by Sophie Jaff
Easing in, limb by limb, first one leg and then the other. Down into the fetid dark.
Lying on my back in my final bed, I use almost all of my remaining strength to pull the lid back across. My will seeps out from my veins. My fingers slip and scrape on the stone, turn bloody; my arms scream in protest. Finally, finally, with a snarl of grit, the lid slowly begins to give and moves until there is but a lip of air. I need little, for my breaths are now few and shallow. The knife did its work well. I did my work well. The ring brooch is back, safe in his chamber, and though I shall soon pass, they will not find me once the fire has started.
Good-bye, world I knew.
If Caradoc is right, surely he who hunts me can hear me now.
You. You who killed my mother know this. I lost my beloved, was forced to kill our baby, and now have nothing left to live for but you. I shall wait for you. I will wait for you through the ages; through fire and flame and ice and stone, I will wait, held safe and still, curled in silver, until the spheres align and the blood awakens. I will wait for the Vessel that can hold me, and then know this, you killer of women, you destroyer of souls, you fiend, I will come for you.
I will return.
26
Katherine
“Katherine? Katherine Emerson?”
A middle-aged woman with a broad pleasant face and short brown hair is holding a clipboard and calling her name. Katherine opens her eyes. “Oh, sorry, I guess I was dozing off.”
“You ready?”
“Yup.” Katherine eases herself up off the chair and follows the woman with the clipboard through the hospital hallway.
“Just you today?”
“Yes.” She feels she owes further explanation. “My partner”—she always chokes a little on the word—“wanted to be here, but he couldn’t. He had a meeting.”
The woman smiles understandingly. “We’ll try to get some lovely pictures for him so he’ll be able to access them online.”
They step into a small white room. Katherine hoists herself up onto the plastic bed and sits with her legs swinging. She feels like a little kid again.
“So, I’m Edna,” the woman introduces herself, “and I’ll be assisting you with your ultrasound today.” Edna consults the clipboard again, making clicking noises with her tongue. “Second trimester, I see. How are we feeling? Any symptoms we should know about, apart from the obvious ones?”
Katherine hates it when people use the word “we” when they mean “I” or “you.”
“No, I feel pretty good.”
“That’s the second trimester for you! More energy again, less nausea.”
“Totally.” Katherine neglects to mention that she never felt tired or experienced nausea even once during her first trimester.
“And are you starting to feel those kicks?”
“Not really.”
“Hmm.” Edna checks her clipboard. “This is your first pregnancy, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s early enough still, and often in our first time around, we only feel the kicks starting nearer to twenty-five weeks, so don’t worry.”
“Oh, uh, thank you.” This time Katherine is grateful for the “we.” It feels inclusive rather than patronizing.
“Now.” Edna has become all business. “As Dr. Edwards no doubt explained to you, this is what we call an anomaly scan, which is basically to check the physical development of your baby and to make sure there aren’t abnormalities.”
“Abnormalities,” Katherine knows, is a word destined to make a mother’s heart grow cold. “Great.” She attempts a lopsided smile.
“It tends to be really exciting and so lovely that you’ll get to have a peek!”
This is a bad idea.
Katherine almost turns to see who’s spoken, for the thought is so loud and clear in her head.
Don’t do this.
The words are sharp, somehow not her own.
Edna picks up on her trepidation. “Really,” she says, “a lot of new mums are nervous, but it’s fine.”
Katherine lies back upon the white plastic bed. The thin white paper sheet crinkles under her. She pulls up her sweater and feels a slight chill on skin. Her belly is definitely fuller and rounder, but she’s far from enormous.
As Edna dims the lights, sweat prickles at Katherine’s temples, under her arms.
Leave.
She wants to listen to the voice, even louder now, wants to leave, but she finds she can’t move her legs, her arms.
“Okay, here we go!” Edna gloops some cool gel onto Katherine’s belly and picks up a white device, like an old-fashioned computer mouse. “Now we’ll see.” She glances toward the monitor.
Don’t
do
this.
