The Hollowing Season: What The Town Remembers

The church bell at the end of Millbrook Lane had not rung in eleven years, but Maren heard it anyway.

She stopped at the gate of Ashenmere, one hand on the rusted iron latch, and listened. A single toll, low and bronze, rolled out across the fields and faded into the grey of the morning. She had counted the strokes once as a girl, standing on the gravel path with her father's hand heavy on her shoulder. Six. Always six. The rector had said it was the hour the first Halloway had died upon these grounds, and the bell had never quite forgotten.

No one had come to wind the clockworks in over a decade. The rope hung in the belfry like a dead nerve.

Maren unlatched the gate and walked through. Gravel crunched under her boots, each step too loud in the muffled air. Mist lay along the lower gardens, pooling in the hollows where the lawn had surrendered to moss. The house waited at the end of the drive, its gables sharp against a sky the colour of old pewter. Every window on the upper floor was dark. A single lamp burned in the front parlour, left burning since before she arrived.

She did not go inside.

There would be time enough for Ashenmere's particular silence. Today she needed the town.

The road into Thresh ran south along the river, a ribbon of cracked tarmac that the county had stopped repairing sometime in the last century. Hawthorn hedges crowded the verges, their white blossoms gone brown at the edges. She walked rather than drive. The hire car sat in the drive at Ashenmere with a dead battery, and besides, she wanted to feel the distance go by beneath her boots. Mile after mile of low stone walls. Mile after mile of fields that did not remember how to lie flat.

The first house she passed belonged to the Marshes. She had known that from the gate, because the gate still bore the brass plate, green with verdigris: E. MARSH, FOLKLORIST. She had a letter for him, from the pile her father had kept in the desk. She would deliver it later. For now, she noted the drawn curtains, the untouched milk bottles on the step, and the FOR SALE sign so weathered the words had become a suggestion.

Thresh announced itself the way small English towns do, with a sign half hidden by an overgrown hedge and a speed limit that no one ever obeyed. MAREN ALLOWED HERSELF A SMALL, PRIVATE SMILE. The High Street opened ahead of her, narrow and cobbled, lined with the kind of stone cottages that estate agents photographed from flattering angles. A post office. A chemist. A pub called The Founder's Arms whose windows had been painted black at some point in living memory, though the paint had cracked and peeled to show ordinary glass beneath.

She stopped at the corner and listened.

Nothing.

No engines, no voices, no scrape of a shop gate being dragged up. A clocktower rose above the chemist's roof, its face pale in the mist. The hands pointed at 3:17.

She checked her own watch. Her father had left it to her, along with the house and the ledgers and the cold weight of his name. The second hand swept on, faithful and indifferent. She looked back at the tower.

3:17.

She walked on, past the chemist's, where the door stood ajar and a cardboard sign in the window read BACK IN FIVE MINUTES in handwriting she did not recognise. Past the newsagent, where the magazine rack stood in perfect order, every copy facing outward, every title legible. The door there was also ajar. A bell above the frame had been removed, leaving only a hole in the lintel.

The bakers was the worst.

It was the bakers because it smelled of bread. Real bread, baked that morning, the crusty kind with the thick heel her father used to buy on Saturdays when they walked into town together. Maren stood at the open door and let the warmth reach her face. Flour dust drifted in the slant of light from the window. The ovens along the back wall held their heat, though the range was cold. A tray of rolls sat on the counter, ready to be sold, and a pair of cotton gloves lay beside the till as if a pair of hands had simply stepped out of them.

Behind the counter, a price list was pinned to the wall. SOURDOUGH LOAF, 1.80. CHEDDAR AND CHIVE, 2.20. Below it, in a different hand, a single line had been added and underlined twice:

THEY WILL RETURN BY NIGHTFALL.

Maren touched the paper. The ink was still tacky.

She stepped out again and stood in the street. Her breath made a pale ghost in the air, though the morning was not that cold. Somewhere above her, a wood pigeon called and stopped, as though it had been answered.

The porch swing of the house opposite the bakers was moving.

