The Shame. A horror story
An entry to season 10 of the Lunar Awards
I never knew my father and my mother is a mystery. Jean, I call her; “mother” never seemed right and she didn’t mind “Jean”. I asked her, when I met her, when I was eighteen, when they took me to Dersingham Manor for the first time.
“What’s your name, Mother?” It took her a very long second to answer “Jean.” Like she had forgotten how to say it.
“Jean,” I repeated. “Can I call you Jean?”
“Yes. Yes of course you may,” she said, and then “My dear boy,” as an afterthought; something she had read somewhere. I am always “my dear boy,” to her. She never uses my name; didn’t when I met her for the first time, struggling to fit myself into my new distorted reality. Later, it came to me she hadn’t known it. My name is Elijah.
The Smeeth Lode. It doesn’t seem real, like so many places here. Words from another time. Words for things with different names now and their old selves forgotten within past times. The Fen Blow shimmers the sky-grey water which has guided me for miles along its unbending lines stretching to the horizon, a lesson in perspective. The wind paints the water in brush strokes onto the land; green and grey and vanishing. A horse on the middle path stops to argue with its rider as my car hums past it on the far side of the secretive water. I mustn’t miss the turning.
The sun breaks in and colours change at once; the waterway to blue and the dyke banks from ash and olive to gold and emerald. I must not miss the turning, but it’s easily done. An egret starts up from the water’s edge; a grey shirt dancing to the sky on a wire hanger. Then, there it is; a shadow behind a stand of poplars, the peculiar roofline of Dersingham Manor, Jean’s home, but never mine.
The gravel of the drive, bedded in moss and weeds, silences my arrival. I get out and wish for a better coat, standing in the portico of this ancient house that almost belongs to me. There’s still money in this vestige of a family. Is that why I came?
I ring the bell again and step back from the weathered door to look up and across the red brick and timber-framed frontage. Needs paint. It all needs paint. I scratch at the mortar between flint cobbles and black witch-coals, it’s sharp and hard with shell flakes. Built to last. But will it sell? There’s a sign up that nobody can see from the road.
“Hello! Hello Mr. ‘Lye-ja! Come in. Come in. I’m sorry. So sorry to make you waiting”.
Magda stands in the doorway, a force of nature, and very Polish. She’s cared for Jean for years; it’s a curious symbiosis which works because Magda has immeasurable capacity for cheerfulness, even here, even in this place. She’s a handsome woman. If I were twenty, no…thirty years younger. She bustles me into the warm kitchen. On the table is cake. She brings tea, talking all the while about nothing.
“How is she?”
“Oh you know her. Always is the same, Jean, your mother.” Magda’s eyes are sad. They tell me “Soon.”
“Shall I go up and see her?”
“Hmmm. Maybelater?” She always runs those two words together. “When after I take her some soup. Go unpack. I made up your room.”
My room.
It’s the room I always stay in, but the house has never been home. Never felt like…home. Always felt like something else. It’s a house with presence. It was a home for a grand family, once; wealthy, influential. Now it's just Jean and Magda. And me.
Jean outlived them all, even her younger siblings. God knows how. I wander the rooms downstairs, touching things, remembering how the place is laid out. Locked glass cabinets in every room, stuffed with china and silverware, taxidermy, beetles on pins. They were antique even when Jean was born. Does anyone know where the keys are? Memories in all these dusty things. Jean barely leaves her rooms; would she notice if I had the auctioneers round? Even just for the silver and Meissen? I think about the inevitable as I creak up the back stairs to my room.
Some time later I wake. I’ve overslept and for a moment I’m confused; why is there a sandwich and some cake? Magda has left me a plate by the side of the bed. I must have been dog tired not to wake, the place is a giant creaking floorboard. But it’s not late, I realise when I check my watch in the gloom. I scratch my head and sniff at the sandwich; garlic sausage. Of course. I bite the nose off it. The best bit. It might not be late, but it would be for Jean and the paperwork.
I’d better go and see her, just so she knows I tried.
I walk to her room at the far side of the house, the North Wing, slowing to a tip-toe creep to listen at the door. She’s talking, no…singing. It’s a strange lilting sound, and the voice doesn't sound like it can be hers. Magda? I can’t make out the words and I press my palms and an ear to the door. Whatever friction was keeping it closed in the ill fitting frame gives up and the door squeaks open. The singing stops.
