She made her way to the rear of the ambulance, reached out and took hold of the handles, felt the cold bite of chill metal against her fingers and palms, felt rather than heard something bump behind the doors, and then swung them open.
Everything was in its place. The coffin and its inhabitant were still on the lower ledge off on the right side, where she had placed them, and the straps around the wooden box were still tight and fastened. She climbed in, crouching and pulling on the padded nylon cables; there was no give in them. She looked around, seeing nothing that shouldn’t be there, nothing loose that would have explained the movement or the sounds. Experimentally, she placed her hands on the end of the coffin and pushed, wondering if the noises had been caused by it moving up and down rather than swinging sideways, but the casket remained still. Something inside it, then? No, she had watched as the dead man had been placed inside, the padding arranged around him to prevent precisely the kind of movement she was wondering about.
There was nothing on the other ledges, three of them, which could have moved. The rear of Elise’s ambulance was, as ever, neat and clean and a fitting cradle for the dead on these, the last of their courses.
The engine, then, or something mechanical underneath the vehicle. She would simply have to drive carefully and hope she made it to Tunstall’s, then make a judgement there about whether it was safe to drive back. She returned to the front of the ambulance and climbed in, shivering in the warmth. With the door shut and the belt back across her chest and securely clipped she pulled away, keeping her speed low.
The road was rising now, curling around one of the fells. It would fall and rise several more times before she reached Tunstall’s, she knew, and wondered if the ambulance would make it. She dug her phone from her pocket and checked it; a good charge but not much signal.
Another curve in the road and this time something definitely moved in the rear of the ambulance, banging hard against the side and setting the vehicle rocking outwards on its axles before it fell back to stability, distorting the vehicle’s balance for a moment. This time, the bang had been accompanied by a noise that might have been a sheet tearing or something flapping—a long low noise, only just audible above the sound of the engine. Her foot jerked on the accelerator, sending the ambulance lurching forward and onto the other side of the road before she could bring herself and it back under control, return them to the right side of the centre line and to a safer speed.
Before Elise could do anything else there was another bump, this time even harder, jolting the vehicle and making the wheel twitch in her hands, along with a long, drawn-out noise like something dragging across metal from somewhere behind her.
The dead man’s bag of belongings slithered across the footwell, the top pulling open and spilling the contents out. There were jeans and a dirty brown coat, pieces of paper covered in writing, and feathers. They must have been in the pockets of the jacket, dozens and dozens of them, hundreds of them, small and large, black and white and brown, speckled and plain, floating out in drifts. The smell of them, of the clothes, was rich and earthy, grimy with sweat and death and cold. One of the feathers settled on Elise’s hand and she shook it off violently, not liking the greasy feel of it.
Another bang, another moment where the ambulance belonged not to Elise but to itself, another correction and control regained and still they were travelling on, Elise wanting to get to Tunstall’s now, to get out of the ambulance and into light and company.
Feathers drifted around the cab, dancing and spinning, as she pressed down on the accelerator, urging the vehicle to gather up the road and loose it out behind them, now sure that the problem wasn’t the ambulance or its engine but whoever was in the ambulance’s rear, whatever was in the ambulance’s rear.
She risked a glimpse behind her. As she turned, there was a long cracking noise and the unmistakeable sound of wood splintering and something falling, the vibration of it rattling through the floor, heavy against her feet. There was a dash of pale movement in the slit, a pallid shape that rose behind the pane and then fell again, not a hand or a face but something indefinable, as though it was wrapped in linen or muslin.
The engine cut out as Elise jerked back from the glass, reaching out to turn the key even though she was still coasting forward, gears in neutral and nothing, nothing, no reaction from the ambulance except to slow and slow, inertia and the slope bringing it to a halt soon, too soon.
The internal lights clicked off with a sound like a gunshot, the dashboard’s glimmer suddenly extinguished. She put the handbrake on, ignoring the increasingly loud, repeating sound of flapping behind her, not looking at the glass, not looking at whatever might be peering through at her, turning the key again and again trying to start the vehicle.
And then the thing with the head like a dog seated next to her turned and drew back lips from teeth that were huge and which were the colour of old, tarnished ivory. She shrieked and jerked back from it, fumbling for the handle and opening the door and falling out into the road a single frenzied jumble of flail and cry. Her shoulder struck the gritted concrete and an off-colour bolt of pain leapt through her upper body and she cried out again, helpless.
A series of taps and shudders ran through the vehicle, tiny vibrations that she could hardly see, visible only as a shiver against the distant night. Feathers, more feathers than she had ever seen before, more than could have possibly been in the bag, drifted out after her, curling and circling in thick clouds, floating upwards instead of down, rising on breezes Elise could not feel.
There was another bang, this from the centre of the ambulance, as though something had struck the partition between the space of the dead and the space of the living, then the long drawn-out groan of something opening and the unmistakeable sound of coins falling into a dish or cup.
For a moment Elise had the terrible sense of having offended something vast and old and she screamed, a wordless apology wrenching out of her. In the now-dark cab of the ambulance, the dog-headed thing shook its head and grinned and held its arms out, and from all around her she heard the sound of beating wings.
Angela Slatter
HOME AND HEARTH
ANGELA SLATTER is an author who specialises in dark fantasy and horror. She has won five Aurealis Awards, been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award.
She’s the author of, amongst other collections, The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings. Recently she has had two novellas published: ‘Ripper’ in Horrorology: The Lexicon of Fear, and ‘Of Sorrow and Such’ as one of the new Tor.com novella series. Forthcoming from Jo Fletcher Books are the novels Vigil and its sequel, Corpselight.
“‘Home and Hearth’ originally appeared from Spectral Press,” she explains, “as part of their chapbook series. The story came about when publisher Simon Marshall-Jones asked me if I’d write him a ghost story. I’ve always wondered about parents whose children kill—those who go to any lengths to protect their little monster, and those who decide they’re responsible for protecting the world.
“I wondered what it must do to you, to think that this is your baby—they come from you and yet they’ve done something dreadful that you’d never dream of doing…what does it to do your sense of self? I wondered about such parents, how they cope, and what their lives become. Thus ‘Home and Hearth’ was born.”