There was no wind to move it. The chains had been oiled sometime in the last month, she noticed, because they caught no rust and gave no complaint. The swing traced a slow arc, forward and back, forward and back, with the patient rhythm of a pendulum. As she watched, it occurred to her that every porch swing on the street was moving. Not at the same pace, but at the same tempo, as though each one were keeping time to a different instrument in the same slow orchestra.

She could not have said how she knew this. She simply did. The house to her left had no porch swing, only a bay window full of ferns, but she knew that if it had had one, that too would have swayed.

She moved on.

The clocktower chimed the quarter hour. Three notes, distant and sweet, and then a silence so complete that Maren heard the blood in her own ears. She approached the tower and looked up at the face. 3:17. She looked at her watch. 9:42. She looked at the sun, what little of it showed through the haze. Mid-morning.

The clock was not broken. It had been stopped.

She climbed the three stone steps to the door of the chemist's and went in. The smell hit her first: iodex, and beneath it, something older. The shop was narrow and deep, shelves from floor to ceiling on either side, every box in its place. At the back, behind a glass counter, a row of apothecary jars stood in graduated sizes, each labelled in copperplate. TINCTURE OF OPIUM. SPIRIT OF NITRE. ACETUM. None of them had been dusted in years. A fine grey lay on every surface, but only that; the air was dry.

The shop bell, she realised, had not been removed. It had been silenced. A small wad of cotton wool had been pushed up into the bell housing.

She moved behind the counter. The till was open. A coin sat in the drawer, a single fifty-pence piece, and a folded receipt lay beside it. She read the receipt twice.

COD LIVER OIL, 1 x 2.20 PARACETAMOL, 1 x 0.80 MATCHES, 1 x 0.60 WAX FOR SEALS, 1 x 1.10

The date on the receipt was three days old.

There was a back room. The door stood half open, and she pushed it with the flat of her hand. A kettle sat on a two-ring burner. Two mugs stood on the counter. Two. She did not need to look inside them to know they were empty, but she looked anyway. One had a teabag still in it, stewed to a brown smear against the china. The other had been rinsed and set to dry.

A calendar on the wall showed the current month. Each day had been crossed through with a red pen until the day before yesterday. Yesterday's square was empty. Today's square was empty. Tomorrow's square was empty.

Above the calendar, pinned with a brass tack, was a printed notice.

BY ORDER OF THE PARISH COUNCIL IN THE EVENT OF A STOPPAGE OF ALL TIMEPIECES WITHIN THE PARISH OF THRESH RESIDENTS ARE ADVISED TO REMAIN INDOORS AFTER THE HOUR OF THREE.

Below this notice, in the same hand that had added the line to the bakers' price list, someone had written in small, neat capitals:

EXCEPT HER.

Maren read the words twice. Then she folded the receipt, put it in her pocket, and went back out onto the street.

The mist had lifted while she was inside. What it had lifted into was worse than mist; it was a pale, flat light that threw no shadows and gave everything the colour of an old photograph. The High Street stretched ahead of her, and for the first time she noticed that every shop on the left-hand side of the street had its door open. Every shop on the right was shut. The chemist's was on the left. The bakers was on the left. The post office was on the left. The newsagent was on the left. On the right, the pub, an estate agent, a solicitors' office, a closed bank.

She turned to look behind her. The church at the end of the lane, where the bell had rung. The lane was on the right side.

She walked on.

Three streets branched off the High Street. The first led toward the school. A metal fence surrounded the playground, and behind it she could see a line of small coats hanging on pegs. The second led toward the new estate at the edge of town, the kind of housing that had gone up in the nineties, all pebbledash and square windows. She did not go down it. The third led toward the river, and along the river toward Ashenmere.

She took the third.

The houses here were older, set back from the road behind low walls and paths of their own cracked tarmac. Some of them had nameplates. OAK COTTAGE. ROSELEIGH. THE LAURELS. And, set a little apart at the end of the lane, a house without a name, only a number painted on the gatepost: 3.

It was the only house with a light in the window.

Maren stood at the gate and watched the curtain move. Behind it, a shadow went past, and a hand drew the fabric back an inch, then let it fall. The figure did not come to the door.

