The Night Side

Somerset, England, 2022

Ruby dreams about Stoneybrook for the first time in twenty years.

It’s a dream in two parts: past and present.

First, she’s fourteen – when the real spirit came to her. Not the pretend kind her mother, Ida, made her impersonate, with a white veil and daisy crown. Or the feral sprite, yelping like a pup, her body slathered head to toe in mud.

She’s at one end of the dining table. Ida’s at the head. Two guests sit on each side, wide-eyed, eager – waiting for the show. Ida wields the spirit-writing pen over a blank sheet of paper. Coins of light from the crystal ball play across her face. Ruby blinks twice at the sudden flicker of scaly cheeks, the sly, reptilian glint in Ida’s eyes.

Ruby’s mouth goes dry. She can’t recite or speak in tongues or even fall to the floor in a faint. A lace curtain rustles. A moth flaps up against the window. Shadows solidify into hazy, distorted shapes. The air feels clammy, tainted with the stink of ashes. A bonfire doused with water.

A memory of something long past.

She’s keeping you prisoner here, says a faint voice from behind the door.

Is it coming from under the table?

She’s not who you think she is.

Maybe it’s just inside her head?

Your family are buried under the ashes.

No one notices when she gets up and collects her navy jacket from the coat stand in the hallway, or when she slips on her canvas runners, forgetting to lace them up in her haste.

Back door or front door?

Front door.

Ida is in the throes of a trance. Speaking in her Southern-belle twang. Spirit, show yourself. Come forward into the light.

Ruby runs towards the streetlight – to the main road.

She’ll wave down a car or a passing truck. Go someplace far. Live on the streets.

She glances back just as Ida appears on the front step: a thin black figure set against the light. Mosquitoes and moths circle her hair, as if her head has cracked open, released her scrambled thoughts and sent them buzzing in vexation all around her. She smiles and beckons, and Ruby stops. Too afraid to cross her.

Then time slips out of joint and something shifts in the air. Years melt away and a heavy silence cloaks the night. A silence filled with the muffled breathing of waiting things.

She’s hidden among a thick stand of pines, watching as the moon moves out from behind a flurry of clouds and sheds white light on the khaki armored vehicle crawling behind a darkened police cruiser. The convoy swishes up the driveway of her two-story clapboard house, headlights out, engines purring low. Swerving away on to the grass, they pull up alongside the dark shape of an old barn, then kill the engines. Silence.

The back door of the SWAT vehicle creaks open and boots hit the gravel as six officers dressed in black uniforms and grey helmets emerge into the warm July night, shouldering rifles, their eyes trained towards the lit windows in the lower level of the house. Two officers climb out from the cruiser. The leader – a tall, athletic woman wearing a bulletproof vest over her uniform – holds on to the door with one hand and beckons the SWAT team forward.

Pinpricks of light dance from the two-way radios clipped on their belts, bleeding on to the dull glint of pistol and taser handles. Falling into formation, they snake towards the house in an orderly line. The leader freezes at the front door. She gives two sharp knocks, waits ten seconds for a response, then waves the others on. Two swift kicks and the door crashes open, splintering the rotten wood. Rifles poised, the shooters rush inside.

Two

Ruby polishes a whistle made from the human thigh bone of a Bronze Age priestess. Seems like a morbid practice to use the perforated skulls and bones of loved ones as musical instruments, she thinks, just as Ivan, the dig supervisor, bustles over to her, all business. He hands her a folded piece of paper and shakes his head. ‘Sorry to break this to you, but someone called and said your mother’s passed. Wants you to contact this number. Immediately.’

Ruby doesn’t flinch. doesn’t cry out. Her eyes are bone dry.

She tries not to think about the timing of last night’s dream. Tries to quell the eerie sense of foreboding that comes when memories of Stoneybrook creep into her head, drawing her back to a time and place she left behind.

But this dream was so vivid. A movie playing in real time. Maybe a vision? But it can’t be, that’s all in the past. She shivers.

‘Ruby?’

She blinks. Glances at Ivan, who wipes mud-spackled glasses on the hem of his T-shirt, perches them on the bridge of his nose and glares at her with a twisted expression that falls somewhere between perplexity and suspicion. He holds out his hand. ‘Specimen, please.’

She slips the bone into his soiled palm, registering the grimy fingernails. Too bad all her painstaking work with the baby-fine toothbrush will be wasted once he gets those dirty hands on her prize. He turns and heads towards the field hut, leaving her standing in the silty mound of Wiltshire clay, shivering under a simmering August sun.

She sighs. It’s finally happened. Ida Carlson. Professional grifter. Ex-hippy. Seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, who claimed to see far beyond the corporal world, has finally gone to the other side. Entered the foggy in-between place filled with lost and wandering souls that had so fascinated her during her life.

She glances at the scrawled message: It’s over. She’s dead. Call Ione immediately. Aidan.

Prickles of heat crackle across her skin. A fly buzzes and throws itself at the fieldhouse window, pock-pocking against the glass. The breath catches in her throat. Aidan. She mouths his name over and over. She’s followed the recent news about Ida’s arrest and impending trial online, but what happened? Why wasn’t she safely locked away in jail?

Disoriented, she scans the dig site, committing the swollen hillocks of loam, clay and gravel to memory. The moist, earthy smell of newly turned soil. The students in khaki work shirts, digging and sifting, eager for the glint of a copper coin or a flint arrow tip. The cheery prospect of a few pints and a pie at the pub, accompanied by the buzz of conversation about the day’s discoveries.

She’s happy here. Content to muddle along in the slow rhythm of days. Existing in present reality, but still haunted by old secrets. One so dark that even Aidan doesn’t know about it. Only Ida. And now there’s a chance she’s taken it to her grave.

Ruby needs to be sure of that. So she’ll have to leave England for a while. Settle Ida’s affairs. Attend to an unfinished chapter of her life. Close the door on Stoneybrook for good.

Now that Aidan has contacted her, she has no choice but to go.

Just thinking about Ida causes instant heart palpitations. A river of sweat trickles down her temple and stings the inside of her eye, and a tight, uneasy feeling clutches at her throat when she dares to think of the house at Stoneybrook with its clammy sense of unease that sucked the joy from everything?

But she puts down her tools, peels off her gloves and walks towards the field hut, averting her eyes from the gauntlet of quizzical looks that follow her progress.

Head bowed, she forces herself forward, as if walking to her own execution.