Itch!, page 25
She shifted on her own stool, body sore and aching from fatigue.
‘It’s so fucking simple,’ Wilkes said, eyes wide. ‘So fucking devious.’
‘They get carried along on the back of the Devil’s March. The queen is carried on her podium at the head of the March and we all skip along, dancing and singing, behind, for miles. Nobody is any the wiser that we’re actually prancing behind a live body, under all the straw.’
Angela rested her head in her hands. ‘I’m so very tired,’ she lamented.
‘Then,’ Josie continued, voice cold, ‘we throw them off the Devil’s Pulpit. The whole village helps. That only adds to his enjoyment of it. That’s your diversion, your distraction. The queen. It’s all a massive game, to him. A way of . . . controlling everyone, in secret. He likes making us a part of it. He likes us to be complicit. Like I was, as a kid.’
Angela wiped her face with her sleeve, as if cleaning away imaginary grime. Finn heaved himself up and sat as close to his mistress as he could, head resting on her knee. He whined softly, tail slapping on the floor as if to try and reassure everyone.
‘They’re alive when they’re thrown,’ Josie whispered. ‘Alive. Maybe conscious, hopefully not. It depends. They’re thrown off, to land in the valley below.’
‘Except for Laurel,’ Wilkes corrected. ‘He gave her too much of the toxin. She died before he could carry out his little ritual. She was in a poor state of health anyway. He overdosed her, then kept her. She was dead when she was thrown, months later. Like . . .’
‘Like he was punishing her for something?’
Josie thought about Old Jacob’s skimmingtons. The parades of shame. Scolds, flung from cliffs for being too loud.
‘Maybe she stuck up for herself too loudly,’ she said, grimly. ‘She survived him at sixteen, after all. She was a fighter.’
‘He used us. Abused our traditions. Made a mockery of all of us.’ Old Jacob had woken up. He glared at them all with bleary eyes.
‘Worse,’ Josie said. ‘He made us all accomplices.’
‘And after . . . after they’re thrown, what . . . ?’ Wilkes was still trying to work through it.
Josie sighed.
‘He goes back for them later, collects the queen. Loads them back into his trailer. It’s this custom-made thing that fits on to the back of his bike. He uses it to lug timber about. Except he doesn’t just use it for that. He also uses it to take the bodies home. To move them around. Nobody sees anything out of the ordinary, because they just see a straw queen. A bundle of hay in the back of a trailer. An effigy. Festival detritus. Not a girl. He takes what is left of them to one of the many wood bins he has, scattered around the Forest. Stores them there for as long as he wants. Sometimes years. Then he remembers them, unboxes them . . . And leaves them in prominent places.’
‘The last three, he left for you to find. Why not the ones before? The other six bodies?’
‘I don’t know.’ Josie frowned. ‘I’ve been trying to understand. I think it was because I was a kid back then. I think all this is about women, not girls. Or maybe . . . maybe he just got tired. Maybe he wanted me to figure it all out. Maybe, eventually, he wanted to get caught.’
Wilkes disagreed. ‘Usually, they think the opposite, they think they’ve gotten away with it so often that they will never get caught. They get sloppy, make mistakes. Very few of them get tired of the hunt.’
Josie didn’t know. ‘He used to make warm milk for me when I was little. I had problems sleeping. I woke up all the time and never knew why. People said it was because I was grieving Mum, but it wasn’t that. It was because I could hear him doing things.’
Grief, anger, shame. The feelings antagonised the ants, who coalesced around her lungs.
‘The milk always tasted too sweet. He said he put honey in it, but I thought it tasted more like caramel. It was hard to tell, exactly, because he’d always burn it in the pan.’
Angela looked unsteadily to the windows. To where her rows of jarred herbs, tinctures, potions and balms sat, on their sills.
Easily accessible, just like Old Jacob’s apothecary cabinet.
‘It wasn’t honey,’ the landlord said. ‘I don’t think he used on you what he used on them. He just wanted to keep you asleep, not paralyse you. He was more interested in making sure you didn’t interrupt him.’