She looked down at the path. A pair of boots had left prints in the fine dust on the flagstones. They came from the back garden, walked to the front door, and stopped. A second set, slightly smaller, came out to meet them, then turned and walked back the way the first had come. Two people, then. She followed the prints around the side of the house. They ended at a low wall, where someone had been sitting. The stone was worn smooth. A newspaper lay folded on the coping, the crossword half done in blue ink.

She picked it up. The date was this morning.

Behind her, the door of number 3 opened.

She turned. A woman stood in the doorway, thin, in a pinafore that had been mended at the shoulder. Her hair was grey and her face was the kind of face that had decided long ago what it thought of the world and had not changed its mind since. She looked at Maren with eyes that did not blink.

"Miss Halloway," the woman said.

It was not a question.

Maren put the newspaper down on the wall. "Yes."

The woman nodded once. "Cora Whitfield. I kept your father's house for him. He paid me by the month and never asked for change."

"I didn't know there was anyone."

"There wasn't," said Cora Whitfield, "for a long while. Then there was."

She stepped back from the door. It was not an invitation, exactly. It was a clearing of the way.

Maren went inside.

The hall smelled of beeswax and cold tea. A coat hung on the newel post, a man's coat, dark wool, the shoulders still holding the shape of the man who had last worn it. A pair of shoes waited by the door, laced and ready. A hat lay on the table, brim up, as if its owner had meant to come back for it.

Cora Whitfield closed the door behind Maren. The latch fell with a sound like a small bone snapping.

"I have put sheets on the bed in the room at the front," she said. "The kettle is on. If you want tea, it will be tea. If you want anything else, I have not got it."

"Tea is fine," Maren said. "Thank you."

The woman looked at her a moment longer. "You have her eyes," she said, and went past her toward the kitchen.

Maren did not ask whose.

She stood in the hall and let her hand rest on the newel post. The wood was smooth and dark, and there was a nick in it at the height of a child's elbow. She remembered that nick. She had made it herself, with a pair of her father's garden shears, the summer she was nine. She had not been punished. Her father had looked at the post and then at her and had said only that the house would carry the scar and so would she, and that it was best to make peace with both.

She went up the stairs.

The landing was smaller than she remembered. The window at the end looked out onto the street, and the street looked out onto itself. A man was crossing the road with a newspaper under his arm. A child was sitting on a wall, kicking its heels. Nothing moved in any of the other houses. The curtains in number 5 were drawn and had been drawn for a long while, the fabric gone the yellow of old paper.

She pushed open the door of the front room.

The bed had been made with hospital corners. A jug of water stood on the washstand, and a glass had been put out with it, inverted, so that no dust could settle in the rim. The curtains were half drawn. There was a book on the bedside table, a paperback with a cracked spine, the title in Cyrillic. She picked it up. The pages were brittle and foxed and gave off a smell like dry leaves in autumn. A pressed flower had been used as a bookmark, a sprig of something she did not recognise, the colour gone out of it, the shape of a hand with five thin fingers.

She put the book down and went to the window. From here she could see the path to her father's house. The gate was still open. The spirea still nodded. The wind had not moved. The man who had crossed the road was gone, and the child on the wall was gone, and there was no one at all in the street, and yet she had the sense, very strong, that she was being watched from more than one window.

She drew the curtain and went back downstairs.

Cora Whitfield was in the kitchen. The kettle was singing on the Aga. The woman had set out two cups and a small plate of biscuits, the sort that come in a blue tin and taste of nothing in particular. She did not look up when Maren came in.

"Sit down," she said.

Maren sat.

The woman poured the tea. The steam rose and curled and was gone. She put the pot back on the hob and stood with her back to Maren, both hands flat on the range.

"I kept this house for your father for nine years," she said. "I cleaned it. I aired it. I put flowers in the rooms when there was reason. I saw to the chimney. I saw to the roof. He paid me by the month and never came to see what I had done."

"He did not come at all?" Maren said.

