chapter NINE
THE LIGHTS ARE off. The house is silent. A solemn gloom fills the empty rooms, making them seem occupied by something patient and unmoving; a thing that lies in wait.
Abby Hansen is flat on her back, naked, in the bed that she once shared with Tessa’s father. Her eyes are open, but she does not see. Her legs are parted and her hands are cupped there, over her pudenda, in a protective gesture. The bedroom curtains are closed, filtering out the light, but the room is nowhere near dark at this time of day.
The house creaks and settles. Other noises sound outside: car engines, yelling children, somebody calling loudly for a dog or a child named Socrates. Far off, a police helicopter prowls the skies, its unseen occupants looking for wrongdoers.
Abby does not move. She hears none of these sounds. The only noises she registers are internal: trees and brushes rustling within the confines of her mind, the gentle thrumming of a tiny bird’s wings, a small animal padding through undergrowth, and a light breeze stirring close to the ground.
She sits up jerkily and stares at the wall – through the wall, to whatever it is that dwells in the places nobody else can see, the gaps in the world that only a few people can discern. She stays that way for several minutes, not moving, barely even breathing, just staring blindly through the solid brickwork. She does not even blink.
Abby Hansen has one foot in this world and one in another, far stranger place.
She is conscious but she is not awake; nor is she asleep, not really.
Whatever she does during this fugue-like state, she will remember nothing of it later. She will simply assume that she took a nap; that the previous night’s exertions tired her out and she’s been catching up on her rest. After all, a woman like Abby needs all the rest she can get these days.
A car radio booms outside the house; tinny dance music fills the street. Somebody starts to shout and swear; another voice joins in, but softer, less aggressive. Laughter. A car wheel-spinning away along the road, churning up loose stones. The music fades into the distance, becoming an imitation of itself, just another sad piece of aural flotsam cast adrift on the currents of life.
Still Abby Hansen does not blink. She does not move. She grips herself between the legs, as if she needs to urinate, or masturbate – perhaps she’s caught between the two acts, unsure of which is the more appropriate response.
After a short while, she twitches. It is just a slight jerk of the head, which she then tilts to the side, like a dog listening to its master’s call. She removes her hands from between her thighs. Her fingers are wet; her pubic hair glistens. The muscles in her thighs are twitching rhythmically, as if a weak electrical current is passing through them.
She slides her legs across the duvet, placing her feet on the floor and twisting to face the door. She sits like that for quite some time, as if waiting to be summoned into another room. Her face is blank, expressionless; her hands are open at her sides, as if she is balancing an invisible item in each palm. She rubs her still damp fingers together, then raises her hands and licks away the residue.
She freezes, her head still tilted to one side.
Finally, she moves again. In one smooth, clean motion, she stands and turns to face the door. Her movements are much more graceful than usual, like those of a dancer. She steps lightly across the room, her bare feet making little sound on the carpet. She walks slowly and softly, barely making an impact on the world – either this world or the other, the one contained within her. As her reflection passes across the glass of the long mirror on her dressing table, she does not even glance that way. She walks through the door and out onto the landing, not noticing that her reflection is fuzzy, faded, as if she is barely there at all.
She knows who she is – she is aware of her name – but that is all. She has no past, no future; all that exists is the present, this moment. Nothing else matters; it isn’t there, doesn’t touch her at all.
She reaches the stairs and descends them silently, heading down and towards the kitchen. She walks across the kitchen floor, to the cupboard under the sink. Bending her legs in a fluid motion, lunging so deeply that her bare buttocks almost brush against the floor tiles, she opens the cupboard door. Her head does not move; she keeps it fixed straight ahead. The muscles in her neck are tensed and bunched, standing out like cables beneath the skin.
She takes a small plastic bag filled with candles out of the cupboard, closes the door, and stands up straight. The candles are the type used for decorating cakes. These are all she has in the house. She turns around and goes into the living room, where she picks up a photograph of Tessa. The one she took in the park, a few days before the girl disappeared. In the photo, Tessa is wearing her bright red quilted gilet over a grey long-sleeved fleecy top, and her favourite dark jeans and running shoes. It is the same outfit she was wearing the day she vanished.
