On the Edge of Darkness

by Barbara Erskine

  Once he had left her to the not-too-gentle attentions of Deborah Wilkins to patch up her wound and get her ready for bed he went to his office and switching on the light he closed the door, sat down at his desk and reached for the phone. When his conversation with Jane Craig was over he sat for a long time staring at the empty blotter in front of him, trying to make sense of what he had just heard. Every part of his rational mind was rejecting the evidence of his own eyes. It was not possible. Not under any circumstances or in any way was it possible that Jane Craig could have stabbed Brid with her nail file. Nor that Brid could have turned into a cat. ‘You suckle a young Devil in the shape of a Tabby Cat.’ From somewhere in the depths of his memory the words from Congreve floated suddenly into his head. He shuddered and then he frowned. He had not asked her about the cat. For a moment he hesitated, then he stood up.

  The ward was once more in darkness, but she was awake, lying with her hair spread on the pillow round her, a pad of lint taped across her shoulder, her eyes staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘How is your shoulder?’

  ‘Better. But Nurse Wilkins is not a good healer. She is too rough.’

  Ivor nodded. He suppressed a sudden thought that he would not like to be in Deborah’s shoes if she antagonised Brid too much. He reached up to draw the curtain halfway round them, and then sat down on the chair next to her. ‘So, I wanted to ask you some more about how you do your travelling,’ he said softly. ‘Are you feeling tired, or can we talk a bit?’ It was refreshing that she seemed to enjoy talking to him, and to have no reservations about sharing her thoughts, in fact, seemed very proud of them.

  She smiled, and propped herself up onto her elbow. ‘All right. I am not tired. When I come back from travelling I am full of life. What does Nurse Wilkins call it? Energy.’ She smiled enigmatically. ‘You want to know how I do it?’

  He laughed quietly. ‘Indeed I do. From my point of view you are performing a miracle.’ Her look of satisfaction was so feline he could almost hear her purr. He shivered. It reminded him what he had come to ask her. ‘Brid, do you ever pretend you are a cat?’

  Her eyes sparkled. ‘Of course. But it is not pretend. I change to a cat to move quickly. Cats are sacred to my family. We use their power, their knowledge. It was the first thing I learned under Broichan when I was still a child. You believe me, that I can change the shape of my body?’

  There was a light in her eyes again, a mocking glint which pulled him up short. ‘I don’t know what to believe, Brid.’

  She nodded. ‘I have listened to a lot of people since I came to your world,’ she went on, suddenly very serious. ‘You no longer know how to do these things. You do not believe in them. It is called by you shape-shifting: entering the body of another creature. Borrowing its power and its knowledge. Using its memories, its strength. Using it to hide and travel and watch. In my country the people expect that what you would call a Druid will know how – and I was training as a poet and a Druid.’

  ‘A Druid!’ Now he had heard it all. ‘You are a Druid?’

  ‘Of course.’ She lay back against the pillow with a sigh.

  Hiding a smile, he resisted the urge to reach forward and push the hair back from her face. ‘Brid, if you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?’ It had been asked often before of course, with no coherent answer.

  As before, she shrugged. ‘I cannot remember.’

  It seemed to him that her memory was selective in the extreme. He decided to be brutal. ‘Dr Craig thinks you must be about forty.’

  ‘Dr Craig?’ Her eyes lit up. ‘You have spoken to A-dam?’

  It was his turn to shrug. ‘I don’t know if it was the right one. As I said he told me he had known a Brid once, but that she would be about forty by now, and you are not nearly that old, are you?’ He glanced at her. To his surprise she showed no indignation. The significance of what he had said did not seem to strike her. Instead she persisted in asking about Adam Craig. ‘He is the same one. He knew me. He will come and see me now he knows where I am. He will.’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Brid.’ Nothing seemed to make sense. It didn’t add up. With a sigh he stood up. ‘One day soon you must show me how you do your travelling, Brid. But not now. You’re tired. You must sleep. We’ll talk again tomorrow.’ He paused, expecting her to argue.

