by Syd Moore
And the tramp? Well, he was probably speaking in the plural but referring to himself. Wasn’t uncommon. And it had that country flavour to the phrase. Anyway he wasn’t all there, so there was no point dwelling on what he had to say.
And after all of that I had left them now. Colchester was miles away.
So why then did I feel a building sense of guilt and betrayal as I drove from the place?
Once I got onto the A12 to Chelmsford I pumped up the volume on the car stereo and thrashed around to some old eighties tunes.
My mood lightened. When that compilation ended I kept the retro mood and chose an R.E.M. album. There was something so upbeat about their early stuff. It was good driving music. Yet as I got into a cruise, coming out of Chelmsford, the CD screwed up: ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Michael Stipe’s emotional warble was caught on repeat. I tried to forward it on to the next track, but it wouldn’t go.
‘I’m sorry.’ Argh. It was getting very irritating. I kept one hand on the wheel and felt around for another CD, any CD. I pressed eject and took the disc out, swapped it for some classical and pressed play. ‘I’m sorry.’ R.E.M. continued to crank out of the speakers. I looked down at the disc in my hand and wrinkled my brow.
I slowed down and hit the stop button. The track went on.
Damn. I ejected the classical disc. The jarring music continued on like a broken record.
And then, over the top of Stipe’s vocals I heard a sobbing.
I started swearing at the player, thumping it with my hand but it kept on playing out that bloody awful line.
The soprano got louder. ‘I’m sorry.’
The memory of the dungeon hit me full in the face: the girl in the cell. The weeping. The despair. The pleading. It all descended on me like a cloud, or rather, the opposite of a cloud. Instead of getting foggy and obscured I felt like something was bringing down illumination, clarity.
I recognised her voice.
And then it was as if everything became connected: the castle, the mirror, the messaging. A linear pattern was emerging. And I suddenly saw it was all one and the same. A woman. One who had been kept in the dungeon. A woman who had been hugely wronged.
A witch.
But even as I thought that word, part of me still couldn’t suspend scepticism. Why think that? I mulled it over. And yet, and yet, simultaneously I could feel it, there, at the base of my stomach, that the word was right. It struck a chord of harmony deep within. Or maybe harmony was not quite the right word. It was more like it struck a chord that wasn’t dissonant – like it was chiming with something I already knew, something that I had repressed thus far; an intuition or forgotten understanding. I don’t know. But, whatever, it was as if, in the micro-moment that it hit me, nothing was the same again. As if defences were coming down in my head and I was opening up to another world.
I lost concentration and swerved into the next lane. A car horn blared at me. This was barmy. Dangerous. My head was all over the place, reeling, gasping, seeing.
I pulled over to the hard shoulder and killed my speed, the ghastly voice sobbing and Michael Stipe apologising over and over again. Then the music stopped and the woman said, ‘Forgive me.’
And I was gone.
Crawling up onto my feet I stagger up, but I am not steady and knock the girl in front. She shouts for me to mind myself. Her father watches on. He puts a hand on my arm to aid me but when I look up he sees who I am and recoils. I push past him unheeding of the jeers and taunts from the others around because at the front of the scaffold I see the woman with the knife is upon Mother’s body. I cannot see what she is busy with, only the arch of her back, muddy feet sticking from the bottom of her dress. I call out for her to leave her alone. But then HE is there. He blocks my path and grabs my arms, fastening them behind my back.
‘You’ll not help her now,’ he says and pulls me roughly to him. ‘Master Ranking. Take her,’ he shouts into the crowd. A man comes forwards dressed in a blue livery I don’t recognise. ‘Keep her with you and take her back.’ Then he turns to me. I am struggling hard to twist my wrists from his grip. ‘They will take care of you, till your time comes.’
I manage to unloose one arm and lurch forwards. HE is shouting instructions to the liveried man who picks me up and throws me over his shoulder.
‘More gentle,’ HE barks. ‘She is with child.’
The man hoists me up slower. When he turns around my body is swung to face the killing stage where I see the knifewoman holding something up for the crowd. Her face is full of pleasure and victory. She stands up and waves it and I realise what it is – blood still drips from Mother’s scalp.
Chapter Nineteen
I was roused by tapping. A pitter patter that got stronger and became an insistent knock.
It was the police outside the window, squinting into the car. I think they thought I was drunk as I couldn’t talk immediately, only shake my head with confusion.
A lorry driver had reported a woman asleep at the wheel, they informed me, and asked was I epileptic? When I told them I wasn’t they took out their gear and breathalysed me.
Thank God I’d only had one at the pub. The whisky did register but I wasn’t over the limit. Eventually they let me go with some cautionary words.
I did my best to get off the main road. I was in no state to cope with the rush hour traffic on the A130, and so navigated to a small village, where I pulled into a pub car park and tried to still my mind.
I had a lot to take on board – a convergence of different experiences. I let them spin around, trying hard to make sense of them; the messaging, the mirror, the dungeons and now this. The word coincidence didn’t cut it any more. It smacked too much of wilful blindness and disclaimers.
Though that didn’t mean I knew what was going on. I knew what it felt like – as if the Fates had spun a web around me and roused an ancient sleeping self. One that was able to tune into things that my old self couldn’t.
