by Harper Fox
“Not me,” Lee returned faintly. “Not me, no.”
“Ezekiel, then?” It wouldn’t surprise Gideon, somehow, to learn that his brother had nixed the poltergeist activity around here. He’d never been a fan of it, had he? Lee and Gid seldom reminded him these days of his denouncement of their poor baby in their little flat in Dark, when he’d first encountered her gifts. Gideon did remember the church and the fire. He remembered a vision of Zeke in Druid’s robes. “Don’t be scared to tell me, Zeke. I don’t understand, but I’m grateful, okay? Was it you?”
Zeke was still clutching Elowen’s hand. Which of them was propping and comforting the other, Gideon wasn’t sure: they were both white with shock. “No, Gideon,” Zeke rasped. “This was not my work. I’ve been a fool, I know. I’ve lived in a limited world. Nothing is as I believed it to be.”
Granny Ragwen shot him a look of pure sympathy. “Poor preacher,” she said. “Down his walls tumble, one by one.” She came to stand in front of Gideon, who realised in a prickling rush that Alice wasn’t passive or neutralised at all: was fighting wildly inside herself, the cuffs only a symbol of a power beyond comprehension. “The trouble is this, Guardian Frayne. There only ever was, and only ever can be, one witch of Dark. So I traded my powers, such as they were, to return, and remember, and to find her and love her again. And so I have.”
She stepped aside. Somewhere in the chaos, the church door must have opened. Standing there in gold and ruby light—and Gideon couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that out of all the madness and trouble of this day, this one bête-noire of his, this bloody thorn in his side, would come to put the cherry on it—was Rufus Pendower.
Rufus, holding Tamsyn by the hand. She stretched out a finger, and Alice Rawle dropped to her knees on the stone floor.
Chapter Eleven
The Weight of the Whole World
The little girl was calm. And here they all were, at Alice Rawle’s command, as she’d predicted. Preacher Ezekiel, Lee with his unwilling, unwanted prophetic power. Gideon himself—the beast, as he’d tried to tell Lee in the grip of that old fever dream. Granny Ragwen, sacred crone, and Elowen, who staunchly as Gideon had tried to deny it was everything to Tamsyn in her way, flesh and blood, the sacred source. Mother to the maiden.
Rage came more easily than acceptance in this wild confluence: Gideon turned on Rufus, a growl burning out of his throat. “You brought my child into this place, Pendower?”
Rufus blanched. He’d made an effort today, was shaved and neatly turned out in his uniform. “She was in the car,” he quavered, trying to hold up his chin. “She was locked in. It’s hot. I heard there was an incident here, and I... I was frightened for Locryn. So I came, and she was beckoning to me. Asking me for help. I had to let her out.”
To Gideon’s surprise, Lee began to laugh. The worst of his nosebleed had stopped. He pushed away from Zeke with a grateful backward glance, and strode over to Tamsyn, who put up her arms to be hoisted off the floor. “I should’ve remembered,” he said. “Who she is, I mean. If she’d wanted to be out sooner, she’d just have pulled up the locks from the inside. What did you do, Rufus—break a window?”
“Yes. I was careful, though. I told her to cover her eyes.”
“I’m sure you did. She was waiting for you, I should think. She always tries to do things the normal way if she can, and she likes you. Don’t you, Tamsie?”
She nodded solemnly. “Do like. Do like Ofus.”
“Back to the baby-talk, sweetheart? You should’ve heard her earlier, Gid—we had proper, whole sentences for a while. And you have to hear her trying to say difficult. It’s hilarious.”
Rufus was staring at Lee and the little girl as if they’d been a ship with everything he’d ever wanted in the hold, about to disappear over the horizon. “She always did like me,” he said wonderingly. “She gave me my own special name. And I was here the last time too, wasn’t I, with you and Zeke and Gideon. Elowen too, and that old lady over there who looks like Mrs Ragwen, though of course it can’t be. I haven’t taken my meds today, I’ll admit. But I belong here, don’t I? I have a place in all this.”
