Witch Hunt

Chapter Twenty




I didn’t go home straight away. I couldn’t.

As much as I was aware there was some strong inner drive propelling me on, taking me into new spheres of experience, I could also detect a dent in my resilience. Not my resolve. But if I didn’t pay attention to one then the other would certainly suffer.

So instead I drove down to the beach and parked up. Then I walked along the front and found a bench to stare out into the sea. The wind was up and clouds were scudding across the horizon, mirroring my rapid brain activity.

Shock is a very physical sort of thing that leaves you adrift in your own skin. I almost felt like I had been bashed round the head and rendered senseless, whilst at the same time, paradoxically, I was super-alert.

I sat there for a long time, under the Cheshire cat moon, in the sharp air. The tide was out, exposing the black mud of the estuary floor. Lots of people hated this time, yearning for the river to come back in and cover the muck. But they didn’t know how to value it. That state never lasted long. The tidal landscape was always in a process of constant change. When you look into the seascape it sends you something back that mirrors your emotional state. Usually when I gazed into the yawning cleft between the stars and riverbed, the emptiness would make me feel as if I was staring into a void, a moment of stillness in the hustle and bustle of twenty-first-century life. Right then, that night, I remember it was unsettling, reflecting back uncertainty and turbulence. I sat there and tried to think it all through, trying to get a handle on what was going on inside and outside of my head. It was like swimming against the tide.

My mind tumbled over the events of the past thirteen days since the funeral: the dreams, the nightmares, the pleading. ‘I’m sorry.’ The voice from the mirror, the girl in the cell, her words not just beseeching but also imperative, like she was trying to tell me something. Like she wanted me to do something for her.

I wondered what she needed, before another part of my brain halted that thought process and told me I was delirious or imagining things, and then I’d question my sanity and think back on poor Mum’s mental illness. Could this possibly be genetic? Had I inherited a weakness from her?

That last time at the hospital Mum had been so weak and frail, but she too had been trying with all her might to say something. What was it? She’d attempted to speak, to form her twisted mouth into words …

Then I remembered. Wasn’t it something to do with a gift? I swallowed.

The gift.

There it was, those two words – ‘the gift’. Surely she had been talking about a legacy of sorts?

But what if the legacy was nothing to do with money or jewellery? What if it was to do with something else? Something that connected now to this new part of me roused from its slumber. Something which, in turn, related to her strange behaviour?

Was it possible that Mum too had seen the things I had started to see – but that she saw them not as a curse but some sort of insight? A peeling back of the layers of reality that others could never perceive?

A gift.

Could I have inherited it from her?

But then, why hadn’t she told me? Earlier on, before she became so damaged and worn? She would have done, I was sure. She would have prepared me.

No, it couldn’t be. I had to be barking up the wrong tree, surely? All that psychic supernatural stuff was nonsense, I’d seen TV programmes with psychics, and was convinced that they were exploiters who had plants in the audience and teams of researchers. The whole thing was hammy entertainment. If people believed it then they were deluded and sad.

Though maybe that was the point.

Maybe that was exactly what was happening to me. A sad delusion had descended to help me cope with the fact that Mum had gone and that there was no afterlife. That all the existential fears I had ever had were true.

Perhaps part of my subconscious was inventing experiences to help my conscious being cope with such huge loss.

But then, why not imagine Mum? Why wasn’t I visualising Rosamund Asquith in all her beauteous glory at her prime of life, when me and Dad and she were happy?

‘Because it’s not Mum who’s trying to get through,’ a voice in my head whispered.

Where had that come from?

It wasn’t a different voice. It wasn’t a different person. It was like an alternative ‘me’ who was speaking. A ‘me’ who was trying to nudge a new idea forwards.

Another bubbled up, darker, more insistent: ‘No. Leave it.’

Maybe that’s what I should do – abandon the project for the sake of my sanity. Perhaps it was taking me to a place I didn’t want to go?

To madness.

That could be it – the only thing haunting me – the spectre of lunacy.

Oh God. Perhaps I was schizophrenic?

That had been one of Mum’s possible diagnoses at one point. And it had horrified me. And her. But then, I recalled, it had turned out not to be valid.

Yet I had not just heard voices, I had seen things too, hadn’t I?

With my very own eyes.

I sat back, exhausted. I was going round and round in circles.

There was one way to settle it. If I had, indeed, been contacted by some supernatural creature perhaps I could call it up? I would do that, yes.

And so I charged myself with strength, gritted my teeth, swallowed then shouted out into the darkness, ‘Come on then, if you’re here, tell me what you want!’

But there was no response. Of course there wasn’t, I scolded myself. Did you really think there would be, you fool?

My sigh blocked out the dull scream of a solitary circling seagull. I relaxed my muscles and let my gaze rest on the lopsided boats, not seeing the drifts and shapes around me.

What, I wondered, does it mean to be mad? What exactly is madness? Wasn’t it just a detour from the expected path of society’s conventions? And nobody was entirely conventional. In fact, if you met someone who did observe every single norm, then you’d undoubtedly think that they were slightly mad.

Did that mean nobody was sane?

I went off on that tangent for a bit, flicking through my friends and colleagues, analysing their behaviour, coming to rest on Dan. Where was he? And how was his mental state? My hands strayed to my mouth and started chewing over my nails, something I hadn’t done for years.

I don’t know when I became aware that I wasn’t alone. It was almost like one minute there was no one there, the next the black shadow was fully formed hovering out there on the waving lengths of seaweed: a black outline of a woman, too misty and vague to see in detail.

I caught my breath as my eyes locked onto her. My mind shut down all thought, rendering other functions impossible and stilling my body.

She was skittering on the surface, flicking to and fro like an imperfect television signal. Then I heard her speak.

‘Mercy,’ she said.

I heard it loud and clear.

It was real.

And in my head everything suddenly clicked.