Where Monsters Lie Read online

  ‘What do you mean? She’s happy.’

  ‘When you were her age, you never wanted to be by yourself. You and Finn were practically joined at the hip. You’d cry and cry until you saw him. Every day. It drove your mother mad.’

  He almost put his hand to his mouth as the words tumbled out. He hadn’t meant to say that about Mum. I tried to swallow my mouthful, but it felt like it had got stuck in my throat.

  ‘I didn’t mean that, Effie,’ he said, before I could reply. ‘It’s not what I meant. It was just hard for your mum because . . . because you only stopped crying when you saw Finn. It was as if your wee heart was broken. But as soon as you saw Finn, you’d stop immediately. Like you’d flipped a switch. It was that quick. Your mother felt . . . well, she felt helpless, to be honest, Effie. She felt like she couldn’t soothe you herself, you see. The only person who could stop you screaming your lungs out was Finn.’

  ‘I don’t remember—’ I started to say, but Dad cut in.

  ‘Of course you don’t remember. You were only a bairn. I’m not saying it was your fault or anything. It was just the way you were. Whereas our little missus over there’ – he gestured to Tommi – ‘she just likes being by herself. We’re all different, I suppose.’

  Later, Tommi climbed up onto my lap. She was holding a tiny stone in each hand and she brought them together so they made a little clink.

  Clink. Clink. They were so small, she really had to concentrate to make sure they hit each other squarely. Her forehead was furrowed with the effort.

  Then she put one of the stones into my hand and closed my fingers around it. ‘For you,’ she said.

  I suddenly understood how my mother must have felt when I was little. I imagined Tommi not beaming back up at me. What if, instead, she had looked away and cried, searching for someone else? What if she hadn’t pressed a stone into my hand, but had thrown them across the room in fury? It would have been more than I could bear if Tommi had done that; if I didn’t see her simple happiness reflected back at me. But I’d always known what to do to calm her, to settle her, to make her smile and laugh.

  All at once I felt a heaviness that wouldn’t leave me all evening. I slunk off to bed early, hoping it would disappear as I slept.

  At some point in the early morning, when the darkness in the sky was still thick like treacle, I realized what the feeling was.

  It was guilt.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The next evening I asked Dad if I could stay over at Finn’s house.

  ‘Just check with Kathleen and Rob,’ he said. ‘But that’s fine. Sure,’ he added unnecessarily.

  I packed a few things up into a bag, along with the photograph of the newborn Finn and me. I wondered if Finn knew that Mrs Tanner had delivered us and that we’d been born in the same house; his house.

  After all these years wondering about our births, were we about to find out that my most secret and greatest wish was true: that Finn and I had grown side by side even before our birth; that we were joined together by our very blood?

  Of course, if this was the case, it meant that I was no longer related to Tommi. Or to Dad and Mum.

  Unless my mum had been the birth mother of both of us . . . but then Kathleen and Rob would not be related to us. That didn’t seem right either.

  ‘Do you think we are the twins?’ I whispered to Finn that night as we lay in the darkness, me on the mattress on the floor beside his bed.

  Earlier, as we were brushing our teeth, I had looked at our faces in the bathroom mirror.

  ‘Do you think we look alike?’

  Finn had spat out his toothpaste and then looked at our reflections. ‘We’ve got the same sort of colour eyes,’ he said finally.

  ‘And hair too,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think it looks a bit the same?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘I think so,’ I said before Kathleen ushered us out of the bathroom.

  ‘If we were twins, why would they keep it from us? And who do we belong to?’ Finn asked now. ‘Your family or mine?’

  ‘I’ve always felt close to your mum,’ I admitted. ‘Really close.’

  ‘But then, so have I to yours,’ Finn said. ‘She taught me everything I know about plants and birds and everything. It could have been the other way round.’

  ‘But you look just like your mum and dad,’ I said. ‘You have to be theirs. I don’t look much like anyone.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Finn said. ‘I used to think you looked like your mum.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Not a lot, but there’s something about your eyes.’

