by Leena Maria
I bent closer. D & K. Dana and Kitty. Our initials, the way Kitty always wrote them: the K pointing to the left from the back of the D. "We have each other's backs," she had explained when I had pointed out the wrong direction of the K.
I got on my knees, grabbed the floorboard and managed to get my fingers under the edge. After that, it was easy to lift the sawn piece away. It had been cleverly sawn at an angle so that the lower part was narrower than the upper one and so it fitted neatly into the space without falling right through.
I was looking down through an opening, which gave directly onto the dry ground underneath the floor. Nothing had grown on that earth for decades. And there, placed on the dusty ground, was a little metal box that I knew very well.
The box was white and had a metal handle that fell flat into an indentation on the lid. The lid and sides were covered in little cat caricature stickers. I had always wondered why Kitty did not have a cat, as it was obvious she was crazy about them. Well, probably because she had found Muffin, whom she loved dearly, at a rescue shelter. Muffin was small and his best friend wouldn't have called him good-looking, with his impressive underbite that would probably have earned him an honorable mention in the world's ugliest dog competition. Muffin also hated cats with the same enthusiasm he loved Kitty.
I knew I was looking down at Kitty's little strong box, where she always hid her secrets from her nosy siblings. She carried the key to the box whenever she left home. The last time I'd seen it, it had been on her desk the evening before she was hit by the car. And now it was here... She must have brought it the evening before the accident, after I had left her house. Perhaps because of this she had slept late and was half asleep when I had come to ask her out. Maybe that was why she had not paid attention on the road...
No. I shook my head, though there was no one to see the gesture. It had not been Kitty's fault. It was that damned drunk driver's fault, may she rot in hell.
But why ever had Kitty come here late in the evening with her precious box?
Still on my knees I put my hand through the opening almost up to my shoulder, managed to grasp the handle, and lifted the box up onto the floor. Muffin was whining and running around me, sniffing the box.
The key was attached to the handle with a wide red silk ribbon with embroidered pink roses. I remembered that one too. It had decorated the waist of Kitty's old porcelain doll, the one that sat permanently on top of her book shelf, out of reach of Ella, Kitty's little sister who was still too young to handle such precious things. Kitty had inherited the doll from her grandmother. It was a real antique, not one of those retro-dolls advertised in magazines.
I opened the white box, and an envelope looked back at me. Literally. Kitty had drawn two eyes on the envelope, looking directly at me. The eyes were smiling. She had always been good at drawing, and the smiling expression had been created with skill, lifting the lower lid slightly. The eyes looked eerily real. They looked familiar, too. Even the little mole on the temple, beside her right eye, was carefully drawn. Kitty must have looked into the mirror and drawn her own eyes.
Underneath the eyes something was written in Kitty's bold handwriting. I recognized the long curving loops and strong rhythmical style of it. Kitty's handwriting was like something from another age, and flowed with beauty, grace and character. Nothing like my scribbling – teachers sometimes commented they had trouble reading my handwriting. No wonder – when I wrote, I always felt as if I was in a hurry to finish the sentence. Probably because I typed extraordinarily fast, and writing with a pen was too slow a method to write down my thoughts. They always ran with such speed my handwriting simply could not keep up with them.
"To Dana: to be opened after I am dead," the envelope said.
Muffin glanced through the open door. I thought I heard Grandma returning, and, without thinking, slid the envelope under the waist of my jeans, pulling my shirt over it. Then I replaced the box under the floorboards, got up and kicked the board back in place, just in time before she appeared in the doorway.
"Maybe we should be heading home - what do you think?" Grandma asked.
"Yes, I think so too. Let's drop Muffin off at his house first, though."
We put the coffee mugs back on the window sill, closed the door and began to walk back to the car, with my arm linked through Grandma's, and Muffin leading the way.
CHAPTER THREE
3. Shadow on the Trail
Fear was haunting the trees in the shape of a shadow looking for prey.
The prey was unknown, but the shadow continued to circle the forest in search of it because the ancient mind that controlled it told it to do so.
Scent was the shadow's text book, telling it whole stories of the forest. The smell of life, death, the old and the new mixed with the fresh smell of trees and plants.
The shadow felt uncomfortable here. This was not its natural domain and it usually visited this world only in the hours of darkness. All this fresh growing forest energy that created new things on its own was a mystery to it. Where all the energy came from, the shadow could not understand. No one had moulded it or created it, at least not in ways that the shadow could ever have comprehended. The energy simply seemed to seep on its own from the ground, or out of the very air around it.
Then its nose picked up the scent of a wounded animal and its spirits lifted. It sped on for a few minutes, following the smell of dried blood on the ground, and found the carcass of an almost completely eaten deer.
The shadow tasted what was left of the animal, though it wasn't hungry. It was good. The energy of the dead body felt familiar to it. It gave the shadow some strength. Invigorated, it continued its silent, aimless circling around the old trees. Like the wind, no-one would ever have seen it if they hadn't paid attention to the sudden silence of birds and little animals wherever the shadow went.
Then it heard something moving, hidden by the foliage. A snuffling type of breathing. The wind brought the scent to its nostrils.
