Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins

Author:Lucy Atkins [Atkins, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2020-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

–Other than the bullying, what specifically did you and Nick disagree on? Faraday presses on.

I push thoughts of my past firmly aside. It will not do to get rattled. I have known from the start that this is not an informal chat. Of course it isn’t. I force my mind to stick with this question. The main thing Nick and I disagreed on was the extent of Felicity’s unhappiness. Specifically, he did not take her night disturbances seriously enough. It might suit him to believe that I was inventing the notion that his daughter saw things in the attic, but he wasn’t up there with us, he didn’t see what I saw.

Felicity’s night terrors seemed to be tangled up not just with her mother’s death, but with the priest’s hole itself. One night, for instance, I was sitting up in bed listening to the heave and groan of the pipes – it sounded as if the house was squeezing a monstrous slug through its bowels – when I heard a thud in Felicity’s room, and a cry. I rushed through and found her kneeling just inside the priest’s hole. She’d meticulously moved her treasure spiral so that it was outside the priest’s hole, and she was on the other side of it from me. She didn’t seem aware of my presence. Her eyes were fixed on the dark interior, something just in front of her, and I heard her say, in a high, anxious voice, ‘Oh no! Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.’

Night terrors are such eerie states of conviction – the dreamer is lucid and looks awake, if slightly absent, and it can be hard to know what to do to get them out of it; Felicity was plainly seeing something dreadful. ‘Mummy!’ she cried, the second syllable rising to a pitch.

I became aware of a rapid scratching, tapping sound, then, coming from somewhere just beyond her, in the darkness. She was staring and muttering under her breath, now, as if rehearsing a complicated speech.

A feeling of urgency overcame me, and I barrelled over the spiral, scattering little bones and pebbles underfoot. I took her arms and lifted her out. She was light, and clung to me like a much younger child as I carried her out of her room and along the attic corridor.

I took her down to the kitchen – as far away as possible from the priest’s hole – I’d probably have taken her outside if it hadn’t been so late in November, and us just in our pyjamas. I shut the kitchen door, and put her on a chair. She looked dazed, blinking and beginning to wake up.

It was cold in the kitchen; the heating had gone off hours before. I remembered the white mohair throw on the sunroom sofa and darted through to get it. When I came back she was where I’d left her, but looking even more confused, and less absent. I wrapped her like a sausage in the throw and knelt in front of her.

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