Freya looks back down at her feet. Long ago, she was told that it was possible for a true creature of light to reach into the essence of another and to switch them off – to squeeze the heart in the fist of the mind. To push another through the veil as if it were an open window.
Freya looks up. The mountains are changing colour. The clouds seem wrong. The sky is fizzing with a lurid golden static; a fizzing wire of ultra-violet vibration seems to thrum above every leaf and branch, every pebble and blade of grass. She feels an energy within her; something at once familiar and new.
She turns to look at the big stone farmhouse where she has been a resident these past eight years. They are nice to her here. She teaches sometimes. Gives classes to the new practitioners. Tells them about the places she has been. The journeys to Peru, to Siberia, to South America, ever searching, ever learning. All she asks in return is a place to pitch her tent, and that they do not ask too many questions. She doubts they would like the answers.
She begins to walk, barefoot, towards the house. As she approaches the stone steps that lead up to the big front door, she is stuck with a hammer-blow of memory. Sees Violet, moving through the tangled copse of trees, scratches on her skin, clothes ripped, muddy handprints upon her forearms, sticks in her tangled hair. Sees Catherine, bleeding from the mouth and nose: flies already landing in the crusted crimson pool, her eyelids flickering, looking up through the pleached trees, the arched branches, soundlessly pleading for help. Remembers her own strangled yell, cut-off at its apex. She has a sense-memory: her muscles perfectly recalling the way the bark of the yew tree felt against her skin and the rich, metallic flavour on her lover’s hands as he stuffed his blood-smeared fingers into her mouth, pushing her lips open, pressing his lips and tongue into her hot, wet mouth.
As she trudges back into the cool of the main hall, she hears it. Hears the whispers. . Hears the low, throaty voice. It resonates inside her; a tuning fork plunged into her skull.
“I give you all she was.”
“She is my gift to you.”
“One day you will understand. ”
She glimpses down at her feet. Remembers the surge of white-hot ecstasy as he moved his healing hands above her. Felt herself cross-over. Felt death and rebirth and the sudden, certain knowledge that here, in this moment of execution and resurrection, she glimpsed Paradise. She will offer the same to Violet., Will take her to that place beneath the earth. Will be a passenger upon her soul as she journeys between worlds, again and again, over and over, until Cormac’s bones start to sprout flesh.
Thinks: I am coming home.
37
It’s cold inside Bilberry Byre. If he hadn’t drunk half a bottle of Bushmill’s and wrapped himself in a quilt, Rowan doubts he would be able to press his damaged fingers against the keyboard. He’s shaking a little. There’s a sensation of intrusion in his mouth. He can feel fingers in his throat, pressing down on his tongue. If there were any food in him he would be struggling to keep it down. The whiskey has already turned to acid inside him. He can taste bile and misery. He’s no stranger to the taste but he can’t explain it to himself. He knows his strengths and weaknesses and only doles out portions of self-loathing when it is deserved. He isn’t sure what he’s done wrong. He followed a story, and now he’s in it. He just doesn’t know what to do with it.
“Focus,” he mumbles to himself. “This is the good bit. “This is what you do …,”
He can hear himself slurring, his voice thick with drink. Snowdrop went home a little after 8pm. It hadn’t been the fun and games she’d been hoping for. He’d been short with her: distracted and preoccupied. He kept barking out orders, telling her to get her fingers off the keys of the laptop if she couldn’t do things properly. Kept telling her to make a call to this number or that number while she was still busy with the previous task. He kept sighing at her: grumbling, telling her she’d never get her foot in the door at a newspaper if she couldn’t handle the pressure. It wasn’t until after she’d made her apoloigies and told him she was going to go home that it occurred to him what a wanker he was being. This was supposed to be a bonding exercise for an enthusiastic pre-teen and her hapless uncle. He’d turned it into a hunt for a serial killer and unearthed decades-old corruption and a missing woman.
He’s slumped in the armchair in front of the dead fire, laptop on his knee, phone on the arm of the chair. The only light comes from the little angle-poise lamp on the table beside him. It throws his shadow onto the wall. He spent ten minutes playing with the silhouettes, making birds and spiders and wolves with his fingers before the effort of stretching his tender new skin became painful. He’s saving his energies for more important things. Needs to roll cigarettes and unscrew the cap of the various medicines that will see him through until the morning. Sometimes he needs the dark, and a glass, and the peace to lash himself without leaving a scar.
He’s come to a conclusion almost subconsciously. These past days he has changed his mind without noticing it. At first, he’d seen a scenario with enough big gray areas to drop a narrative into. He’d seen an opportunity to take an insignificant missing persons case from 30 years back and pump it up into something compelling. Somewhere along the way he has begun to believe the bullshit. He believes that Violet, Freya and Catherine were abducted by a persons unknown and subjected to something terrible. He has seen no evidence that Freya ever came back. Violet began to remember things – terrible things - and sought out alternative therapies to try and recover her memories. She hasn’t been seen in months. He believes that Eve Cater is complicit in a cover-up. He has suspicions about the disappearance of a hippy caretaker-cum-guru by the name of Arthur Sixpence, the ‘suicide’ of retired cop Derrick Millward, and the disappearance on a mountainside of Alan Rideal If he were a police officer, he does not think he would be able to make a case stick. But he’s not a police officer. He’s a journalist and writer and he holds himself to a far lower level of accountability.
“Explain it to yourself,” he mumbles. “Pitch it.”
He starts to think in headlines and opening paragraphs: sees his byline on the front page of both red-tops and broadsheets and imagines his glossy hardback on promotional tables in every bookshop from Waterstone’s to Waitrose. Each time he considers it there’s a tightening in his chest; a prickling sensation all over his skin. There’s sweat at his temples and inside the gloves his hands feel slick with grease.
“Make a decision, you twat,” he mutters, and his breath is tight in his chest. “Are you going to do the right thing, or the thing you already know you’re going to do …,”
Some of the names on the cover-sheet given to him by Vicki-Louise mean nothing to him. He can find no record online or in any newspaper archives. But three correspond to names on the UK’s missing persons database: a charitable website groaning under the weight of pictures and names, dates and disappearances. Rowan had felt hot tears prick at his eyes as he’d stared into the page after page of smiling faces: children, teens, women, men, all colours and creeds, ethnicities, religions. Page after page of staring into the features of those who vanished without trace, and for whom somebody, somewhere, still holds out hope.