Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  A tremor of excitement, or maybe it was dread, went through me. What if it were true? The Cardenio manuscript I’d helped to find had had cachet as a lost play…but this…we were talking about one of the great plays. One of the most profound explorations of evil in all human history. A play most people could quote, even people who’d never seen it—or any Shakespeare at all, for that matter. Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble…

  Lady Nairn cut into my reverie. “What do you suppose it would be worth?” she asked.

  Cardenio had gone at auction for many millions; a lost version of Macbeth would very possibly fetch more. A Macbeth that linked Shakespeare to magic actually practiced, not just cackled on a stage…I shook my head, running my tongue around dry lips. “I have no idea.”

  “Surely it would reach to a sum worth frightening an old man to death for, at least in some quarters.”

  I looked up sharply. “You think…?”

  “I don’t know what to think. But I would like to know what happened to my husband. And if he did find what Ellen Terry was talking about—I want it.” She drew about herself all the hauteur of a queen. “I want you to find it. And then I want you to stage it.”

  She straightened, erect as a queen heading for execution. “I loved Angus, Kate. I left the stage for him, the adulation of the world…. And he was enough. He was worth it. You, of all people, might understand the measure of that. I am not asking you to find his killer. I am asking you to find the manuscript. Will you help me?”

  Something about her strange mix of pride and fragility tugged at the heart. And however disturbing her charge of murder might be, the manuscript had just enough plausibility to pluck at my curiosity.

  “Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood,” I said quietly. “You took him there?”

  She nodded. “I had no idea it was a real place—at least, not one that still existed…. I suppose we should start there.”

  She let out a long, slow breath, bowing her head with relief. “Thank you.” Straightening, she rose to leave. “I’ll take you there first thing in the morning.” At the door, she turned back, her eyes gleaming, though whether with tears or with triumph it was hard to say. “Meanwhile, don’t go up the hill alone.”

  My head still spinning, I changed into a pair of striped silk pajamas laid out for me and climbed into bed. On the bedside table was a copy of Macbeth.

  I sat for a moment with my arms wrapped around my knees. My agreement to help Lady Nairn was already beginning to look like folly. Her charge of murder, for one, was a dark return to superstition, the sort of stuff that had spawned witch hunts. Even the more rational parts of her story were dubious. For all I knew, Terry’s letter was a forgery. Nobody could authenticate something like that by looking at a fax; I doubted that reputable experts would even consent to try.

  How had the grandfather’s story gone? That a dark fairy had told him that Shakespeare had learned magic here, from a witch who lived in a boiling lake?

  I want you to find it. And then I want you to stage it. Out of her presence, Lady Nairn’s demand seemed little less lunatic than the old fairy’s geography. A task set by an angry and sorrowing goddess: find what her husband had found. Or hadn’t. More likely, she’d set me to catch a dead man’s dream.

  And she wasn’t a goddess. She was Lady Macbeth, in a deeper way than anyone imagined. What would it be like to have that past running through your veins?

  I sighed and opened the play. It took a scene or two for the rush of adrenaline to clear from my head. A scene or two after that, I was nodding. Before I reached the end of the first act, I was asleep.

  Aware that I was walking through a dream, I picked my way up a steep hill that leveled off into a wide field. In the distance rose a castle. High on its battlements, a woman with red hair stood staring into the night, ignoring a jeering crowd below, her gown whipping about in the wind as if she were riding out a storm on the prow of some immense ship. Around her, I sensed malice closing in so thickly that it became hard to breathe.

  I woke in darkness, gasping for air, and for a moment I had no idea where I was. Then I remembered Lady Nairn’s voice: Dunsinnan…Dunsinane, Macbeth’s castle of evil.

  I rose and filled a glass of water from the bathroom tap. On the way back to bed, I passed the dressing table, its mirror reflecting the three tall windows, the middle curtain still drawn open to the sky. I stood there a moment, watching the reflection. I could still see a faint glow from the moon in the west, though the moon itself had set. As I watched, though, a yellow star winked into being. I whirled to the window. Not a star. Across the road, high up, flames kindled and caught, blossoming into what must have been a great bonfire atop the hill.

