Nearly everyone died those first few nights. Sometimes I play it in my head, testing different possibilities, the way you reach deeper into a thicket of thorns for the last blackberries of the season. I search for ways they could have escaped, only to come back scratched and bloody with death in the palm of my hand.
Next door’s my go-to; I can imagine them easier. In my head tonight, the film opens with them at the table, playing Monopoly or The Game of Life or some other dusty board game that only gets pulled out at Christmas. The two teenage boys are curled around their stacks of fake money, eyeing each other like vultures, and Maria, their mum, is distracted by the milk simmering on the stove for hot chocolate.
I get wide shots of the room, made cozy for winter, and close-ups of the boys, of the milk bubbling like the popcorn in Scream. When the milk boils over, hissing as it hits the stovetop, Maria gets up, and the reason I know that’s not going to end well for her is that this is a film, and films have rules. The other reason I know is because I heard what happened from across the hallway. The scream when she reaches up for mugs in one of the tall cupboards and sees what’s squatting on top of her fridge.
The graying damp spot on her ceiling had bulged out when she wasn’t watching, dripped bit by bit onto the top of the fridge, coalescing into something viscous and malformed with too many limbs.
Maria stumbles back and knocks into the saucepan handle. The milk hisses louder, flecks of it spitting at her arms, but she’s wearing a Christmas jumper, the kind that lights up, so it doesn’t hurt. She probably wouldn’t have felt it even if her arms had been bare. The thing on the fridge has no eyes, but a mouth opens, and she can see pipes, wires crisscrossing in its throat. Like a whole section of the building has torn away, turned malevolent.
She runs for her boys, but the thing is quicker than it looks. It springs from the fridge, landing heavily on the table. Monopoly money goes everywhere. Globs of gray mold splatter the game board. The boys are screaming now too. One of them’s fallen back in his chair, and his legs are caught in it as he desperately tries to scrabble backward.
I used to play hide-and-seek in the lower car park with those boys. One of them got in a fight with my sibling Danny once. I don’t remember their names.
The thing reaches for one of them, doesn’t matter which. It grabs their foot, and black mold sprouts up their ankle, disappearing into their pajama leg. Maria screams and runs at the thing, but it’s more solid than it looks. When she hits it, the mucus of its body melts away, letting Maria impale herself on the pipework of its skeleton.
She coughs blood, and her sons are screaming, and outside the window there are monsters crawling from the roots of trees and surfacing green with weeds from duck ponds and lumbering from closets that have never quite closed enough for comfort. Across the hall we sit with our knees drawn tight to our chests, and here, now, in this cottage so far from the city and that night, I draw the blankets blankets over my head like drawing curtains over a film screen. It keeps its flickering projection up curtains over a film screen. It keeps its flickering projection up though, all night.
The keys hanging from the hook aren’t the right ones. I’ve tried all of them twice, turning each upside down, twisting in case there’s a knack, but they refuse to fit. In the end, I put a dog bowl against the door. It won’t keep it closed, but it’s an early warning system at least. We can’t lock the night out, but we can know if it tries to get in.
When we get upstairs, the twins want to know why the others aren’t here, the actual adults. I’m not an actual adult, no matter that Danny’s barely older than me. They’re out setting up the wards, and I know I should be grateful that I’ve been trusted with the kids, but it still feels like a rebuke.
We set up beds on the floor, but within ten minutes we’re all on the big bed, legs crossed, talking about anything but. Nature documentaries. Strange brain phenomena. How the light from the bedside lamp makes a perfect shadow theater. The spider downstairs that skittered toward us without warning and made me bash my elbow on a doorframe. Seems stupid to be scared of a spider right now.
We’ve left the camping lantern on, and it’s no Orion’s Belt, but I think we’re all grateful for the soft, bluish glow. The lantern buzzes softly. We appreciate the background noise. Keeps us from listening too hard to the other noises the house might make.
We talk until the exhaustion makes us feel sick, and then the twins drop off, both on the bed. I have to gently move them because I twitch in the night, and I don’t want to wake them.
