by Kim Wilkins
“Great. I’ll ring Chris beforehand so you’re expected. You’re a good sport, Maisie.”
She didn’t know how to respond, so she said nothing.
Maisie emerged from her bathroom and sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the mirror to brush her hair. Going back to Solgreve tomorrow. Last few hours with Sacha. She put down the brush and stared at herself in the mirror. Hardly even recognised herself because she had dissected that face too many times: eyebrows, all wrong; mouth, too small; eyes, too dark; colouring, all the same. But all around her trembled the promise of seeing herself as desirable if only Sacha would look at her as if she were. He was probably asleep now, separated from her by two closed bedroom doors which would be easy enough to open. In less than two weeks she would have to leave England. Who knew how long he would stay with his father? Perhaps she should march out there right now, wake him up, tell him that she was his if he wanted her and damn the consequences. Damn the future, damn loyalty and all those other things that kept her suspended in one position, from where every other position looked more satisfying. She closed her eyes, thought about the way his top lip seemed to turn up a little in the middle, making it wide and flat. The thought of that tiny spot, less than a square centimetre of flesh, made her feel wild, desperate. As though all the answers to life beckoned there; if she could just touch it once with her own top lip, or her bottom lip, or even the tip of her smallest finger. This was a desire like lunacy.
But she didn’t leave her room to seek out Sacha. And she wouldn’t, she knew that. She would return to Solgreve tomorrow, and then a week or so later she would return to Brisbane and her life would pick up again like an orchestra returning from a coffee break. Crescendos and decrescendos in place, movements following on from one another as they had already been written down, the notes carrying her inexorably to the final cadence. Adrian, expensive wedding, upper-middle-class suburbia, children with good teeth, obligatory European trips, teaching music in hushed rooms, illness perhaps, then death.
Thanks for coming.
Clutching Sacha’s hand-drawn map, Maisie walked up from York train station looking for the street where Sacha’s friend Chris lived. She hoped he was home. She hoped he wasn’t like Curtis. Leaving Sacha in London had been a wrench; as they waited on the platform at King’s Cross Station he had confessed he didn’t know when he’d be returning for his van, but he hoped it would be before she left the country. If not, she was to leave the van keys under a certain rock in the front garden for him. As well as she could, she hid the despair that the thought of never seeing him again awoke in her. When it was time for her to board the train he’d hugged her briefly, pressed his lips into her right cheek, and stood back to wave goodbye. As though it might be forever.
Maisie looked up and checked the house number. This was where Chris lived. She took the stairs slowly and knocked at flat number eight. Her next challenge was managing to get the van home without too much drama or embarrassment. She waited by the door and within thirty seconds a short woman with a blonde ponytail answered it.
“Hi,” said Maisie. “I’m looking for Chris.”
“I’m Chris. You must be Daisy.”
Okay, so Chris was a girl. No need to panic. “Maisie,” Maisie corrected her. A grey cat and a white cat twined around the girl’s ankles. “I’m here for Tabby and Sacha’s van keys.”
“Sure,” Chris said. “Come in.”
Maisie followed her inside the tiny, but modern, flat. It smelled strongly of old cat litter and the heating was up too high. Tabby glanced up and wandered over at her own pace to say hello.
Chris was looking in a drawer for the keys. “So Sacha decided to stay in London with his father?” she asked. She said the “th” in father like a “v”.
“Yeah, apparently they don’t get on so well.”
“I know.”
She knew. Maisie looked around, wondering if she’d be staying long enough to remove her hat and gloves.
“Here they are,” Chris said, pulling out the keys and slamming the drawer with her hip. With a smile which Maisie suspected was one hundred percent false, Chris handed her the keys.
“Thanks.”
“You were expecting a man, weren’t you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You were expecting a man to open the door. I saw you were surprised.”
“Well, Sacha only referred to you as his friend Chris, and I guess that’s a man’s name.”
