Life Stealer

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  It was the single most disgusting thing I had ever felt, and it was inside me. I’d taken three steps towards the cubs without even meaning to, the mother was still weak after the birth and posed no real threat, I could easily have…

  No. Nonono.

  “Go away!” I screamed. “Leave me! Goaway, goaway, goaway…”

  Something split. With a wet snap something left me, forcing its way out. It felt as if my ribs snapped and my skin was peeled back. I think I screamed, but I’m not sure. I thought I saw a shadow, a dark splodge, an outline in the moonlight, but it wasn’t any shape that I recognized, just a tangled, living darkness that lunged towards the badger and its cubs in a sudden, unstoppable leap.

  “No! Go away!”

  I didn’t make it stop, but Cat did.

  Suddenly he was there, the size of a panther, right in the middle of the living room, in front of the badger. He let out the most piercing, hateful cat scream I’d ever heard, and his claws grew as long as knives. He and the darkness merged and turned into a hissing, fighting, screaming bundle of cat fur, claws and weird shadows. The badger mum collapsed clumsily and I just stood there with my hand pressed against my chest to keep my heart from popping out.

  And all of a sudden it was over.

  Cat fell bonelessly to the floor. He was no longer a panther. Just a limp, skinny cat, more grey than black, whose skin and fur hung so loosely over his frame that it looked as if he had been stripped of every last scrap of muscle and fat.

  “Cat!”

  I threw myself on my knees beside him, but was suddenly afraid to touch him.

  “What’s going on…?”

  Aunt Isa appeared in the doorway in her dressing gown and with bare feet. She looked from the badger to Cat and then at me. There was an expression of disbelief on her face that I later would find very, very hard to forget.

  “Clara,” she said slowly. “What have you done?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Darkest Night

  “Is he dead?”

  I hardly dared ask, didn’t dare touch him, didn’t dare move.

  “No,” Aunt Isa said. “Not quite. But… there’s not much left.” Carefully, she picked up Cat’s limp body and held him close. He didn’t take up much room in her arms.

  “Boil the kettle and fill a couple of hot water bottles,” she said. “He’s as cold as ice…”

  I jumped up, relieved there was something I could do, so I wouldn’t have to sit still and think. Think and remember… No.

  The Nothing came flapping across the floor from the bedroom, even clumsier than usual because she was still sleepy and confused.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Who was screaming?”

  “Cat,” I said. “He… no, I don’t want to talk about it right now. Please would you help me find some hot water bottles?”

  The Nothing blinked. “I can find them for you,” she said. “But I won’t be able to lift them.”

  Aunt Isa had fetched a pillow and half wrapped it around Cat while still holding him tight so that she could share the heat from her body with him.

  “Let’s see if we can get some sugar water inside him,” she said, and started humming a wildsong, wordless and deep.

  The badger had returned to the basket and curled up protectively around her young, but she seemed calmer now, and she was no longer looking at me.

  I went to the kitchen and filled up the big kettle. What had happened to me? How on earth could I… how on earth could anyone even think of eating… no, the thought was revolting. Inside me. Yeeeeeugh. And Cat…

  My brain whirled and my thoughts started churning of their own accord, even though I tried to stop them. Cat. Limp and grey, no bigger than an ordinary house cat. What had happened? Was it really me – or something inside me? What had I done to him?

  “Please don’t die,” I whispered, although I didn’t think he could hear me. “Please don’t…” Bumble nudged me with his nose, wanting to be patted, or perhaps he was just looking for comfort. I put my hand on his big, warm head and started to cry.

  “I don’t want to be evil…” I whispered into his soft fur.

  “Evil?” said The Nothing, and then she sneezed. “What does that mean? Is it bad?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s… it’s really bad.”

  “Then I don’t think you are,” she declared. “The hot water bottles are in the green wooden box on the shelf under the gardening books.”

