more. I could not stop my ears against the horror of the voices.
I had not yet found Fabrissa, and though I prayed against all the odds that I would not, I knew it was only a matter of time. Her voice singing in the mountains, in the Ostal, the syllables and vowels smudged and indistinct, everything led to the same conclusion.
The noise intensified. Screaming now, a desperate clawing at rock and stone that could not be shifted. Not the Cers wind but, as old Breillac had said, the spirits of the dead. For countless years, the village of Nulle had lived in the shadow of the memories held in this ancient forest.
I could see shapes in the darkness, shifting and sighing, surrounding me. They would not let me be. The cave was full of movement. White shadows, sketches in the air, the silhouette of souls of the dead departed. I covered my face with my hands, knowing it would make no difference. The black parade would walk before me all the same. As I had heard them die, so too was I condemned to watch them die.
Faces loomed in and out of my vision, a terrible beauty in their eyes, coming closer, then withdrawing. Those whom I had met in the Ostal, greeting me once more. Familiar strangers. The man who had sat beside me scowling, his skull now pushing through the skin. In place of his drunken eyes, hollow sockets the size of a man’s thumb. In place of his greasy mouth, emaciated lips and blackened teeth. The gentle face of Na Azéma, almost puzzled as her features slipped away from her, leaving nothing but white bone and the memory of whom she had been.
I knew why I had been brought here. I had been brought to bear witness, both to the manner of their dying and to the nature of the prison I’d fashioned for myself.
Without understanding, there can be no redemption. And at that moment it made perfect sense to me how I, a man who for so many years had walked the line between the quick and the dead, might be able to hear their voices in the silence when others could not. For ten years, I’d heard and sensed things that lay beyond the boundaries of the everyday. I’d been haunted by images of George taken back into the earth. Now, in this place, I was witnessing skin slipping from bone, the putrefaction of flesh, the cavalcade of life and death and decay accelerated. Each feature twisting in upon itself, rotting, collapsing. Lives lived, lives lost. Cradle to grave.
It was too much to bear. I was aware of a different sound, one all too human. The sound of a grown man weeping. At last, I was crying. For George, for myself. For all those who lay forgotten in the cold earth.
Then I felt it. A sudden shift, a thickening of the air. A prickling at the base of my spine and a lightening of the pressure on my chest. They were still with me, the winter ghosts, but they were retreating into the wings.
‘Fabrissa?’
I raised my head and looked straight ahead. The briefest sensation, no more than the tremor of a butterfly’s wing. A moment, not of enlightenment, but of grace in a twist of tumbling black hair and a pale face. I scrambled to my feet and took a hesitant step forward. The vision slipped instantly away, perishing, falling, no sooner seen than gone.
‘No.’ My cry rang out around the cave. ‘Stay.’
I clenched my left hand into a fist, feeling my broken fingernails digging into my scratched palm. I tried to remember the feel of her, so light, the touch of her, her bright grey eyes and the laughter lines at the corners of her mouth.
I took another step closer to where she had been. The weakening beam of light picked out a fragment of blue lying on the ground. A deep blue, the colour of my brother’s eyes, of flax blossom in the Sussex fields in June. The exact colour of the dress Fabrissa had worn. I could see clearly, too clearly, threads of yellow where the cross had been.
I knelt down beside her, more than anything wanting to feel the frail white skin beneath my fingers. But there was only the hardness of bone beneath my hand. I tried to speak her name, to bring her back to life, but I could not.
My ribs seemed to tighten, to crack. Then, at last,