by Helen Slavin
She was more upset than she had thought. The tears were hot on her face in the chill November night, and, when she was back in her car, she had to take a minute to gather her thoughts and settle herself before turning the ignition. She watched the river roar by for a few minutes, and, still feeling rattled, she got out of the car and stood by the rails.
The river was rushing, the air was sparkled with water, and the sound was like taking a deep breath after running. It reached up to Charlie and the breeze ruffled her hair. She took in several deep breaths. Above her, the sky was starred and inky. She felt lost.
Driving home, she opened the windows wide and let the scents blow into her. Her mind cleared as she inhaled the bitter scents of fuel and heating clouding the city. The cold damp of the river, here, where it rusted the edges of the bridge. The bitter crush of leaves, the frost biting into the earth. Soap powder at Portobello House on the main Castle Hill Road; Woodcastle, the farthest, rawest edge a brew of lichen and damp stone, jackdaw’s breath, blood, dirt, bone, fur.
The deer sprang out into the road from the edge of Leap Woods. It was a creature in flight, Charlie’s foot braking before her eyes registered hooves and flanks. It landed and she was afraid she had hit it but no, as she jumped out of the car, it turned to glance back as if aware of her. They locked eyes for a moment before, with ballerina leaps, the deer took off across the road, dodging over the boundary wall that marked the northern edge of the Hartfield estate.
Charlie took a few steps in pointless pursuit. All that remained of the encounter was the scent, the pungent animal musk and a smoky, honeyed drift beneath. Charlie stopped. Woodsmoke. Honey. It called to mind the vanquished warrior that Ailith had brought to Havoc to be Bone Rested. That was the scent he carried, one of old magic.
For a moment Charlie was afraid, a thick, choking fear that made the sky darken despite the stars. She heard the soft, strangled noise escape from her mouth, and it jolted her.
She did not get back into the car. She crossed the road, looked at the leaves and loam by the wall, taking several moments, trying to push the fear to one side, before she saw the tracks. She hesitated, heart pounding; there was no way of not being afraid, she understood that. She leaned down and picked up the dirt that held one hoofprint.
At first the fear clawed at everything, then Charlie shifted her mind to the grains of dirt, the feel of them against her skin. She crushed her hand tighter and the leaf litter she held crumbled and gave up its scent, breathed into her.
At once, she saw the path, not simply where the deer had run, but also, glancing back, where it had come from. The trail was a thin, velvet-dark line, glittered through with stars. Charlie held her breath. Where had she seen that before? At Day’s Ride, when Emz had stepped down. What did that mean? Just a link to Havoc? The deer was a Havoc deer, the velvet-dark trail its marker, perhaps. At last, she let the handful of dirt drift and the trail winked out.
Charlie sat in the car for several moments until she stopped shaking; the key glinted in the darkness. She would start the engine and she would drive off, back home, but nothing would be the same. She was shedding an old skin. Something new was emerging, or was it, rather, something old, a forgotten, mislaid part of herself, returning.
Charlie put her keys in the bowl by the back door and did not switch on the light. Through the window, she could see Emz wrapped in a blanket and sitting on the porch. The kettle was pinging with recent heat.
“You’re up early,” Charlie said as the church clock chimed three in the distance.
“Kettle’s boiled if you want a coffee.” Emz lifted her mug.
“I’m ahead of you,” Charlie said, lifting her own mug. “Let’s have a toast… to early mornings.” They chinked, and Charlie sat down beside Emz.
“You didn’t stay at Aron’s then?”
Charlie shook her head. She had, in the encounter with the deer, forgotten the mystery of the missing Aron. She avoided the topic.
“Why are you up so late? Bad dreams?” Charlie joked and then, from the expression on Emz’s face, wished she hadn’t.
“Odd dreams,” Emz confessed. “I dreamt I was a deer.”
Charlie spluttered out a fountain of coffee.
14
The Heart Murmurs
With a gasp of air, Vanessa sat bolt upright, moving with such speed that the sensors that had been stuck to her temple and her heart popped aside. In the galley beyond, she could see a wave of panic wash over her assistants. Eleanor, grey-faced as Eleanor should not be, was through the airlock door and at her side in a whiplash of movement.