  She merely smiled, and turned away from him.

  He waited only a moment, then he tiptoed away.

  Later that evening, Adam Craig rang. The two men talked for twenty minutes. When they at last hung up they had agreed to meet as soon as possible. In the meantime Ivor Furness would go up to central London the very next morning and visit Foyles, and there he would buy a copy of every book he could find on the study of the occult and on the Druids.

  The following evening, as he stood in the station, several books in his briefcase, waiting for the train to take him back to the northern suburbs, he glanced down at his copy of the Evening News. The headline on page two was succinct: Hospital Nurse Found Murdered. Mental Patient on the Run. He closed his eyes. Please God, no.

  12

  ‘I’m sorry, officer. I don’t think I can help you any more than that.’ Adam’s hands were clenched on his lap behind his desk.

  ‘As I told you, the Brid I knew before the war was the same age as me.’ He paused, aware of the policeman taking in his greying hair, his worn, tired face, the reading glasses lying before him on the blotter. ‘It couldn’t be the same person.’

  ‘And you are sure you haven’t seen her?’ Inspector Thomas seemed more than a little suspicious. The connection with Dr Adam Craig was too specific. He had already spoken to Mrs Craig and she too had seemed to be holding something back.

  Adam shook his head. ‘I can only assume, as I told Dr Furness and as I’ve told you, that this Brid is my Brid’s daughter. But I can assure you that she has not come here.’ He could not meet the other man’s eye.

  ‘Why is it, Dr Craig, that I have the feeling you are not telling me everything?’ Thomas sighed. ‘I’m sure you would not wish to protect someone as dangerous as this. We have issued a warning to the public not to approach her if she is seen.’

  ‘I will let you know if I see her. I promise.’ Taking a deep breath Adam stood up, hoping the man would take it as a sign that the interview was at an end. They had been talking for over an hour.

  There was a long pause as Inspector Thomas scrutinised his face, then at last he levered himself out of his chair with a sigh. ‘Very well then, doctor. Please let me know if you think of anything else. I may need to come and talk to you again, but in the meantime, I’m sure I don’t have to repeat the warning to be careful. Dr Furness seems convinced that she will be making her way here.’

  Adam waited for the anonymous black car to pull away from the gate before ringing Ivor Furness.

  ‘Did you show her your records? Mention the cat business?’

  ‘I’m surprised you need to ask.’ Ivor had all his private notes on Brid in a briefcase before him at that very moment. Of one thing he was sure. They would not remain in his filing cabinet at the hospital. These were confidential patient notes. Besides, he would never be able to hold up his head in public again if it ever got out that he had begun to half believe some of her stories about shape-shifting and time travel. ‘Look, old boy, I know I don’t have to tell you, but be careful. She seems to have ways and means. And she is dangerous. No question of that.’

  ‘And you are sure,’ Adam was staring out at the garden, half expecting to see the cat at any moment, ‘that you don’t know where she is?’

  ‘Absolutely sure.’ Ivor clicked his briefcase shut. ‘She has completely disappeared.’

  She was exultant for a long time after killing Deborah Wilkins. Her triumph at ridding herself of the woman with her petty cruelties and her inferior mind and the surge of energy from the flowing blood had combined to give her the strength to leave the hospital – to draw a cloak of invisibility around herself and walk thr
ough the gates as they opened to let in a delivery van, to walk up the road and around the corner and out of sight. The only thing she had with her was her bag. In it, still, the paperknife, the comb, the compact and Adam’s single cufflink. She walked for a long time, aware that when people started to notice her she would be recognised by the ugly dress she was wearing. She had to find other clothes, and in the event it was easy. She saw a complete selection dancing in the wind on someone’s washing line. The house was empty, the garden pretty and secluded. She chose a dress, a lace petticoat, underclothes and two woollen jumpers, one to wear, one to carry over her arm. She buried the blue dress and coarse regulation underwear in the garden’s compost heap, said a little prayer of thanks and blessing to the owner and let herself out of the gate. No one saw her, and the theft was not reported until the next day, by which time Brid was many miles away.