‘I did, several times,’ Josie remembered.
Angela went over to one of the low casement windows, spent some time peering at the collection, then pulled a slim bottle from the sill. Brought it back to the fire.
‘I used to make this for my sister, when she couldn’t drop off,’ she said, holding the bottle out. Josie could see a label on the glass, one word scrawled in biro: SLEEP.
‘Chamomile, lavender, Valerian. Lion’s mane mushrooms. There’s a secret place they grow, up in the forest, that nobody knows about but me. The recipe is hundreds of years old, probably older, passed down through my family for generations. I had to sweeten it with birch sap, to take the bitterness out. It tastes a bit like . . .’
‘Caramel,’ Josie finished. ‘Too sweet for honey.’
‘I made a batch for your mum, when she was sick. To help her sleep through the pain. He must have kept it. Used it on you.’
More silence. The fire continued to pop and spit behind the glass doors.
‘But why?’ Angela said, eventually. She sounded lost. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. Why?’
Josie thought about Lena. About the joy that would flare within her whenever she was in control, exerting power over someone else. She was always happiest when she was at the centre of things, when she could influence or destroy. Her father had a similar aspect to him, only he went to greater lengths than Lena ever had to hide his true nature. He had made himself indispensable to the locals of Ellwood. He was foul to his family, but polite enough when it came to everyone else.
He was an expert wearer of masks, Josie understood, both physical and otherwise. Only Old Jacob had seen past the facade.
‘Because he could,’ Wilkes replied. ‘What other reason is there?’
‘Where do you suppose he is?’
Angela put the bottle back on its sill, running her hand across the jars. Her finger rings tapped against the glass, eliciting different tones from each container, depending on the contents and how full they were.
‘In the forest somewhere. Hiding.’ Old Jacob’s nose dripped again. He dabbed at it with a handkerchief.
‘In your old shed?’
Jacob shook his head.
‘No, he won’t go back there. If it’s even still standing. Too obvious. He knows we’d come looking eventually. That’s why he emptied out the shed at the cottage, too. He’s been preparing for this for some time.’
‘He left behind Emmet’s mask. Why?’
‘Maybe he wanted to leave you an heirloom.’
Josie didn’t think so.
Old Jacob shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. He could be anywhere. He knows the Forest better than all of us.’
‘The police won’t find him, is what you’re saying.’ Wilkes, exasperated, slid off her chair entirely and lay flat on her back on the flagstone floor, while Finn sniffed around her body, curiously.
Old Jacob snorted.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ the man said, something canny and cunning in his voice. ‘Justice will find him if the police don’t, never doubt it.’
‘What do you mean?’ Josie stared at Old Jacob.
‘Only that justice will find him swift enough. I know, because I can see her sitting on your shoulder.’ The old man grinned.
The skin of her left earlobe tingled.
‘Who?’
‘Who do you think? There’s only one true authority, around here. Only one person we pay dues to.’
‘The Devil? But you said “her”.’
Old Jacob’s eyes were huge with reflected flames and shadow.
‘What,’ he said soberly, ‘makes you think the Devil is a he?’
Chapter 49
Angela laid her head next to Josie’s in bed that night, holding her tight as she fell into a sleep marred by the weirdness of repressed memories, unearthed by the crawling, busy bodies intent on pushing all the bad out, to the surface, and away.
Josie drank in the landlord’s softness, and warmth, and let her mind take her where it wanted.
Another shed. The one that belonged to Old Jacob.
I sold it to him twelve year back, when he took over the making of the queens.
Threw in all my tools, too. My lathe, my chisels. My vice.
He said he’d use it for storage.
A shed in the woods. Chimney, smoking. Padlock on the door.
A bike, propped against a tree. Multicoloured, pannier on the back, basket on the front. Neon bright. A woman on a bench, braid dangling down. More braids on a rack on the shed wall. Woodsmoke and heat, and a pounding headache at the back of her skull. Bales of hay under the bench.
Josie’s skin itched so much she needed to get rid of it.
