Midwinterblood Read online

  Eric passes his time walking around the island. He nods at people he’s getting to know, and smiles. From time to time he stoops and sniffs at a flower in this garden or that.

  Merle comes to see him sometimes, and he is just as happy to see anyone else as her. There was something about her, that’s all. That’s how the thought forms in his head. There was something about her. But it doesn’t matter. Not really. She seems a little distracted, frustrated at times, and Eric starts to wonder what the cause might be, but he decides that that doesn’t matter, either. She ought to be like everyone else on the island. Sometimes she seems to look at him almost accusingly, but he can’t fathom why, or what he might have done. He hasn’t got the energy, his mind is too slow, and he soon gives up worrying about it.

  The people are smiling and beautiful, and Eric feels happy and beautiful, too.

  * * *

  His only other visitor during that time is not a person.

  One morning he finds a rabbit sitting in the middle of the path to his door. He looks closely and realizes it’s not a rabbit but a hare, long and lean. It’s sitting next to him, but is clearly watching him. Waiting.

  He moves forward, expecting it to startle and bolt, but it does not. Puzzled, he makes a jump at it. It still stays exactly where it is. He is about to go right up to it, but something about its stare is unnerving, and in the end it is Eric who gives way to the hare, circling around it to go for a walk.

  When he comes home that afternoon, the hare has gone.

  * * *

  The days pass.

  One day melts into the next, the endless sun smoothing the journey around the calendar into one long chorus of joy. Of beauty, of joy, and of forgetting. Always forgetting.

  The days pass.

  Twelve

  It is the middle of what should be the night, when Eric suddenly wakes up, dreaming he is drowning.

  He throws himself upright and out of bed, and cannot understand why there is actually liquid in his mouth. He falls onto the floor, choking, spluttering, retching some water that he has sucked into his windpipe.

  The bedroom door is ajar. Does he hear, or does he imagine footsteps on the wooden staircase? He stumbles downstairs and finds the front door wide open, but there is no one there. He scans up and down the lane, and across the meadows. But there is no one there.

  Warily, and still spluttering, he shuts the door, and makes his way back to bed.

  His blinds are drawn, and as he switches on the light in the bedroom, he sees a piece of paper on the floor, right in the middle of the rug by his bed.

  It is a little damp from his choking, but the words on the paper are clear enough.

  Wake up and remember. You were right. The answer lies beyond the hill.

  He looks at it blankly, and shakes his head.

  “Well, so it is,” he says.

  He stares at the note for a long time, trying to think what to do, trying to think. He’s so tired, though, so tired, and another wave of lethargy sweeps into him.

  He gets back into bed, deciding the only thing is to forget all about it and, switching off the light, he shuts his eyes.

  About five seconds later, the liquid that has made its way into his stomach gets to work, and then he’s out of bed again.

  He doesn’t have time to get to the bathroom before he is violently and repeatedly sick on the floor.

  His body heaves and shudders, aches and wails, and when it is over, he crawls back into bed, where he spends a grim night, half awake, half dreaming.

  Is it this living nightmare, or is it whatever he was forced to drink in his sleep, that triggers a flood of memories, memories from long ago, of other nightmares?

  Nightmares that terrified not just him, but his devout and strict parents, too. Blood-soaked dreams that came night after night as a teenager, dreams that upon waking seem more real than the drab surroundings of his mundane room, his gray house, his ever more distant mother and father. His life.

  Blood-soaked nightmares. Of another time. Of another place. Another life.

  Thirteen

  It is the middle of the day when Eric finally feels he has enough energy to stagger from his bed, but when he does, something has cleared in his head. He has a long hot shower, trying to think, think more clearly.

  Automatically, his hand reaches for the shower controls. He turns the power up, and reaches for the temperature control, and slowly, fighting the urge not to, he takes the temperature down, and down and down, until he is showering in what feels like ice water. It’s agony, but he forces himself on, until his whole body is shaking with the cold, then heaving in great spasmodic shudders. He looks at his hands. They are virtually blue.

  He falls backward out of the shower, and shaking on the bathroom floor, everything comes back to him.

  Images swim through his head—they are the broken pieces of fractured memories; the journey to Blessed, the flowers, his device. Merle.

  He lies for an age on the floor, holding a picture of her face in his mind. Merle.

  The answer lies beyond the hill.

  He looks out of the window. It’s very quiet; he guesses it’s a Sunday, though he’s not sure anymore.

  This is the perfect time. In five minutes he is whizzing fast on his bike, fully aware that he has to pedal hard, as he makes his way up the steep, steep hill that he knows leads to the western half of the island.

  As he cycles, he repeats her name in his head, using it as a mantra to keep his mind clear. Merle, Merle, Merle.

  At the top, he takes time to look behind him, checking to see if he has been followed and, satisfied that he has not been, forces his way back through the undergrowth, looking for the eyes on the rocks.

  He finds the first quickly, and crawls on hands and knees to the second, and then the third.

  By the time he gets to the fourth pair of eyes, he is able to stand, and at the sixth, he is in open country again.

