The Plague Stones E-Book

James Brogden

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 499

Beschreibung

From the critically acclaimed author of Hekla's Children comes a dark and haunting tale of dreadful wrongs and terrible vengeance.After a brutal break-in leaves her family traumatised, Trish Feenan jumps at the chance of a fresh start in a charming historic community. But in the back garden of her new cottage sits an unsettling reminder of past wrongs: a standing stone, once one of the markers that kept plague sufferers outside the village bounds, its 'powers' renewed every year in a ritual that seems to be more than just local oddity.As the Feenans settle in, they experience unexplained accidents, accompanied by sightings of a girl who vanishes into thin air. Soon, it becomes obvious that there is a reason traditions must not slip, and that all acts of betrayal, even those committed centuries ago, have consequences…

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also available from James Brogden and Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1 Guardian

2 Green Skull

3 Bait Station

4 Welcome

5 Reporting In

6 Toby

7 The Dead Girl

8 Hester April 1349

9 Jobs for the Boys

10 Witch Marks

11 Goading the Ghost

12 The Food Bank

13 Tits On a Fish

14 Hester May 1349

15 History Lesson

16 Hester May 1349

17 Bread and Salt

18 Hester May 1349

19 The Fox and the Rat

20 Emergency

21 Hester Late May 1349

22 Revelation

23 Volunteer

24 The Beating of the Bounds

25 Garden Party

26 The Parade of the Dead

27 Pre-Determination

28 The Cleansing

29 The Pilgrim Badge

30 Catastrophic Circumstances

31 Remembrance

32 Desecration

33 Intrusion

34 The Night Before

35 The Morning After

36 Reckonings

37 Badass Motherfucker

38 What We Invite In

39 Safely Down

Afterword & Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

THE

PLAGUESTONES

Also available from James Brogden and Titan Books

Hekla’s Children

The Hollow Tree

THE

PLAGUESTONES

JAMESBROGDEN

TITAN BOOKS

The Plague Stones

Print edition ISBN: 9781785659959

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659966

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: May 2019

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are theproduct of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblanceto actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales isentirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does notassume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2019 by James Brogden. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission ofthe publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover otherthan that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposedon the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

FOR GRENFELL

1

GUARDIAN

THE OLD WOMAN WAS NEAR DEATH, AND THE TRUSTEES had gathered about her bed to pay their respects. Although she was not a member of the Executive Committee, she had been custodian of Stone Cottage for nearly sixty years, and having coped with its unique requirements for so long demanded recognition. No private hospice could have provided better care than she had received during her last months here, in the place she had guarded so well; no expense had been spared. It was the least they could do, given what she had kept at bay for so long.

The reverend’s prayers were a sonorous murmur set to the slow ticking of the clock on the mantel ‘—I will say of the Lord he is my refuge and my fortress my God in whom I trust surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence he will cover you with his feathers and under his wings thou shalt find refuge—’ even though none there really believed that it would do any good.

The Trustees shuffled and sniffed. The director of environmental services, who had trained as a doctor in her youth, checked the old woman’s pulse. The machines had all been removed; she was beyond machines now.

The chief executive cleared his throat. ‘Is she…?’

Environmental Services shook her head. ‘Not yet.’

‘—take up the shield of faith with which thou mayst extinguish the flaming arrows of the evil one—’

Unbelievably, the director of financial services actually yawned, and nudged the director of housing and community. ‘How are we progressing with the replacement?’ she whispered.

Housing and Community made a so-so motion. ‘Slowly. She had very few living relatives, which is surprising given her age. We vetted the immediate circle but none met the profile to a high enough degree so we’ve been widening out to a lower co-efficient of relationship than we’d normally like, but what can one do? These are the times we live in.’

‘Has,’ murmured the chief executive.

Housing and Community blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You said she had few relatives. She’s not dead yet.’

Housing and Community reddened, and was silent.

Environmental Services looked up from her ministrations to the old woman, plainly unimpressed. ‘You’ve had six months to find a replacement,’ she said. ‘With no new custodian ready to step into her shoes we’re vulnerable. This is exactly the kind of slip-up which costs lives.’

‘There’s no need to be overly dramatic,’ replied the chief executive. ‘We’ve already been through this. The boundary will hold. It always has.’

‘But you know what happens when things become disrupted. When they change. There hasn’t been a new custodian in living memory! We’ve only got the reverend’s reassurances and to be brutally honest with you—’

The old woman gasped suddenly – a dry croak issuing from a wizened throat – and her ancient claw of a hand clutched at the coverlet. The Trustees stiffened. After the gasp, a whisper, little more than the sound of dry leaves blowing across old tombstones:

‘She is here.’

Someone made a small whimpering sound.

‘Control yourself,’ said the chief executive. He went to the drapes at the other end of the room and drew them aside. The others joined him, drawn by curiosity despite their better judgement – even the reverend, who knew better than most what was out there.

‘—as for the head of those that compass me about, let the mischief of their own lips cover them let burning coals fall upon them let them be cast into the fire into deep pits that they rise not up again—’

The window overlooked the cottage’s rear garden. It was tidy and well kept, since the Trust had taken over maintenance of the property as its custodian had aged beyond the ability to take care of such things herself. Neatly groomed shrubbery and trim flowerbeds bordered a lawn as evenly green as a snooker table, in the centre of which sat the stone from which the cottage got its name. It was three feet high and roughly the shape of a canine tooth, its grey surface mottled with lichen, and so old that the markings that covered it had eroded away to faint grooves and hollows.

Standing on the far side of it, glaring up at the house with burning, centuries-old hatred, was the dead girl.

The reverend’s prayers died in her throat.

‘My God!’ said Financial Services. ‘Is that Her?’

The chief executive shot her a withering look. ‘No, it’s the fucking tooth fairy.’

She wore a simple woollen shift, much torn and stained, revealing emaciated limbs which were maggot-pale and blotched with the livid black-purple bruises of plague. Her bare toes and fingers were black with gangrene, and buboes bulged at Her throat. One had burst, and from the crater of ruined flesh beneath Her jaw its rot streaked Her front. The only things about Her which seemed to have any life were Her eyes, black and glittering as She stared up at the window.

