Aurelia sprints through the dark forest, her white nightdress billowing like a cloud, her strides long and swift across the carpet of bark and brambles. She tries not to think too much about how the towering silver birches resemble skeletons, moonlight transforming the silvery trunks into endless prison bars and the weeping sky soaking her to the bone.
Her breaths come in quick, frantic gasps, her lungs ache, and her feet bleed, but he is tearing after her and he will do much, much worse to her than the forest, or the thing in the house. He will hurt the babies, Gaia and Coco, and she will do absolutely anything to protect them. She has to draw him away from them, as far as she can. For good, this time.
So she powers downhill, her heart trying to climb into her mouth and her mind churning like a river wheel, though she knows there is no way she can outrun him for long, and there is no one to call in the wilderness that spreads for miles on end all around.
She takes the trail toward the cliff, where a drop of two hundred feet connects the south end of a sapphire fjord to muscular granite. Her mind splits into two voices, one that tells her yes, this is the only way, the only option, and the other that shouts at her to turn back, it’s crazy, utterly crazy.
She reaches the cliff edge sooner than she’d anticipated. Her toes feel the rush of icy air at the end of the path and she has to wrap her arms around an oak tree to stop herself from tumbling off the end.
She can hear the thud of his feet fifty feet behind. She has only seconds to decide. The risk is enormous. It isn’t the thought of dying that brings a sob to her throat. It’s the girls. Gaia and Coco. Growing up without her.
She sees them in her mind, two bright angels. Even when she feels him grow closer, she holds on to that vision and imagines reaching out to them, taking their hands.
Come on, Mumma! Hold on tight!
With a snarl he lunges at her, and quickly she darts out of his way, letting him plunge headlong toward the edge of the cliff, where there is nothing but night separating rock and water, life and certain death.
But his shoulder collides with hers, and although she reaches out to take her daughters’ hands, her feet lift and she falls down, down into the endless dark.
Once upon a time there was a river who, like all rivers, knew exactly where she wished to go. Some people willed her to change her course, and when she did not bend to their will, they began to tear her apart, pebble by pebble, stone by stone.
Of course, the river won in the end, and returned to her route with a wet sigh of relief, running the length of her spine against the familiar gray rocks and stretching luxuriantly against the grooves of earth she had known for centuries.
And she made sure that the people paid dearly for their foolishness.
from P. Johansen’s
Book of Remembered Norse Folk Tales, 1999
(trans. A. Faraday)
1
endless dark
NOW
Meg was the one who found me slumped against the bathroom wall with red pouring out of my arms. I could make out what she was saying, though it sounded like we were under water. Oh no, oh no. Lexi! What the hell have you done, Lexi?
She crouched in front of me and I wanted to tell her not to because she was going to ruin her lovely yellow skirt by kneeling in my blood. Also there was glass on the floor from the mirror I’d smashed and I’d feel awful if she cut herself.
She grabbed some towels, wrapped them around my arms, and started to cry when she couldn’t tie them tight enough. Have you ever tried to tie a knot in a towel? Really difficult, it turns out.
Meg dialed 999 on her phone. By this stage I was swooping in and out of consciousness—I’d taken a fistful of paracetamol, just in case—and I could no longer decipher between reality and hallucination, which is always fine by me as long as neither is threatening. They must have hoiked me down the stairs and into the ambulance, but I don’t remember any of that. I woke up in the hospital a few hours later, puking my guts up. I’ve no idea what they gave me, but it was efficient in wringing