Resurrectionists (31 page)

“I went down to Manchester to visit an aunt.”

Great! He hadn’t been with a gorgeous girlfriend. Maisie watched his hands on the steering wheel.

“Actually,” he continued, “my mother called. I told her about you.”

Maisie was stupidly flattered that he had been thinking about her while she wasn’t around. “And?”

“She wants to meet you, but she’s stuck over in Wales at the moment and won’t be up here for a few weeks. But you never know. Ma turns up at odd, unexpected times.”

“I’d like to meet her. I think I need her advice on something really scary that happened to me.” This was her lead-in to telling him about the haunting last week, but he continued as though he hadn’t heard.

“I asked her about the colour thing. You know, how I said I got a sense of dark colour around you, not yellow like her.”

“Yes?”

“Apparently it’s to do with intensity.”

“Oh. So the brighter the colour, the more intense the power?”

“No. Other way around – the darker the colour.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s what Ma said. She said Sybill would have been really jealous of you. She had spent her whole life developing and learning to use her powers, and she was extremely adept. But you were born with a raw power of great intensity.”

She studied his profile for a few moments, taking all this in. “So, I’m more powerful than Sybill?”

He shook his head. “Not at the moment, you’re not. You barely know how to use your Gift. You have virtually no stories to tell about psychic experiences in your life. It’s like the power is buried. Ma says you’re quite old to be starting to develop it, that it may even be too late.”

Her stomach tightened. “Too late? But that’s not fair. How was I supposed to know?”

“You should have known. We can’t figure out how you didn’t know. People with way less power than you know as early as six or seven, or if not, then puberty will set it off. You should have known.”

“Damn.” Maisie leaned her head back on the seat.

“But we can still try to develop it. We’ve got a whole week together and a whole house to ourselves.”

Maisie liked the sound of that. “Okay. Where are we staying?”

“You’ll see when we get there. Anyway, what happened to you that was really scary?”

So he had been listening. “I don’t know,” she said, suddenly nervous of sounding like a fool. “You might laugh at me.”

“Something supernatural?” he asked.

“Yes.”

They were passing through a small town now. Sacha gently applied the brakes as an elderly lady in a lilac headscarf started to cross the road in front of them. It had snowed more heavily here, and a thick white blanket lay over grey stone fences and evergreen trees. The elderly lady safely on the other side of the road, they began to move again.

“You know,” Sacha said, “your reluctance to talk about supernatural things is probably one of the reasons you can’t access your power. As those pop psychologists always say, ‘you’re in denial.’”

“I’m just not used to it. If I told this stuff to Adrian he’d have me committed.” That came out with rather more vehemence than she’d intended. Was it to impress Sacha, or was it because she was angrier than she’d realised with Adrian for not taking her seriously?

“You can tell me,” he said, softly. Almost

conspiratorially.

So she recounted for him the evening Tabby had gone missing and how some asthmatic phantom had played with her electricity. He listened carefully, not saying a word until she had finished.

“You must have been terrified,” he said at last.

“Of course. I still am.”

“Leave your doors closed from now on.”

“Are you trying to tell me deadlocks can keep out spirits?”

“Not usually. But Sybill had cast a protection spell over the house. It’s probably still active. She spent weeks working on it. An open door is like a gap in the spell.”

“Is that why she doesn’t have a kitty flap?”

Sacha laughed. “Maybe. Just keep your doors and windows closed after dark. And Tabby can probably fend for herself if she runs off.”

“I found a spell in Sybill’s chest:
I call the black
presence
.”

“Might have something to do with it. Maybe she was calling it to banish it. I don’t know.” He gave her a brief smile. “Sorry, I’m not much help to you, am I?”

“No, no. You’re a great help. I’d be all alone in this otherwise.”

It took just under two hours to drive to York through the North Yorkshire Moors National Park, some parts of which were still under heavy layers of snow. Maisie was proud of herself for conversing with Sacha as though he were a normal human being, and not a minor deity. She was almost certain he wouldn’t be able to tell from talking to her that she spent upward of three hours a day fantasising about him. It wouldn’t do for him to know that. She could barely admit it to herself.

