Safety regulations, she thought. Switch must be on the ceiling because there is water in a bathroom.
She found the dangling toggle, pulled it, saw herself full-on in the mirror. She was wearing an unflattering, voluminous nightgown, courtesy of the National Health Service. All color seemed to have been leached out of her face. Devoid of make-up, expression dull, she resembled a zombie that wasn’t really rotting yet. The splash of freckles across her nose, which she’d always hated, had now vanished. She felt bereft. The only brightness in her reflection came from her hair—a wavy mass that a snooty cousin had once called “unfortunately ginger”.
She peed, washed her hands, drank some water. Then she leaned closer, peered into her own eyes, trying to make out some green in the watery gray. There was no green. Could shock deprive her irises of pigment? No, now there was a hint of color. But it was yellow, an amber glow that became two feral eyes as a great beast bounded toward her, out of the mirror, teeth and claws ready to rend her flesh…
She woke up sweating in a too-warm room. The dream was fading, images confused and jangled in her head. In a few seconds, all that remained was a mental aftertaste of fear and violent movement. She got up and padded to the bathroom.
Tara lay awake for hours after before dozing off. It seemed a matter of seconds before the clatter of her breakfast arriving jolted her awake.
“Morning, love! They’ll probably let you out today,” said a cheery woman pushing a laden metal trolley. “Cereal? Juice?”
She ate a meager breakfast, wondering when she would feel hungry again. An hour or so later, after she had dozed a little, a doctor came to check her progress.
“Still getting those headaches?”
“No, no, the paracetamol seems to have done the trick,” Tara replied.
The young, pleasant doctor seemed pleased with her progress. But when Tara asked about Josh, the doctor repeated the now-familiar message that the police were looking into it.
“They must be able to find—something!” Tara protested.
Tara still did not want to say that Josh was dead, that he had been killed by a pack of monstrous beasts, that his mauled body—what was left of it—must be lying out there. She could just remember snatches of what had happened after she had blacked out. She recalled the cold of an autumn morning, a silver car pulling up nearby, a plump, motherly woman asking her questions.
Then had come the ambulance crew asking her questions, the ER doctors shining lights into her eyes. The police at her bedside.
That had been yesterday. What had happened during the night was a mystery. She had been found on a road on the far side of the country estate, with a bump on her head, some scratches, and a skin rash.
“The skin rash,” the doctor said, “it seems to be clearing up. You might have rolled in something a bit poisonous when… you had your accident.”
“It was no accident!” Tara insisted. “Those creatures killed Josh, I saw it happen.”
The doctor put a small, cool hand on Tara’s.
“You saw your friend being killed? The police found no evidence of, well, anything. They were out on the Mordaunt estate just a few hours after they found you. Josh is officially missing, and—well, the prevailing view is that you were attacked by stray dogs and the rest is down to trauma. Sheep farmers have been complaining about dog attacks for a while.”
Tara shook her head impatiently, angry with herself more than the medic. She had tried to explain what had happened a dozen times. But on each occasion, she had balked at telling the whole truth, as she remembered it. She had talked of dogs, hunting dogs, and mentioned the deer. The police officer who had taken a statement at her bedside had been impassive, professional, with a “nothing surprises me” attitude.
“Well, the manager of the estate says they don’t conduct stag hunts at night,” the cop had pointed out. “And their dogs would not attack people.”
“I know!” Tara had said, angry at the cop and at the whiny tone of her own voice. “It makes no sense!”
And that had been the problem. Tara could not make sense of her experience to herself. The impossible had happened. Not only had Josh been attacked by beasts that seemed to have come straight from the realm of nightmares. Those same creatures had not harmed her.
The physician was speaking again. The young doctor paused, repeated herself.
“If you feel okay, there’s no reason for you to stay. I’ll contact your GP in London. Do you drive?”
“Yes, but we came by train,” Tara said.
