Too Near the Dead Page 5

  Afterwards, we drive up the winding single track road that leads to the dam. We’re both ready for somewhere a bit quieter after the bustle of the hotel, but more than that, I want to show Belle why I want to live here. I know I’m never going to persuade her to walk up any mountains with me – not with those shoes on – but I want her to see the magic of the place anyway. The dam is the best spot for that; you can drive up high above the town until the road runs out and the entire view is filled with the glittering waters of the loch, and the surrounding hills.

  I only know about this place because in our first few days here in Perthshire we took a wrong turning on the way back from a grocery shopping trip, and when there were no more houses and the road began to ascend steeply James drove on anyway, to see where it went. I remember sitting in the passenger seat saying, “But we have frozen food in the back.” James stopped the car and I said, “No, go on, it doesn’t matter,” and he nodded at the road ahead and said, “I can’t unless you open the gates.” There were Highland cows close to the road, those big shaggy ones with enormous curving horns. I had no idea whether they were dangerous or not (I still don’t), but I got out anyway and opened the gates. We drove all the way up to the dam that day.

  Now I drive up there with Belle in the passenger seat, laughing at her alarm when she sees the same enormous beasts so close by. I haven’t the heart to make her get out and open the gates, so I do it. We rumble over the cattle grid, and then of course I have to stop and get out and close the gates behind us.

  “It’s like a safari park,” says Belle when I get back into the car.

  “Except those things mostly don’t sit on the bonnet and pinch the windscreen wipers,” I say.

  “Mostly...?” says Belle.

  The road – well, it’s a track really, and in places the surface has crumbled away completely – leads right up to within sight of the dam. There it comes to an abrupt end next to a small parking area. When we get out of the car, I can feel that the air up here is a degree or two colder than it was down in the town.

  There’s a breeze, too, that blows our hair back from our faces. There is nobody else parked up here today. We have the place to ourselves.

  Even Belle can’t complain about the very short walk to the edge of the dam, where a stone wall topped with green moss separates us from the dark water. The loch stretches away into the distance, with heather-covered hills sweeping up on either side of it into cold blue skies. In all the vastness spread out before us, there is not one human being visible. Far away on the hillside I can see white dots which are sheep, moving very slowly across the slope, and high above us a bird of prey is coasting on the air currents. Otherwise, we are alone.

  When I was a child, I used to find it confusing when adults called a landscape “beautiful”. To my childish self, “beautiful” meant something gold or silver or pink, something that gleamed or sparkled; I couldn’t see how it could be extended to fields and cows and the gnarled trunks of trees. I can’t call this view “beautiful” either, because the word is completely inadequate. All my life I’ve loved words but there aren’t any for this. I know that those hills are savage. They are wild and often trackless and to be caught up there in the dark or the cold is to risk death from exposure. But I feel the pull of them; I feel something like new love – a tingling in the skin, a cold feeling of excitement in the pit of my stomach. I want Belle to feel it too.

  We stand side by side with our elbows on the wall, gazing up the loch towards the distant bulk of Ben Chonzie, the breeze ruffling our hair.

  After a minute or two I say, “Amazing, isn’t it?” I wait for Belle to say yes, or at least to laugh at me and my enthusiasm.

  But Belle says nothing at all. I glance at her, and she has her head down, only her profile visible to me, and her lips pressed together as though she is considering something difficult. She is silent for such a long time that I begin to wonder what is wrong. Have I been so wrapped up in my own concerns that I haven’t noticed that Belle has something on her mind?

  “Belle–” I begin, and as I speak she suddenly turns to me, as though she has made up her mind to say something. Her expression is so grim that my own words die in my throat.

  “Fen,” she says, “I wasn’t going to say anything about this.”

  Her words strike me cold. “That sounds serious,” I manage to say.

  Belle doesn’t smile. “You’ll probably think I’m off my head. But I’ve been thinking about it on and off all morning and I can’t just go back down to London without saying anything.”

  “About what? I’m starting to feel worried.”

  “About Barr Dubh,” she says. “I don’t like it.”

  Whatever I expected, it wasn’t that. I look at her blankly. “You don’t like the house?”

  “Yes. No. It’s not the house, it’s the place.”

  “The place?” I repeat, blankly. “Look, Belle, I know you love living in London, and I really don’t expect you to understand–”

  She’s shaking her head. “It’s not that. It’s beautiful here – in Perthshire, I mean. It wouldn’t be my thing but I can see why you would love it. It’s the place where the house is.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” I say, staring at her.

  “I don’t know. But something is wrong. Look, you know I said I slept badly? It wasn’t just a crap night’s sleep. Something happened during the night.” She hesitates, and then takes the plunge.

  “I know it’s hard to believe, but I woke up, and the house was different. It had changed – I mean, completely changed.”

  “What do you mean, changed?”

  “The room I was in didn’t have pink walls any more – they had patterned wallpaper with birds and flowers on it. And there was a lot more furniture. All of it was heavy, old-fashioned-looking stuff. It made the room look crowded. There was a little wooden table with a bowl on it, with a jug standing in it, like people used to wash in before there was running water. And the bed I was in was different too. I wasn’t lying under a duvet any more, there were sheets and blankets.”

