Best New Horror #26

Stephen Volk MATILDA OF THE NIGHT

ONLY A LITTLE dwt, I was. Four or five, see. Remember it like it was yesterday. Anyway, this day I run into our front room—the posh room, playin’ like—not allowed to but I did sort of thing, and these three people looked round, all in a row on the settee, they were. All looking identical. Like a family. Man, woman, child. Just looking at me. All dressed all in black. All tight and polite, like, with their knees together. Give me the creeps, they did. Duw, aye! I was out of there like a blummin’ shot…

The quarter-inch tape ran through the ReVox. The machine sat so that its turning reels faced the rows of semi-lit young faces.

Well, I told my mam after, and she said, “Don’t be daft. There’s nobody like that been in here. Nobody’s been in that room for a twelvemonth!” And I said, “Mam, I saw them!” But she wasn’t ‘aving it. Marched me in and showed me. Wasn’t nobody there, course there wasn’t. But, true as I’m sittin’ here, this is it—a week later my father dropped dead of a heart attack. Bang! Out like a light. Down by the Co-op. Out like a light…!

Ivan Rees switched it off with a twist of his hand, killing the old man’s rasping, heavily-accented voice.

“Phantom funeral guests.” The illumination stuttered into being. The ranks of students blinked as if awakened from slumber, which possibly they had been. “I got that from a retired collier in Pontypridd. Variation of the typical ‘spectral funeral’, also known as toili, or teulu in north Cardigan, probably from the dialectical pronunciations of the word for ‘family’; or anghladd, unburied; in Montgomeryshire, Drychiolaeth.”

Rees jabbed a button on the keyboard of his MacBook Air linked up to the overhead projector. An old woodcut of a house with a bird sitting on the roof appeared on the screen behind him.

“Other Welsh omens of death include the Corpse Candle or Canwyll Corph—lights appearing over the house of the soon to-be-deceased, or predicting the route of the funeral procession—and the Deryn Corph, or ‘Death Bird’, as you see here flapping its wings against the window of a sick person, often in the form of a screech owl…”

He brought up an engraving of witches with those birds, in one of Goya’s Caprichos.

“The word strega in Italy refers to both ‘owl’ and ‘witch’—an association that goes back to the mythology surrounding Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who became a creature of darkness and child stealer in Hebrew folklore, basically for answering back her husband. Interestingly, in China they call the owl ‘the bird who snatches the soul’. The cross-cultural connections are fascinating.”

The Edvard Munch woodcut fell over him now—a vampiric owl-death-woman.

“Then there’s the Cyhyraeth or ‘death sound’. A dismal, mournful groaning said to be made by a crying spirit. Which is nothing in comparison to the dread prediction of the banshee in Ireland. Here in Wales we have effectively her sister, the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn…”

To the audience’s surprise Marilyn Monroe appeared on the screen in titillating close-up, from Some Like It Hot.

“No, she doesn’t look like Marilyn Monroe.” Chuckles. “In fact there’s still a saying in parts of Wales if somebody’s—aesthetically challenged: ‘Y mae mor salw a Gwrach-y-Rhibyn‘—’She’s as ugly as the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn‘.”

More chuckles. His PowerPoint threw up another Goya print—a ghastly crone with monstrous visage and bat-like appendages.

“For the record, she’s a hideous hag with long, matted hair, long black teeth, one grey eye and one black eye, a nose so hooked it meets her chin, withered arms, a crooked back and leathery wings. In other words, the sort of female that doesn’t even get a shag after closing time on a Friday night in Newport city centre…Oh, I don’t know.”

Laughter, more full-bodied this time.

“Anyway you wouldn’t want to see what she really looks like, since anyone who sees her face or hears her blood-curdling cry, dies. There’s an etymological similarity here with a witch called Yr Hen Wrach, who lived on an island in a large bog inland from Borth, Cardigan, described as seven feet tall, thin, with yellow skin and a huge head covered in jet black hair. This fearsome harridan was said to creep into houses and blow sickness into people’s faces, thus causing illness. So another portent of death, of sorts, in another guise…”

Hans Baldung Grien’s The Bewitched Groom, showed a witch leering through a window at a dead man.

“Literally, for the non-Welsh-speakers amongst you, Gwrach-y-Rhibyn means ‘Hag of the Dribble’ or ‘Hag of the Mist’—connecting her to all sorts of stories of the lamia/swan maiden type we looked at on the Gower and Glamorgan coast. Sometimes she’s called Mallt-y-Nos or ‘Matilda of the Night’, who rides the night sky alongside the Devil himself and his hell hounds…”

Bottom and Titania in a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream superimposed themselves over Rees, rendering his plain denim jacket and jeans exotic, melodramatic. As he walked to and fro they decorated his skin like multicoloured, shifting tattoos.

“Marie Trevellyan groups her in the category of the Tylwyth Teg or Fairy Folk also known as Bendith y Mamau, Mother’s Blessing. In times past they’ve been spotted at local markets in Haverfordwest, Milford, Laugharne and Fishguard. Some sources say that, come mid-Victorian times, they were driven out by Nonconformists and temperance, but the truth is belief in them persisted until only a generation or so ago. I clearly remember my own grandmother blaming them for things going missing round the house. Neither goblin nor ghost, they supposedly had human midwives and feared iron, hence the lucky horseshoe—which as we know is always the right way up because if you hang it upside down, all the good luck runs out. According to John Rhys in Celtic Folk Lore, the Gwrach may have been a goddess of the pagan Celts, like the quasi-divine hag of Ireland. Indeed, in The Golden Bough, Fraser says the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn is the name given to the last sheaf of corn cut at the culmination of the harvest ritual. Yes? At the back? Lad in the Cardiff City shirt?”

A hand was in the air.

“Isn’t there a theory that what we call the ‘Fairy Folk’ might have been real?” The speaker was undeterred by sniggers. “Several writers suggest there was once a pygmy race on these islands, called the Cor—as in Korrigan, ‘she-dwarf’—driven underground by invaders. What I mean is, bones have been found in caves, haven’t they? Of short people. Ugly compared to human beings. With magical beliefs. Certain evidence they buried their dead, worshipped the moon, had rituals and some kind of social life…”

“Unlike most people in this room,” said Rees.

Groans.

“No, yeah. I mean, seriously,” said the boy. “We just call them Neanderthals.”

“Oh, I know what you mean. I do know what you mean. Stan Gooch eat your heart out. And the ginger-haired amongst you beware of your large big toe. They walk amongst us!”

More laughter. The boy blushed slightly and shuffled in his seat.

“Yes, there’s the theory that these imaginary creatures might be the faint memories of another, long lost indigenous species—the Bronze Age replaced by iron,” said Rees. “But as I’ve said before, it’s not the folklorist’s job to explain the inexplicable. That’s not our business—our job is to record, analyse and classify. The reality or not of what we examine is irrelevant.” He took the spool from the ReVox and held it up. “Our work—your mission, if you choose to accept it—is ecology. It’s incumbent on us to save this rich resource from being lost. Our stories are ourselves. We mustn’t let them die.”

He hoped what he said was going in. He tried to discern a glimmer of interest in their dull, placid faces, in their incuriosity, but was sure all they cared about was passing the module. Level one (CQFW level four): ten credits.

He killed the PowerPoint, closed the laptop. “Okay, go home. Start thinking about your essays. Next week we’ll be talking about the Devil’s hoof-prints and changelings.”

He saw Glyn at the foot of the steps, leaning back against a stone plinth outside the University building, flicking through a copy of GQ. Rees could not see for the life of him, and never could, why a perfectly intelligent man would buy such superficial drivel, but he knew better than to let it turn into an argument. Glyn had his childish, boorish side, which for some inexplicable reason he liked to cultivate. Rees supposed it was that macho aspect of gayness that had become all too blatant since he himself was growing up. Men beefing themselves up in the gym in an attempt to contradict the cliché of mincing effeminacy. Glyn certainly fitted into that category, biceps and pecs bulging ridiculously in a T-shirt several sizes too tight—but had just become another cliché altogether. He’d been immensely more attractive twelve years ago when they’d met, before all this nonsense, before the steroids, but Rees had given up on telling him that. How could he tell his partner that looking like a He-Man doll was bordering on the disgusting? Once, Glyn had said he wanted that: wanted to look disgusting, wanted people to stop in the street and point at him and say he looked monstrous, grotesque. Rees found he couldn’t battle such absence of logic, so had long since given up trying.

“Doctor Rees? Doctor Rees?”

The voice came from behind him. Young. Breathless. Female.

Glyn stood up straight and put the GQ under one arm.

“You’ve got a groupie.”

Rees turned.

“Can I have a quick word, please?” The girl facing him was about nineteen. He knew exactly what Glyn was thinking. Scarf. Anorak. Bless. Mouse woman. And that hair. Poor thing. Why doesn’t she do something about herself? “My name’s Katrina.” Scottish accent. Sexy. But would a little make-up kill you, love? “I’m doing your class as part of my MA in Welsh and Celtic Studies. I’m hoping to go into teaching.”