But Katherine’s tongue has withered to an old piece of leather.
Edna circles the wand around back and forth as she studies the screen, which is just out of Katherine’s range of vision. “Wait.” The wand stops. She peers closer.
Look away.
Tell her to look away.
Katherine blinks. Wets her lips, tries to speak.
“Hold on. That can’t be right. Wait just a moment.” Edna peers even closer at the monitor. She is staring and staring and staring and—
Stop her.
The paralysis shatters. Katherine pushes herself up and grabs Edna’s unresisting arm.
“Don’t look! Look away! Look away!” Her voice cracks as if she’s only learning to talk again after a long silence.
Edna’s nose and forehead are pressed against the monitor. A low moaning rises from her; saliva beads from her mouth.
Katherine yanks again at her arm.
“Please! Come on! Come—”
After a brilliant, blinding flash of light, the room is plunged into blackness. Edna’s body thuds back against the wall, slides to the floor with a whoosh and thump. Then nothing. It takes Katherine a moment to realize that it’s not just her room. The blackness is too deep, too encompassing. She hears the flatlining machines, the sharp, controlled orders of the nurses and technicians and doctors.
She pulls down her sweater over her cold and sticky stomach, and heaves herself off the bed. Feeling through the darkness with her fingertips, she reaches out and manages to grab her bag, which she left on a chair. She slides her hand against the smooth expanse of door and utters a tiny prayer of thanks when she encounters the jutting metal handle that yields down to her pressure. The hallway is not completely dark; there are tiny emergency lights at intervals along the wall, like phosphorescence in the ocean. She imagines it’s how a plane’s aisle must look when it needs to make an emergency landing. Out here, it’s much louder. People call to one another, and they’re not running, exactly, but walking quickly. A woman in scrubs moves fast past Katherine. She looks competent even in the dimness, so Katherine reaches out for her arm.
“Yes?” The woman sounds impatient.
“A technician fainted in my room.” Katherine jerks her head at the door behind her. “There.”
“What?”
“Her name is Edna. She was giving me an ultrasound and she fainted when the lights went out.”
“Fainted?” The woman doesn’t ask any more questions, or pause. She turns around abruptly and opens the door. “Wait there!” she barks over her shoulder at Katherine.
But Katherine doesn’t wait. She makes use of the darkness to walk past the doors and down the stairwell. She wants to run, but she takes her time. The last thing she needs is to fall.
Don’t think about it, she tells herself. Just take it one step at a time, take it one step at a time, one step at a time. It becomes her mantra, and she focuses on nothing else. Then finally, finally, she’s out of the emergency exit in the stairwell and into the wonderful gray tail end of winter. It’s wonderful because she is no longer inside that building. She is outside and moving far, far away. Into a black cab, all the way back to her house, all the way up the stairs to her bedroom. Where a woman
is frozen by the bed, looking down at something in her hands.
“Mrs. B?” Katherine asks quietly.
The woman turns around. Her hands are small and pale, but it’s easy to see what she grips. Palm crosses.
It’s Mrs. B’s expression that Katherine will think of later that night. She said very little, made no protest as Katherine gently but firmly guided her downstairs. Shock, yet also something else. Now Katherine lies in bed and tosses from side to side, not wanting to admit what that was. Yes, there was fear—she’s losing her job. But it’s more than that. Relief, Katherine admits. She seemed relieved. Why? Why relief? She was about to be fired!
Finally, the answer comes: She was frightened of you. You scared her.
And then, Screw her, she was crazy, Katherine fumes, and closes her eyes again. Whatever she was, she’s gone now, and there’s no real harm done.
She hopes.
27
Katherine
Two knights on horseback face each other in the field, one is clad in black and the other in red and yellow. Brightly colored flags snap in the wind as a weak sun shines down upon them. After a blare of trumpets, they ride full tilt, thundering down the turf, their lances aimed straight at each other. The black knight strikes true, hitting the other’s shield dead center. The knight in red and yellow plummets with a great cry as his horse gallops away, empty stirrups flailing.
