Things We Say in the Dark Read online

  She called her sisters. Barbara wanted her to call the house clearance company, just like they’d planned before. Delia thought that was ridiculous – it was covered in gold, for heaven’s sakes! It was valuable now. And not just valuable in a nostalgic sort of way, because they’d learned to play on that piano and stuff. She wanted Lydia to sell the golden things. Lydia hung up the phone.

  She closed all the golden windows and made up all the golden beds and put the golden clothes back on their golden hangers. Then she stood in the middle of the golden house looking at the ugly faïence fruit bowl. She couldn’t throw it away, because it was valuable. She couldn’t sell it, because it was her grampa. She couldn’t keep it, because she already had a fruit bowl she liked better and her grampa was gone and keeping his fruit bowl wouldn’t bring him back.

  She pictured herself carrying all the golden things out of her grampa’s house and trying to fit them into her own small flat; how every wall and surface would be covered past using, every blink blinding gold. She pictured herself living here, making a life among the remnants of her grampa. Sleeping on the mattress of him, washing in the bath of him, using the spoons of him to eat her cereal.

  Lydia stood there in the golden hallway, looking at the golden fruit bowl. The longer she stood there, the heavier it felt. Was it her imagination, or were the walls beginning to sag? Could the floor joists take the weight of all this gold?

  The sun began to set. The light through the windows made the whole house sparkle.

  Not long before I started this book, my wife and I got married in a library. She wore vintage brogues and a pinstriped suit; I wore a feathered cape and a grey silk dress. We wanted our wedding to be special and different, just like everyone wants their wedding to be special and different. But like everyone, we slipped into cliché: it was magical and all our living parents cried and I had probably the happiest day of my life.

  We went on a northern honeymoon, where we kissed on black-sand beaches under the slow green throb of the northern lights and felt a constant bone-deep cold, colder than we’d ever been in our lives.

  We did the expected thing, and bought a home. We spent a lot of time looking at paint charts and debating different kitchen worktops. I’ve never felt so steady, so domesticated.

  That’s why I decided I was ready to write about my fears. I have a place to retreat to where I can always put on the lights no matter how dark it is outside.

  Things My Wife and I Found Hidden in Our House

  1. A RING

  And isn’t that sweet? Isn’t it just too perfectly sweet, like it’s a message of hope left for me and Alice, a blessing for our life together?

  I caught the ring with the edge of the broom as I was sweeping out the kitchen. It scraped along the tiles and made a hell of a racket. At first I thought it was just rubbish, all clarty with grot and bugs, but when I rinsed it under the tap it came up lovely. A little circlet of glass, green as a summer sea, bright on its surface but with shadows at its centre. I thought maybe Alice’s granny had left it for us on purpose. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.

  This was her house, before, and it’s not that she didn’t know that we were together, but it was complicated. She called me Alice’s friend, and I could hear the way she put inverted commas around it, even after Al and I had lived together for years and we’d both visited her a thousand times in this musty old house that always smelled like the sea even though it was miles from water.

  I slid the ring onto my wedding finger then raced through the house, calling for Alice, and found her in the spare bedroom with her arms full of floral duvets.

  ‘These are going straight to the tip,’ she said. ‘Can you smell that? They’re damp. Damn, I hope it’s not in the walls.’

  ‘Look, Al!’ I held out my hand, queen-like. ‘Isn’t this pretty? Your gran must have left it.’

  She peered at it. ‘Is it plastic? It looks like it came out of a vending machine. Throw it away, there’s enough junk in this house already.’

  ‘It’s sea-glass. I found it in the kitchen. Do you think it’s a good-luck charm from your gran? To wish us well?’

  Alice threw the musty duvets into the hall. ‘Trust me, Rain. My gran didn’t wish anybody well.’

  2. PAPER

  The folded page fell when we bashed the frame of the front door trying to carry the old bath out. I know, I know, we should have hired someone, but to be honest what little money we had was tied up in the house. Turns out, just because you inherit something, doesn’t mean you get it for free. Alice tucked the paper in her pocket and then, when I was driving to the tip, the bath awkwardly wedged between the boot and the back seat, she pulled the paper out and unfolded it. It was as yellow as old bones and smelled musty-sweet.