Jana Ragwen broke the hollow silence that ensued. “Goddess knows,” she said, “the child tried to make one for you. She’s used you as her... vector, I suppose, her channel for covering distance when she wants to be ordinary. You’ve been falling through the cracks, and she tried to save you from that. But some souls do just fall, as if they missed their footing at the beginning of their lives. Their timing’s wrong. They fall for the dying and the doomed, reach out for what’s not theirs to try and catch themselves on their way down. I’m sorry, Sergeant Pendower. You do have a place in this world, but it’s with Daisy and your little boy, and that’s not enough for you, is it? That’s why Daisy didn’t come, not this time around. She knows.”
Gideon’s radio crackled. The sound was so prosaic in the building’s resanctified hush that he flinched, then fiercely composed himself. Whatever madness had just unfolded here, he’d arrived with a job to do. He unhitched the radio, pressed the pickup: listened while the Tollgate Road dispatch alerted all units in Launceston, Bodmin and points west that Alice Rawle was at large. Dangerous, in possession of some unknown weapon, on no account to be approached without backup. Gideon thumbed the transmitter. “Dispatch? Gideon. I have Rawle in custody inside St Wylloe’s church, half a mile southbound off the Boskellan junction. She’s... disarmed, but I’ll take any backup you’ve got.”
He heard the click as the dispatch officer switched to a single channel. “Gid? Get away from her. Clear anyone near her out of the way if you can. AFO’s on standby in Penzance. They can be with you in ten, but you have to get clear.”
Gideon repressed a freaked-out chuckle. In Penzance, the authorised firearms officer probably meant his old mate Jim Squires with a shotgun. “I copy that, dispatch. We’ll try and hold out.”
“I’m bloody serious, Gideon. Half the staff on her Dartmoor Levels ward are disabled and bleeding out of their ears. She must have gone via Launceston station, too—Sergeant Lennox is dead, and two of her constables. Treat Rawle as an unknown and deadly quantity. Cuff her to the pulpit or whatever the fuck you’ve got and get out of there. Dispatch out.”
The radio’s speaker-range was localised but good, the acoustics in St Wylloe’s excellent. Gideon looked into the ring of shocked faces around him. Only Tamsyn seemed unconcerned. She’d taken off Lee’s daisy crown and was examining the centre of one flower, little face abstracted and serene. “She’s really doing this, isn’t she?” Gideon asked Lee dazedly, his voice hollow in his own ears, empty and lost. “Controlling her.”
Lee nodded. Tenderly he jounced her, settled her more closely against him. “She’s not even trying. Christ, Gid—Lennox is dead?”
“And God knows how many others.” Slowly Gideon moved to stand in front of Alice Rawle. Not a sound had come from her since Tamsyn’s arrival, but spit had gathered at the corners of her blue-tinged lips, and her eyes were wild. “Tamsie, sweetheart,” he said, and Lee came to stand beside him, the child in his arms. “You’re my good girl. You saved all your friends, just like you did at the Cheesewring at Uncle Zeke’s picnic.”
She looked up at him. Her gaze was fearless, full of love, but the wildest, blindest silver he had ever seen. She pointed to the daisy’s golden heart. “Fibonacci sequence, Dada. The spirals grow outwards, all the little suns. One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen. Not dickifult.”
Gideon choked on thin air. “Dickifult?” he mouthed at Lee. “Maybe not for you, kiddo. Other people... Other people might not understand. Do you understand about Alice?”
“Some things. I think she’s like me, but Lee says no.” She flicked a tiny gesture in the kneeling woman’s direction. “She can tell you better. Alice, tell.”
“Wait.” Quickly, out of deepest instinct, Gideon made a gesture of his own. He met his daughter push for push, drawing on the loving discipline he’d established in
her earliest childhood. “Tamsie, this is hard, because Alice would’ve hurt all of us. Once someone’s under control, though, like you’re...” He hesitated, struggling to believe that the force holding Alice Rawle still was coming from his daughter. “Like you’re controlling her now, we have to treat her well. We can’t leave her kneeling on the ground.”
Silently Tamsyn absorbed this. He could see her measuring his words against her own ideas of justice. She nodded, as if finding a workable match, and a heavy oak chair shot across the stone flags from its place by the wall. The vicar gave a moan of pure, sick fear. “Discipline,” he repeated, and Gideon wondered if that was the last word he had left in him. “Discipline. All she needed. A firm hand. But she was a boy when I first saw her. I never touched those boys in Blackwood parish. It was years ago, and anyway they were all little liars and thieves.”