  I stood there rapt, staring at it for I don’t know how long. All around that point of light, the night was dark and still. Then I glimpsed movement closer in. Peering down, I saw a shadow striding across the grass. A woman in a short coat and trousers, a pale scarf fluttering at her neck. Twisted into a neat knot, her hair was paler still.

  Lady Nairn crossed the lawn and disappeared into the shadows of the drive. Going where at this time of night—alone?

  Maybe half an hour later, I saw movement again, but this time it was high and farther away. Perhaps it was the wind and some odd trick of the damp Scottish air. Perhaps I was dreaming. But I could have sworn that silhouetted against the fire I saw the shadowy form of someone dancing with arms outstretched to the moonless night.

  3

  I WATCHED AS long as I could, but sleep eventually dragged at me and I stumbled back to the bed. I curled up facing the window, propping myself up with pillows, watching the hill until I could stay awake no longer.

  When I woke again, much later, the fire on the hill had gone out. Suddenly, both mirror and window seemed ominous staring eyes. Fising, I drew the curtains and cast my robe over the mirror. Then I lay back down and slept till morning.

  I woke late but did not feel rested and dressed in a hurry, eager to be off to Birnam Wood. Downstairs, I had the dining room all to myself. Breakfast—though by rights it was closer to lunch—was served by the cook. I poked at oatmeal and an egg and tried to finish reading the play, but both my mind and my stomach were jumping around like excited rabbits. On the subject of the whereabouts of either the lady of the house or her granddaughter, however, the cook was polite but noncommittal, and I saw no one else about.

  I had no choice but to wait; I might as well make use of the time. Leaving my breakfast half-eaten, I took an apple and let myself out into the garden. The morning was unseasonably warm; surely there would be a bench someplace where I could tackle Macbeth, which I hadn’t read all the way through in a long time.

  On either side of the drive that swooped up from the road to the house lay thick lawns bordered by tall conifer woods. On the left a renaissance knot garden had been laid out, its gravel paths and low hedges marking out beds shaped as lozenges and triangles and filled with lavender, rosemary, thyme, and many more herbs I couldn’t name. I wandered for a while, not seeing a soul, and eventually I found a bench at the bottom of the slope. Once again, I sat down to read the play from the beginning.

  When shall we three meet again,

  In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

  On the other side of the road, Dunsinnan Hill loomed over the words. It was thrilling to read the play in its shadow, but surely it would be even more stirring to read it at the summit where Macbeth had battled all those years ago.

  Suddenly, I remembered Lady Nairn saying, You can see Birnam Wood, or what’s left of it, from the top. As if the hill itself had pulled me up, I rose and took two steps toward it, and then stopped. Don’t go up the hill alone, she’d also said. People disappear from it, from time to time. Her husband among them. I shuddered, thinking of the fire I’d seen in the night. But that had been well past midnight, I told myself firmly. Probably a dream from beginning to end, for that matter. Surely on a bright warm day, more like August than October, th
ere couldn’t be any harm in a short hike—if one could even call it a hike. More like a walk.

  Across the road, the slopes were sheer exposed rock. There was no climbing the hill from this direction. But as we’d driven in, I’d seen a stile over the fence and a path winding up the northern slope. It had been a short drive from there to the house. It wouldn’t be a bad walk. I hesitated, glancing back. The windows of the house stared back blindly.

  I’d like your help, Lady Nairn had said. Well, she would have it. Shoving the play in my coat pocket, I stepped purposefully down the drive and out into the lane.

  It took twenty minutes to reach the stile. Beyond it, the path led up along the edge of a steep grassy field and past a thick plantation of pine. The grass gave way to heather clumped with gorse, and then even the gorse disappeared, leaving russet brown waves of heather unbroken by anything but wind. Topping a rise, I heard the grind and clatter of the quarry splattering through the morning. At my feet, the heather ended abruptly at the edge of a large meadow. To the west, it was edged with a fence labeled Danger; all that was visible through the fence was sky. To the south, though, the meadow lapped against the sheer grassy slopes of the hill’s strange cylindrical summit, rising into the sky like an emerald ziggurat. All that was left of the ancient fortress at its top were the worn tracks of its earthen ramparts, visible in outline as terraces circling the hilltop like a road spiraling into the heavens.

