Fallow Heart Read online

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  “Where did you go last night?” Mum repeated with a sigh.

  Lori frowned.

  “What do you mean?” she said. “I didn’t go anywhere.”

  She saw her mother’s jaw tighten at the retaliation. Lori had long-since learned not to contradict her mother and cause trouble, but she needed to know what she meant.

  “You went outside, Lori, in the middle of the night.”

  It was nonsense. Lori knew she’d been trapped in nightmares all night, and her mother had been blind drunk. But that tension was hovering in Yvonne’s features, and Lori could read it well.

  “Oh, uh… nowhere,” she answered. “I’ve got to go. I’ll be late for Granddad.”

  She shut the door behind her, leaving the pair to resume their fight.

  She’s seeing things. It’s getting serious. You have to tell someone.

  Lori shook her head, stepping down the three small stairs which led to the muddy patch around the van. Most of the caravans at Fir Trees were classy holiday homes, kept by people who had real houses and fancy cars. Mum’s van was old and well-worn from full-on residential living, relegated to the far end of the park. She’d been asked several times to either refurbish the van or upgrade to a new one, but she never had the cash. Lori knew where all her money went, and it was a growing problem that she’d have to face one day soon. But so long as the van hadn’t fallen apart, there was still time to fix things.

  The graffiti was extensive. Lori saw why her mother had been so keen to blame foreigners, for the vivid black words sprayed across the van’s side were not written in English. The letters were six feet high, if you could call them letters at all. The shapes looked more like the curves and dots of Arabic, though Lori knew nothing about the language. She was working on her European languages at college, and other alphabets seemed a long way off in her future. How she wished that she’d had her phone, to be able to take a picture of the damage for Granddad to see. Instead, she stared hard at the symbols to try and memorise them.

  There were three. The first looked like a capital E, but curved and cursive instead of straight. This was followed by two symbols that were both shaped like a lowercase j. One had the dot over the j, and the other didn’t. Lori stared hard, blinked, then turned away. She was sure she could remember. Granddad would know how to clean them off, even if he couldn’t shed any light on what the translation was.

  Setting off in the mud, Lori hugged her body against the chill of the morning. Summer had vanished early that year, leaving her to shiver in its wake. She held herself, her hands curving over her own stomach, and suppressed those voices that liked to say vicious things. Walking quickly for the bus would do her good. Soon, she’d be safely on her way into the city centre, away from arguments and nightmares at least. There was only the road leading out of the park to contend with on her way to the bus stop, which would have been fine if she hadn’t already spotted a familiar obstacle ahead of her. The name of this particular obstacle was Addison, but he was less affectionately known as Mad Addy by his fellow Fir Trees residents. Lori’s teeth clenched hard as she carried on towards the young man at the side of the River Dee

  According to Brian, who would happily talk the hind legs off a donkey, the young man was a ‘wild swimmer’, keen on finding natural water to take a dip. According to Lori, he was a creepy nutter who enjoyed getting his kit off in public, and the swimming was a perfect excuse to do that. Addison had disappeared during the summer months, the only time when the river was even passable for swimming in. She had started to hope he’d moved away from Fir Trees altogether, so Lori was deeply disappointed to witness his return, today of all days. As she approached his skinny, pale frame, clad in only a pair of black speedo briefs, he launched himself from a rock by the side of the river, heading for the water.

  Lori’s head ached suddenly, a flash of pain behind her eyes. She gasped, breath catching in her throat as a single image invaded her senses, like a photograph being captured inside her head. She saw the gargantuan form of a horse-like beast, glistening like black ice, leaping into the river ahead of her. Aside from its equine haunches and hooves, the creature’s head was a little longer and thinner than that of an ordinary horse. It had a mane made of spindly bones attached by cartilage, like the wings of a bat. The horse was massive and heavy as it hurtled towards the water’s surface, burning its shape into Lori’s mind in the brief seconds while it leaped.