  ‘What does it say?’

  Alice didn’t reply.

  I stopped the car at a red light.

  ‘Hello! Are you listening?’

  ‘It says …’ she said. ‘No, it’s nothing.’ And she balled up the paper and put it in the glove compartment.

  ‘Al, stop being weird! What does it say?’

  ‘KELPIES TO HELL,’ she said.

  I wasn’t sure whether to laugh. ‘What’s a kelpie?’ Alice didn’t reply, so added: ‘Call me a Sassenach if you like, just tell me.’

  ‘A kelpie is a mythical creature,’ Alice said, frowning. ‘Lives in lochs. It’s a horse and also a beautiful woman. If it doesn’t like you, it drags you into the water and drowns you.’

  ‘O … kay,’ I said. ‘But why would your gran want to tell us that?’

  ‘Jesus, Rain, would you drop it with the secret messages? My gran was losing it towards the end. She didn’t know I was going to get the house. She didn’t know I was going to live here with you. None of this means anything, okay?’

  So I drove the rest of the way to the tip in silence, and together we lifted the bath where Alice’s granny had had a stroke and drowned, and we threw it away.

  3. A HORSE

  Alice found this one. It was the size of a thumb, wedged into the skirting board under the bed. She brought it to the kitchen as I was making tea and said: ‘Rain, I can’t find my glasses. Can you read this?’

  I rubbed the tiny horse’s haunches, feeling the symbols etched into the copper.

  ‘It’s not words,’ I said. ‘It’s runes or something. Maybe it’s an old Highlands superstition, and your gran left it to protect us from being trampled by – well, not a horse, but – life? Sadness? Money worries?’

  Alice raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, my mum always did say my gran was a witch. She stole my grandad from another woman – did I ever tell you that?’ Alice took the horse from my hand. ‘He was married to someone else when they met. A woman always dressed in green, who wore strange jewellery, rings made of glass she found washed up on the beach. She had green eyes and long black hair – black as a winter night, black like it was always wet.’

  My eyes were wide. ‘What happened?’

  ‘My gran went round to talk to her, to say, basically, I want your man and there’s nothing you can do about it, and she must have been pretty convincing because the next day the woman was gone. She left the village – went for a job down south or something. But you know the strange thing? No one ever saw that woman again.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ I said. ‘Did your gran – do you think she – could she have done something?’

  Alice laughed. ‘Come on, Rain! What, you think my wee old granny was a murderer?’

  ‘Why not? Every murderer has a family.’

  ‘It’s just a silly story,’ Alice said. ‘Gran obviously didn’t kill anyone. She was the other woman, so she had to make up stories about my grandad’s ex. Make her into a spooky witch, a baddie, not a poor lass who’d had her man stolen. If the first wife was the villain, then Gran was the hero, and she could feel better. Simple as that. And she—’ At this Alice jerked her hand and dropped the horse. It thudded to the floor and skittered away.

  All I coul
d do was stare at the blistered outline of the copper horse burned into Alice’s palm.

  4. PEARLS

  It was boring, dirty work, doing up the house. Alice’s gran hadn’t touched anything in years – aside from hiding weird things in grubby corners, apparently. There was so much to do that Alice and I always ended up working late into the night, holding off the dark as best we could. Alice’s blistered hand was healing, but slowly, and I’d got a nasty scrape up my calf from a cluster of nails left inexplicably spiked through a cupboard door.

  When I found the long string of pearls on top of the wardrobe, I stripped off all my clothes and stepped into the shower – then stepped back out and wrapped the pearls around my neck. They were as long as a bridle; I looped them three times and they still covered my breasts. I stood under the hot water until I couldn’t see for steam, then I walked, still dripping, into the kitchen where Alice was fixing the radiator.

