“Hi,” I said at the bottom of the steps, looking up at them.
For a second I thought they weren’t going to answer, they had made me already, and I wondered wildly what the hell I was supposed to do now. Then Daniel took a step forwards, and the picture wavered and broke. A smile started across Justin’s face, Rafe straightened up and raised one arm in a wave, and Abby came running down the steps and hugged me hard.
“Hey, you,” she said, laughing, “welcome home.” Her hair smelled like camomile. I dropped the case and hugged her back; it was a strange feeling, as if I were touching someone out of an old painting, amazed to find her shoulder blades warm and solid as my own. Daniel nodded gravely at me over her head and ruffled my hair, Rafe grabbed my case and started bumping it up the steps to the door, Justin patted my back over and over and I was laughing too, and I didn’t even hear Frank start the car and drive away.
This is the first thing I thought when I stepped into Whitethorn House: I’ve been here before. It zinged straight through me, straightened my spine like a crash of cymbals. The place bloody well should have looked familiar, all the hours I’d spent staring at photos and video, but it was more than that. It was the smell, old wood and tea leaves and a faint whiff of dried lavender; it was the way the light lay along the scarred floorboards; it was the little taps our footsteps sent flying up the stairwell, echoing softly along the upstairs corridors. It felt—and you’d think I would like this but I didn’t, it flashed danger-sign red right across my mind—it felt like coming home.
From there on, most of that evening is a merry-go-round blur, colors and images and voices whirled together into a burst almost too bright to look at. A ceiling rose and a cracked china vase, a piano stool and a bowl of oranges, running feet on stairs and a rising laugh. Abby’s fingers small and strong on my wrist, leading me out to the flagstoned patio behind the house, curlicued metal chairs, ancient wicker swing seat swaying in the light sweet breeze; great sweep of grass falling away to high stone walls half hidden in trees and ivy, blink of a bird’s shadow across the paving stones. Daniel lighting my cigarette, his hand cupped round the match and his bent head inches from mine. The full ring of their voices hit me like a shock, after the flattened-out video sound, and their eyes were so clear they burned on my skin. Sometimes, still, I wake up with one of their voices strong and close by my ear, fallen straight out of that day: Come here, Justin calls, come outside, the evening’s so lovely; or Abby says, We have to decide what to do with the herb garden, but we were waiting for you, what do you—and I’m awake, and they’re gone.
I must have talked too, somewhere in there, but I can’t remember most of what I said. All I remember is trying to keep my weight forwards on my toes like Lexie did, my voice up in her register, my eyes and my shoulders and my smoke at the right angles, trying not to look around too much and not to move too fast without wincing and not to say anything idiotic and not to whack into the furniture. And God the taste of undercover on my tongue again, the brush of it down the little hairs on my arms. I’d thought I remembered what it was like, every detail, but I’d been wrong: memories are nothing, soft as gauze against the ruthless razor-fineness of that edge, beautiful and lethal, one tiny slip and it’ll slice to the bone.
It took my breath away, that evening. If you’ve ever dreamed that you walked into your best-loved book or film or TV program, then maybe you’ve got some idea how it felt: things coming alive around you, strange and new and utterly familiar at the same time; the catch in your heartbeat as you move through the rooms that had such a vivid untouchable life in your mind, as your feet actually touch the carpet, as you breathe the air; the odd, secret glow of warmth as these people you’ve been watching for so long, from so far away, open their circle and sweep you into it. Abby and I rocked the swing seat lazily; the guys moved in and out through the small-paned French windows between the patio and the kitchen, making dinner—smell of roasting potatoes, sizzle of meat, suddenly I was starving—and calling to us. Rafe came outside to lean on the back of the seat between us and take a drag of Abby’s cigarette. Rose-gold sky deepening and great puffs of cloud streaming like the smoke of some faraway wildfire, cool air rich with grass and earth and growing things. “Dinner!” Justin yelled, against a clatter of plates.
