In the Moors (6 page)

I settled onto the mossy bank of my brook, my bare feet dangling in the water. I could feel a tickling sensation. Trendle was licking my toes. His thick coat shone with water.

“Come on in,” he said, and I slid down into the dark green depths.

When Trendle guides me into the stream, it becomes bottomless—it reaches into the underworld where shadowy spirits live. Trendle swam beside me as I sank, stems of weed tugging at my hair and ankles.

“
Here,” said Trendle, and I followed him along a narrow, unlit tunnel of water. I could barely see his fur glisten in the darkness, but I felt the flick his tail on my outstretched fingers. I let myself breathe in—there was no need to hold my breath in the water of the spirit world.

We came out into a muddy lane with high hedges of hazel and ash. The overhanging branches met above my head, winter bare and black. The lane was so gloomy, I had to squint to make out the silhouette of a cottage against the cloud-covered sky.

I knew we were close to the grim little room where I'd seen the sack of hair. I willed myself towards the building until I was standing outside a door, the sort of door country dwellings had in the olden days, with wide, ornate hinges, rusting at their edges. The door's black paint was peeling and smeared with mud, as if someone had kicked at it. The name of the house was prominently displayed on an iron plate.

Brokeltuft
Cottage.

I put my hand on the round knob of the iron handle. It was as cold as a summer drink. When I turned it, I heard the clang of a latch lifting inside. The door swung open. Carpetless wooden stairs rose up before me. A passageway led past them, into a kitchen that hadn't been replaced since the Fifties. I could see the gas cooker and the kettle steaming on its hob.

“What … what shall I do, Trendle?”

“Go on.” The otter lay along my arm. His coat still dripped from the journey, although I felt bone dry. His voice was in my head. “We have to put fear to one side and probe this world if we want answers.” He twitched his whiskers and water drops flew from them.

Step by step I advanced along the passage. I remembered the menacing presence standing close behind me in the little room with the sack of hair. Would I find that presence in the kitchen? The whistle of the kettle became shrill. A girl stepped out of the shadows and switched off the gas.

“Want a cuppa?” she asked me.

I almost sobbed with relief.

“Take sugar?” she asked, appraising me briefly. She was not even my height, just a girl in her teens. I saw her platinum blonde hair clearly. It was dark at the roots and curling at the ends. But, as I often find on my journeys, her face was quite obscured, sort of wishy-washy. I'm never sure why I can't see every detail in a trance clearly, but it is usually so. The girl slammed a cup without a saucer down beside the cooker and opened a larder door. She took out a packet of biscuits and sliced through the packet with a bread knife. The biscuits were thin rectangles, pale brown and studded all over their surface with black dots; little bits of crushed currant.

“Garibaldi biscuits,” said the girl. “That's all there ever is. Bloody squashed flies. Makes you puke to think of it.” She snapped a thin slab of speckled biscuit between her thumb and fingers. “Go on, help yourself.”

I looked down at Trendle. “Is this a gift?” I asked, meaning should I take the symbol back to Cliff.

Trendle blinked once. “For you, dear,” he said into my mind.

“Bloody take one, will you?” The girl's voice had changed. She wasn't joking around any longer. “Take it and get outta here.”

I thought it wise to do her bidding. I didn't even stop for confirmation from my guide. I ran along the passage, clutching a Garibaldi. The massive front door slammed behind me with a boom.

The light was fading fast into evening. I breathed relief out, and my breath whitened before me. I took a step, scrunching over dead leaves.

“This is Cliff's spirit world, isn't it?” I said to Trendle. “No wonder he feels like he does. It needs cleaning up.”

“We can't do anything here today,” said Trendle. “Except leave the food as an offering to his guardians.”

It was good advice. I crumbled the biscuit as if feeding birds. My fingers felt sticky from the currants. “Surely we can help him? His spirit feels so … shattered.”

“You know that Cliff's soul is in pieces. It's going to take a long time to bring them together. Let's walk with caution.”

I nodded. Trendle was my conscience, my inner reservations and gut feelings, as well as my spirit friend; I would listen to whatever he had to tell me.

