A Nest of Nightmares Read online

  Phil had stopped, and I assumed he had reached the centre. He stood very still and gazed off into the distance, his profile towards me. I remembered the man I had seen standing in the field – perhaps in that very spot, the centre of the maze – when we had first arrived at The Old Vicarage.

  Then, breaking the spell, Phil came bounding towards me, cutting across the path of the maze, and caught me in a bear hug. ‘Not mad?’

  I relaxed a little. It was over, and all was well. I managed a small laugh. ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Good. Let’s go, then. Phil’s had his little treat.’

  We walked arm in arm back towards the road. We didn’t mention it again.

  In the months to come those golden days, the two weeks we had spent wandering around southwest England, often came to mind. Those thoughts were an antidote to more recent memories: to those last days in the hospital, with Phil in pain, and then Phil dead.

  I moved back to the States – it was home, after all, where my family and most of my friends lived. I had lived in England for less than two years, and without Phil there was little reason to stay. I found an apartment in the neighbourhood where I had lived just after college, and got a job teaching, and, although painfully and rustily, began to go through the motions of making a new life for myself. I didn’t stop missing Phil, and the pain grew no less with the passage of time, but I adjusted to it. I was coping.

  In the spring of my second year alone I began to think of going back to England. In June I went for a vacation, planning to spend a week in London, a few days in Cambridge with Phil’s sister, and a few days visiting friends in St Ives. When I left London in a rented car and headed for St Ives, I did not plan to retrace the well-remembered route of that last vacation, but that is what I found myself doing, with each town and village a bittersweet experience, recalling pleasant memories and prodding the deep sadness in me wider awake.

  I lingered in Glastonbury, wandering the peaceful Abbey ruins and remembering Phil’s funny, disrespectful remarks about the sacred throne and King Arthur’s bones. I looked for, but could not find, the café where we’d had dinner, and settled for fish and chips. Driving out of Glastonbury with the sun setting, I came upon The Old Vicarage and pulled into that familiar drive. There were more cars there, and the house was almost full up this time. There was a room available, but not the one I had hoped for. Although a part of me, steeped in sadness, was beginning to regret this obsessional pilgrimage, another part of me longed for the same room, the same bed, the same view from the window, in order to conjure Phil’s ghost. Instead, I was given a much smaller room on the other side of the house.

  I retired early, skipping tea with the other guests, but sleep would not come. When I closed my eyes I could see Phil, sitting on the window ledge with a cigarette in one hand, narrowing his eyes to look at me through the smoke. But when I opened my eyes it was the wrong room, with a window too small to sit in, a room Phil had never seen. The narrowness of the bed made it impossible to imagine that he slept beside me still. I wished I had gone straight to St Ives instead of dawdling and stopping along the way – this was pure torture. I couldn’t recapture the past – every moment that I spent here reminded me of how utterly Phil was gone.

  Finally I got up and pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans. The moon was full, lighting the night, but my watch had stopped and I had no idea what time it was. The big old house was silent. I left by the front door, hoping that no one would come along after me to relock the door. A walk in the fresh air might tire me enough to let me sleep, I thought.

  I walked along the gravel drive, past all the parked cars, towards the road, and entered the next field by the same gate that Phil and I had used in daylight in another lifetime. I scarcely thought of where I was going, or why, as I made my way to the turf-maze which had fascinated Phil and frightened me. More than once I had regretted not taking Phil’s hand and treading the maze with him when he had asked. Not that it would have made any difference in the long run, but all the less-than-perfect moments of our time together had returned to haunt me and given rise to regrets since Phil’s death – all the opportunities missed, now gone forever; all the things I should have said or done, or done differently.

  There was someone standing in the field. I stopped short, staring, my heart pounding. Someone standing there, where the centre of the maze must be. He was turned away, and I could not tell who he was, but something about the way he stood made me certain that I had seen him before, that I knew him.

  I ran forward and – I must have blinked – suddenly the figure was gone again, if he had ever existed. The moonlight was deceptive, and the tall grass swaying in the wind, and the swiftly moving clouds overhead cast strange shadows.

  ‘Come tread the maze with me.’

  Had I heard those words, or merely remembered them?

  I looked down at my feet and then around, confused. Was I standing in the maze already? I took a tentative step forward and back, and it did seem that I was standing in a shallow depression. The memory flooded back: Phil standing in the sunlit field, rocking back and forth and saying, ‘I think this is it.’ The open, intense look on his face.

  ‘Phil,’ I whispered, my eyes filling with tears.

  Through the tears I saw some motion, but when I blinked them away, again there was nothing. I looked around the dark, empty field, and began to walk the path laid out long before. I did not walk as slowly as Phil had done, but more quickly, almost skipping, hitting the sides of the maze path with my feet to be certain of keeping to it, since I could not see it.

