Haunt Me Still by Jennifer Lee Carrell
“The plague has broken out in Edinburgh; His Majesty rides hence with His Lordship, your husband.”
As she dismissed the man, a wild surge of elation coursed through her. By nightfall, the king would ride under her battlements, but if she had her way, he would not ride out again. At least, not this king.
The king is dead, long live the king.
She hardly noticed as the player picked up his doublet and, with a sly smile, bowed and left.
WOOD
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root?
13
YESTERDAY THERE HADN’T been enough blood; today its thick, metallic scent was suffocating. No one could survive the loss of that much of it. Whoever I’d seen the evening before, she was dead now. But where was she? And who?
Whoever she was, I’d left her alone, dead or dying, on the hill as dusk fell. And now she was gone.
I glanced from the blood-spattered trench back to Sybilla lying on the bank. On the grass, for a moment, she lay like the body I’d seen the day before. But she was dressed, her arms and legs unbound, her neck intact, and her chest rising and falling. She was coming to, Ben right beside her. I felt a twinge of regret. Why couldn’t it have been Sybilla? I’d thought, as we started up the hill: something one shouldn’t wish on anyone, even in passing, even in a private moment of sarcasm.
“We need to find Effie,” Ben said quietly.
I did a double take. I’d been thinking of the unknown woman seen at the edge of a dream, but Effie was also missing.
Her voice shrilled through my memory: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. I’d assumed—I think we all assumed—that her words were aimed at Lily. Maybe so. But suddenly they seemed a double-edged sword. Effie, after all, had been set to play a witch.
Next to me, Lady Nairn said, “Oh, dear God.” She tried Effie’s cell, but it went straight to voice mail. Her next call was to the police.
My eyes drifted back down the trench. On the far side, a bit of paper fluttered in the grass. Stepping around, I bent down to look at it.
It was a playing card. No—too long and thin. A tarot card. One of the major arcana, or face cards, showing a young man in jaunty yellow-and-red trousers, hanging upside down by one foot from a tree, his free leg crooked at the knee, foot tucked up against the opposite leg, so that his body made the shape of an upside-down four. The Hanged Man.
“Symbol of sacrifice and prophetic wisdom,” said Eircheard over my shoulder.
The figure on the card looked more like a boy than a man—a jester even, with parti-colored trousers of red and yellow, his face oddly serene. In his hand he held a knife with an angled back and runes on the blade.
“Look at the knife,” I said.
“Aye,” said Eircheard, gently taking the card from me. “But it’s not just the blade that’s overfamiliar. It’s the tree as well.” It was an ancient spreading oak, its scalloped leaves minutely detailed. Crutches held up its massive lower limbs, giving it a distinctive silhouette. “It’s the Birnam Oak,” he said.
Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.
I looked up sharply. “Is that part of Birnam Wood?”
“Part?” scoffed Eircheard. “It’s all that’s left. That and two sycamores. But they’re bairns—children—by comparison. The oak, now, he was already mature in Shakespeare’s day. There’s an outside chance he was a sapling when Malcolm’s men were stripping branches for their march on Macbeth.”
Lady Nairn had finished her phone call and was stepping around toward us, a look of annoyance on her face. “We’re not to touch—” She stopped in her tracks, her face going white. “The card,” she said, her voice rasping. “It’s Lily’s.”
You’ll like my deck, she’d said to me. It’s a Macbeth deck. “There’s writing on the back,” said Ben from the other side of the trench. I turned it over. The design on the back was a tangle of Celtic knots. Across it, someone had scrawled a phrase in red ink: Blood will have blood.
Lady Nairn’s words, as we’d first seen the blood.
Macbeth’s words.
The image of Lily naked and bound beneath the blue gown flashed across my mind. And voices in the darkness: She must die. “Where is she?” I asked.
“Still in bed,” said Lady Nairn, already calling Lily’s cell.
“Did you see her?”
