Liminal

by Bee Lewis

  As she said it, the truth hit home. She did know better and he had hidden things from her. Big things. Perhaps he still was.

  ‘Jesus, Esther. This again? What do I have to do to make you trust me?’

  She stood in the kitchen doorway, trying to come up with an answer, but he shook his head and pushed roughly past her into the sitting room.

  Dan had resumed unpacking his books when, about an hour later, Esther joined him. He pointed to a corner of the room, under the rear window which looked out onto a shed and a scrappy patch of hard-standing.

  ‘I thought I might set up a temporary study here, while the renovations are taking place. What do you think?’

  ‘Here’s as good a place as any. What are you going to do with all the books?’ She looked around, trying to work out where everything would fit.

  ‘I’m not planning to unpack them all. I marked the box with the ones I really need.’

  She picked up a book from a pile he’d unpacked. It was about steam on the Highland Line. She quickly cast her eyes down the spines of the other books. All of them were about trains.

  Dan noticed, and his cheeks flushed.

  ‘Okay, you caught me. I’m in two minds about the subject of my book.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, it’s something you said when we arrived and it’s been playing on my mind a bit.’ He reached into his back pocket for the bottle of hand gel and squirted some into his palm.

  Esther watched as he performed the ritual cleansing of his hands. His hand-washing had increased in frequency since they arrived, but humping boxes about and unpacking their stuff was a grubby job. She’d tried not to read more into it, but an ever-present sense of dread in the pit of her stomach gnawed away at her.

  ‘You said something about how I’d become an expert on the history of the area. You’re right, I did a lot of research before buying this place and it’s kind of lit something inside me, fired my imagination. I’m going to write about the history of the railway here.’

  ‘But I thought you wanted to write about the wildlife and the woodland?’

  ‘The railway is more me. I’m an engineer.’ He put his hands in his pockets. ‘I can’t change who I am.’

  She thought for a few moments. It made sense, but she couldn’t help feeling excluded from his thought processes – again.

  ‘What can you say that hasn’t already been said before? There must be hundreds of railway history books.’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘You’d already decided, hadn’t you? Before we even got here, I mean. You must have done to mark the box with the right books in.’

  He turned away from her and straightened up the pile she’d rifled through.

  ‘Write about what makes you happiest. I just don’t understand why you didn’t mention it to me. I’ve always supported all of your choices.’ I even let you drag me all the way up here.

  ‘I’m still going to be writing – just about a different subject.’ His stare bordered on challenging. ‘It’s not important. It’s just a detail. It’s like you making a Victoria sponge instead of a chocolate cake. It’s still a cake.’

  She returned his gaze and considered his words. His logic was impeccable as always, but she wanted to explain how it felt different to her, how she so often felt left out, but the words wouldn’t come. It wasn’t just this decision, or the decision to move to Scotland, away from everything that was familiar to her. It went back further than that, right back to last year and the miscarriage and the unravelling of the life she thought they had. She spoke with care, knowing he would understand the subtext.

  ‘It was important enough for you to move us all the way up here. I just don’t understand why you’d let me go on believing something that isn’t true.’

  She turned away and opened the door leading onto the platform. He didn’t follow her.

  The fog had thinned in places, no longer the thick, choking blanket that had greeted her that morning. She shivered as the chill evening air found its way under each layer of clothing. Although she was tempted to go back inside, Esther was still too angry with Dan to want to make up with him. Part of her thought she might be over-reacting. Dan offered her security and she’d grabbed it with both hands, but in his attempt to set things right between them, to get back to how it was before, he was excluding her. She knew they had to talk about it. She had to tell him he didn’t need to try so hard and that they had to work together as a couple to put the past behind them.

  She reached into her pocket, pulled out the carving and thought back to the incident in the waiting room, unsure now whether it had even happened. She tried to work out what type of wood it was. It was too yellow to be oak so she guessed it might be yew and made a mental note to look it up on the internet when they were connected. She’d meant to hide it in the sitting room, but he was still in there, and she wanted some distance between them. A circle of oak leaves ran around the edge of the disc, broken intermittently by a carved acorn. It gave the impression that each of the three interlocking hares was running across the floor of a forest.