  The land slopes down in front of him, a mixed terrain of grasses, rocky patches, clumps of purple heather, and marsh. He follows the eyes, and very soon, he turns a corner, resting a large outcrop, and there lies the narrow causeway that will take him to the western half of Blessed.

  Again he glances behind and, seeing no one, hurries on, half running, half stumbling over the uneven ground.

  The causeway could be man-made. He’s not sure. It looks natural enough now, but it’s not much more than a jumble of large boulders and smaller rocks, against which a small beach of sand has formed. It seems that there are really two islands here, the one severed from the other in some geological moment millions of years ago.

  The distance between them is short, and in a dozen strides he’s across and into a very different landscape.

  There are no trees here.

  He follows the eyes on the rocks, a series leading him on, painted who knows how many years ago, and within moments he discovers the first secret of the western half of Blessed. The flowers.

  He sees just one at first, then a couple. He stumbles on and sees a dozen more, and then, turning a corner in the rocks, hundreds. Thousands.

  He knows it must be the Little Blessed Dragon Orchid. It is as mysterious as its name. A tall stem, with odd, curly star-shaped leaves clinging to it, and the flower itself, a dark purple-black thing, weirdly contorted. He looks closely, and can indeed imagine that it is a dragon’s head; there are even little bumps on the upper petal that look like horns, and a long black tongue protrudes from the mouth of the upper and lower petals, like that of a dragon, black with poison and evil.

  He goes to pick one, but something stays his hand. Even the scent of the flowers makes his senses swim, and he stands up, deciding to move on.

  The ground dips and rises again, and the eyes pick up once more. It seems obvious to follow them, and after a short scramble along the rocks, he sees something that takes his breath away.

  There is a church in front of him. It’s like no church he’s ever seen, but he knows it can’t be
anything else.

  It is wooden, of a single, high story, with a pitched roof, which he is looking at side on. He is openmouthed as he makes his way around the building, where a small tower or portico frames the entrance.

  The place is a ruin—he can see that—and has obviously not been used in years.

  Like a traveler from another time, he staggers toward the waiting, gaping mouth of the building, and enters.

  It feels like walking into the jaws of a huge wooden whale, and, if it is, he is swallowed whole by the beast.

  The building itself is just a prelude.

  What he sees next is the real surprise.

  Where the altar should be, there is something massive, hidden.

  A large cloth is draping something, hiding a long rectangular shape, which stands upright in the vast space of this temple.

  He walks forward, feeling this is more unreal than any dream he has ever had. As he puts his hands out to the corner of the old, gray, tattered cloth, and pulls it away from whatever is underneath, it is as if he is hovering above himself, looking down, watching himself act.

  What is underneath the cloth is a painting. It is absolutely huge.

  Dazed, Eric steps backward again, trying to take it all in.

  What he sees is a painting of such realistic horror, and yet at the same time such dreamlike variety, that his mind cannot comprehend it all at once.

  There is a click on stone somewhere behind him, and he turns.

  Tor stands in the doorway. Behind him Eric can see the other Wards.

  Tor approaches, and immediately, Eric knows the game has changed.

  “It is appropriate,” Tor says, “that you should have seen it. You should know why the gods brought you here—to help us.”

  He turns to his followers, and calls out instructions.

  “Cover that up. And take him. The door, please!”

  Suddenly the interior of the church fills with people, through unseen doors on either side of Eric.

  While hands wrestle with the job of hiding the painting under the cloth once more, other hands close around Eric’s wrists.

  He tries to struggle, but there is no point. There are too many of them, even if he could wrestle free from their grasp for a moment, more hands would seize him.

  The most frightening thing is their silence.

  Their eyes do not even meet his; they just hold him firmly, three or four on either side.

  “The door!” Tor cries again, and now real fear stabs Eric.

  He has been taken beyond the painting altar, and beyond, in the far wall of the church, another door is swung open.

  Framed through the doorway, he can see the short distance to the sea, which burns brightly blue, but his eye is caught by what lies midway between the door and the sea.

  It is a stone table.

  Now he begins to struggle, quietly at first, then desperately.

  Sheer fear surges from his stomach, into his mouth, making him want to be sick. He fights harder, but the more he struggles, the tighter the silent hands hold him.

  He is steps from the stone table, and there is Tor at his side, as he is pulled backward toward it, kicking and now screaming, screaming.

  They rip his shirt from his back, cast him onto the table, still pinning him fiercely. The stone rips into his skin, the sun almost blinds him, but his wide terror-staring eyes have time to see Tor draw a massive curved knife from somewhere.

  He hands it to Henrik, who steps forward.

  In another corner of his tunneling vision, he sees a face he knows. A face he has known for always.

  Merle looks down at him, tilting her head.

  She whispers to him.

  I followed you.

  Eric screams, and though his mind has largely stopped working already, a final thought bleeds into it, following on from so very many strange thoughts.

  I, thinks Eric Seven, have lived this before.

  One

  The boy looks at the archaeologist.

  The archaeologist looks at the boy sometimes, too. But he has work to do, and limited money and limited time on the island.