  I caught my breath. Macbeth, the real Macbeth, had stood atop that summit.

  Ten minutes later, I scrambled over a slight lip and found myself at the edge of a shallow grassy bowl on top of the world. A sweet wind swept endlessly up over the edge, and for a moment I stood looking about me, breathing it in.

  I stepped down into the bowl. It was instantly quieter and warmer, almost as if I’d stepped into a different place and time. I walked toward the cairn, meaning to use it as a backrest, but a few steps on, I stopped. Just beyond, hidden from first sight by a small hummock, was a ring of fire-blackened stones. As if pulled against my will, I drew near it and bent down. The ash in the middle was still warm.

  I jumped back, my heart thudding in my chest. So there had been a fire up here last night. And from the grass beaten down in a circle just outside the fire ring, a dancer, too. For a moment, I stood poised to run.

  But the day was bright and beautiful, and I was clearly alone. Besides, I told myself, there’s nothing inherently ominous about a bonfire atop a hill on a clear autumn night. No need to bolt like an addled antelope, at any rate. I’d come this far—I might as well look at what I’d come to see.

  I turned and looked northward. Far across the valley, the Highlands rose in waves of deepening purple. Somewhere out there, fringing the feet of the mountains, lay Birnam Wood. Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood, Sir Angus had said. What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  The reverse had not been good news for King Macbeth, at least in Shakespeare’s telling. For a while I stood roiling with frustration, staring across the valley. At last, though, I made myself sit down in the grass with my back to the cairn and pull out both my apple and the book. If Sir Angus’s words were any indication, the play itself worked in some manner as a clue. I couldn’t reach Birnam Wood without wings, but there was no better place to read Macbeth than here.

  When shall we three meet again,

  In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

  When the hurly-burly’s done,

  When the battle’s lost and won.

  That will be ere the set of sun.

  Where’s the place?

  Upon the heath.

  There to meet with Macbeth…

  Fair is foul and foul is fair,

  Hover through the fog and filthy air.

  Even read silently, the words had the eerie rhythmic quality of a spell. In the distance, I could still hear snatches of the tractor’s droning, its sound winding around the clank of the quarry closer to hand and the trill of birds swooping overhead. Somehow they all seemed to twine together in a rhythmic accompaniment to the Shakespeare.

  The birdcalls grew harsh and more insistent. Lower down the hill, I heard the whinny of a horse and then a sound I knew only from the stage: the clash of swords.

  I woke with a start. How long I’d dozed before tipping over into dreams, I had no idea, but it must have been some time, because the warm afternoon had dissolved, leaving behind a world swathed in a cold gray blanket of mist. Low in the southwest, the sun had become a silk-wrapped pearl. By its position, the time looked to be late afternoon. If that was right, I’d slept a long time. I was gathering up my book and my half-eaten apple when I heard the whisper drifting on the wind, so that I couldn’t even tell from which direction it came: “Thou shalt be queen hereafter.”

  I froze. But all I heard was the wordless sweep of the wind up over the summit. I still have one foot in my dreams, I thought. Gingerly, I stepped toward the path leading down through the old ramparts of the fortress. And stopped. At my feet was a gleam of metal.

  I bent down for a closer look. A long single-edged blade of blue-gray steel lay half-hidden in the grass. The hilt, lying toward me, was black with glints of silver. I was reaching out to grasp it when I saw the foot.

  At the edge of one of the old trenches, someone lay stretched out in the grass, covered by a heavy blue-green gown shimmering like peacock feathers, except that it wasn’t feathered. It was scaled. I stepped closer. It looked like Ellen Terry’s gown, the one she’d been painted in as Lady Macbeth. It seemed to ripple in the grass like a long serpent, draped lengthwise, as it was, over—over whoever it was. By the narrow delicacy of the foot, a woman, and young.

