Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2) (14 page)

Laura sat apart, staring out of the window blankly. Church found it impossible to read her; the impassive expression could have been hiding a sense of deep betrayal, or something he didn’t want to consider, but which was nonetheless licking at the back of his mind. He hated himself for thinking it, though when he looked around he could tell the others felt the same. The thing he had dreaded had come to pass: a cancerous suspicion was eating away at them all.

Beyond that he found it almost impossible to cope with the raw emotion searing his heart. At times, if he allowed himself to inspect it too closely, it reminded him of those terrible feelings that had consumed him after Marianne had died, and that surprised him; had he grown so close to Ruth so quickly? So much had changed over the past few weeks, bonds materialising on a spiritual level, others being forged through hardship: he hadn’t even begun to get a handle on what was happening inside him.

As the first rays of dawn licked the rooftops across the street, the intermittent, stuttering conversation told him what he feared: that the others were looking to him to make a decision. Before Beltane, he would have wanted to tell them he wasn’t up to it, he didn’t have the resilience or tenacity of leadership within him. But his failure had made him face his responsibilities, and he would take the difficult decisions however much they might corrupt his essential character and beliefs. That, he told himself, is what it’s all about. He had to make sacrifices for the greater good. He just hoped the sacrifices wouldn’t be so great that there would be nothing left of him by the end of it.

“We need to move on to Edinburgh rapidly,” he said eventually.

“We are going to look for Ruth, right?” Veitch asked.

“Of course.”

Veitch eyed him suspiciously. “What would you have done if she’d been taken in the opposite direction?”

Church didn’t answer.

None of them could decide how they should dispose of the finger so they wrapped it in a handkerchief and buried it in the depths of Church’s bag. They packed quickly and checked out, despite the obvious concern of the hotel manager who wondered why they were leaving so early, without breakfast and one travelling companion short.

The last building of the town was barely behind them when a police car came screaming by, lights flashing, forcing them to pull over. The driver was a man in his mid-forties with greying hair and the wearied expression of someone who had been pushed to the limit, while his eyes suggested he’d been dragged out of bed to catch them. Veitch wound down the driver’s window as he approached.

“You’re going to have to accompany me back into town, sir.” His eyes were piercing, but Veitch didn’t flinch from the stare.

“No can do, mate. We’ve got business down south.”

“I don’t want to have to ask you again, lad. Since the martial law was brought in, I’ve been run ragged. They don’t think it’s the rural areas that need the help, so we have to fend for ourselves. So don’t push me around because I’ll push back harder if it makes my life easier.”

As Veitch bristled, Church hastily leaned across him. “What’s the problem, officer? We were driving okay-“

“You know what the problem is.” There was a snap of irritation in his voice. “A certain matter of blood on the carpet.”

“Oh, that. A bit of horseplay that got out of control. If the manager wants us to pay for cleaning-“

“Get out of the van. Now.” The policeman’s body grew rigid with tension.

Shavi tugged at Church’s jacket from the back. “He thinks we killed Ruth,” he whispered, too low for the policeman to hear. There was something in his voice that suggested he wasn’t simply reading the policeman’s mannerisms.

Everything seemed to hang for a second. Church saw Veitch’s eyes narrow, his forearm muscles tense, and an instant later he had snapped on the ignition and popped the clutch. The van roared away, leaving the policeman yelling furiously behind them. Veitch drove wildly until the police car was out of sight, then he slammed on the brakes and reversed up a rough foresters’ track which wound through ranks of pine. When the trees obscured the road he killed the engine.

“Big macho idiot,” Laura said coldly from the back. “Now we’ll be on everyone’s most wanted list. We won’t be able to travel anywhere.”

Veitch glared at her. “You haven’t got any right to talk. We wouldn’t be here if not for-“

“Leave it out,” Church ordered.

Veitch grew sullen. “The moment he got a look at my record we wouldn’t stand a chance of getting out of the area for days,” he continued. “We can’t afford to waste that time.”

