Borderliners (21 page)

My mind ticked over as the swampy vapour contrived to send me to sleep. More images, this time of cards and a black-covered, anonymous diary. Tony’s voice in my head, telling me things. Things I didn’t want to hear. Transferring the torture of his own voices to me. Linda reaching out to me, screaming. Joan lying dead on the surgery floor, surrounded by the doctors and paramedics; heads bowed, impotence and regret hovering with death just above us.

I wanted to fit all the pieces of the jigsaw together, to get to the answers. Julia was up to no good. She was snooping round an occult shop, looking for books about mysticism, which surely was at odds with her status as the leader of the Charismatics. She exerted power over numerous villagers, encouraging them to wear Gothic-style talismans, join in babbling hysteria and divulge their deepest sorrows and fears in an unsafe environment. I didn’t dare think what else.

I felt cold, despite the heat of the water which was still cascading around me into the bathtub. I feared I was failing my patients. I worked hard to protect these people in my day job but it wasn’t enough. What would I do if it was all true: the clippings, the suspicions held by my council colleagues, my own suspicions? How would I intervene if something untoward happened? I had no idea.

After a while I noticed my elevated heartbeat, all thickened bass. It was time to get out.

I opened my eyes and stood up to shampoo my hair under the shower head. As I stood there I held my palms upwards to feel the little, hard droplets of water as they beat down upon me. Closing my eyes, I rinsed off the shampoo slowly. Suddenly the tenor of the collective droplets changed and shifted across to the left. I looked up to see that instead of being directly above my head, the shower head was now skewed to the right. Puzzled, I yanked it back across to the middle and turned it off.

I stood very still for some moments, sensing a shift in the atmosphere. The bath creaked as water swirled into the plughole. Another creaking noise, almost indistinguishable from that of the pipes, encroached, bothering me so much so that I stepped quietly out of the bath tub, bending to pick up my towelling dressing gown from the floor. Then, a muffled shuffling sound made me feel both stone cold and prickly at the same time. Pins and needles of dread covered me in indecision and fear gripped at my heart. Wishing I hadn’t left my phone downstairs, I edged out of the bathroom door to the galleried landing where the dark stairwell beckoned me into the unknown.

I steadied my breathing and a kind of hush descended, although I wasn’t convinced. My gut told me otherwise, as did the little hairs which were still raised at the back of my neck. Instinct told me to move, so I half-ran, half-fell down the stairs in an attempt to fly down at maximum speed. I hit the bottom hard, my ankle crumpling beneath me. As I tried to get up I felt a hand on my mouth whilst my arms were yanked backwards and I was pushed onto my front. Face down I struggled, but the hands holding me down were stronger. Rancid breath hit my nostrils as I tried, unsuccessfully, to cough. Realising I couldn’t breathe at all, panic arose in my chest and I started to struggle. The hands tightened their grip.

‘Listen to me now and I won’t hurt you,’ said a voice which sounded both unworldly and familiar at the same time. ‘We’ve been watching you for a while. We tried to befriend you and we even invited you into the heart of our community despite knowing what you are, but you don’t want to know do you?’ The voice sounded more familiar now, although the blood rushing to my head made it difficult to concentrate.’

There was a brief silence which I made no effort to puncture.

‘Well hear this. If you try to damage our community there will be repercussions, make no mistake. What we do here is very important. We save people and without us they would be lost. Do you really want to interfere with that?!’

I felt the hands release me and I gasped for breath.

‘We know what you are but nevertheless, we thought we could win you over. You need to be saved, Elena. And you need to watch out.’

Despite myself, despite my fear, I refused to nod. I waited.

‘You need to watch out,’ the voice insisted, and I recoiled at the smell of stale breath. The owner of the voice grunted, and smashed my head on the floor. Blood rushed in my ears and I could taste it as it dripped down from my nose.

Then my training kicked in and I sprang up, twisting round in a flash to face my aggressor. He was masked, wiry, slightly shorter than me. Tightly coiled, too. As his fist shot out I blocked with my right arm whilst delivering a straight-legged kick to his jaw. I followed through but, too late, realised he was making for the back door. He dived into a shadow as I lunged.

