Wieder, wieder komm…
“Who are you?” I whispered into the ether. “What do you want?”
And please don’t answer… please don’t. This is all fantasy, all dreams, not real.
The silence buzzed, and nothing appeared. Eventually, perhaps from the cider earlier, together with the effort of being vigilant hour upon hour, my eyes began to close. I must have drifted, perhaps only momentarily. If only dawn would come and the light would lift… just to get through the night was all…
What transpired, therefore, took a little while to register. Already in the first stage of sleep and wanting to sink deeper, at first I dismissed it. But gradually awareness filtered through that a strong breeze was blowing in my face and the air was freezing. On some level my conscious mind accepted this, only surfacing fully when the breeze became a whistling wind that billowed the curtains and rattled the windows. Hunkering down to keep warm, I tried to pull up the covers, only to have them snatched away by an invisible hand.
Now I woke up!
By then the bed was shaking, rocking like there was an earthquake. The picture of my parents swung on its hook before clattering to the floor; books wobbled on the shelves and tumbled off. Sitting up in a bolt of panic, I glanced at the clock. It was three in the morning.
And then I looked up at the man staring down at me. A man dressed in a black suit, wearing a fedora pulled down low over his eyes.
He smiled, revealing a lower set of jagged, spiky teeth.
“Hello, Eva.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
When I next woke up, it was to a cacophony of bird chatter and my grandma shouting.
“What the bloody ’ell are you doin’ on the floor, our Eva? Earl! Eva’s fallen in the night – come an’ ’elp me.”
Between them, they lumped me onto the bed. Sick was stuck to the carpet and the bedsheets, everywhere, even matted in my hair.
“Her arms and legs were all crooked. I don’t know what’s up with ’er; she might have had a fit. Pass me that blanket.”
“Bloody drunk, that’s what,” said Grandad. “Sixteen years old and drunk as a street tart.”
“Now then, Earl—”
“Don’t you ‘now then’ me! That Mrs Dixon wants a word ’aving wi’ ’er.”
They started to row. Gran was wiping my face with a towel and trying to chivvy life back into limbs that were rigid. “Come on, love. Wake up, Eva. You’ve ’ad a fall, love.”
But Earl’s words and the tone in which they were spoken now filtered through the haze of semi-consciousness. “No…” Struggling to surface, a mumbling croak came out. I tried again. “No, Grandad, it weren’t ’er. Me and Nicky took some cider from a lad, that were all – it were nowt to do with Mrs Dixon.”
“What the ’ell were she doing letting lads in?”
“No, she didn’t. It were my fault, not—”
“Earl, no!”
The punch in my face was such a shock, it scattered all further thoughts into splinters of light.
Oh, so you really do see stars…
“Now get up, get washed and get yourself to school,” he said. “You’re a bloody disgrace.”
I didn’t go. Made up my mind the second he said it. Instead, I sat at the breakfast table eating toast while he munched through his Full English like a warthog snaffling through garbage.
I’d be going to the canal.
Loathing consumed me. My head was throbbing and my cheekbone was swelling up rapidly. Bloody hell, I couldn’t even see properly now. He seemed to have become nastier overnight. Call it intuition, but it felt as though there’d been a shift in the way he regarded me as I lay in bed – a dangerous upping of gears. Lenka had been convinced Uncle Guido had seen something in her he found threatening, sensing perhaps that she despised him. And as I walked along the canal path, it came to me that Earl felt the same way. Oh, he’d always been a ranting drunk who took it out on his wife and granddaughter, but now he’d been triggered on a whole new level. And it was highly personal.
Although the spring day was heady with cherry blossom and birdsong, a sense of doom hung over me. The normally grim canal sparkled, and the grass was bright, studded with thousands of daisies and starbursts of yellow dandelions, yet still it was impossible to shake the shadow of darkness. Who was my visitor last night? He seemed familiar, uncannily similar to the man who appeared to Lenka as Uncle Toby. Yet I couldn’t recall anything further…
Reaching the bridge, I stopped to lift my face to the warmth of the sun in an attempt to dispel it. But as I did so, a strange thing happened. The air chilled, and in a repeat of that day long ago in Rabenwald, the sun became the moon, the vibrant colours of the day ebbed to black and white, and day switched to night. Traffic noise ceased. There was not a sound. Except a distant whistle of wind whipping off mountains and chasing through the trees…
It lasted less than a second, before the spring day catapulted back into focus, the brilliance of it surreal and the noise too loud. I fell back against the stones of the bridge and sank to my haunches, dizzy and badly disorientated.
The whispers should not have been a surprise. I knew with near certainty what was going to happen. But they were. Seeming, as they did, to come out of nowhere. Out of the ether. Or my head.
Give us work, Eva. Give us work… give us work…
The stark parallel between the surreal dreams of Lenka’s life and my own reality punched me in the gut. Would I now get ill? How ill? How fast? It couldn’t really be true… could it? Really?
Once again, the sound of children’s laughter resounded from every direction, tinkling on the soft summer breeze in a ghostly game of hide-and-seek.
Give us work… give us work…
How long did I sit there, huddled on the ground with my head in my hands? Probably all afternoon, until the temperature cooled, school was over, and the bullies who hung around the chip shop would have gone home. What choice was there but to traipse back? There had to be a way out of this, that’s what I was thinking. Maybe if I just packed a bag and left – one more runaway teen on a bus to the metropolis?
Anyway, by the time I unlatched the gate into the backyard it had turned five. And Earl Hart was waiting.
He stood at the door to the scullery with a woodbine dangling from his lower lip. If he’d once had a shining human spirit in there, it was sure as hell snuffed out now. A cloud of sooty blackness clouded his aura. So, too, on the breath he exhaled – plumes of it like I’d once seen on a documentary of Hitler dictating to the crowds. It had come out of his mouth in billows that the people below were breathing in. It hung over the hordes like a thunderstorm waiting to burst. They were lifting their heads to hail him while sucking in all that blackness.
Something really bad was going to happen, something that had been brewing for days now, maybe weeks. It was in the way he looked at me, in the curl of his lip. I hesitated, fingers lingering on the latch. Where was Gran?
He inclined his head. “Get indoors!”
Like wading through deep water, my limbs felt heavy and my feet dragged as I crossed that yard. Ducking under the washing line, I hung back a little.
“Where’s—”
But his iron hand reached out to cuff the back of my neck, and sent me sprawling inside. Immediately he clicked the door shut behind us and locked it.
Grabbing my arm, he said, “Yer making me a bloody laughing stock, yer fuckin’ little bitch!”
“What?”
His eyes were barely recognisable – hard black bullets. Beer fumes blasted into my face. “Know what they’re calling yer on t’ estate? Well then, do yer?”