The Truth Against the World (20 page)

Wyn stared back at him. The wind gusted around her, whipping her long dark hair around her face in snakelike strands that looked like living things. For a moment, he thought of the old historical descriptions of the druid priestesses of Wales, who'd supposedly screamed furious curses at the invading Roman armies. He leaned back, apprehensive. But Wyn's face was rigid and determined.

“You can do whatever you want. But I'm climbing over.”

20

Diwedd y gân yw'r geiniog.

At the end of the song
comes the payment.

Welsh proverb

I squashed down my nervousness and stepped up to the fence. Was it electrified? I didn't think so, but I'd find out soon enough.

Gareth just stood there, a few feet back on the trail, staring at me. I hoped he would follow me. I hoped I wasn't crazy.

But he didn't know how desperate I was. He didn't know what I'd dreamed last night—that it had been worse than anything I'd dreamed so far.

I wasn't going to think about that. Swallowing hard, I stuffed my wind-blown ponytail down into the collar of my dad's jacket, reached out, and grabbed onto the fence with one hand.

Nothing happened. I let out a long breath I hadn't realized I was holding. I dug one toe, then another, into the holes in the chain-link and started to climb. Ignoring the pain of the wire digging into my hands, I quickly reached the top. The fence was probably about seven feet high, but it seemed like twenty feet as I looked back down at Gareth. My head swam. I looked back up and focused on the fence—on my hands and feet, secure where they gripped the wire—and took deep breaths.

There was an edging of barbed wire, strung to the tall supporting poles, that extended about eight inches above the top of the fence; three parallel strands of wicked-looking metal that extended outward toward me at a slight diagonal. No problem, I tried to tell myself. You've gotten this far. I took my time, edging to the side so I could hold on to one of the supporting poles and pull myself up, so that I was standing near the top of the chain-link, both hands gripping the post. I clenched my teeth, let my body hang outward, and swung one leg high—up and over the barbed wire. Now I was straddling the top of the fence at a slight angle, my legs bowed awkwardly to avoid the barbs.

Okay.

Now the other leg. I hung on to the post for dear life and swung my right leg over. There was a heart-stopping moment as one of the spiky barbs snagged my jeans, but it didn't penetrate the thick fabric. I closed my eyes briefly, just hanging there, thankful I hadn't worn a skirt. Then I hastily clambered down and jumped the last few feet to the patchy grass below, breathing hard.

“Someone could be in there.” Gareth looked at me through the chain-link diamonds, his face scrunched into a worried frown.

“On a Sunday?” The breeze picked up for a moment, gusting past with the eerily familiar smell of pasture and ocean, and I shivered. “I'm going, whether you come or not.” My voice sounded a lot more confident than I felt; my hands, sore from clutching the fence so hard, were trembling.

Before I could lose my nerve, I turned and continued walking along the closed-off path. It was so much like my dream with Gareth that I almost wondered if I was still dreaming
.
The green-and-yellow sweep of hillside was dotted with tiny flowers, idyllic and pastoral, but I knew what would be visible once I topped the next few rises, and nervous sweat trickled down my sides. I turned and looked back. Gareth hadn't moved. I curled my hands into fists, letting disappointment wash over me. But I was here, and there was no way I was going to let this chance go by.

I walked a few steps to the top of the rise and looked back at him again. He was holding something in his hand, his shoulders hunched. He seemed terrified. My heart thudded. What was wrong? The next second, he shook his head vigorously from side to side and clambered up the fence as if something were after him. I winced as he barely cleared the barbed wire, then dropped almost the entire seven feet to the ground with an audible thud, one hand on his glasses.

He trotted up to me, shaking his head again as if his ears were ringing.

“Didn't you hear it?” His voice was rough, his eyes wide.

“Hear what?” All I could hear was the wind whistling past my ears and my own ragged breathing.

“The singing. I could hear her singing ‘Ar Lan y Môr' …
You didn't hear it?”

“No.” I stared at him. He was breathing rapidly and his voice had risen to a higher pitch. Panicked.

“It wasn't in my head,” he insisted. “Then I got the strongest feeling that I had to follow you. I—don't know how to explain it. Just look.”

