Chapter Ten #2
badly. The tires squealed as we inched down the spiral ramps, and Viv hit the brakes too soon and too hard all the way home.
She and Mum had left the cottage in such a hurry, there were no lights on when we arrived and it was pitch dark.
We went straight to bed. It felt like the longest day of my life. I unwrapped my foot in the bathroom and sat on the edge
of the bath to re-dress the wound. It was angry and sore. I stood on one foot to brush my teeth. The bathroom mirror had a
chip in the corner that had been there my whole life. In the reflection I could see lines drawn on the edge of the door where
Mum had marked my height as I grew up. I remembered how it felt to stand there as she balanced a pencil on my head to make
those marks.
When I looked at my face it was a shock to see Magnus staring back at me.
His eyes, anyway. I wondered how Mum had felt seeing him in me every single day as I grew.
How she felt about that now. It made me visualize the rest of him, and I hated it.
It felt wrong to imagine his face here, in my childhood home, our sanctum, though it niggled at me that he’d suggested Mum had kept him away.
I turned my back on the mirror until I was ready to rinse and left the room without looking again.
I messaged Sid, wondering if he was still awake.
Can you call?
The idea of telling him everything that had happened was daunting. A changed me might mean a changed us. But I shouldn’t catastrophize. I got into my childhood bed. My body sank gratefully into its familiar hollows, but nothing
felt the same. It was like the day Mum was diagnosed. You know you’ve already changed forever, but you don’t know how yet,
or whether you’ll sink or swim.
It was impossible to sleep. Everything that had happened fought for space in my head. I wondered if Magnus could help Mum
through this new crisis. Maybe get her in a private room, summon specialists. I considered calling him. Before I’d left Cambridge
he’d given me his number, promising he’d respond, day or night, if I contacted him.
“I barely sleep,” he’d said. “It’s a curse and a privilege. Sometimes at night I visit my manuscripts. I look at them in candlelight
and feel like a time traveler.”
Such theater.
I called Mum and she didn’t pick up so I tried the main number for her ward. Cell service at the cottage was poor, which was
frustrating, but eventually I spoke to a nurse who reassured me that Mum was stable and settled for the night.
I wondered whether to tell Viv. She’d want to know, but she needed rest as much as I did. I opened the door and saw that the
light was still on in her bedroom. I could hear faint voices, as if she was listening to something. I crossed the landing.
It sounded like a podcast. I heard: “Manifest your perfect partnership.”
I rapped on her door softly. “Viv, sorry to interrupt, but I just spoke to the nurse and Mum’s stable.”
The voice went immediately silent. She’d muted it. “Thanks,” she said.
“I thought you’d want to know.”
I stood there for a moment, but she didn’t say anything else. I imagined her waiting for me to leave. She felt so much like
part of the family that sometimes, I forgot we paid her to look after Mum, that I should respect her boundaries. Perhaps I
shouldn’t have disturbed her. “Good night, then,” I said.
“Good night.”
I crept back to bed. Sid called.
“Hey,” he said. “Are you at the airport?” His voice was muted, and I heard background noise, as if he was out somewhere. I
checked the time. It was almost eleven.
“No, I’m at the cottage. I had to miss my flight. Mum’s in the hospital again.”
“Oh, God. What’s happening?”
I told him. Reception was lousy again, so we kept losing each other. I didn’t want to try to explain about Magnus over a bad
line.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“I’m at the computer science department.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.”
“Listen, I’ll come and join you,” he said.
“You don’t need to. It’s okay.”
“I’ll book the morning flight to Bristol.”
“Sid, it’s okay, really. I’m okay. Why don’t we speak in the morning? She could have turned a corner by then. I’ll call you
from the hospital. It’ll be better reception.”
“I’m coming.”
It wasn’t worth arguing about and I was secretly pleased.
After we hung up, I took some more painkillers for my foot, and as soon as they kicked in sleep snatched me and dragged me into Boschian nightmares where my mother was screaming and all the shadows had eyes, and when I startled awake in the small hours I didn’t know if they were a reaction to what I’d been through that day or a premonition of worse.
Sid
As soon as he got off the phone with Anya, Sid booked a flight to Bristol for first thing the next morning.
The lab was emptying out. It was too early in the academic year for students to be pulling all-nighters. Sid planned to stay
there until he found some answers.