  But by the time it hit the water, Lori found herself watching the splash of the lanky wild swimmer again. Mad Addy popped up on the surface of the water, his sopping hair slapped against his forehead. He caught Lori’s eye as she began to cross the footbridge that would take her to the bus stop. Lori blinked at him for a moment, still lost in her bizarre flash. The creep simply grinned at her, his mouth all teeth and gums.

  “Fine day for swimming, isn’t it?” Addison asked. “The water’s bracing.”

  “If you say so mate,” Lori replied, quickening her pace.

  He always spoke weirdly, with a v in place of his f, and no mention of a th whatsoever. It was an accent that Brian insisted was Eastern European. Lori disagreed. None of the Polish, Ukrainian or Romanian kids at her college spoke with the same accent that the wild swimmer had. But winning an argument against Brian took a lot more courage and effort than Lori was willing to put in, and her immediate concerns were always about getting away from the cold-water fiend, not asking after his whole life story.

  “Are you okay?” he called. He was in Lori’s peripheral vision now as she left the bridge, his bobbing head getting smaller with every step. “You look fraught.”

  “Fine thanks,” Lori stammered, forcing herself on.

  Was that concern? What business did a creep like that have, asking her personal questions? The nasty part of Lori’s mind suggested that she could do no better, that compassion from a nutter was tantamount to romance for a girl like her. Lori shut the voice up again, her eyes squeezed shut at the bus stop for a moment. When she opened them again, she half-expected another strange, painful vision. Antlered beasts and steeds made of ice. She was going mad. Or perhaps it was stress-induced, not an easily-solved problem in Lori’s life. Either way, talking about it would only land her a prime spot on a psychiatrist’s waiting list, and the last thing she needed at college was to descend the social ladder even further. Fat ass trailer trash was one thing.

  Fat ass asylum trash would be quite another.

  Descending, from great heights to deep depths

  Chester was beautifully historic, but its two-thousand years of history held no interest for Lori’s busy brain. She was drifting and unfocused, traipsing down the busy cobbled streets and barely dodging the tourists before her, who had an uncanny habit of knowing when to stop and take photos so that you walked right into the back of them. The bus ride had only given her time to consider all the possible causes for her sudden visions of darkness, which currently included a massive undiscovered brain tumour and any number of mental health issues. Many years ago, when she’d been staying with Grandmere Patricia in France, she could remember the delicate old lady talking about going ‘round the bend.

  “The beauty of madness,” Grandmere had said, “is that the madman does not know he is mad. It is a charmed existence.”

  Lori couldn’t settle with that philosophy. She knew that the things she was seeing were real to her, and that was a big problem. Yet, if she had the good sense to be worried about madness, then she probably wasn’t mad at all. She often wished that Grandmere Patricia was still alive, and today she wished it more than ever. Throughout her fraught life with her parents and their various other partners, Lori’s grandparents had always been a source of sanity for her. Now that one of them was gone, she clung to the other even more for advice and support. But could she tell Granddad what she’d seen so far? Did she dare to show him the scar and explain its total lack of origin?

  Lori wasn’t sure it was a conversatio
n she was brave enough to have. The whole business wracked her mind as she trundled through the busy town centre. She had made it to the rows on Eastgate Street, easily the busiest part of town. Here, the shops were on two levels, the lower establishments overshadowed by huge Tudor and mock-Tudor buildings above. There was a walkway on the second level, also full of people browsing in the shop windows, so Lori decided to stay down on the street where there was a little more space to weave through. If you weren’t so fat, the voice inside began, but luckily it was drowned out by the bustling hordes.

  Something new was causing a considerable commotion up ahead. A crowd of some fifty people had gathered to the right of the street, forcing everyone else to stream around them. It wasn’t usual for so many people to be attracted to a street performer, but the guy seemed to have trapped a large group of American tourists who had paused in a clump. As she got closer to the eager mass of people, Lori could hear why. Guitar strings plucked her from all other thoughts, and a voice rang out clear as bell despite the heavy crowds bustling to and fro. It was deep and rich, a baritone like none that Lori had heard before, lyrics crisp and echoing into her mind:

  “We plough the fields, and scatter

  the good seed on the land,

  but it is fed and watered

  by God's almighty hand.”