Me and Noah, who just turned twelve, sit in the sanctum of light on the bed and try not to think about the fields around us. When I closed the curtains earlier, I didn’t look, afraid that the big oak at the end of the garden would look like a person.
There were neighbors, once, but there haven’t been any for a while, not from what we can tell. They took most of the useful stuff, so they obviously didn’t leave in that much of a hurry. We found some honey cornflakes that were all stuck together in a clump, and the little ones gnawed at it while me and Noah had stale biscuits. At least there was tea. No milk, but we haven’t had that in ages. I don’t even think we’d remember what it tastes like if we tried.
We don’t try, as a rule.
From the neatly folded cardigans and well-worn copies of Dan Brown novels, we’ve decided the owner of this room was an older woman. There are toys downstairs in a box, bits of brightly colored plastic, but no kids’ bedrooms and no tiny clothes in any wardrobes, so a grandma. It’s nice to think of her tucking us all in, bringing us hot chocolate.
Noah keeps looking at the bedroom door, as though some wizened creature might come creeping in to watch us sleep.
“You think they’ll be back tonight?”
he asks. When we found this place, Danny checked the insides and then left with Ma and Lilian to set up wards. They want to stay here for a while, so they’ll be warding for miles in a rough circle around us. Each ward, little pouches of herbs and salt, needs to be buried carefully or the whole thing’ll fall apart.
“They’ll be back when they’re back.”
He gives me a look, like he’s twelve now, a grown-up, so he deserves the truth.
“Morning, probably. Lunchtime at the latest.”
“Can I sleep up here?”
I hold open the covers for him. “Don’t blame me if I punch you in the middle of the night.”
“It is the middle of the night,” he says as he gets in, and he’s not wrong. It’s been one of those months where it always feels like the middle of the night.
* * *
The others get back in the early morning. I think I’ve forgotten how to sleep deeply, always listening for noises, and the sound of the dog bowl clattering is enough to drag me awake. Noah’s at a weird angle on the bed, sprawled diagonally across, and I’ve ended up curled around my pillow. My neck twinges unhappily.
I leave the kids sleeping and head downstairs, kneading my shoulder with one hand. Danny’s sitting in the dining room, kicking their shoes off. In the kitchen, Lilian’s on her knees with a tea towel to gather up the shattered pieces of the dog bowl.
“What was that doing in front of the door?” Danny asks. They look tired. Both of them do. Lilian moves stiffly when she straightens up to put the tea
towel on the countertop.
“Didn’t have the right key.”
“Fuck. Yeah, sorry.” Danny digs for a set of keys in their pocket. There’s three or four keys, a blocky black car key, and a key ring in the shape of a Scottie dog. “The kids good?”
“They’re still asleep. Where’s Ma?”
Danny nods at the conservatory. When I lean over to look outside, I see Ma in the garden, still in her heavy winter coat and boots, inspecting the oak tree. She needs sleep. We’d been walking for at least four days before we got here, and she hasn’t slept all night.
Lilian can’t read minds as far as I’m aware, but she always seems to know what I’m thinking. “I tried to get her to come in, but you know what she’s like.”
“She’ll rest when she’s sure we’re safe,” Danny says, hauling themselves to their feet. “I’m gonna do the doors.”
“Can’t that wait?”
Danny shakes their head, pausing only to drop a kiss on Lilian’s cheek before they vanish into the pantry, probably to find something to mash up the herbs with. Herbs are everything to us now that they’re the only remedy we know can keep the bad things out. Lilian gives me a look that means your family is stubborn as fuck, only Lilian would never say “fuck.” She’s not wrong though. We are, and Danny’s almost as bad as Ma.
The first day somewhere is always weird. Danny and Ma predictably spend the day sprinkling herbs into pouches to hang from all the doors and gathering anything we might need into the living room, taking stock. Lilian starts washing our clothes, thank god, because we started to smell like a bog a good week ago. All I
want is clean clothes and a bath.