Somehow he twisted back and delivered a punch to the side of my head.

As I fell, the darkness started merging all the images in my head into one. There was presence with me, at once right behind and a few metres away. I opened my eyes to catch a glimpse of dark eyes glinting.

The air closed in on me, pulsating, thick. Where was the light? And then, I was running somewhere. It looked like a wooden staircase in a high barn. I arrived at the top of the stairs and did not dare turn around. Ahead of me, I could barely make out doors and a high-pitched roof above, indicating the end of line. I had to go through one of these doors, and then what? A rush of air and just behind, a palpable sense of breathing and not breathing, tension and control. And then I began to run again.

A voice from above stopped me in my tracks. ‘We told you to keep away. Why didn’t you heed our warning?’

A faint whispering sound pulsed through the tangible silence which had closed in around me. Dank menace permeated the walls and what little flat light was there glowed sickly and weak through the rafters above my head. Just as I thought I would drown in the soupy darkness, a card flipped through the air and fell into my lap face up. It was The High Priestess. Then another, the Death card followed by The Hanged Man. A crack followed and all three cards burst into sudden flames which licked up towards my face and consumed my body. It was as if I’d fallen into the world of the dream diary.

Everything went black.

When I came round, the house was still and my vision was eclipsed by spots in front of my eyes which took some time to dissipate. My dressing gown had come undone and my naked body was almost blue with cold. Nausea rose up in my throat forcing me to get up on my hands and knees and crawl quickly to the downstairs loo. After throwing up I sat by the toilet bowl mopping the perspiration from my forehead. Then, I got up and switched the light on to check my reflection in the mirror. I looked perfectly normal apart from a swelling at the top of my forehead. I pulled my dressing gown more tightly around me before walking slowly through to the kitchen to find some ice. Slowly I sat down with it pressed against my head.

For a long time my thoughts just twisted and writhed around without direction or clarity. Eventually I made some sense of them and got up to check for evidence of a break-in. He’d left no trace, of course. I rattled both the back doors and examined the locks. Nothing. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t changed the locks when I'd had the chance. It occurred to me that throughout the last few months I hadn’t been thinking clearly: my judgement had become cloudy and muddled.

Upstairs in my bedroom, the clippings file had disappeared. Alarmed, I checked under the bed for the
‘Man Myth and Magic’
volume with Tony’s writings and the other clippings nestling within its pages, and upon seeing it was still there, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Some evidence of untoward happenings in the village had been removed but not all. The most incriminating remained.

I felt cold as the memory of Julia’s visit to the New Age shop popped back into my head. Iain’s stale breath was nothing compared to the threat of challenging Julia. I’d get him sooner or later, but she was a different matter. Remembering my after-hours discussion with Vince and the others at the last village council meeting, I resolved to keep a close eye on both her and her entourage at the ball, no matter what it cost. Then, my mind unravelled a bit. Standing, still semi-naked, and cold in my bedroom, I thought of my isolation and introspection and wondered if it had been sending me off the rails. I thought of Vince but pushed him to the back of my mind. And I thought of Tony.

The day is upon me.

I was received into the Charismatic Community two weeks ago, but Julia says to complete the process I must attend the outdoor ceremony tonight. This morning, the daily meeting was crowded and Iain presided. He delivered a long speech and at the end, he said some special words for me. I was not prepared for what happened next.

‘Come my people,’ said Iain, and everyone stood up. There were so many people it seemed like the whole village was there with me. They were crammed down the aisles, so many of them, crowds of people I had never seen before. Eyes blank on expressionless faces, it was not the joyful occasion I’d imagined and the tension was palpable. New people appeared in the gaps in between the waiting crowd, and the occasional whisper punctuated the silence.

‘I give you Tony,’ he said. Then he started to babble and the waiting crowd erupted with him, all of a sudden, falling to the ground in one writhing mass of incomprehensible words and deeds. ‘Let the Spirit cast out his demons!’ shouted Julia from the back of the crowd. ‘Heal him! Heal him!’

