Today as part of my Halloween blog I am posting a short story I wrote over the summer. It's a quirky, creepy tale. I was thinking of entering it into a competition. I didn't in the end, but I don't think it's a bad short story. Any way here it is and enjoy (I hope)
Quilt
She sits in the hush of the house, nestled amongst it’s soft noises. The distant rhythmic swish and swoosh of laundry churning, the far off rumble of the dish washer. Nearer to her the thin tick and fat tock of the clock in the dining room. Nearer still the shhh of wool as it is unwound from the ball and the tickertytick of her knitting needles. Familiar safe sounds of home. As she knits she always counts yan, tyan, tethera; the old Scots numbers her Gran taught her. And she waits, listening, waiting and listening, hardly patient, always waiting, anticipating, on tenterhooks.
Sometimes she listens to the sounds of the outside, if the window is open. The intricate tapestry of birdsong. To her the birdsong is all bright, light colours. High pitched shades of whites, searing yellows and twinkling silver, unless a wood pigeon joins in, then there are round sounds of purples and blues, like a bruise. The leaves shuffling in the wind are white smoke sound. A distant droning mower in the summer and she longs to hear the thwock, thwock of a tennis ball on racket. There is nowhere for anyone to play tennis here, not even in her neighbour’s garden; the ground is too uneven. She longs to sink her toes into a flat, well maintained lawn, feel the short tickling blades between her toes. She needs her feet on a ground she can trust to hold her up. Round here the ground is tricksy and cunning with tufts and hillocks and holes to sprain your ankles in. She doesn’t trust the land round here. She doesn’t trust much since her sight really began to fade. And so she sits indoors and knits and waits, hardly patient, listening, anticipating, on tenterhooks.
She is waiting for night to come. When she packs up her knitting and her crochet. When she has folded all of the laundry and has emptied the dish washer. When she has eaten a simple and healthy tea. Her waiting is over. She makes her way to the one bedroom annex, which is attached to her cottage. She walks up the stairs to the bedroom. It is a room with twin beds and on one of the beds there is an old fashioned patchwork quilt. She lies on the bed. If it is cold she lies under the quilt. She closes her eyes and the waiting is over.
It’s like experiencing a very short, sharp, jolt - like when you are just falling asleep only to be suddenly shot back awake. Except this short, sharp, shock jolts her somewhere else entirely. In a flurry of colour and sound she finds herself in the most realistic dream. In fact it’s more real than the most vivid of dreams, more detailed than a memory, brighter, louder, larger than real life. Each night it is different. Each vision something new.
She discovered it by accident not long after moving into the cottage she inherited from her great aunt. Back then she was full of such optimism. She would make the house her little palace. The garden would be her sanctuary. She would walk into the village daily and get involved with local activities. Join a committee, who knows maybe the W.I? It would be marvellous. But after a long couple of weeks sorting through her great aunt’s things came the turn of the annex bedroom. It didn’t look like her aunt had changed a thing in there since she let the place out. It had a chintzy National Trust vibe that tourists seem to love. So she had walked around the room assessing the state of each item, touching them absently and wondering if she could just leave the room as it was? She came to the bed furthest from the door and ran her hand along the old fashioned patchwork quilt.
It had been like a shiver running from her fingertips, branching out and up through every cell in her body. It felt like an electric shock, after which, she was left utterly disorientated. No longer was she standing in the rather fussy, slightly fusty bedroom. She found herself in an incredibly busy street, bustling with people. The noise was such a shock from the quiet of her room. There was a noise of horses hooves. Not just one or two horses, like you might hear on a country lane, but the sound of many hooves. There was also the sound of voices, calling and shouting, and laughing and joking with one another. At the same time the noise hit her ears she was overwhelmed by a stench, so powerful and complex she wasn’t sure she could work out what it was. She identified manure and the smell of horses, that reminded her of being a small child at the riding stables, but there was a smell of fish, of meat roasting, and smoke. There was also the smell of bodies, of people around her, worse than any body odour she had smelt on a hot day on the London Tube. But there were wafts of sweeter smells too, oranges and something like hay. Her hearing and her sense of smell were always stronger than her sight and so she didn’t realise at first that her vision was restored. Yes, really it was restored! She was so overwhelmed. She could see again! She had been living in a world which was slowly blurring and rubbing its self out for so long, sudden sight was a shock. This was partly why she had been so disorientated. There was too much to see, to take in.
There was a wide brown road crawling with many horse drawn carts and a couple of what looked like proper carriages, she could count at least 15 horse drawn vehicles at different stages and directions along the road. She could see far down the road, the trees and a bridge. She could see clearly the people moving about her, their hair, their faces, their eyes! She could see colour so viivid it was like a child’s kaleidoscope.
To the side of her were men and women pushing carts in a hurry to get somewhere. She instinctively knew that it was to market, and she needed to get to market too with her list of things to buy for the cook. What cook? This part, of what became her nightly visions, was the hardest to get used to. She was a person in the crowd now, moving along with the rest towards the market square. She knew she was on an urgent errand and that she was quite young. But she was also aware of who she really was and that she was just borrowing this girl… “Hannah’s” memories. She was experiencing what Hannah had experienced. Her real body was now slumped on the bed on top of the patchwork quilt. But her mind was in 1843 with Hannah on this important errand. She began to panic; this was impossible, this was like some kind of madness and the panic brought her out of the vision.
