The Rookery

by Deborah Hewitt

  ‘You’ve proofread my drafts,’ said Reid defensively. ‘I’ve kept you involved.’

  ‘You’ve kept me at arm’s length,’ Alice corrected. ‘But fine.’ She shrugged and turned away. ‘Your choice.’

  ‘I’ve . . .’ Reid started, and quickly trailed away.

  Alice waited, doubt beginning to creep in. Maybe she shouldn’t have offered; she was quite happy with their current arrangement and the freedom it gave her to pursue her own interests.

  ‘I’ve pored over Magellan’s published and unpublished manuscripts,’ Reid said at last, her voice tight. She gestured at the tinted-glass and marble cabinet beneath her desk. ‘His letters, his notes – all passed on by his estate. But there’s something missing.’ Reid swiped a curl out of her face irritably. ‘You’ve read my latest work? You’re up to date?’ she asked with faint scepticism.

  ‘Yes.’ Alice nodded, feeling vaguely patronized. ‘It was very interesting,’ she lied. It wasn’t the subject that had been dull, really – it was Reid’s writing style.

  Reid had been studying Magellan’s belief that the soul was composed of three parts. In most modern-day religions, the soul was believed to be a single complete entity, but Magellan had travelled the world meeting people of different faiths. By the time he’d returned to the Rookery and sat down to write Sielun, he was convinced by soul dualism – that people could have multiple souls, each with different functions. Initially, he’d been very taken with Chinese Taoism and the belief that each person had two souls – the spiritual hun, which left after death, and the corporeal po, which remained with the body. But he’d gone back to his roots in the end, with the early Finnish belief in the three-part soul – made up of henki, luonto and itse – forming his own belief model. Reid’s entire project was founded on one goal: to prove that soul dualism, and therefore Magellan, was correct.

  ‘And you’ve read Sielun?’ Reid said sharply.

  Alice stared at her. Reid’s fraught snappiness did not make her inclined to be too helpful. ‘I have,’ she said coolly. ‘Where’s your stumbling block? What is it you think is missing?’

  Reid frowned as though it was obvious. ‘Everything. The fact I haven’t been able to prove that the soul has three parts in the first place, never mind their functions. I’m trying to prove something I’m fundamentally blind to. I can’t dissect a soul the way a surgeon can dissect a heart, because it can’t be seen or touched.’

  Alice’s cheeks burned. She may not have been able to see souls themselves, but she was entirely familiar with nightjars, which mirrored the souls they guarded.

  ‘I’ve studied Duncan MacDougall’s old twenty-one grams experiment in detail,’ Reid went on. ‘He weighed the body before and after death and found it grew lighter, suggesting that the soul leaving the body caused the drop-off in mass. He claimed he’d proven the soul weighed twenty-one grams. Does that mean that each of Magellan’s three parts – henki, itse and luonto – are seven grams, then? Or was MacDougall’s work flawed? He claimed no difference in weight before and after death when he trialled his experiment with dogs, and I utterly refute the idea a dog has no soul.’

  Alice thought of her two elderly Westies, Bo and Ruby, living with her parents in Ireland, and had to agree.

  ‘At the very least, animals and plants must have the henki soul, which is—’

  ‘Plants have souls?’ said Alice. She’d agreed about dogs, but the idea of a nettle having a soul felt like a stretch too far.

  ‘All living things have souls,’ Reid answered impatiently. ‘The soul is what animates the physical form; it brings life to what would otherwise just be a body, a sack of skin and bone. According to Magellan, the soul that gives the body life is known as the henki. Without it, we die.’

  Alice’s brow furrowed in thought. She was rustier on the difference between the three soul parts than she’d thought. Maybe she ought to study Magellan’s Sielun more closely once her membership bid had been dealt with. If she survived the tests.

  ‘But it is possible to live without the other two soul parts, the itse and the luonto,’ Reid went on, ‘because they don’t give us life; they only give us personality. They shape who we are as individuals.’

