On the Edge of Darkness

by Barbara Erskine

  ‘I am pleased to see you.’ He came and put his arms round her and kissed her cheek, thanking God silently that she would never know how, sleepily, he had welcomed the cat into his bed, not wondering how it had got back into the house or if it would attack him again, but instead feeling the sensuous softness of its fur as it slid down under the sheet and nestled against his loins. Nor would she ever know about the violently erotic dream from which she had woken him. The dream about Brid.

  Brid sat up in bed with a start, her body cold and shaking. A-dam. She had been with him. In his bed. She closed her eyes and took a deep slow breath, trying to steady the thundering in her chest and pulses. Around her the other women in the dormitory were asleep. She could hear their breathing, their silence, their groans and their sobs. She had come back to her body too fast and it had shaken her badly. She sat up, pushing the hair off her face and hugged her knees miserably. It had been so good. As good as she remembered. When he welcomed her, like that, she could overcome the strange emanations from the amulet beside his bed which for so long had held her back inside her dreams and kept her away from the house where he lived. He had held her to him and stroked her shoulders and murmured lovingly as his lips sought hers in the darkness beneath the sheet.

  Then the bitch woman had arrived. Not the one with red-gold hair – his Liza. The other one. Jane. The woman with hair the colour of old dead grass who smelled of soap like the stuff they used in the hospital, the mother of A-dam’s son. Looking up at the ceiling above her bed she felt her fingers curl into claws. That woman did not make A-dam happy. She did not look after him. She went away without him and left him alone in a house which in her view was without colour or warmth or beauty.

  Sometimes out of curiosity she had reached out over the years to Liza, questing, still resenting her, needing to know if she were still a threat. But Liza was strong. Far stronger than A-dam. And most of the time she was shielded by a blinding force field which repelled and weakened and Brid withdrew. It was not worth the expenditure of energy it would take to pierce the shield. One day, she promised herself, she would deal with Liza, the woman who had taken A-dam from her. But not now. Now she preferred to concentrate on A-dam himself or, when Liza had forgotten her shield, to peer at her from the darkness and amuse herself with silent threats and promises and spy, thoughtfully, on A-dam’s child and the girl who was now his lover.

  At the end of the dormitory a door opened and she saw the light of a torch shining into the dark cavern between the beds. Silently she slid down under her blankets and shut her eyes. If they found you awake they would bring the needle and put it in your arm and then you would sleep for a long, long time, only to wake confused and dry-mouthed without having dreamed or travelled or even rested. And days would turn into weeks and weeks into months and years again without you knowing they had gone. She had learned a long time ago to play quiet and asleep a lot of the time, in this strange world in which she had been ensnared.

  Footsteps progressed slowly up the ward. She could hear the soft jingle of the keys at the woman’s belt and as she drew closer she could smell the odd carrion smell on her breath. She shuddered and squeezed her eyes more tightly closed. The nurses in this strange place were afraid of her. They did not like her. And she did not like them. But this one, Deborah Wilkins, she especially hated. The woman sensed something of Brid’s otherness, her spirit which could never be entirely captured, and her resentment had turned to sadistic persecution.

  The footsteps stopped at the end of her bed and the woman walked towards her. Brid held her breath. For a moment there was total silence, then Nurse Wilkins turned away and resumed her hourly patrol of the regimented beds.

  The next day was one of those when Brid went into Dr Furness’s office and sat talking to him while they drank a cup of tea. She liked this other doctor who seemed to be in charge of the place in which she lived. She trusted him. He was wise and gentle and she didn’t mind that he wrote down the things she said to him. Gradually, as her confidence in him grew stronger and her loneliness amongst the other inmates became greater, she confided in him more often.

  ‘So, Brid, my dear. Did you go travelling again last night?’ Dr Furness smiled up at her as he opened the now bulging file with her name on the front. He had seen her psyche strengthen and grow as the effects of the drugs wore off and he was pleased. Here was a patient who responded well to a psychotherapeutic approach.

  She nodded shyly. ‘I went to see A-dam at his house.’

