by Jd Field
Chapter 17: The Storm Breaks
Eddy stood beside the pair of Shire horses in front of the cart with one arm wrapped around Judy’s brown and white nose.
“Eddy I have to go home.”
“What’s wrong?”
A file of black birds flapped overhead. I remembered the black cormorant in the tree outside our house, and shivered. “I don’t know. Mum’s... She’s upset.”
He looked at his watch. “I have to do the cart tour of the farm in like, three minutes. That’ll take fifteen minutes. Can you wait that long?”
“How will you get me home?”
Eddy looked at me blankly. “Well, Boxer, I suppose.”
“We don’t have time. Can’t somebody drive me?”
“Kieran’s not here.”
I sighed with relief. Though in desperate need, I really didn’t want to sit in the front of a car with Kieran Hechter.
Eddy grimaced. “I’ll ask the Colonel. It won’t be easy, but if I tell him it’s really important...”
“The Colonel?”
“Kieran’s father. Um, hold the reins.” He handed me the lead ropes of the two gigantic horses. If they decided to go somewhere I had absolutely no chance of stopping them, but I didn’t make a fuss about it, Eddy had to know that as well as I did. Or better.
“Okay, ladies,” I said to the horses. “You’ll just stand here nicely with me.”
Ebony bobbed her head as Eddy jogged towards a manor house at the edge of the farm complex. I planned where I would ask Mr. Hechter to stop and drop me off, so he wouldn’t have a chance to work out how small and crumby my home was. Two minutes later a gleaming navy blue Range Rover pulled up behind the cart. The passenger door opened and Eddy jumped out. “Here you go.”
“It’s okay; I’ll go in the back. You can stay in the front.”
“No, I’m staying.” He took the bridles from me. “I’ve got to do the cart tour.”
“What?” My stomach jolted with unease. A car ride with Kieran’s dad?
“Go on, get in. I told him it was really urgent. I’ll see you tomorrow. Send me a short message service and tell me everything’s okay.”
I dragged my feet over to the car. A handsome forty-something man with thinning, swept back brown hair and intense dark eyes sat in the driving seat. He waved a hand. “Hi, I’m Paul Hechter. Jump in.”
I kept my eyes on the yard, then the road, as I buckled up.
“Glastonbury right?” Mr. Hechter said.
“Um yeah, it’s near Bove Town, the Bove Town side of-”
“I know it. I knew your grandmother. Wonderful woman.”
I stared at him. It seemed everybody knew who Grandmother was. “Really, I didn’t-”
“Please accept my condolences for your loss.”
I had been prepared to dislike Mr. Hechter, to treat him with businesslike disdain for how bad Eddy’s life with him had been. His courtesy disconcerted me. “Um, thank you.”
He steered with swift jerks. “Used to buy her honey. Great on toast, and for sickly foals. Put it in the milk.”
I blinked, struggling to adjust to his machine-gun way of talking.
“You’re a friend of Eddy’s?”
“Well, I guess, we were in history class together, but of course now he’s dropping...” I stopped; maybe Eddy hadn’t told him he had dropped history.
“He said. Economics. Bright boy Eddy. Don’t know what Neil would say. But it’s fine by me.”
We made the last turn onto the Glastonbury road. I turned to Hechter. “I’ve heard so much about Mr. Neil. When do you think he’ll be back?”
Hechter smiled. “Who can tell? He’s got some girlfriend somewhere.”
“Really? I didn’t know.”
“Neil’s always got a girlfriend somewhere. I don’t what his magic trick is. Here we are.” He turned the Range Rover into Chalice Drive. I winced, though I supposed that if he had always known where I lived, him coming there now didn’t make a lot of difference.
He stopped outside number seventeen and as I pushed at the car door he slowed me with the sincerity of his tone. “Good to meet you Madeleine. Hope your Mum’s feeling better. Sorry you had to leave so quickly. Come back to visit. We’re having a party tomorrow for Kieran’s eighteenth. Are you coming?”
Kieran’s party had been mentioned with awe at school. A party on a Monday night was unprecedented, but like the Four Horsemen, the Hechters seemed to do exactly as they pleased.
“Um, I don’t think so.”
“Never mind. Come back some other time. Have a ride on the cart. Meet Kieran.”
I thanked him as I backed away from the car. I noted the way his eyes shone when he said ‘Kieran’, but didn’t dwell on the contrast with the offhand way he mentioned Eddy’s name. My thoughts were focused on my mother. Turning, I peered at the windows of the house. All the curtains were pulled. I ran along the drive and in the kitchen door. “Mum!”
