Close Call

Chapter 9

Philip took the road into town passing the Triangle where the sub post office still resided in the back of the newsagents and the butcher's that had once had sawdust on the floor was now a Chinese takeaway. It was like walking through history, visions, sounds and smells bombarding his senses, trying to draw him, suck him into the layers of the past to hear the stories that were to be told. As he passed the Abbey and cut through Birdcage Walk he could hear the chanting of the psalms from the monks at the dawn of Christianity or perhaps when Eilmer had taken his flying leap into the history books, he couldn't say. In the Market Cross and then half way down the High Street, the sound of hoof beats and haggling echoed in his head. He let the rush continue, flooding his mind, tempting his interest. He was waiting for the static to drop, to feel that break. He did not.

He cut through the narrow corridor leading to Cross Hayes, where the town hall and the local museum were located. He wanted to check something out. Greeting the young lady at reception he tried to act like any other tourist even though he knew he probably wasn't looking as relaxed or casual as he would have liked.

"I suppose you must have photographs from the earliest times of photography?"

"Of course. Just look over there." She directed him to a timeline of life in the town. He glanced along the timeline from Roman times up until the Industrial Revolution, where he stopped and scoured the photographs, searching for anything, something that would give him a clue that what he had seen wasn't just an illusion. If this man really had been a photographer then some of his work might be here. Sadly, there were precious few photographs of life inside the workhouse, just a few records of boarders who had resided there, but that was all.

Thanking the receptionist he strolled out into a rare break in the rain. The streets glistened and he ambled down the High Street, past the Alms houses and out towards the silk mill. The young man Peony had spoken to, had said he had taken photos there too. Avon Mills, as it was now known, had been converted into flats some years earlier but the river still flowed over the weir and under the bridge where the water wheel had once turned the cogs that spun the wheels that made the silk thread. In the early 1800s Malmesbury lace had been sought after by ladies of distinction; only the dainty hands of young girls could weave the exquisitely delicate collars and cuffs. Nowadays, Philip thought, this would be called child labour and condemned.

He had a theory he wanted to try out although he wasn't sure how to go about it and he wasn't sure how wise it was either, but it might give him the ability to help Cathy, Peony and Jenny.

*

Gingerly, Peony reached out and took the doll in her hand. Cathy raised her eyebrows and nodded. At first nothing happened, she didn't know what she had expected, but it hadn't been nothing.

Closing her eyes, Peony tried to picture Jenny in her mind. What had her sister been thinking or feeling when she had walked out of her warm cosy bed and into the void beneath the Dump? She squeezed a little tighter but still there was no sensation of any kind.

"I don't get it!" she shook the doll furiously. "There's nothing. I thought that if I could feel it I would see."

"See what love?"

"See where Jenny is."

"Oh, Peony."

"To hell with it!" she let the doll drop to her side and wiped her tears of anger on the cuff of her jacket. It came like a wave of terror. Like her gut had been ripped from inside, real physical pain and then overwhelming anguish and loneliness.

She could see a child, the young girl who Jenny had followed, sitting in a strange, circular window, projecting from the roof of the workhouse like an observatory, watching the other children in the yard. They were miserable rag-tag children, beaten and abused, their faces smudged with dirt from the labour they had been set and their fingers raw with the cold, but they smiled at one another. They joked and they even braved a raucous laugh, when they thought no one was watching. They were not alone.

Then, as if seized by a chill hand, Peony felt something grip her arm tightly. The girl turned to her. It was Jenny. Her face was raw and sodden with tears; tears that rolled down what once had been rosy, soft cheeks but then, as she was watching, dissolved into the hollowed out shells of the long dead.

"Give my sister back!" Peony demanded, not knowing what to expect.

She opened her dark gaping mouth and roared in Peony's face,

"Let go!"

Peony did. She dropped the doll like it had burned her and she flopped to the floor beside it.

Cathy crushed her in her arms and plastered kisses on her forehead, "What is it? You were in some kind of trance. I couldn't get to you."

Peony saw the fear in her mother's eyes that she had almost lost another daughter and she smiled to ease the poor woman's fear although it was the last thing she really felt like doing. "I think I know where Jenny is."

"Let's go, let's get her!"

"It's not that simple. Mum, I need to get that brush. I don't know how it's connected but if I have it, I think I'll have a chance of doing something."

Cathy nodded, "I have a key to Erica's. I didn't tell the police that she kept one outside. I just told them I had a spare. Let's go together though."

The two women walked as casually as possible along the street and towards Erica's house. Cathy glanced around but there was no one about so the two of them slipped into the backyard which had mercifully high fences and let themselves into Erica's house. The atmosphere was already stale from being closed up for too long. Peony was astounded by the silence; the house was more than unoccupied, it was as if nothing lived there.

Cathy hesitantly led the way, pulling Peony by the hand as she, her fingers gripping her daughter tight in fear of what was to come.

"Where did you find Erica?"

"In the hall - the door was ajar, which was odd as she hardly ever went in there."

They both stopped at the hall door, unwilling to go further. Peony finally pressed the handle down and pushed it open. The sound of their breathing echoed in the silence. The brush was still there on the tiled floor where Cathy had first noticed it. Cathy stooped to pick it up,

"No!" Peony almost screamed and Cathy jumped back.

"Sorry. I want to see if I can get a sensation from it like I did with the doll. The less you touch it the less of you there is on it. The less connection there is of you with them."

Peony knew that her fear and her anguish had triggered the connection between herself and the ghoul that had once been young girl from the photographs. If they were anyway they could tap into Cathy, she would be lost to them too.

Peony took the brush in her hand and just as the penny had yielded nothing when she picked it up and nor had the doll at first, so this was the same. It was just an old wooden scrubbing brush and so it would remain until she let go of her despair. Only when she let all her fears free and her emotions overwhelm her, only then would the visions come.

Glancing at her mother, Peony took a deep breath. Cathy nodded.

There was rain, there always seemed to be rain, the road was a quagmire already. Ahead of her a young woman plodded along, the edges of her dress caked in mud, her threadbare cloak sodden and clinging to her shoulders. She tripped and stumbled and Peony saw Erica's slippers from beneath the dress. That bizarre double exposure image again. She rushed forward to help the woman as it was more than obvious she would son give birth and pregnancy was hard under any circumstances, Peony remembered the strain on Cathy when she'd been carrying Jenny.

"Too late now! Keep away! You've abandoned me, I know that! Keep away from me!"

Peony stood back, shocked. She glanced up and back, towards the workhouse following the woman's gaze. There was a tall man, dressed in a suit and holding a cane in his hand, standing in the doorway watching the woman stagger away.

"If you ever regret it, you will never be able to find me! I'll make sure of that!" The woman voice was lost in the lashing rain. Peony turned back to the man but he was nowhere to be seen and she was prostrate in her mother's arms again.