Shadowstitch, p.2
Shadowstitch, page 2
Anna shook her head faintly.
‘It’s not the funeral wine if that’s what you’re worried about. I filched it from the drinks cabinet. One of Vivienne’s best, I hope. Makes it taste better knowing it would piss her off.’ Selene cackled but Anna didn’t respond. Selene bit her red lips and put down the glass. ‘Matchstick, what happened at the service …’
Anna tensed. She could still hear the screams, she’d been hearing them all afternoon. She lowered her eyes, shrinking into her seat. ‘I didn’t do anything …’
‘I know you didn’t do it on purpose,’ Selene said softly. Too softly. ‘But I’m worried, darling. Your emotions … your magic – they broke free. You have to allow yourself to grieve. It’s OK to cry—’
Selene reached a hand towards her. Anna looked at it, not knowing how to take it, not knowing how to cry.
She stood up from the table, gathering the plates. ‘I better clear up.’
Selene sighed behind her. ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’ve got cleaners coming any minute. Are you sure you don’t want me to arrange removal men too? We can get this place all cleared out—’
‘Not yet,’ Anna replied abruptly.
‘OK.’ Selene sounded unsure. ‘Well, why don’t you check there’s nothing else you want to bring back with you before we leave?’
Anna looked around the kitchen. Aunt’s tea towels. Aunt’s glasses. Aunt’s weighing scales. Aunt’s shopping list, half-written on the fridge. The scent of her still in the air – magnolia perfume, garden soap, the sharp oil of her hair. Anna didn’t want to pick through it all, to pack it up, she just wanted to shut tight the doors of the house and leave it all to rot.
‘It’s all yours now,’ Selene muttered inauspiciously.
It was. Anna had learnt the full truth of it all now. Her mother, Marie, had bought the house quickly and quietly with family money left to her after her father had died. After Marie’s death, Anna had inherited it, not that she’d ever known. As Anna’s guardian, Aunt had simply taken control of proceedings and had chosen to move them in. Why? Why live in the house where you killed her? It was a fine house, a respectable neighbourhood – Aunt would have liked all that, but no, that was not the reason. Anna knew Aunt would have wanted to be close, to soak in the blood of her sins, to live beneath the shadow of the curse, to keep a dead-eyed golem-version of Anna’s father in the third-floor room where she’d killed Anna’s parents. Punishment and pleasure. Pleasure and punishment. They’d been one and the same to Aunt.
Anna wondered why her mother had chosen this unassuming house on this unassuming street in Earlsfield. Perhaps its inconspicuousness was exactly what she’d been looking for – somewhere to hide, to disappear so Aunt and the Binders wouldn’t find her. But they had. Once Anna was eighteen and could legally sell the place, she would, but until then, she just wanted to lock its terrible memories away.
The doorbell rang.
‘The cleaners!’ Selene jumped up from her seat, clearly glad for the distraction. ‘Go on, have a quick look around, see if there’s anything you want to keep. Or burn. I’m a dab hand at sacrificial bonfires.’
Anna managed her first smile of the day. She went through the other door into the quiet of the living room and it died on her lips. She could see it all before her – the Binders lost in their magic, thorns piercing flesh, Attis and Effie bound in the centre, Aunt beckoning Anna to kill them, kill them, kill them …
The room before her was chilled and bare now. Everything as it had always been – the photographs of her and Aunt along the mantlepiece, Aunt’s books on the shelves, the roses still in their pot, withering now. Anna walked past Aunt’s armchair, still moulded to the shape of her head. She drifted a finger over Aunt’s Bible on the table beside it – Aunt had used it to select their embroidery verses from. Stitch in, stitch back …
Anna turned to the piano last. It tugged at her from somewhere deep but she snipped the thread. It had never been her piano. All the music she’d ever played, all the moments of joy in her life … all of it had belonged to Aunt. Aunt had been conducting the whole damn thing. Anna could almost hear the sound of the metronome ticking with Aunt’s judgement even now. The feeling of Aunt over her shoulder ready to tell her she wasn’t doing it right – to play faster, slower, different, better; to be more than she was. Never enough. Blood began to well up through the cracks in the keys, onto the floor—
Anna blinked and it was gone.