“I’m, er…running rather late, as a matter of fact.”

“It’s—it’s about the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn.”

“Oh. As I say, if you want to discuss it in more detail we can do that in the next session…”

“No, no. You don’t understand. You see, it’s quite a, well, coincidence. Do you believe in coincidences? I’d heard the name before. I thought ‘God’. I didn’t think it was real. I thought it was a made-up word.”

“It’s not. It’s really quite well documented.” Rees looked at his watch.

“No, this isn’t documented. This is from an old lady. An old lady who’s dying.”

Dying.

Rees turned to face her.

Dying?

“You can talk about it next week, love,” said Glyn. “I’m sure he’ll be all ears.” He tugged Rees’ arm but Rees wasn’t budging.

“Hold on, hold on. What old woman? Where?”

“In the nursing home where I work. Shifts. Bit of extra income to support me through college, while I’m doing my—”

“Yes, yes. I get that. What did she say, exactly?”

“She kept talking about her, this Gwrach-y-Rhibyn thing. Well, I didn’t know what it was. I just thought it was gibberish. A lot of them are in a world of their own, they just ramble and the best thing is to let them get on with it, sort of thing. But she kept saying it. ‘She’s coming, she’s coming!’ and getting really, really upset about it. Inconsolable, at times. And one night I heard her crying, and I went upstairs to her bedroom, and she said to me, ‘She’s been. She’s been!‘ All mad-looking. And that night an old man had died—Captain Birdseye we used to call him, lovely old bloke. And the thing is, there’s no way she couldn’t have known. She couldn’t have heard. She lives in a completely different part of the building. And nobody else knew until they found him the next morning. But she knew. She knew that this Gwrach-y-Rhibyn thing had come to get him. And she was right.”

It was called Morfa, which even his rudimentary knowledge of his native tongue told him meant “marsh” or “fen”. The building was one of those vast Victorian buildings on the way out of Porthcawl, formerly a grand hotel, now, with sad inevitability, a residential home for the elderly, overlooking the sweep of the appropriately-named Rest Bay. Rees had been on several holidays to the resort as a child, and remembered being confused between the local funfair, Coney Beach, and the Coney Island mentioned in American movies, in the same way he thought Dirk Bogarde and Humphrey Bogart were the same person. Strange how the embarrassment of those things came back to him now, along with memories of freezing sea and damp sand.

As he got out of his Citroën, and hoisted the Nagra out of the back, he could hear the dim strains of a karaoke version of ‘I Could Be So Lucky’ increasing in volume as he stepped into the reception area. In the Day Room he could glimpse a middle-aged woman in a sequinned dress singing into a hefty microphone with the verve of a cruise ship entertainer. A podgy, greasy-haired boy sat manning the playback machine with his back to her while she belted it out. Geriatrics in armchairs watched with loose jaws and gummy, bewildered mouths. One old dear was doing the twist in decrepit slow motion.

“Hello. My name is Doctor Ivan Rees,” he said to the pretty if overweight girl behind the desk. “I’m from Cardiff University.” He didn’t usually have recourse to the title “Doctor”, but in this instance he thought it might be helpful to oil the wheels of accessibility. Luckily, he didn’t need to explain in laborious detail that he was Associate Lecturer in the School of Celtic Studies, M. Litt (Oxford), Ph.D. (Columbia University, Bethesda, Maryland), M.A. University of Wales (Aberystwyth), or why he was there, because she was already saying she’d had a conversation with the Staff Nurse, who’d told Rees on the phone she had no objection to his visit as long as the resident in question didn’t. Which was a hurdle far simpler to cross than Rees had imagined.

The pretty if overweight girl, whose name was Tina Griffiths, led him straight upstairs. “Katrina told me about you.”

“Did she? Good. I hope.”

“I don’t know that you’ll get what you want, though. They get very confused. They can’t remember the word for ‘telephone’ or what they said five minutes ago, but they can remember years ago like it was yesterday.”

“That’s what I’m interested in.”

He had a sense of anticipation he hadn’t felt in a long time, and it had been as if Glyn resented it. Rees hadn’t been able to concentrate much on the French film about persecuted monks they went to see immediately after meeting Katrina, and when Glyn tried to discuss the movie afterwards, Rees could hardly focus on what he was saying. When they got home he hadn’t thought he was doing anything wrong by going straight to his bookshelves and taking down Giraldus Cambrensis’ Itinerary Through Wales, Nennius’s History of the Britons, Walter Map’s De nugis curialium, Rev. J. Ceredig Davies’s Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales and T. Gwynn Jones’s Welsh Folklore and Folk-Custom of 1930. Glyn hadn’t seemed in the least bit interested that in the next half hour he’d had it confirmed that there was no record of the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn that wasn’t at least a hundred years old, and even then quoted from the usual suspects. No doubt about it. This was the first genuine first-hand experience of a death portent in over a century. This was gold dust.

At 2:00 a.m., after tossing and turning, Glyn had stood naked at the bedroom door and asked him to come to bed. By the time Rees had registered what he had said, and turned from his computer screen, there was nobody there.

“She’ll tire very easily.”

“Of course.”

“Mrs Llewellyn gives the illusion she’s strong as an ox. She isn’t.” Tina escorted Rees along a corridor and through a fire door. “She has so much cancer in her, you could virtually scratch her skin and see it. Like one of those lottery cards.” The girl rapped the door they came to, and Rees asked if she’d heard the woman talk about the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn as Katrina had. “All that morphine if you ask me. Or whatever it is in the pills they’re giving her to stop the pain.” She raised her voice. “Bronwen? It’s only me, love. Tina. Orright if we come in? Are you decent?” She turned to Rees with wink and a whisper. “Scares easily, see. Lot of them do. Got to be careful.”

Entering the room, Rees’ first impression was the heat belting out of the four-bar electric fire. It hit him like a wave, then he remembered how old people felt the cold. The second thing was the smell, a sickly perfume odour used to cover something worse. Third was the sight of Bronwen Llewellyn lifting her body from the armchair facing the window. A small woman with thinning ginger hair, extraordinarily piercing blue eyes—had she had her cataracts done or did she need to?—and rounded nostrils that put Rees in mind of a bullock. A frail bullock.

He extended his hand. She walked straight between them and shut the door, evidently to keep the heat in. She pressed it. Opened it. Shut it again. Opened. Shut. Walked back between them to the sash window overlooking the grounds. Checked the catch. Locked. Unlocked. Locked. Unlocked. Rees could tell that Tina knew unless they broke the cycle this could go on all day.

“Bronwen, sweetheart. This is Doctor Rees from the University. D’you remember? The one who wrote you that nice letter?”

“I’m not dull.”

“Bronwen likes to make sure the doors and windows are shut tight, don’t you, Bronwen, love?”

“Because that’s how she gets in. Through cracks.”

Tina looked at Rees. The music downstairs had changed to a spirited rendition of ‘Stand By Your Man’.

“Okay. I’ll leave you to it, then.”

The girl was barely gone before Bronwen picked up a quilted draught-excluder in the form of a snake and rammed it against the bottom of the door with the toe of her slippers.

“And mirrors. She looks at you from mirrors.”

Rees looked around and saw that the mirrors in the room were hooded by supermarket carrier bags or tea cloths held in place with drawing pins. He forced a friendly smile.

“Your room looks nice.”

“This isn’t my room. The things are mine, but it’s not my room.” Bronwen Llewellyn had an unmistakable Valleys lilt, sing-songy but not unintelligible. She’d record well. That was important, and a relief.

“Well, the things are nice. What are the labels for?” He’d noticed there were coloured Post-It notes on most of the objects. Royal Doulton figurines, a glass swan, an oval frame with a Pre-Raphaelite print in it—The Lady of Shalott. Even the bedside lamp and chest of drawers.

“That’s who they go to when I pop off. No arguments. Organised, I am, see. Red is Jean. Green is Dilys. Blue is Mavis. Yellow is Oxfam.”

She lifted her swollen ankles onto the foot stool as Rees sat on the bed, the Nagra beside him, setting up the microphone on the small table at her elbow. He could have used his iPhone to record her, as his students now did, but he’d become accustomed to recording on quarter-inch. Not so much that he resisted new technology, but this was the technology he’d known and relied upon for over twenty years. Perhaps he himself was superstitious in that regard. Old habits being only one step removed, perhaps, from magical thinking. Soon this tape would join the others, hundreds, meticulously labelled by subject and location on his study shelves, dated, indexed and cross-referenced—the sound files themselves copied and saved as MP3 files in that ether tantamount to a supernatural realm called Dropbox. He’d considered her use of the Post-It notes absurd and morbid, but it occurred to him now that he himself was guilty of labelling objects for people who might look at the artefacts long after his demise, just as much as she was.

