Chapter 6, She screams
I can't see her properly. It is like I am staring at her through a waterfall. I know she is waving her arms. I think she is trying to signal to me, but I just cant seem to focus on her. I am sure it will not surprise you to learn that all winter, each night I have slept with my old leather bound copy of 'The Raven and the Wolf' in my arms.
I did so this night, however unbeknownst to the sleeping me, the book and my skin with it had grown very warm.
She is still waving, and now I can hear her, she calls in warbles and hisses. It is like hearing a robot from a long way away. Suddenly the wall of shimmering liquid through which I am staring at her turns red. Her severed arm comes flying through the waterfall. It falls at my feet and is shortly joined by the other arm.
The rest of the dream figure throws herself towards me, and lands at my feet in bits and pieces. The only part I can make out with any clarity is the face. The perfectly preserved face of a pretty girl who is smiling at me. However, despite her smile, I can hear her screaming, screaming with an agony that defies any sound that I have heard in the last nightmare ravaged year of existence.
Suddenly the waterfall changes colour again. Now it is green, a shimmering emerald green. On the other side of it I see a shadow, a vast form that seems to me from my disadvantaged point of view to represent a great bulbous worm.
The shadow starts to move closer. Then I hear her voice.
“Ravensburg” she screams at me “Ravensburg, Ravensburg, Ravensburg” each time louder, each time more insistent. Then the shadow bursts through the waterfall, I am showered in blood...
And it is at this point I wake up thrashing around in the cave with Raj and Lucy desperately trying to calm me down.
“Chill out luv, it's just a dream” says Lucy, cradling a shaken me in her arms. I have had dreams which felt real before, and dreams in which I knew I was dreaming, but nothing like this had ever assailed the night time hours in such a way.
Fate is like a circuit which needs to be a closed link in order for it to be connected. For me, the dream was the last switch. For ten chapters and ten more after that Atticus Faraday wrote about the ravens tower. He talked about the kings and torturers that occupied it, about the drunks who wear faded glory and the killers who wore the night.
“We have to go to Ravensburg.”
“Where?”
“Ravensburg.”
“I gotta ask sweet, where's that and why have we got to go there?” says Raj giving Lucy a look. I know what they are thinking, the dream addled girl, still clutching to the edges of her nightmare, she needs to let go.
I shrug off Lucy's embrace and go over to the bookshelf. To stave off cabin fever Raj has been raiding the towns book shops, and possibly some of the empty homes I suspect, and he'd built up quite a library. I am not the only reader in the cave. One of the tomes he has picked up, which I must remark is far less interesting than 'The Raven and the Wolf' is an A to Z of Great Britain.
My hands tremble as I thumb through the pages. Two curious shadows fall over me, keen to see where my agitation and excitement lead. It takes me a while to find it, I am dealing with a mystery, a quandary and a riddle all rolled into one. Perhaps I will call it a mysdariddle. Perhaps I will not. How is it, that such a fantastic tale such as the one written by Atticus Faraday, can contain hints of such truth?
How is it that the words I read have leaked into my dreams, only to spill back out into the real world in a different form? Perhaps I am dressing up a coincidence as something else. Passages from Faradays neverending book leapt unbidden to my mind;
'And all the lands of Mercurions Gate were plunged into a darkness where only the dead could see and feel'
'A dark clad angel descended from the scorched heavens, he gathered the children of the future at Ravensberg, and as one they sailed across the sea to the dead kings isle, where eternity would be met'
Finally my shaking finger was calm as it pressed upon the page of the map. “Ravensburg is here” says I “and it is here that we must go.” Again they swap looks, damn I wish I could hear their secret language.
“Honey, you've had a bad dream, it's okay..” begins Lucy, kneeling next to me.
“You think, that I have had a bad dream, and now I've suddenly woken up and want to go to the other side of the country because of it?” I interrupt her.
“It does seem a tad like that Annabel, why don't you tell us about the dream?” asks Raj. I don't want to tell them about the dream, with my eyes wide open now I can still see it, the severed yet smiling head yelling at me. I can still sense the immensity of the evil that came at me, that drove me from my sleep.
“If we stay here we will die” I say simply.
“That's a horrible thing to say Annabel” says Lucy, her patience has always been thinnest, whereas Raj has always absorbed the oddities of my behaviour with a smile and a shrug; but, sometimes I needle her, I know this.
“If we leave we may well die too” says Raj. He uses logic, a clever move.
“A choice between certain death and maybe death is no choice at all” I counter.
“We have only your word that death here is certain, this place has kept us alive all winter, why do you doubt it now?”. He is winning. Scoring more logic points. I want to tell him that I have a very strong feeling, I want to tell him that, I am almost completely certain that Atticus Faraday died in this cave. I want to tell him that there is no permanent sanctuary in a world where evil dwells with such all pervading, terrifying eminence.
I want to be able to convince him that only by staying ahead of the wave will we avoid being crushed and broken by it.
But all I have are feelings, and senses. All I have are the tatters of dreams and some coincidences in a book. I am desperate for something that will help me to convince two mortal adults to leave a place which, as Raj quite rightly states, has kept them alive all through the winter at the end of the world. I have only one choice left, it's not one which I want to make.
“Then I will go alone.” From Lucy I get scepticism, from Raj, worry. There are pangs of guilt, certainly, at making him feel like that, at doing what I am about to do. I collect the book and don a large red duffel coat.
“Don't be silly Annabel” says Raj as I start to walk out of the cave down one of the passageways. They follow. I get to the point where one of the hatches that leads to the outside lay above me. I put one hand on the rung of the wooden ladder. Lucy's hand grips my wrist. I let go of the ladder, drop the book and slap her as hard as I can across the face.
“You..” she gasps, “You horrible little shit.”
“I'm going and there is nothing you can do to stop me, I am as free as you.”
“Please Annabel, don't do this, we've looked after you” says Raj the placater.
“How is letting me going off on my own looking after me?” says I. The shame of what I am saying, burns.
“Please” he says “Let's go in and talk about it.” He puts a hand on my back. I go dizzy, an image flashes into my mind; I see Raj, dead eyes staring up at me. The dizziness tows with it a nausea. A few deep breaths. I look at Raj, suddenly terribly afraid of what I'm doing.
“How did you do it?” I ask Raj with a memory of him popping into my head.
“How did I do what?” he replies.
“In the church, when the man attacked us, you disarmed him, and drove him off, it looked easy, how did you do that?”.
“I study, studied martial arts, back when, back in the time...before.” He looks pained. My selfishness is so stark, even I cannot fail to notice. All this time I have spent with Lucy and Raj, they comforted me, they asked so many questions about me and my life. They were adopting me through shared memories, trying to help me out of the mire. And I'd reciprocated so little, the knowledge that they had each other had somehow blinded me to everything else that they'd lost, the lives they left behind.
I lift a pale hand to his face. “Raj, I am so sorry, but I need you. And I
need you to understand, I can't do it without you, but that won't stop me from trying.” It wounds him, these things I say. Lucy is still holding a hand to her face. She is on the middle ground now. I think, as upsetting as it might be in the short run, that she believes it might be better to just let me go.
But Raj tells a different story, it is in a resigned sigh, slumped shoulders and a sullen tone as he says to me “Okay, we will leave, together, when we're all ready.”