Just Before I Died

by S. K. Tremayne

  I get the sense of an evil, returning, a sudden rotten evil that is so intense, I think am going to be sick. In the car. I don’t want to be sick in my own car. Kicking open the car door, I stumble out into the cold air, taking deep breaths, nearly retching.

  Gasping in my fear, I lean back against the stone wall, beyond the gate. Closing my eyes for a moment, I hear the cawing of crows. When I open my eyes I feel like a hunted animal, as if I am being watched. By the man on the moor. Or from the barns under Black Tor.

  Ahead of me I glimpse a sign, one of those Dartmoor signposts that gets lost in the undergrowth, and slowly becomes part of the foliage. One of the arms of the sign points ahead, through the gate. It says BURRATOR. The other says DRIZZLECOMBE. Beyond the gate I see there is a grassy parking space, and yes, at the other end of the space, half hidden by gorse, a moorland road begins again – another tiny, barely used lane, winding up a hill.

  So it appears you can get to Burrator from here. And therefore it is possible I came this way when I supposedly tried to kill myself. When I was with Adam. Or Adam’s double. We were arguing.

  Perhaps I found out what he did to my mum, that made her think him evil.

  Yet still the leap from all this to suicide – or murder – is way too much.

  I would have simply left Adam, if I’d discovered he was not the man I knew and loved. We’d have separated. Surely.

  The roads still lead nowhere. I am still lost.

  Yet I have a vision of myself, staring up at that sign to Drizzlecombe.

  And I was definitely staring up. Why would I be staring up at it?

  An idea occurs to me. Perhaps I am looking at that standing stone from the wrong angle. Turning to the horizon, I tilt my head left, and right, and get nothing. And then, with a cold and profound shudder, I understand the perspective I need.

  Lying myself down on the cold mud, uncaring of the dirt and wet, I stare across from this new vantage: and now I clearly recognize the shape of the stone. This is how I saw it. From flat on my back, looking up.

  And I was flat on my back because I had been dragged from the car, and I was being raped.

  Drizzlecombe

  Monday morning

  Lying here, on the cold Dartmoor soil, I close my eyes, and I can picture almost the whole thing. Someone above me, furious, shouting, laughing. A handsome blue-eyed man. Adam. And he is raping me, beside my car, in this place where I saw the standing stones. I remember a struggle in the car, a knife at my throat, being dragged by my hair. My legs being forced apart.

  My own husband?

  I sit up, abruptly. The heaving in my stomach starts again. I place a cold, shuddering hand over my mouth. It is as if my body wants to expel the truth, this toxic memory. Someone raped me here. It certainly feels like it was Adam. And then what? Where did he go? Did he leave me here, beaten, unconscious? Perhaps I woke, and he was gone, and in shock or horror, I got back in the car and drove to Burrator. And looked at the deep black waters, strafed by the winds of winter, and decided I could no longer live.

  But I still do not comprehend this final movement – I cannot bear to believe – that I could do that to my daughter, even if that was done to me.

  I survive, I get by, I cope: it’s what I do. I would have gone to the police, not to the reservoir, to take my own life. Unless I am a much weaker, sadder, more fragile person than I thought. Unless Adam, if it was him, not only raped me, but did something else. Perhaps he told me something so bad, it tipped my already unbalanced mind into self-destruction. Perhaps he raped me in revenge for something I had done.

  The footpaths stretch across the moor, mazy and unmappable, ancient and modern, they march in all directions: from tor to leat, from combe to lake, from the stones of Stalldon Row to the firing ranges on Willsworthy, to the great old alignments I see here.

  Drizzlecombe.

  It’s a part of the moor I have never visited. So very very remote. Yet it seems I came here on 30 December: presumably my rapist chose it for its total, silent isolation, a perfect place for his purposes, there are no houses for miles, the roads are barely passable. No chance of witnesses. No one to see what he did.