“Here, am I going to sound Welshy? Last time I heard myself on one of them things, Crikey Moses! Welsh, be damned? I used to think I sounded like Princess Margaret!”

“It’s painless, I promise.” He blew into the mic. “One, two, one, two.” The red needle wagged like a warning finger.

“Rees? That’s a Welsh name, that is. You don’t sound Welsh. English, you sound.”

“Lost a bit of it going to uni, I expect.”

“Glad to get rid of it, I expect,” she said, with no apparent disdain.

He laughed. Truth is, she was right. He couldn’t wait to get away and talk like normal people. To lose his past in RP and anonymity. To reinvent himself.

“You want to read this first.” She produced something hidden down the side of the chair. An exercise book, pink for a little girl, with cartoon horses and fairies and bunnies on the cover. She thrust it at him forcefully. He felt obliged to take it, opening it to find the first page full of a list of names and dates written in a terribly shaky copperplate hand. Old-school education never goes away, he thought. Even if the faculty to hold a pen does.

“You know what that is?” Bronwen was confident he could not answer. “That’s the name of everybody who’s died. Here, I mean. In this place.” She pointed to the floor with a finger bulging at the joints with arthritis. “Since I come here, anyway. Everybody who’s heard her and seen her.”

“You mean—I’m sorry. They told you they’d seen her? The Gwrach-y-Rhibyn?”

“Don’t be soft! How can they tell me when they’re dead? Nobody can tell you. Not once they’ve seen her.”

“No, of course not.”

“Once they see her, that’s it. You can’t get away from it, you can’t get out of it. That’s that. And I’ll be oocht when she comes for me, too. And that’ll be soon. Don’t you worry.”

He saw a cloudiness come over her eyes and thought it a kind of bewilderment. He thought of her cataracts again. Then saw the shudder of her lower lip with its aura of downy hairs, and a tremor in the hand that gripped the rim of the arm of the chair, and realised that it was fear.

“Can you—can you say that again, please? For the tape?”

He switched it on, and before he could ident the recording with his own voice, stating the day, time and full name of the subject, she spoke again, staring at a space above the fireplace as if she was alone in the room.

“They’re dead. Just like I’ll be dead, once I’ve seen the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn. Once she comes calling for me.” She blinked and with an unstable, jerky movement turned to look at him, almost as if seeing him for the first time. Then he saw a little girl eager to please. “Was that all right?”

He nodded. It was. It was perfect.

The spool turned, a stray thread curling a corkscrew admonition in the air.

The cold of the wind from the sea did not infiltrate the room but he could hear the slow fingertips of rain tapping the window-panes.

“Fifteen kids, my Mam had. Can’t remember them all. Names. Some of them didn’t live, see. They didn’t in them days.”

“Where was this?”

“Troedyrhiw. She always believed in them. Put a saucer of milk out for them every Sunday, the Tylwyth Teg. ‘Don’t you aggravate them,’ she’d say, ‘or they’ll have your guts for garters.’”

“Which one is Mary?”

Rees had the old photograph album on his lap. It felt like an alien artefact. Nobody had photograph albums these days. They just uploaded their jpegs and selfies onto Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.

“This one, bless her. Like a little doll, she was. Bronwen and May, it was. May and Bronwen…” The old woman began fiddling with the locket on a chain round her neck. “I used to torment her terrible. S’pose I was jealous, her being younger and getting all the fuss, like. We used to share a bed, and I used to tickle her till she wet herself. Wicked, I was.” She opened it and showed it to Rees, but in her trembling hands the face he could make out was blurred and indistinct. “I used to tell her I could make her hair fall out by just staring at her, and she’d scream blue murder. Then one night I started telling her about the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn.” She snapped the locket shut and let it drop onto her wrinkled, puckered chest. “I told her there was this witch outside the window who was so ugly that if anyone set eyes on her they’d die of fright, just like that.”

Rees eased forward, elbows on knees, knitting his fingers together, but said nothing. He wanted this pure. Unspoiled.

“And she said, ‘No there isn’t, Bron. Don’t be ‘orrible. It’s just the branches in the wind. I know it is!’ And I said, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure that’s all it is?’ And she said, ‘Yes!’ And I said, ‘What if it’s not branches though? What if it’s her long, long fingernails tapping the window—tap, tap, tap…”

The old woman gulped and sniffed.

“Well. She screamed the house down. I had to go and sleep in my Mam’s bed, and my dad slept with May. I was awful. Even before that night I was a handful. And after that, well…”

“What do you mean?”

Her face seemed to sag. Her hands made little folds in the knees of her dress and a frown of resistance, of conflict, of hurt, cut into her face.

“If you…”

“No, I’ll tell you. You came here to ask and I’ll tell you. The next morning, I rushed in to wake her, see. I jumped in bed and cuddled up to her and tickled her like I always did, havin’ a bit of fun. But she didn’t move. She was cold and white like one of them enamel plates we had in the kitchen. I said, “Come on, May! Play! Play with me!’ I tried to wake her but I couldn’t. Nobody could.” Her eyes fixed on the bars of the electric fire. They bulged and shone glassily, each reflecting a dot of light.

Rees found his throat dry as he listened.

“And I knew, sure as eggs, Matilda of the Night had got her. She came for my little sister all those years ago. And now she’s coming for me…”

Rees felt a faint draught on his cheek and knew that the door had opened behind him. He hadn’t heard it doing so but was now certain that somebody was occupying the space directly behind his left shoulder. He turned around.

He saw the tray with the microwave plate cover sheltering a meal, and holding it in both hands, the overweight but pretty Tina Griffiths.

“There you are. Meat and mash. It’s time Doctor Rees was making tracks.”

Rees looked at his watch and saw that it was 6:00 p.m.—he’d lost all track of time. As the girl placed down the tray he also saw a plastic container with around fifteen assorted pills inside it. Her daily dose. For what? Angina? Heart? Diabetes? Anxiety? Cholesterol? Or all of the above?

“Did I order meat and mash?”

“Yes you did, love.”

“I don’t like meat and mash. I like fish.”

“No, you ordered meat and mash. It’s beef. Beef and gravy.”

“Oh, I like beef. I just don’t like meat.” Bronwen noticed Rees unplugging his recording equipment, coiling a cable round his hand. “He—he doesn’t want to go. Does he?” Her lip shuddered with agitation. “Do you? Hm?”

“I think I have to,” said Rees. “She’s in charge here, I’m afraid.”

“But what—what if she comes? The Gwrach-y-Rhibyn? What if she comes tonight? And you’re not here? What then?” She was becoming tearful, and this upset Rees but did not seem to bother Tina spectacularly. In fact she became clipped. Firm.

“Bronwen. Now. Doctor Rees can’t stay, can he? He has to go home. He’s just a visitor. You know the rules, my love.”

“Why? You’ve broken the rules before. You know you have. When Cliff was bad, you let his wife stay. Well now I’m bad. What about me? I’m dying! And I want him to stay!” Her voice stuttered into sobs. “I want someone with me. I’m frightened, can’t you see? None of you buggers care! Nobody does!” Tears glistened on her cheeks. “Only him! He’s the only one who listens to me!”

“She’s upset, look,” said Rees, taking the strap from his shoulder. “I’ll stay. It’s no problem. I don’t mind staying. Honestly.”

He sat down and watched Tina sigh and mop the old woman’s tears with a few sheets from the box of tissues on the coffee table. Then a few sheets more. And a few sheets after that, till the childlike sniffling had subsided.

Just after midnight a thin young man of African ethnicity popped his head round the door and asked Rees a second time if he wanted a filter coffee. This time he said yes, thank you. He was tired but he had no intention of sleeping. At 2:00 a.m., quiet settling on the house with an almost physical presence, he paced up and down for a few minutes to stretch his back, then sat on the stool next to Bronwen Llewellyn’s flowery and be-cushioned armchair.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

All being recorded. Night. Branches on the far side of the curtains.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

He thought of Bronwen’s sister, Mary. May.

Eyelids heavy, he thought of the May Bride and May tree cults mentioned in Graves’ The White Goddess…the mythic significance of the horse and the hare…

May. Maybe. Might. Perhaps.

The old woman’s lips were moving slightly and he could see her eyeballs revolving under her lids. She’d been like that for five hours but he hadn’t switched off the tape except for putting on a new one. She was dreaming and he wondered what she dreamed. She was almost forming words, and he stood for almost an hour with the microphone an inch from her mouth in case she did.

Arriving home in Penarth, he found he was famished. He put on a slice of toast, booting up his computer as the toaster chirruped, and ate it standing up as he typed the details into his archive list, not sure if it was excitement, caffeine or tiredness made his hands visibly shake. Too exhausted to edit, he calculated he could get six or seven hours sleep before heading back to the nursing home. As it turned out, it was five o’clock when he woke inexplicably anxious about where he was for several seconds, and was helping himself to some brie and slices of apple with his leather jacket already on when Glyn arrived home from the Wetherspoon’s in Cardiff Bay where he worked, the old Harry Ramsden’s.

