The Cottage at Avebury Corner

The beamed ceilings were low and the room sizes small, made smaller by patterned wallpaper, but it all felt very spacious compared to her one bedroom flat in cold, rainy Birmingham. The cottage was surprisingly larger inside than the grey, unassuming exterior would have you believe. The furniture was unquestionably old fashioned and not items she herself would have chosen but elegant in their own way and, to her, expensive looking, an eclectic mix of styles, some of which looked like antiques, almost as strange and as beautiful as some of the pieces in Heritage homes she had visited as a schoolgirl. She was struck by the sense of history and learning inside this home, the antique furniture being complemented by bookshelves, crammed with more books than she had seen in her entire life. She gasped at the sheer quantity and beauty of those books. All around there were comfortable, worn and sometimes shabby pieces of furniture, everything rather dusty, a feeling of faded luxury and a bygone era.

Lucas slept peacefully in his stroller as she walked quietly around the cottage, little black book in hand, quite in awe. He had fed well and was making up for some lost sleep from this day of travel and disturbed routines, his little chest moving rhythmically while his eye fluttered gently under heavy lids. They had spent the day traveling on the train, leaving Birmingham New Street Station on the 9:30 am and reaching Salisbury at 13.04. She had waited with nervous anxiety for Tom to leave for work as usual, then had quickly packed her and Lucas’s things, leaving through the side entrance so no one would see them leave. Her heart was in her mouth the entire time until she was sitting on the train, her dark eyes constantly scanning around her. She had destroyed her phone, knowing that Tom would find a way to track her down through her phone. She shuddered to think of how he would react when he got home and found them both gone. She remembered the look in his eyes when he told her that he would find her- no matter where she went- ever. That they were simply meant to be together. Everyone thought he was ‘lovely’, just a perfect gentleman, just as she had thought when she had first met him. Even her best friend, Ashley. She hadn’t even told Ashley where she was going.

Her eye was drawn to some exquisitely framed pictures in the drawing room on a console table and she was very curious to see the people smiling from those black and white pictures, but she became distracted by a sound from Lucas, as she passed by the open door towards the dining room which led on to a small, enclosed garden at the back of the cottage. Her heartbeat seemed calm finally and the muscles around her head and jaw began to relax after a day of frenzied emotion.

Having satisfied herself that Lucas slept happily, she remembered the pictures and walked back to the console table. There was a black and white image of an exceptionally beautiful lady dressed in a powder blue dress wearing a hat with a young man; they seemed happy and contented, perhaps having recently got married. Another picture of the same lady again smiling up at her, arm around the shoulders of a younger girl.

Looking through all the pictures, she finally found one of her mother as a young girl with her sister, perhaps around sixteen years old, fresh faced and with a sparkle in her eyes. She felt an aching pain in her heart as she remembered the sadness, like a gaping wound. She quickly turned away from the pictures and started up the stairs toward the bedroom. There she found the same faded beauty of furnishings in a large room with yellow patterned wallpaper and two windows with gothic arches. She sat down heavily on the soft, large bed with its old fashioned, quaint coverings. She lay down as the wave of fatigue washed over her.

The feeling came from nowhere, caught her completely off guard.

She thought she would drift off to sleep but instead there was sense of pressure on her chest - she could not breathe - she gasped and struggled to move her arms.

The air felt cold and all her senses seemed to melt into each other so she could not understand what was going on. Something was pressing her to the bed and the room felt like it was spinning. She felt she heard voices in her head, a low, slow muffled talking, of two whispering voices - but she could not make out what they were saying.

She looked towards the window and, to her surprise, saw there a face.

The face was looking into the room as if looking for something and then it became contorted into a scream, like the Edvard Munch painting. Then she realized with horror that the face at the window was her own face. This was followed immediately by a high-pitched scream. It took a couple of minutes for her to realize Lucas was crying out and she too had been screaming.

She struggled to rouse herself and ran to the window; there was a harsh wind blowing by now and the rhododendron bushes and trees swayed in protest. The sky had darkened and there was a threat of a storm in the air. There was no one there, but she had a feeling as though someone had just left, an imprint in the very air around her. The hair on the back of her neck stood on edge and her hands were trembling slightly. She instinctively looked at her phone, no missed calls.

Of course, it was a new phone, and no one had her number, so how could Tom call her?

