Beltane

by Thea Hartsong

  Chapter 2. The threads are woven

  My name is Thea Hartsong. If you recognize my name from the newspapers or TV please don’t stop reading…I didn’t do what they say I did, I promise.

  Everything you are going to read here is the truth. What I didn’t experience for myself at first hand I figured out later from what other people said to me, or from surfing the web. I can’t tell you exactly where I am right now for obvious reasons, though not only because I’m wanted by the police. There are other reasons too, ones you’ll understand if you finish reading my whole story.

  The only problem, of course, is that I’m crazy. Officially. It’s a matter of public record. Look it up if you want to, if you haven’t already that is. I’m willing to bet every little intimate detail of my private life, not to mention my full medical history, has been smeared across the pages of the newspapers and the Internet for months. So, you see, there’s a strong possibility that everything I’m going to tell you has been conjured up out of nothing by my sick mind.

  To be perfectly honest I can’t really say for sure that it hasn’t, I just don’t think it has. I remember this T shirt I saw someone wearing once in Greenwich Village which said, ‘just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!’ I think that’s basically my philosophy right now.

  Well, there it is, take it or leave it. Read this post or delete it, believe it or don’t believe it. I’ll leave it up to you to decide. At least if you’ve got this far then there’s a sliver of a chance that you might carry on and read the whole story, figure out I’m not completely out to lunch, and act on the warning my words contain.

  It’s important, really important that somebody does. Not just for me, but for everyone, everywhere. For the future of our entire planet.

  So, I expect you’re wondering how it all began. I used to think for a while that if I hadn’t slapped Sadie Adams face during recess none of this would have happened to me, that I could have had a regular life with nice, safe, ordinary everyday problems like everybody else. Of course I know now what a joke that is.

  It’s strange how once a step has been taken it becomes part of the past; fixed, inevitable. A simple movement of the arm and wrist, or failing to press your foot down on a brake pedal in time, and everything can change. I don’t know if I believe in fate completely, but whenever something happens to me which I didn’t see coming I can’t help thinking of the ancient Norse legend about the women who sit around the roots of the world tree spinning our destinies. The Norns.

  We don’t know where the threads lead and we can’t break them. The most we can do is try to stretch them, or to try to persuade the spinners to extend them a little further. Wyrd bið ful aræd as they say in Anglo Saxon, fate is inexorable.

  You’ll have to forgive me, I’m a bit of a languages geek. I love words. I’ve been hooked on myths and legends since my dad gave me a children's version of the Icelandic Sagas, the ancient tales of Gods, Giants, and Heroes, which mix up magic and mythology with the true history of the Vikings, for my tenth birthday.

  I was planning to study medieval literature at university one day, though I guess that’s never going to happen now. Life has taken me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me down a different path, a path that has blown everything I thought I knew about the world to smithereens, and one which is a long way from over yet.

  Up until recently I’d always thought I was a pretty ordinary sort of girl, average height, average looks, except for a pair of startlingly green eyes which everybody tells me are my best feature. I’d always flattered myself that I was smarter than the majority of people though as it turns out it seems I’m nowhere near as smart as I’d imagined. Cap the whole thing off with a mop of curly red hair that just won’t obey any instructions whatsoever, and a figure that goes straight up and down a bit like a boy’s and you’ve pretty much got me.

  Personality-wise I’ve always been a bit of a loner. I’m the girl who spends most of her time in the library. It’s not because I can’t make friends, I’m just happier with books I guess. If I wanted to analyze what it comes down to I think I’d say that I’ve just always felt a bit out of place. Square peg in round hole so to speak.

  Even so, my life was like anybody else’s right up to the point at which my dad died, just days before my sixteenth birthday. That was the real turning point, what the Greeks call ‘peripeteia’, a reversal of fortune, when all the bad stuff began.

  I really loved my dad. Most daughters do I know that, but our relationship was especially close. He drove me crazy on occasion, and there were plenty of things about him which were far from perfect, leaving his toenail clippings in the bath for example; gross! It’s just that for most of my life there was just me and him.

  Mom died giving birth to me, and dad was the one who got to read me bedtime stories and hold my hand until I went to sleep, listen to me sawing away at a violin, take me to riding lessons and swimming, collect me from sleepovers, bandage my bruised knees, and eventually my bruised heart when I started to get interested in boys.

  It’s going to sound strange, but I knew it was going to happen, the car crash I mean. I had a really vivid dream about it the night before. He drove off a bridge into a river in upstate New York; the weather was pretty bad apparently. They said they thought that he got disoriented, lost control, which is pretty much what happened to me afterwards. I blamed myself, of course, for not telling him, not stopping him from getting into the car. Bouts of anger and depression made me want to lash out at everybody one minute, then the next I’d want to sit in my room in pitch darkness and blank out the world completely.

