Beneath the Tor (35 page)

thirty-five

three weeks later

I continued seeing Laurie
once
a week. We both knew that things were going to be a tough for a long time. In those three weeks, he'd already got an appointment with a surgeon and started the long process towards a complete sex change.

In the real word, he had to convince his family and friends—everyone he knew—to change their approach. To think of him as male. Luckily, he had Daniel on his side. Mostly, now, he'd come and give me a report on how things were going, but I'd started showing him how to walk between the worlds, so that he could use this to help keep the process stable. After all, he had powerful allies in the otherworld. They would answer his questions and help him work through each problem as it arose.

That's what I hoped, anyhow. Sometimes we talked about that moment in my therapy room when, before our eyes, he transformed. That was the most amazing piece of magic I had ever witnessed, but I'd had only the smallest hand in it; just a
finger-tip
push for someone already balancing on a needlepoint. I hadn't turned Laurie into a man; he'd always been one. The difficulty was that how he felt inside was not how he looked outside.

I had some inkling of how that might feel. When I'd been tiny—four or five, perhaps—I could listen to the spirit world as others listen to a radio. I walked around in a dreamtime and no one had stopped me, or berated me for my imaginings. Like Laurie, a little bit of my soul had gone missing the day my mother had died, and it had changed me. At the point of her death I'd been thrust into a Lower Realm that was full of menace, a crazy,
mirror-image
fairy tale land in which I had to fight to survive. It wasn't until I met Wolfsbane and studied with him that it became clear how bad things had become inside of me; how I'd lost that person I'd first been. He was the one that retrieved my
soul-part
.

I will always respect Wolfsbane as a shaman. I knew he had feet of clay—what person does not? And when I saw him at Alys's inquest, I felt proud of him, that he'd turned up and shaken Brice's hand and wished him well.

Despite Wolfsbane's fears, none of us had to stand up and give evidence at Alys's inquest. There were only expert witnesses—the paramedics, hospital staff, and the pathologist. There were few documents presented to the court, the most necessary being the blood pathologies.

Even so, things were a lot more complicated than they had seemed.

The courtroom was packed. People from London, mostly—Brice's family, Alys's wider family, and a lot of their friends, including Shell, who had gone back to London after Ricky was Sectioned and taken away. I'd been hoping others from the
ill-fated
shape-shifing
workshop would come to the inquest, but weeks had passed since the funeral and people had moved on with their lives.

I'd been in touch with Anagarika over the phone—I knew his head wound was healing and I also knew that he was planning to go back to Melbourne. He'd done every workshop he could find in Glastonbury, but it wasn't until he prevented Ricky from cracking open his head on the Egg Stone that he'd finally found the centre of his soul.

That's what he'd told me, anyway.

At the inquest I sat with Wolfsbane, and as the pathologist—a
silver-haired
woman in a sage green trouser suit—was called to give evidence, I found myself grasping his hand for comfort.

The pathologist began by describing what she had found in Alys's samples, the most worrying of these being the DMAA.

“Tell the court about this substance,” the coroner had said.

“It has similar properties to amphetamines. It boosts energy and metabolism. It also can raise heart and respiratory rates.”

“It is a banned substance?” the coroner asked.

“Not as such, but it has been was withdrawn from sale in the UK. However, it's still widely available.”

“And what danger does it pose?”

“In small doses, it might pose no threat at all. The reason it's been withdrawn is that, if taken in excess, along with extensive physical exertion, it can attribute to cardiac failure, even cardiac arrest.”

“Cardiac failure being the cause of Mrs. Hollingberry's death?”

“The amount that she had taken, during that night of extreme activity, was, I should hazard, a smallish dose. It should not have resulted in the failure of a healthy heart.”

“Can you explain what you mean by
during
the night? Did she take a tablet?”

“There is a powdered form of the drug, which can be mixed into a sports water bottle. This is what we believe Mrs. Hollingberry did. As I say, not a large dose. I believe she medicated herself in this way with some personal care, at least.”

“Can you tell us what did cause her heart to fail, please?”

The pathologist coughed, and the court stirred, briefly shifting and resettling in their seats. “The high potassium levels in her blood.”

She began to demonstrate her findings. Firstly, Alys had lost blood, in the natural way. She had also dosed herself up on
over-the
-counter analgesia, ibuprofen, which, the pathologist told us, did contain a certain amount of potassium. And in her water bottle was the Jack3d in powdered form.

