第10章 Edda Moss

Edda Moss lived at the top of the street, in a cottage that leaned against the hillside as though it had grown tired of standing upright and had settled into a permanent, gentle slouch. The door was painted the same faded green as every other door in Brannel, but the shutters were different. They were new. The iron was still dark and unweathered, and the latches were bright, and the bolts that held them to the stone were the colour of fresh metal — evidence of a recent installation, hurried and thorough, as though someone had decided that the old shutters were no longer sufficient and had replaced them with something stronger. Rhea knocked. The door was opened by a woman Rhea did not recognise — middle-aged, thin, with the dark, rain-weathered look common to Brannel but with an additional quality of tension, the drawn expression of someone who has been sleeping badly and eating little and spending too many hours in a small room with a person whose transformation she can observe but cannot halt. "I'm Dr. Alder. I'm here to see Edda." "Edda is in the back room. She doesn't come out anymore." The woman stepped aside. "I'm her daughter. Ingrid. I've been staying with her since the night of lights." The cottage interior was warm, heated by a small peat fire, but the warmth carried a different quality from the warmth in Mrs. Kroll's house. Here, the heat felt alive, almost conscious, as though the fire were breathing in counterpoint to the rhythmic exhalation Rhea had learned to hear. The walls were covered in drawings. Not framed, not arranged — pasted directly to the plaster with some kind of adhesive, layer upon layer, so that the walls had acquired a texture of paper and charcoal that gave the room the appearance of being lined with wings. The drawings were all the same. Moths. Moths with their wings spread, moths with their wings folded, moths arranged in circles, moths arranged in lines, moths perched on windows and doors and the lintels of fireplaces, their antennae reaching upward toward a light that was present in every drawing as a single, precise dot of white where the charcoal had been scraped away to reveal the paper beneath. Edda sat in a chair by the window. The window was shuttered, but the shutters were not closed — they were half-drawn, leaving a vertical slit through which the grey light entered and fell across Edda's face and hands. She was eighty-one, or had been; now her age was impossible to estimate. The lines on her face had deepened and multiplied, but they had also changed quality — they were not the lines of age but of something more elemental, as though the skin were being inscribed from within by a hand that drew in patterns rather than in years. Her hair, once grey, had darkened to a brown so deep it was nearly black, and it lay flat against her skull with a lustre that healthy and sickly alike could not account for — it was the lustre of wet peat, of earth that has been compressed in darkness until it becomes something dense and shining. She was drawing. Her hands moved over a sheet of paper with the steady, unhurried precision of someone copying from a model that does not move and does not tire. The drawing was not a moth. It was a landscape — the bog, rendered in charcoal with a detail that no landscape artist could have achieved from observation. Every depression, every pool, every stunted tree was present, and in the centre of the bog, where the ground should have been solid, Edda had drawn a shape that was not a shape — a darkness that had depth, a blackness that seemed to recede into the paper itself, a void that was empty rather than was filled with something the charcoal could not represent. "Edda," Rhea said. "I'm Dr. Alder." Edda looked up. Her eyes were the colour of Mrs. Kroll's — dark, elongated, with pupils shaped like the cross-section of a moth's wing. But there was a quality to her gaze that Mrs. Kroll's did not possess. Mrs. Kroll's eyes were old eyes, eyes that had seen much and accepted much and retained the human capacity for weariness and resolve. Edda's eyes were different. They were calm, but it was not the calm of acceptance. It was the calm of something that has no need to accept because it has never known anything else — the calm of deep water, of stone, of the bog itself. "Doctor," Edda said. Her voice was the same — or nearly the same. There was a resonance to it now, a depth, as though the sound were being produced not by vocal cords alone but by something larger, something that resonated in the chest and the belly and the base of the skull. "I want to examine you," Rhea said. "If you're willing." "I'm willing. I have nothing to hide. The splinter is in me and it's doing what it does. You're welcome to observe." Rhea opened her medical bag and worked with the tools of her trade — stethoscope, penlight, reflex hammer, blood pressure cuff. She listened to Edda's chest and heard, beneath the heartbeat, the breathing — not the breathing of the moths, which was external and came from the bog, but a breathing that originated within the body itself, a second rhythm layered over the first, slower and deeper, as though the lungs were operating on two systems simultaneously. The heart was strong, stronger than it should have been in an eighty-one-year-old woman, and the pulse was regular and forceful, and when Rhea pressed her newly sensitised fingertips to the wrist she felt the splinter's warmth — not the faint stirring she had experienced in her own veins but a deep, steady heat that pulsed in counterpoint to the heartbeat, as though a second circulatory system had been overlaid on the first. "Your blood pressure is excellent," Rhea said. "Better than excellent. Your heart is strong. Your lungs are clear." "I know." "You're healthier now than you were before the night of lights." "I know that too." Edda set down the charcoal pencil and flexed her fingers. The fingers were longer than they should have been — the same lengthening Rhea had observed in Mrs. Kroll, but more pronounced, the extra length concentrated in the joints, which had become more numerous, so that the fingers had a segmented quality, almost insectile. "The splinter sustains the body. It doesn't destroy — it replaces. What I was before, the ageing, the wear, the slow decline — those are human processes. The splinter doesn't follow them. It follows the bog's processes, which are different. The bog doesn't age. The bog endures." "And the drawings?" Edda looked at the wall of moths. "The splinter shows me the village. Not as it is — as it was, and as it will be. The moths are messengers. They carry the image of the bog into the house, through the glass, and the image stays. I draw what I see. I've been drawing since the night of lights. I can't stop. It's not compulsion — it's translation. The bog has a language, and the language is image, and the only way to speak it in this room is with charcoal and paper." "The shape in the centre of the bog drawing. The darkness." "That's the entity. That's what the village calls the thing in the bog. It doesn't have a shape — not one I can draw. But it has a presence, and the presence has a weight, and the weight bends the landscape around it the way a stone bends the surface of a pond. The drawing is as close as I can get." Ingrid stood in the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself. She did not speak, but her expression said everything — the helpless fury of a daughter watching her mother become something she cannot recognise, the grief of a woman who has already lost her parent to age and is now losing her to something worse. Rhea packed her bag. She had what she needed — a clinical baseline, a record of the splinter's effects at the second stage, a data point she could compare against her own progression and Mrs. Kroll's long history. But she also had something she had not expected: a picture of the entity, rendered in charcoal by hands that had felt its weight, and the picture was not malevolent. It was not benevolent either. It was vast, and it was old, and it was patient, and it occupied the bog the way the bog occupied the valley — completely, thoroughly, and without exception. "I'll come again," Rhea said. Edda nodded. She had already returned to her drawing, her segmented fingers moving over the paper with the fluid, unhurried motion of something that has all the time in the world and intends to use it. On the street, Ingrid caught Rhea's arm. "She doesn't sleep," she whispered. "She doesn't eat. She draws, and she stares at the shutters, and sometimes she speaks to something I can't see. Is this what the splinter does to everyone?" "It's what it did to Mrs. Kroll. Over sixty-two years." "My mother has been splintered for three weeks." Rhea looked at the cottage, at the new shutters, at the drawings visible through the half-drawn iron slats, at the faint glow that emanated from the window slit — not lamplight, not firelight, but the phosphorescence of a body that has been lit from within. "I know," she said. "I'll do what I can." ---