‘You’d think they’d have someone watching over it,’ whispered Dennie.
‘I know,’ he replied. ‘Let’s hope they’re getting cocky about having scared us off.’
The stars wheeled slowly overhead. Lights in the surrounding houses went out one by one as even the night-owls sought their beds. A breeze rattled some raspberry canes nearby. Viggo’s ears and nose twitched and quivered at the furtive scampering of small creatures.
David found that if he concentrated he could see quite clearly even though it was dark; the shapes of the world stood out like cardboard cut-outs in a diorama, flat and shadowless. This seemed to be another gift of the first flesh. I don’t want this, he thought, to who or whatever was listening. Get it out of me.
* * *
At half past two in the morning Dennie nudged David awake from a doze. ‘Time to cry wolf,’ she whispered.
He grunted and stretched. ‘Has anything happened?’
‘Yes,’ she replied acidly. ‘I watched it all happen but didn’t like to wake you because you looked so peaceful, sleeping like a cherub.’
‘All right,’ he mumbled. ‘There’s no need to be like that.’
He took her phone and skulked off into the darkness while she settled back to watch the stars and wait.
It was a good thing for her old bones that the night was so mild. She was tempted to try to call up Sarah again, but she didn’t want to risk a repeat of either the migraine or the entity that had come through her. Not here and now. Sarah’s face and shape were just the outward clothing chosen by the part of her mind that as a child had spoken through her doll, and yet in spite of everything she still couldn’t think of the word ‘psychic’ without a sceptical snort. Sarah and Sabrina weren’t two separate things – they were part of the same being, part of herself.
It seemed like only minutes had passed but the next time she looked at her watch it was nearly three. Only the dog licking her hand had woken her from another fugue state, the longest one yet.
‘Please no,’ she whispered. ‘Please, God, not now.’ She felt like an ancient mariner shipwrecked on an ice floe in dangerously warm waters, watching bits of herself break apart and drift away with nothing but an abyss below. What was happening to her? What damage was she doing to herself with all of this? Sensing her distress, the dog nuzzled her, whining, and she stroked his head in gratitude.
Her hand froze.
The dog.
She couldn’t remember the dog’s name.
Panic grabbed her, squeezing her heart and scattering her already tattered thoughts. The dog! His name was… his name was… there was a man, tall and dark, with a beard and a shining sword, and she couldn’t remember his name! She clutched the dog in desperation, and he was licking her face, and her hands found his collar and the metal name tag there and she fumbled for her little torch and flashed the light on it.
‘Viggo!’ she wept in relief, and hugged him tighter still, her face buried in his fur. ‘Oh, Viggo, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!’ Viggo let himself be held as her shudders slowly subsided, and eventually she sat back, wiping her face. ‘I’m sorry I scared you,’ she whispered. ‘But I’m scared myself, boy. I’m really scared. I think whatever this is, it’s bad, and it’s getting worse.’ Cruelly, the one word that she wished she couldn’t remember was the one that sat in her mind as heavy as a tombstone.
Dementia.
Just thinking it made her cringe physically. It had taken Brian’s father, reducing him to a shambling scarecrow of a man who had lived for the last ten years of his life unable to recognise his own family. It was an old person’s disease, but she wasn’t old, she was only in her sixties, damn it – she might live another third of her life so far. To do so with her brain rotting from the inside out like a worm-eaten cabbage was her worst nightmare.
But there was something that could fix it, if David’s story was to be believed. He’d shown her the scar on his leg, and Alice’s medical results were pretty incontrovertible. If it was true, then Ardwyn Hughes had access to something that could make it stop. All Dennie had to do was go cap in hand, and what was the sacrifice of one’s pride when it was one’s very mind at stake?
Well now, ‘sacrifice’. That was the word, wasn’t it? Yes, all she had to do was swallow her pride, along with a bellyful of animal flesh. All she had to do was be complicit in a young woman’s murder.
No.
‘Fuck you,’ she said. ‘I’d rather die.’
3:07 came and went without a visitation from Sarah, and at first she was worried that something had gone wrong, but it made sense if the apparition really was a hidden part of her mind trying to warn her conscious self about something. This was one night Sarah didn’t need to show herself.
‘Consider me warned,’ she whispered.
When Viggo started to whine she knew David was back, and moments later he settled down beside her.
‘Everything okay?’ she whispered.
He nodded. ‘Shirley was asleep on her sofa so I didn’t have to make up any sort of excuse. Called them. Even saw them on the way back here, which was pretty quick, to be fair. Just one car, though, but at least we know
