Too Near the Dead Page 19

  Buried in her wedding dress. The words go round and round my head.

  It is a long time before I feel steady enough to drive home.

  Chapter Thirty

  I sit up that night, far later than I ought to. I find myself reluctant to lie down and close my eyes.

  Perhaps, I think, if I get too tired to dream...

  When I find myself falling asleep over my laptop, I have to go to bed. But first, I go around the house and make sure all the doors are locked, that the keys are removed from the locks so I cannot turn them in my sleep. I read a little from Jane Eyre, trying to fill my brain with something other than Euphemia Alexander’s terrible history. I leave my phone within reach, reassuring myself I can reach James if I need to.

  In spite of everything, it happens again. I wake to find myself in darkness, dressed in unfamiliar clothes that pinch and rustle. I explore the space around me with my hands and discover that I am confined. I push at the surface above me with the flats of my hands, then I hammer on it with my fists. My feet drum uselessly on the boards. The air that I draw into my lungs with each panicked breath becomes thinner and thinner, until I can’t even scream any more.

  At last I wake up, and in the dispassionate stripe of moonlight that lies across the bed I choke and cough and finally cry for a long time, hugging James’s pillow for comfort. Then I get out of bed, because even if I could go back to sleep, I’d be afraid to. I go into the bathroom and splash water on my face, and a hag looks back at me from the mirror, dark circles under her eyes.

  I put on my dressing gown and then I go downstairs, holding onto the bannister like an old woman. The clock on the front of the oven says 03:46. I put on every single light and make myself a cup of very strong, very sweet tea.

  I can’t go on like this. That’s the thought that keeps hammering through my head. I sip the tea and try to think objectively about what to do, but it’s hard to think straight. The shiny black squares of still uncurtained windows make me uneasy. I imagine something looming out of the darkness out there like a drowned thing rising to the surface of inky water; I imagine hands like pallid starfish pressed to the glass. Watching the windows is unnerving but turning my back is just as bad. The back of my neck prickles as though I sense eyes on me. But why am I fearful of something getting in? In some way it’s already inside. It’s in my head. In my dreams.

  There’s the other thing, too – the thing I hardly dare think about. Euphemia Alexander was buried in her wedding dress. It was there in the book, in black and white. Was it possible that she wasn’t really dead? I remember that little green glass bottle of laudanum – a dangerous opiate. Perhaps she overdosed accidentally; perhaps it was suicide. But instead of death, maybe it only brought the appearance of death. Did she literally wake up in her coffin?

  I wonder if it’s possible to know the answer to this question, after all this time. I imagine taking a shovel and a crowbar and going back to the ruined chapel to find out. Climbing through the wire fence, picking my way through the undergrowth. Levering up the weathered stone with RESURGAM carved into it, and breaking the hard earth with the edge of the shovel. Digging down, my arms and shoulders aching, blisters forming on my hands, perspiration trickling down my back. Perhaps there is still something to find. The shovel might hit the splintering lid of a coffin. I could lever it off and look at what lies within, at the crumbling skeletal remains in the rags of a bridal dress, the lipless teeth grinning up at me under the discoloured headdress of wax flowers. The bones of fingers still wrapped in shreds of thin gloves. I shudder. No. I don’t want to know.

  I rub my face with my hands and glance at the clock on the oven. It now says 04.01. Time is passing agonisingly slowly. It won’t get light for another four hours. Black night presses against the windows. I feel horrible, hung over with shock and exhaustion, but grimly wakeful.

  What am I going to do?

  I’m so tired that it takes a while for me to form any coherent thoughts about that, but it’s obvious, really. It’s not, what am I going to do; it’s what are we going to do? I have to tell James. I have to tell him all of it. I can’t keep this walled up inside me any more. He’ll probably ask all the things I asked myself: is this a figment of the imagination, a psychological message, a real person trespassing on the land around the house? But I have proof now. The things I dreamed of really happened. Someone lived and died right here where our house stands. She suffered a terrible tragedy and spent the rest of her life grieving over it. Even if it weren’t for the dreams, that would be pretty fucking creepy.

  I make more tea and wait for the sun to come up. At some point during that long, long night, something occurs to me: a thought I had not had before. If something has survived of Euphemia Alexander...

  Stephen, I think.

  I suppose something might survive of my parents too, but what would I say to them? They seemed so angry with me all the time – so bitterly disappointed. It is impossible to imagine them as anything other than angry ghosts. But Stephen, poor Stephen...

  He didn’t mean to die, I think to myself. He just pushed himself too hard.

  I think of him lying there on the floor between the bed and the desk covered with books; the curtains, opened or closed, I’ll never know which, and the tree with its riot of blossom outside, seen or unseen.

  You helped me escape, I say to him, and I am not sure whether I have said this aloud or not. I want to feel something – a presence, a sense of understanding, anything that will tell me that some part of my brother endures. But I feel nothing. Where Stephen ought to be, there is only emptiness.

