She drove herself on with thought alone, moving in playful turns and spirals, soaring to great heights one minute and dropping like a stone the next. She dived to skim the surface of the river, following its course as it weaved around bends, dipped under bridges and dropped over gurgling falls. After a few minutes the pain had reduced enough for her to be able to make it home. She rose into the air and turned back, not wanting to leave her body in the meadow any longer than was necessary. It was then, on the crest of her turn that she saw something strange.
Whispers
Rinker’s Point was a high pasture between Agelrish wood and Galleran Forest. It was at this green expanse she stared, trying to make sense of the strange disturbance that sped across its surface. She could easily have missed it; so closely did it match the colour of the grass over which it moved. At first she thought it was a trick of the wind – the way it sometimes swept across an open field like an invisible hand, flattening the grass. But she soon realised what she was seeing was the exact opposite of a sweeping impression. It was more like a travelling bulge. She flew down to get a better look and its true form jumped out from its surroundings. It was a man shaped figure that appeared to be made of the pasture itself - as if a patch of grass had decided it was no longer content to lie with the rest and had uprooted itself to run away. She looked back along its line of travel, half expecting to see a man shaped area of bare earth.
She gave chase and swooped in behind it like a falcon. In doing so she passed through a patch of air that made her gasp. For a few seconds she was filled with the warm buzz she experienced when accidently trespassing another soul and she turned a full circle; expecting to see a large bird flying away from her. There were no birds in sight, but as she looked around she heard a sound emanating from the patch of sky she had flown through. Intrigued, she drifted closer until all at once she passed into a beam of whispers that seemed to be following the grass figure. She could hear them clearly now, but as she tried to make sense of them they stopped. She turned and saw that the figure had stopped too. It was a grass scarecrow now, casting an ominous shadow onto the sun-drenched pasture.
Whilst she considered her next move her abandoned body reached out, informing her of its discomfort. She had been gone from it too long and it was beginning to suffer the hardness of the ground. If she remained Absent much longer she risked painful sores that could last for weeks. But she couldn’t go back just yet. Novel encounters were rare for her these days and she wanted to take a closer look at this curious grass figure.
She circled around to see its face and was disappointed to discover it didn’t have one. The front of its head was no different to the back – just a curve of featureless grass, fluttering in the breeze. As she drifted closer she heard her uncle’s voice and felt it like a restraining hand upon her shoulder: Careful Della. What is not known is unknown and what is unknown is best left alone. It was enough to imbue her with a healthy caution and she drew up a dozen feet away.
The grass figure reminded her of the ones some folk made by trimming hedges, only this one was made of meadow grass and bestowed with a number of natural accessories. There was a drooping dandelion clock growing from its left shoulder and a row of daisies on its left arm. On its torso was a clump of pink clover that looked like it had been chewed on by a cow. And when the breeze blew into its grassy face, she was amazed to see a bed of earth between the fluttering blades. She drifted a little closer, not quite able to believe what she was seeing.
The figure lunged when she was in range, plucking her out of the air with fingers that felt like knotted wood. She screamed and yanked away, but it held her tight – a physical restraint that should have been impossible while she was Absent. It drew her close and began to change. The grass withdrew and the exposed soil cracked and melted into a seething disc of mud. Two hollows appeared halfway down the disc and a blunt projection pushed out beneath them. When a horizontal crack opened near the bottom she realised she was looking at a pair of eyes, a nose and a mouth. She screamed and thrashed with fresh vigour, nearly turning herself inside out to get away. But still it held her fast. The mud face firmed and dried until it had the appearance of skin. Corn coloured hair wormed out from its borders and curled into ringlets. Two egg like eyes emerged from the dirt sockets above its nose; blood vessels, irises and pupils materialising on their wet surfaces. In just a few second she was face to face with a grotesque reproduction of herself and its likeness to her was increasing as it continued to shift and remodel.
‘Who are you?’ asked a man’s voice. It was the voice of a well down which a thousand children had fallen to their deaths. She didn’t reply – couldn’t reply. She was in a paralysis of terror and couldn’t speak. As her silence stretched out the owner of the voice took a direct approach. He began to speak in whispers again and it felt like he was pouring a barrel of eyeballs into her – hundreds and thousands of them, blinking open and rolling into every last recess of her mind. One of them found the answer to his question and he spoke her real name into her head: ‘Laurena?’
The whispers started again and the strange creature began to pull her inside its body. Their souls merged and she began to connect with its sensations. Its insides were a constant turmoil of shifting earth and slithering roots and she fought it with everything she had; invigorated anew by the idea that she was becoming its prisoner. But her efforts were to no avail and it continued to draw her deeper inside, binding her to a mulchy foulness beneath the shifting earth. In desperation she changed tactics and redirected her efforts, driving herself not away, but towards the centre of it. And with her thrust and the draw of the whispers suddenly aligned, she shot straight through its vile core and out the other side. The whispers tried to go with her, but her change in direction was too quick and she tore free. But it wasn’t a clean tear. She tore a ribbon of whispers from the main stream and they snapped into her like a strip of tensioned elastic. And as she streaked away she felt their strange fabric dissolving into her.
