Breakfast and taking the kids to school was a blur, something done by another self  as confused as her. Alice kissed her boys, Ellis and Ben, goodbye, and then walked down Malvern Avenue up the Old Town Hall steps to the oldest part of the library. Here she was helping the librarian clean, document and index the Vanderbilt collection, bequeathed to the people of Lawson ten years previously and still gathering dust. Alice couldn’t shake off the feeling of being followed, which caused her to constantly look back over her shoulder. It was as if she could feel someone’s acrid breath on her neck and smell a carrion odor reminiscent of the stinkhorn growing in rotting, buried wood.   

     However, there was nothing, no one, there. She hurried past Walter Maitland’s door and settled  down for the morning’s work of cataloguing all the papers of Sanders Vanderbilt’s travels to China. He had thrown nothing away, and the nineteenth century papers belonging to the trading family were in a dozen brown boxes, stacked in random order, taking up half of the small room in the east wing of the library.

     Alice shivered and stared abstractly at the snowy landscape of the car park, trying to remember the images of the night before. She replied to a question from Jean, the senior archivist, but could only hear the words dully, almost as if trying to eavesdrop on someone else’s conversation.

     “Alice, are you listening? Take your lunch at anytime you want today…Alice?”

     “Sorry, Jean, but I’m really not feeling very well. Can I have the afternoon off and work late tomorrow?”

     Jean fiddled with her glasses and pulled out a red velour book from a shelf that had suddenly attracted her attention. “What’s that?” she set her eyes on Alice and nodded.

     “You look very pale, Alice. Yes, go on home.”

     Pulling her collar up against the chill wind, Alice shuffled along the cold winding streets, her face bitten by the ghastly February wind. She went home to the house on Holland Avenue, which was usually a warm refuge against the staggering cold. Pausing at the gate, she looked up at the pale blue curtain that framed her bedroom window. She thought she saw the curtain move to one side, but convinced herself she’d imagined it. Something sinister she couldn’t quite remember had happened in the middle of last night in that room. Her everyday life was usually rooted in the real world; now she seemed to be slipping into another.

     Alice made herself some cinnamon coffee and gripped the mug tightly in an effort to get warmer. Once settled on the couch, she switched on the television and started to watch a program about trams in San Francisco. Suddenly, she sat bolt upright and nearly spilled her coffee. Her mouth dropped open in amazement as the camera shifted attention to one passenger in particular. It was her grandmother, on her father’s side, May Thomas, sitting there in her best blue Sunday coat and wearing the dark blue, felt hat with the violet brooch that she’d always worn. May Thomas, ten years dead, was giving her that look she used to save for when Alice, as a young child, had been careless in her grandmother’s house.

     “You’re in deep water, Alice, far too deep for you.”

     Her grandmother’s tone was abrupt and cold. Alice could smell the sweet fragrance of lily of the valley in the air; she knew that she wanted life to be simple again…and that her grandmother was right. The sharp blue eyes of Mary Thomas held Alice in a solid chain of contact from which Alice could not break away. Then the camera drifted off her grandmother and on to the other passengers, who looked as though they actually did belong on the tram. As the program ended, the date of its production was clearly displayed—2006—ten years after her grandmother’s death. Alice was shocked. She held back the tears and shivered, telling herself she would have to resist whatever Maitland had in mind for her. The next minute, however, she’d convinced herself that her imagination was running away with her and that she had not seen and heard her grandmother.

     The television was in the far corner of the room. Alice got off the couch and stumbled over to it. She turned it off and swayed slightly, the nausea swelling up from the pit of her stomach until she could taste the bitterness in her mouth. The room began to spin around her, and she felt guilty about the secretive encounters that she needed to finish with Walter Maitland. Her husband Geoff was away on business, and Alice thought she’d seen her guilt mirrored in his eyes. He didn’t suspect, did he? It was not just the guilt haunting her, but fear as well.

     As Alice prepared to go out, her thoughts fell upon last Tuesday when she had gone to Walter Maitland’s house and told him she was ending their affair. He’d been calm, but she’d grown suddenly afraid when he pulled out a kitchen drawer and started rattling the knives. He held one up and the cold sunshine, streaming through the window, struck the blade and dazzled her eyes. Maitland slowly placed the knife back in the drawer, and shut it with a loud bang. Alice jumped and panicked. She could feel the sweat on her palms, and see the wry smile on his face. Was he going to try and make her stay?

     Today was the day she had agreed to meet him one last time, and Alice hurried to his car as he pulled it up to the corner. Her feet slipped on the icy pavement and she almost fell. Recovering her footing, she made for the car, opened the door, hesitated for an instant, trying to remember a warning that now could not be recalled, and got in. Once inside, Alice turned to face the dark hooded eyes that both attracted and repulsed her.

     “Where to, this time? Not the house?” she asked with more than a hint of nervousness in her voice.

