We walked past the barn, along a rudimentary path that climbed a steep hillside covered with stones and rubble. The snow was gone, save for a few white pockets between the rocks. A broken plow blade thrust out from the underbrush, along with a pitchfork, its wooden handle rotted to a black nub. A tire swing hung from a dead tree near a trampoline folded in half like a giant taco.
“So is it just you and your grandmother?” I asked.
“Tamsin.” Sam shot me a quick look. “She doesn’t like being called anything else. Yeah, just us.”
“Don’t you get lonely?”
“Not really.”
“Even when she goes off and leaves you alone?”
“We have a shotgun; she taught me how to use it. Tamsin collects guns.”
“I thought you English were gun-shy.”
“We hunt rabbits with them. And this is Cornwall—we’re not really part of England. More Celtic. We used to have our own language.”
“Yeah? Can you speak it?”
“No.”
She stopped in front of a barbed-wire fence surrounding a small garden plot. A few corn stalks rustled in the wind. Everything else had surrendered to weeds. Several ratty bundles hung from the barbed wire, spaced a few yards apart. I stepped closer and saw they were dead crows, skulls picked clean, wings dangling like empty black gloves.
“Sends a message,” said Sam. She reached between the barbed wire to pluck a sprig of something, lavender-gray with dry, teethlike leaves, and handed it to me. “Heather. For luck.”
“Thanks. I could use it.”
We continued on. After ten minutes we neared the top of the hill. Shreds of high white cloud raced across the sky like gulls. Gorse rattled ceaselessly in the wind. I stopped to catch my breath and looked back.
I didn’t think we’d climbed that far. Yet from here the farm compound appeared impossibly distant, its buildings toy sized. Something moved outside the stone cottage, but I couldn’t discern whether it was a person or animal, or just a shadow thrown by the clouds.
Sam stood beside me. With her anorak’s hood pulled up she resembled a young monk. “Looks like you could just jump down onto it,” she said.
“We must’ve walked fast.”
She shook her head. “Everything here always looks closer or farther away than it really is. That’s how people get lost. That and the mist and wind.”
She lifted her face to the sky so that the hood fell back. “The wind, the wind,” she sang.
“The wind, the wind, the wind blows high
Ash comes falling from the sky
And all the children say they’ll die
For want of the Golden City.”
Her voice was high and sweet, slightly out of key and weirdly bloodless; more like a bird’s song than a girl’s. I shivered. “Where did you learn that?”
“Don’t remember.”
“A woman named Poppy Teasel sang it. Do you know her? She was friends with Tamsin a long time ago. And your father.”
“No.” She began to walk across the moor, head down against the wind. “I wasn’t here a long time ago.”
I hurried to keep up with her, the camera bouncing against my chest. She walked fast for such a skinny kid. We passed a midden composed of old tires, a chest freezer, and snarls of barbed wire. A raven picked at something in the shadows. It lifted its head to stare at us impassively before it opened its wings and took off, a black ribbon trailing from its beak.
“That song—it was in Leith’s movie,” I said. “Your grandfather. Thanatrope. Have you ever seen it?”
“Only about seventy times. Yeah, that’s where I heard it—I forgot. But that’s Tamsin’s movie, not his.”
“What do you mean?”
“He filmed some of it, but she was the one did all the real work. He had to be sectioned, so she finished it. All the editing. He didn’t shoot enough film to make a proper movie.”
“Who told you that?”
“She did. Tamsin.”
“Not exactly an unbiased source.” I kicked at a stone and sent it tumbling downhill behind us. “But you’re not the only one who thinks that. A film critic named Nicholas Rombes wrote about it online a few years ago. You should read it.”
“I don’t need to read some online shite. It’s true ’cause I know it’s true.” She picked up a rock and threw it after mine. “We don’t have Internet anyway.”
“Then how’d you watch Thanatrope?”
Sam looked at me with pitying disdain. “On a proper screen. There’s a projector in the barn.”
I mulled this over as we approached the top of the hill. The revelation that a woman—a socialite, at that—had been the creative force behind an obscure underground movie might not be groundbreaking news. Still, it was interesting enough that some feminist film historian might get an article out of it.
But wouldn’t Tamsin have taken credit for Thanatrope? She didn’t sound like someone who’d hide behind her husband’s reputation, especially after he ditched her to smoke kef in Tangiers.
