Folded In

A Willerby Story

Caitlin had been looking for Joe for ten minutes and was no longer finding their game of hide-and-seek much fun.

“Joe, come out now,” she called into the upstairs living room where she’d heard him laughing moments before, “it’s time for tea.”

“Come find me,” Joe called from one of the bedrooms, which was confusing because there was no way he could have got around her without being seen.

She turned, went the door and called again.

“Joe? Come out now, please. I’m bored of this.”

There was another giggle. “Come find me!” Joe shouted, his voice coming from the living room again.

“Joe,” she said, her unease making her shorter than she meant to be, “that’s enough, come out now.”

“Oh, alright then,” he said, but a moment later he was still nowhere to be seen.

“Joe!”

“Mummy?” Joe shouted back from downstairs, “I’m in the kitchen. Where are you?”

Caitlin went down the stairs, picturing Joe sitting at the table ready for his spaghetti hoops and potato waffles but when she opened the door there was nobody there.

“Joe?”

“Mummy?” Joe said from the downstairs toilet behind her. “Where are you?”

“Here,” said Caitlin. “In the kitchen.”

“I can’t get there,” said Joe. “The doors and halls have gone all funny.”

“Stay where you are,” said Caitlin, goosebumps raising on her arms, “don’t move.”

She searched the house from top to bottom, slowly and carefully at first, then faster, then faster, then in a feverish running panic.

By the time she went to get Lisa from over the road, she’d called herself hoarse.

…

Lisa made Caitlin sit down on the sofa and at least hold the cup of tea she’d made her.

“He’s in the house somewhere,” she said, “it’s just a case of finding him.”

“I can hear him fine,” Lisa said. “Listen.”

She put her cup down and called. “Joe? Joe? Where are you now?”

“I’m in my bedroom,” Joe called back, his voice clear but frustrated, “I’m tired. I’m trying to lie down but I can’t get close enough to the bed. It’s too far away.”

Almost before he’d finished speaking Lisa was up and sprinting to Joe’s door.

“Ah shit,” she called back. “Not there. I thought maybe see if I got there fast, he wouldn’t have a chance to move. Joe? Where are you now?”

“In the kitchen again,” Joe called back. “Can you come and get me now? I’m tired and I’m really hungry.”

“Just a minute, love,” said Lisa. “In just a minute.”

But it wasn’t just a minute.

Caitlin and Lisa tried everything they could think of to get to him.

They tried being in the same room and then being in separate rooms.

They tried being in separate rooms on the same floor and then being on different rooms on different floors.

They tried going out and coming in again and last they tried a pincer movement converging on the lounge.

They tired everything they could think of but they still did not fine Joe.

The closest they got was the suggestion of a breeze brushing past them they agreed they could have imagined.

Joe began to cry and that made Caitlin silently cry too.

“I’m so hungry now,” Joe wept. “And I’m so tired. And I really, really need a cuddle. Please get me now.”

Caitlin took a deep breath and deliberately formed each word so she sounded calmer.

“Just stay where you are, we’re getting closer,” she said. “It won’t be long now.”

Then she took a Post-It from a grinning frog magnetic clip stuck to the fridge, wrote a note on it and passed it to Lisa.

“WTF shall we do?”

Lisa read it then shrugged unhappily. She took the pen from Caitlin and wrote another message on the back.

“I don’t know. I’ll get David and Mauve.”

She showed it to Caitlin, who frowned and nodded.

Then Lisa thought for a moment and wrote something else.

“Soz, what is his name again?”

Caitlin read it and for a moment just looked at Lisa – her best friend of four years – in disbelief.

Then she shook her head, scrawled “JOE!!” in big letters on the note, thrust it into Lisa’s hand and wheeled back to her search for her son.

…

When Lisa got back to the house with David and Mauve, she’d forgotten Joe’s name again and had to look at the note Caitlin had written to remind herself.

It was odd and annoying that it kept slipping her mind, but there finding him – whatever he was called – was more important than his name.

…

“It’s a bad house,” David said as he wiped his feet on the mat, “it always has been, and the land it’s built on is bad too.”

“How do you mean bad?” Lisa asked.

“Thin,” Mauve said, “or maybe porous. Leaky. Things get in and out easy here. Bad things.” She turned in the hallway to look at Caitlin. “That boyfriend of yours – the boy’s father – he never turned back up did he?”

“No,” said Caitlin. “Nobody has seen him since he ran off.”

“And good riddance,” Lisa said.