“I—” This call went to voice mail, too. Lady Nairn’s eyes grew wide. “No.”
I began to walk down the hill. And then I started to run.
14
LADY NAIRN HAD started out with me, but I was younger and faster. At the base of the summit, she tossed me the keys to her car and said, “Go.”
Back at the house near the top of the stairs, I startled a maid, who pointed out Lily’s room. The bed was unmade, the duvet half hanging to the floor. But Lily was not there. For a moment I stood panting on the threshold, and then I turned on my heel and went down the hall to my own room.
Someone had tossed it. The mattress had been pulled off the bed, the bedding left in forlorn heaps on the floor. Pillows had been slit and every drawer pulled out and turned over.
The drawer where I’d hidden the knife was at the top of the heap. The pillow I’d put over it was still there, and the towel in which I’d wrapped it, but the knife was gone.
Had there been enough time, after I’d left for breakfast, for someone to take it and get up the hill before us? And use it?
Just barely.
Whether or not it had been mine, some knife had certainly been used up there. She must die, she must…. A most unspotted lily shallshe pass to the ground, and all the world shall mourn her.
Where the hell was Lily?
The Hanged Man of her tarot deck had pictured not only the knife, but the oak that was, according to Eircheard, all that was left of Birnam Wood. Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood, Sir Angus had said.
I turned on my heel and went back downstairs. Just as I was climbing back into Lady Nairn’s range rover, she and Ben pulled up in his car. “I can’t find Lily, and the knife’s gone,” I said as the passenger window zipped down. In the car, her eyes met Ben’s.
“Have you searched the whole house?” she asked.
“No. But I’m going to that goddamned wood.”
“I’m staying here,” she said. “You two go.”
“Do you know the way?” Ben asked.
I shook my head no.
“Then let me drive,” he said. “It’ll be faster.”
I got back out of Lady Nairn’s car and slipped into Ben’s. “Why aren’t you with Sybilla?”
“She had a shock and she fainted,” he said shortly. “But she’s safe.”
“Which is more than can be said for Lily,” I said, buckling up.
“Or you, Kate.”
I glanced over at him, but he was watching the road, his expression inscrutable as we pulled out of the drive and headed down the lane.
Last night, he’d stopped me from going back up the hill, more or less pointing out that I’d been a fool. “That card was Lily’s,” I said a little defensively. “And it points straight at Birnam Wood. I mean to follow the trail.”
“Yes. But not alone. Is it a trail only, Kate, or also an invitation? Especially since you’ve already heard what might amount to a death threat, twice.”
“If you mean ‘She must die,’ that’s aimed at Lily.”
“Maybe,” he said with a shrug as I explained the context. “But it was you they spoke to.”
I looked out the window, my heart thudding as we sped along in silence between hedgerows lining close-shorn golden fields.
“About the knife,” he said after a while. “It’s gone from your room, but not exactly gone.”
I turned sharply. “That was you? You took it?”
“Lady Nairn has it.”
“You tossed my room?”
“I didn’t exactly toss it, Kate. Didn’t have to. It was the first place I looked.” His faintly
“You complete fucking bastard,” I burst out.
He looked across at me, startled. “Has someone tossed it?”
“Of course somebody’s tossed it. Bedding in tatters, every drawer emptied.”
“Good thing I got there first, then. Though I am sorry about the room.”
That he was right did nothing to lessen my fury. Nor did the fact that he was having a hard time keeping a smile off his face.
“Come on, Kate. It’s fair enough to be angry. But not so much with me…. Tell me about the tarot card. What do you know about the Hanged Man?” for Lily’s sake, I had to set aside my anger. “Not much,” I said tightly. “She had the deck last night, though. Offered to read my cards.”
He raised one eyebrow. “How much of a twist have your occult studies taken?”
“I put her off.”
“So you don’t actually know if that card was still in the deck.”
“No.” Tarot wasn’t something I knew very much about. I phoned Lady Nairn and put her on speaker.