Many miles passed beneath her before she built up the courage to look back. Her abandoned body could respond to her emotions through the same link by which she could feel its sensation; and if anyone had put an ear to her chest they would have heard a noise like galloping horses. She was way to the north of Agelrish now and Rinker’s Point was nowhere in sight. She listened to the day, ready to accelerate away at the slightest sound of whispers. But all she heard was the stirring of trees and the cry of an eagle.
She raced back to her body and swept into it, sitting up with a jerk and frightening the blackbirds onto the wing. She looked around, half expecting to see the hideous replica of herself weaving through the trees or charging across the meadow. There was no sign of it, but she took no relief. The restful ambience in which she transitioned to Absence had been replaced by a sinister watchfulness and all she could think about was that feeling of eyes, rolling around in her head. And if they were able to see her name, they might also have seen where she had hidden her body. The idea rushed through her veins like crushed ice and she knew she had to get home as quickly as possible.
She snatched up her satchel and crutch and stood up with a groan. After the weightlessness of Absence, the first few paces were always like stepping back onto land after a long swim. She allowed time to adjust, but when she set off, her bad leg pushed with unexpected strength and she staggered into a tree. She raked up her britches and stared at her leg in disbelief. Her skin was white and there was no trace of the green hue that had stained it for so many years. And the pain was gone too. Absence eased the pain, but it never made it go away completely. She put her weight onto her leg again and recoiled instantly from the painless bunching of muscles. It had never, at least as long as she could remember, felt like this.
The poison was gone!
It was the one thing she had wished for all her life. A wish she had spoken under every forest canopy, across every meadow and over every lake in the Westland. A wish she had released on a thousand winds. She
had never lost faith that her uncle would find a new herb or root that would rid her of the poison and she had spent many hours fantasising about the things she would do when that day came. She would jump, skip and dance and when she got bored, she would swing from a rope into a river or race her uncle up the nearest mountain. Oh what joy she had seen in those colourful daydreams. But as she tested her leg with another step, she felt none of the delight she had imagined. Her cure was not supposed to happen this way. The poison was gone, but she couldn’t understand how. And if it had anything to do with the ribbon of whispers she tore away with her, she wanted nothing to do with it. She rolled the leg of her britches back down; more determined than ever to keep it hidden. There was still no sign of the monster, but the trees and flowers looked like they were staring at her now. ‘What have you done Della?’ they all seemed to say. ‘You’re in real trouble now.’
Consequences
She hobbled along the lane with a new kind of limp. The pain had been replaced by an equally debilitating distrust for her leg and she was no more comfortable taking weight through it than she was before. She started to think about how she was going to explain it all to her uncle; but the way she felt now, she wondered if she could even look him in the eye.
She crossed the river, thudding over the rickety wooden bridge where she often stopped to drop sticks off one side and watch them reappear the other. Last week she toyed with the idea it was a magic bridge and that if she threw her crutch over, she could wish herself free of the poison as it passed beneath. It was a childish fantasy and she hadn’t tried it. But if there was even the remotest possibility it could grant a different wish and erase the last hour; she would have thrown her crutch in right away. Even if it meant living with the poison for the rest of her life.
She followed the hedgerow to her gate and pushed through into a wildflower garden awash with swaying flower heads: poppies, buttercups, pink clover and ox eye daisies, all dripping with colour and busied over by a multitude of butterflies and bees. The house beyond was timber framed and crooked; with a cracked chimney and thatched roof. And it was flanked by two laburnum trees, heavily encumbered with dangling cobs of yellow flowers that shone resplendently in the afternoon sun.
She mounted the stoop and froze when she reached for the handle. Her crutch was a lump of wood she needed now, no more than any stick she’d thrown under the bridge. But she couldn’t just walk in with her leg as good as new. There would be too much to explain all at once. So she tucked her crutch beneath her shoulder in the usual fashion and limped inside.
‘Is that you Della?’ asked her uncle from somewhere behind the kitchen door.
‘Yes.’
She discovered that she was still, if nothing else, able to frown at his use of her current name. She had chosen it herself, but was beginning to loathe it. All she could hear now was Delaaaar; the way Ismara had taken to saying it.
‘Sit down. I hope you’re hungry.’
She wasn’t.
She closed the door, hung her satchel behind it and crossed to the table where she sat fiddling with cutlery. Her uncle was whistling now. It was a happy melody that hinted at the brightness of his day and she could picture him jigging around as he put the final touches to their meal. But it did nothing to lift her spirits. If anything it deepened her unease. What she was going to tell him would blow a storm cloud into his sunny day.
The kitchen door flung open and he stepped through. He was a tall ropey man with a face that mixed kindness and strength in strong angles. His brown eyes were her favourite feature and she’d once told him they were nutty enough to make a squirrel jealous. He was holding a large bowl of rabbit and minted potato stew in each hand and the smell of it wafted over to her. Any other day her stomach would have rumbled, but her appetite had deserted her.
