Chapter 40
On the other side of the door was a small room, richly scented with wood smoke and old stone.
The fireplace from the main lounge of the pub continued through the wall to this private space, dimly lighting a long table pressed against the back wall and a few chairs here and there.
The curtains were drawn over the single small window, so only the silhouettes of the hanging baskets outside could be seen.
“So, you survived then.”
I jumped at the sound of the voice. It was the same I had heard in my fever dream in the woods. As my eyes adjusted, a lone seated figure leant out of the shadows and into the light of the flames.
The old woman in the wheelchair regarded me from her spot next to the fireplace.
It was the first time I’d properly looked at her. Her face was a web of cracks and wrinkles, as if tracing every thought and every feeling she’d ever had. Not a single one had been hidden. My own face felt like a mask in comparison.
“Roger’ll be happy to hear you made it through.”
I flushed, embarrassed. I’d never asked the old man his name.
Unsure how to address her, I held out my uninjured hand, suddenly aware of my slept-in muddy clothing.
“Hello, I’m Tamsin.”
“I know who you are.” The old woman smiled. “You can call me Callie-Ann.”
She shook my hand. Her grip was firm and strong, like shaking hands with a forest.
I searched the room.
“Where is Roger?”
“Visiting some old pals in the north. Giving me a bit of peace.”
She pointed to the chair on the other side of the fireplace to her. I took the seat.
“I thought he was waiting for me to prove that I am who I said I am or solve a riddle or something.”
She chuckled.
“He is a bit of a trickster, isn’t he?” She shook her head and looked into the fire.
I sat on the edge of the chair, body coiled tight.
The old woman was still and calm. I looked into the fire, too.
Looked at her face. Then back into the fire.
Tried to see something in the fire. No, just flames.
I’d come here following a sense of certainty, a down-in-the-bones knowing like recognising a snake or a growl in the dark. Now I was unsure.
I watched her carefully. Fergus said she was a witch.
I wondered if she would take my punctured hand and read the dried blood in the lines of my palm.
Or perhaps she would reveal an ancient deck of cards from the cavernous pockets of her anorak.
Or she could just be an ordinary old woman, glad of some company as she watched the fire, waiting for her husband to return.
“I heard you barked at the little shit,” said Callie-Ann.
“What?” Then I remembered. The teen boy out in the main room, and what I’d done yesterday. “Oh. Yeah. I guess I did.”
The old woman nodded, a ghost of an amused grin creeping up the side of her lined face.
“That’s not all though.”
I swallowed.
“I wanted to do worse,” I admitted.
She turned to look at me, firelight dancing in her eyes. She held out a hand.
“Show me then,” she said.
I pulled my injured hand out of the sleeve of my filthy hoodie.
The puncture was a crusted welt of dried black blood, and the flesh between my thumb and forefinger was swollen to the size of a golf ball.
It hummed with pain. In my palm, I was still holding the needle, threaded onto the ring of my house key.
Callie-Ann picked up the needle and made a small ‘hmm’ sound. Then she took my hand and yanked it up to her eye to inspect it. I jerked forward as she pulled the whole limb closer.
“You put it through yourself?” She handed the needle back to me.
“I wanted to put it in his eye.”
“Hmm, nasty.”
“I know.” I sank a little into the shame of it.
“We all want to lash out at the world sometimes. It’s the actual lashing out that gets you into trouble, not the wanting bit.
” She huffed, still inspecting my hand. “That boy is a little shit. Though the little shit has his own problems. That’s why he’s such a little shit.
But he’s not worth going to prison for.”
“Rowan said something similar.”
“Rowan’s a wise lad.” She nodded to herself. “A hard-won wisdom, at that. If only someone had intervened earlier.”
She gave me a knowing look.
“I think he tried to warn me.”
“It’s hard to hear what you’re not ready for.”
I shifted uncomfortably in her gaze. Sitting with this woman felt like being caught between the shower and my room without a towel.
No, worse; it felt like all my skin was see-through and my insides were visible for all to see.
All my guts and lungs and piss and shit and stomach contents.
