The Shadow House(14)

The boy squinted at me.

‘It’s okay, you’re not in trouble.’ I gave him a reassuring smile. ‘I’m just new here and I need help figuring it out.’

The boy looked up at me and sighed. ‘It’s the witch,’ he said. ‘It’s like … it’s her sign.’

‘Witch?’ Whatever I’d been expecting him to say, it wasn’t that. ‘What do you mean?’

‘So, um, there’s this witch in the woods?’ The boy mumbled. I had to bend down low to hear him. ‘And these monsters? And they take kids? But before they do, they, like, bring things to your house.’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘A witch that takes kids, huh? Sounds like fun.’

‘It’s true.’ The boy jabbed a finger at the paper in my hand. ‘She brings the things. So, bones first. Like, something dead. An animal or a fish or something. Then she brings you a doll. It’s supposed to look like you. And then she makes blood come out of your walls, and the blood finds a photo of the person the witch wants, and then that’s how you know who she’s going to take next.’ He looked at me expectantly.

I blinked. ‘O-kay.’

‘Can I go now?’

‘Sure. Thanks for helping me out.’

‘’S okay.’

I stood back as if to let the boy pass, but he didn’t move.

‘Is this your house?’ he said.

I nodded.

‘It probably means she’s coming here next.’

‘What?’

‘The drawing in your mailbox.’

I laughed. ‘Okay, cool. Thanks for the advice.’

The boy shrugged. ‘It happened before. Up there.’ The boy twisted on his bicycle seat and pointed across the valley to where the lone farmhouse stood, bleach-white in the blazing sun.

Kit’s words came back to me. The house has a bit of a history.

‘How do you know?’ I said. My words accidentally came out sneery, as if I was the child, and the boy sighed as if he agreed.

‘Everyone knows,’ he said. He placed his foot back on the pedal.

‘Wait, what do you mean?’

The bike started to move.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Wait a sec. What happened, exactly?’

The boy stood up on his pedals as if he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. ‘The witch,’ he called out over his shoulder as he picked up speed. ‘The witch took the farmers’ kid.’

And then he rounded the corner with a tring of his bell and I couldn’t see him anymore.





RENEE





6


Right after they put Ivory in the ground, Renee Kellerman saw a snake.

Not a real one. Just a picture, hovering in the air. It was normal. Sometimes she experienced emotions through a sort of projective synaesthesia: she saw images as she felt things. Physical pain, for example, was a rusty bear trap, its jaws snapping shut in the blink of an eye. Fear was an ice fishing hole, perfectly round and bottomless. And, apparently, heartbreak was a thick snake in a constriction coil, tightening slowly around its prey.

As Michael stuck the blade of his shovel into the ground, digging up spadeful after spadeful of wet earth and tipping it into the hole, Renee saw that snake, all wound up like a noose knot. And the more dirt that went in, the clearer she saw it. The scales. The bulging muscle. The crushed, pulpy mess at its centre. She cried silently the whole time, her tears mixing with the drizzle that fell as if in sympathy.

Michael continued to dig. Each clump of earth hit the plastic bag with a dull thud. When the plastic was all covered up, the falling dirt made no sound at all. And then Ivory was gone, swallowed up, claimed by the soil.

‘Why would someone do something like that?’ she said when he finished.

Michael smoothed the hole over with the end of the shovel. ‘I don’t know.’

At his feet, his beloved black labrador, Ebony, waited patiently for instructions. Her tongue was hanging out of her mouth; her eyes were bright and alert. Renee suddenly wanted to kick her, the slobbery, selfish animal. Why had she survived whatever it was that Ivory had not?

Michael stuck the spade into the soil one last time and leaned on the handle. He wiped his brow with his sleeve. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s done, then.’

Renee sniffed. ‘Yes.’

Michael blinked, then looked up at the sky. ‘I’d better be getting on,’ he said. ‘Before it really starts coming down. There’s a lot to do. The tulips …’

Renee pulled her raincoat more tightly around her body and swept the tears from her cheeks. She had things to do, too.


She was on the veranda, banging the mud from her gumboots by the back door, when she heard the voices. She stopped mid-stamp and listened: a soft murmur of conversation was coming from inside the house – but who could it be? Not Michael: she’d just left him down at the greenhouses. Had Gabriel invited friends over? Surely not.

Slipping off her boots and shoving them upside down on the rack, she nudged the door open and peered through the gap into the kitchen. It was empty. So was the adjoining living room. The voices, so hushed they were almost whispers, seemed to be coming from the hall.

‘Hello?’ she called.

The voices stopped, as if the house had suddenly swallowed them. The hairs on the back of Renee’s neck stood up.