And it was an escape, for when they were with each other in this way it was as if no one, and nothing else, could intrude.
In each other’s arms, they were safe. Or so it seemed.
But Death was watching them. Death was patient. But Death eventually swooped.
They had been sixteen when they first kissed. For two years after that they inched towards each other, closer and closer, ardent, urgent, but always stopping.
Perhaps another boy and girl would not have stopped. But it was impossible for either of them to forget the sense of consequence that weighed on their actions. For in the shadow of Corbenic, phrases like forever and never again were not confined to the pages of fairytales.
Gal was afraid of what would happen to Deirdre if he was forced to leave her; if Mrs Dark found some way of banishing him for good. Deirdre was afraid, as always, of her grandmother, and of what would happen if she followed in her mother’s footsteps. They were afraid and so they waited. They stopped.
But there came a day when they could not stop, when there seemed no reason to stop. Gal was eighteen; he was trying to persuade Deirdre to come away with him; he was beginning to believe her grandmother’s power over them was spent. And he was overwhelmed by the need to heal: to heal with his very body, as he knew he could; to claim Deirdre once and for all for life. Deirdre could think of nothing but Gal; her whole mind and every part of her was filled with Gal; she was intoxicated by the warmth, the light, the life within him. She was overwhelmed by her need for him and by a sense of his need for her – for it seemed to her that he needed her so badly, had always needed her, had been starved of her. She was fleeing the cold, the dark, the decay she dwelt among every day, as if she were condemned to live among the dead.
Life called them, life drew them, and its call, its pull, was beautiful and suffused with love.
Perhaps it was the call of life that woke Deirdre’s grandmother from her nap. Its voice was unmistakeable, for it was not often heard in Corbenic.
Or perhaps, as with the treasure in the crystal box, Mrs Dark had known all along. Perhaps she was aware that Deirdre visited the cave, had been visiting it, alone, since she was five; perhaps, from the moment Gal started meeting her there, she felt it, for Deirdre had always believed that Mrs Dark could feel everything that happened in Corbenic, as if Corbenic were her own body – or mind. Perhaps Mrs Dark had waited, through the years – seeing Deirdre every day, telling her the stories of her past, over and over again, and yet saying nothing of the guilt Deirdre was accumulating – until the moment they finally sinned against her, as she knew they would.
Perhaps it was all part of her plan.
Either way, as Gal and Deirdre kissed again and again, for the first time without stopping, in the cave three floors below her, she woke, rose from her bed, slipped her shoes back on, took the keys from the hook by the door and began the long descent, down halls and stairways, across vestibules, through doors, through all the many corridors of her memory and remembered betrayal, until she came to the entrance of the cave.
There, for a moment, she stood watching them.
Then she said, ‘Deirdre, come out here immediately.’
Her voice at that moment was the most terrible sound either of them had ever heard.
It sounded to Deirdre like death itself. It sounded to Gal like defeat.
‘You don’t understand,’ Deirdre kept sobbing, as they stood before her, like condemned prisoners, in the laneway outside the cave. ‘You don’t understand. I have nothing. I have nothing. I can’t stop seeing him. I can’t go on without him. There’s not enough, not enough to live for. Without him, there’s nothing.’
But neither Gal nor Deirdre’s grandmother were looking at her. For, in the end, it was not the love between Gal and Deirdre that counted. What counted – what would decide all of their fates – was the hostility between Gal and Mrs Dark. And so they were looking at each other.
Deirdre’s grandmother had an expression on her face of such pure hatred, that it seemed almost impossible to believe her face was human. It was utterly savage; it was as if she had access to no faculty of mercy or self-restraint. She was a cruel child pulling the wings off a butterfly, too young to be held accountable for her actions.
Gal’s face had no hatred; only anger. Or at least, as always, it was strangely still on the surface, and so angry underneath it was as if everything inside him was made of white heat.
‘You have no right,’ he said remotely.
‘I have no right?’ she repeated. ‘On my own property? With my own granddaughter?’
‘You don’t own her. She’s not yours to use as you please. She belongs to nobody but herself. And that’s sacred. You don’t understand sacred. You wouldn’t know it if you fell over it. What you’re doing to her is evil. In fact, what you are doing to her is blasphemous.’
‘You will regret this, my boy. You don’t even know what you’re playing against. You can’t win.’
And just at that moment Gal’s anger almost broke its banks. He felt it surging through him like a swollen river, almost blinding him, almost drowning him, and he almost let go of it; and if he had let go the consequence would have been far more dire than knocking an opponent to the ground and being expelled for it. He knew what would happen instinctively even though he could barely put a shape to it in his imagination.
For a moment, he knew that he could kill her.
And it stopped him. The nameless, shapeless, inevitable consequence stopped him. He was so certain that he was more powerful than her – that if he let go he would obliterate her, that she would be swept away and drowned and heard of no more – and he was so sure that on some profound level that would be wrong, no matter how justified it might seem, he couldn’t do it. He was too afraid of his own strength. He always had been.
