The Cursing Stone
Adrian Harvey
Copyright © 2021 Adrian Harvey
The right of Adrian Harvey to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in
accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016
Republished in 2021 by Bloodhound Books
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be
reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in
writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the
terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living
or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.bloodhoundbooks.com
Print ISBN 978-1-913942-95-3
Contents
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Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part II
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part III
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part IV
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Acknowledgements
A note from the publisher
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Also by Adrian Harvey
Being Someone
Time’s Tide
To London
“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”
— J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Part I
The Kingdom of Hinba
1
You cannot see her face. No matter how hard you look, you cannot make it out. It is not even that it is a blur; rather, an absence, a loss. Her precise shape, her features, slide from view as soon as you try to focus upon them. You are aware that you know the face, you have seen it a thousand times, yet still you cannot bring her image to mind. Neither can you remember her name, even though you are certain that this too you know. Just as you know that she is beautiful, if only you could see her. This face should be familiar to you; it is important, although you cannot recall precisely why.
All else is clear, crisply defined: each purple flower on the clumps of heather, the curve of the beach stretching off to the west, the white caps on the distant waves. It is only when you turn to look at the woman that your eyes cloud and the memory of precisely who she is becomes lost, just out of your reaching. What magic is this, you wonder?
It is now that you realise that you are not standing on the low cliff beside this woman, known but unknown. Rather you are hovering, about a metre above the ground. The air feels solid enough, and you feel no danger of injury, of falling. Only the elusive face gives you cause for anxiety.
An insistent wind presses into you. It seeks out every crease and fold, every weakness and softness, relentless. It is cold, but not bitterly so; it is almost as if the air lacks a temperature. It is simply the solid cold of raw meat; as cold as death and just as implacable.
Yet despite its force, the breeze cannot budge you. It tugs and prods and nudges, but you remain stationary, hovering a little above the ground on the solid air. Somehow you are anchored to this place, tethered but not connected. Above you, the sky is bright in the blue and clear way that skies above the island are. And the ground below your feet is dressed in vivid green, the heather and grass tugging against the force of air.
Tethered but disconnected. The sensation of flying – better, of levitating – is not unusual. In fact it feels commonplace, as though you have always been floating just beyond the surface. Never quite touching the land on which you were raised. The heather and gorse and grass of the hillside still ruffle in the breeze. The green is overpowering, encompassing. You drink in its vibrancy and fecundity, made urgent in the sunlight, and breathe in the solidity of the island, of your heart’s love. The world is yours and it is safe and solid, knowable. Then you start to move.
Slowly at first. A gentle gliding, barely noticeable in the rushing wind. But soon you become aware of slipping across the island’s surface, away from your sweetheart. You try to resist the motion, but neither your limbs nor your mind can control your trajectory. You are gaining speed. Over your shoulder, you see her, and then the island itself, slip into the distance. And you are alone, gliding over the sparkling sea, pushing ever faster towards the west and the open ocean, away from the dry land and out into the featureless deep blue. Faster that the fastest sail boat.
The Arctic terns are your only company, their tiny bodies and rigid wings arcing above the rising waves as they slide seemingly powerless on the wind, unable to rise or to drop into the water. They are closer than they should be and you can clearly read the curiosity in their eyes as they pause alongside you before slipping away to a safer distance. The smoothness and whiteness of their feathers, the crisp demarcation of their black caps, is impeccable.
You begin to imagine yourself as a tern, half remembering the thousands of miles of ocean over which you have travelled, the months without sight of land, until you are no longer sure if you had only imagined yourself in human form in a brief moment beside the woman on the hill above the bay. You feel the ghost of a forked tail, its long tines trailing in the air behind you. You try to turn your head to see your own shape but cannot twist sufficiently to look down along your body: you are invisible to yourself. Only the shape of the resistance of the wind and the dim throb of a misplaced memory tells you that you are real, solid, human.
