Entangled (17 page)

They weren’t trees. They were monsters, three times Ria’s height, and she’d walked right into the midst of them. She looked left and right trying to figure out an escape route, but they were all around her – in front of her, behind her, towering over her – blocking her way to the nearby river. She could see their beady red eyes now, like poisonous fruits amongst the weird foliage, and their long pointed beaks, big enough to cut her in half or swallow her whole. These features made them look like birds – perhaps some gigantic species of stork. But their legs really resembled tree trunks, their feet were clumps of tangled roots, their feathers were a mass of dirty green leaves, and a network of large and small bones resembling branches and twigs supported the stubby rudiments of wings.

Could they fly, jump, run, like birds? Or were they –
please let it be so
– fixed in place like trees?

Ria spun on her heel hoping for answers from the spirit girl, but she had vanished. One moment she was there, signalling and shouting, seemingly flesh and blood. But a blink of an eye later she was … just gone.

Ria had no time to be mystified. Moving with exaggerated care, she took a couple of experimental steps towards the river a hundred paces away.

The monsters responded with muted clucks.

A third step brought an ear-splitting squawk from just over her head, accompanied by a disconcerting rustling of leaf-feathers.

As she took her fourth step the rustling increased to a crescendo and she was already breaking into a run when a huge beak scissored down.

Ria dodged rapidly to her left and ducked. The beak snapped closed where her head had been an instant before. She stumbled, almost fell, threw herself forward to evade another murderous lunge and then was up and running again.

Glancing back she confirmed that the weird tree-birds were not, as she
had hoped, rooted to the ground. The good news was that most of the flock seemed to have no interest in her, but the bad news was that two were in hot pursuit, only paces behind, and closing the distance fast. They were so big and heavy that the ground was shaking under their feet.

Whoosh!

One of the great beaks was swinging towards her. She tracked it out of the corner of her eye, ducked –
Clack!
– and carried on running

Faced by danger Ria’s natural instinct was to snatch up stones and throw them at whatever threatened her, but she could see no stones amongst the endless green flowers of the spirit world. So her only plan was to get to the river and find something to defend herself with, or dive in and swim for it.

The bank was close but the two huge birds were agile and fast-moving and forced her to run the indirect zigzag course of a startled rabbit. They were right on her heels, crowding her, stabbing at her back and legs with their scything, snapping beaks. But it seemed that neither wanted its rival to get to her first so they lunged and stabbed at each other as well, uttering furious clucking squawks.

While they were squabbling, Ria stopped zigzagging and made a break for the river, now only fifty paces away, but in an instant one of the tree-birds caught up with her again, squawking and shrieking.
Clack!
Its wickedly sharp beak stabbed down at her head.
Clack! Clack!
She sprinted forward the last few paces and reached the bank. There was a drop of about twice her height to a shingle beach below – a beach covered with rounded cobbles.

Whoosh! Clack!
Another near miss. Ria was already in the air. She went into a forward roll as she landed, grabbed a couple of stones and ended on her feet facing the tree-bird as it flapped down onto the beach twenty paces from her and began to pick its way across the shingle.

The stones were larger and heavier than she would have liked, but there was no time to find substitutes. They would just have to do. Scanning the top of the riverbank for the second bird, she drew back her right arm, took aim and let fly at the first, which had closed the distance between them to just ten paces. There was a distinct and absolutely satisfying
thwack!
as the missile found its target. The creature’s head split open, spilling its brains, and it crumpled on the spot in a heap.

One down, one to go.

She scanned the riverbank again and the second bird hopped into
view, its disproportionately small wings thrashing before it crashed down to the shingle a dozen paces in front of her. It stood still for a moment, clacking its beak and sizing her up with its greedy red eyes. Hoping she could throw as well with both hands in this world as she did in her own, Ria hefted her second stone.

If she took just three steps backwards she knew she would be in the river. It looked as deep and fast-flowing as the Snake, in which her mother and father had drowned, and she wasn’t getting into it unless there was no other way to avoid being eaten. She aimed and threw again, but lost her footing. The stone flew wide of its mark, bouncing off a wing, and at once the tree-bird was on the move, screeching its rage, lurching towards her.

Ria waited a little too long to dodge its charge and was sent sprawling by a kick from one of its massive rootlike feet. As she struggled to pick herself up, the tremendous momentum of the creature’s onslaught carried it past her, skidding on the wet sand. It was unable to stop itself and plunged into the river with a stupendous splash and flapping of wings. At once the water around it seethed and boiled and the monster began to call out with a repeated piteous ear-splitting screech.

What was happening?

Ria peered closer and saw that a host of small reptilian-looking fish with mouths full of long serrated teeth were swarming over the tree-bird, bearing it down under the surface of the swirling river, eating it with astounding efficiency and attention to detail. The teeth flashed and glittered in the sunlight, the water boiled and splashed in a mad frenzy, and within moments there was nothing left of the huge predator at all except trails of blood in the water and its strangely beautiful skeleton, now stripped clean like a dead tree, sinking into the depths.