Glyn saw that Rees was dressed to leave and his face dropped. “Jesus Christ, you could’ve waited. I’ve got pasta. I was going to make meatballs.” He dumped his carrier bag of shopping on the kitchen surface. “I don’t know why I bother.”

“The ingredients will keep till tomorrow.”

“Oh, you’ll be around tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, thanks.”

“Look, I had no idea you were cooking. I’m going out. I have to go out. How could I know?”

“You’d know if you picked up the phone. You’d know if you spoke to me.”

Rees looked at the ceiling and rolled his eyes. Glyn hated when he made him feel like a child. Rees was a year older than his father, but he didn’t want him to be his father—far fucking from it, thank you very much.

“You still don’t get it, do you?” Glyn threw a bag of tomatoes into the chiller compartment of the refrigerator. “Where were you last night—all night? Did it cross your mind I might like to know? No. Did it even cross your mind I might be worried? No. Your mobile was switched off…”

“Yes. I was working.”

“Why?”

“I had to be.”

“Why?”

“Because I have to get this story. The whole story.”

“Why?”

“For God’s sake, because time is running out, if you must know. Because if I don’t get it now, I’ll never get it.” Rees didn’t want the food any more and left the chunk of cheese and apple core on the plate. He zipped up the case of the Nagra as Glyn made great theatrics of stocking the kitchen cabinets, banging doors ludicrously. “Look, I apologise if I didn’t explain, but this is ridiculous, it really is. Why are you so angry?” Rees walked to the door, picking up his headphones en route.

“I’m angry,” said Glyn, “because it never entered your head, did it? Well, did it?”

The overcooked lamb chops defeated her. She sawed at them with a knife then gave up, exhausted, chest heaving. He made weak tea from the jug kettle. As she sipped it he thought of those thin, sipping sounds appearing on his tape.

“Bronwen, when did you first hear about Matilda of the Night?”

“When did you first hear about Father Christmas?”

“I mean, was it from a relative? Do you have relations I could go and talk to?”

“All gone,” she said. “You get old. Nobody left, see. Not much of you left either, in the brain box. You don’t want to get old, I’m telling you.”

Rees sniffed a laugh. “I am old.”

“How old are you then?”

“Fifty-three.”

“That’s no age.”

“Say that to my twenty-year-old students.” He remembered Glyn was that age at the start of it. Teacher and pupil. The old, old story.

“Then they need their bloody heads examined. Parents still alive?”

“My dad died when I was seven.”

“What about your mother?”

Rees shook his head. “Ten years ago. I was in America.”

“You weren’t there.”

“Working. Studying. Same thing. Conference. Talking to complete strangers.” He felt the warmth of the bars of the electric fire. He blinked his eyes. They were unaccountably dry. “I got a phone call in this dreadful hotel room. This Holiday Inn—you know, where all the rooms across the world are identical? There was no time to do anything. It had already happened. She was gone. The worst thing was hearing all that emotion in my sister’s voice and being so far away.” He realised he was playing with one of the day-glo Post-It notes and stuck it back where it was meant to be. “Do you want me to close the curtains?” Bronwen said nothing. He walked over and tugged them shut, then sat back down.

“Sometimes it’s easier to be on your own,” she said. “Then the people you love can’t be taken away. And sometimes you keep yourself in a box, try to pretend it’ll never hurt you again. But it does.”

Rees told himself he didn’t understand what she meant. But even as he tried to dismiss it, it made him feel raw, exposed, uncomfortable. He needed to get out for a minute.

“I’m just—just going to get some water. Is that all right? Do you—do you want some?”

Bronwen didn’t nod. She stared glassy-eyed. Her hands supported her cup and saucer and thoughts and words seemed to have deserted her, or she had absconded to memory. He left the room with the tape spools turning and gently closed the door after him.

He walked to the water cooler at the end of the landing. The floorboards did not creak under his footsteps. He yanked a paper cup from the dispenser, half-filled it and took a gulp. He poured the residue into his cupped left hand and rubbed it over his face and the back of his neck, then rubbed his eyes too.

In a nearby room he could hear an elderly person moaning in their sleep. It almost sounded like weeping. He hoped they were dreaming and this wasn’t the sound of their waking despair. When he was a child he had wondered long and hard why old people did not rage screaming and gnashing at the prospect of death, and he still could not completely understand why they didn’t. The fact they might settle into a kind of numb acceptance only struck him as even more horrifying.

A large window overlooked the garden. The wind from the bay was considerable and in the semi-dark he could make out hydrangea bushes undulating and the branches of trees gesticulating mutely in pools of artificial light. He untied the ornate tassels of the curtains and dragged them tightly across to overlap each other.

“Is that the one with George Clooney?”

The nurses down in the reception area were talking about what movie they fancied seeing. He walked back, leaned over the banister and saw them eating Jaffa Cakes below.

“Oh, is that with that comic off the telly? I can’t stand him. He really does my head in, that bloke. I’m not kidding.”

Rees opened the door to see her on her feet, swaying unsteadily, shoulders heaving.

“No, you can’t! I’m not ready! Skin off! Skin off, you bloody—!” She was facing the window with an outstretched hand. Saw him now. “She’s there! She’s out there! I can hear her! I can hear her bloody whassnames flapping!”

“Sit down. Please sit down, Mrs Llewellyn. Just sit down and I’ll take a look for you.” He managed to settle her into her armchair, then opened the drapes to see what she had seen—except he didn’t. “It’s just the canvas come loose from one of those parasol-type things in the garden…”

“No! It’s her wharracalls—wings! It’s Matilda! Matilda of the Night! She’s out there with her long hair and, and long fingers and she’s after me. She was perched on the windowsill. I know she was!”

“Shshsh. Honestly now. It’s nothing.” Rees bent down to pick up the cup and saucer, fallen from the arm of her chair but miraculously unbroken. As he stood up he felt Bronwen clinging to his sleeve, sobbing.

“You’ll be there, won’t you? When she comes back?”

“I don’t know if I…”

“When she does come for the last time, please! I promise I’ll tell you everything. You’ll have everything on your tape like you want it. I’ll tell you everything I hear and everything I see, I promise. Just say you’ll be with me.” Fear shone in the old woman’s eyes and Rees didn’t feel able to look at it.

As gently as possible he peeled her fingers off him. He sat her down and knelt and placed his hands over hers, which were ice cold. He looked at her and could feel the warmth emanating from his skin but he couldn’t feel hers getting any warmer, at all. This is the way it will go, he thought. The cold. The cold that cannot be warmed. Is this the way we all go? Grey and cold and separated and lost?

“I will. I promise,” he said.

“She wants me to do it.”

“But you want to do it, that’s the point. You want her to die, don’t you? You can’t bloody wait.”

“Rubbish.”

“How is it rubbish? When she dies you’ll have exactly what you want. You said so yourself. A recording of someone experiencing this—this ‘death visitation’, whatever the fuck that is.”

“She’s going to die, Glyn. Whether I’m there sat beside her or not. I can’t stop it happening.”

“No, but you can use it. For yourself. For your precious collection.”

Rees sighed in exasperation. “This isn’t for my ‘collection’. Christ. It’s more than that. How do I get through to you? Nobody has catalogued something like this—ever. This isn’t some piddling article in Folklore. This could be my—my Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. Something that gets me noticed, finally.”

“Me. Exactly. You’re a bloody vulture, Ivan. Haven’t you got any feelings of—?”

“Why should I not have feelings? Of course I have feelings. It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do my job.”

“And what’s your job? To prey off this demented old biddy who—”

“So what do you want me to do? Abandon her? She’s all I’ve got.” Rees corrected himself. “I’m all she’s got.”

“Freudian slip.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true. It’s more important than I am.”

“Don’t be preposterous.”

“Preposterous, am I? If I’m preposterous, why are you with me? I’m serious, Ivan? Why? Because you don’t seem to want to be with me or listen to me half the time. Do you actually want to be loved?”

That made Rees laugh out loud, and it shouldn’t have, because it chilled him to the bone. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Glyn stared at him across the dining table. “What do you want, Ivan, eh? Because I’ll be honest, I don’t have a bloody clue.”

Rees stood and scraped the residue of his tuna salad into the waste disposal. He could feel Glyn smouldering but didn’t turn to face him and waited for him to leave the table. The chair rasped.

“Go. Go and watch her die, Ivan. Be there, if that’s what matters to you so much. But if I matter to you, stay with me tonight instead of her.”

She opened her eyes blearily, tortoise head sunk deep in the propped-up pillows.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

Still half in sleep, the truth comes easier than in wakefulness or daylight. But hesitant. “I’m not scared when you’re here.”

He pulled up the fold of the blanket under her mottled, stringy chin. “Go to sleep.”

She already was.