“Magda?” her voice is her own again.
“No Jean, it’s me, Elijah, your dear boy,” and I enter. It's cold. She’s sitting up on a chaise long in the oriel window, all cushioned and blanketed. A candle on the sill is the only light, a signal flickering into the dusk outside. It could be a painting by Vermeer, this room.
“Oh! My dear boy,” she says, with genuine warmth. I walk over and lean down - an air kiss to each cheek is permitted but nothing more than that. Her skin is miraculously unwrinkled for a woman her age and as white as a grey can be. I feel the down of it like moth wings against my own cheeks which are vivid in comparison, blotched from drink, creased and yellowed by cigarettes. She smells of Coco Chanel, antiseptic, piss and peppermint.
“Jean, you’ll catch your death,” A hint of the fen wafts in as I pull the window closed. Marsh air - the roke - the dankness that floats above marsh waters.
“Nonsense!” she laughs through papery lips, a trace of white foam at the corners. Her laugh catches and rattles phlegm. I fetch her a tissue from her bedside.
“What were you singing?”
“Hmmm?”
“Just now, you were singing something. You stopped when I came in. What was it?”
“Oh, that. A lullaby.”
“A lullaby?”
“Yes. Meg taught me when I was naught but an innocent gal.”
“Meg?”
“My nurse. When I was a babe. Dearest Meggy. She would sing me to sleep. Then, after you were born, she taught me the words, old Fenland words. I forget their meaning.”
“Did you sing it to me?”
“Oh no, dear boy. They took you away from me. You and Meggy, both taken.”
I pulled up a stool to sit beside her and took her hand. We stared from the window out onto the marsh until all the light of day was gone, and then without turning she said “I sing it to your sister.”
“Do you mean Aunt Mary?”
“No dear boy. Your sister.” She began to sing again, and leaned over to nudge the window open. I gave her a kiss on her cheek and stood to leave.
“Not with the lips, dear boy,” She said, a firmness in her voice, “Germs.” Then she went back to singing.
“Goodnight Jean.”
I was at the door when she stopped singing again and said “They took her too, you know. They never let me see your faces.”
Out came the boy and Mrs. Burdle, midwife of sorts, cut the cord with bacon scissors, the best thing for the task that could be found in the house. It was an urgent call and the girl’s father had forbidden her to be taken to the hospital, or for anyone to call a Doctor. She would be delivered of her shame at home behind old iron doors. There was the family name to think of. Mrs. Burdle was known by word of mouth as the woman to call upon for births that needed never to have happened and children to be vanished away. The squalling child was swaddled to silence and given to Meg. Jean sobbed; it was a week past her 15th birthday.
“Take the boy out,” Mrs. Burdle directs in hushed tones. “She must not have him, not even for a moment. It will be all the worse for her to nurse him. Check that he’s right, fingers toes and the rest, yes? I’ll finish up the afters.”
Meg bobbed her head and left the room. She deferred to authority always, and Mrs. Burdle’s was a voice of experience. All the same, it was not nature’s way that a mother not hold her firstborn, wet and bloody and gumming blindly for the teat. How many had she nursed herself? It was always a joy. Meg bathed the boy and latched him to a breast for comfort. Then Mrs. Burdle called her back in, sharp tones told of urgency, of something wrong. Wrapping the boy and placing him in the crib she hurried back. Jean was wailing in the bed, a flannel on her brow, and Mrs. Burdle comforting her as much as her stern tones could carry any comfort.
“You’ve done well, my girl. But there’s something amiss and I may need to cut you. It will hurt, you’ll feel a sharp pain down below and inside, I will not lie, but it must be done. Soonest best. Drink this. Meg, take her hands and hold firm.”
More towels and a basin of hot water are brought. Mrs. Burdle takes the blade and calipers and gets to work, urgent and measured. The afters cannot stay inside or she may die. She curses the father for keeping his daughter here. She curses the man that’s done this to a girl and wonders if they are one and the same man.
She feels something giving inside and Jean screams through the morphia as it does. With a wet slap and slither, the bloody sack is drawn out to slop into the basin. But something else comes with it, and Mrs. Burdle leaps back, calipers scattering to the floor.
“Holy God above!”