“And no word of him either, no?” Mauve asked. “Like he vanished off the face of the planet? Well, he aint the first to go from this house without a trace.”

“But Joe isn’t gone, Mauve,” said Caitlin.

“Who’s Joe?” Asked David.

“Is that supposed to be funny?” Caitlin snapped at him, “because it absolutely isn’t.”

“There’s something Willerby-ish going on here,” she said, taking Caitlin by the arm. “Let’s sit down and work out what’s what and what’s best to do. Try not to worry. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

The four of them sat down around Caitlin’s farmhouse style kitchen table, spice stained and blobbed with Joe’s paint.

Caitlin tried hard to stay calm. She took deep breaths and pre-scripted her words before she said them, willing herself to cold rationality.

“Can you hear him now?” David asked.

“Joe?” Caitlin called. “Where are you?”

“In the bathroom now,” he called back.

David, Mauve and Lisa looked at her quizzically.

“Well?” Mauve asked.

“He just said where he was,” Lisa said, “didn’t you hear him?”

David and Mauve looked at each other.

“No,” said David. “We didn’t hear anything.”

“Hear who?” Lisa asked.

David and Mauve looked at each other again.

“Oh no,” said Mauve.

Then Lisa looked down and saw the paint spots on her table were gone and that Joe’s pictures on the fridge had vanished too.

What was left of her self-control broke.

“What the hell is going on,” she shouted. “Joe! Joe!”

There was no reply.

Caitlin tore around the house, looking in every room with the other three adults behind, ignoring their shouts and calls, driven to greater and greater terror as she realised there was nothing left of Joe anywhere.

His room was transformed. No toys or clothes, no books, no pictures, no dinosaur printed wallpaper; all of it gone, replaced by the neutral beiges and pastels of a perfectly serviceable and comfortable spare bedroom.

It was like he had never existed, and when they all sat back down nobody except Caitlin remembered him at all.

…

“We believe you,” said David, after Caitlin had calmed enough to tell the whole story from the beginning, “of course we believe you. We’re all here and we don’t know why, and this is Willerby, so we know this aint no tall tale.”

“You have a son, Joe,” Mauve said. “He’s five. We all know him well, but we can’t remember him because he’s been folded in.”

“What does that mean?” Caitlin asked.

“It means someone, or something is trying to wipe him out by tangling him up in layers of time and space,” Mauve said, “someone or something angry and mean.”

“How do we get him back?” Lisa asked.

Again, Mauve looked hard at David. “I won’t lie,” she said. “It aint easy. But I’ll try.” She paused, looked down and then looked up again at her husband.

“David, a word outside, please, a private one.”

The night outside was dark and cloudy with no moon or stars and the old couple, married fifty years, could not see each other. Mauve took David’s hand and stroked it gently with the other one.

“Don’t you fuss, David,” she said, “it’s a kiddy that’s gone and you know I have to. Neither Sally nor Dan is near ready. That Lisa has got something going on and I’ll want her to see this but she’s only at the start of a journey she might never go further on. It’s got to be me.”

“You aint young,” said David, “nor strong as you were.”

“Oh, shut up and don’t I know it, but I am who I am and this is what we have before us now. You go on home, and you don’t come back here until it’s light. If it can be done it’ll be done by then. If it can’t,” she stopped again for an instant, “then know we had a good life and I made this choice, and there aint a thing you could have done different to make this different to what it is. You remember all the good times and you tell our kids whatever you need to tell ‘em that makes this easiest. That’s the hard part that’ll fall to you.”

“Mauve..”

“No, don’t you say anything now, we’ve said what we need to each other so many times without ever sayin’ it. More words now will just make this less than it is,” she leaned forward, stepped onto her tiptoes and kissed David lightly on his mouth. “I hope this is just see you in the morinin’, same as we’ve said a thousand, thousand times. But if it aint and this is goodbye, then you just remember I love you and don’t waste the years you have left in maudlin silliness and hankerin’. Now you go on.”

And, unhappily, he did.

When Mauve went back to the kitchen the two younger women were still sitting where she’d left them, opposite each other and holding clasped hands across the table.

“Caitlin,” she said. “From what I hear you’re a sensible woman and I aint going to tell you no lies or half-truths. This is bad and your son is in great danger. But I have good news for you too. I’m the best at this there is anywhere in the world and there’s no place else he’d have a better chance of comin’ home.”

She turned to Lisa.