  ‘This is Dr Craig?’ He glanced back through the pages of small neat black writing.

  She nodded. ‘The woman was away still and I went to him. To his bed. He was pleased to see me. But then …’ She shook her head mournfully. For a while she was silent, sipping her tea, then she reached for the slice of chocolate cake which he had brought in for her. He smiled indulgently as she sank her teeth into it. It was several long minutes before he decided he had better prompt her again. ‘Then what happened?’ he asked.

  ‘His woman, Jane, came back. It was still night-time and we were asleep. She let herself into the house and came upstairs quietly, so she caught me.’

  ‘I see.’ He frowned. ‘And what did she say when she found you in bed with her husband?’

  ‘She was not pleased. She screamed.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘I ran away from the room and then I came back to my bed here.’

  ‘And how long had you been away do you think?’

  She took another bite of cake, then she shrugged. ‘Time is not the same here and there. When I woke up the horse-face nurse came in. She looked at me with her torch and I pretended to be asleep.’ She chewed for a moment. ‘Did you ask her to make sure I was there?’

  He smiled. ‘I worry about you, my dear. Sometimes I wonder if you could get into trouble on your travels.’

  ‘If there is trouble I come back to my bed. My cord is a strong one.’

  He nodded. ‘We’ve decided this is your astral cord, yes?’ He made a note. ‘I would very much like to see you when you do this travelling. I haven’t met anyone yet who does it as you do and who can talk about it.’

  ‘Why not?’ She frowned. ‘It is very easy. Especially when things are not very nice where you are. You can go away. I do not like this place.’ She turned a look of such abject misery on him that he was for a moment quite shaken. ‘I want to go to A-dam’s house to live. He would want me to, I know it.’

  Dr Furness kept to himself the guess that Dr Craig, if he existed at all, would almost certainly not want this beautiful, wild and completely insane young woman visiting him.

  ‘Tell me more about Dr Craig’s house, my dear. It interests me to hear about it.’ He picked up his pen again. In his file there was an address which he had looked up for a Dr Adam Craig. It would be interesting to go and see the man, he had decided, see the house which this strange young woman claimed to visit in her dreams, and ask him if he knew a dark-haired lustful beauty who, after more than ten years in a mental hospital in north London, still looked not a day over twenty-one.

  He had asked her once why she didn’t want to go home. She had sat for a long time in silence and then shaken her head. ‘They will kill me if I go back.’

  ‘Kill you? Why?’

  ‘Because I left. Because I came here, to your world. Because of A-dam.’

  ‘And your people are Romanies?’ He had asked her before, and she did not seem to recognise the word.

  She shook her head again. ‘I have told you, I come from the people of the north wind.’

  He wrote it down again and circled the phrase with his pen. It sounded wild, romantic and vague. Just like her. He had mentioned her claim at home and to his astonishment his Classics student son had reacted at once. ‘That is what Herodotus called the Celts.’

  He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out an atlas, borrowed this time from his daughter. ‘Do you recognise places on maps?’ he asked casually.

  Brid shrugged
.

  He opened the book at the map of Great Britain and pushed it across towards her. ‘Do you see? England Scotland and Wales. You told me you were in Edinburgh.’ He stabbed the map. ‘There. You see?’

  She stared at it blankly and shook her head. ‘Catriona showed me one of these. It did not have Craig Phádraig on it. I saw Abernethy where my uncle sometimes went and the village where A-dam lived.’

  ‘So, you lived in Scotland. Was that all your life? From a small girl?’

  She nodded doubtfully.

  ‘And you wandered round the mountains, you said.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘And you were at college?’

  ‘Like A-dam. Yes.’

  He shook his head. ‘But where are your parents, Brid? Your brother? Your uncle? Why do they not try to find you?’

  ‘I do not want them to find me. Broichan will kill me.’ She could see him sometimes, shouting. He was still trying to reach her, hammering against the strange veil which separated them, like the glass in the hospital windows, calling at her to come to him. She had broken the sacred geas, the taboo which forbade the traversing of the worlds, and the punishment was death. She leaned across the desk and closed his atlas. ‘Why do you not let me go to A-dam? Why must I stay here? I do not like this place.’

