Nocturnes (2004) Read online

  My mother never recovered. She cried and cried, until at last she could cry no more, and then body and spirit surrendered themselves to eternal night. My father grew old and quiet, and the sadness hung about him like a mist. I could not confess to him that I had denied the Erlking, and that he had taken another in my place. I carried the blame inside me, and vowed that I would never let him take another being who was under my protection.

  Now I lock the windows and bar the doors to the outside, and give the dogs free roam of the house. My children’s rooms are never locked, so that I can reach them quickly, day or night. And I warn them that if they hear the knocking of branches at their window, they must call me and never, ever open the window themselves. And if they see a bright and shiny object dangling from a tree branch, then they must never reach for it, but should continue on their way, always remaining on the true path. And if they hear a voice offering them sweet things to taste for the promise of an embrace, then they should run and run and never look back.

  And, in the light of the fire, I tell them tales of the sandman, who tears out the eyes of small boys who will not sleep; and of Baba Yaga, the demon witch, who rides in a chariot of old bones and rests her palms on the skulls of children; and of Scylla, the sea monster, who drags men into the depths and has an appetite that can never be appeased.

  And I tell them of the Erlking, with his arms of bark and ivy, and his soft, rustling voice, and his gifts to trap the unwary, and his appetites, which are so much worse than anything they can imagine. I tell them of his desires so that they will know him in all his forms, and they will be ready for him when he comes.

  The New Daughter

  In truth, I cannot recall the first time I noticed the change in her behavior. She was always developing, altering—or so it seemed—with each passing day. It is the element of being a parent that is most difficult to explain to those without children of their own: the fact that every day brings something new and unexpected, revealing some previously unsuspected facet of their personalities. It is harder still for a father bringing up a daughter alone, for there will always be some part of her hidden from him, unknowable to him. As she grows older, the mystery of her intensifies, and he is forced to rely on love and memories in an effort to remain close to the little girl that was once his own.

  Or perhaps I can talk only about myself, and other men have no such fissures in their understanding. After all, I was married once, and thought that I understood the woman who shared my bed, but her dissatisfaction with the life she had made for herself must have been simmering for many years before it revealed itself to me. I was shocked when it emerged, but not as shocked as I might have been. I suppose, looking back, that her discontent must have communicated itself to me in a thousand subtle ways, and that I had already been preparing myself to receive the blow long before it landed.

  That makes me sound like a passive element in all that occurred, but I am not, by nature, an aggressive man. I am not even terribly proactive in most matters and, when I look back on the path that led my wife and me to the altar, it was she, not I, who made most of the running. Still, I was prepared to fight her for the children, even though my legal advisers, and my instincts, told me that the courts rarely decided in favor of the father in such cases. To my surprise, my wife decided that the children were a burden that she wished to relinquish, at least for a time. They were very young—Sam was one, Louisa six—and my wife did not feel that she could take advantage of the opportunities she sought in the wider world while carrying two children in her arms. She left them with me, and there was an end to it. She calls them a couple of times each year, and sees them when she passes through the country. Sometimes she talks about them coming over to join her at some point, but she knows that it will never happen. They are settled, and doing well in their lives. They are—or were—I think, happy.

  Sam is gentle and quiet, and likes to stay close to me. Louisa is a more independent spirit, inquisitive and testing of the constraints placed upon her, and as she approaches adolescence, these aspects of her character have become more and more pronounced. And so it may have been that she had already become something different, even before we took the house for the summer. I do not know. All I can say for certain is that I awoke one night to find her standing in the darkness by my bedside, my son asleep beside me. I said to my daughter—or what used to be my daughter—“Louisa, what’s the matter?”

  She replied: “I’m not Louisa. I am your new daughter.”

  But I move ahead of myself. I should explain that this announcement was preceded by some tumultuous months. We moved, abandoning our life in the city for what we hoped would be a more peaceful one in the countryside. We sold our house for what still seems to me an obscene sum of money, and bought an old rectory on five acres by the outskirts of the town of Merrydown. It was a beautiful property, and absurdly underpriced, leaving me with a considerable nest egg with which to provide for our comforts and for the education of my children. Both Louisa and Sam were due to transfer to new schools anyway, and their friends would be scattered. Neither objected to the prospect of a move and my ex-wife, after the obligatory grumblings, decided to raise no formal objection. In any case, I informed them that nothing was written in stone: we would try it for a time and, if we were not all happy by the end of the trial period, we would return to the city.

  The house had five bedrooms, four of them quite substantial in size, so the children were able to claim spaces for themselves far larger than had previously been available to them in the city. Two remained unoccupied, while I took possession of the last, to the rear of the house. In addition, there was a large kitchen that overlooked the rear garden, a dining room, a study that I annexed for my own use, and a spacious living area lined with oak bookshelves. To one side of the house were some old stables. They had not been used in some time, but the faint smell of hay and horses still hung about them. The stables were gloomy and damp and, after a cursory investigation, the children decided that they would provide little scope for play.

