She was alone. The little fence that had run around Makepeace and Mother now ran round only Makepeace, cutting her off from the rest of the world.
Everyone else in the house prayed as usual, but with extra prayers for Mother. Makepeace found she could no longer pray the way she had been taught was right, baring her soul before the Lord. She tried, but her insides seemed to be full of a wild, white emptiness like an October sky, nothing she could put into words. She wondered whether her soul was gone completely.
On the second night, alone in her room, Makepeace tried to force the lid off her feelings. She made herself pray for forgiveness, for Mother’s soul and her own. The attempt left her shaking, but not from the cold. She was afraid that God was listening with cold, implacable wrath, looking into every rotten crevice of her soul. And at the same time she was afraid that He was not listening at all, had never listened, would never listen.
The effort wore her out, and afterwards she slept.
Tap. Tap, tap.
Makepeace opened her eyes. She was cold and alone in bed, with no curve of Mother’s back beside her. The loss was vaster in the pitch blackness.
Tap, tap, tap.
The sound was coming from the direction of the shutters. Perhaps they were loose. If so, they would rattle all night and keep her awake. Reluctantly she rose from the bed and felt her way to the window, knowing the room too well to need a light. She stroked the latch and found it fastened. And then beneath her fingertips she felt a tremor as something tapped the outside of the shutter again.
From behind the wooden slats, she heard another noise. It was so soft and muffled that it was barely more than a tickle in the ear, but it sounded like a human voice. There was something terribly familiar about its tone. Hairs rose on the back of Makepeace’s neck.
There it was again, a smothered sob of sound, close against the other side of the shutter. A single word.
Makepeace.
In a hundred nightmares, Makepeace had battled in vain to keep dream-shutters closed and stop maddened ghosts rushing in to attack her. Her hands shook at the memory, but still her fingers rested on the latch.
The dead are like drowners, Mother had said.
Makepeace imagined her mother drowning in the night air, flailing in slow motion with her black hair floating wide. She imagined her helpless, alone, desperate for something to cling to.
‘I’m here,’ she whispered aloud. ‘It’s me — Makepeace.’ She pressed her ear to the shutter, and this time thought she could just make out the words of the muted response.
Let me in.
Makepeace’s blood chilled, but she told herself not to be afraid. Mother would not be like the other dead things. It was different. Whatever was outside, it would still be Mother. Makepeace could not abandon her — not again.
She unlatched the shutter, and opened it.
Outside a few dim stars glimmered in a charcoal sky. A clammy breeze seeped into the room, tickling her with goosebumps. Makepeace’s chest tightened with the certainty that something else had entered with the wind. The darkness had a new texture, and she was no longer alone.
Makepeace was filled suddenly with a terrible fear that she had done something irrevocable. Her skin was tingling. Once again she felt it, the tickle of spider-feet across her mind. The reaching, tentative touch of the dead.
She flinched back from the window, and tried to steel her mental defences. But when she thought of Mother, her private incantations became as useless as nursery rhymes. Makepeace closed her eyes tight, but she found herself remembering Mother’s face, looking as she had by candlelight on that first night in the chapel. A strange creature, with an unreadable expression, and no softness in her at all.
There was a wintry draught against her neck, the breath of something breathless. A tickle against her face and ear — an escaped strand of her own hair, it had to be. She froze, breathing shallowly.
‘Ma?’ she asked, in a whisper so faint it barely grazed the air.
A voice answered. An almost-voice. A molten mess of a sound, an idiot slobber, the consonants broken and spilling like egg yolks. It was so close to her ear, it buzzed.
Makepeace’s eyes flew open. There — there! — filling her vision was a swirling, moth-grey, distorted face. Its eyes were holes, its mouth a long, wailing droop. She lurched backwards away from it, until her back hit a wall. She stared and stared and wanted to be wrong, even as it lunged hungrily for her eyes with fingers of smoke.
Makepeace closed her eyes only just in time, and felt a cold touch settle on her eyelids. It was the nightmare, it was all her nightmares, but now she had no hope of waking. She covered her ears, but too slowly to stop herself understanding the soft, horrible sounds.
Let me in . . . Let me in . . . Makepeace, let me in . . .
It felt its way across her mind, her defences. It found the cracks made by her grief, love and memories, and tore at them with cruel, eager fingers. It ripped pieces out of her heart and mind, as it dug its way in. It knew the way past her defences, the path to her softest core.
And with the savagery of terror, Makepeace fought back.
She lashed out with her mind at the thing’s smoky softness, and felt it scream as she mangled and tore it. The loose pieces of it flailed senselessly like severed worms, and tried to bury their way into her soul. It grappled and clung and raked at her. It could form no words now, only whines and wails.
Makepeace did not mean to open her eyes again. But she did, just for a mere instant, at the very end. To see whether it was gone.
So she saw what the face had become, and what she had done to it. She saw fear and a rictus of something like hatred on its twisted, vanishing features.
It was barely a face at all. But somehow it was still Mother.
Afterwards, Makepeace did not remember screaming and screaming. The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the floor, blinking in the light from her aunt’s taper, and trying to answer the family’s questions. The shutter was ajar, and banging slightly in the breeze with a tap-tap-tap noise.
Aunt told Makepeace that she must have fallen out of bed during a nightmare. Makepeace needed her to be right. It was not completely reassuring, since she knew that ghosts battled in dreams were sometimes real. But, please God, not this ghost. This one could not have attacked her, and Makepeace could not have torn it to shreds. The very thought was unbearable.
It had been a dream. Makepeace clung to this idea in desperation.
It was only a week later that rumours spread of a ghost abroad on the marshes. It was said to haunt a particularly lonely stretch, too soggy for the cattle to graze, and striped with stray paths where the footing could be only sometimes trusted.
Some unseen thing startled a wandering pedlar by crashing through the reeds, leaving a mangled path behind it. The local rooks were found to have abandoned their rookery, and the wading birds had fled to other parts of the marshlands. Then the Angel Inn, lurking on the outskirts between town and reedbeds, found itself a haunt of more than just sailors.
‘A vengeful spirit,’ Aunt called it. ‘They say it came at sunset. Whatever it was, it knocked in a door, caused a world of damage and beat some strong men black and blue.’
Makepeace was the only person who heard these rumours with a painful stab of hope as well as fear. Mother’s grave was on the edge of the marshlands, not so very far from the Angel. There was a horror in imagining Mother’s ghost rampaging maddened, but at least if it was at large, that would mean that Makepeace had not torn it to pieces after all. At least she had not murdered Mother a second time.