“Don’t call me that, Mummy. No one’s allowed to call me that ’cept Bert.”
“Oh!” Fern laughs uncertainly as Bert gives her an apologetic smile. “Of course. Sorry, Stevie.”
Stevie smiles then, big and wide and generous, and tells her mother about the duck pond and all the bread they threw in andthen at one point, in a loud, strident voice, she declares,“And there were piles of birdshiteverywhere!”
“Stevie!” Fern laughs and then Bert’s laughing and so am I, and Stevie grins at me in that way she does, and that’s when I notice her hands are dusted with chalk in pink and green and blue. I frown, thinking about those words outside the house scrawled onto the ground, and an ominous, frightened feeling lights up in me like a match head.
TWENTY-TWO
As I turn onto Beacon Terrace on my way back from the green, I see an elderly woman with a shopping trolley on the same stretch of pavement as me. I don’t think too much about it, other than supposing she is going for her groceries now curfew has been lifted for the day. It’s only as she nears the Webber house that I realize the woman has swerved out into the road, walking in a large semicircle and only mounting the curb again once she is past the front gate. All the while she is staring at number thirteen with such suspicion and fear that it takes me straight back to Paul skinning rabbits and saying scared people do strange things. I scuff at the faded chalk markings with my feet. I think of Vicky lying in a coma, intubated, throat stung fat and swollen. Someone has wiped away the words on the fence and writtennew ones, not in chalk but in thick black paint. It no longer saysbE Not afrAId.
It now readsBurn The Witch.
Paul is smoking restlesslyin the doorway when I reach the porch, as if he has been looking out for my arrival. He looks amped up, muscles twitching under his skin. “Who’s up there with her, Mina?” he barks at me. I can see sweat glistening on his skin. “Who’s she talking to?”
I follow him slowly to the bottom of the stairs, listening. I can hear Alice’s voice, strident and loud, like a burned-out priest administering last rites. I climb a little farther up the stairs until I can see through the gap in the banister. Alice’s bedroom door is closed. I catch a trace of that smell, so dark it is almost bloody. Her voice rings out, now singing a song.
“This is a shit show. I thought you were meant to do something! I thought you were here to help her!”
He runs a hand over his face, Adam’s apple bobbing convulsively in his throat. His voice is hard-knuckled, ugly.
“Paul, you have to calm down.”
“I’ll calm down when you fix my daughter!”
I bite back the urge to tell him Alice doesn’t need fixing, that she isn’t broken. Instead I say, “Where’s Sam?”
Paul shrugs.
“God knows. He took off after that séance, didn’t he? Probably halfway over the Tamar by now.”
I climb the stairs barefoot and silent, trying to catch what Alice is saying but her voice is so slippery and the words are a language I no longer recognize. Her voice dips and rises like aspring tide and by the time I’m pushing open the bedroom door and saying, “Alice, I’m coming in,” I’m almost sure she is speaking an old, eldritch language, something buried in a peat bog or dug out of the ice.
Alice is sitting onher bed with her back to the room. She is cross-legged, T-shirt sticking to her spine in damp, sweaty patches, the sunburned skin of her neck visible with her head bowed forward. Her hands are clasped over her ears, voice loud and unmusical. I open my mouth to get her attention when a flicker of movement catches my eye. My heart ratchets up, throat tight. My head turns toward the fireplace where I could have sworn a clutch of pale fingers has quickly withdrawn into the black throat of the chimney; nails dirty and rimed with soot, skin limpid and gray. My pulse ticks at the back of my eyeballs, my breath fish-hooked in my throat. There is nothing there.
No. No. I’m tired. My mind is playing tricks on me.
Still, though. Still. It’s as if my synapses have been deadened and cauterized. I stare at the fireplace and when Alice turns her head stiffly and looks at me I wonder if she knows just how frightened I am.
“Did you see her, Mina?” she whispers.
“No,” I say. “I didn’t see a thing.”
I step toward Alice, noticing the Walkman on the floor beside her, headphones spooled messily.
“The batteries have died,” she says softly, lowering her hands. “Now I can hear her all the time. I’ve tried everything but I can’t drown her out.”
I stare at her. Sitting this way with her feet tucked beneath her, she looks younger than her years, her face a portrait of misery. I wonder if we pushed her too far with the séance, if our very presence here has simply made things worse. I hear Oscar’s voice telling me I wasn’t ready for this, that I was unexperienced, unprepared. Alice looks up at me.
“I just want to be normal,” she whispers. I take a step toward her.
“Alice, you need to listen to me. Yesterday I went up to that house on Tanner’s Row. I gathered together all the broken pieces of the witch’s bottle and brought it back here.”
“Why?”
“So I can prove to you that it’s just a bottle. You need to see that with your own eyes. Yes, there’s some gross stuff inside it—pee and hair and bent pins—but that’s all it is.”
My heart is still beating uncomfortably fast and I’m not convinced my voice is quite steady. I don’t like being so close to that fireplace, the dark void above it. I wonder if I will see those fingers tonight in my dreams, pale and arachnid.