     “Not the house,” he replied.

     “Then where?”

     “You’ll see.”

     He smiled and patted her knee. She shivered. There were few words between them. The usual day to day stuff was of no interest to them at all. Walter Maitland was a mysterious man, thirty years her senior; Alice had been attracted to an otherness about him because she was interested in the occult. Maitland was charismatic and reminded her of the sinister Alistair Crowley. She had been willing to risk her marriage, all of it, to experience something of the dark side of magic, where mysteries would be revealed and she would have knowledge.

     The February cold was of no concern to them. Maitland took her to a broken down hut in the middle of Nairn’s Wood. They trampled through rotten bracken to a small place that stank of musk and strange, odorous plants unfamiliar to her. He lit three black candles and indicated that she should remove her clothes. He placed a fur pelt around her hips, which he tied securely around her waist with scraps of skin still attached to the fur. The fur felt good, sensual, and smelled familiar. Maitland picked up a dark green bowl and bade her drink a mixture a little like mulled wine, but with an odd underlying taste.

     “I can’t…I can’t do this any more,” she muttered.

     Before entering her, he smeared his penis with strange, animal-smelling cream; it heightened her orgasm and, no doubt, his. During copulation her head filled with the vile faces of creatures hideously deformed; yet she found the attraction of evil irresistible. It lingered like a fugue, but he had not done anything too foul to her, yet. When they coupled she felt the evil flow into her and feed deep within her soul. It started to grow, nurtured by lust and need.

     Alice knew she had to stop. Maitland was beginning to scare her; each rendezvous was arranged in the remotest of places, usually on the cold damp ground in the darkest part of the woods. They lay beside fires in blue-brown clearings reeking of sacrifice, of animal blood and bone, and where no one would hear her scream. In her ecstasy she hardly felt the hands upon her throat.

     That night the boys looked at her askance with troubled eyes, and she knew she had gone too far. She had been afraid for some time about ending the affair with Maitland. Alice should have known that nothing was ever that simple. Then, there’d been the change in her last night which made her wonder about her sanity. It was no use; she had to do something to pull herself out of her malaise.

     The next morning, Alice did not go to work, but to the small library on Raglan Street. It had always been a place of comfort and peace for her. The library was quiet for mid-morning on a market day, and each of the two rooms close to the main counter were empty. Alice chose to go into the third room, where three school girls were sitting, legs crossed on the large table under the window. Each girl was about ten years of age and wore a school uniform; none  matched the colours of the local school. She remembered that Maitland had chosen her because “she had something about her that was childlike.”

     If the librarian caught the girls sitting on the tables they’d be in for it, she thought. The girls suddenly started laughing and pulling faces. They poked each other and pulled each others’ hair. The noise increased, and Alice watched in surprise as they started screaming even louder, jumping off the table, and overturning the chairs.

     The librarian came in to put a few books away; the girls jumped out at her waving their arms in front of her face, trying to attract her attention, but to no avail. She did not see them. They laughed at Alice and pinched each other, generating screams that would wake the dead. Perhaps they were the dead, Alice thought. The librarian did not see them, only Alice. Was she going mad? She hadn’t slept for two nights, although, surely, sleep deprivation couldn’t produce this.

     “You see them too, don’t you?” A man entered the room and came straight up to her. He was around fifty with a beard and moustache, looking like some English professor with a notebook and pad.    

     Standing by his side was a man wearing a baseball cap, who peered over the older man’s shoulder trying to see what he was writing. The man in the cap became irritated and distracted. “I said my name was David Dobson, not Hodgson.”

    “Quite,” said the professor, crossing out Hodgson and writing Dobson. He muttered and wrote, “Young woman and fledgling eye,” on his pad.

     Alice was speechless. There was a sweet smell of candy in the air. The girls were pulling out books and stacking them behind the librarian, giggling and waiting for her to turn around and fall over them. The professor continued to write in his notebook, and then paused.

     “You will soon get used to it. I see them all the time.”

     “So do I,” said David Dobson.

     The librarian turned around. By this time, though, the books were back on the shelves and the girls were back on the table, swinging their legs and singing a song Alice faintly recognised as a childhood nursery rhyme. 

     Alice fled from the building and into what she thought was the comparative safety of the shopping mall. She had the sudden desire to buy something in green, but no idea why and what. She made for the first shop selling women’s clothes, wandered along the rows, and chose a green skirt and a pair of bottle-green army trousers. She paid for both and left the shop to go…where? She didn’t know. Events were moving faster now.

     Then she saw them. In every one of the half dozen shops along each side of the mall, she saw a man standing by the doorway, like some bouncer at the entrance to a nightclub; there was something sinister about these figures. All were Caucasian but dressed in black—dark men outside dark doorways, turning the entrance to each shop into a black abyss one dared not enter for fear of vanishing forever.

     “Is there nowhere safe?” Alice whimpered.