He wanted to rescue Deirdre more than anything else in the world. And yet he knew that, finally, he could not rescue Deirdre by doing wrong. Doing right was the only way open to him. But there seemed no way of doing right that was strong enough to defeat the force that was Mrs Dark.
Mrs Dark saw it. She saw his power, and she saw him contain it. She smiled.
‘I never said you didn’t have it in you,’ she said oddly. ‘You’re a strong personality – you always have been. You’re the only one I have ever met who was my match. But you will never win, not against me, because you have a fatal flaw. Do you know what it is?’
They both stared back at her dumbly.
‘A conscience,’ she answered herself. ‘You have a conscience. And people without one always win. It’s the law of nature.’ Then she smiled and recited mockingly:
‘My good blade carves the casques of men,
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.’
She laughed. ‘But you’re not. Very. Pure, I mean. Are you? You’re just an ordinary boy. Bold Sir Galahad at the very gates of Corbenic,’ she mused. ‘Have you found the Holy Grail yet? Or have you fallen in the moat?’
Gal turned to Deirdre.
‘Deedee,’ he said, ‘please. Come with me. Now. Don’t stay here. It can’t be right. If you come with me we’ll manage, we’ll work out something. But you can’t stay here. She’s killing you. She’s killing your soul.’
Deirdre looked at him wildly, as if she didn’t know him. She looked like an animal, some white creature from a land of icy wastes and glaciers, with black eyes and a lonely cavern for a mouth, wounded and trapped and chained on the blood-smeared snow. He longed to put his arms around her – he longed to wind back history. They had been in the Garden of Eden, they had found it again, against all the odds, and yet now, again, they were being expelled.
‘I can’t!’ she said desperately. ‘I can’t come with you – not without her blessing! I can’t disobey her! She owns me!’
‘She doesn’t own you. She’s not God.’
‘She does own me. You don’t kn
ow! She does, Gal. And she owns you too.’
For a moment Gal felt a thick black despair, a feeling like suffocating. He had no idea how to go on, how to get through the next minute.
Then something strange happened.
Suddenly, without a word, and to his own confusion and surprise, he felt himself turning to go.
He walked jerkily down the little alley, out across the building site, and into the dark laneway that led up to the main street. He didn’t seem to be thinking about anything; he barely seemed to be present in his own body. It was as if something outside him were making the decisions.
Just before he got to the street, he felt a searing pain in his chest, a pain so bad he sank to his knees with it, and then to the ground, his body curled around his torso like a foetus. It felt like his chest was being opened up with a great dagger, it felt like his ribs were being parted by force and a cruel hand was reaching in towards his heart.
And that was when, at last, he knew. Now – too late! – he understood for the first time the nature of his enemy.
For it was her will that had subsumed his own and caused him to walk away just then. It was her hand, from long ago, he felt in his rib cage. He recognised them both, as he would recognise her voice or face. He was possessed, at this moment, by a foreign will, and it was Mrs Dark’s.
She was a witch indeed.
Galahad writhed on the ground in agony.
He had known she was wrong. He had known she was cruel. He had known she was mad, disturbed, insane.
But he had not known Mrs Dark had power, supernatural power, over others. He had not believed in witches. But that was because he had not known what a witch was.
A witch, he saw at last, was not one who had studied arcane books or adopted familiars or been apprenticed to an older witch or played around with cauldrons or broomsticks. A witch was a witch because of the intensity of her emotion. It wasn’t a question of what had happened to her. It wasn’t because her father had abandoned her, or because she had lost a two-year-old son. What mattered was how deeply she had felt it.
Mrs Dark had experienced her life so intensely that her emotions had become a force she could use to harm as she chose. That was how powerful emotion could be.
And she had chosen him.
Now, too late, he knew what he had been fighting.
Gal believed he was going to die. He began to crawl, moaning and retching, towards the street, and when he reached it, and the sight of passers-by, he lost consciousness.
Many people walked past him before anyone stopped. They assumed he was an addict or a homeless youth and they did not even pause. But finally a woman hesitated and bent over him and called an ambulance. They took him to a hospital where, strangely, although he stayed several days floating in and out of consciousness, they could find nothing wrong.
Gal knew what was wrong, and in his delirium he talked of it incessantly. But of course no one took any notice.
Deirdre had no idea that Gal was in hospital. She had no idea what had happened in the laneway just around the corner from where she stood, despairing and defeated, and now alone, forever, with her grandmother. She thought he had abandoned her at last, and she thought there was no other way. The bond they had had, in all its beauty and purity, and with all its saving power, had been cut forever, just as it was about to be fulfilled.
She was desolate. She hardly knew how she would go on living. But there was more to bear, even, than this.
Deirdre had expected consequences. She had expected to be ignored, unforgiven for weeks, perhaps longer, perhaps forever. She expected to be, not only deprived of Gal, but punished by her grandmother.
But after he left that afternoon, Deirdre’s grandmother did not refer to the incident again, or even behave as if anything of importance had happened. It was as if, the moment Gal left, he had never existed.
Deirdre began to feel as if she was losing her mind.
