Dark Sister Read online

  DARK SISTER

  by Graham Joyce

  G&S Books

  Dark Sister is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Copyright © Graham Joyce 1992. All rights reserved.

  This E-book edition first published 2012 by G&S Books.

  Graham Joyce is a multiple award winning author. He grew up in the mining village of Keresley near Coventry. In 1988 he quit his job as a youth officer and decamped to the Greek island of Lesbos, there to live in a beach shack with a colony of scorpions and to concentrate on writing. He sold his first novel while still in Greece and travelled in the Middle East on the proceeds. He is a winner of The World Fantasy Award; is five-times winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel; is twice winner of the French Grand Prix De L'Imaginaire; and was the winner of the American O Henry short story award in 2009.

  His website is: www.grahamjoyce.co.uk. He tweets as Grahamjoycebook

  Other novels by Graham Joyce:

  Dreamside (Kindle available)

  House Of Lost Dreams

  Requiem

  The Tooth Fairy (Kindle available)

  The Stormwatcher

  Leningrad Nights

  Indigo

  Smoking Poppy

  The Facts Of Life

  The Limits Of Enchantment

  Memoirs Of A Master Forger by William Heaney/ How To Make Friends With Demons

  The Silent Land

  Some Kind Of Fairy Tale

  (Short storie)::

  Partial Eclipse & Other Short Stories

  Tales For A Dark Evening (Kindle available)

  (Children & Young Adult novels):

  Spiderbite

  TWOC

  Do The Creepy Thing (Kindle available)

  Three ways To Snog An Alien

  The Devil’s Ladder

  (Non-fiction):

  Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular

  TO: MY MOTHER AND FATHER, WHO NEVER PUT ME THROUGH ANY OF THIS

  When Alex had ripped out the boards, in a cracking and splintering of wood, he called Maggie. The kids came too, along with Dot, their Labrador-cross, who had a sniff at the results.

  "I knew it!" Maggie said. "It's beautiful!"

  Alex was more doubtful. "It might be when it's cleaned up."

  It was a standard Victorian fireplace, with a wrought-iron and tiled surround. Maggie was already rubbing at the tiles, exposing bright, floral patterns. The grate was intact, though choked with soot and debris.

  "It's got to be swept. Kids, take all this wood out the back."

  Alex liked to have his gofors around when he was doing a job. Maggie was already making inroads into the debris with a dustpan and brush when she leapt back.

  "Ugh!"

  The children crowded closer. "What is it?"

  Maggie looked as though she wanted to be sick. "Come away from it."

  "What is it, Mummy?"

  Alex poked at the debris in the grate. Mixed in with the soot were what seemed like sticks and straw. "I see it," he said. "It's nothing. Only a dead bird." He lifted it out on the dustpan. It was a large, black-feathered bird with wings spread. Obviously it had been there for some time. Desiccated, though not decayed, its feathers were choked with dust and soot, and its eye had whitened over. Its beak hung open. Alex waved it at the kids.

  "Ugh!" said Amy.

  "Ugh!" said Sam, with fascinated eyes.

  Even Dot seemed to wince.

  "Take it away, Alex."

  "It must have nested in the chimney at some time. Then got trapped. Happens all the time."

  "What will you do with it, Daddy?"

  "We'll have it for Sunday dinner. Blackbird in parsley sauce."

  "Take no notice, Amy, he's being silly. Get it out of the house, Alex."

  "Will we give it a proper burial, like Ulysses?" Amy wanted to know.

  When Amy's goldfish Ulysses had died, they'd given it a state funeral in the back garden, so Alex took the bird outside, dug a hole for it, and covered it over.

  Amy patted the soil with the spade. "Will it go to heaven now?"

  "Yep," said Alex. "If you look up at the sky, you'll see its white soul flying towards heaven."

  It was an afternoon in late October, and the sky was as blue as a bird's egg. Amy looked up at the sky for a long time. Then she looked back at her father. He could see that at five years old she was already beginning to distrust some of the things he said. It made him sad.

