Becoming Red (The Becoming Novels)

by Black, Paula

Now, as the announcement trailed to nothing and the air hostesses bustled down the aisle, the woman beside her was quiet, gripping her rosary and a small vial of what Ash could only assume was holy water ... either that or liquid explosive and the latter thought had her eyeing the bottle warily and inching as far away as she could get. Her elbow leaned on the armrest and tired eyes watched the clouds drift by, half listening to the chatter around her. Slowly they’d turned from the pristine, sun-shot clouds that had hovered over the Harvard Campus to the rain-swollen grey that heralded their arrival on the other side of the Atlantic. She couldn’t believe she was going back.

  Exhaling a breath that fogged up the window as the plane dropped, the pilot’s voice registered sound with no words above the din of thoughts swirling around her head. Ash’s stomach took a dip and dive, with that strange, no gravity that mushed your insides up under your ribcage. For a split second, she felt airborne in the confines of the steadily descending plane, rising out of her seat and seeing the wreck of her childhood littered on the path in front of her. This journey was slowly lowering her into the strangeness of a past she would burn an infinite number of treadmills trying to escape.

  'Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Dublin Airport. Local time is nine fifty three pm and the temperature is five degrees celsius ...'

  The tannoy rambled on, drowned out by the sudden eager shuffle of waking passengers and roused children. Words got lost in the din of a random burst of applause, and the final speech squawking from overhead was in a language that tugged at something attached to her heartstrings. A visceral jerk accompanied the shush of syllables she didn’t quite understand. It was beautiful, and haunting, and quite obviously was the go ahead for disembarkation. A scurry and rush of bodies poured from the plane with tight clutched bags and sour expressions. Her smile wasn’t any brighter as she stepped out into the half-moonlit night and escaped from the elderly woman dogging her way into the chilled air.

  Crap!’ Toe stubbed, Ash hobbled her suitcases and laptop bag towards the cab. The man with her name on a placard looked as old as her grandmother, his insistence on carrying her bags only feeding the guilt monster gnawing her insides. The oldest DeMorgan had been there when Ash had needed her most, no idea how, but she had been. Ash couldn’t say the same for herself the past years, but, well, she was here now. Tossing her carry on across the back seat, sea legs from the flight had her sinking into the seats of the tobacco musted taxi. It was steadying, even with her head all off kilter. This place sent her back into the past and hazed over her present, the streets flowing by like liquid through the rain dropped windows, and she could have been in any rainy city, any place that was grey with the weather’s tears. But no other place made her feel this young, this unsettled, this scared.

  Shadows lengthened, reaching for the car in a flash under a streetlight and a slow terror crept up her spine, pulsed under her skin. No reason for it. The night was as normal as any, the moon weeping through the windows, a watery crescent in the darkness. The cab rolled on through sets of traffic lights, past people spilling from the clubs that lined the district of cobbled streets. It was a blur her tired mind couldn’t follow too closely, winding and weaving, deeper into the heart of the city or farther out of it, she didn’t know. All she knew was the movement, a settling stride she could understand, of vehicles and cab radios, drifting the strangely familiar world she had re-entered into something she could find home in.

  When she blinked again, the dial above the car’s radio read an hour on, the fare had greatly increased and they were stationary, parked up outside a large facade of brick and an unkempt gated garden, the spirals of black metal branching around the property in a Celtic knot of iron protection. With overhanging weeping willows and a deflowered blossom tree, the place looked as absent as its owner apparently was. With a handful of colourful notes pressed into the driver’s palm, she slid her ass from the seats and stepped into the cold Irish air. Her cases followed silently, the driver surely a mute, eyeing her warily as though she was to be distrusted when he was the one being all weird and mysterious. She assumed her solicitor had sent him. The woman had said she’d arrange the transfer and get her settled into the house. For now, this hulk of brick and iron was hers. What she really wanted was something familiar, something present. But this was her grandmother’s, it had been home once, however briefly. She’d endeavor to find that in it again. Ash waved the cabby off, winning the battle to trundle her cases up the path to the door, a mess of exhaustion and trepidation. Her heart thudded a beat, out of sync and uncomfortable as every second spent in the country illuminated her past into a haze of light, a light she thought had been turned off through years of therapy. Childhood memories, happy or otherwise, had never proved to be the most stable of experiences for her to draw from. She could never truly decipher what was real and not.

