Itch!, page 16
Bringing Jacob’s apothecary cabinet and map to the attention of Wilkes, however, came with risks. Old Jacob could be innocent of nothing more than curiosity and coincidence. He was ninety-something years old, arthritic, thin, and could only walk with the aid of a stick. And then there was the fact Laurel had had sex with someone shortly before she died. Forensic tests had found soil from a number of locations on her remains; Josie doubted Old Jacob had the strength to hump a body around, much less throw it off something. Not that his obvious frailty would cut any ice with Wilkes. Nor would it matter that he wasn’t trying to hide anything. He had given Josie the map, and his knowledge, freely. He didn’t deserve to be dragged through the fire.
Still undecided what to do about Old Jacob, Josie set aside the map and went back to Laurel’s notebooks. It was clear that the hallucinations she’d suffered followed the same theme as Josie’s: ants and worms and other crawling things. The deranged sketches turned her stomach, but she ploughed on, forcing herself to pore over every page, scrutinising the minutest detail in the hope of finding some clue to the mysterious event that had befallen Laurel around the time of her sixteenth birthday. But as she pondered what could have made Laurel fall apart, blow up her life so completely, Josie was aware that she too was withdrawing, hiding from the outside world, hiding from the pain of seeing Lena again, and the feelings her arrival in Ellwood had stirred up.
She’d half-expected her dad to call or text her, to apologise, to check in on her, but her phone remained silent on the bed next to her. After a while, she couldn’t bear glancing over at the black screen, waiting for a notification to come in, so she put it in Airplane Mode and hid it in a drawer. Her dad knew she was here. If he wanted to talk, he could come find her.
He wouldn’t though; her father had never been one for apologies. Angela said he was stubborn, but Josie wasn’t so sure. She thought it was easier for him to believe his own innocence than to admit to any wrongdoing. She wasn’t sure he even understood that what he’d done was in any way wrong.
At some point, she would have to have it out with her father. At some point, she might have to face her ex, too, might have to stand up for herself, might have to assert some boundaries, maybe even call the police on her. But right now, she didn’t have the energy. While playing detective from the safety of a well-made bed wasn’t a long-term solution to her unhappiness, it at least made her feel as if she was doing something to make a difference. To right some wrongs.
What she found in the dead girl’s sketchbook were endless repetitions of the same things. Insects. Worms. And the masked figure, depicted in a progressively bizarre series of poses. In one sketch he was leaning towards the base of a tree, ants flowing from beneath his cloak, watering the roots like water from a spout. In another, he was running after a naked woman, who ran screaming into the mouth of a cave. On the next page he was embracing a sculpture that resembled the straw queen.
The final sketches were hastily scrawled, lacking the meticulous detail Laurel had previously favoured; the paper was splattered with coffee stains and ink blots. These sketches featured a hooded figure floating in mid-air above a path that wound through trees. Its head was thrown back, the peculiar red-black mask still covering the face, both arms raised as if to summon something momentous into being.
Behind the figure, its form scrappily depicted in a blur of red and black biro, a woodpecker beat its head against the trunk of an oak.
The path seemed oddly familiar, the way the narrow trail went through the trees, the bench scrawled off to one side, the bank of bracken leaning in on the left. There could be a dozen places like that in the Forest of Dean, but Laurel had added a waymark post to this drawing, sticking out of the pen-hatched ground not far from the oak tree. It had words on it, words that looked as if they had come from memory, if only because they were too plain and prosaic to have come from anywhere else:
Short trail
←
Long trail
→
Car park 680m
↑
Underneath those three lines, a small acorn, carved into the wooden sign.
Seeing the carpenter’s mark made Josie reach for her phone again. She turned off Airplane Mode. Nothing.
Sometimes her father was hired by the Forestry Commission to make waymarks like the one in Laurel’s sketch, for placing alongside popular footpaths. He was always happy when these jobs came in, because they paid decently enough, and kept him busy for several weeks. He charged extra for installation, which the Commission let him do. Nobody knew the Forest better than Dad, aside, perhaps, from Josie’s mother.
Where was this particular sign? Josie tried desperately to remember if her father had ever mentioned a specific location she could tie the sketch to, but the harder she concentrated, the more her brain skidded away from the topic, as if something inside her memory didn’t want to cooperate. This frustrated Josie, who felt, finally, as if she was on to something tangible and significant, a trail she could follow.
But try as she might, she couldn’t dredge any place names from her memory.
Her phone buzzing on the bed beside her eventually snagged her attention.
It was an unknown number. Not her dad.
Of course it isn’t him, she thought bitterly.
Josie answered it and found herself on a call with Mrs Howell.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Laurel’s mother said. ‘I got your number from Detective Wilkes.’
‘I don’t mind, Janet,’ Josie replied, knowing why the woman was calling.
‘Did you take the notebook?’ Mrs Howell didn’t bother with any further pleasantries. ‘Laurel’s notebook. There’s one missing from her desk.’
Josie sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll bring it back.’
‘See that you do,’ Janet Howell replied coldly. ‘You can push it through the letterbox. I won’t say anything more about it. But don’t come here again, ever. Understand?’
