The House On Nazareth Hill Read online

  ‘You’re never going to plague them on a Sunday, Oswald.’

  ‘They won’t thank me if they’re robbed overnight or the house catches fire while they’re not covered, will they? You can never be too safe. I wouldn’t call that plaguing anyone.’

  ‘I only meant they might appreciate their day of rest,’ said Amy’s mother with a wink. ‘Who knows how they may be occupying themselves.’

  ‘Let me make a note at any rate, so they don’t slip my mind again.’

  ‘Catch us up,’ Amy’s mother said, already trotting downhill.

  Amy looked back to see her father unzip the pocket which contained his electronic notebook and pull off a glove with his teeth so as to type as the fog edged closer behind him. It was moving only because she was, she managed to appreciate, and he was beginning to pace down the hill, if very grudgingly, as her mother ushered her into Pond Lane.

  Amy had never known it to lead to a pond, only past two ranks of cottages to six pairs of the newest houses in Partington, but now the fields below it were a lake of fog. Her mother unlatched the gate of the first new house and preceded Amy up the jigsaw path through the small but elaborately planted garden, all its darkened leaves sagging with dew. She turned her keys in the door and shied her gloves into the base of the coat-stand as a preamble to typing the code that quelled the alarm. ‘Close the door, sweet, before the cold follows us in.’

  Though Amy closed the door as slowly as she could, there was no sign of her father. She’d shut him out from the warmth of the waffles of radiators, the line of her paintings climbing above the plumply carpeted stairs, one for each year of Amy’s life. Her mother was tugging Amy’s gloves off to throw in the coat-stand, unzipping Amy’s jacket and peeling it off with a vigour which yanked Amy’s sweater out of the top of her corduroys, but Amy felt as if she was somewhere else until she heard a scrabbling behind her, at the front door. It was her father’s key, of course. ‘I hope that’s you for the day,’ her mother said to him.

  ‘I wanted to see how our treasure was. How are you now, Amy?’

  Amy saw the closing door sweep a trace of fog out of the hall. ‘I’m all right now we’re home.’

  ‘We’ll see how you’re doing tomorrow, shall we?’ he said, and having already begun to address her mother ‘I may ring the Prices to see what they’d like me to do.’

  ‘I was thinking of an early dinner so the invalid can go to bed.’

  ‘Dinner in an hour, then. Best place on earth, the land of Nod.’

  ‘Have a nap now if you want, Amy.’

  ‘Just let the mat have another go at your shoes first.’

  Amy wiped a crumb of mud on the upside-down welcome as her father watched before delivering himself of a nod of approval and heading for the kitchen. ‘Hot chocolate, sweet?’ her mother said.

  ‘Yes please.’

  As the kitchen stuttered alight her mother said ‘I’ll bring it up to you’ with a firmness which seemed to give Amy no chance to stay downstairs. She had to believe the house was bright enough to keep out anything that lived in the dark, and besides, mustn’t the clanking she’d heard inside Nazarill mean that the thing in the corner had been chained up? Perhaps it had been a dog which had strayed into the building, broken chain and all. Whatever it had been, surely if she never told anyone—didn’t even think about the glimpse—it would leave her alone. She switched on the light above the stairs and shivered only once as she trudged up to her room, where she lit up the overhead light and the gnome with a bulb in him on the bedside table as well.

  Her dolls lined up at the foot of the bed or dangling their ropy legs from her bookshelves looked as glad of the light as she was. She hauled the curtains shut with their cord before levering one shoe off with the other and the other with her foot, then stuffed her feet into the rabbit-faced slippers she’d been given last Christmas. She straightened up Greedyguts, whose egg-shaped body had slumped over its stomach on the top shelf, and took down A Child’s Cornucopia, her best book.

  She had often been read to sleep with rhymes or fairy tales from it when she was younger, but it was special mostly because her mother had bound it for her at the bindery in Sheffield. Each of the leather covers was etched with a golden peacock’s feather that was also a pen—the first time Amy had seen her transformed book she’d thought it had grown wings. Now it seemed heavier than usual; perhaps the fever she wanted to believe she’d caught had weakened her. She folded her arms around the book and sank onto the bed, where she opened the cover with a satisfying creak of the ribbed spine. At that moment she heard her mother’s muffled voice below her in the kitchen, as though the sound was rising from the book. ‘So what were you thinking of, Oswald?’