He took his phone out of his pocket; I realized it was what he'd been looking at. I came closer, slowly, fear bubbling up from somewhere deep inside me. He tapped on the screen a few times and I leaned in, close enough that I could smell sweat and soap.

“Okay, listen to this.”

A recording began to play, a voice message. He switched on the speakerphone and turned the volume up.

For a moment, all I heard was the wind.

And then, a voice. Familiar, but a voice I'd never heard outside of my own dreams. A whisper:
I'm so lonely. You promised.
And then:
My mum. I miss my mum.

The whisper dissolved again into the scratchy sound of wind crackling out of the tiny speaker. Just for an instant I thought I might have heard a snatch of melody; then it was gone.

“Did you hear it?” Gareth looked closely at me. “I'm not crackers, am I?”

“I heard it,” I echoed, my voice sounding faint and hollow.

“She keeps saying that. About being lonely,” he said. “About her mum.”

For a second, I thought I might faint, and I sat down on the grass, putting my head on my knees. Gradually, the blood came back into my head and all I felt was an aching sadness. I felt scattered, broken into bits, like pieces of me were in my great-grandmother, in Olwen, even in Gareth, and I didn't know how to gather them back again.

The dreams I'd been having
…
I hadn't told Gareth yet, but I'd seen Olwen still living with her mother—Gee Gee—in the Davies home, sleeping as a baby swaddled in spare clothing in the bottom drawer. I'd seen Gee Gee being slapped by her mother and ignored by her father, given the cold shoulder by girls who had once been her friends, and sneered at by nosy neighbors. I saw Rhiannon smiling at a young man, her eyes alive and sparkling, holding his hand while waiting in line at the shop, ration coupons bundled in her other gloved fist. I saw Olwen, this time as a toddler, trailing behind Rhiannon as she shopped for a meager bag of groceries; another mother shot her a dirty look and dragged her own daughter angrily out of the shop. And, saddest of all, a young but haggard Rhiannon and Great-Grandpa John bent ashen-faced over a bed in which Olwen lay coughing in horrible, painful-sounding spasms. I'd woken with tears streaming down my face, sweat beading my forehead and my breath gasping as if I'd been running.

The tears threatened again now, stinging my eyes.

“We have to keep going,” Gareth said, holding a hand out to me. “You were right, you know. We had to come back here. I … I made a promise.” He looked down at his feet, blushing. “I told Olwen I'd come back. Let's just go.”

Olwen. We had to help her.

Nobody else could.

I swallowed my tears down, reached up, and took his hand. He pulled me to my feet, his hand warm and dry, and squeezed my fingers briefly before letting go.

The moment was like a mild electric shock, and I could swear my fingers tingled.

As we started walking, everything had a bizarre, heightened, surreal quality—the green seemed more vivid than anything I'd ever seen, and the chill wind scoured my cheeks raw. The salt air stung my nose and lips. It seemed more like a dream than reality; yet at the same time, it was more real than anything I'd ever experienced before.

Gareth had pulled ahead a little. His stride was longer than mine, and I jogged to catch up with him. We topped the last rise, and there before us was the ruined church: headstones tilting and the low wall around the churchyard nearly crumbled to the ground, just as I'd seen it in the dream. Nearly, anyway—one of the walls was hung with a bright green tarp, and an empty vehicle that looked like a small dump truck was parked next to it, its shovel filled with rocks.

Gareth stopped so abruptly that I nearly fell over him, my chest bumping awkwardly against his arm. It didn't matter; I grabbed his arm and held tight. We were here; this was it. I could feel his muscles, tense and rigid, and I followed his gaze, out over the crumbling walls of brown-gray stone tufted with grass and weeds, past the leaning, age-blurred headstones, over to where the path picked up again near a haphazard pile of construction tools and rubble.

My heart was racing. “Over there?”

He nodded. Between my dreams and Gareth's photos, I knew what we would find when we went up the low, shrub-covered hill, but my breath still caught. There was the row of little cairns, nearly overgrown now by tall green grass, and a startling spray of lilies that must have been planted some years past. But the small, conical piles of rough, round stones were unmistakable.