That’s the best part about this place. It has a bath. It’ll take ages to heat up the water, hefting jugs of it from the stream to slowly bring to a boil on top of the fire, but it’ll be worth it. I can smell myself whenever I raise my arms even a little bit.
The twins like the chickens in the garden. Ava especially is excited when she finds them, half wild but friendly as anything. None of us had noticed the hen house at one end of the garden last night, all of us too scared and tired to do much exploring. Now, Ava practically climbs inside the little red structure.
“Come on,” she says and clucks, or at least tries to. Isla shakes her head at me.
“They’re not just gonna come to you. They’re not dogs.”
“How do you know? Maybe they’re trained chickens.”
“You can’t train chickens.”
“Why can’t I?”
“You just can’t.”
Personally, I think the two chickens that still live here are probably best off pecking at one of the vegetable patches, rather than becoming Ava’s new project. At least so long as Lilian doesn’t catch them and cook them.
Noah’s the one who finds the CD player. It runs off batteries, so we can use it until this set runs out. The rest of the battery supply stays in the go bags, for torches and walkie-talkies and stuff.
When he brings it into the bedroom, I’m surprised he even knows what it is. “I’m not stupid,” he says when he sees my expression, setting the machine on the chest of drawers. When I don’t say anything, he sighs in that
trying-to-be-an-adult way he’s adopted recently and adds, “Bungalow guy had loads of tech magazines.”
The bungalow had been our home sometime over the summer. It had been so full of stuff that we’d had to spend a good few days gutting it before there was space for us all, and then we ended up leaving after barely a week anyway when Ma decided the wards were too precarious. We’d tied them to the bottoms of lampposts and electrical boxes because there was nowhere in the concrete area to bury them, but Ma had spent every day worrying at them, testing them to make sure they wouldn’t fail in the face of a storm. They did not pass her test.
That’s how it’s always been. Even from that first day when we’d left the flat. Find shelter. Shelter is compromised. Leave shelter. Over and over and over. Laying in a borrowed bed or on a musty carpet, listening to the sounds of night as if I might be able to hear the witches chafing at the wards, digging their claws into the solid air like it’s made of wood, doing their best to crack us open.
“What about CDs?” I ask, and he looks confused. Grinning, I get up, help him hunt for some. They’re in the bottom of a drawer, neatly organized inside a wallet that zips up.
As far as the twins are concerned, the CDs are precious discs of shiny material that catch rainbows and make a good noise when you wobble them. I give Noah the task of looking after them, and he takes it very seriously, putting the wallet up high where the twins can’t reach. The music is old stuff. Ma says it’s from her mum’s time.
Sound is important; it keeps everything out, the dark, the screams, real or imagined. The first time I heard an owl screech, back when we first fled the city, I’d curled at the foot of Ma’s bed all night.
You get to be able to tell the difference between the noises
if you listen long enough. Owls are a comfort now. The witches sound more like foxes, only the foxes sound more human when they scream. The witches are ragged and primal and everything but human.
* * *
The screaming started at half ten at night. I remember, because the show we were watching had just ended, some crafting thing with a pink-cheeked woman showing us how to make baubles by blowing glass. As though ordinary people just have glass-blowing equipment at the ready. Something else was supposed to come on after, probably something equally pretty to look at but useless in every other way. We didn’t even get to the theme tune.
It was just me and Danny awake. The twins had been put down hours ago, Ma went to bed at the same time, and Noah had fallen asleep sometime during Oliver!. Lilian was snoring gently on Danny. I was making my case for putting on a crappy horror film, like we always used to do over Christmas, when it was just me and Danny.
It was warm and hazy, and maybe that’s just my imagination, but I like remembering it that way.
In my memory of it, Danny’s laughing quietly. I’m saying something like, “We haven’t watched Fiend Without a Face in years.” They’re pulling a face at that, so I’m coming up with a better option. “The Blob. House of Wax. Leprechaun, please.”