  ‘When was that, dear?’

  ‘You know good and well. At that wretched old house.’

  ‘Yes, they should have pulled it down years ago. It’s an eyesore and a temptation to the young.’

  ‘Amy didn’t want to go near it, so what were you trying to prove?’

  ‘I don’t know if prove is the word. I just thought it was time—’

  ‘Don’t put on that tone, I’m not one of your customers. Time for what?’

  ‘I’m sure neither of us wants her growing up frightened of her own shadow.’

  ‘She isn’t and you know it. All her age play at being scared of that place, it’s like a fairy tale to them. Do you know what I think, Oswald? I think it was you it affected, not her.’

  ‘Now whatever makes you say a silly—’

  ‘You started at her when she mentioned spiders. It was yourself you were concerned about, not her.’

  ‘I’d like to fancy at least it was both.’

  ‘Fair dos, I’ll give you that, but what was the point of carrying on at her?’

  ‘I simply wish she wouldn’t go on about arachnids. You won’t tell me they don’t bother her when she keeps bringing them up.’

  ‘That’s because you do, for heaven’s sake, and if you don’t we know when you’re keeping the subject to yourself. I wish you had today. If she’d seen anything in there it would have been because of you.’

  ‘I was trying to help her not grow up like me.’

  ‘There must be better ways of helping. And we’d rather she grew up like you than—’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that, love. It wasn’t in my mind at all. We both have plenty to offer her. We just have to watch what we pass on to her.’

  ‘I pray it’s that simple,’ Amy’s mother said almost inaudibly, and then the house was silent. Amy thought its warmth meant that her parents were comforting each other—about what, she would rather not know. Perhaps her father’s nagging had indeed caused her to see worse inside Nazarill than was there. She began to leaf through A Child’s Cornucopia while she waited for her mother to bring her hot chocolate.

  She couldn’t help wondering which fairy tale her mother thought Nazarill was like. Here was the house which helped lure Hansel and Gretel to the old cannibal witch, here was Red Riding Hood going inside a cottage and eventually inside a wolf until the woodcutter chopped her and her grandmother out again. Both tales seemed to have lost some of their appeal, and Amy didn’t altogether like the flapping of the pages in the midst of so much silence. Then two pages near the middle of the volume parted, showing her a poem she hadn’t encountered before, Mad Hepzibah. Maybe until now the pages had been stuck together.

  ‘Come dance with me, young and old, out from the tree.

  There are songs to be sung, there are marvels to see.

  Come dance with me, young and old, under the moon.

  You’ll have wings on your shoulders and dew for your shoon.’

  ‘Dance away to the moon. Mother Hepzibah, flee.

  In the morning they’ll come to play prickles with thee.’

  ‘Let them come to my hovel, whoever they are.

  I’ve games that I’ll play with them,’ says Hepzibah.

  ‘They’ve come, Mother Hepzibah, come with the dawn.


  Your cat she is drownded, your friends they are flown.’

  ‘Good day, Master Matthew, for that’s who you are.

  Will you trip the old dance with me?’ says Hepzibah.

  ‘Bring her with us, stout fellows, bring her to the oak.

  She’ll dance us a jig ‘til her neck it is broke.’

  ”Tis no dance with no partner, and it’s Matthew I name.

  In a twelvemonth from now you shall see me the same.

  I’ll come for to find you, wherever you are.

  And we’ll dance in the air,’ says old Mad Hepzibah…

  Amy had reached the foot of the left-hand page when she heard her father calling her. She let the book close on her forefinger. At some point she must have dozed, because her Save the Children mug was standing next to the illuminated gnome. A wrinkled skin had formed on the surface of the chocolate in the mug, which she didn’t even recall being brought to her. She gulped the barely lukewarm drink as her father raised his voice. ‘Amy? Dinner.’

  ‘Coming. I just wanted to find out…’ She laid the book face down on the pages she was reading and switched out her lights.

