The Mark of Cain
Page 33
“Should be enough,” I say, flicking mud off my gloves with the knife point.
“Are you ready?” Roger asks, before leaning across for the dolls.
I nod, but am surprised at how unwillingly I take Mimi’s poppet from him. I draw in a deep breath, then quickly drop it into the hole.
A cracking sound.
I turn, squint into the darkness.
Roger flashes the torch across the metal gate, then, seeing nothing, shrugs his shoulders. “Must be another fox, or a rat, maybe.” He directs the beam back to the elder roots.
I pick up the poppet in the blue dress, hesitate, look into its eyes, almost believe I can sense a tiny heartbeat throbbing quietly through its body.
“What’s the matter?” Roger whispers.
I swallow, force myself to squeeze it into the hole beside the other, crushing them together. I sense a tightening of my throat, a sudden fear. My hand twitches, as if it wants to reach out and snatch them back.
“It’s like …” I breathe. “It’s like I’m burying us, Mimi and me.”
“Do it quickly,” he says.
I snatch a handful of wet earth, scatter the clods over the pink-sprigged cotton, the blue polka-dot. Mimi’s fair hair and my long dark strands begin to disappear under the crumbles of soil. Something catches in my throat. I cough, cough again, reach out for more earth.
The embroidered eyes look out at me; the twisted scarlet mouths smirk one last time.
I shut my eyes and fling more soil into the hole, and another handful, until the little knotted eyes disappear into blackness.
Auntie Ida will look after us, see we come to no harm.
And she will no longer be alone in the dark.
They do not see me as I lie here close to the ground, a muddy rag, misshapen and sodden. I feel the hawthorn at my back, its rough bark and its malice. The branches dip and bend to snatch, but cannot reach me; its roots are unable to break the surface of the soil to snatch me, though they stretch downwards, spreading into the hallowed earth under the lychgate.
Even the air here trembles with power.
The two of them move away, along the path, over the gate and out of the churchyard.
I am alone, wounded and torn.
Perhaps some sick person will stumble by this miserable place, or an ailing animal, barely living, but with enough life remaining to become a casing to hold me, let me move, find the last of the Guerdons once more… .
A shadowed hand.
I am clasped, lifted up.
There is a change in the light, a small shift in the darkness.
A child’s face, close and searching.
Fair, wavy hair.
Hard, narrowed eyes look into mine.
She sees me.
We know each other.
“You’re not Aggie,” she whispers. “You’re her.”
She smoothes the green scrap of dress, lifts strands of the flame-coloured woollen hair, now blackened with mud. She touches the face, the rust-brown stains on the rag doll’s cheeks.
“Ange’s blood …” she hisses. “Pulled you in when it all went wrong.”
Flinging me down into the crushed grass, she starts to tear at the wet soil with her hands, throws it all about her, plunges her fingers in among the roots, wrenching out the earth again and again.
She picks me up, looks into my eyes one last time, then slowly, carefully, presses me deep down into the web of roots.
The clumps of soil thud, pound, and spatter as she covers me.
I see her face, the straight, grim line of her mouth, then a heavy black clod shuts off the light. Closed and squeezed and tight, stamped and stamped down again.
I feel the judder of her footsteps as she moves away.
They will not see her. She is a child of secrets, will keep herself hidden, will wait until they have gone.
A small noise close by. A quiet, vengeful creaking.
It begins then.
A creeping root snakes and twists around a little cloth leg. Another encircles it from underneath. They coil and squirm, and one root pulls against the other. On either side, thin, pale laces curl around my arms, jerk and tug and split them apart from my body, the tearing seams spit out downy feathers. A hand of grasping roots seizes my woollen hair and wrenches the fibres apart, ripping them from the scalp.
I hear Zillah’s voice across the years: “Do not cry out, Aphra! Never cry out!”
I cannot cry out.
The red mouth is stitched shut.
In the dark closeness, the vicious roots grip and shred, and I am pressed into a small black space, smaller and smaller … tighter and tighter …
And from deep under the ground comes a tremor — growing and spreading outwards and upwards, shivering the stones, the oaken beams and struts of the lychgate. I feel the heat as the ancient magic enfolds me, wraps me into itself.
The veil dissolves; the pain floats away.
I begin to separate, fragment by fragment, into a smoke-like drifting, disconnecting thread.
Here is a spangle of light, tiny like a spark, and another, one more; all around me they loosen themselves from the ripped and twisted pieces, flickering, glimmering, rising up through the crumbling earth and dispersing into the early-morning air.
I know them.
They are mine.
My own dying lights.
At last, at last … lifting me, detaching themselves one from another, soaring and spreading.
In one last moment of fading consciousness, I dream that a trace of this glittering dust might pass, and know, and touch a mote of his, in some other time, in some far-distant place among the stars, somewhere in the high vault of the heavens… .
As we trudge back up the hill, the light begins to change. Beyond the torchlight a soft, faint grey outlines each twig and stone and mound of crushed grass.
At the top Roger and I turn and look across the marshes again, as we have so many times before. Above us, the long feathery smudge of the Milky Way still glimmers in the deepest darkness, but to the east, the horizon begins to glow in shimmering, rosy bands that shift little by little to yellow-gold, then turquoise, and the small specks of stars in the lower edge of the sky fade one by one into the light of the morning.
He switches off the torch.
We stand there, our coat sleeves just touching, unable to think of a word to say.
We seem to have broken one spell, yet made another.
I take in the pattern of the mud on Roger’s boots, the loose thread on the fringe of his scarf, the silvery glimmer on the rim of one of his coat buttons mirroring the thin crescent of the moon that hangs just on the margin of the fading darkness.
I store all these fleeting things somewhere to remember, because the world takes people away from you, or sends them back damaged, and there may never ever come a moment like this again.
There we stay, Roger and me, saying nothing, as the sun rises gleaming over the marshes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I cannot thank enough my wonderfully supportive and patient editors — Annie Eaton and Natalie Doherty. Thanks also to everyone at RHCP involved in the copyediting and design, especially Sophie Nelson and James Fraser. Warmest thanks also to Deb Noyes and her colleagues at Candlewick Press in the U.S.
I am grateful to my family — Imogen, Christian, and Benjamin, for their comments, and Eleanor, who unselfishly plodded through almost every draft and made many really helpful suggestions.
And at the end, heartfelt thanks to my husband, Richard, who so valiantly held the fort over these last months.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2014 by Lindsey Barraclough
Cover photograph copyright © 2015 by Conor Masterson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means
, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First U.S. electronic edition 2016
First published in 2014 by The Bodley Head, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2015932368
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