  I started suffering from insomnia, which was all very well until the daytime hallucinations kicked in. I was seeing all sorts of weird stuff. You name it, from winged horses to two-headed ogres. I even had little people talking to me for a while until they finally put me on the anti-psychotic pills I call my head zappers. I have to take them every morning to keep me on the level.

  It probably seems like I’m making light of the whole thing, though I can promise you it was horrible. Imagine what it would be like not to know what’s real anymore.

  Even with the pills I started going off the rails, behaving like a complete brat at school and at home too. I became hard to handle, and what a girlfriend of mine described rather colorfully as ‘discombobulated’.

  Before the Sadie Adams incident I’d been seeing a shrink off and on for about two months, to help sort out what we pretty much all agreed were ‘grief issues’. He was a creep who I refused to speak to again after he tried to get me to tell him if I’d had any erotic dreams recently.

  He was eventually canned by my stepmom Rebekah when I explained to her why I hadn’t been to my last two sessions. She’s a shrink herself, and following what she called, in her cut-glass English accent, a ‘difference of opinion’ during which they hurled terms like existential angst, repetition convulsion, and transference at each other she sent him packing.

  Although I didn’t call Rebekah mom or anything, she’d only got married to dad a couple of years before he died, she was pretty much the only person I had left in the world once he’d gone. That is except for Grampi.

  Grampi was dad’s father, but I’d hardly ever spent any time with him. He was what you might call ‘eccentric’ which is the word that people seem to use for someone who’s nutty as a fruitcake but has enough money for folk not to care. Perhaps that’s where I get it from. He figures the world’s coming to an end, so he lives in this cabin full of canned foods and piles of ammunition up in Canada someplace.

  In a way I was responsible for Rebekah and dad hooking up. She was a visiting tutor at dad’s university; they got talking after a she’d attended one of his lectures and she asked him out. She was obviously interested in him but Dad wasn’t even going to go until I forced him to call her.

  I knew he’d been lonely looking after me on his own, and I secretly wanted him to find someon
e nice to date. I have to admit I was slightly thrown when they decided to get married, but what the heck. Dad was in seventh heaven and Rebekah gave me my space, she knew better than to try to throw any mother-type moves on me too soon.

  The shock of dad dying brought us much closer together than we’d ever been before. I hadn’t really realized how much she loved him until we both lost him. She was inconsolable for days afterwards and barely left her room. What really impressed me was how she’d stuck by me when all the practicalities were dealt with and we’d seen him buried. She didn’t have to carry on taking care of me; we weren’t related by blood and I was practically old enough to do that for myself, headzappers aside.

  The day I hit Sadie Adams Principal Dalziel forced Rebekah to come all the way from the hospital uptown where she was on call, to the school in Brooklyn to tell her that he was suspending me.

  It hadn’t even been a particularly hard slap, though from Sadie’s reaction you’d have thought I half killed her. She threw herself onto the ground, thrashed her feet and started screaming like a banshee. Within minutes I’d found myself in the Principal’s office again.

  If you knew Sadie Adams you’d understand why I did it. She’s one of those prom queen types, mean as a rattlesnake, with a nauseatingly convincing ‘butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth’ expression which she employs in the presence of any adult she happens to encounter. Unfortunately Sadie’s parents got straight on the phone the minute they heard about it, and her father, a corporate lawyer, threatened to sue the school if I wasn’t excluded for good.

  “My hands are tied Mrs Hartsong,” Principal Dalziel intoned as Rebekah listened glumly,“I’m sorry, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate what a difficult position we’re in.”

  He stood, his bald head gleaming like a bowling ball, and gestured vaguely towards the paneled door of his office as if slightly uncertain that it would still be there.

  The slap actually had nothing to do with what people tended to refer to in whispers as ‘my condition’. Sadie was a bully, and she had just tripped a ninth grader in the corridor so that she fell against the lockers. I didn’t even mean to slap her really I was trying to grab hold of her by the hair, and mistimed it.

  Whatever the reason, whatever the excuse I had to face up to the fact that I was no longer welcome at Watmore Middle School, and as Rebekah led me down the steps outside the school I couldn’t really say that I was sorry to be leaving.

  Surprisingly Rebekah didn’t even seem particularly angry about school. She told me on the way back in the car that she’d got plans for us both anyway.

  When we got back to the Palace, that’s our joke name for the Brooklyn Heights apartment we both shared, we’d sold the family house after dad died - too many memories - she sat me down on the couch and made us both a nice soothing cup of tea. I mentioned she was British didn’t I?

  While she was waiting for the pot to brew she asked me how I’d feel about moving away from Brooklyn. I thought about it for a moment and then shrugged.

