Tabitha shuddered, the sense that blood was running down her neck suddenly overcoming her, and she put her hands to her throat. As she tried to steady her breathing, she wondered whether this was also the opportune moment to confess to her grandmother that the river hadn't spoken to her for over a year now. She had been too embarrassed to tell Ondine before now, too nervous that it would affect the bond that existed between them. And a small part of her had wondered whether her grandmother knew anyway, and was annoyed that she hadn't tried to speak to Tabitha about it at all. Ondine had an uncanny way of knowing what you were going to say in the moment just before you said it. But before Tabitha could decide one way or the other, Ondine had put the bowl she had been preparing to one side and come back over to her granddaughter. She looked worried. Taking Tabitha's face in her hands, Ondine looked deep into her granddaughter's eyes, as though she was looking for something.
“I'm going to finish making this up for you,” she murmured, looking back over to the bowl, “and I want you to mix it with hot water and drink it before bed. It should put you out like a light. Okay?”
Tabitha did her best to nod while her grandmother was still clutching at her cheeks.
“And mind you tell me if you keep having these dreams,” Ondine said firmly. “Trust me – you want me to know.”
4
CHAPTER FOUR
Tabitha had done as her grandmother had told her to do. She had mixed up the strange concoction Ondine had prepared for her, ignored the off-putting green colour, and gulped down the hot draught before going to bed. And as promised, it had sent her straight into a deep, restful sleep. But barely more than a few hours had passed before the dream interrupted Tabitha's sleep again, and she had snapped awake, clutching at her throat. The sensation of hot, sticky blood pouring down her front remained vivid in Tabitha's mind, and she sat quickly upright, patting her hands up and down herself to convince herself that the vision hadn't been real. She gulped in deep lungfuls of the night air, trying to calm herself down. She was still alive, still breathing. Tabitha ran her hands over her throat again, but she couldn't feel any blemish on the skin beneath her fingers.
Tabitha did her best to go back to sleep, taking slow, deep breaths and telling herself that she had nothing to fear from a dream. But every time she drifted off the dream would repeat itself again. Tabitha was jolted awake over and over again in a tearful panic, each time grasping desperately at her throat, until eventually she stopped bothering with trying to sleep at all. Hugging her knees to her chest, Tabitha forced herself to sit upright in bed in order to prevent herself from falling back to sleep, feeling her eyes grow increasingly drawn and stinging as she was denied any rest.
She stayed that way until morning, by which time she was relieved to see the first light filtering into her room. Staggering up and out of bed, her neck aching from sitting up so uncomfortably, Tabitha padded through to the kitchen with her blankets still wrapped around her. With the sun barely above the horizon, Tabitha poured herself some water and sank down into an old wooden chair at the small kitchen table, suppressing a groan as she did. She shivered, noting that the sun was no longer bringing any warmth with it in the mornings. She was just wondering whether she might sleep better if she propped herself up at the little table when her grandmother appeared.
“Oh, Tab!”
Ondine didn't bother with saying anything else, but rushed over to fuss at her granddaughter. “Didn't you take that draught like I told you to? Honestly, Tabitha, you need to sleep – you look like you haven't slept a wink!”
“I took the draught, honestly I did,” Tabitha protested tiredly, swiping her grandmother's hands away from her face. “You can see the empty flask in my room if you don't believe me. And like you said I would, I fell asleep straight away. But then I had the same dream again, and again, and again, and each time I woke up. And in the end I thought I would rather be awake than go through it all again.”
Ondine looked critically at her for a moment, and Tabitha recognised the look in her steely blue eyes which meant that she was considering whether Tabitha was telling the truth. But she must have been convinced, because she gave Tabitha a small nod, and then disappeared through to the back room before reappearing clutching her knitting.
“I'm going to sit out the front for a while,” she said. “I might be out there for some time. I need to think.”
Tabitha nodded, but the presence of the knitting unnerved her. Her grandmother only got her knitting out when she was troubled by something very difficult.
“It's nothing serious, is it Nana?” Tabitha asked cautiously.
But Ondine's mind was evidently already elsewhere, for she just gave a halfhearted shrug and wandered out of the house, her fingers already untangling the lines of wool as she went.
Tabitha hesitated. She didn't like to bother her grandmother. But the thought occurred to her again that maybe the dream was a kind of warning, and her grandmother was behaving very peculiarly, even by her standards. Tabitha gulped down the water she had poured out and then tentatively followed in Ondine's wake to outside the front of the house.
They were close to the river here, but it was early enough that none of the fishing boats were out yet, so the water remained unblemished. The morning light was pale, giving the illusion that Ondine seemed to be glowing softly where it hit her. She was already thoroughly absorbed in the strange knitting she did on her hands, her fingers moving deftly between one another to create strange patterns in the resulting material. Her face was grim, set like stone. Tabitha waited optimistically for her to say something, but it was as if Ondine hadn't even registered that her granddaughter was there.