  ‘What do you think I should do with—’ she said, and then she saw me and dropped the spanner. We made love on a clean dust sheet on the kitchen counter, and afterwards, Alice whispered in my ear: ‘That’s how you catch a kelpie, you know. With a string of pearls around its neck. My grandad told me – he caught a kelpie once. You catch it, and then it has to love you forever.’ She rolled on top of me and kissed me hard, so hard the pearls pressed red circles into my sweat-damp skin, so hard my teeth nicked bloody on the inside of my mouth.

  5. HAIR

  We’d plumbed in the new bath, and I christened it that night with candles and bath oil. I never felt clean in this house; we’d scrubbed every inch but still kept catching this smell, rancid and salt-heavy like old seaweed. Although I hadn’t said anything to Alice, I was worried that there was damp in the walls, the house rotten to the core.

  I filled the bath full of the hottest water I could stand and slid right down, my nose the only dry part. I felt my muscles relax into liquid and heard my heart boom, boom, boom, steady as footsteps, steady as hoofbeats—And then there was nothing holding me up, and I was underwater, water in my nose, water in my mouth, and I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t find the sides to pull myself out and I felt water in my throat, water in my lungs, and I sank down into the darkness.

  Then Alice was pulling me out and I was crouching on the bathroom floor, coughing up water, breath rasping, and there was something wrong with my hand, something tight and tickling, and I reached for Alice, and my fist was wrapped all around with layers of hair. Long black hair, black as a winter night, and as long as a horse’s mane.

  6. A GLASS JAR

  At first, I couldn’t tell what was inside. When I pulled it out of the dim hidden place inside the bathroom wall, I thought it was jam. Beneath its jacket of dust, it looked plum-dark and sticky. My tongue tingled; I thought about toast and tea and the sweet smear of berries, sitting in the sun with Alice, the sound of her laugh. But that was silly: it was too late for sun, and Alice hadn’t laughed for a long time.

  I shook the jar and felt the thing inside smack off the glass, the wet press of meat. I gave the jar to Alice. She went to unscrew the lid, then thought better.

  She looked at it for a long time. ‘It’s a liver,’ she said.

  ‘A what?’ I asked, because I’d heard but I wished I hadn’t. In Alice’s shaking grip, the purplish thing in the jar quivered.

  ‘It’s what the kelpie leaves,’ Alice said, and her voice didn’t sound right. ‘It drags you to the bottom of the loch and eats you, every single bit of you except your liver. If you find a liver on the shore, that’s how you know the kelpie has eaten someone.’

  7. A KNIFE

  I wasn’t surprised when Alice and I found the long thin silver knife wrapped in blackened grot beneath the floorboards. It wasn’t easy: to find it we’d had to pull up just about every rotting, stinking board in the house, our hands slick with blood and filth. Alice had told me that a silver knife through the heart is the only way to kill a kelpie, so if Alice’s gran really had killed it, the knife was likely to be there somewhere. Her mistake, her haunting, was in keeping the thing. As proof? A memento? We’d never know. Then again, we knew that her bathtub drowning was due to a stroke. So I guess you can never really know anything.

  Alice and I gathered up the ring and the paper and the horse and the pearls and the hair and the glass jar and the knife, and we put them all in a box. We drove for hours until we got to the coast, to the town where Alice’s gran and her grandad and the first wife had all lived, and we climbed to the highest cliff and we threw all the things into the sea.

  Together we drove back to the house, holding hands between the front seats. A steady calm grew in our hearts; we knew that it was over, that we had cleansed the house and ourselves, that we had proven women’s love was stronger than women’s hate.

  8. MORE

  Approaching the front door, key outstretched, hands still held, hearts grown sweet, Alice and I stopped. Our hands unlinked. The doorknob was wrapped all around with layers of long black hair.

  A house is family. A house is history. A house is a body. One subject that comes up again and again in horror, both new and classic, is houses. Haunted houses, home invasions, axe murderers lurking in the attics and chasing us into the basements. Our homes are a site of endless terror.

  We are afraid that someone will come into our house when we don’t want them to. We are afraid that the thing we fear is already inside. We are afraid that we can’t make it leave. We are afraid that the lock on the door will not hold.

