Path of Needles

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

Quercus
55 Baker Street
7
^th
Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW

Copyright © 2013 Alison Littlewood

The moral right of Alison Littlewood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78087 146 2 (PB)
ISBN 978 1 78087 147 9 (EBOOK)

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
and
www.jofletcherbooks.com

Alison Littlewood’s first novel, inspired by her winter commute to snowy Saddleworth, was
A Cold Season
. Her short stories have been selected for the anthologies
The Best Horror of the Year, The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime, Best British Fantasy
and
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror
, as well as featuring in genre magazines
Black Static, Crimewave
and
Dark Horizons
. Other publication credits include the anthologies
Magic: an Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, Resurrection Engines
and
The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women
. She lives in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, with her partner Fergus.

You can visit her at
www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk
.

For those we lost: Marjorie and Miriam, Nev and Mark

PROLOGUE

When Alice Hyland woke, she knew that a new year had begun. No matter that it was April instead of January; to her mind a new year meant new life, and she knew that daffodils would be pushing green shoots up through the cold dark earth and the sun would be shining over the top of Newmillerdam Wood. She knew this because her bedroom was full of birdsong, so clear and insistent she couldn’t bring herself to resent the fact that it had awakened her. She stretched as she crossed the room, her footsteps silent on the soft grey carpet, and pulled back the curtains, revealing bright morning light.

Alice closed her eyes and pictured the bird, singing so hard its heart might burst. She smiled at herself and opened her eyes again, and as she did, her smile widened: she had expected something nondescript, a grey-brown little thing, feathers fluffed against the early-morning cold. Instead, the bird sitting on a branch of the just-budding apple tree in the centre of Alice’s garden was so bright as
to be almost iridescent, its head pale turquoise, its body darkening to the colour of the sky in summertime Greece.

It was impossible.

Its beak was open and the notes came tumbling through the air towards Alice, a song of joy and life and irrepressible
there
ness.

She blinked. It didn’t look like a budgerigar escaped from some cage, or a blue jay or anything else she’d ever heard of. She’d seen a kingfisher once, remembered the brilliant blue flash as it half flew, half fell towards the water – Alice had thought it
was
falling, but the bird had brushed the surface of the river and fluttered upwards onto a branch, revealing its rust-orange breast. This bird had no such colouring; it was much smaller than a jay, even smaller than a kingfisher, and it was blue from head to foot: stridently, undeniably blue.

The Blue Bird
. It was like something brought to life from a fairy tale singing out its heart in her garden, like a good omen. She’d not covered ‘L’Oiseau Bleu’ in her lectures for some time, had been concentrating on the basics: ‘Snow White’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Little Red’, stories her students were familiar with. Maybe it should be back on the syllabus. As Alice pushed open the window she saw the bird was truly beautiful. Cool air came in and Alice thought she smelled springtime in it.

‘L’Oiseau Bleu’ was a fairy tale from the turn of the seventeenth century, and the bird was Prince Charming in disguise. ‘Sing on, sweet prince,’ she whispered under
her breath, and wondered what her students would think if they could see her now, just roused from sleep, leaning out of a window and talking to a bird, her pale hair tangled about her face. She should go inside … and yet the blue bird was looking at her, its tiny water-bright eyes fixed and staring. She almost didn’t like it. Birds didn’t stare like that, did they? A bird of prey perhaps, spying its next meal, not this small, timid thing.

Chrr-chrr-chrr
. The shrill rhythm repeated over and over, evolving as Alice listened; now sounding almost like words, then whistles that rose to an unpleasant squeak, and then a series of pulses like an insect might make:
ch-ch-chrr-chrr
.

Alice broke her gaze and caught hold of the window catch. She should take a shower, get dressed, start all the normal, everyday things. Maybe she’d rummage through her source texts, find the tale about the blue bird who transforms into a man. And she looked up to see the bird coming at her in a flurry of feathers and beak and claws—

She gasped, started back and slammed the window closed in time to see the bird pull up short on the other side. For a moment she saw each individual wing-feather spread wide, the finer, darker feathers delineated on its breast, and she braced herself for the dull sound of fragile bones breaking against glass.

It did not come; there was only silence, the room strangely empty without that high, relentless birdsong.

Alice straightened, brushing strands of hair from her
face, peering through the window. She couldn’t see the bird anywhere. As she bent closer the top of her head met the glass and the sound, though small, made her jump. There was nothing in the tree, nothing on the ground, and now the bird had gone it felt like it could not have been, that she had never seen it at all. Then she saw it had left something for her, a little piece of blue, lying on the windowsill.

She opened the window again and looked about in case the bird should return, but this time there was no movement, only the soft sough of the wind playing through the branches in the woodland beyond. The breeze didn’t penetrate her garden; the leaves of the apple tree did not stir. Alice reached out and picked up the feather. It was small but fully and beautifully formed, and the blue was a little paler, from somewhere high on the bird’s body. Holding it carefully by the quill, she examined it. It felt like a gift, a benediction, a glimpse of something at once impossible and undeniably real, and as blue as the sky in springtime.