  When at last daylight comes, the world outside the window looks grey and damp. I look out and see what appears to be sleet coming down. At least it is getting light, though. Sort of.

  I drag myself upstairs again and lie down on the bed. My eyes won’t stay open any longer and it’s daytime now anyway. I’m bargaining on the fact that I won’t have one of those appalling nightmares during broad daylight, and I don’t.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I awake to the sound of my phone ringing on the bedside table. It rings half a dozen times, stops, and then a few seconds later it begins again. This time I manage to pick it up and press the green button before the call goes to voicemail.

  “Fen?” There’s an edge to James’s tone. “Where are you?”

  “I’m...” I hesitate, groggy with sleep. “Where are you?”

  “At Perth station.”

  “At Perth...” I sit up, rubbing my face with my free hand. “Oh, shit.”

  There’s a pause. “Does ‘oh, shit’ mean you forgot?” says James.

  “I... not exactly,” I say, sliding out of bed. “I was asleep.”

  “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “I know,” I say, pulling open a drawer and rummaging with one hand for a clean t-shirt. “Look, I’ll leave in the next five minutes. The next two minutes. I’m sorry, James.”

  “Forget it,” he says. “I’ll get a taxi.”

  “From Perth?” It must be twenty miles.

  “Yes,” he says, tersely. “See you later.” And he rings off.

  I sit on the bed, the t-shirt crumpled in my fist. “Fuck,” I say to nobody in particular.

  Forty-five minutes later, I hear the doorbell buzz and realise that I left the bolts across the door; James can’t get in. It buzzes again twice while I am hurrying down the hall and drawing back the bolts. Then I open the door.

  James looks as irritable as I have ever seen him, but when he sees me his expression changes.

  “Fen, you look terrible.” He steps inside, dropping his case on the floor. “What’s happened? Are you ill?”

  I shake my head. Where to start? “I had a really bad night, and then I slept in. I’m really sorry I forgot to meet you, James.”

  “Never mind that,” he says. “Come o
n, Fen. What’s up? Has something happened?”

  “There’s been some stuff,” I say. “Stuff we need to talk about.”

  I see the shadow that passes over his face when I say that. “Should I be worried?” he asks.

  “It’s we,” I tell him. “It’s whether we should be worried.”

  “Okay,” he says, after a pause. “But it’s been a long day. Shall we pour ourselves a stiff drink first?”

  We go into the kitchen and James puts his coat over one of the stools while I find two glasses and a bottle of Talisker. James takes a sip of his and then he puts the glass down, looks me in the eyes and says, “Spill the beans.”

  I take a deep breath, and then I tell him. I try to tell him. James is the magician with words, after all, not me, and in spite of – or perhaps because of – sleeping so long I’m so groggy that my brain feels scrambled. I start with the dreams, because he sort of knows about those. He was there the night the men came to nail down the coffin lid and I woke up screaming, and the night I let myself out of the house that hasn’t stood here for over a hundred years, and he found me lying on the gravel. He doesn’t know how often these things have been happening though. And he doesn’t know how detailed, how real they are.

  “I can see and hear and feel everything,” I tell him. “I can feel the fabric of the clothes I’m wearing. When I touch the inside of the coffin I can feel the grain of the wood under my fingers. My lungs hurt when the air starts to run out, for God’s sake.”

  “Fucking hell, Fen. Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

  It’s the first time he asks me this and I struggle to reply. The truth is that when I had the very first dream, the night he was in Spain, I was afraid it was something from inside myself, something I did not want to face. If someone who was engaged to be married said that they had dreamed of being buried alive in their wedding dress, it wouldn’t take Sigmund Freud to draw certain conclusions about that. And then when Belle had that dream about the house being wrong in some way I was upset for the same reason, thinking she was insinuating something. Finding out about the money James owes made it worse. I wanted things to be perfect. I still want them to be perfect. They will be. I am determined.

  So I simply say, “I hoped it would stop.” It’s a lame explanation, but it’s true.

  “It could be some kind of weird sleep disturbance,” James suggests. “Night terrors.”

  I’m already shaking my head. He hasn’t got it. These experiences go beyond dreaming. I’m there – in the coffin, in the armchair, in the doorway of old Barr Dubh House.

  “Maybe you should see the doc,” he starts to say, and I say, “I’ve already seen her. She suggested keeping a sleep diary.”

  “You saw the doc? When?”

  And then he says it again, “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

  I push my hands into my unkempt hair, grasping handfuls of it. I feel pushed into a corner. Because it wasn’t just about my unconscious thoughts, was it? There was the letter I opened, with that shocking credit card statement inside it. After that, it wasn’t just about subliminal doubts. It was about knowing for certain that he had kept something secret from me – something he is still keeping secret. But that is not something I want to talk about now.

  “Look,” I say at last, “It doesn’t matter. It’s not a sleep disturbance. It’s the house.”

  “The house? This house?”

  “Yes. No. I mean, sort of. The house that used to stand here, on this exact spot.”