“Professor Way?” Her hand, cold and small, gripped Vanessa’s hand that was, Eleanor made a mental note at once, ice cold. “Professor Way, are you with us?” Eleanor was already making facial signals to the meds team, and trolleys and heat sheets were being mobilised. “Professor Way, can you hear me?”
“Yes. Of course.” Vanessa took in another breath, an easier one, and she felt her heart rate cease its gallop.
Across the ice.
Eleanor was tapping at her tablet with nimble fingers, her eyes darting across the information.
“Recording,” she stated. “Time stat comparison.” Beyond the glass Vanessa could see Rufus with his ginger beard tapping at the mainframe computer. Beyond them all, the doors were locked on other Dark Lab projects, unregistered. Further away on the campus, even more scientists and research assistants busied themselves with black holes and graphene. There was a team in the outer greenhouses breeding better bees. Vanessa Way’s heart skidded a little.
Across the ice.
It was enough to make Eleanor’s heart shudder in sympathy, her keen eyes watching her mentor. Putting the tablet aside, she reached for a light and looked into Vanessa’s eyes.
“Dilation.”
“What are you doing?” Vanessa asked in a soft voice. She felt surreally calm amidst all the tension. Everyone else’s sinews seemed to be twanging so that they were giving off a kind of music like a mental string quartet. It was, Vanessa thought, rather pleasing to the ear. She could almost hum the tune, if she just adjusted that note, there. She was humming, the sound within her matching the sound that emanated from them, so that the room felt like she was an orchestra, it was enervating, energising. Vanessa gave a peal of laughter.
“That just headed off the scale.” Rufus’s voice cut through on the intercom as the medical trolley was held at bay behind the locked lab door. “Am I opening up the vestibule yet?”
“That’s a negatory.” It was Eleanor’s favourite phrase, something she had picked up from her love of science-fiction cinema. It was humour and she used it, as a general rule, to attempt to hide the fact that she was, at this point in time, afraid and anxious. She tapped some more at the tablet’s screen. Vanessa saw waves of black lines, like the steepest mountain peaks you might ever see.
“You’d better still be logging, Rufus.” Eleanor had her finger on Vanessa’s wrist pulse point and was hurrying to retrieve the sensor and its small rubber sticker. She was counting to herself and attaching it to Vanessa’s skin. “Okay. Are we back online?”
“Yep.” Rufus was tapping at the computer once again. In the distance was the sound of a soft drum. Vanessa began to hum once again, the sound of her colleagues, breathing it in, vibrating it out.
“Rufus.” Eleanor reached to her shoulders to pull up her headphones. Outside in the galley, her colleagues were doing the same.
“What do we do?” Rufus asked. The meds team were getting antsy, shifting their stance and staring in through the window as they adjusted their headsets. There was much shaking of heads, and Rufus was waving them out of the main door. Leaving. Vanessa’s hum was warming, like fire.
Firelight. Burning bright. Across the ice.
She felt sleepy and the soft drum began to have a syncopated beat. Somewhere, a horn sounded.
Across the ice. Whiteout.
Each sleep sequence had been more erratic. Today, it had resulted i
n an adrenalin shot and, Vanessa could see, Eleanor was still grey-faced from the experience.
“Let’s not talk about that,” Eleanor decided. Rufus spluttered his coffee.
“Not if we want to keep our jobs.” He was finding it difficult to look at Vanessa who was now seated in the galley at the table, everyone’s tablet tuned in and the data scrolling before them.
“Can you recall anything from the dream?” Eleanor asked. “It might help.”
Vanessa took a deep breath.
“This…” she tapped at the tablet, brought up the heart rate, “this was a drum, the rhythm of it. This was a drum and this…” another tap, the graph of her breathing, “the wind. A particular whistling sound through the ice. And this…” she swiped up the digital encephalograph data, “this correlates to the way the aurora was shifting above me in the dream.” She stared at it, her eye seeking every last point on the graph. “Almost exactly, small margin of error here and there, nothing more.”
