by E. C. Hibbs
Emily and Michael arrived shortly after. I was amazed and relieved at how much better she looked, but it soon turned to surprise when I saw a long rectangular box in her hands. I tore off the shiny blue paper, and was shocked when my fingers closed around a brand new cane. The shaft was wooden – like my old one – and the silvery-white colour told me immediately that it was birch. But the handle was a sphere of mottled brass, and when I studied it, I noticed that underneath, there was a circle of three thick lines. One green, one white, one red: the colour of the flag.
“Birch isn’t just good for killing Lidérc,” Emily told me. “It’s always the first tree to grow again after a fire. It’s a symbol of new beginnings.”
CHAPTER XXXI
The day after my discharge from hospital, I walked through the streets of Budapest. The sky was grey and pink with the rising sun. Pavestones were covered in a film of wetness from a rain that had fallen the night before. No trace of the snow remained.
Among the buildings, I traversed a familiar maze: places I knew like the back of my hand. But it was almost the hand of some other body, which I’d inhabited in a past life. The cars carried on as their drivers hurried to work, too preoccupied with their own problems and lives to notice me.
I turned a corner and the magnificent sight of Buda Castle appeared, its huge domed roof reminding me a little of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. The breeze was gentle and it swept my hair back from my face. A dressing still covered my left hand, and I held my fingers relaxed and slightly curled, to avoid snagging the stitches underneath. I’d received eight in total: four on either side.
The surgeons had done a wonderful job. It left a scar – almost identical to the one on my back – but I didn’t completely recover without another injury that never fully healed. There were no severed nerves, but because the blade had gone straight through, some of the tissue was damaged. I wouldn’t be able to curl down my two middle fingers and tuck them into my palm as well as the others.
I carried on along the shore of Pest. The Chain Bridge spanned the river up ahead. The sky was gradually beginning to transform into a crisp baby blue as the sun climbed higher, the last few stars vanishing behind soft clouds. In the middle of the growing volume of the awakening city, I imagined the faint crow of Mrs. Fekete’s cockerel in my head, and smiled to myself.
I moved down a slope of wide steps that opened out along the waterfront of the river, and stood at the edge. The cold water slapped at the concrete wall below as I rested my arms gently on the balustrade, staring out towards Buda. The buildings were mirrored in the surface, distorted by diamonds of reflected sunlight.
I lifted my bandaged hand from the railing and slipped it inside my coat pocket, pulling out my old knife. I glanced at it, slowly withdrew the blade from the hilt. The sun caught the golden words, and the painted letters shone. I sighed to myself, reaching back to my pocket.
My fingers grasped a thorny stem, and gently removed a small white rose – a black ribbon looped loosely below the flower. Then I brought out thirteen small birch twigs, from the bundle I’d always carried in my bag. I held the flower against the hilt and twigs, and rested my new cane against the balustrade so I could tie them all together.
Eleven twigs. One for everyone: from Mirriam Takács to Lucy Denborough – and that poor, unknown girl who was the last to die. Two more – slightly larger than the others – rested beside the rose. They were for Anya and Apa.
The edges of the petals were shining in the early light; almost translucent as I ran my fingers over them. I threw the whole lot into the water. The knife hit the surface with a loud splash and immediately began to sink into the depths. I watched the whiteness of the rose gradually disappear, and turned my eyes to the sky.
I never returned to Budapest. The next day, Frank and I went home to London. True to his word, on the journey back from the airport, he called into a jewellers’ and bought me a simple silver chain, with a small pendant shaped like a leaf.
Michael stayed in Hungary for a little while longer, to be with Emily. When I next saw the two of them, I was overjoyed to find they had begun seriously dating. They told me that a week after I’d left, they had gone to Buda Castle and he had finally kissed her.
The Denboroughs went ahead with their retirement plans, and eventually they and Emily moved permanently back to England. They settled in east Islington, but Emily left and took up a new home with Michael in his old Camden flat. She and I rekindled our old friendship, and the four of us often had double-dates together. Michael and Frank bridged the gap between them and the alienation disappeared within weeks. The two boys became as thick as thieves, and it was the same story with me and Emily.
Frank and I soon opened up to them both about the nature of everything the two of us had endured, and they took it very well. If anything, it brought us all even closer together, and cemented the friendship in the best possible way.
I soon found that Emily hadn’t changed at all. She continued drawing, and had high plans to become a children’s illustrator, having returned to London. In regards to her personality: as usual, twice as many words were still used than necessary. I began to wonder whereabouts in her body she might be hiding the second pair of lungs that allowed her to talk continuously and yet not pause to breathe.
Of course, she changed after all she saw. She lost a little of her childhood innocence, just as I lost my own naivety. It was a package deal, as Apa might have said. The good thing was that it changed her for the best. She chose to make it into something brighter than it ever appeared to be.
Soon, Emily became pregnant with their first child, and Michael mentioned to me and Frank about proposing. Among their list of possible names for the baby was Lucy.
