by D B Nielsen
Finn merely raised a sardonic brow.
‘You’re telling me they were murdered? Just for a stupid house?’ I demanded, my voice rising hysterically.
At my idiocy, Finn sighed. ‘Did I say they were murdered? You must have a really low opinion of me. They died. Of consumption. Of smallpox. In childbirth. And in an idiotic, illegal duel which occurred between the heir to the estate and his lover’s husband, a former army captain who outdid himself in the Crimean Wars.’
Under Finn’s withering gaze, I shrunk into myself. Gulping, I stated weakly, ‘How ... um ... unfortunate.’
‘Yes, like I said, unfortunate,’ Finn agreed, watching me over the rim of his teacup with hooded eyes, the intense blue now a somnolent darkness.
Quickly changing the morbid subject, I asked, ‘So the house came completely furnished? What about the collection of bizarre ... um ... ah–’
‘–objects?’
‘–objects,’ I gratefully seized upon the innocuous word, not wishing to make another faux pas, ‘Those along the gallery?’
‘Those belong to the current owner of Satis House,’ he explained, cryptically.
Surprised, I could feel my brow furrowing as I probed, ‘Who is?’
‘Absent.’ was the only answer I got.
Now it was my turn to sigh. But in frustration.
‘Right,’ I commented, ‘And is he likely to return soon?’
Finn shrugged dismissively, leaning back against the cushions of the chair. ‘I have no idea. The current owner is a solitary figure who values his privacy. Even if I knew the answer, I’m unlikely to tell it to you. There’s no point trying to draw me into conversations where you will not get the satisfaction you crave.’
I would not get the satisfaction I craved. But that was not what he had said to me in the Louvre.
I bit my lip, sought the right words. But, as always, my tongue had a mind of its own.
‘Why did you kiss me?’ I blurted out. ‘And why have you been avoiding me?’
He gave me a sharp look; I pretended not to see it. Feeling ridiculous, I occupied myself with my tea, stirring the steaming liquid in the teacup in a pretence of letting it cool.
When Finn spoke again his tone was sardonic. ‘It was either kiss you or kill you. Believe me, I was quite tempted to throttle that slim, elegant neck of yours. Under the circumstances, I thought it might be best if I were to keep my distance.’
‘Why?’ I challenged, eyeing him levelly as I decided to change tack, ‘Because you’re an Emim?’
‘I wondered when you’d get around to that,’ he murmured, picking up his sketchpad and a pencil lying on the table next to him and beginning to doodle as if he was unaffected by my words. But I could tell that he was not as indifferent as he appeared. I don’t know how I knew this – something in his stance perhaps, his casual pose, his pretence of indifference – whatever the case, I knew I’d hit a raw nerve.
‘Well? Is it true?’ I demanded.
He released an irritated sigh. ‘Is it true that I’m Emim? Yes. Was I avoiding you because I’m Emim? Yes ... and no. Was that what you were asking?’
I felt something shift; some obstacle needing to be overcome within Finn himself. The air in the room seemed to still, like something momentous was about to occur. In this moment all seemed to balance precariously on a knifepoint.
‘Tell me, Finn,’ I asked, cautiously, ‘What does that mean?’
In the hush that followed, broken only by Indy snoring and the ticking of the clock, I thought he meant not to answer me. But I was mistaken. Finn seemed to withdraw into himself – I could almost see his thoughts, his external self being drawn in to a place where I could not go and was not invited. Under my very eyes, he seemed to absent himself from his surroundings. Yet still he affected a nonchalant air, continuing to sketch unconcernedly. I saw him like a performer, readying himself before playing his part. I could only marvel at the impossibility of knowing what was going on beneath the surface, beneath his inscrutable expression.
And then he emerged.
‘I am going to tell you a story,’ Finn began slowly, carefully. ‘My story. Though it isn’t really mine to tell. It is my mother’s. Her memory. And I have claimed it as my own.’
Finn paused, his eyes hidden behind the sweep of dark lashes set fixedly upon the page in front of him. His past presented itself to him with a greater immediacy and reality than the present.