  Her energies had been kept up by her anger and frustration in the hospital. Now, as the initial relief and excitement wore off, she began to flag. Twice she stopped to rest and the second time she felt a strange buzzing inside her brain which filled her with foreboding. She staggered to her feet. She had to find somewhere safe to hide, somewhere where she could take stock, somewhere where she could fight off the demons which crowded to overwhelm her, Broichan at their head. And she was not going to allow it to happen in public again. She had at last learned her lesson. When strangers found you in a trance, they took you to hospital, and if the hospital could not understand what had happened to you and if they could not find a way of fitting you in, with families and addresses and people to speak for you, they treated you as mad. They were very primitive in their approach to the human mind, these colleagues of A-dam’s. They had no understanding of the way things worked. They dismissed the sacred arts as imagination although, she suspected, Ivor Furness was beginning to understand.

  She was sad to have left him. She liked the man with his kindness and his attempts at understanding. She had felt safe with him. But Deborah Wilkins had spoiled all that with her constant unkindness and, on that last day, with her anger and her threat to stab Brid again with the needle that brought the black sleep. She narrowed her eyes slightly at the memory, but already it was fading. The woman had been of no importance, as long ago Jeannie Barron had been of no importance, and she would not be given the status of one who is remembered.

  Forcing herself to move on Brid turned the street corner and saw ahead of her a bus standing stationary at a stop. She walked across to it and climbed aboard. It was empty, the driver and conductor leaning against a wall having a quiet cigarette in the pleasant spring sunshine as they waited for the appointed time of departure. She climbed the stairs and made her way to the very front. Then she wrapped herself again in nothingness – one of the simplest tricks they had been taught at Craig Phádraig. As the bus filled up and the driver took his place at the wheel she was left undisturbed. The front seats, usually the most popular, were for some reason not favoured on this occasion and she was left alone. When she stood up and walked the length of the bus and down the stairs ready to get off, the conductor had still not collected her fare. If any of the passengers had been asked they would probably have said, yes, they did vaguely remember a woman sitting in the front, but they could not describe her and did not notice when she left.

  She decided to get off when the bus turned out of the busy streets and set off into the country, its destination a village some ten miles north of London. As she stood on the platform the bus drew up at a lonely stop. She jumped off and within seconds the bus had moved on, the driver wondering why he had bothered to stop at all as there was no one waiting and no one had rung the bell.

  She stood for a moment staring round and then headed for a gate leading into a field. The grass rose gently ahead of her in the evening light and she walked with a lighter step, happy now she was away from the claustrophobic streets. There were black-and-white cows grazing in the field but they ignored her as she made her way between them, only one or two raising their heads to watch the slight, shadowy figure slip past.

  To leave the field she climbed a stile and found herself in a small wood. It was growing cold now and soon it would be dark. She wasn’t afraid of the cold. If necessary she would go and huddle up with the cows; they would keep her warm and understand why she had need of them, but she wanted more than warmth. She wanted somewhere where she could think and meditate alone, somewhere where she could reinforce her intention of staying in the time and place where she wanted to be, and where she could fight off Broichan’s pursuit.

  She found it in a small shelter built by some children the preceding summer under the spreading arms of a centuries-old oak tree. She stood for a while in silence, feeling the tree, sensing its energies, asking for its strength and its favour, and then, satisfied, she ducked inside the shelter. The children had left nothing but a huge pile of dried leaves, gathered for their game, nested in and musty from the small animals of the wood, but insulating, nevertheless. There was also an old saucepan, a broken chair and a kettle.

  She went back to the animals’ drinking trough for water and lit a fire with ease, taking enormous pleasure in using the simple skills like making a strike-alight from a rusty iron nail and a stone, breaking up the chair for firewood, heaping up the bedding ready for the night, and then gathering shoots and roots for soup, all things which, insulated in the claustrophobic hospital atmosphere where everything was done for her, she had not practised for so long. With the warm gruel inside her and the darkness of the trees wrapping itself around her like a blanket she sat down near her small fire and composed herself to go home.