  Aunt Isa told me to fetch an old dog basket from the attic – too small for Bumble, but the right size for Cat when lined with a warm blanket, hot water bottles and one of my jumpers. Aunt Isa placed the basket next to the wood-burning stove so he’d be warm, but when she tried to get some sugar water into him with a straw, it just trickled out of the corner of his mouth and down across the fur on his neck.

  “It was me who found the hot-water bottles,” The Nothing said. “I knew where they were, only I couldn’t lift them myself!”

  “Good girl,” Aunt Isa said patiently. “I’m glad that someone in this house knows where everything is.” She sang some more wildsong for Cat, and I thought I could finally see his breathing grow deeper and steadier.

  Then she turned to me.

  “What happened?” she said, and her gaze was sharper than most surgical instruments. There was no point in lying.

  “I… I was so hungry. I…” I stared desperately at the floor. “Aunt Isa, there’s something wrong with me. I felt like… I wanted to… If Cat hadn’t…”

  “Was it the cubs?” Aunt Isa asked quietly. “The newborns?”

  I raised my head in amazement. How could she know?

  “How did you know?” I whispered.

  “Somewhere in that… tangle… something wants to live. Something that’s dead, or almost dead. Something that doesn’t just kill to eat like a normal predator, but takes everything – body, soul, life force, everything. Life. More than anything it craves life. And nothing is more alive than that which has only just been born.”

  “You said… you said I’d done something.”

  “No, I don’t believe I did.”

  “Yes. You said… you asked me what I’d done. Is it me, Aunt Isa? Is it my fault? Am I… am I becoming evil?”

  “Oh, my darling girl.” Aunt Isa pulled me close and gave me a long, warm hug, something she very rarely did. “It’s not that simple. Evil isn’t a single big thing, something you just are or become. It’s a hundred little things, a hundred selfish, hurtful thoughts, a hundred wicked acts… It’s not an either-or.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “We all have evil in us – and good as well. And plenty in-between. You don’t suddenly wake up one morning having turned evil overnight.”

  “But what I felt… what I wanted to do. Aunt Isa, that was evil!”

  “That hunger wasn’t yours. Or rather, it wasn’t just yours. Think about the yarn. Only some of those threads come from you. But if you’re not strong enough, the hunger can use you.” She placed her hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. “You can’t afford to be scared or lazy or selfish or weak.”

  “Is that what I am?”

  “That’s not what I said. On the contrary, I think you can become a fine and strong human being, and a very good wildwitch. If you want to. And right now… right now we all need you to do that. Otherwise…”

  “Otherwise what?”

  “Otherwise you’ll lose. And then that dead, hungry creature can get at the rest of us through you.”

  I wasn’t hungry now. In fact, I couldn’t imagine ever being hungry again. But if Aunt Isa was right, all I’d done was buy time before the hunger returned. Or rather – Cat had won that time for me. I slumped to my knees by the basket, and cautiously rested my hand on Cat’s head. He was still far too cold, not the warm living creature he usually was.

  “You’re saying it’s my fault,” I whispered. “Because I wasn’t strong enough.”

  “Fault,” Aunt Isa heaved a s
igh. “It doesn’t matter whose fault it is, Clara! It’s about stopping it. Finding that dead thing, whatever it is. Making it release you, Cat, the boy from your school, the squirrel and the hawk, release everything it has stolen or is trying to steal.”

  “But how can I?” I practically shouted. “Not even Mrs Pommerans knows how. She said she would think about it, but we haven’t heard a word from her. So she doesn’t know either. Or she just doesn’t care…”

  “Clara! Stop it. It’s not her fault either.”

  I rubbed my face with one hand. My skin felt alien and dead under my fingers, as if it belonged to someone else.

  “No,” I muttered. But I couldn’t help thinking that it would be so much easier if it were.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Revenant

  I sat beside the basket all night. Aunt Isa went to bed, but set the egg timer to go off every hour so that she could sing to Cat again, looking more and more tired each time she did so.