‘My mother was the daughter of a warrior chieftain from a rough, warlike tribe – the same peoples and region as from where Alexander the Great’s mother, Olympias, would later hail. During this time, the tribal peoples of Epirus, the Molossians, were regarded by most other cultures as barbaric. My mother’s people were a Celtic tribe and in Celtic society women were often considered equal to men and even fought in battle.’
‘Like Boudicca,’ I interjected, remembering something of my father’s lessons.
Finn glanced up at me fleetingly, and I was struck by the intensity of his lapis lazuli blue eyes, before he dropped them again and continued, as if he hadn’t registered the interruption.
‘By 700BC, the Celts had migrated as far south as Epirus, whilst occupying the British Isles in the north. So, as you correctly guessed, my own genetic origins are closely related to the Irish.’ He paused again. Within the stillness of the room were only the faint scratchings of Finn applying pencil to sketchpad.
‘But I digress,’ he murmured, ‘Celtic society was virtually unique in its attitude towards women in ancient times ... possibly even by today’s standards. Celtic women held legal rights; they could own property, choose their own husbands, enter professions, govern, take prominent roles in political, religious and martial spheres, and even had the rights of redress in cases of sexual harassment. They were taught to think and fight for themselves.’
This time when he paused, his mouth turned down at the corners.
‘My mother was a Celtic warrior princess. She was a formidable fighter. She was also extremely beautiful.’
His eyes flickered with equal expressions of sorrow and distress. Aware of the very thinness that held the thread of the past to this moment, I decided not to interrupt. I was anxious not to break what tentative connection he had to the past despite the urgency with which I desired to hear the rest of his story.
Yet I was unprepared for what he was to reveal next.
‘As I said, a Celtic woman had the right of legal redress in cases of sexual harassment. But what redress can she have when she is raped by one of the Grigori?’
He looked up then, pinning me to the seat with his kingfisher blue eyes, dismissing my exclamations – my shock, my revulsion, my pity – even before they were out of my mouth.
‘Of course, she fought against him, but she was no match. Her puny blows were easily deflected – merely the efforts of a butterfly to escape a hurricane. It was a brutal, awful, terrible struggle – similar to the myth of Leda and the swan, but this was no seduction, no willing surrender. She was a victim. And the act was vicious and evil. She was barely alive when he was done with her. You cannot imagine what it was like for her.’
Bloody hell!
I opened my mouth to protest, but found nothing to say. No words came out. Finn was right. I could not imagine such indignities, such horror.
‘Yet worse was to follow,’ he continued; his voice deliberately neutral, divorced of any emotion, as if he was reading the evening news rather than telling me the details of his own story, ‘The pregnancy and labour were not easy. Gestation is often complicated by the size of the Nephilim which leads to the mother being bedridden and often desiring to remain in virtual darkness for the term of her pregnancy. As the children of fallen angels are born in their natural state, the size and the wings of the Nephilim make childbirth torturous for the mother. Most women do not survive. My mother, however, was a fighter. Her rigorous physical training meant her ability to withstand the pain of bearing me in natural childbirth.’
My tea went cold, untouched, as I was drawn into Finn’s tale. Outside, the rain continued its onslaught unabated. Inside, the lamplight stuttered, the storm causing havoc with the antiquated electrical wiring, the lights dipping and flaring briefly in response.
‘And so, I was born,’ Finn stated flatly, ‘on a day not unlike this one, during a thunderstorm in the wettest month of the year. Decades later, those present would recall the blackness of the rainclouds hovering over the region that turned day into night; and the unceasing, pitiless rainfall; and the floods caused by the rivers bursting their banks. Whether my birth was connected to these events is anybody’s guess. Epirus is, even today, the wettest region of Greece due to the Dinaric Alps and Pindus Mountains. As such, the area is densely forested. But, of course, the tribal elders considered my birth an ill-omen ... As indeed it was.’
