Authors: Nick Gifford
Flesh and Blood (6 page)
Part Three
Alternity
8 The Waredens of Crooked Elms
About fifteen minutes later, Matt heard the sound of a car pulling up at the front of the house. Mike was still upstairs with Tina and Kirsty, making sure they were settled for the night, and Vince had gone off to his room, losing interest as soon as Carol had called to say things were okay.
Matt looked out of the window and saw his aunt passing some money through the window of a taxi. He went to open the door. Carol and his mother looked terrible: pale faced, heavy shadows under their tired-looking eyes.
“Thanks,” said Carol, brushing past him. Then she paused and turned half back towards him. “You were just in time,” she said. “If you hadn’t looked in on him when you did...”
Matt didn’t know what to say. All evening, his thoughts had kept returning to what had happened. In particular, he kept asking himself, What’s Gramps going to think when they’ve pumped the medicine out of his stomach? Will
he
be grateful? Will
he
praise Matt for being ‘just in time’?
His mother took him by surprise and hugged him as he stood back to let her in. He stood awkwardly until she let go. He still hadn’t got things straight in his mind, but he was still angry with her for trying to keep him in the dark – she had only admitted what was happening when there had been no alternative. He wasn’t going to forget that in a hurry.
~
A short time later, he shut the box room door behind him and leaned with his back against it. He was shaking again, still reacting to the events of the evening – the shock, the fear, the anger.
He stripped, and pulled on some pyjama trousers. Then he turned off the light and slipped under the striped cotton sheets, the camp bed’s springs groaning beneath him.
He lay for some time with his hands behind his head.
He didn’t want to sleep. He wasn’t even remotely tired.
He remembered the letter. The suicide note. Was it right to read it, now that Gramps’ suicide had been prevented?
He sighed. He knew that no matter how much he reasoned with himself, his curiosity was certain to win in the end.
He got up again, turned on the light, found the letter in one of the back pockets of his jeans. He climbed back into bed and slid a finger along under the flap.
August 10
My dear Matthew,
I will be dead when you read this. Please do not blame me for taking this option: it is not without some deliberation that I decided to end things now. I have gone to the same place as your grandmother, wherever that might be. Life has not been endurable since she was killed.
Matt paused at this point, puzzled at his grandfather’s choice of words: ‘since she was killed’ not ‘since she died’ or ‘since she passed away’. What had happened on that day in the house at Crooked Elms, he wondered?
He returned to the letter:
However, I am not writing to justify my own cowardly actions. This is the last letter I will write; I have already made my excuses in my letters to Carol and Jill.
I am writing to you, especially, Matt. The others are more familiar with the ways of our strange family, but you have grown up apart: what you are experiencing, and what you are to learn, will transform your life. I think you are mature enough to cope. Indeed, I hope that you are, for you must either learn properly now or by accident at some later date.
To the point, I hear you demanding, quite rightly! To the point.
You are gifted, Matt, just as many in our family have been gifted over the years. But with that gift comes a heavy responsibility, one that I have struggled to bear for my own 88 years.
I will explain the responsibility, and the dangers, but first I must explain the gift.
There is a peculiar, and special talent that runs through our family, inherited by roughly half of each generation: Kirsty and you have it, but not, I think, Tina – much to her chagrin! Neither Carol nor Jill have shown any indication of the gift, either.
At this point, Vince’s words about the family madness, the special sensitivity, came rushing back: the family curse that only Vince and Mike, not being direct descendants in the Wareden line, could be sure of avoiding.
Have you ever felt the urge to do something you shouldn’t? Something you’re too frightened even to think about? Everybody has these impulses, but most of us are able to keep them under control. Battling inside our heads is a whole set of alternative selves – the people we might have been, if only things had turned out differently.
But it’s not as simple as that. The realm of the mind is every bit as real as what we call reality. Carl Jung was close to the mark when he talked of the collective unconscious. That shared mental realm is another world: a kind of hell, if you will. Its darker reaches surface in our dreams, and in the minds of the unstable.
