by R. H. Dixon
Dean was ex-military, of course, she had to be careful not to underestimate him or overestimate herself. But she wasn’t going to give them any reason, initially, to suspect they were in danger. Though she suspected that Roxanne would suspect. She always did. Mother’s intuition. The restraining order Roxanne had taken out was still valid, but if a restraining order was the best she could do, it was quite laughable: even Hell’s hound Garm from the underworld couldn’t keep her away from Dean!
For the past two nights she’d slept rough in Whispering Woods. It had accepted her willingly, even though it scared her. But that was okay, she loved feeling scared. The adrenaline rush reminded her of when she was younger. With the thunder and the lightning, and the wind and rain battering the cabin, and Dean close by. Besides, whatever was in the woods, whatever might want to harm her, Dean had protectors. Odin’s wolves, Geri and Freki. The ravenous ones. They’d protect her too, just as Dean’s storytelling of ravens always had. Hugin and Munin, especially. Soon all of them would be together at last. There was just one problem to fix: Roxanne.
The idea of seeing Dean again gave her internal and external chills of excitement. She hadn’t spoken to him in just over a year. For the special reunion she wore all black: skinny jeans, bodysuit, duster jacket and biker boots. She was the black swan and had come back for him, whether he consciously chose her or not. It felt as though her entire life had been leading up to this moment. This was her time to shine.
She grinned and hugged her knees to her chest, and watched as a lone female mallard glided across the loch. When she heard a gruff voice behind her, her heart fluttered and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. ‘Essie, what are you doing here?’ It was him. Dean. He sounded stern, not exactly welcoming. But that was okay. She imagined he must be shocked about her turning up like this. It was only natural.
Then she heard Roxanne. ‘How did you find us, Sarah Jane?’
‘It’s Freya. You know that.’ Freya stood up and dusted the seat of her jeans. She turned round and smiled, her attention immediately fixed on Dean. Her heart felt as though it would rupture with long term affliction, and she thought when it did it might shatter her ribs and that she’d weep real tears of blood; such was her sense of loss for not having seen him in such a long time. His dirty blonde hair was still long and unkempt and he had facial hair that was too long to be stubble but too short to be a proper beard. His face was more slender now, sunken beneath his cheekbones. She couldn’t decide whether this sign of ageing was what her memory measured against the first time they’d met, or whether he had indeed aged so much over the past year. Perhaps, if the latter was true, it was because he had mourned her loss. She liked that idea most. His live eye made her feel woozy and calm; the blue always managing to suppress the red behind her eyes, mostly triggered by encounters with Roxanne. His dead eye looked right through her. Since marrying Roxanne he’d stopped working out as much, lapsing into a more sedentary lifestyle. Therefore, his body had visibly softened, but still he looked good. So much so, Freya wondered at the inevitability of her heart bursting and wondered how long she had till it did.
‘Why are you here?’ Roxanne demanded to know.
‘Pleased to see you too,’ Freya said, with a sense of irony not bitter enough to cause an argument, but bitter enough to show resentment. Slowly she started across the lawn to the veranda where Roxanne and Dean were standing. Keeping her head bowed low, in what she hoped would be taken as submissive body language, she shrugged and offered them another smile. ‘I just came to see you guys. I’ve been feeling bad about the way things turned out and I wanted to say I’m sorry for all the shit I’ve put you through over the years.’
Roxanne rolled her eyes and groaned. ‘For God’s sake.’
‘Hey, I know I shouldn’t be here.’ Freya came to a stop and held her hands up. ‘I know where I stand. With you and the law. But I just had to say sorry. Face to face. I had to see you both again.’
‘How did you get here?’ Roxanne did a sweep of the garden, her hand gripping Dean’s arm. ‘I don’t see a car.’
‘I left it back at the village.’
‘Why would you do that?’ Roxanne’s eyes narrowed some more.