“Your choice what you do, but I want you to stay tonight,” she said. “David and I been watching you for a while. You got the angles for this sort of thing. One day you may be needed for something like this, and I’d like you to see this a time. Will you stay?”

“Yes, of course I will,” said Lisa, talking to Mauve but looking at Caitlin, “I wouldn’t leave if you told me to.”

Mauve smiled. “That’s a good answer,” she said, then turned to Caitlin. “And it should make you feel more hope. Three for this sort of thing aint necessary, but it’s a good number. Now let’s get to work.”

Mauve went round the house with Caitlin pulling down every blind, closing every curtain and turning off every light. “Where we’re going don’t fit with the shape of this world we’re used to,” she said, “and seeing things in it will mislead us. What looks, I don’t know, like a chair two feet way don’t mean in the places we are trying to get to there’s a chair two feet away. It could be a mile away. It might not be a chair.”

She asked Caitlin if she had blindfolds.

Caitlin had two eye-masks from spa weekends she’d been treated to by her parents and kept for rare long baths.

She took a woollen scarf from a peg in the hall by the front door.

Once these were fetched, they all sat back down at the table.

“We’ll begin this in just a moment,” Mauve said, “but first, Caitlin, you got anythin’ to drink? It’s good for you two to know I’m scared, that you two should be to, and a quick tot of something strong aint going to do us no harm now.”

“There’s some whiskey Joe’s dad left behind when he went off,” said Caitlin, “in the cupboard.”

“That’ll do nicely,” Mauve said, “a big measure each, down in one, blindfolds on and then we go. All you two got to know is we hold hands the whole time. Me at the front, Lisa in the middle and Caitlin at the back. We don’t let go not for anything. Caitlin, you’re to keep talking to Joe the whole time. The whole night if you need to, whether he says anything back or not. Call him home. He needs to be able to hear you, even if it’s just to stop him going further. But don’t go to get him even if you think he’s right there beside you. Space and time here, it’s folded, and the shortest route might be no route at all.”

They sank their whiskeys, put their blindfolds on and the longest night any of them had ever known began.

At the start Lisa felt nothing out of the ordinary and, as the three of them edged round Caitlin’s house bumping into furniture, felt faintly ridiculous. It crossed her mind all this was madness. Caitlin hallucinating a child that didn’t exist and Mauve a mad old woman indulging a psychotic episode they should have called a doctor about.

But as the seconds and minutes rolled on and stretched, she realised they were walking further and further – too far for their steps to fit in Lisa’s modest cottage.

Guided by Mauve’s hand and her brief instructions – “go left, take a big step here, on your hands and knees for a few feet – we’re in a tunnel” – the three of them twisted and turned, ducked, stooped and at one point even leapt.  

Then she heard the whispers – a little like the singing in the wire from work but different because these whispers were not asking for her help to join them together, but instead suggesting she let go of Mauve’s hand and plunge into the darkness alone.

“A little further,” one said in a seductive hiss, “just a little bit further.”

“He’s just here,” said another, “you know how to do this better than the old witch does. Let go of her, two steps more and you’ll have him safe home.”

Then her feet were in what felt like long wet grass, coarse and sharp on her ankles, and then they were soaked through by running water, and then they were dried by soft sand.

Sometimes she felt a sense of great space and was buffeted by high winds, at others the air felt close and hot, and they seemed to meander, as if they were stumbling through deep serpentine passageways.

Louder than the whispers were strange calls of birds, the howls of far-away beasts and, once, an animal growling rumble of something that sounded very big and very close.

At this Mauve made them all crouch into balls on the ground and wait until whatever it was passed them by.

Twice Lisa felt the whir of leathery wings around her ears, causing her to fling up her free arm and grip Mauve even tighter.

“Don’t mind them,” said Mauve, “just bats, or near enough bats doing their bat things. They aint harmful.”

“Joe,” she heard Caitlin always calling, “Joe, come to me darling. I’m here. Like I always told you if you were ever lost, I’d always be looking for you. That’s what I’m doing now. Come home, come home.”

“That’s good, Caitlin,” Mauve said. “Talk to him about anything, most of all the things he loves.”

“I’ll make up your room all over again just how you want it,” said Caitlin, “don’t worry if you don’t see your toys. We’ll get them again or new toys, better toys. When you’re back you can eat roast dinners every day forever if you want. You can have ice cream for breakfast before school all year.”

There was a blast of icy wind from just ahead of them.

“He’s fucking gone forever you three bitches,” a man shouted, “I told you that bastard brat aint welcome here, I got help and we’ve locked him away. Fuck off out of my fucking house.”

