“I shall,” I said, “though not at your command. But if you won’t tell me anymore about yourself, then tell me about Tilda?”
He sat up so suddenly, unwinding from the ground like a spring, it startled me. There was twenty first century ivy stuck to his medieval sleeve. “Why?” he said. “What have you done? What will you do? And why Tilda?”
I lowered my gaze, knowing his eyes could read me. “Because you may be torturing her and I need to know why.”
He stared a moment at my still bandaged wrist. “What I do, or do not do,” he said at last, “is for me. My decisions are my own.” His voice slid back into its soft menace. All the bright ingenuous smile had quite gone. I was uncomfortably aware that my skirt was bunched around my knees and my arms were bare, and to a medieval man I must have appeared almost naked. But then, he had seen Tilda more naked than I, and touched her without arousal. He did not look at me now, and there was no sign that he cared what I wore. But he said, very softly, “The power is mine now. You may believe you can ignore my commands, but you will find you cannot. I have leeched your control, and will now stand at the portal when I wish.”
Cross and frustrated by his answers, I pointed to the water. “Look,” I said. “Like the devil, you cast no reflection.” But when I looked up for his reaction, he had gone. There was no one there. A dent in the ivy was all he had left behind him
I stumbled home, repeating endless questions in my head.
A thumping headache was zooming up from the back of my neck, circling my forehead and swirling around my eyes. The sun through the trees rebounded like flashing Christmas lights, blinding and reverberating. Before I reached home, I began to heave and felt feverish. I truly expected to enter Tilda’s time. I believed I was losing grasp on dimension and expected to roll immediately from my world to hers. I nearly sat down to wait, but I did not for I felt sick and drugged and drunk and beyond all else, I desired the secure comfort of my own home.
But I was surprised to get as far as my gate and the faded hammock and the big chestnut tree giving blissful shade. I pushed at the front door which was swinging half open, and called Sammie. I called a few times because it seemed strange that there was no answer, neither from Sammie nor from Bertie, though the door had been left ajar. Since the murders, no one left their doors unlocked.
I made tea. The kettle steam quickly became condensation as I buried my nose in the heat of the tea cup. I slumped at the table until the tea was tepid enough to drink. Then I took my cup upstairs with me into the bathroom, kicking off my rubber sandals half way up the steps, hurrying to the vitality of a cool shower and the desperate need to clear my head.
The house was serenely quiet and only my own pattering centred my thoughts in the correct time zone. I kicked the bathroom door open, first right at the top of the stairs.
Sammie was in the bath. The water was cold and it curdled around her like pink milk. Her face was sunken pale beneath the coagulating surface and her two little feet protruded at the other end, toes neatly varnished bright scarlet, like the stripes of blood from her ankles up to shins. Her hands were crossed across her groin, shimmering underwater. She had not been flayed as Isabel and school bus Muriel had. Instead her body had been dissected from neck to navel, all opened like a biological book, its pages wide and the contents carefully detailed.
I reached into the water and took her hand. It wasn’t cold, though the blood formed black ridges between the fingers. Her palm was soft with long submersion. I told her, a hundred times, as I cried and heaved and squeezed her hand, how desperately sorry I was. I knew it was my fault. In my dance between worlds I had opened a gate and Vespasian had found the way through. He had just told me so himself. He had admitted it though I had not understood at the time. I swore to Sammie that I would kill him though it meant me dying too, and Tilda with me. I sat in the pools of bloody water on the tiled bathroom floor and kept crying until all my words became incoherent even to myself.
Fresh blood, old blood, pain and death, they all had their own special stench and together they reeked and I added to it by being sick in my own lap. Then I walked downstairs and phoned the police. I was sitting on my doorstep when they squealed their brakes to a stop under the chestnut tree and came stomping in past me. A young policewoman whose mother lived in the street behind and her garden backed onto mine, kneeled beside me and put her arm around my shoulders. It was sweet of her because I was covered in blood and vomit. Within half an hour I was back in hospital and Sammie was in the morgue.