There was an abrupt loss of voice as the fire in the grate gave a loud pop and sparked in an eruption of burning embers. I started, emitting a loud gasp of surprise. Finn looked deeply into the dying fire, making no attempt to stoke it. Like some feral, unquiet thing, it continued to hiss and burn.
The dark, almost gothic tale atrophied as the pause lengthened. I waited for Finn to continue, burning with curiosity.
But he didn’t continue.
Instead, he stared at the fire as it burned low in the grate, the film fluttering wildly without the assistance of any wind or draught. His penetrating gaze bespoke the intensity of his absorption as again the lamplight flickered ominously, threatening to black out.
He seemed to spring into action then, sniffing the air like a hound catching the scent of a fox on the hunt.
‘You have to leave. Go now,’ Finn said harshly, vaulting from his relaxed pose where he was seated in front of the fire to pull me to my feet, the sketchpad spilling unnoticed onto the floor. I had a quick glimpse of his drawing, before he tossed my overcoat and beanie at me.
His complexion had gone as white as marble, turning his impossibly blue eyes an even brighter hue. The word “Rephaim” hovered between us, left unspoken, but souring the very air that I breathed.
I felt a prickling of sensation closest to my heart. It took me a moment to realise that the gypsy charm that I wore around my neck, under my clothes, which hung low in between my breasts, was emanating a strange, pulsing heat.
Indy’s ears pricked up, suddenly keen and alert. I thought he was about to resume his former howling, but one glance from Finn was all it took to silence him.
I hesitated. Even then, knowing very well that Louis might be arriving at any moment and that I was in grave danger, I did not wish to leave.
He took hold of my wrist in a vice-like grip and propelled me towards the door.
‘Foolish girl! There are forces at work here that you do not understand! You think my brother is the vilest thing you might encounter? There are more like him. Things far worse than him.’ Finn’s harsh tone held scorn.
His words whipped up a frenzy of emotion within me to accompany the tempest outside. The intensity of his blue eyes mirrored his passionate warning.
‘Show some of the wisdom that you’re gifted with! You have no understanding of self-preservation, Saffron! I will save you, even if you will not save yourself!’ Finn stated ruthlessly, his bell-like voice now low and menacing. ‘Run home! Go straight to the Manor House and bolt all the doors and windows! Do not look back!’
‘But Finn–’ I managed to protest as I was roughly manhandled. But before I even knew what was happening, I was standing out the front of Satis House in the pouring rain.
‘GO NOW!’ he roared at me, his voice competing against the wildness of wind and rain.
I had no choice. I gathered up Indy’s leash and fled from him. With each step that led me away from Satis House, my heart pumped out a rapid rhythm, ‘I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!’.
But, deep down, I knew I was lying to myself.
ABYSS
CHAPTER TWO
The wind whipped the rain into my face; hundreds of pinpricks against my exposed flesh. As fast as I tried to move, the onset of dusk raced me home. Night bled what little light there was from the sky. The wind rattled through the trees, tossing them erratically to leave their bony branches broken and trunks all but dismembered. Waterlogged, poor brown and yellow leaves blew against me, dislodged from their moorings. Driven like ghosts of a former season, they clung tenaciously to my overcoat. But I didn’t care. I did not stop but soldiered on, despite being driven back by the forces of nature which made the going all the tougher.
I should have expected it. This was the season of icy, bitter days – where time whittled down the daylight hours to nothing, taking what little light the season left behind. Where the rains had not washed away the snow, I trudged through slush, my boots constantly being sucked into shifting mud. The trees that grew with increasing thickness the further I journeyed into the woods stretched far into the sky, shielding a shivering and subdued Indy and me from the worst of the storm.
Which was just as well. Mum would kill me if I caught another cold or flu and brought it home; especially after the round of illness that had swept through the house since the beginning of December, with only Dad and Sage remaining immune. And as there was no way I was going to spend another whole week in bed being force-fed chicken soup, I was determined to avoid catching anything.
I quickened my step.