  It appeared that the rectory had been on the market for some time, although I did not learn why this was so until some months after it was sold to me. Apparently, it had never provided a good living, and the care of the village’s flock now lay with clerics from the larger town of Gravington, who took turns offering services in the old chapel.

  An artist, an illustrator of children’s stories, had lived in the rectory for a time after the last cleric had departed, but she did not stay very long and had since died in a house fire far to the north. I suspected that she had trouble keeping up the modest rent on the rectory, if the nature of her work was anything to go by. I came across a box of hers amid a heap of rubbish and dead branches at the back of the house. Some attempt had been made to burn the whole pile, but either the fire had not taken or rain had doused it, for the box was wet and the ink had run on many of the drawings. Still, it was clear from what remained that her true vocation probably did not lie in working with material for children. The illustrations were uniformly horrific, I felt, dominated by pale half-human creatures with melted features, their eyes narrow oval slits, their nostrils unusually wide, and their mouths agape, as though they relied predominantly on smell and taste for their survival. Some had long tattered wings extending from bony nodes upon their backs, the membranes punctured and torn, like those of dead dragonflies rotting on the spider’s web. I kept none of the drawings for fear that the images might disturb the children if found, and the addition of a little paraffin to the fire ensured that, this time, all was burned.

  There was nothing structurally at fault with the rectory itself, and the introduction of new paint and furnishings meant that the previous dark hues and heavy drapes were quickly replaced by summer tones, brightening our surroundings considerably. There were apple trees at the end of the back garden, from which a series of small, sloped fields descended gradually toward a stream overhung by thick green trees. It was good land, but none of the locals appeared a
nxious to pursue grazing rights upon it for their cattle, despite repeated offers on my part.

  The reason for their reluctance could be traced to a mound in the third field, equidistant from our house and the stream. It was perhaps twenty feet in circumference and a little over six feet in height. Its origins were unclear: some in the village referred to it as a fairy fort, a former dwelling place for some older, mythical race. Others said that it was a burial mound, although it went unmentioned as such in archaeological records of the area and no one appeared to have any idea of who, or what, might be buried beneath it. Louisa liked the idea of having a fairy castle on our land, and so she chose to regard it as such. Frankly, I was happy to do the same, little people being infinitely less troubling to my slumbers than the possibility of large numbers of old bones slowly decaying beneath green grass and daisies. Sam, by contrast, avoided the mound, preferring that we take a circuitous path through adjoining fields rather than pass close by it, while his more adventurous sister took the direct route, frequently choosing to wave at us from her perch upon its topmost point as we passed.

  Sam was always a little in awe of his sister and her mercurial qualities, while Louisa in turn remained protective of her brother while simultaneously urging him to be less of a little boy and more of a man. The result was that Sam, against his better judgment, would find himself in awkward, and sometimes painful, situations from which his sister would have to extricate him. These inevitably ended in tears, recriminations, and a temporary respite from his sister’s dares before slowly she would set to work on him again. There was always something new with which to tempt him, some shiny aspect of herself with which to fascinate him. Once again, perhaps that was why I failed to spot the changes in her, for they took place against a constantly shifting backdrop of moods and humors.

  Yet now that I consider the matter more closely, I do recall an incident two weeks after we arrived. I woke to feel a cool breeze flowing through the house, accompanied by the sound of a window beating against its frame. I left my bed and followed the sound to my daughter’s bedroom. She was standing at the window, reaching out to the sill.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  She turned quickly from the window, pulling it closed behind her.

  “I thought I heard someone calling to me,” she said.

  “Who would be calling to you?” I said.

  “The people in the fort,” she replied, but she was smiling as she said it, and I took it for a joke, even as I noticed that she appeared to be concealing something from my view as she climbed back into bed. I went to the window and looked out, but I could see only blackness beyond. On the windowsill itself I spied some fragments of painted wood, torn from the frame close by the lock, but then a wind rose and blew them away into the night.

  I returned to Louisa. She had drifted back to sleep almost immediately, as though she were wearied by her efforts, her hands hidden beneath the blankets. There was a leaf caught in her hair, perhaps blown in through the window, and I removed it gently, brushing the rest of her hair away from her brow so that it would not tickle her in her sleep. As I did so, my fingers touched something rough close by her shoulder. Gingerly, I drew back the blanket. Her doll, Molly, which she always kept close to her in bed, was gone. In its place was a rough form made of straw and twigs. It resembled a person except that its arms were unusually long and its torso was distended, the belly enormous. Six matted strands of woven hair hung from its head. There was a circular hole where its mouth might have been, and oval sockets for eyes. Four dandelion leaves intersected at its back in a crude imitation of wings.

  I saw movement inside the hollow of its abdomen. I looked closer and discerned a large spider trapped beneath the branches and straw. It could not have found its way inside by accident, for the figure was too tightly woven. Instead, whoever was responsible for its construction had deliberately placed the creature within. It probed at the gaps, attempting to escape from its prison. As I removed the figure from my daughter’s grasp, the spider seemed to shudder once, then curled in upon itself and died.