  Reid stopped for breath and stared into the distance. Alice shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘I thought I was getting closer,’ Reid murmured. ‘But it’s all conjecture, in the end.’ She paused, eyes glazed. ‘And Magellan’s estate doesn’t really care about my research. It’s plaudits and awards they want in his name. They care nothing about the nuts and bolts of the work, or the fact it’ll shame my name if it’s torn apart because I’ve holes in my evidence.’ She shook her head bitterly. ‘Magellan had the advantage of being an aviarist. If I manage to prove his theory without assets like his, I’ll have outdone him. I’ll have outdone all of them.’

  Her gaze drifted over Alice, whose face had flushed at her final comment. Reid frowned as though surprised to find Alice there, still listening. Her spine snapped upright and she cleared her throat. ‘You want to keep your job? Make yourself useful then. I need you to copy some of Magellan’s notes on the Ditto machine for me. His estate has sent over the last bundle from his files and I hate taking the originals out of the lab. I’m going to be working into the evening, and red wine and irreplaceable items don’t mix well.’

  Alice stared at her, a peevish glint in her eye. After a moment, she mentally shrugged. Fine. Let Reid battle on alone. Alice had more important things to do. Preparing for her second test and catching up with Bea’s Summer Tree reading list meant that she already had more than enough on her plate. Which, incidentally, was why she couldn’t afford to think about Crowley too. No distractions. She had to throw everything at her House membership bid. There would be time to think more clearly about Magellan, the security of her job and Reid’s complete lack of teamwork skills later.

  Alice reached gladly for Reid’s notes. Trips to the Ditto machine were always good for giving her some additional thinking time. The Ditto machine was an ancient mimeograph, a pre-Xerox photocopier, kept in the reprographics room in the Arlington Building. Like the architecture and clothing, the Rookery’s scientific and technological development had stalled somewhere around the 1930s. Alice had briefly harboured fantasies about revolutionizing the city with London tech, importing Steve Jobs’ inventions and becoming a billionaire. Unfortunately, the electrical systems were also from the dark ages and barely powerful enough to run a pocket calculator.

  ‘Get me some coffee on your way back,’ said Reid, shoving a folder at her chest. ‘Use the—’

  ‘Arabica beans,’ said Alice, snatching up her own notes. ‘Yes, I know.’

  She’d decided she might as well go the long way round and pop in to see Bea on her way back. They were heading out to see the Summer Tree after work the next day, and Alice wanted to check she had everything she needed.

  The sounds of movement on the other side of the wall caused Alice to pause later that night: drawers scraping as they opened and closed, wardrobe doors creaking, the muffled whisper of dull voices. They were clearing out Holly’s room. Not Eugene, the university janitor – her family. Alice hesitated, torn between knocking on to pass on her condolences and not wanting to intrude on their grief.

  When something smashed – a mirror? A vase? – and the fragments of a furious argument seeped through the walls, she decided it wasn’t the right time to pay them a visit.

  ‘Negligence,’ a woman’s voice snapped. ‘Lester . . . fault . . . whatever he claims . . .’

  ‘. . . can’t simply . . .’ A deep masculine voice, striving for patience. ‘. . . Runners won’t . . . civil suit . . .’

  ‘. . . not enough!’

  Alice pressed her fingers to her eyes and exhaled calmly. Holly’s poor family. The holly bush they’d planted in memoriam suddenly seemed so irrelevant in the face of their anguish. Alice undressed and slid into bed, thinking of her parents – happily pottering around their new cottage, learnin
g to bake treacle bread, fixing up an old car. She didn’t ever want them to be in the position Holly’s parents were in, falling apart at the news of her death. She screwed her eyes shut and burrowed under the covers. God, she missed her parents right now. A sudden desperate need forced her from the bed. She whipped back her covers and yanked out the top drawer of her chest. Nestled among the socks and underwear – and now her mum’s letter about Crowley – was the small ring box she’d tidied away on Holly’s last visit.

  Alice cracked it open and gently lifted out the ring inside, sliding it onto her finger. Just a touch too big, it was an oval signet with a worn pattern, partially hidden by the scuffs and bumps that had left four scratches over the dull gold surface. Her mum’s ring; she’d given it to her when she’d left Ireland. Alice had never seen her mum wear it – she’d always said it was an heirloom and so its sentimental value was too great. It was a battered-looking thing, but as she folded herself back under the covers, it brought comfort to keep a visible souvenir of her parents close by.