  “You must have been dreaming,” I say.

  “I know it sounds that way,” says Belle, “But it didn’t feel like a dream at all. It felt absolutely real. I could feel the texture of the cotton sheets and the roughness of the wool blanket. And when I got out of bed I could feel the floorboards under my feet. They were cold.”

  I look at Belle carefully, studying her expression for any sign that she might not be serious, or that she might not be sure of her ground. But so far as I can tell, she is absolutely in earnest.

  She says, “I couldn’t work it out. I knew I ought to be in your place but it wasn’t anything like it was when I went to bed. But it really was just so real.” She shakes her head. “So I decided to go and find you. I opened the bedroom door and the hallway had changed too. You’ve mostly got plain painted walls, but now there were wooden panels, and more patterned wallpaper. I thought, okay, Belle, maybe you went out through the wrong door and this is an old part of the house that they haven’t done up yet. But the house isn’t that old, is it? I mean, it looks new.”

  “No, it’s not old,” I say. I’m surprised how calm my own voice sounds. “It was built two years ago. We’re only the second people to live in it. What did you do then?”

  “I went down the hallway but I couldn’t find your room. All the doors were open but I didn’t recognise any of the rooms, and I didn’t see anyone at all. I could see where I was going alright – there were these weird-looking lamps on the walls – but there was nobody in any of the rooms. I thought about shouting to you and James but it was so quiet I felt funny about doing that. I felt... I don’t know, like it wouldn’t be such a great idea to draw attention to myself. So I just carried on looking.

  “I got to the top of the stairs and I thought, well this definitely isn’t the same house at all, because
there was this wooden staircase that took several turns on the way down, and it had these big bannisters with posts at the top and bottom.”

  “Did you go downstairs?” I ask her. I have a cold feeling in my stomach.

  Belle nods. “Yeah. There didn’t seem to be anybody downstairs either, but it was still lit up everywhere with those same funny-looking lamps. And there was this big picture on the wall.” Belle puts up a hand and rubs her face. “Not a photo,” she says. “It was one of those old types of picture – an engraving or whatever you call it. Black and white. It was a picture of a house – not a modern house like yours, but an old one with sort of little towers on it. Only I think it was here, or very near here, because I sort of recognised the land – the hill at the back, and the trees.”

  I can’t stop staring at Belle.

  “Go on,” I say.

  “You know I said it was quiet? Well, it was at first. When I was upstairs, I couldn’t hear a thing except my own footsteps. But while I was downstairs looking at this picture, I started to hear something. A knocking sound, like someone banging on a door. Bang, bang, bang. It started so quietly that I could hardly hear it, and then it got louder. I looked down the hallway and there was a door there at the end, so I thought whoever it was must be on the other side.”

  “Did you go and open it?”

  Belle shakes her head. “No way. I just stood there, looking at the door and listening to the knocking. I thought: someone really wants to get in. But I had this very strong feeling that it would be a really, really bad idea to let them inside. The whole thing – I can’t describe – it felt wrong.” She heaves a sigh. “So I turned my back and went upstairs again, as quietly as I could. I still felt it would be best not to be heard. I managed to find my way back to the room where I’d started, so I got back into the bed and pulled the covers over my head. I thought I could still hear the knocking, even there, but it was much fainter. I lay there listening to it with my eyes closed for ages and ages, and then eventually I realised I was listening to footsteps going down the landing, and it wasn’t the knocking any more, it was you or James getting up. I put my head out and everything was back to normal.”

  “So it was a dream then – a horrible, frightening dream.”

  “I don’t know,” says Belle. “It didn’t feel like one.”

  There is a long silence after this, broken only by the soft sighing of the wind over the loch. Then I push away from the wall, and start walking back towards the car. The atmosphere is broken, the beauty of the scene tainted as though clouds have come over.

  Belle trots beside me. Neither of us says anything. I take the car keys out and there is a click as the doors unlock. We climb in and for a moment we both sit in silence, staring out through the windscreen.

  Then Belle says: “Fen...”

  Her voice trails off.

  “Yes?” I say softly.

  “I’m just... worried about you.”

  “Belle, it was only a dream. I mean, you can’t just wake up and find yourself in a completely different place.”

  The words are hardly out of my mouth when I think about the night when I thought that exact thing had happened to me.

  “Just a dream,” I tell her firmly. “What else could it possibly be?”

  “You know I’ve always been... sensitive,” she says, in a low voice.

  “No,” I say, shaking my head. I start the engine, as though I can just drive off and leave this conversation behind. “I’m sorry, Belle, I don’t want to hear any more.”

  The tyres crunch over gravel as we turn onto the track leading back down the hill. Both of us sit in silence as I drive back down, carefully circumnavigating the potholes. When we get to the gate with the cattle grid I get out and open it, and the fresh air is a welcome change from the uncomfortable atmosphere in the car. I get back in and drive through, get out again and shut it. I glance around me, at the rolling land and the dense strip of forest, as though looking for escape. Then I trudge back to the car. Belle says nothing as I get back in.

