Mirrorland by Carole Johnstone (best ereader manga .TXT) 📗

large wooden table and its old scratches, dents, and stains still takes up the lion’s share of the space. I can see Grandpa sitting with his bad leg up on a neighbouring chair, shiny smooth head and vast sideburns, throwing back his heart meds the same way he did orange Tic Tacs, banging his big fists on the wood whether happy, angry, or sad.

I can see Mum turning away from the range, the skin around her eyes pinched like dried wet newspaper, soup splattering onto the floor from her ladle, her voice high so Grandpa could hear her. Someone gets stabbed in Edinburgh three times a day. El and me – maybe eight, nine, probably no more, because Mum’s hair is still mostly fair, nearly blonde like ours – looking at Grandpa with wide, alarmed eyes until he grins, flashing white teeth. Poor bastard, eh?

He was from the East End of Glasgow, although he’d been an engineer on North Sea fishing boats since he’d turned sixteen. Gran had died of cancer when Mum was still a teenager. Every year on the date of her death, Mum would shut herself in her bedroom and not come out until the next day. But not Grandpa. He was ferociously stoic. He was like a caricature in one of Mum’s stories: a hard life forged into a hard man, whose world had neither changed nor grown, no matter how many boats he’d sailed on, how many places and people he’d seen. But he’d also spend whole summers in the back garden with only El and me for company, picnicking and laughing and joining in our endless treasure hunts; on rainy days, building ever more elaborate blanket forts and castles indoors. When he went to Leith’s weekend market, we’d sit at the kitchen table for hours, waiting for the ‘Bluebell Polka’ or ‘Lily of Laguna’ whistled off-key and his distinctive limping silhouette through the glass hallway door, the canvas bag full of tablet and toffee swinging from his elbow. He’d been the salve for Mum’s indiscriminate terrors and omens. Always sitting still except for his hands, pretending to listen as she talked in low, urgent whispers, rolling his eyes as she fluttered and flapped.

Worry gies wee things big shadows, hen. Jist chuck it in the fuck-it bucket.

This was where we lived. El, Mum, Grandpa, and I. In this cosy, ugly room. I’m smiling as I look around at the wonky beige wood units. At the old boiler, its silver flue plugged into a hidden chimney that was forever trapping birds. I used to listen to them, scratching and flapping, the sounds muffled as if they were underwater. Beneath the old hanging Clothesmaid, there’s a new Smeg fridge-freezer, an incongruent sapphire blue. And beyond the towering Georgian window, with its many small glass panels framed with hardwood glazing bars, the old apple trees sit and sway.

I turn back towards the open door into the hallway and the grandfather clock, the telephone table, all those china bird plates. There’s a hollow space inside my stomach. It’s easy, I know, to be tricked – fooled into believing something is real when it’s not. Especially if you want to believe it. But this house is more than old memories. It’s like a museum, a mausoleum. Or a moment of catastrophe, preserved like a body trapped under pumice and ash. Was that why El had needed to buy it, to fill it back up with all that was lost? Did she see that auction notice in the paper, and arrange a viewing out of little more than curiosity, hardly expecting that it would be like stepping back into her childhood? It would have been hard, I suppose, to come and then go, to resist its pull. Although I was always the more sentimental one. El mastered the art of chucking it in the fuck-it bucket before we’d even reached puberty.

I retrieve the dustpan and brush Ross has left on the floor, sweep up all the broken china I can find. As I’m crossing the kitchen to the scullery, I come to an abrupt halt close to the Kitchener. I stare down at the long join between two tiles, its grout cracked, stained dark. My heart skips a beat. I feel suddenly sick, look quickly away. A bell rings – loud and sudden and close. My heart skips another beat and then starts to gallop. I turn around, stomach squeezing, fingers and toes tingling, and my eyes go straight to the wooden bell board just inside the kitchen door:

Dining Rm   Drawing Rm   Pantry Bath Rm

Bedrooms

1   2   3   4   5

Every spring-mounted copper and tin bell below each room has a star-shaped pendulum hanging from its clapper. And every room in the house apart from the kitchen has a bell pull: a brass-and-ceramic lever connected to long copper wires hidden inside the walls, along cornices and behind plaster. Whenever a lever was pulled, those wires tightened around pivots and cranks, shuddering through rooms and floors and corridors until they reached the kitchen, where they would shake the coiled spring of a bell mount, ringing its bell loud and long. I remember that those pendulums would swing for minutes after the ringing had stopped, and so whenever El or I wanted to guess which room’s bell pull had been pulled by the other, we would stand inside the entrance hall instead. A rudimentary telepathy test that convinced no one because each bell also had a distinctive peal. We had swiftly grown bored with the game; only Mum seemed to love it, clapping her hands or giving us one of her rarely delighted smiles every time we got it right.

The ringing comes again, louder, shriller, and I jump. I’m staring at the bell below Bedroom 3 when something whispers very close to my ear:

There’s a monster in this house.

I shiver, bite down on my tongue. None of the bells or pendulums are moving. But it takes far too long for me to realise that