A STORYTELLING OF RAVENS

by R. H. Dixon

  ‘Stop it,’ Callie snapped. ‘We’re not dead. The woman I saw upstairs is.’

  ‘Says who?’ Thurston was not calmed in the least by her adamant claim, his complexion becoming less peaky because of his agitation. ‘Maybe Roxanne and Dean are here on some other plane of existence. Maybe they’re alive and we’re the ones scaring the shit out of them!’

  Callie inhaled loudly, her fists winding tight. ‘If I was a ghost why the fuck do you think I’d haunt this place?’ she almost screamed. ‘I’d never even been here before two days ago.’

  ‘Who says we get a say?’ Thurston shouted back. ‘If Sarah Jane Miller killed us, then maybe our souls are like a stamp collection and we’ve wound up in her sordid fucking scrapbook.’

  ‘In which case, there could be quite a few of us living here by the end of the year,’ Pollyanna said, with no sense of irony. She’d lit a cigarette and appeared creepily unfazed by the discussion. She stared at Callie, unblinking. ‘I think Thurston’s right. We are dead. It’s certainly not a new concept to me.’

  ‘No!’ Callie rubbed her forehead, as if to massage the thought away. ‘I don’t believe I am dead. I can’t be. Just no. Smiler, you check for a pulse.’

  At the request, Smiler made a whimpering noise and shook his head. ‘I don’t want to.’ He regarded Thurston with eyes that were glassy with fear. He knew that to touch him would be to seal their doom-filled fate. ‘What good would it do? I’m not a doctor either.’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe you could just…’

  ‘Hey guys,’ Pollyanna said with such profoundness it made the hairs on Callie’s neck rise. ‘Have you seen outside?’

  Callie hardly dared look, but when she did she saw that the veranda was a moving black thing, every square inch of its wood buried beneath an army of feathered bodies. The ravens were mostly facing the cabin. Hundreds of eyes. Watching.

  ‘Sarah Jane’s ravens,’ Callie said, echoing Smiler’s earlier words and believing them wholeheartedly.

  ‘To hell with the ravens.’ Thurston pointed to the journal resting on the couch’s arm. ‘Let’s find out if Essie Bennett definitely did become Freya. Go right to the end, Cal. Read the last entry.’ He cast a look to the window again, his right leg having adopted a tic fuelled by nervous energy. ‘Because I get the feeling we’re a little pressed for time. Something’s about to happen. Something big.’

  ‘End of level bad guy,’ Pollyanna said.

  No one thought to disagree.

  34

  Monday 22nd September 2014

  Dasvidaniya Dorian,

  This is my final note to you. You’ve been a good friend and I’ll miss you. I must go, though, and I can’t say for sure if I’ll ever be back. I’m off to university – much to Roxanne’s delight – to make a fresh start. I need to forget about Dean and be someone else. I need to forge a new life for myself, no matter how much it hurts to walk away.

  I need to forget about the cabin at the lake too. And Whispering Woods. Sometimes I doubt they ever even existed. Dean never took us back there. Not me, in any case. I wonder if that weekend ever truly happened. It was so long ago.

  I remember the cabin’s rooms vividly. Or at least I think I do. Mine and Pollyanna’s room with the twin beds overlooking the woods. Dean’s room with the stag’s head and the velvet throw. The room next to his with the blue bedspread and swan. Only, I never quite picture it that way. In my head it’s always red, because I associate it with HER. Inevitably she was there that weekend and I feel I have to box her in somewhere so that she doesn’t taint the rest of the cabin. Or my memories. So every time I imagine that room, I see it filled with all of her smuttiness. All of her filthy whoredom. All of her blood. In my head it’s always red.

  I hate her for leading the life I want. For masquerading as a beautiful swan and making Dean her own.

  But now it’s time for this ugly duckling to become a swan. Only, I’ll be black with red eyes and a forked tongue, so the white swan better watch out!

  Maybe one day I will go to the cabin. I can’t pretend I’ll forget about it completely. It’s almost as much a part of me as Dean. Neither can be erased. My heart pumps them round my veins and my brain feeds me dreams in which all three of us are together. Always.

  I know that if I go back to the cabin, I’ll never leave again.

