that the child disappeared.”
When Robin had uttered the final words he pulled the covers over his head and rolled himself into a secure cocoon. I lay there beside him with his story crawling around inside my head like a mutilated child.
The man who had done these things had slept in Robin’s room. How had he been able to sleep? He had made his coffee on our stove and drunk it in our kitchen. He had looked out of the same windows as us, walked on the same floors, heard the same creaking floorboard just inside the door. And he had hanged himself next to my bed.
My eyes were drawn to the dark spot on the ceiling where the hook had been.
I lay there looking at the black hole for so long that it started to take on the qualities of its astronomical namesake. Everything in the room was being drawn towards it, waiting to be sucked in; my thoughts moved around it like defenceless planets, orbiting in ever-decreasing circles on their way to destruction. And all the time I could hear the music. Round and round the music went, twelve notes in an incomplete melody.
If you hum: “Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool, Yes sir, yes sir, three—” and stop there, then you know some notes are missing, even if you’ve never heard the tune before. It was equally clear to me that notes were missing from the melody which was now so much a part of me that I couldn’t get it out of my head. I lay in bed staring at the hole and trying to catch hold of the missing notes.
The pile of bedding next to me had started to move up and down with deep, regular breaths, and I managed to free Robin’s sweaty head without waking him up before tucking him in properly. Then I got up and put my clothes on, barely aware of what I was doing, because the notes absorbed all of my attention.
I sat down at the piano and played the entire melody. The notes were so clear to my inner ear that I had played it twice before I realised there was no sound. I banged a couple of the notes really hard as if violence was the way to entice them out. It was only then I remembered. The pliers. The strings.
I looked around the room, unsure what to do, and I caught sight of the box under Robin’s bed. Among cast- off cuddly toys and plastic figures I found the Casio toy synthesiser. It covered only three octaves, but that was enough.
I played the twelve notes, and a dark serenity came over me. Yes, dark serenity. I can’t find a better way to express it. It was like getting stuck in the mud and slowly sinking. The moment when you realise it’s pointless to struggle, that there is no help to be had, and that the mud is going to win. I imagine you reach a point when you give up, and that this brings with it a certain serenity.
Over and over again I played the twelve notes, trying out different instruments in the synthesiser’s repertoire to make them sound good; in the end I settled for “harpsichord”. I think it’s called
I went into the hallway, put on my jacket, found the head torch, switched it on and fastened it around my head. The synthesiser had a strap which meant I could hang it around my neck. Fully equipped, I opened the front door and headed for the forest.
A mist hung in the air, and although the head torch was powerful, the light reached no further than about ten metres. As I set off among the damp tree trunks it was like walking through an underground vault where the trunks were pillars, carrying their crowns like a single, immense roof. There wasn’t a sound apart from the soft rustle as drops of water fell from the branches onto last year’s dead grass.
I hadn’t played for several minutes, and the blind determination that had driven me on had begun to falter when I reached the place.
This had to be the place. I had walked in a straight line from the house, I might even have followed an overgrown path, come to think of it. On the way I had passed the odd rock, but none of them would have been suitable for the purpose Robin had described.
In front of me lay a number of large rocks which sprang up out of the darkness when the beam of the head torch swept over them. When I examined the area more closely I found something in the region of fifty large and small erratic blocks which the inland ice had strewn across the ground where pines and fir trees would one day grow. Even without the knowledge I possessed, it didn’t take much imagination to compare this place with a graveyard.
I wandered around aimlessly, directing the beam of the torch at the base of the rocks in the hope of finding some sign that the ground had been disturbed. But everything was overgrown, and every rock looked the same as every other rock. I wrapped my arms around my body and shivered.
What was to say that there weren’t dead people, dead children under every single rock? What was to say things would be better if I found the two who had sought out Robin to ask for help, to ask him to find them?
The idea was so obvious I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it before. There was nothing to tie me or my son to this haunted place with its gloomy coniferous forest and its brooding rocks. Nothing. It wasn’t my responsibility to drive away the ghosts of evil deeds committed in the past.
I breathed out and switched off the torch, closed my eyes and listened to the silence, relaxed. When I had been standing like that for a little while, a faint awareness came over me. It grew into a certainty: diagonally in front of me to the left. Something was drifting towards me from that direction, faint as the draught caused by a fly’s wings against the skin, and blacker than the night. When I opened my eyes it was gone.
The darkness felt almost solid, and the only light came from the diode indicating that the toy synthesiser around my neck was on. I switched on the torch and studied the keyboard. Then I played a note. Then another. The twelve notes echoed from the plastic speakers and were swallowed up by the darkness and the mist. I edged forward a few steps and played the melody again.
Something moved in front of me, and I glimpsed a figure disappearing behind a rock. I went over and leaned my back against the rough surface, then crouched down and played the melody once more. When I took my fingers off the keys I could hear scrabbling, the sound of small feet flitting across the moss and needles on the other side of the rock.
I directed the beam of the head torch at the trunk of a fir tree five metres in front of me and spoke out into the air: “I am here now.”
Feet moved across the ground, rustling, squelching as they came closer. Nails scraped down the rock just a metre or so away, and I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t be tempted to look over my shoulder. Then I said it again: “I am here now. What shall I do?”
At first I thought it was a noise originating from the forest. A broken branch creaking in a gust of wind, or the distant cry of an injured animal. But it was a voice. The faint, mournful voice of an unhappy old man who has lost everything but his memories, who cries at the sight of semolina pudding because it reminds him of his childhood and makes him talk in the voice of a child:
“Find us,” said the voice behind my shoulder.
Without opening my eyes I replied, “I have found you. What shall I do now?”
“Fetch us.”
I had somehow known that this was my task right from the start, from the moment I stood in front of the spade and crowbar in the tool shed. To find, to fetch, to. conclude.
“Why?” I whispered. “Why did he do this to you?”
The only response was the slow breathing of the forest. I pressed my back against the stone, suddenly conscious of its terrible weight and solidity. To have that weight on top of you, to be slowly crushed to pieces beneath its impervious hardness. To be a child.
When the voice spoke again the tone had changed; perhaps it wasn’t the same voice. Cutting through the old man’s growl there was something that told me this was a younger child.
“The old man had a piece of paper,” said the voice. “He was writing.”
“What do you mean, writing?” I asked. “When?”