In the dream she bolted away from the shed, left her father grunting and straining as he ejaculated messily, and went outside, into the cool forest. Under the largest beech canopy, she found a long stone, made jagged by three deep claw marks. Josie ripped off her coat, her sweater, her shirt, her jeans. Down to her bralet and knickers, she rubbed herself, dragging her body across the rock, pumicing away the shame and the anger and the guilt and the realisation that she had been, even if unwillingly, a witness to a crime so terrible she could not bear it.
Under her skin, she found tightly packed wheat, hay, and yellow straw blades all bundled together in a messy approximation of limbs, torso, breasts. The straw was infested with insects and critters of all kinds: harvest mice, nibbling at her grassy innards, ladybirds, thousands of them. Beetles, grasshoppers, crickets. Big, colourful butterflies. Flying ants crawled out from a darkness behind the straw blades and took flight, off to found their own, new colonies.
The forest flickered, shifted. Josie was rubbing herself across a milestone marker on Ellwood’s main street, just outside the King’s Arms. Her insides were no longer straw. They were rotting meat, maggoty and green.
‘Cor, she’s fucking heavy this time, mate, what did you put in her?’
Josie looked up.
Her father and several other men were unloading the queen from the small steel trailer he fixed to his bike, preparing to take her to her ceremonial platform outside the King’s Arms, where the Devil’s March always started from.
The whole town had assembled, Josie saw, in full regalia. Burning torches flickered in the night. A band played, dancers clacked ceremonial sticks together. People ate pies and drank mead and cider and ale from laden tables set up along the street.
Josie’s father, dressed in his bike leathers, helmet still on, visor up, smirked.
‘Well, yeah. I weighed her down with rocks. Last year her bindings broke, the wind took her and she got snagged on the treetops, remember? Nearly lost her before the end.’
One of the men chuckled. ‘Oh, God, I forgot that. We had a right rigmarole poking her down with poles and all sorts. Didn’t someone have to climb up and dislodge her?’
‘Me!’ a small voice piped up. It was a local kid, skinny, a strong climber. The kid looked a lot like Josie had, at that age. She had the same hair braid. She wore red Converse chucks.
‘Didn’t think you’d want it to happen again,’ Josie’s father shrugged. ‘So she’s put a bit of weight on this year.’
He slapped the straw effigy hard, on the thigh, then himself on the belly.
‘She’s not the only one.’
More laughter, raucous, with an edge to it. Dad had a way of getting people to laugh with him, even when they didn’t like him that much. He tapped into the fervour of the night. People were always excited for the Devil’s March. It was an occasion where a person could let off steam, drink, laugh, dance, eat, walk, exact pantomime violence on the body of a straw virgin. The festival brought out the raw in people, the primeval. A strange, mob-like energy fizzed in the air. The gathered crowds sucked it in and breathed it back out, recycled zeal.
The queen, silent, immobile, lumpish, was heaved into her throne. Heavy straps were buckled across her legs. Josie saw fluid leaking from the bottom of the effigy. No one else seemed to notice.
The smell, however, was harder to disguise.
‘Lord, she stinks a bit, this one, did you use manure straw?’
Josie’s father shrugged sheepishly. ‘Needs must,’ he said. Only it wasn’t manure, this smell. It was too sweet, too sour at the same time. A bad-meat smell, smothered with hay.
A crown of holly and ivy was placed on the queen’s head.
Four men, including Josie’s father, then lifted her palanquin up on to their shoulders, gripping the handles and jiggling them around to try and get a more comfortable purchase.
‘There’s a happy medium, John,’ one of the queen bearers complained. ‘She weighs a bloody ton! We’ve got miles to walk with this.’
‘Yes,’ Josie’s father said, turning and staring right at his daughter. His head was no longer his own, but that of an ant. ‘Miles and miles and miles.’
Josie woke up with a start, crying out. She found herself drenched in sweat and trembling, ants streaming across the sheets, every bit as distressed as she was.
‘What is it?’ Angela roused slowly, still drunk. ‘What?’
