The Feast of All Souls Page 4

  Hallucination. It had to be. Some sort of side-effect from the medication. Anti-depressants could do that sometimes. She’d best get home.

  Alice turned the other way – back the way she’d come, towards the house – but that view, too, had changed. The ground still rose where the river bent round – the hillside where Higher Crawbeck stood, rising to a summit at her house – but there were no buildings there either. No telegraph poles, no streetlights, just the green-furred shoulder of the hillside, studded here and there with rocks. A big, crooked one stood roughly where her house had been; beside it something was afire, sending a long stream of flames twenty or so feet up into the air.

  Alice rubbed her eyes. Not real, it wasn’t real – it couldn’t be – but when she looked again, the view was still the same.

  Over to her left there were noises: the crash and rustle of something heavy trampling its way through undergrowth. Twigs and branches snapped; Alice felt the ground underfoot shiver, and the branches around the entrance to the path she’d just left shook, leaves drifting downward. Beyond them, she had an impression of movement: something big, bigger than a man, was forcing its way through the woods towards her.

  And then there was a sound. Afterwards, Alice could never be sure what it was; it was as if she’d forgotten it almost as soon as she’d heard it. Sometimes she thought it had been a shout, a song, a chant; at other times, the blast of a horn or the sounding of a gong. All she knew was that it sounded, and the air grew still; she looked at the trees and they were motionless, only a last few dislodged leaves drifting to the ground. But up ahead, the fire still burnt upon the naked hill.

  She looked behind her. The sound, whatever it was, had come from there.

  Parts of the Vale were wooded, and others open grassland; others still were wet and marshy, filled with tall bulrushes. The edge of the small marsh was about fifty feet behind her, and a man stood among the rushes, half-hidden. He wore some sort of red anorak or hooded jacket; the hood was pulled up to cover his hair and ears, exposing only the white oval of his face, which seemed almost featureless.

  The man in red was looking directly at her, and put a finger to his lips. Sound crashed in; the rush of traffic on Radcliffe New Road nearby. She looked up at it and saw the cars swishing past, looked up the river and saw the familiar houses of Collarmill Road. When she remembered to look behind her, the bridge and tower blocks had also been restored, but of the man in red there was no sign.

  “God,” muttered Alice. Her fingers were shaking, and the Vale no longer felt so calm or peaceful. She hurried along the riverbank, taking the quickest route back towards the Fall and the steps to the street above. She almost staggered down the cobbled street, but managed to compose herself; self-control might be her only defence against outright madness just now.

  Inside, she locked the door, made coffee, and sat shivering on the sofa for a long time.

  LATER, SHE FELT better. Yes, at the time it had been frightening, but ultimately, what had it been? A brief – a very brief hallucination, that was all. She’d been through a lot in the last two years – not just Emily’s death but the breakdown of her marriage, the divorce, and now this move, uprooting herself, abandoning her job for an uncertain future once her money ran out.

  In that context, a couple of hallucinations didn’t sound so bad. Most likely, she just needed to adjust her medication a little. There was no shame in mental illness any more, no stigma. Allegedly, anyway.

  There was a surgery nearby, so she went there and registered as a patient. If things got worse, she’d see a doctor; it made her feel a little safer. After that, she took a bus into Manchester, sitting on the top deck near the front. She’d always enjoyed that, getting to look down at the world from a height. Some teenage boys got on en-route, cursing and shouting and blasting out loud, discordant music no-one dared ask them to turn down. Alice huddled deeper in her seat, wishing she’d brought her iPod and hoping not to attract their attention.

  Manchester gathered around her with its choked, milling streets, but it wasn’t so bad at first, from inside the bus; she was above it all, and it passed in silence, especially when the boys crashed and stomped down the stairs. Getting off the bus was a different matter; the city’s noise crashed in on her like a wave, and Alice was jostled constantly as she made her way along the pavement, feeling off-balance and clumsy, out of place.

  “Watch out, love,” a man snapped as he strode past. Alice stumbled, blinking, flinching as others glanced her way. The madwoman, she thought. That’s what she’d become. She squared her shoulders and strode towards the Arndale Centre, hoping that didn’t make her look mad or ridiculous too.

  If the streets had been bad, the Arndale was worse; bodies streamed in all directions, thronging to worship at this or that altar of Mammon, this or the other golden calf. She struggled to an escalator, climbed on for respite. People glared and grumbled as they stepped past her; how dare she hold them up by not climbing the already moving staircase as fast as she could, to grasp for the next glittering prize?

  She stumbled around the upper level; from a shop window, plastic orange jack o’lanterns and a row of Halloween masks – witch, mummy, vampire, werewolf – leered at her from beneath a spiderweb of silly string. She flinched away from their empty-eyed gaze and kept going until she finally found a branch of Curry’s, where she bought two replacement dongles. She’d order another off the internet if she had to, but these should last her for the next day or two, even in a worst-case scenario. It would do until they came to put a proper connection in.

  Her business done, she gratefully boarded a down escalator and wove back through the crowds towards Shudehill station, where she sat shivering and waiting until another double-decker pulled in. There were no yowling teenagers, at least, on the outward journey; the city passed away in silence, giving way to Salford and finally Crawbeck.