Environmental Services turned to the reverend. ‘You said we’d be safe,’ she pleaded.

‘I said that we simply don’t know how the death of the stone’s custodian will affect things, but that as long as the stone remains blessed the boundary should hold, and She shouldn’t be able to enter.’

‘Reverend?’ suggested the chief executive. ‘If you’d be so kind as to remind Her of that?’

The reverend ahemmed and approached the window. ‘You have no power over this place,’ she said, her voice wavering just a little. ‘As it is said in the Book of Proverbs, do not move an ancient boundary stone set by your forefathers; do not move the ancient boundary or go into the fields of the fatherless. The blessing of the Lord Almighty is on this hallowed sentinel, which you may not profane. I command you to stay where you are bound!’

The dead girl grinned, displaying a mouth full of teeth that were yellow as poison, black as death, and the same moment a scream came from the old woman in the bed behind them. The Trustees turned.

A rat was sitting on her throat, eating her face.

It had bitten into her cheek, and bright blood spattered the pillow and coverlet. Her frail fingers were in its fur, pulling and fluttering ineffectually as she screamed with a sound like cloth being torn. Several of the Trustees cried out in response. One fled the room, clutching her mouth. Housing and Community gave an inarticulate bellow of indignation and rushed at the creature with a raised fist, and it fled – but not immediately. It paused, glaring at him with the same glittering black hatred as the dead girl, a look which said No, I will not as clearly as a shout, and then it leapt from the bed and was gone.

The old woman, former custodian of Stone Cottage, was dead with her head thrown back, eyes staring at the ceiling glassy with terror, teeth visible through the hole in her cheek. When the chief executive looked out of the window again, the dead girl was gone. Only the living remained, shocked and weeping.

2

GREEN SKULL

HE SLAPPED ANOTHER CLIP INTO HIS MESH GUN AND popped up from cover to spray the Xenoan position with covering fire while the strike team surged forward, over and past him into the battle zone. Return fire from the aliens was fierce, tearing chunks off the carcass of the sky medusa that he was sheltering behind in roaring detonations of purple warp energy. Micro-fluctuations in local gravity pulled his own shots out of true but he compensated; not that it really mattered, since all that he had to do was keep the Xenos’ heads down until the strike team could take out their nest. A piece of shrapnel glanced off his left upper arm but the HUD indicated that the armour rating there was still in the green, so he ignored it and kept firing. His headset was a babble of voices yelling commands, whooping with battle lust, or cursing as they got fragged. Then a DNA grenade from one of the strike team exploded in a howling double-helix cloud of bio-flux and the squad commander (a kid from Japan called Masahito who must have been playing at breakfast, given the time difference) was screaming at them to go! Go! Go!

There was a man standing in the kitchen doorway.

Toby hadn’t seen him arrive or heard the back door open, and with a sudden liquid feeling of terror realised that his mum had told him to make sure the doors were locked, even though she and Dad would only be at the cinema for a couple of hours, because he knew what this neighbourhood was like, didn’t he? As she was saying it he’d already been switching on his Xbox and said yeah sure of course he wouldn’t forget, and he’d totally meant to, just as soon as this mission was completed – well, this or the one after it, anyway. And now there was a stranger in his home.

The stranger was in jeans, trainers and a black full-face hoodie zipped right up to hide his identity behind the leering mask of a green skull. He had a long crowbar in his right hand, dangling almost casually.

On the TV screen, Toby’s avatar had stopped midway across the battlefield and was being peppered with alien fire. His HUD revealed armour ratings sliding from green through amber and into the red while in his headset the tinny voice of someone thousands of miles away was yelling at him in fury: ‘What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?’

I think I’m being burgled, that’s what, he thought. His breath had stopped, caught up somewhere in the middle of his ribcage while his heart beat in a hollow vacuum of terror. Police. Call 999. That’s what you’re supposed to do,isn’t it? He was sitting on the settee with his feet up on the coffee table, and his phone only an inch away from his heels, but it might as well have been on an alien world. His avatar was down now, the screen colours muted to indicate that he was out of the fight.

Green Skull stepped from the kitchen into the living room, looking around with all the ease and confidence of someone in a shop. ‘All right, kid?’ he asked. His voice was low, muffled by the hoodie. ‘Mum and Dad not in?’

‘Who…?’ Toby’s voice stuck dry in his throat. ‘What do you…?’

The man moved so fast that Toby barely saw it, certainly too fast for him to get a hand up in defence as the crowbar arced towards him; it hit his upper arm and a jolt of pins and needles numbed him to the fingertips. He cowered on the settee, curled into a foetal ball and too stunned for the moment to even cry out.

‘Ask another fucking question and I’ll smash your fucking head in, all right? I’m going to ask you again: are your mum and dad in?’

‘No.’

Green Skull nodded and backed off a bit. ‘Good. I already knew that, anyway. Watched them go. But it’s good that you’re honest with me. You might just get out of this okay.’ He turned and saw the TV screen, and gave a little laugh. ‘Hey, I love this game. This is a sick game. Have you made it to the medusa armada yet?’

‘Um, uh, no…’ Toby’s arm was waking up in agony. He thought it might be broken, and he could feel a wet, prickling heat at the corners of his eyes. He blinked it away savagely. He would not cry. He might scream and beg and bleed but he absolutely would not cry.

‘Fucking sick as, man. You’ll love it.’ Green Skull pointed the end of his crowbar at the frozen avatar on the screen. ‘You think you’re a badass motherfucker like this guy?’

‘Um, I don’t know…’ He felt his airway clench in the first warning spasms of an asthma attack, and realised with horror that his inhaler was lying on the floor of his bedroom.

‘Hmm.’ The crowbar swung to point at Toby’s phone where it lay next to the discarded game controller. ‘That your phone?’

Toby hauled in a wheezing breath. ‘Um, yes…’

The crowbar whistled down, shattering the phone and gouging into the table underneath. It was only a cheap flat-pack thing with about as much structural integrity as a wet cardboard box, and the crowbar went straight through it. Toby cried out and shrank back as Green Skull continued to smash at the wreckage until it was an unrecognisable pile of chipboard and birch veneer and his phone was completely destroyed.