A shadow hand crept across the wall and rested on his shoulder.

Rees shook awake with a gasp, the dream already doused. The Holiday Inn banished. The hare run to ground. Was it time to get up? Was he late for school? Mum?

“The Manager wants a word with you,” said Katrina close to his ear.

“Now?”

“Now.”

What time was it? How long had he slept? He remembered looking at his watch when it was 5:00 a.m.—what time was it now? Five past seven.

Nack-nack-nack-nack

The tape spool was spinning, its tail flapping with a metronomic tic. He switched the machine off and lifted his coat from the back of a chair.

Blinking, he felt like a little boy summoned to the headmaster’s study as he descended the stairs past a wizened monkey of an old gent hung on the elbow of an obese carer as if to cruelly emphasise the difference. But Penny Greatorex, revealed after a knock on the office door, did not look like a headmaster. She wore the hard superiority of an MBA, contrasting noxiously with a chunky cardigan depicting a timber wolf. The pleasantries were minimal. Katrina left them alone and soon he realised why.

“Dr Rees, I’m sure you’re a very bright man but do you seriously think that talking about ‘omens of death’ is really appropriate to this kind of establishment?”

Instantly on the back foot, Rees told her how he’d explained fully to the Staff Nurse and she’d given permission for him to visit.

“She had no business to. Sara is only an RSN.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but Mrs Llewellyn seems more than happy to…”

“That’s as may be, but we are the ones legally responsible for her care. And I’m afraid the feedback from some of my staff is that her mental wellbeing has deteriorated since you began coming.”

Rees stiffened. “It might seem like that, but truly, I’m not the cause of her increased anxiety at all. I’m merely listening to her.”

“Well, perhaps indulging her in her dementia and paranoia isn’t doing her a great deal of good, let me put it like that. I’m sure you’d put it differently, but that really isn’t my concern. Our resident’s welfare is. And in her current state she’s a very emotionally vulnerable lady who doesn’t require any additional stress in her life. So I’d appreciate if you would leave the premises, please.”

“What?”

“Oh, come on. Apart from health and safety concerns and insurance concerns, can you imagine what her relatives—or her relatives’ lawyers—would say about a complete stranger staying in her room overnight? Can you imagine how embarrassing that would be if some accident happened?”

“She has no relatives.” He laughed. “If you knew anything about her, you’d know that.” He tried to stop his anger from rising.

“I’m not prepared to debate this, Dr Rees. I think you can see that.”

“Yes, I can.” Afraid of adding something he might regret, he turned on his heel.

“Where are you going?”

He thought that was obvious. “Upstairs, to say goodbye to her.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t think that’s a good idea in the slightest.”

“For God’s sake. She’ll be upset if she sees I’m gone without saying something.” He looked at her in her timber wolf cardigan. “But you really don’t give a shit, do you?”

“Yes,” Penny Greatorex said, and her face showed a glimmer of hurt. “As a matter of fact I do. Very much so.” But this was her domain—alpha of the pack—and she wanted him out of it. “Jérôme will bring down your equipment to your car. There’s no point in waking her, is there? God knows, the day is long enough when you’re their age.” She didn’t look up from the year planner, which was now getting her undivided attention.

Having loaded the Nagra, his shoulder bag and laptop into the back seat, Rees sat with his hands gripping the steering wheel for several minutes before finally turning the ignition key. The engine gave its tinny French snarl. He looked up at the landing window and half-saw a face with a crayon-squiggle of hair.

He turned the Citroën in a tight three-point turn and crawled to the automatic gates, which opened as if by hauled by ghostly hands. Pausing where the driveway met the road which would take him home through Nottage, via the A48 and Culverhouse Cross, a route he infinitely preferred to the motorway, he adjusted the rear view mirror and saw his own eyes, sandpaper-dry from the kind of conflict he loathed and usually avoided, then sharply turned from their accusations.

He realised he didn’t want to arrive back at the house while Glyn was there, and Glyn didn’t normally leave for work till about eleven. Rees drove to the Museum of Welsh Life at Saint Fagan’s, his old stomping ground once upon a time, but wasn’t thinking. He should have known they weren’t open until ten. He turned around in the car park and drove to the coast. He didn’t really care where he was driving. He found himself at Llantwit Major, walking along the rocky beach where he and his father had caught crabs in a plastic bucket, the smell of bladderwrack and crushed limpets in his nostrils. Distant figures crouched and splashed. The cries of children easily entertained. Wind nice as a razor. Familiar wind, mind. He thought of rolled up sleeves and varicose veins.

His cheeks burned.

Glyn’s Doc Marten boots were not by the front door. Rees slid off his trainers. The kitchen air stung of filter coffee. He dropped the paper cone and its contents in the waste bin under the sink, swilling the black residue in the glass jug under the tap and poured it away, something he always did because his boyfriend didn’t. It wasn’t even an annoyance to him any more. He accepted it, in the way he hoped Glyn accepted the million and one ways his own habits were no doubt irritating. Tolerance. Habit. Acceptance. Wasn’t that what having a relationship was about?

Openness?

He almost heard Glyn’s voice saying it, and tightened. What if he didn’t want to be open? What then? Why was he being forced into being something he wasn’t? Why couldn’t he just be who he was?

For the next few hours he sat immobile at the kitchen table and listened to the erratic rhythms of her breathing.

He listened to her lips smacking, her occasional snort and snore and deep, long silences. His pen hovered over paper as she turned over in her slumber. As she wheezed and fretted and stretched under the starched nursing home sheets. (How many had died in those sheets?) His eyes closed as she coughed and mumbled and grunted. He was the sole and private audience to a symphony of moans. The aural hieroglyphics of her inner life.

Tap tap tap…

Branches. Trees.

He frowned, leaned forward. A thin, plaintive sobbing. Hardly audible. Reaching out to him, for comfort. Last night, yesterday, the past caught on tape.

Memory. Fear.

Rees paused it and sipped his glass of water. Glyn was normally home at five in the evening if he wasn’t working evenings. Now it was six. Rees rang The Fig Tree to book a table for dinner. Their favourite place in Cardiff, and walking distance. How many people, sir?

“Two,” he said.

Staring him in the face from the notice board was the old snapshot of Glyn and himself in Rhodes, uncannily tanned and exceptionally happy. There he was, in that rough old taverna, making a fool of himself. Deludedly happy for a passing, photographic instant. Drunk. Silly. Wasting his time. He never even liked the sun. What was he doing there? What was he pretending?

He suddenly felt completely exhausted, and remembered he’d only slept for an hour or two at the most. He went into the bedroom.

Fully dressed, he unbuttoned his collar and lay on one side of the double bed and curled up, wrapping one arm under his knees. His eyes remained open because he was so overtired his stupid body was fighting it, churning up too many random and unwelcome thoughts. Like Bronwen in her room, crying, not knowing why that nice young man (young?) didn’t come back when he said he would. When he promised! He imagined her ball-jointed paws feeling the empty place on the corner of her bed where the Nagra had sat. Her devastated expression—lost, lonely, discarded—as below at the desk two overweight nurses ate biscuits from a tin and discussed the latest Peter Andre programme. His throat felt blocked. He felt he was going to choke.

He sat up and took off his clothes. The heat was making him restless and adding to his woes. He dropped his socks and underpants on the carpet, picked up a wire coat hanger for his shirt and trousers and opened the cupboard door.

They were all gone. Glyn’s jeans. Glyn’s workman’s jacket he got in Amsterdam. The linen shirt, the one Rees always told him to wear to dinner parties. The harem pants that had seen better days. Only good enough for the bin.

Rees stood back three faltering steps and could see that the suitcase on top of the wardrobe was gone too, and his stomach lurched.

The drawers with the folded T-shirts and sweaters he knew without looking would be empty. He wondered about the toothbrush. The shampoo that gave that orange and lemon scent to Glyn’s hair he’d get a whiff of when he kissed his neck. The odour vividly came back to him. Smell. Sound. Touch.

He’d checked the land line for calls when he’d come in, always, but checked again. You have no messages. (That voice. Whose voice? Who was she? Was she alive? How did we know for sure?) Back in the bedroom he snatched up his iPhone from the bedside table where it was plugged in to recharge, tapped in his four-digit password, but could see instantly that the speech-bubble logo showed nothing. He scrolled sideways with his finger, pressed CONTACTS, then ALL CONTACTS. Thumbed down to “G”. Tapped the name. Glyn’s mobile number flashed up.

Rees stared at it. He could ring it. He knew he could. So what was stopping him? His innards felt like lead. An ache incapacitated him, physical and real. It was in control of him and he was at its mercy. He didn’t know why.

He pressed the exit button, letting it die and placing it back down where his wristwatch lay.