She went back with her grandmother to her grandmother’s flat, and, like a ghost, went through the motions of her normal life. She had once seen a television production of the ballet Giselle; she felt like one of the dancers in it, the shades of girls who had died before their wedding night. She felt neither alive nor dead, suspended in a grey twilight that would never change or grow or advance, that would never become either truly night, or truly day.
But she was wrong. That night, things changed forever.
Later, as Deirdre sat in a state of miserable stupefaction in the overcrowded living room of No. 4, her grandmother did a strange thing, stranger than anything she ever remembered her doing before.
On this night Deirdre’s grandmother did not tell, as usual, the bitter story of her unhappy life. She did not tell of her mother’s death and her father’s neglect, of the loss of her little son and the failure and disgrace of her daughter. She did not tell the usual story of how all the people she had known in her life had disappointed and betrayed her.
And she did not talk bitterly of men.
Instead she told new stories.
She told of a solitary life with her beloved grandmother, until she found, at five years old, a friend, the love of her life. And she told of how her jealous old grandmother had sent him away.
She told of finding a treasure with that friend, the most beautiful and important thing in the world, and of how her grandmother had discovered them and banished them forever from access to it.
She told of being hated and feared at school, of how, at thirteen, she had almost been burned at the stake, and of how her friend had saved her even though they had been forbidden to speak to one another, and of how her grandmother had seemed not to care.
And she told of how, at eighteen, she and the love of her life had almost become one forever, and run away together, and found happiness, but how the old woman had stopped them.
She told how she was chained to Corbenic for a reason that was not accessible to her conscious mind, but which was real nonetheless, and so powerful she could never be freed from it.
She told Deirdre’s life story as if it were her own.
And she believed it. She believed she owned Deirdre’s life and sufferings and joys and memory. She believed they had happened to her, as if Deirdre was not an independent person, but a mere cipher to be lived through. She believed that all suffering belonged to her.
She no longer believed that Deirdre really existed.
Deirdre was her slave indeed.
And it seemed to Deirdre, not only that she had been cast out forever from the Garden of Eden, but that she had somehow found her way to Hell.
That night, Deirdre rose, sleepwalking, in the pitch-dark to do something she could never remember during the daytime. She pulled her white dressing-gown over her white nightdress; lit the candle by the bed, using matches in her top drawer; moved like a ghost through the living room to the bunch of keys that hung by the door; and without waking her grandmother, who slept like a dead woman, stepped out on the landing. She glided through vestibules so lightly it was as if she trod on a cushion of air, up and down stairs, along corridors, across landings, until she came around the corner and into the hallway in the very centre of Corbenic – the strange, rough, stony passage, the corridor it was impossible to find unless you were asleep.
She was coming to tend the little red-gold creature in the crystal box full of sunlight: the great secret of Corbenic; the secret she and Gal had discovered when they were five, and then forgotten. She was coming to feed it, to keep it alive with her love. Only she could do it; only she had the power. Her grandmother had put it here; her grandmother had imprisoned it. But only Deirdre could keep it alive.
Every night, sleepwalking, she visited this sacred place. She had done so every night since she was five.
But on this night, there was something odd, something different.
There was the stone stairway ahead of her. There was the iron gate at the top of it.
But there was no dim red-gold light pouring through the
gate, and no sense of presence beyond it. Instead all was empty; all was dark.
Outside, of course, it was the dead of night. But here, in the centre of Corbenic, no matter what the time, no matter what the weather, there was always light, the light she had first seen when she was five years old, and had seen every night of her life since then, a light with the warmth and promise and power and purity of sunlight.
Now it was if something was over, finished forever; as if whatever had been there had abandoned her and would never return.
The dark behind the gate, the sheer absence of light seemed somehow horrific: the most dreadful sight Deirdre had ever seen. She felt suddenly that all hope, all joy had been extinguished; that the thing she most feared, in her very darkest hours, had come to pass. She was dismayed, so deeply dismayed that she woke.
And waking, she was confused, and terrified, and lost. She drew in a great gasp of breath, and began to whimper like an animal being tortured. She stumbled to the stairway, climbed the steps, undid the latch and pulled open the gate, only to feel a sudden strange rush of ice-cold night air.
She stepped into the room.
But there was no room. The door led only to a sheer drop from an opening in one of the outside walls of the building – the same wall in which, many feet below, the hollow storeroom that was the cave stood cold and empty.
And so at last Deirdre took flight, and soared like a white bird, down, down, down into the darkness, leaving Gal alone on the other side.
‘Deirdre? Where are you? Come on! I’m waiting! I’ve got more things to show you! Lots more things!’
It was the shrill voice of the terrifying little girl, Deirdre’s ghost grandmother, calling out from somewhere along the hall ahead of them.
Deirdre looked anguished. She made a movement as if to obey the call. But Gal grabbed her.
Deirdre flinched and withdrew her hand, and he saw for the first time the four livid scratches the ghost child had left.
‘Did she do that to you?’
Deirdre covered the scratches with her other hand.
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