That long, laden table, immaculate in its heavy red damask cloth, its snow-white napkins; the candlesticks twined with strands of ivy, flames glittering miniature in the curves of the glasses, catching in the silver, beckoning in the dimming windows like will-o’-the-wisps. And the four of them, pulling up high-backed chairs, smooth-skinned and shadow-eyed in the confusing golden light: Daniel at the head of the table and Abby at the foot, Rafe beside me and Justin opposite. In the flesh, that ceremonial feel I had caught off the videos and Frank’s notes was powerful as incense. It was like sitting down to a banquet, a war council, a game of Russian roulette high in some lonely tower.
They were so beautiful. Rafe was the only one who could have been called good-looking; but still, when I remember them, that beauty is all I can think of.
Justin loaded up plates with Steak Diane and passed them around— “Specially for you,” he told me, with a faint smile; Rafe scooped roast potatoes onto them as they passed him. Daniel poured red wine into mismatched wineglasses.
This evening was taking every brain cell I had; the last thing I needed was to get drunk. “I’m not supposed to have booze,” I said. “The antibiotics.”
It was the first time any of us had brought up the stabbing, even indirectly. For a fraction of a second—or maybe it was just my imagination—the room seemed to stop motionless, the bottle suspended in midtilt, hands arrested halfway through gestures. Then Daniel went back to pouring, with a deft twist of the wrist that left less than an inch in the glass. “There,” he said, unruffled. “A sip won’t do you any harm. Just for a toast.”
He passed me my glass and filled his own. “To homecomings,” he said.
In the moment when that glass passed from his hand to mine, something sent up a high wild warning cry in the back of my mind. Persephone’s irrevocable pomegranate seeds, Never take food from strangers; old stories where one sip or bite seals the spellbound walls forever, dissolves the road home into mist and blows it away on the wind. And then, sharper: If it was them, after all, and it’s poisoned; Jesus, what a way to go. And I realized, with a thrill like an electric shock, that they would be well able for it. That poised quartet waiting for me at the door, with their straight backs and their cool, watchful eyes: they were more than capable of playing the game all evening, waiting with immaculate control and without a single slip for their chosen moment.
But they were all smiling at me, glasses raised, and I didn’t have a choice. “Homecomings,” I said, and leaned over the table to clink their glasses among the ivy and the candle flames: Justin, Rafe, Abby, Daniel. I took a sip of the wine—it was warm and rich and smooth, honey and summer berries, and I felt it right down to the tips of my fingers—and then I picked up my knife and fork and sliced into my steak.
Maybe it was just that I needed food—the steak was delicious and my appetite had resurfaced like it was trying to make up for lost time, but unfortunately no one had mentioned anything about Lexie eating like a horse, so I wasn’t going to be asking for seconds—but that was when they came into focus for me, that dinner; that’s when the memories start to fall into sequence, like glass beads caught on a string, and the evening changes from a bright blur into something real and manageable. “Abby got a poppet,” Rafe said, dumping potatoes on his plate. “We were going to burn her as a witch, but we decided to wait till you got back, so we could put it to a democratic vote.”
“Burn Abby, or the poppet?” I asked.
“Both.”
“It is not a poppet,” Abby said, flicking Rafe in the arm. “It’s a late-Victorian doll, and Lexie will appreciate it, because she’s not a Philistine.”
“I’d appreciate it from a distance, if I were you,” Justin told me. “I think it’s possessed. Its eyes keep following me.”
“So lie her down. Her eyes close.”
“I’m not touching it. What if it bites me? I’ll have to wander the outer darkness for all eternity, searching for my soul—”
“God, I’ve missed you,” Abby told me. “I’ve been stuck with no one to talk to except this bunch of wusses. It’s just an itsy-bitsy dolly, Justin.”
“Poppet,” Rafe said, through potatoes. “Seriously. It’s made from a sacrificed goat.”