  Her father was walking from the kitchen to the dining-room to collect the dish of lamb he’d placed in the hatch, her mother was pouring soft drinks. Both parents confined themselves to smiles at her until her father had performed his Sunday ritual of carving the joint and spooning out the vegetables, at which point he said ‘How’s the invalid?’

  ‘I’m fine, I think.’ Amy had the impression of saying so on his behalf. ‘Maybe I was just cold. I wasn’t really scared. I’m not scared now.’

  ‘That’s the main thing,’ he said, and raised the greyer of his eyebrows at her mother. ‘We’re in agreement, aren’t we?’

  ‘If Amy says it I’m sure it’s so, because she’s the only one who knows.’

  Amy wasn’t certain what she knew; she felt as if she couldn’t quite focus the conversation or herself. She set about chewing the first mouthful of lamb, which she was unusually and uncomfortably aware was flesh. It wasn’t going down, only growing larger. Her efforts must have shown on her face, because eventually her father said ‘Has my roast run out of charm?’

  ‘I just don’t think I’m very hungry, dad.’

  ‘I suppose it can be resurrected, but it won’t be the same. Can you be tempted to some ice cream?’

  If that was intended to make Amy betray that she was hungrier than she’d admitted, it didn’t work; she shook her head. ‘Would you like to go to bed properly?’ her mother offered.

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘Off you scurry, then,’ her father said. ‘You can leave the washing-up to us this once. We’ll be up when we’re done to see how you are.’

  Amy wished she knew. Some of the mouthful of lamb had lodged beneath her tongue, and she dashed to the bathroom to rid herself of it before attacking her teeth with a brushful of toothpaste. She washed her face and untangled her hair, which the fog had rendered wild. In her room she pulled on her pyjamas and wriggled under the portly winter quilt, on which she turned over A Child’s Cornucopia to finish reading the verse. But the pages at which the book lay open were full of a poem about an old washerwoman who scrubbed clothes so hard she wore a hole through to the far side of the world.

  Amy turned to the previous page, then to the one that followed. Both contained stories which, like the washerwoman poem, she already knew. She was ranging back and forth through the book in search of Mad Hepzibah, rubbing every right-hand corner between finger and thumb in case the verse was trapped between two pages stuck together, when her mother intervened. ‘I shouldn’t start waking your mind up if it’s sleep you want, Amy. Your father’s just finishing the dishes and then he’ll look in.’

  Amy thought that might be time enough to find Mad Hepzibah, but her mother lifted the book out of her hands and replaced it on the shelf. ‘You’re like me,’ she murmured. ‘My mother always said they wouldn’t be able to screw the lid down on me until I’d found out the end of the book I was reading.’

  She sat on the bed and took Amy’s chin in one cool gentle hand while she stroked her forehead with the other. ‘That won’t be for a very very very long time. I only meant you and I love books. Shall I tell you one of the stories my mother used to tell me at bedtime?’

  ‘Yes please, mummy.’

  ‘Let me think of one.’ She carried on stroking as if Amy’s forehead was a lamp from which she would conjure a tale, but then she said ‘Don’t mind if you have to make allowances for your father now and then. He’s got the harder job, having to deal with people instead of just books.’

  ‘I know what he’s like. He’s my dad.’

  ‘True enough, we all know one another inside out. Let’s always stay this close.’ She took Amy’s hands in hers and embraced her with her deep blue gaze, and let her wide pink lips relax into the smile that felt to Amy like being kissed to sleep. ‘Once upon a time there was a princess called Amy, going on for nine years old…’

  Amy listened to the tale of the princess and the enchanted castle, where every room contained a prince who wasn’t quite good enough for her. One prince turned out to be bald when his hair came off with his crown, another left a tooth in the piece of her cake she gave him to sample, a third got so worked up by telling her how beautiful she was that his glass eye popped out… Amy laughed at each of them, although each laugh had farther to travel to the surface of her drowsiness. She wanted to stay awake until her father came to see her, and perhaps she would have a chance to search through A Child’s Cornucopia before she drifted off to sleep.