  ‘I know, Brid. It’s very hard.’ It was all there in her records. She had been committed after being found wandering in London. There had been a few notes on her life in Edinburgh – admission to the Royal Infirmary, one to a mental hospital in Morningside and before that nothing.

  He closed the file. ‘I have to go, Brid, my dear. We’ll talk again. Now, I want you to be good. Shouting and threatening the nurses does not help, you know. If you want to leave here, you have to prove to us that you can behave and look after yourself.’

  She wandered out into the garden later. There she felt safe. The others didn’t seem to like the trees and the flowers. Perhaps she should tell Dr Furness about the trees and flowers in A-dam’s garden. They were beautiful.

  Ivor Furness did not realise until he was almost there that his journey to his second cousin’s wedding that weekend in Harpenden would take him through St Albans and almost down the street where Dr Adam Craig lived. The address which he had found in the medical directory was engraved on his heart – the suburban house in the quiet street with the flowering cherry outside and the coloured glass in the front door which were described so fondly by Brid. ‘A detour. Only a moment,’ he told his surprised family as he swung his car out of the main road.

  And there it was. The cherry tree, the blossom gone now and the leaves green and heavy with summer. The door with its inset panes of stained glass depicting an Art Nouveau white lily just as she had described it. Of course that did not prove anything. She might have been there before, as a child or as a young woman. She might have seen photographs.

  Leaving his family in the car he walked up the path, raised his hand to the doorbell and rang.

  It was the next door neighbour who told him that Dr and Mrs Craig were in Scotland.

  ‘I told you not to come.’ Thomas Craig opened the front door and stood barring the way into the shadowy hall. The house behind him smelled faintly of TCP.

  ‘I had to see how you were, Father.’ Adam resisted the sudden childlike urge to turn and run away. ‘Jane and I were worried by your letter.’

  ‘There was no reason to worry. Everything is under control.’ The old man pushed his chin forward slightly and scowled. Then unexpectedly he relented and stepped back. ‘Well, now you’re here, you’d best come in, I suppose.’

  The house was spotless and tidy, his study the only room which looked even remotely lived in.

  ‘I thought he was going to send us away again,’ Jane whispered as they stood in the cold kitchen looking round. ‘And I’m almost sorry he didn’t. The hotel would have been better than this morgue.’

  Adam shuddered. ‘This is where Jeannie died.’ He looked down as though expecting to see the bloodstains still on the floor. His voice broke and Jane put her hand gently on his arm.

  ‘There’s no sense in thinking about it.’ She sighed, and reaching for the kettle she glanced round. ‘The range isn’t lit. Is there an electric ring or something? I can’t think how your father could have stayed here alone after it happened.’

  ‘There is a cooker in the pantry there.’ Thomas appeared behind them. In the sunlight streaming in through the windows Adam saw for the first time how grey and drawn his father’s face was. ‘I never light the range.’ He walked over and pulled the back door open, allowing more light to flood the dark kitchen. ‘I stayed here, young woman, because it was my home and my parish. Where else was I to go? Going would not bring Mrs Barron back.’

  He watched Jane carry the kettle through into the pantry and put it on the Baby Belling she found next to the meat safe.

  ‘How long will you be staying?’

  Jane gave him a faint smile. ‘Only as long as you would like us to, Father-in-law. We just wanted to make sure you were all right.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ He frowned. ‘As you see.’ He turned away to the door. ‘When you’ve made the tea, bring it through to my study and we’ll have a wee bit talk before you both go on your way.’

  Jane gave a small chuckle. ‘I think that can be counted as a success, don’t you?’

  Adam picked up the tray and followed Jane back down the passage to his father’s study. ‘I thought maybe Jane and I could stay here a night, Father?’ he said as he laid the tray on Thomas’s desk. ‘You must have room in this big house. We won’t put you to any trouble. In fact we’ll take you out to a meal this evening at the hotel, what do you think of that?’