  “Ok. I guess,” Brooklyn was where my life had always been, while on the other hand Brooklyn was where everybody knew that I was a freak who saw things and took pills.

  “Where are we moving to?”

  Rebekah lifted the lid to the pot and began stirring it with a tea spoon.

  “The New Forest.”

  Having never been anywhere that wasn’t Stateside I naturally assumed with a name like that she was talking about someplace in the Catskills or maybe even as far away as New England. It took a while for her to explain that she was talking about going to live in old England.

  “That’s over three thousand miles away!” I groaned.

  “I know it’ll be a wrench for you. It’s just that I’ve been offered an extremely good position in a psychiatric hospital over there. They first contacted me months ago through a firm of headhunters. I told them I wasn’t interested, but they called me last week and offered me the post outright. The salary is more than generous, and it’ll be a complete break from everything. It could do you a lot of good; take you away from all of the associations and triggers which have contributed to you being unwell. Besides it doesn’t have to be forever, the contract’s only for three years.”

  My eyebrows shot up at the thought of spending three years living in a country I’d never even been to before. However as Rebekah handed me my cup of tea and I took my first tentative sip, she never puts enough milk in for me, I began to see the plus side.

  “Can we go to the British Library?” Rebekah blinked in surprise as she offered me the cookie tin.

  “I don’t see why not. There are regular trains to London. ”

  I took a chocolate chip cookie and dipped it into the tea, eliciting a rather satisfying pained reaction from Rebekah.

  “Great!” I said, through a mouthful of soggy cookie, “they have the only known medieval manuscript of Beowulf in the world. I’ve always wanted to see it.”

  Just two weeks later Rebekah and I found ourselves sitting in a jumbo jet winging our way over the Atlantic Ocean towards Great Britain. Rebekah’s not a great flyer to say the least, though she won’t really admit it because she doesn’t think it looks good for a psychiatrist to have a phobia about flying.

  I just find the whole thing boring and uncomfortable. Dad used to say ‘if God had wanted man to fly he wouldn’t have invented economy seating’ and after nearly seven hours in the air my backside agreed.

  I kept Rebekah talking most of the way across in order to distract her from the bouts of turbulence which periodically made the plane shake like Jello and turned her an interesting shade of green.

  I hadn’t had much time to interrogate her properly about exactly where we were going since I’d agreed to her proposal. We’d been too busy arranging a visa for me, contacting schools, and organizing for the Palace to be sub-let while we were away.

  The first thing Rebekah told me about the New Forest was that it isn’t new at all. I don’t know a lot about Great Britain, but it didn’t surprise me remotely that the English would call a place which has been there since 1066 ‘new’. From what I can gather they seem to consider anything that wasn’t there when the druids were dancing around Stonehenge to be ‘modern’.

  In between casting nervous glances out of the window, and holding onto the arm rests for grim death, Rebekah managed to tell me that not only was it not new, it also wasn’t really what you or I would call a forest. It was founded as a royal hunting ground by King William the Conqueror when the Norman French invaded England in the eleventh century, and although it does have lots of trees over half of it is open heathland and muddy bogs.

  “What was that?” Rebekah jumped as the wings made a mechanical clunking noise, and the cabin slanted downwards, “we’re going down. The plane is going down! What’s happening?”

  “It’s OK.” I told her, glancing out of the window, “we’ve started our descent into London is all. Look, you can see the outskirts of the city through the clouds. Well you would be able to if you just opened your eyes.”

  Muttering what sounded like some sort of mantra Rebekah seemed to be trying to wrap her arms behind her own back and rock herself to sleep at the same time. I decided I should try to keep her mind off the fact that we were about to go through a layer of thick cloud which was bound to be bumpy.

  “Where exactly are we going anyway?” I asked, taking her hand in mine; a tricky maneuver when you are trying not to be obvious about comforting someone.

  “I told you before” she said, squeezing my hand tightly in return. It felt surprisingly nice. It was the first time she’d done anything like that since the funeral.

  “The village is called Baring. You’ll love the animals TT,” Rebekah started calling me TT not long after dad died; it was his pet name for me, “they run free within the park boundaries.”

  I shifted in my seat to try to get some life back into my cramped legs, “what sort of animals? Bears, coyotes, jacka
ls, cougars?”

  Rebekah managed a weak smile. “No! Nothing like that. In fact there’s nothing in the forest that can hurt you at all.”

  I wish I‘d known then how wrong she was. I’d have pulled my hand away, burst into the cockpit, forced the pilot to turn us around and made him fly us straight back to New York, or to Timbuktu or anywhere at all as long as it was a million miles away from the New Forest, and the village of Baring.