Chapter Twenty
Somewhere in the distance, I think I hear my name being called.
‘Holly!’
There it is again. I try to open my eyes, but my lids are too heavy.
‘Holly. Wake up.’
The voice is louder this time, more urgent. My shoulders shake and my head flops back and forth.
‘Holly? Holly!’
The voice is clearer now. Closer. Then a thunderous crack sounds above me. I flinch. Then another one comes, then another. Light flickers.
‘Come on, Holly. Come on. Please…’
The voice is familiar, warm, welcoming. It fills me with comfort. I’m safe in that voice.
One more crack and suddenly my eyes snap open.
‘Oh, thank god. Holly.’
I squint as I struggle to see. A face comes into focus. A soft face. A worried face.
‘Callum? What happened?’ I groan and try to push myself up.
‘Hey, take it easy. You fainted or something.’
His arms wrap around me as he helps me sit, squatting behind me, and pulling me against his chest. I lean back into his warmth.
‘Never touch that tree again,’ he says, holding me tight to him.
‘Okay,’ I answer groggily.
‘Can you stand? Because I think we should go.’
‘Sure.’ I wobble a little as I push myself up.
Callum snakes his arm around my waist and I rest against him, letting him support me as we half walk, half stumble across the clearing.
‘I feel like we’ve done this before,’ I say.
‘Except in reverse,’ he says, through puffs of exertion. ‘You’re heavier than you look.’
‘Charmer.’
He chuckles, and his laughter chases away my fear.
The further we get from the tree, the stronger I feel. By the time we reach the line of pines and disappear into their protective darkness, I can stand on my own.
I stop. ‘I think I’m okay now.’
‘What the hell happened back there? You were screaming your lungs out, then you dropped to the ground. I thought you’d stopped breathing.’
‘I don’t know. There was pain, a lot of pain. In me and around me. Voices howling from anguished faces.’
His eyes are wide, filled with horror, and my stomach sinks. I knew the other shoe would eventually drop. What I can do, what I am – it scares him just like it scares everyone else.
He puts his palms on my cheeks and stares deep into my eyes. ‘Listen, Holly.’ I hold my breath. ‘Don’t die on me, okay? You can’t do that. I couldn’t…’ He presses his forehead to mine.
Then his lips touch my skin, so softly they feel like butterfly wings. The lightest of tickles. My heart soars. He’s not scared of me. He’s scared of losing me.
Callum tosses his duffle onto the chair in the corner of his room. ‘I think I should get some food into you. We haven’t had anything since Martha’s cake. How are you feeling?’
I drop onto the end of his bed. ‘Confused.’
He sits beside me. ‘Any idea what happened?’
I shake my head. ‘Something moved into me, or through me, or…’
I try to remember the sensations that exploded inside me in the forest, but they’re already drifting out of reach, the faces and the horror dulling as if they were never there.
I know it happened, but I can’t feel it anymore.
Like the pain from an injury. An intellectual memory without the sensory recollection that should go with it. Even the fear has gone.
‘I think I was supposed to know their sorrow, their terror, their grief. It’s like the sickness I feel at the house. I think they want me to know their pain.’
‘Whose pain?’
‘The victims?’
‘Maybe that’s what “let us in” means. Maybe you just did it.’
‘No. I didn’t, because they’re still asking me to. I heard them again. All of them this time. Callum, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’ I look at my hands, dirty from the forest floor. The knees of my jeans are covered in mud. ‘I should wash up before we eat.’
‘I’ll wait here,’ he says.
‘I’ll be fine. Why don’t you sort out our food? That pizza was good the other night, do they deliver?’
‘Leave the door open, okay?’ he calls after me as I head for my room.
I hear him on the phone, ordering dinner as I shrug off my clothes.
Something is changing inside me. Something new thrumming alongside my gift, and weirdly, I don’t hate it.
I never imagined there could be more to me than the thing I’ve always been.
I’ve never wanted to imagine that. But what if this…
whatever this is… was always there, just buried by self-loathing and shame?
I’ve spent my life battling spirits, but I’ve never tried to connect with them, to understand them.
I’ve just blocked them. What if they’ve been trying to communicate with me this whole time?
I should be freaking out, that would be my normal reaction, but I’m not. Because something else is going on inside me too, and it’s smothering all my fears in flutters and tingles and hope of a life beyond the one I’ve been living. Barely living.
I scrub the dirt from my palms, my face and neck, washing away the tears on my cheeks, and close my eyes, trying again to recall the terror that filled me at the tree – to hear the wails, to feel the agony.
