It Grew Too Great

An Interview Conducted by Mr. Sam Webber with “Miss Juliette”

Foreword

This true story is not like my others.

It has me stumped. No above-ground-human explanation makes sense to me. Neither, for once, does the work of the Etmon, the underground peoples on which I normally write. If this story is indeed true (and not a word Miss Juliette utters contradicts police reports), then to my mind, there is nothing short of witchcraft at play. Or ghosts. Or the unfathomable justice of God.

Secondly, the subject in question is still alive to tell me of their experiences firsthand. Perhaps it is my willingness to believe and share that which others unduly dismiss, or perhaps my simply living in the town of Norwich, the setting of this tale, was enough to spark a trust in Miss Juliette.

In any case, Miss Juliette contacted me, through her people, and it is a privilege to be burdened with her story.

Spending so much time with the historical is isolating, and if in this account I come off as short, or cold, then please do me the service of assuming my questions were cut down in the editing.

Where I come off well, assume it was all spoken as written.

Finally, Miss Juliette is, of course, a pseudonym. She has promised that after both she and I are dead, then a second edition can be published with more accurate details.

For now:

Miss Juliette’s Tale

I see Miss Juliette in her quarters on the 24th of December 2023. She is a sprightly sixty-two years old and, despite her confinement, remains thoroughly in charge of her own world. Mealtimes, bedtimes, and playtimes are at her own whim, and none of her staff can change her habits. After some brief introductions:

Can I ask about your time in Tombland?

That is why you’re here.

You know people won’t believe that is the name of the street?

But it is the name, isn’t it?

Yes. Who is it reads your stories?

Essentially nobody.

Well, those from Norwich will know that Tombland is indeed the name of the street. Anybody else can check a map, I suppose.

Or look it up online.

I wouldn’t know about that.

How did you come to be there?

Very good. Now we are getting somewhere.

I was twelve years old when Mother declared that we were to move. I understand the reasons why now, but at the time, all I knew was we were to leave my wonderful house for a cramped, crooked, dark, and altogether dismal little flat some half an hour further away from my school and my friends.

Why did you have to move?

Money. Why else? My staff tell me that the country was doing bad in general, but I only know my small portion of it. Both of my parents had worked at the prison. My mother was a cook there, and my father did odd jobs and maintenance. This didn’t pay as well as you might expect, but we got by. Until, in 1972, my father was returned from his job by some ambulance men, both of his arms and many more of his nerves smashed beyond repair.

Do you know what happened?

Rumor on the playground was that he had got in the way of some dirty scheme between one of the richer inmates, a man imprisoned for high-level financial crimes, and an officer. They paid off some of the rabble to target him, and they did as told. My school chum Alice had a father in the police element of the prison, so perhaps she was right in her gossip.

Whatever occurred, my father was unable to work as he used to. The man had spent his whole life tinkering, and now his hands were not his own. With great effort he could use his hands as sort of claws. Anything more delicate and his palm would spasm inward like a clamp. Tools would drop to the ground, or food would go flying off the fork, and he would bite his disobeying fingers in frustration.

Eventually I was made to eat separately so my mother could feed him without him losing dignity in front of his daughter. I wouldn’t have minded. I did love him, believe it or not.

As the months passed and it became clearer that he wouldn’t be returning to work, he fell into a great depression.

My mother would come home after a long shift to find him sat at the kitchen table, seemingly unmoved since she had left him early in the morning, still staring at the same crossword in the newspaper he was hardly able to hold. She would then feed him and go to bed. As for myself, he would politely ask me how my school day was, I would tell him some inconsequential piece of news, and he would say, “Very good, Juliette. I’m proud of you. Now go and entertain yourself, would you?” And I would.

The last thing he truly did for himself was dress. True, he needed help with his shirt buttons, but everything else he would painstakingly pull on using his teeth, bolstering himself against any nearby furniture he could find to bounce his way into his trousers. Sometimes this would take upwards of an hour, but he would always arrive downstairs and declare that he had achieved his morning routine by himself, thank you very much.

I have since seen a film in which a man with no limbs at all rolls a cigarette with his mouth and lights it, all in under a minute.

Your father’s illness led you to move house?

There was a payout from the prison, but it was limited and wouldn’t last forever, so we moved whilst still solvent. I was just told one morning, “Come home early, Juliette, we’ve got a lot of packing to do, we’re moving house,” and that was that.

Within the week, we’d sold all our furniture and taken up a letting in the so-called Augustine Steward House across the other side of the city. Once upon a time, several hundred years before I was born, it actually was a house. You might know it by the name of the Plague House. By my own time, it had been divided into smaller apartments, and we had the flat that juts out above the walkway. Directly opposite the cathedral. I assume that’s still standing?

Very much so.