‘Well done, Ria’ said a thought-voice in her head. It was a voice so thrilling and ethereal that it made her hair stand on end. ‘You have passed the first test.’

She looked up from the bloodied water and saw three figures standing watching her less than a bowshot away on the far bank. One was a tall woman with long black hair and deep blue skin. The others were her mother and father, waving, looking just as they had on the last day of their lives.

Forgetting everything in her love and excitement, Ria ran out into the river.

As the waking sleep of deep ketamine sedation wore off, Leoni began to be troubled by memories of a strange dream.

If it had been a dream.

It came back to her in fragments, not in a connected whole, and with the sense that she had forgotten large parts of it.

It began with a vivid and convincing rerun of her near-death experience, and she found herself out of her body, drawn into a vortex of light and returned to that strange world that the Blue Angel had called ‘the land where everything is known’. She was in a body again and – exactly as before – she was dressed in a simple sleeveless tunic that didn’t belong to her. She was sure that she’d had another encounter with the Blue Angel, one laden with significance, but she couldn’t remember anything that had passed between them.

Next came a tremendous rush and noise, everything around her blurred and refocused, and she materialised in the midst of a group of the sinister tree-birds. Right in front of her walked a young woman dressed in a tunic identical to her own. She seemed oblivious to the imminent danger.

Leoni’s powerful instinct to run away was not so strong as the deep and immediate connection she felt to this girl, and she knew she had to warn her even at risk to her own life. Besides, there was no
risk
, right? Because at one level of consciousness she understood she was lying on a hospital bed tripping out on ket and this was all just a crazy dream. Wasn’t it?

Still she yelled: ‘Hey, you! We gotta get out of here. These things aren’t trees.’

The young woman spun on her heels. She was more of a girl, really – maybe sixteen – quite short, wiry, very pretty in a tough tomboyish way, with nut-brown skin and chestnut hair. She stood facing Leoni with her hands clenched into fists and shouted a challenge in a strange
language.
Dumb bitch.
She was so up for a fight she was missing the bigger picture – namely, a flock of monster predators with beaks the size of cars looming right over her head.

Leoni rolled her eyes and tried again: ‘RUN! OR WE’RE BOTH GOING TO BE BIRDFEED!’ She raised her arm and pointed. The kid looked back over her shoulder and saw the danger. Then –
whoomf!
– the scene went blank and Leoni was emerging from her ketamine haze in California, strapped down to her bed, locked up tight in thick darkness.

It was as though her mind were running on two parallel tracks. One continued to give her glimpses of that strange and compelling otherworld that she had been immersed in on the edge of death and seemed somehow to have entered again under the influence of ketamine. The other dwelt on her predicament as a prisoner in a psychiatric hospital where her parents intended to keep her permanently out of their way.

Leoni had done a lot of drugs in her short life and once at a club had been persuaded to snort a bump of K. It made her eyes sting and burn, left a horrible taste in the back of her mouth and turned her bones to rubber. Far from speeding her up, as ecstasy and cocaine usually did, ketamine had locked her in a lugubrious and incoherent world of her own where everything moved in slo-mo and simple physical tasks like lifting a wine glass became daunting obstacle courses. It also gave her the feeling that she had somehow been sitting about a foot away from herself for most of the evening. She realised now that this might have been a kind of low-level out-of-body experience.

The dose Melissa had injected into her must have been larger than the amount she’d been able to snort. Much larger. And it had produced different effects – including a weird and spectacular return journey to the land where everything is known.

Here was the problem. Leoni’s very strong instinct about her bizarre experiences in the near-death state was that they were
real
– and the one good conversation she’d had with Dr Bannerman had reinforced her in this view. But, courtesy of Melissa, she had now discovered that she could repeat elements of those experiences, get the out-of-body feeling, even encounter the same beings – such as the Blue Angel and monsters like the tree-birds – simply by shooting up a drug.

Didn’t that prove that
all
such adventures, whether induced ‘artificially’ by ketamine or ‘naturally’ in a near-death coma, were just hallucinations – and thus completely
unreal?
And if that was so then wasn’t it likely that the devastating conversation she’d overheard between her parents while supposedly out of her body must also have been unreal?

Alone in the darkness, fearful, strapped so tight to her bed she couldn’t move, Leoni began to lose her new-found confidence in her flashbacks of being raped by her father. Suppose the rapes were just hallucinations too? Suppose they had never happened, as Dad had always claimed? Suppose they were no more ‘real’ than her ketamine dreams and near-death delusions of a non-existent otherworld?

Suppose her memories really were false?

Leoni heard the sound of keys turning in locks and bolts being drawn. Then the door was flung open, lights came on and Sansom strode into the room, scowling and red-faced.

Right behind him was John Bannerman.