The Cottingley Cuckoo Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Leave us a review

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  “Lures you in with its charm and cleverness, and then, wow, it knocks you for a loop and leaves your head pleasantly spinning. A sharp mix of mystery, fantasy, and psychological horror that also explores the weight and wages of motherhood.”

  Paul Tremblay, author of Survivor Song

  “If fairy tales never go out of fashion, it is because of books like this. This is a wonderful tale on magic, poetry, motherhood and, ultimately, us.”

  Francesco Dimitri, author of The Book of Hidden Things

  “A.J. Elwood has created a seductive tale with a sinister edge, where nothing is quite as it seems. Written with great subtlety and skill – and a good serving of chilling menace – this dark fairy tale is both a study of human obsession and a hymn to the power of storytelling itself – I was captivated.”

  Katherine Clements, author of The Coffin Path

  “A.J. Elwood’s exquisite, sharply observed prose brings out the eerie in the everyday, and makes the fantastical seem natural.”

  Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street

  “Consistently took my breath away – a sweet but chilling marriage of real life and make-believe, and a beautifully voiced observation that the truths inside us are oftentimes the most difficult to face. Magic realism at its captivating best, I loved every page.”

  Rio Youers, author of Lola on Fire

  “A marvel. Both sinister and cozy, it reclaims the eeriness of Faerie, and provides lots of comforting shudders along the way. Twist follows twist, the unease maintained right until the last page.”

  Marian Womack, author of The Swimmers

  “A.J. Elwood is expert at weaving fairy-tale lore with psychological menace; a tale that grips you to the last page.”

  Marie O’Regan, author of The Last Ghost and Other Stories and editor of Wonderland and Cursed

  “Beautifully written, The Cottingley Cuckoo is a wonderful plaiting together of ancient and modern, at once melancholy and strange. I enjoyed it immensely.”

  J.S. Barnes, author of Dracula’s Child

  “Reality and folklore weave together so tightly that new mother Rose can barely tell one from the other. A.J. Elwood builds a sense of creeping dread that will keep you breathless to the end.” Angela Slatter, author of the World Fantasy Award-winning

  The Bitterwood Bible

  “A fairy tale as they’re meant to be, The Cottingley Cuckoo is a masterclass in tension, paranoia, and a rising sense of deep dread. Elwood’s deft characterisation and sharp prose ensures that this whole story feels real, even when fact and fantasy become inextricably entwined.”

  Tim Lebbon, author of Eden

  “There’s nothing whimsical in A.J. Elwood’s novel that references the Cottingley photos. It’s a modern changeling tale that pulses with the malice of the original fairy lore.”

  Priya Sharma, author of All the Fabulous Beasts

  “Cleverly merges fairytales and more disquieting folklore, but an even greater triumph is its depiction of the fears and disorientation of the early weeks of parenthood. I loved every moment of this haunting tale of fairies, changelings and delusions.”

  Tim Major, author of Hope Island

  “A smouldering, suspenseful and gloriously sinister exploration of the old, bad brand of fairies. I loved every word, and the ending had me chilled to the bone.”

  Camilla Bruce, author of You Let Me In

  “An unsettling Gothic novel which switches effortlessly between a modern setting and the familiar – yet unfamiliar – world of England’s pastoral past. Elwood’s writing is confident, crystal-clear, and deeply evocative; a vein of deep cruelty and ancient horror runs through the book from beginning to nightmarish end. I found it absolutely impossible to put down.”

  Ally Wilkes, Horrified Magazine

  The Cottingley Cuckoo

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789096859

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789096866

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP.

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: April 2021

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  © Alison Littlewood 2021. All Rights Reserved.

  Alison Littlewood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  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.

  CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.

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  For Priya and Mark

  1

  The first thing I notice about Charlotte Favell is that she smells like my mother. The perfume creeps under the door and into the hall and I recognise it at once: lily of the valley, and I am a child again, balancing in her heels while I dab it behind my ears. It is as sweet as it is familiar, and I wonder that anyone would choose to wear it now. It came as a shock to me to learn, later, that lilies are poisonous.

  I go in and she is the first thing I see, sitting with her back to the window so that I have to blink to make her out, and the second thing I notice about her is that she doesn’t smile. Most of the residents had, wanting me to like them or wanting to like me, because they think we might be stuck with each other for long enough. They don’t know that, for me, this is purely temporary.

  Charlotte Favell is nothing like them, that’s clear. What she is like I don’t know, not yet. I wonder if I’ll see her smile later, when I serve her dinner or help with her hair, and realise I’m not sure I want to. Maybe such familiarity would mean I belong here; or perhaps my disco
mfort is something else, something to do with the sharpness of her eyes.

