The silence was too much. Hissing like the sound of a bundle of clothes, sliding across the carpet of the landing toward her room.
So she pulled out her field recorder and slipped her headphones on. She scrolled through some files and settled, as usual, on the sounds of a market in Marrakesh, which she’d recorded last year. A rich soundscape suddenly filled her ears: street chatter, car horns, muffled local music from buildings and the constant sound of unintelligible bartering. And every now and again she’d hear an English voice amongst it all. Debbie. Her ex-girlfriend. Telling her to come and look at something. Handing her a hat and saying, hey, try this on. In the weeks just before she sat Rachel down and said, let’s be like grown-ups about this and dumped her for God.
Hearing her voice and the sounds of the market pulled her out of Menham for a moment. Long enough for her to ignore the fact that maybe Rachel was exactly like Holly, after all. Maybe she would never leave this place either. Not really. But the sounds played long enough for her to gradually forget where she was, and better still, who she was. Long enough, at least, to tug her into a deep and dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Amelia was sleeping now, finally. Curled in her giant quilt cloud, with that fluffy tortoise clamped under her chin. He’d bounded across the garden so fast, he’d almost tripped on a little stone tortoise Wren had put out. By the time he got upstairs she was already holding Amelia tight, with the torchlight on her phone giving the room a dull glow.
‘It’s another power cut,’ she said softly, patting Amelia’s hair. ‘It’s no big deal, okay?’
But it had been a big deal. Enough for her to see the shadow in her room again, only this time it was at the bottom of the bed and was climbing up on her feet. She refused to go to sleep in this room even with the light on. Not unless one of them stayed with her. Wren had offered, but she had a presentation first thing. So here he was, sitting on Amelia’s window sill, listening to her tiny mouse snore and watching her face crush into her pillow. Ready to reassure her that any figure she was seeing was a hypnagogic illusion. No phantoms here. Her yellow lamp cast a cosy haze across the room. He looked at the corner and couldn’t see any shadows to worry about.
As he sat, he nibbled at the corner of a breadstick and gazed out of her window. His beloved cabin sat in darkness in the garden below. He’d switched everything off down there but he had the thought that if this was a movie, this would be the bit when the room suddenly lit up with the flash of that VHS again. And he’d hear the muffled voice of Holly Wasson, talking about black rabbits.
There were no lights, though. So it looked more like a proper shed than ever. He glanced across at the Anglican church just down from them and the corner of the graveyard that was visible from here. Wow, he thought. What the hell did he and Rachel expect? Giving a seven-year-old the room with the best view of an allotment for corpses.
He sighed and stared back down at his phone and the three words he’d thumbed into Google Search.
Demonic. Symbolism. Rabbit.
He tapped the search button and saw stacks of references spring up. He wasn’t really surprised to find so many. Animal demons were as common as muck in folk tales and legend. But he was more used to seeing the rabbit symbol in Renaissance art. Like Cosimo’s image of a white hare, snuffling Cupid’s hand. Or Titian’s unusual piece that Matt had once seen in the Louvre. With a cute little white rabbit being stroked by the Virgin Mary, while a delighted baby Jesus looks down at it, smiling. There were carvings of three rabbits on a Swiss cathedral too, who were supposed to represent the Holy Trinity. He knew that much.
But he had to admit he was rusty on his psycho-evil-rabbit knowledge.
Turns out, there were plenty of others who weren’t.
– Rabbits and Hares in the Dark Arts.
– Rabbits as Demonic Guardians: Ancient Egypt.
– The Shadow Demon Rabbit in Mythology and Reality.
Fascinating.
He swallowed and started tapping.
The Internet, he’d always thought, was ironically a rabbit hole itself and he found himself moving from link to link, winding up in the most unexpected places. At one point he found himself on The British Museum site, scrolling through the funerary papyrus of someone called Bakenmut, an ancient Egyptian priest and scribe. Matt had a fair bit of knowledge of Ancient Egyptian symbolism but he hardly had to be Indiana Jones, or indeed a vet, to spot the figure of a rabbit drawn on the centuries-old papyrus. Described as some sort of demonic guardian, the rabbit appeared to be standing tall on its hind legs, holding a knife.
A few clicks later and he saw photographs of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Chartres, France. He clicked on a link and the screen suddenly filled with a grotesque-looking gargoyle carved from dark-grey stone on the southern portal. It was a tall rabbit on two feet, huge ears dangling. Over its shoulder it was carrying a woman by the ankles and the rabbit looked hungry. Exactly what the rabbit was hungry for was open to discussion, but the fact that the woman was naked made suggestions of its own. Another part of the cathedral showed a soldier running away in panic … from a hare.
Then a beautiful, centuries-old building in Dean Street, Newcastle. Overlooking the rear of St Nicholas Cathedral. Over the arch of a door, a mad gargoyle crouched with fangs and claws bared. The good old Geordies had christened it the Vampire Rabbit.
He found a bizarre statue in Dublin, Ireland, which