  My House is Out Where the Lights End

  Everyone said that sunflowers couldn’t grow this far north and they were right, they couldn’t and wouldn’t, until finally, one day, they did. Pop always said it was because of his Secret Method. He said it in capital letters to make it sound scientific and complicated, but Jay and Yara watched him in secret from Jay’s bedroom window and knew exactly what his method was: he sang to the sunflowers. Big Pop, terror of the town, half the teeth smacked out of his head, body more scars than skin, faster with his fists than a kung-fu movie star. Big Pop sang to the flowers.

  Jay thinks now that she should have found that sweet. Her father, a surprise like a wrapped present, hard as nails but soft as trifle – it was sweet, right? But at the time she found it frightening that Pop was so unpredictable. That he could be two opposite things at once. That there was no way to know whether it would be fists or song.

  She drives up to the old farmhouse with her sunglasses on and the radio off. In her memory it looms so huge, so loud and technicolour, that she’s sure it will overwhelm everything else. But the bright painted boards are faded and rain-dragged, and the tin roof is rusted through in places, and the driveway is overgrown with weeds. She pulls the car to a jolting stop and sits there, watching the empty house as if waiting for someone to come out and get her. No one does.

  She climbs out of the car and walks round to the back of the house, where in her memory miles of sunflowers gleam brighter than the sun. She finds a field of withered grey stalks, bent under the weight of their dead heads. The ground is heaving with black seeds, piled thick, gleaming like insect shells. She kicks at them and listens to them sift, an uncomfortably sensual sound. For many seasons the field must have grown wild, alone all summer, then sunk back on itself through autumn, only to repeat the whole thing again next year. A ghost harvest.

  She shoulders aside a dead sunflower to go further into the field and jerks back with a cry when a smatter of small black somethings land on her shoulder. She stands on open ground, shuddering, brushing off her bare shoulder long after she’s seen that it was just sunflower seeds, dead black carapaces now scattered in the dirt around her feet. She knows they just fell from the head when she knocked it, but she can’t stop thinking of the word spat, that the sunflower spat the seeds at her on purpose.

  Jay goes to the back door of the house, faltering on the steps when she feels the lack of a key in her hand. Then she shakes her head, laughing at herself: city girl. All
through her childhood this door was never locked, and she and Yara clattered in and out all summer, the door banging in its frame, the checked curtain whipping in the breeze. Now that she looks at the door, it doesn’t even have a keyhole; it’s just a brass housing and a handle, like on an internal door. Everything is rotted to hell; the wood is soft and yielding under her hand, and the door creaks open easily. The floor is more dirt than lino. The sink, the oven, the cabinets: everything ripped out and taken away.

  On late summer days Jay and Yara used to go exploring, eating blackberries straight from the bush, even though Mam said they were covered in fox piss. They’d stay out collecting berries so late that the sun went down and the light dropped blue and the owls swooped over their heads, making them run shrieking with laughter through the bramble-choked lanes. When they got home their arms were all scratches and their bellies ached from eating too many berries. Mam said they were sick because of the fox piss, and didn’t that just show them that it wasn’t safe for girls out there, and that the world was a sickening place, and they were to be home before dusk from now on. Jay and Yara laughed – quietly, under the covers where Mam couldn’t hear – oooh, the dangers of the owl were terrible, and oooh, the brambles were deadlier than the devil, and oooh, fox piss was coming in the night to get the softest girls.

  Years after she grew up and left the farm, Jay was in a bar, cigarette in hand and onto her fifth beer, and she mentioned to some pretty bit of rough the name of her home town. Where all those folk went missing, said the pretty bit. Jay laughed and waved her beer bottle like she was stirring cake mix and said nah, it’s a boring old town, nothing ever happened there but scarecrows and fox piss. The pretty bit laughed in that way you do when you’re not sure if something is a joke. But Jay stubbed out her cigarette and turned sickly away because yes, people had gone missing, she remembered that now, at the time it had been in the papers and on people’s lips but she hadn’t cared.