I still couldn’t explain what was going on but right then, I felt strongly that there was a reason for it.
I would just have to work out what that was.
Chapter Twenty
I didn’t go home straight away. I couldn’t.
As much as I was aware there was some strong inner drive propelling me on, taking me into new spheres of experience, I could also detect a dent in my resilience. Not my resolve. But if I didn’t pay attention to one then the other would certainly suffer.
So instead I drove down to the beach and parked up. Then I walked along the front and found a bench to stare out into the sea. The wind was up and clouds were scudding across the horizon, mirroring my rapid brain activity.
Shock is a very physical sort of thing that leaves you adrift in your own skin. I almost felt like I had been bashed round the head and rendered senseless, whilst at the same time, paradoxically, I was super-alert.
I sat there for a long time, under the Cheshire cat moon, in the sharp air. The tide was out, exposing the black mud of the estuary floor. Lots of people hated this time, yearning for the river to come back in and cover the muck. But they didn’t know how to value it. That state never lasted long. The tidal landscape was always in a process of constant change. When you look into the seascape it sends you something back that mirrors your emotional state. Usually when I gazed into the yawning cleft between the stars and riverbed, the emptiness would make me feel as if I was staring into a void, a moment of stillness in the hustle and bustle of twenty-first-century life. Right then, that night, I remember it was unsettling, reflecting back uncertainty and turbulence. I sat there and tried to think it all through, trying to get a handle on what was going on inside and outside of my head. It was like swimming against the tide.
My mind tumbled over the events of the past thirteen days since the funeral: the dreams, the nightmares, the pleading. ‘I’m sorry.’ The voice from the mirror, the girl in the cell, her words not just beseeching but also imperative, like she was trying to tell me something
. Like she wanted me to do something for her.
I wondered what she needed, before another part of my brain halted that thought process and told me I was delirious or imagining things, and then I’d question my sanity and think back on poor Mum’s mental illness. Could this possibly be genetic? Had I inherited a weakness from her?
That last time at the hospital Mum had been so weak and frail, but she too had been trying with all her might to say something. What was it? She’d attempted to speak, to form her twisted mouth into words …
Then I remembered. Wasn’t it something to do with a gift? I swallowed.
The gift.
There it was, those two words – ‘the gift’. Surely she had been talking about a legacy of sorts?
But what if the legacy was nothing to do with money or jewellery? What if it was to do with something else? Something that connected now to this new part of me roused from its slumber. Something which, in turn, related to her strange behaviour?
Was it possible that Mum too had seen the things I had started to see – but that she saw them not as a curse but some sort of insight? A peeling back of the layers of reality that others could never perceive?
A gift.
Could I have inherited it from her?
But then, why hadn’t she told me? Earlier on, before she became so damaged and worn? She would have done, I was sure. She would have prepared me.
No, it couldn’t be. I had to be barking up the wrong tree, surely? All that psychic supernatural stuff was nonsense, I’d seen TV programmes with psychics, and was convinced that they were exploiters who had plants in the audience and teams of researchers. The whole thing was hammy entertainment. If people believed it then they were deluded and sad.
Though maybe that was the point.
Maybe that was exactly what was happening to me. A sad delusion had descended to help me cope with the fact that Mum had gone and that there was no afterlife. That all the existential fears I had ever had were true.
Perhaps part of my subconscious was inventing experiences to help my conscious being cope with such huge loss.
But then, why not imagine Mum? Why wasn’t I visualising Rosamund Asquith in all her beauteous glory at her prime of life, when me and Dad and she were happy?
‘Because it’s not Mum who’s trying to get through,’ a voice in my head whispered.
Where had that come from?
It wasn’t a different voice. It wasn’t a different person. It was like an alternative ‘me’ who was speaking. A ‘me’ who was trying to nudge a new idea forwards.
Another bubbled up, darker, more insistent: ‘No. Leave it.’
Maybe that’s what I should do – abandon the project for the sake of my sanity. Perhaps it was taking me to a place I didn’t want to go?
To madness.
That could be it – the only thing haunting me – the spectre of lunacy.
Oh God. Perhaps I was schizophrenic?
That had been one of Mum’s possible diagnoses at one point. And it had horrified me. And her. But then, I recalled, it had turned out not to be valid.
Yet I had not just heard voices, I had seen things too, hadn’t I?
With my very own eyes.
I sat back, exhausted. I was going round and round in circles.
There was one way to settle it. If I had, indeed, been contacted by some supernatural creature perhaps I could call it up? I would do that, yes.
And so I charged myself with strength, gritted my teeth, swallowed then shouted out into the darkness, ‘Come on then, if you’re here, tell me what you want!’
But there was no response. Of course there wasn’t, I scolded myself. Did you really think there would be, you fool?
My sigh blocked out the dull scream of a solitary circling seagull. I relaxed my muscles and let my gaze rest on the lopsided boats, not seeing the drifts and shapes around me.
What, I wondered, does it mean to be mad? What exactly is madness? Wasn’t it just a detour from the expected path of society’s conventions? And nobody was entirely conventional. In fact, if you met someone who did observe every single norm, then you’d undoubtedly think that they were slightly mad.