“She’s crazy, too,” Sam said, as though I’d spoken my thought. “Crazy like a fox.”
Up here the wind roared like a jet turbine endlessly revving for a takeoff that never came. With only a fringe of cropped hair to protect them, my ears ached so badly that I walked with my hands pressed against the sides of my head. Sam did the same. We looked like refugees from The Scream.
She gestured to where the broken walls of Kethelwite Manor reared against the sky, perhaps a quarter mile distant. “There’s a windbreak over there.”
We crossed an ancient field stitched together by stone walls. It reminded me of the webs woven by spiders given LSD in research experiments, a lunatic crosshatch of rock walls and hedges and the occasional sagging metal fence. Sam clambered over these like a squirrel, but the pointed tips of my Tony Lamas caught treacherously between the rocks.
Overhead, tiny white specks bloomed and disappeared in the blue sky, like flaws on an old film strip: gulls, their cries drowned out by the wind. A ridge topped by tall standing stones aligned with the wreckage of the manor house. Beyond the ruins sloped the highlands, ending abruptly in those cliffs above the north Atlantic.
“People don’t know how to watch that movie.” Sam said. “You have to know what to look for, otherwise you won’t even know what you’re seeing.”
I wondered if this was some rote speech of Tamsin’s that she’d memorized. “So what do you see?”
“This.” She kicked through knee-high bracken, jumped onto a broad flat rock, and turned with her arms out, pretending to fly. “The movie’s a map of all this, only a map through time. A guy’s dying. It’s what he remembers of this place over thousands and thousand of years. Tamsin says it helps if you’re tripping.”
“I was tripping first time I saw it. Didn’t help me.”
“Me, too.”
“Your grandmother gave you acid?”
“Mushrooms. It made me puke. There’s these shamans in Siberia, they drink reindeer piss. The reindeer eat poisonous mushrooms and the psychoactive ingredient comes out in their urine and the shamans drink it. Otherwise if they ate the mushrooms they’d die, ’cause they’re deadly poison. Fatal,” she added somberly.
I shot her a skeptical look.
“Tamsin’s training me to be a shaman.” Sam’s tone implied this was as commonplace as soccer practice. “She studied it in Barcelona from Salvador Dalí—that’s how she met my grandfather. People like me, we’re chosen to be shamans.”
“I wasn’t aware that was still a career track.”
Sam glared at me. “It’s true.”
I was starting to see why this kid had a hard time in the school cafeteria. She pushed away the anorak’s hood, gathered her lank hair in one hand, and pulled it away from her face. The hard light made the angles of her cheekbones and pointed chin appear even more pronounced, her deepset eyes dead black against skin white as bone. She didn’t look like a girl or a boy but some unearthly amalgam of both, an eerie rendering of what a human face might be, reduced to its simplest planes.
She let go of her hair and it whipped across her face. “They call it the Man-Woman. At the Furry Dance at Helston. Other places, too. In the movie, there’s a scene where they do it. My grandfather played the Man-Woman.”
“I don’t remember that scene.”
“That’s ’cause you don’t know how to watch the movie.”
I was too tired to argue. We continued on, past a tall cairn. Someone had drawn an eye on one of the stones in red paint, so faint I could almost imagine it as a natural feature, except for the skeletal pylon drawn beneath it.
We reached a stone wall. Sam held open a rough-hewn gate. We stepped out onto what looked like an extension of the moor, more thorny vegetation and spiny grass.
Only the ground wasn’t earth, but shattered brick and pulverized stone. I picked up a scorched chunk of concrete and dug my fingernail into the surface, drew my finger to my face and sniffed the black residue. Even after forty years, it stank of burning.
“There was a castle here,” said Sam. “Tamsin says it was the real Castle Scream.”
She held out her arms and ran toward a wall of crumbling brick, with the ruins of a clerestory window in the second storey. Without pausing, she clambered up the wall, her black anorak billowing around her. When she reached the top, she let out a piercing shriek, swung herself onto a ledge, then stepped onto the sill of the empty window, bracing herself with a hand on either side.
The wind tore at her hair as she stared down at me and screamed again. Her face contorted and her black eyes fixed on mine as her voice deepened into a howl. Her skinny body shook with the effort.
“Get down!” I yelled, breaking into a run. At the foot of the ruined wall I looked up.