‘I didn’t think it would cope with the potholes very well,’ Freya said, maintaining a level of nonchalance, just as planned. She couldn’t let them think she’d made the one-way trip by hitchhiking and walking, because then they might realise too soon that she had no intention of leaving. She pointed to the Land Rover on the drive, as if to shame them, and said, ‘I don’t have a flashy car like you guys.’
Ever the diplomat, Dean scratched his chin and nodded. ‘You’d better come in.’
All three of them stood awkwardly in the hallway, Dean towering above both women. He and Roxanne blocked the way to the lounge and Freya had made it no further than the doormat. Feeling the need to exert control, or be the one to do something at least, Dean put his hand on Roxanne’s shoulder and squeezed. ‘Why don’t you put the kettle on, love?’
Roxanne flashed him a look of incredulity and opened her mouth to argue, but Dean insisted, ‘Let her talk for a while, then she can go.’
Accepting her husband’s judgement, rightly or wrongly, Roxanne turned and headed for the kitchen. Dean then led Freya through to the lounge. On the way Freya breathed in deeply, the smell of the cabin’s wood as well as Dean making her feel in some way close to content. In the lounge Dean motioned for her to sit down on the couch, but she walked to the window instead and looked out at the loch.
‘How did you find the cabin?’ he said, taking a seat for himself. ‘And how did you know we’d be here?’
Freya continued to stare out of the window at a sky lined with pewter that concealed a heartbeat. A storm was coming. ‘Do you remember that story you started to tell me about Whispering Woods?’ she said, purposefully ignoring his question. ‘About Old Mally Murgatroyd and the family he killed. And how afterwards the trees told him to kill himself.’
Dean said nothing, but she could feel his discomfort like a palpable new fizz in the air. She smiled, pleased she could make him feel something unpleasant. It was payback, however miniscule, for the way he’d made her feel for all these years. All the agonised suffering she’d had to endure. Her poor heart.
‘Do you want to know why I think Old Mally Murgatroyd and the trees spared that little boy?’ she said, turning to him then.
Dean shook his head, his blue eye lessening in brilliance as vagueness befell him. He waited for her to tell him.
‘Because he was you!’ she said. ‘He was you all along.’
Dean raised his eyebrows and began to speak, but she talked over the top of him, ‘The trees want you here. They always have done. You can hear them, can’t you? What do they say to you?’
‘Whoa, Essie,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘Of course I remember telling you that story, but it was just a bit of fun, that’s all.’
‘Fun?’ Freya repeated the word as though it had no meaning. Then her eyes became awash with fearful bewilderment at the implied possibility of what he meant.
‘It was just some local folklore. A daft tale that I thought you’d like.’ Dean shrugged. ‘Kids like that kind of thing, don’t they?’
Freya shook her head, unable to accept this. ‘But it is true. The trees do talk. I’ve heard them myself.’
Dean regarded her with something like pity. ‘It was just make-believe, Essie. A story created to stop local kids from wandering too far into the woods.’
‘No.’ Freya’s face had paled. She imagined her blood had too. All of the red had left her and Lucy cowered in some cerebrum nook inside her head. ‘It was real. It really happened. All of it.’
‘Sorry, Essie, but no.’
Roxanne came in then, carrying a tray. She set it down on the coffee table and sat on the couch, close to Dean. Nobody moved to claim a cup of tea. The tray and its contents were simply there as a focus. A prop of civility
in this surreal gathering. She may as well have brought three empty cups.
‘Why did you come here, Sarah Jane?’ Roxanne said, fidgeting with her hands in her lap.
‘I already told you,’ Freya said. Her voice sounded distant and she stared at the floor, trancelike, still pondering Dean’s words. ‘It’s Freya.’
‘Whatever.’ Roxanne inhaled deeply. ‘Why did you really come?’
‘I wanted to see you guys. To apologise.’
Roxanne shook her head and snorted with derision. Her brown eyes sparked with something dangerous. Territorial anger, perhaps. ‘I don’t believe a word of that. You don’t have a remorseful bone in your body. Is it money you want?’
Freya looked at her mother then and laughed. ‘What the hell must you think of me? I don’t want your money.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘You’re the only family I have.’
