Just Before I Died: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Ice Twins. S. Tremayne K.
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what way?’
‘You said I’d never been here before. But I have been here before. Here to Grey Wethers. I remember it.’ As she speaks, she repeatedly brushes non-existent sandwich crumbs from her jeans. Brush brush brush. ‘I’ve been here before, with you and Daddy.’
I reply, very gently, ‘No, darling, you haven’t been here, not with me, perhaps you came here with Daddy, or Uncle Dan, but not me.’
Lyla shakes her head. Stops brushing. ‘I have been here. You’ve forgotten.’
‘No, darling, I—’
And now I remember. I murmur, out loud: ‘Oh, yes, my God.’ She’s right. Lyla has been here before. In fact she was here the very first time I came here. Adam brought me to see the Grey Wethers and I was carrying Lyla on my back, in a harness, because she was nine months old.
For a moment I am speechless.
I know that my daughter, like quite a few people on her part of the spectrum, has this ability to recollect way back beyond normal human memory, but it always surprises me. And delights me. My daughter has issues; but she also has gifts. And this is one of these gifts, however unsettling.
Lyla gets to her feet. Picnic time is over. We begin the walk back to the car.
‘So you had a nice time?’
‘Yes, Mummy, yes, thanks. Look, here’s Felix and Randal, can we give them the last of the peanut butter sandwiches?’
The dogs are galloping over the windswept brown turf. Lyla takes the picnic box from my rucksack, unwraps the foil, and hands out the crusts. The dogs eat as if they haven’t been fed since they were pups. I’m sure they’d prefer fresh meat, but they would probably eat dust and pebbles from Lyla’s hand: their adoration of her is total.
Our long, chilly walk back to the car is quiet, the journey to Huckerby is quiet, everything is quiet, until we are a mile from home and Lyla asks if we can go to Hobajob’s Wood. It’s another one of her favourite places: she finds rare flowers there – eyebright, fritillary – and the iridescent shells of nameless blue beetles. Flowers and insects and little weathered claws.
I glance at the wintry sky, ‘It’s getting really dark, sweetheart. We need to get home.’
‘Oh please, Mummy. We’re so close.’
‘Hmm.’
The day has been good. One of our best since my accident. I experience a surge of maternal happiness. Why not indulge her? ‘All right, but only for a few minutes. It’ll be night in half an hour.’ Parking the car in the lay-by, we begin the cold walk along the cold valley to the cold and dense little wood with its twisted, moss-hung oak trees, clawing at the blank winter sky. Hobajob’s Wood is like a smaller version of famous Wistman’s Wood. Not quite as atmospheric, but not as touristy, either. Hidden away.
Our secret.
The dogs run ahead, leaping over boulders. They know the route well, it looks as if they are keenly following the scent of a badger or a fox. I pat my pockets, wishing I had brought a torch. The daylight will be gone in twenty minutes. Anxiety rises, very slightly. I want to get home, to a nice roaring wood-fire. Whatever timid warmth the day possessed has now gone for good.
It’s going to be a very bitter winter night on the high moorland.
The trees surround us, their cold branches scratching my anorak. It must be below freezing now: the perpetual Dartmoor dampness has turned, here at Hobajob’s, into a hard-core frost. The twigs and leaves underfoot make brittle, snapping sounds as we pace. Lyla is eagerly pursuing the dogs towards the gloom, towards the little clearing in the middle of the wood, where she always finds her treasures. The clearing was probably a Stone Age hut, many thousands of years ago, or some Neolithic shrine, no one quite knows.
We have to cross a stile, an ancient wall, it could be two hundred years old, it could be two thousand, after that we climb a hill and the woodland deepens again, surrounding the clearing. Cages within cages, no birds sing.
The dogs are already there. I can see them in the frosty gloom, circling shapes, like loping wolves in a Victorian picture book. They are barking wildly, oddly. Making a noise I have never heard from them before. What have they found?
Lyla turns to me, her face worried.
‘What’s wrong with Felix and Randal? Mum? Something is wrong!’
I have a fierce and overwhelming urge to turn and run back along the deepening shadows of the path to the car. It’s freezing cold. It’s nearly dark. I am scared, of what I do not know.
But I don’t want to show Lyla my fear. Get the dogs, and go home. Now.
Lyla runs towards the dogs as their howling gets even louder. I can barely see a thing; the winter evening is falling fast, dark grey and black, and the mossed and gathered trees make it darker still. ‘Mummy!’
Lyla’s yell cuts right through me.
She is yards ahead, in the clearing; I push icy brambles aside and run into the sombre glade. The dogs are circling and yowling. Fiendish. Perhaps they are simply scared of the weather, and the whiteness: here in the dark cold core of the forest, there’s been an ammil, that strange Dartmoor phenomenon when an initial thaw in cold weather is turned to ice, once again, as deep winter suddenly returns, devouring and glaciating.
In the slantwise evening light, this ammil, as always, looks beautiful. The special moorland ice storm that makes silent glasswork of the world.
My mother always loved the ammils.
As the dogs raise their eerie lamentations I look around, in something like wonder, an infant on a dark Christmas Day: every twig on every branch on every wizened little tree looks like the finger of a candied skeleton, a slender see-through bone of sugar. All the holly leaves are turned to immobile flames of white frost; through the trees I can see the distant shaggy cattle walking on grass made of tiny crystal spears.
But the dogs won’t stop their yowling. What is frightening them?
‘Look, Mummy, look!’
Lyla is pointing to the centre of the clearing. I can see a couple of dead birds and a few dead mice, three or four, lying, claws in the air, no doubt killed by the vicious returning cold. They’re in a kind of line, but that means nothing. Next to them is a trail of household rubbish. Daily waste. Casually dumped. It makes me so angry when people do this to Dartmoor, it makes Lyla even angrier.
It sometimes makes her cry.
Yet something snags. I look again at the scattered line of trash in the frost. I can see a hairbrush. Incongruously pink, and now rimed with a varnish of frost.
It is mine. I am sure it is mine. I lost it a while ago. And now I step a little closer I can see my own fine brown hairs are still meshed in the prongs, though stiffened to wire by the cold, and there are scrunched-up, mouldering tissues trailing from the brush, red and stained, either kissed with lipstick, or dabbed with blood. I shudder in the freeze. Is this my blood? And there, at the end, under the tree, is that a tampon? One of my used tampons? I have to throw away tampons carefully, in bags: our sewage system out in the wilds cannot cope with these things, but why would my tampon be scattered out here?
Revulsion shudders through me. I feel invaded, or poisoned. Violated. It must be the scent of all this, the blood, the hair, the waste, that is freaking out the dogs, who are now backing away from the clearing, hackles up, growling.
Lyla calls after them. I stare at the tissues daubed obscenely with my blood. Who is doing this? Who has taken my trash, my hair, my brush, and laid them out here in the wood, next to these sad little birds, stiffened and killed by the cold? I look at my daughter, could she have done this, as a joke, or some ritual, making a pattern? Why? This is not her style, she is not sly or conniving, and she looks as shocked and alarmed as me.
‘Mummy, what’s wrong with the dogs?’ Lyla’s face is