The years passed quietly, and Jane spent a lot of her time entertaining guests and acquaintances alone as Edwin’s importance to Britain’s expansion grew. His ever-increasing wealth and influence were nice, she said, but it took a toll on his health. A preference for excessive doses of rich food and drink didn’t help, and a summer they spent with cousins in Grimsby (and a healthier lifestyle) proved temporary. Aline spoke nearly at a whisper as she told me a man came to her door on a windy day in 1770 with the news Edwin had died in his office and likely, she said, from a heart attack. A year later, Jane sold their grand house and went to live with a cousin in Poole. Elias stayed behind in London, eventually selling off the family’s interest before calling it a day and removing himself to a small home in the Cotswolds.
She recalled Jane’s move to Poole with a clear detachment I found strange, and it was then when I realized the story of her own life diminished in Aline’s eyes the further it went. I’m sure that was Tegwen’s preferences and the only remaining voice, but the sadness I expected her to display wasn’t there. She showed me church records and a simple paragraph in Jane’s obituary. There were prominent references to “Edwin Clarke” throughout the notice, and it was obvious her death was worth noting only because she had been married to a prominent and successful man.
I asked as softly as I could if she knew where Jane’s body was laid to rest. She nodded and told me of a small cemetery near their church, and when I asked if she ever went there in her lives since, she said she had, but only once. She looked and told me there wouldn’t be a second time. When I wondered if there was a reason to avoid it, she said, “I had no choice; they buried me beside the church but I didn’t belong there…in England.”
“Where did you belong?”
“Here,” she answered simply, “in this land where I began.”
Finally, I understood. From her first existence in a Druidic village on Anglesey, all the way through to her seventh life as a modern woman making her way in the twenty-first century, Aline’s identity—Tegwen’s life force—began within the borders of Wales, and I felt suddenly stupid for not seeing it earlier. “Our gods made it that way,” she once said. It was never random in Aline’s mind that her beginnings in an ancient and mystical time of Celts and post-Roman Britons demanded a geographic constant for reasons beyond even her understanding. I decided not to ask about it again, and the answer may never be revealed, but it still brings strange feelings today.
VIENNE CALLED THE following evening, and Aline paced around her house as they went through their customary catching-up exercise. Plans for a vacation “somewhere warm” resumed, and a resort hotel on a beach in Malta surged into the lead over other potential Mediterranean destinations. She became loud and lively speaking with my sister and, for a while at least, the interference of Andre Renard and the cascade of stressful events in the weeks and months since were kept at bay.
Aline jotted notes hastily on a pad in her kitchen as reminders to check into available flights or arrangements for rental cars and what level of opulence each of them required from a hotel to make the trip worth taking. There was no point in offering perspective because my authority was always subordinate to theirs, but it didn’t stop Aline from asking what I thought about the preferred hotel. It wouldn’t make any difference, of course, but it was nice she made the effort anyway.
While she and Vienne finished up their call, I pawed through the plastic tub’s trove of documents, just to pass the time but also to learn a little more about the lives she’d lived spanning fifteen centuries. After a while, she noticed and sat beside me.
“In all those lives,” I asked quietly, “were you able to do the things you can do today, even if you didn’t use them?”
“It took a long time for me to even understand each time I entered a new life. I was aware only of my ability to hear inside—I never manipulated the physical world and it’s not even clear I could.”
“But later?”
“The thoughts and feelings of others were obvious to Enydd; it wasn’t disturbing but I never considered acting on them.”
“Cadwal’s influence?”
“He was so deliberate and serious…I suppose his caution carried over.”
We sat in silence, and I know she waited for me to adjust. Listening to a description I once regarded as an exercise with a history professor had changed because I understood it was real; there was no contrived fantasy by a crazy girl with a rampant imagination. I listened as she spoke of her lives in present terms despite the truth they happened centuries before. She watched me for a while, but another clue surfaced and my questions resumed.
“I don’t know much about Druids…well, nobody does except you, I guess, but Cadwal didn’t magically hand over these abilities, did he?”
“It wasn’t something we spent much time talking about.”
The only conclusion I could reach seems obvious today, but she waited patiently until I found my way through.
“Your powers didn’t emerge after becoming a Druid priestess,” I said at last. “Cadwal accepted and trained you because of them.”
“I knew my ability to hear thoughts was the reason he decided to begin my training, but it never occurred to me to wonder how or why I had them; I simply did, and it wasn’t questioned.”
Aline looked at me with the pride of a mother as if I had learned to read a clock or tie my shoes. It felt a bit like acing a big college exam to qualify for the next as a condition for graduating. I didn’t realize until that moment the progression of Aline’s lives was a parallel to my discovery of them as each layer was peeled back for me to see and understand in careful and deliberate increments.
IN the hours after our tense and uncomfortable trip to Somerset, a nagging sensation of dread began to ease when Burke understood Aline was closer to a summit. The potential for in-depth study that could, under the right circumstances, vault his section’s hidden efforts miles ahead of where it lingered in little more than informed suspicion was finally within his grasp.