The man stepped back, panting a little. ‘If you think maybe you’re a badass and you make this go hard I will fuck you up in ways you can’t imagine. You do exactly as I say, and you’ll see Mummy and Daddy again. You get me?’

Toby nodded, chest heaving. His airway felt like it had narrowed down to the width of a pinhole, and his lungs were burning. ‘Please…’ he gasped. ‘Please… I need… inhaler…’

Green Skull peered closer at him. ‘Oh, fucking hell,’ he said. ‘You’re not having a fucking asthma attack, are you?’

Toby nodded, wheezing.

‘Fuck!’ the man spat. He turned away and smashed at the wall in frustration, gouging ragged tears in the thin plaster. ‘Why does nobody ever tell me this shit?’ He spun back to Toby and held the end of the crowbar an inch from his face. ‘You better not be fucking with me.’

Toby shook his head, blinking back tears of panic which he couldn’t prevent any longer. This was his worst nightmare. Having a stranger break into his home and threaten him was shocking, as mad as aliens landing, but the fear of suffering an asthma attack without his inhaler went bone deep and right back to his earliest memories of visits to the hospital, of his mum’s frantic worry, of his dad’s thinly burning anger at having to raise his son in a place like this.

The crowbar dropped away. ‘Where is it, then?’ asked Green Skull. ‘Your inhaler?’

‘… Bedroom…’

Green Skull waved the crowbar at the door. ‘Go on then. But I’m right behind you, badass.’

Toby scrambled up from the sofa and lurched for the hallway. A pathetically optimistic part of him hoped that the neighbours might have heard the table being smashed up; the walls were so thin that he could usually hear them watching soap operas and arguing, which seemed to be their two main hobbies. But he knew that even if they were in, and even if they had heard anything, and even if they thought something bad was happening in Toby’s home, they wouldn’t so much as knock on the door to ask if everything was okay, never mind call the police. He wasn’t even sure what their names were.

In his bedroom he scrabbled around one-handed on the floor amidst the clutter of clothes and schoolbooks, until he found his inhaler, jammed the nozzle into his mouth and fired off a puff of salbutamol, and immediately felt the clenching in his chest begin to loosen up.

‘Better?’ Green Skull was standing in the bedroom doorway.

Toby nodded.

Green Skull grunted and cocked his head, considering the mess and the football posters on the walls. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Villa fan. Good job. If you were Blues I’d’ve had to kill you.’ He laughed like this was the most hilarious thing he’d ever heard. ‘How old are you, kid?’ he asked.

‘What…?’

‘Oi!’ That earned him another tap with the crowbar, not as hard as the first one, but Toby jerked as if electrocuted. ‘I warned you about that, didn’t I? How fucking old are you?’

‘Thir-thirteen.’

‘You had pussy yet?’

Toby stopped himself just in time from asking another question. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Pussy! Sex! You know? You got a girlfriend? Shit, are you gay? Not that I give a fuck one way or the other, you understand.’ Toby turned crimson with embarrassment. Why was this guy trying to start a conversation? It was excruciating.

Toby took a deep breath. ‘You can take whatever you want,’ he muttered, ‘but I’m not talking to you about that kind of thing.’ He clenched his eyes shut, hunched his shoulders and waited to be fucked up in ways he couldn’t imagine.

‘Whatever. So, whyn’t you show me where they keep passports, birth certificates, important shit like that.’

‘Okay.’ Clutching his arm, Toby got up and led Green Skull to his parents’ bedroom at the end of the short hallway. He didn’t actually know where his mum kept important documents like that, but it seemed like a good bet. Theirs was a cramped, claustrophobic ground-floor flat and there wasn’t much to it beyond two bedrooms, the bathroom, kitchen, living room and a closet in the hall overflowing with coats, brooms and boxes of random junk.

He saw his parents’ bed, with his mum’s old silver crucifix – the one she never wore but sometimes took and looked at when she thought nobody was watching – hanging over the bedpost by her pillow, and felt a stab of guilt about how easily he was letting this guy get away with it. Even helping him.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘You can take my Xbox, my games, all of it – just leave their stuff alone, please?’

Green Skull turned slowly to look at him, and for a moment Toby let himself think that it would be okay. He’d wrestle the crowbar out of the guy’s hands, and maybe he’d get away or maybe he wouldn’t, and the guy would do something like clap a heavy hand on his shoulder and laugh and say Shit, kid, seems like you do have some badass in you after all and the grizzled old career criminal would take him on as an idealistic apprentice and they’d run off and have adventures through which they’d come to acquire a grudging respect for each other, just like in one of those films.

What actually happened was that the burglar who had trashed his parents’ living room because Toby had been too stupid and lazy to lock the back door grunted, ‘Cheeky little cunt,’ and backhanded him so hard his head bounced off the doorframe. He was too stunned to even beg as he slid to the floor and Green Skull kicked him twice in the stomach. He hoped he might pass out, but that didn’t happen either. Later, at the hospital, the doctors told him that he was a very lucky young man: his arm wasn’t broken, no ribs had been cracked and he’d suffered no internal injuries, and the worst that he could expect was some spectacular bruising. Right at this very moment, however, he felt far from lucky. He just lay there until the guy was finished, curled around a burning knot of agony in his guts which felt like it was eating him from the inside out; then, as the intruder went on to ransack the flat, he remained there pretending to be unconscious, lying in a puddle of his own tears and snot. Finally, when there was only the sound of his own sobbing to bruise the silence, he got to his knees and crawled in search of a phone.

3

BAIT STATION

TOBY FEENAN GLANCED UP FROM HIS PHONE LONG enough to look through the car window at the house that his dad had pulled up in front of, more because the car had stopped than out of any real interest in their destination. The glance became a stare and he sat up straighter.

‘Wait, what?’ he said, and pointed. ‘We’re going to live there?’

‘Yep,’ said his mum. She closed the folder of real estate documents that she’d been reading through and unclipped her seatbelt.

‘So, are we rich now?’