‘I think he’ll be back for the March,’ Josie gabbled. ‘I think he’s tied to it, to the performance aspect. The pageantry. I think he’ll be back. In a different mask. He’ll get a kick out of that. He’s going to come back, to join in. He’s coming back for the Devil’s March.’
Angela reached out in the dark, gripped Josie’s hand tightly in her own.
‘Then we’ll be waiting for him,’ she said quietly. ‘Come back to sleep, love.’
Chapter 50
Days passed. Torrential bursts of rain came and went, lashing the land and drenching it so thoroughly that all the fields, heathland and farmland around Ellwood became a spongy, waterlogged bog. Even the forested parts were nigh unwalkable, as mud and leaf mulch combined into a sticky, slippery mire that sent dog walkers and stubborn hikers tumbling to their knees and falling into puddles wherever they dared to tread. Angela quickly got fed up with sweeping tracked mud from the floor of the pub every day, so she installed old-fashioned boot brushes on the pavement outside for patrons to wipe their feet on, before entry.
She put up a small cardboard sign above it, at eye level, to be extra sure: Muddy Feet = No Service.
The locals who felt like braving the weather knew better than to argue. The ones that didn’t stayed home.
The pub fell quiet, apart from a few hardened regulars.
The King’s Arms stood warm and steady as storm after storm rolled in, battering the region, ripping thatched roofs to pieces, felling trees, blowing over chimney stacks and telegraph poles, smashing windows and loosening tiles. It was the worst succession of storms in recent history, according to the news, which Josie still watched each evening, only now she watched it on a small portable TV in the corner of the bar with Angela and Finn, background noise while they prepared the pub for service. Every evening she hoped to hear news about the dead girls, or her father, or something that would give her hope that justice would be served, but every evening it was the same succession of local interest pieces: disaster weather. Sports fixtures. Small disputes. A good-news tidbit thrown in for balance.
Josie knew, when it came down to it, that justice wouldn’t be served, not by the Devil like Old Jacob had said. No. It would be left to her.
That was why the colony had made a home in her. Josie found she had come to more peaceable terms with the infestation, perhaps because she had finally found a home of her own, with Angela, with Finn, with her cleaning duties and the locals who became an important feature of her daily existence at the pub.
But to Josie, the responsibility for righting decades of wrongs now resting firmly on her shoulders was intimidating, albeit inevitable. Her father had made her responsible for a lot, over the years. He had made her a homemaker, a surrogate wife, cook, parent to herself, and then, when he got bolder with his habits, he made her an accomplice. Josie would never get over the guilt of soundly sleeping while innocent women suffered within a stone’s throw of her childhood bed. Guilt was like a stain, and it leached into her very soul, but the thought of catching him, of somehow bringing him to account, kept her sane.
As did the thought of revenge.
It certainly kept the colony happy, knowing there was a plan.
A plan that the weather, which bore down relentlessly, was doing its best to sabotage.
‘The March will be a washout this year,’ Wilkes said one evening, thumbing through her phone and sipping her usual white wine. She wore her hair in a less severe style, and had done away with the starchy buttoned collars, opting for heavy knitwear instead. Josie thought the change suited her.
‘If the weather continues like this, we can say goodbye to any family reunions with your dad,’ Wilkes continued bleakly.
‘I don’t think a bit of weather will stop him,’ Josie remarked. ‘He might be many things, but he isn’t a fair-weather type of man.’
Josie remembered muddy boots on her mother’s clean floors. She should go back to the cottage, she knew, and clean up after him. That was, after all, her main skillset. Cleaning things. Tidying things. Putting things away. Setting the world to rights one mess at a time.
But it didn’t feel right to, not yet.
Not when he might come back and sully all her efforts.
Josie felt him out there, always, watching. Whether he was or not was immaterial. She felt his presence, as she had since she was little. Looming, overbearing, angry. Unpredictable. It was like a horrible itch between her shoulder blades, one she couldn’t quite reach.
‘I don’t think there is going to be a Devil’s March this year,’ Angela said, coming in from the back with a stack of firewood. She took it over to the burner and dumped it in the empty wood basket next to it.
