Slow Poison

by Helen Slavin

  Outside, Anna stopped and turned part way up the path. It was going to be safe. She suffered a fleeting second of a sense of loss, an edge of grief that grazed at her before she saw Matt Woodhill appear up a ladder, perched against the windows. Inside the building someone began whistling.

  18

  Job Done

  It appeared to Emz, as she sat in a fug of equations, that the world was split into two spaces. There was the general and crowded space of the sixth form centre where noise ran like water, a constant and a comfort. This space expanded into the studious hum of M2 where Mrs Kumar was imparting her knowledge of mathematical theorems. This space was lit with electricity and the reflection of the white board on Mrs Kumar’s almost perfect skin and her long and incredibly shiny black hair. Mrs Kumar, although somewhere in her forties, was universally admired and looked up to by the sixth form because she was clever and extremely beautiful. She was also stylish. Rumour had it that she had, once upon a time, been a runway model in Paris. Into this space clicked the numbers and the denominators and the vectors and factors and all the machinery of Mathematics. Everyone moved around this space with energy and speed and a brightness of eye.

  Bounded by this space was the miniature universe that contained Emily Way and Logan Boyle. The only noise in this space was of hidden thoughts, of thudding heartbeats and shallow breaths. Right at this moment, for example, Logan Boyle was existing in the two spaces, his hand moving quickly across his notebook making mathematical markings, but, as Emz watched him, she could see the real edges of him, where he pushed out into Logan Space where his chair was angled so that he could watch her from the corners of his vision. This Logan Space lifted from the chair now and walked towards her, his hand, the one that was not marking out mathematics, was at her neck, her head was tilting towards his face and his mouth was—

  “Emz?” Mrs Kumar’s voice warped Logan Space. “What have you got?” she looked expectant. Emz looked at the page in front of her, the rough jumble of symbols. Mrs Kumar’s perfectly groomed eyebrows wrinkled elegantly with impatience.

  “Erm.” Emz considered busking it. She looked up to the front. She could just pull this together from a standing start. She could hear her voice intoning the terms and she could see the maths in her head as it engineered itself. Mrs Kumar nodded and enthused and pulled up more slides from the presentation. Emz retrieved herself from Logan Space and concentrated.

  At lunchtime she avoided all human contact and took herself off to sit under the pagoda shelter listening to her stomach rumbling and rueing the fact that she’d rushed out on Ailith this morning and in her haste to get away had neglected to bring either lunch or money. It was going to be a long afternoon of History and English. She rummaged in her bag for the copy of Wuthering Heights that the English group were currently intent upon.

  As she moved through the chapter there was a scent of ham and cheese and then she was hallucinating that a hand was offering her a torn half of supermarket bap. The edges revealed a slice of Emmental, a thickly sliced wodge of off-the-bone ham, a shining glint of mustard. Emz did not look up at Logan Boyle.

  “Aren’t you having lunch with Caitlin today?” Emz stared at her book. Emily Bronte, it appeared, had written in gibberish, the words a jumble.

  “She doesn’t eat lunch.” Logan waggled the torn bap at Emily. She was trying to play it cool but her aggrieved stomach was having other, growlier ideas. Logan smirked and sat beside her. Emz took the offering. His other hand lifted the twin half of the torn bap to his lips and began to chew. Emz took a small bite, fighting the urge to cram the whole delicious concoction into her mouth at once and then ask where the doughnuts were. Instead she thought she might push the obvious Caitlin point.

  “Where’s Caitlin then?” Emz was conflicted, the question seemed both mealy-mouthed and confrontational. She wanted to retract it at once. Logan ignored the question and ate in an easy silence for some moments. He wiped his hands on his jeans and reached into his bag.

  “Impressive bit of busking you did for Kumar,” he mused as he dredged, no, it couldn’t be, a packet of supermarket doughnuts from the depths of his rucksack. Sugar snowed onto his jeans, frosted itself over Emz’s own leggings. “How did you pull that off?”