His father turned and gave him a goofy, beatific smile. ‘Only in our love for each other, my dearest darling son.’

‘Sorry I asked,’ he muttered.

‘In other words,’ added his dad, ‘no.’

The estate agent’s car had pulled up ahead of them – a black Lexus, Toby noted with approval – and the agent got out to meet them. She was a little taller and a little older than his mum, wearing glasses and a smart suit, with an iPad tucked under one arm. Her name was Natalie Markes, and she was the director of property and development for the Haleswell Village Trust Estates department, but estate agent was the closest Toby had got to understanding what it was she actually did. She’d been around to their home several times – their old home, he supposed he’d better get used to calling it – in the months during which incomprehensible legal wrangles had prevented them from moving into the new place, but now that it was all sorted out she had insisted on personally escorting them to their new home. ‘Short of a red carpet for our newest Trustee, I’m afraid I’ll have to do,’ she’d said. Toby didn’t understand how his mother – Trish Feenan, about as ordinary a mum as any you could imagine – had come to be a Trustee of a posh village neighbourhood in the suburbs that she’d never lived in just because an old lady she’d barely known had died, but if it meant she got to drive a Lexus too instead of their current shitty old Peugeot that was fine by him.

Toby got out of the car and tugged with a finger at the collar which had been chafing his neck throughout the journey. He couldn’t believe they’d made him wear an actual tie on a non-school day. Apparently after this they were going on to meet the rest of the Trust at an actual garden party at an actual vicarage, for which he needed to appear smart – or at least, in his father’s words, ‘as little like a Hunger Games reject as possible’. Repeat: garden party. Vicarage. Like in those TV detective shows like Midsomer Murders or whatever.

It seemed impossible that they could still be in the city. The road was lined with broadly spreading trees, and the houses all sat back behind high hedges, but behind even those he could still hear the muted background roar which reminded him that he only had to go half a dozen roads in any direction and he’d be back surrounded by dodgy takeaways, snarling traffic and high-rises just like the home they’d left – what? He checked the time on his phone. Twenty minutes ago. Impossible.

He looked at the house for a moment, imagining how it might be described in an estate agent’s listings. Then he took a photo, found a filter which made it fuzzy around the edges and a bit muted like an old postcard.

PIC0507181 shows a high hedge of beech, its leaves like sheets of beaten copper, and a gap with a wrought-iron gate between stone posts. In one of them is the rectangular slot of a letter box. A glossy green veinwork of ivy twists through a name which has been worked into the metal: Stone Cottage.

He added a caption: stoner cottage lol, and picced it to his friends.

Ms Markes produced a set of keys and unlocked the gate. ‘We couldn’t be sure who Mrs Drummond might have given spare keys to, so we took the liberty of changing all the locks – though we couldn’t change this one, obviously. The Estates office does have a copy of the new ones, but only in case of emergencies.’ Toby caught an anxious glance pass between his parents.

Ms Markes pushed open the gate and then stood aside for Toby’s family, holding out the bunch of keys, but his mother hesitated, standing with her hand to her mouth and her eyes shining as if she was either about to burst into laughter or tears, or both.

‘Everything all right?’ asked his dad.

‘I just…’ she started. ‘It’s hard to believe that it’s finally ours, that’s all. I keep expecting someone to come out of that door and say sorry, it’s all been a big mistake, clear off. Things like this don’t happen to people like us.’

‘People like us is people like them, now,’ said his dad. ‘Listen, if you don’t want those keys I’ll take them, but then me and Tobes get first dibs on a games room, isn’t that right, fella?’

Toby stared at him. ‘We get a games room?’

‘Oh no!’ His mum plucked the keys from Ms Markes’ hand and strode through the gate. Toby followed, taking photos all the way.

PIC0507182 shows a gravel path circling a trim lawn and beyond it a detached two-storey suburban house. It has a large bay window on one side of the arched front porch, and a roof which is a lopsided ziggurat of steep gables and dormer windows set at odd angles to each other. Despite being perfectly straight and neat, with cleanly painted window frames and tidy guttering, it nevertheless gives the impression of having been caught in the act of turning around, like a man peering over his shoulder at something following behind.

‘Well it certainly looks a lot tidier than the last time,’ observed his dad.

‘We haven’t been able to do much to the garden, I’m afraid,’ said Ms Markes. ‘There was so much that needed doing on the house. I won’t bore you with the details – it’s all in the surveyor’s report – but basically it was the first time since the seventies that anyone’s been able to get in and give it a really good going-over.’

‘I remember we came here once,’ said Mum. ‘When I was little; I think I must have been five. One of those big family get-togethers, probably somebody’s birthday. There never were any again – not that there was a feud or anything like that, it was just that you know how sometimes two sides of a family will drift apart? Well, that. I remember it being very dark and smelly in the house. Full of big old pieces of furniture and things that you weren’t allowed to touch.’

His mum unlocked the front door – a hefty latch with a chain and a row of four thick deadbolts, Toby noted with approval. Ms Markes saw him looking.

‘We’ve replaced both the front and back entrances with state-of-the-art security doors,’ she said, ‘with oak cladding over a steel core and steel frame, though you’d never know it to look. The windows are made of laminated safety glass, like in cars or shop windows, so that if they break there are no jagged pieces to hurt you, and anybody trying to break in is going to have a very hard time of it.’

His dad gave a low whistle. ‘Expecting a siege, are you?’

‘It’s standard on all Trustees’ homes. The Trust takes the security of its members very seriously.’

‘I’m getting that impression.’

There was no darkness in the house, and no heavy items of furniture – not much by way of furniture at all. The interior had been stripped right back to allow light to flood every room and hallway; it shone from the freshly repainted walls and glowed golden from newly varnished floorboards, gleaming from worktops and modern appliances in the kitchen and glittering from mica-flecked granite in the bathrooms. The windows were spotlessly clear and, he checked, also fitted with solid locks. Their flat, being rented, was only as well maintained as the landlord needed to avoid breaking the law. It was permanently damp, which meant that his mother was fighting a continual war against an insidious variety of black mould that seeped out of the ceilings and from the bathroom grouting like shadows taken root, and so everything smelled simultaneously of bleach and dank plaster. From as early as Toby could remember, he’d been fighting off one respiratory problem or another. Here it was dry and smelled faintly of pine- and lemon-scented cleaning products. In the old place, mismatched and draughty floorboards were covered with cheap, hard-wearing carpet which had actually given him serious road rash once when he’d fallen down the stairs; here he reckoned that if he took his shoes off he could glide down the long hallway on his socks like a curling stone. It was almost intimidatingly clean, and Toby followed the adults on tiptoe, afraid to touch anything for fear of leaving smeary fingerprints while his mum uttered variations of ‘Oh my God!’ as they went into each new room.