  Just as the morning sun was starting to paint the black branches green and brown, I heard cooing and scrambling by the kitchen window. I stood up stiffly. A fat pigeon was sitting outside, tapping the glass with its beak. I let it in. It had a small note tied around one leg with green yarn.

  I wasn’t used to carrier pigeons, so it took me several minutes to untie the yarn. The pigeon tucked its beak into its chest feathers in a mildly irritated fashion, but it put up with my butterfingers.

  “Coooo, cooo,” it said.

  “All right, all right, I’m doing it as fast as I can.”

  The note was from Mrs Pommerans, obviously. There was a stamp on the outside, an apple with an elaborate P inside it. I unfolded the thin piece of paper in haste.

  Find out who the hungry one is, it said in the same loopy handwriting as the P.

  “Is that it?” I said, looking accusingly at the pigeon. “She spent the whole night thinking, and this is all she has to show for it?”

  “You don’t write long messages for carrier pigeons,” said Aunt Isa behind me. I jumped because I hadn’t heard her come in.

  “She could at least have written a bit about how,” I protested. “There would have been room for that.”

  “As soon as Kahla arrives, she can take you there. Then you can ask her yourself.”

  It was obvious why Aunt Isa couldn’t take me. She had to stay with Cat. Even a half-baked, rubbish wildwitch like me could see that her wildsong was the only thing keeping him alive.

  Kahla and her dad arrived a little later, just after Aunt Isa had finished singing for Cat one more time.

  “Run and ask Master Millaconda if he would be kind enough to come inside,” Aunt Isa said.

  Normally he would just walk Kahla through the wildways fog and say goodbye to her by the gate, a bit like when Mum drove me to school and dropped me off. I had a hunch Aunt Isa wanted to know if he could help Cat.

  When I caught up with them, Master Millaconda was about to leave. As usual Kahla was protected by a colourful cocoon of caps, coats and gloves, and Master Millaconda, too, was warmly dressed in a brown camel coat with a brown-and-white checked scarf and a brown felt hat that looked a bit like the ones worn by old-fashioned detectives. His dark-brown shoes were shiny and smelled of shoe polish. He tipped his hat politely when he saw me.

  “Clara. How are you doing?”

  “Not so good,” I said, which was something of an understatement. “In fact Aunt Isa wanted to know if you have time to come in.”

  “Of course,” he replied.

  It turned out it wasn’t just Cat that Aunt Isa wanted Master Millaconda to take a look at. It was me, too. She ushered him over to the badger basket and spoke to him in a low voice, but it didn’t take a genius to work out what she was saying. My cheeks burned with shame.

  “What’s wrong with him?” asked Kahla, who was squatting on her haunches next to Cat. “It’s almost as if he is not really here anymore…”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  “No. But just don’t.”

  Kahla looked up at me with her clear, dark eyes.

  “I haven’t found a wildfriend yet,” she said. “But I can imagine how you feel.”

  I wasn’t so sure; after all, she didn’t know that Cat was lying there, grey and shrunken and practically lifeless, because of me.

  “Clara. Could we step outside for a moment?” Master Millaconda said.

  I looked at Aunt Isa. She nodded. And so there really was nothing else but to do it.

  “I’m sorry it’s so cold out here,” Kahla’s dad said. “But I need the sun.” Bumble had followed us and went to pee up against the apple trees and the fruit bushes in the orchard. From the stable Star whinnied, thinking I was bringing her hay.

  “It won’t hurt,” Master Millaconda said, which only made me tense up even more.

  He placed a gloved hand on each of my shoulders and started chanting something that sounded completely different from Aunt Isa’s wildsong, yet somehow was still the same. I guess he carried on for about ten minutes. Bumble padded over to us and sniffed Master Millaconda’s leg, but I don’t think he even noticed.

  When he stopped, he watched me for a few more moments.