“Good, you shouldn’t drive for a few days. A bump on the head is usually just that. The scans showed nothing, it seems to be just bruising. But be careful for a few days…”
The doctor talked on about taking care of herself, the information being shared with her GP, the need to get help if she felt dizzy. Tara tried to pay attention, but she was plagued by memories. Yellow eyes, blue flowers. the spray of warm blood over her face, and above all, the howling. She could still hear it. The memories of impossible horror mingled with her guilt over bullying Josh into going for a hike in the first place and left her confused, miserable, and afraid.
The doctor left. Time passed. She watched TV, gave up, listened to pop radio. A meal arrived, almost inedible but she ate most of it, mechanically spooning the tepid stuff into her mouth. Then her mom called from the States, and they talked for the first time in months. Her dad had already phoned, and Tara had had to dissuade him from flying right over to help in some unspecified way.
“I’m fine,” she said when her mother stopped talking thirty-eight seconds into the call. “I’m just—look, Mom, I need some time to get my head together, okay? But I’m not hurt. Nothing broken. It’s Josh I’m worried about.”
Another barrage of words. Tara held the phone away from her ear and counted off the seconds. It was a comforting ritual, working out just how high a percentage of each call her mother had.
“Look, my phone’s nearly out of juice,” Tara lied when she got another chance to speak. “I’ll call you when I’m back in London. I promise. I gotta go. Gotta go. Bye!”
There was a call waiting. It from Josh’s mother. Tara took it and told the truth as she remembered it.
***
The following day, she asked the owner of the bed and breakfast where she had been staying if the police had been ’round. They had not. But a couple of reporters had called and left cards. They were scribbled with offers of money that she found insultingly small. Tara shoved them in the back pocket of her jeans. Tara pointedly did not talk to the landlady about what had happened, and instead, went up to the room and packed her stuff. Then she packed Josh’s clothes, deciding to take them back to London. She dreaded meeting his family but knew it could not be avoided.
Activity kept her from thinking, kept the memories at bay. When she had finished, she sat on the creaky bed and stared at her phone. Messages from her friends at college mingled with offers from the media, who had not taken long to get her email address. Tara reflected that people were always being told that their details were out there for anyone to find. Here was evidence.
This reminded her of the local reporters, and she took out their cards. Without looking at them she tore them in two and flicked them at the wastebasket. Six pieces of cardboard fluttered like wounded moths, and only three landed on target. She stooped to pick up the stragglers, then paused. Six pieces, but the landlady had said two reporters.
“She was mistaken,” Tara muttered.
But she had always been intensely curious and needed to check facts. She retrieved all of the pieces, reconstructed three cards: one from the county newspaper; one from local TV; and, one that had just a number and email address, plus a name in black capitals—MORTLAKE. She turned it over. The other side was blank apart from a single word scribbled messily in ballpoint ink. LONELY.
“God, you got that right,” she said, sniffling.
She shoved the two bits of the Mortlake card back into her pocket, tossed
the other pieces, and called a cab to the station.
On the train back to London, her brother called. It was the third call in as many days, and Tara had nothing new to say. But she knew that was not the point. As soon as he was sure Tara was okay, Tommy always revealed his real agenda.
“Hi, little brother,” she said. “Before you ask, no, I didn’t mention all that old crazy stuff. And yeah, I’m gonna put the new crazy stuff behind me…”
She trailed off as the train raced across some half-flooded fields that were dotted with patches of blue flowers. Then, she was whisked into the midst of fields of sodden grass, dotted with cattle standing in the morning rain.
She remembered the first time she had met Josh. He had offered to share his umbrella at a bus stop and apologized for it being “such a whopping great cliché.” Tara had accepted and pointed out that, cliché or not, it meant she wasn’t getting wet. They had talked about small stuff like that for a while. His smile, shy and rare, had brightened many of her days since meeting him.
“Why aren’t I crying now?” she murmured, looking down at the phone that no longer connected her to anyone. “Why haven’t I cried for him?” She had known he wasn’t the one she wanted to spend her life with, but she had still cared for him.