I stared at the hedge on the far side of the lane. There was not a leaf or bud to be seen. I have a hazel tree in my front garden and at the moment it's festooned with glorious dangly catkin earrings, but it was still deep winter in this place. I bent a sapless twig and it snapped off in my hand. “You're not dead, are you?” I asked it. The wind rustled through the brittle branches in reply.

“Nothing here is dead,” said Trendle, soft-voiced. “Just debilitated.”

In the depths of the thicket was a single, perfect hazel catkin. The branches were rough against my hand as I reached in and let it rest on my palm like a caterpillar, a dusting of pollen staining my skin.

This was the sign I should take back to Cliff, something hopeful for the future. As I thought this, the drumming that was still vibrating at the back of my mind changed its rhythm, calling me home.

Cliff had fallen into a deep sleep. No wonder I'd been able to slip so quietly in to his world. Gently, I untied my arm from the braid that connected us and went into the kitchen to boot up my laptop. I recorded my journey, saved the file, and printed out a copy for Cliff. I crept into the therapy room and slipped the folded paper into his notebook. With sudden resolution, I drew a child's representation of the cottage on the back of the paper, concentrating the details into the door, with its round handle and wrought-iron plaque.

Cliff let out a snore, and I dropped the pencil in alarm as the noise exploded into the silence of the room. Yet I didn't want to wake him. He would have to work through the night, so it seemed good for him to catch an hour now.

I scrabbled for the pencil, thinking that I should also draw a representation of the catkin. But I realized I could do better than that. I crept away and let myself out through the front door. It was a drizzly evening. The streetlights splashed Renoir orange over the pavement. I breathed in the cool air. Against the low wall that separates the house from Harold Street, I'd planted a line of bushes—a pretty pussy willow, a Japanese maple, and a corkscrew hazel. At their base, daffodils pierced the soil like green lances, almost ready to open. I stepped over the soil to the hazel. The branches were laden with fine-haired golden fingers. I love to see passersby stopping to touch the catkins or put their nose to the pollen. The occasional delinquent will break off a couple of twigs and carry them away—these are usually elderly ladies, keen to plant them as cuttings. Despite these attacks, my trees are thriving.

As I plucked a single yellow catkin, a cry of anguish arose, as if the young tree wailed at its loss. I sprang around. The noise was coming from inside my house, a low growl that progressed up several scales until it wavered hysterically on a top note. It was a petition for the kind of help no one could offer, and it made my spine jangle.

I rushed in. Cliff Houghton was kneeling on the floor by my desk, vomiting into my waste bin.

“Cliff?” He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes, his pupils tiny pinholes at each centre. I grabbed some tissues and thrust them into his hand. “Come and sit down.” I helped him shuffle to the wicker seat and he fell into it, huddled with his arms tucked around his knees. “I'll get you some water.”

On the way to the kitchen, I grabbed the bin he'd filled and dumped it by the kitchen door. When I got back to him, he was babbling something incomprehensible. I could see the cold sweat like oil smeared across his face, and he was panting as if he'd run for miles. He gulped the water I offered. The skein of plaited silk dangled from his wrist like broken jewellery.

I bent over to loosen it. With a sharp movement, he grabbed my arm.

“What did you see?”

His tone was urgent; I knew I had to be as accurate as possible. “A house on a country lane,” I said, keeping my voice light. “Someone was there to offer me tea and biscuits—Garibaldi biscuits.”

“That place,” muttered Cliff. “I'd forgotten it. How did I do that? I don't understand.” He screwed his fingers to his mouth.

My vision flickered. A gauzy veil fell over it, creating a double-image—a glimpse of Cliff's otherworld self. I stared as his grey eyes seemed to travel back into his head until they were pools of murky water. The fingers round his mouth twisted the skin as if it were rubber. Grotesque growths protruded from his nostrils, green as sea cucumbers, writhing over his cheeks. As quickly as it came, the vision faded. I wasn't able to speak for a moment, but he was still gripping my wrist like an iron band; without thinking, I yanked myself free.