“Wrong holiday,” Danny probably said, and then the screaming started across the hall. We both stared at the door. It wasn’t the first time we’d heard weird sounds; our flat was on the edge of a city, screaming was sort of a built-in feature. Usually, though, it came from outside, followed by hysterical laughter or drunk singing.
This screaming sounded like it was being dragged out of someone’s throat. Like it came out flecked with bloody phlegm. It died a whimper, and Danny looked at me.
We probably made a joke. My imagination sort of fails me somewhere around here. Things solidify. The lights in my memory flickered, and Danny muted the TV, head tilted to listen. We sat in a silence that felt thick with something hard to swallow. Or that could just be how I remember it. Maybe I was scrolling through my phone, ignoring Danny’s worry, because Danny was always worrying.
I do know that the screaming started again, and that this time round it didn’t stop for a long while.
* * *
None of us are sure when we started calling them witches. It just sort of happened. I think people need names for things they don’t understand. It makes it easier, like it’s something we get. We know the rules of witches. We can melt them with water. They’re fallible.
Yeah, well, we tried the water thing. Just in case. Whoever made The Wizard of Oz didn’t have a clue what witches really are.
I don’t know if they actually are witches. They don’t look like witches, but then I guess our idea of a witch is mostly down to the Brothers Grimm and Disney. They could be anything. The only reason we call them that is the things that keep us safe from them. Running water, wards, rowan branches lining the lintels of our doors. The adder stone Ma keeps on a string around her neck even when she sleeps, polished smooth from generations of wear.
We’ve discussed (and by we, I mean me and the kids; Danny won’t abide by conversations like this) whether witches existing means other magical creatures exist. Isla and Ava both hope for unicorns. I wouldn’t mind a dragon or two, so long as they were friendly and happy to let you ride them. Noah doesn’t want any of them to be real. I can’t blame him. The witches are so much worse than anything we ever read or watched as kids, so why shouldn’t the unicorns and dragons and fairies be the same?
They were brutal when they were first told, though, weren’t they? I remember reading Hansel and Gretel when I was a kid and not sleeping for weeks. Or Bluebeard and all his wives. So maybe Noah’s right. He usually is.
School starts at nine. We sleep in. Why not? Danny’s always saying we should preserve our strength, rest while we can, in case a time comes when we can’t rest.
Generally, we stick to practical stuff. Our English lessons are all about reading signs and maps, about communicating with different types of people, about letter writing, leaving signs, our own version of Morse code. Lilian teaches us about plants and herbs as well as she can. We look at the geography of our area, how to figure out where to find water, how to find yourself again when you get lost. Things that matter. Things that might save our lives at some point in the future. When there’s things to be fixed, we fix them together. We learn as we go. It’s the best way I’ve found of getting through the days.
We all know how to scavenge. We know which berries are safe and which will leave us shitting for weeks. We know how to take care of the hens; that’s easy enough for the little ones to do. We’re lucky to have them really, Bessie and Saucepan Man. The twins named them that. This morning, eggs are to be collected, fruit picked, water boiled.
The garden here is beautiful, like it was designed to be left to its own devices. Carefully placed plots of soil boast thorny roses and sweet peas that have long since abandoned their triangular trellis. A plum tree sits just outside the shadow cast by a huge apple blossom tree at the end of the garden. Wildflowers grow in tufts in the grass, grown long with no one to tend to it.
Ma will find space to grow herbs from the small stash of cuttings she carries around with her always. It’ll take a little while for them to grow properly, but she always makes sure we have more than we need. There’s a small vegetable garden in one corner, but it’ll need work; some of the plants are dead, and there are others on their way out that we might be able to save if we’re quick about it. There’s even some rhubarb, given away by its huge, draping leaves. Like tents for fairies.
It’s a cornucopia of a garden. Makes me feel guilty for the way my stomach craves a pizza. The greasy kind.
I open the back door and the kids run out, each with their own task. Mine’s the worst one, and the only one the kids can’t do. I’ve got a two-liter bottle in each hand, empty and ready to be filled from the stream that runs through the village.
When the others laid the wards, they made sure to include everything they thought we might need in the boundaries. ...
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