  ‘Well, do you think we should ask your mum? I don’t reckon my dad knows anything about it. He just thinks we were born on the same day, a few hours apart.’

  ‘Or Rosemary Tanner,’ mused Finn. ‘We could ask her. She must know. But if we were twins, why would they separate us? Why wouldn’t they let us both stay with our real family?’

  ‘Something bad must have happened, don’t you think? We know that both our mums were pregnant. There’s that photograph of them. What if . . . What if one of them lost their baby and the other one had twins, so . . .’

  ‘They gave one of the twins away?’ Finn finished for me, sounding dubious. ‘I don’t know.’

  I heard him roll over onto his side; when he spoke next, I knew he was facing me.

  ‘It would mean that you are going to awaken the monsters, Effie. If it were true; if the prophecy is true.’

  ‘Lots of ifs . . . Finn, do you think it has anything to do with my mum? The way she went . . . like she did?’

  I heard him take a deep breath in the darkness, but suddenly the bedroom door was flung open and we were bathed in the golden light from the landing.

  ‘Sleep, you two,’ Kathleen hushed. ‘Don’t be up all night talking. You’ve got school tomorrow.’

  We fell silent.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said, and shut the door behind her.

  I heard Finn shift, turning over onto his back.

  ‘I think it might,’ I whispered to him.

  But he didn’t answer.

  I didn’t know if it was because he hadn’t heard me or because he was too scared to say.

  There is something within me. A stirring. I think of a whirlwind whipping up everything in its path; things come to land in a completely different place to where they started, the wrong way up from where they were.

  Maybe I can change things too.

  Maybe I can turn things upside down.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A couple of days after that, Finn and I set ourselves up in the Tree Cave for a full day of raft-building. I had risen early and given Tommi her breakfast, but although I was eager to leave, Dad was not yet up.

  In the end I knocked on his bedroom door and tiptoed in. He was lying very still, and I noticed that his duvet was the wrong way round: the side with the buttons was at the top.

  ‘Dad? Are you awake? Dad?’

  He didn’t answer.

  I pulled the curtains back a little, letting the weak, thin winter light into the room.

  ‘Dad? Can you look after Tommi? Can I go and see Finn? Dad?’

  I thought he was still asleep, but suddenly his voice filled the room.

  ‘Just give me a moment, Effie,’ he said. He sounded tired.

  I started to backtrack: ‘Only if it’s OK. Don’t worry if it’s not.’

  Dad sat up and yawned noisily. I looked at him carefully: he looked thinner. His face was sharper – it had lost its roundness and I realized I had not seen him smile for a long time.

  ‘’S OK. Just need to get up. It’s fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I felt guilty leaving him when he looked so thin and unhappy.

  ‘I’m up now, Effie. You’re free.’

  I went down to the kitchen and opened one of the cupboards. The last few Jammie Dodgers had gone soft but I took them anyway, and I made some sandwiches using up the very last of the peanut butter and Marmite, l
eaving one on a plate for Dad. When I got to the Tree Cave, I was glad to see Finn’s offering of two thick cheese and chutney sandwiches and a tin of sticky, falling-apart flapjacks. The idea was that we would not have to go home for lunch – although we somehow managed to eat most of the food before the morning was out. Finn said it was OK because we needed the energy.

  We had already built a square frame and were fixing planks across it to make a floor. Finn had made it look easy, but I was struggling. I kept missing the nail or hammering it in crooked. More often than not, I had to wrench my nail out and start again with a new one.

  Still, I liked the sound of the hammer. It stopped me from having to think about things. Mum. The funeral. The legend. Dad, sad and lonely.

  Finn looked like he didn’t want to think about things either; as soon as he had secured one plank, he reached out for another and starting hammering. I wondered if he was trying not to think the very same thing as me: that we hadn’t been able to find out what happened to Mum.

