“It’s nowt but a power cut, lad.” In the dazzle from the torch, the boy couldn’t see the man’s face, but the shape of him was so unlike anything from home—the red coat the red coat the red coat—that he felt the air transform, becoming clear again, slick and clean and free of terror. “Come downstairs if you’re going to take on so, I’ve all the candles out. Is your mouth bleeding?”
The next day was wet and blustery, but the man made him put a coat on—again too big, the bottom of it came down to his knees—and they went walking outside. The area around the house was green and isolated; Michael could see fields and hedgerows, and a tangle of dark woods. It was this that the man led him toward, their trousers quickly becoming heavy with water from the tall grass, and as they passed under the dark twisted trees, Michael shivered and blinked, feeling more awake than he had for days.
“This is Fiddler’s Wood,” said the man. “It’s ancient.” There was a clear note of pride in his voice. “Primrose, wood anemone, yellow rattle, dog roses. Bluebells, in the spring. Flowers that mean a place is old, that a place is a leftover from the ice age.” He looked down at Michael, his false eye dull. “You don’t care for flowers none, I expect, but that’s not what I’m going to show you.”
Not far from the wood’s edge, they came to a small domed building, sunk deeply into the black dirt. It had been built from red brick once, but the colors of the woods had leeched into it. Green moss and yellow lichen covered it, until it looked like a natural thing, a growth on the forest floor. There was a low padlocked door set into the front of it.
“This is an ice house,” said the man. “A lot of big old houses have them. I want you to think about your mother, lad.” He dropped his hand onto Michael’s shoulder, and Michael felt cold fear move through him like a shower of stones.
“What’s in there?”
“Your mother was not a good woman, but I imagine you know that better than most. Your whole family is …” He stopped and pushed the boy forward slightly. “But I don’t want you to remember that, lad. I want you to remember the last time you saw her. You got that? Are you listening to me, boy?”
He stepped forward, smoothing a key from his pocket, and he unlocked the door. Cold air moved across the boy’s face. It smelt brackish and strange, like water left to stand in a bucket for weeks.
“Are you thinking of it, lad? The last time you saw her?”
The boy did not move. He was remembering the odd feeling of weightlessness in his stomach as they’d fallen down the stairs, the delicious sensation of hurting that which had hurt him.
“Remember the time when you had complete power over her,” said the man. He settled his hands on Michael’s shoulders again and gently pushed him through the door of the ice house. The ground sloped away ahead of them, and Michael felt his over-sized boots moving through a gritty kind of sludge. The daylight from the door revealed a dank room, the walls smeared with creeping black mold, and it was cold, much colder than outside. There was a shape in front of them, resting on a long, low stone bench. Michael looked at it. The man squeezed his shoulder.
“Remember the power you had then, lad. Remember it.”
The shape was his mother. She looked small, curled in on herself. Her limbs were dark, as though her skin were one big bruise, and he could still see the flash of white bone poking through her arm where it had torn itself free. The yellow smock was no longer yellow. Her face was turned away from him, but he could see the jut of her jaw and her cheekbone, which looked larger than it had. He imagined her staring at the far wall, imagined her whispering into the dark. Dirty beast, filthy little shit. Michael made a small strangled noise in the back of his throat.
“No,’ said the man, firmly. “Look at what she is now. She’s nothing. Do you see?”
He pushed the boy forward sharply, so that he almost fell onto the corpse. All at once Michael was inches away from the torn flesh of his mother, her rotten fingers like small brown sticks.
And he saw it.
He saw that she was a small pitiful thing, a broken shape on the landscape of his rage.
“That’s it, my lad. That’s it. When you are the wolf, the likes of her are just meat. Bad meat.”
CHAPTER13
IF HEATHER HAD one good habit, it was that she was early to everything. Arriving at Belmarsh a good hour before she was needed, she had taken root in a greasy spoon in Thamesmead. Heather had a begrudging sort of affection for Thamesmead; like Balesford, it clung to the bottom of London like a sort of crusted canker, but it at least had the good sense to be cluttered with lots of brutalist architecture—looming gray concrete wherever you happened to look, and that vague sense that once this urban landscape had existed only on the design sheets of an extremely optimistic architect.
She ordered a bacon and egg sandwich and a cup of tea, and sat near the window, looking out at a high street crammed with betting shops and fried chicken places. Eventually, she pulled out a folder of scanned letters. Ben Parker had given her a few copies of the letters her mother had sent, and these she had already read feverishly, rigid with indignation, but ultimately, they hadn’t told her much at all. Mostly the letters were short and polite, talking about inconsequential things like the changing of the seasons, the weather, or her dinner plans. Heather couldn’t make head or tail of them; you would never guess that the
