Tapestry of Deception

Chapter Three

A slick black raven flew into view, an arrow cutting across the bleeding, red-gold sky. It steered steeply to the left, powerful and enchanting, slicing through the air as it swooped through our street and into the park outside our house, leaving a flurry of leaves behind it. The newspapers were all about omens at the moment, reminding us of the ancient powers of black magic in a rather ironic way – ‘progression or regression?’ was the headline in The Times the other day. I’d read that in Greek mythology ravens were dead souls that came from the Underworld, the devils apprentices. I watched the bird as it flew back into view, a graceful, state-of-the-art beauty. Bethany muttered something about the raven’s intercourse with the devil, and, despite my upset, I found it difficult not to laugh at her cynicism. The raven met my eye and a shiver ran, involuntarily, down my spine. I blinked. The raven was gone. A black feather clung to the outside of my window.

“This can’t be good.” I heard Bethany grumble, and I couldn’t control my laughter. The idea of her believing that a bird should be a warning seemed utterly ridiculous.

“I’m going to miss you Bethany, are you sure you wouldn’t like to come too?”

“What and leave your mother to fend for herself?” Bethany shook her head decisively, “Speaking of, you’d better go tell her your plans.” I swallowed and nodded, but I couldn’t face telling her yet.

I thought of the nightmare I’d had for the last few nights, the one that started just before my Uncle went missing. I’d fallen through a sky filled with burning lights to an exotic tent where my Uncle sat like a statue, letting a strange lady run her long, painted fingers over his face. She sang as she rotated around him and pressed a circle of glass into his hand. Then, every night the scene would turn bad. Even as I remembered it I could feel the breath of the shadows as they crept forwards out of the darkness, the sound of the woman’s mask crashing to the ground, the taste of something that hung like metal in the air. I squeezed my eyes shut tight but the images didn’t go.

The grandfather clock down the hall struck nine. With nothing better to do I picked my Viola off its chair and played the only melody I knew, a strange haunting tune that always reminded me of the sea. Looking through the window as I played my eyes drifted in the direction of the train station. I tried to ignore the tightening of my heart.

“Annabel, why don’t you go and pour out your mother’s medicines?”

Bethany’s voice startled me and I nearly dropped the Viola. I called out to say I would then, plucking up courage, crept along the dark corridor to my mother’s room and let myself in slowly. Thick drapes blocked any light from the windows and I could barely make out my mother’s thin frame in the extravagant four-poster bed. People told me she had been one of the most beautiful women that ever lived, only you couldn’t tell that now. She had played the violin in orchestras all over the world and had been renown for her own compositions. Thinking of this only made me angry, angry about how much she had changed. Her hair is thin and wasted, her once butterscotch waves, just like my sisters, now shriveled to a few strands of grey. My hair is different. It hangs in long dark tresses to my waist and I’m always being forced to brush back the stray strands that curl up my forehead. I remember I used to wish I looked like the two of them and not my father, back when I was little and my mother had been pretty and fun. She’d spend hours thumbing through thick history books, tracing her ancestry and following the lives of historical figures while I looked up the tricky words in a dictionary. Sometimes my Uncle Alex would join us too. They would chat in French, Spanish or Italian, and he’d draw me pictures of all the exciting places he’d been too. My father used to sneer they were like two peas in a pod, incapable of doing anything worthwhile with their time, but even then he couldn’t stay rude for too long – I think in those days he still loved her a little bit. He would read the newspapers out loud to us in the evenings, bouncing Charlotte on his knee. Then, there was the accident and everything changed.

 My mother stirred in bed and her eyes suddenly opened. They stood out like two dark almonds against her pale, translucent skin. She saw me and leaned up, straining to do something as simple as prop herself up on her elbows. I poured out the medicines, passing her the different coloured liquids one by one and checking that she finished them.

“I am going to Lalington tomorrow, to help find Uncle Alex.” I said as I watched her push them down her throat.

“What? Your father let you?” she sounded even more feeble than normal.

“I have to help find him, I feel like I’m meant to help, if that makes sense.” I wanted to tell her about the dream I’d had, the one with my Uncle in it, but I didn’t want to worry her.

“Don’t go Annabel” her voice sounded painful to my ears, “I need you here with me. I need you here, to protect you “ she murmured.

A single tear trickled down my cheek. I thought of how much I would have loved to have a mother who could protect me but she had tried that before and she had nearly died as a consequence.

“I’m sorry. I have to help find him. I know you will understand”, my voice came out in a whisper.

She began to moan, her voice piercing the air. “I never wanted you to go there. Never. Never.”

I looked around for Bethany but she was nowhere to be seen. Pouring mother a glass of water I held the cup to her cracked lips then watched as her head slumped back on the pillow in exhaustion. As I left the room I heard her faintly humming a tune between her lips, it sounded like the melody I’d been playing earlier on my viola.

*****

I arrived at the station early in the morning, well before the ten o’clock train was due. My father’s chauffeur unloaded the bags and drove away. Charlotte was with me, ready to go to a friend’s house somewhere in Oxford. She sat on one of the suitcases with a forlorn expression on her face.

“When’s daddy coming?” she asked expectantly.

I gritted my teeth. “He’s not.”

“What, he’s not saying goodbye? Why not?” she whined, pouting her upper lip. I scowled at her. Little sisters could be so annoying, most of the time she seemed so grown up that I forgot she was only eleven. It was bitterly cold. There was a hard wind too, it scattered about the bubblegum wrappers and newspaper clippings on the ground. There wasn’t a soul in sight. An old rusty train wheezed into the platform and a thread of passengers in creased suits walked out in unison. A male voice called through the tanoy for Oxford, the voice sounded tinny and thick with cigarette smoke.

“I guess that’s you.” I lifted up Charlotte’s suitcase and my sister followed behind me miserably.

“I’m going to miss you. Will you call me if they find Uncle Alex?”

I nodded. Despite our differences my sister and I had always been really close and hated being apart.

I waved after her as the train sped away. It took me a while to realise that someone else had boarded the train too: a lady dressed in a long cloak like someone who’d walked out of one of my dreams - maybe I was the one going crazy now. I wheeled my suitcase over to the soft drinks dispenser and sat on it, trying to make myself as comfortable as was possible on a hard, overstuffed suitcase. I plugged in my iPod and thought of my mother’s parting words. It dawned on me that she could have been worried about me. But then why should she have been? I opened a packet of crisps, feeling utterly alone.

The train rumbled along the rusty track, groaning under its own weight. I lugged my case along the corridor of an empty carriage, a monstrosity of peeling paint and stained carpets with rows of hard plastic chairs - Lalington was obviously not a popular tourist destination. Hugging my rucksack to my chest I busied myself in looking out the window. It had steamed up and I had to rub on it with my sleeve. I caught sight of a road and imagined our chauffer had already reached home. He’d be handing over the car keys to Percy now. Percy would polish them with anti-bacterial soap, as was his custom, and put them in the heavy bronze bowl on the stand next to the front door. They’d chink as they brushed up among all the other keys in the bowl. Tendrils of purplish blue smoke, like a bruise, spluttered out of the train and I watched as the smoke coloured in the city. Everything disappeared. I jutted out my chin, resolved to finding my Uncle.