Page 43 of Breaking the Dark

Jessica loses herself in ridiculous small-town fantasies as the hot water rains down her head and she runs soap all over her skin until her hand comes to the rectangle of skin above her groin and her brain floods with some kind of sped-up film footage that she must have seen on TV at some point in her life: a sperm infiltrating an egg to fertilize it, the egg splitting and doubling and splitting and doubling, limbs and eyes and hands and feet and fingers and toes appearing—and Jessica presses her eyes shut hard at the very moment that the thing in her head starts to look like a real baby and she quickly turns off the water and grabs the towel from the handrail, rubs herself hard, expunging and exfoliating and growling to herself under her breath because how can she make pizzas in a small town when she can’t even make herself a hot meal in her own kitchen? How can she make friends with strangers if she doesn’t know who she is? And how can she be a mother when she can’t even be a human?

The same boy who served her in the pharmacy the day before lets her in through the door with the plaque on it that says BARTON WALLOP AND BARTON WALDEN HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND MUSEUM.

“Oh,” she says. “It’s you again.”

“It is. Good morning.”

She follows him up a narrow set of gray-carpeted stairs. “So you own this place too?”

“We own the whole building, yes.”

“And who runs the society?”

“My mum. She’s a historian. But I help her out with it.”

“In between running the shop?”

“Yes. And studying for A levels.”

“You’re a busy boy.”

“I am. Yes.”

“Where are your parents?”

“They’re on holiday. Turkey.” He slips a key into a door at the top of the staircase and pushes it open. “They’ll be back next week. Here.” He turns on some lights. “Sorry, it’s a bit chilly in here. No point heating it when nobody ever uses it. But I can plug a heater in for you, so you don’t freeze to death.”

“Sure,” says Jessica, looking around the room. “Thank you.”

It’s a beautiful room, high ceilings decorated with ornate plaster moldings. All around are mahogany filing cabinets and display boxes full of ancient paperwork and objects, a silken embroidered banner decorated with medieval-looking figures attached to one wall, the walls filled with framed letters and maps and sepia-toned photographs.

“Where would I find out stuff about the house at the other end of the street, the one with the moat?”

“Barton Manor? That’s where the Randalls live. The family I was telling you about with the American kids. It’s one of the oldest houses in the village, so there’s loads about it, here.” He pulls open a drawer and tugs out a huge book with a fabric cover. “Press cuttings, accounts, plans, all sorts in here.”

“Thanks,” Jessica says, taking the book to a small desk in the window and pulling out a chair.

“Anyway. Just shout if you need anything else. We close at one p.m., so you’ve got plenty of time.”

“Great stuff,” she murmurs over her shoulder, and then she hears the door close and footsteps back down the stairs and she is alone in this strange room in this strange village in this strange country.

“Right,” she says to herself. “Let’s get this thing started.”

An hour later she finds something in a book called The Bartons Through the Ages by a Miss Anne Satchel, who appears in a photo on the backflap as an elderly lady with a small white poodle perched on her lap, in front of a bush of pale pink roses. The book was published in 1978, and Jessica strongly suspects that neither the author nor her dog is still with us.

Very little is known about the village of Barton Wallop in the 1400s, it begins, but a small plaque in the local chapel, St. John and St. Peter, commemorates a terrible tragedy that blighted the village for dozens of years.

In 1436, Barton Wallop had a population of just over three hundred people. It was farming land, mostly owned by Lord Thomas of Walden, who resided with his large family in the sprawling estate of Walden Manor, which was demolished in the 1800s and is now home to the market town of Barton Walden, five miles from Barton Wallop.

In September of 1436, the harvests had been gathered. It had been a remarkable year for crops and local farmers ran out of space to store them and dug underground for extra capacity. In late September there were three days of torrential rain that turned a freshly dug-out grain store into a mud bath. Twelve local children ran to the mud bath after church one Sunday to play and were buried alive when it collapsed on top of them. The children were aged from nine to eighteen and accounted for over 30 percent of the village’s young. The entire village went into a prolonged period of mourning that lasted for well over five years.

For many centuries, this ground was said to be both cursed and blessed, and rituals took place to prevent anyone from using the ground for building on. The land lay empty for three more centuries, until eventually all the ancestors and memories of the lost children were long gone. In 1789, the land was bought by a London merchant for a country retreat, and a large home built upon the very spot where the children had perished. The house was built in a trapezoidal plot, surrounded by a moat, and to this day is known as Barton Manor.

Barton Manor? thinks Jessica, an icy chill running through her. That’s Sebastian Randall’s house. And it appears, according to Miss Satchel, to have been built on cursed and hallowed land, on top of the bodies of twelve dead children.

She has no idea what this has to do with the Randall twins coming home with perfect skin and cracking bones, but she is more desperate than ever now to get inside that house.

“Miss Allan!”

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