“Lily’s not here,” she said, her voice tense with worry.
“We’ll find her,” said Ben.
“The tarot card is hers,” she said. “The deck’s spread out on her bed, and the Hanged Man is missing.” She’d found nothing else missing and no further clue to where Lily had gone, but she could tell us a fair amount about the card’s meaning.
“The Hanged Man,” she explained, “symbolizes sacrifice and prophecy—not death, as novices often assume. He’s a reference to Odin, chief of the Norse gods. A divinity of war and wisdom who wrested secret, possibly forbidden knowledge from the underworld.”
“How?” asked Ben. “By sacrificing himself to himself, hanging nine nights on a tree, pierced with a spear, until he’d sunk deep enough into the realm of death to seize runes and, screaming, pull them up into the world of light.”
“Got to love the Norse,” said Ben, shaking his head.
The Hanged Man, Lady Nairn went on, always had a serene face. He symbolized the surrender and acceptance that led to clarity of vision, and to wisdom. Unless he was reversed, and then he symbolized passivity, or the tendency to get lost in a labyrinth of idle dreams.
“Where’d Lily get that deck?” I asked. “from Corra bloody ravensbrook,” she snapped. “Who else? Ordered it off her Web site.”
“How did the card come to have the Birnam Oak on it? And the Nairn knife?”
“No idea. All I care about is finding Lily.” Her voice cracked as she hung up.
We drove awhile in silence. On either side of us, fields stretched into the distance, stacked with cylindrical bales of hay. Now and then the road shot through thinning archways of russet and yellow trees. Halfway across the plain of Strathmore, we headed west and wound into the foothills of the Highlands.
“Who would do this?” I asked suddenly. “Do what? Do we actually know what’s been done?”
I took a deep breath. “Lily’s missing, for one. And yesterday, I saw a body I thought was hers.”
“Yes. But it wasn’t her. And whoever she was, she wasn’t there when we went back, and she isn’t there this morning. We don’t even know that the blood is human, Kate.”
“There’s the knife.”
“Which was clean yesterday and has been in either your possession or mine or Lady Nairn’s ever since.”
“And there were the voices, both on the hill and in the stone circle. Which told me, more or less, in the circle, to put the damned thing back, or else.” Or else she must die.
“Auld Callie told you that straight out, didn’t she?”
We looked at each other. She was supposed to have met us up on the hill that morning.
“Did you see her?” asked Ben.
“No.”
That made three missing people. What was going on? “There’s also Sybilla’s card,” said Ben.
The Hal Berridge card. I sighed. “At the very least, someone’s doing a damned fine job of trying to sabotage Lady Nairn’s production. Is that why you’re here?”
“She’s spoken to me. She has some legitimate concerns.”
“Do they have names?”
“A reverend Calvin Gosson. On the far, fire-and-brimstone fringe of the Kirk. The Church of Scotland. Currently filling in as minister at the Cathedral of Dunkeld, while the regular man recovers from heart surgery. I’m told that he believes we’re all engaged in a great battle between good and evil, only most people can’t or won’t see the battlefield any longer. Which, in his view, means the odds have tipped in favor of the forces of darkness.”
“Would he have any connection to Effie Summers?”
“Yes. He’s said to favor the quotation Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live in his sermons, for one.”
“Charming. Is there a ‘two’?”
Ben looked sideways at me. “Gosson found his calling late, it seems. He used to be an actor. He was in Lady Nairn’s famous Macbeth. Played fleance.”
“The boy who got away.” Banquo’s son, the young boy who escapes Macbeth’s murderers—played in many productions by the witches, or at least by the same actors who played the witches.
“The boy who lived,” said Ben with a wry smile. “Like Harry Potter, he’s dedicated his life to the war against evil. Unlike Harry, he counts witches among his enemies.”
“Even the stage variety?”
