Rowan tries to make fists. Tries to stop himself screaming as the metal bites into his flesh.
“I never met Cormac, but I found Elrik,” she says, smiling. “Woke up find him at the end of my bed. He said he knew who I was. What I was. Said he understood my pain and could help me use it to grow strong. He showed me things I didn’t believe were possible. He said his father wanted him dead and that I was nothing but bait. That as soon as I told Mr Pearl or his tame copper that I’d made contact with him, they’d swoop in and take him away and he’d end up with a bullet in his brain. Put down, like a dog. He said ti give him a chance to show him he didn’t deserve that sort of end. He said he could show me the nature of things. All he needed was the two girls who were sleeping in the next room. Said to put my faith in him.”
Freya shakes her head, twitching as if stung by countless invisible bees. “So much of it vanished afterwards. After they escaped. After that fat little policewoman got hurt. They broke the circle, do you see? The sacred place. He was jockeying their souls, taking them to the next world, showing them all the wonders that were going to be his to control. Something must have scared them. Woke them. I remember him inside me. Remember seeing with his eyes, with my own; looking out through the consciousness of Violet; of Catherine… and then it was all darkness. They climbed the ladder. Wriggled through the earth. He’d tried to stop them, you see. Tried to pull them back. But his consciousness was still in the place beyond. He fell. Came apart like he was made of straw. They left me down here. Elrik spoke to me long after his heart stopped beating. Spoke to me until I could hear nothing else but his voice.” She presses her hands to her head and lets out a high, tittering laugh. “By the time I emerged from the ground I think I had gone a little mad. I didn’t know what was real and what was not. But I knew I’d done wrong. That I had let people down. That there was a bad man who would want to know why I hadn’t kept my side of the bargain…,”
A hiss of pain shoots from Rowan’s locked teeth. He feels himself slipping. Looks down at the sparkling black floor; the carpet of bones, and feels as though he is dangling over a void of absolute blackness.
Freya looks down at Violet, helpless and broken on the floor. “She helped me remember. For so many years I hid the truth from myself. For three decades tried to be good – to turn the things Elrik had shown me into a positive force – a way to help people. The ayahuasca; the drink that we had shared, it turned those days and weeks beneath the ground into something unreal. I’d run so fast and so far that by the time I stopped running I had all but lost sight of what had caused me to flee. And I didn’t want to remember – not really. I wanted to forget. The money he’d had in his bag – I spent it on forgetting. On drugs and drink and anything that closed the windows in my head. By the time I was locked up – by the time they sectioned me – I didn’t know what was memory and what was hallucination. But I found my peace, I need you to know that. I made sense of it. I knew I would never disentangle it so I concentrated on being as good as I could be. I took all the courses, all the classes. I learned to be a healer. I took classes in Reiki, in Shamanism, and all the while the voice in my head kept trying to break through, to force me to remember. Only when I took control of myself, when I began to believe myself to be well – only then did it break through. Only when I felt well enough to face the past did it all come back like a punch.”
She looks down at Violet. Replaces the mask.
“She found me. She made me remember. She brought Elrik out of the space behind my heart and put him at the front of my mind. She did this. And she deserves everything that’s been done to her.” She looks up at him, eyes narrowing. For a moment it seems as though something else is staring out through her black lenses; a sensation of snout and tail. “You will too.”
She turns away from him. Reaches down and takes Violet by the hair. Drags her closer to the where the cavern becomes nothing but darkness.
Rowan glances up at his ruined hands. The bandages have come loose. His churned, glistening skin oozes blood; the meat of his hands shredded to offal.
Slowly, he becomes aware of a rhythm. It surges up from the cavern floor like a wall of foaming water; a sensory avalanche; an ancient thunder of wood upon skin; the temp furious, the reverberations striking him in the heart and vibrating down to the bone.
He hears a voice inside himself. Sees in a thousand shades of crimson and vermillion; his every sense crystallizing into a vision of colours so vibrant they threaten to overwhelm him. He smells ammonia and burning sage.
Rowan feels himself slipping. It is as if strong, desperate hands are holding his legs and pulling at him. He can’t decipher how high above the ground he is. The figures below seem at once close and far, far below. He can make out a colour that seems familiar: a flash of something bright and oddly cheerful – a flower among dead leaves.
He feels himself dying. His head sinks back into his chest, compacting his airways, wrenching harder at the sockets of his shoulders. Over the thunder of the drum he hears tendons and bones creak and strain.
He hears a voice inside himself. A small, quiet sound, like a child still unsure of their voice.
Your hands.
The new flesh.
Rowan yanks down. Feels the cuffs bite into the fat of his hands, gnawing into the pink and blue skin below the ball of his thumb. The pain is like nothing he has ever known before. He does it again. Again.
He squints into the blackness. Sees. Curled up like a foetus, her skin faded alabaster-white, is the outline of a woman who nearly died here, in this place beneath the ground, some thirty years ago. Violet Rayner. He can’t see whether she is breathing. But he hears Snowdrop’s shouts – a harsh, desperate screech over the heartbeat syncopation of the drum.
He glances at the ladder from which he hangs. There’s another set of cuffs, dangling from the rusted run. Somebody died here. Dangled in the dark until their heart gave out and didn’t fall to the cave below until their flesh and bones rotted through.
He tugs. Pulls. Grits his teeth.
He feels the metal slide under the tortured epidermis of his ruined hands. Feels skin and pus-soaked bandages peel away from the meat beneath. He cannot contain the scream. It explodes from his mouth: a screech of bats and ravens erupting from the jaws of an ink-dark cave.
He hears a sound like sailcloth being torn in two.
His hands, pared almost to the bone, slip through the teeth of the old handcuffs. He falls into the darkness like a stone.
Freya beats her drum. Raises her voice to the old gods and the new. Feels the spirits rise around her. Feels the void opening around her: the thinning of the veil between worlds. Here, in this place where she was reborn.