Glimpse (24 page)

‘Why do you never listen?’ Ann screeched.

Panic pumped my legs faster. Then, abruptly, my panic fractured – I could not let her do this to me. I stopped so fast I stumbled in the damp grass. I turned to face Ann, arms raised to fend off her attack.

I had less than a second to take her in – the violence on her face, her ringlets flying out behind her head like Medusa’s snakes – before I realized she wasn’t going to stop. I flinched, bracing myself for the impact, forcing myself to stand firm.

It was like being hit full on by a solid block of wind. I dropped the torch. There was an overwhelming stench in my nostrils: mildewed fabric and mould. Then Ann snarled with anger – from behind me. I opened my eyes to see only the dark inn.

I spun to face her. Her eyes were hidden in malevolent shadows, her mouth a full display of tiny white bones.

‘I told you to stay away from him.’ She lunged for my coat pocket, as if she knew Zachary’s bone was inside, tearing futilely at the fabric. I flinched away, though her touches were nothing but angry air. The darkness blurred with cold hair and corpse-white skin; Ann surrounded me like a whirlwind.

‘You think you’re so clever, don’t you?’ she demanded.

‘Get off me.’ My voice was strong. I twisted towards the inn, trying to get away from her grip. ‘Leave me alone. I’m nothing to do with you.’

But Ann didn’t stop, and my nightmare slammed into my mind – an image of my mother tearing at me the same way Ann was. The strength I’d been holding together dissolved. I twisted faster, trying to get Ann behind me, away from me, but it was like trying to escape the wind.

I picked up the torch, shone it in her face, illuminating ice-blue eyes and thin lips.

‘Leave me alone!’ I said. I couldn’t take this any more. Standing up to Ann was one thing, torturing myself was another. I ran, shaking my arms as if Ann was a wasp I could bat away.

I barely registered Zachary flying out of the woods before he was on Ann – a flash of his grim face, a blur of lithe body, then he and Ann were a tangle of limbs and brown fabric on the ground.

I stifled a yelp, skittering away from them. They only struggled for a moment before Ann leapt to her feet, lunging towards me. Zachary caught the bottom of her long dress, and she got no more than a step in my direction. In a second, Zachary was standing behind her, holding her wrists expertly behind her back. It was disturbing how easily he held her – a testament to his fighting abilities, not to her lack of strength. Ann was small, but agile and vicious as a terrier.

‘You should never have come back,’ she snarled at me.

‘Stop it, Ann.’ Zachary’s voice was tired, like he’d said the same words a thousand times before. His eyes met mine over Ann’s shoulder. ‘This is what she was like with Bess, for over two hundred years.’

‘I can hear you, you know.’ Ann strained against Zachary’s grip. His face turned stony with the effort of holding her still. ‘Let me go,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll leave your girl be.’

My face flared, but Zachary didn’t act like he’d registered the words.
Your girl
.

‘If you attack her again—’ he began.

‘Let her go, Zachary,’ I interrupted. ‘She can’t do anything to me.’

He gave me a surprised look, but he did as I said. Ann yanked her arms free, shooting an affronted look at Zachary. She stalked towards me. I forced myself forwards to meet her.

‘You’ve ignored me too many times,’ she said.

‘No.’ I made my voice sharp as hers. ‘You’ve ignored me too many times. Give it up, Ann, and leave me alone.’

She stared at me for a long moment. I held her hard gaze. I could smell the mouldy fabric of her dress, cold and damp as rotting weeds.

Then Ann drew back, the left side of her mouth quirking up in a humourless smile. ‘I’ll see you again, Elizabeth,’ she said, then she brushed past me and stalked away.

My heart pounded. My legs felt like all my bones had dissolved.

Zachary’s face was pale and troubled. He looked like he wanted to talk to me, but instead he strode past me, following Ann, dipping his head to me. ‘I’ll make sure she doesn’t come back.’ He hesitated, holding my eyes for half a second, then broke into a run.

By the time I turned around, both of them were gone.

I stood for a minute in stunned silence. The night folded in around me. I turned and headed for the inn.

Too late, I remembered the twitching of the curtain. I looked over at the outbuildings . . . and froze.

The curtain wasn’t just twitching this time. It was wide open. And framed in the window was Scott’s pale face, staring straight at me.