Good. If you stood in the dead center of our front room and looked at the window, the whole cathedral entrance was framed perfectly by the grounds gate, which was in turn framed perfectly by our window. The other side looked out over the courtyard, a fancy name for where the alley briefly broke out into a graveyard attached to another church along the way. Otherwise we had no windows, as every other wall was connected to another property.

Despite everything that happened, I have no regrets about waking up every morning to see such a beautiful building looming over me. The cathedral, I mean. Almost a thousand years that’s been there, in some form or another. So many lives lived through under the shadow of its spire. It was burnt down once. I believe a priest killed someone, the city rioted, and the bodies piled up. A lot of heads on pikes. A lot of diseases back before people knew what germs were. For everyone who walks into that cathedral now, there must be a thousand others who died within sight of it.

I used to think that was why the area right outside of it was called Tombland. A very large church should have a very large graveyard, don’t you think?

I could look up the meaning of the name, if you like?

I wouldn’t like.

The flat was a small and run-down property, cold in the winter and hot in the summer. It consisted of a sitting room and kitchen in one, a bathroom, a small bedroom, and a glorified cupboard where I was supposed to sleep. The single narrow staircase ran from the alley below to our front door, and then onward up to the so-called attic room. When it became clear that I couldn’t do much more than stand in my own bedroom, my mother inquired with the landlord about expanding the lease to include that attic space, if it could be less “completely out of bounds” than it was. A small staircase leading up to a warped wooden door covered in scratches, moss, and four large metal chains with padlocks bigger than my own head. The look of the thing screamed No Entry louder than the landlord ever could, try as he might.

He was dead against the idea. The upstairs was not worth looking at, and yes, it was a sort of living space, but there was no way he was letting us have it. We had agreed to have the flat as seen, and that was that. My mother fought a good fight. My father simmered in the corner. The landlord got more and more irate each time they proposed a new price, or appealed to his sense of mercy on my need for a space to call my own. He was appalled at the idea anyone would want to open the attic door and expressed this by getting angrier and louder and red-faced and stamping his polished shoes as hard as he could.

I didn’t like conflict at the best of times, and the strange man in a suit seemed to have such power over my poor parents that when he started shouting profanities at them, I burst into tears. I was sent to play outside, so I sat in the courtyard and waited in silence whilst my mother negotiated with the man. The yelling of the landlord echoed through the thick medieval walls, but I, like most children, managed to cloak myself in a personal bubble of anxious silence.

My eyes cast down the alleyway running underneath our flat, to the great big cathedral across the road. Time was lost as the evening sunlight blanketed rooftops ancient and new, and I stared absently at the looming buildings around me. I sometimes think I am actually sat there still, a child of twelve with a wandering imagination simply lying on the grass, waiting for adults to get on with adult business. If I tell you that sometimes a moment can last an eternity, do you understand what I mean?

Very much so.

It’s not a metaphor.

Then no.

Perhaps someday you will.

As my eyes scanned the clouds in the last of the daylight, looking for some grand meaning in it all, I idly pulled at the grass on the ledge I was sat on. My fingernails scraped on something cold. Looking down, I had thoughtlessly dug away several layers of dirt and revealed flat white stone beneath it. The cold of the stone must have shocked my body some, as my heart was beating rapidly, and I could hear blood racing past my ears in thick bursts. Feeling a little more, I discovered some deep engraving, as on the several dozen gravestones around me. When I say I was compelled to look further, I mean just that. I was never curious as a child, but I needed to know what was written on that stone.

Using the cuff of my jumper, I brushed away earth until the following words became clear.

Here lieth Elyzabeth Bronwen, Daughter of the Parish.
1566–1578
The Hunger Grew Too Great.

The marking was clear but hurried. The stone itself only just large enough to contain the letters, as if the stone were not meant to be found. At that moment the breeze stopped. Car engines in the distance ceased. As I looked up again toward the church, I saw a fellow young girl smiling at me from in the alley, wearing the most beautiful white dress. I went to say hello, but then—bang! The landlord slammed the front door, hurried down the stairs, and bulldozed through the alley, muttering wildly to himself. The girl was gone.

I ran back up the stairs to find two exhausted parents holding a new set of keys. “Did he let us have the bedroom upstairs?”

“Not only did he let us have it, my dear Juliette, but he gave it to us for free!”

Father spoke up from his corner, his voice quiet as usual but full of fear. “He didn’t want to give it to us at all, did he? Practically begged us not to take it, in his own way.”

“Since when have you paid attention to what landlords have to say?” questioned my mother, trying to keep the mood light for my benefit.

“Every landlord I’ve dealt with has been a money-grabbing twonk”—only he didn’t say twonk—“but they’ll do it calmly. They’ve got the powers that be on their side, and they know it. They don’t need to shout to be heard. That man was scared. And he didn’t take a penny. Something’s wrong with that room.”

