Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
T obias had lost track of time. Or time had lost track of him. One of those for certain. He had been walking in sand with an enormous sky. For days or years. Now he was somewhere cool and quiet. A forest. The sky was crosshatched with branches and the sun was filtered through pale green leaves. It was a relief. He knew that. And he knew he was looking for something. Or he thought he was looking for something. Unless that was a dream he had had once. His thoughts were slow and there were spaces between them. Spaces that he could lose himself in if he wasn’t mindful.
He was just thinking about the word mindful and how it felt to think it and whether it would be enjoyable to say out loud. Whether he could, in fact, still stay things out loud. And that made him wonder at the purpose of such an activity. There was nobody here to hear him and that reminded him that once upon a time there had been others to hear him speak. That he had not always been so utterly alone.
At that moment, the densely packed trees parted into a large clearing. In the centre of the clearing, there was a round hillock. It was covered in grass and didn’t look as if it belonged in this forest. Like him. In that moment, he glimpsed a truth. He wasn’t supposed to be alone in this forest. And that hill was important.
Esme went to The Three Sisters’ house. Bee would understand her concerns, she knew. She hoped Bee had finished her spirit walking. She was the only other person who didn’t seem to be taken in by the Lewis show, who hadn’t attended the bogus fire ceremony.
There was no answer at the front door. Esme was debating with herself about going around to the back garden and seeing if Bee was out there, when the door opened a crack. Through the opening, she could see a white dress and black hair, and her skin prickled with goose bumps. It was Lucy.
Esme hadn’t seen Lucy since she had saved Luke. She opened her mouth to say ‘thank you’ for that, but something stopped her. Words were powerful and she didn’t want to imply any kind of obligation to the youngest of The Three Sisters. Instead, she kept her speech purely factual. ‘I’m looking for Bee.’
The door opened wider. Lucy was standing on tiptoe and gazing at Esme with black eyes that sparkled with starlight. Esme felt herself tip forward, as if she would fall into them, and grabbed instinctively at the door frame.
Lucy’s laugh was girlish and terrible. She skipped away, leaving the door open. Esme didn’t know whether to step inside or not. It felt like a trap. She could see the familiar open-plan space in which she drank tea and practised yoga and meditation with Bee, but it seemed altered in a way that she couldn’t perceive with her normal vision. Something menacing was telling her to turn away and go home. Bee was always telling her to trust her gut, so that was exactly what she did. Lucy’s laughter seemed to follow her.
Bee wasn’t sure where she had stepped through. The air was warm and humid and she was in an ancient agricultural landscape. She wasn’t alone. Farmers were working on the land with hand tools, and there was a small wooden building with a cooking fire outside the entrance. An old woman with a wide-brimmed hat was sitting nearby, hulling beans. She raised her head as Bee approached, and she saw that the woman was blind, her eyes milky with cataracts.
‘If I feed you, the food will burn,’ the woman said in a pleading voice.
She could sense Bee’s presence and assumed she was a spirit. There was a legend in China that ancestors could return as ghosts. They were starving, but if the family member tried to feed them, the food ignited before the ghost could take a bite. They were doomed to see the food, smell the food, even be offered the food, but to never taste a morsel. Like Tantalus. Yet another cautionary tale of the pain that could be inflicted as punishment for wrongdoing in a mortal life.
Bee wasn’t sure if she was Elsewhere or had stepped back into her own world but through a tear on the other side of the globe. If she was in her world, then she ought to be invisible. She was walking in spirit only. She turned back to where she had entered. It was a shrine. A pile of stones and a gold statue of a bear. That didn’t belong in the China of her world, Bee was almost certain, but the woman had spoken something close to a Beijing dialect.
One of the men in the field straightened up and looked directly at her. One woman with the sight, who could see her in spirit form, was possible. Two highly unlikely. She was Elsewhere, then.
The farmer was still staring. He had a knife in one hand and Bee knew it was probably intended to frighten weary travellers. She straightened her spirit body and walked over the neatly hoed field to meet the farmer. She wasn’t afraid of his knife and he would be her guide.
Luke had never seen so many people in the bookshop at one time. Wave after wave of visitors were streaming across the causeway and wandering around the island, browsing the bookshop, buying snacks and drinks in Matteo’s and eating at The Rising Moon.
Lewis had helped out for the first couple of days, but he hadn’t been very good at it. The bookshop hadn’t liked it, either, and had kept hiding even the most prosaic of shelves such as the ‘f’ section of crime fiction and sporadically switching off lights in different parts of the shop, plunging them into random darkness. On the whole, Luke was relieved that Lewis had found other ways to occupy himself.
He helped a woman find a thriller by C.L. Taylor that she hadn’t yet read, and sold a stack of vintage gardening books to a teenager in a washed-out hoodie. ‘Nice place,’ he said as he paid. When he turned to leave, Luke saw that someone had written ‘burn capitalism’ onto the back of his hoodie in puffy marker.
Luke appreciated the sentiment, but he could do without burning allusions in his shop. He rubbed at the marks on his chest. They still ached as if they weren’t fully healed.
At Strand House, Esme had been full for the week. When one set of people left, another lot arrived. Nobody was staying more than the two-night rule, but she had never experienced this level of turnaround before. By Thursday, demand for accommodation was too high, and Lewis said that he would start hosting people at Tobias’s house. ‘It’s the only way to maximise. If people can only stay such a short time, we need to pack them in while the weather is good.’
That was the other thing. The weather wasn’t particularly good. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as it had been in the first few days after Tobias’s disappearance, but it was standard early spring on Unholy Island. Extremely changeable, in other words. Cold and wet as often as it was dry, misty, chilled, grey on many of the others, with occasional moments of sunshine in a cloudy sky.
Esme objected to Tobias’s private space being opened up to strangers, but she had been in the minority. ‘It’s good to make money while we can’ had been Matteo’s pragmatic response. Even Hammer had shrugged. ‘I don’t think Tobias would mind. Besides, he’s not using it at the moment.’
She had tried to get Luke on his own to talk about it, but he was either busy in the shop or spending time with Lewis. It was good that they had regained their closeness and she didn’t begrudge him time with his family, but she missed him too. And worried that this distance between them would turn out to be more permanent.
It was almost midnight, and Esme was in her kitchen. The guests had all, finally, retired for the night and she was enjoying the peace and quiet. She knew she would be tired tomorrow – it would be another early start to make the guests' breakfast – but she wanted a few minutes to drink tea in her home and to pretend that things were normal. Jet was out, no doubt hunting. Or sulking. One of the families that was staying had a small girl who had grabbed his tail earlier.
She had brewed chamomile and valerian and added a spoonful of honey. The bread was proving in a basket on the side and she had a tray of breakfast muffins ready to bake. Small pots of bircher muesli were already assembled and in the fridge. There was clean folded bedding in the laundry basket ready for the bed changes and no reason to feel unsettled. All was well.
Esme yawned. She was more tired than she had realised, or the tea was working quickly. She put the mug on the side and turned to make her way to bed.
She did not notice the figure in her garden, staring through the window at the tableau inside.
The warmly lit kitchen. The sleepy witch. Lucy prowled around the grass in her bare feet. The island didn’t feel right. The humans were dreamwalking, not properly awake. Lucy didn’t usually concern herself with the people, didn’t have the patience or the interest, but her skin was itching with the wrongness that had stolen over the island. Something was not right, and the witch was drinking tea. Oblivious.