Beneath the Tor (2 page)

two

wolfsbane

As soon as the
air ambulance had arrived, the paramedics took over from the hospital nurse, rolling Alys onto a stretcher that disappeared into the 'copter. Brice and Shell clambered on board and seconds later, the helicopter had done that bouncing, flopping movement to get airborne which makes them look so vulnerable.

The crowds on the Tor watched until it was a dot. We had come to celebrate the dawn. That was forgotten now.

Wolfsbane and I sat with our backs up against the stonework of St. Michael's Tower, sipping at our water bottles. The sun was up, but there was a high breeze. I could feel Wolfs's bare arm against mine—cold as a snakeskin. He had a single tattoo high on the shoulder, a pentangle surrounded by foliage, and a pewter arm torc in a Celtic design, so tight around his arm, I wondered if it made his fingers tingle.

“What do we do?” I'd asked him.

“We go and tell Stefan our workshop's over.”

Officially, the shamanic workshop had started yesterday, when everyone had arrived at Stefan's house. It was supposed to go on for the rest of the week. But Wolfs was right; we'd have to cancel it now.

Wolfsbane rounded up the five remaining workshoppers. He gave Yew fifty pounds and told him to treat them all to breakfast in town. We watched them go, then set out on the
three-mile
walk to the workshop base. We took a slug's pace, as if not getting to Stonedown Farm would allow time for a miracle.

As we tramped along a country path, Wolfsbane mounted a fence that took him into a small enclosure where two old oaks stood proud. It took me a minute to catch him up. I found him leaning into the farther of the two oaks, his arms hugging the trunk, which was so broad it would have taken several of us to surround it completely. I rested my hand on the gnarled and weathered bark of the other tree. The day was warm, bees already buzzing in the foxgloves. A woodpecker rapped with furious persistence in the distance.

“Oh, listen,” I whispered.

We stood in silence. I couldn't imagine a better way for us to recharge our spiritual batteries. Eventually, Wolfsbane turned round. He hitched his thumbs into the waistband of his shorts and looked at the ground, as if the weight of what we'd seen only an hour ago was dragging at him. “I think I might have to apologize to Brice.”

I found myself gawping. Not a deliberate act, but I was startled by his words.
Apologize
seemed altogether the wrong sentiment. When someone you know has lost the love of their life, you condole. You keen and sorrow with them.

“Why ever would you need to apologize to Brice?”

Wolfsbane leaned right into the trunk of the tree and closed his eyes. “This is Magog, you know.”

“Oh,” I said, recognizing but not quite placing the name.

“The twin oaks. End of an avenue of ancient oaks.”

“Gog and Magog. I remember.” The oaks were almost leafless and white with age. “They're dying, Wolfs.”

“They're dead.”

I put my hands over my mouth. “That's sad.”

“They're the last, Sabbie. The rest were cut down—heck, a century ago. Even then they were millennia old. It's their time.”

“It wasn't Alys's time.”

Wolfs looked around before he spoke, as if informants might be hidden in the branches above us. “I'm worrying about the tea …”

“Tea? What tea?”

“The flying tea.”

His eyes were shadowed by the bare branches above him, but I knew he wasn't looking at me. I'd never seen Wolfsbane discomfited. I'd never even see him stick his hands flat in the pockets of his shorts, as if he wanted them out the way. Wolfsbane loved to have his hands on show, they achieved as much communication as his words.

“I watched you gather the ingredients for that tea,” I said.

Garden sage to heighten senses, mugwort to induce visions. Lemon balm leaves for calm alertness plus honey and spearmint for flavour. That would hurt no one and probably didn't do much more than a cup of English Breakfast.

“Stefan came up to me,” said Wolfsbane, “while we were preparing the opening to the workshop. Asked me why I didn't use something a bit stronger than garden herbs.”

“Like what?”

“He had tablets in a sealed plastic bag. Some sort of high. Said it was completely safe. Said it was completely legal.”

“A legal high?” My innards felt as hollowed as a dried gourd. “They're not safe. And they're not legal, Wolfs, not at all.”