  And as I walked, it seemed to me that I was not alone, that people were moving ahead of me, somehow just out of my sight (beyond another turn in the winding path I might catch them up), or behind. I could hear their footsteps. The thought that others were behind me, following me, unnerved me, and I stopped and turned around to look. I saw no one, but I was now facing in the direction of The Old Vicarage, and my gaze went on to the house. I could see the upper window, the very window where Phil and I had stood together looking out, the point from which we had seen the dancers in the maze.

  The curtains were not drawn across that dark square of glass this night, either. And as I watched, a figure appeared at the window. A tall shape, a pale face looking out. And after a moment, as I still stared, confused, a second figure joined the first. Someone smaller – a woman. The man put his arm around her. I could see – perhaps I shouldn’t have been able to see this at such a distance, with no light on in the room – but I could see that the man was wearing a sweater, and the woman was naked. And I could see the man’s face. It was Phil. And the woman was me.

  There we were. Still together, still safe from what time would bring. I could almost feel the chill that had shaken me then, and the comfort of Phil’s protecting arm. And yet I was not there. Not now. Now I was out in the field, alone, a premonition to my earlier self.

  I felt someone come up beside me. Something as thin and light and hard as a bird’s claw took hold of my arm. Slowly I turned away from the window and turned to see who held me. A young man was standing beside me, smiling at me. I thought I recognised him.

  ‘He’s waiting for you at the centre,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t stop now.’

  Into my mind came a vivid picture of Phil in daylight, standing still in the centre of the maze, caught there by something, standing there forever. Time was not the same in the maze, and Phil could still be standing where he had once stood. I could be with him again, for a moment or forever.

  I resumed the weaving, skipping steps of the dance with my new companion. I was eager now, impatient to reach the centre. Ahead of me I could see other figures, dim and shifting as the moonlight, winking in and out of view as they trod the maze on other nights, in other centuries.

  The view from the corner of my eyes was more disturbing. I caught fleeting glimpses of my partner in this dance, and he did not
look the same as when I had seen him face to face. He had looked so young, and yet that light, hard grasp on my arm did not seem that of a young man’s hand.

  A hand like a bird’s claw . . .

  My eyes glanced down my side to my arm. The hand lying lightly on my solid flesh was nothing but bones, the flesh all rotted and dropped away years before. Those peripheral, sideways glimpses I’d had of my dancing partner were the truth – sights of something long dead and yet still animate.

  I stopped short and pulled my arm away from that horror. I closed my eyes, afraid to turn to face it. I heard the rustle and clatter of dry bones. I felt a cold wind against my face and smelled something rotten. A voice – it might have been Phil’s – whispered my name in sorrow and fear.

  What waited for me at the centre? And what would I become, and for how long would I be trapped in this monotonous dance if ever I reached the end?

  I turned around blindly, seeking the way out. I opened my eyes and began to move, then checked myself – some strong, instinctual aversion kept me from cutting across the maze paths and leaping them as if they were only so many shallow, meaningless furrows. Instead, I turned around (I glimpsed pale figures watching me, flickering in my peripheral vision) and began to run back the way I had come, following the course of the maze backwards, away from the centre, back out into the world alone.

  THE HORSE LORD

  The double barn doors were secured by a length of stout, rust encrusted chain, fastened with an old padlock.

  Marilyn hefted the lock with one hand and tugged at the chain, which did not give. She looked up at the splintering grey wood of the doors and wondered how the children had got in.

  Dusting red powder from her hands, Marilyn strolled around the side of the old barn. Dead leaves and dying grasses crunched beneath her sneakered feet, and she hunched her shoulders against the chill in the wind.

  ‘There’s plenty of room for horses,’ Kelly had said the night before at dinner. ‘There’s a perfect barn. You can’t say it would be impractical to keep a horse here.’ Kelly was Derek’s daughter, eleven years old and mad about horses.

  This barn had been used as a stable, Marilyn thought, and could be again. Why not get Kelly a horse? And why not one for herself as well? As a girl, Marilyn had ridden in Central Park. She stared down the length of the barn: for some reason, the door to each stall had been tightly boarded shut.

  Marilyn realised she was shivering then, and she finished her circuit of the barn at a trot and jogged all the way back to the house.

  The house was large and solid, built of grey stone a hundred and seventy years before. It seemed a mistake, a misplaced object in this cold, empty land. Who would choose to settle here. who would try to eke out a living from the ungiving, stony soil?

  The old house and the eerily empty countryside formed a setting very much like one Marilyn, who wrote suspense novels, had once created for a story. She liked the reality much less than her heroine had liked the fiction.

  The big kitchen was warm and felt comforting after the outside air. Marilyn leaned against the sink to catch her breath and let herself relax. But she felt tense. The house seemed unnaturally quiet with all the children away at school. Marilyn smiled wryly at herself. A week before, the children had been driving her crazy with their constant noise and demands, and now that they were safely away at school for nine hours every day she felt uncomfortable.

  From one extreme to the other, thought Marilyn. The story of my life.

  Only a year ago she and Derek, still newly married, were making comfortable plans to have a child – perhaps two – ‘someday’.

  Then Joan – Derek’s ex-wife – had decided she’d had her fill of mothering, and almost before Marilyn had time to think about it, she’d found herself with a half-grown daughter.

