Seventeen-year-old Patience is in love with her best friend Lissa. But Lissa is promised to another, bound by her cruel father’s debts. So when a wolf-spider with an unsettling yellow eye crawls from her beloved guardian’s grave and offers a way to be together, Patience accepts – with deadly consequences.
Now the snow won’t stop falling, and Patience is trapped. As her choices unravel, she must confront the monstrousness within herself. And whether she’s willing to lose the love of her life to do what’s right.
Set in a little queer family haunted by loss, Something Dead is a lyrical YA folkloric horror for fans of She Is a Haunting, The Honeys and Bitterthorn – a story of love, buried grief, and the terrible bargains we make to survive.
Part One
a shiver of wind
1.
I shift in bed, trying to get comfortable between both of my sort-of-sisters. The slats beneath the bed creak as I turn.
‘Stop wriggling,’ Bid hisses, kicking me in the shin.
‘I’m not,’ I hiss back, but I try and lie still anyway.
Outside the bedroom door, the floorboards squeak. ‘That’s the third time tonight,’ I whisper.
‘You worry too much,’ Bid replies quietly. ‘Bear is fine.’
I don’t say, If I don’t worry, who will? but I think she must hear it anyway as she puffs and turns over.
‘You stop wriggling too, with your daddy longlegs,’ I whisper back. At fifteen, she is two years younger than me but she is already taller. Her feet reach almost to the end of the bed. My other sister, little Silence, is curled tiny and warm on my other side. She snuffles.
We fall quiet. The dark is thick and solid; it presses down on me. It’s been months since Ira died, and Bear still can’t sleep.
‘Jacob Lower talked to me today,’ Bid whispers deep into my right ear. Her voice makes me jump.
‘Who?’ I say. For a moment, I can’t think who she means.
‘Jacob Lower, shepherd, from Lower Farm in the hills.’ Her voice is soft as she says his name. ‘In town this morning. He bowed so low I thought he might fall over.’ There is a small laugh in her voice as she says this. ‘Maybe we’ll marry.’
‘You’re fifteen!’ I whisper.
‘So? she says, offended. ‘Mary Pryor married when she was fifteen.’
‘I’m not sure you want Mary Pryor’s life,’ I say. She lives above the pie shop with three children in two tiny rooms and reeks of exhaustion.
‘Maybe not exactly her life,’ Bid replies, ‘but I don’t want to be a spinster.’
‘And what’s wrong with being a spinster?’
‘I think I could love him. He is so strong and handsome, and he will inherit a plot of his father’s farm, I’m sure. I should be happy herding sheep alongside him.’
I almost snort. She doesn’t like the cold, or the wet, or mud. Or animals. And I don’t really understand how she can have lived with Bear and Ira most of her life and still want that particular fairy tale.
But anyhow, she’ll probably go off poor Jacob Lower again next week, and as long as she isn’t engaged by then, all will be well. Little Silence shifts, and mumbles sweetly in her sleep. Bid snuggles in, her breath hot and sour, the curve of her smile against my shoulder.
So I don’t say anything, instead I kiss her forehead. She nudges me with a sleepy nose. Slowly, her breathing changes and her limbs twitch before becoming still and I am alone again.
Another loud creak, this time upstairs in the attic in Ira’s old room. Bear is pacing upstairs, back and forth, across the room.
My heart aches for her. I can’t stand it, so wriggling down through the close warmth of the rough cotton sheets, I push into the chill of the night air feet first. Pulling on my robe, I slip out onto the landing. The long rug is soft under my feet and moonlight shines in coldly from the window by the stairs to the attic.
‘Bear?’ I say quietly into the darkness.
An owl hoots hauntingly in the distance.
Standing at the first step up to the attic, I look into the shadows and the spot of light at the very top from the moon. A shiver of wind down the chimney sends the back of my neck prickling.
‘Patience?’ Bear’s voice sounds behind me. ‘That you?’
The glow from a candle lights Bear’s face as she appears on the landing at the top of the stairs from the kitchen. Her hair is all fluffed like a duckling, and her round glasses sit slightly askew. She is big, Bear, but gentle.
‘You’re awake,’ I say, moving away from the attic steps.
She reaches the top of the stairs. ‘You okay, pet?’
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I reply.
Her eye sockets are dark hollows. ‘Me neither,’ she says. Her shadow is huge and hulking in the dark.
But then she stamps over and presses a big hand on my shoulder.
‘Missing is hard,’ she says quietly, and my stomach twists. She has assumed that I am awake and missing our Ira. I do miss Ira, but just not at this moment, so then I feel guilty for not missing Ira as much as I should. And of course I can’t say any of that so I say nothing, and that is worse because then she assumes I am too overcome with feelings to talk.
‘It’ll be right,’ she says, squeezing my shoulder. ‘Talk to her. She can hear you.’
I hope not, I think. She’s dead.
But I don’t say that either.
‘Night Bear,’ I say, reaching up to hug her.
