Lurker (5 page)

Meg found this kind of material fascinating, but was nonetheless eager to review the book she’d taken from the library. Once the documentary had ended, she switched off the TV, brewed a mug of strong coffee, and then settled down in the armchair in one corner of the lounge. And that was when she—

—heard a knock at her front entrance.

She panicked, imagining that large insectlike creature she’d spotted on the front page of the newspaper had come to visit, using what passed for its hands—no more than the ends of jelly-esque tentacles—to punch at her door. But then after getting up from the chair, Meg noticed what she hadn’t moments earlier: the curtains were lit up from the outside; the cottage’s security light had been triggered.

This implied a tangible visitor, someone much realer than her stupid, involuntary imaginings. Nevertheless, while heading for the door, Meg remained anxious, her heart running beneath her ribs as if with multiple limbs. She’d locked the front door earlier, a matter of habit after living in a city for so long and certainly not because she was fearful of anything out here, on the trouble-free coast.

But a woman has gone missing recently
, a soft voice spoke up in her mind, and the recollection made her hands shake as she reached for the key in the lock.

“Who…who is it?” she called, attempting to steady her voice, but an involuntary stammer betrayed her unease. She hoped whoever was outside—perhaps the police, come to question her about the missing woman—had failed to detect her discomfort. A wind howled, cutting across the coastline like a cry of seabirds. Meg thought maybe this had masked the sound of an approaching vehicle—a police car, she hoped, bringing a man in reassuring uniform.

Moments later, however, it was a woman who replied.

“Oh, hi there. Sorry to bother so late in the evening. But I was wondering if you could help. I’ve booked accommodation in this area, but am struggling to find it. I’ve been looking for about an hour, with no luck. And I just wondered, what with you being a local, you might be able to help out.”

The voice belonged to someone younger than Meg, maybe in her early thirties. She sounded pleasant, and her reason for calling seemed plausible. Meg was even amused to think that of all the properties at which the woman might have sought guidance, hers was least likely to provide it. Meg had been in the area only a few months, after all, and had yet to learn where everything was.

Nevertheless, she quickly turned the key in the lock and then opened the door. Meg had always been willing to help out others in need; this was an ingrained characteristic established during her youth. She smiled broadly and peered outside.

The woman was extremely attractive and maybe even younger than thirty. Her voice possessed a confident tone, as if she was used to addressing large venues full of people. Elegant clothes and a stylish haircut also suggested some important occupational role. Her eyes remained fixed on Meg for several seconds, but then the moment broke, leading her to hold out a hand to shake. Smiling, she averted her gaze as she spoke.

“Thanks for this. It’s really appreciated. It’s cold and dark and I was getting worried.”

Should Meg mention the missing goth girl, and by doing so, remind the woman that being cautious was sensible? But that could ruin the newcomer’s vacation or whatever other reason she’d traveled to the coast. Might a proud husband be lurking back in the car? Now Meg had an opportunity to look, she saw the roof of a red sports vehicle parked at the end of her driveway, behind a hedge. If the guy was anything like Harry, he’d be reluctant to admit to getting lost. Men were like that, of course: some genetic need to orient it was always foolish to challenge.

Meg decided not to mention the missing woman, and then replied, “Don’t worry about it. I’m new to the area myself. When my husband and I first visited, it took us a while to find this place.”

Once Meg stepped back, allowing her guest to pace over the threshold to evade the gathering chill, the woman said, “I’m Amanda, by the way. Pleased to meet you.”

“Meg,” replied Meg, and finally took the hand she’d been offered. The two women shook, gazing at each other cautiously. Then they smiled in unison, as if bound by the same body and with the same fundamental purpose: to get along in life and find contentment. Once their hands had unclenched, Meg added, “Okay then, what’s the name of the place you’re looking for?”

Amanda told her, and Meg soon accessed the Internet—her PC was located on a desk in a corner of the lounge—to identify the standalone vacation home. It was about a mile away. Meg printed off directions and then came across to her impromptu visitor, who was taking stock of the place, as if envious of…well, of
what
, Meg wondered? Its coziness, maybe? Its seclusion? Or…something else?

In truth, Amanda didn’t look the type to retire into such seclusion. Her demeanor was too in-the-world, her dark eyes loaded with an appetite Meg thought she recognized from her own younger self and still regularly observed in Harry. It was ambition, the curse of the go-getter. The woman, Meg noticed, had nothing on her third-left finger. Late twenties or early thirties, she’d yet to be tied down by any suitor, and Meg imagined there’d be many.

“Here you go,” said Meg, handing over the directions on a single sheet of paper. “Hope that helps.”

“I’m sure it will. You’re very kind.”

A pause followed, during which Amanda appeared to adjust to all she’d perceived since arriving and then sum up in a single devastating sentence.

“Your husband and yourself,” she said, her face awash with unfeigned innocence, “do you live here alone…or do you also have children?”

Meg had closed the front door after the woman had entered, but now sensed a chill suffuse her frame. She thought she also heard something shuffling outside, but then decided it was only the wind, sending autumn-dry leaves skittering across her stone path.

Eventually, after swallowing awkwardly, she replied, “It’s…it’s just the two of us. We…like it that way. We’re peaceful people at heart.”

And that was true—at least,
part
of it was. Meg loved solitude, the freedom to do as she pleased. If Harry had been coerced into such a life by caring for her well-being, he’d surely grow used to it. Besides, he still took weekly trips inland, didn’t he? That would satisfy his need for company and attention.

Amanda was now looking at Meg in the same intense way she had upon arrival. But then she snatched away her gaze, smiling with inauthentic haste.

