Hiding From the Light. Barbara Erskine

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СКАЧАТЬ her bicycle, then, after a moment’s deep thought she made her way quietly towards the cottage. The For Sale sign had gone to be replaced with one which said Sold. It stood straight and proud, strapped to the gatepost at the end of the holly hedge throwing a black rectangular shadow across the path. Will Fortingale had told her who was buying it. A business woman from London who was so rich she didn’t need a mortgage. A weekender. Someone who would probably employ an interior designer and gardeners and change the place out of all recognition. Carefully she let herself into the garden. Out of the moonlight the shadows were very black. The house still seemed to be asleep. Behind the doors and curtainless staring windows she could sense its emptiness and suddenly she was afraid. She stood still, staring round, the tiny short hairs on the back of her neck bristling. ‘Liza?’ she whispered. ‘Liza, are you there?’

      No one answered. The moon was sailing higher now, and smaller. In the apple tree by the gate a bird called out in alarm and she saw the small dark shape flit out of sight across the garden.

      Making her way between the rose bushes with their burden of overblown, sweet-scented flower-heads, Lyndsey moved silently around the back of the house. The terrace had been extended about thirty years before by the Simpsons. Small moss-covered red bricks had been set in a herringbone design and around the edges of the terrace they had left a dozen or so large old flower pots which still boasted leggy untrimmed lavender and rosemary bushes. The weight of the roses had pulled down the pergola and their scent, rich and sweet in the night air, was almost cloying as she stepped off the terrace and onto the wet grass. She could feel the garden full of eyes, watching her. Small animals and birds, but also other creatures of the night, hidden invisible beings who had made the garden their own. They were worried too, as uncertain as she was about what would happen to this place. ‘I’ll take care of things, my darlings,’ she whispered. She felt them listening, felt them tense suddenly, their attention hers. ‘We don’t want anyone moving in here, do we? Don’t worry. I’ll get rid of her. You must help me.’

      She glanced up as an owl hooted, and watching its swift silent traverse of the garden, she smiled. ‘It’ll be child’s play for us, won’t it. With Liza’s help.’ She paused, turning round. ‘You will help, Liza, won’t you? We don’t want any newcomer pushing her way in here. This is your place. Yours and mine.’

      The Simpsons had lasted eighteen months, so she’d been told, before they moved out of the cottage. Holidaymakers came and went. They didn’t seem to bother Liza. After all, there were long periods when the cottage lay empty in between. And since Lyndsey had come back to the village there had been no holidaymakers at all. She had seen to that. She wanted the house empty because the garden was hers; the place, though with such care that no casual observer would see that anyone had been there, where she planted and tended and harvested her herbs.

      She had lasted four terms at university. Hateful place. In town. Full of people and cars and noise. Her parents had washed their hands of her when she walked out, her father blustering and indignant, her mother crying. ‘Most people would give their right arm to go to Cambridge, Lyn! How can you do this to us? How?’

      They had never understood her. Never cared about who she really was, about what was best for her, rather than for them. When Lucy Stebbings, her great-aunt, had died and left her the tiny terraced cottage in Mistley she had taken it as a sign that she was blessed and supported in her bid for total freedom. She moved in and earned a modest living doing odd jobs around the village to subsidise her real work and her passion: her exquisite, detailed paintings and her research into the occult use of herbs which would one day form the core of the witches’ herb Bible she was planning to write. She had never gone back to her parents’ home in Woodbridge. Had never seen her father again. Her mother came over occasionally with food parcels and clothes and clucked around. Lyndsey was barely civil to her. All she wanted was to be left alone.

      She shook her head. What had got her thinking about her past suddenly? Liza, probably. Liza wasn’t an ancestor. She had had no children who had lived. But Sarah had, and Sarah was an ancestor. Sarah, who was Liza’s nursling, Liza’s friend and Liza’s pupil. Sarah who had ended her days in this cottage, the dower house where she had come to live in her old age and where she had carried on Liza’s work.

      This cottage should have been Lyndsey’s by rights. That it had not belonged to anyone in her family for three hundred years made no difference to her at all. This land, this home, this place, was hers, her natural inheritance, and no one was going to steal it from her.

      She shuddered. She could feel her everywhere, the stranger who was buying the house. She too had stood out here beyond the terrace. Her energies were strange. Uneasy. Afraid. She was bringing unhappiness and danger. Suddenly Lyndsey’s senses were screaming. This could not be allowed to happen. It would undo all the good she had worked for over the years; unleash everything that she had fought to contain. She was going to re-awaken the evil, allow it in, encourage that mist to drift in from the sea and engulf them all.

      The spell was an easy one. First the circle drawn faintly in the grass, her whispered invocation to the guardians of the quarters, her arms raised to the goddess moon as she sailed serenely in the clear, midnight sky.

      ‘Let no one buy this house. Let no one live here. Let no one enter these doors who does not belong. Liza, mother of my mother’s race, listen to my prayer and help to guard your home. If anyone should move here, let their stay be short. Let the very doors and walls, ceilings and floors, the spiders, the rats and mice, let them all conspire to drive her out. Let the chimneys smoke and the mildew curl about the walls, let the rot take the boards and the worms the beams.’ She paused, pleased with the resonance of the words. Then suddenly she frowned. ‘But not so badly that it falls down, of course.’ She smiled to herself and shook her head. ‘Liza, this is still your home. Your house, your place. Keep this woman out. Haunt her! Scare her! Make her ill. Send her mad. Do not allow her to stay!’

      She stared in silence at the moon, feeling its power touching her, feeling her own hatred. Then she frowned. The moon was still a fraction off the full. Perhaps she should return tomorrow when she was at her maximum power and repeat the spell. What had Will told her the woman’s name was? Emma. That was it. Emma Dickson. She raised her arms again. ‘This house will never be yours, Emma Dickson; you will not thrive here. Don’t darken its doors. Don’t cross its threshold. Don’t touch this garden, which is sacred to Liza’s memory.’ She felt in the pocket of her jeans. Yes it was still there, the short length of cord she carried with her in case she should have to make a binding spell. Holding it up in both hands, she began to knot it. ‘A knot to bind my spell. A knot to keep it well. A knot to hold at bay, the danger that comes by day.’ Three knots. The triple seal. Scrabbling with her fingers in the grass at the centre of the circle, she managed to scrape a small hole into which she tucked the cord. She covered it and rearranged the grass. It was done. If Emma Dickson ever moved into this house, she would regret it for the rest of her days.

Part Two

       20

       End of September

      Unable to sleep, Mike had walked out into the icy dawn and was looking across the river. He could see nothing. The previous night’s mist had settled into thick fog, blanketing a clammy, viscous tide as it licked towards him across the mud. The silence was intense, heavy and cloying, beating against his eardrums as he narrowed his eyes, trying to see the outline of the old boat lying on the saltings, her ribs bare, her keel rotted and broken.

      The atmosphere was eerie and disorientating and he found himself suddenly catching his breath, overwhelmed with fear that there was something СКАЧАТЬ