It might have been midday when Freya found herself outside Catherine’s house. The cottage was still. She stared numbly at the building, which meant so much and so little, Eaton’s lead hanging limply by her side. She knew Catherine had gone, to be as the others in the Forest. She could tell just from looking at the house. Still she walked slowly up the path to the oak wood door and knocked.
She didn’t know quite how old the house was, or how long the Laceys had lived there, only that it had stood for hundreds of years at least. Families had lived out their lives behind the grey stone of its walls; their loves, their hates, their tender moments and cruel words imprinted on that stone for as long as people living remembered. She knew Catherine’s pain when, late for school one morning, she had stubbed her toe on a table-leg. She heard the echoes of Catherine’s laughter when they had discovered a dirty book in her father’s study. How they shrieked at the thought of learned Mr. Lacey, nose-deep in those pages! She remembered the quiet sound of the floorboards beneath their feet as Catherine had leaned in to kiss her, the thrill that had coursed through her as their lips brushed together that first time. It had been their last day of school and her breath was hot with celebratory wine. The taste, she knew, had remained with Catherine for decades afterwards.
She knew the sounds of grief, when Catherine’s parents passed away, of joy, when she had bought Merlot, and the animal screams of birth when the cat had produced her litter. She knew tears and smiles and the warmth of desire and the walls knew all these things too. A lifetime witnessed and remembered.
She used her key to enter the cottage. The inside was just as she remembered it. The hallway had been tidied recently. Six empty wine bottles stood beside the door. She smelled lavender and loneliness and realised she was breathing heavily.
She moved into the front room. The scarlet curtains were stark against the whiteness of outside. Some books had been left open on the coffee table, their spaces vacant in the bookcase. They looked like poetry collections. She didn’t read them but turned to inspect the rest of the house, revisiting the rooms and retracing the steps she had walked a hundred times.
The bedrooms were perfectly made. The bathroom too appeared to have been thoroughly cleaned. On descending into the wine cellar she found it empty. Where before there had been stacks of wine, cases of bottles older than she, now there was only darkness and the skeletal framework of the racks. The air was sweet and vinegary on her tongue.
The kitchen was cold. The whole house was cold, as though Catherine alone had warmed it with her lips, her eyes, her wild, drunken laughter. On the work-surface, beside the knife block, she found a piece of paper. It was a page, torn carefully from a book. A lipstick had been used to weigh it down.
For several minutes she read silently from the page. Then she turned and walked out of the cottage, closing the door behind her. On the doorstep she smelled the lingering aroma of lavender. She fancied she heard laughter and crying and the mewling of a cat. Then she left.
Marry me, my Lady,
By the Forest’s edge,
Hear the trickling of the stream
As we, as one, are wed.
Marry me, my Lady,
By the Forest’s side,
Hear the roaring of the trees
As we, as one, are wed.
Marry me, my Lady,
By the Forest’s kiss,
Hear the silence of the leaves
As we, as one, are wed.
* * *
She has almost caught up with herself. It could not have been a week, days perhaps, since Eaton stepped in the jaws of the trap. He flashes behind her eyes, his auburn fur matted with blood, as though the colour seeped out of him with the passing of his life into the snow. She misses him more than she can express in words, or through the nib of a pen. A memory resurfaces, which she had thought lost. She is watching a puppy as it crosses their sitting room, head low, ears flat with the curiosity of youth. He is awkward-looking, like the foals born to the Forest in spring. He grew into his limbs, his speed, her love; a constant reminder of that last meal with Robert, when she had first decided they would one day get a dog. And now he has gone. They have both gone. There is almost nothing left, to remind her who she was.
She clutches her chest, feeling the texture of her clothes – these had mattered, once – then the hardness of her chest beneath. She traces her ribs with her fingers, reminding herself that when all else fails she is flesh and blood and sweat and bone and hot, wet breath...
Eaton was all these things, and now he is none of them, even his bones snapped and sucked clean by the man that had been Mr. Shepherd. Her stomach growls, and she hears Eaton in her mind, lips drawn back, teeth bared, and then it is not Eaton but Mr. Shepherd, jaw set, mouth red, and then her son, his eyes sharp in his pale face, mouth open, a hungry shout tearing from his throat.
She does not know for certain if Mr. Shepherd was always in the tunnel. She does not know whether he visited her son at night, whether it was he who bequeathed him the brooch from Ms. Andrews’s grave. She does not know whether it was he who protected her son from those boys, who dragged their bodies into the tunnel and ate from them, or whether it was George himself, her little George, who fed on their flesh, every bite a rebuke against their bullying, against school, against uniform and smart shoes and Sunday service and a world that neither loved or understood him, but expected him to comply all the same.
Her chest rises and falls quickly beneath her arms. Her ribs are hard, her body shaking. This is not the first time she has considered his role in Lynnwood’s darkness, but it is the first time she has faced it. Inside, she has always known, always suspected. They all grow lean and hungry. Why should her son be any different? Nothing else could have driven her back to the tunnel that day, where the trees grew so close, except to stare with her own eyes into the abyss where her son had simultaneously found and lost himself.
Another figure flashes behind her eyes and she starts as, outside, pink sky turns to midnight blue. It is her daughter’s face, so similar to her own. It stirs more feelings inside of her. Pride struggles to surface above the forest of primitive drives, which are so strong now. Pride and sadness enough to dredge her from instinctual descent, for just one moment. One moment is all she needs, before she is free to run as the dogs through the trees. One moment of remembrance for one solitary girl, who, when the rest of Lynnwood succumbed to their wilder instincts, fought a silent battle with her hunger, unnoticed by all.