He bought himself a refrigerator-stunned sandwich and an energy drink from a vending machine. When he sat back down, he realized
he hadn’t done any digging on Paul yet, so he typed “Paul Fields,” hit the search button, and found a Facebook page.
One year ago, Paul had been working for a local climbing company and was listed as a guide. Before that, he’d been based in
Anglesey for a few years. And before that, in Northern Italy. Sid wondered if it was where he’d met Giulia. He found only
one post from the past year: a bleak shot of the ocean, from the beach in front of Paul and Giulia’s house, captioned: “Gray
days.” It was a literal description of the scene but a sharp contrast in tone from the upbeat posts of previous years, where
Paul showed off his travels and his climbing achievements. Sid searched the other social media platforms, but Paul was absent.
He thought of the broken man he’d just met with. The drop-off in activity on Facebook matched up with the timeline Paul had
given for his decline in mental health. It made him more plausible. Sid rubbed his eyes. What happened to people when they
came here? Was it going to happen to him and Anya?
He expanded his search to the deep web, which didn’t tell him anything new.
Then, to the dark web. As before, he ran spiderweb searches for a range of terms: Diana Cornish, Anya Brown, Sarabeth Schilders, Giulia Orlando, Karen Lynch, Institute of Manuscript Studies St. Andrews, Paul Fields, Folio 9, Alice Trevelyan, and Minxu Peng.
The only one that threw up interesting results was Folio 9. A few usernames were associated with the term across a range of
forums. The search did its work of finding out where they congregated. It was in a private, invitation-only forum called “Suspicious
Minds.”
Sid frowned. He would have to get into it by impersonating one of the chat members. Not impossible. He had a text file of
hundreds of thousands of common passwords. He ran an automated spam attack on the forum that tried every password in combination
with each of the usernames, and he was in.
The chat participants presented as nerdy medieval academics who were spooked and obsessed with ensuring their privacy. Sid
allowed himself a small smile at that—clearly, none of them had IT expertise or they’d have been way more careful—but it soon
faded when he found a mention of Folio 9 and of Alice Trevelyan in the same sentence, followed by the killer line:
I have definitive proof that Folio 9 was forged.
He stared at it. If true, this could be devastating for Anya. If. The skin on the back of his neck crawled. He wanted to know more, but that was all it said.
He spent hours searching, typing in combinations of his search terms, but nothing else came up. It was almost midnight when
he walked home to grab his passport and a few hours’ sleep before getting a taxi to the airport.
Outside, the deep darkness beyond the campus lights spooked him.
He took the main road into town, then walked up North Street.
He knew he was close to the cottage when he passed beneath the tower of St. Salvator’s Chapel.
A rowdy group of students walked toward him, on the other side of the road, drinking beer and sharing boxes of fish and chips.
At first, he was grateful to have company on the quiet streets, then he did a double take, his brain telling him urgently
that one of the women he’d seen on the footpath with Paul was part of the group. He stared, unsure now, unable to identify
her from behind, but also certain he was right. He could have been. The group had just passed a narrow alleyway that she could
have disappeared into. She could even be standing in the shadows and watching from there, right now.
He hesitated, wondering if he should check, then shuddered involuntarily, as if someone had walked over his grave. He was
too spooked to chase anyone down a dark alleyway, and he had a flight to catch in a few hours’ time. He hurried to the top
of North Street and cut toward the Scores. He knew he wouldn’t sleep, but he couldn’t wait to be out of town and with Anya.
Anya
I woke at six the next morning, sitting bolt upright, my skin slick with sweat and my jaw aching with tension.
Magnus and his London home had appeared in my nightmare: his face looming, then dissolving and reforming as the de Kooning
oil of the obliterated woman I’d seen on the wall of his London house, the thick paint twitching, then writhing, becoming
a backdrop to my mother’s painful death. Horrific.
I found a message from Sid on my phone.
On my way to the airport landing in Bristol around 10. I’ll come straight to the hospital.
I couldn’t wait to see him.
I was still expecting a reply from Diana and was surprised she hadn’t responded yet. I checked that the message I’d sent her
last night had gone through: I had to miss my flight back to Scotland. Mum is very unwell, so I’m home, and will be needed here for a few more days. I’ll
be back as soon as possible.