  But for now, as much as I love him (and always will), I need to distance myself from Dean. I need to get on with my life. I need to be someone new. I can no longer have the names that he gave to me. They’re too painful to bear.

  I don’t yet know who I’m to become, but I know I won’t be Sarah Jane Miller again, and I can’t ever be Essie Bennett. I’ll be stronger next time. Better than either of them ever were. I’m older now. Fiercer. I’ll have new friends too. Better ones. And I’ll try to love again. Someone else besides Dean.

  My new love won’t have it easy, granted. He’ll have a lot to compete with to make me love him. He’ll have to be powerful and beautiful, with a name like thunder.

  Maybe Tarrant or Tarren. Or Thor. Would that be too much? Yes, probably. Tyrell. Keme. Thorin. Torbin.

  Yes! Torbin. I like that. I like that a lot. And he’ll look just like Dean.

  35

  Callie looked up, her eyes wide with consternation, ‘Can somebody please tell me what I just read?’

  But nobody could, least of all Thurston. The fog pressed closer to the window and the ravens shuffled restlessly, their hoarse baying softened by the nothingness that closed in all around them. Eventually Smiler broke the conversational silence. ‘How could she have known?’

  ‘Known what?’

  ‘That she’d end up with someone called Torbin who looked like Dean.’

  Thurston ran his hands through his hair and laughed; an ill-humoured sound. ‘I admire your spirit, Golden. But really? I mean, that last entry was pretty profound and my head is in bits, but surely you get it? Surely.’

  ‘It’s a massive coincidence, that’s all,’ Callie said, squeezing her eyes closed and trying to think of a way of making it so in her head. But a greater instinctive part of her knew it was beyond any such thing.

  ‘It’s worse than being dead, that’s what it is!’ Thurston stood up. He began pacing the floor, his chest as gruesome as ever but no longer seeming to cause him pain. Whether this was a case of mind over matter or pure shock, Callie couldn’t decide.

  ‘You’re not thinking about it logically,’ she said, hoping to convince him so that he in turn might convince her of something she hadn’t yet thought of. She cast the journal onto the coffee table, no longer able to bear the feel of its leathery waxiness. The dead skin of its front and back cover held pages of depravity at its rawest, which petrified her. Did it even exist? Did she? ‘It’s a sick prank. That’s all.’

  Thurston shook his head, a maniacal grin curving his mouth. ‘No. No it isn’t. Watch.’ He showed her his hand, as if to prove that whatever he was about to demonstrate wasn’t a trick, then delved it into the bloody hole of his chest. Wrist deep. Then further still. Callie looked away, too disturbed. Smiler dry-heaved. Thurston made desperate grunting sounds as he poked his fingers through the spaces between his own ribcage, and his eyes soon exuded a profound misery of confirmation. ‘See?’ he said, pulling his hand free. It emerged slippery black. ‘Empty. No heart. Just like I said.’

  Callie bit her bottom lip and began to sob. Either he was telling the truth or had completely lost his mind. Smiler buried his face in his hands and Pollyanna gawped in shocked silence. None of them said anything; each of them trying to process the hideous thing that Thurston had just done to himself, as well as Sarah Jane Miller’s last written words.

  ‘We were dreamed up by a delusional, self-obsessed psychopath,’ Thurston thought to say, when still none of the others had spoken. He laughed then; a demented sound which made Callie cower away from him. ‘We’re nothing but characters inside her head.’

  ‘No.�
� Callie groaned, shaking her head at his theory. ‘There has to be a rational explanation.’

  ‘Yes, there has to be,’ Smiler agreed. ‘It’s got to be some sick joke.’

  Pollyanna said nothing.

  ‘Seriously?’ Thurston said, his voice rising to near hysteria. ‘If you’re all finding it hard to believe, then feel free to have a dig about.’ He indicated the yawning slick hole in his chest, offering it to anyone who might like to. Nobody did. So he ran his hands over his head, which left his blonde hair bloodied, and moved about in a bid to expel some restless energy. He looked at Callie and wagged a finger at her. ‘That life of stardom you thought you were leading, well really you aren’t.’ Then he looked at Smiler. ‘And don’t bother losing any more sleep over that ruined reputation of yours, mate, because guess what? You never had one. And my film production company? Never was. Pollyanna’s accident? Never happened.’ He was becoming more and more frenetic, his arms gesticulating, his eyes wild. ‘And the reason we can’t get out of this shithole is because we’re stuck within the confines of Sarah Jane Miller’s fucking head.’ He struck the side of his own head with the heel of his hand.