  The acid taste in my mouth is vile. I want to spit it out yet I sense that won’t get rid of it. The cold is acute: my fingers are numb as I get to my feet, open the car door, start the engine and retrace my route, past Conybeer’s ruined stables, past the Spaldings’ farmhouse. The windows are dark, the house looks empty; I guess they are still having their break in London. As I drive, I look to the right, beyond Black Tor. Great lines of smoke from the swalings rise behind it, as if the entire moor has been ripped open, revealing the fires of the earth always raging beneath us.

  Slowing the car, I gaze through a break in the tumbledown dry-stone wall. I can see the barns that stared at me when I drove home that night. As if they knew me. The ones Lyla talked about. I saw Daddy by the barns under Black Tor.

  I sense I am close to the very last facts, and I desperately need them, because once I have made the final accusations everything will be broken. I have to be sure.

  Stopping the car, the engine dies and the moorland silence engulfs. Climbing out, I zip myself as warm as I can and, ignoring my shrieking fears, begin my march across the moors, towards those ruined barns.

  The smell of the swaling taints the air. Burnt gorse and dead birds. Smoke billows to the grey chilly sky; I hear shouts in the distance as the farmers manage the dangerous burning. Shouting and beating, shouting and beating. Dartmoor people are not easily deterred from their ancient traditions. Like my husband.

  Now the anger begins. My first reaction was shock, but now I feel anger. If it was Adam, I won’t let him win. He didn’t kill me that night; he shall not win now. I won’t let him do to me whatever he did to my mother.

  The barns are barely a mile away. But the moor beneath my feet has turned to mire, the grass to silvery water. If I sank to my knees in this, I’d be in trouble. This is impassable. I will have to go right, climb the nearest hill, go the long way round.

  The wind bites as I haul myself over a row of stones, and scramble up the next pile of wind-sawn rocks. It’s an impressive tor, a serious crag of cracked and battered granite; but I like the exertion: it stops me thinking. Of the future. Of Lyla without a father.

  One more heave, one more handhold – on a cold spur of quartzy granite – and I attain the top of the tor. It’s high enough to give me a view beyond the moor: the glimmer of the distant coast, which drags the rivers from these moors.

  I must go down to the barns.

  Gathering myself, fighting my fear and fury, which come at me from both sides, I stamp down the hill. I am running now, running off the anger, running like the Dartmoor ponies, leaping from tump to tump, jumping the puddles.

  Here we are. I am approaching the first ruined barn. The swaling smoke drifts like poisonous mist between the buildings.

  Fear tightens itself around me: telling me not to look inside this hulk of a building, with its black and glassless windows, like the gouged eyes of that hare in Hobajob’s. But I have to know. So I push at the door, which creaks on ancient hinges. I allow myself one moment of hesitation, to quell my fears, and I step inside.

  The stench of mould and damp is oppressive. Finger to my nose, I gaze around. There is a bird’s nest in a corner. Shattered eggs. Droppings. But no sign of humanity. Nothing.

  Something.

  I can hear the screech of something alive. The noise is sudden, loud, strange. I turn, terrified. It’s a big crow, flying in through the window, not expecting me, a crow nearly in my face, black feathers in my eyes, hysterical, frightened. The bird flutters away, half falling to the floor. I wonder if it is hurt but it screeches again, and flees out of the window.

  I stand, taking deep cold breaths, sensing that the whole moor wants me to leave. The winter birds are trying to frighten me away; but I will not be deterred.

  Dabbing my face, checking there is no blood, I step outside.
A stronger, colder breeze stirs the pelt of the land. In the hints of winter sun the silver-green mires seem to move like something enormous struggling into life.

  The next barn waits. I must try them all.

  This neighbouring barn is a little bigger, yet it has much smaller windows; one of the windowpanes is intact, the glass unbroken, though choked with dust and cobwebs and dead spiders. The door also appears to be in better condition, perhaps because it has been used recently.

  A strange sensation grips me as I push against it. As if someone wants me to enter this hulk of a building. As if I am being manipulated.

  Turning quickly, I scan the faraway hills and rolling moors. The road to Huckerby. There is no one in sight.

  Swallowing my irrationality, ignoring my cowardice, I twist the squealing doorknob.

  Inside it is very dark, because the windows are so tiny. It is also deeply cold. I can barely see a thing. I want to leave at once, yet I sense a human presence. Someone has been here. No ghost. Someone real.

