Chapter Forty-Seven

Aeonian

I stole bleary eyes away from the journal and looked up into the room. The fire was burning low and warm, with Blythe stretched out before it like a soft little rug, purrs running into half-snores, feet twitching as he pursued phantom mice in his dreams. Martha must have fallen asleep some time ago, but I hadn’t noticed. Her book was at her side, and she had pulled a blanket over her shoulders. Sleeping with a slight frown on her face, she looked as if something puzzled her in her dreams.

Outside the storm was wailing still. Fresh drops of rain beat sporadically at the windowpanes like shards of metal, and every now and then as another burst hit the glass, Martha would twitch restlessly in her sleep, moaning, as if the rain was trying to rouse her.

I blinked at the clock and saw to my surprise that it was almost one am, long past the time I had intended to stay up, but before I slept, I needed water. My throat had suddenly awoken to thirst, remembering that aside from a couple of cups of tea, I had drunk little that day. My throat suddenly seemed lined with salt, meat hanging in a butcher’s shop. Perhaps it had been the fear I had felt for Philomena, as the unpleasant fate of the poacher, Brune, had come to light, or the creeping feeling that there was something truly sinister about the way her employer played with her, or perhaps it was just thirst, but either way I would have to abandon the warmth of the fire, the comforting light of the candle, and go and get a glass of water from the kitchen.

I shivered as I set aside the blankets which covered me, and at the same time felt a muscle in my neck jar painfully. I had been reading in one position and had managed to freeze a muscle in my poor neck. I grimly pressed a hand to the ache, ruefully thinking I might spend the next few days unable to turn my head one way or the other. My habit of becoming lost in a book had given me this kind of uncomfortable and inconvenient injury all too often. Although unlikely to cause serious harm, a cricked neck was always annoying. Being unable to turn one’s head, and having to instead turn one’s whole body to look at something or pick something up always made me feel like a penguin, or like one of those street performers pretending to be statues, and there are few things in life which brought me more petty irritation than living statues. I never liked things like mannequins which looked like humans but weren’t, and living statues performing in the streets always seemed like a nightmare realised: something you think is inanimate becoming animate, something you’d dismissed as not alive, coming alive.

I winced and stood straight, having to bend my knees to take hold of the candle as if I feared that my head would fall off. The candles had worn down, snakes of wax rippling down the smooth sides, making them uneven, sloping rivers of wax pooling at their bases in the little dish. I moved slowly, because my neck hurt and because I was also afraid to extinguish the candle with any sudden movement, and went to the kitchen.

Walking by candlelight is a singularly spooky experience. Perhaps it’s just the effect of seeing too many horror films or hearing ghost stories, but shadows loom and transform into sinister shapes, and the possibility that the light, the only thing in your mind at least protecting you from the darkness, might go out is most unnerving.

The darkness seemed to loom away from the light of the candle, a slinking beast, as I walked into the vast room, and it was cold. The room, so inviting and merry in the daylight, appeared cavernous and chill in the dim hours of this impenetrable night. The storm outside howled to be let within the house. Separated by only walls and sheets of glass in the windows from the desired inside, storm winds smashed hands of rain and wind against the glass and sent draughts billowing through unseen crack and gap. I shivered again, feeling little winds whip about the bottom of my bare legs, around my ankles like serpents, and went to the sink to get my drink quickly and scuttle back to the warmth of Martha’s room. I’ll put more logs on the fire, I thought as I took up a glass and turned on the tap. They would keep it warm through the night.

As I twisted the tap closed and lifted the glass to my lips, a sudden burst of wind blew through the kitchen itself. The blind over the kitchen window, which I stood in front of, snapped upwards, ripping from its fastenings and zipping upwards in a sudden motion which made me jump and slop water down my top. The water was freezing, and the additional shock made me cry out. I put the glass on the draining board and tried to pat the water off my front. I put two wet hands to the edge of the sink, and breathed in, trying to steady myself. I looked up and saw my own reflection in the window glass; a pale, ghostly face, drawn with fear and with dark shadows under her eyes. I looked old, and scared.

It was then, as I stared at myself in the window, that a light came on in the garden. The security light. It had been going off and on, sensing motion of course, with the wild winds and falling branches outside, but as it flashed on, I seemed to see movement in the bushes at the far end of the garden. Movement not caused by the storm. It was too steady, not like branches or bushes whipping backwards and forwards, but slow, purposeful, and large. I froze in place, hands gripping the edge of the sink like a vice as I pushed my head almost involuntarily forward and narrowed my eyes to try to see what I thought I had seen in the darkness, in the middle of the night, in a storm in my aunt’s back garden.

Because something in me told me there was a person out there.