The usual tasks kept Aline in Colwyn Bay for a few days, and I stayed behind to deal with a maddening leak from her downstairs bathroom faucet. I didn’t mind being an unpaid, amateur plumber because those mundane parts of life we take for granted were signals that things had returned to normal. When she came home on an otherwise dull Saturday morning, we lazed around and did precisely nothing simply because we could. Deep in the night we slept like kittens and didn’t see the clock beside her bed click over to 5:44 when she sat up sharply and whacked my shoulder; I couldn’t know it then, but the last and final act was already underway.
They came in over the hill north of her farm at dawn, moving silently and swiftly as only trained specialists can, and I would never have realized but for Aline’s unique (and peculiar) abilities. I asked her what was wrong, but she held out her hand to silence me. It’s the sort of reaction from people who hear an unexplained thump or knock in the distance, but after a second or two, she was moving.
“Get dressed,” she said calmly. “We have to go.”
“Where are we going?” I asked in a bewildered mumble, but she was nearly at the bedroom door when she shouted for me to hurry.
I followed downstairs as quickly as I could, pulling on a shirt as I went, but she stopped and aimed me toward her back door. I fumbled with my shoes, and I remember wondering how she’d dressed so quickly. Again, I asked her what she had heard, but she slipped quickly across her lawn in the pale light on a brick walkway leading to the lower field and beyond it my old path home. It was clear she meant to make for the dry creek bed at the low point in our shared hill, but the way was blocked when the first two men slipped into the open. At once, I understood: Burke’s people had sent a covert team to burst in and take Aline by force. As we watched, one of them crept slowly forward with a stubby machine gun aimed straight at us.
“Get on the ground,” he shouted firmly. “Now!”
I began to raise my hands in reflex when Aline turne
d slowly and looked past me toward her house where four more figures in black tactical uniforms and ski masks went laterally across her grass to flank us. My heart was pounding and again, the first soldier shouted at us to lie face down, but Aline did nothing.
“We’d better do as he says,” I whispered, but she was unmoved, and it was stunning to see her calm in a place where many people would wet themselves.
“Not yet,” she replied, nudging me ever closer to the trees.
“Lay down, now!” the soldier shouted again, “or we will force you!”
With each command they inched closer until Aline’s invisible border was breached, and she pushed me away in a single, sudden movement that brought the commandos’ guns up in an instant. I wanted to say something—to talk them down from a tense and needless moment—but there were no words I could form, and I watched with a strange, detached fascination when it began.
Aline’s eyes narrowed and she tilted her head slightly backward in an odd sort of frown when the first soldier cried out. He straightened quickly and his back arched, but it was his scream of pain that seemed to stop time. Another moved quickly forward, unsure if he should keep his aim fixed on Aline or tend to his stricken comrade, but she made no distinction and he felt the first waves send him to his knees. Instinctively, the hooded trooper raised his hands to each ear as though trying to protect himself from a piercing noise, but the motion made clear both men were in desperate trouble.
From behind us, more shouts as the second group moved up quickly. They separated into pairs, and Aline pivoted to aim her gaze at the closest two. They stopped and stood up straight, letting their guns dangle from shoulder straps as though gripped by an unseen paralysis. Their knees were bent slightly and heads bowed so that each man’s chin rested against his chest. Through it all, I couldn’t move or speak, and even today I wonder if it was simply the inability to react from fear and the suddenness of it all, or if it was Aline’s influence holding me safely at a distance.
I remember most of what followed, but I think that is only true because I’ve had time to replay it in my mind and watch the memories and a flurry of movement so startling and swift, I couldn’t keep up. The second soldier in front us had fought through the pain and he aimed his gun as he moved quickly up the hill, shouting for us to get down or he would open fire. I don’t know if it was worry for my own life or for Aline’s, but I tried again to speak without success.
She didn’t move as the remaining pair behind us went left and into the open field to form a chevron-shaped cross fire zone. Aline didn’t have to look to know where they were, and she turned suddenly toward them when the first volley cut into the cool, still air.
The loud, threatening soldier held to his word and squeezed off three short bursts from his weapon less than fifteen yards away. It took a second or two before realizing the bullets went wide when I wrongly believed he fired only to warn her a last time. The sound shocked me back to reality from what seemed a distant and vivid dream, but it was too late as he stopped and pulled at the gun’s slide mechanism, suspecting a malfunction, and it was the moment I realized he meant to kill Aline.
Time stood still as he suddenly—inexplicably—abandoned his gun. The image was so strange and alien until he began to slap at his own arms and legs, hopping around like an afflicted man in a bizarre St. Vitus’ dance moving in fast-forward. I didn’t understand what any of it meant until the first swirls of blue flame appeared around him, and in seconds, his body was engulfed by a blinding tornado of fire.
