Just Before I Died

by S. K. Tremayne

  Adam’s gaze was insistent. ‘It was just that one drunken, stupid night. No one else knew, no one saw, apart from Jack Bryant, my cousin who drinks down at the Warren – he was there at the Ring that night, he saw her come on to me, he actually saw her pull me into her room. Literally pull me. And he’s kept it a secret ever since: he’s a bit of a bastard but he’s not a total bastard. He’s family. He kept it quiet.’

  Adam ran fingers through his hair, as if he could comb away the guilt. ‘Anyway, as soon as I woke up next morning I bitterly regretted it, totally, totally, because I really was in love with Kath, and I got my clothes on and I left Penny there. Made a vow I would never touch another woman.’ Another deep sigh. ‘But Penny kept coming back for more, after that night. She wanted more from me, a proper affair. She said she was in love. Said I was the spirit of the moor, the Green Man, crap like that, I dunno. She said we would conceive some sacred child. Crazy shit. Mad. So I rejected her. I told her to go away, told her I was in love with Kath, and then I told her Kath and I were engaged and Penny ran off to India, furious, and crazy, maybe she already had the cancer, who knows. And that’s all that happened, Tessa. That’s all that happened. It was one night with a woman who wanted more.’ His voice was low and sad now. ‘And yet it seems I should be condemned, should lose my wife and daughter for one drunken night, at the age of nineteen. Is that right?’

  Tessa was silent. She refused to answer. But inside, she thought: This is a man who is telling the truth. And he was probably right. No one should lose everything for one error, decades past.

  Adam filled the silence. ‘Soon after that, Penny died, she died so quickly. But when—’ Adam shook his head, as if incredulous at his own story. ‘But when me and Dan went to collect the ashes, there were these, like, letters. For me and him. I can guess now what she said to Dan. But the one to me was horrible. Worse. Disgusting.’

  Tessa looked at him, sceptically, but curiously. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Full of hatred. She said she’d got pregnant by me, that one night, and she said she’d aborted the baby. She said that she felt so guilty at what she’d done that she’d killed herself. Really. That’s what she said. And therefore her death was all my fault. It was toxic. Fucking poison. I think she hated me for rejecting her. She wanted to hurt me as much as possible. She wanted revenge on me.’ Adam frowned, his voice growing stronger, angrier. ‘I nearly burned the letter. But I didn’t. And now I’m glad I didn’t. It’s here. Look.’

  Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a crumpled envelope and took from it an old piece of paper. He handed it over. The letter was wrinkled and pale brown with age, the hue of milky tea, but it was still perfectly legible. Tessa read every word, every furious sentence, confirming what Adam said. The letter was written in a fevered scrawl, the mad words of a dying woman. Was this loathing sprung from the cancer in Penny’s head? Or was this wicked madness, this malignance, Penny’s real self emerging?

  ‘See what I mean?’ Adam said. ‘She was nuts. That’s all there is to it. I know Kath really loved her mum, I know Kath still misses her, but Kath doesn’t realize what her mother was actually like: she was a fucking witch, obsessed with sex, and what she could do with sex. She could be downright evil. She liked to hurt, play these cruel mind games, manipulate everyone. And she’s done that all right. She’s done it with those letters, the inheritance, every way she can. By giving the house to Dan and nothing to Kath: she did that to hurt me and Kath. And still her selfishness hurts us all these years later. She’s still destroying us. Was Kath’s suicide bid caused by it all, somehow? I don’t know. I still don’t know.’

  He sat back, and exhaled, his job done. He looked calmer.

  ‘So that’s my confession, Tessa. That’s what happened. I did one stupid thing, as a teenager. I let a manipulative older woman use me, and now we’re all suffering.’

  His phone made a beeping noise. A message arriving. Adam took it from his pocket. And his frown now was not angry: it was mildly alarmed.

  ‘I’ve got to go, sorry. But this is weird.’

  ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Swaling,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘All over? At Cherry Brook, as well? That’s odd.’

  Before Tessa could ask any more, he was up and pacing out the ancient hotel, opening the door to a rush of cold winter wind. A medieval tapestry of Heaven and Hell fluttered in the breeze, making a demon dance with his pitchfork, as if he were, at last, alive.