“Hey, look, I was just curious,” she said, hoisting the sheet of directions and then pulling car keys from one pocket of her expensive jacket. “I’ll be on my way. It’s been a tiring drive.”

Meg seized on the opportunity at once. “Where have you come from?” she asked, her mind refusing to consider what kind of subterranean material had prompted the question.

And when Amanda replied—a little awkwardly, Meg believed—there was surely no tremble in the land, like a minor earthquake or explosives set off underground. This sense of movement was just Meg’s uneasy perceptions adjusting to the news.

“Leeds,” the woman had said, her voice terse and evasive. “Leeds in West Yorkshire.”

Once Amanda had departed, driving away in her pricey-looking coupe, Meg closed the door and locked it again. Something about the unsolicited visit, however briefly the woman had stayed, troubled Meg in a way she was unwilling to acknowledge. Maybe it was simply receiving a guest so late at night…or perhaps the awkward question she’d been asked, catching her unprepared and vulnerable…or maybe even the suggestive body language Amanda had displayed, which had surely been Meg’s residual paranoia again reading far too much into events…

Whatever the truth was, the episode had exhausted her and she was now—at only nine p.m.—ready for bed. She tidied away the pamphlet she’d been preparing to read earlier, no longer eager to add to her nebulous concerns this evening. She simply craved the oblivion of sleep, but soon wondered whether even that was safe. She recalled her terrible dream a few nights ago in vivid detail, as if events today had revived it. And as the dark closed in around her—the security lamp outside had long since been extinguished, and she’d now switched out all the cottage’s lights—she wondered whether mysterious Amanda would be her only nocturnal visitor.

7

When she awoke the next day and went outside, she found the wall covered again in many more of those filthy handprints. Still in her dressing gown, she tried scrubbing them off with a brush, but that was when, despite sunshine blazing down upon her, the culprit returned. She heard it first, the heavy, crackling approach of something undoubtedly moist, scuttling her way on innumerable limbs. Then she turned and saw it in all its hideous glory: a queue of schoolchildren, many of them boys, clinging on to one another like carriages in a locomotive train. The hands of the one up front shared the same characteristics of all the others, but were free to enact more of the weird vandalism Meg had been seeking to eradicate. These were an adult’s hands attached to the wrists of a youngster; it looked as if the boy, eager to grow up quicker than nature allowed and enter a world of work and pain, had had his smaller appendages severed and replaced by larger ones. The fingers and palms were covered in clay and mud, like that extracted from a cliff-side mine, and moments later, the children were all over her, covering her gaze with oversize hands, all of whose fingernails, she now noticed, were painted a gaudy purple…

Except of course that none of this happened; it had just been a typically savage dream. She jerked up from the bed, her arms flailing left and right. After glancing down, she expected to see herself bearing oversize fingers and palms, as well as stitching around her wrist where new appendages had been attached…but there was nothing other than her usual small hands. Then she was able to throw back the sheets and hurry to the bathroom, where she showered away the unclean residue of her latest gruesome imaginings.

Her thoughts right now seemed connected to both children—perhaps understandably—and the mining area she’d visited several days earlier. The meaning of the second association was less transparent, and she ought to do everything possible to understand what it meant. After entering her lounge, where she’d briefly entertained Amanda the previous evening, Meg stooped to gather the errant book she’d located in the library, the one with no Dewy decimal details assigned to it.

It had no imprint information either, which suggested—along with its photocopied appearance—it had been independently produced by some local maverick. There were twenty pages, ten A4 sheets folded and stapled. The text and drawings—roughly executed sketches in pen—constituted the narrative, with no chapter breaks or even a contents list. The booklet was amateurish, and for a reason Meg found uncomfortable, this made it feel untrustworthy as a source of information. But was that necessarily true? She’d worked in advertising for many years, and knew how glossy façades and official paraphernalia could lend authority to what was essentially bullshit. Just because the publication had been poorly produced, did that mean its material should be neglected? No, she found that conclusion illogical.

And what
did
it have to offer? Meg boiled the kettle for a mug of strong coffee and then, not feeling like eating yet, returned to the lounge to sit in her favorite chair (the one away from the clutches of her lascivious husband), and finally began to read.

The text was in a large font, and said very little with an awful lot of words. This only added to the document’s dubious nature, and Meg imagined if the author had a serious thesis to present, he or she would have endorsed it by adding a name and contact details. Alternatively, of course, lots of local history texts were presented as authorless, letting the facts speak for themselves. But
was
the information presented here grounded in truth…or simply the ravings of some deluded amateur historian?

She decided to give the booklet the benefit of the doubt and read it straight through to the end.

Most of the detail was humdrum, involving the working lives and conditions of miners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some parts were based on scraps of evidence, and others purely speculative, but after getting through the opening section, Meg felt more aware of what it must have been like to be employed in the Sandsend mines during days of yore.

It was when the prose moved onto more significant events that her interest perked up a little. She’d wanted the miners’ stories to be dramatized by key episodes, and she certainly wasn’t disappointed by the second half of the book. She read accounts—crudely penned, it had to be admitted—of botched subterranean explosions and the occasional collapsing mineshaft. There was also material on criminal acts, such as an episode in the 1790s when a murder had been committed, with one miner stabbing another over access to a local woman. These were all tragic events, of course, but even so, Meg couldn’t help feeling how perspective achieved by the passage of time had rendered the violent quaint, the terrible nostalgic. She wondered whether her own dreadful experience would one day fade and become something she could accept with wistful reflection. It didn’t seem likely, somehow…But that was when the narrative took a turn for the worse.