  "Let's go back inside."

  It had all started the night they'd gone over to the Suzmans for dinner. First the car wouldn't start.

  "What are you getting mad about?" Maggie said.

  It was the kind of remark guaranteed to infuriate Alex. He wasn't mad until Maggie had told him not to get mad. Now he was mad. He took a deep breath and tried to think why he was getting angry. It had started to rain, the kids were playing slap in the back of the car and Maggie was looking at him. She wore too much blusher and eye-shadow. Whenever they went to the Suzmans, Maggie felt insecure; and whenever Maggie felt insecure she put on too much makeup.

  He got out of the car, flung open the bonnet, and was impotently fiddling with the plug leads when the engine coughed into life, fan blades narrowly missing lopping off the tops of his fingers. Now he really had something to be mad about, and this made him feel a lot better.

  Maggie still had her hand on the ignition keys. "Magic touch," she said, smiling at him as he climbed back inside.

  "Trying to amputate my fingers, were you?" Her smile disappeared. He looked at the heavy red lipstick at war with her flaming chestnut hair. Who could stay angry with someone so nervous about meeting old friends that she had to plaster her face like that? Alex couldn't. "Forget it."

  He turned to the kids in the back. "If you two don't stop slapping each other, I'm going to bang your heads together." He'd never banged heads, and probably never would, but Maggie turned and nodded to them as if to say he means it.

  "This is supposed to be enjoyable," she said.

  "So why isn't it enjoyable?" said Amy.

  "That kid's five," Alex shouted. "Five!” And Maggie knew everything was fine.

  And the visit to the Suzmans had turned out to be enjoyable after all. Amy and three-year-old Sam were whisked off by the Suzman kids, giving their parents the chance to show Alex and Maggie around their monster of a new house. Bill Suzman, a commercial lawyer, had managed to get in before the house prices went crazy. Alex had missed the boat, as usual.

  After Alex and Maggie were conducted on a grand tour (where they were expected to admire the way the towels were folded in the bathroom, and to comment on the parquet floor) Bill cracked open the wine. Anita drew attention to their new integrated sound system and located the right music before they settled down in front of a rip-roaring log fire.

  Maggie looked into the flames, firelight reflecting in her hair and in the wine glass at her lips, and Alex knew exactly what she was thinking. Marriage, proximity to another person, he supposed, cultivated knowingness, a rough telepathy. It was something you acquired in exchange, when ardour faded. But he loved to do things to make her happy, and if she, too, wanted an open fire, she could have one.

  Nice fireplace," Alex observed.

  "Original to the house," Bill said, getting up to stroke the marble mantelpiece. He always stroked anything he wanted others to admire: his CD player, his mantelpiece, his wife.

  "Look at those tiles. Perfect condition. Been boarded up for years. We had to rip out an old gas fire to get to it."

  "That old fire had protected it," said Anita.

  "You wouldn't believe," Bill continued, "the state of the thing we took out. You're an archaeologist, Alex; you'd appreciate
it. One of those sixties plastic log-effect things. You plug 'em in and a rotating fan casts shadows on a very unconvincing orange light."

  "Ghastly," Maggie agreed, and they laughed more at the word than at Bill's description.

  "We've still got one," said Alex.

  There was a pause. "I'd forgotten about that," said Anita.

  "What the hell," said Bill. "Is dinner ready?"

  Dinner was indeed ready, because Anita had hired some help for the evening, a gesture beyond Maggie's comprehension and budget. Silverware gleamed, crystal glimmered, and no one seemed unduly worried when Sam seemed deliberately to tip a glass of claret on to the snow-white tablecloth.

  "Why did you do that?" said Alex, exasperated.

  Sam giggled and showed everyone a mouthful of half-chewed dinner.

  Otherwise the meal went well. Alex and Bill cackled a lot and guzzled wine. Anita said sophisticated things about antiques, in which she had a "hobby" business, and Bill stroked her arm a great deal. Maggie paid attention to keeping the children in order. Then she won the others' interest by telling them about a psychic evening she'd attended.