“I think I'm going to go to the library today,” Tabitha said. “I might find some information there which helps.”
She waited to be told off for interrupting, but to Tabitha's surprise her grandmother merely nodded, not taking her attention off the grey wool she was knitting together on her fingers, meditating on the problem with a formidable silence. Tabitha had been expecting Ondine to grumble over this, to protest that Tabitha ought to trust her grandmother to come up with a solution.
“I said I'm going to go to the library,” she said again, but Ondine still said nothing, and so Tabitha slipped back inside the house and packed up some bread and salted fish and tomatoes, filled a skein of water from the well, and set off for the library.
Still bleary-eyed with lack of sleep, Tabitha stumbled across the marshland, her feet catching on every slight bump and hollow in the ground. The library was a short distance upriver from the village, in the ruins of what had once been a sprawling university. No one else visited it apart from Tabitha these days. No one else in the village could even read.
Her mother had brought Tabitha here when she was a little girl, when she had taught her to read, and they had continued to visit the library together as long as her mother had been alive. At the time Tabitha hadn't thought very much about this at all, about how strange it was that her mother knew how to read when no one else in the village so much as knew what a book was. She had just lapped up every story which her mother had read to her, delighted by the stories themselves and eager to prove to her mother how quickly she could learn to read.
But as Tabitha had got older, this had further fed the mystery that seemed to surround her mother and where she had come from. Tabitha still didn't know where her mother had learnt to read books, or why she had thought it was important to teach her daughter to do the same. She had stopped visiting the library for a long time after her mother died, but for some reason Ondine had taken umbrage with this, and begun a relentless campaign to persuade her granddaughter to start reading again.
“You know your mother really loved reading,” she would say mournfully whenever Tabitha's father wasn't with them. “And it made her so happy that you loved to read too.”
When this had little effect, Ondine had tried a different approach.
“I miss you reading to me, Tab,” she would
say plaintively. “Who else is going to keep a poor old woman entertained with stories if you stop reading? And what a waste, all those stories just waiting to be read aloud...”
Tabitha had never learnt why her illiterate grandmother had been quite so keen that she learn to read, but eventually she had been persuaded that her mother would be saddened to think that she had stopped reading and that she oughtn't to deprive Ondine of the books. And so she had been talked into returning to the library again, painful though it was.
Tabitha reached the foot of the ruined building, a tall, crumbling tower beside a vast lake. Every time she came here she thought how magnificent it must have been once. The view from the uppermost floors across the river and surrounding countryside was fantastic, and you could see for miles on a clear day. What must it have been like when it was still fully standing, and teeming with people who wanted to learn? Tabitha's mother had often talked about this, trying to enthuse Tabitha about what the world had been like long ago. But Tabitha struggled to picture it, and so she remained more interested in the books inside.
She wished again that she knew more about how her mother had learned to read. She would have asked her father about it, except that while Ondine had been delighted when Tabitha returned to the library, her father had been quite disgruntled to find out that she was reading again. This had been very confusing for Tabitha, who by this point was beginning to feel that everyone else had much stronger feelings about reading than she did. She never did pluck up the courage to ask him why he disliked his daughter reading so much too, and since a few sharp words from Ondine had prevented him from criticising Tabitha for doing so, it was never brought up by him either. So the books had become a habitual part of her life again, and as Tabitha had grown older, they became an important part of her life, too. The library was a sanctuary whenever life in the village became too difficult.
It was easy to get into the library when you knew how, as long as it hadn't been raining too hard. You just needed to know where the rubble was secure enough to scramble up and over in order to drop into a slight gap that let you in. And to be willing to climb back out again. If it had been very rainy, the basement beneath often flooded, and then – as far as Tabitha knew – there was no other way in. But without knowing that the gap was there, no one else in the village could have followed Tabitha there. Not that they would have wanted to – but it pleased Tabitha to know somewhere that Brigit and the others did not. This place was hers alone.
She dropped into the basement and breathed in the smell of rot and paper that always reminded her of her mother, which always made her heart catch just a little, and then began the long climb up the winding staircase to the upper floors.
There were seven floors in total, if you didn't count the basement. Most of the books here were ruined now. The glass in the windows was long-gone, and so they had been subjected to years of exposure to the weather. But someone – Tabitha thought it might have been her mother – had painstakingly collected those books which were still in a legible condition and piled them up inside the staircases, and made shelters from the unluckier spoilt books in the middle of each floor, inside which more of the still-legible books were stacked up. Many of the books were piled up just wherever they had been found, but there was some order where whoever had tried to preserve them had begun sorting them thematically.
Tabitha had tried to make her contribution to the future of the library – although goodness knew who else other than her would ever be interested in the books stored here – by continuing this project whenever she couldn't settle to her reading. But there were hundreds of books in the library, and the task was far from finished.