  Lori pushed herself into the crowd, searching for the voice. It belonged to a young busker with a battered old guitar, and the song was a hymn that Lori hadn’t heard since her days at Sunday school. It was jarring to hear something so openly religious on the streets of a town filled with multi-cultured tourists, and even stranger to see the young man who was singing it. He had sienna skin that was peppered here and there with thick black tattoos, and dark wavy hair barely contained by a bohemian flat-cap. His aquiline nose and heavy brow gave him a brooding look, adding conviction to every word of the song, and Lori was shocked to find his eyes meeting hers. They seemed to seek her out – a new face joining the crowd – giving her an invitation to stay and listen.

  He had settled himself beside one of the gothic-looking rows of Eastgate, and to the left the Eastgate clock was ready to chime eleven. The busker’s eyes shone with purpose, and Lori’s gaze travelled over his body, examining the places where hints of black tattoos escaped from the edges of his sleeve and the neck of his shirt. The young man’s gaze did not break away when Lori looked back to his face. Her cheeks burned with flush. He continued to stare directly at her, a small smile curving his pale brown lips as he sang on:

  “We thank thee, then, O Father,

  for all things bright and good,

  the seed time and the harvest,

  our life, our health, and food;

  no gifts have we to offer,

  for all thy love imparts,

  and, what thou most desirest,

  our humble, thankful hearts.”

  And Lori might have asked him what he meant by those words and those looks, as the crowd broke into rapturous applause. If time had allowed after his performance, she might have felt brave enough to inquire what lay behind the busker’s knowing smile. Except that the crowd suddenly stopped clapping, and the busker stopped smiling. What had stopped him, Lori discovered half a heartbeat later.

  A body had fallen from the sky.

  In the split second that Lori had to think about it, she presumed someone had jumped from the rows. But the body that landed before her was limp and heavy, making a deep, dull thud as it sank into the cobblestones. Lori gasped, taking a step back before her eyes had even sent the message to her brain of what she was looking at. People were screaming all around her, pointing and screaming. Her eyes grew wider, stomach lurching. She wanted to look away but there was nothing that could tear her gaze from the scene.

  It wasn’t a body. It was half a body. Ripped clean in two at the waist, Lori found herself stupefied, staring at the lower half of a partially-clothed woman. She had most of her hips, where a flouncy skirt of some kind had been tattered and soaked with blood, and above that lay a mass of wet, red innards. Lori didn’t understand enough about biology to know what she was seeing, but the congealed collection of torn-open organs was too much to bear. She ripped her gaze from the sight, her vision travelling back over the tanned legs of the woman, right down to-

  “Oh God,” Lori said, the sickening sense of déjà-vu overwhelming her senses. “Those shoes.”

  Red-and-black zebra print down the outside. Black-and-blue giraffe patterns on the inside. They were unmistakeable, and far too lurid to be a coincidence. The half-body of Pauline O’Leary lay bleeding in the street, right before Lorelai’s eyes.

  Questions, from those who matter, and those who don’t

  Lori’s mother was obsessed with detective shows. Lori hadn’t realised how deep that obsession had also sunk into her, until she found herself sitting in a police interview room. From years of education on the TV, Lori had assumed the interview room would be one of those shiny grey boxes with a large oak table, and a massive two-way mirror running down one side of the wall. The little beige room she found herself in, no bigger than a storage cupboard, was disappointing. A strip of fluorescent light illuminated the windowless space, flickering now and then as if to remind Lori how unnatural everything seemed.

  Pauline’s dead.

