Hekla's Children, page 12
‘You can’t tell me not to take this personally,’ she says, and points to Ryan, whose skin is as yellow as old teeth.
Ryan slips in and out of delirium. His cries of pain alternate with rambling, one-sided conversations from which the only sense that can be made is the piteous pleading. Inevitably, he loses control of his bodily functions, and the stench of his sickness fills the camp. They have long since passed the point where they can do anything to keep him comfortable, and are just sitting – lethargic with starvation – when Bark Foot limps over to them.
‘A third and last time, I ask: will you not offer him to me? His time is near.’
‘His time is his own,’ snaps Scattie. ‘Not yours.’
‘Nobody would let even the basest of animals suffer in this way. I can end it for him with honour.’
‘If all we can do is die then we’ll do it without being part of your sadistic little game.’
‘He will be dead by tonight, and you will be dead by the end of three days after that, at most.’ He turns to address Liv personally. ‘After the boy it will be you. You are weakest. You know this—’
Scattie leaps up in a violent surge which takes them all aback, Bark Foot included, even though the head-rush brought on by nearly two days without food or water makes her stagger. But she plants her feet and stays upright and brandishes Ryan’s fire-sharpened stick in his face. ‘Don’t you fucking dare!’ she snarls. ‘Pick on the weakest, would you? How’s that honourable? You don’t talk to her! You don’t talk to any of us! You send us home or you get nothing! Right, Liv?’
Liv nods mutely.
‘Right, Bran?’
Bran isn’t meeting her eyes. His foot doodles in the dirt, making spiral patterns.
‘Bran…’
Still not looking at her, he squares his shoulders and says to Bark Foot, ‘I offer you Ryan.’
‘NO!’
‘Well what fucking good is your way doing us?’ Bran storms, and this is by far one of the most frightening things Liv has seen because despite all the years of bullying and teasing she’s seen him suffer at school, she has never ever seen him lose his temper. ‘Getting all stubborn and holier-than-thou? What good is it doing? Ryan is dying…’
‘We’re all dying!’ she retorts.
‘I know that! But at least this way one of us doesn’t have to!’
Bark Foot is standing over Ryan. ‘Do you all offer him?’
‘No!’ snaps Scattie.
‘Yes,’ whispers Liv. ‘Scat, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t…’ she tries, but Scattie shoves her away and collapses with her arms wrapped around her knees, heaving great hollow sobs.
‘It is enough,’ Bark Foot announces, and gathers Ryan up gently in his arms. Scattie looks up as if she might be thinking of trying to stop him, but just buries her face again, which is the only way she can say Yes. Bark Foot takes the limp body to the animal-hide igloo and places him inside. He makes many trips to the river, first bringing water-rounded stones and placing them upon the fire, which he has banked to a blazing height, where they glow cherry red. Then he fills many skin bags with water and takes them and the hot stones into the hut, and soon clouds of steam begin to billow from around the hide door. Bark Foot sings – a low, murmuring, rhythmic chant which falls and rises through the day, pausing periodically to shovel out piles of fire-and-water-shattered stone onto a mound of scorched debris which testifies to many rituals such as this over the endless years.
While they wait, Bran tattoos each of the girls with the same triskelion that Bark Foot gave him. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen next,’ he explains, ‘but there’s strength in threes. Three of us, three arms on this design. It must mean something. If this is the place of the dead, and we do die, maybe we’ll end up together.’
‘Whatever,’ Scattie mutters, but lets him get on with it. Liv knows it makes no sense but it’s as close to a plan as anything.
At last Bark Foot emerges, naked and streaming with sweat, and flexing the gleam of a young, strong leg with no wound – but of Ryan there is no sign, either within the hut or without.
‘The way is open,’ Bark Foot says, and even to Scattie’s ears this sounds like as close to an apology as he can come. He crosses to Liv, who is too weak to even be embarrassed by his nakedness, and helps her to her feet. ‘Gather your things. You are going home.’