My mother jangled the new keys and said brightly, “Shall we take a look?” With that, my father retired to barely reading his newspaper, and that was that.

So you went into the room?

Yes. Behind all those chains was, I’m afraid to say, a boring old room. Carpets worn through, spiderwebs everywhere, but a boring old room underneath the dust. We aired it out, stuck in a mattress and a lamp, and I had some room to breathe. Some mornings when I woke up late, I didn’t see my family at all, as of course the bedroom door led straight out to the outside stairs. For the first time in my life, I was incredibly lonely, and longed for some other children to play with.

There weren’t any at school?

At school I stopped socializing very much. Largely because I always had something to catch up on, and I had such a long walk home now that there was no time to hang around afterward and talk to people. It’s probably now safe to admit that I wasn’t very good company either. I think I was very morose and silent with my classmates. I didn’t know which ones of them knew about my father. And I didn’t know what their parents had said about us. 

Tombland consisted of shops, pubs, cafés, churches, and grim little flats like our own embedded within these buildings. Solitary men and widowed old women lived in them almost exclusively, hiding themselves away, glad of the shelter but disappointed by everything else life had given them. I briefly struck up a friendship with a sickly boy called Rhys who lived in the church and never went to school, but his mother banned him from talking to me when she found out what number we lived in.

So no, not many children to play with.

There was, however, a school opposite the house, under the shadow of the cathedral, out of which boys of about my age and up teemed every afternoon.

Did you grow up in a moneyed family, Mr. Webber?

Why do you ask?

What a wonderful way of avoiding the question.

No, we weren’t rich.

Such short, vague answers. I can see why you spend your time transcribing the stories of others, Mr. Webber. You are clearly incapable of penning your own.

Okay.

When you are a child, you never realize you are poor until you see other children with money. Before this move, I was perfectly happy in our rented two-up two-down terraced box. Everyone else I knew lived in one, and it had my family in it. We ate our meals at home, and my school skirts were dutifully repaired and reused from the older girls next door. We did not have a car.

Others on my street lived the same way. The girls I knew at school from other roads also described their life the same way. I don’t want to belabor the point—we weren’t in the abject poverty of the third world—but there wasn’t much spare going around for anyone, and this was so normal that I couldn’t have even told you this was the case. Like gravity. As if someone had said to me, “You know there are other people who can float?” I might have believed you, but it wouldn’t have been real to me. The rich and the floating live in films.

Were those other children rich, then?

Beyond anything I could imagine. Though they wouldn’t admit to it. The private school under the shadow of the cathedral was hardly Eton, but the cost of any one of those school shirts would have kept me fed for a month. I naively thought I could strike up some friendships, once. My school day ended half an hour before theirs, so I was home in time to see them coming out. There were always at least half a dozen who hung around the corner shop eating sweets, and they seemed nice enough, so I braved it one day and said hello.

They were not gentlemen in any sense I understand the word, despite their heritage and endless supply of sweet money. I should have known that a bunch of teenagers from one of the city’s oldest institutions would have nothing but a jovial contempt for a state-school girl of twelve. I started deliberately wearing my skirt lower and lower just in case they came by.

Secondly, there was no way they could understand my situation, even the nicest of them.

There was one kind boy, my age, called Rafe. Spelled like Ralph but pronounced without the L. Strange name, but a sweet boy. After I ran away crying that first day, he followed me back to my front door and stopped me. 

“Sorry about them,” he said as he grabbed my coat. “Please don’t listen to a thing they say.”

“Leave me alone!” I shouted. “Go back to your horrid friends.”

He wiped his nose (the cold had begun to set in) and said, “They aren’t my friends. That’s my older brother, and I have to wait for him before I can go home. He wants to stay out with his pals, and if I come with him, then Mother believes that the bus was late, so he makes me wait. My name’s Ralph.”

“Juliette.”

“Do you live in there?”

“Yes, I do. What’s it to you?”

“Nothing. Mr. Jerwood says that house is very historical. He told us all a story about it last week. Do you want a toffee?”

There was some hope in the world. When Ralph’s brother wanted to hang out on the streets after school, Ralph would knock at my door and we would play for as long as we could. Just before the October half term, I took him inside to introduce him to my father. He tried his best to hide his shock, but it was obvious he’d never been in a house so small before. All my father said was “Nice to meet you, Ralph”—pronounced wrong—“shut the door on your way out.” I think my mother must have been at work.

After I gave him the grand tour, he asked, “Where’s the television?” and I was ashamed to admit we didn’t have one. “We got a color one last Christmas. There’s some really good programs on there. I like Record Breakers. There’s these twins, and they see who’s the fastest or the strongest or the tallest in the whole world. It’s really good.”

“That sounds fun.”

“Do you want to play Record Breakers?”

