In Her Shadow
Authors: Louise Douglas
Tags: #Literary Criticism, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Poetry, #European
About the Book
One ordinary morning at work
Hannah Brown
glimpses a young woman with dark hair, wearing a green coat spattered with rain. The woman is identical to her childhood best friend,
Ellen Brecht
. But Hannah believes Ellen is dead. Could it really be her?
For a moment it is a though the past twenty years have never happened: life becomes dazzling and exciting again and Hannah remembers how it felt to be young and strong, and without regret. Then she thinks about what happened to Ellen and to her all those years ago and she’s filled with a terrible fear. Because the seemingly idyllic Cornish childhood she and Ellen shared ended in obsession and betrayal. Has Ellen returned to forgive her, or to punish her?
Contents
In Her Shadow
Louise Douglas
For Kevin, with love
CHAPTER ONE
I LOOKED UP
and she was there. Ellen Brecht was standing just a few feet away from me, so close that if we had both reached out our arms, our fingertips would have touched.
‘Ellen?’ I whispered, and it was as if the past twenty years had never happened. For a moment, life became dazzling and exciting again, and I remembered how it felt to be young and strong and healthy, and without loneliness or regret. My desiccated, useless heart came back to life, pumping relief through me like some sublime narcotic. For the first time in two decades, I felt truly alive.
‘Ellen!’
I wanted to touch her, I wanted to reach out and take hold of her hand and never let it go. I wanted to ask her why she had gone away like that, why she had left me alone for so long, why she had let me believe she was lost – but before I could move, the lights began to fade and she had melted away into the darkness. Then I knew it was too late. I had lost her again. She was gone.
The day I saw Ellen had begun much like any other. I had woken at the usual time and gone to work in the Brunel Memorial Museum in Bristol. The morning had passed
quickly and without drama. I’d eaten a tomato and mozzarella panini for lunch and then John Lansdown, the Curator of Antiquities, had asked me to assemble some materials for an illustrated lecture. One of the objects he needed was a jade amulet that was kept in the Egyptian Gallery on the mezzanine floor. Normally I would have asked our intern, Misty, to fetch it, but she was off that day and in any case I felt like stretching my legs. I picked up my keys and left the cramped backstage rooms where the academic staff worked, crossed the museum’s cathedral-like main hall and trotted up the sweeping marble staircase, its wide steps patterned with lozenges of coloured light reflected beneath the grand glass dome.
On the mezzanine, I wove through the tourists and visitors crowded around a visceral display on the science of embalming, and stooped to go through the low doorway designed to resemble a pyramid entrance. A narrow tunnel led into the gallery, which was a recreation of the interior of a tomb. It was dark inside, a deep and heavy darkness, black as pitch. This was broken by muted spotlights which were on timers; so as one faded, another would come in, and the jackal face of an eight-foot-high statue of Anubis would disappear as a rag-skinned mummy emerged grinning from the gloom. A soundtrack of a mournful wind played low in the background. The visitors spoke in hushed voices, and although I was used to the gallery, its claustrophobic atmosphere never failed to unnerve me.
I moved slowly amongst the displays while my eyes adjusted to the gloom, and when I found the relevant cabinet, I crouched to unlock it and disable the alarm. The glass door swung open, I reached inside to pick up the ancient amulet, closed my fingers around it and cupped it carefully in my palm. I shut the door and relocked it, stood up and straightened my back, squinting as the
spotlights grew brighter – and that was when I saw her.
Ellen Brecht was there, in the chamber.
Ellen Brecht. My best friend. My nemesis.
She was wearing a green raincoat with the collar turned up, the red lipstick she had favoured when she was trying to look sophisticated, and her eyes were dark in her pale face. Her hair was damp. She was wearing her mother’s necklace, the treble clef charm lying in the hollow beneath her throat.
‘Ellen,’ I whispered, but before I could say anything more, the lights faded again. As the artificial darkness fell, I remembered what had happened to Ellen and me all those years ago, and my joy was replaced by fear. Panic crept up behind me and grabbed me by the shoulders. It shocked me back to my senses.
