Bitterhall by Helen McClory (story books to read .txt) 📕

Then he dropped his head and breathed out in a long shuddering sigh and fell back down onto the pillow. Curled himself up, fists to head and legs up to his chin. His breathing was coming in feverish judders. Little whispers emitted between gritted teeth could have been speech or release. As I was making to leave, the pressure in the room seemed to drop. That’s how I’d describe it. I felt my throat tighten, and I swear I saw bright blotches gathering, the kind you see when you get lightheaded. Slowly and slightly at first, window panes began rattling. The bed Tom was lying on began rattling too. It rattled up and down, against the wall, scraping, in a way that it would do if someone was shaking it, or fucking in it to a really weird pattern of motion. Tom, to my eyes, did not appear to move. He was solid as a stone in his curled position. I got closer. His eyes were open, and unmoving, his mouth a little open, his bottom teeth showing. Daniel came up too, reached out a hand as if to pull the blanket back or up, and the rattling intensified. He whipped his hand away as if burned.

‘What the fuck . . . ?’ he whispered.

The rattling went fainter. It stopped. Tom lay there in his strange sleep, twisting himself. A small still gleeful voice in my head said, ‘Oho, look at this now.’

Folie à Deux a Real Risk

Daniel and I sat in the kitchen, the book on the table in front of us. A neat, slightly scuffed rectangle bound in reddish cloth. It looked reassuringly placeable by age and classification. On the first page was the name of the writer and his place of address, in big swirling inky loops. Ostentatious, I thought.

‘Could it have been some kind of fit?’ Daniel said.

‘He was just dreaming. The rattling, though . . .’

‘If you’re sure,’ he said. ‘Dreams are strange things, you know. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by what he said.’

‘Maybe the “her” wasn’t me,’ I said, ‘when we sleep we go to be with the mass of human subconsciousness. It could be anyone at all he wants to stab, living, dead, made up.’

‘Houses have funny settling floors. When we stood on it together, that probably explains the rattling.’

I nodded, like I believed him.

‘Have you read any of this?’ he said then, and he reached over and tapped the book with two fingers. A strange motion, I thought. Like knocking on wood.

We made coffee, heavily sugared. I wasn’t going to sleep again. I could have – I’m not so easily shaken. But I am easily intrigued by psychodrama and Daniel is easily led into telling stories, and even before he began on the story of this particular book, well, I think a part of me was lit up wanting this to be the moment when I saw a possession come on before me.

‘This diary isn’t mine, by the way,’ he began, still whispering as if Tom might hear us from the next room. I settled in. Let me say again I am not that fanciful. I knew logically it was Tom just having a nightmare that was shaking the bed and us probably making it worse by blundering about; his some human fear, present even in sleep, of moving predation in the dark. But I also felt excited by that girlish wish for this, this overwhelm by malign forces stealing into a body that couldn’t really take its strength. It didn’t really matter if this was caused by fictional sources of torment, by dreams only. The overspill, oh that was it. I was ready.

‘Where does it come from?’ I said.

There’s a kind of intimacy in sharing a foolish idea, in the middle of the night with both of you in your pyjamas, fretting up a storm of possibility.

‘My friend Mark. It was his – I stole it. I’ve been reading it, and, you know, it’s fascinating. James Lennoxlove, intermittent stories of his life and his days, from about age nineteen up until thirty or so, I think. I thought Tom was reading it casually. I noticed it had been moved about. But I think now something about it may have unsettled him, I mean in a profound, lasting way.’

‘It’s a young man’s diary, right?’ I said, nodding at it. ‘Anything in it beyond the usual sordid stuff?’

‘Yes, actually. As a younger man, James Lennoxlove was witness to a murder, one night before a party at a neighbour’s house. It’s not much, just a few pages of description, then he drops the subject. The next entry is over a year later, and he doesn’t reference what he saw at all. I haven’t closely read the whole thing, so my thinking is he must reference it later, and in more detail.’

‘A murder?’

‘Yes, of a maid by a groom. In the stable.’

‘With the candlestick?’

‘No,’ he said, laughing, ‘with a knife, as you’ve already guessed.’ I picked at the book and opened it to a page and read,

I am so much happier than I could have imagined with this new person in my life. We have gone to track the deer in the Bitterrave forest of an idle afternoon though not to hunt them but to sketch, because art is this person’s great love. Not me, but that I can accept, because—

‘Person,’ I said, ‘here, about going sketching deer. He seems to go a long way to avoid saying the gender.’

‘I noticed that, too,’ said Daniel.

‘It could be nothing. I mean, what Tom was doing. Disrupted sleep.’

‘You’d noticed he’s been stressed lately though.’

‘Could be work. Could be any number of things,’ I said, my mind glowing so brightly I imagined Daniel could see right into my head, see the red and orange lava slopping about in there.

‘Spooked. No, you’re right,’ Daniel said. He sipped on his coffee for a moment. We both sat