“He warned Lady Nairn off the play. Told her it gathered dark powers strongly around itself, especially in the hands of gifted performers.”
“A compliment in reverse, I suppose…. If Effie’s under his spell—so to speak—why would she take the role of a witch?”
“Dunno. Maybe she’s only recently been swayed by him. Maybe she’s a mole.”
“A spy? Are you serious?”
He smiled. “Admittedly not a very good one.”
“Did Lady Nairn mention anyone else?” I asked. “One other. Lucas Porter.”
“The film director?”
He nodded.
Lucas Porter was a Hollywood legend—all the more mythic for his reclusiveness. He’d been a great film director, auteur of a dozen or so classic films from the fifties and sixties. Cult films, most of them. Four or five of them, including two starring Janet Douglas, perennially showed up fairly high in lists of the greatest films of all time.
Janet Douglas—Lady Nairn—had left the stage for Sir Angus. She’d also left Lucas Porter.
“Her next project,” said Ben, “would have been a film version of Macbeth, directed by Porter. He was furious, apparently. Told her she’d ruined the picture he’d meant to make his magnum opus, the crowning achievement of his career.”
“Jesus. There must have been any number of actresses who would’ve killed for that part,” I said.
“That’s what she told him, but he wouldn’t make the picture with anyone else. He told her that he’d ruin—personally—any production of Macbeth that she got anywhere near.”
“But that was over forty years ago.”
“That’s what I said. She said, ‘You don’t know Lucas.’ She and Sir Angus apparently kept watch on him from a distance.”
“He scared her that much?”
“Mmm. Two years ago, she says, he faded from view. Not that he was ever flash. More like a recluse. But he just quietly disappeared. They waited for a year and a half—”
“And then they figured it was safe to mount their show?”
He nodded. “And then Sir Angus died. And you know the rest.”
Coming through some trees, we turned down through the tiny, ancient town of Dunkeld, which clung to the river Tay as it tumbled out of the hills. Far away, at the bottom of the steep main street, I glimpsed a graceful bridge of stone arches curving over the river, deep blue and swift, rushing its way toward the sea. On the far side lay the village of Birnam and the wood from which it took its name. From Eircheard’s description, I’d thought there were only the oak and two sycamores left. But the riverban
At the bottom of the road, just before the bridge, the light turned yellow. Walking toward it, two people broke into a run, crossing just as the light turned red. One was a tall man with black hair; he was pulling along with him a girl with long flame-red hair that seemed to float about her of its own accord.
I leaned forward, pointing. “That looks like Lily.”
We drew to a stop several cars back from the light, which seemed interminable. As long as Lily and her companion were on the bridge, we could at least keep tabs on them from a distance. Once they reached the other side, they could scatter in any direction. They neared the other side, and the light still showed no signs of changing. Ben jerked the car out of the line. One wheel up on the sidewalk, we careened around the cars in front, shooting through the morning traffic on the cross street and onto the bridge. At the far end, the man pulled Lily into a run, disappearing into the woods on the left.
We skidded to a stop just past the foot of the bridge and leapt out of the car, following in their wake. The bank here was still far below; steep steps led downward from the road into dimness. “Lily!” I called, but got no answer. With a glance at Ben, I chased after her.
The chill of dawn still lingered beneath the eaves of the wood, though the sun was well up in the world beyond. Deeply carpeted in coppery leaves and roofed by the arching trees, the path was a long tunnel lit by a scattershot sun. No one was on it. “Lily!” I called again as I ran, glimpsing flashes of the river through laced branches. Save for our footfalls and breathing, and the rush of the water, however, the wood was silent and seemingly empty.
Stirred by our passing, leaves swirled up in eddies that looked, from the corner of the eye, like small animals herding us onward. Rounding a bend, we came to an enormous tree, green with moss, its trunk gnarled into the silhouette of a giant’s bulbous face staring sadly at the ground. “The sycamores,” said Ben as we passed another, equally immense.