* * *
WITH ONE FOOT ON THE TIMBER TRACK AND THE SUNLIT slope of Rowton Bank ahead of her, Liv turns to look back at Bark Foot, who is flanked by her two friends in the dripping gloom. They can all hear the afaugh growling nearby; it senses that the world is close. There is every possibility that despite Bark Foot’s new strength it will attempt a reckless dash at the footbridge anyway. This hesitation is dangerous, but when it comes to it, she finds she is reluctant to leave them. For once she is not behind everybody else. She is going ahead, but there’s no joy in it, no achievement, because it feels too much like running away.
‘Don’t,’ says Scattie. ‘We’ll be fine.’
‘How can you possibly say that?’
She pushes up her left sleeve and shows Liv the raw red and blue of her fresh tattoo. ‘Big boys’ club,’ she says with a grim smile and a shrug. ‘If you can’t beat ’em, right?’
The afaugh wails, a lot closer, and Liv knows that she must move, now. She treads carefully but quickly along the crudely shaped lengths of timber track, concentrating on her footing, because the wood is shiny and she knows that if she falls now she’ll never get up again. The afaugh’s disconsolate cries become savage and there’s a tremendous crashing in the bushes behind her and Bark Foot is roaring a battle cry and Scattie is shrieking, and Liv almost turns around but Bran yells, ‘No! Don’t turn back! Go! Go!’
She runs, knowing that she’s going to fall, and lets her momentum carry her forwards, and by the time it grows too big – like a great rolling boulder pushing her – she is falling, halfway across the revenant bridge, and her final despairing lunge ends with her going face-first into the far bank, legs flailing in the water, hands clawing herself up into the sun and the short springy turf of Sutton Park.
When she has regained breath and courage enough to look back, she sees only bright parkland. The timber track has disappeared, along with the shadows of Un.
Except that’s not true. She knows that they’re still there, waiting behind the world, and that her friends are there too, fighting to stop a terrible hunger from escaping. So when the rescuers find her she says nothing. In her famished condition it is easy for them to believe that shock has wiped her memory of the last twenty-four hours, so she lets them.
And for a while, it even becomes true.
13
HOME VISIT
THE TABLE OF THE INTERROGATION ROOM WAS A MIDDEN of paper coffee cups and food wrappers. Liv sat on the other side of it, glaring at them, daring them to disbelieve her. ‘You can’t let it escape,’ she finished.
‘What?’ scoffed DS Pryce. ‘Bark Foot the Frankenstein Bog Mummy from Hell?’
‘No! Haven’t you been listening? The afaugh!’
‘“Aw-fuck” is right,’ he laughed. ‘As in this makes fuck-all sense.’
Hodges shushed him, but he was smiling all the same.
‘Every day that you have him out of the ground, poking and prodding at him, he gets weaker. Soon he won’t be able to stop it from finding the way into our world, and it will do terrible, terrible things! That’s why you’ve got to put him back!’
She shifted her gaze onto Nathan, where it settled like a shadow. ‘You have to convince her, Mr Brookes. I know you believe me. I can see it. You have to convince her because when you put him back he will open the way to Un and you can find Scattie and Bran and bring them home.’ She pushed up her sleeve and showed him a tattoo. It did look crude and homemade, its outlines smudged with age.
‘They’re still alive,’ she said. ‘I would know if they weren’t; I’d feel it through this. They’re still alive.’
* * *
A UNIFORMED OFFICER LED LIV AWAY TO THE HOLDING cells, and her social worker went to make a call. Nathan was left in the interview room with the two detectives. He was so anxious to get out of there it felt like his skin was crawling with bugs. ‘So are we done?’ he asked.
‘Oh, we’re done,’ replied DI Hodges. Beneath the veneer of professionalism he reeked of sour disappointment.
Nathan couldn’t resist one last jibe. ‘Not what you were expecting to hear, was it? Want to arrest me for dressing up as a monster and running around in the woods scaring kiddies?’
‘One more fucking word out of you and I’ll have you on obstruction. Get.’
Nathan got.
* * *
THEY WERE WAITING FOR HIM OUTSIDE THE POLICE STATION. Whether it had just been the jungle drums of social media which had alerted them to Liv being in custody, or whether Hodges had actually arranged it just to fuck with him, the end result was the same: Nathan barely got to the bottom of the steps before fists were bunched in the front of his shirt and a man’s face was snarling into his own.