‘We’re going to need a bigger sofa,’ said his dad, as they stood gazing in wonder at the expanse of the sitting room with its wide fireplace and the sunlight streaming in through the panes of the tall bay window. ‘Honestly, this is just embarrassing now.’

‘All of Mrs Drummond’s belongings were put into storage while we were completing the renovations,’ said Ms Markes. ‘You can have your pick and what’s left will be auctioned.’

His dad was peering at the old-fashioned light switches by the door. ‘Hold up, are these original Bakelite?’ Toby sighed. He didn’t know whether being an electrician had turned his dad into a heath-and-safety freak or if he had always been that way, but once introduced to a new environment it was only ever a matter of time before Peter Feenan started judging how likely it was to be a Potential Death Trap.

Ms Markes shrugged. ‘I imagine so.’

‘Can you show me where the fuse box is?’ There was no way he was going to take assurances about the quality of Haleswell Village Trust’s own electricians on faith.

‘Of course. It’s down this way.’

Toby followed them as far as the hallway. ‘Hey, Dad?’

Peter turned. ‘What is it, mate?’

‘I’m going to go have a bit of an explore outside, okay?’

There was a moment’s hesitation in which he knew his dad was thinking about telling him No, stay where we cansee you, but then he said, ‘Okay. Just don’t go too far.’

Too far. As if he were six and they were at the beach and afraid he’d drown or get abducted. Since the break-in his parents’ baseline level of worry about their dodgy neighbourhood had escalated into something approaching full-blown paranoia; instead of walking to school he’d been driven and collected by Dad in his electrician’s van, and his social life had all but died. All he wanted to do was check out what the rest of the property boundary was like – did the garden have any hiding places, was the fence or wall climbable, whether there was a back gate, and if it was secure. Surely that was just sensible in a new place: to know its vulnerabilities.

PIC0507183 shows a narrow passage down the side of the house turned into an obstacle course by piles of junk and debris: stacks of old fence boards, terracotta plant pots, empty cement bags, bits of trellis, a rusted bicycle frame with no wheels, piles of glass panes from a long-dismantled greenhouse, and more besides.

The wall of the house was on his left, and above it the steep roof slope, and above that still the cliff face of the house’s upper storey, blank on this side except for drainpipes and the narrow window of what was presumably a bathroom. He could have taken the wider, clearer path on the other side of the house, past the windows of what he was already thinking of as the study, but he wasn’t interested in that. An intruder would never use something so open. These shadowed and narrow places were where the world kept its secrets and hid its true face.

PIC0507184 shows, tucked in against the wall, a low box about the same size and shape as an overhead projector. It is made of black plastic with wide holes in either end and the logo of a pest control company stamped on it, along with the words ‘Warning! Contains rodenticide! Do not touch!’

Rat poison.

Last year’s school scandal had been a boy in the sixth form who had ended up in hospital after taking a batch of fake steroids laced with rat poison. Apparently they were all at it, juicing up either to get onto a team or into a girl’s pants by turning themselves into one of the swaggering tools from Love Island. He’d looked it up, because it was one of those sick, nasty little nuggets of knowledge that were currency amongst his mates (the ones who emphatically didn’t try out for teams or watch Love Island). Apparently it was like a maxed-out blood thinner which caused internal bleeding and slow death over a matter of weeks. Lethal stuff, basically. Do Not Mess.

He knelt beside the bait station and fiddled with the lid, managing to pop it open. Inside was a circular reservoir containing a handful of bluey-green pellets, with more scattered in the body of the casing. Disturbed by something that’d had a curious, maybe fatal, nibble.

‘Winner winner, chicken dinner,’ he murmured.

He clipped the lid back on and continued exploring, but found no furry little corpses, so it seemed that the resident rat population had gotten away with it for now.

The back garden had the same manicured look as the front, with a tall green hedge running along the rear and a raised area with a summerhouse. The only place where it was not tidy was in the centre of the lawn, where a large stone protruded from the ground. He pulled up short at the sight of it. It was only about a metre high, very roughly conical in shape and made of something which was probably granite though he couldn’t be sure, and there were strange bumps and hollows all over it which might have been the traces of weathered carvings, so it was obviously very old. There was nothing especially striking about it in itself, but somehow its very existence here, in this place which was otherwise so ordered and sane, felt wrong. It jutted like an erupted molar or an open fracture, splitting the skin of the world. It shouldn’t have been here. It should have been out on a desolate moorland, part of a circle with its brothers guarding the grave of someone long dead, not surrounded by flowerbeds and herbaceous borders.

PIC0507185 shows a close-up of the grain of the stone; coarse, pocked and cratered, a desert landscape photographed from high orbit, patches of lichen spreading in an archipelago. The soft furrow of a carved line long eroded invites a finger to trace its length. No, more than invites – insists. Demands.

This close, Toby fancied he could feel the chill radiating from the granite as he reached out to touch—

‘I see you’ve found it, then,’ said Ms Markes from behind him.

He leapt back and whirled, as if caught in the act of committing a crime.

She was in the back doorway, smiling. He hadn’t heard it open, his attention in thrall to the stone.

‘What?’

‘The parish stone,’ she said, and stepped out to join him. He wondered where his parents were. ‘It’s why this is called Stone Cottage, after all. Although it’s been here for a lot longer than the cottage – probably longer than every other building in the village, for that matter.’

‘Uh, really?’ He was still flustered from having been crept up on, but she seemed to take it as an expression of interest.