She smiled at her own folly but was overcome with deep dread as she realized that by now Tom would have called and messaged and would be enraged as she had not answered immediately. Perhaps he had already left work early and was looking for her. She could not help glancing at her mobile phone every few minutes, out of habit and fear.

She rushed down to Lucas and picked him up. As always, he calmed quickly to her touch. She only wished she could quiet her own beating heart as quickly as that. But Lucas was an exceptional child. In his seven-month life, he had hardly had a bad day. He fed, slept, smiled and played, as though God had sent her a reward for the difficulties she had endured in her life before she had him.

Her heart jumped as the quaint old doorbell suddenly rang out.

They were sitting at the kitchen table with cups of tea and slices of Battenburg cake that Andrew the young lawyer from Addison Law in Amesbury, had brought with him. He explained “I figured you would be tired and in need of a nice cup of tea after that long train journey” in his perfect English accent. Well, she had to admit that was certainly true. The cake was marvelous, and she did feel better after that. As they talked, he kept looking at Lucas, as though not quite believing that the baby was so placid and calm as he sat playing with his toys on the floor. Andrew had a pleasant face, the deepest blue eyes, a wide smile that touched the corners of his eyes, and a very mild manner, almost old fashioned. She liked him immediately. She felt as if she had known him for a long time. He went over the details of how her Great Aunt Elizabeth had left the Cottage in Avebury, Wiltshire to her, Olivia Blake, since her mum’s sister Evelyn had passed away two years ago and left no heirs.

“After the costs of inheritance tax and all government fees and legal fees are taken care of you will left with a cool sum of twenty thousand pounds Olivia.”

She had been told all of this before - but hadn’t quite believed it until they finished signing the paperwork to make it official.

After shopping for provisions at the local village grocery store, where she had been regarded with some suspicion by the shopkeeper, Olivia had prepared a light meal for herself of canned soup and bread and fed Lucas, and then unpacked her bags, leaving aside her little black notebook. She was now suddenly taken with the idea that she would start sketching in the little book rather than making notes.

There were many quaint old buildings and beautiful rolling green countryside to sketch here in Wiltshire. Only two hundred yards away from the Cottage there was an old Church, which she heard was dated back to the 11th Century. It had some old sprawling gravestones in the little cemetery, and she felt drawn to it and planned to sketch it. Only eight miles from here was the famous Stonehenge and her new home of Avebury even had its own well known stone circle. She had only heard of Stonehenge because they had a school trip there when she was thirteen. It had been so bitterly cold and windy and all she had wanted to do was get back inside and get warm. That was a few months after her mum’s death, and she had little interest in anything that year.

After she had fed Lucas and eaten her meal, she bathed and put Lucas to bed in the crib in a corner of the master bedroom. This room with the yellow printed wallpaper must have belonged to her Great Aunt Elizabeth and she felt that Grand lady’s presence around her in this room. The sweet child had gone to sleep without protest as usual.

She decided to run a bath and try to settle her nerves. She flicked through her notebook and found a sketch she had made of the quaint little St James’s church and graveyard earlier that day. She had visited Aunt Elizabeth’s grave. It was a beautiful grey tombstone with some freshly lain flowers and beyond it an expansive view of the Wiltshire landscape.

Something did not feel quite right here this evening. While the bath was running, she walked around the whole house, checking every room and making sure all the windows were locked. She tried not to think what Tom might be planning now.

He didn’t know anything about any of this, how could he?

She figured it was the thought of Tom that made her heart skip about in this chaotic way and her breath catch, but then decided it was this very room, in this very moment.

It did not feel like the fear of Tom, this fear felt different somehow. She hadn’t known there were different, specific types of fear until this night.

A part of her felt abject fear, but another part felt like she had arrived home and she felt almost a sort of calm. It was a curious feeling, familiar, like coming home.

Olivia was awoken by a sound in the middle of the night and noticed that it was three thirty-three exactly on her digital clock. Odd time, she thought absentmindedly as she roused herself.

There was a scent of roses in the tomb-like stillness of the air.

She heard the sound again, it was a woman’s voice, as though singing a soft lullaby.

She thought she recognized the song but couldn’t quite draw it out from the depths of hazy memory.

She looked towards the corner of the room where Lucas’s crib lay and found that it was being rocked by an unseen hand. Looking up into the dark corner she saw a powder -blue elegant dress, a frail smiling face, sad eyes fixated upon the sleeping baby.

She did not look up at Olivia, but continued. Continued rocking the cradle with her pale white hand.