The Golden Key - Marian Womack
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