  Red hair fluttered at the corner of Alice’s eye. She reached out, fingers stretched in anticipation. It brushed against her wrist, soft and silky. She smiled in relief, her lips forming a word. Jen. But her voice leached colour from the hair. It faded into a brittle blonde and broke off in her hand. There was a clump of it in her palm. She stared at it in horror. Jen’s hair? Holly’s hair? There was a peal of high-pitched laughter, and then a rasping voice, too close.

  ‘Alice . . . don’t beat my time!’

  She bolted upright, her fists clenching the damp sheets and her eyes wild. The room was dark and haunted by shadows. Grappling with the bedside lamp, she banished them with light and sank back into her pillows, her heart thudding against her ribs. A waft of air kissed her forehead and she squinted gratefully at the white bird perched on her headboard, flapping its wings to cool her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she murmured begrudgingly, her throat dry.

  The bird tucked its wings in and shifted closer. It was so pale that its feathers seemed luminescent. She knew, suddenly, what to call it, but she bit her tongue. To name it would be to recognize it, to honour it and all it stood for. Her nightjar gave a regal toss of its head and cooed softly as though offering comfort, and Alice was struck by a fleeting sense of guilt. Was she being fair, always keeping it at a distance?

  ‘Your name . . . is Kuu,’ she murmured, raising a shaky hand to stroke it. ‘Because you coo over me. And because kuu means “moon”. Pale, glowing, hovering in the air . . . with a dark side no one else sees.’ She studied it closely. ‘Yes. Your name is definitely Kuu.’

  It churred in response and nuzzled her hand with something like affection. Sighing heavily, Alice switched off the light and lay rigid in the dark, staring at the patterns on the ceiling. The moonlight was obscured by long shadows from the trees in the gardens. The breeze tousled their leaves and the shadows undulated so that her ceiling seemed to pulsate with life.

  She hadn’t dreamed of Jen for months. Back in Ireland, her dreams had been filled with fleeting visions of red hair turning grey and lifeless in her hands. Every time she woke sweating and with a heavy sense of dread – but something had seemed to settle when she’d returned to the Rookery. She’d taken it as a positive sign that the nightmares had finished with her. But now Holly was haunting her dreams.

  She sighed and closed her eyes, concentrating on the sounds of wind and leaves, and the white noise of her nightjar’s song. If she concentrated she could hear the occasional rumble of a night bus on the distant roads and the clop of dray horses’ hooves. Underneath the quiet city noise there was another sound: the cracking and splitting of wood under pressure, of fibres snapping . . . She frowned in the darkness. It wasn’t coming from the soft whisper of the mulberry crowns bending in the wind. It was something else. Something closer.

  Her nightjar shrieked in sudden warning and Alice leapt from the bed on instinct. She landed off balance, her heels striking a ridge in the wooden floor. Biting back a flurry of swearing, she lurched sideways and flattened herself against the wall. She tensed and peered into the shadows for the source of the noise, shaking with adrenaline. There was something in her room.

  She crooked her finger and her nightjar appeared on her shoulder with a flutter of pale wings.

  ‘Bird’s-eye view,’ she whispered into its ear.

  It lifted upwards, wings unfolding as Alice focused on her breathing and reached for the glowing cord around her wrist. It pulsed warmly in her hands and she pushed her mind into the connection. Her vision travelled through it, throwing her consciousness into her nightjar.

  Through Kuu’s eyes, Alice hovered above the bed, scanning the room for the source of the noise. From the higher vantage point, her sense of the room sharpened: the spaces within it, the layout of the furniture cast in darkness, the stillness . . . Except, the room was not entirely still. She barely saw the movement at first – a flicker against the window . . . and then the slow progress of a shadow slithering along the ground, creeping closer.

  Something long and narrow brushed against her leg, prodding her skin like questing fingers. It crawled over her bare foot and coiled around the ankle . . . Her vision snapped back to her physical body and she staggered. She felt heavy and lumbering, all lightness gone. Helpless in the face of her cumbersome frame, she inhaled sharply as a nimble rope of vine unravelled swiftly across the floor and curled around her other ankle. She jerked backwards, but another twig circled her leg and tightened, strangling the blood supply and firing her pain sensors until she cried out. The floor . . . the floor was alive. A mass of branches, twigs and leafy vines writhed across it, pouring out from the window frame. It was her decorative window, the one she’d proudly teased into shape, practising her Mielikki skills and injecting some personality into her room.