Something black as oil slithers and flaps in the basin, blood and water splashing. Stunned for just a moment, she covers the basin with a towel and presses down, reaching for another.
“Whatever be wrong?” asks Meg. Jean is groaning, the morphia dulling everything.
“Jean. Jean! Listen to me girl. When you had your monthlies, did you swim the Smeeth Lode? In the Faine Broad?”
But Jean is insensible and can only moan, her senses are not fully in the room. She doesn't answer, but Meg understands and draws a sharp breath in, hand to mouth, eyes wide. She knows the tales.
“Take it, Meg. Don’t you look on it. Take it and put it out with the night water and think no more of it.” Beneath the towel something writhes, a red stain blossoms on the white cotton. Meg, head bobbing, hurries away.
That night, I had troubled dreams: I was lost in darkness; a voice called or sang? It sang for me; stone walls scraped the backs of my hands and I ran and ran and ran through narrow places. I woke with a start, and even though it was dark, the warmth of the Aga and the kitchen was preferable to the risk of that dream again. I got up and dressed.
When Magda came down just after six, she was surprised to see me. She spoke little more than morning pleasantries, and I knew she was put out; this was her time, the hours before Jean would need her, and now she had me to think about. I insisted I make my own toast and sat quietly, letting her hum along to her radio undisturbed. Jean’s words nagged at me from the previous night but Magda broke the silence first.
“You don’t ever call her mother. Only Jean. Why?”
“It’s a long story.”
“This Family and the stories. I been here fifteen years. I have time.” Her hands went to her hips. A challenge.
“Does she talk to you? About the past? About the family?”
“Sometime little, sometime a lot. You know how she can be. Worse these days.”
I told her what little I knew; that I was born in 1952 when Jean was only fifteen. They never knew who my father was, and she would never say. It was a disgrace in those days, and worse because she was still a child herself. The family gathered round and it was agreed that her eldest brother, Alfred, newly married to May, would take me, leave Norfolk and raise me as their own. Nobody was to know of the family’s shame.
Magda came to sit at the table with me and laid a hand on my arm.
“I never knew Jean existed until I was eighteen, and father brought me here. She’s never been my mother. Aunt May was my mother. Jean is…just…Jean.”
“And she stay here always, Jean?”
“Yes. All her life. Never left. Grandfather locked her up, if I understand what my father told me. But even after grandfather died, she stayed.”
“Very sad this, Mr Lye-ja. Sad for her, sad for you.”
I waited until Magda came back down with the breakfast tray to go and see Jean. The paperwork came out; legal matters, a power of attorney. I explained about the house, about the medical care she needed and the care home, but she wouldn't have it. The more I insisted, the more distressed she grew until she screamed for Magda to come and for me to get out.”
“I can’t leave here!. I shall never leave. I have to stay, must stay; for her. Now get out!”
I packed, resigned to Jean spending her last days here. Who knew how long it would be? Magda thought not long. She walked with me to the car, a foil parcel of pierogi in her hands; cottage cheese and dill, my favourites, as she well knew.
“Mr Lye-ja, can I ask one thing before you go? Jean. Did she ever have daughter, like you. Taken?”
“A daughter? No. Why?”
“Yes. Because, see, at night, sometimes she sing now, you know. Is Lullaby, song for childrens. And she say she sing it for her daughter. For her daughter that was taken.”
“I think she must just be confused about her sister, Mary. It happens when they get old. I didn’t have a sister.” At least, they didn’t tell me about a sister.
That was the last time I saw Jean alive, or dead. I can’t abide an open casket. She died only a few weeks later, peacefully on her favourite window seat, looking out over the Cley Marshes. That’s what Magda told me at the wake, to reassure me, I'm sure, but the thought that I had hastened her off with the bloody paperwork? It worked away at me.
She was ninety one. She had a good innings. If you can die peacefully in your own bed, you can’t ask for more. But Jean could have asked for much more.
It was an uncomfortable affair, the wake: me; Magda; Mr Kindlisides the solicitor; the doctor and two neighbours, farmers both, come to size-up the estate for land, it turned out. Straight out with it, blunt as farmers are and not about wasting any time on pleasantries. I told them to speak to the solicitor, and later; now was not the time.
