In her bathroom, everything was arrayed tidily, in the order she needed.
They had to be ground down, she decided; one simply couldn’t swallow so many any other way. Caroline had taken the boxes from the medicine cabinet, popped the pills out of the blister packs, each one making a satisfying metallic crackle as they broke through the silvery packaging. She’d brought the small mortar and pestle up from the kitchen, the one she kept for dry ingredients, and stood it on the white marble of the vanity unit. She dropped the tablets in, absently counting them as if it mattered, then began the painstaking process of turning them into dust.
In the end, the small mound of white powder wasn’t enough. Or perhaps it was, but she didn’t really believe it. She wanted to be certain; didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Next came the bottles—so many bottles!—the pills larger, harder to crush, but she managed it. She could do it. She could do anything, as long as she concentrated on one task at a time. Behind her, cold radiated, a frigid comfort.
Then the stairs, one at a time, carefully cupping the mortar with both hands. Easy. Down was easiest. One thing at a time.
In the kitchen, she poured milk into a saucepan and put it on the stove, the click of the lighter making her flinch until the gas caught with a blue sigh. From the pantry, the canister and the sugar bowl. From the cupboard over the sink, a mug, the biggest, his favourite.
The powders, the mixing of white and brown, until no one could tell the difference; the sound of the milk as it heated, simmered, threatened to boil over.
And finally, she stood at the bottom of the stairs, took a breath, kept her voice steady and called upwards.
“Hot chocolate?”
Rebecca Lloyd
DUST
REBECCA LLOYD, an author and fiction editor from the south of England, writes short stories and the occasional novel. She was the developmental editor of The Female Ward by Debalina Haldar (Thames River Press, 2013), and the co-editor of Pangea: An Anthology of Stories from Around the Globe, (Thames River Press, 2012).
She had two short story collections published in 2014—Mercy and Other Stories from Tartarus Press and The View from Endless Street by WiDo Publishing. A third collection, Whelp and Other Stories, was a finalist in the Paul Bowles Short Fiction Award that same year. Her story ‘The Reunion’ was reprinted in Best British Horror 2015, and her novel Oothangbart will be published by Pillar International Publishing in 2016.
“In ‘Dust’ I was attempting to write an ambiguous story in which it wasn’t clear if the subject matter was about ghosts or really about madness.” reveals the author. “The story concerns a ferocious married couple who continually fight but are unable to leave each other, and the effect they have on their two daughters.
“The setting for the story is based on a house with extensive gardens that I once knew, and scenes at the dinner table are very roughly based on dinner table scenes from my own childhood…so they came in handy, after all.”
MUCH HAS DEVELOPED since the day in April I stumbled out of the Quiet Garden with blood running freely down my cheek. The intensity that has arisen over the months cannot be quelled, and I find myself engaged now in a monstrous negotiation, the nature of which I scarcely comprehend, and one that shifts ground continually. As much as I would keep Beth naïve, I sense in her silences that she is on the edge of recognition. I am touched as much by her innocence as I am by her fierce protectiveness of me—but I would keep her in ignorance for I have yet to comprehend the matter myself. I know only that I am involved in urgent entreaty on her behalf, yet I feel my resourcefulness weakening daily.
It is already November and the numbing draughts have taken up their habitual places and creep at will though the old kitchen. Beth has padded the windows with newspaper, and outside the sky is inky and swollen. She is determined to stay, and I can do nothing more to urge her to leave. There are many repulsive details I keep from her, but lately she has come to understand a little of what we are up against, although she struggles to deny it.
She has locked all the doors to the unused rooms upstairs, thinking to make the top corridor safe. At night she is anxious, and would have it that we sleep in the same room together as we did when we were children, as if by doing so things would change. I do not try to convince her otherwise; conversation between us has taken a strange turn lately. She and I should have much to talk about for we have not seen each other since the day she left in 1905, less than a six month after our parents died.
She does not tell me about her life in Edinburgh, and she does not ask me how I have fared here alone—as she would have it. She asks me oblique questions and watches me all the time when we are together in the house. She wishes to protect me, she says, just as she did when we were children. She is older than me by seven years and her memories of our childhood differ from mine; I do not recall her protection. I remember only suffocating resentment should I find her in my hiding places. On many occasions in the summer months, I spied on her from the Quiet Garden, daring her to tread the path that would lead her to me, but she never did. She stayed instead in company on the south lawn playing with the dogs. She fancied that were one of us to be there, the other could be free. She declares that we were close as children, and would be so again, were I to allow it.
The Quiet Garden stands above the lower lawns. Curved steps spotted with orange lichen lead up to a platform of ancient pitted stonework no bigger than a large room, and surrounded on three sides by gigantic yew hedges. The place has a penitent heavy feeling about it that attracted me singularly when I was a girl. A stone ornament in the shape of a Greek urn stands off centre in the square, and it was close to this, on an old bench, that I would sit reading. Chinking blackbirds warned me if someone was approaching, and there was time to slip away through a narrow passageway between two overlapping hedges before I was found. The place was my refuge. As soon as I was released from company, I hastened there to the silence, relieved to be cut free from the panting of the dogs, my sister’s pale face, and the rough bitter jokes our parents flung at each other between their deck chairs all through the summer days.
I am certain that it is Beth’s return that has brought about the feverous escalation. Although through the years, I have been aware that the two of them do linger, it is only since Beth came home that they have made themselves so very obvious. It was barely two weeks after she arrived when I first found myself in conflict with them. I had walked the gardens, the south lawns, the nut tree path, and up to the stables and fields beyond. I returned then to sit in the Quiet Garden. It was late afternoon, chilly but bright, the sun silvering the air around me. I cannot tell now if the phenomenon had been sudden or gradual, and as useless as it is to say, the only words I can find to describe it are that things started to bend. It was as if I had swooned, but the swooning was outside me. The edges of the flagstones appeared to warp, and staring at them did not return them to their proper place. I looked away and noticed that the yew hedge on the west side was curving inwards.
I became aware that there was moisture on the back of my neck, and reached my hand up. A bubbly wetness covered my palm. I stood up quickly and looked behind me, and as I did so, what I took to be a shower of small stones slashed at my face. I was conscious of the abnormality of the thing; the force with which the objects hit my cheeks and brow would have needed some visible person to be no further away than three or four paces.