‘Where’s my son, you fucking arsehole?’
Ryan’s dad: Nigel Edwards, beef-faced and sweating, upon whom it seemed nine years of waiting had accreted physically, making him even more massive than Nathan remembered.
‘Well?’
Behind him stood his wife Alicia, glaring through smudged eyeliner, and slightly behind them an older, greyer couple – him in tweed, her in a beige housecoat – not as belligerent but fully prepared to let this happen. Jennifer and Oliver Whitehead. Brandon’s parents.
He was shaken by the collar like a dog. ‘Well? Who did they dig up? Was it my son? Was it theirs?’
Obviously they thought that he was the one who’d been interviewed, and that if the police wanted to know something then he must have something to tell. He opened his mouth to explain, but the impossibility of it choked him more effectively than a pair of hands, and all he could do was shake his head and gasp, ‘I’m sorry… I’m sorry…’ like an idiot.
‘Sorry? You fucking…’
Oliver Whitehead came closer. What time had given to Ryan’s father it had stolen from Bran’s. Brandon had been a late, accidental child in any case and his father had already been in his fifties when he’d disappeared, but nine years of grief had left him looking frail and elderly.
‘Please,’ said Mr Whitehead. ‘We just want to know what happened. Why is Olivia Crawford in there?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I can’t… I don’t have any answers.’
‘Has she said what happened? Has she finally remembered?’ The naked pleading in his and Jennifer’s eyes was almost too much to look at.
Edwards shook him again. ‘Did she tell them what you did, eh? Is that it?’
There was nothing he could say about Liv that wouldn’t sound like he was mocking them with the most absurd of lies, so he settled on the simplest. ‘No. None of it. She’s insane.’
‘Fucking liar,’ snarled Edwards.
Then uniforms appeared and pulled them apart, and while the parents turned their helplessness on the police he shuffled away like a criminal.
* * *
THE INTERVIEW VIDEO STOPPED AND TARA SAT BACK IN HER chair, feeling like her brain had just been put through a similar forced march to her feet, which still hurt.
‘You said you wanted to see it,’ said DS Pryce, tucking his iPad away. He’d brought the footage around to her room at the Conference Park hotel as a courtesy, but the fluttery pleasure at having him turn up unannounced had quickly disappeared as she’d watched the footage of Olivia Crawford tell her impossible story. ‘I don’t know what good it’ll do you,’ he added. ‘That girl’s as mad as a box of frogs.’
Yes, she thought. The maddest thing of all being that it makes perfect sense. ‘Do you think that if two insane things agree with each other then that means they’re sane?’ she wondered.
‘Uhh…’ Plainly this wasn’t the sort of response he’d been expecting. ‘You didn’t believe any of that, did you?’
‘No, of course not,’ she lied. ‘Tell me, what are the rules on reclaiming stolen property? Olivia Crawford stole my laptop when she vandalised my house – I was wondering if I might get it back now you’ve caught the thief?’
Pryce was on more solid ground here. ‘Easy. You gave your local station the details of what was nicked, yes? Colour, size, serial number, et cetera?’
‘It was definitely high on my to-do list,’ she admitted. ‘Things have been a bit busy since.’ She waggled her bandaged feet at him.
‘So that’s what you should do. Then we send some uniforms around to the perpetrator’s address with the burglary report and they pick it up. Done.’
‘Will that take long?’
He shrugged. ‘A couple of days – end of the week, max.’
‘Oh.’ Tara tried to look as disappointed as possible, which wasn’t all that difficult. ‘That’s a shame. I was really hoping to get it back sooner – today, ideally. Apart from a lot of personal stuff it’s also got all my Rowton Man research on it, you see, including some things I was looking at to help your DI.’
It’s not an outright lie, she told herself. She didn’t feel the need to point out that Hodges had found her information less than valuable. Pryce probably knew that anyway. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any possible way that I might be able to quickly pop into Olivia Crawford’s place, grab it and pop out again – obviously accompanied by a reliable detective sergeant to make sure I behave myself? I know it’s probably massively against the rules and everything…’
Pryce rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. ‘Yeah,’ he said slowly. ‘It sort of massively is a bit.’ Then he gave her a small, oddly boyish smile. ‘About as much as a DS asking a witness in a case he’s on out to dinner.’