  ‘No,’ Smiler said. His own stance was shrunken, as though he was trying to retreat within himself, away from Thurston’s frenzy. Despite his refusal to accept what Thurston said, his eyes were racked with all the dread of a condemned man. ‘That can’t be right. What about the village? How could it be inside Sarah Jane Miller’s head when she couldn’t even remember where the cabin was?’

  Callie groaned; a sound that indicated a new level of trepidation. ‘That’s a valid point, Smiler, but it actually substantiates Thurston’s theory. Sarah Jane Miller, subconsciously or not, would have recalled bits of the village as they drove through it to get to the cabin, her mind probably filling in the blanks. The village itself was never really important though, hence the empty interiors and lack of people. It was never anything more than a scenic buffer for the cabin, a vignette of proposed reality.’

  ‘No!’ Smiler was shaking his head in abject denial. ‘I can’t believe that.’

  ‘Well I certainly don’t want to,’ Callie said, taking to pacing the floor space in front of the couch while gnawing on the skin around her fingernails. ‘But scarily enough it’s starting to make the most sense, because there’s also the whispering to take into account.’

  ‘What whispering?’

  ‘I’ve been hearing voices. I thought it was the trees. But now I wonder if it was her all along. Like what if the voices are her memories? Snippets of conversations she’d remembered from here. In fact, it has to be. It was never the bloody trees! When Dean told her about the woods and the murders, he planted a voracious seed in her head that grew and grew into something huge. Especially as he reinforced a sense of mystery surrounding the cabin by never revealing where it was or bringing her on a return visit. This is all about Dean, don’t you see? It always has been. She’s dangerously, obsessively infatuated.’

  ‘And I was meant to be his substitute,’ Thurston said. A great deal of contempt cast a shadow over his face. ‘But I didn’t quite live up to the ex-army sergeant. Obviously.’

  ‘You never would have,’ Callie said. ‘No matter what, it was always going to be Dean she’d come back to eventually.’

  ‘Should that make me feel better?’ His reply was a little too harsh.

  ‘Hey, we’ve all had the same news,’ Smiler reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, but your name isn’t written down in black and white,’ Thurston said, pointing at the journal, which was sitting on the coffee table with as much of an air of guilt as a bloodied axe at a murder scene. ‘You didn’t have to sit and listen to the childish process of her choosing a name for you. One she liked best. One that rolled nicest off her tongue. Did you?’

  ‘No. But if we really are cast members of her fucked up fantasy world, as you suggest, then that’s how it must have happened all the same, because here I am!’ Smiler retorted, holding his arms out. ‘In fact, if you flip back a few years I’m pretty sure that same childish process is jotted down for Miles Golden. Only, it’s even worse for me. I was like some practice run. A lesser model that led to you.’

  ‘Anyone other than Dean was never going to be good enough,’ Pollyanna reminded them. The ravens continued to bustle about on the other side of the glass from her; just as fake, yet no less real than she was.

  There was a loud bang upstairs, a door crashing open, then a huge raven swooped down and perched on the stair post. It was easily twice as big as its counterparts outside and it regarded them all with shrewd black eyes. ‘Oonin,’ it cawked, the consonants rolling awkwardly from its powerful beak. ‘Oonin.’

  Callie and Thurston both stopped pacing. The bird was like some portent of imminent doom.

  ‘Shit, that’s it!’ Thurston said, raking his fingers down his face. ‘You were right, Cal. The tattoo on my back is relevant.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I thought I liked ravens,’ he said, ‘but I guess maybe I never really did. It was Sarah Jane Miller’s idea to put them there. Obviously. But they do have significance. They’re Odin’s ravens.’

  ‘Who’s Odin?’

  Thurston breathed a weary sigh into his hand. ‘A god from Norse mythology. Top dog. He’s blind in one eye and Thor’s dad, would you believe?’

  ‘Easily,’ Callie said. ‘Dean couldn’t be anything less, could he?’

  ‘Odin’s ravens are called Hugin and Munin. Their names mean ‘thought’ and ‘desire’.’