Did that mean nobody was sane?
I went off on that tangent for a bit, flicking through my friends and colleagues, analysing their behaviour, coming to rest on Dan. Where was he? And how was his mental state? My hands strayed to my mouth and started chewing over my nails, something I hadn’t done for years.
I don’t know when I became aware that I wasn’t alone. It was almost like one minute there was no one there, the next the black shadow was fully formed hovering out there on the waving lengths of seaweed: a black outline of a woman, too misty and vague to see in detail.
I caught my breath as my eyes locked onto her. My mind shut down all thought, rendering other functions impossible and stilling my body.
She was skittering on the surface, flicking to and fro like an imperfect television signal. Then I heard her speak.
‘Mercy,’ she said.
I heard it loud and clear.
It was real.
And in my head everything suddenly clicked.
Chapter Twenty-One
Maggie’s surprised but ostensibly pleased husband, Jules, led me into the back extension of their house, where the editor of Mercurial was holding court. It must have been a long meeting because everyone’s faces perked up at the interruption. When I plonked a bottle of white on the table a small shout went up.
‘Saved by the belle!’ Rik applauded his own pun.
‘All right, all right.’ Maggie rolled her eyes at the gathering. ‘Well we’ve covered enough ground. I was going to go over the Artside launch but that’ll be enough for tonight. Especially as Sadie has got the first round in. Anyone up for red?’
I nodded at Maggie and gestured for a large one and
we proceeded into Maggie’s kitchen. It was a nice bright extension with a modern finish and all mod cons, and after the day I’d had it was exactly where I wanted to be. I’d detoured here before home. There was something I had to do. In the minutes after the phantom disappeared I had worked out what that was. She’d told me.
Maggie didn’t look put out to see me but I felt I had to explain myself. ‘Sorry to butt in, Mags, but I’ve had a bizarre sort of day. Needed to see someone sensible.’
‘And you thought of me?’ She reached up to a rack on the kitchen cupboard and presented me with a bottle of red. ‘This one’s better than what you brought.’ Then, clocking the paleness of my face she added, ‘You all right, love?’
I grimaced as she handed me the corkscrew but nodded. I knew, after our last conversation, I’d have to edit my words carefully.
Maggie sussed my hesitation. Her face dropped for a moment. ‘What’s up? Everyone okay? Your dad? Dan, is he okay?’
‘I still don’t know where Dan is, I’m afraid. It’s a worry,’ I sighed and uncorked the bottle, pouring two large ones into bulbous glasses. ‘Can I run something past you?’
There was an exasperated tone to my voice that Maggie caught at once. ‘You want a fag?’
‘More than ever,’ I said and handed her a glass.
We swept through the living area, where she deposited two wine bottles with the crew, and on through a conservatory into the garden porch. Despite its state of the art interior, Maggie’s garden was a thing of the past: a long stretch of land that flowed downhill towards the seafront and thus gave a good view of the sea. However, its high fences and drooping apple trees lent it protection from the coastal winds.
Maggie got into the swing chair and I came and sat beside her. ‘So what’s eating Gilbert Grape?’ she said.
I’d already decided on my way over here that I was going to omit any mention of the supernatural. There was no point communicating any of that to Maggie. She would try to rationalise it, as she had the messages and the girl in the mirror. She wouldn’t get it. It wouldn’t touch her. Someone like Mags would never understan
d or believe it unless she experienced it for herself. And even then, she still might not trust herself. Just as I hadn’t – until tonight. Until she told me.
So I began with the trip to the castle. I told her I’d got stuck in the gaol because someone had played a prank and shut the door. That I’d got very distressed and it had made me realise just how terrible it had been for the women that were imprisoned in that tiny dreadful space and how unjust that was.
And then I hit her with it. It had appeared in a flash, when she had pleaded for ‘mercy’.
‘You know, I keep going on about how awful it was, and how tragic and unfair. I know that most, if not all of the women Hopkins took there, were innocent. But I’m not doing anything about it other than just writing it down.’
Maggie shifted in the chair and crossed her legs.
I carried on. ‘But I could do something more. People do, don’t they? When there’s been a miscarriage of justice …’
Maggie kept her mouth shut and nodded.
‘So I’m thinking – why don’t we try to get a pardon for them? It was a travesty. I mean seriously – it should be put right. They should be forgiven. Acknowledged. In Salem they’ve got a remembrance garden and a plaque and a museum for their twenty-two. There’s one in Lemgo, Germany, for 254 poor sods; a fantastic monument in Vardo, which was opened by the Queen of Norway herself. Lord Moncrieff in Kinross, Scotland, is building a maze to commemorate the execution of local witches by one of his predecessors. And yet we’ve got nothing in Essex. There’s information on the witches and Hopkins in Colchester Castle but nothing else. Not one single monument or confirmation of the human catastrophe. We lost so many more than in Salem. And, you know, monuments, they are a way of coming to terms with the past and of ensuring we remain watchful for intolerance …’
At some point Felicity must have crept out to join us. I hadn’t noticed as I’d been in full flow.