Sam is gentle and quiet, and likes to stay close to me. Louisa is a more independent spirit, inquisitive and testing of the constraints placed upon her, and as she approaches adolescence, these aspects of her character have become more and more pronounced. And so it may have been that she had already become something different, even before we took the house for the summer. I do not know. All I can say for certain is that I awoke one night to find her standing in the darkness by my bedside, my son asleep beside me. I said to my daughter-or what used to be my daughter-“Louisa, what’s the matter?”
She replied: “I’m not Louisa. I am your new daughter.”
But I move ahead of myself. I should explain that this announcement was preceded by some tumultuous months. We moved, abandoning our life in the city for what we hoped would be a more peaceful one in the countryside. We sold our house for what still seems to me an obscene sum of money, and bought an old rectory on five acres by the outskirts of the town of Merrydown. It was a beautiful property, and absurdly underpriced, leaving me with a considerable nest egg with which to provide for our comforts and for the education of my children. Both Louisa and Sam were due to transfer to new schools anyway, and their friends would be scattered. Neither objected to the prospect of a move and my ex-wife, after the obligatory grumblings, decided to raise no formal objection. In any case, I informed them that nothing was written in stone: we would try it for a time and, if we were not all happy by the end of the trial period, we would return to the city.
The house had five bedrooms, four of them quite substantial in size, so the children were able to claim spaces for themselves far larger than had previously been available to them in the city. Two remained unoccupied, while I took possession of the last, to the rear of the house. In addition, there was a large kitchen that overlooked the rear garden, a dining room, a study that I annexed for my own use, and a spacious living area lined with oak bookshelves. To one side of the house were some old stables. They had not been used in some time, but the faint smell of hay and horses still hung about them. The stables were gloomy and damp and, after a cursory investigation, the children decided that they would provide little scope for play.
It appeared that the rectory had been on the market for some time, although I did not learn why this was so until some months after it was sold to me. Apparently, it had never provided a good living, and the care of the village’s flock now lay with clerics from the larger town of Gravington, who took turns offering services in the old chapel.
An artist, an illustrator of children’s stories, had lived in the rectory for a time after the last cleric had departed, but she did not stay very long and had since died in a house fire far to the north. I suspected that she had trouble keeping up the modest rent on the rectory, if the nature of her work was anything to go by. I came across a box of hers amid a heap of rubbish and dead branches at the back of the house. Some attempt had been made to burn the whole pile, but either the fire had not taken or rain had doused it, for the box was wet and the ink had run on many of the drawings. Still, it was clear from what remained that her true vocation probably did not lie in working with material for children. The illustrations were uniformly horrific, I felt, dominated by pale half-human creatures with melted features, their eyes narrow oval slits, their nostrils unusually wide, and their mouths agape, as though they relied predominantly on smell and taste for their survival. Some had long tattered wings extending from bony nodes upon their backs, the membranes punctured and torn, like those of dead dragonflies rotting on the spider’s web. I kept none of the drawings for fear that the images might disturb the children if found, and the addition of a little paraffin to the fire ensured that, this time, all was burned.
There was nothing structurally at fault with the rectory itself, and the introduction of new paint and furnishings meant that the previous dark hues and heavy drapes were quickly replaced by summer tones, brightening our surroundings considerably. There were apple trees at the end of the back garden, from which a series of small, sloped fields descended gradually toward a stream overhung by thick green trees. It was good land, but none of the locals appeared anxious to pursue grazing rights upon it for their cattle, despite repeated offers on my part.
The reason for their reluctance could be traced to a mound in the third field, equidistant from our house and the stream. It was perhaps twenty feet in circumference and a little over six feet in height. Its origins were unclear: some in the village referred to it as a fairy fort, a former dwelling place for some older, mythical race. Others said that it was a burial mound, although it went unmentioned as such in archaeological records of the area and no one appeared to have any idea of who, or what, might be buried beneath it. Louisa liked the idea of having a fairy castle on our land, and so she chose to regard it as such. Frankly, I was happy to do the same, little people being infinitely less troubling to my slumbers than the possibility of large numbers of old bones slowly decaying beneath green grass and daisies. Sam, by contrast, avoided the mound, preferring that we take a circuitous path through adjoining fields rather than pass close by it, while his more adventurous sister took the direct route, frequently choosing to wave at us from her perch upon its topmost point as we passed.
Sam was always a little in awe of his sister and her mercurial qualities, while Louisa in turn remained protective of her brother while simultaneously urging him to be less of a little boy and more of a man. The result was that Sam, against his better judgment, would find himself in awkward, and sometimes painful, situations from which his sister would have to extricate him. These inevitably ended in tears, recriminations, and a temporary respite from his sister’s dares before slowly she would set to work on him again. There was always something new with which to tempt him, some shiny aspect of herself with which to fascinate him. Once again, perhaps that was why I failed to spot the changes in her, for they took place against a constantly shifting backdrop of moods and humors.
Yet now that I consider the matter more closely, I do recall an incident two weeks after we arrived. I woke to feel a cool breeze flowing through the house, accompanied by the sound of a window beating against its frame. I left my bed and followed the sound to my daughter’s bedroom. She was standing at the window, reaching out to the sill.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She turned quickly from the window, pulling it closed behind her.
“I thought I heard someone calling to me,” she said.
“Who would be calling to you?” I said.
“The people in the fort,” she replied, but she was smiling as she said it, and I took it for a joke, even as I noticed that she appeared to be concealing something from my view as she climbed back into bed. I went to the window and looked out, but I could see only blackness beyond. On the windowsill itself I spied some fragments of painted wood, torn from the frame close by the lock, but then a wind rose and blew them away into the night.
I returned to Louisa. She had drifted back to sleep almost immediately, as though she were wearied by her efforts, her hands hidden beneath the blankets. There was a leaf caught in her hair, perhaps blown in through the window, and I removed it gently, brushing the rest of her hair away from her brow so that it would not tickle her in her sleep. As I did so, my fingers touched something rough close by her shoulder. Gingerly, I drew back the blanket. Her doll, Molly, which she always kept close to her in bed, was gone. In its place was a rough form made of straw and twigs. It resembled a person except that its arms were unusually long and its torso was distended, the belly enormous. Six matted strands of woven hair hung from its head. There was a circular hole where its mouth might have been, and oval sockets for eyes. Four dandelion leaves intersected at its back in a crude imitation of wings.