  And following quickly on that event – while Marilyn and Kelly were still wary of each other – Derek’s widowed sister had died, leaving her four children in Derek’s care.

  Five children! Perhaps they wouldn’t have seemed like such a herd if they had come in typical fashion, one at a time with a proper interval between.

  It was the children, too, who had made living in New York City seem impossible. This house had been in Derek’s family since it was built, but no one had lived in it for years. It had been used from time to time as a vacation home, but the land had nothing to recommend it to vacationers; no lakes or mountains, and the weather was usually unpleasant. It was inhospitable country, a neglected corner of New York state.

  It should have been a perfect place for writing – their friends all said so. An old house, walls soaked in history, set in a brooding, rocky landscape, beneath an unlittered sky, far from the distractions and noise of the city. But Derek could write anywhere – he carried his own atmosphere with him, a part of his ingrained discipline – and Marilyn needed the bars, restaurants, museums, shops and libraries of a large city to fill in the hours when words could not be commanded.

  The silence was suddenly too much to bear. Derek wasn’t typing – he might be wanting conversation. Marilyn walked down the long dark hallway – thinking to herself that this house needed more light fixtures, as well as pictures on the walls and rugs on the cold wooden floors.

  Derek was sitting behind the big parson’s table that was his desk, cleaning one of his sixty-seven pipes. The worn but richly patterned rug on the floor, the glow of lamplight, and the books which lined the walls made this room, the library and Derek’s office, seem warmer and more comfortable than the rest of the house.

  ‘Talk?’ said Marilyn, standing with her hand on the doorknob.

  ‘Sure, come on in. I was just stuck on how to get the chief slave into bed with the mistress of the plantation without making her yet another clichéd nymphomaniac.’

  ‘Have him comfort her in time of need,’ Marilyn said. She closed the door on the dark hallway. ‘He just happens to be on hand when she gets a letter informing her of her dear brother’s death. In grief, and as an affirmation of life, she and the slave tumble into bed together.’

  ‘Pretty good,’ Derek said. ‘You got a problem I can help you with?’

  ‘Not a literary one,’ she said, crossing the room to his side. Derek put an arm around her. ‘I was just wondering if we couldn’t get a horse for Kelly. I was out to look at the barn. It’s all boarded and locked up, but I’m sure we could get in and fix it up. And I don’t think it could cost that much to keep a horse or two.’

  ‘Or two,’ he echoed. He cocked his head and gave her a sly look. ‘You sure you want to start using a barn with a rather grim history?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Didn’t I ever tell you the story of how my – hmmm – great-uncle, I guess he must have been – my great-uncle Martin, how he died?’

  Marilyn shook her head, her expression suspicious.

  ‘It’s a pretty gruesome story.’

  ‘Derek . . .’

  ‘It’s true, I promise you. Well . . . remember my first slave novel?’

  ‘How could I forget? It paid for our honeymoon.’

  ‘Remember the part where the evil boss-man who tortures his slaves and horses alike is finally killed by a crazed stallion?’

  Marilyn grimaced. ‘Yeah. A bit much, I thought. Horses aren’t carnivorous.’

  ‘I got the idea for that scene from my great-uncle Martin’s death. His horses – and he kept a whole stable – went crazy, apparently. I don’t know if they actually ate him, but he was pretty chewed up when someone found his body.’ Derek shifted in his chair. ‘Martin wasn’t known to be a cruel man. He didn’t abuse his horses; he loved them. He didn’t love Indians, though, and the story was that the stables were built on ground sacred to the Indians, who put a curse on Martin or his horses in retaliation.’

  Marilyn shook her head. ‘Some story. When did all this happen?’

>   ‘Around 1880.’

  ‘And the barn has been boarded up ever since?’

  ‘I guess so. I remember the few times Anna and I came out here as kids we could never find a way to get inside. We made up stories about the ghosts of the mad horses still being inside the barn. But because they were ghosts they couldn’t be held by normal walls, and roamed around at night. I can remember nights when we’d huddle together, certain we heard their ghostly neighing . . .’ His eyes looked faraway. Remembering how much he had loved his sister, Marilyn felt guilty about her reluctance to take in Anna’s children. After all, they were all Derek had left of his sister.

  ‘So this place is haunted,’ she said. trying to joke. Her voice came out uneasy, however.

  ‘Not the house,’ said Derek quickly. ‘Old Uncle Martin died in the barn.’

  ‘What about your ancestors who lived here before that? Didn’t the Indian curse touch them?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Derek,’ she said warningly.

  ‘Okay. Straight dope. The first family, the first bunch of Hoskins who settled here were done in by Indians. The parents and the two bond-servants were slaughtered, and the children were stolen. The house was burned to the ground. That wasn’t this house, obviously.’

  ‘But it stands on the same ground.’

  ‘Not exactly. That house stood on the other side of the barn – though I doubt the present barn stood then – Anna and I used to play around the foundations. I found a knife there once, and she found a little tin box which held ashes and a pewter ring.’