Abby moves across the room, not caring that she is naked. Her thighs are soaked; she’s been secreting sweat from her skin and fluid from her vagina, as if her waters are breaking prior to giving birth.
The curtains are open but nobody is passing by in the street outside. She opens the bureau beside the bookcase and takes out a brown package. She unfolds the paper package and removes the old pair of Tessa’s pyjamas, the ones the girl was wearing the night before she went away. They are still stained with her urine. She wet the bed that night for the first time in years, as if she was afraid of something or experienced a premonition of what was to come.
She returns to the stairs and ascends, holding tightly onto these items. She turns right at the top of the stairs and stands outside Tessa’s room, gazing at – no, through – the door with her thousand-yard stare. If she is aware of anything around her, she does not betray this on her face. Her eyes are still open, but they are like the eyes of the blind: wide, empty, unseeing. Glazed. For all she sees of her surroundings, they might as well be shut tight.
She reaches out without looking and opens the bedroom door. She steps inside and closes the door behind her.
The curtains are closed to ensure that the room is dim; she always keeps it this way, as a form of tribute. This room is not meant to see the sun again until her child returns.
She approaches the shrine she’s made and kneels down beside it. She places the photograph on the floor, and then begins to arrange the candles around the base of the crude pyramid. Inside the bag where the candles were stored is also a box of kitchen matches. When she’s finished setting out the candles, she lights them one by one with a match. She does not look down, but she doesn’t burn her fingers. Her body knows exactly what to do. This is not the first time she has carried out this homespun ritual, despite the fact that she has no memory of doing so before or afterwards. Like an athlete’s muscle memory, her body stores the information and carries out the task without even bothering her mind.
Once the candles are lighted, she takes hold of the pyjamas and presses them against her face, inhaling the smell of her missing daughter’s dried piss. Still there is no expression on her face.
She puts down the pyjamas and tucks her legs and feet beneath her bottom, drawing in her knees tight in front of her. Slowly, she begins to rock on her knees and calves, back and forth; a small, rhythmic movement. She smells wet grass and hears the rustling of tree branches. Somewhere beyond the grove of ancient oaks, a small figure is waiting. She cannot identify who this person is, but it seems familiar.
More liquid leaks out from between her legs.
She feels the wet grass under her legs. The wind blows against her skin, rising slowly. Branches creak; tiny animals move in the undergrowth. It is dark within the protective circle of the trees. She is outside, naked, but does not feel the cold. The light of the moon keeps her warm, even though it is a cold light, a dead light whose warmth can never reach her. Menstrual blood runs down the inside of her thighs; the animals hiding in the trees smell it and began to whine, like wolves scenting fresh meat. They are hungry. They need to feed.
Abby opens her mouth and begins to chant:
“Tessa, Tessa, Tessa... bless her, bless her, bless her... come back to me.”
Her voice is dull, flat. There is no sing-song quality to the chant, but still it is a song of sorrow, a short chorus of mourning.
“Tessa, Tessa, Tessa... bless her, bless her, bless her... come back to me.”
She rocks faster on her knees, hearing footsteps crunching towards her on the fallen leaves. The quality of the air changes subtly; someone is approaching from out of the thickest trees. Somebody is coming. The rich blood she spilled has called whoever it is to the scene.
She chants the rhyme over and over, a litany, a calling.
In front of her, the trees part; in front of her, the makeshift shrine shifts, one of the objects that form it moving slightly to create a small opening.
“Tessa, Tessa, Tessa... bless her, bless her, bless her... come back to me.”
The cold, dead moon shines down its pale light, making her milky skin shimmer.
Something moves in the opening, emerging from inside the shrine. It is a short, scrawny tree branch – not much more than a sapling. It moves sinuously, curling and twisting as it quests forth, tasting the air of two worlds that have momentarily become one.