  ‘You got me back. You always said you would.’ Spoken to the sudden whip of wind that whistled its agreement through strands of her hair, Ash shuddered into the cuddle of her coat and fished the keys from the envelope the driver had given her. Step one: Place key in lock. Done. Step two: Haul ass inside. Step three: Try step two again. She shoved her suitcases over the threshold into the darkness on the other side of the door, listening for sounds of anything moving at the intrusion. She got only the bark of a fox somewhere in the near distance as answer, and nothing Vashta Nerada'd her bags, but her feet still refused to enter. Her body leant in, her hair fell forward and she was wobbling on the threshold. Part of her was still expecting a hound to leap out from a corner and tackle her to death for intruding, but no dog made its presence known. For a second she wondered if she’d find its starved body in one of the hallways. Better a dog’s corpse than her grandmother’s. Ash shuddered. According to the solicitor, its incessant howling had been the alarm bell for the old lady’s collapse, and its lack of presence gave her pause.

  Knock it off, DeMorgan; scaring yourself isn’t going to get you anywhere here. There is no dog killing psychopath waiting in the bowels of this house. The thing probably just ran off or animal control got it.

  Logic, how she hated it at times, and now with its all-too-sure-of-itself voice chirping up in her head, she felt silly for standing afraid on a doorstep.

  ‘Alright, logic, but if I die, you owe me one.’ And she took the step that crossed her into the inner sanctum of her grandmother’s life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Out on the gravel driveway of the Tír na nÓg nursing home, Connal disengaged the kickstand on his Black Shadow and tugged the zipper of his leathers chin high. It was one of those clouds on the ground, soft Irish days that misted your skin and clothes and threw everything into soft focus.

  His visit to Anann DeMorgan had been anything but soft and fuzzy. The pair of them had developed something of a routine, where the old woman would stare fixedly out the window, chewing on some nonexistent cud and refusing to even acknowledge his presence. Meanwhile, he would stand, awkwardly waiting, exercising a patience he didn’t possess. Their silent standoff would last until the nurse interrupted with a tray of jelly and ice cream, or whatever formless food was on the menu that day. Anann invariably flung it back at them, wiping the perky smiles off their faces and soiling yet another pristinely starched, ‘Eternal hope in Dignity’ embroidered uniform. Already, her flaccid right side had begun to wither, the fingers of her hand contracting into a claw, but she still packed a mean left hook. Connal almost pitied the staff. It was tough to look dignified wearing somebody else’s lunch.

  Fists curled around the handlebars, he opened up the throttle and the beast roared to life. Both straining at some intangible leash, man and machine rode in perfect synchrony, leaving the city and everything behind in a hazy blur of speed. Connal lost himself in the cold wind that streamed his hair out behind him, and allowed himself to believe, for a moment, that he could outrun the encroaching darkness and the violence breeding inside of it. When he eventually pulled up and cut the engine, it was already dusk, high up o
n the grassy headland overlooking the sea. The straggle of ramblers and dog-walkers was already dissipating for the night, dark forms retreating to the safety of their curtain-twitching windows. He eased back in the saddle, taking the weight of the bike between his thighs, and let the cold sea air whip his cheeks. He had known there would be nothing to gain by going to see her again, and yet had been compelled to do it anyway. What had he expected?

  The silent cliffs spoke no answers for him.

  ‘How could you do this to me now, DeMorgan, you conniving bitch?’

  The words were snatched away on the wind to a whisper, carried off into the morning mist that was rolling in off the sea, the kind that blurred horizons and the edges of reality. He closed his eyes and breathed in the salt air, and was transported back.

  The wave caught him unawares, a freezing wash out. Crashing knee-deep through the water one moment, the powerful dragging suction of wet sand stole his feet from under him the next. Flattened, his head submerged beneath the water, flooding his senses with the roiling boom of the surf as it sucked back into the sea.