The crowd applauds and angles their cell phones for a better shot. Katherine, Niamh, and Lucas clap until their palms ache.
“Wasn’t that amazing?” Katherine is deeply impressed.
Lucas nods so hard it looks like he’s headbanging.
Niamh smiles at him. “Can you ride?”
He shakes his head solemnly.
She turns to Katherine. “You?”
“Not unless you count summer camp, which was a disaster.”
“How so?”
“Well, as soon as the pony started to trot I let out this high-pitched scream, and it panicked and started galloping. By the time they got hold of me, we were both thoroughly traumatized. You?”
“I’ve ridden plenty . . .” Niamh grins, and murmurs in Katherine’s ear, “Just not horses.”
“Da-dum-dum.” Katherine grins back and then glances guiltily at Lucas, but he’s missed that particular exchange and still stares raptly at the field. “What did you think of that, hon?”
“It’s so cool!”
“Agreed.” Katherine thinks with a pang of her neglected sword-and-armor Christmas present. Still, maybe their time has yet to come, she tells herself.
“Now what?” Niamh asks.
Katherine, Niamh, Lucas, and Cordelia are on a day trip to a Game and Country fair. There are pens of cows and pigs and sheep, clay pigeon shooting and angling and vintage steam engines and tractors. There’s even an event called horseboarding, where skateboarders are pulled by horses, and also, gloriously enough, ferret racing. Not to mention archery and backswording, in case visitors want a less traditional method of killing people. In a small, enclosed area, you can pet bunnies if it all gets to be too much. It hasn’t come to that yet, but who knows what the day has in store.
Lucas was beside himself when Katherine said he would be allowed to bring Cordelia with him. It seems that at least half the spectators have brought their dogs, terriers and hounds and mutts named Roger and George and Miss Marple. A country game show may be the doggiest place on earth. Lucas has found his people. They are amiable, mellow, jolly-hockey-sticks types, or what Katherine thinks of as the very-English English. Lots of tweed jackets and Barbour coats; old men in old checked flat caps holding walking sticks and striding purposefully on; gray-haired, stout, pink-cheeked women of that indeterminate age, somewhere between sixty and one hundred and sixty, who are dressed for comfort in soft pants and shapeless sweaters and rainproof jackets. Not a fashionable bunch, though some of the younger girls, in their late teens and early twenties, sport a certain look in tight jodhpurs and riding boots. Plump mums and smiling dads in stained jeans and faded shirts hold the hands of small sticky-faced offspring.
After the joust, they wander through the craft tent, past an excess of wooden bowls and bags and cross-stitch samplers. They check out a demonstration done by the local blacksmith, which enthralls Lucas, and see a plethora of glassblowers, but the artisans that ultimately win their hearts are the chainsaw carvers. Large, grumpy-looking bearded men, they wield their instruments with grim concentration, but their sculptures are surprisingly delicate and detailed. Katherine admires a mermaid springing from a conch shell, a sleeping dormouse from Alice in Wonderland, and a woodland nymph with a coy expression playing a lute.
“Can we get that?” Lucas points to an orangutan holding a baby, both of them slung from a tree. “Or that one?”
She looks at the massive swordfish, springing red and grainy from an oak.
“It might be a little hard to bring back, honey, but let me know if you see something a little smaller, like an owl or a squirrel. There’s no telling what might happen.”
“An owl? Really?” Niamh looks skeptical, as does Lucas.
Katherine has to laugh. She puts an arm on Niamh’s shoulders, takes Lucas by the hand. “Sure, I’m feeling expansive.”
She feels expansive because it’s the first time she’s seen Lucas truly happy and relaxed after what happened with Mrs. B. It’s great to be out with him and her friend Niamh, especially because it’s hardly raining at all.
“I’m hungry,” he announces.
They head off toward the main eating area, ringed with little food stalls and small tents, where wooden tables are set up on the damp, patchy grass. Lucas gets Thai noodles, Niamh opts for a falafel sandwich, and Katherine gets two sausages, one for Lucas just in case the noodles aren’t up to scratch, and a hot, flaky chicken-and-mushroom pie. Her appetite for animal flesh is immense, her hunger endless. She wonders if she lacks iron, thinks she really will have to ask Dr. Edwards.