The sky and woods darkened above and around me. I marched on under the vast sepulchre of forest and oxford-grey dusk sky; the colourless dome of rapidly closing night. The onslaught of rain was kept at bay by ancient oak but the winds had not abated; pouring forth from every direction, howling through the trees like some ferocious animal. They sang of more stormy weather to come in the days to follow.
But clearly I was not paying close enough attention. It was the East Wind that was singing to me. It was a discordant tune best left unsung. Like the Death Watch Beetle, the East Wind was an ill-omen. It came to bear away the pestilent-ridden multitudes and the dying organisms of earth; to sweep the earth for the dead and for the souls of the lost. A snippet of remembrance came to me from one of my favourite books, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It was the only lengthy book I had ever had the fortitude to read and that was only because of Peter Jackson’s films – though I don’t know why I remembered it in that moment. I simply recalled that it was at the part where Legolas and Aragorn sing a lament for the fallen Boromir, invoking the other three winds but not the East Wind, with Gimli complaining that they had left the East Wind for him to sing but he wouldn’t sing it. His refusal earned him Aragorn’s approval as he claimed that in Minas Tirith they endured the East Wind but did not ask for its tidings because Mordor and the evil in the east lay in that direction.
Satis House lay in that direction. The notion came unbidden but, once the thought had taken shape, I couldn’t dislodge it from my mind.
I gave a shiver of apprehension. I had never heard the winds so clearly before, though I could now discern that each was distinct in its shape and purpose. Each wind had its separate voice.
But it was the voice of the East Wind which sang to me.
Stopping beside an ancient oak – its gnarled, expansive trunk proclaiming its centuries-old age – I huddled close to its bulk in the hopes of avoiding the lashing of the wind with its cruel, hollow voice.
With Indy cowering beside me, I momentarily closed my eyes against the shifting shadows of the woods, but when I heard human voices I opened them again, fearful that the enemy had caught up to me. The sharpness of the wind made me squint in reaction, but I saw things that were neither part of this world nor the next. It was not the Rephaim I heard fast approaching, though a known enemy may have been preferable to what I beheld before me.
I began to see the faces of the long departed. Faces so pale and distant, their eyes stared through me blindly.
I heard the hoof and heartbeat of horse and man. I heard their deep male voices and mumbled prayers, like the
babbling of a brook, offered up to the heavens as they flowed past me; a shimmer of ghostly white against the pressing darkness of the forest. I understood nothing of their speech except that they were speaking a dead language.
Above, but from some distance, I heard the lone cry of a bird of prey and the plashing of raindrops upon the dense layer of rotting vegetation that covered the forest floor, patchy with melted snow. And always, like incessant background noise, I heard the invisible, singing wind.
The procession wound its way through the ancient woods, weaving between the ancient trees and beyond the scope of my gaze. A shadowy apparition detached itself from the others marching past. He paused and seemed to see me with eyes that did not see. I knew at once this was their leader; a holy man whose face was chiselled from moonlight, holding an aged wisdom. I shrunk into myself; trying to make myself small and invisible against the enormous tree’s trunk. Staring, I could not move, as he raised his hand in my direction and pointed.
Something fell in a shimmer of incandescent light into the trampled ground a few feet beyond the gnarled, mossy roots of the primordial oak I leant upon for support.
I did not move, holding myself absolutely still.
I did not move for what seemed the longest time. To say I was incapable of movement in those fleeting moments would probably have been more accurate.
But Indy had had enough. His sudden action surprised me, as I had all but forgotten he was there by my side. In a fury, he tugged loose from the leash held within my frozen grasp and hunted down the wind, escaping into the woods.
Startled, abruptly freed from my captivity, I took a few seconds to search for the ghostly cavalcade but, noting their disappearance, started quickly after Indy who had bounded away in the direction that the holy man had pointed out earlier. Not only did Indy have a head start on me, as a gundog he was built for this treacherous terrain. The ground was slick with slush and moss and rotting leaves. Rainwater had seeped through the layers of topsoil to the root system below the forest floor. My heels sank into the soft, muddy mire as I sprinted after Indy, attempting to increase my stride to chase him down.