Wolfsbane shook his head, a slow rhythm of despair. “What I can't face … what I couldn't bear … would be if we were responsible for Alys's death.”

“Wait—you let Stefan add this stuff to our flying tea? We all drank it?”

“No! Of course I didn't. I told him to keep it to himself.”

“
For
himself, I suppose.”

“I don't much care what he did with these pills so long as he didn't crush them into our teapot.”

“Did you see him do it?”

“No. I would have chucked the brew out if I had.”

“But do you think he did?”

My knees were giving way under all the implications. I was trying to remember how I felt after drinking the tea. As a kid, I had tried most forms of unnatural stimulant. I'd never take anything nowadays, but I would recognize the effects. As far as I knew, “legal highs” were like ecstasy or speed. Your heart races and your mind races with it, and suddenly you love everyone in the universe. Sage and mugwort could make you
light-headed
. You lose your inhibitions a bit and your tongue gets loosened. But surely I'd have spotted the difference.

“We should go to the police,” I said.

“Hey—whoa, Sabbie, stop right there. We need to ask Stefan first.”

“I'm not sure Stefan would tell you the truth, especially if he thought he'd end up at the police station.”

Wolfsbane leapt the fence and was disappearing up the lane. “Twenty minutes to the house, if we stride it!”

I caught Wolfsbane up and jogged alongside him. “If Stefan says ‘no, I didn't do it,' you'll believe him, will you? Because I might not.”

“He's a mate of mine. He'll tell me straight.”

“He's not a mate,” I corrected. “He's a business associate who currently is pissed off with you.”

I hadn't liked Stefan McKiddie when I'd first met him, four years ago. He thought himself a bit of a comedian. He had a way of not laughing at his own jokes, as if he was on stage. I've got used to him over time, but when I'd arrived for the start of the workshop, yesterday, he had already been in the middle of a spat with Wolfsbane which I was still trying to get to the bottom of.

“What if he didn't put the stuff in the tea?” I asked. “After all it's a bore, crushing pills. What if he just offered them around, instead. Did he offer you one? Did he offer Alys one?”

“Did he offer you one, Sabbie?”

I scoffed. “He'd know my response.”

“You're searching up the wrong track.”

“Am I? We need to report this so that the forensic toxicology report can take it into account.”

Wolfsbane skidded to a halt. He snatched at me, hands tight round both my elbows. He was usually a gentle person—a hugger of trees who was now hurting me, digging nails that were slightly long for a man into the bare skin at the crook of my arms.

“You're going over, Sabbie,” he said.

“What?”

“A boyfriend in the police force is never a good idea for someone with an alternative lifestyle.”

“Is that any of your business?” I snapped.

If Wolfs's nails hadn't been hurting me, I might have agreed with him. Rey Buckley and me were as suited to be together as a snake and a ground squirrel. Being diametrically opposed in most things
—
outlook, type of job, interests—only seemed to fire up the passion between us. I tried putting Rey out of my mind. I thought back to the moments before Alys died, when Shell had been flirting with Ricky.

“Where were you, by the way? When the sun rose?”

“What?”

“Shell had been looking for you.” I might have added that he should keep a better eye on his girlfriend. I shrugged off his grip and rubbed my elbows, throwing a final remark over my shoulder. “Whatever you do, don't apologize to Brice. Just extend your condolences. We don't know how she died, yet.”

“You make it sound as if it was murder!” His voice was thin against the summer sounds as I marched on. “None of us had anything to do with that death. Do you hear me, Sabbie?”

I'd never met Alys or Brice before Midsummer Eve.

That previous morning, I'd snatched an early lunch and taken the
thirty-minute
drive from Bridgwater to Glastonbury, heading for Stonedown Farm, a rambling old building a few miles outside the town. The owner, Stefan, let out rooms for events. Wolfsbane held regular sessions there under his company brand of Spirit Flyers, and I'd agreed to help him with a
shape-shifting
workshop—it had seemed like a neat plan to begin it by celebrating the solstice on the Tor.

