PRAISE FOR THE GOLDEN KEY
‘With hints of the brooding Gothic of Rawblood and Rebecca, this wonderfully creepy historical novel makes it absolutely clear that Marian Womack is a rising star.’
Tim Major, author of Snakeskins
‘An intriguing and unsettling tale of séances, strange lights, disappearing children and a poacher who swears he has seen the devil in the marshes… Womack brings a great sense of the uncanny to the Fens.’
Alison Littlewood, author of A Cold Season
‘Graceful, moving, confident and intricate, like slipping into a warm bath and finding secret thorns there to pierce the heart’
Catherynne M. Valente, Locus Award-winning author of Space Opera and Deathless
‘A beguiling mystery that lingers long after reading, much like the unsettling mists of the Fens that creep through this story. The Golden Key mesmerises, offers a door to another world – one which casts an uncanny light on our own self-destruction.’
Katherine Stansfield, author of Falling Creatures
‘A fey, unsettling vision of Norfolk, and London, that fans of The Essex Serpent will love. A compelling mystery in which everyone has hidden facets, this book gives up its secrets like a puzzle box.’
G.V. Anderson, BFS award-winner of ‘Down Where Sound Comes Blunt’
‘A fascinating, unsettling tale that shifts, mutates and changes meaning much like the eerie ruined house in the Fens at the centre of this weird and brilliant debut novel.’
Lisa Tuttle, author of The Witch at Wayside Cross
MARIAN WOMACK
TITAN BOOKS
THE GOLDEN KEY
Print edition ISBN: 9781789093254
E-book edition ISBN: 9781789093261
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First Titan edition: February 2020
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© 2020 Marian Womack. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
To Oliver Julius Womack Via
There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his great-aunt’s stories.
She told him that if he could reach the place where the end of the rainbow stands he would find there a golden key.
‘And what is the key for?’ the boy would ask.
‘What is it the key of? What will it open?’
‘That nobody knows,’ his aunt would reply.
‘He has to find that out.’
GEORGE MACDONALD,
The Golden Key (1867)
Who has not experienced the burning heat of the sun that precedes a summer’s shower?
EUNICE FOOTE,
‘Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays’ (1856)
CHAPTER ONE
There are many ways of getting lost. Breadcrumbs can sink into the snow, be eaten by rooks.
You can be sucked in by the marshes, lose your way on the flatlands. Be spirited away from the narrow footpaths. You could get confused at the imagined frontier of impenetrable dusk that hangs over the Fens, lose sight of the realm of the tangible.
Samuel Moncrieff had never been lost. For as long as he could remember he had been graced with the intuition that, if you got lost, you might never come back.
It almost happened once. He felt it, a strange force that pulled at him from the lane that cut between the flatlands. He had gone out for a walk; he could smell the cold, the wet leaves. The little shoots of frozen grass crunched under his feet, and the ground was white with frost.
Ahead of him, the dark agricultural fenland stretched, eerily flat. For a second the world had lost some of its gravity, its weight.
He felt suddenly alert, and turned back, pulling with all his might.
He could not blame the fog, for it happened in that uncertain November twilight, impossibly heavy under its many layers of dusk. One step out of place, that’s all it would have taken. Later, he would hear the expression ‘being pixie-led’; but he himself had no words for such a portent, not then at least. Except for the notion of falling into an inescapable void, the unmistakable sensation of darkness advancing in his direction, intent on devouring him. Like drowning in a pool of stagnant water.
That day, the day he had almost got lost.
Was that the day he first saw it, the ruined house that had haunted his childhood dreams?
The dismal construction had been such a fixture of his nightmares for so many years, and yet had disappeared all of a sudden as soon as he put Norfolk behind him, went off to be educated. Almost every night he had traversed its corridors, looked up at the sky through the collapsed ceiling, dreading, always dreading the approach to that mouldy room at the passage’s end. The house stood on a flat stretch of yellow land. The formal garden had run wild, overgrown, and he could hear a faint murmur of water. Some of the outer walls were blackened, and part of the ceiling was gone. The dim light, flat as the land itself, drew endless unmoving shadows.
It was a hollow carcass, home to foxes and mice, and to the jackdaws that flew to and fro around its triangular gables. Branches were overhanging the opened rooms, the floors covered in brown dirt, stones, broken pieces of flint. The dreary salons and bedchambers were all livid with mould, so that the fireplaces looked as if they had been painted in many shades of green by a madman. Ivy had crept in through the windows, and fungi of many different colours, shockingly vibrant, spread their silent empire over the walls, painting maps to unknown realms.
The house spoke of lives coming to abrupt ends, of broken promises. It spoke of endless possibilities, both seen and unseen. Its layers of unmoving time made him uneasy: there was something odd, slightly off-key. You could not hear the birds, the wind rustling. Like a place neither here nor there.
* * *
Why had it reappeared now, after all these years, with the inopportune insistence of a long-lost friend one has no time for?
He knew, deep down, what the house meant. A place to escape to, it came back to him during those first feverish hours without Viola, with its faint aura of a long-lost memory; the river accident had triggered its return. Just as mould and decay covered its imagined walls, so the memory of the house had silently conquered his nightmares, leaving no place for Viola, for the treacherous Isis.
What Sam could not remember was whether the building was a true memory, or something that he had imagined, part of some vivid childhood make-believe, a long-forgotten game of hide-and-seek with the shadows. He had no recollection of the property existing in this world. But then, he had been there once, had he not? He could not simply have imagined it, not in all its sumptuous decaying detail.