The Wind of Southmore (24 page)

Not that
she hadn’t tried already. She had taken several weeks off when she
had first collected them from Cornwall – tiny, thin creatures with
enormous eyes and haunted expressions. Neither would talk about
what had happened there except in vague terms, and a child
psychologist friend of a colleague had suggested that it was
probably best to let them get around to it themselves. Love and
trust come first, tackle the other problems later. And she had
tried. Talking with them, taking them out, telling them about work.
She had pulled strings and got them into a good school, had
attended every parent-teacher night, and helped them with their
homework. Arlen more than Alice, poor thing. Her education had been
seriously neglected, and although she could outshine any of the
others in the reading department, was decidedly deficient in other
areas and needed an awful lot of extra work. She had thought about
a learning assistant, except that it made it look as if Arlen was
troubled or mentally challenged in some way, and she hadn’t felt it
was fair. So she had engaged a private tutor and given up time
herself. There had been some progress, but the annoying thing was
that she always had the feeling that Arlen was quite capable of
quick study, it was just that she didn’t see the point and couldn’t
be bothered. She had tried to explain to her about the modern world
but this was hard, especially when the child had grown up amongst a
village of elderly people still living as if it were centuries
earlier.

It was
strange, too, that the closer she and Alice seemed to grow, the
more strained the twins’ relationship appeared. The household had
altered from the girls huddled and whispering secretively together
in a corner, to Margaret and Alice becoming the best of friends and
Arlen always seeming to be the spare part. This was through no
fault of theirs, Margaret was sure. They had both tried to include
her, but she didn’t seem to be interested. In some way, it seemed
as if she was still living in Southmore in her mind, and she became
more and more introverted as the months went on. She constantly
carried a small velvet pouch in her pocket, and occasionally would
take it out and peer into it like a sybil, so that Margaret
couldn’t help but wonder what it was Aunt Maud had actually been
teaching her. Once she had come upon her by surprise, with the
contents of the pouch spilled over her hand like fiery drops of
blood, but when she had sensed someone behind her she had drawn the
fragments quickly together in her closed fist and disappeared into
her room. Margaret had had a vague, frightening sense of having
seen them somewhere before, and had suffered strange dreams for the
next few nights about a dark, tossing sea and a white hand, some
recurrent nightmare from her childhood that she had submerged well
into herself and forgotten all about. She had watched Arlen more
closely from that time, a fear growing silently in her heart for
her strange, lost daughter.

Alice had
been suspicious at first and very protective of her sister,
recognising how new everything was to her. Alice had been badly
raised as well by Gary, their good-for-nothing father, a small time
gambler and crook, although Margaret hadn’t known that when she
married him. The relationship hadn’t lasted long, any feelings well
over before the twins were born, but Gary had insisted that he have
one of them, as if they were things rather than people, simply
because he didn’t like to feel he was missing out, and Margaret, at
nineteen and in the throes of a severe depression, hadn’t felt able
to cope with one baby let alone two. So Arlen had ended up in
Cornwall with Aunt Maud, and Alice had spent the first twelve years
of her life on the run with her father, dodging the law and
occasionally bullets, and often living out of peanut and biscuit
packets at hotels, where her father would leave her alone for long
periods of time, out on his “business trips”. Margaret felt as
though she would kill him if she ever saw him again, but then, she
had let him take Alice, knowing full well he wouldn’t – couldn’t –
be a responsible parent. She had been so determined to make it up
to them, and Alice, after her initial hostility which Margaret
couldn’t help but feel was partially echoed from Arlen, had become
good friends with her mother and had settled well into London life.
A stable home, stable school, and the modern, predictable world she
was used to, had left Alice chatty and excited and happy. She had
tried to encourage Arlen to enjoy her new life, but Arlen had
appeared to regard this as some sort of traitorous behaviour.
Margaret had hinted to Alice for the story, but Alice had remained
tightlipped, and at one point had departed to her room in tears.
Therapy might be on the cards eventually, but Arlen had been
through enough for the moment, and Margaret was determined to give
her as much space as she needed.