And then we ran outside again to see who could go the fastest, or be the strongest, or be the tallest, and Ralph explained to me how the program worked. It wasn’t all that exciting, to be honest, but I was glad to have a friend.

And he would always have a plentiful supply of sweets, of course.

Of course.

One day I ran down as normal to find Ralph being clung to by his brother. After a whispered argument and a small shoving match, the brother marched my way.

“You’re not to hang around with our Ralph anymore. Understood? We don’t want him getting caught up in the wrong crowd.”

I failed to see how I was the wrong crowd.

“Listen, to be honest, you seem a nice girl. But they’ve noticed things, and reputation’s important. For me and for my brother.”

“Who is them? Who’s noticed things?”

“Mr. Jerwood, first and foremost. These lot, for seconds.” He gestured to the group of boys behind him, who started jostling each other and ribbing each other in the elbow, laughing at some joke I still don’t understand.

“They don’t know anything!” I cried. “They’re just snobs who don’t know what’s good and what’s not.” The older boys were all staring at me, most of them still giggling. Ralph, however, was stony faced and serious as he glared over at our conversation. “What’s wrong with me?”

The brother was almost sheepish. He bent down to look at me on an equal level, and his voice softened so the others couldn’t hear. If he weren’t trying to wrest me away from my only friend, I would say he was trying to be kind. “It’s not you, Juliette. Well, not entirely. It’s that other girl that’s always following you around. It’s strange that she doesn’t speak at all. They think she’s got something wrong with her.”

I was about to protest when Ralph burst into the conversation and exclaimed, “But I don’t mind! I know that’s just how she is. My friend Jack has a sister who’s nine and hasn’t said a word yet. I’m not snobby. That’s just how people are.”

You can imagine how confused I was. “What other girl? What are you talking about?”

Ralph looked up at his brother for support, speechless.

“If you’re going to not be my friend anymore, at least let me know why!”

Both of them looked confused, and the brother stood up and looked like he was trying to figure something very difficult out in his head. “That other girl, obviously,” he said as he pointed over my shoulder. I looked where he was pointing and saw the trail of that beautiful white dress disappearing round the alley corner.

“See, she always runs away whenever I try to talk to her,” said Ralph. “Maybe if you could get her to be a little bit social, people might feel less strange about her.”

“I’ve never seen that girl before in my life,” I lied.

And then . . . ?

And then what? The brother gave up. Me and Ralph carried on playing together, on occasion. But the nights drew in, being outside became less and less pleasant, and Ralph was dragged home earlier and earlier. We could have gone indoors, but my embarrassment at our appalling flat was too much to bear.

When we did play, I got the feeling Ralph was trying to humor me. A very kind boy. A kind young boy who was always looking over my shoulder. From that meeting on, he was always ready to run off when called, and the relief when he had an excuse to go was clear to see.

My mother took longer shifts, but still the money began to run out. By December we were living almost entirely off prison leftovers. These were disgusting and small meals, whatever my mother could sneak out without too much suspicion. Her colleagues must have known, but they didn’t say anything. And she took just enough of the boiled vegetables and assorted muck to sustain us.

Your father?

The same as ever. Sat in his corner, withered arms doing less and less, his newspaper unread. The father I knew was not that man who sat all day doing nothing, hating the world and his place in it. In fact, he was so not my father that I almost ceased to see him altogether. I spent extended periods holed up in my dusty attic room, reading what books I could find and generally wasting away, tucked into the cheap sheets that served for my bed.

I think I might have survived all this relatively unscathed (I am not the only child to experience poverty) were it not for a change that came over the house that winter.

It was the 1st of December to the day. My fingers were shaking from the cold as I did my best to turn the pages of some book. From out of nowhere—and I mean nowhere, not a single sound or preamble of any sort—there was an almighty crash at the bottom of the bedroom, as if the whole house was caving in on itself.

What were you reading?

What was I reading? What was I reading, he asks! You, Mr. Webber, are a moron.

Sorry.

I don’t know what I was reading. One of the Chalet School books, probably. Heard of those?

I don’t think so.

A bunch of girls at a boarding school going on adventures. Nonsense stuff, entirely. Something to distract from my own situation. Now, if I might continue . . . ?

Please.

There was an almighty crash at the bottom of the bedroom, and the light above my head fizzled out. My book, whatever it was, flew out of my hands and I shut my eyes in desperate fear. Peeping my eyes open bit by bit, seeing nothing more in the absolute darkness, I could hear a tiny scraping sound of metal on wood. I did what anyone would do and screamed for help, but the moment I had started, the light fizzled back on.

In seconds my mother had hurled herself upstairs and burst in, desperate to know what all the fuss was about.

“There was a crash! And scraping! And the light was out.”

She was furious. “There was no crash, and you know it. We would have heard it, we’re immediately downstairs.”