  “Are you hungry now?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Remarkable.”

  “Why?”

  “Your aunt told me about the badger cubs.”

  I’d guessed as much, but even so I went red again.

  “I don’t know what came over me…” I said.

  “I think that Isa is right when she says you might have an uninvited guest. Possibly a revenant.”

  “A what?”

  “A revenant. Someone who is trying to return to life.”

  “A ghost?”

  “Not quite. What you call a ghost is usually a dead person whose spirit still walks the earth.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “No. Revenants aren’t content with being spirits or ghosts. They want to live again, body and all.”

  Mrs Pommerans had said there was something dead in my soul tangle. Something dead but hungry at the same time. I shuddered.

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Yes, unfortunately. If the hungry one takes enough lives.”

  “So was the hungry one… trying… to take me? Take my life?”

  “It sounds more like it was trying to take life through you. And when you expelled it with your simple, but strangely effective invocation…”

  “Go away?”

  “Yes. When you did that, Cat attacked and pulled it away.”

  “Where to?”

  “Back into the soul tangle, as far as I can tell. Right now he’s keeping the hungry one in check, and he won’t let it get to you. You have a remarkable wildfriend.”

  “And that’s why he is… the way he is?” Limp and lifeless. It was like someone had taken an ice pick to my gut and my conscience at the same time.

  “I think so. He and the hungry one are keeping each other in a stand-off, that’s why you’re not hungry any more, but the struggle is so consuming that he barely has enough strength left to stay alive. And…”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this: he can’t carry on.”

  The tears stung my tired eyes.

  “What can I do?” I said. “What can I do to save him?”

  “Kahla and I will take you to Mrs Pommerans now. You’ll have to find your own way back to Isa because I have to go on from there.”

  “Where?” I asked, though it probably wasn’t terribly polite. After all, it might be none of my business.

  Or perhaps it was. At least he answered me.

  “I need to speak to the Raven Mothers,” he said.

  “About me?”

  “About you, among other things,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Vademecum

  Mrs Pommerans looked up as Kahla and I approached. She was
sitting in the sunshine in front of her house with a basket on her lap, busy sorting seeds into home-made envelopes on which she had written in her neat, old-fashioned handwriting: spinach and marigold and so on.

  “You look very serious,” she said.

  “My dad thinks Clara has been visited by a revenant,” Kahla said.

  Mrs Pommerans pursed her lips.

  “A revenant,” she then said, and it wasn’t a question. “Now, that is… serious.”

  Anger rose inside me, hot and sudden. I wasn’t entirely sure where it came from, but it had something to do with all that scrutiny, all their gloomy assumptions and their anxious faces. I was fed up with being probed and studied. And I was even more fed up that some kind of spectre seemed to be making its comeback through me. Who exactly had decided that I would be the ball in the big pinball game of life, so that everyone, living or dead, could just flip me around whenever they felt like it?

  “Tell me what to do,” I said. “Cat is dying, and I… I can’t stand it any longer. There has to be something I can do!”

  Mrs Pommerans gave me yet another one of those scrutinizing adult looks I’d had more than enough of.

  “Finally,” she said with a faint smile. “I do believe you’re ready.”

  “Ready?” I growled. “Ready for what?”

  “Clara, sweetheart, you can’t help the way you’ve been brought up. You’ve resisted all along, and no wonder. But it’s hard to become a good wildwitch when something inside you is constantly pulling the other way.”

  “Just tell me how I can save Cat,” I demanded.

  “The answer hasn’t changed: find out who the hungry one is.”

  “But how?”

  “Right now you just want someone to lash out at, and I can understand that. But you need to look inside yourself for some of the answers. Not all enemies can be vanquished from the outside.”

  I felt like shaking her small, gentle figure until her head bobbed. I didn’t because a small, tired, doubting voice in my head was asking if the angry person really was me, or if the rage was seeping out of the soul tangle like the hunger had earlier.