I stayed the night because of the vodka Magda pulled out from somewhere. She insisted, and she knows I’m weak for the drink. We sat in Jean’s room before retiring to bed, watching the sun set, counting crows and herons, hoping for a murmuration, but starlings were seldom seen now. Darkness settled over the marsh. Bird songs stilled and frogs began in earnest. I imagined Jean sitting here night after night and I calculated the days that she had spent here. It’s a skill, or a curse, one way or another, to work with numbers in my head, and this was an impossible number. This was a whole life.
I’d never had strong feelings about Jean until that moment. Probably the vodka; but now, sadness crushed me, battered tears and unnatural gutting sobs that made my stomach muscles cramp. To be seventy five and never have cried for your mother. My ribs ached. Magda held my hand. We talked about the plans for the house to change the subject. I told her she could stay as long as she needed, but she had somewhere to go already; another job, but she would help me pack and clear the house, all the things she had dusted a hundred times.
That night, I had the dream again, but far worse than before. Again, the darkness, again the fear of something that I was running from, again something was calling, but this time, it wasn’t singing it was something else. It was bestial; something desperate, hungry, anguished. My knuckles and knees rasped on unforgiving stone. I urged myself to wake but the dream went on and on and when I did awaken, I was shattered, the mattress soaked, hands aching with fingers curled into claws. I had to rub the life back into them.
Magda could see I’d had a terrible night, but she didn't ask, she seemed to know because instead she told me that she was leaving, she wouldn't stay in the house on her own; something bad had come after Jean had gone. Perhaps it was Jean, I suggested, half joking, but she didn’t think so. Magda told me of Polish spirits, the Mamuna; the Vodik; they were always female; grieving a dead child, or drowned or murdered; raped virgins seeking a mortal for revenge. She said she felt it strongest at dusk when the roke sat above the marsh. Marsh lights glowing, floating above the Smeeth Lode; a sure sign of spirits. I was never one for superstition, but both of us were uneasy.
It was a simple decision to never spend another night there, never go back except to hand over the keys. If I could ever sell the place.
I had to make arrangements to clear the house before it could be sold. There was immediate interest from some niche hotel chain. Norfolk was a destination. The house had immense charm and history…wonderful views of the broads. And it had more land than I realised. Space for luxury chalets; the farmers would not be pleased. I called Magda; she would be only too happy to help and let people in to clear the house and take photos. She would keep an eye on them..
A few days later she called me. There was a problem with the drains. “Big. Big problem. Terrible.” She knew a plumber - we both laughed. Could I come? She wasn’t wrong about the problem. It was the drains and it was terrible. I could smell it before she opened the door, wellington boots slick with it.
Most of the downstairs was flooded, inches deep in stinking foetid liquid. Water was not the right word for it. All the toilets were brimming with the brackish, thick sludge. From time to time there would be a pulse of it and more would spill over adding to the horror that had spread throughout almost every room.
“I try to clean, but is keep coming out, “ Magda said as we stared at the downstairs cloakroom toilet bowl. There was a deep gurgle and a swell of thick filth belched out, and something else with it; something more solid and shapeless. It caught on the edge of the bowl and hung from it. As the coating of liquid and slime drooled off it, we recoiled; it was the skeleton of something, its skull half missing and limbs mangled and incomplete.
When the plumbers arrived, they spent hours poking flexible rods into the toilets and sinks, scouring the gardens for manholes. Magda and I left them to it and went shopping for bottled water and beer. We didn't trust what was coming from the taps. When we got back, they told us they had found the problem.
At the back of the house, where there was a slight slope down towards the reed beds of the Faine Broad, they had uncovered a rusting hatch. It was a septic tank. It must be full, and the waste backing up into the house. They asked when it had last been emptied. Magda said she didn't know and I was clueless. The rust on the hatch, and the dirt and weeds that had covered it were so thick, it looked as if it had never been opened.
“We’ll crack it open and this should stop more shit coming back into house. So you can start clean it at least. But you will need to call specialist to pump it out.”
“Do you know anyone?”
“Yes, I have a number, but…” he rubbed a finger and thumb together “..it cost a lot to fix this. Is big fucking tank. Old. You need replace whole thing.”
We left them to their work with pickaxes and hammers and went back to the house. It was getting late. Too late for me to drive home, I hated driving in the dark.
“Go to my ‘partment, Mr Lye-ja. I stay here, keep the place safe. I stay in Mother’s room. Everything still there, upstairs. Shit is only downstairs. Is ok.”