  She must have nodded off, because she missed the end of the story. Her mother was silenced, and had let go of Amy’s hands—indeed, was no longer in the room. Here came Amy’s father, his silhouette flickering with a light she had never seen in the house, and all at once, though she didn’t know why, Amy wanted to cry for her mother and dodge out of the room. But her mouth gaped like a wound, and she couldn’t move. The light flared up, and she saw where she was. It wasn’t the bed in which she had fallen asleep, nor did she recognise the room.

  Four hats hung in a line on the wall to her left, three black bead necklaces adorned a dressing-table mirror beside them. That was all she had time to take in before the flames behind her father in the doorway leapt up so fiercely that their reflection in the mirror illuminated his face. His eyes looked brighter and more dangerous than the flames, his grimace bared his teeth and their gums too, but his voice was calm as ice. ‘Your mother’s dead, and you’re mad,’ he said, ‘and you’re staying here in Nazarill.’

  She didn’t know if the cry which responded was hers, it was so distant and muffled and so unlike any noise she would have wanted her mouth to produce. A light invaded her eyes, and as she blinked wildly to regain her sight she saw her familiar bedroom, her father stumbling through the doorway as he wrapped his dressing-gown around himself, her mother following him. ‘Quiet now, quiet,’ he urged in the voice she knew. ‘We’re here. Were you dreaming?’

  ‘Yes,’ Amy pleaded. ‘I didn’t like it. It was nasty. It was horrible.’ Her tongue was functioning again, and she was home, with her parents holding her hands with the hands she’d always known. Soon they and the room would feel solid enough to persuade her she had only been dreaming, but for the moment she was clinging harder to a thought than to her parents. Whatever she did, she would never again in her life go anywhere near Nazarill.

  1 - New for old

  Hedz Not Fedz was the smallest of the shops at the upper end of Market Approach, but its window displayed more items than its neighbours, Pawnucopia and Charity Worldwide, put together. A notice in the bottom right-hand corner of the window, THESE PIPES ARE FOR ORNAMENTAL USE ONLY, did little to obscure the view. Someone or a wind had knocked over the four-legged sign which alerted users of the market to the existence of the shop. Amy unfolded the sign—HEDZ NOT FEDZ: EVERYTHING LEGAL—to the length of its chain and planted it on the pavement, then she
hitched her Mexican canvas bag over her shoulder and let herself into the shop.

  Wind chimes announced her arrival, but Martie barely glanced up from thumbing a price tag onto the contents of a box on the counter. ‘What kind of pipe is that?’ Amy said over the strains of a tape of ‘Walk Right In’.

  ‘Electric. Press here and you don’t even need to suck.’

  ‘Competitive.’

  ‘Just in time for Christmas,’ Martie said, and jabbed one stubby thumb at the tag. ‘Maybe we’ll see where the money’s hiding. As long as you’re up on those classy long legs, why don’t you make me a space in the window.’

  Amy dropped her bag with a thud of books on the bare floorboards, which she always thought looked earthy from the years when the shop had been a greengrocer’s. She had to move bead necklaces and ammonite pendants and incense holders and hologram badges and crystals nesting in padded boxes before she was happy with the spot she chose, between an African carving and a book of Eastern philosophy, for the new pipe. She went outside to see how it caught the eye, and returned as she heard a shutter rattle down a shop-front in the marketplace. ‘I’d buy it,’ she said.

  ‘You might get some funny looks at home.’

  ‘I get those anyway,’ said Amy, fingering the stud in her left nostril.

  ‘You’d be disappointed if you didn’t, wouldn’t you? I remember feeling that when I was sorting out who I was.’ Martie glanced past her and frowned. ‘There’s a look I can do without, though.’

  Amy turned and saw only the top of a head, its scalp cropped even closer than Martie’s, ducked low as if to butt the window. Then the security guard from the marketplace straightened up from scrutinising the electric pipe and marched into the shop, donning his cap and tugging its peak towards his small suspicious eyes. The notes of the wind chimes were almost drowned by a spitting hiss of the phone that was clipped to his belt. ‘Can we give you any kind of a hand?’ Martie asked him.