Christobel Kent - A fine and private place

The blue-white glare off the snow was deceptive: the light was failing, and behind the grey lid of the sky the day was closing. Cate realized she had no idea what time it was, only the cramping of her empty belly told her it was later than she thought. She floundered away from the bungalow to find herself up to her knees in a drift, waded on to the path and looked down through the trees.

The villino stood, perhaps half a kilometre away; over her left shoulder the bulk of the castle. Somewhere down here Michelle had set off on her run, somewhere down here Per had seen a light moving across the dark landscape. Cate could see fresh footprints in the snow, and she followed them.

Big prints, wide apart, wider than she could stride. Alec Fairhead, going down to see Tina; no prints coming back. Cate stopped a moment. They would be there together, of course. She would be — intruding. Uneasy, she shaded her eyes, trying to see; on the corner of the villino the black shape of the oil drum, at hip height and half hidden, was still there, where they had left it. Uncertainly Cate set off again stumbling and slipping on the track: unstable hardcore overlaid with snow. If they were there, she would just have to explain. She pushed away the image of Alec and Tina together — not because she had any interest in Alec Fairhead, she defended herself silently to Tiziano. But because it was somehow — wrong. Vulnerable was the word that she had used. Tina was vulnerable.

And just short of the villino , Cate stopped. A couple of metres away, it was as though her legs wouldn’t take her any further. Her cheeks were icy, her fingers frozen, and quite suddenly she was very, very frightened.

Behind the villino , the little house where Mauro had been born, the trees clustered dark, ivy smothering their spindly trunks, almost as high as the house. Go on, she urged her legs, but they felt as useless as rubber. One step, then another.

The windows were dark in the rough stone walls, the door closed. Cate leaned against its peeling wood, and rapped, the sound feeble. And again, with as much force as she could muster, feeling no pain as the wood grazed her frozen knuckles. Then she leaned heavily on thebell push. It sounded inside, shrill and lonely. Cate waded through the snow to the window and, on tiptoe, peered in.

There was the long brick island supporting the work surface in the centre of the studio space, the potter’s wheel and assorted shapeless things barely lit in the grey gloom. The high shelf with its row of watching pots, the faces on them obscure now: Michelle had packed to leave, but Tina had not. Why not? Did she not mean to leave with the rest of them? Something was different, all the same. Something had been moved, or taken, but Cate didn’t know what.

Cate heard herself swallow. Nothing moved, not a flicker, but it was not quite silent. There were the tiny, obscure sounds of the crusted snow as it shifted and settled; there were soft patterings and drippings from gutters and branches, not all close, falling from the eaves, but further off too, down the hill, among the trees. A sense of something breathing that Cate had heard before, as if the wooded hillside had its own system of lungs and veins and its own pulse, the castle its beating heart.

The wind. It would be the wind. Feeling her lungs burn in the cold, her breath short, Cate turned with awful reluctance away from the window. Where were they all? What had she come here for, when she might have just climbed on her motorino and escaped, once and for all?

The oil drum: that was what she’d come here for. It was on the far corner of the villino , carelessly shoved half out of view, abandoned, but just the sight of its steel edge furred with black gave Cate a sudden sick sensation. Just the memory of those soaked and charred fragments in the blackened interior, a bad smell of burnt leather and hair and things not quite discernible. What might Michelle have disposed of in here?

Cate knew now she should have told Sandro Cellini about it, this nasty little secret of feminine hysteria and illogic, but she had been ashamed, hadn’t she? For Michelle and Tina, or for herself, for halfbelieving in it too? Too superstitious even to begin to describe it; how would you begin? But she should have told him. Cate took a step, then another, cold hands set on either side of its charred and rusted edge, and she was looking inside.

The smell of old ashes and worse, something sodden and organic and stinking fused to other, chemical odours, rose to Cate’s nostrils. Turn it out, she thought with a quick, violent revulsion, and she tipped the drum, heard it scrape harshly on the stone underfoot but not before she had heard another sound, down below the house and deep in the trees, a variation of that breathing again but this time more of a quick gasp or even a choking. And the drum was on its side only Cate was not looking at what had spilled out of it but listening, it seemed, harder than she had ever listened in her life.

‘Who — who is it?’ She tried to call and it came out as a whisper. But there was only that silence that was not quite silence but a hundred thousand tiny sounds and all of them mocking her. Her back against the stone of the house, she knelt, the knees of her trousers soaking instantly, and made herself look at the blackened rubbish now dirtying the snow in front of her.

The brittle remains of a burnt plastic bag. A strip of disintegrating printed fabric that had once been Loni’s. Out of the corner of her eye the doll was discernible, a crudely stuffed limb flung out and something like hair, but Cate didn’t want to look at it directly. Michelle had had nothing to do with this, she knew quite suddenly: this was horror-story schlock. But there was other stuff here: this was more than a doll and a few scraps of cloth.

With trembling hands, unable to look up for fear of the sounds from the trees, nor to the side, Cate forced herself to reach into the sodden heap of ash. And immediately she felt something solid, rubbery. Grateful for the numbness in her fingers, she flipped it out of the pile. It was — a shoe. A half-burnt little flat oriental cloth shoe, not much more than child-size. She stared: what else? Feeling her chest burn, Cate pulled at a dark piece of cloth that turned into a trouser leg, charred from the bottom, loose cotton trousers. And as she raised and opened them and saw whose hollow-bellied, thinshanked shape they would have fitted, a scatter of smaller fragments fell. She didn’t see the stamp-sized sim card or follow its trajectory into the snow because she was looking at something else. The grotesque melted remains of what might have been a condom butwas in fact, as Cate saw when she forced herself to go on looking, one latex glove, of the kind a doctor might use, or an artisan working with glazes or chemicals or -

She thought of Tina, sitting, leaning forward in the little library, watching the old TV set. Watching the weather report, the night before Loni died. Rocking, just slightly, hugging herself and rocking as she stared at the screen.

And then into the quiet she heard the gasp again only this time there was a finality to it, a sigh as if of love satisfied or sleep attained, and although all Cate wanted to do was run the other way and never turn around, she was up and stumbling through the trees towards the sound.

In her mind’s eye Cate had thought the tree trunks stood there in ranks like soldiers that she might easily dodge, but she had not bargained for the brambles and the ivy that clogged and snared the space, ripping at her trousers, strangling the branches. Or for the cobwebs and nameless trailing things that touched her face so that she had to fight not to scream and bat at it all, to fight just to run. Or even for the horrible idea that each tree, those on the periphery of her vision as well as those blocking her path, might not be an inanimate thing but someone. Someone come to seize her from behind and pin her arms and bring her down and press her face into the dead things on the forest floor.