  Broichan, as she had sensed, was not there. She did not pause to wonder why, did not sense that other man, the man from A-dam’s time, who was also questing for her uncle. Behind her closed lids she searched the pathways of her brain and then, reassured, she made the leap deep inside herself which would bring her to the Scottish mountainside where so many years before she had abandoned the life she knew for the love of a twentieth-century schoolboy.

  The cottage was abandoned. There was no sign of her mother or Gartnait, and no new message carved on the stones. She stood for a long time by the great cross-slab, staring out across the mountainside, feeling the wind in her hair and breathing deeply of the cold spicy air beneath the old pines. Inside her head she was calling – cautiously in case Broichan heard – knowing her mother would hear her.

  But no one came. The silence of the echoing hills was immense.

  Frightened, she laid her hands upon the stone, trying to feel its power. But the energy had gone. The earth was sleeping. And she was trapped once more at home in the Scottish hills.

  In the small wood in Hertfordshire the fire burned low and went out. The kettle fell sideways into the ash and almost at once a few leaves blew over it, half hiding it from view. If there ever had been anyone there to watch the badgers creep out of their sett and trot purposefully down the path towards the field they had long ago gone, and left the wood deserted.

  Jane was staring down at the bowl of muesli in front of her with fixed concentration. The silence at the table was broken only by the singing of a thrush high in a tree in the garden, the sound resonating through the open dining room window as Adam turned the pages of his Times with a rustle. Jane glanced at Calum. The Hardings had sent a good luck card which he had opened and thrown down next to his plate in what looked like despair. He had eaten nothing and was on his second cup of coffee, an open maths textbook beside him on the table; for once Adam had not said a word about reading books at meal times. Jane had suggested an egg, or toast or oatcakes and honey, to no avail; Calum’s pasty white colouring reinforced his angry outburst that if she forced him to eat he would throw up all over his plate.

  Adam closed the paper at last and folded it with a sigh. He glanced at his son and grimaced. ‘Okay, old chap? Shall we go?’ He had promised to drive Adam to school during the exams, so he needn’t worry about missing the bus.

  C
alum nodded. He stood up, hesitated, and bolted from the room.

  ‘Poor kid.’ His father shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen him so wound up before.’

  ‘He’s no need to worry. Dr Passmore said he’d sail through them.’ Jane stood up too and began to stack the plates as the phone rang. Adam went to take it in the study. Two minutes later he reappeared. ‘It’s for Calum. It’s Julie. I suppose she wants to wish him luck. I wish the girl would let him alone just for these couple of weeks.’

  He went to call his son out of the lavatory where Calum had been standing wondering if he was going to be sick. Watching the boy disappear into the study, Adam shook his head. Grouchily he picked up the newspaper and began to fold it even smaller, ready to put it into his case, though he knew he wouldn’t look at it all day and that Jane resented having to wait until he got home to read it. ‘Come on, Calum,’ he called over his shoulder.

  There was a pause. When Calum reappeared he looked stunned.

  ‘What is it?’ Jane glanced up as he walked through the door, and she saw his face. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s Julie.’ Calum flung himself down in a chair and put his head in his hands.

  ‘What’s wrong with Julie?’ Jane glanced at her husband.

  Calum shook his head. Looking up he forced himself to look at his father. ‘She’s pregnant.’

  ‘What?’ Adam’s shock was palpable.

  ‘Julie’s pregnant.’ The boy’s hands were shaking.

  ‘And she chooses today to tell you? Half an hour before you start the most important exams of your life?’ Adam was incredulous.

  ‘She forgot about my exams, Dad. She hadn’t given them a thought.’ Calum rubbed his face miserably with the heels of his hands. ‘Oh Shit! Shit, shit, shit!’ He was on the point of tears.