There is a sound from above – the screech of a rabbit taken by a crow.
She looks up, glaring out through the pig mask: eyes huge, all tusks and teeth and hair.
And the man with the fleshless hands falls from the sky.
She folds in on herself beneath the impact, her head slamming into the hard ground. The tusks in the porcine mask are pressed upwards by the impact, skewering the soft flesh beneath her jawbone. Both legs snap at the knee. Something splinters inside her; split rib bones pushing out through the flesh of her gut.
Rowan tumbles away, bones breaking, blood pouring from his nose, his mouth, his ears. He cannot see. Cannot make sense of himself. Puts out a hand and slips to the floor. He raises his arms and looks at his palms. Sees bones. Tendons. Sees something flash – a shape in the darkness, a sudden surge of frenzied movement.
Freya should not be able to move. Her bones are brokwn. Her torso is a mess of blood and paint and splintered bone. And yet she moves with a strength and speed that is the product of pure and perfect hate.
Instinctively, Rowan scrabbles behind him, his ruined flesh sliding off stone and drenched wood. He fleshless palms close upon something firm. He brings it up, blood frothing from his mouth, eyes wide and white and terrified.
The fractured bone punctures Freya’s heart like a lance plunged into the flank of a charging boar.
Her dying breath, all spit and blood and foulness, rushes into Rowan’s open mouth like a gust from an open door.
He does not try to move her. Does not try to stand. Just lays on the floor of the cave and watches the distant, twinkling lights.
It feels like a long time before he hears the voice. He feels the pressure on his chest ease a little as the corpse that sits astride him is levered onto the floor. Then violet’s face is above him; all wide eyes and matted hair.
“I saw,” she whispers. “Saw what was out there …,”
Rowan swallows. Tastes blood.
She looks at him, reading something that perhaps only she can see. “You helped me. You did.” She says it as if making a decision – as if the alternative would be to bring down a rock upon his skull. “Can you walk? I remember the way …,”
Rowan closes his eyes. Finds the strength to raise his arm and to proffer a bloodied, skin-stripped hand.
“Rowan Blake,” he says, trying to smile. He manages to hold her gaze for a moment. “I want to tell your story.”
Epilogue
Rowan’s brought flowers. Half a dozen red roses and half a dozen white. They lay on the table, wrapped in shiny plastic. There are tiny bugs climbing in and out of the velvety folds. He doesn’t know what he’s trying to say with the gesture, but a gesture seems important, in this place and at this time: At St Olaf’s Church in the Wasdale Valley, on the day Derrick Millwards bones are given some company.
Rowan leans against the headstone of a mountaineer who died on Pillar Rock in 1923. He doesn’t imagine he will be reprimanded for the sacrilege. He already has the look of a resurrected corpse. He walked here with the aid of a stick, Sumaira’s arm always close enough to reach out for if he needed her. Snowdrop stayed within hailing distance, her whole being radiating pride. She’d been told to dress respectfully for the internment of Eve Cater’s remains. In her rainbow Wellingtons and short tie-dyed dress, she strikes Rowan as perfect. She’s a floral tribute among the cold, dark graves.
Dippy and Jo stand shoulder to shoulder. They both wear black, though Snowdrop is wearing a floppy-brimmed hat that looks to Rowan as though it would better suit a cartoon donkey.
He turns at the sound of a cough behind him. It’s Vicki-Louise. She’s looking well. She sports a Marbella tan. She didn’t cry during the service. Just gave a little nod as she tossed her handful of earth onto the coffin and told her boss she understood. Rowan, watching, had fought the urge to climb into the grave: to start clawing through Millward’s rotten coffin and half-eaten bones to look for the papers he was buried with. He resisted the urge. He was too tired; too sore.
“You going to write it then?” she asks, looking him full in the face.
Rowan readjusts himself, putting his palm down on the rams-head walking stick. It was a gift from Violet’s mum, hand-carved by a man in the valley. It’s been smoothed down so as to keep the friction against the new flesh upon his hands to a minimum. They hurt every day, but it is the damage to his legs that is taking longest to heal. Both legs broke when he smashed down from the cavern roof and crushed Freya into the hard ground. Were it not for Violet he would still be there.
“Write about it, Vicki?” he asks.
“You’re the man who solved it, aren’t you? Put the pieces together and made sense of it all. Who nearly died and who saved the day…,”
“Bollocks,” smiles Rowan. “I’m an arsehole who blundered about like a carrier bag on the breeze and who only stopped a killer because he fucking landed on her..”
“Aye, but that’s not what you’ll write.”
“Who says I’ll write anything?”
Vicki-Louise looks at him. “You know, don’t you? Eve. What she did. The way she played it …,”
“Like I say, I might not write a word ….”
“You will,” she says, smiling. “Your sort. You’re a slave for the adulation. Either way, I hope you write it here. In the Lakes. I hope you put down roots.”
Rowan glances at his niece. At his sister and her wife. On, across the endless silver of the waters to where the red-grey mass of screes plunges into the depths like a blade. He listens to the rustling of the birds in the branches of the yew trees. Watches the clouds scudding across the indigo sky like the baggage cars of a ghost train.
“I need to get well before I decide anything,” he says. “I’ll recuperate for a while, then see what happens.”
Vicki-Louise rolls her eyes. Looks at Sumaira, playing with her phone, and across to where Rev Marlish and his wife stand in silent prayer.
“Best of luck to you” she says, at last. “There’s a wake at Haskett’s. A few coppers. A few friends. You’re welcome to join us. There might be some people to talk to for your book…,”
Rowan shakes his head. “It’s a bit of a hike on the bad leg. “I’ll stay here for a bit.”
Later, alone, Rowan finds himself wondering what he truly thinks. There are days in which he yearns for simplicity. Peace. He daydreams of some rural idyll with a beautiful barefoot girl who will cook fruit pies in the morning and walk with him in the woods each afternoon. Other days bring less humble ambitions. He imagines an existence of spectacular debauchery. Of whisky poured onto his tongue by masked courtesans. Sees himself as Caligula amid ghoulish tableaus of fire and gold and flesh. He does not know if a man who can hold two such disparate concepts in equal esteem is deserving of either. Doesn’t know, in truth, if what comes next will be an improvement or merely an alteration. He simply knows that he wants his tomorrows to contain fewer problems than his todays.
He tries to ride the feeling as if he were a passenger on a wave. Feels his consciousness reaching and the air above the church flares briefly crimson and gold; a shimmering outline around its hard edges. He wonders what he knows and what he fears and what any of it matters to anybody.
His phone pings. It’s a suggestive message from Sumaira, overlaid like decoupage atop get-well wishes from Catherine Marlish, and Rosie, the neighbour who is helping Violet put herself back together.