But all I find there is the warmth of Callum’s arms around me and the heat of his lips on mine as we kissed in the cool shade of the forest. Those sensations I can instantly remember, and they vibrate through me even more than whatever attacked me in that clearing.
I can’t hold back my smile. I’m finally opening myself up to the good, and my emotional debris is falling away as I do.
Callum is sprawled on pillows on the floor, his laptop in front of him.
‘Hey,’ he says, rolling onto his side and smiling up at me. ‘Feel any better?’
I flop down beside him. ‘A lot better,’ I say. ‘It’s weird. It’s like it never happened.’ What I don’t say is how good I feel, that I’m buzzing and excited, because I don’t want to examine that right now. Instead, I shimmy in closer, pressing my thigh against his as I reach for my journal.
‘Here’s the sketch I did of the symbol at the Western graveyard, the same one we saw on that tree.’
Callum reaches for the book, a spark of desire finding me again as his hand touches mine. I need to calm down.
He looks at me, a smile twitching on his lips. ‘Can I ask you something?’
I frown, suddenly worried. ‘I guess.’
‘Why didn’t you take a photo of this thing with your phone instead of drawing it?’
‘I… ah… I don’t know. I didn’t think of it.’ I burst out laughing and snatch my journal away from him. His eyes sparkle with amusement. ‘I was writing names down, and… Oh, shut up.’
He rolls onto his back, his hands resting on his belly, his eyes squeezed shut and a wide smile across his face as he laughs. My insides melt.
‘Sorry.’ He clears his throat as he rolls back onto his stomach. ‘You did a wonderful job. Quite the artist. I’ll just take a photo of it and see what we can find.’
He pulls out his phone and snaps.
‘Okay,’ he says, sending the picture to his laptop and dragging it into the search bar. ‘Let’s see.’ Various images of the symbol fill the page. Callum clicks on one. ‘This is it, right?’
‘Looks like it.’
The symbol is an inverted, ornate triangle with an Egyptian ankh hanging in its centre. He clicks through a few pages, reading rapidly.
‘The Poculum Vitae. The cup of power. It’s an occult symbol. This says it represents the potential we all have within ourselves. It symbolises the idea that you can have anything you wish for, so long as you take it upon yourself to act.’
‘That doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, it sounds like good advice.’
‘But wait, there’s more!’ Callum says, in his best TV-salesman voice. ‘By drinking from the Poculum Vitae, a person attains physical and spiritual perfection and lasting life. It signifies the passage of energy through the body and the transformation of the human soul into something divine.’
‘So why is it on the gate to the Western graveyard, and why was it carved into that tree?’ I study my sketch again. ‘Oh wait,’ I say. ‘Did Ola email through the photos?’
‘Oh yeah, let’s see.’ Callum opens his email. ‘Yep, here they are. Dear Callum, here are a few photos of the house, hope they’re helpful… blah, blah, blah. Wait, here’s the other email. Promised photo of EW…’ He clicks, then stops, staring at his laptop screen.
‘What?’ I lean in.
He swings the screen to face me. ‘Edward Western. Damn. How’s that for a handsome man?’
I draw a sharp breath. ‘That’s the man from my dream!’
‘Why am I not surprised… Wait, which dream? The strangling one or the stabbing one?’
‘Neither. The other dream, the one where I felt the pain in the house.’ The one where you asked me to trust you .
‘And you’ve never seen him before otherwise?’
I slowly shake my head.
‘And he looked just like this?’
I slowly nod. ‘Same golden eyes.’
‘Well, shit. What if he’s the handsome man your ghost Elizabeth was warning you about?’
I shrug. ‘Could be. When was that photo taken?’
He examines the caption. ‘Edward Fionn Western, 2018, at the East Mill Western property management hearing. This must be from when the town petitioned to take control of the house after Brendin Western’s death.’
‘That would make Edward, what, seventy-five there?’ I reach across Callum and zoom in on the man’s startling face. ‘He looks forty, fifty at most.’
‘Poculum Vitae. Lasting life.’
‘Physical perfection,’ I say. Callum’s foot drops over mine, and I shift my leg to meet it. Our feet tangle behind us. ‘We aren’t really believing this stuff, are we?’ I ask.
‘C’mon, Holly, why not? You see ghosts and have weirdly accurate dreams about people you’ve never met. So…’
‘Those things are different.’ I frown at him.
‘How? Besides, every culture in the world has myths around immortality and resurrection, the soul and the afterlife. Christianity is practically based on it.’
‘But they’re just stories, created to keep the masses morally in check.’
‘I guess that depends on what you believe. But I’m not going to have a theological argument with you right now. Like I said earlier, most myths and legends have their roots in truth.’
‘Even vampires?’ I snort.