Page 47 of We Live Here Now

Freddie

The smell hits me like a wave as soon as the alarm wakes me. A vague rotten stench hanging like mist in the room, so strong that it almost makes me gag. I go out to the bathroom, closing the bedroom door quietly on sleeping Emily. The smell is worse here, thicker, like food rotting in a bin in the height of summer. The landing window is closed, and I think this is one time she could have bloody opened it in the night and I wouldn’t have minded. God, the stink is foul.

I should wake Emily up, but I don’t want to face thatI told you soexpression that she does so well. And anyway, this smell might be something completely different from what she claimed to have experienced before. Iso was so drunk at the party she might well have vomited somewhere upstairs, forgotten by morning, and not cleaned it up.

My jaw’s tight with irritation as I try to keep my breathing shallow and head up to the third floor barefoot. Iso has never been good at cleaning up after herself. I don’t know how Mark puts up with her, banging body or not, because there’s no way I could live with someone that high-maintenance. After those few months living alone when Emily was in the hospital, even she feels high-maintenance. I find it hard to remember how much I missed her now. Did I really want her to come home? Sometimes I’m so tired that I can’t remember our lives before this house at all.

The stench of awful decaying wetness is even worse on the top landing, and I cover my face in the hope that will help. It can’t just be vomit, surely? There’s nothing up here that I can see though, noteven any tiny droppings, evidence that maybe rats or mice have died under the floorboards, although it would have to be a whole nest that had died to come close to this smell.

As I head toward the primary suite, which seems to be the source of the odor, I hate to admit it, but maybe Emily really did smell something up here. And if so, what’s causing it? I push open the door to the bedroom and fight back a gag and cough as a wall of stink hits. Something is very wrong in here and it panics me. I avoided telling Emily but I bought this house without a survey. What if this is going to cost a fortune to repair before we can sell?

I stumble over to the window, holding my breath, and quickly tug at the lock and push the window wide, hooking the lever to hold it open. It’s still dark outside even though it’s after six and icy air immediately tumbles into the room, embracing me, but I don’t care. It’s deliciously clean and sweet and I momentarily drink it in.

I wedge the bedroom door open and hurry back down the stairs, happy that the smell is already diminishing behind me even as the temperature drops. Still, I think, as I go back to the bedroom to get dressed, happy to see Emily is still fast asleep, she always goes on about the house being too hot. See how she likes it cold.

I don’t bother with coffee and sneak quietly out to the car. Whatever’s going on with the house is going to have to wait. We can’t afford to fix anything anyway.

From somewhere on the roof of the house I hear a bird cawing into the dawn and another answering from somewhere on the moor.Emily will be up soon, I think, as I head down the icy lane and pause at the postbox at the edge of the village to slide the signed life insurance renewal form in. A headache starts thumping behind my eyes as I watch the envelope disappear.Why couldn’t she just have died?All my problems would have been solved. I’d have been free.

She could still die, a tiny voice inside whispers, and the headache blooms into a migraine.The vicar thinks she’s obsessed with the suicide victims on the crossroads and all the strange things in the house.

There’s a lot of medication in the house too. It would be easy for her to make a mistake. Take too many.

59

The car sends clouds of steam and smoke up to the sky as it disappears down the lane. The raven watches it go, the man inside. The raven does not like the man,no, not at all, not anymore, nevermore, but doesn’t know why. He used to like him, but now the man makes his feathers twitch and ruffle. The man has been in the house too long.

Bright Wing is waiting for him somewhere beyond the wall. It’s the cusp of dawn, and as much as he wants to fly, he will wait until light. He does not like leaving his dead mate alone in the dark. It reminds him of how he left her to die in the darkness of the chimney, and then he finds he cannot move. Guilt turns his wings to heavy lead.

Bright Wing calls for him again, impatient. She is more impatient than Broken Wing was in the happy days when her wing was whole, before the shotgun blast brought out the worst in her. The pecking. The rage. The frustration.Peck peck peck.Sometimes he’s sure he can still feel her pecking him in the night, her beak sharp and cold on his soft, warm chest. He thinks she would still peck him if she could, for being whole and healthy and clean-winged.

He waits until the sky begins to wash away the blackness with blue hues, and then finally he prepares to leave for the day. To join Bright Wing and hunt and enjoy the skies with bloodied beaks and full bellies. It’s only as he leaves the roof that he sees the window below is open. He hovers, staring at it, that slit into the house. The hungry house. He can’t take his eyes from it.

Feed me, the open mouth whispers to him on the wind that his black spread wings surf across.Give her back to me.

Before he knows what he’s doing, before he can change his mind, he darts to the roof and picks up her vanishing husk, now just a few feathers clinging stubbornly to brittle bones, and tosses her through the open maw of the house, into the upstairs bedroom.

She lands, facing away from him, a ghost of his love on the floorboards, and as soon as she does, a gust of sharp wind blows, and the window rattles free and slams shut. He stares through the glass, as inside the bedroom door slowly closes too, trapping his dead mate’s corpse inside.

At least she’s in the warm, he tells himself as he turns and flies away, wishing that the heavy weight of guilt was so easily disposed of.At least she’s out of the cold.He’ll come back one last time tonight to say farewell. And then he’ll be gone.

60

Emily

I wake at seven thirty just as a gray-blue washes through the darkness outside. Birds caw in the distance, already up and darting around the moor.

Warm under the covers, glad that Freddie left without waking me, I realize that for the first time in ages I’ve had a proper deep sleep. No bad dreams. No coma. No accident. And actually my leg doesn’t hurt too badly this morning, rather than waking to the deep, dull ache that makes me want to stay in bed rather than have to move it. Maybe I’m turning a corner.

And soon I’ll have a hundred and fifty thousand pounds.It’s a strange and alien thought, and for a minute it’s almost as if it was a dream. I’ve blackmailed Mark. I really have. I don’t know how I feel about that. Relieved, for sure. But also disturbed by how easily I did it.

My phone pings with a text from Merrily saying they’ll drop some equipment over later in prep for starting the job next week. There’s snow forecast and they want to make sure they can get everything up the lane now in case it gets icy. I answer that it’s okay, and if I’m out just do whatever they need to do as the gates are unlocked, but my stomach drops. At some point I’ll have to come up with a reason to delay most of the work I’ve planned with them if we’re going to sell the house. There’s no way I’m spending that big a chunk of Mark’s money on this place.

You wouldn’t have a hundred and fifty thousand pounds if it weren’t for this place.

I pad into the bathroom. It’s true, even if it goes in theam I going mad or is this post-sepsis syndromelist of crazy things in my head. Ifthe bathroom door hadn’t stuck at those couple of inches, then I’d have come out and bumped into Mark, who would then have panicked and made up a reason for being awake and gone back to bed. And then, if the boot room door hadn’t opened, I’d never have been able to get the recording of him and Cat together. It’s just a coincidence; it has to be. There’s no such thing as ghosts, and if there is a draft, then that could easily have opened the boot room door. It almost makes sense, but as I brush my teeth I push the bathroom door forward and back and it moves smoothly, no hint of stiffness. Maybe there was a door wedge I hadn’t seen and the door caught on it. I look around for one, but I don’t find anything. I look to the bathroom mirror, and no steamy writing appears to give me clues.You will die here.That gives me flutters of disquiet even if the study has since remained undisturbed. If itwasme, it was probably my hospital fears coming out from my subconscious. But still.You will die here.No one wants to see that.

Stop it, I tell myself.You’ll be away from this house soon and it won’t matter.

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