“You did the right thing, Ryan.” Church put his head back and closed his eyes wearily. “If things are as bad as they seem … if things are going to get as bad as we expect … the cops will have too much on their plate to worry about us. It might make things a little more difficult, but if they’re not putting a dragnet out, I reckon we’ll be okay.”

“You better be right,” Laura said gloomily.

Church recalled Shavi’s apparent knowledge of the policeman’s thoughts and turned to him. “You can read minds now?”

Shavi shrugged. “It was empathic.”

“But you can get into heads, you’ve shown us that.” Shavi wouldn’t meet Church’s gaze.

“What are you getting at?” Laura asked.

“I think Shavi should try peeling back the layers of your memory so we can find out what you really did see last night.”

Even Laura’s sunglasses couldn’t mask her concern. “Not in my head.”

“What have you got to hide?” Veitch asked coldly.

Laura’s face froze.

“Ruth and I went through something similar when all this mess started.” Church tried to be as reassuring as he could, for Shavi’s sake as much as Laura’s. “It wasn’t so bad. And it really helped us to get all those trapped thoughts out in the open.”

Laura moved her head slightly and Church guessed that behind her sunglasses she was looking at Veitch, weighing up his words and her options; his barely veiled accusations made it impossible for her to back out.

“Okay, Mister Shaman. You get to venture where no man has been before.” Her voice was emotionless.

Church clapped a hand on Shavi’s shoulder. “It’ll be okay.”

Shavi smiled at him tightly.

They locked up the van and ventured into the pines until they found a spot where the sun broke through the canopy of vegetation, casting a circle of light. Laura and Shavi sat cross-legged in the centre, facing each other, while Church, Veitch and Tom leaned on tree trunks and watched quietly. Shavi had already eaten some of Tom’s hash to attune his mood. He spent a few moments whispering gently to Laura; after a while her eyes were half-lidded, her movements lazy.

The atmosphere changed perceptibly the moment Shavi leaned forward to take Laura’s hands; the birdsong died as if a switch had been thrown, even the breeze seemed to drop. There was a stillness like glass over everything.

When Shavi spoke, the world held its breath. “We are going back to last night, Laura. To the hotel, after the dance. You and Ruth had gone to bed early.”

“I wasn’t in the mood. I’d had enough of Miss Prissy. And too many people were looking at my scars.”

“You both went into your rooms. And went to sleep?”

“I lay down on the top of the bed. I was tired, the booze was knocking me out.” Her voice was soporific. “I don’t know how long I was asleep. Couldn’t have been long. I heard a noise-“

“What was it?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Try.”

She thought for a moment. “It was Ruth. She cried out.”

“What did you do then? Tell me, step by step.”

“I got up. I felt like someone had beaten me around the head with a baseball bat. I walked to the door … Actually, it was more of a stagger. I thought, `I’m glad Church isn’t here to see this. I’d never live it down.’ There was another noise. Sounded like a lamp going over. I thought I could hear voices through the wall. I stepped out on to the landing …” Her breath caught suddenly in her throat.

“What was it?”

Tears sprang to her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. “I …” She shook her head, screwed her eyes up as if that would prevent the images forming.

Shavi’s reassuring voice grew so low the others could barely hear it. “Concentrate, Laura. Focus on the interloper.”

“It was …” A shiver ran through her. “No, no. I see a large wolf. It reaches right up to the ceiling. Bigger. Passing through. It’s growing to fill the whole hotel. It has sickly yellow eyes and it turns them on me. And it smiles … it smiles like a man.”

She started to hyperventilate. Shavi let go of her hands and put his arms around her shoulders, gently pulling her towards him until she was resting against his chest, where her breathing gradually subsided.

“A giant wolf? She’s making it up,” Veitch hissed.

They moved into the circle of light and squatted down, waiting for Laura to recover. She wouldn’t meet any of their eyes. “That’s what you get delving around in the depths of my mind. I told you I’d done too many drugs.”

“What do you think? A shapeshifter?” Shavi seemed to have gained renewed confidence from the success of the exercise; the faint, enigmatic smile Church remembered from the first time they met had returned to his face.

