by Helen Slavin
* * *
Winn was more used to patching up hedgehogs and applied much the same principles to patching up Emz. The cuts on her face felt raw and most of her ached. She had no idea how she had got back to reception.
“You are a bit spinny-headed… not surprising considering…” Winn winced as she dabbed at Emz’s face. Emz looked down at her clothes, torn and smirched with woodland detritus, a smear of mould, streaked mud. She couldn’t move her right arm, she reeled a little at the thought. “Anyway… you made a bloody good fist of chasing the punchy twat off the premises… did you fall?” Winn quizzed her.
“Yes. Yes. I must… must have.” The remembrance of Tighe Rourke rushed at her. Once more she felt a compulsion to head to Cob Cottage. She stood up. Winn pushed her back down.
“Don’t know where you think you’re going.” She pushed hard fingers into her shoulder, Emz winced, Winn pulled a face. “We’ve got to pop that shoulder back in before I take you home.”
* * *
Gathered at the table at Cob Cottage, the Way sisters looked the worse for wear. Seren Lake was not crying, she was silent, a deep muteness and her eyes, Charlie noted, were black, there was no way to tell between the iris and pupil, just sorrowful black holes.
“You think he’s gone?” Anna asked Emz “He ran off? That’s what you remember?”
“He left you for dead.” Seren whispered. Emz shrugged deeper into her grandmother’s black raincoat and felt the ache in her shoulder sing through her. She hitched her arm tighter into the makeshift sling Winn had rigged for her.
“I only half remember. I was… a bit spinny-headed by then, I don’t know how I got…” Emz’s brain was still picking over the broken bits of the information to try and find the sense. It was failing. For now. “I thought he’d head back here. Seemed like a possible plan for him.”
“He thought he’d pick us off. Me. Then you. Then…”
“Back here…” Anna’s voice drifted with the knowledge.
“He’ll wait until dark.” Seren spoke. Her voice as dark and hollow as her eyes. “I told you. There’s no way to end this.”
“Oh, there is… he thought he’d try and pick us off… Ha. Second best he’s had already. If he comes here tonight he’s…” Charlie started the sentence but couldn’t finish it.
“We’ll get the police. That’s the thing to do. Call them out here. Scare him off.” Anna did not sound convinced, could not, in fact, look up at any of them. Seren looked at her, her face set, decided.
“There’s no way to end this.”
“There is…” Anna began but Seren cut her off.
“Yes. I can let him kill me and hope that the picture they show of me on the news is a good one…” Seren was rattled, the tension vibrating out of her, her voice spiralled away into small sobs of frustration, “… one where I’m at a wedding and looking cheery.” Through the doors the sound of the lake lapping at the shore whispered in.
“He’ll never give up. The only way to end it, is if we kill him…” Seren’s voice was hoarse, hiccupped with tears.
“We can’t kill him,” Charlie said. She did not sound defeated and her gaze turned towards first Emz, then to Anna. Their eyes locked. There was a long silence and then Anna spoke.
“But we can kill you,” said Anna, her voice low and dark and practical.
24
Best Laid Plans
The plan shifted and distorted itself as it was verbally rolled around the table at Cob Cottage. Every action against Tighe Rourke had to take place within the boundaries of Havoc Wood, that much seemed clear.
“Everything Grandma Hettie did for her guests and visitors was here… right here at the lake.” Charlie pushed the point. Since her too close encounter with Tighe she had found flash memories of lakeside days ebbing into her head.
“We’re strongest here,” Anna stated the fact that had been waiting at the edge of all their minds. Despite the troubles with Tighe all three sisters felt better than they had in almost a year. An energy was building inside them, invigorating and scary in equal parts. They were together, and they were at Cob Cottage and that was a good place to start from. Seren too, did not seem flustered by her role as, essentially, bait.
“I’d rather be bait than prey… at least as bait there’s a chance of springing the trap…” She was glowing with energy.
“It would help if we knew where he was…” Anna mused. Emz jumped in.
“I could head up to the backpacker’s hut, check it out, see if he’s still camped out there.” The memory of her confrontation in the wood was distorted in places. She could see Tighe running away, but she could also see him looking beyond her, to something that frightened him. Shocked him. She pushed the thought away because she could not mentally turn in the memory and see whatever it was that Tighe had seen. This line of thinking linked to her sense of someone else being inside her head. She wanted to clear that feeling and a patrol of Havoc Wood would do that. “I could maybe make a patrol of the woods… up on the ridge where he stashed his stuff before.”
“Not on your own, I could come with…” Anna nodded her head, stood up to fetch her jacket. “Charlie, you stay with Seren… give us an hour.”
Charlie shook her head.
“What is it?” Anna asked. Charlie took in a deep breath and held it. She was considering, her eyes glanced over each woman and then she let out the breath heavily as she turned to the kitchen. She was rummaging along the counter, picking up the box of teabags, putting them down, discarding half a packet of biscuits, a box of eggs, opening and closing the drawers.