The terns have abandoned you now, wanting the closeness of their nesting grounds on the land that you have left behind. Over open ocean, with no land visible, you cannot imagine how this journey will end, cannot recall how it began. There is only the sea. You cannot conceive of any moment in your entire existence, up to this point and forever more, that was not, is not, will not be spent gliding six feet above the rushing waves of an empty ocean. You are taken suddenly by a dumb despair.
In that instant, you start to climb. You are no longe
r skimming over the waves but rushing upwards, like a rocket, straight into the sky. It takes several moments for your body to adjust to the force of acceleration, to the drag and to gravity pulling at your limbs.
You hurtle upwards and the surface of the ocean becomes indistinct beneath you. Soon it is just a single polished surface, with no waves or creases visible. There is only the sheen of blue and the curve of the world. There is no more. You have become accustomed to the speed and the growing altitude, to your separation from every substantive thing in the universe. There are no scents, no sights; the only sensations come from the rush of air and the tug of gravity.
Then you stop. You are hanging in blue space, and everything is still. Your organs turn anxiously inside you and the giddiness of weightlessness provokes a little nausea, disorientation. You can no longer recall how long you have been like this, stationary in space and time. Perhaps this is where you will spend eternity, suspended just below the sky, with only blueness for company. Your disappointment becomes dismay as you realise that you are not suspended at all, but beginning to fall.
Your body tumbles and cart-wheels through the sparse air. Fingers clutch at it, vainly seeking to catch hold of something that could slow the descent. But nothing tempers the acceleration until the body reaches terminal velocity. A body could not survive: it would die, smashed against the surface of the ocean that is now racing upwards through the unreliable air. As the body plummets towards the hard shining surface of the sea, you imagine the pain that will flow through it with the inevitable impact.
You remember that the falling body is yours, that you inhabit it. You have once more caught up with the tumbling form and reoccupied the speeding mass in time to be overwhelmed by the terror that resides within it. You want to depart once more, to trail the falling man, to witness the crushing of this body, from beyond its confines: to sense its agony vicariously. But it is moving too fast, and with too little control.
Despite the speed at which your proto-corpse is falling, the sea moves only slowly up towards you. So great a distance is left to fall. The descent itself seems to last an eternity and you cannot remember how long it has taken to attain the altitude from which you are falling, let alone the means of achieving it. In the slow rush of your impending death, you half-remember some monstrous bird, climbing to the edge of the sky, its talons pressed tightly into your chest before, weary or bored, it released you to this cascade, to your death.
Or maybe you had been an angel once, an angel that had fallen from the heavens. But you have no wings. Do angels always have wings? The thought that you might be an angel makes you question the certainty of your death. If you were not a mortal, then the impact could not kill you. You would survive. But you would be stranded in the midst of an endless sea with no way to return to the heavens, nor even to find a shore and the company of men. And it would hurt. The impact. Even if it did not kill you, it would hurt beyond all pain that you can imagine. You struggle to find your wings so that you might evade that pain.
The first of the white caps on the waves appear and you know that it will not be long now. In an instant, the tiny specks of spume become individual waves, clearly discernible one from the other. There are small birds, soon much larger, gliding above the surface. You struggle against the racing air to stand upright, so as to limit the impact, to limit the pain.
Then you are under the water, intact, sinking deeper and deeper in to the darkening haze. Down and down through the slow stickiness, the momentum of the fall carrying you farther into the cold wetness. For the first time that you can remember, you are cold. And it is dark: already, before you think to pull against the water, to kick out with your legs, it is dark. You can see nothing, yet can sense the creatures circling you in the gloom. The rushing hush of salt and sand whisper in your ears, threatening in a language you cannot understand. A panic seeps in and you thrash upwards towards the light and air, away from the hidden serpents and sea-daemons.
It takes an eternity to swim back to the surface. Weed and fatigue bind your limbs. Your wet clothes slow you still more. But the grey light grows around you until you can see the fractal surface above. With all your remaining strength you kick and pull upwards and, breaking the shifting tension, you find your face in the air, your skin suddenly chilled. You gulp in heavy breaths and struggle to clear the water from your eyes.