Doctors had talked of delayed shock. Her mind hadn’t fully processed what had happened. Maybe when it did, she would curl into a ball on the floor and weep, but until then, she could only go on with her life.
***
The students Tara shared her house with rallied ’round, and she got more helpful attention than she needed or wanted. She found herself yearning for some famous British “stand-offishness” at times. She went back to her post-grad course, and immersed herself in cosmology, in a rational universe where science solved mysteries with observation, calculation, and intuition.
Josh did not turn up, living or dead. When she had given her statement, one cop had talked about the “golden hours”. It was a short period when finding a missing person was easier, before the trail got cold. That vital time was long past. Tara looked up some details on the estate they had trespassed on. It belonged to Rupert Mordaunt, the eighth Viscount Gonfallon. The title was derived from the village of that name, which was part of the extensive lands owned by the Mordaunt family since Tudor times. Pictures showed him as a lanky, weak-chinned man. He was 43, divorced, and said to be one of the richest property owners in London.
A couple of days after she got home, Tara washed the jeans she had flung into the laundry basket. She searched the pockets and found the two halves of the torn card. She wondered about Mortlake and decided to Google it, or him, or her. At first, she got too many hits and had to decide which word or phrase to add to narrow the search.
She settled on “mystery”. This produced a few thousand hits, mostly blog entries with a leavening of news items. Tara skimmed a few, then became absorbed. Words and phrases jumped out at her.
Spontaneous Human Combustion. Ghost. Curse. Paranormal. Occult.
One word in particular brought her up short.
Poltergeist.
The word summoned her back to adolescence, divorce, shouting, and things breaking. She shut the laptop, wanting to banish the memory and focus only on the now and what was to come. Mortlake was part of the crazy, dangerous world that had somehow taken Josh. She opened the laptop and read some more.
“Marcus Orlando Mortlake,” she said aloud. “You couldn’t make it up.”
She tried it again in a British accent and giggled.
There was a knock at the door. Tara froze, then heard a slight clinking sound and relaxed. She knew who it was.
“Yeah?”
“Fancy a cuppa, Tara? It’s decaf.”
Tara was not keen on any kind of instant coffee but she was happy to be interrupted by Anita, who always struck the right balance between concern and giving Tara space. Anita was the one person Tara had wholly confided in since returning to London.
“That’s great, thanks!”
Anita entered carefully, holding two steaming mugs in one hand and going “Ow, ow, ow” until Tara took one. Anita jingled wherever she went thanks to an impressive array of bangles, bracelets, and necklaces. It was a comforting sound.
“Working at this late hour?” the English girl asked. “That pesky Nobel Prize still eluding you?”
“This is—kind of private,” Tara said, closing the laptop. “So, I am now officially not working and available for gossip.”
Anita looked at the computer, and Tara felt a pang of guilt. She opened the laptop again and explained what she was doing.
“Am I going bonkers?” she asked. “I mean, would it be crazy to reach out to this guy?”
Anita examined the torn card, shook her head.
“I’ve heard of this guy—he’s been around for yonks. I think he was trapped in that doll museum, wasn’t he?”
Tara stared for a moment, then started to scroll through. Soon, they were having an eager, light-hearted discussion about Mortlake and his many adventures.
He was a British occult expert who had been “ghost hunting” for decades. There were some pictures, quite old ones, which showed a tall man with dark hair and eyes. He looked scholarly, old-fashioned, his clothes giving off a shabby-genteel vibe—an English eccentric. The impression was reinforced by the fact that Mortlake was standing next to an elderly clergyman in front of a church.
“Ooh, he’s quite hunky in a codgery sort of way,” Anita said.
“Aw, come on!” Tara rebuked her.
“No, I can see myself getting there,” her friend insisted. “If he got his divining rod out…”
Tara, laughing hard, tried to hit Anita with a pillow. Fending it off, the English student insisted that Mortlake was not merely “a bit dishy” but a proper researcher, based at a Cambridge College.