Rare individuals among us are especially sensitive to this other realm, this Alternity. Such sensitivity runs in families, as it does in the Waredens. You have a connection with this other world, Matt: your mind forms a mental bridge. Many of our greatest leaders have shared this gift: indeed, I have studied the scriptures, and I believe that Jesus himself shared it.
But, as is so often the case, such gifts bring with them great dangers and responsibilities. I have told you about the special individuals, who can form a mental connection with what I have called ‘Alternity’.
There are also special places. These places are where the two realms come close together, where Reality and Alternity brush up against one another. These places, or ‘Ways’ as I call them, are the foci of great power. Often, churches and palaces have been built at or near to these places, as new religions unconsciously tap into the power of the ancient.
One such Way exists at Crooked Elms: no doubt that is why the church was built so close to the Waredens’ family house. That is how I know you are gifted, Matt: I sent you into the basement to test you, and you suffered – you know you suffered.
This is because of your mental affinity with Alternity. At a Way, that affinity becomes physical: that mental bridge becomes real. In your head, you carry the key that links Reality and Alternity – a key you must guard. Your talent must be mastered, for the realm of Alternity must never be allowed to spill into the real world: the very fabric of our existence would be destroyed.
Such a tragedy nearly happened a century ago, and again when I was a young man.
It is something that must always be guarded against, and this is where we come to the responsibility to which I referred. The Way is weak, unstable; all kinds of people are drawn to the powers that emanate from these places. Alternity reaches out into their minds and pulls them in. The weak-minded think they can use the powers of Alternity, but in truth it uses
them
, trying to break through into our world. The Way is a weak spot and it must be defended by those who understand. It must be kept shut.
The name Wareden comes from the Old English ‘Weardian’. It means guardian, or protector, and that is our role. We are sensitive and we are strong enough to keep the Way closed against those who would open it and let the powers of Alternity loose. Long ago, we were drawn to this Way and now we are bound to it. We are its protectors. This has been our role for generations, and, please, God, I hope it always will be.
My dear Matt, I hope you will be able to forgive me: both for my cowardly exit from this place, and for those gifts you have inherited from my line. Be strong, Matt. You have to be.
I am tired now. So very tired.
With love,
Gramps.
Matt lay back, his head spinning. He could see why Gramps had chosen to write all this down. Spoken aloud, the words would have appeared little more than the ramblings of a demented old man. Spoken aloud, they would have been distorted, misheard, remembered incorrectly.
He stared at the neat writing. It was either totally mad, or totally sane. It went against all he had ever understood of the world. He felt as if he was being smothered: everything piling in on top of him, until it was hard to breathe.
He recalled the strange enclosure in the Crooked Elms churchyard: six families, slaughtered in what the vicar had called “a night of quite horrific violence”. Matt looked at the letter again: “such a tragedy nearly happened a century ago...”
Nearly?
If over twenty deaths in a single night was “nearly”, what would happen if this Alternity was ever let loose for real, he wondered?
He thought of the few times he had visited Crooked Elms. As a child he had never been comfortable there: haunted by vivid, frightening dreams, calmed by Gramps’ old stories and poems. He remembered going into the basement – only yesterday! it seemed so long ago – for Gramps’ box of books. He remembered the feeling that his feet were stuck in concrete, that he couldn’t move.
The letter explained it all.
But as he thought about it, and read the letter again and again, he started to question that. How could such a strange phenomenon be explained by a mere letter? It raised so many questions, so many doubts... So many fears.
He struggled to stay awake, suddenly scared of his recurring nightmare. Was he dreaming of Alternity? Was the dream a sign of his ‘mental bridge’?
But eventually there was no resisting it, eventually he slept. And dreamt.
9 Kirsty
He’s out running, getting fit for the start of the new football season. Running along Bay Road, heading towards the war memorial and the sea. The sky is a heavy grey, clouds bulging downwards as if they are about to burst at any second.
