‘Can we go home now?’ Makepeace’s skin was crawling. Something was close, some things were all around her. She felt the queasy tickle of their nearness, like spider-feet against her mind.
‘No,’ said Mother.
‘There are things here!’ Makepeace fought down her rising panic. ‘I can feel them!’ With horror, she recognized the sensation. Her nightmares had started with the same prickle of dread, the same sense of encroaching enemies. ‘The demons in my dream—’
‘I know.’
‘What are they?’ whispered Makepeace. ‘Are they . . . dead?’ In her heart, she already knew the answer.
‘Yes,’ answered Mother, in the same cool, level tone. ‘Listen to me. The dead are like drowners. They are flailing in darkness, trying to grab whatever they can. They may not mean to harm you, but they will, if you let them.
‘You will be sleeping here tonight. They will try to claw their way into your head. Whatever happens, do not let them in.’
‘What?’ Makepeace exclaimed, aghast, briefly forgetting the need for stealth. ‘No! I can’t stay here!’
‘You must,’ said Mother. Her face was sculpted and silvered by the starlight, and there was no gentleness in it, no compromise. ‘You need to stay here and sharpen your stick.’
Mother was always strangest when something was important. It was as though she kept this other self, this wilful, incomprehensible, otherworldly self, in the clothes chest below her Sunday best, for use in emergencies. At these times she was not Mother, she was Margaret. Her eyes seemed deeper, her hair beneath her cap thicker and witchier, her attention on something that Makepeace could not see.
Usually when Mother was like this, Makepeace kept her head down and did not argue. This time, however, terror overwhelmed her. She begged as she had never begged before. She argued, protested, wept and clung to Mother’s arm with fierce desperation. Mother couldn’t leave her there, she couldn’t, she couldn’t . . .
Mother pulled her arm free, and gave Makepeace a sharp shove that sent her reeling backwards. Then she stepped back out and slammed the door, plunging the room into pitch blackness. There was a thud of a bar dropping into place
‘Mother!’ shouted Makepeace, no longer caring whether they were caught. She rattled the door, but it did not budge. ‘Ma!’
There was no response, only the rustle of Mother’s steps receding. Makepeace was alone with the dead, the dark and the wintry trills of distant owls.
For hours Makepeace huddled awake in her nest of blankets, shivering with cold and hearing the distant vixens scream. She could feel the things haunting the corners of her mind, waiting for their moment, waiting for her to sleep.
‘Please,’ she begged them, pressing her hands against her ears, and trying not to hear the whispers. ‘Please don’t. Please . . .’
But eventually her brain fogged with sleep against her will, and the nightmare came for her.
As before, Makepeace dreamed of a dark and narrow room, with an earth floor and walls of singed black stone. She was trying to close the shutters to stop the moonlight leaking through them. She needed to keep it out — it had whispers in it. But the shutters did not meet in the middle, and the latch was broken. Beyond the gap yawned the sickly night, where the stars swayed and glittered like loose buttons.
Makepeace braced herself against the shutters with all her might, but the night breathed the dead things into the room, by the score. They swooped for her, wailing, with their smoky, molten faces. Makepeace covered her ears and closed her eyes and mouth tightly, knowing that they wanted to get in, in, into her head.
They buzzed and whined against her ears, and she tried not to understand them, tried not to let the soft, sick sounds become words. The pale light prised at her eyelids and the whispers seeped and licked at her ears and the air was thick with them when she could not help but breathe . . .
Makepeace woke with a jerk, her heart banging so loudly that it made her feel sick. Reflexively, she reached out for the warmth and reassurance of Mother’s sleeping form.
But Mother was not there. Makepeace’s spirits plunged as she remembered where she was. She was not safe at home this time. She was trapped, entombed, surrounded by the dead.
A sudden sound made her freeze. A rasping rustle at floor level, startlingly loud in the cold, crisp night.
Without warning, something small and light ran over Makepeace’s foot. She screamed reflexively, but the next moment her pulse began to slow. She had felt the brief brush of fur, the tickle of tiny claws.
A mouse. Somewhere in this room a mouse’s bright eyes were watching her. She was not alone with the dead after all. The mouse was not a friend, of course. It would not care if the dead things killed her or drove her mad. But it calmed her to think of it, sheltering from the owls and night-prowling beasts. It didn’t cry, or beg to be spared. It didn’t care if it was unloved. It knew that it could only count on itself. Somewhere, its currant-sized heart was beating with the fierce will to live.
And soon, Makepeace’s own heart was doing the same.
She could not see or hear the dead, but she could sense them, pawing at the edges of her mind. They were waiting for her to tire, panic or let her guard down, so that they could strike. But Makepeace had found a little knot of stubbornness.
It was not easy to stay awake, but Makepeace pinched herself and paced through the long, dark hours, and at last saw night yield to the early grey light. She felt shaky and sick, her mind raw and scraped, but at least she had survived.
Mother came to collect her just before dawn. Makepeace followed her home in silence, head bowed. She knew that Mother always had reasons for everything she did. But for the first time, Makepeace found that she could not forgive her, and afterwards nothing was the same.
Every month or so, Mother would take Makepeace back to the graveyard. Sometimes five or six weeks would pass, and Makepeace would start to hope that Mother had given up the project. Then Mother would remark that she thought that ‘it would be a warm night’, and Makepeace’s heart would plummet, for she knew what that meant.
Makepeace could not bring herself to protest. The memory of her desperate grovelling on that first night made her feel sick.
If someone throws aside their pride and begs with all their heart, and if they do so in vain, then they are never quite the same person afterwards. Something in them dies, and something else comes to life. Afterwards, it was as if some understanding of the world had sunk into Makepeace’s soul like winter dew. She knew that she would never feel safe or loved as she had before. And she knew that she would never, ever beg that way again.
So she followed her mother to the graveyard each time, stony-faced. She had learned from the little mouse in the chapel. The ghosts were not cruel bullies who could be reasoned with. They were predators and she was prey, and she would need to be stubborn, fierce and alert to survive. Nobody else would save her.
Inch by painful inch, Makepeace started to build her own protections. As the rain thudded and her breath wisped in the cold air, Makepeace recited home-made prayers and invented words of banishment. She learned to brace against the scrabble and buffet of the dead spirits, and to lash out at them, even though the contact sickened her. She imagined herself as Judith from the Bible, standing in an enemy camp with her borrowed sword, a general’s blood bright on the blade. Come near me, she told the night whisperers, and I will slice you to pieces.