‘Hardly.’
‘Gran’s in the nuthouse and Dad’s not far behind. He was never the same after you left him. Not that I came here to piss on your parade. Bit late for that anyway. Besides, you did what you had to. But it really did finish him off. So now you’re the only family I have. You and Dean.’
‘You’ve never been the sentimental type either, Sarah Jane.’
‘Don’t you think it’s sad that we don’t talk anymore? That you have a restraining order against me, your own daughter?’ Freya frowned to convey her deep-rooted hurt. ‘I mean, shit, what did you think I’d do to you?’
Roxanne hadn’t relaxed in the slightest. She looked tightly wound. Ready to snap. The tendons in her neck were massively pronounced. ‘Continue to harass us.’
‘Harass you?’
‘Yes, because you’re bloody obsessed!’
Freya’s expression clouded. ‘With what?’
‘You damn well know.’
Dean shifted in his seat and looked somewhat uncomfortable. Embarrassed even.
Freya fixed her attention on him and smiled, her eyes becoming darkly mischievous. ‘I think she’s trying to say that I’m obsessed with you, Uncle Dean. Do you agree?’
‘Look, Essie,’ he started to say, but she cut him off.
‘It’s okay, if you agree with her then just say so. We can only move forward as a family if we’re open and honest with each other. Perhaps you’d even like to hear my take on it?’
His blue eye flashed angry and his white one remained all-seeing and not so blind to what was going on. To how she felt. He knew she was obsessed with him. She knew he always had done. It was never that he’d encouraged her attention per se, he’d just simply been there. And there was never anything he could have done to dissuade her about the way she felt. She loved the very essence of him. ‘Just say what you came to say, Essie,’ he said, hard-faced. ‘Then I think it’s best if you leave.’
His firm demand was like a blow to the gut and part of her wanted to die, but Freya managed to smile through it. ‘Me and Roxanne always did rub each other up the wrong way, didn’t we? But why can’t we just be a normal family?’
‘Because there’s nothing bloody normal about you,’ Roxanne told her.
Freya laughed again, although she didn’t feel like it. ‘You never were the motherly type were you?’ She held her hands up to show defeat. ‘I get it, though. You wish I wasn’t here. I can tell I’m not welcome. I just thought, I dunno, I thought things could be different now that I’m grown up. But I can see that it’s always going to be difficult for you when you just don’t have the feelings for me that you should. But hey, don’t feel bad. I get it. There are anomalies in the wild sometimes too, you know. Animals that eat their young. So you’re by no means a freak of nature. It happens. And for the record, I think I’d be a lousy mother too.’ She clapped her hands together to signify a truce. ‘So then. Now I’ve said what I came to say and we all know where we stand, I guess I’ll be off. I’ll leave you alone to live happy ever after. You can’t say I didn’t try, though, you have to give me that much.’ She’d kept her voice calm and as she made her way towards the hallway Dean and Roxanne both looked uncertain. At the door she turned and spread her arms wide. ‘But don’t I at least get a hug before I go?’
Roxanne looked to Dean, as if needing some moral advice. He shrugged one shoulder and cocked an eyebrow, in as much as to say please yourself, but made no attempt to move, perhaps not wanting to encourage his step-daughter’s fixation by giving her physical contact. Under a strained sense of obligation, Roxanne rose from the couch, slowly and stiffly, and went to Freya. Her reluctance to do so made her grimace.
It was Freya who forced the embrace, bundling her mother into her arms. A little too keenly perhaps. Roxanne’s body was bony and sinewy, and she didn’t relax into the hug at all, which made Freya hate her more than ever. Holding her mother close, Freya breathed in the clean coconut scent of her hair. ‘There once was an ugly duckling,’ she began to sing. ‘With feathers all stubby and brown.’ She felt her mother stiffen and, as such, almost trembled with exhilaration as she slid the metal file she’d kept hidden up her coat sleeve into her hand.
This was it.
Time for the white swan to die.
