Dale Bailey - In the Night Wood

It was haunted, of course, Hollow House.

But they were all haunted — Erin and Charles, Cillian Harris, Mrs. Ramsden, too. And though Mrs. Ramsden’s sins and failures and regrets, like those of Ann Merrow or Dr. Colbeck, have but glancing significance in this story, they were each of them protagonists in other tales, with their own dramas, their flights of joy, and their plunges into sorrow. Once upon a time: no life too humble, no event too insignificant.

Every story is a ghost story.

It was the photograph that haunted Erin and Charles, or, more precisely, the loss that it signified. A kindergarten photograph of a blonde girl, three-quarter profile, her hands crossed neatly upon the table in front of her, but otherwise unposed — her giggling smile (no doubt the photographer had ventured some joke), the soft curve of her jaw, her milky complexion — all this trapped behind a spider web of shattered glass.

For Erin, the photo was like a shallow well in a dry season. She dared not drink of it too often — yet she could not help herself. She drew it in her sketchbook time and again, laying out the lines of Lissa’s visage, lending it dimension and form with each careful stroke of her pencil. And then she would turn the picture to the wall and keep working, as if by this obsessive reproduction she could score the image into the tissue of her brain and heart. She would not forget her daughter’s face.

Already she could feel it slipping away.

For Charles the photo was like a jail, prisoning away the grief that could any moment escape to overwhelm him. As long as Lissa was locked behind the glass he could manage his days by rote — not unaffected, but functional at least. Erin feared forgetting. Charles longed for it. The burden of his sin (for so he thought of it) was too much to bear. Yet memory could not be contained. The shattered glass made the metaphor manifest. Looking at the photo now, he felt an inconsolable longing to go back, to start over and do everything right.

And Cillian Harris? Who could say? But he’d stiffened, like a man taking a small electric shock, when his gaze fell upon the photo that first day in the breakfast room. Briefly, to be sure — a breath, no more — but Charles had observed it nonetheless, and wondered.

The glass would have to be replaced, of course.

“I can’t look at her like this,” Erin said, too much reminded of the horrors of the day that Lissa had died. And now that Lissa had escaped, Charles had to lock her away once more.

He took the car and drove into Yarrow, to the hardware store he’d seen on the way to Hollow House. But Lissa had arrived before him. He saw her in a small child — was it her? — holding her mother’s hand as she leaned forward to smell the early spring flowers that bloomed in pots outside Petal Pushers. And worse yet, he saw her on the front page of the newspaper racked before the newsagent: the Ripon Gazette , the photograph unnerving, the headline worse: A FAMILY’S AGONY. He stepped inside, pressing his coins with tremulous fingers into the hand of a gruff man who barely acknowledged him, his eyes fixed on the television behind the counter.

Outside, in the bloodless English sunlight, Charles turned his attention to the paper:

The search continued for a missing six-year-old Tuesday near Yarrow. Mary Babbing was last seen riding her bicycle in front of her family home toward dusk last Sunday. Investigators —

Too much. Charles moved to discard the paper. He could not do so. Lissa stared up at him from the front page in lurid color. He folded it instead, tucked it under his arm, composed himself, blinking back tears.

Okay, then.

Mould’s hardware was next door.

Charles took a deep breath, pushed his way inside. The narrow space beyond felt claustrophobic, though the store wasn’t crowded. A single customer, lean, with a hank of dark hair hanging over his forehead, studied the packets of seeds on a wire rack. Charles nodded as he slipped past to the counter at the back of the store.

A tall, fleshy man stood there, wiping his hands on his apron.

“Ah, the stranger among us,” he said in a thickly accented voice. But Charles was the one with the accent here, wasn’t he — the stranger, as Mould (was he Mould?) had pointed out, in a strange land. Mould or not, the man was old, seventyish and hale, bald but for the unruly wisps of gray that clung to the sides of his head, thin of lip, bulbous of nose, tufted of eyebrow and ear. Eyes of pale, penetrating blue peered at Charles over half-rim glasses. Charles wasn’t sure he liked the eyes. They seemed to see more than they had any right to see. The old man extended his hand. It was callused, the thick, ridged nails clogged with crescents of grease. He was Mould after all, Trevor Mould. He said the name as they shook hands, and Charles winced, not at the name but at the fact that he seemed to have inserted his hand into a vise.

“Charles Hayden,” he said.

“No doubt. We’re glad to have you here.”

“True enough,” the seed-packet man said, joining them at the counter. He introduced himself as Edward Hargreaves, adding, “Hollow House hasn’t had anyone to warm its bones for near two years now. Longer if you think of how Mr. Hollow grew toward the end.”

“Wouldn’t leave the house,” Mould said. “I hadn’t seen him for years by the time he finally passed.” He reached out a hand. “Let’s have a look at that, shall we?”

Charles passed the photo across the counter.

“So beautiful at that age, aren’t they? Six, I’m guessing.”

“Five. Five and a half, she would have said,” Charles said, his neck burning.

Mould tilted his head. “Left her at home, did you?”

“Back in the States.” Not a lie, he told himself, but — something else. He couldn’t say exactly what. An omission, nothing more. Yet a lie by any other name —

He hesitated.

The truth would come out sooner or later. Given the amount of research it had taken to track Erin down to inform her of the inheritance, Merrow almost certainly knew. And now Colbeck knew. How long before all of Yarrow did as well?

He spoke without conscious volition. “She —”

“What’s that?”

Mould had turned to the rear counter to study the photograph.

“Nothing,” Charles said. “She couldn’t make the trip,” he said, for to speak it aloud was to acknowledge it as a true thing — to acknowledge his role in it. He swallowed.

“What happened to the glass?”

“My wife. She dropped it. She took a spill on the stile.”

“She’s all right, I hope?”

“Twisted her ankle. She’ll be on her feet again before the week’s out.”

Hargreaves shook his head. “Funny thing that, isn’t it? That wall.”

“Both walls,” Mould said. “Must have been a hell of a lot of work. Hard to say whether the intent was to keep something in or something out.”

“They say,” Hargreaves added, “that old Mr. Hollow kept the place closed up in the last years of his life. Wouldn’t so much as permit an open curtain.”

A chill passed through Charles. There was something haunting about the idea of the old man thrice imprisoned, inside the house, inside the great encircling walls.

“We can fix this up for you,” Mould said. “Later this afternoon, say? Joey, the one that does the glass cutting, he’s down to the King for lunch. He’ll be back in half an hour or so, and I can put him right on it. Say an hour. I hate to make you drive all the way back here.”

“That’s fine. I wanted to look in at the historical society.”

“Quiet village, Yarrow,” Hargreaves said. “I warrant you won’t find much there.”

“I’m interested in Caedmon Hollow.”