They gave me a heavy dose of tranquilizers. “I need to talk to the police,” I muttered. “I don’t suppose I can help much, but they’ll want to ask questions, won’t they?”
“There’s time for all that, my dear,” said the nurse, injection poised. “You have to sleep first. A good rest will give you strength to cope with what follows.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Nothing can give anyone that sort of strength.” They had cleaned me up and I smelled of lanolin. The nurse stuck the needle in the flesh of my upper thigh, rolled me back and covered me up. I felt like a small, swaddled puppy. I closed my eyes.
Then the shapes kicked in and I didn’t sleep at all.
Chapter Twenty One
At first the mists of unconscious stupor moved into symbolic shape and darkness. I saw Sammie’s face sunk under the bloody bathwater but then she rose, holding out her arms. Congealed blood and pus had collected around the huge wounds of her upper body but she smiled. I knew what she meant. She was telling me it wasn’t my fault, but she was wrong and I knew better. Though my involvement had never been malicious, the fault still stayed with me and my wanton travelling. I travelled now, floating in billows of scarlet cloud. I clung to intergalactic consciousness and waited to spin down into Tilda’s pain.
“Open the gates at my command,” Vespasian had said. Now I understood. “I sent someone here and then followed her.” He had come for Sammie and I had somehow let him in.
When I landed, Tilda was lying on cold stone. The pain I had expected hit me like thunder. It covered my body with a series of burning and overwhelming horrors. I had never, could never, have imagined anything like this. I lay and shivered helplessly and wondered how I could get out of a body that could no longer bear me. I was stretched unnaturally and could feel the chains looped around my wrists and ankles. I tried to move, and could not. Then I heard noises, whispering voices and the scuffle of movement, and knew I was not alone. My eyes were blind with tears of utter hopeless wretchedness and terrified agony, I could see nothing although my hearing, though faint, seemed clear.
Practical but doubting, the first voice said, “If you continue now she’ll die. You said you wanted to wait for Her.”
“I have control,” said the harsh voice I knew. “The slut won’t die until I give my permission. Not until She is here to see.”
“My lord,” said the woman, “would you have me nurse her back then, ready for the second invasion?”
“No,” said the old man. “The hand’s already healing. This one may have her own secrets. I feel some form of undisciplined power in her that interests me. The broken bone is so quickly mended and see, the burns fade quickly. It’s unusual and even I did not expect –. But the left hand passed through fire. The fire must be preserved but whatever protects her must be stripped of energy. De Vrais may have interfered more than I realised. I’ll see how these latest injuries mark her and how soon they heal. Feed her, but give no other assistance.”
“And Jasper?”
“He won’t dare interfere this time,” said the man. “Since his damned inconvenient escape, I can’t deny him right of precedence for having brought her here. He’s claimed first penetration. The rules must be kept sacred. But I’ll only allow him to play after seeing the initial affects of my experiment. The sacrifice is mine alone and my power is far greater than his. Do you doubt it now?”
A worried hesitancy, and the woman whispered, “But if – just suppose, my lord – if
this is – one of them. The opener’s servant, perhaps. Could it be so? These signs of magic are – surely unexpected. And if Jasper is so interested, there must be a reason beyond simple –”
He was cross and interrupted her. “Fool. Would I not recognise the power of the gatekeeper herself? This is just a pauper’s brat, a slut from London’s gutters. Don’t you remember where we first saw her?”
The woman’s murmur; “I do.”
“Then,” snapped the old man, underlying fury guttural in his throat, “Do you dare suggest I would not recognise the truth? Do you dare suggest Jasper would know when I do not? Do you even dare suggest his power is greater than mine?”
“Never. My lord, forgive me.”
I heard them leave. Then from deep beneath me I heard chanting. It was musical and rhythmic and I thought it beautiful. It gathered up my awareness so entirely that I was no longer conscious of my own body. I felt I changed dimensions. I passed through time as though time itself was symbolic of something far more beautiful.
