Jasmyn

by Alex Bell

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ I shrieked in Ben’s face.

  But, without a word, he threw me off roughly to land on the other side of the bed. I lunged out a desperate hand to try to grab the back of his shirt and drag him back but my fingers missed him by a fraction, and although I scrambled off the bed I wasn’t quick enough to stop him. The moment seemed to freeze in a tableau, etching itself forever into my mind: my skeletal, delicate Violectra lying on the floor, its blue and silver outline stark and elegant against the carpet; Ben’s booted foot raised directly above it, the expression on his face even harder than usual so that although a wordless, desperate plea tore from my lips, I already knew that he was going to disregard it.

  His foot came down with all his force behind it. I closed my eyes involuntarily but I heard the awful sound of wood breaking, plastic snapping and a sort of anguished squeal from the metal strings as Ben’s boot scraped along them.

  No violin could survive being stamped on like that but I couldn’t accept that it was over and when I opened my eyes I flew at Ben, trying as hard as I possibly could to hit his face and scratch his skin. I managed to get one good blow in where my wedding ring tore at the skin on his cheek. But after that he quickly regained the upper hand, grabbing me roughly by the arms and shoving me back towards the bed so hard that I sprawled over it.

  The only explanation for his behaviour seemed to be that he had gone completely mad. I scrambled to an upright position on the bed and called his name pleadingly, ‘Ben! ’

  To my surprise, he paused and looked back at me. I hadn’t been expecting him to heed me and, now that I had his attention, I found that I didn’t know what to say. What words could possibly be enough? How could I make him understand what that violin meant to me? I’d loved all the violins I’d ever had but this one - this one - there would never be another one like it. There could be no replacing it. Liam had chosen its colour and design; he had swapped it for the normal violin in my case that day; his money had paid for it and his hands had held it. He had listened to me play it many, many a time. I remembered him and felt close to him through that violin far more than through any photo or home video ...

  Somehow I needed to make Ben understand all that before it was too late and something else indescribably precious to me was lost forever. He had stamped on it once already but perhaps it had sounded worse than it really was. Perhaps the violin could still be repaired ... Emotion clogged my throat, tears spilled from my eyes and my breath rasped horribly as I croaked in a voice that sounded childishly frightened, ‘Please! Please Ben. You ... you don’t know what that violin means ... it ... it’s so important to me ...’ I trailed off into sobs, unable to say anything more for I could see in his eyes that it was no good. I had never seen anyone look so hard before. There wasn’t a glimmer of warmth or sympathy in his face. Just an anger and bitterness that made him practically unrecognisable to me.

  He turned his head away without a word and stamped down once again upon the remnants of my violin. This time I couldn’t close my eyes. I couldn’t even look away but stared transfixed as the wood splintered beneath his monstrous boot, the blue and silver paint chipped and flaked away, the pegs snapped and the strings tore out to curl uselessly and forlornly on top of the sad wreckage.

  It was hardly recognisable as a violin any more - now it was just a pile of broken blue and silver bits mixed in with a few black pegs and loose strings. My heart aching as if it would burst right out of my chest, I dropped down onto the floor to gather the beloved pieces towards me - knowing full well that I couldn’t save the instrument but wanting to touch it, to hold it in my hands anyway. In the meantime, Ben took the bow out of my case and broke it across his knee before throwing the two pieces onto the floor.

  He stood there in silence for a moment, looking down at me before saying in that same cold voice, ‘Did it work?’

  My tears had frozen on my face and I felt numb - the same sort of numbness I had felt after the doctor told me that Liam was dead. How could something like this have happened? I looked up at Ben and could hardly focus on him. When I spoke it was with an effort, so the words came out a little slurred. ‘Did ... what work?’

  He didn’t answer but turned his head sharply away and walked towards the door with long strides. Stirring myself into action, I jumped suddenly to my feet and said sharply and clearly, ‘Ben! ’

  He turned back with his hand on the doorknob and I swear for a moment he looked almost hopeful, as if I was going to say that his destroying my violin was no big deal and that he was forgiven. Instead, my voice came out so full of hatred and bitterness that I scarcely recognised it as my own, for I had never spoken to anybody like that before in my life. ‘I don’t know how or when,’ I said quietly, ‘but I swear to God that one day I’ll find a way to pay you back for what you’ve just done. I promise I’ll find a way to make you suffer horribly for this!’

  He looked at me from heavily lidded eyes for a moment before muttering, ‘I believe you.’

  Then he opened the door and was gone. I dropped down to my knees as quickly as if someone had kicked my legs out from under me and gathered the broken pieces of the violin into my lap where I then sat and wept over them for what felt like hours. I cried until my eyes were so sore that I could hardly keep them open. I couldn’t believe that my Violectra was really gone. And yet the pieces were all there in my lap. At that moment I felt that I would rather never play the violin again than play one that Liam hadn’t given me.

  Why? Why? What reason could Ben possibly have had for doing what he’d done? He must simply have been desperate to hurt me any way that he could. But none of it made any sense. It was the sort of thing that happened in nightmares. Yes, he had been withdrawn from me and rather cold and unsympathetic at times, but I had never, never in my wildest dreams believed him capable of this. I truly hadn’t known him. Not at all. It was no wonder Liam had wanted nothing to do with him. Why hadn’t I listened to him? Why had I ever trusted Ben in the first place?