  She was charmed by the object and sat staring at it for many minutes until a vibration in her coat pocket interrupted her thoughts. She pulled out her phone. It was still vibrating and the caller display flashed off and on. She nearly dropped it, hardly believing what her eyes were telling her: Sophie.

  Confusion jabbed at her as she struggled to collect her thoughts. Sophie is alive! The realisation that it wasn’t possible collided with the hope she’d briefly felt, and her instinct was to hurl the phone far away from her, like it was cursed. Yet she held on to it, fearful of breaking the tenuous connection. The vibrating stopped and she sat, rigid, for some moments before she mustered the courage to look at the caller display again.

  There were no missed calls. And yet, there had to be. She hadn’t imagined it. She opened her list of recent calls, her hands shaking from cold and shock. Except for Dan, the only other recognisable number on the list was Anthea’s. She pressed the button to call Dan, but the dial tone dropped out straight away. Still no signal. It couldn’t have been Sophie. Esther didn’t even know where Sophie’s phone was now. Was it sent back to England with all of Sophie’s other personal items? Perhaps it had been donated to charity with the rest of her possessions. That’s it. It’s been sold and the new owner is trying out the random numbers stored on the phone.

  She put the carving back in her pocket and looked at her phone again. Her breath caught as she noticed there was one bar of signal strength and she quickly selected Sophie’s number. She listened as the dial tone changed to ringing. Esther knew she’d have to make do with the voicemail message, but she needed to hear Sophie’s voice again.

  ‘I’ve missed you.’

  Esther cried out and dropped the phone. Sophie’s breathy voice rang out as clear as if they were sitting side by side. Esther scrambled to pick it up, but the screen was blank again. Even before she put it to her ear, she could hear the three-note tone and the pre-recorded voice telling her to hang up and try again. She ended the call and pressed redial. The hairs stood up along her arms. She knew she wasn’t mistaken; it was Sophie’s voice she’d heard. Come on. Come on. Dammit! She listened intently, but the line failed to connect over and over.

  Shaking with frustration, she stared at the screen. No signal. As she sat in the freezing night, a single tear spilled down her cheek. Then another and another, until all of her pent-up tears threatened to engulf her and she was choking back huge, shattering sobs. Esther pulled her right leg up onto the bench and curled up on her side, cat-like, rocking to and fro as she sobbed. She didn’t hear Dan join her on the platform. He crouched down beside her and reached out to brush a stray lock of dark hair from her face. She opened her eyes.

  ‘Shh,’ he said. ‘It’s okay.’

  She sat up and put her arms around him, taking comfort from
his warmth and the familiar smell of his neck – a mix of fabric softener and the bergamot notes of his cologne.

  ‘What’s up? What’s got you so upset?’ His eyes scanned her face for any clue he could recognise and process. ‘It was just a silly argument.’

  ‘No. Yes. I mean . . . Sophie. Sophie called me. She spoke to me. I heard her voice.’

  He looked at her for several moments, unable to grasp what she was trying to tell him. ‘What do you mean you heard her voice?’

  ‘My phone rang. It was Sophie, but it rang off before I could answer it. I was so shocked. When I tried again, I couldn’t get through, so I kept trying. Then I heard her voice.’ Esther’s speech was muffled as she spoke into his shoulder. In those short moments, she forgot about their quarrel and her disappointment with him and silently pleaded for him not to tell her to pull herself together.

  When he did speak, his voice was low and soft and he was looking at her in the same way he had when he’d broken the news of Sophie’s death to her.

  ‘Darling, there’s no signal here. You’re exhausted and I guess your body is out of whack coping with the baby.’ He pulled her tight into him and stroked her hair. ‘Maybe you did hear something.’