‘Yes, it’s at least fourteenth century. Some people think it might even have been an Anglo-Saxon moot stone, which would put it at over a thousand years old. Archaeologists excavated around it in the eighties and found coins and the remains of a dagger; isn’t that cool?’ When he didn’t reply she shrugged. ‘Well I think it’s cool.’ He was beginning to get the distinct impression that she was trying to persuade him to like it, appealing to what she thought a fourteen-year-old boy would find interesting, as if she were selling the property, as if it didn’t already belong to his mum.

‘Is that why there’s the thing in the contract about not messing around with it?’ he surprised himself by asking.

‘The leasehold? Yes, there’s a covenant to prevent anyone removing or damaging the parish stone. It was here long before any of us, and if we look after it properly it will be here long afterwards too. That’s why your mum is an honorary Trustee; it comes with the house, and the house comes with the stone.’ She gave him a sidelong look. ‘I didn’t know you were interested in property law.’

‘Me neither.’

‘I heard about the break-in, of course,’ she said, still looking at the stone, her voice low and neutral as if talking about nothing more unusual than the weather – but his heart was suddenly thumping in his ears all the same. ‘And I know that you were alone when it happened. I want you to know that this place is safe. It’s looked after. It’s… protected.’

Now she looked at him, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. It was excruciatingly embarrassing. He’d barely said anything about the attack to his parents or the police, much less the school counsellor, and now this stranger was presuming to talk to him about it as if she was his closest confidante?

‘Especially from the rats, I guess,’ he said, not really meaning anything by it beyond finding something to fill the awkward silence, but when she spoke again there was a sharpness to her tone that didn’t sit with the reassurance she’d just been trying to project.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing,’ he replied. Touched a nerve there, it seemed. ‘Just you’ve got some heavy-duty rat killer lying around. This place isn’t infested, is it?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that,’ she replied, trying to sound like she was breezing it off. ‘It’s just routine. Whenever we clear out a property we like to make sure it doesn’t disturb or attract any unwelcome visitors, that’s all. There’s an old saying that you’re never more than six feet away from a rat, but that’s nonsense. Right then,’ she added, ‘I better go and see how your parents are getting on.’

She left, and he watched her go, wondering why, of all things, this was the one she should be lying about.

He chose a room behind one of the oddly angled dormer windows overlooking the back garden. At some point in the cottage’s long past someone had converted the loft space into two rooms, which had probably been intended as a hideaway for a middle-aged husband to play with his train set or his porn collection. It definitely wasn’t designed to be a bedroom: the ceiling sloped steeply in all kinds of directions so that the walls were only a few feet high and there weren’t many places where a fourteen-year-old boy could stand up straight, and his mum wasn’t at all sure that it would be suitable for his ‘needs’ (whatever she thought those were), but Toby was adamant that he loved it, so that was that. He liked its closed-in nature. It reminded him of something he’d read about Indian palaces being built with deliberately narrow passageways so that intruders would have to fight one man at a time to get at the maharajah. So while Ms Markes and his parents went through the last of the paperwork, he sat in the high, narrow window at the top of the house and looked down at the parish stone sitting insolently in the middle of the lawn as if daring him to do something about it. ‘Protected’ it might be, but from up here he would at least have a decent warning if that turned out to be a lie too.

4

WELCOME

THINGS LIKE THIS DON’T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE LIKE US.

People like us is people like them, now.

Peter’s words kept coming back to Trish all through the afternoon that they spent meeting the other members of the Haleswell Village Trust. It started with drinks in the garden of the rectory of St Sebastian’s.

People like Richard Nash, Chief Executive of Haleswell Village Trust, whom she made a beeline for first thing, even though under other circumstances she would have found him to be more than a little full of himself. He was well fed rather than fat, with his belly emphasised by a check shirt tucked into mustard-coloured chinos – country golf club smart-casual, though he had a beer in his hand while most of the others held wine glasses. He wore glasses and the perpetual half-smile of a man who appeared to be laughing at some private joke. The sort of man her bosses at the warehouse aspired to have drinks with.

‘Peter!’ he beamed, shaking her husband’s hand first before turning to her. ‘And Patricia! And of course this handsome young gentleman, Tobias.’ Right there, she thought, there was the pecking order. She saw Toby rolling his eyes and smiled to herself. ‘Fabulous that you could all make it. How are you finding everything?’ he asked, his attention defaulting back to Peter.

‘Wonderful, thank you,’ she said before he could reply. ‘I just wanted to say thanks to you and your committee for everything you’ve done for my family. You’ve been more than generous.’

‘It’s a genuine pleasure, Patricia…’

‘Trish, please.’

‘Of course. Trish. What can I get you all to drink?’ And he led them to a side table loaded with bottles, alongside plates of finger food: miniature sandwiches, pastry savouries that looked like origami, and not a cocktail sausage in sight. ‘Red or white?’

She surveyed the options. ‘I think I’ll have one of those expensive-looking lagers, thank you, Mr Nash.’

He laughed like this was the best joke he’d heard all day. ‘Richard,’ he insisted. ‘The only people who call me Mr Nash are the people I can fire.’ The bottles were the kind with a wire contraption at the top which flipped a little ceramic lid on and off again. She and Peter took one each. Nash turned to Toby. ‘And what about you, young sir? What do teenagers drink these days? When I was your age it was a can of Top Deck on the way home from school, though I suppose that doesn’t even exist now. Top Deck, that is, not school. I’m fairly certain that’s still around.’

‘He’ll have a lemonade,’ said Trish.

‘Absolutely. Plenty of time for the hard stuff, eh?’

While Nash was sorting this out Toby leaned in close to his dad, and though she couldn’t hear the whole of the murmured exchange, definitely caught the word ‘nob-end’.

* * *

People like Anik Singh, the Trust’s director of human resources, who listened with absolute seriousness as Trish embarrassed herself by telling him about her ambitions to train as a mental health counsellor now that she didn’t have to work all hours of the day at her crappy, ironically named ‘zero-hours’ contract.

‘What is it that you do?’ he asked. He was quite short and slim, with a dark-eyed intensity that somehow made evasive small talk impossible.

