“But the blood disappeared! Off my axe. Off the floor. There was nothing. And then the next day she was fine. I saw her, here in The Curtyard. As if it never happened.” I wiped my non-bandaged hand over my face. “And then yesterday, in the mist, I saw her and… she looked like—I think she looks like me. But better somehow.”
The old woman nodded, eyes skirting over the flames.
“Hmm, the axe. She probably wasn’t expecting that. That’s why it’s so different this time.”
“This time?” I hugged my arms around my shoulders. “This has happened before? What is she?”
“Those are complicated question that share a rather long answer,” she said as she reached round the side of her chair and unsheathed an impressive-looking walking stick.
It was made of rich, dark wood and had an iron point at the end, blackened with use and age. The grip at the top had a surprisingly heavy build to it, a little like a hammer. It made me wonder how this woman was hefting it about so easily.
She drew a line into the ash below the grate of the fire, the metal tip skipping over worn layers in the hearthstone.
“James Hogg came by this way in 1802 on one of his travels. He goes on to write The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner where a puritanical man meets the devil as his double on the mists of Arthur’s Seat.”
She drew another line.
“Sometime later in 1868, Robert Louis Stevenson passes through the same area on his way to the family engineering works in Wick. He goes on to write The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde where a genius doctor splits himself in two: his good and kind self, and his evil and murderous double.”
With a screech of iron on stone, she laid another line into the ash.
“Around the same time as Stevenson’s trip, J M Barrie was a boy living not too far from here. When he was young, his mother thought there was another boy living in the house. A boy who looked like him. She thought it was his dead elder brother. Barrie goes on to write Peter Pan about a child who’d run off to live with the faeries. A child who gets separated from his shadow.”
One more line in the ash, joining the others into a squat rectangle.
“Then that psychologist came to Britain in the early 1900s. Took a sneaky sojourn up north. You won’t see anything about it in his meticulous diaries, so you’ll just have to believe me when I say he came this way. Not for long, but long enough to stumble across something. To suffer a strange confrontation. He became menaced by hallucinations, visions and voices. See, he’d always believed that he contained two selves, and now he’d found something that explained why. He spent years writing up his experiences with the thing he found, the thing he realised everyone carries but no one wants to be. A thing that, if ignored, has the potential to take over and frustrate even the most well-meant intentions.”
She looked to the curtained window and the dancing shadows of the hanging baskets outside, then back at me.
“Starting to sound familiar?”
I leant onto my knees.
“What is it?”
Callie-Ann looked up around the ceiling, her eyes an icy blue, as if admiring the bones of the room.
“This place, like all the world really, used to be a wild place.” She tapped her cane on the ground. “Thousands of years ago, people would travel across Doggerland—the land bridge between the rest of Europe and here—back and forth across multiple ice ages. Over time they collected stories. Stories of forbidding, strange places on the other side of the water. Of the creatures that lived there. Faeries. Pixies. Changelings.” She leant toward me, voice deep and low. “There are strange things in the darkest corners of every country, where the land is still a little bit wild. But when you’ve mapped most of the mountains, chopped down the forests, drained the bogs, you don’t leave much space for whatever used to live here before you. It wouldn’t be too much of a surprise if some things remained, hidden in the quiet corners of these islands. Deep in the earth. In the treetops. Under the waves. Or in a remote cottage in the middle of nowhere, waiting for someone to move in.” She sighed. “Whatever your neighbour was before you got here is lost to history. What’s important now is how she’s chosen to manifest. How she’s chosen you. Now she is your shadow. And it is as your shadow you must deal with her.”
“Okay.” I took a big breath in. “So how do I get rid of my shadow?”
Callie-Ann barked a laugh. It rang off the stone walls that surrounded us. I ducked down in my chair. Something in the laugh made me think of thunder, of blizzards, of rocks falling from the sky.
“Oh child, you can’t get rid of your shadow,” she said as she wiped a mirthful tear from her eye.
“What do you mean?” I swallowed. “Do I have to leave?”
The old woman shook her head. “Wherever you go, she’ll follow.”
I threw up my hands. “Then what am I supposed to do?”
Callie-Ann looked at me, kindly, firmly.
“You have to face her,” she said. “Normally this would be as simple as a conversation. But you’ve been running—avoiding all of this—for so long, she’s not going to come to the table easy. No.” Callie-Ann scratched her chin. “You’re going to have to go to her.”
I blinked, trying to follow.
“What, like, break into her house?”