“But there was! It made me throw my book!”

“Is that library property? Please don’t say you’ve damaged it, we can’t afford to pay any fines . . .” She scrambled around the mess of clothes next to my bed and pulled it out, examining it for anything we might be liable for. “I think it’s passable. Look after your things in future.”

“But I was only—”

“You’ve given your father the fright of his life. I need to go let him know everything’s all right. And, oh my goodness, what’s all of this doing on the floor? You shouldn’t be playing with this. You don’t know where it’s been.” She kicked at something heavy on the floor, and I heard that same scraping of metal from before. “Put it away. I don’t want to see it again.”

And she was gone.

I got up from my mattress and peered over to the far end of the room. There on the floor, in a disheveled pile, sat the four rusted chains that used to bar my bedroom door. I thought they had been thrown away, or at the very least tidied in some cupboard that wasn’t my business. One thing was certain. They had not been in my room before the crash.

When I tried to move them, I found they were incredibly heavy. I have no idea how my parents didn’t hear them hitting the floor, or how they didn’t smash their way through the ancient floorboards, they were so weighty. But I didn’t want to incur the wrath of my mother again, so somehow, with the sheer determination of a twelve-year-old avoiding trouble, I got them out of the room. With more terrifying crashes that I was sure would wake the whole neighborhood, they rolled down the stone stairs and into the courtyard.

Standing in the icy night, surrounded by graves, in the dark of night, I couldn’t help but think of the comments Ralph had made. The inscription I found in the grass played on my mind as I dragged the chains into a corner behind some bins, and as I looked into the gloom, I saw the faint outline of that girl in the white dress, weeping and clutching her stomach.

I rushed back inside as quickly as I could, locked myself away, and started to pray. 

Are you religious?

No.

I collapsed into a sleep. It wasn’t a deep sleep, but it was enough for me to get some respite from the horror. What I couldn’t ignore was the hunger.

As I have said, food was not abundant in our household. This hunger, however, was new to me. It hurt. Somehow by the morning I was fine again, but each night from now on, I was kept awake by such acute and nasty hunger that I have never known before or since. After an hour or so of crying, I was too dehydrated to produce tears. Then my emaciated body gave up and I would pass out with relief.

Did you ask your parents for more food?

Of course. That first morning I begged them for a big breakfast, and they gave it to me. I hope I haven’t portrayed them as uncaring monsters. They were not. They cared for me, I know.

When I first mentioned this hunger to my mother, she gave me a long talk about growing up and the changes of the body, followed by a hot water bottle. When I continued complaining, I think she and Father must have had a discussion about it, because my meals became larger and they both watched me with confused apprehension as I ate.

As pained as my stomach was when I went to bed, by morning all food seemed disgusting to me, and I had to force-feed myself by way of thanks to my parents, who I knew were giving up so much for my sake. Prison food isn’t as bad as people think, but to me it was like every bite was cold, damp ash.

The hunger at night continued no matter how much I ate.

And the girl in the white dress? Did you continue seeing her?

I didn’t see her again for some time. But I felt her. As I lay in bed, dreading the oncoming starvation, I knew she was at the bottom of the room looking at me.

How did you know?

I may have been twelve years old, but I know what was there. I suppose you’ll say it was the power of suggestion, or a brain reaction to some illness related to the hunger. Maybe it was, but if you had heard the soft tread of child’s feet coming through the darkness as I have, if you had felt those eyes boring through your skull every time you closed your eyes, you would know what was real and what was not.

The strangest thing . . .

Yes?

Sorry, I have told my story to so many of my staff, but never quite given this detail . . .

Please, take your time.

The strangest thing, Mr. Webber, was that each midnight, the feeling of being watched would stop. The sound of soft footsteps would stop. My tears would stop with the fright, even as my stomach screamed for sustenance. And all at once a warmth ran through my body, and every muscle relaxed with the feeling of being loved and cared for and safe. The sheets I slept in felt tight around me, and my hunger slowly began to dissipate. As if a great and gentle caregiver were gently rubbing my belly and saying, “Shhh, shhh, don’t worry, we will get through this. No need to fear . . .”

I didn’t hear any voices. I never heard her speak. But like in a dream, when you know for certain that someone is speaking even if they are actually a cat, or a cardboard box, or not there at all, I knew what I was being told. I was cradled, a hand laid softly on my aching gut, and whispers repeated, “I understand. Me too, me too . . .”

And then I would wake up in the morning and the cycle would start again. It is only looking back that I realize this happened every single night. At the time each occurrence was like new.

I suppose we had better get to the crux of it.