Great realms of reassurance rolled over me, and years passed, or I passed them. I was rocked, nestled, protected. Removed from sequence. A strange inconsequential happiness cocooned me. Then I tried to lift my hand and at once the pain came back. I was strapped down and could not move and the bed which had once been sweetly comfortable was now hard and cold. The slabs were wet with my own blood and urine. I was spread eagled and chained. A brazier close beside me was hot. It scorched me to one side and I heard the little busy crackle of its flames. I was caught between extremes with heat to my left and seeping cold beneath me. Through the centre where heat met ice, a ridge of splitting pain cut the centre of my groin. I had no idea what they had done to me. I had no idea why. I lay still and tried desperately to lose consciousness once more. But time had imprisoned me again.
Then I was aware of water. I could hear it singing. It became merged with the chanting. Then I felt water surge above me and thought I drowned. But it was Sammie they had murdered under water, it wasn’t Tilda, and I was Tilda, I couldn’t be Sammie too. Other waters tumbled around my ears until everything I heard was an amalgam of waves. I saw the silver pool where Tilda had bathed and where she had told them to bury Richard. I saw the algae pool in the bluebell woods where Vespasian had slipped unasked into my world. I saw the little stream that trickled through my Cotswold village beneath the tiny bridge. I saw white waterfalls and wide brown rivers and last of all I saw the ocean, birth of creation and symbol of spirit.
The sea parted in fountains, and bubbles of dancing golden water began to gather speed around me. I felt strong hands all across my body, exploring, adjusting, bringing together what had been somehow ripped or defiled, as if they could remake a body once desecrated and destroyed. The hands were kind and efficient. They neither trembled nor hesitated. I knew I lay in my own blood, my own vomit and my own urine, but the hands avoided nothing. They were strong palmed, long fingered, and hard ridged. Although I knew they held me and touched me everywhere, even within where decency forbade such intimacy, I felt a surge of utter trust.
A soft voice said, “In the power of water, the fetch of the soul is preserved and inviolate. As it is above, so it is below and I demand the right of birth restored. I summon the sacred purity of merit. With ash, mistletoe and betony, the crossroads shall be shut. The way shall not again be opened by other than myself, and I claim that power now, to make the vessel whole, and to heal her.” It was the magic of the chanting again, but just one steady passage of words and just one voice.
I tried to open my eyes.
“Hush,” said the soft voice, strangely gentle and barely rising above a breath. “I have nearly finished, little one. You will fly soon.”
“So I’m dying?” I whispered. “You mean heaven? Will I fly to paradise?” Then I realised these were just thoughts and I had no strength to speak aloud.
The voice in the water answered my thoughts and said into my mind, “Your escape is not into death but into life.”
“Please,” I thought, since I knew he could hear my thoughts, “please don’t hurt me again.”
“No,” he said, though the words floated away on the rushing tide. “The pain is over now. I will not hurt you anymore.”
There was a light, very bright, growing in my consciousness. It took force from the words I had heard, and though my little world was silent now, the light expanded. It seemed to come at the end of a long tunnel and the tunnel was all water, a parting of the seas into a great passageway of dark blue, muralled with the crawling tendons of reaching things. There, at its vibrant ending, the light continued to beckon. Someone seemed to take my hand and lead me safely through.
Then all the tunnel broke apart, the tentacles wound around me and the light exploded. I heard a spluttering screech of fury and I opened my eyes. Uta was pulling at me, her hands gripping my shoulders and her mouth distorted. Her spit was in my eyes. “You won’t,” she kept screaming at me. “We won’t let you. You can’t get away.”
“I want the light,” I whispered. The light was receding. It had almost faded into silver glow.
I had always thought of her as so pretty and I had wanted to be like her. I had admired her and now she had turned into a maniac, grabbing at me and shouting. Her spit was on my lips. “You’re not going anywhere. You haven’t the power. You’ve been through the fire and the blood.”
“She’s been through the water,” said the voice which had guided me before, though I barely recognised it. Where it had always been so soft that I had hardly caught its words, now the sound was strangely harsh.