“I don’t think so.” Tom’s expression was troubled. “The wolf could be representational of whatever she saw. She might be converting her memory into symbols to help her deal with it.”

Church remembered his own experience of regression therapy to try to unlock the memories of the terrible sight beneath Albert Bridge, images so horrible his mind had locked them away. Although what eventually surfaced had proved to be the truth, the therapist had talked about false screen memories designed to protect the mind’s integrity from something too awful to bear.

“This is doing my head in,” Veitch said. “It’s like you can’t believe anything you see or remember or think!”

“That’s how it always was,” Tom replied curtly.

“So how do we break through the symbolism to get to what Laura really saw?” Church asked.

Shavi rubbed his chin uncomfortably. “I would not like to try again so soon after this attempt. I think Laura … both of us … need time to recover. The mind is too sensitive.”

“Yeah, and it’s the only one I’ve got.” With an expression of faint distaste, Laura rubbed her hands together as if wiping away the stain of the memory.

“At least we know Laura saw something … someone,” Shavi continued.

“So do you believe me now, musclehead?” With her sunglasses on, Church couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or Veitch.

“I still think she could be making it up,” Witch said suspiciously. “None of you know what’s going on here, what her mind can do, what’s real and what’s not. She might have dreamed it up this way. Some kind of self-hypnosis, I don’t know.” He turned to Laura. “You didn’t say anything about how you got the blood on you.”

“I remember that now. Whatever I saw turned my head upside down. I wandered into Ruth’s room like some kind of mental patient and I just, sort of, touched the blood because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

“Fits together perfectly, don’t it?” Veitch sneered.

As Laura bristled Church jumped in to prevent further confrontation. “We can’t stay here any longer with that cop driving around.” He glanced among the trees. “Who knows what’s in these woods anyway? We need to get to Edinburgh.”

“That cop will at least have put out the van’s description and number,” Laura said. “Face it, we’re not going to get far in that.”

“Then we dump it, find another form of transport,” Church said. “Time to use our initiative.”

Before they left, they took Ruth’s finger and buried it in the leaf mould. It made them sick to leave it there, but there was nothing else for it. Then they took the A84 to Stirling where they found a dealer who took the van off their hands for two hundred pounds. It was an effort to lug their bags, camping equipment and remaining provisions to the station, but they didn’t have long to wait to pick up a train to Edinburgh Waverley. There were only two carriages but apart from a trio of people at the far end of their carriage, the train was empty.

“I thought they would have shut the trains down by now,” Church said to the conductor as they boarded.

“Make the most of it,” he replied gruffly. “The last service is tonight. Indefinite suspension of the entire network.” He shrugged. “I still get kept on at full pay, at least for the moment. Not many people travelling anyways.”

They settled into their seats, lulled by the sun-heated, dusty interior, and once the train gently rocked out of the station they found themselves drifting off after their night without sleep. The journey to Edinburgh would be under an hour, but they had barely got out into open countryside when they were disturbed by the loud voices of two of their fellow travellers. It appeared to be a father and daughter conversing in a heated manner. His greying hair was slicked back in a manner popular during the war, and he had on an old-fashioned suit that seemed brand-new. A cracked briefcase was tucked under one arm. The daughter, who was in her early thirties, wore clothes that were smart, if unstylish. She was quite plain, with a complexion tempered by an outdoor life.

Drifting in and out of half-sleep, Church made out they had a farm somewhere outside Stirling which was experiencing financial problems and they were heading into Edinburgh to attempt to secure some kind of grant. But there was an edgy undercurrent to their talk which suggested some other issue was concerning them and they couldn’t agree about how to deal with it.

Veitch shifted irritably in his seat and plumped up his jacket as a pillow. “Just shut up,” he said under his breath as their voices rose again.

They all managed to get some sleep for the next ten minutes, but then they were jolted sharply awake by the farmer snarling, “There’s no bloody fairies in the fields! No bloody God either! It’s not about luck! It’s about those bastards in the Government, and in Europe!”

Church glanced around the edge of the seat ahead. The woman was pink with embarrassment at her father’s outburst and trying to calm him with frantic hand movements. But there was something else concerning her too.