  The scent of mould is not quite as pungent as in the other barn. The floor is cold and hard, plain concrete, perfectly dry.

  My eyes slowly adjust to the darkness.

  There is a sleeping bag in the corner. It looks new. At the end is a pillow made of a second sleeping bag. Someone has clearly been bedding down here. Rough camping.

  Hikers? Shepherds? Adam? Possibly it is soldiers: they use the moor for training: Get from Yelverton to Okehampton, use what shelter you can, carry everything on your back. Fifty pounds of kit.

  Yes, soldiers – that makes sense. Stooping to the sleeping bag, I examine the material. It looks quite serious, designed for low temperatures. So that could be military kit. By the pillow there is a plastic Aldi shopping bag. Picking it up, I look inside, and see a couple of apples. Fresh. Unrotten.

  Someone has been here in the last day or two.

  Under the bag is a single, sad-looking book. In Watermelon Sugar, it says, on the front. I’ve never heard of it. It looks old, secondhand, well worn, much loved; in the darkness of this freezing, half-ruined barn, I can just about make out the cover: a monochrome picture of a bearded man sitting on a railway track.

  He looks sad. As sad as the apples in the shopping bag, as sad as the dead spiders in the window. The whole thing, this place, my mind, the moors, it all sings with sadness. My broken family, my broken life: how will I protect Lyla now?

  Calming myself, I open the book. The spine is old and the pages part immediately: falling naturally open, to reveal a photo, loosely inserted either as a bookmark or as a way of protecting the image.

  It is an old colour photo, very faded, tending to sepia. In this meagre light I can’t quite make out the faces. But something about this group of figures chills me, something about the house behind the people in the photo, the sensation of this thing in my hand. I know what it is, and it fills me with dread.

  Stepping to the unbroken window to make use of the grey winter light, I lift the photo close.

  I am looking at a picture of my mother. She is about thirty-six or seven, smiling in a summer dress, painfully dated, yet so new then. The house behind is Salcombe. It must be a sunny day: shadows are deep and rich. There are two children with her on either side of her. On the left is my brother. And on the right, is me.

  The photo trembles in my hand.

  I must be about nine. Roughly Lyla’s age. I’m not entirely sure, because the face – my face – has been viciously scribbled out with black ink.

  A doodle of hate. Erasing me.

  Huckerby

  Tuesday morning

  This seems to be where I will spend the rest of my life, standing at the sink, gazing out of the kitchen window. Gazing at the cold and muddy yard, remembering when Lyla laid out all those dead birds. Perhaps that is when it all began, or when it all began to go wrong. Perhaps my daughter cast a Dartmoor spell on us all that afternoon, a hex made of bird bones and icy feathers.

  She’s out there now, playing with the dogs, throwing a stick up the lane into the Dartmoor fog. She refused to go to school this morning, for perhaps the first time in her life: she said she was too sad about Daddy.

  I didn’t have the heart, or the strength, to argue with her and, in truth, the last thing I wanted to do was drive through that fog to dismal Princetown, then go to do another pointless half-day of work in the National Park Office when I can do the very same work from home, and be close to my daughter, which is where I want to be. I feel an urgent need to protect her.

  ‘Catch, Felix, catch!’ Lyla seems cheerful enough, hurling the stick from one side of the yard to the other. The delighted dogs are even happier, gnawing and shaking the stick until the rat in their heads is surely dead.

  Opening the door, I call out to my girl, ‘Don’t stay out there too long, will you? That fog is freezing.’

  She does not turn, she does not respond. She’s in her special place: focused on Felix and Randal. I try again, calling her; I don’t want to go out there, I haven’t got any shoes on. ‘Lyla.’

  The stick is hurled towards the rowans. Lyla jumps up and down as the dogs canter away.

  ‘Lyla!’

  At last my daughter stops, tilting her head my way. Her face shows confusion. Then she gives me another strange smile. As if she is wearing a mask of her own face. ‘Mummy?’

  ‘I said, please don’t stay out there too long. This weather, it’s freezing, I know you don’t mind the cold, but …’

  I gaze at the fog. It’s a killer even by Dartmoor standards: a cold, damp sky come down to smother us. To hide us all, each from the other.