She stumbled from the room and into one of the cleaners. ‘I’m – sorry, sorry—’
The woman smiled. ‘Want me to start in there, love?’
‘Sure – I – yes—’
Anna made for the stairs, wondering if she was going mad. Will I ever be free of Aunt? Will I ever breathe again? She looked up the stairway and could feel it already. The darkness of the third-floor room pouring down from above – a flood that would drown her. She hadn’t been up there since that night but it had filled up her dreams ever since. She would go there now and face it. Lock it shut and be done with it forever. No way out but through. Aunt had used to say that. She’d never believed in giving up easily, Anna had to give her that much credit.
Anna started upstairs. On the first floor, she walked past her old bedroom, the shadow of her and Aunt flickering in the corner of her eye – Aunt combing her hair in the mirror as they had done every night of Anna’s life. She passed Aunt’s room, still as meticulously ordered as ever. She stopped at the bottom of the next staircase. Her legs felt suddenly like stone, the stairway above her narrowing and stretching out as if it would go on forever. As if she’d never reach the top. One step at a time. I can do this. She began her ascent. Each step harder than the last. The air seemed to thin, a dizziness took over her, her feet growing heavier, like anchors trailing through sludge. The darkness pushed down on her, squeezing the breath from her. She gripped the bannister, pulling herself upwards … one more step … one more step … Her vision began to cloud at the edges. She leant forwards, feeling as if she might faint. One more step … It took every last scrap of her effort in her, and then—
She rounded the corner at the top and scrabbled for the light switch. The light came on but the shadows did not dissipate. The silence slipped itself around her.
The door ahead was open.
It felt wrong to see it that way. Its secrets released. The room in which Aunt had killed her parents. The room that had contained their family curse for sixteen years. Open. The curse was out there now. Inside of me now.
Anna propelled herself towards the door. Once inside, she twisted around, expecting something to jump out at her. But there was nothing – no ghouls or golems or Aunts waiting to get her. Nothing but a room. Someone had opened the curtains and made the bed. Light streamed in. And yet, Anna could feel the violence as if it were written into the walls, a language made of blood and screams and terror; as if, somewhere, what had happened here was still echoing over and over …
She spotted her mirror on the dressing table. The mirror she’d made out of magic and moonlight, the mirror that had helped her get into the room, cracked into pieces now in its case, a shard fallen loose beside it. She picked up the broken slice of glass and placed it back into the missing space. She gasped. The pieces of glass began to melt together, turning briefly mesmerizingly liquid like the surface of a lake finding stillness after a storm. And then – the mirror was whole again. Anna tapped the glass and found it solid, only the smallest whisper of a hairline crack at the bottom where the large shard had rejoined. But when Anna picked it up – she almost dropped it again.
Aunt’s face stared back at her. For a split second, Anna had thought it her own face – the same high cheekbones, red hair, green eyes. But it was Aunt. Anna moved her head to the side and Aunt’s moved too. Anna’s insides turned to worms, writhing and twisting with horror. She felt her own face drain of colour, but the face in the mirror did not. It flushed with life. The eyes gleamed. A smile played dreadfully along the lips. Aunt tipped her head back and began to laugh. It was Aunt’s laugh too, like vinegar poured on a laugh so that it was puckered and sour and bitter and taunting. Blood dripped down the walls behind her—
‘Matchstick—’
Anna spun around to find Selene in the doorway.
‘Darling, are you OK?’
Anna held the mirror to her chest, her heart hammering against the glass. ‘I – yes, I’m fine.’
Selene’s frown deepened. ‘You shouldn’t have come in here.’
‘I just wanted to …’
‘I know, but places like this are better left shut. No point opening old wounds. Come on, it’s miserable in here, let’s go.’
