It’s OK. He’s doesn’t know where she is.
She looks down.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says to her stomach. ‘I won’t let him anywhere near you.’
Outside, there’s that same, unsettling stillness from the previous night. She doesn’t like the look of the clouds – the way they hang low and grey in the sky. There is something ominous about it.
She sweats under her layers as she heaves herself into the car. The seat is as far back as it can go, her hands barely reaching the steering wheel.
Her heart races as she turns onto the A66, passing the snow-blanketed fields. In the distance, the peaks of the mountains spark silver.
She takes a deep breath, tries to calm herself. She is safe. The baby is safe.
For now, she just needs to focus on driving.
She’s going to see Frederick at his nursing home in Beckside. Really, she’s not sure what she expects: he barely made any sense last time she saw him, all those months ago at Orton Hall. Guilt twinges in her stomach at the memory. She should have told someone – those dead insects everywhere, the room he’d been living in with its animal scent … and Frederick himself. She shudders at the memory of those eyes. At their emptiness. And yet. She can’t quite bring herself to pity him.
Violet’s words come back to her.
I am plagued by memories of it.
She has an image of him barricaded in that festering study while insects swarm outside, undulating through the corridors of the Hall like one great, glistening snake.
And the strange thing he said to her, just before she left.
She had released me at last.
There had been thousands and thousands of the things, according to the newspaper article. The insects normally frequent aquatic environments and rarely infest dwellings. This wasn’t some natural phenomenon.
A plague for a plague.
Kate thinks she knows what happened. But she needs to be sure.
The nursing home – Ivy Gate – doesn’t exactly live up to its name. The imposing iron gate is devoid of all greenery. Even from a distance, the buildings have an institutional look – something about the slate grey stone, the narrowness of the windows.
‘Ivy Gate,’ a curt voice answers the intercom at the entrance.
‘Hello,’ she says. ‘I’m … I’m here to see a relative – Frederick Ayres?’
‘Better be quick about it,’ says the voice, with an impatient sigh. ‘Visiting hours are coming to a close.’
She is directed to the common room – or, according to a sign on the door, the ‘Scafell Room’ – which is decorated in insipid peach; landscapes on the walls the only nod to its alpine name. Kate’s stomach turns at the smell – a combination of cooking oil, bleach and, faintly, urine. Frederick is in the corner, huddled in a wheelchair far away from the other residents. As she approaches, she realises that he is asleep: his head lolls to one side, eyeballs flickering beneath almost translucent lids.
For a moment, she wonders if she should just leave, come back some other time. But, she knows, there may not be another time – the baby will be here soon, passing into the world just as Frederick is fading out of it.
This could be her only chance to get some answers.
She lowers herself into the chair next to his, leans forward.
‘Hello?’ she says softly. ‘Frederick?’
Slowly, his eyes open. At first, they look clouded, unfocused, but then they widen in horror. She touches the lapel of her jacket, remembering his previous reaction to the bee brooch – but it’s not there, it’s in her pocket. Then she realises. He’s looking at her necklace. Aunt Violet’s necklace.
He arches back in her chair and – Kate’s heart stops – screams.
‘Get away!’ he shrieks, spittle flying towards her. ‘You’re supposed to be gone!’
An orderly comes running – young, cheeks bright with acne, peach scrubs loose on his thin frame.
‘There, there, Freddie, old mate,’ he says. ‘Let’s take you back to your room.’ He glares at Kate as he steers Frederick’s wheelchair into the corridor.
‘What’d you do, to upset him like that?’ The orderly throws over his shoulder.
‘I – nothing,’ she says, still stunned by Frederick’s outburst.
‘Hold on, are you that woman he’s always talking about? Valerie, or something?’
‘Violet?’
‘That’s right. Look, I don’t know what happened between you two, but he’s not stopped going on about you since he got here. What are you, his granddaughter?’
‘No, I—’
‘So you’re not even family. Honestly, miss, I think you should go. It’s Saturday. Visiting hours end at 4 p.m. anyway.’
Kate can hear the orderly reassuring Frederick as he is wheeled away.
‘You’re all right, mate. Just a little scare.’
‘But it was her.’ She hears him take a great, shuddering breath. ‘She’s the one who sent them. The one who sent the insects.’
Fresh snow begins to fall as Kate drives home from Ivy Gate.
She’s so distracted that she stalls the car twice. Luckily, there’s barely any traffic in the valley. Both times, before she manages to get the car started again, panic snakes its way up through her body, gaining intensity as it passes through her stomach, her heart, her throat.
He thinks Violet was responsible for the infestation.
She remembers something else he said, when she went to Orton Hall. That the insects had died last August.
Just like Violet.
It is snowing harder now, the air so thick with it that she can barely see the road. The radio sputters with static, and she turns up the sound to catch the weather forecast. ‘Heavy snowfall …’ a man is saying. ‘Disruption while travelling …’ The signal is lost.
In her gut, panic blooms. She shouldn’t have come. What if she’s put the baby in danger?
She is driving past the woods, the trees sugared with ice. The woods. Where she’d felt such unease, before her unsettling visit to Orton Hall. Fear bubbles in her chest, the steering wheel suddenly slick under her hands. She remembers the claustrophobia of those tightly packed trees, the way they’d blocked out the light.
Kate forces herself to look straight ahead, at the reflective lines of the road curving ahead of her, away from the wood, disappearing into a haze of white. The wind roars. She needs to turn the fog lights on so that she can see better, but in her terror, she can’t remember how. Her fingers slip and fumble on the wheel and the dashboard, and she takes her eyes off the road briefly. There. She’s found the button. She lifts her eyes back to the road and the twin beams illuminate the remains of an animal – matted, bloodied fur; pale limbs – strewn across the road. The blood impossibly bright against the snow.
She screams. She loses control of the wheel. The car careens forward, and the noise of the trees scraping against the roof and smacking the windshield is deafening.
Everything goes white.
Kate’s heart pounds in her chest. It takes her a moment to realise that she has crashed into the woods, that the front seat of the car is littered with ice, with glass from the windscreen.
The wind howls through the jagged edges of the windscreen. Kate shivers. She is so cold.