  "It was a birthday present from Alex," she said.

  Alex coloured slightly. "It was what she asked me for. It was a joke."

  Maggie began to relay the events of the evening, but she caught herself in the middle of the story. The two men were gazing at her, entranced by her enthusiasm, but Anita was looking at her strangely, so she allowed the story to tail off.

  But it had been a pleasant evening; the conversation had stayed light, friendly. With the kids asleep in the back of the car, Maggie drove them home.

  Alex, mellowed by the wine, said, "Why did you stop halfway through your story about the psychic?"

  "I don't think Anita liked me grabbing the limelight."

  "Why d'you say that?"

  "Just a feeling."

  "It's your imagination. Anyway, to hell with Anita. That was your story, and your chance to tell it. She wouldn't stop for you."

  "No. You're right. I think Anita doesn't like me because I've got red hair."

  "Nonsense. You're drunk."

  "No I'm not. Anyway it's not my hair. Not just that anyway. It was a ... feeling. Sometimes I look at people and I...."

  "And you what?"

  "Never mind."

  "Go on! Say it!"

  "No. You'd just laugh at me. You always do."

  "Yes, I probably would."

  "Did you see that lovely open fireplace, Alex? Do you think ? .."

  "Don't ask. The answer is yes."

  Which is how Alex had come to be tearing out the old gas fire from their lounge the following day, a Saturday. The moment he'd seen Maggie staring into the fire at the Suzmans, he'd remembered what had irritated him.

  Every time they visited Bill and Anita's immaculate house, Maggie returned discontented. Consequently his precious weekends (designated for watching Sports Report from the comfort of the sofa while lubricated by tins of beer) were spent trailing around home improvement stores the size of aircraft hangars. Death by DIY. Previous visits to the Suzmans had spurred the conversion of the cellar into a playroom for Amy and Sam, and the erection of a lopsided conservatory at the rear of the house. However long-suffering he was about it, Alex just wanted to make Maggie happy. He would look at her moist eyes and her long, curling chestnut hair, like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and generally he would give in to whatever she wanted.

  With the gas disconnected, the fire had lifted out easily enough. Alex had had more difficulty with the nailed-up boarding. A strong timber frame had at some time been constructed out of thick lengths, leaving only a small vent for the passage of the gas fumes up the chimney. But now that part of the job was done. Meanwhile someone had to stop Sam juggling with the loose soot, and Alex decided that was women's work. He put his coat on and adjourned to the Merry Fiddler.

  Theirs was a large Victorian villa with a huge, over-hanging gable. It was described by estate agents, when they'd first bought it, as a character property, and character properties were Maggie's enthusiasm but not Alex's. Character properties were like character people. Their qualities, entertainments, and rewards came in equal measure with their usually hidden but considerable faults. Alex had doggedly devoted much of his leisure time in the past five years to beating back elements permanently poised to invade the sanctuary he was trying to build for his family.

  There was the ongoing damp problem that made him sometimes wonder if the house were built over a river. There was a woodworm blight he'd poisoned into submission. There was a silverfish infestation astonishing even the experts from Rentokil. The high-ceilinged rooms had demanded the installation of powerful central heating just to secure the beautiful plaster mouldings round the light fittings. And he was still embattled over a roof leak which thwarted him by shifting nine inches every time it was "fixed."

  Embattled yes, and if occasionally he broke ranks and deserted the front line in favour of the Merry Fiddler, Maggie let him go. She said nothing as he went out, and checked the Yellow Pages for a chimney sweep.

  She primed the children for the arrival of the sweep. They'd seen Mary Poppins on video, and she told them stories from her own childhood. When she was a kid, the chimneys had been serviced by a local man who played ventriloquist to keep curious children amused. He pretended to have a midget assistant who spoke from the chimney, and would send Maggie outside to check if his brush had cleared the chimney pot. Amy and Sam were fascinated. They sat by the window, waiting eagerly for the man to arrive. Maggie told them they should "touch" the sweep for luck.