     Alice made for home, realizing seeing her dead grandmother on TV was nothing compared to the kids in the library and the men at the mall. She could go to her sister—no—she was looking after Ellis and Ben tonight, as Alice had said she was working late at the library. Besides, she didn’t want them involved in this, whatever this was. The world had seemed so safe yesterday; now her life seemed to be in pieces. She was falling apart. Alice could barely count out the money for the bottle of wine she bought at the liquor store. Once home, she nervously glanced up at the blue curtains, put the key in the lock, and sat on the stairs clutching her mall purchases and the wine. Her head was exploding with images of people and things that should not be there. What was happening to her? Was Walter Maitland behind it all? Or was she going mad? She commenced a steady rocking motion to comfort herself. Then she pulled the skirt and the trousers out of the bag, wondering which to wear for protection; green was good, wasn’t it? The colour of life would help her, wouldn’t it?

     Alice felt herself losing her grip, and burst into tears. Was the whole ghost world trying to get her attention? She was terrified; whatever she’d found deep within the black depths of her mind last night would not leave her alone, and she felt it follow her around the house. She dared not look over her shoulder, and the rotten smell lingered.

     She went through the house too terrified to rest, feeling compelled to throw some of her cherished possessions out in the trash can: the radio her mother had bought her, the porcelain figure of the little child she’d always treasured, the wedding cards she would never have discarded…

     “They all have to go,” she said sadly. Was this a precursor to her departure…but for where? She almost threw out the manuscript she’d written, based on the Lancashire Witch trials of the seventeenth century. No! Some stronger impulse saved that.

     Once done with the cleansing, she felt exhausted. She heard the phone ringing—that would be her husband. She ignored it, trusting she would sort this out herself. Alice opened the wine, poured a large glass, took it upstairs with her, and lay down on the bed. She briefly closed her eyes and, out of nowhere, felt Walter Maitland’s face rushing towards hers at breakneck speed.

     “Boo!” When that simple childish word came out of nowhere, Alice held her breath in terror as she looked into the dressing table mirror. The weak sunlight of a February afternoon lit the room, but, in the mirror for a brief second, she could see from the neck down to just above the knee, the form of a man dressed in black.

     Once more she fled her house, leaving the door open behind her; she had no fear of the living, just of the dead…or her own madness. She tried to cross Delaware Road, but found it difficult to do so, on account of the man in a dark overcoat, whose proximity so close to her scared her half to death. Halfway there, she thought, but to where? Alice backed away from the edge of the road, and jumped instinctively as something tugged at her arm.

     “Are you all right, Miss? You don’t seem so to me.” A cop was staring hard at her. She could see in his eyes that he was wondering if she was in trouble, or if she was simply unwell and needed help in crossing the road.

     “Can’t you see him; can’t you see the man?” she stated.

     “What man, Miss?”

     “The man standing right next to you.”

     The cop looked around behind him. “There’s only you and me here.”

     Alice didn’t say anything as the tears once more streamed down her face. She’d done a lot of crying that day. The cop helped her cross the road, and she wandered aimlessly into the park and sat down on a bench. As the snow gathered and settled on her green coat she shivered until her lips turned blue with the cold. The kids were coming out of school, and she thought she saw her sister pick up Ellis and Ben. They never came across the park, so would not see her. Alice closed her eyes and whispered a silent prayer.

      She saw Walter Maitland just one more time after that; Ellis and Ben, however, never saw their mother again. Walter got bored easily. The police found Alice’s body—or what was left of it after the dogs had been at her—just north of town.

     By spring, Walter found a new Alice; he’d become nostalgic when he realized that he missed the old one. Her name was Anne, and she was an assistant in a drug store. She invited him over for dinner; he sipped red wine and pondered the new games he’d devise for her. In the kitchen, Anne made cinnamon coffee and nodded in agreement with the other woman, who spoke to her earnestly and then faded away into the shadows.

     Walter thought he heard the rattle of knives in a kitchen drawer, and then the soft step of feminine feet…just before he felt a single, sharp pain between his shoulder blades, and darkness claimed him. 

The End

Allyson Bird, Allyson@birdsnest.me.uk, wrote “Shadow upon Shadow” for Black Petals #43 and has other credits: Scifantastic Dec 2005, “The Oily Door”; Wicked Karnival Calendar 2006, “The Myrrh Baby”; Hungur Magazine April 2006.  “Blood in Madness Ran”; Grafika Press 2006, “Deathside,” “Sunny Down Snuff,” “In a Pig’s Ear”; Maniac  Press, “The Darkest Hour,” “Alice Adulterated”—meant to be published 2006, but Maniac Press is a dead market; Rage Machine 2007, “Silence is Golden” and “The Asylum”; Lighthouse 7 Anthology 2007, “The Darkest Hour.” Websites: www.birdsnest.me.uk  and www.screamingdreams.com.