Above me, Sam looked terrifying and beautiful, like one of those figures painted on an ancient Greek vase, half girl and half bird. I grabbed at the Konica around my neck, popping the lens cap and adjusting the focus even before I looked through the viewfinder.
I shot three pictures and lowered the camera. Sam remained within the shattered window, silent, her mouth gaping. She leaned forward, stared down at me, and grinned.
“You better look out below!”
She let go and fell backward.
With a shout, I ran alongside the ruined wall till I found a way through, into a courtyard thick with blackthorn. At the base of the ruined wall, Sam lay on her back atop a sagging trampoline.
“Ow.” She rolled over and got to her feet. The trampoline’s fabric slumped beneath her as she hobbled to the edge and hopped down. She tugged at a frayed nylon rope dangling from the bent aluminum frame. “I really need to tighten this.”
“You really need to not be an asshole.” I grabbed her hair and shook her. “You want to kill yourself?”
She yelped in pain, swinging at me. “Why the fuck should you care?”
“I don’t,” I snapped. “But I don’t want to be the one to tell your goddamned father his idiot daughter just jumped off the roof.”
I stormed off across the courtyard. Broken arches rose above the devastation. A dagger of glass pierced a charred wooden beam gone soft with rot. I kicked it, and the wood exploded into a foul-smelling brown cloud. Some ruins are beautiful. Kethelwite Manor was just grim.
I walked to a large, battered dome, its verdigris pocked with lichen—a small fortune in salvageable copper. Given the local economy, I’d have thought someone would have poached the metal long ago. Maybe they really were afraid to tussle with Tamsin.
I picked up a rock and threw it at the dome. It made a hollow boom, answered by a deep, sustained hooting I could feel in my bones, like an oncoming train. I looked back to see Sam atop a pile of broken roof slates, staring at the black crags of Carn Scrija.
“It doesn’t like that we’re here,” she yelled.
I wanted to tell her to fuck off, but I had a feeling she was right. I shouted back. “Let’s go.”
Sam climbed down from her perch and ambled toward me, hands jammed into her pockets. For the first time I saw that her deep-set eyes weren’t black or brown but indigo, a color picked up by the delicate capillaries across her pale face. Whatever issues she had with her sexual identity, she was a striking-looking kid and might be a beautiful adult, if she made up her mind to live for a few more years. I replaced the lens cap on my camera, clicked the film transport lever.
“I saw what you did.” Sam looked at me defiantly. “Taking pictures. You don’t give a fuck about me.”
I laughed. “I don’t give a fuck about anything.”
Her mouth hardened to a slit. But I could see her watching me from the corner of her eyes, as we retraced our steps across a landscape frozen between Leith Carlisle’s vision of late-twentieth-century apocalypse and some mystery that seemed to flicker just out of sight.
The sun hung low on the horizon, beginning its plunge into the ocean. The wind had died, so I could hear the sea, mindlessly gnawing at stones and shingle. I started as something flew past my face, a bird or a large insect.
Sam touched my arm, pointing. “That was a chough!”
“What’s a chuff?”
“C-H-O-U-G-H.” She spelled it out. “Like a crow, but with a red beak. They’re very rare. Extinct, almost.” Her white cheeks were pinked from the cold. “It’s bad luck to kill one—they say King Arthur’s soul went into a chough when he died at Avalon.”
I looked around, but the bird was gone. I turned to Sam. “Zip up your coat. You’re making me colder just looking at you.”
I gazed across the hillside. There was no sign of Kethelwite Farm, nothing that resembled a path among the gray boulders and gorse.
“You know the way back, right?”
“’Course.” She hadn’t zipped the anorak, but she pulled it tight around her and drew up the hood. She pointed at a small promontory to the east, where two upright stones rose from what looked like another pile of broken masonry. “Do you want to see the dead babies?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Just over there.” She indicated two standing stones. “But we need to hurry; it’ll be dark soon.”
We scrambled down a steep incline and followed a path slick with moss and yellow fronds that fed on a rivulet of black water. A line of knee-high rocks marched up the hillside. Not a wall, but some kind of boundary or marker. At one time they might have stood sharply against the sky, but over the centuries the moor had grown up around them. They looked like all that remained of a city submerged beneath the turf.
Then, as though the earth had swallowed her, too, Sam disappeared.