  They were given the room that had been his parents’. It was cold, impersonal, the cupboards empty, the dressing table bare. Thomas now slept in Adam’s old room. But they could not persuade him to go with them to the hotel and it was alone that they sat down in the restaurant that evening and ordered cold salmon and new potatoes and peas accompanied by a fairly nice and very expensive bottle of wine.

  ‘It must be strange, coming back after all this time.’ Jane had been watching her husband’s face as he stared out of the window at the slow broad sweep of the river at the end of the lawn.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ He dragged himself back from his thoughts with an effort and nodded. ‘It is. We should have brought Calum.’

  It was something she had also been thinking, but it was too late now. She shook her head slowly. ‘So, are you going to take me up to see your famous Picts’ stone with its weird carvings? I jolly well hope so.’ She reached forward for the bottle and topped up both their glasses. ‘You are going to, Adam, aren’t you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It’s quite a climb. I was young and fit in those days.’

  ‘We’ll take a picnic. I can’t believe your father will miss us if we take ourselves off for a few hours. He really is a curmudgeonly old soul, isn’t he! How long has he got, has he told you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not long, I think. He’s got a drawer full of painkillers in his desk and another lot in the bathroom and they’re hefty ones. Poor Dad. I wouldn’t have wished this on him for anything.’

  They left the manse in the late morning, leaving Thomas to walk stiffly over to the kirk. On Adam’s shoulder was a bag full of food and a bottle of white wine bought the night before from the hotel bar. He led the way across the river and up the steep path beneath the overhanging trees and shrubs, and within minutes was very out of breath. ‘This path wasn’t so steep in the old days, I’m sure it wasn’t.’

  Jane laughed. ‘So, aren’t you sorry you didn’t join the squash club when I did?’ She danced a few steps ahead of him and then slowed again. ‘This is so beautiful, Adam. I can’t imagine anyone being lucky enough to live here all the time.’

  ‘It didn’t seem lucky at the time. I was miserable after Mother went.’

  They stopped and stood looking down int
o the steep ravine where the river hurtled down the hillside in cascades of cold rainbow spray in the deflected sunlight of the overhanging trees. The roar of the water was deafening.

  ‘Come on. This way.’ Catching his breath he strode on ahead of her, following the path with difficulty in places, ducking beneath the pale green lichen which hung from the trees in ragged curtains. Once they were on the open hillside he stopped, panting again. ‘Up there. See?’

  Jane followed his pointing hand and saw the stone silhouetted against the sky on the top of the ridge. ‘It’s certainly imposing.’

  They were both panting when they reached it. Throwing the bag down on the ground, Adam bent over and touched his toes with a groan. ‘I’ve got a stitch! My God, I’m unfit. So, what do you think of it?’

  ‘Weird.’ Jane walked over and traced the patterns of the designs with her fingertip. ‘And it’s hundreds of years old, you say?’

  ‘More than a thousand.’ He smiled. ‘The Picts had this amazing reputation for being magicians and Druids and stuff. They really caught my imagination. And this is a spooky place. The mist was always playing round the top of this ridge when I was young. I was an impressionable boy, on my own, prepared to believe in anything. And then I met Brid and …’ He paused, staring away down the hillside towards the valley.

  ‘And?’ Jane prompted.

  ‘And I used to follow her into what felt like another world. It was like some strange, wonderful adventure with me as the hero.’ He sat down on a rocky outcrop a few feet from her and went on staring into the distance. ‘I felt very bad when I left her and went to Edinburgh.’ He paused. He was trying very hard to put the image of Brid out of his head. It was a seductive, erotic image, an image linked to his dreams, linked in some way to the beautiful vicious cat he had befriended; it was an image which at the same time filled him with dread.

  There was a long silence as they both stood watching a circling hawk. Suddenly it closed its wings and stooped out of sight into the high corrie and they were left in the intense silence of the heat. Behind them the summit of the mountain was a blaze of heather.