  I was filled with a sudden desperate longing to hear Liam’s voice again and couldn’t get my mobile out of my pocket fast enough. I phoned my home number and cried even harder when the answerphone message started to play: ‘You’ve reached Liam and Jasmyn. Sorry we can’t come to the phone right now. Leave us a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can ...’

  I rang the number until I ran out of credit, then I threw the phone across the room and curled up in a sort of ball on the floor around my shattered violin, all my memories of Liam tearing through my mind - that first day in the playground when he had called me a snow princess; all those times at school when he had protected and defended me like my very own knight in shining armour; the day he gave me the Violectra; the time we came to Munich and ate Lebkuchen and drank spiced Glühwein outside in the snow; the day we got married and - finally - the afternoon he folded up and died by the lake, nothing more than an empty shell of a corpse by the time we reached the hospital. What was the point of it all? I almost hated him in that moment for dying and leaving me here to struggle like this on my own. How could he not be about to walk through that door at any moment to pick me up off the floor, hold me in his arms and tell me that everything was going to be okay?

  I curled myself tighter around the broken violin, covered my head with my arms and was pulled down into a fitful, restless sleep that probably lasted no more than an hour. When I woke up and saw the carpet stretching out away from me I wished that I could escape back to sleep and nothingness. But it was midmorning and I was not tired, for all that I had been up late the night before. For a while I lay there wide awake, willing sleep to come but to no effect, just wanting never to move ever again.

  But then an anger - a hot, horrible fury - crept in around the edges of my grief, gradually pushing all the sadness out and filling me with a cold, hard determination. What was I thinking of, lying pathetically here on the floor like this? I sat up abruptly, pushed my tangled hair out of my face and s
tood up. I was not going to be a helpless victim any longer. The violin was broken. And that was all there was to it. No amount of wishing would bring it back. I would just have to get on without it like I’d learned to get on without Liam.

  I could hardly believe by this point that Ben really was looking for the swansong to save Heidi’s life, for I suddenly found it impossible to imagine him capable of anything approaching love. She had probably left him and that was why he had her ring. Served him right, too. The story he told me had surely been an act, a ruse, a ploy, a cleverly calculated trick to ensure I would find the swansong and hand it straight over to him. Well, I meant to find it all right. But I would not be giving it to Ben.

  17

  Lost in the Mountains

  The first thing I needed to do was get away from Ben. From this point on, our search for the swansong would be a separate one. He was quite clearly unhinged and, after the way he had behaved, I was afraid of him. Not enough to stop me from trying to beat him to the swansong, but certainly enough that I had no wish to be left alone with him. Indeed, I shuddered to think that we had been alone in his bedroom last night, sitting together on the bed while he clung to me like a child.

  The thought occurred to me now that perhaps this was why his mother had been so abrupt with me when I’d said I wanted to stay in touch with him. Perhaps she had known these things about her son and had feared for my safety with him. Perhaps she simply hadn’t wanted to come out and actually say my son is mentally ill. He’d wanted to hurt me - to cripple me even - so he had destroyed my violin as brutally as possible. But all he’d really achieved was that now I was mad as all hell. The thirst for revenge is an ugly feeling but at least it is a strengthening one. Somehow I would make him pay for it. I would hit him harder than he’d hit me.

  I let myself into my bedroom on the second floor feeling slightly nervous in case he was there. But the room was empty, so I hurriedly packed my things - including every broken piece of my Violectra - and then went outside to the car. But it was gone. Ben had already taken it. And when I went back to his bedroom I found that all his things were gone as well. He must have had them packed and ready before I came back. He’d planned all along to leave after breaking my violin.

  As he had not left so much as a toothbrush behind, it seemed unlikely that he would be coming back, so I paid the room bills before calling a taxi and going to another guest house. I didn’t want to be where he knew I was. I needed to hide whilst I figured out what to do next. I had no idea where Ben had gone but could only assume that he was still pursuing the swansong alone, or perhaps with Lukas. For all I knew, Lukas had been able to tell him exactly who Henri Rol-Tanguy was and they had now gone off to find him together.

  When I went into my room in the new guest house I put my luggage down by the door. The room was similar to the one I had just come from but for the fact that it was a little smaller. And darker. And generally more depressing, because this time I was here on my own with no idea what I should do next. I had already been to both castles and the lake. There was no obvious location left for me to visit - nowhere else I knew that Liam had been before me.

  The lake. I had yet to visit it at night when it was supposed to change so dramatically. Ben had seemed curiously reluctant to go there but, really, it was the most important place of all. I couldn’t help but shudder a little at the thought of going after nightfall by myself. The castle had been quite eerie enough, and Ben had been with me then, before I realised what a lunatic he was. Still, it had to be done, there was no one to go with me and that was all there was to it. I would wait until dark and then I would go alone, approaching through the trees and taking care not to be seen.