What is it that you do? The kind of question which she imagined in these sorts of conversations would usually be followed by something like. Oh you know, international finance, hedge fund acquisition, the usual.

‘You know those shopping catalogues where you buy handy kitchen gadgets and dodgy jewellery?’ she replied. ‘Well they all get supplied by these great big robot warehouses out in the middle of nowhere. I’m one of the “distribution technicians”, which basically means if something gets jammed I hit it with a stick until it’s unjammed.’

He nodded as if she’d just told him she was a brain surgeon by day but dabbled a little in rocket science on the side.

‘And you?’ she asked

‘All the clichés, I’m afraid,’ he said with an apologetic smile. ‘Second generation off the boat, with a pair of pushy parents who I disappointed tragically by becoming a chartered accountant instead of a doctor.’ He picked a volau-vent off a nearby tray and munched it unenthusiastically. ‘Do you like these things?’ he asked.

She shrugged, not wanting to offend. ‘I imagine they’re an acquired taste.’

Singh leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Do you want to know something? My father owns a cash-and-carry business on the Stratford Road. One year when I was twelve we had some bad flooding and he tried to save what he could in the big chest freezer in our garage. We ate chicken Kiev for a month and I put on half a stone.’ He grinned. ‘It was fantastic.’

* * *

People like the reverend Joyce Dobson, a tall, angular, middle-aged woman with large hands that seemed to do most of the talking for her. They enfolded both of Trish’s in a warm grip of greeting, flew open in laughter, tapped fingers in thought and clasped solemnly when sympathetic. Trish listened politely while Joyce told her about the voluntary and charity work that the Trust organised to help the more deprived housing estates under their management, and when she finished with ‘I do hope you’ll consider popping in to lend a hand now and then’, actually found herself thinking that she might.

‘Would you like a quick tour of the church, while we’re here?’ Rev. Dobson asked. ‘Escape this madness for ten minutes?’

Trish glanced over at where Peter and Nash were chatting, with Toby at his father’s elbow, sipping his drink and looking bored and restless. She’d ordered him to leave his phone in the car, and he was obviously suffering from withdrawal, but a bit of enforced social without the media would do him good. Visiting a church was the last thing she wanted to do, but it would have been rude to refuse. ‘I’d love to,’ she said.

A door in the rectory garden’s brick wall let them straight into the churchyard, and onto a short path leading between gravestones to St Sebastian’s church. It was a simple building, and smaller than Trish had been expecting, with a square, four-pointed tower at one end and a half-timbered porch with heavy doors set halfway down its length.

‘We’re not exactly Westminster Abbey,’ said Rev. Dobson, as if reading her thoughts. ‘But then congregations are usually so small anyway. I’m not sure what I’d do if my flock actually started turning up.’

‘I bet Christmas is fun.’

‘Bless the Lord for folding picnic chairs, that’s all I can say.’

Reverend Dobson unlocked the doors with a huge cast-iron key that looked like it would have been better suited to a medieval dungeon, and stepped into the entry porch. Even from here, Trish could smell it: the heavy redolence of furniture polish, old carpet, and candle wax which was instantly familiar even though she’d never set foot in this place before. It was like smelling the cologne of an old, abusive lover, one you thought you’d said good riddance to and never expected to have to deal with again. Her pulse quickened, and she told herself not to be so bloody stupid.

What’s He going to do, strike me down with holy retribution?

Inside there were a few dozen pews and shelves stacked with hymnals, their dark wood set against oak panelling and grey-gold sandstone. On the pulpit a huge Bible lay open at a wide bookmark richly embroidered and embellished with shining pilgrim badges. The altar was modest, even for an Anglican church. She hadn’t set foot in a church of any description for twelve years, but even so she was surprised to find that the urge to approach the altar and genuflect was immediate and strong. I’m sorry, please take me back, she wanted to say, at the same time as No, never again, you bastard.

In one corner, crayon pictures made in Sunday school were stuck directly to the stone wall next to inscribed plaques commemorating notable parishioners and a table with an honesty box and a wicker tray full of small bottles the same size as hand sanitiser. A hand-lettered sign read:

WATER FROM ST SEBASTIAN’SWELL, SUGGESTED DONATION £2.

She picked up one of the bottles for a closer look. Its label read:

A SIGN OF LIFE AND GOD’S HEALING GRACE FROM HALESWELL, THE SITE OF ST SEBASTIAN’S WELL, A PLACE OF CHRISTIAN PRAYER AND PILGRIMAGE FOR900 YEARS. PRAY WITH THIS WATER; PASS THIS WATER ON TO SOMEONE AS A SIGN OF YOUR PRAYER FOR THEM; ASK FOR GRACE TO LET GO OF PAST HURTS OR SORROWS WHILE POURING THIS WATER INTO THE EARTH; WASH YOUR HANDS OR FACE IN THIS WATER, PRAYING FOR GOD’SBLESSING FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS.

And then in red capitals:

NOT SUITABLE FOR DRINKING

Trish laughed.

‘What’s that?’ asked Rev. Dobson. ‘Oh, I see you’ve found our little holy moonshine operation. I hope you won’t think it too cynical of us. Prayer alone won’t replace stolen lead roofing, unfortunately.’

‘No, I just thought it was funny how the grace of God isn’t fit for human consumption.’

‘Ah, well there’s the power of the Lord, and then there’s health and safety legislation. Come on, I’ll show you our holy well.’

Rev. Dobson led her up to the chancel, then turned back to her. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise that you were a Catholic.’

Trish looked at her sharply. ‘What? I’m not. I mean, I was. How did you know?’

‘You just crossed yourself.’

‘Did I? Shit. Oops, sorry.’

‘No need. Do you mind if I ask…?’

‘A little bit, yes.’

‘Then the apology is mine.’ Rev. Dobson continued to the altar, with Trish blushing furiously behind. Dammit, was it really that easy? She stared at the image of Christ carved into the glossy wood of the reredos behind the altar. Oh no you don’t. Meanwhile Rev. Dobson had lifted the altar cloth, laying her hand on the stone beneath.