“What are you looking for?” Anna asked. Charlie did not answer. Instead she appeared to have a sudden important thought and turned off into the small pantry. There were clinks and chinking sounds and the scrape of the step stool legs on the flagged floor before she returned with a jar of green lentils, one that their Grandma Hettie had shoved long ago to the back of the top shelf where the small round window arched downward.
Seren and the sisters watched Charlie as she tugged at the wire clip closure on the jar. As Charlie took out a handful of lentils and put them on the table they tumbled and slid and made a shushing sound that was almost the twin of the sound the lake was making beyond them. They made a small speckly green mound. Seren and the other Ways watched Charlie. She peered hard at the little mound.
“What are you doing?” Emz asked. Charlie looked pinched, her lips folding tight on themselves as her fingers swiped at the lentils. If before they had looked like a squashed toad, now they looked like a sloughed snake, a trail of tidy green edible pebbles that someone was going to have to tidy away. She bit at her lips, tidied the lentils into something resembling a square.
“What is it?” Anna asked. There was something about what Charlie was doing that had set a distant bell chiming in her head. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” Charlie’s voice was hard and small. Her fingers smoothed and roughed up the lentils, the sound scratched, then pattered. Charlie covered her eyes and then uncovered them. “But I’m doing it wrong.”
Emz felt something twinge in her memory, like a gate opening only she couldn’t quite see where. Her hand reached up involuntarily as if turning a page. “Oh… I reme—” Her voice was small and neat and eight years old once more and all the answers were right there on the very outermost edge of her head and you needed mental binoculars to look and as she thought that, focus pulled.
“The maps.” Emz let the sounds out, the words falling as if straight from the past. As she said it Charlie started, her hip knocking the table, the kilner jar of lentils wobbled heavily left, decided on turning right and tipped itself off into air.
The jar bounced on the rag rug and rolled under the table as the lentils spewed out like a lava flow. In a second, everyone was activity: Seren crouching to reach for the jar by her feet, Anna stepping around to reach for the dustpan. Only Emz stayed still, her hand pointing, her face on Charlie but her mind visiting som
ewhere from a long time ago. Charlie held up her hands.
“Don’t move.” Everyone stopped moving, Seren standing with the jar as if it was an offering. Anna holding onto the old dustpan as its compatriot brushed across her memory.
Charlie almost didn’t dare to look down. She wasn’t looking. That was the answer to this. Stop looking. Just see it.
The lentils made a beautiful map of Tighe Rourke’s current destination. She saw in one swirl of pulses where he had attacked Emz and she saw his path since then picked out, the tiny discs plotted and charted his progress across the rug.
“He’s here at Havoc. He’s coming. Through the trees. At Badger Hollow.”
The sisters, triangulated around the table from each other, felt the air shift, their minds locking together as, freed at last, memories hurtled upwards like a flock of jackdaws.
* * *
Once upon a time it was a rainy day.
Anna, Charlie and Emz had been down at Cob Cottage for weeks because it was the summer holiday and their mother was busy with black holes. In fact, they had seen so little of Vanessa that Anna had joked that perhaps she had created one and disappeared into it.
Anna had been almost fifteen then, Charlie was about ten and Emz who, despite only just having turned four, would be going to school for the first time in a few weeks. The weather had been bad most of the time except that Hettie Way had taught her granddaughters that there was no such thing as bad weather, only different weather.
“Wet or dry…” Anna had intoned, and Grandma Hettie pulled her tongue out, playful.
“The sound of the rain on the roof, Anna…” Grandma pointed out, her eyebrows raising up into her hairline. There was a moment between them, something matched up as it always did with Grandma Hettie, and Anna spoke back.
“The smell of the earth after rain.”
“The sound the wind makes in the trees,” Emz joined in and Charlie followed after with:
“The light of snow.”
“Snowmen… snowballs…” Emz crowed.
“Lightning! And thunder.” Charlie made her voice rumble. Anna rolled her eyes at them all.
“Alright, I get it. Good point… well made…” Anna teased. “So, we’re heading out for a rainy walk then?”
“Yes.”
And they’d got their coats on. And the rain rained. And rained. And as they walked they could barely see where the water ended, and the land began and Emz recalled how tightly her grandmother had held onto her hand.
“You know Gran…” Anna’s voice was whipped away from them so that she sounded as if she was talking from far away “… it’s really pishing down now… I think… we might… we should go back…” It was getting hard to breathe. Emz felt the rain like cold fingers rolling down the hood of her cagoule and her feet were squishing, her socks like sponges and her grandmother holding so tight it was almost hurting.
“We keep on.” There was something determined in their grandmother’s voice. “Keep on and keep close…”
“But Gran it’s…” Anna stopped. She could see how intent her grandmother was, she was not just looking at the view, she was watching out. She was looking for someone.
“Which way Charlie?” Grandma Hettie touched Charlie on the shoulder softly, safely. Charlie looked into the rain and then pointed across the water.
“Over there,” she answered, matter of fact.
“Is this about the Strengths?” Anna’s voice pulled forward through the water and was like a whisper beside their ears, close and comforting. Grandma Hettie nodded, and they began to walk.