I could feel the little hairs stand up on the small of my back, felt the goose bumps rise under the baggy sleeves of my dad's rain jacket, even before looking past the cairns to the ancient standing stones I knew would be there. The slabs of rock seemed as if they'd been set there by giant hands, a colossal child building a house from blocks of stone and earth. Even when I wasn't looking at it, I could feel its presence, solid and looming.

“So the box is here somewhere,” I said, reluctantly breaking the silence.

“Yeah.” Gareth looked at me. “Near the plaque.” He led me, slowly, to the nearest of the cairns. The stone pile was around mid-calf height, and there, embedded in the ground just in front, was Olwen's grave marker. It was a simple flat rectangle of gray slate, carved with weathered letters that read, uncannily, my own name:
Olwen Nia Evans
. I started to shiver again, uncontrollably, and hugged myself, huddling against the misty breeze. I willed myself not to panic. It wasn't really my name on the grave, after all. It was Olwen's.

Gareth knelt carefully in front of the plaque and used his hands to dig around in the tumbled dirt and pebbles, sifting through the top layer of dirt to either side of the plaque. “Do you see it?” he asked, his voice strained.

“Wasn't there a corner sticking up in that picture you sent me?” I knelt in the dirt beside him.

“Yeah, but it must have rained or something since then. Or the workers disturbed the dirt, maybe.” Gareth moved toward the other side of the cairn and started pulling up clumps of grass and earth. I was afraid of digging too deep, but I was determined to keep going, despite a sick feeling like a lump in the bottom of my throat. If we didn't find the box, what
would
we find? I didn't want to think about it. I threw aside handfuls of soil and earthworms, wishing I'd thought to bring a trowel.

Finally, my fingernails scraped against something hard and flat. Something metal. I ignored the feeling of dirt clogging my nails and shoved both hands into the ground, worming my fingers around the top edge of the object until I had enough purchase to cling to it and pull. Slowly, the soil released its hold and the thing came free, dirt raining down on my jeans.

The box was about eight inches square and five inches deep, rusted and battered. Grass and roots clung to its sides, and a tiny padlock held the hasp shut.

Gareth and I stared at it. I realized that I hadn't quite believed, until this moment, that the box truly existed. The silver locket with the key felt cold against my chest. But I didn't want to open the box now; not here. I didn't want whatever it held to blow away, to get lost, after we'd waited so long to find it.

Also, I had something else I wanted to do.

First, though, I set the box to one side and carefully began patting the dirt and plants back into place. Gareth nodded and did the same. When we'd restored the site to a semi-tidy state, I got up, went over to the nearby lily plant, and plucked a single white flower. Kneeling down again, I placed it over the newly tamped-down earth. Then I sat back on my heels.

“So,” Gareth said. “Ready to go?”

I took a deep breath. “Not quite yet. I want to see the cromlech. I want to see the place where you … saw her.”

“Want” wasn't entirely accurate. It was more that I felt like I had to. Gareth had been visited by Olwen multiple times—in the cromlech, in his photos. But I'd only ever seen her in dreams.

Maybe if I went inside the cromlech, like he had … .maybe I could tell her we were trying to help.

Maybe then the dreams would stop.

I got to my feet. “Show me,” I said.

We walked through the ruined churchyard, past the collapsing walls of the sad little building, and stood in front of the stone burial chamber where, somehow, Gareth had found Olwen. I didn't know if it was luck or fate that they'd … connected. My dad always said you make your own luck.

Then I cocked my head. I heard a rumble, off in the distance. It was faint but slowly growing louder—the unmistakable sound of a vehicle's engine. It went on for a minute, still some distance away, and then stopped.

“What was that?” I asked. Was there some kind of caretaker? A security guard?

“I think we can safely say it isn't Olwen,” Gareth said with a weak smile.

“Your powers of deduction astound me.” I tried to smile back. “Anyway, let's hurry.”

He looked at me more seriously now. “I'm not sure what you want me—us—to do.”

We stood side by side, looking up at the massive granite boulders of the cromlech. They almost looked like a gateway, with the capstone resting on two smaller supporting stones. The space beneath was hollowed out and dark. It was impossible to see very far inside the hole; the opening only let in a small amount of light.

“I want to look inside,” I said. “That's where you saw her.”

“I'm not sure I'd recommend that,” Gareth said hesitantly. “There's really not much room in there.”