I've been having these “psychic events” since I started to train seriously as a shaman. Despite the turnaround in my life, I was still as bad as ever at picking guys. A loser called Jon was my man back then—or at least, I was his girl. One night, sitting at a bar table, chatting, I saw the film of reality lift from his face. For a second or two, the otherworld Jon was revealed; snarling mouth, over-long canines, bloodshot eyes, flaring nostrils. I was so shocked I dropped my bottle of beer. I thought I'd seen the devil himself.

At the time, I hoped a moment like that would never happen again, but they've increased over the years, and now I welcome them. They are not all unpleasant. I might see angels behind the masks people wear, or the features of a trusting infant, and this understanding helps me work with my clients. Cliff was carrying a form of parasitic spirit. These “intrusions” are the leeches of the spirit world, and they attach to people in extreme circumstances. It didn't mean that Cliff was the architect of appalling deeds. Rather, that he was troubled by shades of dread—that, some time in the past, his soul had been injured.

“It was a bad place,” he said. He was talking to himself, though, not to me.

I took a deep breath. “It wasn't all bad. There was some hope.”

I looked about for the catkin I'd picked as my returning gift from the spirit world. It lay on the laminate of the floor, crushed underfoot. I bit my lip at the sight, not knowing how to continue.

Cliff pulled at the silk cord. It came away from his arm. He handed it to me. “No. There's no hope now.”

It was the picture that had released the memory. He'd picked up the sheet of paper and seen the sketch I'd drawn. In the instant he read the name on the cottage door, a memory had flooded into him, not just as images, but as sensations, smells, tastes, pain. He'd cast up his accounts into the nearest receptacle.

“I must have blocked it out for all these years,” he said. Saliva drooled from the corner of his slack mouth and he dabbed at it with the tissues. “I've heard of women who do that about bad memories, but I'd never really believed it happened.”

“What—What is it … you forgot?”

Cliff was quiet for several minutes. He stared into the middle distance. I wasn't sure if he was still summoning up memories or simply trying to put the ones he had into words. Finally he said, “I'd just turned eleven.”

Then I knew. A dreadful sensation flooded through me, a choking feeling that made me want to back off or cover Cliff's mouth with my hand to stop him telling me, and I thought of the way he covered his mouth, as if he too, always had that feeling. To my horror, I found myself saying, “What happened, Cliff?”

“It must have been the start to the summer holidays, because Dad was having chemotherapy, I think. Anyway, he was in hospital and Mum and Rachel were going to visit, but I'd asked if I could go round Greg's.” He managed a wonky smile. “I hated going into the hospital. Dad would be strapped to this bag of fluid, which seemed to do him harm, not good, and the pyjamas Mum had bought him specially for the treatments didn't fit him anymore, they hung on his bones. Greg had a tent that his dad let him put up on their lawn. We used to sleep in it, some nights. Thought it was a great adventure.

“Anyway, I think Greg and I built a sort of ramp affair out of planks for our bikes that afternoon. Mine hit a rogue nail. We tried to repair it using Greg's kit, but his dad told us it still had a slow leak. He made me promise not to ride it until I'd bought a new inner tube. He wanted to take me home, but I said I'd be fine pushing the bike. I took my time, though. I was worried I'd get well told off about the tyre. Mum got jumpy when Dad was in hospital.”

The story seemed to be going nowhere as Cliff broke off to sip some more water. I knew I mustn't say a word or even move, even though I badly wanted to shift position. I was kneeling on the floor beside him, my knees digging into the laminate, but Cliff had grabbed my hand and was holding it as if it were the railing to a high balcony.

“It was a lovely evening. I can remember now, and that's so odd—like this memory has landed inside my head all in one piece. Even so, I was getting fed up of pushing the bike. I was a mile or so away from home when this car drew up beside me. There was a woman and a girl inside. The woman put her head out of the window and asked if I had far to go. I wasn't going to say no to a lift. Besides, I thought it was just a mum and her daughter.” Cliff paused.