The man was face down on the stones, the water nudging at his boots as if testing whether he could be roused. They turned him over, Grandma Hettie and Emz knelt beside his fish-white face.
“Is he breathing?” Anna stepped forward to reach for his neck, find a pulse. His skin was clammy and cold but as she touched him he took in a rasping watery breath, his eyes shuttered open, his eyes, the brightest green Anna had seen, ever. A riffle shuffle of images rushed through her head, of walls, iron gates, a heavy oak door slamming so hard it sent a shockwave that forced her backwards like a blow, so she almost lost her footing. Grandma Hettie let go of Emz’s hand for just a moment to steady Anna, and in that moment Emz knew what must be done and she reached for the man, her little hand going to his chest and she could see all the forest in his eyes, all of Havoc Wood as if she was running and running through it and it was breathless and sunny and Emz let the lovely feeling wash through her, the energy of it and she could feel his heart then, stuttering and cold and she knew that all she must do was squeeze here, push there.
The man took in another breath, deep and sounding like the wind now, whistling through him, in, out, in before he struggled to sit up, his skin still pale, his clothes soaked. Grandma Hettie took hold of Emz’s hand, squeezed it once.
“Come far?” Grandma asked, the man looked around startled, scrabbling to his feet now, looking at the girls, last of all at Emz, peering out from under the curtain of rain that poured off the edge of her hood.
“Far enough.” His voice raspy and dry and, with a sudden movement, he ran off into the trees.
“Where’s he going?” Grandma Hettie seemed to speak to no one in particular but Charlie answered, assured.
“East of Frog Pond… up by the stand of birches.”
Anna and Emz looked at their sister, then all three looked at Grandma.
“Do we have to follow him?” Charlie asked.
“What do you think Anna?” Grandma Hettie turned and looked at her eldest granddaughter. Anna looked caught out, considered for a moment. “Don’t be afraid of it…” their grandmother said. There was another moment between them, eyes locked, Anna thinking hard.
“If we’re asking the question we already have the answer,” Anna answered.
Grandma nodded, mopping her hand up her forehead so that the wet fringe of hair slicked back over her head.
“And what’s the answer, Anna? Just for future reference here, girls…” she squeezed Emz’s hand again, smoothed at Charlie’s shoulder.
Anna could see an image clearly, of the man skinning through the trees further into the wood and his arms reached and his body lunged, and he lifted into the branches and was out of sight. And she knew that she was glad he was gone, glad that they didn’t need to follow him. “If we had to follow him we would know. We’d already be following him,” she said, confident.
“Exactly.” The grey linen scarf Grandma Hettie always had tied around her neck was black now with rain. “Time to go back. I think you Watchers deserve a cup of tea and some cake.”
They walked back to Cob Cottage, the rain still pounding. Still. More. Soaking.
“Who was he?” Anna asked as they cut up the cake. Emz was busy colouring by the window, Charlie was curled up with a book. Charlie could not read the book, exciting as it was, because her sister’s question made her think of the man running and the words on the page shifted and distorted into a map, showing where he was, where he was headed. It was both frustrating and interesting and finally she just settled in to watch the map shift because she understood that when he got where he needed to be, the map would become her book again and she could continue reading. It was fast, reflecting his speed as he moved up through the eastern tracks, not using the tracks that were trodden, finding his own path, she could tell that by the way it was pictured. This was a way only he knew and used, and she liked that, that she was in on his secret. She saw Frog Pond then, the dank mossed rocks and the print shifted across the page into words once more.
“Shouldn’t we tell someone?” Anna sounded like their mum.
“He was heading home. That’s all. He’d come a long way through rough terrain.” Charlie said, not lifting her eyes from the page. Anna looked at her sister, then back at her grandmother. Grandma Hettie smiled and licked jam off her fingers, put the plate of scones down onto the table. She could feel her granddaughter looking at her.
“Headi
ng home? He wasn’t even in outdoor clothes. What had happened to him?”
“He’d crossed the lake, that’s all. We just have to watch out for those crossing the lake, sometimes.” Grandma Hettie said, “It’s our job.”
Anna had a strong feeling that she ought to know something, that there was a fact, something simple and clean, sitting at the edge of her head. It flashed into view.
“He didn’t have a boat. Did he…swim?”
Grandma looked at her.
“Did he?” she batted the question back. You always had to think so hard with Grandma Hettie. Anna thought of the green of his eyes, the shock of it had made her take a step back. A particular shade that recalled something in her mind. Something not good.
“No…” she couldn’t say more. She could see him moving along a pebbled road, with a green sky above him, a silver light lashing across like ripples, except he wasn’t walking, he was running. Away. She looked up at her grandmother.
“What do you see Anna? I’ve asked you before… a long time ago when you were little… do you remember?”
Anna thought hard, something glittered at the edge of her mind and stepped forward, a memory from a day long ago, before Emz was born. A woman that had come to Cob Cottage and stayed for a few hours, resting, and Anna had said she must stay the night. It had been very important that she stay, Anna could remember the feeling she had had, the fear and the certainty of danger if the woman left. Grandma Hettie had listened to her. The woman had left the next morning.