I still wondered about Lucy and the others. I’d think about the white landscape where I saw them, and what it might be really like beyond that. Their heaven; which I was too alive to see. It made me believe again: my loved ones and the strange in-between place, where we were reunited for that brief time.
In those jumbled thoughts, there was the wonder of where they might be. Those earthy bodies, which were once theirs; but now were just the remains of the personalities, only remembered by printed names in police reports. Were they all together somewhere, or scattered throughout Budapest and beyond? Were they so close to me all the time, hidden within the cemetery in unmarked and shallow graves?
Sometimes, I thought about how things would be if they were ever found – and a part of me, deep down, was glad they never had been. When I was younger, and the closest I ever came to horror was reading about it in newspapers: I recognised that just because something’s dead didn’t mean it’s buried. They stayed more alive in a stony purgatory than they ever would when they looked down on you, in the tears and smiles and memories of those who still lived.
I compared that to Lucy and every single one of the others. Although the older victims – who left this life so long ago now – would have no-one left, it would dredge up so much that had found its place and settled. An unnecessary rupture.
Even if there had been something of Lucy for the Denboroughs to let go of, I didn’t think I would have gone to her funeral. Unlike them – or anyone else – I had seen her after she’d disappeared. It was hard enough to get that image out of my head as what I would forever remember her by. I didn’t want to add a coffin to it.
Wherever Lucy was, I knew she was alright. In her unknown and unmarked final resting place, the body that was once hers was remembered by those who loved her. Not everything that’s lost should be found.
One of the last things that Frank and I did in Budapest was to fetch my old cane from the crypt. He’d gone whilst I packed up in the hotel room, to spare me a final journey to that place. When he returned, we placed both halves into our bags, and took them home. The demon had vanished, but I’d remembered a detail from my research about his kind: that they could be imprisoned in tree hollows. My cane was ever so slightly hollow, and the idea of him being trapped insi
de it was confirmed when I saw the halves. The one I’d shoved into him was darker than ebony.
Our first night back in England, we went to the bank of the Thames. Like I’d thrown my knife to the Danube, we weighted both of the halves with stones, and dropped them off the old quay. I did all I could to make sure he was gone forever.
We’d barely been back in London before Frank took me for a walk along the Serpentine in Hyde Park. It was freezing cold and the water had iced over, and he kept a strong hand on my arm in case I slipped. Eventually, I sat down on the bench where we’d talked on our first date, but was shocked when, instead of sitting beside me, he dropped to one knee and slid a ring onto my finger.
Somewhere in the wild mixture of memories, I walked down the aisle of a little church in Islington – complete with a special white cane – followed by Emily. Frank waited for me at the altar with Michael at his side. In front of our friends, co-workers from the Museum, and photographs of Apa, Anya, and Lucy; he lifted the veil from in front of my face.
“I, Bianka Katalin Natásha Farkas, take thee, Frank Thomas Anthony...”
After the wedding, Frank received a promotion and his salary rocketed. We honeymooned in Donaueshingen for a week, and whilst there, I woke up one morning to find he wasn’t beside me. Undeterred, I ventured into town to explore by myself, making a mental note to return to the hotel by lunch. Frank found me a few hours later engrossed in a cuckoo clock shop, and I was alarmed to see a fresh bandage over his wrist. But he quickly calmed me, and peeled it back to reveal his surprise. A new tattoo – on the opposite side to Hanna’s dragonfly – of a bumblebee.
When we came home, we bought a new house, not far from the Denboroughs, to have a new beginning. I stayed at the Museum for a while, but then decided to leave, and started as a classroom assistant in a local primary school, teaching history and religious education. I’d enjoyed that side of working at the Museum, and followed it down another road. The archaeologist Bee was something belonging to another part of me, that was shared with Lucy. I needed to let it all go.
I learned fate wasn’t conscious or sentient. Fate was fate, and life was life. There wasn’t any good and evil in that. Life was just a road with its fair share of potholes; a river made turbulent by an occasional storm. Life walked hand in hand with fate. But choice walks with perception. I once chose to see an ugly, evil world; surrounded by death and deceit, and its own perfect mask. For a long time – longer than I ever should – I was bound by my own tragic silence: the idea that everything terrible that came into my life was my fault. That I was powerless in the face of something greater than myself; and that I’d failed the ones I loved the most.
But it wasn’t so. I learned my lesson, and in almost killing me, it helped me to survive.
Sometime in the future, some unsuspecting person might stumble across my discarded amulet, hidden under the snow and weeds of that lonely cemetery in the middle of Budapest. Knowing nothing of its significance, they might hold it up to the light, wondering what it is. They may notice the care I took in creating it, and wonder where that person is. Whatever became of them, and what is their story?
And my present self would answer, subconscious and silent to that unknowing faceless somebody, that my story – like everything we ever perceive – is a memory. Nothing more, and nothing less.
