The greenhouse is gone too. But the old stone washhouse, with its red-framed window and small slate roof, still stands dwarfed by the corner of the house. Rusty padlocked chains are strung across its red wooden door. It was always locked up like that, I remember, as if condemned. The garden walls still tower, covering its borders in shade, but now trellises of lilac and clematis and trumpet vine hide the dark, wide stones and their seams of moss. My gaze slides to the expanse of high wall alongside the washhouse. No lilac and clematis there, not even the strangle of ivy. A flash of red. An itch. Red. A whisper of silvery, shivery dread.
I ignore it. Go down the steps and into the garden. Through the orchard, dense and rustling. Past a shed I don’t recognise. Khaki-green-painted wood and a black tarred roof.
And then I’m standing in front of Old Fred. Where our treasure hunts always started.
El hid the clues, and I followed them. Tiny little squares of paper scrawled with cryptic messages only I had a hope of understanding. She’d hide them anywhere and everywhere, each little square of paper leading to the next, and only at the last one would there be a prize instead. Almost always a drawing or painting of us that I’d pin to the walls of the Kakadu Jungle like a totem.
Old Fred looks the same. Squat and wide and appleless, his branches low and inviting. I walk around him to where El carved our names into his trunk, and breathe in cold, sharp air when I see they’re still there, scored deep into the brittle bark. Hardly faded. Not inside a heart, but a circle. I reach out to touch them, and then snatch my hand back when I see what’s been carved beneath.
DIG
I stand for a moment, glance up at the house’s empty windows. And then something halfway between hope and frustration makes me obey.
It doesn’t take much digging around the roots to find something. A deep hole covered over with leaves and loose earth. When my fingers touch something solid, I pull it out. A shoebox. I lift up its lid slowly.
I see the empty bottle first: a pirate grinning at me, standing with one foot on a barrel, one hand on his cutlass. Captain Morgan Spiced Gold Rum. Next to it are unopened tins of food, careful neat stacks of them: tomatoes, baked beans, sweetcorn. Immediately, I think of Mum supervising the six-monthly restocking of the Survival Packs stored under our bed – black canvas rucksacks stuffed with non-perishable food and bottles of water. I think of her forcing us to run through the house on endless fire drills, intruder drills, nuclear war drills; refuelling our panic, that ever-present hum of doom.
There’s also a tin of paint. A tester pot. I pick it up, turn it round. Blood Red. I drop it back into the box as if it’s hot. It lands on a tiny square of folded paper. My heart is beating fast when I take it out, open it up.
12 November 1993 AGE = 7+a bit!
Theres a monster in our house at night.
Not evry night, but lots of them. He has a blue beerd and is so very frightfull and ugly that all ladys should hide from him and never venchure to go into his company.
Thats what mum says. Its from a book.
She says Bluebeerd and Blackbeerd are brothers. She says Bluebeerd lives on land and Blackbeerd lives on sea and Bluebeerd is worse but I’m more scayerd of Blackbeerd coz hes a pirate and Bluebeerd is just a man.
I hear a sound like a bird cry – press my hand against my mouth when I realise it’s me. My fingers are shaking. My breath feels hot. I can see El, half-slumped over her desk, diary open, elbows wide, brow furrowed in concentration as she writes slowly in that same careful cursive.
I get up quickly, start carrying the shoebox back towards the house. My heartbeat is inside my throat and temples. I slow when I reach the paving, glance across at the washhouse and its chained door. Stop when I see another flash of red in the corner of my eye. Turn back to face that flanking high wall seamed with moss and lichen instead of clematis or ivy. Nothing. But when I close my eyes, I imagine the words splashed across that naked old stone in blood:
HE KNOWS
Moonlight, I think. There should be moonlight.
And then I’m running up the stairs and back into the scullery, turning that huge rusty key behind me before shoving the shoebox into the nearest cupboard. I go back into the kitchen. Look up at the bell board, at the bell and pendulum below the number 3. Imagine that gloomy thin corridor above my head, the dusty dark panels of the door at its end. Mum’s sour breath on our skin, the snap of her teeth. You ever go in there, and I’ll have both your guts for garters. Because Bedroom 3 was Bluebeard’s Room. Because the bodies of his wives hung on hooks from the walls, and it was filled with blood. Because at night, when he was hungry, he prowled corridors and rooms looking for more. I go suddenly cold. The thought – memory – is as certain as it is obscure. The why that itches under my skin. And in the wake of that memory comes another. I look back at the bell board, the faded Pantry. El and I hid from most of the house’s ghosts and monsters inside the Clown Café. But we always – always – hid from Bluebeard inside Mirrorland.
The pantry is at the very rear of the hallway, crouching in the shadows opposite the stairwell’s flank, and hidden from view by a black velveteen curtain. I pull it open. It’s heavy, dusty. The rattle of metal rings against its rail makes me want to cringe, and fills me with