"He came," said Cora Whitfield. "He came in the way a man comes to a place he has left. He stood at the gate and looked at the house and then he went away again. After a while he stopped standing at the gate and only came as far as the wall at the end of the lane, and then he stopped coming at all, and I had the garden and the rooms and the quiet."

She turned round and sat down opposite Maren and lifted her cup and drank.

"You are his daughter," she said. "You have the look of him. You have the way of standing in a doorway as if you are not sure the room will have you."

Maren did not answer.

"You have come because he is dead," the woman went on. "You have come to settle the house and to go away again. That is what people do. They come and they settle and they go. Thresh is used to it."

"Thresh," Maren said.

"This town," said Cora Whitfield. "You will have noticed that there is no one in it."

"I had noticed."

"There is me," the woman said. "There is Dr. Marsh. There is the postman, who comes on Tuesdays and Fridays. There is the vicar, who has not been seen since the spring. There are the Grieve boys at the farm, who are not right in the head but can bring in a harvest. There is the woman at the post office, who is new. There is the man at the pub, who is not new, and there are the women who come to the pub of an evening, who are not new either but who have changed. That is all. That is the whole of Thresh."

She drank again.

"In the winter of 1987," she said, "this town began to drain. That is the word we use. It is not a medical word. Dr. Marsh would have a medical word if you pressed him. He would say that the residents of Thresh are subject to a progressive acceleration of the senescence of memory and of the body, which is to say that people here age in weeks and forget in days. I say it drains. You can use either."

Maren set her cup down. "How long?"

"Since the winter of 1987," Cora Whitfield said. "Since the week your sister went missing."

The kettle sang on, and the steam went up, and the kitchen was very still.

"I have not come about my sister," Maren said.

"No," said the woman. "You have come because your father is dead. But you will not leave without asking about her. People do not. They come for one reason and they stay for another, and the second reason is always the same."

She stood up. She took Maren's cup and her own and rinsed them under the tap and set them on the rack.

"You will want to see Dr. Marsh," she said. "He has been expecting you. He is a clever man and a kind man and a man who has read too much, and he will tell you what he knows, which is not everything, and he will keep back what he does not know, which is the rest. You will find him at the surgery in the morning. He is there from nine until one, and after one he is somewhere else and you will have to look for him."

She went to the door and stood there, both hands folded in front of her.

"I have said what I have to say," she said. "I will leave you in the house. If you want for anything in the night, you will not find me. I sleep at the back of my own place and I do not hear well. The back door key is on the hook in the scullery. The front door you will have to lock from the inside. There is a bolt at the top and a bolt at the bottom. Use them both."

She paused.

"Your father used them both," she said. "He did not sleep, the last months. He sat in the front room and he watched the road. He had a pistol in the drawer of the table and he did not sleep."

Maren said nothing.

"I will bid you goodnight, Miss Halloway," the woman said.

She went out into the hall and Maren heard the door close behind her, and then her footsteps on the path, and then nothing.

Maren sat at the kitchen table for a long while. The kettle ticked as it cooled. A clock in the hall struck nine, then ten, then eleven, and she did not move. She thought of her father sitting in the front room with the pistol in the drawer. She thought of her sister. She thought of the boy at the window and the girl in the garden and the sound of a voice in the stairwell, and she thought that the house had not changed and she had, and that this was the thing her father had meant when he had said the house would carry the scar and so would she.

At half past eleven she went up to the front room. The bed had been turned down. A candle had been left on the washstand, and a box of matches. She lit the candle and undressed and got into bed. The sheets were cold at first and then warm, and the pillow smelled of lavender and of something else, faint, like wet wool.

She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling. A crack ran across the plaster from the cornice to the light fixture, the shape of a river on a map. She had stared at that crack as a child and had decided it was the River Styx and that she was Charon and that the house was the barge. She had not thought of that for twenty years.

She slept.

She woke to the sound of someone on the stairs.

It was not Cora Whitfield. The steps were heavier, and they did not hurry. They came up to the landing and stopped outside her door, and a shadow went across the crack of light at the bottom, and then the handle turned, very slowly, and the door opened an inch, and a voice said her name.

It was not her father's voice.