  She tensed against him. He wouldn’t give in to her so easily, what was he going to say next?

  ‘The mind is very powerful, you know. You’ll have heard her voice because you wanted to so much.’

  Esther didn’t want to hear that it was all in her mind, or worse, that it was her hormones rampaging. For once, she needed him to believe that sometimes things happen that can’t be explained, but that would be expecting the impossible. Her fingers brushed against the carving in her pocket and once again, the scent of pine surrounded her.

  ‘Can you smell that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The smell of pine trees. You must be able to smell it?’

  ‘I haven’t noticed – besides, they are all around us now. Easy to acclimatise to.’ He changed tack. ‘You know, the atmospheric conditions here are a bit screwy. Maybe that has something to do with it?’ He picked up the phone and looked at the call list. ‘You’ve been calling your voice mail a lot recently, perhaps it was a message that you’ve already stored. I don’t know what happened, I wish I could come up with something to convince you, but I can’t explain it.’ He stopped, as though he was going to say something else. Instead he pulled her closer to him. ‘I’m worried about you. You don’t seem to be coping very well with the move.’

  She didn’t respond, thinking instead about the previous evening, sitting on the platform and trying to listen to the voicemail messages Sophie had left. That must be the explanation, she’d somehow managed to listen to an old message. Yet at the same time, she knew that couldn’t be the case. She knew every word of every message and none matched what she’d heard tonight. Sophie couldn’t have called because she was dead. The one saving grace was that even Dan was sensitive enough not to point that out. Her thoughts made no sense and she let him comfort her as he led her back into the cottage and sat her down by the fire. She stared at the flames behind the glass door of the wood burner, turning things over in her mind, reaching no satisfying conclusions as he busied himself making a hot drink for them both.

  Unusually for Dan, he kept up a stream of chatter from the kitchen, but she barely acknowledged it. She reached into her pocket and her fingers closed around the carving. She felt calmer now, her breathing more settled and her tears had abated. She closed her eyes, content to drift, carried by the river of her thoughts. Sleep came to her quickly.

  *

  The chorus line of birches gossiped about the argument to each other as the shadows fell. The night scent rose upwards bringing with it the words the couple had said, and not said, and wished they’d said, until the air stank with their rancour. The pinhole stars glittered through the lace canopy of branches overhead and the peaty ground, trembling with anticipation, began to warm as an old magick stirred, deep in the earth. The trees that clung to the mountainside felt the excitement as the pine needles fringing their branches shivered in the breeze, while the soil shifted and settled, creating new hiding places and hollows.

  The station exhaled and the hunter sank low into the undergrowth. Watching.

  3

  MONDAY

  Esther woke on a bed of bracken, the air quiet and cool and with the smell of waxen earth in her nostrils. She lay still for a moment, letting her mind catch up with her wakening body. There was no sign of the cheerless fog that had plagued the day and as her eyes adjusted, pinpoint stars flickered in the coal-black sky.

  The moon lit the clearing from behind a gauzy cloud, just enough for her to make out the shelter of the hollow, nestled into the rise of the mountain. Sitting up, she looked down at her naked body and instinctively drew her long legs up under her chin, hugging her knees. The metal shaft of her right leg was cold against her skin. The breeze picked up and she shivered. Silver birches waxed and waned in the breeze, their shadows dancing on the forest floor like dryads.

  All her senses on high alert, she looked around, trying to get her bearings and to make sense of what had happened. There was no sign of Dan or anyone else. Fear coursed through her; the tiny hairs on her neck standing proud of her skin and her pulse racing. This was bad. She had to get back home, back to Dan, back to safety, but nothing looked familiar to her and a growing dread burrowed into her stomach. She ran her hands over her body, checking for injuries as she stood up, hunching her shoulders and stooping low to the ground, conscious of her nakedness. Her mouth tasted of iron as the fear she felt fused with her blood. The trees loomed in towards her, closing ranks, surrounding her on every side.