  When he arrived that afternoon, Maggie was enormously disappointed that he wasn't black from head to foot, and that he brought with him a suction machine instead of a set of brushes. The modern version was a bespectacled young man arriving for his first job of the day in a clean set of blue overalls. He had no sweep's humour for her children. When Amy and Sam ran forward to touch him almost before he got through the door, he looked at the spot on his overalls where the children had put their fingers. Then he looked (sourly, Maggie thought) at the children. Maggie quickly showed him where to set up his gear.

  Sam rapidly lost interest in this unpicturesque sweep and trotted away to play with Dot, but Amy remained, watching his every move. She was utterly spellbound. She inched forward, gazing over the shoulder of the man as he knelt before the fireplace, until she was almost breathing on his neck. Maggie was about to shift her out of his way, but she was checked by a second thought, almost like another voice in her head. Why not? Why not let her look?

  The first thing the sweep did (though it didn't seem right to call him a sweep when he was only a man with a machine which sucked) was to put his arm up the flue, bringing down more debris, straw, and sticks into the grate.

  "Hello," he said, withdrawing his arm. "Something else here." He was holding some dirty object in his hand. It was a book. He scraped away the soot and the dust. "People hide things up chimneys, then forget all about them."

  He flicked the pages open, as if looking for something pressed between the leaves. Maggie was mesmerised. She felt a thrill of possessiveness, almost childish in its intensity. My book, she wanted to say. My house, my chimney, my book. She objected to his large, sooty thumbs imprinting on the cover. She wanted to snatch it from him, but instead she said, "Do you find many things?"

  "I once found five hundred quid—"

  "Sweeps are lucky," she blurted, unable to take her eyes from the object in his blackened hands.

  "You didn't let me finish. It was in forged- notes." Finding nothing between the pages, he lost interest in the book.

  "Here." He passed it to her and proceeded with the task of sweeping, or rather sucking, the chimney.

  That evening they had a crackling log fire going in the lounge. They all sat round it staring into the flames as if it was some new form of light entertainment, except for Dot, who commanded the place in front of the fire and immediately went to sleep
, as if the entire thing had been introduced for her benefit alone. The newly exposed fireplace showed off to great effect. An ornate, black, cast-iron surround was inset with beautiful ceramic tiles in rich autumnal colours. The design had an oriental feel, depicting peacocks and other exotic birds entwined in mysterious looking shrubs and trees. Maggie had polished them until they gleamed. The glaze on the tiles was perfectly preserved, not a single chip or scratch anywhere.

  It was, they both agreed happily, even better than the Suzman specimen.

  Alex was initially fascinated by what had been found hidden inside the chimney and every now and then broke the hypnotic spell of the fire by reading aloud from the book.

  It was a leather-bound diary. It was soiled and slightly charred, but still legible. Alex struggled to decipher the handwriting, and insisted on reading out what seemed to be mostly shopping lists. His first flush of excitement soon dulled though, as Maggie knew it would. Maggie's had not; but for some reason she felt compelled to disguise her interest in the thing.

  "It belonged to someone who lived here," said Alex. "Actually lived here over a hundred years ago!"

  Maggie pretended to stifle a yawn. "Will! you give it to your museum?"

  "No, I bloody won't. It'll end up in a box on a shelf in a cupboard in a back room on a forgotten inventory."

  "Some archaeologist you are."

  "I know too much about the bloody business."

  "Did Daddy swear?" said Sam.

  "He said it's time for your bed," said Maggie.

  "No, he didn't," said Amy.

  Amy had a pageboy head of silky blond hair, and a habit of looking suddenly from under her fringe. Her eyes were the impenetrable blue-grey of the mist from a lake. They disarmed. They challenged. Sometimes it was mightily disconcerting to be wrong-footed by a five-year-old.