It was not the voice of the boy at the window.

It was a man's voice, low and smooth, and it said her name again, very clearly, as if he had been saying it for some time and had only just got her attention.

"Miss Halloway," the voice said. "I am Dr. Marsh. I must speak with you. It will not wait until morning."

Maren sat up. The candle on the washstand had burned to a stub and the room was mostly dark, and for a moment she thought she was still in the dream of the woman with the lamp, and that the voice was the lamp woman's voice, and that the door would open upon a corridor that was not a corridor.

Dr. Marsh stepped into the room as if he had been invited. He was a tall man, somewhere between forty and sixty, with a high forehead and dark eyes that moved too quickly. He wore a dark coat over a waistcoat, and a cravat that had been tied with care, and he smelled of tobacco and of something sharper, like ink. He did not look at the room. He looked at her.

"My dear," he said. "Forgive the hour. I would not have come up if it were not urgent. Your father, I think, would have understood."

Maren did not answer. She was aware of her own shoulders, of the sheet pulled to her collarbone, of the way the candle made his face half lit and half in shadow. She was aware of the diary under her pillow, three inches from her hand. She was aware of the smell of him, and that he had known she was in the house, and that he had come up the stairs as if he had a key.

"You have been in the house," she said. It was not a question.

Dr. Marsh inclined his head. "I have the run of it. Arthur was very keen that I should. We had, you might say, a working arrangement. He was a man who disliked working alone, and I am a man who dislikes working without access to my materials." He paused, and his eyes went to the candle, and then to the door, and then back to her. "I have been waiting for you to come. I had hoped you would come sooner. I had hoped, in fact, that you would not come at all, but that was never very likely, was it? You are very like him."

"Sit down," Maren said. She indicated the chair by the washstand. It was the chair her father had used when he had come in to say goodnight. She did not want Dr. Marsh to sit in it, but she wanted him out of the doorway, and she wanted him where she could see him.

He sat. He crossed his legs. He folded his hands in his lap. He looked, Maren thought, like a man who had been painted.

"I am going to ask you a question," he said, "and I would like you to answer it honestly. I am asking because the answer matters, and because I think you are honest, and because dishonesty at this stage would be very dangerous for both of us."

"Ask it," Maren said.

"Did Lidia send you, or did the house?"

Maren did not answer at once. The candle gave a small jump and the shadow of his head went across the wall and then back again. She could hear her own breathing. She could hear, very faintly, the sound of water in the pipes, as if someone had turned on a tap downstairs and then turned it off again.

"I beg your pardon," she said.

"Lidia," Dr. Marsh said. "Your sister. Did she send you? Did she write to you, or telephone you, or otherwise communicate with you, in such a way as to suggest that she wished you to return to the house? Or did you come of your own accord, in response to the news of your father's death, and in response to the house itself, which has its own way of asking?" He smiled. It was a thin smile, the sort of smile a man gives when he is pleased with his own question. "I am asking, Miss Halloway, whether you are here because a living woman invited you, or because a house did."

Maren thought of the letter. She thought of the handwriting she had not recognized. She thought of the way the letter had been folded, and of the way the postmark had been smudged, and of the fact that she had not rung Lidia's number in London, had not written to her, had not, until this moment, considered that she might have written first.

"I came because my father died," she said.

"That is not what I asked."

"That is what I am telling you."

Dr. Marsh looked at her for a long time. Then he uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, and his voice dropped, and the smoothness went out of it, and what was left was something harder, something more precise.

"Miss Halloway," he said, "I am going to tell you what I think, and I am going to tell you because I think you are the sort of woman who prefers truth to comfort. I think your sister wrote to you. I think she has been writing to you for some time, by various hands, in various inks, and that you have not recognized her hand because she has been very careful that you should not. I think she wanted you here. I think she has wanted you here for years. I think the house wanted you here too, and that the two wants are not the same, and that the difference between them is the difference between a lock and a key, and that you have been inserted into the mechanism whether you know it or not."

Maren's hand, under the sheet, closed on the diary.

"What do you know about my sister," she said.

