There were bones all over his piece of Fiddler’s Woods, and he knew the location of most of them, but of the women he brought back only their hearts nestled in the mud—that was the rule. This skull felt like a message of some sort, but he couldn’t have said what it was. A warning? A blessing? Were the woods trying to speak to him directly?
He had just placed it back into the dark earth, turning it so that its eyes looked up to the trees, when an alien noise made him sit up. It took him a moment to place it—a baby, not crying yet, but whinging in that pitiful way that babies do when something isn’t quite to their liking.
“Hello?”
He stood up and moved away from the skull, wiping his hands on his trousers. It was a warm day, and the midges were thick in the air. The closer he got to the sound of the baby, the more he picked up other, more reassuring noises: there was Colleen, her voice pitched higher than usual as she tried to settle the child, and there was the voice of someone else, talking to her. A moment after he recognized her voice he saw her, walking an old woodland path with one of the Bickerstaff sisters. She was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with tiny purple roses on it, and the baby was wrapped in a yellow blanket. Every now and then she rocked it in her arms, trying to get it to quieten down, but the whinging was edging close to crying now.
“Babysitting, are we?”
Both women looked up at the sound of his voice. Neither of them had heard him coming.
“Oh, Mike.” Colleen smiled. Strands of her blonde hair were plastered to her high forehead with sweat. “Just giving Eileen a break. This little one,” she pressed one hand briefly to the baby’s cheek, “is teething, we think. Walking them about sometimes calms them down.”
“Bit of brandy in the milk works, too,” said the Bickerstaff woman. “That’s what our mother used to do.”
Colleen looked faintly scandalized. “Everyone’s a bit frazzled at the commune, so I thought we’d best take our walk where it’s quiet.” She grinned suddenly. “This is the second spring baby!”
Now that he was next to them, Michael peered down at the baby’s face; Colleen, pleased he was taking an interest, pulled the blanket back a little so he could see better. The small face was mottled and pink, and he could see a few curls of carroty hair sprouting from a downy scalp.
“Two babies and another on the way.” He looked up at the Bickerstaff woman. It was Lizbet. “Are you sure those contraceptive pills aren’t duds, lass?”
Lizbet scowled at him openly. “It’s not our fault that girls are forgetting to take them, is it? You should be grateful you don’t have to think about it, Michael. God knows where we would be if men had to take some responsibility for what they keep in their trousers, filthy beasts.”
Filthy. Beast.
Michael swallowed hard. Something about his demeanor must have changed, because he saw a look of pure alarm pass over Colleen’s face.
“She’s just joking, Mike, that’s all.”
He could do it. He could reach out and snap Lizbet’s neck like a twig; it would only take moments. His mother, who had called him dirty and monstrous had died in seconds, too, and then she had moldered away inside the ice house, her doughy flesh turning into brown sticks. But Lizbet was smiling at him, her eyes full of a knowledge she shouldn’t have, and the moment passed.
“Take the baby up by the stream,” he said eventually, not looking at either of them. “The sound of the water there makes it peaceful. That might calm her down.”
CHAPTER38
IT WAS, HEATHER had to admit, a beautiful stretch of land. Gentle hills in the distance, clumps of wild, dark trees held apart by empty fields, alive with the movement of long grasses. In the summer, she imagined it was magnificent—and at this end of the year, with most of the red and gold leaves around their ankles rather than on the trees, there was a pleasing bleakness to it all. And there was the silence. If it weren’t for the constant calling of the birds, it might even have been possible for her to put aside the feeling that she was haunted—the sense that far from escaping the ghosts and horrors of her mother’s house, that she had simply brought it all with her.
I’m getting closer, though. It was easier to put her worries to one side when the truth about her mother—and the Red Wolf—felt like it was just around the corner.
“Here, what’s that?”
They had reached one of the little country lanes and on the corner of a turn there was, standing half hidden in a bush, a strange figure of twisted metal. Heather and Nikki wandered over for a closer look.
“I didn’t expect to see something like this up here. I mean, wandering down Peckham Road, you’re falling over stuff like this, but here?”
It was about five feet tall, and made of graceful twists of silver and copper-colored metal. The figure stood with its hands held out in front of it, each curving finger like a melting knife.
“Look, there’s a sign.” Nikki reached out and tapped the palm of the left hand: there was a small metal tag there, letters neatly pressed into it. She read it out loud. “The Shifting Man, a work by Harry Bozen-Smith. Commissions accepted. Follow the signs to my studio.”
Heather straightened up and looked down the turning. The road there was narrower, the bare trees crowding in on either side, but she