Frosty York greeted them around one p.m. Maisie thought guiltily of Cathy, wondering if she was back from Edinburgh yet, but decided that all bets were off when a girl was a universe away from home at New Year’s. She had to grasp social experiences as they were offered, without any moral obligation to keep old friends (especially ones who were never really friends) company.

“Chris lives just up this street. We’ll leave the van here and walk up to the train station, okay? It’s only a couple of blocks.”

“Sure. That’s fine.”

He pulled into the driveway of a newish apartment complex, and parked around the back. He unbuckled his seat belt and opened his door, and Maisie followed suit.

“Um . . . you may as well wait here. I won’t be long,” he said.

“Oh. Okay.” Maisie stayed in her seat as he busied himself getting Tabby out of the back. She watched him disappear into the stairwell, then checked her appearance in the rear-vision mirror. She liked English daylight – it rendered her face in soft-focus. After ten minutes she thought about going into the stairwell to call for him, realised she never would, and kept waiting. Why didn’t he want his friend to meet her? Was it really expedience, or was he embarrassed about her?

She still hadn’t decided when he emerged from the stairwell.

“Sorry it took so long,” he said.

“That’s fine.”

He was around the back again, grabbing their suitcases. “Come on,” he said, locking the doors.

“Lock your side when you get out.”

She did as he said, took her suitcase from him, and followed him two blocks to the station. Her ears were aching with cold by the time they took refuge in the warm ticket office.

“Wait here,” he said, heading for the counter.

“Hang on, I’ll give you some money.”

“No. It’s my treat.”

“Sacha –”

“No, I promised you a trip to London. Call it a late Christmas present.”

She imagined she must be glowing with pleasure.

“Okay.”

While Maisie hung out by the entrance, studying route maps and timetables, Sacha was engaged in some serious negotiation at the counter with the sales clerk. When he joined her, he brandished two tickets.

“The good news is, they still had tickets for the next train. It leaves in ten minutes.”

“Is there bad news?” she asked.

“The seats are in different carriages. Sorry.”

Her heart fell. “Different carriages?”

“Yeah. It was either that or wait an hour for the next train.”

“Oh. Well, I have a book to read.” This was a lie. She had been counting on a few hours of Sacha’s undivided attention.

“I might not have been good company anyway. I was planning on dozing most of the way.”

“Really, it’s okay.”

She spent the journey looking out the window, her daydreams repeatedly returning to Sacha in spite of a solemn promise to herself not to do so. It was hopeless

– if he felt about her the way she felt about him, he would have booked the tickets for the following train and not told her there were others available. That’s the way she would have handled it. She banged her head lightly three times against the window and groaned. The woman sitting across from her observed her warily.

Maisie plunged a hand into her handbag and fished out her wallet. Flipped it open. Here was a picture of Adrian and herself, taken the previous year on their third anniversary. She studied his face – his adored face. He had pale brown hair and calm, grey eyes. A slightly crooked smile which he was embarrassed about. She closed her eyes and remembered the feeling of holding him in her arms. There was only 175

centimetres of him, but his body was well-muscled and warm, and he smelled like lemon and sunlight. Edible. Yes, she missed him. But not with a pain in her soul. She only got that pain when she thought about what she might miss out on by committing herself to him. A young man in the seat behind her was listening to U2 on a Discman. She could make out a couple of verses of “Stay”, scratchy and deprived of their shape by the tiny headphones.

Opening her eyes, she turned back to the landscape speeding by outside. Life was like that: just speeding past, beautiful in places, inhospitable in others, but never able to be grasped, always in a state of transition. When was she going to be happy? When were things going to slow down enough for her to hold on to something wonderful, without being obsessed about how soon it would slip through her fingers? She thought about what Virgil had said to Georgette:
I ache to live, and all I get is this.
She felt like that too, sometimes, but upper middle-class girls from good homes could hardly compare themselves to starving poets who robbed graves for a living. Still, she couldn’t help it if she felt that way.