The wall was bereft of wallpaper, plain concrete, with thin lines of water running down it. He was puzzled why nobody was panicking and thought he should tell them there was a leak somewhere above them before a disaster happened. He might get into serious trouble if he didn’t mention it, and it worried him. Tina wore make-up. Her mascara was running, her head tilted slightly down. She was sobbing pitifully and he wanted to put his arms around her but before he could reach her she drew back the starched white sheet from the body on the slab. He was wondering why somebody didn’t answer that bloody telephone as he saw it was Bronwen Llewellyn, mouth caved in without the benefit of teeth, eyes the sky and dead as buttons, redness pooling and sticky at the back of her skull.

He woke, stabbed by reality. Not a gasp in him. The dark still had work to do. The sheet twined round one naked leg, he was alone, still.

“Hello.” The throbbing iPhone now illuminating his cheek. “Yes?”

We leave the lights on. I don’t know what she was doing up and about, but a lot of them go wandering, it’s not that unusual. You can’t lock them in like prisoners, can you? She must’ve had a hell of a bump. Tina said she was just lying there at the bottom of the stairs, groaning. Couple of minutes she had this massive bruise all up her thigh, turning purple, you could see it. God knows what she thought she was doing. She must’ve been out looking. Looking for someone…

He saw a branch. He saw its knuckles. Its mossy fingernails.

Yes. The Royal Glam in Llantrisant. Aye, I just came on and they told me. Hell of a crack, they said. Going all in and out of consciousness, really confused and in pain. They didnae try moving her till the paramedics got here. Sirens and everything. Yes, Penny went with them. She just rang with the latest. Said they’d checked for fractures and were putting her in for an MRI-type effort…

Rees threw on clothes, grabbed his jacket and patted his pockets, checking for his car keys. He reached the front door and swirled back. Cursed at his jelly-mind, foggy from sleep, the urgency of Katrina’s voice having thrown him. He’d forgotten his priority completely. He lifted the Nagra strap. Snatched a few boxes of pristine quarter-inch still in their cellophane wrapper. Hit the light switch.

It was what she wanted, he told himself. He was doing what she’d asked for.

Drizzle barely more than a mist made his view of the night semi-opaque through the thinly-speckled windscreen. He flipped the wipers.

On. Off. On. Off. On. Off.

His headlight beams picked up the wraith of a shaggy pony limping across the road through Llantristant Common, emerging from fog and disappearing into it again like a heavy-hoofed intoxication, a pagan acid flashback.

He blinked from the GIG Cymru/NHS Wales logo—BWRDD LECHYD CWM TAF HEALTH BOARD—following the arrow to the car park and snatching a ticket at the barrier, before running through the emptiness to the footbridge.

A congregation of wheelchair-users lurked under the portico, back-lit by the bilious strip-lighting of the interior, the side of them facing him in shadow. The figures seemed to have gathered as if in ritual formation around an ashtray on a stainless steel plinth. He saw their dappled skin and heard their damaged lungs crackling as they gnawed at their cigarettes.

To his left a grille covered the shop. A little boy was crying and plucking at the slats, and Rees imagined the mother was in the nearby toilet with the occupant of the empty buggy he now passed. The information desk to the left was unmanned—no one in sight—so he kept walking, lured towards a central atrium. The floors were colour-coded, he now saw—lines painted in red, blue and green running through the building like arteries, directing people obediently to their shuffling appointments with Surgical Assessment, with Anaesthesia, with Supported Recovery, with death. This was where it happened. This was where it always ended. This was the building built for it. The shininess and disinfectant not so much fighting E-coli or MRSA but fragility, despair and the fucking inevitable.

He looked at the overhanging signage and found CRITICAL CARE (ICU)—the arrow pointed right.

He took to the stairs three at a time because the lift was taking an age. He didn’t strictly know she was in Intensive Care. She might be in a general ward, or A&E. She might even be on her way home with cuts and bruises for all he knew, but somehow he believed his instinct was right. He felt bad when he saw that the reason the lift was delayed was a gurney with an old man lying on it fighting for breath.

Ahead of him down the corridor he saw Penny Greatorex with her mobile to her ear, and he paused, nose to a window while she passed. Not that he needed to—she was far too involved in her call to notice him. Who was she ringing? The home, or her home? Darling, sorry I’m late, but one of the old ladies is very inconveniently dying. Outside the window a coarse expanse of green plastic flapped like a sail, tethered to scaffolding poles. Once she’d got in the lift, he hurried down the corridor through the double doors from which she’d emerged.

“Bronwen Llewellyn. A patient called Bronwen Llewellyn?”

The dark-haired nurse baulked. “You’ll have to ask on the ward.”

“Which ward?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

Seeing his obvious agitation, she pointed. “That one. Sixteen.”

His palm shoved the heavy door. It didn’t give. He looked through the glass, shielding his eyes. Pressed the intercom next to the entry phone. It squawked. He asked if he could see a patient, please, giving Bronwen’s name. The intercom went dead, cut off like the last crackling message of a Spitfire pilot.

Through the window a nurse with fat arms approached the door, opened it half way but blocked his entry with her bulk. He tried to read in her eyes what she knew, but it was impossible.

“The nursing home informed me. I know this is…but I came here as…”

“Are you a relative, sir?”

He could not think of an alternative. “Yes.”

“Siân? Diolch yn fawr i chi.“ The voice came from behind her. She stepped back, letting the door open, and Rees saw a skinny, blond man with a stethoscope curling out of his pocket finish writing something on a clip board. The chap was in his twenties and not conventionally handsome (usually a euphemism, but in this case true). “Mr Llewellyn?”

“Yes.”

“Your mam’s been in the wars, poor thing. Have you come far?”

“Quite a way.”

“Well, you’re here now. That’s what matters, eh? We put her in a room to herself. To give her a bit of peace.”

In a way he was prepared for it, in a way it hit him like a ton of bricks. He expected the hospital bed, the clouding oxygen mask, the drip, the white patches on her chest connected to the ECG flickering its digital data. What he didn’t expect was to see that vital bundle, that sprightly calf, looking like a punctured bag. Nostrils flaring under the plastic, hissing cone. Wrinkled lips pouting and twitching. Eyelids struggling to so much as flicker. Eyes—black eyes from the fall—themselves hooded, failing, pooped. The massive lump at her temple, hideously discoloured and embossed with a dozen stitches like the work of some brutal staple-gun. Worst of all, the cruel harshness of the Venflon needle rammed into that snappable forearm with its sagging skin lined like bark, the cotton wool absorbing an ooze of dark blood. He wondered how many times they’d gone for a vein and missed. He thought of her yelp and recoil and tears, and the platitudes that would have come back at her. It made him shudder.

“I know,” said the doctor, or registrar as he called himself, whose name was Sand. (Dr Sand—it sounded like a comic book hero—or villain.) “She’s getting her sleep, and that’s a good thing after what she’s been through. The fact she hasn’t broken anything is a miracle, but a bash on the skull isn’t funny for anybody—especially at her age. It looks worse than it is, with all the inflammation, but that will go down. Our worry is the impact on her system, something like this. We have to keep an eye on a head injury, in case there’s any sort of bleeding in the skull, any haemorrhaging, any swelling. So far so good, but the next twenty-four hours is the crucial time. We can’t take anything for granted. I’m sure you understand.”

Rees looked at the blue-black bruising muddied around the crook of her elbow. His mouth was desert dry. He clacked as he swallowed.

“Is she going to die?”

“I’ve told you all I can. So far she’s been a brave old thing, love her.”

“Just tell me the truth. Please. What are the chances of her pulling through?”

“I really can’t give you chances, Mr Llewellyn. All we can do is keep an eye on her and hope for the best. I’m sorry.”

“How long have I got?”

Dr Sand paused at the door. “You can stay as long as you like.”

He sat beside the bed. Did not pick up her hand as he felt, peculiarly, he might break her. Or that his gesture might be some kind of imposition, one she didn’t want or need. Old people tended to have very clear boundaries of privacy and didn’t like them abused. This is what he told himself.

Wach, the breathing in the oxygen mask said. Wachch…Waaccchhh… Waacher…Wachch-ur…

“Wrach-y-wribyn…nuh…wraaach…”

Her eyes, stuck with a rheumy, Galapagos glue, opened. A leaden cloud having moved across the sky of them.

“Tilda…Muh…Muh…”

Rees didn’t need to struggle to make out the words.

She turned a groggy inch to him, struggling to focus.

“Put it on…” Throat caked with suffering. “Put it on.”

Her arm lifted, bone, skin. He followed the line of her quavering finger. It led to the Nagra he’d placed on the chair next to the door.

The lick of leader made a rhythmic tick and tock. In a quite mesmerising way if you let it be, one spool blossomed with tape as the other slowly diminished. Luckily he had a collection of little plastic clamps and one of these held the microphone to a metal rib of the bed head, coiled with gaffer tape. It was important to position it as close to her mouth as possible to get a clean recording.

“Uh…Matilda…I…Aye…shush…shush…”

“Brownwen? Bronwen? I’m here. I’m here, look. What do you want to tell me?”

