Foxlowe. Eleanor Wasserberg
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early one morning, while the stars were still out, and the dogs, the goats, even the chickens were still sleeping. It was the Bad’s favourite hour, black and cold as stone. So when Green came, it latched onto her easily, red and slimy, like organs ripped out. Freya knew it by the glisten of the blood and the way it screamed. It filled the house, and we all shrank from it, driving some to pack and become Leavers, the cries so full of spite that they ran away into the night.
Freya hoped that the Bad would leave once the sun became stronger, but instead it screamed and howled and scratched at her, it gnawed at her breast, it made her bleed. No one wanted to hold it, no one wanted to touch it. It was shut away in the attic until we could decide what to do. Freya knew it was the Bad, but the others were too afraid to say it. We survived it by wrapping it tight so it couldn’t rage too hard, and not looking it in the eye, or touching it too much.
Freya felt the Bad all over the house. It made her weak. It made her cry and feel tired even when she hadn’t done any work. The others tried to help, with food, and chores, and making things for baby Green, like shadows on the walls with their hands.
Things got worse. The rush of Leavers after Green’s birth had weakened us. Freya was seeing things that could not be real: her mother standing at the foot of the bed, her father holding a small child’s hand. There were whispers in corners. Secrecy. The Bad began to swell and grow in potency, inside the walls.
It was Richard who suggested we take baby Green out to the Standing Stones for Solstice. The group gathered up blankets and bottles of moonshine and set out with the baby wrapped in a quilt. Freya followed, hoping the air and light would deliver her strength. At this time, we would spend Summer Solstice at the Stones and meditate, feel the Stones at our backs, and watch the double sunset, a gift only we can see. So we sat around the Stones, and talked, and ate, and tried to ignore the Bad in Richard’s arms. It was screaming, feeling the power of the Stones, but was holding on.
As we watched from the Stones, the sun dipped behind the hill called the Cloud, and shadows stretched across the moor. The Bad crowed in triumph, and we were afraid. Freya was cast down by the tiny hope that had flared in her, only to be extinguished again. Then the sun was reborn. It reappeared between the peaks of the Cloud, before sinking again. This is too much for the Bad, light renewed just as darkness sets in. It fled.
Freya held Green and kissed her, and loved her. This was the end of the Crisis, and Foxlowe became stronger and happier. We understood how the Solstice could help us.
But the Bad will always remember it lived in Green. It’s still there, little traces inside the veins, little worms in the stomach. This is why the rituals are so important. Summer Solstice to drive the Bad away, and the Scattering to protect us when the sun is weak.
After we brought her back into the kitchen, muddy and cold, I never had a bad word or look for Blue again. In the years that followed we expanded, me and Toby, to let Blue in, and she became another Foxlowe ungrown. We taught her the best places in the house: the middle landing with its blue pool, the yellow room, the back stairs and corridors full of mice and cobwebs, and the empty rooms that sat decaying there, with their treasures of broken furniture and walls on which to draw in charcoal and chalk. By the time she could run, she made a good chaser with quick dodges and a hard grip, and wasn’t afraid to slide down the banister or jump from the windows. When she was very little, she bit and kicked like we did, but me and Toby would attack each other if she was hurt by one of us, and because we rarely touched her, she stopped raging that way. When me and Toby fought, Blue took the side of whoever was left with the reddest skin, the deepest scratch.
We didn’t need to teach her the way she had to live, like other new people who came. She was almost like me, almost a born Foxlowe girl. She learned our language and the rituals, Freya said, as new. It was how it should be for everyone, Freya said. We didn’t have to explain that blood family didn’t matter, because we were the only family she knew. We didn’t have to warn her about the outside, because she couldn’t remember it. I think she remembered her first Solstice somehow, because Blue always had ice fingers and toes. Freya would rub her feet under the sheets before she went to sleep. Gooseflesh, even in the summer. She could never get warm. Sometimes I watched her holding her hands in her armpits, or curling her fingers around a steaming mug, and wondered if her skin remembered lying on the icy ground, that night, with the scarf unravelled and the Bad all around her.
One day around five summers after Freya brought her to us, Blue disappeared. She’d slept in the attic with me like always; her drawer was too small for her now, and she lay with me on the mattress, and Freya sometimes slept on the rug, wrapped in her coat. I woke up alone, and when I found Freya in the kitchen, we both thought Blue had been with the other.
—Why don’t you take better care of her? She’s not a doll, Freya said.
She was sketching at the table, brushes and paints in a jar. Ellen and Libby were brewing tea and they looked around.
—What’s that, said Ellen. —Little one lost?
—She’ll be around, said Freya, but she swiped her brush in the jar, making black clouds there, and got up.
We searched the downstairs first, and the obvious places: the ballroom, where Egg and Pet were ripping up sheets for rags, the yellow room, where Libby said Blue liked to nap in the afternoons. —No she doesn’t, said Freya, but Libby showed us the chair Blue curled up in, how it was out of the draughts. The back corridors with their empty rooms were quiet, and the staircases. In the big upstairs rooms, peeling wallpaper and rotting books, we found Valentina lying on her stomach and writing in a notebook, wrapped in a blanket.
—Not seen her, she said.
—October gone too? asked Libby. —Maybe they’re together.
—No, we’re playing hide-and-seek, said Valentina, turning over a page.
We tried the studios, and found Richard hauling sacks of clay, new delivered, ready for the pottery wheel, his tweeds covered in dust.
—Oh, he said, —I saw her in the gardens this morning.
—On her own? said Libby.
—Well, yes, he said.
Freya went to the window and cupped her hands around her face. —Green used to wander around all the time, she said.
—No, Libby said. —Toby was always with her, or you.
—She’s fine, said Ellen, —I’m sure she’s fine, but she went to the window too, and cupped her hands there, so she and Freya looked like they were speaking to someone, silently, on the other side of the glass.
It started to rain, and we went out onto the back lawns to search for her, calling her name, tripping over the leaping dogs. Raindrops turned into sheets. Toby showed up, in a thick red jumper that stretched in the drench, the sleeves flopping down to his knees. Valentina twisted one of them, splattering the grass, and said, —Inside, kiddo, don’t want you catching cold. And Toby smiled his smile that was just for her when she noticed him, not half and crooked like the ones he gave to me, and obeyed.
—She must have gone back in, said Richard.
—We’ll stay out and look here, Freya said, squeezing my hand. The others waded back to the house, some giggling and shrieking, others glancing back at the gardens and the moor beyond, brows creased.
Blue’s name got lost in the rain when we called her.
—She’ll be fine, said Freya. —Sure she’s back in the house, drying that hair of hers.
Something about Blue’s hair — the bright red had faded as she grew, but it lived in glints and streaks in the brown, and it was glossy, lovely like Libby’s was — irritated Freya, and for her Blue’s hair was always that hair of hers. All of her worry seemed to have drained away, and she stood smiling, cupping her hands to catch the rain.
—My Green, haven’t