  There was no obvious path to take. She fought with brambles and branches that lashed out at her as she tried to pass, taking little nicks out of her skin. The terrain was pitted, rutted, too rough to gain any speed, so she focused on placing her feet carefully, all the time alert for the slightest movement nearby, her mouth set in a grim line of concentration.

  Whatever had happened, whatever had caused her to be out here alone, she had to get back to Dan. Back to safety.

  Picking her way through the trees, she found herself at the edge of a clearing. She had no idea which direction she was facing, which way was home. The sound of twigs snapping behind her made her whip around. The light from the moon emphasised the shadows and, moving slowly, she took refuge behind the nearest tree, eyes fixed on the edge of the clearing, trying to see where the sound had come from.

  He materialised in the way the fog had. First, a tentative outline and then, as her eyes grew accustomed to the shapes in the forest, he became something more solid, more visceral, yet poised to vanish back into the ether.

  Esther put her hand over her mouth to stop herself from crying out. Her heart battered against her ribs like it wanted to break free. Could he hear her?

  He stayed at the edge of the clearing, partly obscured by the trees as though he was an extension of the dark shadows they cast. She took in his lean limbs, taut and ready to spring at the slightest sound. He wore a primitive brown tunic, belted at the waist, and the animal pelt draped over his shoulders clung to him like a second skin. She was unable to make out his features for his face was obscured by the shadows and the hood he wore. When he stepped back into the trees, she thought she glimpsed a dagger hanging in a sheath from his belt, moonlight flashing a warning off the curved edge of the blade as he stalked through the trees, moving away from her.

  Instinctively, she crossed her arms in front of her belly to protect her child from harm. Although her head told her to flee, her intuition insisted she waited and watched to see whether he’d appear again. She hesitated for as long as she dared, hoping that he wasn’t tracking around the clearing to circle up behind her.

  The moon disappeared behind a cloud bank, taking with it the weak light, and in the next breath she took fligh
t, her reflexes taking over. The forest closed in around her as she fled, with tree roots snaking out to catch her ankles, trying to trip her. She ran as best as she could, but her gait was uneven and sluggish. Twigs snapped underfoot, and as she pushed forward she was sure he would have heard her moving through the trees.

  Esther knew he must be gaining ground on her all the time and didn’t dare to look behind her. She imagined his hot breath on her shoulders, the cold dagger in his hand. The thought spurred her onwards as she imagined him reaching for the blade that would stop her heart. Dodging overhanging branches and exposed roots, slippery with lichen, she no longer cared that that she was naked; she moved as fast as she dared, as fast as her body would let her. The only thing that mattered now was reaching safety and protecting her baby.

  She changed course, avoiding the patches where the moon lit the shadows, and paused behind a tree, trying to steady her breathing. Thinking quickly, she decided her best chance was to lie low; the only way to get out of this alive was to trick him and hope that he couldn’t pick up her scent.

  A shape to the left caught her attention. It was too uniform, too regular to occur naturally, and she squinted into the gloom, trembling with adrenalin, not trusting what her eyes were seeing. It was a doorway, about three feet high, carved into the trunk of a broad oak on the far bank of the stream. It looked familiar, just like the door in the wood-panelled waiting room back at Rosgill. Like that one, it had swung part way open. She had to try to make it to the doorway, to whatever lay on the other side.

  The oaks whispered relentlessly, ‘He is coming. He is coming.’

  She doubled back towards the burn, hoping that the noise of the water would deaden the sound of her steps as she tried to reach the doorway. She side-stepped out of the way of the moonlight, but her leg was not built for such a manoeuvre and she lost her footing, rolling down the bank towards the river bed. Partially obscured by the overhanging tree roots, Esther lay among the rotting leaf mulch, scooping handfuls over her luminous skin as camouflage. She closed her eyes knowing that at any minute he could be upon her and it would all be over. She could hear him coming through the undergrowth, the relentless crashing of his footsteps through the dead leaves on the forest floor keeping time with her beating heart.