So far I had not questioned my parents in anything. They said we moved, so we did. They sent me to the attic room, so I went. This was how things were. But around mid-December my mind was whirring with anguish and recollections of the things people had said to me. The landlord’s insistence that we don’t open the attic room. Ralph’s comments about some story his teacher told him. The little sickly boy who wasn’t allowed to play with me on account of the property we lived in. And most of all, that girl in the beautifully white dress, and that hidden gravestone: The Hunger Grew Too Great.

“Father?”

He started from his depressive state and looked instinctively around for my mother. She was at work.

“What is it? Still hungry? Your mother gets back at six.”

“I know. I’m not hungry”—I was—“I want to know about this flat.”

“What about it?” He was even more irritable in winter as the days grew short, and inane questions wouldn’t help anything. I thought it best to ask him straight.

“Lots of people look at me funny when I say I live here, and the landlord seemed terrified to come in, and my room was chained up when we arrived. Did something happen here?”

He looked at me, considering whether or not to lie.

“The thing is, sweetheart, that lots of people get funny about all sorts of things. And more than anything else, this flat is cheap and damp and cold and not very nice at all to live in. Don’t you agree?”

I said nothing.

“And sometimes,” he continued, “that’s enough to put people off of people. I know it’s not fair, but it’s the way things are. I’m sorry you have to live like this. I’d give you a hug if I could.” He definitely still could. 

“As for the landlord, well, you know what I think about him.”

As I stared at him, waiting for him to go on, he let out a huge sigh.

“This building has been standing for a very long time. And a very long time ago, back in the 1500s or 1600s, I can’t remember, but there was a plague going about, and it got into this house.”

I knew exactly the year. 

“And back then, they didn’t have doctors, not good ones anyway, and the only way to stop the plague from spreading was to lock up any houses that had it and hope it went away. There was a family in this house that died whilst locked up. That’s it. There must be hundreds of them around the city, but for some reason this one’s famous for it.

“It’s nothing for you to worry about, but sometimes people get funny about old buildings. Especially when there’s stories attached. Please don’t go worrying yourself over it.”

I ran down into the courtyard, compelled to check the gravestone once again. Elyzabeth Bronwen. So that was how she died, locked in the house with plague. I took a note of her name and the dates and waited. I would see Ralph on Monday, and then I would get him to ask his teacher to tell him everything he knew about the house.

That night, Sunday night, at the peak of my hunger pains, the girl appeared before me. She sat on the floor at the bottom of my bed, facing away. Her dress was as shining as ever, but for the first time, I noticed the patches and the holes where it had fallen into disrepair. She didn’t turn to face me, but her back was heaving up and down to the rhythm of faintly echoing sobs, and I could see the notches of her spine through the gaps in the fabric. As with all these night terrors, I found it impossible to move or speak to her.

The sobbing ceased, she raised her right arm to her mouth and began to chew something tough. The taste of hot pork filled my mouth, and as she swallowed, I swallowed. My stomach was screaming in joy; for the first time in weeks, I felt as if I had eaten something real.

The girl stopped, raised both her hands to her own throat, and disappeared.

The next morning was December 17th, and school was almost over for the year. I put on my school uniform, packed my bag, and hid behind a bush near the bus stop, watching throngs of boys turning up for school and waiting to spot Ralph.

When he did arrive, he was clearly running late, and I had to chase him into the cathedral grounds to catch him.

And what did you tell him?

Everything. Everything about the girl and the house and the plague she suffered. To my complete surprise, he believed every word I said and told me that he would seek out Mr. Jerwood straight away to find out what he could.

It is not often one meets someone so immediately willing to help. Despite his background and his general fright at the whole affair, there was not a jot of hesitation in his determination to end my troubles. I firmly believe that not only is he one of the finest children I have ever been lucky enough to meet, but one of the finest men full stop.

If only I had confided in him sooner.

“Arden!” A fat man in a brown suit was screaming across the green. “Ralph Arden, stop chatting up that girl and get in here now! You’re late!”

Ralph went a bright shade of red. “Sorry, I have to go. I’ll find out what I can, though. That’s Mr. Jerwood—he knows everything.”

The irate man bellowing through his thick gray mustache didn’t look like he knew everything to me, but I trusted Ralph. He turned to look at me again just before he went into his class. “Stop hanging out with that wretched girl. Plenty better where she came from, lad . . .” the fat teacher spluttered as Ralph was hurried inside.

“Meet me in the courtyard!” I shouted after him.

What did he find out?

Nothing from Mr. Jerwood. I had never seen him so animated as when he found me again. I had spent the day hiding out to avoid my father and anyone else who might ask why I wasn’t at school, so I was freezing cold and ready to drop. Ralph, however, had a manic energy that almost warmed me up by association.