Silence.
“Mum!”
“Maddie.” Her voice, faint and weak, issued from her bedroom. I closed my eyes, for a moment; at least she was aware of the distinction between her daughter and her mother. Then I ran up the stairs.
“Mum!” I burst into her bedroom.
She lay on her bed, facing the door, eyes half closed.
“Mum, what’s wrong?”
“I’m okay, Maddie. I just had a bit of headache, that’s all. I needed to get out of the light.”
I peered at her face. Shadows ringed her eyes, but nothing seemed terribly wrong. “Mum!”
I had left Eddy when I might have been able to change his mind. He hadn’t even played the music I gave him. I had left Eddy when he was being all manly and powerful, striding about in work boots, golden eyes flashing. What a waste. I shook my head in an attempt to rid myself of the image. “Well... I’m here now. You just have a rest. I’ll be downstairs.”
As I closed the door a bird call sounded from the garden and though I knew it wasn’t the cormorant my back stiffened with anger. No good could come of having such a malevolent looking creature hanging around the house. I ran down the stairs and into the garden, grabbing the broom from beside the back door. In the road I stood under the dead tree and brandished my weapon at the cormorant, standing on its bough with its wings half spread.
“Get away!”
The bird croaked at me and shuffled along its perch.
“Go on!” I scooped a handful of gravel from the gutter and hurled it up into the tree. The tiny stones rattled against twigs and with heavy wing beats the greasy looking bird flapped into the sky. I waved the broom in triumph. “That’s right!” Then I looked up and down the Drive, hoping nobody had seen me.
In the house I looked in on Mum every half an hour and spent the rest of the evening doing history homework. I took extra care over the notes now, knowing I was going to pass on all the information to Eddy.
At ten o’clock my scalp prickled and I got up and looked out the window. The dead tree stood empty. The old woman with the empty shopping basket stood on the sidewalk underneath it. She didn’t seem to be going or coming, just standing. I looked a bit harder. Behind her glasses her eyes might have been trained on our house.
A mumble from Mum’s room rose to a cry. I jumped away from the window and ran to her bedside. She had turned onto her back and had her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.
“Mum?”
Her face stretched into a taut mask. “The desert, don’t fall into the desert.”
“What Mum?”
She sat up in bed and her eyes raked the room. “Oh catch me, catch me Mother.”
“Mum, it’s me, Maddie.”
She got out of bed and pushed me aside. “Get away from me. Where’s mother? I have to tell her something.”
At the bedroom doorway she paused. “What is this? This isn’t London. Where are we?”
I stood behind her, racking my brain. Should I phone for an ambulance, or a doctor? I didn’t know
the local doctor; we’d had no reason to meet him yet.
“Get me a boat, get me a fleet of swans. I have to go to the Bride House.”
Swans? My pulse quickened with fear. I didn’t know what to do. Whenever I didn’t know what to do I would ask Mum for help, but how could I when she was the question? I blinked tears out of my eyes and put my hand on her shoulder. “Mum I-”
“I’m not talking to you!” She spun and scratched my hand from her shoulder. “What are you doing here?” Spittle gathered in the corners of her mouth. “I want my mother. She’s gone away somewhere and there’s a beast....” Her voice rose to a shriek. “There’s a beast out there!”
I shrank away from her, staring. Vomit surged in my throat and stung my mouth. I was in the middle of a horror film and my strength evaporated, dropping me to my knees.
She flung one hand towards my room, and the road beyond. With the other she pulled at her hair. “There’s a beast in here.”
Tears flooded down my cheeks. What should I do? If I called an ambulance they would take her away and they might never bring her back. And what would happen to me? Sixteen years old, no relatives, not even any close family friends, barring a few old acquaintances of Mum’s in London.
Taking Mum’s hand I loosened it from her hair. She shoved me away and descended the stairs.
I trailed after her. If I had to go to London when would I see Eddy? The idea of being away from him was unbearable. The sight of Mum in torment was worse. What was wrong with me? Mum suffered and all I could think about was the boy I fancied.
Eddy.
I decided to try something, something that seemed to have worked in the past. “Help,” I whispered. “Eddy, please help.”
Eddy would know what to do. Because, apart from anything else, this had to be somehow connected to him. I feared that what the world would see in my mother as madness was actually linked to facts. The facts of my family and Eddy’s past. She would expose it and it would be heard as insane rambling, when it probably had some truth in it.