“His friend?”
“Yes,” Maisie said slowly, wondering what she was implying.
“I’m his girlfriend.”
“Oh.”
“He didn’t tell you that?”
“No.”
“We’re on a break. You know, having a bit of time apart.”
“I see.” A vague nausea sat in her stomach. And anger. Why hadn’t Sacha told her? But then, why should he tell her? Chris was still looking at her, chin slightly raised as though in challenge.
“I’d better take the cat and go home,” Maisie said.
“If you want a good home for Tabby when you go back to Australia, I’ll gladly take her. I’ve already got two but I could look after three.” Pronounced “free”.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Maisie bent over to pick up Tabby who squeaked in protest but didn’t try to run away.
“Do you want some help starting the van? It’s a temperamental old thing.”
Temperamental old “fing” or not, Maisie did not want this woman around her, demonstrating her intimate knowledge of Sacha and his possessions. “No, I’ll be fine. Thanks anyway.”
Downstairs, cooling off in the winter late afternoon, Maisie put Tabby in the van and got into the front to start the engine. Sacha had instructed her to let it warm up for a good five minutes. She did so, finding indicators, heating vents and windscreen wipers, and experimenting with levers to move the seat forward. She hadn’t driven a car with manual transmission in two years. She and Adrian shared a shiny Japanese coupe with an automatic gearbox and power steering. The drive back to Solgreve was going to be a trial. She checked the other side of Sacha’s map, where he had written instructions for which entries and exits to take to get home, and memorised them as best she could. When she was sure all was okay, she checked Tabby in the back (even the cat looked nervous), put the car in gear and drove as smoothly as possible away from that awful Chris woman and her smug smile and mispronounced consonants. Wondering what Sacha ever saw in her.
Maybe it was the unfamiliar car and the unfamiliar road; maybe it was the dark clouds building on the horizon, threatening rain; maybe it was the way the wind became gustier the closer she got to Solgreve. For some reason, anxiety began to drift around deep inside her on the last few kilometres home. She became aware of her own pulse in her throat, she couldn’t stop nibbling her fingernails, and she had a vague, jittery feeling. She took deep breaths to try to fight it, but as she took the last turn-off before Solgreve’s main street, she realised she was almost frantic with fear.
Something bad is going to happen.
This was unbearable. She wanted to turn the car around and drive straight to Heathrow. Instead, she drove down past the bus stop and the church and the cemetery and the ghostly remains of the abbey, took the right-hand turn into St Mary’s Lane, and pulled up outside the cottage. Killed the engine. She leaned for a moment on the steering wheel, looking at the front of the cottage. It looked the same as it always had: no broken windows, no pentagrams painted in pig’s blood, no axe-wielding shadows moving around inside. Situation normal. This anxiety was not presentiment.
Tabby was already scratching at the door.
“Okay, cat. Let’s go in.”
She opened the back and retrieved her suitcase. Tabby scampered out and, within seconds, was mewing at the front door. Maisie followed the cat down the front path to the house and unlocked the door.
Almost as soon as the door swung inwards, she was overcome with acute dizziness. A sudden shift i
n her perception popped in her ears. She let go of her case and cried out. Hands to her temples, she gulped for air. She dropped to sit on the doorstep, her mind reeling. Every sound in the street and beyond – the sea, the wind, every branch moving on every tree – was screaming at her. Every colour’s brightness had been turned up, every scent on the air was acrid in her nostrils. And the horrible fear she had experienced indistinctly all the way home suddenly became an agonising black barb to her mind, the kind of terror one might feel on Judgement Day. Not just fear for her life, but fear for her eternal soul. She wondered for a split second whether she could live through this feeling.