A dog - and not just any dog. It had smelled this one before, by the road before the girl had been killed. There had been an accident, and the shadow had been there. Had - participated in the accident.
The shadow sniffed one more time, letting its nose drink in the scent of the dog. Yes, this was the dog that had tried to wake up the girl bleeding by the roadside. He remembered the smell, and the sound of the little dog's whimpers. And there were other scents too, a young woman's... And of someone else as well... This familiarity of this scent made the shadow uneasy, though it did not know why.
Still, finally, there was a trail.
Soundlessly the shadow turned and followed the scent and heavy breathing of the small animal, and the occasional spoken word between the two people, careful not to make a noise and to stay downwind. It soon came to a forest path that led to a weather-beaten old hut, and waited behind it, deep in the shadows of the forest until the humans and the dog had settled. Then it drew closer, without making a sound. It moved only as far as it took to see the girl sitting in front of the shed.
A slight breeze blew from the direction of the hut directly to the nostrils of the shadow. The smell of roses - perhaps it was the scent of the girl's soap or shampoo. And underneath it all the unmistakable scent of jasmine, with a touch of cinnamon. They had their individual scent, but usually the cinnamon undertone was there. That is how they spotted the maturing young of her kind.
If she was the one sought by the ancient mind, she could not escape the shadow after this, not once it knew her scent.
The girl was crying. The sound made the shadow feel powerful, and it was tempting to grasp the energy and grow on it. Suddenly the girl shivered, as if she sensed something. She glanced back towards the shadow but could not see it from the darkness of the forest. Impatient, the shadow crouched, ready to move closer.
Then it felt a familiar tuck at the back of its neck, which almost made it fall backwards, as if on a leash.
No. Not this one. Need to be sure. Need
to be sure.
The shadow reeled back and forth like a fish on a line, finally obeying the voice in its mind, the voice that controlled the leash. She was so close. Just two short strides away.
The shadow breathed deeply, enjoying the smell of the pulsing blood, and warm skin, the sensation of young energy and the feeling of grief.
Then the other woman, who had been sitting behind the girl, stood up and walked into the hut. The shadow was still downwind, and now it caught the scent of the older woman.
The scent brought a memory. The shadow shrank deeper into the shade beneath the bush. Ancient mind spoke.
"You know this one?"
"I know this one."
Chaos. Shadows split apart at the memory. Darkness, explosion and smoke.
"It's her?"
Ancient mind knew. It never forgot anyone it had smelled. Now they both knew for certain that the girl was the right target.
Follow. Do not show yourself.
The shadow knew the girl had no hope from this moment onwards. She was the one they had been seeking all this time. Eventually they would get her. And maybe, if she refused to cooperate, she would be killed. They did not kill their own kind often, but there was always the chance, if she offended him. The shadow laughed soundlessly at the thought.
With new eagerness and anticipation, the shadow flattened itself against the ground, becoming almost invisible. A twig snapped, and the older woman, who had been drinking coffee with the girl, turned her head and looked in its direction.
Then she rose and walked casually straight towards the shadow, frozen on the ground. She would see any movement immediately, and the shadow knew what would happen.
The hunter was now the hunted. Retreat, retreat, said the ancient voice in his mind. The shadow was reeled in as if on a line and the world changed back to formless mist.
CHAPTER FOUR
4. Grandma's Gift
We drove Muffin home. There was still no one from Kitty's family around, so I did not have to talk to them.
"'Bye, Muffin." I patted him on the head, feeling a bit sad again at the sight of his little face at the gate.
I got back into Grandma's car and she started the engine and began to drive along the back road towards our house.
Grandma sometimes remarked that in another life she might have been a rally driver. She refused to act her age, a thing my conservative mother could not accept. I often thought that Mom was born old, and to be honest, she didn't have much of a sense of humour. She felt most at ease in her kitchen, away from the turmoil of the world. Grandma, on the other hand, wasn't the kind of person who would spend her days in the kitchen baking pies for church events. She wanted to see life. And she loved her sports car.
"There's not much chance of meeting people on your roads, not in the back of beyond where you live," she had once explained to my mother, who considered her behaviour childish. "I'm always careful when we meet with horse riders and only put my foot down on long clear stretches. And why buy a car like this, if you never have any fun with it?"
"Why indeed..." Mom had muttered through gritted teeth, her fingers gripping the side of the seat, and her butt pressed down hard in it as usual. Fast driving was on top of her list of reckless behavior.
Mom was not a very spontaneous person, I mused as we drove along.
"Have you visited her grave yet?" Grandma asked. Her tone sounded as though she was inquiring if I had been to the beach recently.
"No."
"Would you like to? I can take you there right now. We could pick her some flowers from these fields," her hand drew an arch in the air, covering the blooming fields around us. Early summer really was at its most beautiful.
With Grandma the thing that had seemed so difficult, impossible even, was much easier, and I heard myself saying "OK."
I hadn't admitted it to myself, but the thought of going to Kitty's grave on my own had been too much. And going there with my parents and then breaking down in tears in front of them, was even more of an impossible thing to consider. But Grandma was such a no-nonsense type of a person, and so easy to be with. She was just about the only person with whom I could go to Kitty's grave.