‘Yes.’
The call clicked off, leaving Josie sick and disheartened.
When she looked down at the sketch again, the little acorn she thought she’d seen on the bottom of the waymark had gone. She brought the book up close to her face, double checking. Her vision wasn’t the most reliable thing, these days, especially when worm-thickened.
No acorn.
She’d imagined it.
Christ, Josie, way to project.
The location of the sketch still looked familiar to her, though. Like a place she’d walked past, or through. In a region as insular as the Forest of Dean, where the many beauty spots were regular haunts of locals, the fact that Laurel and Josie had walked the same trail, passed the same waymark post at some point, was only to be expected. Especially given the number of walks Josie had taken with her mother.
A rising tide of movement in Josie’s belly signalled the unwelcome awakening of the colony. It was almost a relief. They’d been quieter, of late.
Too quiet.
Why now? she wondered, flipping the notebook shut. What strange compulsion did they need to fulfil all of a sudden?
The ants calmed, as if listening to her thoughts. Josie, exhausted, rolled up the map. Threw her phone across the room.
Lay back on the bed, listening to raindrops drumming on the windowpane.
When sleep came, it was not restful. Josie dreamed of flowers with long purple stems, delicate leaves threaded with veins, clusters of white blooms opening slowly, as if answering the call of spring, or awakening to sun . . .
But instead of basking in the glow, each blossom, as it unfurled, was screaming.
The flowers then disintegrated, collapsing into a whirlpool of ants and other tiny creatures. They swirled on the spot for a long, long time before forming a trail, a living column, the head of which was shaped like a spear, or an arrow, pointing in one direction only.
Josie was powerless to stop herself from following it.
And when she woke from the dream, blue-lipped, shivering, wrapped only in a coat over her T-shirt and knickers, she was no longer at the King’s Arms.
She was outside, in the freezing cold.
It was morning. The rain had stopped, a weak sun was making its way over the horizon. She was kneeling on a freshly re-frozen path, slick with hardened puddles, lined with large oak trees, a long stand of them. The path itself was stone-littered and sandy, the sand grey and fine and glittering with mineral deposits. Further along, two goldfinches sat on a frozen log, pecking a hole through the thin layer of ice that had collected in a hollow.
There was a bench nearby, and a waymark directly before her.
The waymark, Josie saw, blinking, had three lines chiselled into the wood.
Short trail
←
But after the first line, the lettering was unreadable, marred by three, deep jagged scratch marks splintering the wood beneath.
The Devil’s claw marks.
Josie looked at her own hands. They were caked with filth, and raw from tugging at something. She saw she had been scrabbling at an object secured to the base of the waymark, in a patch of ferns and bracken, where the soil was darker, and glossy ropes of ivy tried their best to get between her and the thing she was trying to grab hold of. The ivy stems looked like pronounced veins running up the trunk of the sign.
High above, a woodpecker tapped its beak against a knot in one of the oak trees.
And Josie’s fingers eventually closed around the tied neck of a sodden, bulky hessian sack.
She managed to untie it, though not yet fully awake.
Inside, she saw bones.
Chapter 31
The temperature plummeted further as the morning wore on, falling unusually low for the time of year. A bitter hoar frost covered every part of the Forest, so thick it could have been snow, except this was crunchy, with thorn-like icicles clustered around every twig, branch, blade of grass, leaf. Cold swirls of milky air danced as the sun crept reluctantly higher, staining the upper part of the horizon a deep amber, which paled to gold, then primrose yellow.
Josie leaned against a squad car in the Nagshead Nature Reserve car park and watched the sun with blankets draped around her shoulders, breath curling in the air around her head, nose and lips numb, insides even more numb.
She couldn’t believe it had happened again.
A white tent was being erected in the distance, on the edge of the path through Nagshead, where she’d woken. How, she couldn’t even begin to fathom, which terrified her. Nagshead was over an hour’s walk from the King’s Arms, along Coleford Road, and she must have navigated the route in complete darkness, in the middle of the night, with no memory of having done so.
This wouldn’t go down too well with Wilkes, she was well aware. Any minute now she expected the detective to appear, neck pinched by her signature starched collar, an equally pinched expression on her face as she took in Josie’s presence at yet another crime scene.
What was she going to say in her defence? The truth?
Josie didn’t think the truth would suffice, not when it came to human remains.
The ants stirred in her chest, pressing in on her lungs. Josie drew in a painful breath, to remind herself that she was still alive.
Men in Tyvek suits carefully measured the ground around the base of the waymark where the sack containing human bones had been left. A cordon ran around a large swathe of the oak tree stand, across the public footpath, and into the bracken beyond. Josie gazed at the white tent, at the Tyvek suits beetling around it, and wished she could remember a time before the discovery of not one, but two dead bodies, fly-tipped like rubbish in the woods. How she had felt as a well-meaning woman going about her business without the invasive memories of dead flesh, of greened bone and empty eye sockets penetrating her existence.
A policeman handed Josie a steaming flask cup of coffee. She took it mutely, unable to summon the strength to thank him.
Two more officers gossiped quietly behind her.