“I’ve never seen Mr. Jerwood look scared before,” he said, eyes wide with excitement. “I asked him about the house, and he froze up. I said I knew someone who lived there, and he said, ‘For the last time, you must not be out with that stupid girl!’ and I said, ‘She isn’t stupid, she’s my friend,’ and then he gave everyone a lecture about life choices. Then I said, ‘Sir, why do you hate Juliette so much?’ and he said—”

“Stop it, Ralph!” I knew by now what the teachers at that school thought of me, and didn’t need to hear any more. “What did he say about the house? Does he know anything about Elyzabeth Bronwen?”

“I asked again, but he told me to leave well enough alone and get on with some work, and if I mentioned it again, I’d have detention for the whole of next term.”

“So nothing, then?”

“Not yet. But I know when teachers want to cover something up. I’m not stupid.”

“If he won’t tell you anything, then he won’t tell you anything. I know how stubborn adults can be.”

Ralph grinned at me.

“What?”

“He won’t tell us anything, but this will.” He laid his satchel on the ground, undid the poppers, and pulled out a huge leather-bound tome, dog-eared and covered in dry mold. “After registration, Mr. Jerwood ran to his office faster than I’ve ever seen him move. And I followed him. He locked his door and, when he thought no one else was looking, pulled this from the top shelf of his bookcase. He spent ages looking over it, white as a sheet. I’ve never seen a teacher look like that.” For Ralph, adults without confidence were clearly a novelty.

I looked at the book. There was no title or any kind of decoration on the cover. “What is it?” I asked.

“Take a look at the first page.”

As carefully as I could, fingers tight with a day spent in the winter cold, I turned the cover and looked at the title page. It took a while to make sense—the handwriting was very old and faded—but eventually I could make out the words:

Unholy Hapenyngs:
A History of the Plage in Northwic
in the Years of Our Lord 1500–1600.
To Be Recordid and Ner Forgot

by the Good Vicar Thomas Faridon of This Parish

Ralph’s brother shouted something from over the way and marched toward us. Ralph threw the book back in his bag and darted.

“I have to go now, but I will find out what’s going on!”

And with that, the book, Ralph, and my chance of understanding anything in time were gone.

Did you see him again?

Once only.

The next week was a bad one in all ways. Father remained depressed, and stopped talking. Mother could take no time off work to look after him or me. The terrible hunger of each night grew worse, and by day, I couldn’t even pretend to stomach whatever gruel my mother laid before us.

The girl in the dress?

We may as well call her by her name. Elyzabeth continued to visit me each night. Once I knew we were joined together, though by what force I don’t know to this day, I began to view her as a comfort. When you are suffering as I did, any company can be good company.

As she ate, I felt sated. As she paced up and down the room, I felt guarded. As she sobbed into her tattered rags I had once seen as so beautiful, I knew myself to have a companion in my solitude and pain. Strangely, the situation had flipped so that in her presence I felt contented, and when she clutched at her neck and disappeared, it was then I felt alone and frightened.

School had stopped I don’t know when—I hadn’t gone in several days and had missed the end of term. Ralph must have stayed at home as well, because I heard nothing from him and didn’t see him or his brother get off the bus once. By December 21st I gave up looking, and spent all my waking and sleeping hours alone in my room, waiting for the girl to appear and feed.

It was Christmas Eve, late at night. I ventured into the main living space. 

My father had fallen asleep in his chair, and my mother on the sofa. I hadn’t noticed before, so wrapped up was I in my own problems, but they were both of them aged well beyond their years.

Mother had never looked so tired, her hair gray and her eyes sunken in where only a year before she had been brunette and alive as anything. Even in sleep, her eyes darted back and forth with worry, and her teeth ground together every few seconds with some new dreadful dream. I went into their bedroom, grabbed the bedsheet, and laid it over her. With a kiss on the forehead, I bid her good night. 

Father, in his chair by the window, was somehow thin and fat all at once, a sack of flesh that hadn’t moved in months. His beard grew out at random and caught the drool that fell out of his slack jaw. The newspaper in front of him: open at the crossword page, two weeks out of date, not a single word completed. He looked cold, each tired breath making mist in the air.

There weren’t any more blankets in the main flat, so I went to fetch my own.

I must confess that when I first walked into my room and saw the bundle lying at the end of the bed, my first thought was of presents. None had been mentioned to me, and I had steeled myself for a bleak Christmas, but when I saw the neatly folded pile on the floor, my heart briefly lit up with joy. They hadn’t forgotten!

It wasn’t anything but my own blanket, which I already owned, wrapped neatly and ready for carrying.

Elyzabeth stood by the door, waiting to guide me back down again. She looked at me this time, smiling with rotten teeth. In a kind of trance, I followed her down those ancient outside stairs and into the living room. Both of us struggled to move, and with each step down I took, the pangs in my belly increased. I could see Elyzabeth bending double with her own pain. Still, each time that ghastly ethereal girl glanced back at me, she was smiling.

