He swallowed a chunk of breadstick and for the first time he became aware that the hedges in the garden were moving. He stared down there, and cupped his hand against the glass to cut out the lamp light.
– It’s the breeze, stupid. You’re getting as bad as Amelia.
Back on the phone he moved on from the pictures to articles. He found that rabbits had become particularly reviled from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. This was due to their supposed pagan connections to sexuality and fertility. The pagans embraced them because these animals apparently had the ability to walk between the worlds and commune with the dead. He thought of Holly, sending her animal messenger back and forth between worlds.
This skill of rabbits meant it wasn’t a shock that they became so popular with witches, who sometimes kept them as familiars. He saw an old painting of a hook-nosed woman waltzing through a forest at night, as a string of animals paraded in tow behind her, walking on their hind legs, holding candles in their paws. A tall black rabbit led the way.
He clicked on another picture, which turned out to be the frontispiece from the 1647 book, The Discovery of Witches by Matthew Hopkins. Ah … he knew this one well. The woodcut showed the arch witch-finder Hopkins decked out with his cape and staff, looking Vincent-Price-sharp while he presided over some old lady being forced to name her ‘imps’. Toward the bottom left he saw a black rabbit standing on its hind legs, and next to it was the name it had confessed to: Sack and Sugar.
For some reason he tapped the rabbit with his finger. The bushes rustled outside.
He shrugged, moved on, scrolled through more and more of this stuff, surprised at the sheer amount of it. He glanced up at Amelia, still sleeping, but with her head lost completely under the quilt. Just a lump sitting there in the room, now. He slipped his earphones on when he ventured into YouTube territory.
He started watching the most traumatic clips from Watership Down (that had been a ‘U’ certificate? Sheesh). Bulgy-eyed rabbits glared as they watched blood spreading in rivulets across fields. And of course the Black Rabbit of Inlé. The grim reaper who lived in a stone warren and announced and delivered death to all other rabbits. Not even a villain as such. He was only doing the bidding of the great god Frith. The rabbit as messenger. The black angel.
He yawned and clicked on a home-made cartoon which turned out to be Bugs Bunny violently sodomising Elmer Fudd while the theme from Benny Hill played. Finally, he laughed at the ridiculousness of everything he had seen and read that night. All that gonzo stuff he’d heard today in the Gazebo took on its right perspective, as the jaunty Yakety Sax rattled his eardrums.
‘Bedtime for bonzo,’ he said to himself.
He clicked the ‘Bugs Does Fudd Gud!’ video off, just in case Wren walked in to discover he had a bizarrely specific taste in Looney Tunes porn. Then he slid off the sill and pulled Amelia’s quilt back a touch. He kissed her very gently on the forehead. Looking at her and feeling thankful not to God but that the random chaos of life had got them all out of Hobbs Hill in one piece, this summer. Then a thought came to him. If Amelia had been around in his Christian years, he would have prayed for her right now, just as she slept. He’d have knelt by her bedside and held her hand. Would have asked God to keep the shadows away, regardless of them being in her mind or in the ether. He thought about this for a long moment, then he turned and left her light on, kept her door open and headed off to bed.
It was 1 a.m.
It was only when he crossed the landing that he felt anything approaching real, genuine unease. He glanced out of the large window towards the church. He was getting into the habit of doing that, just in case vandals were up on the roof tearing the lead off to sell.
Tonight though he froze, because he saw a small dark shape springing between the gravestones of the churchyard. On any other night he’d have said, ‘bloody foxes,’ but he didn’t say that because frankly it didn’t really look like one of those. He just leant towards the glass, fogged with his breath and watched the little black shadow leap from one grave, then to the next, only to vanish behind the white marble gravestone. The stone was one he recognised, because they’d all walked through there the other day, and Wren had sighed when she saw it. A young kid, dead before he’d even hit his teens. The name escaped him, for now. Though wasn’t he nine?
He waited for more minutes than were sensible but whatever animal it was never emerged from behind that gravestone again. He was almost tempted to grab his shoes and go out to look but he lay in bed instead, struggling to sleep for a very long time. Funny what darkness can do to perfectly rational minds.
He just kept thinking that the small rabbit (he knew that’s what it was) had now burrowed itself deep down into the earth of that little one’s grave, and had found itself somewhere warm and dark to hide.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jo Finch fluttered her eyes open and looked at the bedside clock. It was just after 2 a.m., though she could barely read the blurred red digits of the display. She pulled her hand from under the quilt and rubbed at her eyes.
Wet.
She’d been crying in her sleep.
The dream had done that. A