  But, of course, I had no way of getting there because Ben had taken the car. I swore irritably to myself, realising now that I was going to have to get another taxi to the nearest car rental place, which could be miles away and would involve more time and expense. But perhaps, after all, it was better that Ben had taken the car, for I would have felt uncomfortable driving it now for fear that he would come across it and know who it belonged to.

  So I went down to the reception and ordered yet another taxi. Fortunately, the nearby town of Füssen was not very far away and, as it was a popular tourist destination, there was a car rental agency there. I hired the cheapest car available and then drove back to the guest house, only going wrong a few times along the way.

  Finally, I got back to my room feeling the tiniest glow of pride that I had managed to obtain a car, even if it had taken me an age to get back because of my poor sense of direction. It was almost four o’clock when I walked back into my room. I had missed lunch but still had some snacks left in my suitcase from the Karstadt in Munich, so I unpacked what was left along with my laptop. I didn’t intend to sit around doing nothing while waiting for it to be dark enough and late enough to go to the lake. I had to do something useful to keep myself busy. So I spent the next few hours making use of the guest house’s Wi-Fi access.

  I continued to research the name Henri Rol-Tanguy, but without anything more to go on it was hopeless. After a while, fed up with looking through other Henri Rol-Tanguys who seemed to have nothing whatever to do with anything, I went back to the very beginning - the Germanic folklore that had drawn Liam to Neuschwanstein and Ludwig in the first place. He had told me before that Germany was a magical country and the birthplace of fairy tales, as documented by the Brothers Grimm in the stories they collected from people they met during their travels and then noted down so that they would not be forgotten - tales like ‘Cinderella’, ‘Rapunzel’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’ ... Full of magic, cruelty, wicked stepmothers, lost woodcutters and evil witches ...

  I narrowed down my searches to look for anything to do with magical swans and their knights. The myths and legends were all slightly different, although the general consensus seemed to be that the swans were birds by day and women by night. And I came across one story that said the reason the swan knights had been deemed necessary in the first place was because swansong was so bewitching and powerful that the wicked witches who lived in the mountains kept on setting traps for the swans to steal their voices. That was why, in the end, all magical swans were bound to a lake - so that the knights would always know where they were and be better able to protect them.

  As this seemed to be a largely Germanic myth, I had the distinctly frustrating feeling that, had I been fluent in German and able to use German search terms, I would have been able to find out a lot more. As it was, I was limited to the sites written in English.

  I’d let the little black horse out of the box whilst I was doing all this for it seemed unfair to keep it cooped up. For the most part it just wandered about the room exploring its new environment but, after a while, the sound of munching made me look down and I saw that it was nibbling at a crisp I’d dropped. I gazed at the little horse, frowning. It had simply never occurred to me that it might eat but now I felt bad for not thinking of it sooner. I put a few more crisps on the floor for it as well as a soap dish filled with water.

  Then I turned back to my computer with a sudden thought. I had researched magic swans and Henri Rol-Tanguy, but the one thing I hadn’t even tried to find out more about was the tiny horse. For a while I sat there, typing in various unsuccessful searches. Then I looked back down at it and remembered the idea that had occurred to me when I had first seen it - that it was like a little, perfect faery horse ... My thoughts went back to the blue faery I had seen in my grandparents’ stable as a child. Unlike most adults, I fully believed in faeries for I had seen one all those years ago and knew that they were real. Who was to say that they did not have horses?

  I spent the time I had left that afternoon reading of the faeryland that was said to exist beneath our own - in the hills and the mountains and the wild places. Some sources described the faeries themselves as mischievous and playful whilst others described them as fickle, cruel creatures who would trap any human who found their way into faeryland so tha
t they could never leave ... And I read that the faeries were indeed said to have animals - tiny and delicate like themselves ... Just like the little horse wandering inquisitively about my room at that very moment ...

  A little while later I had a hasty dinner downstairs. Although adequate, I found the food not quite as good as it had been at the previous guest house, nor were the staff as friendly. The rooms were all perfectly clean but not as bright or cosy as the last one and I couldn’t help wishing that I could go back to it. Any kind of familiarity was a comfort to me, but I couldn’t risk it. I had no wish to be found by Ben.

  As the time crept slowly nearer I felt increasingly uneasy about going out to the mountains so late all by myself. But at half-past eleven I forced myself to put on my coat, put the tiny horse back into its box, pick up my bag and go to the car. Snow lay thickly on the branches of the surrounding pines along with many frozen waterfalls that clung solidly to the edges of the rock faces through which the weaving road was cut.

  I was confident I knew the way, having driven to both castles and the surrounding lake before. Which was why it was so odd that I became lost so quickly. I came to a fork in the road that I had no memory of whatsoever. Indeed, if I hadn’t known any better, I would have sworn that it hadn’t been there before. I slowed almost to a halt, trying to work out which one to take. I knew I was going in vaguely the right direction because I could see Neuschwanstein up in the mountains, pale and ghostly in its blue floodlights. It seemed to me that the road to the left was going more that way so I turned down it. I couldn’t know then that I had just made my first mistake of the evening ... But perhaps things would have worked out the way they did whatever I’d done. I did, after all, have one of their horses in the car with me.