Eventually, when I made it to my father, I laid the blanket over him. His breaths were shorter now, but something in him stirred with thanks, and his useless fingers made some effort toward holding the thing.

Most people, I understand it, see their parents become helpless at some point in their lives. I was twelve years old. Remember that, Mr. Webber, when I share my next thought.

I will.

It was not a charitable thought.

I will remember your young age.

In that moment, and only in that moment, I hated the man. I hated his stupid accident and his complete lack of effort and his vacant stare and his stupid newspapers that he never even read, and his ignoring me and his making Mother work so hard she almost broke herself, and I hated his pathetic, worthless body.

Even in my hunger, I knew this was wrong. Without waking him, I got down on my knees and silently begged for forgiveness. My hands held his, and I pushed my tear-covered face into his arms. His arms that had caused him so much struggle. Broken, withered, useless, sinewy arms that did nothing but weigh him down.

Elyzabeth’s hand pressed into my shoulder.

On my back, staring at the ceiling. Brutal weight slamming down on my abdomen. Gasping for breath.

“Juliette! Juliette, you’re back! Look at me, Juliette, look at me!”

Ralph slapping me awake, his face pressed to mine.

“You’re all right, you’re going to be all right.”

I pushed him off me and sat up. “Of course I am. What’s going on!”

“Juliette, I found something. I finally found something in the book and I needed to tell you, so I ran away to come find you.”

“Ran away? What . . .” The room was spinning around me. “What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Three? Four? I was going to sneak in through a window or something, but when I got here, the door was open and you were on the floor, blue in the face and not breathing.”

My throat ached, and all I wanted was a moment to regain my vision and figure out what was happening, but Ralph was wild with excitement. He pulled the huge brown book out of his bag and slammed it to the floor.

“We don’t have long. There’s a lady across the way—she heard me shouting and called an ambulance. She wouldn’t come in, but it must be on its way, and I have to tell you what I’ve found. Now!”

I could barely remember anything of what he was talking about or how I had come to be on the floor. “Ralph, what happened? What do you mean ambulance?”

He was flicking rapidly through the book. “When Mr. Jerwood found out I’d stolen his book, he phoned my parents, and they’re refusing to let me out the house until I give it back. But I’m very good at hiding things.” He stopped at a page near the back. “And every night, I’ve been going through this, looking for anything related to that little girl. It’s hard to read the writing sometimes, and the spellings are all strange, but a few hours ago, I found it. It’s important you hear this before it’s too late.”

In the distance: shouting, sirens.

“It’s here,” he said, “right near the end of the book. ‘The Case of the Family in the Augustine Steward House.’ That’s this house, isn’t it?”

“Yes, we know this already. Ralph, it’s stupidly early, and apparently I’ve been in some sort of accident. Can you please stop for a second?”

“It says that ‘the strangest and most abominable case to be recorded in this dark history is that of the Bronwen family and their confinement during the terrible plague of 1578. After plague was discovered upon the person of James Bronwen’—that’s the father—‘after plague was discovered upon the person of James Bronwen, the residence was boarded up for to stop the spread of disease.’ That’s the family that died here!”

I remembered what had happened to me. Ralph carried on.

“And then it talks for a while about what he did for a living, carpenter or builder or something, doesn’t really matter, not the point. But then it says: ‘Neighbors heard the cries of the child Elyzabeth for seven days and seven nights after those of the parents had stopped. Upon the 24th night of December, her cries did cease just as the period of confinement was at a close.

“‘Upon the unboarding of the residence, all members of the family were discovered dead, James and his wife having succumbed to the plague. The young woman Elyzabeth was found choked to death on a piece of meat, and bite marks over all the corpses of her family.’

“This is what happened to her, Juliette. On December 24th! She was so hungry she ate her parents and she choked! I had to tell you straight away—I thought something awful might happen. Now we can tell your parents everything and you can move and lose that horrible ghost girl for good. You can move in with me if you want! I’ll make my parents take you, I’ll make them.”

I stared at him, incredulous that he’d missed so much of his surroundings.

“Good thing I did come, or you might not have been found until the morning.” He smiled with self-satisfaction.

The siren outside grew louder and then stopped. Car doors slamming, a rush of footsteps crashing up toward us. A doctor began asking where the victim was, before stopping in his tracks.

“She’s here. I saved her. It’s all okay!” said Ralph as he stood up, and for the first time since arriving took a good hard look around the room.

He ran past the doctor and out of the front door, into the night. I have not seen him since.

On the assumption that he didn’t need them anyway, I had begun with my father’s arms. In the stupor that followed I could not tell you how much I ate, but I am told there was very little of either of them left by the time I had choked on a piece of face, and my dear, dear Ralph had arrived to save me.

Miss Juliette remains confined in a hospital near Peterborough for the safety of herself and of others.