The first person to book a place was an Australian traveller called Anagarika Dharmapala, of all things. The second was Juke Webber, who studied shamanism with me, and he invited his old university roommate, Ricky—they'd just reconnected on Facebook. These three bookings made the workshop seem viable, especially when Freaky and Yew, both established shamans, signed up in their usual way. After that, things went sluggish. No one had money to throw around anymore. Just as it seemed we'd have to cancel the event, Shell had come up with a couple of friends—Brice and Alys Hollingberry. We firmed up the arrangements and booked the rooms in Stonedown Farm with Stefan.

Stefan McKiddie was a shambling bear of a man with thick brown hair just beginning to show signs of grey, and an unpredictable temperament. When I arrived at Stonedown Farm he was sitting at his kitchen table, muttering in a low voice to his
long-standing
partner, Esme, a woman as cold as a jar of frogspawn. She took a look at me and flounced out of the kitchen, knocking against my shoulder hard as we passed in the doorway.

“Hi,” I said.

“Wolfsbane's in the workshop room, if you want him.” Stefan stared into his Barleycup, not drinking, not looking up, even when Wolfsbane joined me at the door. I could feel Wolfs's tension; it seethed out of him. With only seven paying clients on this workshop, I had guessed he'd be a bit on edge, but this was something bigger.

“I've just been into the workshop space,” he barked at Stefan. “It's a mess.”

I'd been eyeing the piles of dirty crocks. I'd clocked three saucepans coated with old porridge, implying they hadn't washed up for several days. The kitchen often smelt of forgotten food, but it felt totally neglected this time. I could see mould growing out of a line
half-empty
mugs on the window sill which looked like it might take over the planet.

“Hey!” Stefan was clearly stung. “I made a start.”

“So make a bloody finish, will you?”

I'd taken Wolfsbane's arm and dragged him away before the verbal turned nasty. “What is going on?”

“Stef has increased his prices by almost twenty percent.”

“And he's only just told you?”

“Well, no, but it's despicable. He's a total slimebucket.”

“Couldn't we have used a different venue?”

“I'd already advertised this one. Taken deposits.”

At that point Freaky and Yew arrived and wreathed us in hugs, and Wolfs calmed down.

Freaky lived in a caravan in a corner of Stefan's field and he'd seen our cars in the driveway. Yew lived in Yeovil, a short drive away, where he worked at a hostel for the homeless. They mucked in on the cleaning with dishcloths and dusters and by the time Juke, then Ricky, had turned up, the place didn't look too bad.

The unknown element of the group, Anagarika, came by foot from Glastonbury town, crunching up Stefan's
weed-infested
drive strapped into an enormous backpack. He seemed affable enough—he took Wolfsbane's hand and pumped it up and down while slapping him between the shoulder blades. “Always wanted to meet you, cobber. Honoured. I'm goin' learn lots from this workshop, that is for definites.”

Within moments of meeting Anagarika, Juke and Ricky seemed smitten by his big Aussie personality, while I was pinning a “pseudo” label on him. His unpronounceable chosen name was driving me mad and there was a smell about him—maybe he'd picked it up from the boarding house he was staying at in town—an oily aroma, as if he'd rubbed something meant for greasing an engine into his hair.

Alys and Brice had come last, arriving in a sharp yellow Smart Car which looked like it had the smallest fuel footprint in automobile history. For a moment or two, as Brice pulled their bags out of the back, he was the centre of male attention. A thought occurred to me for the first time: there were a lot of blokes. Not a very good gender balance. Shell and I weren't actual workshoppers, after all, which left Alys as the only paying female participant.

Juke had been fawning all over Brice's car. “I'm thinking of trading in for one of these,” he'd said.

“It's a limited edition Cityflame.” Brice smoothed its wing as if it was a massive yellow cat.

“What's wrong with the car you've got, Juke?” I often forget that other people have a surplus of cash at the end of the working month. Juke ran an office that offered help to displaced persons and asylum seekers, and he earned a good salary for someone in their
mid-twenties
.

“Smart Cars are cool. But I'd have black.”

“Too right.” Anagarika's accent was so strong it felt phony, which was nuts because by then he'd passed round his phone to show us the pictures of his Melbourne home. “To be honest with you, mate, I don't think a bloke should be seen half dead in a yeller car?”