  The thought hit her again, though more numbly than it had the last forty times. She had been in the little beige room for an hour, most of that time spent crying and talking to someone assigned to ‘help her through the shock’. That someone had finally left the room about ten minutes ago, and Lori was certain that anyone who took a good look at her would see that the shock was still ongoing. It was as though a large, trembling emptiness had replaced her innards, leaving only a bag of bones threatening to collapse in on itself.

  Pauline… The body…

  She hadn’t seen the head, or indeed the top half of her at all. No-one would tell Lori whether it had been recovered or not, though she reasoned it must have been for them to tell her so confidently that it was Pauline whom they’d found dead at her feet. No more Pauline. There was some dark relief to be taken in not having to hear that dispassionate, nasal tone of hers when she called Lori’s father ‘babe’. Lori shook herself every time those wicked thoughts crossed her mind. It wasn’t right to feel that way, even if she hadn’t liked the woman. Her poor father would be devastated. He had loved Pauline, after all.

  The door opened with the gentlest click, but Lori still jumped as though a gun had been fired. Through a small slit between the door and its frame, a pair of bright blue eyes blinked at her. As the gap increased with gentle pressure, a petite blonde woman of about forty passed through. Her neat bob swayed at her shoulders as she turned gracefully on her heel, closing the door as quietly as she had opened it.

  “Miss Lorelai Blake?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Lori mumbled, hoarse from crying.

  She found her eyes landing on the woman’s shoes as she spoke. The blonde had dainty feet, almost child-sized, and her black leather shoes were coated with a curious layer of reddish dust. It was as if she had walked in off a building site, though the rest of her clothes were smart enough. Brick dust. Weird.

  “My name’s Matilda Vane,” the woman said, her voice soft and low. “May I call you Lorelai?”

  Lori flickered her gaze to meet the startling blues eyes for a moment.

  “I guess so,” she answered with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter.” She grazed her teeth out over her lip, finding it parched and sore from all the salt water, then sucked up a breath to add: “Are my parents here? Can I see them?”

  “Not yet, I’m afraid,” Matilda answered. “We need to ask you some questions about the events of the last few days, Lorelai.”

  The accent gave Lori sudden pause. Whilst most of Matilda’s parlance was as refined as the woman herself, she had the strange affliction of losing her f and th sounds, like the wild swimmer up at Fir Trees. If anything, Matilda’s shockingly pale hair gave her a Ge
rmanic look, which certainly didn’t fit with Brian’s Eastern Europe theory either. Lost as she was in this strange moment of similarity, it took Lori a good thirty seconds to process what Matilda had asked her. The last few days. That meant Friday. She was asking about Friday.

  “But everything happened this morning,” Lori replied.

  Matilda shook her head, that perfect curtain of hair swaying again. How did she keep it so sleek when faced with the daily grind of policing, Lori had to wonder. She wasn’t in uniform, which would have to make her plain clothes, like a detective or something. But surely, Lori reasoned, all detectives were supposed to be haggard and overwhelmed, especially when so gruesome a crime had been discovered?

  “Your father tells us you were mugged by an unknown assailant yesterday afternoon, is that correct?” Matilda asked.

  “My dad’s here?” Lori said, her heart giving a little jab of anguish. “Can I-”

  “Please answer the question, Lorelai. It’s important.”

  She looked into Matilda’s patient expression, but there was a steel in the woman’s eyes that set Lori’s nerves on edge. She was a petite woman in all senses, with a button nose and round eyes like a Cabbage Patch doll, but her tight-lipped expression was so firm that Lori squirmed under it. She had to answer, if only to make her go away.

  “I wasn’t mugged,” Lori lied, trying to stamp all emotion out of her tone. “I lost my bag. I was late for work. I… I needed an excuse.”

  Matilda smiled, though she was looking less friendly by the minute.

  “I’m sorry my dear, but I don’t believe you.”

  Lori’s cheeks flushed pink, a tell-tale sign of being caught out. She receded for a moment, looking at the floor in silence, but she knew that refusing to speak was only going to prolong Matilda’s stay in the tiny interview room.