I stared transfixed and speechless until the screams of agony became unbearable. Aline turned and walked quickly left to meet the last two soldiers at the moment they drew their aim and fired, but again, the rounds missed when they collapsed suddenly beside each other, writhing and convulsing like poisoned insects gasping for air. She went at a near run behind us to where the first pair stood motionless with bowed heads, powerless against an enemy without weapons. I watched her inspect them patiently and deliberately like statues in a museum until satisfied they were no longer a danger, but a man was burning alive ten feet from me and I could take no more.
“Aline!” I shouted, but she didn’t notice. I screamed at her again when at last she looked at me with an expression I won’t forget and hope never to see again. Her mouth was drawn into a clenched-teeth grimace as if captured by a photographer in the middle of a deep, primal growl. In her eyes there was only distance from anything like humanity, and I felt the fear swarming over me like angry hornets. I don’t know how to describe the sensation, only that it was visceral—physical.
I experienced night terrors as a kid when imagery was secondary to the feeling of darkness and panic when a buzzing started in my ears and the taste of metal invaded my mouth. It was like that, but my shouts made no difference. In a terrifying, single moment I wondered if she could stop. Would her power sweep through my mind, if only for the mistake of proximity, to leave me writhing in agony in the wetted grass like the others?
“Aline! Stop, goddamn it, stop this now!”
I shouted as loud as I could until finally—mercifully—it began to slow. Her expression eased and returned to what it was before, calm and nearly emotionless. I went quickly to where the second man lay still in the tall grass, his jumpsuit smoldering at its fringes. I knelt quickly, and when I reached to pull the mask from his head, the material was stuck to skin that was badly blistered. I leaned close with a dreadful feeling of helplessness to take his pulse, but he was already gone. Behind him, the others seemed unconscious except for one who appeared to be choking, and I ran to him. As I pulled away his hooded mask, a gush of thick, clear fluid poured from his mouth in a nearly endless stream, and I stood away quickly in a swirl of revulsion and horror as the last of the soldier’s life gurgled from his mouth. I bent low again, but his eyes were fixed and there was no pulse.
I looked up in desperation for help to find the second group was motionless and held in a trance that couldn’t be broken until Aline decided to release them. It was strange and unlikely to watch, but the four simply sat down in the wet grass, docile and with blank expressions that haunt me still. It was utterly silent, and the air hung heavy as I struggled to grasp all that had happened.
Aline paced slowly in a wide circle, waiting, it would seem, for the next act to begin as we heard the first staccato thump of a helicopter’s rotors and its growling engines echoing up the valley from the east. I turned to watch as a dark blue Dauphin with only its registration number along the tail curved neatly past our hill to settle at the bottom of Aline’s field. The door slid open and two crewmen leaped from the opening to reach the fallen soldiers where they lay in the weeds.
I felt terror at the prospect it would begin again, but Aline walked quickly toward me, simply pointing at a third shape as Burke stepped through the soaking grass slowly with his arms extended to demonstrate no threat. He said something, and I could see his mouth move, but the helicopter’s noise made it impossible to hear until he drew closer. Aline only watched but gone was that otherworldly grimace, and she waited with me until Burke approached.
“Stand down, now,” he called out. “There’s no need for this.”
“I’m not coming with you,” Aline shouted suddenly, but Burke only shook his head and waved a hand to signal removing her was not his goal.
“This was a terrible mistake,” he replied. “We tried to contact you, but there was no answer.”
“Your mistake,” Aline replied loudly.
“If you’ll just give us a moment, we need to see after our people.”
“Take them,” she said as she moved close, “but never come here again, do you understand?”
He nodded and motioned for the crewmen to help the first group into the helicopter. Aline watched them, but the extraction process went quickly and without a word until Burke walked slowly to us.
“Please be calm,” he began, and I noticed the helicopter’s engines were spooling down. “This was not our decision, Ali
ne.”
“I thought you were head boy!” I shouted. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“The others,” he replied evenly, “far above my level, ordered these soldiers to bring Aline by force; we discovered the plan only a short while ago and commandeered their helicopter on our Minister’s authority.”
“And you expect us to believe you had nothing to do with this?”
“It was not on my orders, you have my word.”
“Hurd?” I asked, and he nodded twice.
“They will not be satisfied with what happened today, and I’m afraid it won’t end here; that is not a favorable outcome for either of us.”
Burke’s usually calm, knowing smile was gone, and Aline knew what it meant before I did.
“If he sends more of these men, I’ll kill them, too; is your experiment worth more lives?”
In that moment I felt a nervous twinge up my spine because it was the first and only time I ever heard a threat to kill made with serious intent and the ability to back it up. Hearing it from Aline, no longer restrained by notions of civility, only worsened the feeling of dread I fought against in the silent, foggy air. I know it was a last threshold but not merely from witnessing her fury and six highly trained soldiers incapacitated by only the force of her thoughts. If there were any lingering doubts before those terrible seconds, all had been washed permanently away on that quiet morning when I understood with stunning finality what she could do and how far she was willing to go when pushed beyond her limits.
The Seventh Life of Aline Lloyd Page 32