2
Fergus woke slowly. He slipped loose of sleep with a smooth comfort, even though the sweat still crackled through his hair, clung to his body, pulled the sheets tight to his skin. Sunshine reached in through the curtain’s crack to search through his belongings, scattered about the room. The pile of yesterday’s clothes left in a heap on the carpet. Beside it, a stack of books teetered, topped with his old school atlas, still opened at the page covering Eastern Europe. On his desk-cum-dressing table, the index of British post codes was propped open; a hairbrush, tangled with lengths of strawberry blonde hair; a deodorant spray; a half-eaten tube of Polo mints, its flayed skin curling in the light.
As these relics came into focus, he rolled across the damp bed to the night stand. He drank deeply from the glass of water left there since the night before, then pulled open the draw to hunt out first his note book, then the fat pen his mother and father had given to him on his 18th birthday. The world was forming again into a crisp clarity, as lucid and as solid as his dreams. His eyes traced the curling lines doodled onto the notebook’s cover before pulling the pages apart where his fingertips found the folded corner. Halfway through.
He had dreamed again, of course. He dreamt every night: precise, tangible dreams, dreams that left their savour in his nose, on his tongue. He could recollect them perfectly, more so than the events of the previous day, but still he recorded them, in exact detail, each and every morning, before his mother called him to breakfast.
This was his eighth notebook. Like all the others it was a slim pale yellow exercise book, taken from the little shop downstairs, offset against his wages. Each book was filled with tight, dense handwriting, detailing in tidy but inelegant longhand his nocturnal adventures these past six years. They were varied, these adventures, but all shared a consistent feature: in his dreams, Fergus could fly. More accurately: levitate. Simply float at will, rising above whatever place he found himself. Gliding smoothly into and through the air, sedately and calmly.
It was early still. Only his grandfather would be up and dressed. Sitting at the long kitchen table with a mug of tea and a pipe of tobacco, staring out into the bay. The boy fancied that he could hear the old man’s laboured breathing rising through the floorboards, could smell the sweetness of the smoke. The fantasy brought a smile, a calmness. But the moment passed soon enough and he returned his attention to the task at hand.
Leaning against the headboard, Fergus wrote carefully but swiftly, capturing the dream before it began to lose its shape, became indistinct and opaque; just a feeling, a sense of wonder and dread that would hang unnoticed over the day. This was why he recorded them, the dreams. By writing them down, in the fullest of detail, he could hope to retain a calm mastery of his subconscious. Others carried through their days an elusive idea that something, somehow, was not quite right: on some days, people seemed to feel simply apprehensive, fearful, out of sorts for no good reason that they could place. Fergus was sure that by capturing and containing his dreams, by searching through every twist and turn of the night, he would rob them of their power to creep up on him, unannounced and unnoticed, and spoil his mood.
Of course, he also wondered if they might mean something. Premonitions or windows into deeper truths. Sometimes he would read back through the carefully dated entries, especially after significant or unexpected events, to see if he had predicted their occurrence in some literal or obscure way. Before making big decisions, he would interrogate the records of his dreams from the previous month or so, trying to detect guidance from a higher power. God maybe. Or simply his true and lucid self. His writing recalled the sensation of not being
able to see the face of the woman – it was Shona, of course – and it gave him a momentary flicker of doubt about his plans. But, to date, the notebooks had held neither warnings nor answers. He put his doubt aside and moved on to note the colour of the gorse flowers and the dead chill of the wind.
As he wrote, he could hear the muffled voices and movements of his parents in the next room, then the creak of the bathroom door, and the sound of the sudden deluge as his father fully opened the taps to fill the bath. He had maybe twenty minutes before the bathroom was free for him, then another ten before breakfast would be on the table, an hour before he needed to be at the harbour side to collect the mail from Mr McCredie’s boat. It was plenty of time to finish his notes and then pick out some clothes for Shona’s birthday party, before shaving and starting his rounds in good time. But Fergus knew not to dawdle, to mistake a lack of urgency for a surfeit of time. Better to use its excess than to fritter it away, his grandfather would say.
The Cursing Stone: a gripping mystery and family saga Page 1