  Inside the house, she shut the doors and climbed into bed. It was always tempting to stay there in the morning or go back in there during the day, to cocoon herself in blankets and hide from the world. It was also the kind of temptation best not yielded to: staying in bed would become a habit, venturing downstairs a commute, leaving the house a full-scale expedition to a wild and hostile land. Structure; choice; control. She needed them now, to come back from where she’d been and not slip back.

  But just this afternoon, she’d make an exception. One hour, she promised herself. No more.

  IN THE END it was more like two hours, but she got up again and went downstairs. By then it was beginning to get dark. She pulled the curtains, switched the lights on. As a child she’d always found something deeply comforting about the sight of house-lights aglow in the dull grey autumn evenings.

  She watched a DVD. Her phone rang.

  “Hi, Mum.”

  “It’s Dad.”

  She laughed. “Sorry, Dad.”

  “How you doing, love?”

  “I’m okay. Settling in.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Just – you know, getting used to it. It’ll take time.”

  “Mm. Everything... all right?”

  Apart from her lost marriage, her dead daughter? But she didn’t say that. That was the whole point. Everything, now, was no longer everything. It was whatever she had left with those things gone. “I’m okay. Yeah.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  A pause. “Ooh, your Mum’s here.”

  She told Mum more or less what she’d told Dad. She didn’t mention the hallucinations or the anxiety because there was no point. To their generation, ‘mental illness’ still evoked images of someone foaming at the mouth in a straitjacket, or screaming in a padded cell. Christ, it wasn’t even just their generation. Most people seemed to feel that way – unless, like her, they’d spent some time on the other side of the mirror, at which point you realised it wasn’t so very different. We treat our minds in a way we’d never treat our bodies, Kat had used to say.

  She though
t she’d managed to reassure them, at least. When the call was over, the film had lost her interest; instead she switched on her laptop and curled up on the sofa, surfing from site to site.

  After a while, she remembered her Facebook page; she hadn’t looked at it in nearly a month. She took a deep breath, then opened it.

  Notifications, personal messages – most of them were to be ignored. The notifications were for trivial shit that might have seemed funny or vaguely important before Emily’s death, but not any longer. The messages? Mostly from people she’d seen or heard from since the death, the funeral or the divorce.

  There’d been some friend requests though. She scrolled through them, smiling a little. A lot of them were from people she’d known at university; it was like pressing the rewind button on her life, going back to before Emily and Andrew. Things had been simpler then; it had just been her and the career she dreamt of, that and finding the right boy. You thought you were so grown up at that age, thought you knew everything and had the world at your feet. But really, you were still little more than a child. Christ, could she really be almost twice the age she’d been when she’d graduated?

  Alice studied the friend requests. Nicola Smith: she’d fallen pregnant in the final year. God almighty, her child – hadn’t it been a boy? – would almost be old enough for university now himself; his biggest worry would be exams. And girls, of course. Or boys. Whichever way he swung. That had been a bigger issue back then, too. Although there’d been a lad on her year – God, she couldn’t remember his name at all – who’d allegedly been gay but had slept his way through half a dozen of the girls on the course. He thinks he’s gay because it’s in fashion, Emma – one of the few university friends she’d kept in touch with – had said of him.

  Bloody hell, it was all coming back. All the emotions of those years swept through her, despite the numbing effect of the anti-depressants. She’d make an appointment to see the doctor tomorrow. She scrolled through a few more friend requests, clicking ‘confirm’ on them, one after the other, until one name sprang up.

  John Revell.

  He smiled out of the photo at her. Christ, except for the addition of a goatee beard, he hadn’t changed remotely. Black don’t crack, he would have said, putting on a fake American ‘ghetto’ accent. The same calm, kind eyes; the same gentle smile. It hurt to look at him.

  She reached for the mouse. She couldn’t accept this request: time hadn’t bought her enough distance, not even a decade and a half after the fact. She was about to click ‘ignore’, but that would have seemed too cruel, like spitting in that face. She looked at his Facebook page instead, what she could see of it. Works at Paranormal Researcher, it said. She sighed. He’d kept on with that foolishness? What a waste. It just made her remember why they’d broken up, why the gap between them was too hard to bridge, even now. Especially now.

  She logged out of Facebook, switched the computer off, and let the silence return. It was getting late, anyway; a good time to get some sleep.

  The whispering began as she stood up.

  This time there was no telling herself that the voices came from the street outside; they were coming from right behind the door. She fumbled beside the sofa, picked up the chair-leg and advanced.

  When she flung the door open, the hall was empty, but movement flickered at the periphery of her vision – above, and to the left. She looked up towards the top of the stairs before she could stop herself – and, just for a second, she saw the children standing there.

  She opened her mouth to cry out, and they were gone. The blinking of an eye; that was, quite literally, how long she’d seen them for, and yet so vividly that, however hard she tried to convince herself they’d been an hallucination, she could never quite believe it. There’d been boys and girls of various ages – as young as seven or eight, she thought, and as old as twelve – in scruffy, rather old-fashioned – Victorian? – clothing. But they’d been there, looking down at her, even if only for a moment. And they’d been so terribly pale.