All of a sudden that fluttery feeling was back.
* * *
OLIVIA CRAWFORD’S COUNCIL FLAT WAS IN THE FALCON Lodge Estate on the eastern boundary of Sutton Coldfield, as close as it was possible to get to the countryside without actually escaping the city. It was a labyrinth of cul-de-sacs, alleyways, and wasteland; the lot behind Crawford’s building was overgrown with knotgrass, docks, and rosebay willowherb.
‘I read a research paper once,’ Tara said, as Pryce’s car pulled up outside the building, ‘which suggested that the types of plants that grown in urban wastelands are the same kinds of species you’d have found colonising the land at the end of the last ice age.’
‘Proving what?’ he asked and killed the engine.
‘I don’t know. That we’re all just tenants?’ She sighed, looking around at the bland uniformity of the brick boxes around them.
Like all the others, Crawford’s building was three floors high, with a single entrance reached by a wide slope of concrete lined with rubbish bags awaiting collection. Her one-bed unit was on the top floor, behind an anonymous door, but all pretences to normality stopped at the threshold. The acrid stench that greeted them nearly drove them back outside.
It looked like the post-glacial wilderness had been attempting to colonise the inside of Crawford’s home as well. Hanging from the ceiling, the walls, covering the floor and inhabiting much of the space between the furniture were tangles of wood and hand-made cordage – things that looked like they were trying to be nets, baskets, snares, crudely bodged-together stools, tools and bowls, and the scraps and drifts of wood-shavings from their construction formed a mulch underfoot. Animal pelts were strewn across the floor and drying on racks – squirrel and fox, mostly, but also some that looked suspiciously like cat. By the window, which had no glass, the carpet had been cut away to allow for a campfire on some broken slabs of concrete, and smoke and soot had blackened the entire wall and the ceiling above it.
Pryce peered out. ‘Top floor, overlooking wasteland,’ he commented. ‘Nobody to see and call the fire brigade. It’s amazing she hasn’t burnt the place down yet.’ Through the gaping window frame the elements had wreaked havoc with damp, mould and a crust of bird droppings. Feeders hung from the upper frame. But all of that only accounted for part of the smell – the rest came from what they discovered in the bathroom: more pelts soaking in two buckets of dark yellow urine.
‘I think she’s been trying to tan her own leather,’ said Tara. Her eyes were streaming.
Pryce was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Jesus Christ, she really is off the scale, isn’t she? Seriously, don’t touch anything. You might catch hepatitis. This is a social services job, no mistake. Mental health too, probably.’
‘How was this allowed to happen? Was no one looking out for her?’
‘There’s no father on file. Mother was more harm than good – after the thing in the park Crawford was fostered out but funding for that only lasted until eighteen back then. After that she was on her own.’
‘That poor girl,’ Tara murmured. Wherever Olivia had gone, part of her had never really left that place.
Un.
‘All I can say is, for someone who’s been dragged for miles at knifepoint you’re more sympathetic than I would be, Doctor. Nobody forced her to do that, and nobody forced her to live like this, either.’
It was in the bedroom that Tara made the most surprising discovery. A jumble of muddy excavation tools were stacked in a corner along with an ancient metal detector, next to a flat-pack bookcase crammed with finds: fragments of bone, stone and ceramics, all neatly bagged and tagged but jumbled together in a way that defied any sense of organisation. There were even a few bits of jewellery. She caught her breath at a cardboard box which rattled with old coins – many of them Roman, all of them invaluable, but casually tossed in together as if of no interest. Books were stacked in tottering towers, all of them in one way or another to do with archaeology, local history, myths and folklore. By the bed – which looked and smelled more like an animal’s nest than anything a human had slept in – was what Tara assumed to be her most precious of all treasures: a journal, not much more than a scrapbook, really. It was the kind of cheap glittery stationery that any teenage girl might buy from a high-street newsagent – but stuffed to overflowing with notes and bits of paper and held together with an old Disney hair bobble; Ariel, from The Little Mermaid. Tara felt a momentary pang of guilt, quickly crushed, as she slipped the book into her satchel.