Abby keeps chanting. She continues to rock back and forth on her knees. Her bladder fails and urine pools around her legs, soaking along with the blood and other fluids into the weave of the carpet. The smell is sharp, pungent, as it finally reaches her nostrils, like a spilled chemical.
The scrawny sapling reaches out further, towards her face. Like a small arm, its tip spreads out into four spiky wooden fingers and a thumb, and it makes to caress her cheek. Then, quickly, it changes direction and whips briskly against her flesh, making a minuscule nick and drawing a spot of blood below her right eye. Abby does not even wince; she does not pause in her lament.
“Tessa, Tessa, Tessa... bless her, bless her, bless her... come back to me.”
She rocks and chants, chants and rocks. The two worlds begin to merge more fully, and then to separate before the culmination of these events can take place. The grove of oak trees dims, becoming shadow and silhouette, and then the harsh light of the world outside the house seeps gradually back into the room. She stops speaking. She becomes still. Her eyes – although already open – snap into focus as if she is opening them for the first time.
SHE LOOKED DOWN, at the candles, and then threw down onto the floor the pyjamas she was clutching. The carpet was wet with blood and piss and ejaculate. The room smelled like a hospital toilet. She started to cry, silently but deeply. Her entire body shook with grief as it remembered giving birth to her child, her Tessa.
Once she managed to stop the tears, Abby reached out and snuffed out each of the candles with her forefinger and thumb, like a vicar putting out the votive candles in a church after prayer.
She put the candles and the matches back inside the plastic bag, gathered up the rest of her things, and left the room. She didn’t bother getting dressed. She went back downstairs and put the stuff away, then filled a plastic bucket with hot water from the tap, squirted washing up liquid into the water and stirred it with her hand. She returned upstairs, to Tessa’s room, knelt down once again, and scrubbed the carpet clean. She did not weep again. When she was finished, she rinsed out the bucket in the upstairs bathroom and left it on the floor. She took a long, hot shower to clean her body and dried herself with the oldest, toughest towel she could find in the airing cupboard. Like a hair shirt, it punished her, making her skin turn red.
She returned to her room, to her bed, and sat there, staring at the wall.
She was unsure what had just happened, but something inside her felt broken. It was a familiar feeling, one that had kept her connected to her emotions for such a long time; she remembered experiencing a sensation just like it when she lost her virginity at the age of fifteen to a family friend, and then again, when she pushed out Tessa into the world.
She picked up her cigarettes off the bedside table and lit one, drawing deeply from the smoke. She opened a drawer and took out the small whisky bottle she kept there; it was half full. She drank the whisky straight from the bottle and smoked the cigarette down to a stub.
Only when the whisky bottle was empty did she allow herself to lie back down on the bed, on top of the cheap duvet.
She thought about the guy she brought home last night and ran her hands slowly along her thighs, feeling strangely aroused. He had touched her there, too, but he did not touch her inside. Nobody could, not now. Not ever again. Other forces were at work inside her womb. She was sure of it. The desire passed, like a cloud crossing the sun.
She closed her eyes and thought about a grove of ancient oak trees, a high, cold moon, and the sound of approaching footsteps in the undergrowth. In the darkness behind her eyes, she saw a small, skinny arm with four claw-like fingers, and wondered if it was real or just a dream she’d once experienced.
She reached up and felt the small nick below her right eye. It had stopped bleeding but it was still sore. The slight pain was a comfort; it meant that all the things she struggled to remember might just be real after all.
Daisy like a flower got bad sleep. we hear noises in teh nite. bad nioses. bashing on walls. laffing. crying. I don’t now what happnin anymore. she cried lots and I hugged her. mummy and daddy didn come. clickety sound under my bed and I want it to stop. bird face man stand besides my bed. in the walls an under the floor. he there. he evawhere. captain clickety he evawhere. he even in places we hide. under the bed and in the cubod. I seen him. he see me. he smilez with his birdy mask. I write in this dairy cos I donno what else to do. words mite make him go away.
– From the diary of Jack Pollack, April 1974
PART TWO
The Crawl
“Always ask for me.”
– DS Craig Royle