‘Night pet.’ She pats me awkwardly before releasing me, then trudges heavily up the stairs to the attic room she and Ira used to share, leaving me standing on the landing in the dark on my own.
Well. At least she spoke to me. All she’s done is hide in her workshop and not-sleep since Ira died. I feel itchy-awake, and I can’t possibly go back to bed now so I stand at the window and look out into the dark and velvet night.
Ira is buried in our garden at the very edges of the wilds. Silent trees stand guard, tall dark shadows cover the soft settled mound of earth where she lies. The night has crept deep into my bones. My feet are cold and the moon hangs over the dark forest. I draw my robe tighter around me as the cold air from the window slips around my throat.
I have to stop myself thinking about what her body looks like. If there are still maggots and worms, or if her bones have been picked clean yet. If the coffin has held firm, or collapsed under the weight of the earth. If the tall pines have grown roots around to hold her.
Just then, a small bell rings cold and high in my ear, right close. I spin, heart thudding loud in my ears.
‘Bid, don’t do that,’ I snap. But there is nobody there. I am alone, entirely alone.
All I can see is the dark hollow of the stairs down to the kitchen, and the moonlight that stripes the floorboards black and yellow-silver.
Then, clear as anything, the bell rings again.
This time, it rings from the garden. The sound is small and high and my stomach turns. At the head of Ira’s grave is a small bell, with a line snaking through the grass into her coffin so she could pull it if she ever needed to. But it has been months since we buried her, and though we could not bear to pull up the cord, there is no chance she is still alive.
As if in a dream, I make my way down the stairs and into the dark cave of our kitchen, then out of the door to the back garden. Something howls from deep within the forest.
A chill wind ruffles my hair. The earth is cold and claggy underneath my bare feet, sending damp shivers right up my spine. The pale yellow Wolf Moon watches me like it might just eat me, given half a chance.
There, on the wet earth, just by the wooden cross at the top of the mound of earth, lies a bright silver bell, glinting. It must have fallen. Perhaps that is what I heard, the bell falling?
I go to pick it up, reattach it to the stake, but then I stop dead.
The stake is covered in thick, sticky spiderwebs, glistening white in the dark. My toe nudges the bell. It rolls in the dirt and tinkles coldly. A long, dark shudder runs all the way up my spine.
I hate spiders.
Skin prickling, I leave the bell there on the earth and run damp-footed back to the house, heart pounding. Finally I reach my bed, and curl up with my arms tight around the warmth of Silence’s small and snuffling body.
Ira’s dead, I tell myself firmly, as I close my eyes. Dead.
2.
Water sluices over my fists.
I kneel at the riverbank, searching in the grit and the sand for rocks knocked clean and beautiful by the current. My fingers are freezing. The water is fresh, though my knees are damp and clouds scud over the early morning skies.
Ira brought me here soon after I first arrived. I was eleven, and silent as just-baked bread, with no memories of where I had come from or who I was. We walked in silence – my thoughts alive with bees and birds and tiny buzzing things, her face inscrutable as the wide blue sky.
Then, after what felt like a lifetime of quiet, Ira pulled from the water a stone and placed it in my hand. The rock was heavy and smooth, and slick with wet, the precise green-grey of my eyes.
‘I think,’ she said, slowly, ‘that the world remembers you, even if you do not remember yourself.’
The stone felt solid in my palm. Something to hold on to. I have kept it ever since.
Later I found out that she was a Foundling too.
Kneeling back on my heels, I pull my hand from the river. A small round blue stone sits glistening wet in my palm among the sandy grit that sticks to my skin. I close my eyes and wait for a hint of something, anything, but all I can feel is the mud underneath my knees and the toes of my boots dug into the earth and the harsh cries of a heron as it circles overhead.
Once, I found a stone the exact pale and sinister yellow of a wolf’s eye. I brought it home, but it unnerved me so much that I buried it in the garden and sometimes, even now, I dream of a wolf in the shadows behind the roses.
Nothing.
Opening my eyes, I drop the deep blue stone. It hits the water with a thunk.
But there in the stony bed of the stream, something silver glints. My mouth is suddenly dry. Smooth, hollow metal in the shape of… it can’t be… Dipping my fingers back into the cold, clear water, my fingers lift a solid silver bell smaller than my palm.
The metal is bright and untarnished. When I roll the bell over in my palm, the round thing that drops down and makes noise lolls, and out comes a small ringing that makes my tummy shiver.
Above me, starlings fly in the cold grey skies. Skeletal branches reach into the skies as if trying to break free.
I don’t know how long I kneel there.
Is Ira dead, really dead, or is she trying to talk to me? The thought squeezes my heart so tight that tears fall from my eyes.
But it is a funny thing, I try and put the bell back in the river, my hand will not let go, so instead I tuck it in my pocket. When I move I have to hold the thing in the middle – which I now remember is called the ‘clapper’ – against the side of the bell so it does not ring as I walk.
I have the strangest feeling that something is following me home.
a space to reflect 