  I brought my hammer down with a resounding, heavy thud. The nail bent awkwardly; I sighed and started to pull it out with the claw of my hammer when I noticed the absence of banging. Finn had stopped too. The quiet of the day settled around us.

  ‘I think I heard something,’ Finn said. ‘A car door. It might be Rosemary Tanner.’

  We had purposefully left hammering the planks for a day when Rosemary Tanner was out. Her house was nearest and we didn’t want to give away the location of the Tree Cave by making too much noise.

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ I said, and we put down our hammers and crept through the undergrowth, round to the path that led to her cottage.

  As we were about to emerge from the scrub, Finn put his hand out to stop me – and before I could object, I saw Rosemary Tanner striding straight past us. She hadn’t seen us, but if we had come out only moments before, then we would have walked straight into her.

  ‘She’s off on her walk,’ I whispered to Finn.

  ‘No she’s not. Look – she’s stopped.’

  Sure enough, she had come to a standstill at the edge of the loch.

  ‘What’s she looking for?’ I said to Finn. She was gazing out over the water, just as she had in the days after Mum had gone missing – but there was nothing to see. Just water.

  We peered out at Rosemary Tanner. She looked as she always did: the black cape; the black notebook clutched to her chest.

  Suddenly she bent down, as if noticing something in the water, but there was nothing there, and after a moment she straightened up again.

  ‘Come on,’ Finn said after a while, in a whisper. ‘Let’s go.’

  We scrambled back through the bushes until we were encircled by the leaves and branches of the Tree Cave.

  ‘It seemed like . . . she was looking for something—’ I started to say – but then a thought planted itself in my head. A thought that scared me; a thought that sprouted, grew.

  ‘I know it might sound silly, but maybe it’s the . . . something to do with—’ Finn started.

  But I finished the sentence for him.

  ‘The legend.’

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘’Nother ’gie!’ came Tommi’s cry.

  ‘Not another one!’ I was getting fed up with catapulting them into the garden. ‘Dad! There’s another slug!’

  ‘Put it outside!’ came Dad’s reply.

  I’d lost count of how many I had evicted. Dad had put salt down, but it hadn’t stopped them coming in.

  The slug curled into itself as I tried to scrape it onto a spoon.

  ‘Got you!’ I said triumphantly, and shook it off into the grass, but as soon as I went back in, I caught a movement in the corner of my eye. Another four slugs, all different sizes, that I had missed. They were climbing all over Mum’s old binoculars.

  I picked up the binoculars by the leather strap, reluctant to touch their slimy, shiny bodies. Their skin glistened black.

  One by one I spooned off each slug and ejected them out of the window. ‘Dad?’ I called out. ‘What’re Mum’s binoculars doing down here? Did you get them out?’

  The last time I’d seen them was when Dad asked me to choose things for Mum’s coffin; I’d left them on her desk in their bedroom, next to a book about wild birds.

  ‘I brought them down,’ Dad said, appearing at the kitchen door. He had his coat on, but wasn’t wearing any shoes. ‘I thought Finn might want to have them. What do you think?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I thought we should start putting some bits and pieces of your mum’s away – I remembered young Finn liking these. What do you think? You never use them, do you?’

  ‘No, no,’ I spluttered. ‘And Finn will use them all the time. Birds and stuff. That was their thing.’

  Memories of Mum and Finn filled my head: the last time I remembered them being together on one of their nature walks. They were bent, almost conspiratorially, over a leaf skeleton that Finn had found.

  ‘These act like our veins, bringing water and food to the leaf,’ Mum said, pointing out the tiny lines.

  ‘Tori! I see a hawk,’ Finn said, and quickly passed her the binoculars that hung around his neck; Mum had to bend slightly awkwardly to look through them.

  ‘Good spot, Finn!’ she said admiringly, gazing at the hawk circling the expanse of blue above.

