Borderliners (3 page)

Mrs Dobson had small dark eyes in a sharp little face which reminded me of a weasel’s. She held a neat, cloth shopping bag in one hand and had a small, red handbag over the opposite shoulder. Explaining that the grocery delivery hadn’t arrived she asked me if I had any fresh basil I could give her. I fetched some for her from the basil plant I kept on my kitchen windowsill.

‘I noticed His Nibs by your back door yesterday,’ she said as I handed her a handful of basil. I considered my response. ‘His Nibs’ was her nickname for Iain.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, bold as brass. I thought I’d better tell you. I’m sure you invited him over, didn’t you dear?’

‘No, but Julia came round later on in the day - there was something she wanted to ask me.’

‘Of course. I just thought I’d mention it.’ She held up the hand with the basil in it. ‘Thanks for the basil, dear.’ She stuffed it into her shopping bag, turned and made her way back up my driveway.

‘Bye,’ I called after her and shut the door.

Once back in the house, I sat down again to look through the black notebook, more slowly this time. It fell open on the first page.

Dream journal, September

All was silent except for the sound of a clock ticking. I hate the marking of time, and the sound made me uneasy. It was dark, murky, but gradually that lifted. I saw there were bookshelves right ahead of me, so I moved over to them, as if being pulled by a string. Bit by bit my surroundings revealed themselves: a turgid, black interior, dirty, oak shelves lined with crystals, ancient symbols and wooden carvings, statues of hands with lines chipped into their wooden palms. It was difficult to tread a clear path through all the junk heaped on the floor.

There were no voices or sounds of any kind. A relief, but a sign I was not in the real world.

I kept going. A glint caught my eye and I jumped at the sight of a woman propped up on the wall. She looked just like me – all long black hair and pale introspection, and blue eyes which didn’t look right. She was flanked by turquoise crystals and fragmented light - an emerald hue of split spectrum behind her. My heart beat time now, the clock no longer prominent as I looked again. It was a reflection, some kind of mirror.

Then the scene changed. I was heading to the noticeboard again. I knew it then, knew I was trapped in the dream. I went over to it as I always do, but when I got there, it swam around in front of my eyes, refusing to reveal its secrets, no matter how hard I concentrated on its cork outline and hazy contents.

At this point the noticeboard never does.

I looked up from the diary, turning the page which was dirty and smudged in places. A sense of disquiet hovered as I cast my mind back a few years to my younger self. In my mind’s eye I saw myself knocking on the heavy wooden door of an establishment in my student town, known for the sale of occult items. My primary interest at the time had been its large selection of astrology books and, reckless as I was then, I hadn’t given much thought to the taxi driver’s warnings on the trip over. Once inside, the shop owner - an unsmiling gangly man clad from head to toe in Gothic black - had pushed a large bolt across the inside of the door. When I’d asked him why, he’d said it was because locals kept attacking the place and they couldn’t take any chances. That was when I’d seen the skulls and chains on the opposite wall.

I shook myself. I was a grown adult, no longer a vulnerable teenager, and one who needed to get on with the task in hand. On the next page I had to squint to decipher the next couple of entries which were partially obscured by the ghost of a ringed tea stain.

Dream journal, September

This time, I dropped through an open door into a dark pit. It felt like one of my episodes coming on, as unseeing and unfeeling, I fell as the world around sped up. Dreary colour blurred at my side before exploding into fireworks as my head hit the floor. When I got up, there was a cloaked figure floating through to the glistening gravel beyond me. I remembered the noticeboard and tried to hurry over to it. But my legs wouldn’t move and the floor beneath dissipated.

No voices, no sound of any kind. The same signs, but worse. The same message, unseen.

There was a shop assistant this time, unaware of my presence. Like real life where people just don’t see me.

I glimpsed a sneer, but I did not fear her. In fact, I just wafted past her through the shop, until I got to the bookshelves. I noted, once again, the small window, the dark corners, the crystals, the incense and the wooden carvings. I passed through the purple sequined throws, the chains and the skulls until I got to the noticeboard and its newspaper clippings. They swarmed into focus as I read:

'Dramatic collapse in village surgery…'

I jumped to see a woman by my side. She was tall and dark and she, too, was silent as she stared at the clippings, her presence contaminating the air with menace.