The train slid into King’s Cross station shortly after three forty-five. Maisie stepped out and waited anxiously on the platform. That would top it all off, if she couldn’t find Sacha. But she spotted him within seconds, waving over the heads of three portly ladies chatting excitedly between themselves. She set her case down and waited for him, the crowd separating around her. In a few steps he was with her. She had the distinct feeling he was going to hug her, but he pulled back at the last moment. The disappointment tugged sharply in her stomach.

“We have to take the tube to Goodge Street now,”

he said, picking some fluff off the shoulder of his pullover.

“I’ll stay with you. I don’t know my way around at all.” Maisie pulled on her gloves against the cold.

“My dad lives near the British Museum.”

“Your dad? We’re going to stay with your dad?”

“It’s his house, but he won’t be there. Don’t worry.” They had emerged into some kind of

concourse with people rushing in a hundred different directions. “Stay close,” he said, grabbing her hand. “I don’t want to lose you.”

He dragged her through the crowd, up and down stairs, down an escalator and onto a platform. A train came along in a matter of seconds, but after one stop they had to change to another line. Maisie was having serious suitcase anxiety. Sacha seemed happy to leave their cases near the door and sit down, but Maisie was terrified somebody would take off with her stuff. Finally they arrived at the right station. It was so far underground they had to ride a lift back to the surface. They emerged a few moments later into freezing cold on Tottenham Court Road.

“This way,” he said, leading her out across the road even though cars were zooming all around them. She clung to his hand and braced herself, but nothing hit them. It was growing dark by now, a freezing drizzle descended and car tyres hissed urgently along the slick street. Sacha took her down a side road, then off into another. Her shoulder was starting to ache from carrying her case, but if she swapped arms she’d have to let go of his hand. Luckily, they soon stopped outside the fauxGeorgian facade of a block of modern apartments.

“There’s a great bookshop two streets over,” Sacha was saying as he entered a security code and waited for the door to unlock. There was a popping noise and the door swung inwards. Sacha led her into the warm foyer and kicked the door closed behind them. “I’ll take you there tomorrow.”

“I’d love that.”

“And it’s walking distance to Leicester Square, the British Museum, Soho – plenty of good coffee shops in Soho.”

“Uh-huh.” She was barely listening. A giant chandelier hung above them; terracotta and bluestone tiled the floor; the stairs wore a thick cream carpet. This was opulence as she had rarely seen it, and it was right in the heart of London. Was his dad a millionaire?

Up two flights of stairs, and then Sacha fitted a key in the lock of a heavy, polished wooden door. “Here we are,” he said. Within moments they were standing in a fabulously appointed lounge room: leather lounge suite, sunken television viewing area, tasteful lighting, glossy upright piano, mahogany furniture, designer coordinated turquoise and cream walls, and turquoise and cream curtains.

Maisie couldn’t hold back any longer. “Is your dad royalty or something?”

“Sorry?”

“How can he afford this place?”

Sacha went to the drapes and pulled them open.

“Come and see the garden.”

She joined him at the window. Two storeys below them was a perfect courtyard garden, illuminated by an outdoor light.

“My dad comes from old money,” Sacha said.

“Plus he’s a professor of anthropology at University College. But I think a trust fund bought this place.”

“Where is he at the moment?”

“On Grand Canary. With his wife, who is three years younger than me. They have two little boys. One’s three and one’s still a baby.” He turned to her and smiled wryly. “There goes my inheritance.”

“Does it bother you that he lives like this and you work in a bakery?”

Sacha shook his head. “No. He’d give me money if I asked for it. But I don’t want to ask for it. We don’t get along.”

“That’s a shame.”

“I have very little respect for him. He and my mother were never married, you know. And I’m sure you can figure out how an anthropologist and a gypsy got together.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

“He was studying her family. She was seventeen, he was thirty. Nine months after his survey was completed, I came along.”