“Eccentric bookish gentlemen can still be charlatans,” Tara pointed out. “And dishyness is a very subjective quality.”
“It’s dishitude, actually,” said Anita with mock condescension. “And you could do worse than get help—I mean, get his opinion.”
“No, help is the right word. Let’s find out more about this guy.”
As they plunged deeper into cyberspace, she found the word “debunk” and many variations thereof. Mortlake had debunked the Enfield Haunting, the Bleeding Nun of Chillingham, the haunting of the Red Chamber, the horrific Chelsea Smilers, several spiritualist mediums… The list was impressive. And she found that Mortlake was a distinguished academic, a visiting professor at a Cambridge college. His fields of expertise were folklore, mythology, and related matters.
“Okay,” Tara concluded, “maybe he’s not a con artist. Maybe he’s totally sincere in what he does. But do I want to open up to this guy?”
“Only you can answer that,” Anita said, finishing her coffee and standing up in a silvery tinkle of jewelry. “But I really think he’s dishy.”
Tara sat alone for a while and pondered her options. She could not bring herself to call Mortlake, yet she was still torn with guilt and shame over Josh. Their relationship had not been too serious, at least for Tara, but now she wondered how much it had meant to him. His friends and relatives all seemed to think he would turn up. Sure, there had been some kind of wild dog attack, and Tara had got kind of mixed up and confused after hitting her head. Only Anita seemed to believe her.
“Maybe I was wrong,” she said to herself. “Maybe I went a little crazy.”
As she thought over what happened that night, doubting her memory and sanity, the fact that Josh was dead sharpened into crisp reality. Her throat closed up with the abrupt surge of emotion. She wanted to call Anita back when she felt it, the great dark wave of suffering that she had been waiting for. The proof that she was human, that she had feelings like a normal person. And she had been right, thinking about it on the train. She did curl into a ball on her threadbare bedroom carpet. She wept, biting at her knuckles, trying to quiet her sobs as much as possible.
<
br /> September passed, then October. Tara hid from Halloween, telling the half-truth that work was too demanding. The memories did not fade but they did become even more confused. Hope dwindled for Josh, but as the days passed, fewer and fewer people asked Tara if there was any news. Her guilt remained, gnawing at her, so she threw herself into her work. When she wasn’t working, she went running, usually along the canal down the street from the student house.
One dark, drizzly morning in mid-November, she was pounding up the old towpath when she discovered just how much of a mess she still was. The canal banks were overgrown and littered with garbage. Normally, she would run with a soundtrack, but her phone was recharging that morning. This meant she could hear a thrashing sound in the unkempt bushes somewhere behind her. She ignored it; it died away. But then came the skitter of claws on the asphalt path behind her. There was a panting, a growl. She felt a scream rising in her throat just as a voice shouted.
“Dexter! Get back here, you idiot!”
A greyhound ran past her, bounding joyfully along, tongue lolling as it looked up at her. Up ahead, a pigeon took to the air. For a moment, the dog stopped and stood, barking and growling at the bird, then turned and ran back toward its owner. Tara laughed with relief. Once, she would have called to the dog, wanted to pet it. Not now.
I need closure, she thought. I can’t go on like this. Something bad happened, and I need to know the truth about it. And find out who was to blame.
She finished her run and took the torn card from a drawer. Her phone was recharged, and she made the call. She half-expected it to go to voicemail, but instead, she was answered in a couple of rings.
“Always interesting to see an unknown number,” said a surprisingly cheerful male voice.
“Is that Mortlake?” she asked.
“It is! Might that be Tara Pride?”
“Don’t tell me, you’re psychic,” she said.
“No, just playing the odds,” Mortlake replied. “I believe one of my associates left my card for you. It doesn’t happen often, and I don’t get many unknown callers.”
Wolfsbane: Supernatural Suspense with Scary & Horrifying Monsters (Mortlake Series Book 1) Page 2