  ‘All right, love,’ Dad said. ‘Well, would you like to give them to him? I’ve got to be off.’ He quickly ducked down and planted a kiss on Tommi’s head and then one on mine, and rushed towards the front door. ‘It’s Deidre today, I think,’ he added.

  ‘No, it’s Old Bill,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Oh yes . . . Losing track of the days.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes, love?’

  ‘Your shoes!’

  ‘Ah. Oh yes, of course.’

  Dad quickly shoved on his boots and left the house with a slam of the door that made the windows rattle.

  Not long after, I heard Old Bill trudging up to the path. Tommi must have heard him too, for she ran towards the door, calling, ‘Bill, Bill!’

  I felt nervous about seeing Old Bill again after speaking about the legend, but I let the door swing wide and Tommi almost ran straight into him. He quickly knelt down and lifted her high in the air. Tommi’s laughter spilled out.

  ‘Flying today then, young Tommi?’ Old Bill said when he put her down. ‘We’ll do plenty of flying today.’

  ‘I’ll be off,’ I said, slinging Mum’s binoculars over my shoulder, where they banged painfully against my hip bone. ‘Bye, Tom.’

  ‘Bye-bye, ’Fie,’ said Tommi. Old Bill lifted her up so that she could wave to me over the hedgerow, until I rounded the corner and could see her no longer.

  I caught up with Finn by the old crab apple tree beside the road.

  ‘She wanted you to have them,’ I replied when he shook his head at Mum’s binoculars and said, ‘No, Effie. They’re yours. Or Tommi’s when she’s grown. I couldn’t.’

  ‘Honestly, Finn,’ I said, trying to hand them to him as we walked towards the bus stop. ‘It’s right for you to have them. I know you’ll use them properly. No point in them just gathering dust at our house.’

  Finn hesitated, and I knew then that he would take them.

  ‘You and Mum did a lot of bird watching, didn’t you? She’d want you to keep going. Please, Finn.’

  He took them carefully from me and hooked them over his head. ‘But if you ever want them back, any time, you just say. I’ll just look after them for you until then.’

  Finn started to peer through the binoculars into the sky, carefully adjusting the lenses.

  ‘See anything?’

  ‘Look – there’s a buzzard!’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘I’m not. Here, have a look!’ Finn quickly passed the binoculars to me. ‘Over there!’

  ‘Nope . . . just sky,’ I said. ‘Nothing there.’

  ‘Next time,’ Finn s
aid meaningfully.

  ‘One thing I should tell you about those binoculars, though.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘This morning they were covered in slugs!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There were four of them sliming all over it.’

  ‘I wonder what they were doing there.’ Finn turned the binoculars over in his hands, studying them closely.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, slugs live in damp places and like to eat rotting things. None of which they would find on a pair of binoculars. It’s just odd, that’s all. You said they just started coming into the house all of a sudden?’

  ‘Yeah – just the other day, out of nowhere. Our house isn’t damp, and Mrs Daniels won’t let anything rotting survive there.’

  ‘See if you can find out where they’re getting in,’ Finn suggested. ‘There must be a hole or something.’

  The school bus pulled up, steaming, at the side of the road, and we forgot all about the slugs and the binoculars until the very next day, when something even odder happened.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  ‘There, on my bookcase. By the bird books. Do you see?’

  Two giant black slugs were creeping over the lenses of Mum’s old binoculars.

  ‘Just like yesterday,’ I said.

  ‘How weird is that?’ Finn said.

  ‘They were black ones yesterday too.’

  ‘Now, what’s even more strange – this morning, when I woke up, I saw the slugs there and took them outside,’ Finn told me. ‘Dad said I had to put them a really long way away so they wouldn’t come back in. I walked all the way to the other side of the village.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Then I put the binoculars back on the shelf, gave them a wipe to get the slime off and had breakfast. When I came back, guess what I found?’

  ‘More slugs,’ I said, my stomach turning over as the slimy bodies of the slugs slowly wrapped themselves around Mum’s binoculars.