I couldn't persuade her that I should stay and she go home. “You’re old man, you can’t stay here.” she said with typical bluntness. I was secretly relieved; the prospect of staying there, of suffering the dream again? It made me weak.
Then we heard shouting and cursing in Polish. Magda’s eyebrows raised and we hurried outside to the back of the house. We found the burly Poles inching back, away from the morbid blackness boiling out of a gaping hole in the ground. They had had to smash the brickwork around the iron hatch, it had been so rusted shut. When they had cracked through what was contained within had erupted like a fountain. The grim lake was spreading, showing no sign of stopping and as the liquid dispersed it left in its wake dozens and dozens of twisted animal skeletons. More and more of them swirled from the ground. A tide of death.
Ivan, one of the plumbers, pressed a crumpled business card into my hand as they left. “Call this number. They come fix this.”
In the house, the toilets had stopped overflowing, but now there was not much more we could do; cleaning would have to wait for the morning. I took Magda’s key and her postcode and promised to return the next day as soon as I had contacted the “Specialists”.
The next morning, after I had called the septic tank cleaning company and arranged an emergency evacuation, I called Magda to let her know I was on my way, but she didn't answer her phone. Radio on and mopping away, most likely. I stopped for bacon butties and two coffees on the way. When I arrived, the house was silent, full of nothing but the stench. Magda was nowhere to be seen. There was no answer as I sloshed through the corridors, calling her name.
When I got to the bottom of the stairs in the North Wing, cold fear bit into my spine. Magda’s wellington boots were there, and her scarf and coat hung over the newell post, but what gripped my throat to dryness were the black tracks on the stair carpet; tracks of something, not footprints, not quite footprints and long snaking streaks of slime between them.
“Magda?” I croaked up the stairs. Why did I expect an answer? None came. Every step was a cold, sweating torment, and as I approached Jean’s bedroom door, my voice had shrunk to barely a husky rattle. The door was ajar, the black trail fainter now but still there, leading within. I pushed it open and went inside. The room was dark and it smelled rank, but the whole house did. My fear was washed away in sudden relief as I saw that Magda was in Jean’s bed, under the covers, asleep, exhausted from yesterday’s exertions no doubt. She had earphones on. No wonder she couldn't hear me calling.
I strode to the oriel window and drew back the curtains.
“Wakey….……..
….wakey.”
Magda was not asleep. My ears screamed, my heartbeat hammered on fast forward in my head. Every hair stood up so hard and fast and cold that all of my skin ached.
“Magda?”
She’s dead
“Magda?”
She’s dead.
She’s dead.
Five steps to the bed, the blood-soaked and black stained bed.
Magda’s throat was ripped out, flesh missing, bones showing. The top of the blankets was a crimson bib and her de-fleshed bottom jaw hung loose. Black, clawed handprints sunken deep into the white pillows. Magda’s eye sockets were empty, circled by teeth marks; a monstrous mouth had clamped over each orbit and sucked them out like morsels. My stomach rebelled, I turned to heave, vomiting to the floor. I collapsed, screaming into my bile.
Then I heard it. A slithering.
On my hands and knees, head down, I could hear it approach but I couldn't raise my head, couldn't look at anything but the pattern in the carpet and the threads of blood in the mucus of my puke. It was in the en-suite bathroom. It was coming. I shook and felt my bladder emptying. I could only whine.
Closer and closer the sounds of its heavy wetness approached, the stink of death and shit and butchery and an iodine brine intensified, the sibilant hiss and flap of its breathing growing stronger.
Crouched, whimpering like a dog, I felt its breath on me, its head weaving around mine, sniffing at me. I felt the cold tongue sliding over me, tasting my face, probing my ears, pushing at my screwed shut eyes, forcing its way into my mouth before withdrawing when I wretched and gagged with a yawk at the taste of blood upon it.
“Mother?” it said, with a voice like drowning.
This is my entry to the Horror section of season 10 of the Lunar Awards.
With thanks to
and for running this beautiful show.
OMG! Yes. I need the movie right now. You should read Lone Woman by Victor LaValle.
I 'liked' this, but I didn't. It was horrible! A great horror story that reminds me why I don't ever read horror stories. Don't have the stomach for it. Poor Magda though.