She looks again at the picture on the inside flap of the book. Rowan Blake. She’d seen it in his eyes when he knocked at the door – seen the hunger, the desperation, the need for this to become something he could use. She knows he won’t stop. It will all come out, in time. Everything that she achieved will be wiped away in one great black headline. The crimes she covered up and the people she left to die; the money she took and the killer she allowed to walk free. She made a terrible error – a decision made in temper, in the funeral shrouds of a cold hospital bed.
There is a creak from the floorboard beneath the doorway into the kitchen. She has a memory of that little bedroom at the guest house on Rydal Water – Derrick on the big four-poster, herself sat in the high-backed chair, talking about the disappearance of a healer and speculating about the connection to Cormac Pearl – the boy who heard things; saw things; who stayed with him for years having almost killed a member of his family.
She turns, slowly.
Sees her.
Sees the one who fooled them all.
The one they saw as a victim, but who was always more huntress than prey.
Eve doesn’t try to bargain for her life. Doesn’t apologise or ask that her good deeds be weighed against the bad. Doesn’t tell her that for nearly 30 years she has lived with some vile, carcinogenic lie bleeding its poison into her old bones.
She simply raises her head, and waits for the knife.
Eve tries to mouth the word ‘Violet’. To ask after the girl who would not stop looking for answers, even when her questions brought her within kissing distance of evil.
“Let go,” says Freya, quietly. “He’s waiting for you. They’re all waiting for you.”
When it comes, there is something almost compassionate in the way the blade saws across her withered flesh.
40
February 15, 2020
The Wasdale Valley
8.30pm
Violet is adrift in delirium, her thoughts a jumbled mass. She is at once herself, and another. She is now, and she is then: woman and child, united in one body. She feels like a skin-suit, stitched tight over two people.
She wears a long white nightdress. The hems are torn and the delicate embroidery is obscured beneath splashes of mud. In places, the material clings to her skin. She’s plump and pink. There are patterns on her flesh; serpentine sigils and jagged circles, daubed in sticky fingerprints on the ripe fruit of her skin. Her mind is a basket of slithering shapes, interweaving, gorging on one another. She cannot distinguish her own consciousness from the voices that whisper, sibilant, in the shushing of the trees and the fizzing of her blood.
Her throat is agony. Her mouth is bitter with the taste of burned herbs, a tingling numbness in her tongue and gums. From somewhere, Catherine’s voice.
“Violet! Violet, please ….!”
A branch snaps in two beneath the sole of her left foot, gunshot-sharp against the silence of the night. Unbidden, her eyes flutter open. She glimpses at her surroundings and feels panic claw its way up her aching throat. Mist rises from the mulch of the woodland floor; shapeless wisps that coil around the bases of the rain-blackened trees. The moon is a leering eye, half hooded by a skein of thick cloud. It finds its likeness in the flat, bronze-black surface of the lake.
She sees a shape, moving towards her through the trees. A round, motherly shape. She reaches down and the action makes her stomach heave. She throws up onto the forest floor; the bitter drink and the green liquor spattering into the forest floor. She scrabbles in the mulch. Her hands close on something hard and sharp – a twisted tent peg, rusted and bent. She clutches it like a blade.
“Violet … Violet, I’m frightened.”
Desperately, she hisses Catherine’s name. Looks back and sees the small, pathetic figure of her best friend, wriggling out of the hole beneath the twisted tree roots, mud and blood and tears and snot forming a mask upon her flesh as terrifying as the pig-skin shaman mask that the man had handed to Freya with the reverence of an acolyte.
Her mind feels as though it has been ripped into strips. She needs to get somewhere safe, somewhere loud, where she can try and put the picture into focus.
She runs. Runs until Catherine’s voice fades away.
The forest seems older here. Thicker. The trees have fatter trunks and their branches fork off at odd angles, like limbs that have been broken and improperly set. The air feels somehow heavier. When she licks her lips she tastes raw meat.
“A little further,” comes a voice, in the darkness. “You are so close …,”
A twig whips at her face as she pushes through a tangle of spindly branches. She becomes aware of a sound, a keen-edged rhythm: a saw finding purchase in wet wood. She realises that it is the sound of her own breathing; that she is softly hyperventilating. Ghosts of warm breath gather in the black air around her face, drifting away to mingle with the mist and the cold night air.
She raises an arm and pushes on through the twist of trees. In places, the ground is uneven. Old stones push through the earth like skulls. There was a building here, once.
Two beeches have grown at odd angles, their trunks leaning inward and branches weaving around one another to form an archway.
“You must be strong. You have been chosen. Chosen for rebirth …,”
She pushes through the arch of trees, trying to steady her breathing.
She emerges in a small clearing. On all sides, the trees form a tight mesh, snarled up with blackberries and thorns. She suddenly thinks of fairytales. Of Sleeping Beauty. The thought emerges as if from nowhere and is met with a screech of pain inside her skull, as if the simplicity of the memory has caused physical pain to the voice that whispers inside her. She shakes her head, angry wasps inside her skin; scratching at herself so hard that she scores red lines into the bare skin of her chest.
The clouds uncouple for a moment and a little yellow light anoints the clearing. There is a hole in the earth; a yawning maw of disturbed ground. A mound of loose stones has been built into a cairn at the far end of the hole. She starts towards it, her feet moving over damp grass. The light reveals the wildflowers that rise from the flattened ground; purple foxgloves, violet knapweed; a constellation of gold and yellow blooms, winking like the lights of a distant town. She reaches the edge of the hole and leans forward. She gasps, sucking in a lungful of cold air. She smells decay. Spoiled meat and sour milk. She catches a taste of her own scent; all sweat and churned roots.
There is a moment’s hesitation. The voices in her head fall silent, cowed, as a new voice enters her consciousness. It is a funereal monotone, a throat-sung requiem, but somehow each syllable throbs with a power that makes her flesh prickle. She feels flies landing upon her bare skin, attracted to the stink of her sweat. She hears a low buzzing sound, more of a vibration that a noise, and she realises that there is a part of her that does not want this. A part of her that still fears the dark. That wants to turn and run and rip the darkness with raucous screams.