“This is new, but it is a pattern. Let me show you…” Eleanor was collating all the bio information from Vanessa in their recent sleep studies. “The physical effects from the dream state have begun to shown a marked increase. This…” she tapped and scrolled and tapped some more and brought up old information for her comparison. “This is where we were back in June. As against where we are now.” She aligned the two sets of data. “There are just two other points in the records where the phasing veers out and takes on a new wavelength. Both those occurrences are several years ago. The most recent was…” Eleanor tapped and scrolled at the page.
“Nineteen years ago,” Vanessa spoke softly. She took in a deep breath and continued. “The previous one; twenty-six years ago.”
Eleanor stopped scrolling and looked directly at Vanessa, who managed a smile.
“Go on with what you were saying,” Vanessa encouraged. Eleanor stared at Vanessa for a moment or two longer. “You’ll forget your train of thought, El.” Vanessa smiled again. Her assistant hesitated.
“It isn’t just the alteration in the wavelength. There’s a time issue. If you look at the timecode, it’s as if you’re not in it. This is too slow. This too fast.”
“As if I’m slipping between,” Vanessa said.
Eleanor stopped tapping at her tablet.
“This new phase began in July. It might be unscientific to point out that it was just after your mother died.”
Vanessa nodded and kept nodding.
“Do you need a moment?” Eleanor asked. “I could fetch us some tea.” Vanessa was about to refuse the offer, to concentrate upon the task at hand, but then she thought of her mother, of sitting on the porch at Cob Cottage with a pot of tea, and she nodded to Eleanor.
“Tea would be very good.”
Rufus clocked off before Eleanor returned with the tea, and so Vanessa was alone in the lab, sitting at the table which, once upon a time, would have been loaded with paper and printouts. Now, everything was kept online, ethereal knowledge held in the memory of a computer. Vanessa was the only one who insisted on the paper encephalograph as back up. The machine, cranky as it now was, had come with her through all her years at De Quincey, and she was not about to part with it. She trusted its records more than any. She glanced now at where the sensor arm was halted, but ready.
The lab was very quiet except for the sound of the branches tapping at the window, a thin musical noise that caught in Vanessa’s head. She tapped vaguely at the screen of her tablet, her fingers drawn to smooth over the intricate lacework of the patterns and shadows on the screen. It was so beautiful as it trailed over the desk in crisp white patches and down onto the floor so that, if you breathed in deeply, you were in the branches of a tree and above you, Vanessa looked up, the aurora was a ribbon across the sky.
Strip lighting. Ceiling. There was no aurora. This was electricity, cold and white and clear. Vanessa felt her heart rushing like water and her hand, paused over the screen, was shaking.
“This,” Eleanor tapped at the screen, “is another anomaly.” She did not look at Vanessa, only at the screen. “It’s similar to what we saw the other day. The only way I can think to describe it is…” Eleanor’s lips pinched together for a thought, “it’s like a heart murmur.”
“Murmur?” Vanessa liked the sound of the word. In her head a breeze blew through leaves. Murmur.
“This is your heartbeat and then alongside or behind it, every now and again, there is this other sound, like…” she paused, searching her mind for a way to explain, “well. A murmur, another heartbeat, an extra sound, extra activity. The only way I can get a grip on it is to suggest a heart murmur.”
“Okay.” Vanessa had no words to offer the troubled young woman.
“That doesn’t explain it. It’s not medically correct, and it’s too simple for what this is. Only I don’t know what this is.” Eleanor’s voice cracked. “Harmony perhaps. Counterpoint.” Eleanor shrugged, edgy.
“That’s a good analogy.” Vanessa smiled. There was a moment, Eleanor gathering herself. “You look worried.”
“I want to help,” said Eleanor, serious.
“You have. Always.” Vanessa reached for her tea.
“I asked before, what is happening, and your response was…”
“Interesting things.”
Eleanor nodded and they exchanged a look. She pursued it.
“You know what is happening don’t you? You know what all of this means?”