‘Despite what it looks like, this altar isn’t a solid block of stone. It’s actually been hollowed out into a trough with a wooden board laid across the top. During the time of the Black Death this stone was placed on the parish boundary and used as a way for the villagers to trade with their neighbours without actual physical contact, to try to prevent the plague spreading. One of the things that Haleswell had to offer was healing water from a spring blessed by Saint Sebastian.’

At the opposite end of the nave from the altar, under the stained-glass windows in the western wall, there was a shallow stone basin built into the floor, full of water. At first Trish thought it was a particularly odd design for a baptismal font, but then she noticed that the water was actually bubbling up into the basin from underneath the floor and flowing away along a channel through a grated culvert in the wall.

‘It was originally in the grounds of the church,’ said Rev. Dobson, ‘but at some point in the seventeenth century the church was rebuilt and expanded to incorporate it as part of the structure. As you can see, it’s quite small. Parts of the church actually date back to the twelfth century and it’s likely that there were people settled here since the Anglo-Saxons. Even then this spring probably wasn’t big enough to supply the village entirely on its own, but that wasn’t why it was so important.’

‘I imagine that fresh, clean water coming out of the ground must have seemed like a gift from God,’ said Trish.

‘It wasn’t much of a jump for the church to attribute its miraculous powers to Saint Sebastian, who is supposed to defend against plague. People still come here to pray for healing, and so we bottle a little of it for them to take away with them.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s harmless, and it helps towards our running costs.’

‘Just as long as they don’t drink it, that is,’ Trish pointed out.

Rev. Dobson laughed.

‘And do you really believe that it works?’

‘Are you asking me if I believe in miracles?’

‘You’re a priest. It must go with the territory.’

The vicar smiled wryly, and the look she gave Trish was cool and measuring. ‘Well, put it this way – if someone had told you six months ago that you would be living mortgage-free in a large detached cottage in one of the most affluent neighbourhoods in the city, what would you have called it? Luck? Just that? Or maybe a little more?’

‘Fair point,’ Trish conceded. She was beginning to feel that this was a bit more than just a friendly tour – something more like an interview.

‘Aha, but you didn’t answer the question,’ Dobson said.

‘Aha, but I have no intention of answering the question.’

Rev. Dobson’s hands folded themselves together, the tips of her forefingers tapping each other as if in conversation. ‘Patricia Feenan,’ she said, ‘if it doesn’t sound too pompous, and I’m sure it does, you have firm inner defences. I like that in a person. And I like you, which is just as well, since we basically have the same job.’

‘Um…’

‘No, not that one. I mean that you and I are both non-executive Trustees. We retain voting rights even though we have no portfolio as part of the Trust’s day-to-day business.’

‘All the privilege but none of the responsibility.’ Trish nodded. ‘Makes a nice change.’

Rev. Dobson frowned slightly. ‘It’s not quite like that. You are a Trustee because you have the guardianship of the parish marker at Stone Cottage. I, similarly, have the guardianship of this spring. Both are important to the history and heritage of Haleswell village – by which I mean the core of the village, the original parish, not the extended series of estates and properties which the Trust has built up over the years. I’m hoping that as a… er…’

‘Lapsed? Recovering?’

‘Yes. That you will appreciate that Rogation Sunday is a very important fixture in our calendar.’

‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to remind me about that one. It’s been a while.’

‘The Sunday before Ascension Thursday? May twenty-sixth. This year it’s part of the main bank holiday so obviously we want to make it as much of an occasion as we can—’

‘Joyce, if I can stop you there? I think I know what you’re trying to say, and it’s okay. Honestly, it’s all fine. Natalie was very good in talking us through all of the small print in the title deeds before we signed the contract. We know that there are various conditions that come with owning the cottage, and we’re more than happy to observe them. Of course we’ll open our garden for the Beating of the Bounds, you don’t have to worry about that.’

Reverend Dobson’s face relaxed, and her hands stopped fluttering around each other like nervous birds. ‘That’s lovely to hear. It’s been a very long time since Stone Cottage has had new owners – certainly not within living memory of any of the current Trustees – and as you can imagine some of us are a bit nervous about the, ah, continuity.’

‘Well you have nothing to be nervous about on my account. We know exactly what we’re letting ourselves in for.’

Trish was surprised by how bitter Reverend Dobson’s laughter sounded as she led Trish out of the church and back towards the rectory, saying, ‘I very much doubt that, my dear.’

* * *

Back in the reverend’s garden, Richard Nash got their attention in the time-honoured fashion of tapping his bottle with a fork.

‘And now,’ he announced, ‘it’s time that we properly welcome our newest Trustee and her wonderful family into our community. If you’ll all…’ He gestured towards the French doors of the rectory study, which stood open. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added to the Feenans as the group headed in. ‘We’re not all going to throw our car keys into a big bowl and dress up in pointed hoods and shag each other, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ It didn’t seem to bother him that her son was listening, and trading smirks with his dad.

Reverend Dobson’s study was exactly as Trish had imagined – lined with books from floor to ceiling and furnished with a heavy desk and several wing-backed armchairs. The only thing which surprised her was that above the fireplace, where she might have expected an image of the crucifixion, there was instead a reproduction of an oil painting showing shroud-wrapped corpses lying in the streets of a medieval town while townsfolk rolled their eyes in terror and priests prayed over the bodies. In the sky an angel and a demon did battle underneath the figure of a man pierced with arrows like a pincushion, who was kneeling on a cloud and pleading with the Lord. It was entitled Saint Sebastian Interceding for the Plague-Stricken. She nudged Peter and nodded at it.

‘Bit grim,’ he whispered.

‘Catholics for you,’ she whispered back.

Reverend Dobson led her to the desk, upon which lay open the kind of large leather-bound tome kept with a precision which might have done a Victorian accountant proud. It was a register of names, each written in a different hand, the dates next to them going back several decades. The most recent ones were the names of all the people currently in the room with her: Richard Nash, Joyce Dobson, Donna Russell, Sean Trevorrow, Natalie Markes, Anik Singh, Alan Pankowicz, Esme Barlow and, a few places above them, separated by names she didn’t recognise going back to the fifties, her great-aunt, Stephanie Drummond.