So she killed the engine, and we got out of the car again. The sun had dried the last of the dew, and it did not take us long to gather a big bouquet of wild flowers. Grandma fished a string out of her pocket - it never ceased to amaze me, the stuff that she carried around in them - and tied it around the stems.
"There. Now we have a nice bouquet. Let's go!"
And so I found myself sitting in the sports car (why were they always built so low?), holding a big bouquet of fresh flowers. Grandma knew the way to the churchyard well – after all she had lived in our house for a long time before moving to the city permanently. ("I wanted some excitement in my life after all those years in a rural backwater!")
I knew where the grave was, of course, and walked along the gravel path towards it with dread in my heart.
Much to my surprise Kitty already had a tombstone. It was light grey in color, and her name was written on it in golden letters. Beloved daughter. And the dates of her birth and death, a pitifully short period of time marked by the slash between the dates.
Suddenly I felt clumsy and heavy, and stopped. I didn't know what to do with the flowers, just stood there holding them awkwardly in front of me, staring at the tombstone.
"Well don't just stand there – give Kitty her flowers." Grandma gave me a little nudge.
I stepped forward and stiffly bent to put the flowers on the grave. There was no grass growing on the earth yet. The thought of Kitty buried there made me nauseous.
There were other bouquets as well, all fresh, so either others had only visited her grave in the last two days, or someone had been tending to the grave and taken any withered flowers away. Little angel statues and teddy bears and candles were strewn everywhere. Names of my classmates under "Miss You" notes and poems. A Christmas tree ornament even - a stylized bird made of some glittery red material. Our flowers complemented the little display beautifully. A robin flew to the stone and observed us for a while with before flying off to feed its young.
"How lovely," Grandma said tilting her head slightly to one side, her hands on her hips. She sounded as though she was commenting on a painting or a piece of decoration. There was a pause while we looked at everything, and suddenly it was real for me. Kitty was dead. But strangely, I didn't feel like crying any more. It was so peaceful here, and the little - gifts - everyone had brought her were so kind and loving. It was as though in death, we suddenly really knew her as she truly was.
Grandma was speaking, and I tuned out my thoughts so that I could hear what she was saying. She repeated it for me, because it was obvious I hadn't heard the first time.
"I said," she repeated in a matter-of-fact tone, "has she tried to contact you yet?"
I looked at Grandma, not quite believing my ears.
"What did you say?"
Grandma sighed. "I asked if Kitty has tried to contact you yet," she repeated yet again, in the same matter-of-fact tone as she had used to pose the question. "They do, you know."
"Who?" I did not understand.
"The dearly departed, if you will," she looked slightly amused. "It is quite common. If you know what to look for. And aren't afraid of the contact, of course."
It's OK, I thought to myself. Just Grandma having a temporary fit of weirdness. Or perhaps she's trying to cheer me up. My Grandma, the medium. Next she'll be donning a turban and calling herself Velma the Mystic or something.
Her cell phone rang and she took it out of her pocket, checking who was calling. That was just as good as answering, as I could not resist touching the letter tucked under the waist of my jeans. The message from Kitty.
"It's your dad... Hello, Mike! Yes, not long now. In fact, I met Dana on the road on the way to your house. OK, yes, we'll be right there."
She slid the phone back in her pocket. She never had a handbag, j
ust sometimes her ratty old back pack, but mostly she carried all the necessary stuff in her pockets. ("What doesn't fit in my pockets, I can do without. I've always thought handbags get in the way of action." She never specified what she meant by "action".)
"Well, the chef is about to make his famous pasta, and would like us to be there when he bears it to the table. Let's get going."
I sat quietly next to Grandma while she drove us home. She did not say anything more on the subject of Kitty contacting me. She was like that, never pushing her opinions on others, or continuing a discussion if she noticed the subject made someone feel uncomfortable. My puzzled expression must have convinced her to drop it.
The pasta was delicious, as always. Dad really knew his way around a kitchen. He had been a professional in the hospitality business for many years before we'd come to live in this peaceful rural idyll on the border between England and Wales, where he now focussed on consultancy and teaching. When he was young, he'd worked his way through university in many different kitchens, happy to start at the lowest level every time, because as he always said, you learned more that way. It was a great opportunity to study different cultures - European, Asian, African - he immersed himself in it all. He did most of the cooking at home, leaving only baking to my mother, who happened to love it. I helped them both, and hoped I would learn both their skills - it was like having a private restaurant, living with them.
When I was very small and Dad was building his career, we'd lived in different places - Italy, Greece, Korea and America. I had been so young I didn't really remember very much about any of them other than the States. Dad, who was American, had met Mom in England years earlier while he was a student travelling around - she and Grandma were originally from a Kentish farming family and now that we were back in a rural area she felt really at home there with her church activities and so on. I loved it too. Apart from anything else, there was a real sense of antiquity and mystery about where we lived and I had become fascinated by history and archaeology. Grandma, though, had kicked back at living the rural life at some point and gone off for adventures.