  All of it comes spilling out then. The figure dressed in lavender – the unlucky colour, the colour of half-mourning – glimpsed first at the treeline and later, near the house. The gravestone of Euphemia Alexander, RESURGAM chiselled boldly across it. Her woeful history, pieced together from musty old books in the reference section of the library. The conviction that the dreams I have been having are not really dreams: they are the real experiences of someone who has been dead for over a hundred and forty years.

  It takes a long time to explain all this. James asks questions – lots of questions – as anyone would. He wants me to describe the dreams down to the tiniest details: the clothing I find myself wearing, the contents of the rooms, the scraps of overheard conversation. He wants me to tell him exactly what happened the morning I went to explore the ruined chapel. I tell him about the feeling I had, of being watched by someone standing behind me and slightly to the left, and that sound like a long indrawn breath, as though the whole wood were breathing. Even as I am telling him about these things, I realise how insubstantial they sound. They could be the product of an overactive imagination. If someone else described these things, that’s what I’d think. By the way James’s brows are drawn together, I can see that he is perplexed and that he still cannot understand why I did not tell him any of this at the time.

  When I explain how I pieced together Euphemia Alexander’s unhappy story, he wants to follow every step: the websites I checked, the titles of the books I consulted.

  “When was this?” he says, and then, “So you went to the library? I thought you were going wedding dress shopping.”

  I stare at him, biting back a defensive reply. I feel as though I have been detected in committing a string of little deceptions but I know it wasn’t like that.

  He stares back at me for a moment. Then he says, “Never mind. Look, let’s think about this logically. Is it possible you’d heard this story before but forgotten about it? Unconscious memory, power of suggestion type of thing?”

  I shake my head vigorously. “Absolutely not.”

  Both of us are silent for a little while after that and the atmosphere is heavy with unspoken words.

  Then James says slowly, “Okay, we know for a fact that this Euphemia Alexander lived in the house that used to be here. But how do you know for sure that any of these dreams, or whatever they are, are about her?”

  I think about that. “There was that ring – the mourning ring. The one you said I should throw out if it creeped me out that much. I was wearing that in one of the dreams. It had E.A. and C.R. engraved inside it. Euphemia Alexander and Charles Robertson. It can’t be a coincidence, those initials.”

  “Did you throw it out?”

  “No. I put it away in the old bureau in the room that’s going to be my office.”

  I slide off the kitchen stool. “I’ll go and get it and then you can see for yourself.”

  I leave James taking a swallow of the whisky and go down the hallway to the room where the bureau is stored. I open the lid and look at the cubbyholes. The little dish is there in one of them, where I left it. I slide it out. It’s empty. I look at it for a moment and then very gingerly I slide my hand into the space and feel about for the ring. My fingertips touch the wooden surface at the back, but there is nothing in there. Squatting down, I peer into all the cubbyholes. In one of them there is an old till receipt, yellowing and curled up at the edges. There is nothing in any of the others. I pull open drawers, I run my hands across surfaces, finally I get down on my hands and knees and look on the floorboards underneath the bureau. No ring.

  I go back to the kitchen. “It’s not there.”

  “Are you sure that’s where you put it?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” I say, a little more sharply than I meant to. I spread out my hands in a gesture of helplessness. “It’s like that decoration with the white flowers. It’s just gone.”

  James looks at me and I see a brief flicker of something in his expression: uncertainty, or disbelief. I can’t blame him really because the whole thing sounds insane, but I feel frustration welling up.

  “This is not my imagination,” I say, folding my arms. “I didn’t move those things, so unless you did...”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know where you put the ring and I’ve never even seen the other thing, the decoration.”

  “You wer
e looking at me like I’m nuts or something.”

  “I don’t think you’re nuts.” James sounds perfectly sincere. He puts out his hands to pull me into a comforting embrace, and the warmth in the face I love so much gives me a sudden wave of tenderness.

  “I just wish you’d told me before,” he says.

  I’m anxious and afraid and so exhausted that I can’t think straight, and when he says for the umpteenth time that I should have told him before, I feel a tiny flash of anger.

  “You’re a fine–” I retort, and then I stop dead. I shut my mouth. I didn’t mean to say that.

  There’s a pause.

  “A fine one to talk?” says James slowly. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” I say, hastily, but I can’t quite meet his gaze.

  “Fen.” He says it flatly – not angrily, but gravely, as though he’s trying to get my attention. That single word is the chisel that breaks through the armour of my silence.

  It comes out in a rush, before I’ve had time to think. “I know you owe money, James.”

  “What?” He looks genuinely shocked.

  “On your card. I didn’t mean to look, I swear.”

  “You opened my post?”

  “Not deliberately -”

  “How else can you open someone’s post?” There is an edge to his voice.

  “The letters were wet. All the letters. We’d come in from the rain and dripped water all over them and I thought they’d just turn into papier mâché if I didn’t open them and dry them out. You were on the phone for ages so I just opened yours as well as mine.”