I took a few steps away, and then the lights came up again and I cried out in alarm because she was closer to me now, standing beside a display of canopic jars. Now I could see what I had missed before: Ellen’s gaze was fierce – her eyes bored into me and I was afraid of her, and of what she wanted from me. She hadn’t come to forgive me, she had come to punish me. She wanted to hurt me as I had hurt her. She had been waiting, all these years, to claim her revenge – and now the moment had arrived, it was almost as if I had been expecting it. I had known it was not over between us.
Cold fingers of dread tightened around my throat.
‘
Go away!
’ I pleaded. ‘
Go away! Leave me alone!
’ But she didn’t move; she stood and stared, and her eyes burned into mine, as if they could see into my soul and read its awful secrets.
I tried to back away but my legs were useless, like newborn legs. I tripped, bumping into a sarcophagus in the dark, and it seemed to me that the body inside in its ancient brown bandages was looming towards me. The floor was tilting, the chamber spinning. The lights faded again and I didn’t know
where Ellen was. I turned and pushed into the tunnel entrance, scrambling and blinking back into the light. I ran along the edge of the mezzanine, holding onto the balcony rail, then I clattered down the sweeping staircase and into the main hall. A crowd was gathered in the shadows beneath the suspended Tyrannosaurus skeleton. My elbows knocked against adults with toddlers on their hips pointing up at the remains of the huge creature and I tripped over children flapping their educational quiz-sheets.
‘Excuse me!’ I cried. ‘Please,
please
let me through!’
At the far side of the hall, I stumbled into a dimly lit corridor leading out of the atrium. The passageway was low-ceilinged, and narrowed by lines of Victorian glass display cabinets containing threadbare stuffed animals. At the far end was a door labelled:
Staff Only
.
I looked again, over my shoulder, and made out a figure at the entrance to the passageway moving slowly towards me. The light was bright behind, turning it into a faceless silhouette. With a sob, I fell against the locked door and fumbled over the security code. After three attempts, drunk with panic and weak with fear, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I cried out, my heart pounding, and slid to my knees, covering my face with my hands, and then a kindly voice said, ‘Hannah, dear, what on earth is the matter?’ And I looked through the cage made by my fingers and saw the concerned face of my colleague and friend Rina Mirza.
Rina helped me to my feet and took me through the door and into her office. It was tiny and overcrowded, a professorial burrow. I sat on a rickety chair squeezed in between filing cabinets piled high with bundles of paper and shivered while Rina made tea in the staff kitchenette. She returned and passed a mug to me. It was only half-full, even so my hands were trembling so badly that the liquid slopped around. I tried to contain it, holding the mug cupped tight in
the palms of both my hands, steam curling from its surface. I felt icy cold inside.
Rina rubbed my back.
‘What happened?’ she asked, peering at me over her half-moon glasses. ‘Has somebody hurt you? Were you assaulted?’
‘No,’ I said so quietly that Rina had to lean forward.
‘What was it then? Something’s given you a shock.’
I looked up at the older woman, her kind face, her anxious eyes, black hair wisping out of its bun.
‘I saw somebody who used to be my friend,’ I said.
‘And that’s a bad thing?’ Rina asked.
I dropped my head forward, so that my hair fell over my face. The years since I had recovered from my breakdown, years that had formed a protective carapace of new memories and experiences around me, were crumbling to dust. I felt vulnerable as a newborn mouse, blind and squirmy and naked.
‘Hannah?’ Rina asked again. ‘Why did it upset you so much to see your friend?’
‘Because Ellen Brecht is dead,’ I said. ‘She died almost twenty years ago.’
CHAPTER TWO
THE STORY OF
Ellen and me began in the 1980s in the Lizard Peninsula, a wind-blown, storm-tossed, rocky Cornish outcrop. That was where I was born and where I grew up and where I knew Ellen. As far as I am concerned, she was only ever there. It has always been difficult for me to imagine her anywhere else, out of that context.