Her long fingers reached out to touch a third clipping, which was pinned further along the cork board. The fingers caressed it for a moment and I strained my eyes until they wouldn’t stretch further from their sockets, but all I could see was:

'Disappearance of …'

'What are you doing here?' she said, and I felt my body faltering, as if the game was up.

Dream journal, October

The atmosphere was velvet and as my eyes got used to the darkness I saw that I was in an old farmhouse, or maybe a barn. There was a pile of hay in the corner and a scratching noise emanating from the rafters above. Another second and suddenly there was someone right behind me. I knew I had to run. I took to my feet and it felt like flying, more like gliding than running.

Again, there was a presence somewhere nearby. Faster now, I darted through a small door in the corner of the room and took to the stairs ahead of me. These were concrete, old and worn, twisting up through a narrow space. I was dimly aware that it was not wise to be travelling upwards, away from any possible exit, but instinct drove me. Panic drove my breath out of my lungs in short bursts as I turned to see a dark shape behind me on the stairs, a presence at once right behind and a few metres away. I saw a glimpse of dark eyes glinting; a sense of danger, a flash of metal and I felt my heart beating.

The air closed in on me, pulsating, thick. Where was the light? Arriving at the top of the stairs I did not dare turn around again. I could barely make out doors and a high-pitched roof above, indicating the end of the line. I had to go through one of these doors, and then what? A rush of air and just behind, a palpable sense of breathing and not breathing, tension and control. And then I began to run again.

A voice from above stopped me in my tracks:

‘Watch out! She’s behind you. We told you to keep away. Why didn’t you heed our warning?’

A faint whispering pulsed through a kind of tangible silence which closed in around me. Dank menace permeated the air and what little flat light was there glowed sickly and weak beyond the rafters above my head.

A card flipped through the air and fell into my lap face up. It was the High Priestess. Then another, Death followed by The Fool. A crack followed and all three cards burst into sudden flames which licked up towards my face and consumed my body.

And I felt as if I would never wake up again.

I put the book down. Puzzled, I went to get my laptop to check my personal notes on Martha’s case, specifically on what she’d said about fortune telling cards and astrology. She had been anxious about it and it seemed her interest in such things was frowned upon by many in the village. I squinted at the notes. But Martha had never mentioned being a member of the Charismatic Community; in fact, her apparent lack of friends and acquaintances had been my biggest worry. Why hadn’t she told me more about the people she had around her? She’d always been so vague. I’d assumed her woolly-headedness was a part of her depression.

Behind my eyes, a migraine had started to needle my sinuses and unable to read any more, I went upstairs to my bedroom and crawled under the covers where I lay for a long time, thinking. The image of Martha’s lifeless body flashed up again and again as she lay, prone, next to the book. I shivered. Before the police arrived, I’d been gripped by a strange desire to pick up the black notebook from the floor and take it home with me.

I looked down at the diary, its pages splayed open on the quilt, and one paragraph in particular jumped out at me. ‘…
black interior, dirty, oak shelves lined with crystals, ancient symbols and wooden carvings, statues of hands with lines chipped into their wooden palms’.
Wasn’t it the same place? The New Age shop I’d found Martha in? I thought of the shadowy barn nestling in that secluded clearing. On a previous visit I’d peered through the windows to glimpse wooden palm carvings and crystals, just like those described in the diary. My meeting with Martha there had been my second visit to the place. I didn’t think it would be my last.

Rubbing my forehead, I fetched some Aspirin from the bathroom and swigged back a couple of tablets. I knew I needed to rest, but my head was full of conflicting thoughts, too many to make sense of. After finding Martha I’d been questioned by the police, talked to the paramedics, and met Martha’s family when they’d arrived at the hospital. Everybody wanted to know what I’d been doing at the New Age shop at that time of night. Why didn’t I use office hours to meet my patients? Didn’t I think it was odd this was the second time I’d found a person’s body, just minutes after they’d committed suicide? It came as no surprise the uniforms took notes with pursed lips and raised eyebrows, and I knew I would have to keep under their radar for a while.