That was
one of the reasons she had chosen this holiday and the freedom of a
large rented house, just outside of Edinburgh, and complete with
housekeeper and gardener, where she could switch off the phone and
the laptop and be with her girls for a full month before the
onslaught of the new account in September. She needed to know them
properly, and after two years of trying still didn’t feel as if she
had scratched much of the surface. It was funny – they looked
identical, except for the fact that Alice was growing her hair out
like the other girls at school, while Arlen maintained the chin
length blunt bob with its sharp fringe that she had always had –
and yet they seemed so different. Alice was very much like her, she
felt, and could adapt quickly. But Arlen –

And it
wasn’t as if she was like her father – no, there was nothing subtle
or mysterious or deep about Gary. His cockney bluntness, which had
been different and thrilling, and even a little bit dangerous to
her when she was a teenager, now filled her with a cold, sick
shudder. His quick temper, his selfishness, his long nights out
without telling anyone – and she had let him take one of their
girls. She brushed Alice’s hair back from her face with a quick,
fierce gesture. Alice turned and smiled, still singing along with
her CD. But Arlen – although at times her face took on an
expression which oddly reminded her of Aunt Maud – she didn’t know
at all.

“
How much longer?” Alice asked then, breaking sharply into her
reverie. She had removed the current CD from the player and was
contemplating the next one.

“
Oh, ah,” Margaret tried to collect her thoughts, “about ten
minutes into the city, I think. It’s been a little while since I’ve
been up here. Why don’t you leave the CDs for a while and we’ll see
if we can get any inkling of the weather for the next few
days.”

“
OK,” Alice slid back in her seat with a magazine and Margaret,
thankfully it must be admitted, switched the radio back
on.

“
That’s good,” she remarked after a few minutes. “We may be in
luck. Clear skies until Sunday at least.”

But she
was talking to herself, for Alice was engrossed with reading and
Arlen, as always, was lost in her own world. Margaret sighed, and
pretended it was just her and the radio.

Alice
perked up as the scenery began to scatter and the blackened
buildings of Old Town sprang up around them in a concrete smoke.
She had been to Edinburgh once before with her father, but had not
been allowed out to see anything, although she knew the interior of
the hotel very well. She leaned forward with excitement as the car
made its way up Lothian Road and turned right into Princes Street,
past the Castle.

But the
short gasp came suddenly from Arlen in the back, and Margaret
smiled to herself, pleased that a reaction had been gained. “It’s
beautiful, isn’t it,” she said.

Arlen
felt cold suddenly, the Castle grim and foreboding on the black
rock, winking in the pale sunlight, tourists crawling like brightly
coloured ants to the top. It seemed familiar somehow, dangerously
familiar, and she had felt a sudden flash as if of fire all around
her, while from within the flames a pair of cat-green eyes suddenly
blinked before her in the car window, as though borrowing her own
face, just for an instant, and then she was staring into her own
grey eyes once more. In the sudden horror of the second she could
almost feel those other grey eyes piercing, waiting. It couldn’t
be, she thought quickly, trying to quench the sudden panic. It’s
just imagination, like all the dreams. We’ve seen the last of him.
Alice saw him shatter. It can’t be him.

But if it
wasn’t him, she wondered then, pulling her thin jacket more closely
around her, then who was it?

ALSO BY ARIEL DODSON

BLOOD MOON

Auvergne,
1588. A young nobleman severs a wolf's paw as a trophy for his
wife. But the contents of the bloody package prove to be something
far more terrifying ...

A chance
meeting with young lord, Etienne Sanroche, catapults 15 year old
Laure Beaumains from her isolated forest home into the glittering
artifice of the castle. But the lure of the natural world proves
too strong, and when Laure is attacked by a creature of the forest,
the tragic events that follow test Laure and Etienne's love and
lives to an unimaginable limit. For a wolf cannot be tamed, and
thwarted freedom bites in blood...

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Blood Moon
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http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/315456

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