We drove for a long time. Mum had lined the backseat of our little blue Kia with pillows and duvets so I was really quite comfortable – apart from the fact that I was getting dizzier and there was a strange buzzing in my ears like an irritated mosquito, only louder and closer, as if it were actually inside my ear. Mine, mine, mine. I must have dozed off because when I woke up, we had left the city behind and there were no more street lights and no traffic noise around us, only darkness and the occasional headlights of another car. The windscreen wipers squealed across the windscreen, iiiiv-iiiiv-iiv, and the rain pelted onto the roof of the car.
“Please would you turn on the radio?” I asked, hoping it might drown out the mosquito sound.
“Yes, of course. Are you comfortable?”
The speakers crackled while Mum tried to find a station with clear reception. Fragments of voices and music drifted past before breaking up into white noise.
“I don’t think I can find a station this far out in the country,” she said. “Why don’t I put on a CD instead?”
“OK.”
She found an Electra album which she knew I liked. Electra’s clear, strong voice cut through the boom of the bass and the percussion beat. “Go where you gotta go, no matter how far,” she sang. “Mamma always told me, gotta be who you are, can’t be nobody else, gotta seek your own star, gotta be… gotta be… gotta be who you are.”
I lay in the back, listening. My headache seemed to throb a little less violently when I concentrated on Electra rather than the mosquito. I braced myself.
“Mum?”
“Yes, Mouse?” She changed gear and accelerated. I could feel that we were driving uphill now.
“Is this… this disease. Is it something you can die from?”
She took her foot off the accelerator and the car slowed down almost immediately because the hill was so steep. Then she turned in her seat and looked at me.
“Clara Mouse. You mustn’t think like that!” she exclaimed. “We’re almost at Aunt Isa’s and she’ll help us. It’s going to be all right. OK, sweet heart?”
“Yes,” I mumbled. “OK.”
But I said it mostly to humour her. As the car sped up again and we drove through the rain and the dark I could think of only one thing.
She hadn’t said no.
The car rattled and shook as it went down a road so bumpy that Mum could only drive the Kia at a snail’s pace. I decided to sit up. It was just too uncomfortable to be bounced around when I was lying down. I looked out between the front seats and tried to get a sense of where we were. The headlights swept across steep verges, puddles and tall, wet grass. The road had become almost a deep, wide hollow. The verges either side were higher than a person and, though it had stopped raining, I could see only a few stars because we were driving through a forest of giant, pitch-black spruces.
“Are we nearly there yet?” I asked.
“Nine minutes,” Mum said. “Or at least that’s what the sat nav is saying. I don’t think it has factored in the state of this road.” She tried to swerve around a hole, but the high verges made it impossible. Grrrrrrr. Something scraped against the bottom of the Kia. Perhaps travelling by helicopter or with huskies wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all.
It took more like twenty minutes before we turned right across a small wooden bridge and saw lights between the trees further ahead.
“This has to be the place,” Mum said. “I can’t imagine anyone else who would want to live so far away from civilization.”
We drove through a gate and along a small field before Mum stopped the car in a yard between two buildings, a farmhouse and what looked to be some kind of stable. She parked next to an ancient Morris Minor with black side panels and a white roof. Both buildings had thatched roofs and thick stone walls. The light was on in the house and when Mum opened the car door I could smell wet soil, spruce and smoke from a log fire.
The entrance to the farmhouse was one of those doors that you sometimes see in stables. The top half was flung open and a tall, hunchbacked figure with long plaits appeared. No, wait. She wasn’t a hunchback. The hump had feathers, eyes and wings. It was an owl and it was eyeing us as if we were something it might consider eating for its breakfast.
“Come in,” said the strange lady with the owl. “And let me see what I can do.”
This would appear to be my Aunt Isa.
Aunt Isa had lit a fire in the wood-burning stove of a large room which, to my eyes, was an odd mixture of workshop and lounge. A pot was bubbling away on the stove, regularly sending out small clouds of steam and acrid smells from under its lid. There were bookcases and cupboards along all available wall space, and the shelves held not only books, but also jars and glass containers, toolboxes and rows of baskets lined with newspaper. Later I learned that hibernating hedgehogs and dormice lived in some of them. There were a couple of non-matching armchairs, two long tables and a carpenter’s work bench. The light was coming from two paraffin lamps. There was no sign of a TV.
I was lying on a faded old sofa that smelled of dog, with two patchwork quilts on top of my own duvet, and I was still freezing cold. Aunt Isa had been nice to me, but not quite so nice to my Mum, or so it seemed to me.
“Get some sleep if you can,” Aunt Isa said to me. “You’re safe here.” Her eyes were the colour of autumn leaves and, for some reason, I believed her.
“The cat…” I whispered.
“Not here,” she said. “It can only enter if I give it permission.”
No further explanation was needed. She already knew. I had no idea how she could, but I was hugely relieved that she understood and didn’t question me.
Towards Mum her voice was completely different – so sharp that you could cut yourself on it.
“You should have come much sooner.”
“How could I?” Mum protested. “It only happened this morning.”
“I know. But she turned twelve in March, didn’t she?”
It wasn’t exactly a difficult question, but Mum didn’t reply. At first I thought she was just as confused as I was: I couldn’t see what my birthday had to do with anything. But when she did say something, I could hear that she wasn’t confused at all; she was angry and frightened.
“She’s not like you,” she said. “She’s a sweet, bright and normal girl.”
Aunt Isa looked long and hard at Mum. “Now is not the time to discuss that,” she said. “First we need to get that fever down and get the child back on her feet.”
Yes, please, I thought. And if you could make my headache go away while you’re at it…
Aunt Isa lifted the lid and used a ladle to pour some of the pot’s contents into a mug.
“Here,” she said, handing me the mug. “It tastes a little bitter, but it’ll do you good.”
“What is it?” Mum asked, suspiciously.
“Toad venom and snake spittle,” Aunt Isa said. “What did you think it was?”
I looked up, horrified, but then I saw the twinkle in her autumn-brown eyes.
“Don’t worry,” she said to reassure me. “I’m only teasing your mum. It’s willow bark and herbs that will help the penicillin along. And when you’ve finished that, I’ll massage your neck and your head. It all helps.”
And it did. The toad venom – or whatever it was – tasted disgusting, to be honest, but when I’d drunk it, Aunt Isa sat down on the sofa with my head in her lap and started running her fingers firmly but gently up and down my throat, across my neck and all the way up to my hair. It felt soooooo nice. It was as if she took away a little bit of my headache with every stroke. Even when she started pressing the cuts on my forehead, which really were quite swollen, they didn’t hurt at all.
She hummed while her fingers worked away, a wordless tune that rose and fell in strange rhythms; it wasn’t a song I’d ever heard before. At times it sounded almost as if she were singing two notes at once, one low and one high. I don’t know why, but it made me think of the wind and the rain and the smell of autumn leaves. Then without warning, I heard a door slam. I flung open my eyes, which, until then, had been well and truly shut.
“Mum?”
“She’ll be back in a moment,” Isa said. “She’s not really into herbs and wildsong.”
“Hush. You think too much. We can talk about it later.”
By now my headache had gone completely. And when I drifted off to sleep, there was no monster cat waiting for me in the shadows.