In my nightmare, my mother tears at me, snarling, ‘Get out, get out, get out!’

Ann leans in beside her. She shoves at my body with her delicate hands. She can’t touch me. But I don’t understand why she wants to.

I don’t understand why either of them hates me so.

I’m sobbing, but I can’t move. I’m terrified, but I can’t make them stop.

I woke, my mind fuzzy, my body weak and sore as if I’d been through a spin cycle. I glanced at the clock and groaned – it was almost time for school. I’d only had a few hours’ sleep.

I rolled over and grabbed my locket, too tired to open it to look at my mother’s picture. I pressed the gold surface to my nightdress, over my heart.

I wanted nothing more than to stay in bed. I didn’t want to think about Scott or Ann.

It bothered me that Scott had seen me last night. Either he’d seen me attacking thin air and talking to myself, or he could see Zachary and Ann – which by now, seemed pretty certain – and knew I’d ignored his threats. Both scenarios were unbearable.

I forced myself out of bed. I had to go to school. If Scott decided today was the day to blab to everyone that ‘Liz sees things that aren’t there’, I was better off on the front line. I had no intentions of talking to the boy, but it made sense to keep him in my sights.

School also had the advantage of being one place I had never yet seen Ann. After her craziness last night, that was a big advantage.

I dragged myself to the shower to wash the soil from under my fingernails. Then I put on the first thing that came to hand, a long vintage dress with pink and blue paisley patterns – feeling comfortable today seemed more important than squeezing myself into skinny jeans.

I gave myself a pep talk in the mirror as I plaited my hair. Neither Ann nor Scott could hurt me at school. Tomorrow, I would have Zachary all to myself. We’d go where Ann couldn’t, we’d look for Bess, and I’d get him to tell me the rest of what he knew about Mum.

I pulled my lips up in the mirror – my smile wasn’t very convincing, but it would have to do – and went downstairs to Dad.

‘What time’s your interview again?’

I sat at the kitchen table on Saturday morning, sipping tea and watching Dad jitter around the room as if he was going on a first date. I was excited too, for different reasons. Today was the day I got to spend with Zachary, far from Ann and Scott. Luckily, Dad was too distracted to notice my distraction.

‘Eleven. The taxi’s picking me up any minute now. Are you sure what I’m wearing is all right?’ Dad spread his arms and looked down at his outfit: pinstriped jeans, the ‘Ripe Banana Studios’ T-shirt I recognized from photos – now slightly too tight, but passable – and a grey blazer.

‘You look great. Very hip.’

‘Thanks, Liz.’ He looked at his reflection in the microwave door and swiped at his hair, which he’d finally had cut into something more surf-dude than shaggy. He exhaled. ‘You’ll be all right while I’m gone?’

I nodded, and took another sip of tea. ‘I’m meeting a friend in the village, so I might not be here when you get back. But I’ll have your phone.’

Dad nodded and rushed from the room, muttering something about his wallet. A moment later, there was a knock on the door.

‘Bye!’ I called. ‘Good luck!’

The door banged shut behind him. I waited five minutes to be sure the taxi was gone, then went upstairs to get my satchel. I wrapped Zachary’s bone in a scarf, put it in my bag, took a deep breath and headed into the sunlight.

Today, we might find Bess. Today could be the day when everything changed.

When I stepped out of the inn’s front door, my eyes darted first to the outbuildings – Scott’s car was mercifully absent – then to the line of trees.

Zachary stepped out of the trunks and started to walk over to me. It only took one glance at him to make locking the front door become a complicated business. I’d never seen him in full daylight before, and it was . . . distracting.

Door successfully locked, I dropped my keys into my satchel and faced him as he walked across the grass towards me. It was like seeing the moon in the middle of the day.

I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever thought he was alive. I wouldn’t have, if I’d seen him in daylight. His colours were too coldly beautiful, bright and muted at the same time, like it wasn’t the sun shining on him but the moon, enhanced.

I walked to meet him, and he fell into step with me. The knowledge that we were really about to leave the inn – together – made my heart leap. It was like I was walking with him for the first time.

I glanced sideways at him. ‘Are you nervous?’

‘Not nervous,’ he said. ‘Terrified.’ But he grinned, like being scared was the greatest thing in the world. ‘Let’s do this.’