All of this meant it was very difficult to find a book when you had a specific topic in mind, and Tabitha was doubtful that it was going to be easy to find anything on the topic of dreams. She didn't even know which section she would look in if the books were in perfect order. But for want of a better solution, she thought that she might as well try. She had resolved simply to start on the top floor and work her way back down again, in the hope that she might stumble upon something helpful as she went. However unlikely it seemed, she had to try.
On the top floor, Tabitha paused briefly by the section on fairytales that her mother had collected together, and which she had frequently read to Tabitha as a child. Although she had loved reading these fairytales, she hadn't been able to look at them since returning to the library after her mother had died. Would there be anything on dreams in those, Tabitha wondered? Probably not, she told herself doubtfully. She was sure there was nothing in old faery stories that would help her to fall asleep, or to stop the strange dreams that were plaguing her nights. So there was no reason for her to look at them now. None at all.
Instead, Tabitha turned to the next shelf along. She was constantly amazed by what you could learn from books, and she was sure that a book would hold the answer to her problems now. She just had to find the right one.
Resigning herself to a long day of looking over as many books as she could, Tabitha began searching.
5
CHAPTER FIVE
It was the middle of the night, and it should have been dark. But the moonlight was blindingly bright, making everything gleam a luminous silver as it streamed in through the window. Tabitha was wide awake.
She was sat hunched up in bed, in the same knee-hugging position she had assumed for several nights running now, determined to keep her eyes open. She couldn't go through it again – couldn't bear to feel that silver knife slicing open her throat one more time. Tabitha knew that if she felt herself thrust awake even once more into the lingering belief that she could feel blood trickling from her throat, then she would dissolve into blind panic. She was too exhausted to keep calming herself down each time she jerked back into consciousness. So Tabitha had resolved that she would stay awake.
She yawned widely. Her tired eyes darted around the small bedroom, taking in everything lit up by the bright moonlight, desperate to find something to distract herself with. It was boring just sitting up in bed, and in spite of forcing herself to remain in her uncomfortable upright position, she was finding it difficult not to drift off. No, just sitting here wasn't helping at all; before long she would be back off to sleep again. Tabitha needed something to do. Stretching out her cramped limbs, Tabitha got stiffly out of bed and paced up and down her room. The cold air nipped at her now that she had abandoned her blankets on the bed, but it helped to wake her up, so she continued pacing back and forth, glancing around for something to distract her with while being very careful not to bump into anything in case it made a sound. There wasn't very much that she could do right now, Tabitha thought grumpily as she surveyed the room, without waking her grandmother.
Ondine had been very sullen when Tabitha had returned from the library earlier that afternoon, to the extent that she had been quite snappy with her when Tabitha had confessed that she had been unable to find any book that could advise her on dreaming.
“What is the point,” she had grumbled, “of you having learnt to read, and of us having that library right on our doorstep, if it isn't in the slightest bit helpful when we really need it to be?”
Tabitha had thought this was a bit unfair. She had found the books in the library to be very helpful over the years. And she thought it was a bit of an exaggeration to say that her recent bout of insomnia was a time when they really needed it. She was just a bit tired, that was all. But her grandmother had disagreed.
“Sure, just leave me to worry about it then,” Ondine had snapped when Tabitha had voiced this thought. “You've never had dreams like this before, Tab.”
Troubled by how seriously her grandmother was taking all of this, Tabitha had relented and promised that she would keep searching the library for a book that might help.
Tabitha stopped pacing, and sighed. Thinking of the library had made her think again about her mother. She tiptoed over to a little trinket box she kept beside her bed, in which she kept sev
eral treasured possessions of her parents, along with some beach-combing finds she had been particularly pleased with. Still being careful to stay very quiet, Tabitha slowly removed her treasures from the box, placing them gently down in a line along the tabletop. She picked out a bone fishing hook from her father, which she had used the first time they had gone out fishing together; an ancient tooth she had found on the beach one day with her mother; a tiny woven fish from her grandmother; a perfectly round piece of sea glass; and, last of all, a beautiful stone necklace that her mother had given her.
Tabitha picked up the necklace now. It was a strange piece, and not only because she had never seen anyone else in the village wearing any jewellery. The pendant was of an ordinary grey stone in the middle, rough to touch, set within a clear, smooth stone around the outside. It didn't look as though the two different stones had been fused together by human hand, but Tabitha had never seen another stone like it. It must have come from far away, she thought as she ran her hand softly over it, feeling the change in texture. Perhaps stones like this one could be found wherever her mother had come from.
Tabitha couldn't remember why her mother had given her the necklace, but she had worn it every day after her mother had died, running her thumb across it whenever she missed her mother. She probably would have carried on wearing it if Ondine hadn't finally convinced her that it might be better to keep such a treasured possession somewhere safe, to prevent it from being lost or stolen. And since her father had never liked her wearing it very much either, presumably because it had reminded him of Tabitha's mother, she had eventually agreed to keep it in with the rest of the small treasures that were piling up on her bedside table. Her father had made her the trinket box then.
The River Witch Page 3