  “Skills,” was all Emz managed. She bit into the doughnut, sugar crusting her face and a creamy burst of chocolate making her stomach rumble ever more greedily.

  “Fucking not.” His laugh was brief, and he didn’t look at her; his stern gaze roamed across the empty space of the pagoda shelter surroundings, the wildlife pond, the balding grassland that bordered the back of the maths block. “Kumar was one bracket away from owning you…” Again he watched her from the corner of his eye. Emz gave her own brief and carefree laugh. At least that is what she aimed for, what came out was a sort of snort, a cross between an amused goat and a horse sneezing. There was a pause for more munching of doughnuts, Logan offering the bag for further pickings.

  “She’s going to take you down at the Parents’ Consultation Evening,” he predicted. Emz almost choked.

  “What?”

  “Well she is… you don’t show up… you don’t do the...”

  “Parents’ Consultation Evening?”

  “Yeah. Week Thursday?”

  Emz recalled very dimly the slip of paper she’d been given, two, or possibly three, weeks ago requiring her to organise herself and her parent into attending the consultation evening. What had she done with it? Whatever. It didn’t matter. She could come alone. Her mother did not have to know anything about the event and would no doubt be splitting an atom or something that night. Panic over. Panic over. Panic.

  Logan was looking directly at her now and Logan Space expanded and eclipsed all other space in the entire universe so that Emz was hyper aware of his smell, the colours of each strand of his hair, the pen mark on his sleeve. He had come to find her. Hadn’t he? He leaned towards her and she waited for the kiss. His teeth, neat and white, bit into the doughnut in her hand before he rose up and stepped away from her.

  “Whenever,” was his farewell.

  * * *

  Emz managed to force herself to participate in the English lesson but History defeated her and once again it was a mere half an hour or so before she was pulling on her hiking trousers and tugging her Prickles sweatshirt over her head. The second her arms filled the sleeves she felt better and more in control.

  The infirmary was free of hedgehogs this afternoon, Winn having just returned from an extensive release programme in the farthest reaches of Leap Woods. Emz cleaned out all the cages and pens in the infirmary itself and in the yard beyond. Their only occupants this afternoon were a selection of pheasants who had strayed into a garden in town and been retrieved by Winn.

  “Why isn’t the kettle on?” Winn grumped as she moved into the kitchen. “There’s bugger all else for you to be getting on with.” Winn was always edgy when there was a lull and she was not required to relocate a badger’s kneecap or resuscitate a vole.

  Emz stood in the kitchen with the back door open. She looked out into the wood as the kettle rattled on the worktop. Today the squirrels were all calm and going about their business. She needed to refill the bird feeders at the front of reception too. Emz made a mental note and wondered if she had time before the kettle boiled. She put the teabags in the pot.

  Sunlight slanted through the trees as Emz funnelled seed into the largest holder. There were three bird feeder stations at the front of the reception shed and they attracted a wide variety of local birds. She put the lid back on the feeder and looped it over its hook. As she lifted off the peanut holder she saw something move through the trees on the path to Cooper’s Pond. The movement was not an animal and it was evasive. Emz thought of the vandalism they’d suffered to the hides in recent months and set off down the path in pursuit.

  A biting breeze blew through the wood; she could see where the breeze wafted the leaves further into the wood. As the hairs on the back of her neck prickl
ed the word Trespassing printed itself onto her brain and the breeze chilled further. The sensation was strong. She could see Grandma Hettie at the edge of her vision. Trust your gut.

  She made her way quickly through the wood, following the twitching branches that the breeze snapped through the wood. As she moved further and deeper into Leap Woods Emz felt anger burble up inside like indigestion. Who was this?

  “Ailith?” She called out the name and at once knew it was wrong. The trees seemed to know it too, catching her voice and softening it so that the name did not ring out, was muffled and pushed down into the leaves. The hairs on Emz’s neck prickled further.