  At last, she found the courage to creep up the stairs, although she was only able to keep her eyes open for fear of what she might otherwise pass close to without seeing it. She climbed into bed and turned her face to the wall in the dark, waiting and waiting for sleep to come.

  Chapter Four

  G.I.G.O.

  19th – 28th October 2016

  ALICE RANG THE surgery at eight the following morning, spoke to a bored-sounding receptionist and made an appointment for half-past nine. By then, much to her own annoyance, she’d already taken her daily anti-depressant – she’d done it on waking, almost on autopilot. If an increased dosage or different drug was the answer, she’d have to wait until tomorrow before beginning the course.

  Even if the new prescription – assuming the doctor gave her one right away – took effect at once (which it wouldn’t) that would mean a whole day of waiting for any more unwelcome visions to reveal themselves. Correction: a whole day and night of it.

  Here she was, clamouring for drugs. From experience she knew what counselling could do for some, what it had done for her, but right now she had no time to go digging in her psyche, trying to root out the cause of the things she’d seen and heard. What she needed, for now at least, was a chemical off-switch, something to make them go away until she was readier to deal with them.

  In a way, she was in luck. The local practice had about a dozen GPs and God alone knew how any of the others might have reacted, but Dr Whiteley, the doctor she saw that morning, just grunted and nodded, half-listening, as she recounted her woes. He’d reached for the computer keyboard to amend her prescription before she’d even finished speaking.

  “Okay,” he said. He was a thin, sallow-faced man, unshaven and sunken-eyed. He looked ill himself, or hungover. Physician, heal thyself, indeed. “So what we’ll do to start with is increase your dosage. If that doesn’t work, we can look at upping it again – that, or switching you to a different drug. Okay?”

  “Okay, but –”

  “Any problems, any side-effects, come and see us again. Otherwise, come back in a couple of weeks and we’ll see how you’re getting on. Any changes to your drug regime will usually take a few days to have an effect.”

  “Yes, of course. I understand.”

  The pharmacy was next door; she bought the new prescription and made her way home. Well, after all, this was Salford; it was known to be one of the most deprived areas in the UK. You knew that, she almost heard her mother cry, and you still chose to move back there? What’s wrong with you, Alice? But Whiteley and the rest were probably used by now to an endless parade of the walking wounded traipsing through their surgeries, psychically maimed by loss of one kind or another – not only bereavement but long-term illness, unemployment, poverty, debt, domestic abuse or casual Saturday night violence. To him, she’d have been just one more face in the crowd.

  At home, she looked longingly at the packet of pills with their increased dosage. Here was peace, here were the answers. She shook her head in disgust and thrust them back into her handbag. Here she was, supposedly an intelligent, rational woman, and she was clutching a packet of pills like rosary beads, or some saint’s relic that would heal all affliction. What price reason now?

  But then again, that was the point, wasn’t it? Alice put the kettle on and made a cup of decaff, treating herself to a couple of teaspoons of sugar. It was her mind, her reason, that was under attack here; she couldn’t trust her own perceptions any more. Computer techs had a saying: Garbage In, Garbage Out. You couldn’t make decisions accurately if you couldn’t trust the information you were putting in.

  Simple as that. The brain as a computer. Fix the duff connection and you fixed the machine. She padded back into the living room, switched on the laptop. Was this all there really was to her, then – a softer, meatier version of a hard drive? Runs for a while, then develops faults, finally packs up and ends up on a junk-heap?

  It occurred to her that the ghost-children �
� there, she’d thought it, the dreaded G-word – might be something she wanted to see. Because if she was just a hard drive on legs, that was all Emily had been. And that meant Emily was gone – completely, forever. But ghosts? Ghosts meant there was more to the equation, some missing factor...

  Alice browsed Facebook for a while – looked again at John’s friend request and once again could bring herself neither to delete nor accept it – and finally looked up at the room around her. It was empty. Silent, too. No whispers from the hallway. All the same, she played some music – Jan Garbarek, letting his arrangements of Greig’s Arietta and Jim Pepper’s Witchi-Tai-To wash over her.

  In a way, the worst part was looking up and seeing nothing, listening and hearing only silence. It meant the sight and the sound were still to come.

  But they didn’t come, not that day. Not even when she went to bed, to the attic room. She was alone there. But still she turned her face to the wall and refused to look at anything, not until morning came.

  SHE TOOK THE first of the new pills as soon as she woke, then set about her normal routine – up early, coffee, breakfast. Surf the net, read, potter around the house intending to make plans for redecorating and stare at the walls instead. Watch DVDs, and try, above all, to skirt the elephant in the room: what now? With marriage, motherhood and work all gone, what was there?

  She could find another job easily enough, she supposed. Despite everything, with her qualifications, it would be a cakewalk. If she wanted a career change, she could retrain – she had savings enough, plus her share of the proceeds from selling their old house. Even a new family wasn’t impossible; there was still time to find a good man, to have another child –