Through the mess and confusion I thought I saw that woman again. Tall and blond, her hair up in a ponytail, her clothes tailored, carrying a small square handbag, she was standing alone at the back of the community, her mouth open as if she were shouting something. But I couldn’t hear over the noise of the people who were writhing about at my feet.

I shut my eyes to quell the voices, the chanting and writhing. I drifted into a waking dream in which the blond woman came up close and stood right next to me, in which she plucked the roll-up from my fingers, stroked my hair and told me I should go with her. ‘
Tony, it’s me, Elena,’
she said. My angel? I thought.

‘Get away from here. Before it’s too late.’

The ball was held every year in a function room within Harlesden Hall, a National Trust property a few miles outside the village. I had never visited the Hall before but my fellow council members spoke highly of the venue and as we drove through the grounds along the narrow road leading to the car park, I could see why. Set in five hundred acres of parkland, the property had been owned by a local family of wealthy landowners for the last three hundred years. Set in the centre of its grounds, the Hall’s Elizabethan facade peeked out from its location deep within an eclectic mixture of sprawling meadows and pockets of woodland.

All I could do was stare out of the window as we drove. That morning I’d awoken to to the sound of heart pounding, the memory of the attack clinging to me like sweat in a hot climate. And although I’d tried to distract myself throughout the day doing more research into the behaviour of cult leaders and how to combat them, I couldn’t shake it. My attacker’s presence wouldn’t leave me and I didn't need to study myself in the mirror to see that my face looked gaunt and my grey eyes sunken into their sockets. I knew I would give myself cause for concern in my own consulting room, but there was nothing to do but see this thing through to the end

It was about 7pm when we arrived. I got out of the car, whilst Dan switched off the engine. As he walked around the back of his red Alfa Romeo to join me, his smile was appreciative. ‘You've scrubbed up well.’

I laughed and linked arms with him. ‘Thanks for coming Dan. It means a lot.’

We made our way up the drive, my heels crunching on the gravel beneath us. I clung to Dan's sturdy presence beside me. Unseasonably crisp, the air clung to my bones as did the sleek, grey satin of my dress. My blond hair hung glossy and straight, reaching past my neck to reach almost to the bottom of my shoulder blades which were uncovered tonight. The criss-cross back detail of my dress revealed a patch of skin at the bottom of my spine where my quincunx tattoo lay. I noticed Dan stare at it for a second before he had a chance to avert his eyes and realised he’d probably never seen it before.

We walked slowly around the building's periphery, joking about my heels, my ridiculously straight hair and his over-tight cummerbund. I asked politely after Dan's girlfriend and he remarked that she was a sensible girl, possibly even the one who might bring him into line, although we both knew this was never going to happen.

The descending dusk was signalled by deep russet which turned rapidly to black behind the light cloud covering above. The murmuring of arriving party guests floated over to us on a gentle, but sharp, breeze. Distracted by our light-hearted conversation, I saw - too late - that Vince was chatting to Mark on the path ahead of us, together with Emma, Louise and Martin. There was another woman there with them whom I didn’t recognise: Vince’s partner for the night, I presumed. Before I could divert Dan, the group turned to look at us. Martin looked away immediately and Louise smiled garishly - she was already drunk. Vince didn't look at me.

I made a beeline for Emma. ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

‘We're fine. Not working tonight then?’

‘No.’

Without introducing Dan to the group, I moved on, noticing that Louise was sniggering whilst muttering something to her husband behind her hand. Vince had disappeared.

Inside the stately home, Dan squeezed my arm. ‘Come on,’ he said.’ A smile won't kill you?’

I took both his hands in mine. Giving him my best smile, I winked and stood on tip toes to whisper in his ear. ‘Thanks for this Dan, I'll make it up to you.’ Then I lowered myself down and looked round quickly, feeling sudden goose bumps on my arms. I caught Vince’s eye before he had time to look away, before turning back to Dan, who was studying me with a wry smile. He was amused, I realised.

He bent his head down to mine. ‘Elena love, that guy has a woman with him. His wife?’