That had been the first time. She had pulled herself out of Hannah”s memory too quickly and never found out what errand was so urgent. She went on however, over the following days to experience other people’s memories more vivid and intriguing than the first. She also began to get used to the feeling of seeing memories through someone else’s eyes. Eyes that could usually see or at least see more than she now could. Many memories were of Scotland or of the British Isles but others were of far flung places like Japan and India and the Americas. Some were fairly modern in the 20th century, others were 19th century. A few seemed even older, in times where she couldn’t place the date from her surroundings and the person who’s memory she was viewing either did not know the exact date or used a system she did not recognise. She never had the same memory twice but occasionally would see different memories from the same person. Often weeks apart. She saw Hannah’s wedding day once, but never glimpsed her again after that.
She soon became obsessed with the quilt and it’s visions. These glimpses into other lives, other people’s feelings and thoughts, she could not get enough of them. It was better than the most spectacular theatre show or compelling television series. The visions the quilt showed her brought meaning and sustenance to her life. She became addicted to them so quickly and so profoundly she had no time to even think about what was happening to her. She instinctively knew it was the patch work quilt that was feeding her these memories. She began to crave them and would spend days wrapped in the quilt like a junkie, feeding on her drug of choice. She stopped sorting through her great aunts things, she stopped answering the phone or the door, she barely ate or washed. She just lived through other people’s memories. For it soon became obvious that this is what this quilt had done. It had stolen other people’s memories and was now playing them back to her. The cottage had been a holiday let for years. Before that her great aunt had run a hotel in Edinburgh. The quilt, she was sure, had been in a guest room there and then here for all those years. Those who slept under it or near it, would have their memories stolen, or borrowed or just copied. She knew all this just as surely as she knew who the people were in the visions she had. She guessed that the quilt had been in an inn or hotel room of some kind for many years before her aunt’s.
It was nearly 3 weeks after she discovered the quilt when her brother discovered her, curled up “asleep” under it. He had taken one look at her unwashed hair, the general state of the house and had declared her “depressed.” She’d got up on his instruction and had some strong black coffee and looked at her self through the bathroom mirror. She realised how much time had actually past whilst she had been journeying with the quilt through centuries and miles and miles of lives. Her brother gave her a lecture about how taking early retirement was bound to do this to her, that she needed a part time job or more of a hobby than just knitting. She agreed and promised that she was going to join the W.I. She cooked him his favourite stew and he seemed satisfied that she wasn’t suicidal, He said she had just “let herself go” as if this was just what he had expected of his sister and exactly why he had visited unannounced. He left the next day after sleeping in the annex next to the bed with the “memory quilt” on it. He said he had slept well apart form some strange dreams nothing he could recollect. Then he was gone.
She knew he was right. Douglas was always very sensible. It was then that she decided she would only use the quilt once a night. She would get one fix each evening and would live her life normally at all other times. That was how she found herself in that constant state of anticipation for her next fix, for her evening hit of ultra real visions of other people’s lives. The rest of her existence became pale and flimsy, transparent. She would knit all day, listening listlessly to the sounds around her, counting dowm yan, tyan, tethera, anticipating what adventure she would go on later. When she saw such wonders at night how could her own drab little life compare?
She soon realised that the quilt only snared the most vivid of memories, the most brutal, overwhelming or touching, memories which defined a person. She had been kissed countless times in these visions, made love in the most wonderful ways but she had also witnessed such tremendous grief and fear. She had even once murdered someone in a dark Edinburgh wynd. That memory had been so chilling, so full of hate and disgust she had thrown up afterwards and had vowed to never use the quilt again. But the next night like the ragged and ravaged addict that she had become, she crept back upstairs to it, ashamed but desperate.
What she had no idea of was that the quilt did not want to hold on to her for much longer. She had lived an interesting life and had experienced many things. Even though she was only in her mid 50s, she had been a journalist for an Edinburgh news paper. She’d travelled the world and covered exciting news stories. Even when her eye sight began to fail the news paper had supported her to stay working. She had been married twice but had never had any children. She had lost her best friend to a car accident in her 20s, Her life had been unusually emotionally rich. The shimmery, spidery thread in the patchwork, snagged all these emotional ups and downs from her life. It had snared her grief, her fear, her excitement and her love whilst it fed her images of other people’s lives. Those visions were to keep her docile and pliant while it probed and plied out fresh memories for its own secret needs. But her mind was running dry and the quilt needed fresh folk to feed from.
It began to whisper to her whilst she sought out it’s comfort. It began to whisper that she must find it new subjects to draw from. She would have to share the quilt with others if she was still going to be useful.
She now only uses the quilt once a week (Occasionally she has to wait a fortnight.) She lives for Saturday’s. The day guests staying in the annex have to check out. Guests leave by 10 AM and the next lot arrive at 4pm. The lady from the village who cleans arrives at 12 . So she has a whole 2 hours for just her with the quilt and the memories it has harvested from her guests during that week. Guests who write such lovely things in the visitors books about the cottage and how well they sleep there. How they tell her about the vivid dreams they have. Then when they leave she sees their lives plaid out to her. It’s amazing what these holiday makers have got up to, the indiscretions, the triumphs, the heartbreaks. She’s even had guests return to her cottage and the patchwork quilt. She does not blush when she remembers their most cherished or hidden memories, which she has viewed. She does not blush for the things she has seen them do, heard them think, felt them feel.
Her voyeurs life is not with out it’s risks, for each beautiful or pleasurable memory there are ones of depravity and despair. Memories to taunt and to possess and to bludgeon any sane mind. Memories that don’t belong to her but seep into her own. So that soon she will not know where her mind ends and this myriad of others begins.
In the day when her guests are out sight seeing or relaxing in their cosy cottage annex. She sits in silence in the house nestled amongst it soft sounds, her knitting needles clicking, whilst her mind screams and screams and screams. Yet she is constantly ravenous for more.