That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead. Gideon and his daughter exchanged a look. Tamsyn made the smallest running movement with her index and middle finger, and Sawyer jerked upright. He looked frantically all around him for the source of the compulsion seizing his limbs, and then he headed for the door at an awkward, high-kneed trot. “Gently,” Gideon advised the little girl. “He’s old.” She nodded, and Sawyer’s pace dropped to a walk. These nuances of control were costing her nothing: the door eased open soundlessly to let him out into the sun.
Carefully Gideon lifted Alice Rawle into the chair. It was hard to touch her, like trying to handle an electric eel, all bones and repulsion. Hard to handle something that would kill him on the spot if unleashed. He had perhaps five minutes before the Penzance officers arrived, five minutes to resolve and neutralise this threat, because Alice would never give up. She’d torn her way across the county to get here and would tear on. He couldn’t stop her. If he got at her reasons, would he stand a chance?
He didn’t know where to start. The air warmed beside him, and he looked up gratefully to find Lee at his side. “Can you talk to her?”
“I don’t think anyone can, not and have it mean anything to her. The inside of her head’s like flashing knives. Tamsie, you can make her talk to us if you want, can’t you?” Lee waited for her staunch little nod. “Okay. Don’t force her, though—just let her. Can you do that?”
What Tamsyn couldn’t understand was why any of this was a problem. Gideon knew the look well—the crease in her brow that appeared whenever she discovered a new lack or failing in the adults around her. Only her inborn kindness restrained her from an outright gawp. She laid a hand on Lee’s chest like a protective five-pointed star: said, absently, as if more intrigued by her Fibonacci daisies, “Alice? Tell.”
Slowly Alice raised her head. “You stopped up my mouth, witch?”
“She’ll stop it again if you don’t keep a civil tongue in it,” Lee said unexpectedly. “Elowen? Come here for a minute, will you?”
Elowen darted to his side. She put her arms out for Tamsyn just as she would have for any other child. Whatever demons of loss and neglect had tormented her, they were gone. Gideon had a glimpse of the fully engaged human soul she could become, and his own sense of nightmare ebbed. There she was, shoulder to shoulder with Lee, his sister and comrade at last. “Do you remember us?” she asked, her voice and gaze searching, gentle. “We went to your dad’s summer school one year. I thought you were the most wonderful person I’d ever seen. What happened to you, Alice?”
“Carriers,” she croaked, as if the word had been dragged out of her. Tamsyn made a small, sleepy gesture, and she went on in a rush, “You two were carriers. I knew it straight away. My father wanted you both, but I said not to bother, I said to wait for one of you to have a child. Just carriers.”
“For what? Psychic gifts, telekinesis?”
“Sometimes. Yours are just party tricks, though. He wanted ’em weapons-grade.”
Gideon shivered. “Weapons? Is that what I found at the site of your father’s school—a place where children like you were made into weapons?”
“A place where they tried. My father was frightened of me, Guardian Frayne. Frightened and broke, and you see I’d killed my mother in a temper fit the year before, so he didn’t know what to do with me. I didn’t have to touch her—just raised my hand, and...”
She tried, one arm twitching against the restraint of the cuffs. The air around her became bright. Elowen gave a faint gasp and rocked Tamsyn until the movement ceased. “Did they hurt you there, Alice? At the school?”
“What do you think? My father dropped me and his school and all the other kids there like a hot potato on General Bolton-Reeves when he came calling from his military lab on Dartmoor. Reeves had been searching for years. Something in the soil, he said it was, or the radon gas, or the quartz getting crushed in the granite, but Cornwall’s always been full of carriers—pellar-kind, like her,” she spat out, jerking her head in Granny Ragwen’s direction. “Psychics and tarot readers, witches and little prophets. They were no good, though. Reeves broke dozens of ’em before he worked it out. He had to wait for their children.”
Lee had stood quietly through this exchange. “Children like Tamsyn. And... and you. Is that what you were doing in Dark that day, with Bolton-Reeves? Looking for others?”