  It’s true that she has always claimed to be ‘sensitive’, as she calls it. It’s never really bothered me before, probably because I’ve never really taken any of it seriously: feelings about places and people, omens and premonitions. I felt about it the same way as I feel about horoscopes – I don’t really believe in them, but I find it fun reading them anyway, picking out the best bits and saying, “Yes, that’s totally me.” Belle and I have never fallen out over this stuff, because it’s always felt like a harmless quirk. But this feels personal. She’s telling me there’s something wrong with the place I live. My home.

  When we get to the bottom of the hill, there’s a small, muddy layby, and I pull in. We have to finish this conversation before we get home, because I don’t want to have it in front of James.

  I sit for a moment, thinking.

  “Belle,” I say in the end, “You have a right to believe whatever you want to believe. But Barr Dubh is our home, mine and James’s. When you tell me you don’t like it, and it feels wrong... It’s kind of hurtful.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, in a small voice. “I just...”

  I wait. “Just what?”

  “I just felt I had to... warn you. Something felt off.”

  “It was a dream. It had to be a dream, however realistic it felt.”

  “It wasn’t...” she begins, and then her voice trails off. For a minute or two we both just sit there, not saying anything at all. Then she says, “Just be careful, Fen.”

  I think about that for a moment. “Alright,” I tell her. “If we can agree that whatever you thought happened, it was a dream, then I promise if any monsters or serial killers come knocking, I won’t open the door. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she agrees, and then she hesitates, as if there’s something else to come, but nothing does.

  I start the car again and we drive back to Barr Dubh. With the heater on and music playing, the atmosphere soon becomes more mellow.

  I point a few things out to her as we pass them, until the topic of last night is far behind us. By the time we get back to the house, and find James in the kitchen making coffee, it’s not too difficult to act as though nothing has happened.

  Okay, I said to Belle, and she agreed: Okay. But somehow, in spite of our smiles and chat, it isn’t okay – not quite.

  Chapter Nine

  “Did you and Belle fall out?” says James the next morning, as we watch Belle’s car disappearing down the drive.

  “Well, not exactly,” I say, uncomfortably.

  James looks at me quizzically, eyebrows raised, but he doesn’t push it, and I’m glad.

  Have I fallen out with Belle? I’m not even sure myself. From the moment I drove out of the layby until Belle’s departure a minute or two ago, we didn’t mention her dream, or whatever it was, again. All the same, I’m not surprised James detected something amiss in the atmosphere between us. We were friendly enough with each other – but not quite natural. There was something a little strained about Belle’s manner, as though she was afraid the mood would plummet if she let up with her relentless cheerfulness. She looked tired this morning too, as though she hadn’t slept well last night; under her magenta hair she was drawn and pasty. As for me, I felt as though James and I were on probation: if we seemed to be anything less than perfectly happy at Barr Dubh, Belle might think that her dream meant something, that there really was something wrong. And there isn’t.

  When we said goodbye, some of the real warmth returned. Belle is my best and oldest friend, after all. We hugged each other for a beat longer than usual.

  “Come back soon,” I said.

  She said, “I’ll call you.”

  And then she was gone.

  James says he’ll make coffee – and tea for me. He asks where I want it, which is a tactful way of saying that we both need to get to wo
rk.

  “In the kitchen,” I tell him. I am going to have a study of my own but I haven’t quite settled where it will be. For now, I’m happy with my laptop on the breakfast bar, where I can look out of the kitchen window at the green land beyond, so deliciously empty of people. I boot the laptop up and open my emails.

  The one that catches my eye immediately is from my former employer, and it’s ominously titled Availability? It sits there amongst all the promotional offers and requests to sign online petititions, like a hand grenade in a bed of roses.

  Belle was right, I think. I click to open it, and sure enough, it’s a crafty attempt to sell me the idea of copyediting the terrible new thriller. I know you’re taking a short sabbatical, Fen, it says, but this is such a great opportunity. There’s a lot of stuff about the unique skills I’d be bringing to this high profile project and how they’d really, really like it to be me. Nowhere does it mention the fact that Genghis Caan said she’d eat her own iPhone before she ever touched another manuscript by that author.

  I sit there for a bit, just looking at that email and thinking. I’m certainly not going to write back with Hell yeah, but on the other hand, an emphatic No might have its disadvantages.

  I’m freelance now, so I have to consider carefully before turning work down. We could certainly manage without the income from this particular job, but if the work dried up, what would I do with my time? That is too big a question to be answered in an instant. In the end I take the coward’s way out and defer the decision until later. Perhaps someone else will have volunteered to do the work by then. Or whoever the thriller writer is sleeping with will have thrown him out on the grounds of disservices to literature, and then cancelled the book. Or the apocalypse will have happened. Anything, really, so long as I don’t have to untangle any more of that horrible prose.

  There are a hundred and one things I could be getting on with now – like looking for suitable wedding venues, for example. The good ones always get booked up ages in advance, so it’s not something I can put off for long. Instead, I raise my head and listen carefully for a few moments, to make sure James is safely in his study and not prowling around. Then I click over to a search engine and type in Barr Dubh House.