  Dartmoor

  Tuesday morning

  Adam sped out of Chagford, doing fifty, breaking the speed limit as he swerved around the narrow moorland road. But he didn’t care. Out-of-control swaling could be seriously dangerous. It wasn’t his patch but it was his moor and his friends. He needed to help.

  He was in deep valleys, thick moorland, out of signal; after fifteen or twenty minutes his mobile caught some reception – and he got six or seven pings in a row. Messages. Which had been queued up, and waiting for him. Urgent messages from his friends, colleagues, rangers—

  Trouble in SW now. Sherberton.

  It’s totally out of control, Combestone. Can someone check wind forecast.

  Hexworthy village. Fire reported near church.

  Hexworthy?? That was close to Huckerby – and Lyla, and Kath – far too close. And he was still so far away. He had to go right across the moor. How fast could he risk driving? His hands were damp as he took the curves at dangerous speeds. And then, when he swung the car over another tiny bridge he got another message. With a photo attached. He glanced down at the phone screen and the message nearly made him drive straight into a wall.

  And it was sent about thirty minutes ago.

  Hey Dad,

  I reckon you deserve at least a text. And a photo. Before they die. So here you go.

  I know you don’t know me, but you really should. Because you made me. When you raped my mum. That’s my mum who casually gave me away. Because she is a witch, because they are all witches. That’s why I am going to kill them, kill my sisters, kill and rape your Kath and your Lyla. And I’ll video it for you. OK? I’ll send it to your phone, Dad.

  I’m sending over the first pic. There will be more So you might as well slow down. I know where you’re driving from. But you’re not gonna make it. I did Findyourphone. I know you are in Chagford. You are an hour away You don’t have time to help, Dad. You are too late, Dad

  So say goodbye to everyone, before I cut them into pieces. That’s how they killed witches in Greenland, did you know that? I read it in one of Mummy’s books.

  Adam felt a deep and intense nausea. The photo arrived in his phone with a cheery ping. Adam gazed down in despair. The photo was a selfie. Clearly taken at Huckerby, in the kitchen. The selfie showed Lyla tied to a chair – and standing by her was a half-smiling young man. This man had Penny Kinnersley’s chin, her jaw, the particular set of her mouth, very full-lipped. Generous, even. But everything else screamed Adam. Adam’s hair, Adam’s eyes, Adam’s genes. Almost a doppelganger.

  The young man in the selfie was clearly his adult son by Penny Kinnersley. And he had Adam’s daughter tied to a chair, with a big knife poised at her pale, ten-year-old throat.

  Like she was about to be cut into pieces. This very morning. And this message was old. Adam put his foot to the floor. Eighty miles an hour. Ninety.

  Huckerby

  Tuesday morning

  ‘So here we are again, Katarina.’

  He enters the kitchen as if he has come for coffee and choc-chip cookies. Smiling my mother’s smile. Holding the knife. He points the shining tip of the blade at me.

  ‘Got your mobile?’

  I nod. Mute.

  ‘Slide it across to me.’

  I do what he says. I take the mobile from my pocket, and slide it down the kitchen counter. He picks it up, glances at the screen, reads it, pressing buttons. Looking at the screen very carefully. I wonder if he is using that app. Findyourphone. Working out where Adam might be, clo
se or far. Perhaps he has a hunch already.

  After that he takes out his own phone and types a number, without calling. Then he smashes my phone on the hard wooden surface, shattering it. Pieces of plastic and metal go spinning everywhere, clattering into the sink, on to the floor.

  Now the point of his blade is aimed at the kitchen table. ‘Both of you: sit down.’

  I glance across at Lyla, standing under the calendar, under the snow on Kitty Jay’s grave, red flowers on white. She is perfectly still. The only sign of fear is the trembling corner of her mouth.

  ‘Do as he says, Lyla. Please, darling. Just do what he says.’

  We move towards the table, scrape chairs across the floor. We sit down, slowly. I feel the pressure of the kitchen carving knife in my back pocket as I sit. It’s only thanks to Lyla that I have it, but what chance will I get, against him? He sits there, silent. Waiting, thinking, apparently.

  He is tall, six foot two. Muscled. Well built. Looks older and harder than his years. He must be eighteen or nineteen, though he could pass for twenty-five, even twenty-eight. He looks much older the way his dad looks much younger.

