It’s not right.
It wasn’t right that they could come with their smiling faces and sharp hands and take his safety away. It wasn’t right that they could make him weak like that, when he was the strong one. They were soft, after all, he had seen it; the weakness of their flesh, seeping out of their clothes—had tasted their prey-scent in the flowery perfumes they doused themselves in. Women were dangerous, and difficult, just as the man had said they were. They would always be lethal to him, a thing to be feared.
When he returned to the house, the man was nowhere to be seen, but the living room door was open and Michael could see one of the women still sitting on the sofa. It was the one in the white fur coat, and she looked bored, picking at a loose thread on a cushion. The other girl was gone. Michael went down to the kitchens and picked out one of the long meat knives; he had seen the man cooking with it sometimes, cutting up steak or carving a pork joint. When he returned, the girl was still there, and in the lengthening shadows of the evening Michael realized that she couldn’t see him just outside the room. He imagined himself as he was in the woods, silent and at home, a predatory force. He thought of all the little ghosts he had packed neatly away in the black earth, how they knew him from his silent footsteps as he passed over their graves.
The knife held loosely in one hand, he went into the living room and closed the door.
Later, much later, Michael became aware of the man standing in the doorway, watching him. He blinked rapidly. The room appeared to have changed; it was a different place, a room in a red landscape full of silence.
“Michael.” The man’s voice was very soft. “We can’t leave her here, lad.”
He shook his head. “We’ll take her to the woods.”
“No,” the man came a single step into the room, then seemed to think better of it. “Even that’s too close. We’ll have to take her far away, Michael, just to be sure.”
“But that’s what I promised her, a place under the trees.” Michael didn’t recall making the woman any such promises, but the last hour or so was already fusing into one strange fever dream, and it seemed right enough. She belonged in Fiddler’s Woods with the rest of them, so she would feel his silent footsteps walking over.
“That can’t be, lad,” said the man, and there was an edge of danger to his voice now. Michael dragged his eyes away from the mess on the carpet and looked up. The man was a creature of black and gray shadows, the light from the single lamp winking out of his dull, false eye. “You’ve done well, but you’ve got to bloody listen to me now, right? Every word, you pay attention now, and learn something. Right?”
In the end, they gave her heart to Fiddler’s Woods. The rest of her they loaded into the man’s battered old van, and they drove a long way, the hot, sweet smell of her flooding the cab and making the man grimace. Eventually, when they had found a good, remote place, they took her out of the van and placed her in the grass. By that time, the sky in the east was turning a burnished silver color, and the man was eager to be gone.
“A lot of tidying up to be done lad, and don’t think you’ll be getting out of that. It’s important you learn it. A proper good clean will save your neck.”
Michael ignored him for the moment. The woman in the grass looked oddly serene, her eyes turned up to the brightening sky, everything below her collar bone a churned, butcher-shop mess. He knew why she looked so peaceful; because her heart was in the cold, black dirt, deep in the roots of the ancient wood. With a single gloved finger, he drew a heart in her blood on one of the few patches of her skin that wasn’t ruined.
“A heart for a heart,” he said.
And her coat. Her coat, which had been so white before, was a deep and sopping red. He smiled at that, drinking in the sight, before getting back into the van.
CHAPTER19
IN THE SPARE bedroom with the lights still on, Heather sat in the bed with her knees drawn up to her chest, waiting for the nausea to pass. There was a bucket on the floor next to her. She had screwed up the note and thrown it in the bin in the bathroom, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the words, so neat and so damning. It hadn’t looked like her mother’s handwriting, but then how familiar was she with it, anyway? Not to mention the fact that it had been written in big, uppercase letters, much closer to the way her dad had used to write his notes: Post-its on the fridge for more milk, or receipts for building work. Nikki had said, she reminded herself, that suicidal people were very ill, that they might not be thinking clearly when they wrote their notes—perhaps this message had been her mother at her most unwell, writing accusing letters to no one in particular, or perhaps even to herself. She wanted to believe that, for the shred of comfort it gave her, but she didn’t.
She knew the note was for her.
It made sense. It was too close to all the barbs her mother had thrown at her in the months before she had finally moved out. Back then, in the dark days following her dad’s funeral, the two of them had been in a state of war, all the conflicts between them finally exposed by the