  Her spine is very straight. ‘Old school,’ Mandy had said. ‘Manners, talking proper, all that. You’ll get it.’

  I wasn’t sure if Mandy was telling the truth even then, but I smile at Mrs Favell anyway. She doesn’t do anything, doesn’t even nod, and for a second I wonder if she’s asleep – sleeping with those piercing eyes open – but she shifts her hands in her lap, a gesture that could be rejection, could be a question, and I know I should say something, introduce myself. Manners, I think, but somehow my voice isn’t there. I can’t seem to look away from her. She’s wearing what I will learn she always wears: a pastel-coloured blouse that looks like silk: a garment I’d have spilled something on in five seconds flat, a neat, plain skirt; and a string of the most lucent pearls I’ve ever seen. Later I’ll find a succession of those blouses in her wardrobe: pink, mauve, lavender, blue and green, all of them soft, delicate, perfect, and smelling of flowers.

  They are not a key to her character. It doesn’t matter what Mandy says. I may only have been here a few hours, but I saw the looks when Mrs Favell’s name was mentioned and I knew at once there was something amiss. It’s not that anyone pulled a face or said anything direct – it might have been better if they had – it was more the way they closed up, as if there were things they wanted to say but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, because if they did they might have to go to her room instead of me.

  Then Mandy told me that when I settle in I could even be her keyworker, that I should take special care of her.

  The others didn’t say anything then either, but I sensed their suppressed laughter, saw their eyes brighten. I wasn’t sure if the flush I felt was entirely down to the temperature in the care home, kept up high to comfort old bones.

  ‘It’s room ten,’ said Mandy. ‘You go up and say hello and see if she wants anything, while we sort out all the bedpans.’

  Making it sound as if they were doing me a favour – that too was a dead giveaway, but I told myself I didn’t care, and they watched as I turned and headed for the stairs. Mandy and the others are a clique, that much is obvious. We went to different schools but I can almost see them smoking in a huddle behind the gym block, bunking off to eat chips, chatting up the same bus drivers and then, somehow, drifting into working at Sunnyside. And they know I’m different. I got the sense they can smell the university on me. I may have only been there a year before I was called back again but I feel marked somehow, and I’d had the urge to tell them; to package up my failure and present it to them like a gift. But my mother’s face had floated before me and I’d said nothing.

  And so I went to see what was so wrong with Mrs Favell while Mandy turned and cooed over Edie Dawson, everybody’s favourite. She’d just finished knitting some tiny garment, soft and fluffy and pink.

  ‘What is it that you want?’

  Mrs Favell’s question makes me jump. Somehow I still can’t speak. It isn’t her words or the sharp, clearly incised consonants or her tone that cuts into me but the clarity of it, the bell-like musicality of her voice. It doesn’t sound as if it’s coming entirely from inside this room: enclosed, narrow, almost the same proportions as a student cell in the halls of residence I’d briefly lived in and only a little larger. She has the usual accoutrements: a single bed, though hers is ordinary rather than adjustable or fitted with guard rails; a wing-back chair; and a matching wardrobe and chest of drawers in anodyne blond wood, not a sharp corner in sight. The walls, as in all the rooms I’ve seen, are painted peach, a colour someone must have imagined would look homely but doesn’t. And then, in the middle of it all, these: a gleaming bureau, well used and weathered but polished to a heartwood gleam, as if a corner of an antique shop had materialised here in this room; and above it, her photographs, not a single one in colour.

  I realise I’m staring at the pictures. Their ornate silver frames reveal a series of faces: all of them women and children, some of the ladies wearing bonnets. They look stern and impossibly distant, except one: a smiling girl, her eyes full of merriment and dimples in her cheeks, shining curls escaping a hat that places her a hundred years in the past. I suppose she must be long dead. I wonder how Mrs Favell could have known her, if she’d known any of them, or if the photographs are just dressing. That’s the word that comes to me – dressing – and I don’t know why. We’re supposed to talk to the residents about their pictures, their old lives, the manager told me so, but I shiver and look away.

  ‘Come here,’ she says.

  Her tone makes me feel like a child and she isn’t supposed to give me orders, not like that, but I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot and so I smile as if I want nothing more than to go towards her. She holds out one hand like some ladies do in films, palm down, the fingertips hanging limp. I’m not quite sure how to respond but I touch my hand to hers, just for a moment.

  ‘Charmed,’ she says.

  I start to step away from her but she leans towards me and grasps the short sleeve of my tunic, pulling it higher, and I squirm. Her fingers are like iron and just as cold.