‘She’s either psychic or she’s the unluckiest woman alive,’ one of the officers grunted, not appearing to care if Josie heard him or not.
No, she thought, in response. No.
Once is unlucky.
Twice?
Twice felt like something else.
She gripped the warm plastic cup in her hands and felt the deadly cold of winter scold every other exposed part of her. It would be nothing in comparison to the scolding Wilkes would give her when she finally made an appearance.
Josie looked down at her cup. A tiny ant crawled out of her tear duct, dropped from her eye and plopped into her coffee.
She didn’t bother to remove it. Josie drank it down in one large, burning gulp, for that, she assumed, was her lot now.
Part Three
2005
Josie could smell woodsmoke. Rich and appealing, the smell of safety in the winter, of comfort, of warm foods and warm toes after a cold, dreary walk. In the cottage, when her mother had been alive, the fire had always been lit on returning from any winter rambles she and her mum took together. Wet socks would get hung in front of the fire to dry out. Josie would watch them steam while her mother made hot chocolate in the immaculately tidy kitchen, adding cinnamon and nutmeg and marshmallows. The fire was rarely lit these days. Josie’s father said they couldn’t afford the logs, even though that was his trade, his currency. He had enough chunks of oak and pine and beech in his shed to light a thousand fires, but that would be burning money, he always said. Only a fool would burn their livelihood like that.
The smell tickling Josie’s nostrils now came from a thin column of white smoke that rose above the trees just beyond the path she trod. She walked cautiously towards it, reluctant to turn back, hoping she wouldn’t be spotted through the trees in her school uniform, pushing her bike.
The path wound around the edges of Darkhill Ironworks, a collection of nineteenth-century stone and brick structures deep in the forest where men used to experiment with metals, with the making of steel and alloy. Josie knew this because her mother had told her all about it, on one of their many excursions together. Not that you could tell from what remained of the ironworks. Right now, pushing two wheels along the narrow, bumpy path, Josie saw a stepped rise, covered in blackberry bushes, honeysuckle and masses of ivy, through which an old, tumble-down wall would occasionally be glimpsed. Rubble, ruin. Nothing more exciting than that. Not a place where men played with the elements.
Her mother had brought Josie here several times when she was very small, and tried to teach her about the terraced structures, the secret experiments carried out behind the walls, in the bowels of the forest, while the Industrial Revolution raced along elsewhere, changing the course of history, of nature, and of the people caught between the two.
Tungsten steel, her mother had said, as if that should have meant something to her, but Josie had been more enchanted by how the green had grown back over the ruined ironworks.
It looks like a castle, Mummy! Her mother, unimpressed with her contribution, had merely snorted in response.
Do you think fairies live here?
The expression had softened.
Yes, darling, came the reply. I rather think they do.
Not long after, Josie’s mother stopped bringing her. She’d been too sick to take Josie anywhere. Her eyes sank into her face, her soft, pink cheeks hollowed out and turned white. She vomited repeatedly. The local doctor, when he was finally called, was baffled. He talked of blood tests and scans, but nothing ever came of it. No cancer, no medical reason for the decline.
Josie loved her mother but had found the smell of sickness difficult to be around. The illness was confusing to a child who didn’t understand how it could change a person so completely in such a short space of time.
And then, one day, her mum was gone entirely. No lingering presence in the bedroom. No smell, no vomit sounds, no groans of pain or people coming in and speaking in hushed voices. There was a complete lack of anything associated with Josie’s mother.
She still found that absence difficult to cope with. It was like leaving a conversation partway through, expecting to return to it, pick up right where she’d left off, only to find she couldn’t – unless it was in her own imagination, and that was too painful.
Still, coming to these places made her feel closer to her mother, somehow.
The ruins were even more crowded by foliage now, overgrown despite a valiant attempt to mow the grass along the pathway, to erect fences to keep the trees and bracken back. The forest was not interested in staying away; it wanted to reclaim land lost to it hundreds of years before. Saplings sprouted all over the site, much to Josie’s joy; red cedars, oak, plums, willows, even a rare redwood. Black beetles crawled across the path in their dozens before her, too many to completely avoid. The slow ones popped beneath her bike tyres, a noise both satisfying and mildly disgusting.
Sound carried in this strange little pocket of the forest, echoes of Josie’s own footsteps, birds singing a morning song, high up in the branches of the trees, the rattle of dying leaves falling. It was winter, the early days of it. Soon the Devil’s March would wind its way across the land, off to the Devil’s Pulpit.
But first, Josie had feathers to collect. The woods next to the ironworks were famous for woodpeckers and Josie wanted to replenish several balding patches on her mask before the next procession.
And, she wanted to spend some time alone. Not alone like she was in her classroom, alienated from her classmates by grief. Not alone as she so often was in the cottage, listening to the ticking walls and creaky pipes.
Alone in the forest, with trees, with birds.
Josie was disgruntled to find that someone else apparently had the same idea.
She kept pushing towards the narrow plume of smoke, feeling nervous. She should be at school. Her dad would be furious if he found she’d taken her bike and bunked off to collect feathers and leaves.