“Ah, so it’s you, you tiny excuse for a man,” Mauve shouted back. “I heard thought it might be. I know about you and the death you earned yourself. Well, you been used by your wicked friends and you’re the first I’m locking out of this world forever. You’re bloody easy, you I could do with no hands at all. Go away – I banish you. I seal you out. Go wander the grey corridors forever alone where you deserve to be.”

The blast of wind disappeared as if someone had closed a door on a storm.

“That’s the cause of all this dealt with,” Mauve said, “but I knew that’d be the easy bit. Small little men do the harm they do because they’re weak not because they’re strong. That mean dead fool was just the key that opened the doors. The work will be finding where the boy went, folding everything back away neat with no loose ends and then locking everything up. Remember whatever you do don’t let go of my hands. We’ve a long, long way to go and I’ve a lot to do.”

Blind, they went miles and miles – much later after it was all over, Lisa checked her phone pedometer and wasn’t surprised to see fifty-thousand steps.

Every few minutes Mauve stopped to work at something the other two women could not see – sometimes it was just for a second and at others she muttered and fiddled for much longer.

“Listen carefully, you two,” she said hours in, “I know I said never to let go of my hand but for this I’m going to need both. There are big parts that need pushing together here and I think there’ll be more of them as we go on – maybe some that need splitting too. I’m going to let go now but you two put your hands on my back and don’t get go of each other.”

Mauve groaned as she heaved. Caitlin and Lisa could feel how hard she was straining by the creaking knots they could feel under her blouse, and it was then they realised how much the night had already taken from her.

“Ah,” she said to Caitlin a while later after more heaving and pulling, “your boy is closer now. I’ve threaded us closer to him and soon I think you’ll hear him but that don’t mean he’s actually close – I know that doesn’t make sense – it’s hard to explain,” she stopped and thought for a moment, “think of two people on two high cliffs facing each other twenty feet apart. They can talk easy enough, but they can’t reach each other and if one tried, they’d plunge to their death. To get to each other they must walk the long way round. But it is hopeful because it means at least there is a route.”

“Joe,” called Caitlin, “Joe, can you hear me? We’re coming.”

“Mummy?” He said, “where are you? I can’t see you.”

“Oh Joe, I’m coming as fast as I can,” Caitlin said. “Where are you?”

“Just in the house,” said Joe, “I keep looking around everywhere but you aren’t anywhere.”

“Ah there’s part of the kink,” Mauve said, sounding exhausted, “Joe, can you hear me?”

“Mummy?” Joe said.

“You tell him not to move.” Mauve said. “Tell him to stay put.”

The lines of a song she loved came to Caitlin. “Don’t look too far,” she sang, “Right where you are that’s where I am.”

The women went on, for hours longer, Caitlin calling and singing, Joe replying with words the other two did not hear until faintly they could hear him too, calling back to his mother, crying softly.

…

Towards the end Jack stirred in his pool, woken by the powerful magic moving somewhere in his haunt. He did not rise.

This, he knew, was a deep, strong power and while it made him curious, he was old and wily enough to know it was not his business and it would be unwise to draw the attention of the person wielding it.

She – he could feel – was locking lots of things away and while he did not think she could do the same to him he was not certain of it.

Like a person stirred by a passing bad dream, he shivered, rolled over went back to sleep and forgot it.

…

“He’s here,” Mauve said, more hours later, after so much more pulling, pushing and stitching, tired beyond words, drained. “It’s finished. I thought I might not be able to do it, but I have. I did good work. We can take off our blindfolds. Lisa, you wait here with me. Caitlin, you go fetch your son. He’s in his room.”

She ran to see and there he was, sitting on his bed with his duvet wrapped around him, knowing nothing of the night beyond hours of hunger and loneliness in an empty house.

…

“It’s done and more,” Mauve said two days later to her husband, over a late and hearty breakfast in her own cottage, and to Lisa and Caitlin, and to Sally and Dan who needed to know of such things.

“I folded everything back to where it should be and shut it all up. That house aint a bad house no longer. It’s safe now. There’s nothing left to fear there.”

Caitlin believed her but knew she’d never feel comfortable in it again.

She put it up for sale. She and Joe moved in to live with Lisa.

It was supposed to be temporary, but the arrangement lasted decades.

The three of them became a family.

In its own way, this was as remarkable as anything that ever happened in the cottage in all of the long years of its curse, and just as typical of Willerby.

…

The End.