He set the bowls down and sat, cutting his tune short when he got a good look at her. It was his first glimpse of the storm cloud she’d brought in. ‘What’s wrong? … Come on, I know that face.’
She thought about the monster wandering the countryside and decided to tell him about it right away. ‘Something happened after school.’
He lowered his spoon, feeling her discomfort as though it was a nail in his chair. ‘Ismara again?’
‘No. Well that as well, but I can deal with that. Something else.’ She raised her eyes to his and tightened them apologetically. ‘I might have brought us some trouble.’
‘Go on.’
‘I stopped on the way home.’
He stared at her blankly until he deciphered the true meaning of the words from her guilty eyes. ‘Oh Della. You didn’t go Absent outside again did you?’ he said, with more than a touch of exasperation in his voice. ‘I thought we’d been through all that.’
‘I had to. The pain got too bad and it’s been so hot. I had a run in with Ismara on the way home and couldn’t make it back afterwards.’
He leant back in his chair. ‘That girl. Maybe I should have a word with Lady Demia.’
‘No, don’t. It’ll only make things worse.’
‘Okay. But this business of going Absent outside – you should’ve just rested up a while…’ He stopped dead as if only just hearing the words she began with. ‘You said you might have brought us trouble. You weren’t caught were you?’
‘No. Nothing like that. At least not in the way you’re thinking… While I was Absent I saw something at Rinker’s Point.’
He raised his eyebrows. The storm cloud was in the room now and she was about to make it pour. She told him everything that happened after the girls ambushed her right up to when the monster pulled her out of the air. At first his face was ploughed with concern, but as she started to talk about the monster she saw the lines relax and a sceptical shine came into his eyes. ‘You don’t believe me!’
‘It’s not that, it’s just…You said you stopped because the pain was bad and you nearly fainted. You know what can happen when it gets like that…’
‘You think I dreamt it,’ she said in a flush of anger. She reached down, rolled up her britches and hiked her leg onto the table. Her boot came down with such a thump the cutlery jumped and her stew sloshed in its bowl. ‘Did I dream this as well?’ she said, sweeping a hand over her leg. ‘When I got away from that figment of my imagination it was like this.’ He stared at her pale shin in disbelief. ‘And I can walk without pain too.’ She lowered her leg then crossed to the door and back again, forcing herself to put her full weight through it now. ‘Even run if I had to.’
Her uncle rose from the table as if there was a hay bale on his back. Then he went to the window and looked out, scouring the countryside as if expecting the monster to be hiding there. When he turned back he was grasping his chin.
‘You said it spoke your name?’
She nodded. ‘My real name. It got it by looking inside me – like it was reading it straight out of my head.’
There was another clench of his face. But it wasn’t disbelief. It was the face one makes when confronted with an extraordinary fact. ‘Like what happened with the spirit lure in Lyell?’
She recoiled as if stung. He was referring to an episode she had been trying to forget for many years. She thought about the sensation of eyeballs pouring into her and had to admit it was similar. ‘I suppose,’ was all she could say, but in remembering that strange sensation it brought back the horror of seeing the monster’s mud face transform to look like her. She realised she hadn’t told him that part of the story yet, but when she opened her mouth to tell him, the intention to do so was smudged away by a strange blackness in her mind. She closed her mouth, forgetting what she was going to say.
‘I can’t fathom it,’ her uncle said as he paced the room.
‘Do you think…?’ she paused and he stopped in his tracks to look at her. ‘Could it be one of them?’
He came back to the table and sat down, his face so pale the full moon would have looked flushed beside it. And when he spoke it was only to utter a single word - a wor
d that barely crawled over his lips. ‘Uhuru.’
It felt like the whole house strained inwards to hear him say it; every knot of wood suddenly an eye and every crack, a channel leading away to an ear. And once the word was out it kept a presence in the room, as if it were emblazoned on the walls in giant red letters. The Uhuru. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d spoken of them.
‘You tried everything to cure me. In all those years you never gave up trying. But now it’s gone - just like that. It was their magic that poisoned me and maybe it’s their magic that took it away.’
He stared at her, temporarily incapable of words. She thought she had seen his entire range of expressions, but the face he was wearing was new and totally unfathomable. The storm was upon him now and the word he had spoken, its thunderclap.
‘Oh Della! Why didn’t you just leave it alone,’ he said, leaning onto his elbows and burying his head in his hands. His tone was not angry, but resigned. ‘Didn’t you learn from what happened last time?’
It was another reference to the spirit lure in Lyell. The day he spoke of still haunted her and for him to bring it up like this was far worse than any scolding.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and truly she was. But it didn’t change their situation. ‘But what do you think? Could they be back again?’
‘Hard to say. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It could be something from the Eastland. The mists are Uhuru magic after all.’
‘Aren’t they guarding the mountain passes?’
‘So they say. But it wouldn’t be the first time something’s got across without them knowing. Remember the spiders in Yarrock and the quaggar raiders that got through to those upland farms. It happens. There might even be a contingent of frontier guards in pursuit as we speak. It would explain why it was running.’
Absence: Whispers and Shadow Page 2