  A branch snaked up and wrapped around her torso. Another around her wrists. Forcing her fingers between skin and tree branch, she tried to prise them away, but they only increased their stranglehold. A vine travelled up her spine and curled around her shoulder – this one thorny and blossoming with roses. Holly’s roses. Alice’s eyes widened in horror.

  ‘What the f—’

  It slid around her throat and squeezed, choking her protests.

  Her free hand flew to her neck, pulling at the vines, but they entwined, pinching the soft skin beneath.

  Alice’s nightjar swooped to her aid, its claws outstretched, tearing at the flexible wood, pecking and slashing at the bark with its beak. But it was no use. The branches tightened. She was trussed up like a fly in a web. The squeeze on her windpipe sent the room spinning like a carousel. Her eyes bulged and stars popped across her vision. Shit. She couldn’t . . . couldn’t breathe . . . Her woodwork – of all the fucking things, her woodwork had turned against her.

  Her thoughts beginning to darken, she focused her gaze on the window, imagined the branches and vines that spilled from the wood pulling back to their source, shrivelling under the power of her stare. But the pressure on her windpipe increased and her concentration lapsed. Her hands were numb, her head tingling – and her Mielikki skills utterly ineffectual. She sagged at the knee, all her energy bent towards staying upright. Not falling. Not collapsing to the floor, where the writhing vines would surely envelop her.

  Her fingers scrabbled again at the vine circling her neck, and she suddenly remembered another attack – a stranglehold of vines just like these, the look of fury in Lester’s eyes as he’d stormed from the university. The banister. She’d rotted the banister beneath her hands. If her Mielikki legacy was failing her, then why not use Tuoni’s? She clawed uselessly at the vine, willing it to decay. Why won’t this fucking stuff die? It squeezed harder instead, and she swayed drunkenly.

  Her nightjar tugged at the cord lashed to her wrist, pulling away from her, urging her to action. She stared at it, confused, double vision making it swell in size, a hazy blur dancing at the edges of her consciousness. The bird opened its beak and shriek
ed at her, pulling at her arm, her hair, her shoulder – and whether by instinct or design, she raised her free arm and forced it away, batting it off.

  ‘Stop,’ she croaked. ‘Go.’

  And it did.

  The cord thinned, its glow dim yet unbroken, as Alice’s nightjar flew – far beyond her sight. A pain tore open her chest and she slumped over, her grip on herself loosening as the vines tightened. A jolt of pure electricity hit her in the spine and she snapped backwards and exhaled what felt like her last breath.

  Except it wasn’t a breath at all; it was something else: power and spirit, and darkness and hunger. Pure energy, expelled from the prison of her body . . . a soul in flight. And she rose into the air – like a bird, but not a bird. Without wings, she stretched herself wide, learning the shape of herself, a billion glittering particles suspended in the air above the catatonic body she’d discarded. Slumped on the floor, she observed the top of her head and shoulders, but the familiar nausea escaped her this time. Instead, she felt lighter than air, free, exhilarated . . . and hungry. So hungry. And cold. She moved towards the window, desperately seeking heat. The branches and twigs throbbed with life. Warmth. She reached out for them . . . but they dissolved into ash and dust. The air rained with it, floating past her like specks of grey snow. A fluttering of white wings drew her attention. Pale wings and pulsing light danced around her . . . Her nightjar cried out and Alice shrank back in alarm. Shrank back. Shrank. Back.

  Her eyes flew open. With a gasp, she crashed to the floor and a cloud of dust blossomed up around her. Ash. Dust. It covered the wooden floor. She traced a finger through it in confusion. The vines and branches were gone. The window frame: plain and ordinary, utilitarian in its lack of decorative elegance. Only a single red rose petal remained.

  Her nightjar swooped down and landed on the floor next to her, churring in the most soothing way. It sidestepped closer and nuzzled her hand. The stranglehold of the vines had left marks in her skin.