And my heart, beating fast, like a bird trapped in a net, so small and so exposed.
I wanted to tell her, please let me put my skin back on.
She straightened up and sighed.
“At least it’s a clean hole straight through. Lucky you used a leatherworking needle. Needs cleaning though.”
With a surprisingly quick movement, she reached over to a side table then dumped a small glass of clear liquid on the wound. Vodka. It burned immediately. White light flashed behind my eyes. I screamed.
“I know, I know,” she said as she took a napkin and started to wipe the dirt and grime away from the edges. “It needs to be done. Got to clean it before we can heal it.”
She sniffed the puncture then squeezed the edges. I bit my other hand to stifle a cry. A rivulet of blood and plasma dribbled down my wrist.
“No pus,” she said. “That’s good.”
She dabbed a medicinal-smelling ointment onto the wound.
It instantly cooled the stinging flesh. The relief was so good I could have groaned.
My muscles relaxed and I sank back into the chair, blossoms of sweat clinging along my back, now chill on the opposite side of me to the fire.
I watched as Callie-Ann gently applied a sterile patch to my now clean hand and wrapped a bandage around it.
“That should do you for now, but you’ll want to go see a proper doctor.
” She leaned back into her chair and let me reclaim my hand.
“Not today, though. Today you have work to do.” She fixed me with a look.
“So, now we’ve fixed one wound, what’s this Roger tells me about you having some bother with your neighbour? ”
Finally!
I leaned forward, voice barely rising above the crackle of the flames in the hearth.
“The thing is,” I said, licking my lips, trying to think of another way to say it and failing. “I don’t think she’s human.”
The old woman’s eyebrows raised.
I didn’t know if she thought I was crazy or what; I didn’t care. I hadn’t come this far to start clamming up now.
“She rustles around the house next door at all hours, even when it seems like she isn’t in. She can change her appearance. One minute she was mousey and odd looking, the next she was like some supermodel. She broke into my home—”
Callie-Ann’s mouth flickered slightly.
“She broke through?”
“Yes. And then I—” Oh God, how could I explain this? “I hurt her. It was an accident. I got startled. But I was also really angry at the time. And drunk. Not that that excuses anything—”
Callie-Ann waved my excuses aside. “How did you hurt her?”
“I put an axe in her head.”
The old woman’s eyebrows really raised that time.
“But the blood disappeared! Off my axe. Off the floor. There was nothing. And then the next day she was fine. I saw her, here in The Curtyard. As if it never happened.” I wiped my non-bandaged hand over my face.
“And then yesterday, in the mist, I saw her and… she looked like—I think she looks like me. But better somehow.”
The old woman nodded, eyes skirting over the flames.
“Hmm, the axe. She probably wasn’t expecting that. That’s why it’s so different this time.”
“This time?” I hugged my arms around my shoulders. “This has happened before? What is she?”
“Those are complicated question that share a rather long answer,” she said as she reached round the side of her chair and unsheathed an impressive-looking walking stick.
It was made of rich, dark wood and had an iron point at the end, blackened with use and age. The grip at the top had a surprisingly heavy build to it, a little like a hammer. It made me wonder how this woman was hefting it about so easily.
She drew a line into the ash below the grate of the fire, the metal tip skipping over worn layers in the hearthstone.
“James Hogg came by this way in 1802 on one of his travels. He goes on to write The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner where a puritanical man meets the devil as his double on the mists of Arthur’s Seat.”
She drew another line.
“Sometime later in 1868, Robert Louis Stevenson passes through the same area on his way to the family engineering works in Wick. He goes on to write The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde where a genius doctor splits himself in two: his good and kind self, and his evil and murderous double.”
With a screech of iron on stone, she laid another line into the ash.
“Around the same time as Stevenson’s trip, J M Barrie was a boy living not too far from here.
When he was young, his mother thought there was another boy living in the house.
A boy who looked like him. She thought it was his dead elder brother.
Barrie goes on to write Peter Pan about a child who’d run off to live with the faeries.
A child who gets separated from his shadow. ”
One more line in the ash, joining the others into a squat rectangle.