But I understood the system, too. The hospital would do a postmortem. The cause of death would be a drugs overdose. I hoped it would all be fairly standard. There was no note, and that worried me. If the family wanted one, there might be an investigation. I turned the diary over and over in my hands, wondering if this was it, if the clues to her death were in here somewhere. I wondered if there was anyone else I could ask without arousing suspicion, but I wasn’t really on those kinds of terms with anyone in the village. I had scant knowledge of people outside of my practice or my interests, which extended to the occasional village council meeting, the local gym and the theatre, which was located in the nearest big city. I kept my social life away from the place, preferring to meet up with old friends in my free time rather than make new ones there. I often left at weekends, only to return late on a Sunday night ready for a busy week ahead. I was dedicated to my profession. Some might say I was a workaholic: my week nights were often spent reading up on patient notes or researching new trends in psycho-analysis. It was no wonder I suffered from recurring headaches.

It was no wonder I was still an outsider in the village.

The migraine had started to bore its way into the nerve endings behind my eyes and I realised further reading was out of the question. Reluctantly, I pushed the diary across to the other side of the bed and stared at the open curtains framing my window. I couldn’t be bothered to close them, so I just lay there and let my mind tick over.

As the moonless sky merged into the shadowy trees at the foot of my garden, I checked my phone for messages before I slept. I had a voicemail from a DI Brown who wanted to talk to me about Martha’s death. The thought of going through it again provoked the same dizzy feeling I’d experienced when Julia had surprised me at the door. There was an email from one of the GPs at the surgery, Dr Sian Rushden. I grimaced. We had a silent understanding - she kept out of my way if I kept out of hers. A late night email from her, requesting a review of my services, wasn’t a great omen.

Finally, I scanned an email from an address I didn’t recognise. As I read and re-read it my heartbeat crept up until I jumped to my feet and started the quick routine I’d learnt to help keep my emotions under control as a youngster: four carefully controlled moves designed to get my breathing under control. Whilst I was doing them, I looked down at the phone screen, as if to stare it out and ward off the email. The subject header was blank, but the message contained within it was clear:
Another one of your patients dead? Who’s next? Physician, heal thyself

There was something odd about my front door.

It had always been a little peculiar, the way the swirls of frosted glass stared back at me when I stood fumbling with my keys. Always so patient, yet so oblique. When I’d first rented the place, I’d wondered about asking the owner to change the door. Glass doors weren’t my favourite, especially not in my current singleton predicament. Without housemates, a lover or even a dog to share my house with, I needed protection from prying eyes.

As it happened, I needn’t have worried. The glass was quite useful, allowing me to see the shape, albeit slightly distorted, of my visitors as they stood blindly by, peering at its opaque blankness from the other side. Today, though, I didn’t trust my powers of perception. I hadn’t slept well, and I’d suffered a late running day. Consequently, it wasn’t just the glass in my door: everything felt distorted. It looked as if the welcome mat had been moved and there were scratches around the lock I didn’t think had been there before.

I shrugged my shoulders. There were lots of things I’d never noticed before. It was as if I was only just waking up now to my surroundings after a long sleep. Recently I’d started reflecting on why I’d even come here at all. Of course, I knew why. I’d chosen this village in the English heartland for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was far enough away from my childhood home to put a distance between myself and my remaining family. My younger sister, Amelia, and I had never been close. The distance also served to draw a line under the past and keep it well away from the present time. Secondly, getting a job had been easy. The market for psychotherapists was less competitive in the Midlands than in the South. Furthermore it seemed nobody wanted to work in a place like this. Other youngsters in my field were keen to cut their teeth in bigger towns and cities where they could enjoy life to the full. Finally, moving here was supposed to have provided me with a fresh start. I’d wanted to be in a place where nobody knew me. It didn’t matter to me that the village felt worn and tattered around the edges, nor did I care that the locals behaved like creatures from another planet. Although my privately educated, home counties background had marked me out from the start, their behaviour hadn’t fazed me. I’d told myself it would be a challenge.