  ‘Bran!’ Sodden laughter was whipped away on the wind as the young boy leapt to his feet, disorientated, scrubbing at the wet, salty strands of hair plastered across ruddy cheeks. The huge silver-haired hound lunged from the swell, the ball clamped in its jaws. Bounding towards him, the momentum of giant, wet dog was no match for the spindly-limbed youth and they barrelled as one, back down into the surf. Flailing, the boy propped up on one elbow and snatched the ball from Bran’s jaws.

  ‘Bad dog.’ He scowled and splashed water in the beast’s muzzle, but there was good-humoured devilment in his reproach. The spirited animal was his best friend and only real companion. His mother said they had an ‘affiliation’, both having been taken in as strays. Besides, the other boys in the village resented his speed and strength. Bran didn’t judge him. ‘Mother will tan my backside for ruining my clothes again Bran.’

  The hound pulled up from his haunches, nuzzling at the ball in the boy's hanging palm with a low whine. Scrabbling to his feet, he pitched the ball over the dunes and out of sight. Bran rose to the challenge with a fluid lunge, streaking across the sand in pursuit. The boy ran hard, the gorse scratching his shins as his feet ate up the ground with the dog at his heels. He ran up the dune, churning sand until his lungs burned and wiry muscles ached in protest, until, mounting the summit, the sight out in the bay stopped him dead in his tracks.

  It was spectacular, carved figureheads rearing up from the prows of the longboats, a great pack of painted wooden beasts riding the cresting surf, sails crimson and straining against the wind, billowing out like proud chests displaying the emblem of the snarling wolf, black emblazoned against the blood red weave. The clouds, ominous and grey as the granite mountains rolled in at their backs. He should have taken it as an omen. Instead he stood and he gaped, heart in his throat, transfixed by wonderment and fear in equal parts.

  'Are they Gods, Bran?'

  As soon as he could work his lungs to breathe again, he set off at a dead run to tell the village what was coming. The men would take up arms, the women and children would flee to the hills, there was not a moment to lose. The evening sun was already so low in the sky, it was blinding, but his feet knew the way, knew every rock and tree along the well worn path, sure-footed, right up until he slammed face-first into a tree trunk some amadán had planted right in the middle of the road. Wheeling backwards on a groan, he squinted up into the spearing shafts of sunlight. Somewhere, to the side, Bran was going berserk, snarling and barking, adding to the boy’s confusion as a face loomed large above him, seeming to materialise out of the blinding halo of light. The face belonged to a great giant of a man, with a thick crown of black hair and a frame so broad it blotted out the sun. Trunks for legs were clothed in brown hide, arms and throat adorned with bands of gold, and on his barrel chest was emblazoned the emblem of a howling wolf. Pale eyes regarded him with the look of one who was intimate with cruelty. By all the Gods, had he led these marauders right into his village? They were less than a mile from his mother’s hearth. Rage swelled his heart. He ran at the wall of muscle and bone, pummelling his frustration into the giant’s gut. His efforts were met with derisive laughter, a huge fist gripping his wet tunic and holding him off the ground like a squealing piglet. ‘This is the one, Vise. Blood knows blood.’ The titan’s voice rumbled like thunder as he addressed his fellow warrior, who had Bran secured betwixt his thighs and was fashioning a muzzle from coarse rope. ‘At least my blood has not lost all its fight.’

  Connal exhaled a shuddering breath, dragging a palm down his wind-burned face and scrubbing at the nape of his neck. He had gone by a different name then, hadn't he? A name his mother had given him. He could remember neither the name nor the face of the woman who had offered him comfort and sung him to sleep when he cried in the night. The inexorable passage of time had stolen both from his possession. She had not even been his true mother. Training his eyes on the rolling sea mist, he longed for that same amnesia to engulf the memories that crashed over him now, dragging him down into a drowning surf of wretchedness.