  ‘No, Mummy, I promise.’ The grimace has gone. Now she looks blank, expressing nothing at all. She picks up the stick. I can see her quietly talking to herself: her lips are moving, but she says nothing aloud. She does this more often every day. She will say a sentence, then quietly – silently – her lips move afterwards, forming words that only she can hear. I don’t know if she is checking her own sentences, or silently contradicting herself. Or casting more spells over Huckerby.

  The fog is so intense that I can barely see her now even though she is fifty yards away. She and the dogs are mere shapes in the grey, figures from a dream already half-forgotten, and her voice is muffled by the damp.

  ‘Felix, Randal! Over here.’

  Closing the kitchen door, I lean against the warmth of the iron stove. And now the storming questions return. Who is out there on the moor? Who had that photo of me and my mum and Dan? Why is my face the one scribbled out so viciously? I look at my phone on the kitchen table. It is inert. I’ve turned it off.

  Adam has been trying to ring me all morning, since 8 a.m. Probably he wants to apologize for his ranting. Perhaps he wants to rant some more, to threaten me. Maybe he wants to admit to me what happened with my mother.

  I have no desire to talk to him. Until I know what I am doing. Soon I will have to go to the police: I simply must. But what is my accusation? I have a vivid memory of being raped. I have no proof. Just a fragment of returning memory: which is probably of my husband. Probably. Also I think someone who knows me, or knows of me, has been camped not far away, on the moor. That could also be my husband. And my probably-autistic daughter is still predicting a death by a song that no one taught her. And, by the by, I hallucinated the ghost of my mother on the moor the other day, and heard her dead voice in a church.

  And, yes, all this was after I possibly tried to commit suicide, for reasons I still cannot deduce. Leaving behind a daughter who is pathologically incapable of identifying her father.

  I can picture the policewoman’s face as I deliver this incoherence. She will sit there with her recorder, and she will politely shake her head, and turn the recorder off. They will think me a madwoman. And I will have accused my own husband of rape, with no evidence, and Adam and I will split, and my daughter will be damaged further, perhaps broken forever.

  Deep down, Lyla still adores her daddy. She wants him back. I know this. A
nd if we split, we would have to live in some grisly flat in Princetown. It’s all I could afford on my income. Or in a tiny studio flat in Salcombe, where my brother and sister-in-law have their own divorce drama, and I will make things worse.

  I’m entirely stuck, like one of those hikers, trapped in the sucking black mud of Fox Tor Mire, the tourists that Adam has to rescue on a weekly basis in the summer. I am up to my waist, and every time I try to struggle free, to work out the problems, I sink further into confusion and fear.

  Because I am also very scared.

  That photo I found on the moor. The way my face was so violently erased. Someone hates me, for reasons I don’t know. I sense that danger closing in, faster now.

  Picking up my mobile, I switch it on, counting the damned seconds as it slowly comes to life. There is no signal at all. My stupid mobile. My dumb, feeble signal. So I cross the kitchen and put my feet into chilly wellington boots and I go out into the frigid yard. I can hear my daughter, and the dogs, but they are entirely lost in the fog, up the wintry lane.

  Who do I call? Why don’t I have more friends?

  Because I chose to lead a solitary life, to move down here with my husband and Lyla. Because we exiled ourselves: quite happily at first. Now I am not happy. Now I need to call someone. Anyone.

  I stare at the phone in my hand. Only one name comes to mind. I press the keys; she answers at once, as if she has been waiting for me.

  ‘Tessa?’

  ‘Oh my God, Kath! Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, yes I’m fine.’

  ‘Dan told me about all about it, Lyla running away. Everything. You know you could have called me, any time since?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I shrug, inwardly. ‘I’ve been kind of hibernating, hiding away in denial. Avoiding people. It’s all so difficult, Tessa, you know.’ I don’t want to say I’ve become suspicious of everyone, including Dan, including her, however unfairly. So I wait for my words to catch up with my thoughts. ‘Did Dan tell you what Lyla said, to her dad?’