Uta twisted around. “You. But you put her through the fire too. You claimed the first rights. I was your witness. You’re one of us.” She grabbed him by the collar, reaching up with her plump little fists and her face heaving in sweat. I could smell all the musky violence of her. “You’re mine.”
“I have never been yours,” said Vespasian and the threat in his voice was cold fury. “Now let her go.”
I don’t know what happened. I was blasted into the white light with an impetus that was suddenly brutal and totally unexpected. I must have lost consciousness at last because I remember only vague flames, the rush of water, an amalgam of blurred faces, and then darkness.
It was only a narrow point of light that penetrated through the darkness. The great white brilliance that had seemed so wondrously healing had left me alone and night had come back. Within the blackness, one solitary star wavered. Once again there were faceless voices in the gloom and I struggled to recognise them. I expected and feared the old man, Uta and her cousin, Vespasian and the room in the tower. I hoped, lurchingly, that it might be Sammie and Bertie – then realised it could not, of all people, be my own cousin. There were several people, whispering around me. Then I knew that my eyes were already open and what I saw was real. The wavering cold star in the night was a little candle flame and it was held unsteadily by a child’s hand.
“She’s coming back,” said Stephen, “I think she can hear us.” The candle moved closer to my face and its spluttering tallow smoked under my nose, making me cough.
“Thank our merciful God,” sighed Hugh.
“Thank Walter,” said Stephen.
It was Vespasian’s house in the forest and it was night and I was lying on Vespasian’s bed with the feather mattress and the woollen coverlets and the duck down quilt, and around me knelt Hugh and Stephen and Osbert; small worried faces in the candle light. I tried hard to say something but my throat hurt too badly and I spluttered and then just looked up at them all, trying to change the grimace of pain into a smile of gratitude. I didn’t have the energy for anything else. Then Walter’s snub nose and dark eyebrows shoved through the other faces, and a smell of something hot and aromatic.
“I expect you just want to sleep, but you have to eat first,” he said, all gruff with worry. “I’ve heated up the pottage Hugh made earlier. It’s really fine with lots of leeks and onions and you have to try.”
&nbs
p; When shaking my head didn’t work and my neck wouldn’t obey my brain, I managed a word. “Can’t,” I said.
Walter grinned. “You have to. After carrying you all the way back here through that interminable forest, I won’t have you die now. Come on, try.”
Hugh put his big flat troll’s hands behind me and lifted me up on the cushions. I flopped like a baby but he supported me. Walter spooned the soup. Because he was right and the heat and substance immediately gave me strength, I managed to eat a great deal more than I had expected. Finally Walter put down the spoon and gave the bowl to Stephen to take away. “Now,” he said. “Is there any chance, even just a few words, to explain what on earth happened to you?”
Didn’t he know? How had they rescued me if they didn’t know? The heat of the soft food in my throat had given me back some of my voice. “Vespasian,” I said. “The castle was his. I was his prisoner. They tortured me. I don’t know what they’ve done to Gerald. But I suppose he’s dead.”
They were all staring at me. “But you were only gone an hour,” said Walter. “You can’t know all that in such a little time. And you weren’t Vespasian’s prisoner. How can you think such things about him? He was the one who carried you up the hill and told us to take you home.”
I didn’t understand and stared back at them in total confusion. “You’re all crazy. I was gone weeks. I don’t know, it was hard to tell, but it must have been weeks.”
“It was an hour,” said Osbert, “or maybe less.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “Tell me.”
“We were hoping you’d tell us,” said Water. “All we know is, once we arrived at the river and saw the big house, there was that terrible storm that just came down from nowhere. We got flung down the hillside and we hung onto some thorn bushes and then we saw you’d disappeared. We were all scratched and bleeding but we managed to sort ourselves out and we started searching for you. Everything was wet and muddy but the sun came out just like the storm had never happened. There was this enormous rainbow, with the colours all shining, like an arc right over the house.”
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