Anna noticed that Selene had not crossed the threshold of the door. The room held dark memories for her too. Selene turned and Anna quickly wrapped the mirror in an old sheet – around and around like a shroud. She tucked it under her arm and followed Selene down the stairs.
Selene slowed on the landing and swivelled back to Anna, fluttering her fingers. ‘Actually, darling, there was something I’m looking for. Perhaps you could help?’ Her voice was light but there was tension beneath.
Anna took a moment to answer. Aunt’s face was still in her mind. ‘Er – yes, sure. What?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing really. Just a ring. A trinket. It used to be mine. I already checked Vivienne’s jewellery box but it wasn’t there. Anywhere else she might have put it?’
‘There was another box in her room … I can check.’
They entered Aunt’s room, Anna doing her best to ignore the scent of Aunt’s perfume still souring the air; the uneasy feeling, as she reached into Aunt’s bedside cabinet, that she might be caught in the act. She pulled out a small wooden box – she’d come across it when she’d searched Aunt’s room the year before. It had been full of all sorts of bits and pieces.
Selene took it hungrily and began rifling through the contents, discarding old tickets and receipts, trinkets, a white key – Attis’s skeleton key! – Anna picked it up off the floor and put it in her pocket as Selene’s breath caught. She was holding a thick, plain band between her fingers. It was exceptionally ugly – its thickness uneven, its metal dark and tarnished.
‘Is that it?’ said Anna, doubtfully.
Selene slipped it onto her finger. It looked out of place next to the vivid, twinkling colours of her other rings.
‘Why did Aunt have a ring of yours?’
‘Oh, I lent it to her once …’ Selene stared down at it, looking both relieved and burdened. Anna knew there was more to the story but she didn’t have the energy left to question it now.
She stood up. ‘I’m going to get some fresh air. I won’t be long.’
‘I’ll just have to open another bottle of Viv’s wine in the meantime.’ Selene winked. ‘When you’re ready, we’ll go home.’
Home. The word rose up, adrift. Anna didn’t know where home was any more. It wasn’t here in this empty, besieged house. It wasn’t there either – in Selene’s house in Hackney. Effie’s and Attis’s house. It did not belong to her. They didn’t belong to her.
Anna made her way to the gated garden in the middle of Cressey Square. She took out Attis’s skeleton key and put it in the lock. It opened with an easy click. That afternoon he had visited her here came back to her like sudden colour, a vivid flare burning the grey film of the day away.
No. She would not remember it.
She’d become good at that – closing the doors in her mind and keeping the keys hidden where even she couldn’t find them. She’d tried to shut them out – Effie and Attis; Attis and Effie. Where they were. What they were doing. They’d gone away together. Together.
She traced her old route down through the garden, the wind pale and still, the plants around her threadbare, clutching onto life. She made it to the oak tree and slid to the ground, its trunk so familiar that somewhere, deep down, her heart began to ache. The rain had stopped but the earth was soft and damp, droplets falling from the leaves like the tears that would not come. It was as if when Aunt died, she’d tied a Choke Knot around Anna’s life, cutting her off from it, from herself. A final punishment.
Anna’s eyes wandered over the grass, to where she and Attis had lain in the garden and not in the garden at all. A magical world he’d created for her and then taken away. The boy she and Effie were cursed to love.
Effie. My twin. My sister.
The thought still felt too big to comprehend. She’d spent her life believing she was all alone in the world except for Aunt and now Aunt was dead and Effie was her family. Aunt snickered in her head … out of the frying pan and into the fire …
The curse rose up around Anna like black smoke – uncontainable, uncontrollable, overpowering.
One womb, one breath, sisters of blood, bound by love, so bound by death.
How far did it go back? How many lives taken? Sister after sister fated to love the same man and to tear themselves apart over it – one to kill the other. Anna would hardly have believed it if she hadn’t seen it, hadn’t lived through its destruction.
Aunt killed my parents. My mother.
And I killed you, Aunt. Oh Goddess, I killed you …
Anna fell to her knees.