Freya pulled way from the hug, enjoying the look of bemusement that had befallen her mother’s face. With a quick swipe, she brought her hand up and drove the file into the side of Roxanne’s neck. There was a wet choking sound. ‘And her mother said in so many words.’ Freya pulled the file free and pushed her mother to the floor. ‘Get out of town.’
Roxanne dropped hard onto her knees and gripped her gushing throat with both hands. The white swan was fatally bloodied and there was a satisfying and distinct look of acceptance in her eyes, Freya saw, of the inescapable death that her daughter had dealt out to her. And there was so much blood. Red everywhere. Freya gaped in open-mouthed wonder. She’d dreamed of this moment for years and now that it was really happening it felt like just another dream.
It was Dean’s shouting that broke through the surreal red. He was off the couch, lurching straight towards her.
‘Get back!’ she screamed. Snatching a handful of Roxanne’s hair, Freya then held the file just millimetres away from her mother’s eyeball and told him, ‘Or I’ll put her eye out.’
37
To Callie, Thurston, Smiler and Pollyanna the cabin’s rooms and contents transformed as soon as Freya entered. It was as though the memory of the place in her head had decayed over time, distorting into a place that was close to dilapidation. But upon Freya’s return all of that changed. The furniture and décor, they saw, was actually clean and tidy. Dean and Roxanne Bennett were right there in the room too, not as ghostly figures but as real people. Yet still they were unable to communicate with them in any way.
Thurston couldn’t stop staring at Dean. The likeness between the two men was unreal. Pollyanna stayed by the window, quietly seething. Freya had transformed into a woman while all this time she had been trapped in the body of a girl. Smiler fidgeted by the hearth, hardly daring to look at Freya. And Callie paced back and forth in front of the couch, feeling uneasy for Dean, but more so Roxanne. She cried out and told Roxanne to sit down when Freya requested a hug, then pleaded with Freya when she saw the silver flash of death graze her hand. But it was all in vain; Callie had no voice in their world.
It all happened quickly thereafter: an awkward hug turned into a deathly embrace. Roxanne Bennett crashed to her knees, blood pouring from her neck, and Callie found that she couldn’t determine which were or weren’t her own cries because Dean, Thurston and Smiler were also yelling at the same time.
When Freya threatened to stab Roxanne in the eye with the metal file, Callie couldn’t stand it anymore. She screamed and screamed; her horror so intense everyone fell quiet and Freya flinched.
‘Did you see that?’ Thurston said. ‘She heard you! She heard you!’
‘Do it again,’ Smiler urged.
But Callie didn’t think she could. The
most she could muster was a weary, ‘Freya, stop it. Please.’ This sombre appeal did nothing but emphasise the massive divide between their two worlds though, because she got no reaction. Nothing at all.
Roxanne coughed up blood and scrunched her eyes shut against the threat of the file’s narrow tip; the file that was saturated with her own blood. She tried to move away, but Freya’s fingers worked tighter in her hair. She yelped, a sound that gargled around in her throat, and looked wide-eyed at Dean.
Dean edged closer; unable to do nothing, yet not able to do anything to help his wife.
‘There’s nothing you could have done to stop this, Dean,’ Freya said, her face devoid of remorse for the act of violence she’d just committed. ‘You’ll get over it eventually, though, because it was always meant to happen this way. It’s the way it should be. Just me and you, here in the cabin.’ She then applied enough pressure to scrape the surface of her mother’s eyelid. Her expression had a demented guile that suggested she was ready to drive it home any second.
Callie’s stomach roiled at the thought. ‘STOP IT!’ she screamed.
Freya scrunched her eyes shut, as though pained with a sudden headache. ‘No, not you!’
Callie’s heart thumped. ‘Yes, it’s me. Me, me, me!’
‘Go away!’
‘You were supposed to be my friend, Freya. How could you do this to me?’
Freya’s jaw clamped tight and she screamed through her teeth. ‘Go. Away!’
‘But why?’ Callie insisted. ‘Why did you do it? How could you bring me here and leave me to rot?’
‘I said go away!’
‘Tell me.’