  ‘Fuck.’ His eyelids trembled, screwed down tight, attempting to block out the images playing out in high definition across his visual cortex. His fists were balled and frictioning denim. Knowing why these memories were intruding now didn’t make them any easier to replay. She had been his bloody passage out of there, after all, his one-way ticket from one form of slavery to another, infinitely long servitude. He despised her for it, but she had tamed the side of him that he couldn’t control. And now she was gone, leaving only a broken, barely breathing husk of a body behind.

  It killed him to admit he needed her. Already, his long buried past was seeping from the deep vault inside of him and bubbling up through the fault lines in his psyche. If DeMorgan’s intention had been to light a fire under him, to jump-start his flat lined motivation, well, she had hit home. Hard. His fear was that in doing so, she had resuscitated a monster. Everything pent up inside him suddenly seemed dangerously close to the surface. When he cracked his lids and opened his fists, his vision was red, his palms oozing bloody crescents. ‘Get your wrinkly, cantankerous old head back in the game, you witch! We had a fucking deal ...’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Stacks and stacks and stacks of junk still lined the walls and littered furniture surfaces, strewn through the house like the papery remains of a tree massacre, even though she’d been plowing through it like a human dump truck ever since she woke with the goddamn tweety birds. It was all nonsense, images and diagrams, words in languages she couldn’t comprehend, books scattered and half open with water rings marring the wafer thin pages. It had taken her a while to navigate through the bizarre forest of strange totems and scary figures enough to get her bags into a spare, surprisingly uncluttered room, and tired as she had been, it had taken the light of day to illuminate the true extent of freak paving the house in occult paraphernalia. It was the only word she could fit to it all. Occult. A madhouse of woodcut drawings pinned to the walls beside newspaper clippings and half-obscured Celtic knot work that spoke curses and spells, it was all in black. The translations, bold beside the originals, in a messy scrawl that took a magnifying glass to decipher, notes upon notes written over every papered surface, sense and insanity in perfect alignment among fairytale creatures and myths too old to even be remembered by modern scholars.

  ‘Ow ...’ She stretched out her spine from its hunch over the desk she’d cleared, a bare expanse of smooth marble on dainty knotted legs, depicting hounds as a brace for the desk’s corners, their jaws holding the large slab. Her fingertip traced the muzzle of one before she shook herself and reached for the next load of papers. It looked so much smaller sitting at it, rather than under it, soft flashes of her younger self playing around the twisted iron legs curving her lips in a smile. Systematically sorting through the house and its nooks and crannies, she was finding far more of her deep buried memories than sh
e’d expected. The smallest thing would stir the dust from her mind and she’d have to sit awhile and brush it off, aiming for the clearer picture and making piles of her grandmother’s life. Shredded rubbish, filed important documents for the solicitor and bagged recycling closed a semi-organised fort around her. Ash pushed the heavy fall of her hair from her face with a weary sigh, wrapping the length of black into an absent-minded, ragged braid as she sipped at her cooling mug.

  God. In between bouts of nightmarish sleep and too many cups of coffee, Ash was starting to think the words on the sheets actually made sense. Several of the newspaper clippings stirred something painful in a lobe of her brain she’d thought long buried under heaps of psychobabble. The grainy pictures were bright with colour and coffee stains. A small girl with a mass of black hair escaping from the blood red hood of a cape coat stood in the centre, staring blankly out of the paper as a woman knelt before her, a doll waved in her hand. The distraction hadn’t worked. She knew. Knew that she was being taken away, and the story scrolled around the image in all its facts and glamorised bullshit. A holiday gone wrong, the homicide-suicide that resulted in a small girl being whisked away in the dead of night to hide on another land, far from the gore that imprinted the soles of her white slippers. She still couldn’t stand the colour. It absorbed too much, was never as pure as it seemed and could be corrupted so easily.

  She’d been corrupted. Corrupted by nightmares and mental ‘delusions.’ But she knew, she knew her stepfather hadn’t been man enough to take his own life, and that the people who really killed her mother were still out there, abandoned by authorities too eager to blame it on a dead man. And while they may have given up all those years ago, she still found herself searching the shadows in her head for some semblance of truth, for a look at the real face of who took her family from her.