There’s a metallic grey Volvo up ahead, slowing down, pulling up.
He can see the driver: tall, dark-haired, stooped over the wheel. Leaning over to one side, then straightening with a mobile phone held to his ear.
Matt raises a hand, tries to call, “Dad!” but he can’t, because suddenly his throat is too tight, too dry. As he approaches the car, the driver replaces the phone and glances into his mirror. His look meets Matt’s, then moves on. The car pulls out into the road again, and starts to accelerate.
Matt tries to run harder, but his feet are getting heavier, heavier. The pavement has turned to wet concrete and his feet are sticking, collecting concrete with every step. Getting heavier.
Eventually, he reaches the top of the cliff and stares down the grassy slope to the bay in amazement. The sea is red: blood red. And there are things floating in the waves, washed up onto the beach. Arms, feet, heads – all ripped from their bodies by some unimaginably vile force.
He starts to run again, following the road until he comes to Bagshaw Terrace. He turns left, heading for town. Faces crowd every window. Ghoulish faces with bulging eyes and insane smiles. Every window ... watching him, smiling. As if they are waiting for something.
This isn’t Bathside, he realises. Although, in a peculiar sense, it
is
Bathside. Where is he, then?
His feet are heavy again, and all he wants to do is stop. But he can’t... he knows for certain he can’t stop now.
The faces are pressing hard against the windows now, as if sensing his weakness. Hands press at the windows, and he can hear their fingernails – hundreds of fingernails – scratching down the glass, the sound like some mad, warped string section tuning up. Just waiting.
And suddenly, he knows where he is. This isn’t Bathside, it’s an alternative, a Bathside that has never existed, but contains all the darker, twisted Bathsides that
might
have existed if things had been different, if things had been far, far worse.
He’s crossing the mental bridge. He’s out jogging in Alternity, and his feet are getting heavier and heavier again.
He stares at all the ghoulish, eager faces.
He’ll have to stop running soon. He won’t be able to go on for much longer. He’ll have to...
~
He woke, his body soaked in sweat, his head aching as if someone had been trying to break out of his skull with a pneumatic drill. He sat up straight, hugging himself, willing the mad images to go away, willing the pain to stop.
He was going insane, he knew. Almost every night now, he was having these dark, terrifying dreams. Even now that he had some kind of explanation – even if it was one that transformed everything he had ever understood about the world – he feared that it would end in madness.
How had Gramps lasted so long if he had suffered like this, he wondered? And how did a child of Kirsty’s age cope with it? Little wonder she had so many ‘turns’, as Aunt Carol called them.
These thoughts offered a morsel of comfort to him: Kirsty survived, Gramps had lived with it for more than eighty years. There must be a way of coping. He remembered the letter, Gramps’ phrase:
your talent must be mastered
.
He had to find some way of controlling it, whatever
it
was. He had to master this gift, this affliction. The alternative, he knew, was insanity. Or maybe something worse.
~
The following afternoon presented Matt with his first opportunity to learn. It was the first time he had been alone with Kirsty for more than a few seconds, the first time he had had the chance to talk to her.
Vince and Mike were at work, his mother and aunt were at the hospital with Gramps, and Tina had gone to a friend’s birthday party. That had come as a surprise to Matt: he couldn’t imagine Tina having any kind of life outside the small circle of her family. Perhaps they weren’t very close friends, he decided. She hadn’t been at all keen to go to this party, after all, but Carol had insisted. “You accepted the invitation,” she told her. “You have to learn to meet your obligations. You’re going to go to this party, my girl, and what’s more, you’re going to enjoy it.”
Kirsty seemed to be trying to avoid him. There were just the two of them in the house, yet he didn’t see her for nearly an hour. She was up in her room, he guessed.
He settled down at the end of the sofa with one of his grandparents’ old photograph albums. This one dated back to the early 1950s. Gran and Gramps would have been about the same age as his parents were now, he realised. Next to each of the pictures was a label, written in his grandmother’s flowing script, identifying the place and time.