  Instinctively, my fingers wrapped around the hilt. Sliding the knife from the grass, I stepped closer. She didn’t move.

  I lifted a corner of the gown and saw a fall of flame-red hair. Aware of a dull thudding that must be my heart, I lifted the gown farther. What lay beneath I glimpsed only for an instant, but it is branded in my memory: her hands bound behind her back, a length of cloth passed lengthwise around her torso, passing through her groin and knotted around her neck, smeared thickly with blood.

  It was Lily, and she was dead. Floating on the wind came another whisper.

  She must die. And then, drifting closer, a third: Nothing is but what is not. Whoever they were, they were closing in.

  The blue gown slipped from my grasp. Tightening my grip on the knife, I backed slowly for a few paces, and then I turned and ran.

  4

  STILL GRIPPING THE knife, I stumbled through the mist, slipping and sliding down the ramparts and on down through the heather. A gorse bush loomed out of the swirling grayness. As I swerved to avoid it, someone grabbed me from behind. I swung around with the knife, but it was knocked from my grasp, thudding off into the heather. A broad hand clapped over my mouth, and I was forced to the ground and dragged from the path.

  “You’ve kent what you shouldna,” whispered a voice in my ear. Broad Scots for You have known what you should not. Twisting around to look at my captor, I saw a wild-eyed, gray-haired woman, broadly built, at least twenty years my senior.

  I lunged away, but she jerked my arms back so expertly that the pain nearly knocked the wind from me.

  “Lie still,” she said, “if you don’t want to get the both of us killed.”

  A few seconds later, I heard what she must have sensed earlier: hoofbeats coming fast down the hill. I twisted around to face the path, just in time to see a white horse emerge from the mist not five feet away. Spooked by the gorse, the animal whinnied and reared. The rider threw his weight forward, fighting for control, his focus so intent on the horse that I don’t think he ever saw us. But the horse did.

  Its hooves crashed down no more than a foot from my head. Backing a few paces, it bolted. But not before I’d seen the rider’s face. He was the dark-haired man. For what seemed like eons, my captor and I lay in silence beneath the bush. At last, she raised her head. I sat up, but she shook her head. �
�Hush,” she said, her head cocked, listening. Footsteps were coming back toward us, up the hill. Footsteps, not hoofbeats. This time, she did not have to pull me down; I crouched next to her, as small as I could make myself.

  Bent low to the ground, the man ran right past us. Then he stopped and looked back, reaching down to pick something up.

  My book. Hot panic flooded through me.

  Stealthily, he crept toward us and then stopped. Go, I prayed with every sinew of my body. Go, and don’t look back.

  He turned and took one step away, and then another, and then without warning his hand darted out, grabbing me by one wrist.

  Behind me, the gray-haired fury cried out. Shoving me forward so that I stumbled right into his arms, she darted across the heather, flapping like a broken-winged bird as she disappeared into the mist.

  I jerked away from the hands grasping me, but he held tight. “Hello, Professor,” said a voice I knew, and I realized that his hair, though dark, was curly, and his eyes were green. It was Ben Pearl, and he was laughing.

  “You!” was all I could manage to croak.

  Something in my voice cut through his hilarity. “Are you all right?”

  My breath came out in a sob. “Lily,” I gasped, pulling free at last.

  “Your friend?” He nodded in the direction the old woman had run.

  “No. Lady Nairn’s fifteen-year-old granddaughter. On the hill-top,” I said. “Dead.” I bent down, scrabbling through the heather for the knife.

  “Whoa,” said Ben, crouching down with me. “Slow down.”

  I sat back on my heels, brushing away a hot squeeze of tears. “up on top of the hill. I found a knife. And then Lily, lying there dead, with her throat cut. And a voice, or maybe two voices. Whispers. I don’t know. So I ran. The woman you saw, the gray-haired woman—I don’t know who she is—knocked the knife away and dragged me off the path, and then the dark-haired man nearly rode me down on a spooked horse….” I waved wildly in the direction of the hilltop. “And now I can’t find the knife.” The last sentence was nearly a wail.