“Ah, yes, that day in Dark. He’d drive me round the villages. I could sense ’em, you see—smell them, almost, and your girl was like a rose, or a fresh-cooked pie. Oh, I wanted her! I thought maybe, if I handed him the greatest of them all, he might let me go.” A terrible grin sliced across her face. “But your beast growled at me, little prophet. Do you remember? And your maiden picked me up like a paper doll and slammed me back into the car. I couldn’t even open my mouth to tell him what I’d found.”
“I’m sorry. Gideon wanted to help you. But you made the air sing, the way you were doing at the church here today. You made his nose bleed. Tamsyn reacted to that.”
“I don’t care why she did it. I’d found her. I’d felt her power—just the tiniest push of it. So I went back to the Bowithick school, where Reeves had made a kind of a teacher of me, showing them how to fly rocks and explode sacks of cement from the inside, to see if they could do it to human beings. I went back, and I gathered the children together, all those little Cornish daisies who were nothing, nothing compared to my new rose, and I wiped their minds clean with one sweep. I didn’t want to hurt them. They helped me tidy the school up, then I called their parents to come and take them home. That night I got into the general’s mind while he slept, and I exploded that from the inside. I wanted Tamsyn, you see.”
“But you couldn’t have her.”
“No, no. Oh, how you and the beast shut me out! You wouldn’t even talk about me. And you don’t even know about her, not one bit! You don’t know what she’s done.”
Sirens began to drift on the warm air. The sound recalled Gideon to himself, or at any rate to the part of himself he could understand and bear: the police officer, the working family man. If Alice Rawle said beast one more time, with that mad glimmer in her eyes, he’d have to shed his skin and eat her whole. “I’ve heard enough,” he barked. “Alice Rawle, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder. You have the right to remain silent, and you’d better bloody exercise it. Anything you say—”
“Gideon.”
He jumped. Lee had laid a hand on his wrist and was watching him with silver-jade eyes as eerie as his daughter’s. “Don’t let her get to you,” Gideon commanded. “Whatever you’re seeing, she’s probably making you see it. Don’t let her mess with your head.”
“I’ll try. In a few minutes, though—when the Penzance squad gets here, she’ll either be taken away, or something... something dreadful will happen.”
“She’ll just be taken away. I don’t know how she got the drop on the staff at the Levels and those poor bastards in Launceston. Maybe it wasn’t even her.”
“You know it was. You know who’s stopping her now. I have to talk to her. There are some things I have to know.”
&n
bsp; Gideon exhaled explosively. Then, because Lee was right, and there was no ocean of denial deep enough, he nodded at Tamsyn, who was plainly looking to him for permission. “All right. One minute. Tamsie, switch her back on again for Lee. Then I’ll take you home for ice-cream and a normal childhood, I swear.”
She smiled at him with heart-wrenching sweetness. She always played along with him when she could. “Alice, tell.”
Alice’s head snapped round with the blind greed of shark. “What shall I tell?”
“Tell me, Alice. Please.” Lee dropped to one knee in front of her. It was his sympathetic posture when talking to a child or a grieving parent sunk onto a sofa or bed, but somehow there was pleading in it, a surrender. Gideon wanted to haul him back upright. “Tell me about the Launceston schools. What were you doing there?”
“You were there, little prophet. I was riding your mind. Wherever you go, these children of old Kernow—not the carriers but their children, Tamsyn’s generation—they start to shine, and I can see them. If I couldn’t have Tamsyn, I’d have one of them, I’d take it and train it and aim it the way I was taught.”
“But I didn’t sense a child like that in those schools.”
“You didn’t have to. Does a horse have to know its rider’s destination?”
“Oh, God. The ghosts of Beaumont Hall.”
Alice emitted a faint, whistling laugh. “Oh, yes. Everyone loves you, don’t they? Even the spirits you’ve come to exploit for your shitty little show, even them, Peg the housemaid and sailor Johnny. Old Colonel Henry, trying to warn you! I took his wolf’s-head staff, the one with the flute inside, and I blew it for you, little prophet, and someone who loves you will die. Someone who loves you will die.”