“I want to tell you…” Her feather-light fingers tugged the oxygen mask to one side, the elastic cutting a scar-line into her cheek. Its hissing became louder. “…I want to tell you you’re a good boy.”

Where was that coming from? Was that the pain-killers talking? He fought a smile.

“Bronwen, do you remember our arrangement?” He reached between his legs and brought his chair round, closer.

“Arr—arrange…?” The mask, skew-whiff, twisted, added to her look of helpless puzzlement. Resembling a dislodged red nose, it made her stray hair look like a clownish wig.

“Yes, our arrangement. What you’d tell me? If I came? D’you remember?”

She lost all her strength at that point and her arm fell from the oxygen mask to the bed. Something about the brown paw of it frightened him, but he reached out to hold it.

The door opened. He retracted his hand like a thief.

“How’s she going? Is she sleeping, still?” The camp voice and bleached hair betrayed the ICU nurse’s sexuality. The plucked eyebrows and sun-bed tan added to Rees’ impression he must be a drag queen on the quiet. “I’ve come to change her dressing.” What dressing? Of course—her thigh. Katrina had said. The rainbow bruising. Maybe other damage he didn’t know about. “Why don’t you go and get a bite to eat for ten minutes? A coffee or something? But it’s bloody dreadful, I warn you.”

“Thanks,” said Rees, easing himself to his feet.

“What’s this palaver?” Drag Queen said as he peeled down the sheet, thumbing at the mic. Slim hips and slip-ons. “It’s not interfering with our equipment, is it?”

“No, I cleared it with Dr Sand,” Rees lied. “He said it’s fine.”

The ICU nurse looked at the Nagra, then at him. Rees wondered what he was thinking, but didn’t really care. One thing he did know—if this was going to be a long night, he did need that coffee, and better to do it now whilst Bronwen was being properly supervised.

“Ten minutes,” Rees said to her, imagining she could hear.

The hospital café was trying hard to be a Costa but towers of plates full of chips and rejected pasties destroyed any illusion. The server clearly spent more on piercings than on personal hygiene, and the wipe of a ubiquitous cloth saturated with toxic spray only moved around the grease on the Formica tabletops.

Rees tried to concentrate on the sounds around him while his Americano cooled: the squidge of doors swinging open and closed, the squeak of nurses’ rubber soles and trolley wheels on highly-polished floors. The sounds alone gave him a sense of place. Other than that, he could have been anywhere: an airport, shopping mall. They anchored him.

He’d left the spools turning. Let it record everything, just in case. The odd word, the odd sound—it might mean everything later, when he played the reels back in the hermetic comfort of his own home. Home. He wondered what that meant now, and thought of the house in darkness, empty.

He dug out his phone. Messages? None. He looked at the back of his hand, the blue rivers running under the pink surface. He remembered an old trick a friend used to do, plucking the skin on the back of your hand and counting to ten. The longer your skin stayed pinched before becoming soft again, the older your skin was. He remembered when he did it, in his twenties, he was only fractionally a one. The last time he did it he reached four.

He looked up, aware of being watched even before doing so. The gaze came from three people seated on a lime green sofa. Man, woman, child. Dressed formally, in black, as if they’d come from a funeral. They weren’t looking at each other. They were looking at him.

Through the corridor window, the sheeting that strait-jacketed the scaffolding outside sucked in and breathed out like the building’s lungs. Its green glistened with rain.

Rees pressed the ICU intercom again and waited, rubbing the mysterious but nonetheless physical tension in his neck. He heard some whispering and light, conspiratorial chuckling behind him—his first thought being that he was being laughed at, ridiculed, humiliated. Memories of the school yard. He turned, and through an open door into the ward opposite he could see two nurses stripping a bed. They stopped laughing abruptly when they saw him, frozen until the door re-opened.

He hadn’t registered the notice board before. This time he did. The thumb-tacked greeting cards written by young hands, thanking the nurses for being lovely to Nanny or Grampa. Saying, praying, these votive offerings, that they were glad to have them back. That they didn’t want their last memory to be of them sitting in that terrible bed, yellowing and shrinking, accursed by medical bafflement. Young, unblemished faces, smooth cheeks. It seemed an act of abuse to expose them to it. And there they were—the trite pictures of dogs, cats, cuddly bunnies. Or was it a hare?

He stopped dead. Katrina stood with a semi-wet raincoat over her arm, nodding to a nurse. He felt his stomach knot at the thought of what she was being told, but when he caught her eyes and she gave the flicker of a smile by way of greeting he knew it wasn’t what he feared. As the nurse hung up her coat, Katrina took a tissue and wiped the rain from her hair and face.

He sat with elbows on knees staring at the old woman, tube trailing from the oxygen mask clamped like a vicious sucker over her puckered maw, lips forming invisible syllables, the occasional fearful gulp or gasp as if to remind them, or herself, that she was still there.

He could not hear the rain on the roof. They were isolated from it. The bastion of medicine and pharmaceuticals protected him here, he was not sure from what—he supposed, from nature. From night.

Muh…tild…

“I remember when I was about seven,” said Katrina, “or maybe six, asking my mum, ‘Mum, what’s death?’ And she said—she’d answer anything, my mum—’Och, you get a wee taste of it every time you go to sleep, hen. That’s all it is. A big, long sleep.’ I didn’t close my eyes for a month.”

Katrina wanted him to smile but Rees didn’t respond, so she filled the silence.

“Hey. She’s had a good innings. When it comes, it comes, eh?” She saw him look at the floor and misinterpreted his lack of communication. “It wasn’t me who went to Penny, by the way.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You didn’t think…?”

“I didn’t think anything. I don’t think anything. Let’s just leave it, can we?”

“You know all that stuff about the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn? I think she was just lonely. I think she’d say anything for a bit of company.”

“And in the end,” said Rees, “who’s she got? Just you and me.”

“And her son.” Katrina saw Rees’ features jolt as he tried to make sense of what she’d said. “She never mentioned him? Kai?”

“No. What the hell? Why didn’t you mention it?”

“I didn’t think it was important. To you, I mean. Anyway, he lives in Spain. According to her, they couldn’t wait to put her in a nursing home and they were off. ‘Course, old people can be very one-sided about things like that. Maybe the guy had no choice. Maybe he lost his job, ran out of cash. Had to downsize. He had a family. Kids.”

“She has grandchildren?”

“Oh, yeah. Four. She gets photos, letters. I tried to get her to do a Skype but she wasn’t having it. It was always: ‘It’s up to him.’ She’s proud, our Bronwen—and a bit pig-headed and a bit of a well, pain in the arse, too, at times. They get like that. You can’t tell fact from fiction.”

“In your vast experience,” murmured Rees, pretending it was not for her ears.

“Well. Sorry. I’m sorry you didn’t know. Anyway, what time is it?” Katrina looked at her watch. “They phoned and e-mailed him as soon as it happened. The fall, I mean. His contact numbers were on file in case of emergencies. Obviously. He should be landing at Heathrow soon, if his flight isn’t delayed. I hope to Christ he makes it in time.”

“In time?”

His spoken thought didn’t need elaboration. He voiced it only to be cruel to her, because she was being cruel to him by saying this. He didn’t really know why. Katrina stood, and he was only dimly listening now.

“Penny’s gone off to collect him. I think it’s all the old girl has ever wanted, really, deep down. For him to be with her at the end. Isn’t that all any of us want in the end? To not be alone?”

Rees’s eyes were fixed on the old woman. He heard a sharp intake of breath, saw her jaw glove-puppeting behind the plastic hiss, the tendons stretching in her neck. “What can you hear, Bronwen, love? What can you see?” He circled the bed and lifted the microphone from the sheet to rest on her undulating chest. Held it there with the flat of his hand. “Bronwen?”

“Nnn…She’ll be here, now just…Buh, above, above us, she is, sh, she is, now just…Blummy toes scratchin’ the flamin’ roof, can you hear them? Scra-scratchity scratch-scratch…Flamin’…nggghff…puh.” The vowels drifted—consonants becoming stutters and starts and mute spits, lips contorting in some dream-life, eyes only briefly alert and cognisant and he could tell it was burdensome, a torture. She sagged, thorax lifting the black bar of the mic with each mucus-filled rattle.

“What did she say?” He looked over at Katrina but a shrug was the most the girl could offer.

Now Bronwen’s mouth flexed like a sphincter. A newborn mute and writhing for first breath. Until which, pain. Just pain.

Rees felt a wave of nausea, a scent-memory of grease and acidic coffee courtesy of the cafeteria.

Chu-kak! Chu-kak! Chu-kak! Chu-kak!

The sound—a sudden feathery slashing—startled him, tugged his chin to see the tape on the Nagra had run out and the loose tail was flailing, whipping circles, ablur. He’d seen this a thousand times before. Stupid it had made him jump, something so innocuous and banal.

He walked to the machine.