  ‘Oonin,’ the raven on the stair post said as if in confirmation.

  ‘Which is Munin?’ Callie asked.

  ‘Desire.’

  Callie looked from Thurston to Smiler, then she glanced at Pollyanna near the window. ‘I think Sarah Jane Miller’s here at the cabin. Or at least close by. When I saw the woman upstairs, probably Roxanne, I heard her say ‘She’s here, Dean. I saw her. I think she saw me.’ At first I thought she meant me, but she didn’t. She meant Sarah Jane Miller. Freya.’

  ‘Freya! Of course.’ Thurston groaned, his eyes expressing recognition of his own idiocy on the matter. He’d been slow on the uptake, realising only now. ‘In Norse mythology, Freya is Odin’s wife.’

  ‘And now she’s come back to do whatever she has to do to get Odin,’ Pollyanna said.

  Callie nodded. ‘She’s going to kill Roxanne. We have to intervene. We have to stop her.’

  The raven on the stair post laughed; a croaky sound that filled their heads with the threat of infinite death and uncertain purgatory. Then all of the ravens outside started to beat their wings, their own laughter a deafening furore like a prolonged tremor of thunder.

  ‘How the hell are we supposed to intervene?’ Thurston cried. ‘We don’t even exist!’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ Callie said, furiously unwilling to accept this fact. ‘We’re here and I’m talking to you. I’m thinking. I’m feeling. Therefore, I do exist!’

  ‘What if we make her think about us,’ Smiler suggested. ‘If we get to the forefront of her mind we can maybe talk her out of whatever it is she’s going to do.’

  ‘But why do we care?’ Thurston wondered aloud.

  ‘Because it’d prove we’re human,’ Callie said. ‘It’d prove that we’re more than what she wanted us to be. That we have freewill. That we have our own minds.’

  ‘Do we though?’ Thurston said, casting her a disparaging look. ‘How do we know we’re not just aspects of her subconscious? Conflicting morals that are probably too weak to stop her anyway.’

  ‘No. I won’t have that. I’m not her, I’m me.’ Callie ground her jaw tight. ‘Freya tried to talk me out of the part I played in Ampato Curse. She said she was worried about my mental health. I’d had a few breakdowns and she suggested that I should take a career break. That’s what she wanted me to do, I can see that now. But I didn’t, I went against her advice and did what I wanted to do. Just as Smiler did when he
chose his career over Essie Bennett. That’s why she wrote us off, confined us to this box in her head, because we wouldn’t conform to her will. But here we all are, guys, plotting and thinking and living independently from her.’

  ‘Similarly,’ Smiler said, ‘every time it looked like Pollyanna was going to make a name for herself, Sarah Jane Miller stuck a spanner in the works.’

  ‘And no matter how much she wanted you to love her,’ Callie said, to Thurston, ‘no matter how hard she tried to make you, you never did.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘not even a little bit.’

  ‘Therefore don’t you see? We do have freewill.’

  Thurston didn’t look wholly convinced, but she could tell that he was contemplating what she’d said.

  ‘So now, for all of our sakes,’ Callie urged, ‘we need to challenge her.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pollyanna said, her voice filling the room like a memory. A sad memory of a girl who was once normal. ‘It’s time to confront her.’

  36

  She sat by the lake. Brazen as can be. Well, technically it was a loch. She was in Scottish Highlands territory. The Munros in the distance were almost how she remembered them, but darker, as if they’d brooded a lot during their wait for her to come home. She breathed in deeply and smiled. Home. Finally, she was home. All she had to do was officially announce her return.

  The bathroom window to the rear of the cabin was open and she had thought about sneaking in that way, to take Dean and Roxanne by surprise, but decided against it. She was sick of skulking and hiding and not being seen. Besides, when they did see her, if they hadn’t already, there was no risk of them phoning for the police, she’d already cut the phone line. Not that she imagined there was a police station within close proximity. The biggest town she remembered passing, before things got fairly remote, four days ago, was Fort William. There was no mobile signal at the cabin and although Dean’s car was on the drive, it wasn’t going anywhere. She’d removed the tyre valves and filled the exhaust with expanding foam. So the three of them would have to negotiate this surprise homecoming between themselves, with no outside interference. It was the only way.