“Freya,” she whispers. “What happened …,”
Her throat is agony. Her mouth is bitter with the taste of burned herbs, a tingling numbness in her tongue and gums. She is in a place between memory and fantasy, reality and nightmare. She is asleep on the neat, laundered sheets of her bedroom at Catherine’s house. And she is beneath the earth, rolling from the table with a hard thud, landing, naked upon the hard damp floor. She is seeing firelight reflected in countless bottles. She is looking up at half-made man dangling from the bottom rung of an old iron ladder. She is turning, terrified beyond understanding, as the thing with the pig-face looms from the blackness like a nightmare made flesh.
There is blood on her hands now. Blood on her chest and on her face. And she can feel Catherine’s hand slipping wetly into hers as they drag each other, deliriously, for the tiny chink of light high above.
And now it is fading. The memory is coming apart like damp paper. Somebody is shaking her. Stroking her. Whispering her name.
She opens her eyes into the large, round face of Rev Marlish. He is smoothing back her hair, whispering her name, saying the same thing over and over, like a spell.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Please …,”
“Catherine,” croaks Violet, again.
“She’s okay,” says Rev Marlish, cuffing the tears away from his eyes. “You had us so worried. You got lost. Do you remember that? You got lost in the woods. Gave us quite a scare…,”
“A man,” whispers Violet. “There was a man. A musician. I can’t remember. We were in Keswick.” She looks at herself, clean and scrubbed and dressed in soft pink pyjamas. “How did I get here? Where’s Catherine?” She closes an eye. “Where’s Freya?”
“Don’t you worry about that now,” says Rev Marlish. “Catherine’s fine. Sore head but she’s the same as you. I think you took something. Maybe you ate some mushrooms in the wild, eh? Sqw some peculiar things. Freya’s heading back to Ireland, I think. We’ll sort all that out later.”
Violet tries to sit up. There is a man with dark hair in the corner of the room, watching the exchange. He’s old. Skinny. Neatly-dressed.
“Who’s he?” asks Violet. She feels wrong. It’s as if there’s a hole in her brain and things are pouring away like paint down a drain.
“Don’t worry yourself,” smiles Rev Marlish. “We all make mistakes. You get some rest. Don’t think about this any more. It doesn’t matter. All’s well.”
Violet sinks back against the pillows. Suddenly she starts forward. She has a memory of the small, goblin-faced copper. Remembers her reaching out. Remembers lashing out. Can see her laid out on the damp forest floor, bleeding into the earth. Then the picture is gone.
She closes her eyes. Feels it all fade away. Slips into sleep, and darkness, and nothing.
The last thing she sees is the face of a wild boar; yellow eyes and monstrous tusks, eyes that burn like cigarettes.
And then it is gone.
28
Later, after the laughs and the questions and the futile attempts to legibly sign a half dozen books with his seeping fingers, Rowan is able to make his way back to Serendipity and Snowdrop for what he expects to be a more candid assessment of how the gig has gone. They’re waiting for him in the shadow of some exotic-looking tree. Fairy-lights wind their way around the armadillo-shell trunk.
“You were great!” says Snowdrop, grinning at him and stopping just short of going straight in for a hug.
Serendipity, behind her, gives a tight smile. Her eyes are damp; her face flushed.
Behind her, one of the nice ladies from the second row are waving, thanking him again, wide-mouth vowels and bitten consonants, indicating that their sides are still sore.
He’d spoken for an hour. Where the writing journey began, his idyllic childhood and criminal adolescence; anecdotes from his time as a hack; indiscreet celebrity anecdotes; a story or two about ways he’d tricked his way into people’s confidences: giving himself a bit of a roguish polish. He’d enjoyed himself. Julie, the librarian, had been seated front and centre and he could tell by halfway through that she was feeling good about herself for having snagged him as their group speaker. He hadn’t been able to see his sister or niece but he’d been gratified to see Catherine grinning, sometimes even chuckling, as he did his best to speak like somebody who actually meant what he was saying.
“Oh I’m so pleased we came!” gushes Catherine, bustling up behind Serendipity. She still has a big armful of assorted rubbish. Rowan can’t understand why she wouldn’t just ask to use a bin. “Oh we were in stitches, weren’t we? I hoped it would be informative but it was actually properly funny! Imogen was laughing too.”
Rowan looks at Imogen. She’s staring at the screen of an iPhone, hair flopping forward, one cheek grotesquely pushed out to accommodate what could well be anything from a fistful of Fruit Pastilles to rack of lamb.
“I wasn’t sure if I struck the right tone,” says Rowan, uncertainly. Behind her, Julie the librarian is asking for any members who had handwritten their short stories should hand them in now, and for others to email the usual address. He hears the phrase “disseminated among the editorial panel’ and raises his eyebrows at Catherine. She is looking at her shoes, awkward, flicking glances at her partner’s daughter and clearly fighting the urge to say ‘this is nothing to do with me’.
“Shall we go and say our goodbyes to the lady, Mum,” asks Snowdrop, nudging her mum. Serendipity looks mildly surprised at the question but seems to read something in her daughter’s eyes that strikes some kind of chord. Serendipity plays along, making a grew show of shouting “Marjorie” in her most affected jolly-hockeysticks voice.
Rowan gives Catherine his full attention. “There’s an unedited version, you know,” he smiles. “Much more X-rated.”
“You haven’t got a story to hand in?”
“No.” She shakes her head at that, as though a voice has told her not to be such a bad girl. “Well, I have, but I think I’ll chicken out again. I’m struggling with a bit of the old self-doubt. I used to write when I was very young and I suppose if I’m honest I thought I’d be a real writer by now and in truth it’s just ramblings and bits of silly poetry …,”
“Some of the best books are nothing but ramblings,” says Rowan. “You’ll be in good company. Personally, I admire anybody who just does it, you know? Who just sees it through to the end. The difference between a published writer and an unpublished one is that the published writers actually finish the book. Don’t give yourself such a hard time.”
Catherine looks away, muttering something about Imogen needing to get into a hot bath. Rowan has an image of a chicken simmering in a slow-cooker. “You’re nice,” says Catherine, and it is said so directly that he finds himself a little off-balance.
“Am I? Even for a journalist.
Catherin’s laugh has a schoolgirl sound, a high, nervous giggle. She claps her hands like a Southern dame. “Honestly, I’m so pleased I came tonight.”
“So am I.”
She suddenly pulls a face, as if agonising with a truth. “I don’t normally like journalists,” she giggles. “I don’t like people poking into stuff. It’s grubby.” Her face changes, and she takes a small bite out of the air: a dog leaping at a moth. She makes a small squealing noise, pig-like to Rowan’s ear, then erupts into more giggles. “They’re swine, they really are.”