She experiences a moment of absolute clarity. A memory so bright and fresh that it seems newly painted. Sees herself, sitting up in bed, hair wild, eyes red, grinning at her laptop screen like a crazy person as the message pinged through from the one person who could provide answers. Freya. Freya - who promised to help her. To heal her. To tip the ayahuasca down her throat the same way the boy had done three decades before. Who promised to hold her hand as the visions came.
Violet feels herself grow light-headed. Her limbs are too heavy for her body; her thoughts a soft swirl. Thirty years of memories spin, gently, in front of her drowsy eyes. She tries to centre herself. Sees herself doing as she was told; making her way to the secluded little spot halfway up the fellside in a knotted tangle of trees. She had been sweating from the steep climb through the forest, boots caked with mud, shirt clinging to her back, camera bouncing from her softly rounded belly with each step up the near-invisible path. A broad-shouldered, shaved-headed woman had greeted her with an embrace, pressing her own softness against her. She had shushed her even before she found breath to talk. Had helped her from her shirt and her shoes. Led her inside the sacred place and laid her down. She had not spoken. Didn’t make a noise until the incantation began.
She hears movement. Senses a shape draw near as the light in the room flickers and fades.
Freya …
She realises she has thought the name instead of spoken it. She cannot seem to make her mouth obey her commands. She has so much to ask. She came here for answers: to embrace what happened in the darkness thirty years ago. Freya has been so kind these past weeks. Has taught her so much.
The thoughts evaporate as she moves closer; her scent briefly penetrating the mixed aromas of the small, hot space. He smells her sweat. Smells the high, keening song of earthy skin rubbed with moss and wild garlic.
She tries not to wriggle as he feels the small, cold objects being placed upon her back. There is a smoothness to the stone at the small of her back. The others are more jagged, their make-up crystalline, and there is something oddly sensual in the way they prickle her skin. There is an unexpected warmth to their surface, as if they are generating heat.
She feels her eyes close again. Takes a deep breath. Smells dead flowers and disturbed stones. The forest floor seems to be moving, as if snakes and eels are wriggling beneath the thin carpet of green. She can taste the bitter, brackish liquid on her tongue. There’s a sickness in her gut, swelling like a living thing.
Memory hits her like a wave.
She sees herself underground; the pink-pink-pink of water tumbling down a jagged crevasse, hidden beneath the roots of the tree where Mr Sixpence used to help those who came to him when nobody else could. She can see him now: the tall, grey-haired man, the braid in his beard, the blue ink on the backs of his hands. Can see herself and Catherine Marlish draped around one another, skins not their own, adrift in delirium, giggling and puking and crying as the man with the green toes banged his drum.
An image pushes itself up from the pile of dead leaves in her memory. A picture long since submerged – hidden from herself in the place where bad dreams go. She sees Freya, as she was then. Sees the new girl who’d been so kind. Sees her stroking the hair of the singer from the subway. Sees the thing gangling from the bottom rung of the old iron ladder high above. Here, at last, she sees what she should have noticed all those years ago. She sees the look that passed between two kindred spirits. Sees the truth about the man with mismatched eyes, and the red-haired girl who helped him find troubled souls on which to prey.
Through the haze of hallucinations, Violet becomes aware of the clamminess of her skin. It’s too hot inside the yurt. It’s a dank, dark heat. She feels as though there is a crust forming upon him; a rind of salt and dirt. It is as if the canvas walls of the little round dwelling are made of flesh. She pictures deerskins. Sees the carcasses of flayed animals heaped into a gory red mound of festering flesh. Sees the woman who stands above him: Imagines her crimson-handed, squatting above the forest floor, a bone needle in her hands pulling lengths of sinew through the tattered buckskin pelts of slaughtered doe.
The smoke is catching in her throat. It feels as if there is something in her mouth; some fruit-slimed peach stone blocking her oesophagus. Freya’s voice has changed; slow, breathy, a wood flute playing a funeral reel. It makes her limbs feel heavy, her skin turning to rubber. She hears the rustle as she moves around the space. She smells something sweet and floral. Feels a sudden tickling heat at her feet; a warmth just the right side off painful. There is an electrical charge within her – a copper wire inside her bones. She becomes aware of the connection between them. She smells a rich, green tang of sage. For a moment she is a mosaic; a pixilated image; a whole made up of a billion parts. Inside her skull, an orange glow, like watching a bright sun through closed eyes.
Her mind fills with images the way another’s eyes might brim with tears. Her feet jiggle up and down as though he is running. She feels as though there are ants beneath her skin.
A hole, black and wide as a whale’s mouth, opens inside her skull and she pours through it as if being sucked into a pit of tar. She is suddenly 14 again. 14, and scared, Catherine’s hand in hers, dragging herself up and out of the forest floor like a corpse rising from a grave.
Inside her mind, Violet runs. Her bare feet catch on tree roots; risen from the muddy ground like swollen veins. Sharp pebbles puncture her skin: the sting eclipsed a moment later by the sensuous suck and pull of warm mud and dew-moistened grass. She is only dimly aware of these sensations. Could not speak if she wanted to. Her throat is afire: her tongue swollen; the taste of rotten bark filling her mouth and nose.
“You have been chosen,” comes a voice: an icicle melting in the centre of her skull. “You will be reborn ….”
39
Friday, 2.16pm
Seascale, West Cumbria
Evelyn wakes in the kitchen, face down on crossed arms. There’s an empty bottle of Famous Grouse on the table and two Mars bar wrappers scrumpled up on her paperwork. A mugshot of Rowan Blake’s face is staring up at her from the inside flap of the red book. She fell asleep while reading. Dreamed of tall, angular figures moving towards her through fire-blackened trees; the shadows and the objects that cast them indistinguishable; bindings about her elbows and ankles; soft earth in her throat.
Groggily, she reaches out for the last dregs of her water-glass. Tips it into her mouth and swallows, drily. She’s pleased the whisky bottle was almost empty when she unscrewed the lid. She’d have kept on drinking were there more to drink.
Her gaze returns to the kitchen window. The day is already darkening and she can see more of her own reflected kitchen than she can the steel-grey sky and squabbling gulls in the space where the cliff disappears into nothingness. She pulls herself up and stumbles to the light switch, turning it off in the hope that the darkened room will give her a better view of what lays beyond the glass. Instead she sees only herself; small and round and old; her face pudgy and slack, creased and rumpled with the pattern of her watchstrap temporarily embossed on the wrinkled skin of her cheek.