CHAPTER ONE

Angie Farrell knew the photograph was hidden beneath her handbag, the black clutch with the silver studs which was still sitting where she had abandoned it the night before, on the table. She set down her bowl of cereal next to it, slopping a little skimmed milk over the side, and started spooning cornflakes into her mouth. The crispness was too loud, hard against her teeth, jarring in her skull. She’d had a drink when she got in, and then another – she hadn’t meant to, but she’d been torn between going straight to bed or waiting up for Chrissie, and instead she’d found herself standing alone in the lounge, staring at her reflection in the mirror. The house had been silent, and cold: the heating had long since clicked off and winter hadn’t quite given up its grip.

Angie hadn’t switched on the lamp, but the sidelong glare of the fluorescent light in the kitchen had illuminated the lines settling deeper across her forehead and around her lips. She hadn’t moved, and she hadn’t looked
at the photograph again. She had seen it already; she didn’t need to look at it twice. She had checked the clock, though, and seen that the dance was over, and that was when she had decided to open a bottle of wine, no matter that it was just her. Maurice left years ago, bought a cheap bar on one of the more unfashionable stretches of Spanish coastline with his bit of fluff. He’d not even lingered long enough to ask for a divorce; it was Angie who’d had to do that, Angie who’d had to organise everything, as if Maurice was suddenly the younger one, his new woman’s youth rubbing off on him. It was Angie who’d had to tell Chrissie she was now a child of a broken home, and she’d tried not to relish those words, even though she was fizzing and spitting with spite. It was Angie who had to drink alone.

She stirred, leaned across the table and dragged the bag towards her, bringing the photograph with it. She pulled it from underneath the bag and turned it over and for a moment she was dazzled by her daughter’s smile.

No, not dazzled: she winced.

Chrissie was framed by a chain of giant daffodils and daisies, their stalks spun of green twine, the white petals narrow strips of paper, the yellow ones fragile tissue, almost transparent where spotlights shone through them. The lights cast a warm glow across her daughter’s skin and picked out bright points on the crown she wore – just a cheap plastic thing covered in glue-spotted sequins, but in that moment her daughter had made it look like something
magnificent. It was in her eyes too, the knowledge of her own blithe beauty. The photograph had been taken at the spring dance. Chrissie was surrounded by her classmates, though she wasn’t looking at any of them; it was they who looked at her; that was their job. She was Christina, crowned before them all, queen of the dance, queen of the springtime in her coral dress and her cheap crown. Everyone else smiled up at Chrissie, her adoring courtiers.

Angie was in the picture too. Angie hadn’t been smiling.

She dropped her head as her eyes filled with tears. She ran a finger over the picture but found no smooth skin or satin dress, only a cold surface she couldn’t penetrate. She was full of the things she wanted to say, but didn’t know what they were; she only knew she was so proud of Chrissie, her beautiful little girl – and at the same time she wanted to tear the picture in two with her teeth.

It had started with Mr Cosgrove. There weren’t many teachers at the dance; the parent-helpers covered it, mums like Angie, those who weren’t forbidden to be there by their kids for fear of embarrassment. But Mr Cosgrove had been there, and he looked like one of the cool teachers, the kind who tell their pupils to call them by their first name. Angie didn’t know his first name but she had crossed the dance floor and sidled up to him as he ladled fruit punch into a paper cup. He grinned and passed it to her. The DJ was playing some throbbing beat.

‘Good tune,’ he said. He pronounced it ‘choon’, and
that was when Angie knew he was one of the cool teachers. She didn’t know the name of the band, but she recognised the sound from the CDs Chrissie liked to blast from her room and she nodded along to the rhythm. She took a sip of the punch and pulled a face.

‘I know,’ said Mr Cosgrove, ‘it could use something.’

She turned and gave him her smile, the full beam, and nodded. She was still moving to the music. She had a good body for dancing, worked out at the gym four times a week, five when she could manage it. Her hair swung around her face, a shade darker than Chrissie’s pale blonde. Mr Cosgrove was probably in his late thirties. He was regular of feature and untidy of hair, unshaven. Angie liked untidy hair in a man, imagined for a moment what her daughter would say if she put out a hand and ran her fingers through it, right there in front of everybody; she smiled, imagining the scandalised shrieks. Chrissie was somewhere behind her, no doubt at the centre of a huddle of her friends. They’d all be covering their mouths with their hands while yelling their gossip over the music. No doubt they were wondering why no one had yet sneaked vodka into the punch. Angie was beginning to wonder too.

‘You must be Chrissie’s mum,’ Mr Cosgrove was saying. He put out a hand and she shook it, catching it only by the fingers. She could feel the bones beneath the skin.