Then as fast as it had hit her it was gone again, but she was left with the impression that her sensations were somehow magnified. The paint under her fingertips on the doorframe felt particularly smooth, the tickle of a strand of hair on her cheek particularly keen, the smell of the house behind her, musty from being locked up and unlived in for a week, particularly cloying. She knew, with certainty, that this had to be some kind of after-effect of all the psychic work she had done in London. She shakily rose to her feet and closed the door behind her, stepped gingerly into the lounge room afraid that the act of entering a new room may set the feeling off again. No, she was fine. The hammering of her heart had begun to slow. She forced herself to make a fire, practical steps one after another, willing herself to return to normal. In the kitchen, Tabby was headbutting the cupboard where her food was kept. Maisie fed her, then went through each room in the house, reassuring herself that she was safe, that the awful feeling wouldn’t come back again. She ended up in the laundry, peering out the back window, looking at the dark wood behind the garden. The wood she kept dreaming about. The sky was dimly overcast, but full darkness was still about an hour away.
How did Sybill die?
She opened the back door and strode across the back garden with more confidence than she felt. Still daylight – nothing was going to jump out and say boo to her. And while she was in this heightened state of sensitivity, perhaps there was something the wood could tell her.
Her strides became slower, less confident as she moved through the gap in the rosebushes. She braced herself for that awful feeling again, took a careful step, another. Past the first small trees, leaves spongy underfoot, grey clouds of tiny branches around her. Slowly, the sense of dread began to return. Every patch of moss looked like a portentous pattern, every branch tensed in waiting for some horror. She tried to keep her breathing deep and regular, to remain centred as Sacha had shown her. Rain started to spit from the sky and a half-second later the wind picked up, making the tree branches sway crazily. She moved further into the woods, reached out her hand towards a tree trunk. Like an electric shock, a dark, cold energy shot up her fingers and into her brain. She pulled her hand back instantly.
“This is impossible,” she said aloud, her breath making fog. She reached out her fingertips again, let them rest on the tree trunk, and closed her eyes bravely. The dream images came back to her – she was an old lady running for her life from some unspeakable terror – here among these trees, which had somehow remembered her fear. She tried to keep her eyes closed for as long as possible, to experience as much of the scene as she could, but she felt she would explode from the terror. She opened her eyes and withdrew her hand, shoved it in her pocket. The rain grew heavy and she pulled up her collar; the wind crushed her breath in her throat. Enough. Her scepticism was misplaced. She knew what the dreams, what the trees here in the wood, were telling her. Her grandmother had died in fear, been pursued to her death in this very wood. But by whom, and for what purpose? She turned and walked back to the cottage. There was only one way to find out for certain the circumstances of Sybill’s death.
She would have to ask the old woman herself.
CHAPTER TWENTY
With the fire at her back, with Tabby curled up on her favourite armchair, and with a circle of thirteen candles around her, Maisie went through the preparations for psychic ritual which Sacha had taught her. Opening energy centres, focusing, breathing. She was flying without a safety net now; nobody was around to encourage her or save her. It was both frightening and exhilarating. Rain beat on the eaves and wind shook the panes. Though only early evening, it may as well have been midnight on doomsday outside. She really had no idea what she was doing as she closed her eyes and tried to sketch in her mind Sybill’s face. As she had only ever seen photos of her grandmother, she found this difficult. For fifteen minutes or more she tried, but nothing happened. The problem was she had no memories of Sybill to draw upon. She climbed to her feet and carefully stepped outside her circle of candles. In her bedroom she found the few pieces of Sybill’s jewellery that she had kept, and selected an amber brooch. Perhaps this could provide the connection with her grandmother she needed.
Unless Sacha was right. Unless Sybill had already gone across.
But she had to try.
She switched off the bedroom light and went back to the circle. With the brooch closed tightly in her fist, she sat down and began the whole process again. Breathing, centring, focusing, lining up the coloured lights along her spine.