  His dad.

  The last shining fragment of coloured glass is fixed in the lead of that stained-glass window. The whole story is revealed.

  If I was close before, now I see it all.

  My mum must have had a baby by Adam, an illicit baby just like Kitty Jay, and she killed herself, just like Kitty Jay, because she had cancer and couldn’t look after the poor child; and that’s why she asked to be scattered at Kitty’s Jay’s grave. She was impregnated by the Green Man, my man of the moor, my husband.

  My mum was Kitty Jay, but it was not her beauty that she cast away, it was her baby by Adam. This baby was a son. This son is now a man. This man has been camped out on the moor, he has scribbled out my face, he is here for revenge. And now this handsome, jumpy, sinister young man sits across our kitchen table. Waiting, thinking. No one moves. My mind churns.

  Slowly, he leans across the table, opposite us. Smiling all the time. His smile, in its shape, is very much like my mother’s, but now I realize it is also a little like Lyla’s, when she is particularly Aspergery. A hint of a grimace. Fixed and faked, trying to express emotion, or hiding some other emotion.

  ‘Quite a fire, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Worked it out, the other day. How it would help. Cos I saw that Adam was away. Daddy. And I saw they were doing the burning, whatyoucallit, swaling, whatever. I knew this was it. I had to take my chance with you guys. With the witches. Finish what I nearly did at Burrator. Rape you again, the way he raped Mum. Then I will kill you. Cut you both into pieces. No one can reach us through that fire. And I set fires everywhere. They’ll be totally confused. They won’t even know about us, out here, not yet.’

  Lyla is stimming now. Her right hand twirls in the air. The little bird trying to escape.

  He gazes at her.

  ‘You saw me, didn’t you? From a distance. Saw me on the moor sometimes. Saw me in Hobajob’s. Maybe going into the house, stealing stuff? But you couldn’t work it out. Could you? Because I look so much like Dad.’ His smile is hard and glittery. ‘I did this deliberately, Sis, I let you see me, so it would confuse you. Same way I made patterns for you, on the moor, which you could copy, yet not understand. You realize that now, right?’

  Lyla says nothing. I realize I was right: prosopagnosia. Lyla must have the syndrome – but have it mildly, because we’ve not seen it before. Yet her condition was enough to cause all this confusion. Leading us to this kitchen, this day, this desolate scene.

  My brother sighs, in a false way. Then he looks at me. ‘She’s a pretty serious case, pretty far down the spectrum. Have you had her labelled yet? Eh? Got to put a label on her, Katarina.’ He tuts. ‘She’s obviously autistic, Asperger’s, freak with no friends. It’s cruel, letting it go on so long, without a label. Shoulda labelled me. Then maybe I’d have been given some meds. Too late now. Too late now. I told you this. I told you all this in the fucking car. Too late now.’ He looks at me, hard and direct. ‘Don’t you remember? I think you remember it all now, don’t you?’

  And he’s right. I do remember. With the scent of winter honeysuckle in my nostrils, I recall it all. The whole day.

  I was so bored, and so lonely. Days in rainy, wintry Huckerby alone with Lyla, trying to keep her entertained. Then a day when we talked about Kitty Jay, and it got too much. So I sent her off to Auntie Emma, and went to the Two Bridges for a drink, needing the sense of company, of adults, a single glass of wine. Anything. I remember how I sat discreetly in a tiny corner for a few minutes, looking at my silly shred of a poem. And then I was overwhelmed with guilt – the bad, selfish mother, sending her daughter away to go for a drink, in the day? – and I ran out of the pub, barely half a glass later.

  That’s when I saw my brother, but I didn’t want him to see me. Being a bad mum. So I fled: avoiding him.

  After the Two Bridges I went home. Maybe had another glass of wine. And then: an unexpected visit. From a young handsome man, with that knowing, charming smile of my mother. Full-lipped. So very distinctive. Of course, in that face, that stature, that stride there was an even more striking resemblance to Adam. Yet something blinded me to it. Perhaps I was attracted, sexually, without realizing, and the concept was too taboo to acknowledge. Or perhaps it was all too absurd.