“I think I’m going to grab a beer, want one?”
Niamh shakes her head. Katherine thinks about justifying this craving but can’t. She has looked it up on the Internet but got nothing from the tangle of mixed messages. Is it the potassium, the vitamin B, the phosphorous? Before her pregnancy she was all about the wine or whiskey, but now she craves the dank, fizzing bite from the marrow of her bones.
The guy serving the ale doesn’t blink. “Dark or light or red?”
“A half-pint of red, thanks.”
Katherine takes a tentative sip; it tastes cool and rich, right somehow. As she walks back to Lucas and Niamh, stepping carefully so as not spill her drink, she passes a table packed with guys who seem to be louder and drunker than everyone else. Katherine guesses that they can’t be much older than teenagers. Pale underneath their hoodies, dark gray and black, they’re getting some looks from people around them. They don’t really fit in with the rest of the scene, which is decidedly family-oriented. Their eyes crawl over Katherine as she makes her way back to Lucas and Niamh, who are watching as she gingerly negotiates between the tables with her cup. She thinks she hears the words “lush mum” amid laughter.
Katherine sits back down, trying hard not to care, trying to remember when she was that age. It seems a world ago.
“Want a sip?”
Niamh shakes her head regretfully.
“Guess I’ll be drinking for two.”
Another phrase drifts out, she can’t catch it, but the mirth is unmistakable. Katherine takes another sip and puts the cup down, her taste for beer gone. Pregnancy makes you vulnerable, she admits. You’re putting it all out there whether you want to or not.
Lucas is engrossed with feeding Cordy a bite of roll, but she can sense Niamh growing angry. “It’s not worth it on your blood pressure.”
“Yobbo shites,” Niamh hisses, then glances guiltily at Lucas, who is still mercifully looking down, all attention on his dog. She turns to Katherine. “Sorry, you can take the girl out of the council estate, but you
can’t take the estate out of the girl.”
“Ignore them,” Katherine tells her and laughs as she hears herself. “Didn’t you used to hate to be told to ‘ignore them?’ It’s crazy what comes out of my mouth these days.”
Niamh sighs faintly in agreement. “If I see someone smoking near me, I have to be physically restrained from lecturing them about the damage they’re doing, and that’s me, Niamh Walsh, former champion chain-smoking, pint-chugging party girl.”
“Those were the days.” Katherine holds out her plastic cup for Niamh to clink it, and they share a little toast.
The louts at the nearby table burst into another round of hoots and guffaws. They’ve found a new target. Katherine glances around and sees two heavy teenage girls at another table, looking miserable.
Niamh stops smiling. “Then again,” she says, “some people just need their heads kicked in.”
“Yeah.” Katherine stands up. “But you’ll have to put your ass kicking on hold because we have a dog show to dominate.”
A whole arena is set up for the dog show, and it’s filling with Great Danes, spaniels, terriers, mastiffs, and more Labradors than one can shake (or throw) a stick at. The categories range from prettiest puppy, sweetest bitch, and handsomest boy to most sensitive ears, most musical bark. Clearly the intent is for everyone to be a winner. Rosettes are to be given for first to fourth place.
A call beckons judges over the loudspeaker, and Katherine helps Lucas to volunteer. He is judging “Happiest, Waggiest Tail.” When not giggling, he seems to be taking his responsibilities extremely seriously. Niamh and Katherine watch him as he goes down the line, meeting the dogs one by one.
“He seems to be doing well?” Niamh offers.
“You mean after the whole firing–Mrs. B thing?”
“Yeah.”
Katherine turns to see Lucas petting a small mastiff with a tail moving in a frenzied blur.
“How’s he taking it?”
“Hard. He doesn’t understand why I had to let her go and I can’t tell him, ‘Oh, she just happened to be a religious lunatic hiding crap under and in your bed.’”
