Our car jerks to a stop. I realize we’re home. In the front seat, Mama bows her head. I wonder if she’s praying. Looking down, I see my hands have stopped trembling. I pop my seatbelt and grab the door handle, but of course I can’t get out. My parents still use the child locks, even though I’m twelve years old.
I wait for Papa to open the door. Then I worm out of my seat. He lumbers up the garden path, shoulders braced as if he’s carrying all the world’s troubles. Mama and I follow.
Our cottage windows are dark, offering no hint of what lies within. The front door is a single slab of oak. There’s no letterbox. Papa rarely gets any post, and when he does it’s delivered straight to Meunier. Mama gets nothing at all. Our door has no number, because we don’t live on a street. If anyone ever wrote to me, they’d have to put this on the envelope: Elijah North, Gamekeeper’s Cottage, C/O THE RT HON. THE LORD MEUNIER OF FAMERHYTHE, Rufus Hall, Meunier-fields. That’s quite a lot to write, which explains why Mama isn’t the only one the postman ignores.
There’s an upside-down horseshoe nailed to the lintel, put there to catch us some luck. Passing beneath it, I go inside.
V
I’m in my room, standing at the window. We’ve been home twenty minutes. I’m itching to escape, but I daren’t, not yet.
When I hear the back door clatter open, I step closer to the glass. Down in the garden, Papa looms into view. He tugs a packet of Mayfairs from his chest pocket and lights up. Leaning against the coal shed, he breathes a fog of smoke into the sky. I go to the hall, creep down the stairs and out through the front door.
From our cottage, the Memory Wood is a five-minute walk. I make it in half that time, jogging along the track beside Fallow Field. Overhead, the sky presses down like a steel sheet. The day feels heavy, as if it might crumple under its own weight.
I’m halfway there when I hear the screaming. Twisting around, I see a family of crows squabbling in Fallow Field. Something’s got their interest – likely the remains of a rabbit or pheasant that a fox has left. The collective noun for crows, I once read, is murder.
Pretty gross.
VI
It’s chilly inside the Memory Wood, which is strange because there’s barely any wind. There’s a steady drip of water, leftovers from this morning’s rain. Under my trainers the mulch is soft and wet.
With Fallow Field screened by trees, the screaming of the crows is muted. Ahead, I see a flash of movement. All sorts of things it could be, but there’s only one that I fear. My parents didn’t mention him on the way home, and I made a point of not asking. Sometimes I worry that speaking his name too often will increase his power over me – and with it, his cruelty.
Maybe cruelty isn’t the best word. Once, on the TV in Magic Annie’s caravan, I saw a Great White burst out of the sea and bite a baby seal clean in half. It looked cruel, but it wasn’t, not really – it was just nature. The shark was hungry and the baby seal was prey. The other youngsters stayed out of the water when they saw the shark’s fin cutting the surface, which shows the importance of good instincts. Good instincts are something I worry about quite a lot.
Now, in the Memory Wood, I slow my pace. I’ve seen deer among these trees, but their coats match the woodland so perfectly that often I only notice their eyes. The flash of movement I spotted a moment ago was no deer.
I think about running back to Fallow Field, and from there all the way home. But I came here for a reason, one far too important to ignore.
Bad instincts.
Even though my heart’s beating faster than it should, I allow myself an eye-roll. Three weeks ago my favourite word was melodramatic. Right now, it’s pretty apt. I don’t really know if I have bad instincts. One thing I’ve learned, growing up by these woods, is to think twice about trusting what I see.
Steeling myself, I take a forward step. No startled fawn or badger crashes out of the undergrowth. No owl or hawk swoops from the overhead canopy. I take a second step, then a third, twisting my head to check that nothing’s creeping up on me.
Minutes later I arrive in the clearing, and suddenly my mouth is as dry as the knucklebones in my Collection of Keepsakes and Weird Finds.
VII
It’s a mopey-looking spot. Not the best place for a cottage, which is probably why it was left to rot. Papa once told me that the estate’s head gardener lived here, back when Meunier’s ancestors needed one. What makes it so creepy is that it’s an exact replica of our own cottage, right down to the horseshoe nailed upon the lintel. This one is rusty, though. And it certainly hasn’t brought the place much luck.
Not a bit of glass is left in the windows. The branches of an ash tree poke out of what would have been the sitting room. Some of the tiles have vanished from the roof, plundered to repair other buildings on the estate. Papa’s work, no doubt – he hates to see useful things go to waste. Those that remain are streaked with bird mess and felted with moss, making the cottage look less like it was built by human hands and more as if it was raised from the soil by an evil wizard’s spell. There’s a toilety smell about the place, mingling with the stench of something even fouler.
I wish I’d worn my coat. It’s chilly in the Memory Wood, but where I’m going it’ll be filthy, cold and dark. Screwing up my eyes, I check the clearing one last time. I see dripping trees, tangled bracken, a metallic sky hanging like a guillotine’s blade.
Near the cottage’s front door there’s a lighter patch in the mulch, as if the dead leaves have recently been disturbed. Last time I was here, I’m pretty sure I saw a pallet box outside the entrance, filled with old tools. It’s not there now, but there’s no dink in the ground marking where it lay. Perhaps I don’t remember right. Perhaps it didn’t leave a trace.
A cry pierces the silence. From a tree across the clearing, a magpie fixes me with a glossy eye. I think of the old rhyme: One for sorrow. When I clap my hands, the magpie flaps its wings, but it doesn’t fly off. Moments later I hear an answering shriek. I look up at the cottage’s sagging roof and see two more birds perched there.
One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl.
Claws of ice climb my spine. I’ve never liked magpies. Once, I saw an adult bird drag three baby blue tits from their nest. It killed them all before I could frighten it off. I buried the chicks near our laurel bush, making a cross from two lolly sticks and a piece of wire. The worst thing wasn’t watching the chicks die, or having to pick their bodies from the grass. It was seeing the parents return to an empty nest, hopping around in confusion as they searched for their babies. One of them even flew down and perched on the cross. I cried and I cried, and when Papa came home and wanted to know what was up, I couldn’t even look at him.
Some stuff just isn’t meant to be shared.
Besides, Papa wouldn’t ever understand a thing like that.
Turning my back on the memory, I edge towards the cottage, avoiding its blank-eyed stare. Soon, I reach the patch of disturbed mulch a few yards from the entrance. The kicked-over leaves glisten like the whitish bellies of slugs. Has someone, I wonder, dug a trap to capture peeping Toms like me? Perhaps, under this shallow carpet of litter, a pegged sackcloth hides a steep-sided pit. Deadfall traps, they’re called, in the survival books I’ve read. Sometimes, their floors are fitted with sharpened stakes to skewer anything that falls in. Sometimes they’re empty, forcing whatever’s inside to wait for the trapper’s return before discovering its fate. The worst option, I always think, would be for the trapper never to return at all, leaving the victim to die of hunger or thirst, knowing all the while that safety lay only a short distance away.