“Okay, Sybill,” Maisie said, a little embarrassed about speaking to herself in the dark. Then she remembered what Sacha had said, that her negative attitude might be holding her back. She breathed deeply and closed her eyes. “Sybill,” she said, more confidently. “This is your granddaughter, Maisie. I’m trying to contact you…” She trailed off, not quite sure what else to say. A cold breeze tickled at the base of her spine and she thought of getting up to close a window when she realised that she had no windows open. The cold must be coming from elsewhere. Her first instinct was to open her eyes, but instead she kept them closed.
“Sybill? Are you there? Can you speak to me?”
Suddenly, the cold engulfed her and a vision flashed into her mind: fists beating against a window, a mad flapping as though of wings, a muffled cry for help. Maisie’s eyes flew open. Safely back in the quiet, firelit lounge room.
More deep breaths.
She closed her eyes again. “Sybill?” Her voice sounded thin, fearful. “Do you have a message for me?”
Again the frantic beating as though from behind a thick glass barrier. A muffled scream of terror. It went on and on, and once more Maisie had to break the trance. The sound was too horrible, too desperate and frenzied. She shook herself, stood and turned on the light. Had she made contact with Sybill? Was hers the voice of that awful smothered scream?
She blew out all the candles and placed them carefully on the hearth. If it was Sybill, why was she trapped? She cast her mind back to Sacha telling her how Sybill had died. He had said that Reverend Fowler brought him the news. Perhaps she should pay a visit to the Reverend tomorrow morning. He may know more than he let on.
“Sorry, Reverend. You know I’m no good with figures.” Tony Blake passed the church ledger back to him and raised his hands, palms up, in a gesture of defeat. Every month they went through the figures together, and every month Tony’s dodgy adding-up made the Reverend think he either had more in the bank than he had anticipated, or that he was going to run out of money in a fortnight. The Reverend suspected the blame lay with Tony’s big, bear hands: his fat, round fingers couldn’t manage the small keys on the calculator.
Tony sat in silence while the Reverend added columns of figures again, checking totals off and making neat ticks in the appropriate columns. “All right,” he said at last, “what kind of expenses will we have to cover this month?”
The big policeman was about to open his mouth to answer when there was a knock at the office door. The two men exchanged glances.
The Reverend stood and crossed the room, mindful of his sore knee joints which seemed to get worse in wet weather. He opened the door to Sybill’s granddaughter.
“Good morning,” she said. She had a long, black raincoat on and clutched an umbrella. Behind her, rain drove diagonally across the cemetery and cliff-top.
&
nbsp; “Good morning,” he replied, jolted by seeing her.
“Can I come in? It’s wet out here and I need to talk to you about something.”
The Reverend stood aside and let her in, closed the rain out. He walked back to his desk while she slipped out of her raincoat. She was dressed all in dark grey.
“Good morning, Constable Blake,” she said. Tony stared up at her suspiciously. She pulled off her gloves and hat and stood expectantly in front of the Reverend’s desk.
“How may I help you, Miss Hartley?” the Reverend asked.
“Fielding. Hartley was my grandmother’s surname.”
“Of course.”
“And anyway, call me Maisie.”
“How may I help you?” he asked again.
She cast a significant glance in Tony’s direction. “Could I speak with you alone?”
Tony’s eyebrows shot up. The Reverend hesitated. What did she want with him?
“Tony, would you mind waiting in the church?” the Reverend asked.
Tony responded with a gruff affirmative, stood and then disappeared through the side door which led to the nave. When the door was shut behind him, the Reverend gestured to the vacated chair.
“Sit down.” He studied her as she sat. She seemed anxious about something. Her nails were bitten to the quick, her fingers laced and unlaced in front of her until she was properly settled.
“It’s about my grandmother,” she said at last.
A cold shock to the heart. What did she know? “I might not be able to help you. I didn’t know Sybill very well at all.”
“Who found her?”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Who found her body?”
“Oh.” Tread carefully now. This could be bad. How had the story gone? He cursed his poor memory. “Now, I don’t know if I remember right. It was nearly a year ago.”