“I better ring her,” said Katrina, getting up. “See if he’s touched down. They don’t allow you to make phone calls in here. I better go outside. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Rees said nothing. She probably thought she’d got on his nerves and needed to give him a bit of space. She hadn’t. Not really. It was all petty. Pointless. She was a decent sort. There was nothing wrong with her. He didn’t like putting down people the way Glyn did. She was ordinary. She was not a deep thinker, or snappy dresser, but that wasn’t a crime. She cared. That was why she’d come, after all. And that said a lot. And for some strange reason, now, he wanted to acknowledge this to her in some way that wasn’t condescending or trite, but she was gone.

He turned the tape recorder off, took the delicate stray end between his thumb and forefinger of one hand and pulled out a length of it, enough to insert it carefully into the gap between the heads, then curled the free end back round the empty spool. He switched to REWIND for a few seconds and put on his headphones. He wanted to know what she had said—or tried to say.

He pressed STOP then PLAY.

“…can you hear, Bronwen, love? What can you see?”

The sharp intake. Disembodied now, though he knew it was from the person lying behind him. Not clearer in meaning but more ambiguous. Fright? Surprise? Discomfort?

“Bronwen?”

Rees listened to the muffled, shuffling sound as, a ghost on tape, some audio doppelganger, he had lifted the microphone from the surface of the hospital bed and placed it—pop, numb—on her hollow chest.

“Nnn…She’ll be here, now just…”

A laugh somewhere. Why had he not heard it? Faint. Several walls away. A cackle at a dirty joke, it sounded like, then stifled in a snigger by the hand of a nurse realising ICU was no place for such hilarity—or was it a patient’s relative attacked by a short, savage burst of hysteria?

“Buh, above, above us, she is, sh, she is, now just…”

Then—the other noise…Something. What was it? Even fainter…

“Blummy toes scratchin’ the flamin’ roof, can you hear them? Scra-scratchity scratch-scratch…Flamin’…nggghff…puh.”

For once he wished Bronwen would shut up. It was a background drone, lifting high then dropping low…

He stopped the tape and rewound it again. Turned up the volume.

Pressed PLAY again.

“…scratchin’ the flamin’ roof, can you hear them? Scra-scratchity scratch-scratch…Flamin’…nggghff…puh.”

Of course…An ambulance. Ambiwlans. The siren and its Doppler effect, growing louder as it pulls in to A&E on the far side of the building. Not a cry at all. Not a bird-like cry or screech. Not a drawn-out screech at all…

He saw it, bright green and luminous yellow, flapping? Why did he think, flapping?

“What did she say?”

His own voice in the Sennheisers, hooking him.

He wound it back. REWIND. STOP. PLAY.

Ambulance/Ambiwlans

Too far. Earlier than the first time. Katrina’s voice.

“…should be landing at Heathrow soon, if his flight isn’t delayed. I hope to Christ he makes it in time.”

“In time?”

His own voice. Bitter. Old. Cruel. More like his father’s.

In the pause it rose again. The siren. But it wasn’t there before—it most definitely wasn’t there before, the wailing. The shift from high pitch to low—almost musical. The cawing ululation…How could it be earlier this time? How could it be growing? Getting louder even now, as he listened?

“…all the old girl has ever wanted, really, deep down. For him to be with her at the end. Isn’t that all any of us want in the end? To not be alone?”

His back to Bronwen Llewellyn, Rees switched off the Nagra and tugged away his head set as if it was on fire, her words—in reality now—suddenly sharp in his ears, as sharp as was possible from behind the oxygen mask:

“Gutter she’s hanging from now…cowing looking in at us…knows, see, she does…it’s her job, see…swining thing, she is…”

Without turning he grabbed another tape box and let it fall to his feet, sprung open on the floor, clear plastic fluttering after it. He tried with feverish fingers to lace up a new reel, yanking out a yard of the white leader. He fed it past the recording heads and made a loop, knotting it onto the empty spool before pressing RECORD and PLAY simultaneously. He realised he was panting and held his breath.

“Bronwen Llewellyn. Royal Glamorgan Hospital. Tape four. Time… Time…” It became a question—”Time?”—not even for the tape any more, and it was always for the tape. Always. Because the tape would outlast him—wouldn’t it? Though now he seemed its servant. The tape asked him for more but he couldn’t give it. Not a fact, not a confessional, nothing. The most he could give in the abject silence was his fear.

Knowing he must, he turned to face the bed.

Katrina sat with her back to him. She was facing the old woman, slightly bent forward, forearms on thighs, wearing her Dorothy Perkins raincoat. He could see in harrowing clarity dark, mercury rivulets beading down it, lines chasing each other.

“You were quick,” he said, forcing a lightness into it that stuck in his throat.

Katrina did not reply. Nor did she turn.

She extended a hand to rest gently on Bronwen’s and it was not the hand he last remembered as Katrina’s. Of course he had not examined it, not had occasion or need to, but Katrina’s had been soft and white, and now the skin was—what?—brown, if not grey, and he was sure if anything her fingers had been rather dainty, but these? These were too long, surely—far too long, and the knuckles too many…The most appalling thing of all was he now saw that the figure’s back was hunched quite notably, the head sinking low to its chest as the hand with palpable urgency squeezed and shook the old woman’s.

Almost paralysed, yet feeling the sac of his testes prickle and tighten, Rees knew that the object was to wake her and that Bronwen knew this with unique and horrible certainty. He could see that she had her eyes so tightly shut that her entire face was a route map of wrinkles pointing at a central point. Her lower lip shook in her non-babble, shining with rogue spittle as the oxygen mask misted in bursts. She resisted. She resisted. Weak as she was, enfeebled as she was, mute as she was, she was defying the night with every ounce of her embattled being. But the night was relentless. It persisted. It was waiting, predator at the water hole, with its filthy, lank, coal-black hair for her to give in, as it knew she must.

It was waiting with immoral, sickening patience for her to open her eyes.

“No,” Rees said, voice his own again, not his father’s, not on tape, not artificial or an electromagnetic reproduction but alarming real. Knowing that more than almost anything he’d had in life, or wanted in life, he wanted Bronwen’s eyes to stay closed.

“Not her,” he breathed. “Not yet.”

In bemusement or arrogance the hunched figure did not respond, and Rees knew what he had to do. Seeing past it the flickering eyelids that tried so hard to keep shut, he grabbed its shoulder and yanked it round to face him, tearing its gaze from its victim.

Two swishing curtains of thickly-matted hair fell long either side of its Geronimo cheeks, the face framed by them hard to reconcile as human. It filled his vision, riddled with warts, Neanderthal brow sloping above a bony ridge overhanging holes dug into putty. In the same instant the lips of a jutting jaw, ancient and simian, pulled back from a mouth with frightening elasticity to display gums blackened and rotten as it emitted a sound he failed to define even as it consumed him.

Strangely, he remembered seeing a programme about the making of a monster movie of the 1950s which showed the roar of a dinosaur ravaging New York created by the amalgamation of recordings of a bear, an elephant and a howler monkey. His brain tried to deduce, to codify, oddly, some similar recipe for what was assaulting his ears, but the task defeated him. Even in that grasping moment of lucidity, on another level, he understood completely that he was lost in the all-encompassing trap of it. There was no escape but to succumb, and the burden of resistance was shockingly easy to divest. He let it bathe him, that strange manufacture of the vast, insouciant yawn of a lion, the manic glee of a chimpanzee and the plaintive top C of a mezzo-soprano singing La Cieca’s aria from La Gioconda—the first opera he had seen that had made him weep. It—all of it—rose, transporting and yet holding him like a claw.

Perhaps he found beauty in that sound because he knew that if he was hearing it, Bronwen was not.

And even as the noise coursed through him, he knew that the only scream they’d hear on the tape would be his own, torn from him now as a crippling fire exploded in his chest, fissures of agony snaking down one arm. Pain choked him as he tried to blot out the inhuman howl of the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn with his own. But he was doubled, quartered, falling, fallen, as the polished floor raced to hit his splayed hand then, as it twisted, his forehead.

Hiroshima whited him back to the world. Faces? Faces he didn’t know. Demons. Saviours. Making him afraid. Fishermen hauling him back from drowning. But drowning felt best.

Two hundred joules. Stand back please!

The kick again. Cold. Shirt ripped open. Paddles descending.

Not responding. Nothing happening. One more time. Stand back please! Stand back!

“She’s coming for me,” he could hear somewhere in the room. “She came for him, and next she’ll come for me.” And he knew Katrina, upside-down Katrina, returning now from outside, would comfort the old woman in her madness.

He didn’t care. What mattered was that she was safe. That she had time. Time enough to see her son. Time to make a difference. And the light was bright. And he didn’t mind that, either. He didn’t mind anything very much at all.

And the last thing he listened to was his own voice in his own head.

“To the folklorist, nothing must die. There is life every time a mouth opens to tell a story.”

Now I am a story, he thought.

Tell me.