  Yet it was all there, hidden in plain sight.

  And he was company for me, and we had more wine, and he seemed so charming. And most of all he had that extraordinary story, an astonishing and beautiful tale, that my mum had a baby, him, Lucas, Luke Kinnersley, a baby that she gave away, and that baby was him: so Luke was my brother, or half-brother, returned from the dead, returned from India, a final gift from my mad, crazy, lovely, quirky mother.

  He didn’t tell me the rest. Didn’t tell me the name of his father. Adam Redway. My mother had so many men, after all.

  We hugged, that afternoon, brother and sister reunited.

  Then he told me he’d come back in the evening, and tell me the rest of his story. Of course he did this because he wanted the cover of darkness for what he intended to do. But I simply got excited. Like a teen. A new brother! A handsome young brother! A handsome young uncle for Lyla! That’s why I told Emma Spalding I was off to see my brother. I wasn’t lying. It’s just that this brother was also Lyla’s brother.

  I got all dolled up and sent Lyla away again. My new brother Luke arrived at nine, asked me to drive us to a place he knew, towards Conybeer’s. And it was there that the atmosphere changed. I began to feel menaced, to feel his strangeness.

  That’s when the knife came out and Luke forced me to drive on. And as I did, he told me the rest of his poisonous story, so painfully, obviously true. How my dying mother had given him to hippies in the ashram, idiots, druggies, pyjama people, vain silly dreamers like Mum, who gave him a half-hearted home schooling, let him drink at ten, smoke weed at eleven. Neglected him the rest of the time. They had sex parties in the house, him wandering around, unwashed. Unwanted …

  And now my mother’s younger son speaks. Here. In the kitchen, as the smoke of the swaling drifts under the front door.

  ‘You finished working it out?’ He grins. But it is a sad grin. I feel almost sorry for him. For what he can’t help doing.

  ‘Nearly,’ I say. And I am not lying. I am fitting the final pieces in place.

  When we were in the car, by the winter honeysuckle, he also told me how, at the age of fifteen, his behaviour got so bad that his feckless adoptive parents threw him out, abandoned to the world, with a letter from his real mother. A letter waiting for this very moment, a letter telling him the truth. That he was the product of a rape. By a man named Adam Redway who lived in Dartmoor, Devon, England, Great Britain.

  Go and take revenge.

  And so, in the end, he came back to take revenge on Adam. To rape his wife, kill the kid, do the worst.

  But even as I sit here, paralysed with t
error, feeling the painful sharpness of the blade in my back pocket, I wonder: did Adam really rape her? My supposedly funny, lovely, selfish, promiscuous mother? I remember the way she used to look at my handsome boyfriend and suddenly I wonder if she came on to Adam. All those nights she would spend in Chagford, in the same pubs, buying drinks for everyone, including Adam, even as I was back in Exeter, studying and revising, so diligently and naïvely, in my Halls of Residence?

  As if he can read my thoughts, Luke speaks.

  ‘You remember the rape, Kat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Cos I have a question. Did you come? I’ve wondered ever since. I mean, I know I was a bit, like, forceful, I know I had to open your legs up, get at your fucking pussy, with a knife to your throat, but …’ He tilts his head. ‘All that quivering, though? You can’t fake that.’

  He goes quiet. Lyla’s hand trembles in mid-air and I try to disguise my own trembling. He looks as if he is truly enjoying our fear in these last moments, relishing our terror. He hasn’t come to talk much more. He’s certainly come to rape me again. And probably Lyla too. After that he will obviously murder us both. He wants the worst kind of revenge on Adam. Killing Adam wouldn’t ever be enough.

  I wonder if he really believes we are witches. My mum always wanted to believe in witches.

  Luke turns, and winks at Lyla. Now he is cheerful, funny, rapscallion Uncle Luke. Who is also her half-brother. Uncle Luke with his knife, with which, very soon, I am sure, he will slit my daughter’s throat.

  I see it, in my mind, quite vividly. I see him lift her up by her black hair, slice that shining blade across her little white throat, making her blood squirt across the kitchen table. Her body slumping on to the floor, bleeding out, like that sheep at Vitifer Leat. Blood dripping on to earth, slowly, slowly, slowly; a sequence of miniature red jewels.