisation dawned. ‘Deirdre’s not your niece.’ It wasn’t a question.

Mary refused to meet Louise’s eye.

‘So please, tell me what’s going on,’ Louise persisted. ‘I won’t leave until you tell me the truth.’

Mary left her chair and knelt in front of Louise. She put her arms around her, and pushed her face very close to Louise’s. ‘You want your daughter back, don’t you?’

Louise’s voice was thick, clotted with tears. ‘Is that really possible?’

‘I can’t say because I don’t know enough about you or about Alice. And that’s the truth, Louise.’

‘Can anyone in Wake Wood help us?’

‘I don’t know.’

Louise felt she had no choice but to accept what Mary had told her. Her phone began to ring again. She took it from her pocket and answered it. Patrick’s voice echoed down the line.

‘Hey, how are you?’

‘Fine,’ she lied.

‘I was hoping you could come out on a job. I need your help.’

Louise was conscious of Mary watching her. ‘I can’t right now, I’m busy,’ she demurred.

‘I wouldn’t have asked if I could manage without you,’ Patrick pressed.

Mary left her chair and went into the hall. She picked up her shopping bags and carried them through to the
kitchen
, where she began opening cupboard doors and putting away the food she’d bought.