After Chrissie and Mandy left, the twins walked out of the house and over to the little beach. While Annie sat on a fallen log, Lewis
searched the rough sand along the water’s edge for some smooth, flat stones he could skim across the loch’s surface.
‘How disappointed was Chrissie … ’ Annie said. ‘But I get it,’ she added. A sudden wind whipped her hair in front of her face. She tossed her head, and pulled it back behind an ear. ‘It was just … ’ She took a moment to work out how best to express what happened earlier. ‘I saw a memory of Damien. I saw nothing of where he might be now. I don’t think this curse works in that way.’
‘You haven’t really tried though,’ Lewis replied. ‘To work with it, I mean. You’ve mostly been fighting it off.’
Annie stared at her brother. ‘So would you, Lewis. It’s bloody terrifying.’
He held his hands out. ‘I’m not judging you, Annie. I’m just saying it might be like … ’ He paused. ‘I was reading up on fear, you see, and how we react to it.’
‘Right.’ Annie could feel herself tighten, about to spring to her own defence, but she held herself still.
‘It’s like when you’re driving and you skid, and you’re told to drive into the skid because you then get some traction and can straighten up, whereas when you try to correct, to fight the skid, you end up worse off.’
‘Lewis, what the hell are you on about?’
‘Anxiety, fear, phobias are all like that. You tighten up, fight the bad feeling, and that tells your brain this is something awful, and that tension makes it feel so much worse and that, apparently, is how we perpetuate our fears and phobias. Whereas if you go with the feeling, relax into the skid, kinda thing, it tells your brain: “This is fine, you can cope. You’re safe.”’
‘Oh piss off, Lewis, you have no idea.’
‘Okay. Sorry.’
He looked so crestfallen Annie felt she had to try and appease him. ‘No. You’re … you have a point. I can see how relaxing into a bad feeling might help when there’s nothing behind that bad feeling but an old or imagined fear.’ She chewed on her lip, thinking 42that through. ‘And I can see how that might help reprogramme the impulse, and the build-up of adrenaline and all that stuff. But this is very fucking real. This is here, in my head, and it’s almost ever-present. There’s no relaxing into that shit, Lewis.’
They were silent for a time as Lewis returned to skimming stones. One bounced four times across the surface of the loch.
‘Nice one,’ she said.
He accepted her peace offering. ‘Before they left, Mrs Mac said something to me – in the kitchen, away from Chrissie.’
‘What?’
‘About us looking into this.’ He looked into Annie’s eyes. ‘We did a proper good job investigating Bridget’s whereabouts.’
‘Right,’ Annie replied, and felt a surge of sadness, as she always did when Bridget’s name came up. They began looking into Bridget’s whereabouts as a way of helping her cope with the rise of her murmurs. At the start they believed Bridget was their aunt – their mother, Eleanor’s sister – but they were to discover she was in fact their biological mother.
‘And you didn’t need to rely on the curse then,’ Lewis continued.
‘No, but I triggered a man into trying to kill me.’
‘That’s one interpretation of what happened, Annie. He’d been on your case since the moment he read about you in the newspaper.’
One of Scotland’s top rags had run a piece about her premonitions and her wish to help convicted killer, Edward Trainer – who was protesting his innocence after a twenty-year jail term – to find out what had really happened to his fiancée, Tracy Dobell.
‘The point is we kicked ass,’ Lewis went on. ‘We tracked down Bridget and Aunt Sheila. We uncovered the truth. Maybe we could so some super-sleuthing and find out what happened to Damien?’
He looked so keen she didn’t have the heart to tell him the idea 43was nonsense. ‘What, like, I’ll be Nancy and you’ll be Drew?’ she said instead.
Lewis laughed.
‘Dunno,’ she finally admitted. ‘I can’t leave this place, Lewis. You know that.’
‘And you can’t stay,’ Lewis argued. ‘You have no front window, and the natives are a lit pitchfork away from storming the place.’
‘They don’t light pitchforks, Lewis. They’re for stabbing the monster with.’ Annie looked away, up to the hills in the distance. ‘And in this case, I’m the monster.’