Vanessa gave a single, simple nod. The young woman waited for more, but it did not come. Vanessa sipped more tea to give herself a moment to consider everything. She had chosen this young woman for specific reasons. All her team had been handpicked, not employed by any agency or drawn from the pool of students and scientists that De Quincey Langport kept on retainers, turning their hand to anything and everything.
“You have seniority here,” Vanessa said. “I’ve arranged matters with Senior Management so that, should the need arise, you can take full control here. Beyond this project…”
“Beyond it?” Eleanor’s grey colouring paled further to a ghostly marble white. “You’re ending the project?”
Vanessa held her gaze.
“You asked me what is happening.” Vanessa paused. From the corner of her eye, she could see the branching shadows dancing on the white lab flooring. “Plans must be made.” Her voice failed her, and her facial muscles could no longer contain their emotion. She struggled for a moment to master herself.
“You mean contingency plans?” Eleanor’s face was as white as the snow of Far North. Vanessa reached for her hand.
“Yes. De Quincey are not kind. I want to make certain that your future is assured. Beyond this project, I have recommended that you be allotted your own Dark Laboratory research project. Your dissertation on Dark Light has caught their interest, but the final choice will be yours. Everything that you have learned here you will take with you.”
Eleanor stopped breathing, her eyes widened. She nodded, once.
“You’ve got a meeting with Professor Harcourt on Thursday at 2:00.” Vanessa tapped at Eleanor’s tablet screen, scrolled through the calendar to the date just so that the two of them would have something to look at other than each other, and the future.
15
Horse
Today something itched at Winn Hartley-Hartfield, and it was not the fleas she had caught from the badger. It might be the prospect of the imminent meeting with that ghastly Wildwood woman and her committee. Winn looked at her hand. Oh bugger, she’d had the time written down on the back of it, but it was obscured now by the mud she’d acquired in her recent rescue with the accursed poodle. If Winn had a pound for every time she’d had to wade over to Quarry Tump to rescue the creature, she’d have enough for a new education centre. Mrs Marshfield insisted on exercising the beast in Leap Woods.
“Poodles are hunting dogs,” Mrs Marshfield insisted. She was right, of course, in the dim and distant past, but not in Petroc’s pedigree bloodline.
Winn had washed at the mud, and the slick green detergent had also done an excellent job of erasing the note she’d made of the Wildwood meeting. 2:00pm was chiming in her head, so it was probably 3:00pm. She should just scrabble around on her phone and retrieve the text.
As she rummaged on the scree slope of paperwork on the desk, the hairs on the back of her neck prickled. She stood up.
“Hello?” Was someone stealing from the gift shop? She moved through. Not a soul and yet there was an edge to the air. Winn sniffed. As she did so, a snuffled, huffing snort of breath could be heard. Had she made that noise? It fuffed into the air again. It was a horse, Winn was sure of it.
The horse standing just beyond the pens was vast, grey, and as magnificent a beast as any she’d ever seen. Winn loved horses but only from a reasonable distance. She’d ridden to hounds once with her father and still felt the nagging creak in her collarbone from the terrible fall. There was also no escape from the memory of the pistol, warm in her hand, and the heavy, cooling corpse of the bay, Springheels. Winn let it wash over her as the great grey horse gave a low nicker and stamped its hoof with impatience.
Winn reached a hand towards the reins, but the horse would not let her hold him, choosing instead to move off. The horse was saddled up and riderless and so, here we go, thought Winn, someone somewhere needed dusting off. She remembered to pop her phone in her pocket, useful for ringing the ambulance when she located the rider. Or would it be simpler to just take the tractor?
It was difficult to keep up. The horse strode ahead of her, so far ahead, in fact, that he almost moved beyond sight. Winn puffed and pushed herself, taking care not to stumble or trip in her haste.
She was troubled by the memories of Springheels. Of his horsey face always giving her a wild-eyed glare and the sheer power of such an animal. He’d broken her in the end, of course, her collarbone snapping like a twig in the hawthorn they had attempted to jump. It had killed him too, his own legs snapped as the ground was not where he had thought, the hedge giving way to a deep drainage ditch. Winn scrubbed the memories to try to erase them.
