Mike Shevdon - Sixty-One Nails

"Are you hurt?"

"I don't think so. Nothing's broken." Her voice sounded shaky and thin.

"Deborah?" The man's voice was scratchy from disuse. "What are you doing under the bed? And what have you done to your hair?"

"My hair?" Unconsciously, her hand went to the back of her head where her hair had been grabbed. It was drained of all colour, white as cotton and brittle as hay. As her hand pushed through it, the white fell away like ash, leaving only ragged tufts close to her head. She looked at the grey smudges on her fingers where her hair was powdering. Her hand began to shake.

Elizabeth pulled her close, whispering, "It doesn't matter. You're safe, now." Deborah stared at the fine grey smudges on her hands. Elizabeth addressed Blackbird. "She is safe now, isn't she?"

Blackbird nodded, releasing a long breath.

In the doorway, Sam stepped fully into the room. "What happened? Where…?" He looked around the room, trying to make sense of what he'd seen.

Blackbird walked around the splintered pottery and helped me up from the floor.

"Did she touch you?" she asked.

I shook my head, accepting her help.

"I thought I told you not to attract her attention."

"She was here, in this room. You said she would be weak."

"Yes, I did say that, didn't I? It looks like the barrier's even closer to collapse than we thought."

"Did anyone else see a woman in here?" Sam asked.

Blackbird turned slowly towards him and then looked around the room with exaggerated care.

"I think you'll find, Sam-who-keeps-secrets, that no one saw anything."

He looked at Elizabeth, who was hugging her daughter while she tried to stop trembling. She shook her head. He looked at me and I shrugged. He turned to Claire.

"Don't ask me, Sam. You won't like the answer." She looked at him levelly, daring him to push it.

"What the hell happened in here?" he demanded. "The electricity was all over the place, she's lost half a head of hair, there's ice on the floor; look, it's still melting. What happened?"

"I broke a vase," said Blackbird. "You'd better get a dustpan and brush before someone hurts themselves."

I walked over to where Elizabeth was hugging Deborah and collected the knife from the floor, being careful to keep my body between the knife and Sam so he wouldn't see the blade darken at my touch, and I concealed it in my belt once more.

"Is she going to be OK?" I asked Elizabeth.

"Thanks to you. If you hadn't, well, I hate to think what might have happened."

"What's the matter with you people? Can't you see this is all some sort of scam?" he demanded.

"Make up your mind, Sam," said Blackbird, "Either it's a scam and nothing happened or there was something and you missed it. Which is it to be?"

"You think you're clever, don't you?" He pointed his finger at Blackbird. Claire tried to get between them but he resisted her. "You think you can pull a fast one, but I know you're hiding something. I can smell it."

"You're too smart for me," Blackbird confirmed. "You're right, we are hiding something. But even if it ran up behind you and bit you in the behind, you wouldn't recognise it for what it is. Go home, Sam."

"Don't tell me what to do."

"Sam, please?" Claire was trying to calm him down, but it only made him more angry.

"I thought you wanted my help, Claire. I thought you wanted me here. Instead you're conspiring with this charlatan. What am I supposed to think?"

"You're not supposed to think anything," she told him, "and I'm sorry now I even asked you here. Knowing the kind of work you do I thought you would understand, but you don't, do you? It's OK for you to have secrets but you can't bear it when anyone else does. It didn't work before, Sam, and I thought that was because you always put your work before me. But that's not it, is it? It's not your work. It's you."

He stood there, shaking his head. "I thought I knew you."

"No, Sam. You never tried to know me. Do as she says. Go home."

He looked from one of us to the next, searching for some clue, ending finally back with Claire.

"If I leave, I'm not coming back."

"That's right, Sam. You're not."

"Fine. If that's the way you want it." He turned back to the door, wrenched it open and stormed out, slamming it behind him so hard it made the glass rattle in the frame. In the silence that followed we could hear his footsteps fading down the corridor.

Claire turned back to us, her stern expression fading, become hurt and vulnerable with the shock of what she'd done.

Elizabeth stood. "Claire, I'm so sorry. This is all because of us."

"No. It was over a long time ago between us. I just didn't have the guts to admit it." Her eyes watered, but she brushed away the tears with the back of her hand and straightened her jacket, turning to Jerry who was still looking gaunt and pale on the bed. She smiled weakly.

"Will Jerry be all right now? Will that woman come back?" She addressed the question to Blackbird.

"Thanks to Deborah, Jerry is safe for the moment. Get a good meal inside him and a night's rest and he'll be fine. He'll need his strength for the ceremony on Tuesday."

"I don't need sleep," he said. "I feel like I've slept for a week already."

"I'm not sure the doctor will discharge him by then," said Elizabeth. "They'll probably want to do some more tests."

"He doesn't need tests. There's nothing wrong with him that food and rest won't remedy. But without the ceremony to reinforce the barrier, the woman who was here will be able to come and go as she pleases and there will be little any of us can do to prevent her. The way she sees it, she was denied what was rightfully hers and without the barrier, she will surely return to claim her prize. You saw how she came right into the room? That means the barrier is close to collapse."

"What can we do?" Elizabeth asked.

"We need the sixty-first nail. With that we can restore the Quick Knife to the ceremony and reinforce the barrier. If Jerry doesn't perform the ceremony this year, with the re-forged knife, then the barrier will fail."

She looked at each of them in turn.

"And now you know what happens if it does."

We tidied up the room as best we could, replacing the bed against the wall and pushing the pieces of the broken vase into a pile before informing the medical staff that Jerry was awake. Deborah told the nurse that her father had smashed the vase when he had woke suddenly and she'd cut her thumb trying to remove a fragment from his. This explanation was received with a degree of scepticism and the nurse kept trying not to look at Deborah's hair, but in the absence of any other explanation she simply dressed both cuts.

She took Jerry's blood pressure and measured his temperature, concluding that he'd awoken from a shallow coma and told us she would have one of the doctors come and give him a full examination.

While the nurse assessed the patient and arranged for the debris to be cleaned up, Claire, Blackbird and I moved into the empty rest-room across the hall.

"We are to meet the smith at the Royal Courts of Justice at noon tomorrow," Blackbird told Claire. "We are going to need the sixty-first nail, the one that's different from the others. Can you get it for us?"

"The Courts are closed on the weekends and they don't encourage visitors for all sorts of reasons."

"We need it tomorrow. Without it the Seventh Court will be able to come when they want, how they want. What they did to Jerry will be the least of it. We need the nail."

"I should be able to get it for you in the morning. They're used to me coming in at weekends to do things for Jerry. I can go into the office and collect it then. You'll still have time to meet the smith at noon."