  It is hard to get funding for this kind of dig, small and obscure, and the travel expenses alone have eaten a big chunk out of his budget. It has cost him a fortune to get his team up here, though he has to admit he is actually embarrassed by how little they’re charging him at the Wardhouse—the island’s only guest house.

  His team consists of three young graduates; again because they are cheap. Happily he can also say, hand on heart, that they are all three promising diggers. There’s Nancy, an American he’s known since she was an undergraduate; Isabella, a German girl, from Leipzig, and finally there’s Mat, he’s not from the island itself, but from the mainland, about a hundred miles south along the coast. In this remote part of the country, where distances are vast, that almost makes him a local.

  * * *

  But there’s something about the boy that keeps taking Edward’s attention away. Every day, the boy comes to the dig, and stands on a low bump, one of many in this corner of the meadow, to get a good view of their work. Every day, around noon, a woman’s voice calls to him from behind a nearby garden hedge, and he disappears, presumably for lunch. Half an hour later he reappears, takes up his spot on the mound, and spends the rest of the day watching.

  He must be about sixteen Edward supposes, but he’s big and strong, like a man twice that age. Edward suspects there is something wrong with him. He never speaks, though his lips are slightly parted much of the time, as if he is about to.

  In his hands, like a small child, he is always, always, holding a soft toy. It is a brown hare. He holds it by its long ears, so that it droops from his big palm, dangling as if crucified.

  Two

  It’s almost lunchtime, and though they have been here a week, it’s not going well. Again, because of money, Edward has not been able to bring all the equipment he would have liked.

  On the first morning, Mat made a geophysical study of the meadow, but the machine is lightweight, and gives rather weak signals. While Mat walked up and down, through the hay, sticking the sensors of the magnetometer in at regular intervals, Edward, Nancy, and Isabella crowded around the laptop, trying to shield the screen from the sun’s glare, watching the scan of the field slowly emerge.

  There wasn’t much to go on, in truth, but Edward decided to put two trenches in, a few meters apart, cutting across some of the features produced by Mat’s survey.

  Edward watches them now, Nancy and Isabella, working side by side in trench one. Nancy is tall and thin, and kind of laid back. It’s not that he thinks she is lazy—she works as hard as the other two—it’s just that everything she does is done smoothly, easily. She is languid.

  Isabella is a Goth. She has a pierced nose, and pink hair, and always dresses in black. Odd earrings and strange haircuts are not unusual among his profession, he knows, but something about the way she has even managed to develop a Goth field dress sense amuses him. But she’s a good worker, always smiling. He once asked her if she wasn’t too happy to be a Goth, really, and Isabella’s excellent English let her down for once.

  “Excuse me, please?” she’d said.

  “Ignore me,” Edward had replied.

  Mat, Edward has decided, is great. He is exactly what he seems to be. A tall, handsome, smiley boy from the countryside. One who’s bright enough to have gone to the big city to get himself educated, but still come away without losing the trusting generosity of his people.

  He talks carefully, as if considering everything, and is currently sporting a long beard and long hair, as if he’s escaped from a seventies commune, though fortunately, one where they don’t believe soap is the capitalists’ tool of oppression.

  Edward looks wistfully at Mat, and while the girls are pretty, Nancy particularly, it is Mat who he thinks about the most, because he wishes he’d been more like Mat when he was young.

  If he’d been more like Mat, more confident, maybe
he wouldn’t have missed his chances in life, chances that sometimes only come along once. Sometimes there are single moments, he thinks, where your path divides, your life can go one way, so very different from another. Work out well, rather than be a failure. And if you miss those chances, he thinks, well, is that it?

  * * *

  His daydreams are disturbed by the woman’s voice, calling from behind the hedge. He’s never seen her; her garden backs onto the meadow, and he guesses the roof they can see beyond belongs to the boy’s house.

  She calls again.

  “Eric!”

  The boy leaves his mound, and goes in for lunch.

  “Eric!”

  Three

  That evening, the four archaeologists sit around the communal supper table at the Wardhouse.

  Their landlord is a kindly old man; his wife is the cook. Every evening they prepare and serve something simple, but delicious, all from the island, an island that seems to have everything its small population needs: sheep and goats for meat and milk, plenty of fish in the sea, lobsters, and even oysters. The fields are full of wheat, gently ripening, and there are orchards of fruit and fields of vegetables.

  When Edward tried to offer a little more for their food and lodging the landlord would hear nothing of it.

  “We do things differently here,” he’d said. “What need have I of money? We have enough to cover our costs, and you are welcome visitors to our island. That is enough for us. We are always glad of visitors. Our little population has been dropping, you see. We used to be so many more, but not many babies are born on Blessed now.”

  He’d smiled.

  * * *

  It’s an extraordinary place, Edward has decided, and he wonders if it’s the sort of place he’d like to retire to one day. Maybe not. It might be a bit too simple, too quiet, even for his taste.

  There’s always something a little odd about remote places, he thinks. That sense that things happen differently. That’s all it is, though earlier that day, a man began to cut the hay in the meadow, not with a tractor and swather, but with a scythe, as if this were 1911, not 2011.