Alhambra Palace, Granada, July 12th 1953. Toledo, August 4th 1953. The Prado, Madrid, August 6th 1953
.
The small girl in the pictures must be Carol, he thought. The baby would have been his mother. His grandparents looked so contented, so at one with their world. The young doctor and his wife.
It seemed like a golden age to Matt. He wondered what it was really like: what had been going through the mind of that man? What fears, what worries? What night terrors did he endure?
Perhaps that was why he had travelled so much: distance offering the only respite from the madness, and the danger. Had he been running away?
He looked up as the TV leapt into life. Kirsty had come into the room without a sound, and now she was setting up one of her video games. She met his look briefly, then turned away.
“Hi, Kirsty,” he said.
“Hello.” Her voice was small, uncertain. Suddenly, he knew that Tina must have spoken to her before going out, warned her to steer clear of cousin Matthew. Was she deliberately going against her sister’s wishes by coming down here now, he wondered? Was this her little act of rebellion?
Soon, she was quite absorbed in the game, eyes wide and fixed on the screen. It was a racing game, he saw, not the usual battle game that she played with Tina. He grinned as his cousin’s small body flexed and leaned into every corner.
He let her finish the circuit before saying anything. “Not bad,” he said then. “Where did you finish?”
She looked at him shyly again. “It was just a practice lap,” she said.
He nodded.
“Tina doesn’t like racing,” she went on, as if she was gaining in confidence. “She likes Kombat. She always does better than me at Kombat. Do you play?”
He shook his head. “Not much,” he told her. “I’ve got a Game Boy, but not here. It’s at... at home.”
She offered him the handset. “Here. Have a go. It’s easy, really.”
He put the album aside and moved over to sit on the floor. Taking the controls, he studied them carefully.
“This one’s the speed. This is your brakes...”
He sat quietly as she explained. She reset the game and, finally, let him have a go. He made sure he crashed early on, and sat back, shaking his head. “You made it look easy,” he said. “But that corner just came out of nowhere.”
She laughed. “I did that first time, too,” she said. “You get used to it, I suppose. Another go?”
He shook his head and handed the controls back to his cousin. “Nah,” he said, “I’ll leave it to the professionals.”
She was pretty much like any other seven year-old, he thought. A bit shy, a bit submissive to the demands of her mother and older sister, maybe a bit mischievous. He was wondering how to shift the talk to more serious matters when Kirsty did it for him.
“Are you really going to be living here now?” she asked. “Until you’re a grown-up, I mean.”
He shook his head. “Not that long,” he said. “Just a few days. Mum needs to sort herself out, then when she knows what she’s doing I can make my own decisions.” It sounded very uncomplicated, put like that.
“Tina says you’re a... a destabilising influence. She says you’re making the bad dreams.”
Matt had to stop himself from staring at Kirsty in surprise – he couldn’t afford to put her off now. “Do you believe her?” he asked. “
Am
I making bad dreams?”
She tipped her head on one side, finding the confidence to study his face as she replied. “You’re certainly doing something,” she said. “I’ve had more funny turns since you came than I did for all of last year. And I am having more bad dreams, too.”
He remembered what Gramps had said in his letter about dark powers emanating from the Way, about mental bridges and the need to master the gift. Was his mere presence stirring up dark forces? Was he really making Kirsty ill? No wonder Tina hated him.
“I’m not doing anything deliberately,” he said. “And you seem okay now, don’t you?”
She seemed to accept this argument. He plunged on, determined to learn as much as he could from this rare conversation. “I’ve been having bad dreams, too.” He watched her closely as he spoke. “Frightening dreams, about a world that’s not quite like this – a place that’s scary, where you see some horrific things. There’s always a terrible sense of doom, a feeling that some horrifying, monstrous
thing
is just out of the picture, waiting for me... always waiting for me.”
Kirsty was nodding in recognition. “Alternity,” she said softly.