Mum reached the back door. She held a hand out towards the handle, then pulled it back as if she had been shocked.
I went down the stairs. “It’s okay Mum, there was a bird. I chased it away. I chased away the sea raven.”
For the first time since she had woken she seemed to really see me. Her face crumpled. “You chased it away?” She folded to the floor. “No!”
A momentary blaze of light filled the room, then thunder boomed overhead and rain began to drum against the window.
Mum lay motionless. Stroking her arm, I said her name. She didn’t respond. I put my hand to her throat, she was breathing, but seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep. I pulled her onto the carpet in the next room and slid a cushion under her head. A blanket draped the couch and I tugged it down to cover her. How long would it take Eddy to get to me? How would he manage, in the rain?
I sat at the kitchen table in the darkness. For a reason I couldn’t explain I felt caution at turning on the light. Instead I ran water from the hot and cold tap. I filled the sink, without a plug, holding the water in place under my instruction. I opened the plug and as the water spiralled out of the sink I whipped the spiral faster, until it formed a ferocious mini whirlpool, lining the sides of the sink but leaving its bottom almost bare. Proving my power was an attempt to make myself feel better, and it almost succeeded.
“Hmm.” I spoke to myself. “Maybe it’s possible to...” I filled the sink again, and used my mental connection with the water to wind its surface into a whirlpool. It formed a saucer shape, and I pulled on the edges, raising them into a translucent wall, growing from the shimmering water. I stopped the whirlpool, then pulled the water into a spout in the centre of the sink, a silver column that I twisted like candy.
Above the rain I heard the familiar drum of hooves. He came so quickly! The water sculpture collapse into the sink as I jumped to my feet. I pulled the back door open and Eddy burst through it.
He wore a long coat, soaked through. His hair was stuck to the sides of his face and lay in dark tendrils on the back of his neck.
As I pulled his coat from his shoulders my fingertips felt the heat of his skin through his flimsy t-shirt. He shuddered under my touch and stepped away. “What’s wrong?”
“Why didn’t you wear something waterproof?”
“It’s only really raining here, Chalice Drive. It’s bizarre.”
I showed him where Mum lay on the floor, and told him – as well as I could remember – what she had said.
Eddy paled.
“What is it?”
“It’s an, an old enemy of mine. Somebody, something, from before I slept.”
“That old? Are there many?”
“Merlin believed that he was the only one surviving from that time. I always thought that he might be balanced by one wishing me harm.”
“Mum said there might be.” I brightened. “Wait, could it be a bird, or take the shape of a bird?” I explained how the Drive had been haunted by the cormorant, and I had chased it away.
Eddy’s face, already pale, drew tight over its bones. For a moment his beauty disappeared and his face resembled a skull. “You chased the cormorant away?”
“Well yes. I didn’t like it. It was creepy.”
“Oh Maddie!”
I flinched.
For the first time I saw the impact Eddy’s majesty and blazing eyes could have if he was angry. His face became a war mask.
I shrank away. “What?”
“The sea raven is your bird, yours and the ladies. It watches over rivers and lakes, and over you. It’s ancient. It has a place on the tree of life and I think, before she died, your grandmother may have set this one to watch over you.”
“It’s magic?”
He winced at the word ‘magic.’ “No, not of itself, but it represents something, natural and true, that can resist malevolence.”
I slumped to the floor beside Mum and put my head in my hands. “You’re right. I chased the bird away, then the woman was standing right outside my house.”
“Who?”
I described the woman with the empty shopping basket. The same one I had spoken to as she walked up and down the road, but this time she had been staring at the house. “She always seemed nice, you know. A bit nosy, but a harmless old woman.”
“Ha!” Eddy’s laugh was bleak and mirthless. “Harmless as a nuclear missile is harmless. It’s her. I knew all along she had lived. Mr. Neil, damn him...” Eddy waved his hand, as if dismissing old, private arguments. “Never mind. You have to get away from here.”
“What? No. Who is she?”
“She’s, she’s...” Eddy bit his lip. “I don’t know exactly what she is, but she is the equivalent of Merlin in power and age. She’s ambitious, she feels wronged and she’s vengeful. She wants to harm me and all around me.”
“Is she, whatever her name is, Morgan?”
“In the stories she’s called Morgan le Fay. Yes.” He took a deep breath and looked around him. “But we haven’t got time for this. The rain will have driven her away. That much water she will find unpleasant. It dilutes her efforts, but she’ll come back and she’ll reach into your mother’s mind again.”
“Oh my God! Is that what she’s doing?”