She raised her head to the sky and screamed – but no sound came out. She watched as every leaf on the oak tree fell one by one. She didn’t look away until the last leaf had fallen, the branches left bare as bone.
What’s happening to me?
She couldn’t trust herself and she couldn’t trust her magic. She’d seen what it could do; felt it. Anna took the cord out of her pocket and tore her fingers through the earth. Once the hole was deep enough she dropped it in. Earth to earth. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. She pushed the soil back over it and covered it with the fallen leaves.
Buried.
DARKNESS
Seven kinds of dark there are,
can you withstand them all?
Twilight, starlight, midnight-shimmer;
moonlight, shadowlight, candle-flicker;
the darkness of earth’s places deep,
where light can’t strive nor reach.
And yet, beyond, there lies another,
a darkness far above the others.
Not of this earth, not of this realm,
may none withstand:
The True Darkness of Hel!
‘True Darkness’, Folk Song, Source Unknown
The train clattered into darkness, the darkness of being buried beneath London, and Anna was dragged back into her dreams. The night before it had come again. It always started the same: lost in darkness …
She’d reached out – but her hands had met something unyielding and soft, slyly silken. She’d tried to push herself up but arms were wrapped around her. Not arms – bones. She’d known then with dizzying horror where she was. Down with the worms and the rot. Locked in Aunt’s coffin – with Aunt, their red hair entwining, the stench of death rising up …
Her screams had been soundless but she’d begun to hammer and thrash against the walls containing her, pounding and pounding, until her knuckles tore and her hand broke through – earth pouring in. Then clawing and clawing her way up – up – up – through the dense night of soil until a hand had grabbed hers.
A shock of warmth.
It had dragged her out. Attis standing before her, saying her name over and over … Anna … Anna … Anna … A voice like music made of smoke. So real. He’d been so real. He’d wrapped her into him, enfolding her in the fire of his arms, his lips threatening to melt her entirely … Anna … Anna … Anna …
But his voice had begun to change – its softness stripped away, warping into something hard and serrated. A cold caw. A raven’s shriek. The tip of a knife had appeared through his chest and he’d exploded into black feathers. Effie standing behind with a smile that gave nothing away. She’d put out her hand. Anna had taken it. Why had I taken it?
They’d followed the feathers up a spiralling staircase before them – the feathers condensing into ravens, leading them up – up – up – Attis calling behind them, snow falling on Anna’s skin like ice-kisses – up – up – up – no end to the darkness before them, below them, gathering around them – making it impossible to see, to breathe, to remember who she’d once been …
A darkness like Anna had never known.
The train shuddered into the next tube stop, flooding the carriage with light and shaking Anna from the clutches of her dream. She tried to shake the darkness away too but it clung to her, as if it was always there, living somewhere inside of her. Facing the third-floor room had not released her. Ever since Aunt had died the staircase had been waiting for her, her nightmares caught on a punishing loop she didn’t know how to escape.
The train launched off again and Aunt’s laughter seemed to echo around her. She looked about the carriage in quiet desperation, at the blank faces around her. She wanted to run back home and lock the door. Hide away like she’d been hiding all summer, avoiding everything and everyone – even myself – the days passing by like drifting snow, never quite settling. Nothing feeling quite real. But there was no escaping now …
Attis and Effie were arriving back tonight.
Suddenly the darkness was too much, pressing against the windows as if the carriage would crumple – she would crumple. Anna stood up and moved to the door, something threatening to break through her layers of numbness. She didn’t want to see them. She couldn’t see them. She wasn’t ready.
She could still see the Attis of her dreams so clearly. His skin honey and flame, a horseshoe tattoo glinting dangerously on his chest, eyes full of invitations no one could say no to; more real than the real Attis, who believed he was not real at all. Nothing but a living spell. And Effie, with her unreadable smile, leading her into the darkness. How could she face them? Would they want to see me? Anna had half expected them not to return at all, to disappear into the magical world, leaving her behind for good. It would be the best thing for all of them.