“She was not drinking water,” said the pathologist. “She enjoyed a sports drink that was mostly coconut water. This has a high content of potassium.”

“Can you explain which of these were actually the cause of her death?”

“What we have is a number of negative, but unpredictable factors. Loss of blood, increase of potassium in the blood from two external sources, plus raised heart rate from the dimethylamylamine. Added to this, was a level of activity over several hours, at what I would describe as endurance level. None of them are to blame overall. The combination of complications effectively created a unique event. Each circumstance aggravated the situation, causing a confluence that resulted in this lady's death.”

“A perfect storm,” suggested the coroner.

“Yes. That describes my findings exactly. A perfect storm.”

The coroner recorded the verdict and summed things up. I don't think I'll ever forget what he said.

“Nothing that Alys Hollingberry did during her night on Glastonbury Tor was inappropriate. She was a marathon runner; she felt she could dance all night. She'd been told that her supplement was harmless in the small dose she was using. She was also under the impression that her coconut drink was healthy. She'd taken something for her period pain and she felt well enough to enjoy herself. None of these factors should have led to her death, yet events took an unexpected turn and she suffered heart failure leading to cardiac arrest. Death, then, by misadventure.”

We stumbled out into the fresh air. People looked shocked, numbed, as pale as if they'd spent a year in the courtroom. They took off in small groups. Brice was swept away by what looked like his parents. I hadn't expected him to speak to me; I'd been there because I wanted to hear the outcome of the inquest for myself.

“Hi, Sabbie.” It was Shell. Her voice had returned to normal, the bruising at her throat had yellowed and she was smiling. “I've brought you something.”

She handed me a little package. I peeled back the flap and pulled out a pair of earrings with a swirling design in pale blue.

“Shell! Oh, these are lovely—exquisite! What are they? Not enamelling?”

“No. It's marbling under a clear resin. I do quite a lot of different jewellery techniques.”

“These are beautiful enough for Aphrodite,” I said, and held them to my ears. “You shouldn't have gone to the trouble, with all this going on.”

“It took my mind off things.”

“You okay?”

“Good. I'm running a market stall in Croyden. My jewellery is doing so well I can't make enough of it, to be honest.”

“So are these something to remember you by?”

“I guess you won't see much of me around Glastonbury. I've decided that friends are more important than lovers.”

I gave a rough nod. I myself had been hoping that lovers and best friends could be the same thing, but in the three weeks since Alys's funeral, Rey had already been for an interview and been offered a job, heading up a missing persons and unsolved cases department in the Staffordshire police force. Although he'd only be a few hours' drive away, I was terrified that the distance would throw a fire blanket over our relationship only moments after we'd got it flaming. Without kindling, air, and a bit of a spark, I was worried it might fizzle out.

“Did you hear about Ricky?” I asked Shell.

He was still awaiting trial in a
high-security
psychiatric hospital, which I suspected he would never leave, although he had already been escorted back to the New Forest, where he had shown the police the place where Babette lay. In the five years since she died, no doubt the grass had reseeded itself and new growth had emerged. No doubt her spirit, the hind, had often fed in the glade. Now it had been attacked by diggers. They had retrieved her body from its deep grave.

“So many people have been affected by Alys's death,” I said. I was thinking of the Johnson family, of Ricky, and of the three knights.

“I guess we should count ourselves lucky that we're able to get on with our lives.”

I let Shell run to catch her friends. I sauntered around the shops in Wells for a while, and walked beside the Bishop's Palace moat, watching the swans, not keen to start the journey back to my empty home.

Well, not
empty,
exactly. I now had seven growing chicks. Yeah—I should count myself lucky.

A cog clicked into another cog and something in my brain shifted. The sun spun in the sky.

I don't know anything about my father
, I'd told Sabrina.
Only his name … Lucky Luc Rameau.

Can I enquire, sir, for your name?
I'd asked the guardian who had sat before the hut, who had showed me Babette's place of death. He'd given me a sideways glance.

I am lucky.

The swans glided past me, unaware of this tumbling, shouting, frightening, thrilling revelation.

I turned on my heel and made for home.

the end

About the Author

Nina Milton holds an MA in creative writing, works as a tutor and writer for the Open College of the Arts, is a prize-winning short story writer, and has authored several children's books, including
Sweet'n'Sour, Tough Luck,
and
Intergalactic Holiday
.
Beneath the Tor
is her third novel with Midnight Ink.