  I carried the primitive form from my daughter’s room and placed it on a shelf in my study before returning to bed. When I went back to check on it the next morning, it had fallen to pieces. No trace of its previous form remained, and the spider that had once dwelt within it was now merely a ball of dry, withered limbs.

  It was almost midday when I at last had a chance to talk to Louisa about the incident of the night before, but she could recall nothing of our conversation, nor could she tell me where Molly had gone or how the straw figure came to be in her place. I left her scouring the house for her lost doll. The sky had darkened and the promise of rain hung in the air. Sam was napping, and our housekeeper, a local woman named Mrs. Amworth, was keeping one eye on him while working through a pile of ironing. Despite the prospect of the weather changing, I decided to take a walk and found myself, not entirely without design, making my way toward the mound in the third field. Even in bright sunshine it had a vaguely threatening aspect to it; now, beneath lowering skies and gray clouds, it seemed almost to have a palpable consciousness, as though something within were brooding and conspiring. I tried to dismiss the sensation, but Louisa’s words from the night before kept returning to me. Her window faced out upon the mound. She could see it in the distance when she stood at the glass. Beyond it lay only the river and empty fields.

  I reached the mound and squatted silently at its base. I laid my hand upon it, the earth warm beneath my palm. I was experiencing no unease now. In fact, quite the opposite: I found myself relaxing, my eyes closing, the scent of wildflowers and running water filling my nostrils. I wanted to rest, to lie upon the ground and forget my worries, to feel the grass against my skin. I think that I almost began to stretch myself upon it when an image came unbidden to me. I both saw and felt a presence approaching fast from beneath the mound, ascending along a tunnel of earth and roots, segmenting worms and crushing insects as it came. I glimpsed white skin, as of a creature that had spent too much time away from the light; long-lobed ears that came to sharp points; wide, flattened nostrils beneath slitted depressions where once eyes might have been revealed, now concealed by a layer of veined skin; and a mouth set in a permanent grin, the lower lips drawn down to create a triangle of teeth, flesh, and gum. Its ruined, wasted wings were held tight against its body, occasionally flapping tentatively against the earth walls as though desirous of the freedom of flight that had long been denied them.

  And it was not alone. Others followed it, ascending toward where I knelt, drawn by my warmth and driven by an anger that I could not comprehend. My eyes snapped open, my mind emerging from its torpor, and I snatched my hand away and threw myself back from the mound. But for a brief moment I felt movement beneath my palm, as though some force had tried to thrust itself through the crust of the earth in order to grasp me to itself.

  I rose to my feet and wiped the grass and dirt from my hands. Where my palm had rested only moments before, I now glimpsed a patch of red. Warily, I stabbed at it with a twig. It tumbled down the slope of the mound, a little pile of disturbed earth beneath it exposed by the movement, and came to rest at my feet. It was a doll’s head, separated from its body, worms coiling through its thick red hair and beetles scurrying from the hollow of its neck. It was the head of Molly, my daughter’s doll, and it was only when the first drops of rain began to strike my face that I found the strength to pick it up and take it home.

  Later, I went to Louisa’s room and attempted to speak to her, but she grew agitated and tearful, denying with increasing force that she had done anything wrong and appearing genuinely shocked when I showed her the remains of her doll. In fact, she became so distraught at the possibility that Molly was lost beneath the earth that I was forced to remain with her until at last she fell asleep. I myself locked her bedroom window, securing it with a little key that, until now, had remained unused, then deposited the key in my pocket and took it with me to bed once
I had ensured that every other entrance to the house was also securely closed.

  That night, a great storm arose, and all the windows and doors rattled and shook. I awoke to the sound of Sam crying and brought him to my bed. I checked on Louisa, but she remained asleep, oblivious of the turmoil without.

  The next morning, when I pulled the curtains, the sun shone brightly and there was no sign of any disturbance to the garden or its environs. The leaves remained upon the trees, and the flowerpots on the windowsill had not deviated so much as an inch from their positions.

  And in the village, nobody could recall even the slightest breeze arising during the preceding night.

  Days went by, and the summer sun grew warmer and warmer. We slept with the thinnest of sheets to cover us, and tossed and turned until tiredness overcame our discomfort and at last brought us rest. On one or two of the hottest nights, I awoke to the sound of a tapping at the glass in the room next door, and found Louisa standing, somewhere between sleeping and waking, scraping at the lock. I would approach her carefully, recalling vague warnings against waking those who walk in their sleep, and guide her gently back to her bed. In the morning, she would have no memory of what might have caused her to rise, and she never again spoke of the people from the fort. But marks began to appear on the outside of the glass: faint, parallel scratches, as though the tines of a large fork had been dragged roughly against it, and more wood was torn from the frame. My dreams were haunted by shadows of flying beings, their long-constricted wings now free once more to beat against the darkness. They surrounded the house, testing doors and windows, frantically trying to gain access to the children within.