She knew its name, then. He wasn’t sure what this proved, except that Gramps must have spoken to her at some time, perhaps in an effort to help her master her gift, to control her ‘turns’. Gramps was a doctor, after all: Carol was bound to have turned to him when Kirsty had started showing signs of the family affliction.
“Did your mother give you a letter from Gramps?” he asked.
She shook her head. She clearly didn’t understand what he was referring to. He had been fairly certain that Carol wouldn’t have passed on the letters Gramps had written the day before. So Kirsty must have learnt about Alternity some time earlier, then.
“Have you dreamed of... Alternity very much?” he asked her.
“It started when I was four,” she said. “I wouldn’t go to bed at night unless Tina was with me and the light was on and Mum was sitting on the landing playing her guitar.”
She seemed quite proud of this, Matt thought.
She paused, then went on. “One time we visited Gran and Gramps and I had a turn. Gramps looked after me. He told me stories and taught me old poems that would help me close the doors in my brain.”
Matt suddenly recalled those rare childhood visits to Crooked Elms when he was little. Gramps had always liked telling him old stories – King Arthur, Joan of Arc, Beowulf – and old poems. Matt hadn’t understood them, but they had soothed him. Now, he remembered quite distinctly how Gramps had used the poems to settle him and help him sleep at night. “Words have a magic,” the old man had said. “They work the locks to the doors of the mind.”
Kirsty continued, “He told me that it was very special to be able to see into Alternity, but that it was scary as well, and that I should always keep my dreams locked up in a special place.”
Her look became distant, just then. For a moment, Matt had the horrible feeling that he had somehow triggered another of her turns. What was he supposed to do if that happened? He had done a first aid course through the football club, but that hardly prepared you for dealing with this kind of thing.
But she was thinking of Gramps. “Is he really going to be all right?” she asked. “Is he going to get better again?”
“Sure,” said Matt. “He’s being looked after. He’s getting better.”
“Mum said you saved his life.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t do anything much,” he said.
“You can’t really be as bad as Tina says if you saved Gramps’ life, can you?”
~
A short time later Matt heard the front door open and, immediately after that, the sound of his aunt’s voice.
She came into the front room, followed by Matt’s mother and then Tina, who they must have picked up from the party after leaving the hospital.
Instantly, Matt was aware that he was still sitting on the floor by Kirsty. Tina stared at the two of them, at first in surprise, and then with narrowing, angry eyes.
Matt ignored her. He had done nothing wrong. “How’s Gramps?” he asked his mother.
She looked away and he knew something was amiss. Then she looked up, and tried to smile. “Oh,” she said, “about as well as you could hope, really. He’s an old man. He’s very lucky, really.”
Meaning, of course, that he wasn’t nearly as well as she had expected him to be.
“How long will he be in hospital?” He was aware that they wouldn’t want to say too much in front of Kirsty, but he wanted to know as much as possible.
“They’re keeping him in for now,” said Carol. “He’s been through a lot for a man of his age. We have to take things day by day.”
“But he will come home, won’t he?” asked Kirsty.
Carol nodded and smiled her brittle smile. “Of course he will, darling. The doctors just need to make sure everything’s working properly, that’s all.”
“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” Kirsty’s voice was rising, becoming shrill. “Just like Gran!”
Tina rushed to her sister’s side, forcing her way into the narrow space between Kirsty and Matt.
Matt got to his feet and went to gather up the photograph album, determined not to let Tina’s behaviour disturb him.
But then, when he glanced back at the two girls, he saw that Kirsty had frozen, her eyes focused on some hazy middle-distance. Tina held her sister’s head against her shoulder and rocked her back and forth.
“Mum,” she said quietly. Then, as Carol hurried across to the two of them, Tina turned her hard stare on Matt.
Kirsty was having one of her turns, and it was all Matt’s fault.
Tina’s eyes burned into him. Even when he looked away, he was aware of her eyes, the intensity of her anger.
He sat down and started to leaf through the album, once again.