  “You’re trespassing,” she announced. There was a moment when the air stilled completely. Emz felt the anger’s heat fizz and build to a fierce, prickling spark that pushed out of her, rattled the leaves. Wait. Stop. What had they talked about last night? Mourners and guests.

  “Oh. No. Wait.” Emz lifted her hand in a wave. “Hang on. Are you a Guest?” There was no response. Emz took a breath, thinking of what to do next; she recalled the mental feeling of pushing Tighe Rourke through Havoc Wood and she tried that out too, shoving hard, mentally, into the space in front of her.

  In the near distance a small branch broke free of the limb of a tree and thudded earthwards. Emz’s gaze scanned every inch of her landscape, her feet moving her at speed through the undergrowth, off the paths, towards the small act of violence.

  “Hey.” She gave chase, her feet pounding and the earth springing away from her. “Hey!” Her voice was snatched at by the wind which whipped a branch into her face.

  * * *

  “You need to be careful.” Winn patched up her scratches with a dab or two of witch hazel and a restorative cup of tea.

  “It was just a branch,” Emz grumbled. “I was stupid.”

  “I meant the vandals. Be careful.”

  The witch hazel began to pinch at her small wounds and she felt grumpy and out of sorts. Winn half pushed her off the chair.

  “You’ll do. Now get home,” she instructed.

  * * *

  Emz stuck to the path that wound away from the back of reception down to Cooper’s Pond. Usually she did not walk the paths, she had her own ways and means through the wood, but today she wanted to walk a boundary. Each footstep she planted firmly, and was aware of her breath which was, currently, shallow and sharp with anger. She made a conscious effort to look at the anger, to breathe it out in the continued little blasts and by the time she was at the shore of Cooper’s Pond she was smiling to herself at the image she had in her head of small bright orange flames scorching from her lips.

  The cool steel of the water quenched her at last as she looked out across the surface. She drank in the bright lemon of the late afternoon autumn sunlight and breathed in the distant darkness of a storm rising above the other side of Castlebury. The sky was a deep and attractive shade of grey, one that made Emz feel very much better. There was a breeze rising now, one that carried the scent of rain.

  She could shake off the anger, but she could not shake the sensation that there was still someone else in the wood. Other. The word printed clearly and Emz’s gaze picked its way through the trees. It was not impossible for some guest or mourner to have wandered into Leap Woods; there was the rush of the River Rade, of course, but that was not uncrossable and there were other boundaries of bogland and scrubby ground that separated the two entities. Leap Woods was, as Emz had been taught, the younger sister of Havoc Wood, the frilled and tilled edge. There were more paths through Leap Woods because more people entered it but, very early in her life, Emz had walked the boundaries of those paths and learnt the parts of Leap Woods that few others ventured into. In the main the townsfolk of Woodcastle did not stray from paths. They closed gates and kept their dogs on leashes.

  Emz walked the wood. She wove her way along the trodden tracks and then began to criss and cross the landscape taking herself up to the edges where Leap Woods just shied away from joining with Havoc Wood. Here and there branches reached and connected with each other forming green lanes between the two parcels of land and Emz walked each familiar one of them.

  In each place she felt the Other watching her. Except this time she was not the watched, she was, rather, keeping them in her sight, however much she could not see them. She had the new sensation that she was pursuing them and that whoever this was they were on edge, they had overplayed their hand, and now she was aware. It was interesting to Emz that each time she thought of Other, the advantage seemed to thin a little, the breeze that was not a breeze blew up a little swifter, rattled a tree, or pushed at her shoulder. When this nagged at her and she substituted the thought Trespasser she felt an energy pull back into her making her feel stronger. It was a mental tussle. She was standing in the easternmost firebreak road when this revelation occurred to her and as a consequence she walked the wood once more, crissing and crossing her paths and with each footprint pressing the word Trespasser into the earth.

  By the time she turned out of Leap Woods and headed into Havoc she was tired to the bone and let the soft golden light of Cob Cottage reel her homewards.