He held out his hand, and I took it. We raced the final metres to the end of the driveway. Zachary took a deep breath, like he was about to plunge into deep water. He exhaled it in a loud whoop! as we ran from the gravel onto the pavement by the road.

‘It worked!’ I said.

‘Damn, yes, it worked.’ Without slowing down, he scooped me up and spun me around three hundred and sixty degrees.

I shrieked with delight. Though my feet barely left the concrete, and I had to do some of the spinning myself, it was amazing that he could swing me at all. I stumbled back into a run, still holding on to his hand. His enthusiasm was infectious; I wanted to run and dance and shout.

But a car coming down the road towards us made me pull my hand from his. I didn’t want to be seen shrieking and holding hands with thin air, like a bad mime artist. I slowed to a walk, the last of my laughter bubbling out of me, though I kept my smile.

‘So where are we going?’

‘Dalsham, if you have no objections to a walk. It’s a few villages distant from here.’

I hadn’t expected him to want to go so far. ‘I could check the bus timetable,’ I said, uncertain.

He looked pointedly at my satchel, indicating the bone within it. ‘I don’t know if even carrying that with you would allow me to enter a vehicle.’

‘Then let’s walk.’ I shrugged.

Using a combination of Zachary’s memory, road signs and the maps app on Dad’s phone, we made our way out of the village, taking narrow roads that – to me, at least – looked exactly the same as the one Zachary had existed next to for centuries.

But it was obviously new enough to Zachary. When the initial excitement wore off, he fell quiet, gazing around him in wonder, head thrown back to take everything in. After a little while, public footpath signs directed us across the fields. I smiled to myself as the wonder played on his face.

Over the last couple of days, I’d pictured all the new things I’d show him – the shops in Hulbourn centre, the village war memorial, the sculpture of the highwayman at my school. I’d imagined being his tour guide, showing him the wonders of the modern world.

But somehow, this felt better. Zachary belonged in the countryside, as much as he belonged in the night. The further we walked, the more he relaxed, his smile losing its hard angles. He even took off his gloves, and rolled his sweater up to his elbows. His forearms were contoured with muscle, crossed with small scars like the one on his jaw, betraying the dangerous way he’d made a living. I found myself wondering what other hidden scars he had, and had to mentally slap myself.

‘So what’s it like?’ I asked.

‘Like being in a rainbow after centuries of monochrome. Those blackberries—’ he gestured at the bushes we were passing ‘—bring to mind picking berries with Bess for her parents to ferment into wine. Those trees over there—’ he pointed across the field ‘—you see the shape of them, like the canopy is formed of clouds? They remind me of the woodland I lay low in for a week when thief takers were searching for me. It was the coldest, most miserable seven days of my life. And that—’ he pointed at a dirty white T-shirt strewn in a hedge ‘—makes me recall bathing in streams.’

I kicked my way through the long grass. ‘It must be so strange to remember things like that after all this time.’

‘It is overwhelming. Like dredging up parts of myself I’d forgotten were there. I’ve scarcely thought of half of these memories in centuries, yet here they are, in my skull.’ He stretched his arms up to the sun as though easing a centuries-old tension from his muscles. ‘You cannot know the gift you’ve given me.’ He looked at me. ‘Or maybe you can.’ He sighed. ‘We will find your trigger, Elizabeth. There must be something that will make you remember. If I can recall so much after over two hundred years, so can you.’

‘I know.’ I smiled, more at the kindness behind his words than because I believed them any more.

‘What can I tell you that I haven’t already,’ he mused to himself. He bent to sweep his hands through the long grass, not seeming to care that he made no impression on the stalks.

I looked down at the ground, watching my feet move, as Zachary launched into a series of anecdotes about my mother. He talked about when she’d lived at the Highwayman with the innkeeper – my granddad – when she was young, about when she returned to the inn with first my father, and then me. He told me how Bess had taken an interest in my mother, since both she and Bess were innkeeper’s daughters; he said that when we found Bess, she’d be able to tell me so much more.

I smiled when he said that, because I was meant to. But the hope it gave me was heavy as a wet rag; hardly hope at all.

I’d been so determined, when I came to Hulbourn, to remember my mother and my life before the accident. But nothing I’d tried had worked. It wasn’t that I was ready to give up – I didn’t know if I’d ever give up – but maybe it was time to give my hope-muscle a rest.