  ‘Painted,’ she says. I don’t know what she means until I realise she has bared my tattoo, the one I’m supposed to keep covered: a garland of briars around a central rose, the thorns long and sharp, all in simple black, no colour in it. At once, I am minded of my mother again, the moment she had first spotted it; her bright fury. I’d sneaked off and had it done on my fifteenth birthday, at a parlour that was none too picky about the law or what her wishes might have been, so eager to be me, to claim my own skin.

  Mrs Favell smiles, as if she’s uncovered a treasure. I didn’t admit to being inked when I had my interview here, but ‘No visible tattoos’ was stated in the application pack. It had put me off – what kind of backwater was this? – but then, money’s tight and I couldn’t afford to be put off. Not yet, I think.

  ‘You love nature?’ Her voice is arch and there’s a flash of impatience or something else in her eyes, amusement perhaps, or maybe she’s wondering why I still haven’t spoken.

  At last I find my voice and say, ‘It’s my name. Rose.’

  ‘Ah.’ She lets out a trill of laughter, letting go of my sleeve. ‘Of course.’

  The way she says of course summons an image of Mandy, grinning and pointing at the ceiling at the thought of how I’m getting on.

  I straighten my posture, push back my short black hair. ‘I came to see if there’s anything you need.’

  ‘Did you.’ She doesn’t say it like it’s a question. She stares at me until it becomes uncomfortable. Her eyes are clear as a twenty-year-old’s and very blue. Her skin is a little creased and thin-looking but she carries no spare flesh and the overall impression is one of elegance. I have the idea that she’ll walk with her head high, with poise, that she’ll carry herself better than I do.

  ‘Any help with the stairs, perhaps?’ The words feel stupid on my lips, particularly since there’s a lift at the far end of the corridor for anyone who needs it, but I want to fill the silence, or offer some reason for my presence, or simply leave.

  ‘Oh—’ she puts a hand to her mouth to cover a sudden smile, a gesture that seems purely theatrical, and she lets out another trill of laughter.

  Be careful, I think to myself, biting back a retort, sensing hidden depths, a polished surface covering something worm-eaten. Another word springs to mind: acerbic. It strikes me that she’s a woman who likes to play games and is likely to be good at them. I do not think she would take well to losing.

  ‘Yes, you may help me with the stairs, if you wish,’ she says. ‘And later, you shall read to me. You’ll like that, won’t you, Rose? I see that you will.’

  She says it as if she really does see, and she’s right. To sit away from the other residents and staff, to be immersed in a book – to share dreams and ideas and something bigger, just for a little while – that is a pleasant picture, an ideal, I suppose, of what I imagined life at Sunnyside might be like. I
wonder if it’s common knowledge that I studied Literature, at least for a time. Mrs Favell has a way of looking at me that makes me feel transparent, as if she can read me too.

  I reach out, expecting her to take my arm, but she doesn’t. She merely holds out her hand as she did before and places it over mine, as if I were a page and she a queen, and we process down the stairs like that, side by side, our hands held high between us. I don’t quite know how to arrange my features as we enter the residents’ lounge, the clatter of dice and rustle of newspaper and the murmur of conversation all stopping suddenly like the closing of a door. Mandy and Sarah are over by the tea trolley, scowling as if this isn’t what they expected; as if they want me to run from the building screaming or crying. I hold my head higher and glance sidelong at Mrs Favell’s sharp little eyes. Then I turn to meet the world with the most genuine smile I’ve felt on my face in days.

  * * *

  3rd September 1921

  Dear Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

  Forgive the impertinence of my writing to you as a stranger and without introduction. I have lately exchanged correspondence with Mr Edward L. Gardner, and he would have been pleased to be our intermediary; but I felt that in view of your current endeavours, I should not delay in laying before you the wonders it has been my lot to discover.

  I am aware that you have unveiled upon the world some photographs in which have been captured, by the agency and innocence of children, the little beings that live all about us and are usually unseen, which we have been pleased to name ‘fairies’. Naturally, Mr Gardner, whom I had heard of through his lectures in Theosophy, hesitated to admit any particulars of your continued interest in the matter to me. I trust that, when I reveal the reason, you will feel his change of heart understandable, and I hope his only sensible course.

  I hold within my hand something that will be of the utmost interest to you, if not the crowning exhibit in the proofs it may be your pleasure to unleash upon the disbelieving world. I will come to it; but first I will explain how it came to me, and say that I myself have undergone the most profound change of view regarding the existence of such beings, so that I hope I may be the model of what is to come upon a larger stage.