  * * *

  At the edge of Hartfield Hall Mrs Fyfe stumbled out of the woods. There were twigs in her hair and she was breathing heavily. She crossed the lawn at a swift pace looking nowhere and as she entered the building the door slammed to behind her.

  That girl. That girl. If she only knew her own Strength. What a tussle. Mrs Fyfe felt drained, the altercation taking a chunk out of the reserves she had gleaned from the wedding. That girl. Mrs Fyfe needed to regroup. Her work had been interrupted and now she must continue into the night.

  A cat, one-eyed and malevolent looking, was sitting on a chair watching her. Its tongue licked out, interested, thoughtful. Mrs Fyfe’s tongue licked out too.

  “Here Puss…” she reached out a hand. The cat, old and wise, lashed out a set of claws and drew blood.

  He was sorry, during his last moments on earth.

  19

  My Kingdom for a Head

  The Way sisters were ranged around the table at Cob Cottage, none seated, standing in an unconsciously formed triangle. By the window Ailith was standing looking out with the basket, containing the wrapped warrior’s head, at her feet. The room was filled with a smooth and rich scent of honey and wood smoke.

  “Does it matter that this Trespasser or whatever was in Leap Woods and not Havoc?” Charlie had chewed over Emz’s thoughts about the wood and possible visitors. Anna shrugged and looked at Emz.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s like Grandma taught us, Leap is the edge, the boundary. Whoever it was might have been lost or off track.” Emz suggested.

  “If you thought Trespasser then whoever it is shouldn’t have been there,” Anna said. This thought settled onto the table between them.

  “Well, we patrolled and there’s no one and nothing around,” Charlie said. “I’d say the coast is clear.”

  “Yeah. No one’s up to pay their last respects,” Emz said.

  “Or steal him?” Charlie was on edge “That’s still a possibility. We need to make him safe. Maybe Emz’s Trespasser was just on a recce.”

  There was a long silence. Anna blew out a long anxious breath.

  “We need to do the Bone Resting…” Anna began.

  “Tonight,” Charlie said without preamble and the other sisters nodded. As they turned from the table Ailith had already lifted the basket from the floor and the handle was looped over her arm.

  “Do we have a plan?” Anna asked as they pulled on jackets and laced up walking boots.

  “A plan?” Charlie asked.

  “To get in. It’s a castle after all,” Anna reasoned. Charlie shrugged.

  “It’s old. We’ll climb in through a window or something.”

  Except of course, breaking into a castle was rather a tall order. Mrs Bentley, it transpired, used all the ancient security measures that had been fitted ov
er the years. While the original drawbridge was no longer functional there was a portcullis and the doors, hewn from oak some centuries ago, were firmly locked. Charlie could look in through the giant-sized iron keyhole and see the tantalising vision of moonlit greensward within.

  “Moonlit?” Emz looked up, the sky was clouded over.

  “It isn’t even a full moon…” Anna chipped in, pushing Charlie out of the way so she could have a look. “That’s not the moon, that’s a security light.” She could see the fox who had triggered it strolling across the lawns with some sort of morsel in its jaws. “There’s a fox…” she pointed it out. Charlie looked once more. There were a few moments of silence during which Anna walked a few paces up and down the nearest stretch of curtain wall.

  “Think we could climb this door?” Charlie asked Emz. “Maybe use the rivets as footholds? We could get in through those murder holes at the top? D’you think?”

  Charlie had several goes. She reached almost the top of the gate only to realise that the murder holes that looked out from above were not nearly wide enough to squeeze through having been fashioned large enough only to drizzle through boiled oil. With several grazes and splinters she slid and bumped back to earth as Anna returned and beckoned them into the shadows.

  “This way... the old gate!” They walked with some purpose up towards High Market Street.

  “The old gate?” Emz puzzled. “Is there one?” She couldn’t remember ever seeing a gate at the back end of the castle.

  “You won’t remember. You were too small.” Anna strode onwards not noticing that Emz looked a little hurt at this. Charlie shook her head, held up her hands.

  “Was I too small?” she asked Emz. “I don’t remember.”