"I know what your father told me. I know what the house told me. I know what I have read in certain books that are not in the county library, and I know what I have inferred from the way the doors behave when no one is watching them." He paused. "I know that she did not die. I know that she is in the house. I know that the house keeps her, and that she keeps the house, and that the arrangement is not a happy one, and that your father was the only person in the world who could negotiate with either of them, and that your father is now dead, and that the arrangement is, as we say in my profession, in flux."

He stopped. He sat back. He folded his hands again, as if he had finished a lecture and was waiting for questions.

"You are telling me," Maren said, and her voice was very steady, "that my sister is alive."

"I am telling you that the woman who is in this house, and who is not your sister, is alive. I am telling you that the woman who is your sister is somewhere else, and that she is not alive in the way you mean the word, but that she is, in another way, very much alive, and that the two of them are in correspondence, and that the correspondence is not friendly."

"You have seen her," Maren said. "Lidia. You have seen my sister."

"I have seen what is in the house," Dr. Marsh said. "I have not seen your sister. I have inferred your sister from what is in the house, in the same way that a man infers the existence of a magnet from the behaviour of iron filings. I have inferred her from the way the doors close, and the way the fires light, and the way the walls weep, and the way the corridors arrange themselves at night to suit a geometry that is not on any plan."

Maren thought of the figure in the upstairs corridor. She thought of the hand on her shoulder. She thought of the smell of wet wool.

"And the woman," she said. "The woman who is not my sister. What is she?"

"That," Dr. Marsh said, "is the question I have been asking myself for seven years, and that is the question your father asked himself for twenty, and that is the question your sister asked herself in the diary you have under your pillow."

Maren did not move. Her hand, under the sheet, tightened.

"Yes," Dr. Marsh said. "I know about the diary. Your father told me. He told me where it was kept. He told me that one day you would come for it. He told me that when you came for it, I was to be ready, and that I was to tell you the truth, because the truth was the only thing he had left to give you, and because he had tried everything else, and because everything else had failed."

He stood up. He went to the door. He stood with his hand on the handle, and he looked at her, and his face in the candlelight was very tired, and very old, and very careful.

"Read the diary," he said. "Read it to the end. Do not skip the pages she tore out. Do not skip the pages that are not there. When you have read it, come down to the clinic, and we will talk about what is to be done, and whether there is anything to be done, and what it will cost you, and what it will cost the house, and whether the price is one you are willing to pay."

He opened the door. The landing was dark.

"Dr. Marsh," Maren said.

He stopped.

"Did my father know," she said. "When he sent for me. When he wrote the letter that I have not yet read. Did he know that you would come up the stairs tonight, and say what you have said, and leave me here with a candle and a diary and a sister who is and is not in the house."

"Yes," Dr. Marsh said. "He knew."

"And the woman," Maren said. "The woman in the upstairs corridor. The woman with the lamp. Is she part of this? Is she what you came up to warn me about?"

Dr. Marsh was quiet for a long time.

"The woman in the upstairs corridor," he said, "is the thing that was in the house before your family came to it. She is the thing that your father bargained with. She is the thing your sister is bound to. She is the reason the house keeps the shape it keeps, and she is the reason the doors close when they should not, and she is the reason the letters are written in a hand that is not a hand, and she is the reason you are here tonight, and she is the reason I am warning you, because she is hungry, Miss Halloway, and she has been hungry for a long time, and your father was the only thing between her and what she wanted, and your father is now dead."

He stepped out onto the landing. The darkness took him. His footsteps went down the stairs, slowly, and did not hurry, and the front door opened and closed, and the house was quiet.

Maren sat for a long time with the candle burning down. Then she took the diary out from under her pillow. She opened it to the first page, and she began to read, and the woman with the lamp stood at the end of the bed and watched her read, and did not speak, and the house breathed, and somewhere in the house a door opened that should not have opened, and somewhere in the house a door closed that should not have closed, and the night went on, and Maren read, and the diary told her what it told her, and the house remembered what it remembered, and the candle burned to a stub and went out, and in the dark Maren turned the page, and turned the page, and turned the page.